Just Like That

by Les Edgerton

  I didn’t say anything, just sat there staring at Ray.

  “I asked the warden for you, if you could get out to go to the funeral. He said he’d consider it. The funeral’s day after tomorrow, on Tuesday.”

  “What’d she die of?” is what I finally said.

  “It was her heart. Heart attack. The doctor said she probably didn’t feel a thing since she was asleep when it happened.”

  Yeah, right. Your heart seizes up, you don’t feel a thing. I’m gonna buy that shit. Fucking doctors, fucking everybody, always lying to you. Fucking punk doctor. Everybody was a punk.

  We talked a little bit more, some stuff about when we were kids and things Mom had said or done and then Ray said he had to leave. Ruthy Ann was in the car, waiting.

  “Why didn’t she come in?” I already knew the answer to that. My sister-in-law hated my guts, thought I was a “bad influence” on Ray.

  “She couldn’t handle it. Too depressing, she said. She sent her love.”

  I’m sure, I thought, but I didn’t say that to Ray.

  “Well, that’s what I came down for, mainly. Let you know and give you the money.”

  We stood up and hugged and the walking guard came over.

  “Visiting hours aren’t over,” he said. “You still got a half hour.”

  “I got to get back to my cell,” I said. “I’m expecting an important phone call from the Pope.” We shook hands, Ray and I and I turned and walked to the back door. In a minute, the guard on the other side came up and unlocked it and I went through. I looked back and saw Raymond’s back going through the other door. He turned around and waved and I waved back and then the hack had me put my hands up on the wall while he shook me down.

  Later that afternoon, Warden Coffey came down to K himself and had me brought downstairs to talk to me.

  “I checked your packet,” he said. “Pretty clean, Mayes. I think I can let you go to your mother’s funeral.”

  “No thanks,” I said.

  That night at chow I sat next to Stiles and we made a deal. For dope and fixings. I hadn’t run anything in a long time so I had to cop a rig from him too. Later on, about midnight I fixed up, ran the whole load at once which was a stupid move. I hadn’t done any dope in so long I didn’t know if I could take it. Smart thing would be to chip a little at a time, let it come back up in the needle, tap it when I started coming down, but I said fuck it and did it all at once.

  Waste of good dope. I went out like a light. Only thing I know is Dusty was shaking the shit out of me and the sun was out and somehow he got me dressed and over to the barber school. I was some fucked up. All the haircuts I did that day I did on automatic pilot. Probably the only thing saved my sorry ass was Mitch’d already stepped on the shit and lucky for me I figure he’d stepped on it with both feet. I didn’t know if I was happy about that or not.

  CHAPTER 18

  Dusty found out first, about Bud coming back. It was a week after the riot had ended. Things were pretty much back to normal except we had a shakedown every time we turned around and you didn’t want to be one of the guys in solitary. The hacks down there were having a ball thumping on the prisoners sorry enough to find themselves there, especially the ones that were there because of the riot.

  There was two brothers, worked the midnight shift in the hole, were total sadists. Big motherfuckers, they weren’t twins or anything although they both joined the staff on the same day about six years before. There was four years in age between them but they looked like twins. Big bastards, about six-three and about a pound apart at two-fifty. Most hacks, they try to stay away from the hole but not the Delaney brothers. They loved it. Didn’t mind a bit they had to listen to inmates screaming all night. In fact, if they weren’t screaming they’d roust one out and play their favorite trick. One of them would hold the inmate down and the other one would pick up the end of one of those heavy wooden benches down there and drop it on the poor sucker’s head. They’d done it so many times to one inmate in particular, Betty Sue, that she was brain scrambled. Betty Sue got to liking what the Delaneys did to her, fucked up all the time on purpose just to get back in the hole, get her head smacked again. It’s a wonder they didn’t kill her, all the bumps to the noggin they gave her, but she just smiled goofy all the time and kept coming back for more. I think she thought the Delaneys were her mom and dad and them whacking on her brain meant they loved her. Her real name was Steve McQueen, like the actor—I knew that from my time in I.D., but I doubt anybody else knew her real name.

