by Seth Morgan
“Makes it sound like a beauty pageant.”
“Ha! In a sense it is. The more homicides a prison successfully prosecutes, the sexier a warden’s bonuses and prettier his commendations. My string of goose eggs makes me look soft, Mel. No … muscle … tone!” The pencil broke. “What drew attention to us was that kid who got killed last month on R-2. Turned out the little snot was a state senator’s nephew doing time for cocaine sales …”
“A routine penitentiary killing, sir.”
“They dont see what’s so routine about getting your dick sliced off and rammed up your ass with a mop handle.”
“They would if they knew his wife brought her child from a previous marriage on a visit. Her husband was black, the kid was highyaller. The other whites had to take him out for having a redheaded stepchild.”
“Well … the fact remains, Mel, that they dont rate a warden’s effectiveness on the peace he keeps but the butt he kicks. So we’re gonna have a crackdown here at Coldwater. I’m bringing in a new commander for Search and Investigation. We need to shore up our Custody image.” Gasse snatched up the transfer order tucked in his blotter. “This hardass made his bones the oldfashioned way, by breaking them, including a few of his own.”
“Crackdown? Sir, have you read my memos, weighed my arguments?”
“Yes, Mel. Following your advice is what’s got me in this fix. We cant operate any more on the theory that if we treat convicts nicely they’ll return the favor.”
Reilly rose heavily and crossed to the window, looking down once more at the town in the prison’s shadow. All along he’d considered the town a symbol of all that was protected by the existence of the prison. Now he wondered if it wasn’t the prison that needed protection.
“Warden,” he said, “every day this prison is becoming more crowded, and every day one inmate program or another is being axed, removing their incentives to preserve order. We only control this human toxic waste dump because the convicts view us as reasonably fair and just, people they can somewhat trust and understand. When we resort to coercion and violence, they’ll respond in kind. When we say, ‘Hey, fuck you, scum—we got you behind bars and we got all the keys and guns and clubs …’ we’re lost.”
The Warden wasn’t listening; he’d heard the spiel a hundred times before. Reilly was a relic of the rehabilitation age. He couldn’t grasp that prison was a business and the convicts were its inventory which must be controlled. Again, as Reilly spoke, he examined the transfer order. Yes, this ballbuster was a blowback to days of yore when men were men and prison guards kicked any ass that needed softening. Just the Custody fanatic to prove to the Director that Warden Gasse appreciated that desperate times called for desperate measures. He’d fax it out as soon as Reilly left the office. He cleared his throat. “Mel …”
But Reilly was on a roll. Turned from the window, hands spread, looking around the walls, across the ceiling, an eerie tremolo mystifying his voice: “You’ve been here long enough to know, to feel this … place is theirs. It was built for them, it stands for them, it’s their home and right by birth almost. We only control it because they allow us to. Otherwise, it’s theirs any time they want it.”
Gasse stared at his oldest, most decorated line captain with alarm giving way to wary pity. Maybe it was time to put Reilly out to pasture. At least then Gasse wouldn’t have to look at that luxurious silver mane every day.
“Hey!” the Warden shouted suddenly. “What happened to your hair? Who cut it?”
Grinning abashedly, Reilly rubbed the stubble around his neck and ears. “I had to go to the barber in town. Del Rio got sent to the Hole by the same rookie who gaffled Moonpie up.”
“Savage! I want to kill him!” Bloodlust rocketed Gasse to his feet. Reilly could hardly blame him. When the Cold Cuts didn’t show, his wife put on polka records and the dinner party couldn’t have been gloomier than a soiree with Adolf and Eva at the Berghof.
“How are you disciplining that imbecile, Mel?”
“Graveyard Culinary. Also, he’s assigned color detail every morning. In fact …” Reilly again turned to the window and chuckled with satisfaction. “There he is, right on time, raising the flag … I always say that there’s hope for a man who knows how to follow an order.”
Gasse joined Reilly at the window. With approving smiles, they watched the solitary figure on the Admin lawn pulleying the flagpole lanyards. The flag reached the pole’s summit; a gust of wind snapped it flying … and Reilly’s eyes bulged in horror. Blunt fingers scrabbling the thick glass, he let go a terrific howl. Warden Gasse sprang like a mongoose to his desk. He grabbed the institutional line and ordered Tower One to fire warning shots at the moron with orange hair saluting an upsidedown Old Glory.
