Homeboy

by Seth Morgan

“If Little Lord Fauntleroy can tell anyone with a straight face I’ve abused him, fuck im …”

  Kitty flinched. The phrase was so startlingly out of character as to carry utter conviction. In that instant she couldn’t be sure the charges weren’t true. Hearing Dan deflect his venom from his wife to son, she flashed on Papa blaming his life’s every woe on her while Mama neither heard nor saw nor once spoke the evil and Kitty suffered the outrage in silence.

  No, not Dan, she quickly changed her mind—he’s just drunk. You got a baby in your belly and Papa on your mind, girl.

  “I wish you could hear yourself takin out your lousy marriage on a defenseless kid,” she said.

  He swiveled facing her with eyes suddenly bright and sober. The rain was subsiding, individual drops hissing on the flagstones. His voice was carved in ice. “Marriage? You whore! What do you know of marriage? And where do you get off lecturing on parentage lugging a convict’s bastard in your gut …”

  Kitty shot to her feet. “I aint got this comin.”

  “While you were out sucking twelve dicks a day to keep you and that dirtbag loaded, I was working twelve hours a day to send that kid to the best schools …”

  She dug in her jeans for a coin. Swinging around the table for the tall narrow stairs, she flipped it to him. “Here’s a peso, dildohead. Call someone who gives a fuck.”

  Halfway up the stairs she paused. Below Dan was lurching to the rickity bamboo bar. The mongrel bellhop set the bottle of tequila before him. “Bes fren a man has,” she heard Dan slobber; obsequiously the bellhop hissed “Seguro qui si” and winked up where he knew she stood in the shadows.

  She locked the door of the suite’s bedroom and napped. She awoke to Dan’s pounding the door, bleating apologies, begging admittance. He was very drunk, very loud. She listened to his fists slide down the door, pound the floor abjectly once or twice, then fall still. She went back to sleep.

  It was night when she next awoke. She heard mariachi music. It was a song that she’d heard the night before at dinner and asked the band to repeat when they came around her and Dan’s table. It was called Las Ombras, “The Shadows,” and was darkly romantic and moody and, yup … tragic.

  She rose and went to the window. Party lights were strung around the verandah over the ocean. Evidently some big local cheeses were in attendance: a couple of fat guys in military or police uniforms, their women in outdated American styles. There was Dan regaling a knot of spies, gesturing grandly. She caught snatches of his voice shouting about la mer and el cielo. Bombed wasn’t the word for his condition.

  The band struck up some sexy tango or other. Everybody started strutting and strolling and dangerously dipping. They looked ridiculous from above: overage, overweight revelers aping svelte youthful passion and bumping into crappy lawn furniture. Dan was dancing with the greaser gal with orange hair who waited on their table in the diningroom. Her name was Concha. Her movements were languorous and full of abandon. Probably thought she could replace the gringa upstairs, be carried back to the land of washing machines and takeout chicken.

  Dumb cuchafrita.

  The music stopped. The band packed up its instruments and the local couples called Buenas noches and Hasta luego and weaved away laughing in the dark. Kitty watched Concha supporting Dan toward the parking lot. He’d rented a funny little Volkswagen jeep thing with a candystriped awning to show Kitty some sea caves. She heard it start, watched it careen out of the lot.

  It was just another shouldaknown.

  “Señora Graves?” The little doctor with patent leather hair stood in the waitingroom door, small hands joined, their fingers steepled beneath his pursed lips.

  “Yes?” She stepped on her cigaret and smoothed the Mexican prom dress.

  “The inside bleeding. It cannot be stopped.” He spread his hands.

  “Then he …”

  “Yes. I am sorry. Soon he must. There is nothing we can do.”

  “Does he know?”

  “No. We have not told him. We thought you … We have given him morphine for the pain, but he is conscious.”

  “May I see him?”

  “Of course, Señora.” The little doctor stepped aside with a sweep of his arm as graceful as a toreador’s paso.

  She didn’t know why, but she expected IV’s and bleeping video monitors and everything like in an American hospital. That a man whose life had been defined by gadgetry should be deprived its benefit at death struck her as tragic. Beneath a naked cross in a naked whitewashed room lay Dan, clutching the sheet that would soon be drawn over his face.

