Homeboy

by Seth Morgan

  “Which is how come I be headed there,” put in Duck Butter. “Where else they gonna make good use of my bedside manner, my deft shooter’s touch.”

  Gates crashed behind them, and a hoarse bawl rang around the tiles of R&R—“DEAD MAN WALKIN!” The cry was meant to protect a condemned man from the other convicts as he was escorted through their midst. No killer behind these walls was as implacable and jealous as the state. Joe and the rest parted as silently as smoke allowing the Death House detail to pass. It was a slight Filipino teenager carrying more than his weight in chains to his date with the gas chamber. He wore white transit coveralls like their own, only on his back was stenciled DEATH ROW. The two guards escorting him looked in need of the same tranquilizers slackening the boy killer’s jaw and leadening his feet. He stumbled on the dock steps, and they gripped either elbow, lifting him to the bottom, then dragged him across the gravel, his lifeless toes plowing wobbly furrows all the way to the station wagon marked DEATH ROW, SAN QUENTIN.

  “Load em up!” halloed the transport officer once the death wagon had departed with a wet surge of gravel.

  Joe and the others chinked down the steps and boarded the Gray Goose by its front passenger door. The last two rows of seats had been removed and a widemesh steel screen erected, turning the rear of the bus into a gun cage. A transport guard armed with an autoloading shotgun climbed into it through a special door cut over the rear wheelwell, which was locked by another guard from the outside.

  The Goose had landed at Susanville and Folsom to the north during the night and was half filled with sleeping convicts. Oblivia woke several she knew with little shrieks. After Spencer was deposited up front by the driver, she and Duck Butter took seats together in the middle, where they’d be least visible having sex. It amazed Joe how seamlessly Oblivia made the transition from street to prison, scarcely missing a beat.

  He and Earl chose two seats nearer the front. Joe tripped over his legirons and somersaulted upsidedown into his window seat.

  Earl chuckled, the sound of a straw sucking drops from a glass bottle: “Errp errp. Usta to have a sooner Catahoula, every time he run up on an armadillo hole he get his head stuck down there, yeah. Legs wavin in the air like you …”

  “What’s a sooner Catahoula?” Joe asked untangling and setting himself upright.

  “Hound he grows only down the bayou and jist as soon as he do something, that’s how soon he in trouble.”

  Joe rolled his eyes. “Earl, you said you had something of Whisper’s for me …”

  Up flew a rooty finger to the steep spotted nose. “Not till we on the road, no.”

  Joe shrugged: all he had was time. The old bus crashed its tired bones in gear and roared out the Vacaville gates. One last time Joe looked back at the vast stone warren, saying a silent farewell to Whisper Moran.

  Down Interstate 80 the Gray Goose flew, then skirted the northern rim of the bay. Joe watched a flock of egrets stepping with infinite cautious grace across the mudflats. At the howl of diesels they took sudden flight, beating slow wings in unison, stopping at once to glide long and smooth ten feet above the gray ruffled water, solemn with memories of prehistory.

  “There she is,” Earl pointed. “The Big Funhouse.”

  San Quentin’s storied walls shone salmonpink. The massive cellblocks and looming battlements reminded Joe of fairytale illustrations. Through the yawning portcullis the Gray Goose wheezed on aged airbrakes, into a court walled high with stone. At its center shivered a bed of dahlias, brave and incongruous. While they unloaded prisoners and took on others, Joe peered through the mesh at gray convict faces that might have been hewn from the same granite that yielded the silent walls.

  Two of the convicts boarding at San Quentin took seats across the aisle from Joe and Earl, a hambone and peckerwood comprising an impromtu saltandpepper traveling band. All the way back around the bay, south through Pinole, Richmond, and Oakland they entertained the Gray Goose with a spirited rendition of “Working for the Man.” The black hamboned on every available body part, using limp hands to thrash on thighs and arms a rebop rhythm, knuckles to knock a backbeat on kneecaps and skull, fingers to strum a melody on the flexing diaphragms of throat and tautened cheek. The pockfaced white with a frog in his throat yodeled the lyrics. Their stamping legirons and clinking cuffs punctuated phrases, and at the end of each chorus the peckerwood let rip a rebel yell dying in a lovesick yowl while his sideman knucklerolled his nappy skull, grunting “Gud Gawd Awmitey!” Then, shaking their chains like tambourines, they were off again.

