by Curran, Tim
Oh, yes, pain and pain and pain.
They lived it and so did he.
And now Chrissy’s mother was telling him about dead people coming back and it was just too much. Nicky…Nicky had been buried over in Hillside Cemetery, only there wasn’t such a place anymore. Nicky’s grave had been washed out with the others. And maybe his coffin was floating around River Town and maybe Nicky wasn’t dead anymore, maybe—
Lily said, “Are you okay, Deke?”
“Sure,” he managed. “Just fine.”
He excused himself and went upstairs.
He went into the bathroom and his breath was coming in short, sharp gasps by that point. He looked in the mirror above the sink and did not care for his reflection. The way his eyes kept blinking or did not blink at all. The way his lips quivered and age had been etched into his young face. He did not look in the sink. He could not bear to. A hot, almost gaseous odor was coming from the drain.
Come down to us, Lily, come down in the darkness with us.
Christ, he’d come here to see Chrissy and now her crazy mother had opened up a can of something horrible in his head. Dead people down in the sewers. Nicky. Her dead sister calling to her from the drain. What kind of damaged shit was that?
Well, you helped her along that path to the nuthouse, now didn’t you?
He supposed he had. Lily talking about all those dead people living down there and what does he say? He tells her how, yeah, there’s plenty of room down there for a city. Dammit, what had he been thinking? But he knew he hadn’t been thinking at all. Just saying the first stupid thing that jumped into his head. Lily didn’t need to be hearing that, didn’t need to be encouraged to climb the walls and hide in the drapes. It was like some terribly depressed person talking suicide and him discussing the various razors available.
That was just not stupid, it was—
He looked down and something black bubbled from the drain.
It was like ink leaking from a pen. It formed a bubble that popped, then another, that black inky fluid seeping up from the foul-smelling drain. He could smell the sewers and the secret, dank arteries that flowed beneath the city. And something more, something fetid, something like rotten meat.
No, he wouldn’t deal with it.
As he turned from the bathroom, he thought he heard a moist, clotted chuckling coming up from the drain.
He ran downstairs and Lily was nowhere to be found.
Oh shit, oh shit, she’s trying to get into the sewer.
Then he heard her talking. Feeling something solidifying in his guts, he walked down the hallway to the downstairs bathroom. He could hear Lily giggling in there. The timber of her voice was just insane as she giggled and droned on and that was very bad.
But what was worse was when a gelatinous voice answered her back.
4
Slayhoke Penitentiary was a grim, ugly place to spend a day, let alone five years of your life. Harry Teal had done his share of time in county lockups and prison farms, but he’d never seen anything like Slayhoke until that day they’d dropped him off with all those other inmates, all of them chained together with leg irons, all of them hard and desperate looking. Most of them had done real time before and they all seemed to sense that Harry hadn’t. Though Harry had been around plenty, to them he was just a piece of meat to sharpen their teeth on.
Of course, they didn’t start any trouble on the bus.
There were hacks watching them, real hard and brutal looking sonsofbitches, just looking for a reason to use their sticks. But Harry felt those eyes on him and he knew what those guys were thinking, how they were planning on extorting him and using him, maybe selling him to some old pervert in order to get a few bucks that might make their stays a little easier.
No, Harry might not have been a veteran of hardtime joints like Slayhoke, but he sure as hell knew how things worked. He’d spent six months in the Cook County Slammer and he’d seen plenty there. The overcrowding, the violence, the corrupt guards. Guys wired out on drugs vomiting and pissing themselves. Men getting knifed and raped and beaten. It was a way of life there.
But coming into Slayhoke, he felt vulnerable, felt like a virgin waiting to get her hymen busted. Slayhoke consisted of a series of narrow four-story brick buildings topped by smokestacks and surrounded by high razor-wire enclosures and guard towers. It sat roughly five miles outside of the Witcham city limits in the Black River Valley. Coming at it down that winding road through the forest, Slayhoke looked like a Medieval madhouse and that was pretty close to the mark since the facility had a long and unpleasant history as a state hospital for the criminally insane long before it was converted into a maximum security prison back in the 1930’s. You got behind those tall cinderblock walls and you could practically feel the desperation, hopelessness, and inhumanity oozing into you, making you part of Slayhoke. If that place had a soundtrack, then it was a silent scream that echoed only in your head.
The inmate who worked central processing was an Asian named Ricky Chuba. He was a short, thick-necked man who was missing two fingers on his left hand. “See here you been around, Teal…but never max?” he said, looking through Harry’s file.
“No, never.”
“That’s not so good. Says here you like to steal cars, but you ain’t so good at it.”
“I’m good at it,” Harry said, figuring that he was. He’d been stealing cars to order for fifteen years. He knew his business.
But Chuba just shook his head. “No, you ain’t no good at it. If you were, you wouldn’t be here. If I was any good at killing cops, I wouldn’t be here.”
That was logic you just couldn’t argue with.
“You from Milwaukee?”
“Yeah.”