HOTSHOT
Day broke like a wine cooler smashed suddenly on the curb of the sky, splashing the derelict building with lemon and peach, drenching its concrete crevices cherry, inking the lacework shadows of exterior catwalks and ladderways in grape.
Quick Cicero alighted from his ’65 Sting Ray. His washedout gaze scanned the tall pocked face of the abandoned brewery and locked just beneath the cracked blue globe that once revolved this legend girdling its equator: BLATZ, A BEER TO CHEER THE WORLD.
From broken davits beneath the globe a derrick boom swayed above great iron doors frozen half open on rusted tracks. The climbing sun widened a wedge of light inside. Quick glimpsed the smooth arcs of the giant oak beer barrels hooped with rusted steel.
On slithered the expug’s kid leather gloves, slick and thin as wet membranes. He popped the Vette’s hood and used a pocketknife to carefully scrape the corrosion from the battery terminals into a glassine envelope. He held the tiny opaque square to the light, shaking it, fluffing the white powder with its yellowish tinge like urinestained snow. The hotshot glittered as genuinely as the capped teeth flashing from his forked smile.
Pocketing the envelope, Quick quietly closed the hood. His Nikes scrunched quickly across the empty gravel lot to the loading dock beneath the boom. Catlike, he zigzagged up the ladderways to the iron doors and slipped through, ducking sideward into the shadows to look and listen.
And smell. Once these horizontally ranked barrels big as cement mixers were redolent with hops and barley. Now the reeks of piss and pigeon shit dankly streaked the air. The aisle separating the oaken barrels was choked with rotting garbage rustling with rats. Faintly he heard a woman’s ragged moaning, either dying or getting fucked; rockenroll from somewhere else; a raucous shout of laughter suddenly sliced off.
Quick began picking his way down the aisle through the clutter of refuse redolent with human feces. He grimaced, betting Tarzon fired up one of those Hav-A-Tampa Jewels to camouflage the stink of these catacombs. Several wraiths darted between huge round shadows, urgent knuckles warning barrel dwellers of his approach. From the darkness above, pigeons cooed like bubbling poison. Something swooped by screeching, the rush of leather wings raising his gooseflesh. A fat rat slouched across his path, dragging a piece of blackened flesh in its bared yellow teeth.
Quick stopped at the last barrel on the left. Like the others, its hatch was ajar. He cocked his head at a steady hissing from within. He pulled the winch wheel, creaking open the circular iron hatch, and stepped over the bulkhead into the barrel.
The hissing was a kerosene lamp’s jet. By its blear light a naked girl crouched on her haunches. Her thin body was blued with welts, lumped with abscesses, studded with scabs. Her hands were so swollen with infection that they resembled surgical gloves filled with water. By the lamp’s side lay the square lid of a Vaseline jar filled with a silty white substance like wet sand.
So absorbed was she in her occupation, she didn’t hear Quick enter her barrel or note his long arched shadow. One ulcerated hand held aloft a fat syringe filled with a cloudy solution, the Codeine coldcooked and strained from the multiple tablets crushed in the jar lid beside her
; the other’s bloated fingers frantically squeezed her scaly skin, hunting for a pinch of unscabbed flesh to plunge the shot.
Veins were just another entry on Fay DuWeye’s lengthening list of the Life’s bustout ustabe’s.
“Hey, baby. Squirt that shit out. I got the real thing.” Kid leather fingers waved the glittering glassine bag.
The dark eyes flying wide were all pupil like a dayold corpse. She said, “Quick … How did you find me?’
“The same way Tarzon did.” He grinned watching those zombie eyes attach hypnotically to the plastic envelope swinging like a shingle in the hissing light. He said, “What did the murder loot want with a nice girl like you?”
“You brought me …”
“Pure China white, baby. Remember, you worked for us once. Kinder like family. Mr. Moses looks after his family.”
