by Seth Morgan
“What’s in my belly proves you aint no dream, fella,” she said aloud, cocking and aiming her finger pistols in the mirror. “I used to say I didnt know where I left off and you began. Well I do now. Inside me, growing, where we both end and both begin.”
“Ah, the Cubist nightmare of post-Versailles Germany,” she heard Dan working on his Leslie Howard imitation through the door. “I can feel it in my … my … my viscera!”
“Girl, I dont know how much more of this you can take,” Kitty’s mouth muttered back from the goldveined mirror. She snatched a handful of Kleenex and dabbed the hurryhome drops from her cheeks. Next she slapped her face with a loaded powder puff. The sudden explosion of perfumed particles practically smothered her. Frantically she flapped her hands, choking in the pink dust storm. Then suddenly she was still, staring agape into the mirror.
The powder and steam still wreathing the bathroom recalled the swirling chaff in that ramshackle East Texas barn so long ago. She’d choked then, too, on the dust and her own impotent selfdisgust. Nate Winder was the name of the boy she made take her up there that brassy August afternoon to do what Papa had taught her to want, but from no other; and Papa caught them, it was like he was laying for them, though they hadn’t seen him—caught them before it could happen even and stamped back out to wait, roaring in the sunblasted yard with Mama trembling in his terrible, long shadow; roiling the leaden air with whiskey fumes and fulminations, cracking his tongue like a whip until Nate came out like a man and said he’d marry her as a man should; though Papa still backhanded him like a woman, bitchslapped him to his knees; and none knew but the girl that his rage was not the blameless red that sprinkled the dust, but green.
Least of all Nate, who got up. Got up and did the Christian thing and married Katherine Quintana without asking her even (knowing if he did, she’d say, You neednt, you didnt, what’s swelling me isnt yours) in the clapboard church on the bluff overlooking the Gulf; then went off like the others to the war that wasn’t and did his duty, and got his fool head blown off on a tropic upland plain for reasons he would have understood less than Kitty even, who could no more pronounce the name of the province pasted on the Army telegram announcing her widowhood at fifteen than give a damn. She was wild.
They brought Nate home and buried him behind the church overlooking another summer’s Gulf; folded the flag like a tragic napkin and lowered the knottypine box into the grave beside the tiny one of the infant Mama and Papa had made her carry to term against her will. Nine months she felt the horror growing in her, crying to Mama it was wrong, a sin; and Mama crying back, What sin? She and Nate were married legal, a family. Behind, Papa stood scowling drunk; and when she smothered the newborn in her breasts and they called it crib death, none knew but him to whom it was son and grandson both … Damn you, Papa, but not before you see proof that this second bloom is blessed of the womb whose first you poisoned …
Joe learned the meaning of hard water in the Receiving and Release showers. It was like standing beneath the tailgate of a truck dumping gravel. Stepping out, an inmate fumigator frosted his pecker with a nozzle blast from the delousing canister strapped to his back like a scuba tank.
“Dont touch it, fish,” warned the fumigator, using the handle for new prisoners. “Might snap off.”
“Maybe it’ll give it longer shelf life,” Joe hoped.
Naked then, the fish were paraded past desks manned by twofingered inmate typists who recorded their physical descriptions, next of kin, religious preference, educational and medical histories. Through the barred windows Joe watched the day being squeezed down to an angry red line beyond the fences. R&R was a halflit dream of Purgatory, peopled by antic shadows who spoke in echoes. The din dizzied him, the reek of leaking adrenaline made him queasy. The absurdity of being checked into the zoo by the animals tempted him to pinch himself awake.
Once he was fingerprinted, Joe was pointed to a long table where he was issued his fish roll: blue work shirt, denim pants, brogan shoes, socks, underwear, toothbrush, and sack of state tobacco. Gratefully, Joe dressed and took his place on a bench to await his prison mugshot. Beside him Whisper sprawled, legs straight out and crossed at the ankles, arms folded across his chest, cap pulled low. He might have been dozing but for his catlike aura of quiescent vigilance.
Joe rolled and fired up a state cigaret. “Tastes like yak dung.”
