The Weight

by Andrew Vachss

  He looked at me close when he paused. But if he expected me to show him a new face, he’d grow old waiting on it.

  “If that happens, you better hope he holds it together like you did,” the lawyer said. “Because, if they can tie you to that job, they will.”

  “So I could end up doing time for the one I … for the one they think I did, plus the one they know I didn’t.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Wait!” I remembered something. At least I thought I did. “What’s the statute of limitations on … whatever they think I was really doing when that girl was raped?”

  “Five years,” he said. “Of course, if they could prove you eluded prosecution, left the jurisdiction, anything like that, they could get the time extended.”

  “But if I’m in their custody for the whole five, they’re the ones who’re fucked.”

  “Exactly.” He leaned back in his chair, smiling like a guard dog giving you fair warning. Waiting.

  “Tell them they just bought themselves a rapist,” I said.

  It was all supposed to go down quick-and-dirty, but the only thing that fucking judge got right was the dirty part. The fat-faced pig started off asking me simple questions, playing his role like he was supposed to. But then he switched up and started playing it for the papers. Made a big speech about how he, personally, didn’t like the deal, but he was going to respect the wishes of the victim, especially because her therapist’s report said that the stress of a trial might be too much for her.

  I just looked straight ahead. He wanted to pose, what did I care? But then he goes and wrecks the train.

  “Mr. Caine,” he says, “I want you to tell the court exactly what happened on the night of July 3, 2005.”

  I didn’t fucking know what happened.

  My lawyer and the DA rushed the bench together. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it looked bad—the judge was getting all red in the face.

  When my lawyer came back, he whispered to me, “The deal was, no allocution. We’ll have to straighten him out in chambers.”

  They called a recess. I went back to the holding cell. They probably had a long lunch.

  When they brought me back in, my lawyer told me, “Just say ‘yes’ every time they ask you a question.”

  After that, it didn’t take long. Then they were all finished with me.

  The papers said I got five years. They always report the max, never the minimum.

  But, this time, they weren’t lying. I knew the Board was never going to cut me loose early. It’s easier to do time when you don’t get yourself all fucked up hoping for something. Hoping for anything, that’s a mistake.

  I didn’t last long in the Sex Offender Treatment Unit. Once they finally figured out I was never going to talk about some rape I never did, they kicked me out. That’s when I knew I wasn’t getting any of that “good time” off my sentence for sure.

  If you wanted to be in treatment, you had to talk about what you did. They called it “owning your behavior.” I thought that was pretty funny, considering that the only reason you were there was that the State owned your body.

  Some stooge—greasy little slob, a real veteran of what they called “group”—he decided to confront me.

  “Confront” is what they call it when you get to spit on a guy and he can’t make you pay for doing it. Like calling a man a pussy from the other side of the bars.

  “You have to take responsibility, Tim,” he said. “That’s when the healing can begin.”

  “The assholes of those little kids you fucked, think they healed up by now, ChiMo?”

  “We’re not talking about me.”

  “Who’s ‘we,’ ChiMo? I’m talking about you. What’s your problem? Too much fucking ‘stress’? You don’t like it, go back to your cell and jack off some more, you baby-raping sack of puke.”

  “No personal attacks,” the whiny little shrink who came in twice a week to run the group said, not looking at me. “And we don’t use terms like ‘ChiMo’ in here.”

  “Look in one of those books of yours,” I told the shrink. “See if it tells you what it means, you call a guy ‘ChiMo’ like it’s his name.”

  “I know what it means,” he told me, all snotty and superior.

  “No, you don’t. You think all it means is ‘child molester’? Maybe in this room. But outside this little ‘group’ of yours, it’s another world. And it’s got different rules.”

  “We all agreed—”

  “ ‘All’? Me, I didn’t agree to shit.”

  I turned in my chair so I could look at all of them, one at a time. “How many of you skinners walk the yard? You, the greasy punk with the beard, you think fucking your own kid makes you special? Yeah, I know, you’re all special, right?”

  None of them said a word.

  “What’s that tell you?” I asked the shrink.

  He looked everywhere but my eyes, rubbed the patch on the elbow of his sport jacket, like it would give him strength. “Societal attitudes—”

  “Man, I can see why they all love you. Gonna write a lot of sweet letters to the Parole Board for them, huh? You fucking chump—all that college and you still get played for a retard? Or maybe you just get your rocks off listening to their stories, is that it?”

  I crossed my arms. Not to make the biceps pop, the way some of those iron freaks do. Just to wall me off from them … and make them see it. “Me, I’m not in PC,” I said. “I can walk the yard.” I turned to look at the shrink. “You think that’s because of your faggot ‘societal attitudes,’ you don’t know shit. I can walk the yard because the people out there don’t care about what you did to someone else—they only care about what you can do to them.”

  When I got back from Yard later, I found the paper in my cell. I knew it had to be from the people who run the place—who else’s got enough juice to get a kite put right on your bunk?

  It said I was “found to be a poor candidate for treatment” because … ah, the rest was a bunch of words I didn’t give a damn about. Just another reason for the Parole Board to hit me when I came up. Like they needed another one.