“You’re an angel, Quick. Lemme slam it. These Codeines dont touch my kind of sick …”
Quick held back the bag and shook a finger at her. “Ah ah … No talkie, no junkie. What did you tell Tarzon?”
She had crawled to him now, looking up into his flat face with those eyes like rainslick tombstones. “He wanted to know about Gloria. You remember Gloria …”
“Sure. Gloria was family too. What did he want to know?”
“He found a motel manager up in Tahoe remembers she and I checking in with a coupla dates …”
“You?”
“Yeah, me,” she declared, surprising him with an unsuspected reserve of defiance before resuming a tone of tender banter: “It musta been a year ago. I dont usually do blacks but Glori’s friend was one and he had a friend, so as a special favor to her … Anyway, Tarzon asked did I know who Glori’s sugardaddy was. I told him no, Glori kept it a secret and he didnt exactly introduce himself … Only Glori did mention he was some kind of bigshot, like a politician, only not like in elections. I knew he had to be someone you’d recognize.”
Quick cocked his head like a bird at a worm. “How?”
“Like I told Tarzon, the bonenose wore big cheap shades and a heavy trenchcoat and bigass cowboy hat in July … and a phony beard … Now?” She lifted a bloated hand.
“What did Tarzon say?”
“Please lemme get straight … I’ll do ya …”
Quick slapped away the swollen hand groping for his zipper.
“Sex is a deflated currency in my world.” It was one of the Fat Man’s lines.
“Maybe I can inflate it …” Her lips cracked a smile like lifting a sewer manhole.
Quick snarled, “What … did Tarzon say when you told him that?”
“He asked would I recognize this nigger if he brought down his picture with … What did he call it? … a composite layover sheet for the beard.”
“Anything else?”
“Yeah. He asked if I’d seen that Belly Blast. I told him no.”
“The spic rassler makes loops for Mr. Moses? Where does she fit in this?”
“He didnt say.”
“When’s he coming back?” Quick dangled the glittery bag closer.
“Said a coupla days. Said the cops wouldnt have the mugs he wanted me to see, he’d probably have to go to the newspaper morgue … I was gonna lie, even if I did recognize the bonenose. That’s what Mr. Moses would want, isnt it, Quick?”
“Sure, baby. Sure.”
“Can I have it now? Please, Quick?”
Quick handed her the glassine envelope.
“You tell Mr. Moses he can trust me, hear?” She squirted the Codeine solution in an arc like milk squeezed from a tit and cast around for a cooker for the China white.
“It’s pure, baby,” chuckled Quick. “Just pour it in the barrel … then shake n shoot.”
While she did so, her demented twittering echoing in the barrel, Quick looked around, nodding, his lower lip stuck out. “Lifestyles of the broke and bustout … You come a long ways, Fay.”
“Old hookers never die,” she giggled, burying the needle deep in her hip, “they just fade …” A strangled shriek cut off her voice as the sulphuric acid struck through her veins like lightning, melting her universe white, blasting her cerebral cortex to a stump the M.E. would later be unable to distinguish from number nine coal.
Quick stood hands in pockets enjoying her spectacular death spasms. Trying to claw open her chest, Fay DuWeye tore off one of her flaccid breasts. A swollen hand wrung blood from its pulp, then was still.
“Sure I’ll tell the Fat Man he can trust you … now.”
In the charcoal light of 0435 hours a state car passed in the gates and deposited an ungainly form on the Admin Building steps. The great prison stirred in its sleep with a gnash of steel and stretch of stone and grumble deep in its belly of chained souls.
SPACE CADETS
The neon hand of stud circling the big sky outside Laramie showed bullets over deuces. Beneath, a scrolling digital sign promised vittles, lodging, and diesel fuel at independent prices. A soothing sight for bloodshot eyes squinting through the flyblown windshields of Kenworths and Freightliners cresting the Medicine Bow Range and slipping into sweet Georgia overdrive for the long downhill coast to the honkytonk oasis called Aces High Truck Ranch. And how those citizens bands would sizzle—
“Cmon cmon, Prairie Dog callin lot lizards, got financin for romancin …” and “Manitoba Blue haulin pipe that needs tight fittin, lust or bust, need a fillup filly, come back …” and more and more these days “Gypsy girl dance round my truck, Gypsy girl I want to …”
And Gypsy would come back, hawking her bahakas on a band beneath the hearing of ICC or Smokey: “Gypsy could, Gypsy would, Gypsy do what she oughtna should. Put one foot on the wheel, the other on the floor, and if a trucker dont get enough I wont let im back for more … kasj!”