“You gonna lay up on the state tittie,” Whisper shared some cellspun savvy. “You better get used to its juice.”
“I hope I dont have to get used to guards like Rowdy McGee.” Joe shuddered, wondering what fate the Goon Squad leader might devise for him if he recognized his face from Sick Bay.
“May as well. You gonna find Gooners in every pen takin numbers and kickin ass …”
“Not like him,” Joe was sure.
“Nooo, that I’ll give yuh.”
“What if he recognizes you? From Quentin, I mean. From throwing him off the tier.”
Whisper tipped back his head to study Joe. “He’s already recognized me. By this …” He touched the cap’s faded bill; something glinted in its shadow. “Only he’s scared of it. As long as I’m wearing it, he wont touch me.”
Joe asked what was so scary, it just looked like any old baseball cap to him.
“Only it aint … See, when the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles the general manager donated the old caps to the state. We had a baseball team at Quentin, nine of us, that old Glass House gang I told you about, and we each got one. The ‘B’ stood for the Brotherhood. We were wearin em that day when we came in from practice on the Yard and caught McGee alone on the third tier and flipped him over the rail. Ever since, when he sees one of these lids he spooks, like he’s smelling the flowers on his own grave.”
“Wish you killed him.”
“Stop worryin bout McGee. You’ll ship out to another pen in a coupla weeks.”
Joe snorted. “Sure. Just whistle on off to gladiator school …”
“They aint all gladiator schools.”
“But they’re sure to send me to one. I’m doin a GTA with a silent murder. I heard you gotta grab a bunkframe member for a spear and a garbagecan lid for a shield to survive in gladiator school.”
“Like I say, they aint all so bad. And it aint up to them where you go.” The dice shook in Whisper’s throat. “Remember who really runs these joints.”
“Jack Moran!” called the photographer’s assistant.
Hearing the name, the convict photographer ducked from under the hood attached to his antique camera. Already Joe had discovered convicts usually looked young for their age, as though the rancor of prison years was spent grinding down souls, sparing physiognomies. This coot was maybe sixty; tall and stooped, with a beaklike nose dropping in a straight line from his high liverspotted pate. Owlish eyes completed the impression of an old predatory bird. Eyes of two colors, Joe noticed when he turned a long face unraveling in smiles—one pearl gray, the other gunmetal blue.
“Well, I’ll be snakeeyed, yeah, if it aint Whisper Moran!” The shutterbug’s accent skipped lightly over his words like a flat stone across smooth water. He and Whisper gripped and shook forearms like longlost brothers. He asked, “This time whatcha in for?”
“Forever,” Whisper scowled.
“Yeah you right,” breathed the old bird, his gray eye dilating above its pouch of penitentiary secrets.
While the assistant dogged down the stool in the plywood booth, Whisper and the man he called F Stop cheerily reminisced about old times on prison yards. Whisper took the stool then, and the assistant swung a pegboard with his name and number beneath his chin, and Whisper swept off the Dodgers cap and smoothed his baroque pomp and even laughed at something the old con said from beneath the hood the instant the bulb popped.
Leaving the booth, Whisper said something in the coot’s ear, jerking a thumb Joe’s direction. The old convict sla
nted Joe the bright blue eye and nodded tightly.
Finally Joe was on the stool himself, directing his best deadpan at the camera.
“Amigo, look like Dillinger or Daffy Duck,” the old con said. “Only remember this mug will be stapled to the jacket that goes to the Parole Board, yeah?”
With a bat of his eye, Joe changed his look from Billy the Kid to the kid next door.
The pegboard the assistant swung beneath Joe’s whiskered chin read: SPEAKER, J CALIFORNIA PRISON B-83478—“Memorize your number, dude,” an R&R clerk had instructed him. “You left your name hanging on the gate.”
The old con finished fussing around inserting a new plate into the contraption Mathew Brady might have used and disappeared beneath its black hood. A large hand with half of the second and third fingers missing reached in front to swivel the lens delicately.
