Homeboy

by Seth Morgan

  “BITCH DOWN!” chorused the hambone hos at the bars. “BITCH BE DOWN BIG TIME.”

  DEAD HEAT

  The mailorder lingerie catalogue that appeared overnight on his desk was just the icing on the cake. Undersheriff C.C. Collins knew his secret was out within five minutes of coming on shift. The dispatcher’s blush, the stifled sniggers squeezing each good morning; the cutoff conversations and compressed smiles as he passed the booking desk. Men with a secret to guard keep a keen eye out for any sign of its escape.

  It was my picture in the paper last week, he told himself, hiding the catalogue beneath a batch of files on his desk. He attended the Boys Will Be Girls Gala in his Eleanor Roosevelt getup, and just his luck as he was leaving, so was a sevenfoot transvestite celebrated in cheap cult movies. At the barrage of paparazzi flashbulbs, C.C. dropped instinctively in a combat crouch, reaching for his offduty piece. Next morning there he was, on an inside page of the morning edition, squatting by a potted fern in the background, impersonating Eleanor wrestling with her girdle. C.C. was surprised it took a whole week for someone to recognize him. He thought it was pretty obvious, even with the plastic buckteeth.

  In a booming bleacher bum voice C.C. ordered coffee from a trusty passing his open office door. If I tried explaining, he reasoned with himself, these cretins would never understand. Hell, let em think I’m gay, he decided—it’s chic in this town.

  He followed his morning habit and repaired to the staff toilets at ten.

  He took along the lingerie catalogue hidden inside a budget folder. Passing through the lockerroom, his neck hairs frizzled feeling the stares that followed him. It wasn’t until he was seated with the catalogue spread on his bare knees that he stopped to consider that there were too many deputies lounging in the lockerroom for this time of watch. He frowned down at a young girl sitting on a rock, weaving daisies in her garter. His nostrils spread, smelling something worse than the staff toilets could offer. Hastily he concluded his business there.

  The lockerroom smelled of shoe polish and gun oil. The half dozen deputies were gathered around a television playing a tape of E.T. They jumped at the Undersheriff’s sudden voice from the door. “Where are you men posted?”

  “Sick Bay,” several answered.

  “Then what the hell are you doin here?”

  “What did he say?” a deputy asked.

  “I said …”

  “No,” the deputy said. “I meant the little space freak.”

  C.C. stalked across and shut off the television. “You’re all on report.”

  “Sir,” spoke up a stocky redhead with eyes like broken blue glass, “we were ordered off Sick Bay. SFPD took our places. They put a wired informant in a tank with a suspected killer. They want their own guys on hand if things go wrong.”

  The Undersheriff’s mouth dropped. It was the same cover used the last time. “Who ordered you off Sick Bay?” he asked in a dull voice already sure of the answer, yet no less in dread of it.

  “The Comptroller,” answered the stocky deputy.

  “Mackey?! He has no authority over the ranks. He’s an administrator.”

  The deputies shrugged and traded bored looks. The Undersheriff rushed from the lockerroom.

  The executive offices were on a lower floor, beneath the racket and reek of the county tanks. Comptroller Lamson Mackey was a lean, emphatic man whose height of forehead and steelframed glasses gave him a scholarly look. He was watering an avocado plant on his windowsill when the Undersheriff burst in. He turned to look at him in vast burlesque surprise.

  “Why, C.C. What has you so worked up?”

  The Undersheriff heard contempt in his voice and knew it was grounded in the recent revelation, but didn’t give a damn. He stood holding the open door. “The whole Sick Bay watch is kicked back in the lockerroom. They say at your orders …”

  Mackey set down the miniature watering pail without speaking.

  “That’s the same story you used to pull deputies off the court detail last month.” The Undersheriff closed the door. He crossed the room and set a folder on the edge of the Comptroller’s desk. “The Teamsters sent a hitman into the holding tank. He shot all nine prisoners so there’d be no witnesses. No one ever figured out which was his target.”

  Slowly Mackey sat behind the desk. He picked up a small typewriter brush and began dusting his watch crystal. “You better figure out whose side you’re on, C.C.”

  “I dont follow you, Lam.”

