by Seth Morgan
Murderers are usually the most easygoing convicts, their biggest problem having already been eliminated, and this cheerycheeked wifeslayer was no exception. But today Benny was pulling hard time. Joe only hoped the remitless heat wasn’t driving him stir crazy.
“Take all the time you need, Benny.”
The sun was hottest during its descent when it seemed stalled atop the cellblocks. Only two other cons were mad enough to be driving iron on the weight pile beneath Tower Three, Moonpie Monroe and Dr. Raggedy Mouth. Dr. Raggedy Mouth was a self proclaimed voodoo witchdoctor from the Atchafalaya swamps of Louisiana. He greased his long dreadlocks with pork fat and crayoned circles around his protuberant eyes and flew into frenzied trances several times a day when he’d yap in Creole gibberish. Dr. Raggedy Mouth was Coldwater’s black response to Swami.
No heat could burn out Moonpie and Raggedy’s enthusiasm for iron. If they could, Joe was sure they’d eat the Olympic plates like pancakes. Moonpie was benchpressing six fortyfive kilo plates like feather pillows, grunting joyously to the meter of Raggedy’s chant:
Pie yous a covershaker … TWO
unna slick slatbreaker … FOUR
one sweet babymaker … SIX
yous a binder Pie … EIGHT
a shonuff grinder … TEN
unna weak spot finder … TWELVE
Moonpie finished his set with a titanic groan and Raggedy took his place on the bench. The three hundred pounds flew off the stanchions as though Moonpie’s conjuration suspended gravity:
Raggedy yous a sweet peter jeeter … TWO
one chilly womb beater … FO
cradleshaker … FIVE
whoretaker … SIX
love faker … SEVEN
yous a buckbinder Rag … NINE
a cold womanfinder … TEN
John Henry was a wimp next to this pair of ironheads.
Silently Benny loaded the bar with six twentyfive pound plates. Joe benchpressed it fifteen repetitions. Not bad for a whiteboy who’d never lifted more iron than a U-100 syringe, he kidded himself. At the end of three sets, his pectorals were inflated like hotwater bottles. Next they did military shoulderpresses, one hundred pounds behind the head until Joe’s deltoids bunched tighter than lover’s nuts.
He took a break while Benny burned out his last set, staggering in circles, hands on his slippery hips, in the trapezoidal shadow of Tower Three. The oxygenated blood foamed through his torn muscles, flushing him with an exhilarating sensation of depletion. Driving iron was the best means of dissipating the sourceless rages swirling on the Mainline like tornadoes out of neutral skies.
Two chicanos had joined them on the pile. Joe watched them working silently and earnestly through their routine. Neither could be over twenty; both wore the regulation cholo razorcut hair, spitpolished Santa Rosa high tops, sharply creased denims rolled just so at the cuff—Zoot!—the ubiquitous bandannas low over black eyes. The tattoos slithering on their sweaty torsos illustrated their romance with La Madre and La Muerte. On one back the Virgin was installed on a jeweled throne; she wore ermine capes and a riot of jewelry and looked more like an overcompensated puta than the Mother of God. On the other’s back Jesu Christo rolled up weeping eyes beneath his bleeding thorns; below was a lengthy Spanish prayer in Gothic scroll. Each on his shoulder displayed the lowrider legend, MI LOCA VIDA; from one eye apiece flowed the frozen inkblue tear.
One of the ironhead carnales caught Joe staring and issued a mute challenge with a roll of gleaming shoulder muscles. Joe turned to watch Benny wrap up his set.
“You’ll be musclebound in a coupla months,” warned Joe. “You wont be able to toss any pots.”
Benny flung the barbell down. “If I’m around in a coupla months,” he gasped. “Cmon. Let’s do the stroll before we cramp up.”
They crossed to the cinder track circling the hundredacre Yard next to the double row of fences festooned with razor ribbon and concertina wire. Joe puffed his cheeks and said, “All right, Benny. I’m not trying to rush you, but if this thing involves me I think I’ve got a right to know.”
Benny studied Joe’s face with a sad slantendicular. “You’re right. You got that right … Two weeks before you got here, Joe, a kid was murdered. It was a racial thing. His killer cut off his dick with an X-acto knife, then crammed it up his …”
“Hey! Cmon. I dont need this noise.”