  “Well I did it this time,” he mumbled when he saw her. He looked like hell.

  She pulled a straightbacked chair to his side and sat. “Yeah. Here’s another fine fix you’ve got yourself into.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Dont be. That news was a jolt. And I dont guess I helped.”

  “I know I said some things I didnt mean.”

  “Ssshhh.” She laid a cool finger on his puffed and fevered lips.

  “I’ll mend, dont worry. Be a better man, too. Sometimes it takes a brush with death to bring you to your senses.” She only smiled. “There was someone with me … What happened?”

  “She bought it …” The purple eye blinked and Kitty’s chichis rivaled great powers rising and falling, taking a big one. “The police here are a little worked up about it, ole buddy. Say either her family’s compensated or you go to La Mesa. That’s the penitentiary down here. But it can all be fixed with a bribe. La mordida, they call it. The death bite. I’ve brought one of your checks already made out.” She reached in her purse. “You just sign it and I can take care of this business toot sweet so you can concentrate on getting better.”

  “Say, this dope’s gettin me sleepy … I cant see … How much?”

  “Few hundred,” she flashed bright teeth lying. She fit the Mark Cross in his slack fingers. The effort of signing left him gulping raggedly.

  “Guess I’ll mosey along.” Kitty stood. She fluttered the check to her lips and blew him a kiss across it, drying the ink.

  “I’m gonna get better,” Dan repeated. “Be a better man, too.”

  “Then I’d say you’re doin the right thing, good buddy.”

  Back in the suite she wrote Joe a letter laying out her drawings. She chewed her lip wondering whether to mention Tarzon and decided not to. Till the wheels fall off, she signed it.

  When Kitty called the next morning the little doctor said Dan had died during the night. She called down to the desk to switch her plane reservations from California to Texas. She had decided to go home to Galveston to have the baby. The ten thousand she scored off Dan would pay the doctors and buffer her from Papa. She packed in a hurry. They were sure to freeze his accounts shortly; she couldn’t waste any time cashing the check.

  The tickets were ready when she got downstairs. The bellhop with a face like a wasted coconut was playing desk clerk this morning. She handed him the letter and asked him to call a cab, as in pronto.

  “One’s already sittin at the curb,” he answered in a flat SoCal accent. “Idling,” he added with meaning.

  Kitty returned his last collusive wink.

  AN AMERICAN ORIGINAL

  Mondays prison salaries were credited to the convicts’ books, and Tuesday mornings they made store, thronging the Mainline in front of Commissary’s three steel shutters an hour before their opening at 0930. Boisterously as children besieging an icecream truck, they jockeyed for position in one of the lines, playing the dozens with their homeys, finetuning their Tales, catching up on cellblock scuttlebutt.

  The Hobby clerk made twentyfour dollars a week, the highest pay level in the joint. Joe jostled in the middle of his line, using Earl’s back to complete a shopping list. He’d bribed a cell for himself the week before and was eager to provision it. The most expensive freezedrie
d coffee, the biggest bars of chocolate, stationery unstolen from the state—he housed in T Block now, on the first floor power wing, where the pen’s most influential convicts celled. Appearances must be maintained.

  Several places in front of Joe stood a scurfy young con whose face showed the scars of pitched battle with acne and now challenged the world to reveal its next adversary. He was holding an impromptu rape seminar, instructing a couple of fish on the finer points of booty banditry: “Always use a rubber. They cant prove it forensically that way.” It sounded technical enough to appeal to the fishes’ ignorance; they turned wily eyes on one another, nudged out lower lips to nod. Joe coughed to disguise his laughter. How absurd was the popular notion that prisons were colleges of crime. It made as much sense as going to Alcoholics Anonymous to learn how to drink. Prisons were home to the social fuckup and criminal flunkout; the only thing to learn there was how to keep on fucking up, keep on returning to stand in Commissary lines.

  Up crashed the shutters like betting windows. The singing labels, the swirling plastic colors, the airconditioning sweet with icecream and candy—Eden was never paradise until it was lost and once remembered.