“You been around there a lot?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. I’m gonna put you in with another white boy name of Jacky Kripp. He’s from Milwaukee, too. You do what he says, you might come out of this with your life and your virginity. And in this goddamn place, that’s the best you can hope for.”
After that, they took Harry into a five by five steel cell and stripped him. The hacks got on their rubber gloves and gave him a body cavity search and if that wasn’t dehumanizing enough, then they sprayed him with disinfectant to keep the lice down.
“We got the lice real bad here,” one of the hacks said. “We got lots of things you ain’t gonna like here, boy.”
And that was one of the truest statements any of those bastards ever made to him. Because not only were the lice bad, but mosquitoes infested the place in summer and just about all year long there was a serious rat problem. They came out mostly at night looking for crumbs. Weren’t too many inmates there that hadn’t been bitten and more than once. At night, Harry learned to sleep with his state-issue wool blanket pulled right up to his chin because those rats would nibble on anything you left hanging out. Anything. After lights out, they would come out running right over the top of you, squealing and chittering, and it did no good to tell the hacks because they were blind to the rat problem. Lots of inmates had written up motions and writs about the filthy, unsanitary conditions at Slayhoke, but it did little good. The Bureau of Prisons sent in exterminators every now and again and those boys killed so many rats they had to be hauled out in twenty-five gallon drums, but within a month they were back, biting and scavenging.
But that was Slayhoke.
It was infested by four-legged vermin, but they were nothing compared to the two-legged variety crowding in every cellblock. It was hot in the summer and cold in the winter. Everything was dirty and slimy to the touch. The smell there was a perpetual mix of bad food, rotting garbage, urine and shit and blood. Cons committed suicide regularly and knifings were a daily occurrence. The inmates went after each other with shanks and pipes and razors and the hacks sat around, pretending they didn’t see a damn thing while they paged through their girly magazines.
Harry’s first day in stir, Jacky Kripp showed up.
Harry
had heard of him, of course, you didn’t run in Milwaukee’s crime circles without hearing about a guy like Jacky Kripp. He was a vicious street hood hooked up with the Chicago Outfit. Through the years Jacky had his hand in everything from drug trafficking to prostitution to contract murder, and was currently sitting on a ten-year stretch for breaking some guy’s head open with a tire iron. He was barely six feet, but weighed an easy 250 and all of it was hard muscle. He had huge Popeye arms sleeved with jailhouse tattoos, bushy black hair, and silver-gray eyes that were completely dead looking like dirty nickels.
When he came to see Harry, he brought some of his entourage. A wiry black guy called Roland Smyth, who was some kind of half-assed gun runner, and a hulking white redneck farmboy named Mo Borden…who was openly known as “Frankenstein” around the blocks. Borden went in at nearly 400 pounds, stood 6’9, and was completely bald. Didn’t even have eyebrows. Word had it Borden had taken an ax to a local farmer in Crawford County after the man had attempted to rape Borden’s kid sister. Borden chopped him up, decided to do the guy’s wife and brother, too. He bagged up the remains, put them out with the trash and then went to a local bar, covered in blood, and told everyone about it.
“You Harry Teal?” Jacky Kripp said.
Harry assured him that he was.
Kripp put the questions to him—who did he run with in Milwaukee and what crews had he been part of. Harry answered the questions satisfactorily because when he was done, Kripp said, “Okay, you’re with us now. Nobody touches you. They touch you, they touch us. If somebody insults you, you hit ‘em. You cut ‘em if you have to and you kill ‘em if you got no choice. We back you up. Somebody throws down on one us, you fight with us. We’re one, you get it? One. Any insult to one of us is an insult to all of us.”
And that’s how it was at Slayhoke for Harry.
His first days there, he saw the respect Jacky Kripp had amongst the other cons. Those that didn’t respect him, he hurt. And he hurt ‘em bad. First week with him, Harry saw Kripp stab a black inmate that cut in front of him in chow line and mercilessly beat a Hispanic punk for simply looking at him the wrong way. But that’s how it worked. Over the next year, Harry fell right in step with it all. He cut people, he beat them, and once out in the yard he smashed a gangbanger’s head to pulp with a brick when he made the mistake of jumping Roland Smyth. After a time, Harry did not remember another life. When he looked at himself in the mirror, sometimes he wasn’t sure who was looking back.
By the time of the flooding in the Black River Valley, he was a hardened con toughened by fighting and abuse and brutal conditions. He worked the weight pile out in the yard, he knocked off a hundred and fifty pushups every morning. When he looked around the yard, not many eyes dared look back. If you wanted to survive Slayhoke, you had to be an animal, so Harry grew some claws and kept his teeth sharp. And whenever any shit started, he was the first one into the fray.
And what that got him behind those walls was respect, just like Aretha said.