  Just thinking about the Delaneys was enough to keep me on the straight and narrow, like it was most of us.

  But other than the shakedowns and more guys spending time in the hole, things were pretty normal. Oh, yeah, the chow was lousier even than usual being as how a lot of the food got stolen during the riot and they weren’t about to replace it. For a while, we got powdered eggs three meals a day for a week or so and then they gave us a break and served beans three squares per day but nobody gave much of a fuck about that. Regular chow wasn’t much better. It wasn’t like we got prime rib ever anyway.

  Dusty came over to me at the barber school the third morning we’re back to normal and I could tell he was excited.

  “Bud’s coming back!” he said.

  At first, I didn’t get what he was saying, who he was talking about.

  “Bud who?” I said, like a dummy.

  He gave me this look and then I knew who he was talking about.

  “How’dja know?”

  “Jonesy told me. He got a call from his sister, lives in Fort Wayne.” Jonesy was the hack got us into the barber school first time and that got stabbed in the riot. Great guy, one of the few hacks everybody liked, guards and inmates alike. Square guy, didn’t mess with your head like a lot of them try to. Black guy, too, but regular. It was a shame he’d got stabbed, but that’s what goes down in shit like that. Most of us were glad he hadn’t bought it.

  Turned out the news was right on. Bud was being tried next week in Superior Court for killing his girlfriend. I guessed that would be Kimmie although Jonesy didn’t know any names. He came over to K Dorm that night and told us what he knew. Showed us the stitches where he’d been cut in his throat. He’d lost some blood which saved his life on account of he’d passed out and the assholes who cut him thought he was dead but mostly what they’d cut was neck muscle. Turns out Bud smacked Kimmie a little harder than he meant to and she cracked her head on the floor according to what Jonesy had heard.

  “Way it looks, they got him nailed for manslaughter,” Jonesy said. “I expect you’ll be seeing him in couple two or three weeks maybe.”

  For some reason, this got me to thinking about Donna again. What with all that had gone down, the riot, Mom, and my problems with Boles I had pretty much put her out of my mind, but thinking about Bud and Kimmie got me to remembering about our trip to Louisiana and that got me to remembering about why I had gone there in the first place.

  What I got to thinking about was screwy. It wasn’t pictures of us in bed, shit like that but what it was about how different we were in a lot of ways.

  Like memory. Donna had this fantastic memory. She could tell you what her teacher’s name was in first grade. Me? I wouldn’t bet a nickel on what state we were living in when I was in first grade, much less what my teacher’s name was or even what she looked like. It could have been a man for all I remember.

  My whole past is like that. I don’t know—is that normal? I mean, I remember things, not a lot of them but a few. It’s not always things that were important, either. Donna said I couldn’t remember because my childhood was so horrible I had blocked it out but that’s bullshit. I just had so many things happen nobody could remember them all.

  We moved all the time I was growing up. First we’d be in Texas, then Indiana, then Louisiana, then somewhere else. We always came back to Texas because that’s where my mother was from. Her mother, my grandmother, owned a bar and a taxi company. My dad would work
for her for a year or two then get fed up with things and we’d move someplace else for a while. We’d usually return when he couldn’t get a job or make enough money and we’d be in some car you hoped would make it—my sister and me would be in the back seat closing our eyes and wishing with all our might that we didn’t get a flat tire or throw a tranny because we’d heard our dad say we’d be fucked if something like that happened, and the way he said it we knew it was only a matter of time before there’d be a blowout and we’d end up in some charity ward or something.

  I told Donna there was nothing to block out. My folks didn’t beat me that much, not more than anybody else’s folks. Dad didn’t believe in spanking you if you were a boy anyway. When you messed up, he’d say, “Okay, cowboy, you think you can take your old man, come on.” He’d want you to fist fight him. My sister Janice, he’d take his belt to her. Not to me. Me, he wanted me to fight him. If I did, doubled up my fists and attacked him, he’d bust me in the chops, put me on my ass. If I didn’t, he’d call me a sissy and laugh at me, tell my mom to get out a dress for his little girl. I don’t know which was worse, getting clopped in the puss or getting called a girl.