“Yeah you do, Joe. Cuz X-acto knives can only be ordered through Hobby.”
“But still, if I wasnt here even …”
“Wait. Just listen … Night before last the Warden brought in a new ramrod for S&I. A regular Conan the Gooner. His first order of business is to crack that murder.” Benny bit a nail, spit out its quick. “To do it he’s playin the snitch game.”
“The what?”
“Snitch game. It’s just as simple as it’s deadly. They coerce information from convicts by threatening to falsely expose them as informers. It’s a no win game for a convict. Either way, whether he snitches or not, he’s branded one. He’s as good as dead unless he locks up. Maybe even then.”
A frisbee fluttered across their path, coming to a rest on the sixfoot strip of grass between the fence and track. Joe made a reflexive move to retrieve it.
“Wave!” Benny warned him. Convicts weren’t allowed on that strip of grass; it was no man’s land. Tower guards could assume they were making for the fence and fire. To retrieve balls and frisbees and such, they had first to wave to the closest tower and receive an answering wave acknowledging their innocent purpose.
Joe waved. Nothing from Tower Two. He lifted his cap and waved again and shouted into the still heat. After a moment, in the shadows behind the smokedglass window, a shotgun described a lazy arc. Joe crossed the strip to the fence. For a fleeting, manic instant he wanted to follow Whisper. It was the same hypnotic exaltation he felt in high places that made him want to leap. Death as liberation, death as instant redemption. Instead, he stooped, picked up the frisbee, and fluttered it back to its waiting convicts.
“Because the X-acto knife was a Hobby requisition,” Benny continued as they fell once more in step, “S&I is ducating inmates with lead Hobby positions. That includes me … and that includes you. They know it was whiteboys who thrilled that kid.”
Joe laughed disbelievingly. “How can they ducat me? If I wasnt even here, how could I have any information on the killing?”
Benny shrugged. “You might have heard something. Besides, the Hobby clerk is always worth putting the screws to. He has his fingers in enough contraband pies that he’s sure to give up something. If they got an inkling of your A.B. action, they’ll lean on you to turn that over. Whether or not you do, they’ll make sure the brotherhood believes you did. You’re finished on the Mainline then …”
“Christ.”
“Just remember, if they take you in, hold your mud. If they try jacketing you, lock up. You’re a short timer, Joe. You might last in Protective Custody.”
Joe jumped at the shriek of the Yard whistle. Reentering the prison with its stench of huddled flesh and hollow echoing noises revived a childhood memory, of coming out of a hot summer day into the primate house at the zoo. Once a baboon hurled a pawful of shit right smack between Joe’s shoulder blades. A woman behind him screamed. The boy only turned and looked with the briefest astonishment into the atavistic replica of his own defiance, then laughed.
“What about you?” Joe asked. “Can you pull life in the Hole?”
Benny didn’t hear him; his eyes were widened down the Mainline. He grabbed Joe’s arm. “Here come the space cadets.”
Approaching the Yard Sally Port down the Mainline marched in lockstep the most menacing military detail Joe had ever seen off the silver screen or outside comicbook covers. They were uniformed in a synthetic quilted armor like black polyester chainmail. It flowed from the bottom rim of their c
onical helmets, giving them a scifi samurai look. They wore heavy studded gauntlets and kneehigh metalnailed boots that rang sparks down the Mainline.
“Christ! They look like they’re policing a nuclear meltdown.”
“AIDS armor,” growled Benny. “Kevlar, the stuff they make bulletproof vests from. Director’s finding said that Coldwater was an AIDS greenhouse. Wearing the armor they can kick ass and not worry about the blood … Look, there in front, that’s the new captain playing dragons and dungeons for keeps.”
“How do you know?” Joe asked. Their black Plexiglas faceshields were down.
“His limp …”
Christ! It cant be! Even in my direst imaginings of Hell …
The convicts shrank to either side, hugging the walls as this band of futuristic guards approached. Joe and Benny followed suit. Joe kept telling himself over and over again it couldn’t be true …
Until the blackmailed squadron halted right before them and its leader reached under and lifted off his helmet and Joe was staring at the lips like bloated worms, the veinburst nose and bleak bloody eye of Rowdy McGee.