  The Comptroller set down the miniature broom and placed his hands flat on the desk blotter. “Without a loan from their pension fund, our widows and orphans would be without a health plan … Or maybe that doesnt bother you. Not being a family man, that is.” Mackey’s smirking eyes were fixed over the Undersheriff’s shoulder.

  “I know whose side you’re on, Lam.”

  “Oh, stop with the goodytwoshoes bit. It’s a war out there, C.C, and we’re losing. We have to accept whatever allies offer themselves … Besides, what’s one less bag man with a case of the gabs, or one less tattooed streetwalker …”

  “Tattooed streetwalker?”

  Mackey took the question as a signal that the Undersheriff was coming around. He smiled confidentially. “They’re scratching a hooker with so many tattoos she looks like the side of a city bus.”

  So that’s how word got out. The Undersheriff lunged for the door.

  “Dont rock the boat, C.C. Your position in this department is shaky enough already …” But he was talking to an empty door. He rose and closed it, snatched up the phone and dialed Narcotics. “Lemme talk to Villareal …”

  Waiting for the cop to come on the line, Mackey idly fingered the file left by the Undersheriff on his desk. It flipped open revealing the catalogue within. Paris Nights, it was titled. Mackey cringed hoping his wife hadn’t ordered one of its numbers before he swiped it off her sewing table.

  “Tony? Lam Mackey here. We got a loose cannon on deck.”

  Joe awoke from a morning nap to a Howl From Beyond the Crypt cranked up by a comatose form bandaged head to foot in the next bed. The cops who chased this thief off a downtown building had yet to ID the mess scraped off the pavement.

  Next he heard the familiar whrr zzz whrr zzz of a wheelchair. It was Spencer, Sick Bay’s quadraplegic gadfly, jockeying close to Joe’s bunk. “King Cheops is feeling his Wheaties today,” he chirped. Spencer had been a Navy pilot in Vietnam, losing his arms and legs when he was shot down. In the field hospital he contracted an exotic jungle infection through transfusions, a virus attacking his spine like meningitis and rotting his flesh like leprosy. No two doctors had yet to concur on a diagnosis, agreeing only that he was a “medical anomaly.”

  “Got a square, Joe?”

  Reaching for the Camels on his bedstand, Joe held his breath to wince in pain and was surprised instead to feel only a tightness. He was healing nicely. Spencer pinched the cigaret in a preposterous coathanger prosthesis he’d fashioned for himself to smoke against doctors’ orders. The quad leaned his strawthatched head to the match Joe held; an elongated head calling to mind an eggplant squashed at the bottom of a Safeway bin. His gown fell open, showing translucent skin stretched over ribs like white silk thrown over a bird cage, against which his heart fluttered like captive wings.

  If I had the wings of a turtledove, the lyric lofted in Joe’s head, prompting him to ask Spencer if he missed flying.

  “Do I? Hell, when they transferred me stateside, from the freefire zone to the Twilight Zone, I wanted to punch the Big Clock. Not because I couldnt walk to the corner bar for a beer or have a woman anymore. I was past those cares. I wanted to die because I couldnt fly anymore. There’s no rush like screaming over the jungle with thousands of pounds of thrust between your legs …” The talking eggplant flung back, loosing that shrill bird to the ceiling. “Oh Gawd! I must’ve caked every flight suit in my squadr
on with cum!”

  The outburst unnerved Joe. Somehow he doubted Spencer had flown any planes outside dreams. But even allowing that men who lived beyond the law were freed from its moral boundaries of truth and falsehood, the quad seemed more daft than deluded. Drunk on his private mythology, Spencer reminded Joe uneasily of Rooski. It was as if the spiritual alchemy that compensated each for his handicaps had confiscated the common sense needed to survive them. Grown old without the benefit of experience, they shared the hellbent innocence of children playing with matches.

  Up to the bars rolled the Pill Cart, its orderly shouting: “Medication call!” Spencer stabbed with the coathanger at his transformer, whining his motor like a hornet, and spun a wheelie shooting straight to the bars. On an impulse, Joe swung his feet off his bed and stood shakily. Rolling his IV stand beside him, he toddled to the bars for his painkillers.

  “You’re not supposed to be on your feet,” the orderly admonished.