  It was that kind of shit made me move out of the house when I was sixteen, I told Donna.

  “I slept in my car for two years and finished high school. Once in a while, somebody would let me stay with them, but mostly I just lived out of my car. I’d go into the high school early in the morning and wash up.”

  “How’d you get money to eat?”

  I just smiled at her.

  “Then I joined the Navy,” I told her. “Four years of bullshit from morons. I should have stayed in though.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I couldn’t take one more minute taking orders from mental defectives. I got a year of college out of it, though. I took these USAFI correspondence courses, they pay for, from the University of Maryland. I was going to be a psychologist. Can you imagine! One of my correspondence professors wrote me in a packet that most psychologists have messed-up childhoods. He said they’re all the time trying to figure out what happened when they were kids by digging around in other people’s backgrounds. He was full of bullshit, like I found out most of the other profs were. College is a bunch of happy horseshit, you ask me.”

  “That makes sense to me,” Donna said, “what your professor said. You can’t remember half your childhood, seems to me. I can remember every teacher I ever had, clear back to kindergarten and you have trouble remembering what you ate last night. Don’t you think that’s kind of odd?”

  But I do remember that shit. I didn’t block any stuff from my memory. I don’t know what I blocked or why but I know it wasn’t for the reasons Donna thought I did. We had some arguments about that.

  I remember when I was twelve and my grandmother said it was time I worked a full shift like a man and she gave me the job as night dispatcher for her cab company. Grandma was a sharp old gal. My grandpa had ditched her and her two kids, my mom and uncle when they were both little, and she worked like a maniac from then on. She ended up owning this bar and restaurant in Freeport, Texas, only it started out as an ice cream shop she named “The Sweet Shop.” I guess she saw there was more money in beer than there was in nickel ice cream cones, so she changed it to a seafood restaurant and bar. Only she kept the same name. She still sold ice cream, up at the front, but the rest of the place was a bar, pure and simple. I told this bit about me being the night dispatcher for the cabs when I was twelve to Donna, who’s never been any place but Indiana in her life, and she acted like she didn’t believe me.

  “You think every place in the world is like this hick place?” I said to her. She made me mad. “Texas is a wide-open place, not like this farm state.” It was, too.

  Grandma started the cab company to make money from the sailors who came into the bar. The liquor laws in Texas go by county and we were in a dry county. Brazosport. You could get a beer but not a shot of Wild Turkey. Freeport was a seaport, had all these oil tankers in from Russia and Greece and Norway and all, loading up Texas oil and the sailors from the ships would hit town with a hard-on and a pocket full of money, and along about midnight would get a hankering for something stronger than Jax beer. The closest place to get whiskey was either Galveston or Houston so she obliged the thirsty by providing them cab service.

  She figured the late trick would be all right for a kid to dispatch on as it was mostly taking sailors on whiskey runs and there wasn’t anything hard about that. In the daytime, it was more complicated. You had lots of short trips all over town, little old ladies going to the drugstore for their medicine, women going from bar to bar chasing down their husbands, fares like that and the dispatcher couldn’t think straight half the time, manning the phone and the call radios. At night, late at night, it was calmer.

  So I go to work, first night on the job, scared but trying not to show it and about an hour into the shift one of the drivers shot and killed another driver about eight feet in front of me. So much for being calmer at night.

  What happened was the driver that got shot was trying to scare the other guy with this dead rattlesnake. Only the other guy didn’t know it was dead. He kept warning him not to mess with him because he was terrified of snakes but he wouldn’t listen. When he threw the snake at him the driver pulled out a gun and shot the snake guy.

  Killed him dead. And then he got off, got acquitted. They said it was self-defense on account of he was scared of snakes.

