Internecine

by David J. Schow

  En route to the sheriff’s station, your arresting officers indulged in manly running commentary about what a fucking scumbag you are, you rapist clot of dogshit, you caveboy, you social degenerate. It’s all sculpted to make you blow your cool, get a rise out of you, so you’ll say or do something that justifies a little pit stop for coffee, with a side of energetic, professional brutality. We just pulled over and he attempted to escape, so we shot him thirty or forty times. Hard, you know, to hit a moving target in the dark, and this prick’s a public menace. We’re doing the public a favor. You sat on your hands, numb already, hurt all over, knowing that for the cops, this was the best time. Inbound to the station, committed to deliver a miscreant—therefore unavailable for other calls, barring an outright emergency. Another hour of guaranteed life, which time might have been spent cutting you down in the line of duty.

  For this, they pay law enforcers an embarrassingly low wage, and you figure they have to get their perks where they can find them, according to mood. Fiscal inequity is not your burning preoccupation, anyway. Numbers are. Access numbers, phonecard numbers, any string you can summon in order to profitably employ the pay phones, which will otherwise mock you with their stoic, recorded admonitions. Wrapped around your thoughts like hazard tape is Dandine’s warning about the police, and “red light items.” We’d find ourselves very politely thrust into a holding cell, which would end our new career . . .

  Which is where you have landed, minus the courtesy. You take the rough processing by the police as a feeble sign that perhaps they don’t know—exactly—who they have netted. Yet.

  Public phone. Time a-wastin’. Maybe worth the risk. Maybe, in five more minutes, they’ll haul your butt out of here and extinguish the option.

  You decide to take a fool’s chance, and using the access code assigned to your office phone, you call Katy Burgess’s machine. Katy never answers her telephone, instead using her machine as a call screener, since she does not have a secretary (and everyone who pesters her about not answering, does).

  “Katy, this is Conrad. Listen, I know this is going to sound strange but I’m in a tight spot. I need you to call this number—” you spiel off the number you remember for Andrew Collier’s latest production office, somewhere in Culver City—“and just say that it’s a personal message for the boss, and then say that Mad Dog is in jail. Remember, Mad Dog is in jail. I really need your help, kiddo. Thanks.”

  Personally, you remonstrate yourself for every bad thought and throwaway sexual fantasy you’ve ever had about good ole Katy. Your cry for help makes you sound like a five-year-old in need of an adult authority figure, and you indulge in a flash of self-pity that is quite out of character for you. Normally, you are the one who cuts loose selected bursts of power to achieve targeted goals. Can’t you come up with anything better than this squalid, weak-kneed, hat-in-hand routine?

  You can’t recall the number you used to phone Collier directly at his house. You can’t think of anyone else whose day needs ruination. Friends? None that apply. Acquaintances? Plenty; none of any use or worth, now. Relatives? Oh, please, gimme a break. You could ring up your ex-wife, if you wanted to hear her laugh and hang up.

  There is no time for a second chance, anyway, since the bulky officer from the fingerprint adventure is pointing at you through the shatterproof glass, and jingling a big ring of keys in his hand. Cell time.

  Ruefully, you remember that Collier’s home number is still on the Post-it note stuck to the useless credit card inside your now-confiscated billfold. So much for poor old Andrew.

  The common bullpen is a big, brightly lit room stinking of disinfectant and bum stench (organic decay, sweat-rot, B.O., filthy socks). It looks about forty by forty feet with a twenty-foot ceiling, and is entirely without edges. Hard rubber is layered over the walls and floor, sealed over with durable canvas, painted bright yellow. One cushioned, pillbox-style peephole for monitoring prisoners (glassed in triple-thick Plexi that’s smudged and fingerprinty on the inside), and one padded cell-block door—the only way in or out. Backed into the wall housing the door is a single, stand-alone institutional toilet of stainless steel with a push-button sink in the tank’s top. No seat, no handles; half a roll of cheap TP balanced on the sink’s lip. The mildly yielding canvas floor around the toilet is spattered with dried piss and what must be traces of vomit (after identifying a corn kernel, you don’t want to look at it anymore).