Another of the detail removed his helmet and stepped forward. He held a clipboard. “Inmate Rizzuto, Benjamin A-00893 …” he cried in a loud voice obviously calculated to spread the news to all of General Population. “You are under escort to the offices of Search and Investigation for questioning in the matter of the homicide of Billy Joe Girod … Inmate Speaker, Joseph Holly …”
“Take the other puke in,” McGee slurred. “I want a word with this bowelbaby in private.”
It’s the cap, Joe flashed. He’s too frightened of it to take me in. Whatever fate awaits Benny, this old rag on my head has spared me. From the corner of the eye Joe watched the potter being swallowed into the black phalanx, which aboutfaced and marched back up the Mainline in gunfiring lockstep.
McGee lowered his voice to a gaseous croak redolent of beer and tacos. “Where you get the … lid?”
Joe didn’t answer. He had no wish to reduce McGee’s pathological terror by explanation. McGee had been rendered outwardly by Whisper’s baseball team what he’d always been inwardly, a monster. Now he associated the cap with that metamorphosis. Any mystery attached to the cap could only deepen and enlarge his paranoia.
“Okay, Speaker. Play it chilly. But you saw what happened to the last man who wore it.” McGee cocked his head, stretching a pink eye at Joe. “You did see, didnt you?”
Joe nodded tightly, remembering suddenly that the cap had flown off when the first bullet struck Whisper, that McGee shotgunned him bareheaded.
“That’s good,” gloated McGee. “Having something to look forward to helps pass the time.”
McGee’s howl could have won him a job in television hosting latenight horror flicks. Tucking the helmet beneath his blackmailed arm, he turned and lurched back up the Mainline. The head with its jagged streak of platinum tipped back, laughing. The way he laughed at Whisper on the fence before blowing a hole big as Dallas in his back.
LA MORDIDA
The waiting room of La Infirmia de la Nuestra Madre smelled of chloroform and humid limestone and dense, wet jungle rot seeping through the single windowless aperture overlooking a greasy calm Pacific. The adobe hovels of Boca Prieta tumbled down to the beach; the lights strung on naked wires through the streets had just come on. The tinsel slab of the Hotel Fiesta remained a dark megalith against the indigo ocean, like a giant transistor radio with batteries gone dead. A wind snuck up the arroyo, bringing the smell of frying tortillas and the tattered thrash of wild palms.
They brought Dan in before light; Kitty arrived at dawn and had been there since. They said the jeep flipped several times falling down the fiftyfoot cliff to the beach and Dan was lucky to breathe. The girl, sadly, was dead.
“Shitfire,” Kitty muttered trying to straighten the pleats of her wilted dress. “Silk,” the label read; cornsilk, she suspected. Already ruined and Dan had bought it at the Hotel Marejada’s gift shop just the day before yesterday when they arrived from Mexico City. He’d selected the prim dress to accompany the ring he bought to masquerade as a wedding band. Just for appearances, he quickly explained to allay any suspicion that he was trying to pull a fast one. Provincial Mexicans were deeply prejudiced against living in sin, he said. Dan was some kind of big expert on Mexican culture.
Kitty lit a cigaret and resumed pacing the waiting room. Her heels clicked on the sandstone tiles, slow sad castanets. If that dufus were conscious, she bet herself, he’d wish our marital status was his biggest headache. It never rained but it poured, and Dan’s clouds broke yesterday twenty minutes before the skies over Boca Prieta divided like clockwork at quarter to four to loose their quotidian deluge.
“Telegramo para Señor Graves,” hawked the bellhop in the seedy monkeysuit who doubled during the day as cabana boy in appropriate costume. From the way he eavesdropped Kitty suspected the twerp spoke perfect English but was operating on the theory that the native lingo fattened gratuities. If so, Dan, who overtipped by habit, did nothing to disprove it.
They were sitting in the hotel’s gloomy stucco lobby giving on to the ocean. The fronds of a potted palm drooped over their heads. They were yellowed and pitted with black. It seemed to Kitty that everything in Mexico was slow and sensually dying.