  Joe meanwhile leaned his cheek against the cool steel mesh and closed his eyes. The throbbing diesels made him feel peaceful and sleepy. His mother and he always traveled by bus, maybe this very one before it became a Charon’s ferry for the state. She would be anxious and snippy before they embarked. Other people looked wistfully back at what they would miss; she craned dreadfully over her shoulder at what she was escaping. Neck tendons leaping, chewing her lip, she boxed Joe’s ears for being such a whiny brat. But once the bus was under way, her face softened and she stroked his hair and whispered how different things would be in the next town where always a brandnew uncle awaited. No matter that they ran always into the same old trouble they’d always been through, while on the bus anything seemed possible.

  They never reached Soledad proper. A contingent of guards in riot gear halted the Goose at the outside perimeter gates marked CALIFORNIA TRAINING FACILITY. There had been a double shanking on the Yard the day before and the joint was under General Lockdown like Vacaville.

  Earl shook Joe awake with this prophecy: “Things keep up this way the whole damn system’s gonna be locked down.”

  It took Joe a minute to fist the sleep from his eyes. The tense roadside guards distributed bag lunches to the Goose’s riders, then herded aboard five bandaged and beaten cholos. The driver and gunner remounted front and back and the Gray Goose coughed, grumbled, doubleclutched stripped gears, and headed back to 101, backtracking north. When the running noise was loud enough, Earl gestured with his chained wrists where the new riders were seated and said, “See the skinny one with the glass eye? That’s Flaco de la Oilslick, a Nester General. One evil choke, yeah.”

  “Dont like his looks,” Joe said. “But the Nesters go with the whiteboys if shit comes down, right?”

  “Yeah you right. The barrio cholos band natural with ghetto blacks. Their country cousins, like that crew, become our allies in a riot or war.”

  “Why they moving them out of Soledad?”

  Earl shrugged. “The Department moves in mysterious ways, its blunders to perform … My guess is that Flaco’s been ordering hits and they cant stop it. So instead of containing a problem, they spread it.”

  Glancing back at the startlingly white cellblocks against the azure mountains, Joe wondered if a face in one of the slit windows was offering a thanks to a God of his comprehension that the circle of blood was broken this time.

  He leaned back in his chains. “Spread it where?”

  “Coldwater. It’s this heap’s last stop.”

  The Gray Goose hooked off 101 onto 152, heading east, rocking … Through sleepy towns the Goose downshifted, where drugstores still had soda fountains and barbershops striped poles outside; where movie theaters showed double bills and old men played checkers in shaded courthouse squares.

  That such burgs existed heartened Joe. On the hurtling freeway he had the disquieting sensation of being spirited away to some desolate spot where time would pass him by. Riding down these dusty streets where cars parked perpendicularly still, the way horses once were hitched, it seemed he was being transported back to a time patient enough to wait for him.

  Or so he daydreamed as the diesels howled climbing the Sierra foothills, and a chill wind rattled the windows’ steel mesh, and Earl began humming a tune Joe recognized, “St. James Infirmary.” When Earl reached the last bar, Joe sang
it softly to a close—“So cold, so bare, so fair … Thinking of Whisper?”

  “Yeah you right.” Earl chuckled errp errp, slanting Joe the bright blue. “I guess I can give it to you now. I got it when they sent me to mug his corpse.”

  Earl rummaged at the bottom of the orange carton between his brogans. It lay beneath ancient reams of legal papers, yellowed correspondence smuggling memories across the years, frayed postcards, a number of cracked and faded photos the old con took pains to shield from Joe’s view, several bulging manila folders marked ARMADILLO. Right at the very bottom, its crown neatly tucked and folded: Whisper’s Brooklyn Dodgers cap.

  Earl’s gray eye clouded abstractly handing it to Joe. “I bet he would have wanted you to have it,” he said.

  Joe slowly turned the cap in his chained hands, studying it minutely as if it held some clue to the enigma of his fate. A glowy chill suffused him, raising gooseflesh, and he would have wept were he alone.