  After five minutes locked in this room, you’re extremely glad that you cannot see all the odors roiling in the air. This is where the dregs land, in a room that can be easily hosed down.

  The rounded corners (to prevent prisoners from damaging themselves) and the searing yellow above you, below you, all around you, make it simple to imagine yourself inside a giant, plastic child’s toy. In here, the lights never go out. They blaze 24/7, from protective insets beyond reach, on the ceiling.

  One more thing: You are not by yourself.

  Nope, no solitary confinement for you. Right now you are a file number in general bullpen pop, until someone shows up with money or other just cause for your readmission to the world of the walking dead. After being issued a square of “blanket” about as effective against the cold as a thin towel, you are conducted through the padded door with the padded edges and then forgotten, phone call or not.

  Tonight’s other guests include three guys on the floor, curled the way you see derelicts sleeping on the sidewalk. They smell so apocalyptically awful that the more wakeful inmates have mustered them to one corner of the room, and one of them is lying sidewise, so the window guards won’t see the blood on his face. This one is not asleep, he’s unconscious after being punched out and discarded. He’s the only one with no socks, and his Caucasian feet resemble soot-blackened wood from a prematurely expired fire.

  Four others have been tanked tonight, before you, and they’re still awake, though not moving much in the cold. Everybody still has their inadequate blanket, which means so far nobody has opted to play King of the Cell and collect them all to form layers for himself, with a fist in the face for any protestors. Two of them look haggard and resigned, like you. One looks like a biker, and the fourth is a Mexican who never utters a sound the whole time you’re in the cell.

  You’d sell a substantial portion of your stock portfolio to have a book to read, any book, anything with words on pages to free at least part of you from this world. Because once that door slams behind you (it’s airtight enough to hurt your ears when it closes), and time does its rubbery elongation trick, you quickly become convinced that your stay is open-ended. In here, an hour seems like a day, with nothing to do except look at your own hands, and maybe pluck fabric pills from your socks. You have no urge to engage your fellow evildoers in small talk, or to bitch about the cops, or compare crimes. You don’t dare talk to yourself, or nod off for very long, which is a shame because sleeping is the only way to plow through time in here. You realize the others feel the same way. They’re sunk into themselves, huddled like Apaches, waiting, remaining alert enough to radiate a sense of warning to anyone who might pester them.

  You’re in the bullpen, you abruptly realize; with the other fuckups for this calendar date. Which means that the sheriffs don’t know about Dandine, or any of the rest of it, at least, not yet.

  Back against the wall, you pull up your knees, imitating the others. Your feet are already frozen. No meal here, till breakfast. You try half-baked mental counting games, or remembering the lyrics to songs. That one ran two minutes, forty-two seconds on radio play; if I recite the lyrics, I will have passed nearly three more minutes. You waste about ten minutes this way before you decide to risk a threadbare nap.

  But your mind is too alive with other input. Such as, Working backward, who, then, hired Dandine?

  Or how about, Is NORCO blackmailing Alicia Brandenberg? Did they propose some sort of fake hit to her, to help her credibility somehow . . . and then carry through without telling her? Or did someone leak the fake to Al
icia?

  That would mean a missing character in the chain, as Andrew Collier might propose. A go-between who contacts Alica, but leaves out the part about the hit being fake, then stands back to watch all the dominoes fall.

  But to what benefit?

  There were rich, time-consuming veins of worry to mine here, deductions to which you might apply your usually sharp intellect. No good, because there just isn’t enough basic information. It was like being stuck with a fresh pad of paper and a pen with no ink.

  You have never been in jail before. Ridiculously, you feel you have achieved some sort of watershed of manliness, by being stupid and unaware enough to get foxed by Choral, or, as Dandine might put it, “man-trapped.” From now on, you can speak with authority on having been “inside.” That is, if you don’t get killed in here, if you ever make it back “outside.”