  “I’m feeling much better,” Joe said, dry swallowing the pills handed him in a Dixie cup.

  “Dont get feelin too much better, too fast, or it’s back to the Felony Tank,” the orderly advised with a wink.

  The effort weakened Joe, and he stood clutching the bars while the others retreated back into Sick Bay to smoke and play the dozens and swap lies. The Darvon made him hungry and he smiled hearing the tympanic rumble and clash of chow wagons rolling down an intersecting corridor. From the women’s Sick Bay echoed a doowop chorus of “Baby Love.”

  His smile set with perplexity as he heard another sound, a steady metallic scraping. Pressing his face to the bars, Joe peered down to the end of the corridor. There a giant exhaust fan set in the wall opened to the southern sky. Its grill cover was removed, and its giant double propellers paddled slow rubescent shadows down Sick Bay. A white trusty with long hair tied in a topknot was perched on the fan’s wide frame. He held one of the threefoot blades, filing its edge with a large steel rasp. He paused, taking a can from his toolbelt to oil the rasp, then swung the blades, grabbing the next.

  “Hey, dude!” Joe called. “You wanna loan me that thing to cut through these bars?”

  The trusty whirled on Joe and unsheathed a soundless snarl. Square on his brow was tattooed a blueblack swastika, one bent branch pulsing to the beat of a gorged brow vein, likening the emblem to a wriggling black widow. With laughing eyes he drew the rasp slowly across his throat.

  “Never mind,” called Joe amiably, reminding himself that they put people in jail for reasons.

  The trusty whirled back to his task, seizing a blade, screeching its edge with the rasp. With a start Joe realized he was stropping the propellers, sharpening them, though to what end he couldn’t guess.

  Then he heard a warped male voice from the direction of the women’s Sick Bay: “Ready?”

  The trusty raised a grimy thumb.

  “Then crank her up,” came a giggle.

  Joe scooted to the end of his bars, trying for a wider angle of vision up the corridor, curious who issued this command in a slurred voice as if slightly braindamaged. But he couldn’t see.

  Without replacing the cover grill, the trusty threw the switch on high. Joe’s ears filled with the howl of the twin propeller blades, his gown flapped in the typhoon sucked down the corridor.

  “Where you takin me?” Joe heard a girl’s voice in the corridor. “They awready pumped my stomach.”

  “Special surgery,” Joe heard the slurry voice.

  A gurney drew abreast of his bars, pushed by an orderly Joe had never seen before. His irongray hair was cropped close in a style as militant as a Wehrmacht tank commander’s. Down one sidewall streaked a platinum patch, like a lightning bolt. His lips were gray and fat as worms, and he walked with a clumsy limp. A naked girl graffitied with tattoos lay strapped atop the gurney, protesting: “But I aint scheduled for no surgery.”

  “Kind of a last minute thing,” chortled the orderly, handing keys to the trusty who had made his way up the corridor leaning into the tunneling wind. The trusty unlocked a mechanism mounted beside steel elevator doors opposite Joe’s bars. The doors thumped open, a halogen quartz lamp above them began flashing.

  “We got thirty seconds,” the trusty shouted.

  Joe knew the girl on the gurney, she was a Strip character. He rifled his memory for her name and found it. “Rings,” he called, but his voice was swept up in the roar of the exhaust fan.

  “What am I, buffet brunch?” she screeched.

  “Twenty seconds,” the trusty cried.

  “Unstrap me!”

  “No sooner said than done,” chuckled the orderly, unbuckling and flinging aside the canvas restraints. She tried to climb off but he held her down with a fist on her chest. “Say your prayers, snitch bitch,” he slurred.

  “Gag me with the moon!”

  Moon? Joe’s heart dinned with horror.

  “Ten seconds,” the trusty shouted. “If these doors are still open the whole jailhouse locks down automatically.”

  Still holding Rings down, the orderly broke into a lurching run, wheeling the gurney down the corridor, toward the sucking blur of death.

  The Undersheriff danced between the elevator banks, banging the buttons. A tattooed prostitute in the jailhouse at the same time that his secret slipped? It had to be Rings’n’Things. They were going to kill the only woman in his life who’d let him act out his deepest impulses. For that he’d forgive the fleabrained floozie’s motormouth a thousand times. He shook his fists at the ceiling, cursing himself for not ordering the deputies to return directly to their posts. If he was too late, her blood would be on his hands.