  “We’re home, amigo,” Earl said, pointing toward the vaulting Sierras. “The California Institute of Medicine at Coldwater.”

  Joe stared at the monstrous gridwork of cellblocks clamped to the purpleshadowed plain. Without thinking, he put on the cap, yanked it low over his eyes, the way Whisper Moran once wore it. Suddenly the light shifted, spreading shafts like a Japanese fan. Then clouds blotted out the sun and the fields blackened and crows cried.

  PUNKS OUT FOR REVENGE

  “One more dirty test, Miss Batista, and you’re off the methadone program,” warned Belly’s counselor, a dowdy old dame who couldn’t find a husband to badger and had to settle for addicts. “You’ve yet to give us one that hasnt been full of marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, and what have you.”

  “Dont worry, Miss Aspinwall,” Belly said.

  “I’m not the one who must, Miss Batista,” handing Belly the plastic sample bottle and pointing to the clinic bathroom. “You are.”

  Fine by Belly, who had just that morning figured the way to beat this system. “Booze dont count, huh, Miss Aspinwall? I had a beer or two last night.”

  “Alcohol isnt a controlled substance, Miss Batista.”

  Good, because it was a wino Belly bribed with a shortdog to piss in the douchebag slung hidden under her arm where it would stay warm. Cold sample bottles were dead giveaways.

  She waited at the bathroom door for the previous client to finish. It amused her that the clinic called its addicts clients, the same term massage parlors used for its tricks.

  Inside the tiled room she went straight to the only stall, regretting that it had no door to latch. She yanked down her Levi’s and sat on the bowl. Here was the tricky part: she had to reach with both hands between her legs, one holding the sample bottle, the other groping for the douchebag’s tube swinging down her ass. She caught a glimpse of herself in an opposite mirror and laughed. There, she snagged the tube. Holding its end over the bottle, she popped the clip. Her smile rose with the burble of urine in the little bottle.

  But at the crash of the bathroom door, her smile turned green. Miss Aspinwall and a male clinician blocked the stall opening. “That’s a twoway mirror, dearie,” smiled Miss Aspinwall. The male clinician grabbed Belly under her arms, derricking her off the bowl with her Levi’s twisted at her ankles, to snatch the douchebag from beneath her arm. Only the prospect of an assault and battery charge restrained Belly from whipping a Missouri mule on the geek and using his head for a toilet plunger.

  Triumphantly, Miss Aspinwall held up the douchebag. “Miss Batista, never darken this clinic’s door again. You’re going in the dead files.”

  Outside, dark ragged clouds wrung dirty water onto the sidewalk. Ducking her head, Belly hurried down the line of clients waiting to be dosed and crossed the street to the Early Bird Cafe. There, in a dimness tiered with grease and tobacco smoke, the clients congregated afterward to trade drugs and gossip at the chipped formica tables.

  Belly spotted Gino the Pick at a front table. Gino was dispensed juice at clinics in two counties and always had doses to sell. For a jackson Belly scored an eightymilligram jug, half her normal dose, but enough, she prayed aloud, to give her the nerve to ask Aldo Tortoricci to let her back in the ring.

  Gino was eager to help. Getting eightysixed from the methadone program was every client’s nightmare. He asked, “Hey! Why get beat up for a buck? Why not make loops for the Fat Man?”

  “Shit,” hissed Belly, shaking a Marlboro from Gino’s pack. “Last time Gordo had me use a rubberspiked dildo to cornhole this kid couldna been more than twelve. You gotta draw the line, know what I mean?”

  “Hey! If I dont, who does?” Gino was from New York. “But at least with the Fat Man you get to pee in guys’ mouths instead of bottles.”

  Belly screwed her mouth sideways. “You’re a hoot and a half, Gino. Really a fuckin riot …”

  “Hey.” Gino spread his palms.

  “But you got a point. Plus the Fat Man pays good.”

  “I’ll say. You heard about the reward he’s got out on the streets?”

  “Reward?”

  “A kilo of dope for the character who can finger the dudes who took down his theater.”

  News to Belly. Quickly, to change subjects, she asked, “You got a Valium to kick in the juice?”

  “Hey! I got better, babe. Two Tylox.” Gino cartwheeled the pills across the table and Belly used his cold coffee to swallow them.