  If this was a movie about your predicament, some editor, by now, would have had the mercy to Cross-cut Sharp to Simultaneous Action—what was up with Dandine, concurrently, or Collier, or Choral, or Alicia; maybe even a bleak peek into the goings-on at NORCO. Anything to dispel the monotony of being stuck in this cell, one character, doing not much, from one boring angle; no action, no interstitial footage to achieve what cinemaphiles call “cutting rate” or “cutting tone”—editorial colorations that confer pace and rhythm to what the audience sees. Moviegoers never think about shit like this. They merely sponge up imagery for entertainment. They never think about how it’s all put together; how complicated the process is of their transient little diversions. By now, if this was a movie, the audience would be getting bored of looking at this one poor-ass motherfucker sitting in a cell.

  Get in line, assholes, you think. I have to live it.

  Choral certainly worked you over well when you weren’t hitting back. Trying to rest your head on your folded arms, atop your knees, makes your neck throb. Your bowels want to move, but no way you’re going to drop trou in this shitpit, letting seven guys watch you take a dump and then, probably, pound the hell out of you for stinking up the room.

  No wonder men become rapists, drug addicts, and chain-smokers in prison. Nothing else to do. You’ve been here half an hour and already you’d gladly chain-smoke a pack, igniting one off the other due to the prohibition on matches. The option does not exist: no smokes, no belts, no buckles, no change, no keys, nothing. Rising on numb feet and chancing a sip of water from the fountain button on top of the toilet tank constitutes a major excursion.

  The introduction of yet another scumbag is a benchmark event. He gets tanked while you’re still standing, so he looks at you first. As soon as the door thunks shut and the bolts clank, he says, “What the fuck you looking at, fagboy?”

  No way he’s speaking to anyone other than you.

  He’s not big—five-eight, maybe, with his shoes off—but he’s broad enough to suggest he enjoys knife fights in parking lots as dessert when bars evict him at closing time. Wide, deep-set, piggy eyes below unwashed hair raked straight back and gleaming like shellac. Thick stubble outlines his jaw; you think of Fred Flintstone’s permanent five o’clock shadow. Stressed-out gray T-shirt with pit stains in large wet-dry-wet rings. Jeans with road grease on the knees. A beer-gutted weekend warrior with rage to spare, still burning off his latest bender. He scopes the talent of the room and refocuses on making your life hell.

  “Think you’re better’n me, boah? Well we’re both in the same fucking cell, so you better watch what you lookin’ at.”

  Your mouth barely moves as you return to your warm spot on the floor. “I’m not looking at anything.”

  Silver glints appear in his eyes and he moves. “Whadjou say? Whadjou say, faggot?!”

  You’re turning, ready to duck, or maybe catch his fist one time, just to see his surprise at your defiance before you get mutilated. Your heartbeat is slamming and your adrenaline pumping, and you don’t need any of it, because the biker-looking dude—who hasn’t moved or uttered a syllable since you got here—appears as if by ghostly magic behind the new arrival, rising up to full looming height. He grabs the guy by the hair and the back of his jeans and propels him right past you, close enough to smell, face-first into the padded wall.

  The plumper guy sags in the biker’s grasp long enough for your savior to ram him into the wall one more time, for good measure. When he pulls him back the second time, there’s blood leaking from his nose, and his eyeballs are rolled up to the whites. Closed. Sorry we missed you.

  The biker-looking dude zombie-marches the insensate newcomer to the derelict end of the pen, and dumps him in a bone-free sprawl on top of the other unconscious occupants. Then he heads back to his original spot. You think of Andrew Collier’s on-call, two-wheeler death squad, and even though you have no idea how to say a simple thanks to this stranger, you start to speak anyway, your tongue running ahead of your brain, as usual.

  The biker-looking dude interrupts his trip to bug-board you, dead bang, with a glare. He has a lazy eye.

  “Shhh,” he says, holding a finger to his lips.

  You nod, like one bad homie acknowledging another as they pass on a street. You sit as he sits.

  The whole drama has sucked up another two minutes, tops.

  Just like everyone else in the bullpen, I looked up, too hopeful, at the sound of the door unbolting. Some undifferentiated amount of time must have elapsed, because now I was freezing, and groggy, as though I had captured a swatch of thin sleep somewhere along the line. The grit and odor of the cell seemed embedded in my pores.