“Damn!” Dan was trembling, chattering the pastiche of teletype tape in his hand. He slapped it on the table to snap his fingers at the departing bellhop. “Muchacho! Bring me a double … no, make it a triple Lonely Bull.”
“What is it?” Kitty asked. Dan didn’t normally drink. Whenever invited, he’d tap his bean and say “Mens sano,” which sounded like a urinal cake to Kitty.
Dan didn’t answer. Rereading the telex for the third time, his lips whitened and his brow blackened like the thunderheads marshaling above.
The bellhop delivered the drink in a water tumbler. Dan drilled it in three gulps. “Otro!” he croaked, paying with a large note like a printed party napkin, waving away the change, turning on Kitty as if she and not the bellhop should be killed for bearing bad news, blurting: “My wife has filed charges against me for … for …” He emptied the next triple down his throat as quickly as he could have tossed it on the floor, reordered, then turned to Kitty with a queer, quizzical halfsmile, as if she might burst out laughing and tell him it was all a joke. “She’s charged me with molesting my own son.”
“Your son?” And she did laugh, though not the way he wanted or even the way she wished she could. She laughed in the same trembly way he smiled, the laugh of a person praying a joke has run its course. “I dont understand … Why?”
“She wants custody, of course. Or should I say child support.” His voice assumed a catty lilt. “It’s all the rage now. Its faintest suggestion creates a sensation.”
“Aw, chin up, hoss. You’ll straighten it out. Shitfire, I’ll testify you’ve been too busy molesting me.”
“It’s no joke.” He peered wobbily at her in the gathering gloom. Thunder muttered on the horizon. “Even if the allegations are discredited, the stink will cling to me. My image will shrivel, my business go bellyup. I’ll be a pariah. Ruined.”
“You’re overdoing it, good buddy. Tragically. A little breath of scandal gives business goosebumps, its the American way.”
“A little breath? We’re talkin typhoon here …”
Kitty flipped her hand. “She’s just jerkin your chain, Dan. The way you jerk hers every time you subpoena her checkbooks or demand an inventory of her jewelry. Shitfire, the two of you fight over that kid like a dinner check. Neither of you want him, you just dont want the other to have the satisfaction.”
“How can you say that? I live for my son, he’s all that matters.” It sounded sappy, like a life insurance commercial.
“Then you should be more concerned about him than your image, your fuckin business.”
Th
en thunder cracked the sky like a hammer striking a gourd, spreading electric branches overhead; and the rain fell in fat drops, plucking silver nipples from the flagstones without. Kitty took a grateful breath of suddenly lighter, fresher air. Dan drilled his drink and ordered another.
“Easy on the hootch, good buddy. Remember what the immigration boys said about humidity and alcohol.”
“Good. I cant get a plane out of this dump until tomorrow. I’d appreciate getting twice as drunk twice as fast … Muchacho! Otro!”
Kitty laughed. This dump had been primitif chic an hour ago. It was she who suggested Acapulco. It might be overbuilt and spoiled and all that crap, but at least there were doctors available if something went awry with her pregnancy. No, Dan said. They must go somewhere wild and natural to correspond with his feelings for her.
You dufus. Guess who needs the doctors now?
To make matters worse, they arrived to find that La Fonda del Luna, the only hotel in Boca Prieta where iguanas didn’t share the bathroom, had gone bankrupt. So Dan booked them a moldy suite at this crumbling relic frequented, as far as she could tell, by Eurotrash with black socks and sandals and six out of the Ten Most Wanted Mexicans, all in mirrored sunglasses.
“Rickie gave a statement,” Dan was saying. “It’s not every day your own kid accuses you of diddling him.”
“Your wife made him … Imagine the pressure on the poor kid to make him lie … He might be so mixed up he actually believes you been boffin him.”
Dan sneered. “What does a whore know about child psychology?”
It was the first that he’d ever called her that. “I’m just tryin to help,” she said evenly.
“Gimme some pesos. That’s alla help I wan. Wanna nudder drink.” Over Dan’s shoulder the bellhop cocked his head and grinned at her.
Kitty upended her purse on the pigskin table, dumping out all its beaner play money. She watched with scorn as he stuffed an indiscriminate wad into the bellhop’s monkeyclaw.