Suddenly the hand froze. It reached back flinging off the hood. The photographer’s pale face rose behind the camera like an elongated moon. Wide unhooded eyes stared fixedly and confoundedly at Joe as though the camera lens had revealed some awful truth invisible to the naked eye.
“What’s the matter, Pops? I aint a ghost. Not yet.”
“Is the ‘J’ for Joseph?” Dread leadened the photographer’s voice. Absurdly Joe was reminded of Professor van Helsing starting from an empty mirror to stare back at Count Dracula with a terrible new comprehension.
“Just plain Joe is fine,” he said amiably. With the wild hope of escaping the gladiator schools just hatched in his heart by Whisper, Joe wanted to remain on good terms with any friend of the A.B. General. He grinned crookedly, asking: “Why? What’s the big deal?”
“Oh … not a thing, amigo.” The photographer shook his head with a peculiar diffidence. “There was a baseball player once …”
“Tris Speaker! Not many people remember him. He died the same year I was born.”
The long face quickly rehooded itself. The flash exploded a hundred colored balls, the induction process was complete; Joe was a convict.
When Kitty entered from the bathroom, Dan was watching the kraut flick with the whore in the top hat again. She was singing with her foot on the chair. The butchy tuxedo whorefit reminded Kitty of Bermuda and Eartha and their bustout ilk.
“Ah!” Dan gasped when the Professor flapped his arms and crowed. “She’s weaning him off his sanity.”
“Cuttin his lil weenie right off. Shitfire.”
Dan hardly gave her time to pin up her hair before he started with the sexy stuff. Lunching on her chichis was his favorite pregame warmup. Joe used to suck and nibble them like big gum drops. Dan had to scissor them in his teeth like tearing open cellophane potatochip sacks. It was tragic, like nursing a piranha.
Kitty yanked him up by his layered hair to read her lips.
“Stop.”
“Stop?” His eyes were untracked.
“Like in cease and desist, buddy. My jalobies are too sensitive.”
“Ja-what? Oh, nipples. I wish you wouldnt talk that way when we … What’s wrong with them?”
“Nothing’s wrong … Havent you noticed I’ve been puttin on weight, eatin goofy things like Top Ramen for breakfast?”
“Pregnant?” His eyes said such biological inadvertencies weren’t Danstyle. “Have you seen a doctor?”
“Danny boy, I dont need to snuff no rabbits. I know I’m pregnant just as sure as I know I’m a woman … Hefty muchachas like me can tell early.”
“Then I’ll marry you.” He might have been volunteering to go into a burning building.
“Dont want to marry you. Aint yours no how, buddy.”
“You mean … it’s his? But he’s been gone …”
“It took the last time we did it.” She snapped her finger. “Rang my ovaries like church bells.”
“Oh Jesus.” Dan buried his face in his pillow. But after a minute he lifted it from its satin grave, and it shone with a zeal as if running into burning buildings, not Danstyling America on the Make, was his true calling. “I’ll still marry you.”
“You dont get it …”
“Oh, you’re going to abort it.”
“Shitfire! Flush my baby to San Pedro? Say that again and I’m outta here. I’ll go home to Galveston n have it n wait on Joe to raise up.”
“But you cant go home again.”
“Home’s where all the good girls go before the credits roll.”
“But him? Wait for him? That deadbeat?”
Kitty set her mouth hard, holding back telling him how he stacked up against Joe Speaker.
After a moment he gave in as she’d expected. “If your mind’s set on it … At least let me take care of you. You dont want a welfare baby.”
Kitty’s shrug wondered what difference such labels made, not that Dan noticed, he was getting all sexy again, and she let him have his way. For the baby’s sake, she needed Dan a little longer. Galveston was only a threat; the last place she’d go broke and pregnant was home to Papa’s brutalities. Alone, she’d take her chances on the streets, but she couldn’t gamble with the life within her.
To avenge the crack about Joe, she grudgefucked Dan. Doggystyle, she wrung expert snapper muscles slamming it shut like elevator doors, so he went limp trying to push in. An old hooker’s trick to keep the little boy in every man strapped to his psychic trainer toilet.