  You never count the days unless your sentence is in days, like that county-jail slap I got before. Ninety days, that’s a number you can count. Felony time, the faster you move, the slower it goes.

  They sent me to the joint I wanted. Not because I asked or anything. Probably because they figured it would be the last place I’d want.

  Dannemora. “Little Siberia” is what everybody called it. Just a few miles from the Canadian border. Nobody wants to jail there, because it means your family has to travel a whole day just to get a visit. Most of them, they come up the day before, stay at some motel. So it’s really a three-day trip. That all costs money, makes it even harder.

  Black guys really hate the place. They’re all city boys. Not only do their people have to come all that distance to see them, but the town where they have to stay, everyone knows why they’re there. The Latinos don’t like it much, either.

  But it’s a good place for a guy like me. Everyone wants to transfer out, so the race-war thing is dialed way down. And if you don’t try to go into business for yourself—like getting your girlfriend to mule in some dope, or opening a gambling book—you don’t make anybody mad at you, either.

  Lots of notorious guys were there when I was. I mean, guys you would have read about in the paper. Like that “Preppie Killer.” When the jury hung on his first murder trial, they let him plead to manslaughter, and threw in a bunch of burglaries, no charge. Another one had killed hookers. Lots of them.

  For most cons, the more of those kind, the better. They were always getting money sent in, and you could usually muscle them off a piece of their haul when they drew commissary.

  I never did that. The best way to do your own time is to stay out of the rackets—even the little ones, like trading your phone time.

  You never take favors. Like when a con offers to get a girl to visit you. His girlfriend,
she’s got a friend. All it’s supposed to cost you is a slice of whatever you manage to work the girl for.

  No use telling the other guy you’ve already got a girl, since anyone can see you’re not getting visits. So you have to say no and make sure he never asks you again.

  The first time I hit the yard, I was a little surprised that I didn’t know one single guy out there. Eddie was gone, but I figured, my life, the odds were pretty good I’d know someone. I guess any decent outlaw would have managed to work himself into a joint where there was more action.

  Action was what you needed if you were pulling a long piece of time. Me, I was probably the shortest guy in the whole pen. They used to keep this place reserved for the hardcores: double-lifers, cons who had stuck a guard, top-shelf gangsters. Then the dumb fucks who run the system figured out that a joint full of men with nothing to lose wasn’t such a bright idea. I think it might have been the guards’ union that tipped them off.

  My account was always kept full, so I could get what I needed without going on the arm, or putting in work for one of the crews.

  I paid for smokes, never borrowed any. After a while, I just quit. Whole goddamned place was supposed to be smoke-free, so you couldn’t walk around with a pack, much less a crate. You had to do one at a time, and you’d catch a ticket if you got caught, too. Fuck all that.

  You’d think prison, it’d be the last place to change. From the outside, it might look that way, but things had really shifted since I’d been away the last time. Even what the cons called the guards: it was “hacks” my first time, now it was “COs” or “cops.”

  Changing what you call things doesn’t make them different.

  There’s two kinds of contraband: the kind that gives you power inside the prison, and the kind that you could use to get out.

  The first kind mostly comes from drugs. Which means they have to be muled in. The gang that has the best traffic system could buy a lot more power with the profits. More fancy sneakers, more color TVs—stuff you could buy, that was how you showed off.

  My first time, everyone knew the mob guys didn’t use mules. They got their supply direct from the prison pharmacy. It was the best connection of all, until the blacks started jumping them, right out in the open. That wasn’t about black against white; it was about gang against gang. The black gang might have been nothing on the street, but Inside, they way outnumbered the mob guys.

  Some of the blacks ended up binged for life. Only too many of the mob guys ended up dead, so the blacks took over the drug trade anyway.

  That was a long time ago, but I could see it was still that way. Only now, the Spanish guys had their own operation, too.

  What did change was that other kind of contraband. On my first bit, if you got caught holding soft money, they’d lock you down tight. And if you got caught with a pistol—not a zip, the real thing—you’d probably never see daylight.

  Only reason to have soft money was if you were planning to slip out. If you go without a dime in your pocket, you’re as good as caught. Plenty of guys plan how to get out, but don’t have a clue on what they’re going to do once they clear the wall.

  You can’t make a life-without sentence longer, but you can sure make it harder. Anyone who ever got brought back after making an escape could tell you that.

  A zip gun, that’s for settling an individual beef, not for trying to bust out. Even a real pistol’s no good for that—you can threaten to kill a guard all day and they’re not going to open the gates. But it’s great for taking hostages, and getting a lot of cells opened. Which means a riot.

  Nobody could mule a pistol in. But a couple of gang bosses were known to have access to one. There had to be guards in on a deal like that.

  That’s the first thing that hit me. I hadn’t been away that long, but now it seemed like nobody cared about going for the Wall anymore. The guys with real juice, they could get anything they wanted right there. They didn’t care about soft money. Or even pistols. What they really wanted was cell phones.

  A cell phone, that’s super-bling. The ultimate. Perfect for a shot-caller who’s never getting out of Ad-Seg. That’s what they call the hole they dump you in for heavy violence now. Stands for “Administrative Segregation.”