  He gave up on the elevator and took the stairs two at a time up to the seventh floor. Past the booking desk he ran, crashing into a trio of gangbangers reciting their vital stats to the sergeant in rap music. Making saucer eyes, they recouped their cool without missing a beat—There’s a panic in the jailhouse, THAT’S … NO … JOKE, Sheriff jukin down the line like a MAN … ON … COKE.

  Reeling around the corner of the booking tanks, he dashed down the disciplinary block, eliciting taunts and jeers. Several prisoners threw food, the chow wagons must just have passed, and C.C. realized with enough force to redouble his pace that they’d make their move on Rings during lunch hour, when the increased movement would contribute to confusion and assist escape. He was in a dead heat.

  Past the federal and extradition tanks he flew. He skidded around another corner, pumping his legs high down the south corridor for Sick Bay. A chow wagon blocked the corridor, one trusty passing trays through the food slot in the tank gate, another stacking cartons of milk on a crossbar. The sight of a half ton of rolling steel reminded C.C. that he was unarmed, that he needed something to even the odds, and he cried out for the trusties to stand aside as he hit the wagon at a full run, capsizing trays, drawing cries of anger and surprise. But he heard none of this over the wagon’s mounting rumble as he ground the bones in his wrists and ankles straining to push it up to speed.

  Neither did he hear the breaker trip, nor the turbine lift its howl. He became aware of the fan by its shadows spinning down the corridor. Lifting his head over the teetering trays, he spotted the fan cover leaning against a wall at the Sick Bay intersection. He couldn’t imagine how, but he knew instantly that the ventilator was being used as a murder weapon. Thirty feet to the intersection, twentyfive … Sweat stung his eyes, his breath scorched his throat; he’d wrenched one knee, it’s cap jiggled sickeningly … Fifteen … Then, over the rumble of the wagon and the turbine’s windy roar, he heard a strange inhuman baying ringing down the walls, and his limbs flooded with adrenaline. He ducked his head and dug harder, leaning into the wagon, feeling it gain speed, grow lighter. Heaving all his strength from the balls of his feet up his legs, across his back and down his arms, he flung the wagon before him with a cry and fell sprawling to the concrete.


  Joe nearly fractured his cheekbones squeezing his face between the bars. The orderly slid to a screeching rubbersoled halt some ten feet from the ventilator. With a maniacal howl, he released the gurney and leaped sideways through the street elevator doors which slammed shut behind them.

  The turbine scream eclipsed Rings’s own. There was a terrific crash, it had to be the gurney striking the fan blades, though Joe didn’t see, having buried his eyes in his arms linked through the bars, unable to bear the horror. But his inner lens captured all: Rings shooting off the gurney into the blades, dancing a spastic fandango before being seized in the centrifugal vortex and spun faster and faster, shooting off bloody pulps—this he heard beneath the roar, a muddy mincing—until just her shredded torso still twirled in the reaping shadows; then it too disintegrated, sucked out the Hall of Justice’s tenthfloor exhaust vent in a pink puff, mingling her misted flesh with the night fog blowing off the Pacific.

  Something warm and wet splattered his face, chasing his heart up in his mouth, and he squeezed his eyes tighter.

  Then suddenly the fan fell silent, the wind died. Joe counted to ten and raised his gaze from its cradle. The elevator doors were shut. The wall opposite his bars dripped bloody globules of flesh, the same gore dribbling down his face.

  “Christ!” Joe screamed, sole witness it seemed to the final transubstantiation of Rosemary Hooten from Valleygirl to vapor. “Deputy!”

  But the corridor was empty. He whirled, facing into Sick Bay. The other patients were playing cards, pretending to sleep, reading pulp westerns as if nothing had happened.

  “Christ!” Joe screamed again. This time King Cheops responded to Joe’s cry, answering with a particularly bloodcurdling Howl From Beyond the Crypt.

  His mouth was stretched to scream once more when a lumpy rivulet of the offal on his face found his tongue. He seized his throat to hold down his gorge and stumbled for a sink. Then he stopped, pursing his lips quizzically—it tasted like onions and chili powder …