  I remember that night and I remember other stuff, too, but what I don’t remember are huge chunks of time, years, in which I guess nothing much happened.

  It’s like stabbing Boles. I know I did it, I remember doing it, but only a little bit of it. I sure don’t remember stabbing him thirty-three times. Felt more like five or six.

  CHAPTER 19

  “So that was a riot.”

  Me, Manny and Dusty were sitting on his bunk while Dusty did his books. He was king shit now on account of all the dope he had to sell. We were all getting rich. I had three hundred in green myself, not to mention all the cookies and cigarettes I wanted. Dusty treated you right. So far, I hadn’t had to do much. Threaten a guy once in a while. One guy, we jacked up, Manny and I, broke some teeth out, shit like that. Scared him. He paid up. It was an easy job.

  Manny was talking about the riot.

  “Yeah, that’s pretty much it,” said Dusty, toting up figures in a long column. “That’s what a riot’s all about.”

  “What’d you think a riot was like?” I asked Manny.

  “I don’t know...something more I guess.”

  “That was a pretty typical one,” I said. “Guys go nuts, grab a hack if they can, burn everything in sight and shank their best friend. The warden lets it go on a few days for political reasons.”

  “Whaddya mean?”

  I explained how it worked.

  “The warden knows he can shut most any riot down in five seconds but he doesn’t. He calls up the papers, the governor, people like that, tells ‘em he’s got a serious situation on his hands, gets interviewed by everybody and his brother. Newspapers, TV, you name it. Milks that puppy like a big ol’ Holstein. Then, he sends in about fifty hacks with shotguns and tear gas and it’s all over in about five minutes. He coulda done that at the git-go but then he wouldn’t get all that wonderful publicity. Now, he looks like some kind of hero to the straights. They think he’s this tough motherfucker on crime, criminals.”

  “You’re shittin’ me.”

  “Yeah? Didn’t it go down just like I laid it out?”

  It had, too. Soon as the Man moved in with the 12 gauges, guys laid down their shanks all over the place, fought each other to get in line and give themselves up. It was a riot ending the riot.

  “Hey, dummy, why you think we give ourselves up? You see many punk kids do that? Unh-uh.” Dusty put away his sheet and fired up a Camel. “No. All you seen up there with us was old-timers who know the score. You watch this warden, he’l
l be running for lieutenant governor in a year. The dummies out there will vote him in in a landslide.”

  “That’s right,” I agreed. “This is my ninth riot and they’re all the same. Mostly, it lets guys blow off a little steam. If we didn’t have one once in a while, the warden would probably make us have one. Let me ask you this, Manny—you talk to any of those reporters that came by?”

  The day after the riot a bunch of Clark Kents took a tour of the institution. All in a bunch and about ten hacks with them, along with the warden.

  “No, why would I?”

  “Exactly. You ain’t the type the warden would let talk to a reporter.”

  “Why not?”

  “You might tell them the truth. Only ones get to talk to reporters are old-timers who want to make trusty. Warden isn’t totally a dumbass.”

  Just then there was a commotion up by the front door and it opened and in came four guards.

  “Manuel Del Rio, get your ass up here!”

  They even put the cuffs on Manny before they took him away. That was serious when they did that.

  The dorm went nuts after they left with Manny, everybody wondering what the fuck he’d done.

  Dusty thought somebody’d snitched us out for the dope we were selling. I hoped he was right but I had a pretty good idea that wasn’t it. Sure enough, back he came in about four hours and he was about as white-faced as a Mexican could get. Right away he came for me and got me off back in a corner.

  “That guy was stabbed?” he said. “They think I done it.”

  “What guy?” I said, playing dumb.

  “Don’t fuck with me, Jake.” He was mad, really mad.

  “Okay, okay, I know what guy. Why’d they think you did it?”

  “Why? Oh, gee, I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I held him over the rail in quarantine till he shit his pants.”

  “They don’t know that was you,” I said. They didn’t, either. If they’d seen who did it that time, Manny would have got sent to the hole right away. I told him that.