  With a cell, the shot-caller can reach out anytime he wants. And touch somebody, too.

  I thought that was amazing, but a guy who’d done time in Mexico told me the narco kingpins always had cell phones there. Carried them around, nobody said a thing.

  Some of the shot-callers spent too much time in Ad-Seg. Once they snapped that it was really going to be forever, it drove them nuts. They used those cell phones all the time, texting members outside about who needed to be hit.

  If you’re in that guy’s crew, there’s no way out. If you say out loud that he’s having people hit for no reason, you’ll be the next to go. And even if you keep quiet, you could end up on that same list anyway.

  Yeah, that was the real difference. Instead of scheming to get out, everyone was scheming how to make their life better right where they were. You can’t even plan an escape without some help. My last time up, the gangs trusted each other a lot more, too. Now being crewed up didn’t mean you were safe. Not even from your own guys.

  Outside, I never went near dope. In my line of work, nobody trusts a junkie. You get a rep for that, you’re done.

  For sex fiends, it’s even worse. A junkie might kick his habit. An alkie might get off the booze. But no sex fiend ever gets off his train. Everybody knows that. Except maybe the people who run those bullshit “programs.”

  Or maybe they do know. It’s a pretty good hustle. The State pays you to do something that can’t be done, so you don’t get blamed when one of them goes right back to doing what he likes to do after he’s been cut loose.

  There’s another part about that “treatment” thing—it probably makes them harder to catch the next time. Those slimy fucks may call it “group,” but all they’re doing is passing around trade secrets. How this one slipped up with something on his computer, or this one took pictures with his phone and never deleted them. I guess you go through enough of those programs, you learn a bunch of new tricks.

  So, yeah, probably it does look like the treatment works. I mean, how are they going to “relapse”—that’s what they call it, when a sex sicko gets caught the next time, “relapse”—when they spend years learning how not to get caught the next time?

  What I did was: watch a lot of TV, read some books, work out every damn day. I even answered some of “Marcy’s” letters, just to make sure Solly knew I was holding tight.

  When I wrote Marcy that we’d pick up right where we left off, Solly’d understand that meant I’d be looking for my money.

  Before I knew it, I’d already done the minimum.

  The two weasels they sent up to decide what they’d “recommend” to the whole Board came with pages of reasons to deny me. I gave them a couple more. The man asked me, “Have you attempted to make any sort of restitution to your victim?”

  “I don’t have a victim,” I told him.

  “You’re saying you’re innocent.”

  “Bring in a polygraph, you’ll see it for yourself.”

  “It’s common knowledge that sociopaths are immune to polygraph examinations,” the woman said. “A polygraph doesn’t detect lies, it measures consciousness of guilt. And it’s clear from your record that you qualify.”

  “Qualify as what?”

  “A sociopath,” she said, real fussy-like. “You exhibit a pervasive pattern of conduct which—”

  “Sure. I get it. Look, you’re not going to stamp my ticket no matter what, so just call it off, okay? I’m missing a show I always watch.”

  “What show is that?” the woman asked, like she really was curious.

  “This whole place,” I told her.

  People on the other side of the law from me, I never tell them the truth. By now, it’s more than just a habit; it’s who I am. So, even wh
en I did what they wanted me to do, I kept it to myself.

  Like how they were always saying I should be “reflecting” on my crime. I actually did that.

  I spent a lot of time thinking about the crime.

  A lot of time hating.

  Not the girl. It wasn’t her fault I was in there. If she picked me, she must have believed I was the guy who did it. Or else she got pressured into it. That happens, too.

  I didn’t hate her—I hated the rapist. He fucked us both, I thought to myself. But I felt dirty just thinking of it like that, so I changed it. He hurt us both. That was better.

  I’m not a killer by nature, the way some guys are. I don’t go looking for it; I don’t get a kick out of it, nothing like that. But, for this guy, I’d make an exception. I’d really like killing him. Specially if I could tell him why first.

  It’d be extra great if the girl he raped got to watch.

  I thought about that all the time. I even dreamed about the guy who did it. But I could never see his face.

  I didn’t think the girl had seen it, either. But maybe she knew something. Something the cops never connected to anything. Or even asked her about.

  What I couldn’t figure out was, how was I going to ask her?

  The one good thing about maxing out is you’re off paper the minute they close the gate behind you.

  After that, they don’t give a fuck. Why should they? Some cons are psycho mad dogs who’d tear a hole in your throat with their teeth for looking at them wrong. But the ones the guards in Ad-Seg really hated were the gassers—the ones who were so mental that they’d save up their own shit just so they could throw it at anyone passing by.

  Too dangerous to be in Population, but they’re fine for the street. Like doing time cures people or something.

  You just walk through the gate, get on the bus. They’ve got one going downstate every day. Costs more than a plane ride, but they can charge whatever they want—there’s no competition. Like with the collect calls. You can only call collect if the person you’re calling agrees to accept it … and that means they pay through the nose for every minute. The phone company splits the take with the prison. They got guys in here for working that same kind of racket on the street.