  “Gotta book,” she said. She had to get alone to think this one out.

  Splashing along the pavement, oblivious to the rain guttering down her neck, Belly believed that the way her life was going, she was due a reward. And it was hers to collect. The Barker never knew, but that day when he thought he was alone with Rooski in her crib, she was eavesdropping at the front door. She got back early from running the credit cards in the Troll’s wallet—wouldn’t you know they were already overcharged. Just as she was putting her key in the lock, she overheard him telling Rooski how they were going to rip the Fat Man. The Barker sounded just as crazy as the caper. It was one conversation she wasnt about to walk in on. So she tiptoed back down the hall and didn’t return to her crib until after she heard Rooski was blown away.

  Chica, she put it to herself, how much closer to heaven could you get than holed up somewhere with a kilo of heroin? Rooski was dead, the Barker was slammed up with nothing much more to lose. And it wasn’t like he wouldn’t give her up. But wait—she pulled up short in the blinking yellow neon of a barroom beer sign. That aint no reward, chica, it’s bait. Sure, Gordo wants the info. But he aint gonna pay no key of junk once he’s got it, not when all he’s gotta do is off a bitch’s bahakas. And you know how, too. For the dirty birdie.

  A passing man mumbled something and Belly turned. “What?”

  “I asked if …” He smiled shyly, stepping close to hold his umbrella over them both. “I asked if you maybe liked to party.”

  “Long as you pay the band,” Belly said, hooking his arm and steering him down Mission toward the nearest motel she knew with hourly rates. The Tylox was kicking in the methadone now. She felt its warm petalfall in her tummy, its soft kiss on her brain. Playfully she skipped from beneath the umbrella, turning her button nose and bangs to the sky. The rain splashing her face was sweet and warm as blood.

  Joe walked the Yard alone. It was the first time he’d been outside unchained since Whisper’s slaying. The Dodgers cap felt momentarily tight when he reflected what tumult of desperate ideation had seethed within its band to vault Whisper Moran onto the Vacaville fences.

  The Coldwater Yard was larger than Vacaville’s and scenically grander. To the west the vast valley swooped up like an immense purple wave, trailing webs of bluegreen foam, cresting where the jagged high Diablos met an electricblue sky. To the east the sky was blocked and boxed by the white geometry of prison walls, which seemed to emit as much as reflect the lemongold light.r />
  It was Sunday, and the Yard was fairly crowded. Five hundred or more convicts lifting weights, playing Softball, pitching horseshoes, languishing on the grass, idly strolling. Joe passed among them with a strange sense of invisibility, as though either he or they were phantoms. He felt secretive but not alien. Looking around, he realized he knew none of the men on the Yard by name but all by heart. His and their hopes and fears were commingled in some pool of mutual need. They were his tribe.

  It was the same with the prison. Joe had never heard of Coldwater before, he’d received no preparation or orientation. He was simply thrown into General Population to sink or swim. Yet he knew the currents, the prison’s moods and rhythms; he was instinctively prepared. He was home.

  He found a spot in the center of the Yard and sat. He looked around him at the hundreds of the Yard; looked toward the secretive white walls, imagining the hundreds more scurrying around their assignations like ants in a hill. Each in his own time had been born into this violent new world within a world. And the trauma of each had been reduced to something distant and insignificant like a cyclone on Saturn, like Joe’s.

  Home is where they can’t throw you out, he decided, gazing at the walls. Home is also what doesn’t change while you do. He was looking at a kind of living laboratory, a time machine almost, from which he must emerge finally and irrevocably changed, a stranger to his self that sat on the Yard; yet another fish that future day sitting where he was now would stare at the same enigmatic white geometry against the same too blue sky and be visited perhaps by the same thoughts.

  “Life dont get much better,” he caught himself repeating aloud the phrase he used to buck up Rooski when things could always be worse. And once more arose the seventh wave of grief, rolling his heart among stones. Sadly he was reminded that this was Rooski’s home before he ever found it. If only the carrottop kook were hunkered beside him on the grass. If only … the phrase choked him with a bile of remorse and pity, the one for betraying Rooski, the other for condemning himself to live and remember.