In the dark she patted his sobbing shoulder and told him it happened to real men too, take it from a whore; and with a cheery nite nite she turned over, punching a saddle in the pillow, and hihoed off to sleepy pastures.
Joe’s was the last school of fish through the inner gates onto the Vacaville midnight Mainline. Their steps echoed down the tall stone hallway, halting at each cellblock, dropping off the fish assigned to each. Joe was deposited at the last. A First Watch sergeant keyed him through and checked him in at a small desk lit by the only light in the cavernous cellblock. Overhead the tiers loomed up into a stonechambered blackness animated by myriad sounds of sleep merging into a restless hum like a phantom dynamo.
Joe followed the beam of the sergeant’s flashlight up three flights of ringing steel stairs to the uppermost tier. Then all the way down the narrow catwalk to one of the last cells. He looked down once at the desk light far below and got dizzy and had to grab the handrail.
Alone, he stood in the black cell listening to the sergeant’s metal steps descending the steel stairs and crossing the rotunda to the lockbox. He heard the faraway airbrake levering the doublelock thunking home in his cell gate.
He tossed his roll on the bunk and crossed to the window bars. Across moonlit folded fields shone a cluster of lights, the brightest one blue. Blue as the mysterious photographer’s eye, he mused. Blue as a rock called the Moon. He clutched himself to the bars as tightly as he clung to that image of all that was left for him to believe in.
FENCE PAROLE
The interview room was as naked and cold as the surmise narrowing Tarzon’s eyes. Strewn on the table between them were the betting slips found in the house on Treat Street, some blackened and curled with blood.
“Look familiar, Speaker? That’s your crimey’s blood.”
Joe’s nostrils flared smelling death; he shook his head tightly.
“Soon as I finished booking you, I had these compared with slips seized around town by Vice. They matched those of a flyweight named Frank Stutz. Fabulous Frank makes book for Baby Jewels Moses. That’s how I knew you and Rooski took off the Fat Man. The revolver and masks found behind the theater confirmed what I already suspected finding Rooski with the Mossberg, that you’d pulled a switch with the Sings.”
Joe swallowed hard and fingered one of the slips. “Your thing crystal channeling or just an oldfashioned Ouija board?”
“Is being an asshole a fulltime job or do you take a day off now and then?”
Trying to screw up a grin
half as enigmatic as that encasing the Hav-A-Tampa Jewel, Joe succeeded only in looking sick.
Dentalwork flashed brightly to the side of the Hav-A-Tampa Jewel. “Didnt expect to get the diamond, did you?”
Joe crushed his lower lip between his teeth to still its trembling. “You better send that seegar to the lab for analysis.”
“I’m as sure you got it, asshole, as I’m sure I’m goin to get it back.” The seegar erected like a Minuteman in his wintry smile.
“You may be playin with a full deck, only with an extra joker.”
“It aint just a diamond you stole, Speaker. You stole the key to lock the Fat Man in the little green room … I’ll put my cards on the table. All fiftyfive of them, asshole. Give up the diamond and I’ll have your sentence modified to time served.”
Joe spread a grin that would have dripped canary blood had it been a cat’s. “You shouldnt lay your cards on the table until all the bets are down. Supposing I had the diamond and gave it up. What’s to keep you from giving me up to the Fat Man? Let him do what you and the state cant, execute me.”
Tarzon’s badge was displayed from the wallet tucked in his breast pocket. He tossed it on the table. “I swear on my shield.”
Joe puffed his cheeks and gunned the cop a chary sidelong. “I’ve had such a wealth of sanctified oaths broken right over my head, you must be kidding … Besides, it might be against my principles to give up Moses. Maybe I’d rather walk the Yard a man than the streets a punk …”
“You didnt have any qualms about snitching off Rooski …”
“So say you.”
From an inside pocket Tarzon produced a cassette player; set it on the table and pushed PLAY. Joe heard his own voice muffled by the dragon jacket: “183 Treat … Chakov … armed … wont be taken alive …” Tarzon punched STOP and tucked the player back into his jacket. From another pocket he pulled out two short rolls of graph paper. He laid them side by side before Joe. Each was marked with parallel jagged lines.