Life went on and then came the rain and the explosion at Fort Providence Military Reservation and after that? Things just started getting weird. Stories started making the rounds at Slayhoke like clap at a convention. You could hear just about anything you wanted to, depending on who you listened to and what your particular bullshit level was. Crazy shit about yellow rains killing a group of trustees and a few guards outside the wall. Stiffs sitting up in the prison mortuary. Rats that had eaten two guys in a cell in K Block, rats with funny red eyes. Yeah, it was all there, loony stuff about the prisoners being experimented on, about ghosts walking through walls and sucking people’s blood, and, of course, the requisite stories about all those corpses and coffins from Hillside Cemetery washing down into the streets of Witcham. What that was like. And how when the rains finally stopped and the water retreated, it was the cons from Slayhoke that would have to clean up the mess. Another favorite topic was Ft. Providence down the road and the crazy-ass shit they were doing with dead soldiers shipped back from Iraq.
But that was Slayhoke sometimes, Harry figured, like a big hen party.
5
Jacky Kripp was one of the top dogs over at the mortuary. He got to pick and choose the cons that worked with him, so guys were always kissing ass on him, always trying to get a job working the cold cuts. Because, honestly, it beat the living hell out of the boiler room or the metal shop, the mattress factory with its swarms of insects or the roadcrews and their attendant hardcase hacks.
At first, Harry didn’t want any part of shuffling the cold meat.
He told Jacky as much. So, Kripp fixed it so he could get a sampling of those other prison industries and wasn’t long before Harry decided he liked the dead just fine. Of course, at first he lost his lunch a few times. You had lots of dead cons moving through there, some that had been beaten to death or sliced up or even burned. Sometimes you’d get a con you knew that had been fed strychnine with his hash and had died with the contortions, vomiting white foam. Men died violent, dirty deaths at Slayhoke and very rarely was it of natural causes. A lot of medical students from North-Western U worked at the mortuary. Under their instructor’s watchful eyes, they learned how to perform autopsies and very often when Harry and the others wrestled the remains into pine boxes, they were completely mutilated. Just slit and plucked and dismembered.
So it took a strong stomach to work the mortuary detail, but more often than not, the work was light. Harry, Jacky Kripp, Roland Smyth, Mo Borden, and a half dozen other guys would spend eight hours a day in the mortuary, mostly playing cards, smoking dope, and eating gourmet foods Kripp had smuggled in.
But, now and then, there were some really awful jobs to perform. And if they involved stiffs, they involved Jacky Kripp and his crew.
The very same afternoon that Mitch Barron and many other residents learned that the dead were rising in Witcham, the hacks shook Harry and the others out of the mortuary like dirt from a rug, marched them and about thirty other cons out into the pouring rain, gave them shovels and picks. They wanted them to dig up the stiffs in the old potter’s field graveyard where the convicts nobody claimed were buried. The DOC wanted to put a new administration building there, so the bodies had to be moved.
The cons pulled it, of course.
The hacks weren’t about to dirty their hands with shit like that.
Jacky Kripp, who had half a dozen hacks in his pocket, took Krickman, the sergeant hack aside, and said, “What’s this shit, sarge? What the fuck is this about? How come I didn’t know about this three days ago, a week ago?”
Harry knew that Kripp was usually told everything well before it happened. Lots of guards at Slayhoke had kids in college or fat bank accounts, and Jacky Kripp’s deep pockets were the reason. For even behind those walls, Kripp was running a multi-million dollar operation in Southern Wisconsin and the Chicago area. He dabbled in everything from heroin trafficking to extortion to internet porn. Owned scads of legitimate businesses like restaurants and movie theaters and car lots, was a high scale loanshark with as much as ten million dollars on the street at any one time. His personal income was very often in the seven digits monthly.
“They just told us this morning, Jacky, I swear to God,” Krickman said.
“I thought we were friends, sarge? I thought I helped you and you helped me? What the fuck is this shit? Why are you fucking with me like this? You don’t like me? You’re trying to piss me off?”
“Jacky, please, I swear to God, they didn’t tell us…”
It went back and forth like that while all the cons stood out in the rain sucking up the water like sponges. It was kind of funny, because Krickman was among the most hated hacks at Slayhoke. He was basically a violent, ignorant redneck who liked to dish out the shit. The day he broke kneecaps or skulls with his stick was a good day to him. And here he was, the tough psychotic sonofabitch, practically sucking the piss out of Jacky Kripp’s shorts.
Finally, some kind of agreement was reached and Kripp turne
d to the cons soaking in the rain, all those hard white and black and Hispanic faces, a few Ojibwa and Sauk Indians sprinkled amongst them. “Listen, boys, we gotta do this thing. It’s fucking dirty work and a shitty day for it, but we gotta make the warden happy.”
Not that Kripp actually got his hands dirty.
He stood around with the hacks telling them dirty jokes and stories about all the pussy he’d had in Milwaukee, most of it barely legal. The hacks ate it up and the cons went to work.
Two flatbed trucks were pulled up on the winding dirt drive. These to haul the exhumed coffins the inmates pulled from the earth like rotting teeth. There was also a backhoe that would open the graves to a level of about four feet. That was as close as they dared go with the backhoe’s bucket without risking damaging the caskets themselves. The cons would shovel out the rest of the earth by hand.
“I ain’t got no problem putting stiffs in the ground,” Roland Smyth said. “But digging ‘em back up…fuck kind of work is that?”