  It was a new officer, a replacement for the burly fingerprint cop, cut from the same world-weary pattern. “Maddox,” he said.

  I just stared at him, from the floor, from my little tent of blanket around my knees.

  The officer grimaced as if from a gas pain. “Yeah, you.” He crooked a finger. “Come on.”

  My feet were on ice, in another country, and my legs were asleep. When I wobbled upright I was keenly aware of how stupid I looked. I could not walk, but managed a meandering shuffle toward the door. I tried another nod at the biker-sorta guy, who merely closed his eyes and put his head back down on his folded arms. That would have to play, for gratitude.

  Thunk, and the cell was a universe away. “What happened?” I said. The cop was marching me by a forearm. “Just come on.”

  I could see his wristwatch. Just after eleven o’clock, but A.M. or P.M.? “I don’t understand,” I said. “Am I out, or is this another—?”

  The cop did not look at me, but offered another intestinal-stitch grunt. “Don’t you know how this works?”

  No, I didn’t.

  I found out, however, that it takes a fuck of a long time to get out of jail; just as much time as it does to get in. The downfall of our civilization won’t be starvation or nuclear catastrophe or pollution or a stray asteroid; it’ll be due to processing. I fully expected to be hand-delivered into the clutches of some anonymous and threateningly bland NORCO operatives. About the time the sheriff handed me my brown, string-clasp envelope and told me to sign again, my brain began to toy with the idea that maybe I was not walking my last mile, but had made bail.

  Thanks to benefactors unknown.

  Envelope in hand, personals accounted for, I was shown a door and the cops forgot all about me. I had to open it and walk through by myself. It was an unmarked exit that pooted you back into the front of the station, near the soft drink machines and another door, farther down a short hallway, labeled men. The thought of an actual, functioning restroom seemed like a gift from the gods. It was so weird—the more I thought about that, the more innovative and special it seemed, as though a restroom was an obvious convenience no one had ever bothered to invent. Phony, cheap hope flooded me. I wanted to spend a long time dunking my head in a basin of hot water, with real soap. Or, possibly, try to scrub my humiliation off my still-stinking hands. I realized I was still pulled into myself, shutters folded. My consciousness was still back in the cell.

  “Yo, wrong
way,” said a voice behind me.

  I turned, joints grinding. In the sickly greenish light of the station fluorescents I saw the gangly figure, dirty-blondish hair, SMOKING CAT T-shirt, worn-in athletic shoes . . . but my brain was still on time-delay.

  “Zetts,” I said. It felt like test-driving a new mouth. “DMZ.”

  “At your service. Can we please get the fuck outta here?” Getthefuckouttahere was all one word. “I fuckin hate police stations, dude.”

  I was lamely searching for some flip rejoinder when I caught the expression in his eyes, We go like your life depends on it. Now.

  The deputy on desk duty was already looking at a screen, then at me, then back at the screen.

  When he looked up again to triple-check, Zetts had already hustled me out the nearest door. “Go, go, go, don’t stop, don’t look back, keep going, before they—

  I figured it out. Red flag.

  Zetts’s midnight-blue GTO waited in the visitor lot in all its jacked-up, muscle-car splendor. Something seemed strange about it, but Zetts was in a hurry. “Get in—we gotta fly.”

  Fly where? Why? My mouth still wasn’t working right.

  His gaze darted down when I sank into the passenger bucket. “Seat belt,” he said. When he fired the engine the whole car shook, grumbling, a bomber revving up to takeoff speed. The “seat belts” were the type of harness that crossed over both shoulders. Competition grade; I should have guessed.

  He did not have to tell me to hang on.

  The GTO nosed harshly down as Zetts spun the leather-wrapped steering wheel and we backed furiously out . . . and continued, in reverse, down the canted drive marked ENTRANCE. We piled ass-first into the street and I heard civilian brakes whine as collision was averted. Deputies were already boiling out of the exit door we’d just used, shouting stuff, unholstering sidearms.