She’d been ranching peckers at the truck plaza most of the summer. Where seldom was heard a discouraging word and the action was seven twentyfour—round the clock every day of the week. The handle Gypsy went with the new cover for the tattoos and rings. She’d been kidnapped as a baby by the gypsies and raised as their queen until she shot the whole camp one night in its sleep. It was the sort of hardtime fable that appealed to the highwaymen.
“Gypsy’s had it rough,” they’d shake their heads over coffee after roughing her up some themselves in their cabs. “But she’s got heart still.” “And she could suck the grain out of a twobyfour and spit toothpicks.” Talent, after all, will out.
If she wasn’t watching MTV in some trucker’s cab or issuing her siren call over his CB, Rings could be found in the truck plaza’s video arcade feeding quarters from a styrofoam cup in her favorite game, Space Cadet. So accomplished a cadet had Rings become that she could pulverize each malevolent meteor, disperse the intergalactic herds of dragoids, blast every last Hell Ship to electrons, and still retain forty cents’ worth of gamma rays and photons with which to vaporize the Space Blob, last protector of the Cosmic Cube, the space cadet’s holy grail. Many a weary trucker, seeking peace in a game of Pac Man, was startled by her cackling as she depressed both triggers, really pouring the beams into that pulsing glob of hyperspacial puke that had become in her febrile imagination the Fat Man. The Cosmic Cube, of course, was the diamond. Like, fur shur.
During the night the heat washed up from the valley floor, awakening the prison in a brass grip squeezing the breath from the walls, wringing sweat from the bars. Career cons demonstrated cellmade airconditioning for first termers, draping wet towels over the electric fans that ticked in the cellblocks by the hundreds like caged locusts.
It wasn’t the heat itself that maddened Joe, but the claustrophobia it sponsored. He had to get outside. Finishing his paperwork at Hobby early this afternoon, he headed down the Mainline to the Yard gates blazing bright as furnace doors at its southern end. The heat dragged down the faces of passing cons into masks of agony.
Fingers nipped his sleeve. “Wait up, Joe.” Benny Rizzuto, a Hobby potter, fell into step beside him. “We got trouble right here in River City,” announced the side of his mouth.
“What trouble?” Joe laughed. “Other than it’s too hot to even bop my baloney.”
“I’ll tell you on the Yard,” Benny said darkly.
Control’s riveted iron door swung wide in their path and a fourman escort of guards marched onto the Mainline with a chained convict in white overalls in their middle.
“Z Blocker,” Benny whispered. “Come back from a parole hearing.”
“Man walkin,” hoarsely cried one of the escorts. Joe and Benny pressed their backs to the wall with the other convicts on the Mainline.
The Z Blocker was in full body restraints, legirons and a bellychain to which his wrists were cuffed. A football helmet was strapped to his drugged head to protect it in collisions with floors and walls. In its shadow Joe glimpsed the dull sheen of lidless glassy eyes. The wretch twitched and trembled as though afflicted with Parkinson’s disease. Waiting for the escort to shut Control’s door and form up, his feet pawed at an invisible doormat and his hands yoyoed thin air.
“What’d he do?” Joe asked.
Benny shrugged. “He’s so fulla Prolixin he dont even remember himself. That’s what he’s doin there, the Prolixin shuffle … A little step we may be dancin ourselves before long.”
“What?” The security detail passed; they started walking again. “For Christ’s sake, Benny. Quit jerkin me off. What trouble are you talkin about? Something about Hobby?” It was the only connection Joe could think of between the lifer and himself.
“Please, Joe. Dont rush me. I’m sorry I’m so squirrely. Maybe it’s the heat, maybe I’m just scared. Seeing that Z Blocker didnt help. Let’s bump some iron. Maybe I’ll calm down some then and be able to think straight enough to tell you.”