  “F Stop,” Joe said shuffling forward with the line, “what are you doin makin store? You’ve fucked off all your ducats gambling.”

  “I sent off for a free text, yeah. The Dasypus Novemcinctus.”

  Joe said that he knew Earl was Catholic but wouldn’t have slotted him for a missal reader. In a hollow, oracular voice Earl intoned: “It means armadillos. Which is good as a prayer to me.”

  “Ah ha!” Joe frowned and plucked his chin repeating it, “Armadillos.”

  Earl trained his ambiguous gaze on Joe, gray eye like a spoiled oyster, blue like a core of flame. “Know what that means in Spanish? Thought not. Little … armored … things. Spies got a way with words. Words and knives, yeah … When I raise up I’m gonna have me an armadillo ranch in west Looziana, Texas maybe, yeah.”

  Joe thumped the heel of his hand to the side of his head to dislodge whatever was making him hear things.

  “Gonna ranch the little fuckers for dogfood. Best dog meat God in his wisdom created. They lowfat, nutritious, yeah, tasty as pork. And with enough Dixie Beer to keep em amorous they multiply faster than Tijuana cucarachas … Plus”—Earl raised a bony finger—“they sperm cure baldness, yeah.”

  “F Stop, I dont know what’s eatin your brain worse, Alzheimer’s or weisenheimer’s …”

  “Did you know the female lays nine eggs and they hatch into nine eye-dentical baby armadillos she cant even tell apart? Yeah you right. I bet too you had no earthly idea that the armadillo got two choices when faced with danger. He can run, and I guarantee them fuckers can make time. Or he can burrer hisself, yeah, completely underground faster n you can zip yer fly. I talkin about sunbaked East Texas scrabbleass dirt that’s harder n yer dick gonna ever git.”

  In exchange for this zoologic arcana, Earl felt entitled to ask Joe for another loan. He owed six cartons to Big and Little Casino, Coldwater’s bookmaking kingpins. Joe assented on the condition that Earl fasten his obsession on a team other than the Dodgers, whose bullpen, in Earl’s words, was “sucking a big one, yeah.”

  “You gotta dance with the one that brung you,” Earl said, shrugging high bony shoulders like arranging folded wings.

  “Not after that one’s broke both your feet, F Stop.”

  But the coot wasn’t listening. He’d hooked the arm of an ovate hairball rushing from the Commissary windows with a paper sack of groceries. “Lay some of them chips on me, Ramsey. I’ll tighten you up, yeah, once I got my own zuuzuus and whamwhams …”

  “Dont hold your breath,” Joe advised.

  “That’s barbecue flavored,” the hairball made sure Earl understood before surrendering the bag of potatochips. Cyril Ramsey was a U.C. Davis animal husbandry student who’d taken his major too far to heart and was doing time for a Crime Against Nature as represented by a lamb. He was also a compulsive writ writer, his most celebrated being a petition to allow him to import a blowup sexdoll into the institution for worship. The court, being disinclined to such a broad view of religious freedom, slamdunked it.

  When he wasn’t decrying the California Gulag, this Custody clerk enjoyed mourning the rape of the Constitution. “May as well use that noble charter for shitpaper.” The convicts of Coldwater, who understood the Constitution’s abstract freedoms about as well as the Dow Jones Industrial Average, took to bleating his name, thus: “Rahmsey. Baa Baa Rah-ahhhmmmsey.”

  Sweat formed a twitchy dewline on the sheep shtupper’s lip this morning.

  “What’s eatin you, Baa Baa?” sprayed potatochips from Earl’s mouth. “You nervous as a longtailed cat in a room fulla rockingchairs.”

  “Got sixteen Protective Custody lockups to type … I’m late, I’m late …” Baa Baa marchhared down the Mainline.

  “Who P.C.’d?” asked Joe, reaching for some chips.

  Earl sighed, rubbed his nose, and lamped Joe with the sympathetic gray. “I was waitin to tell you later … A bunch of cons locked up on the First Watch. Benny Rizzuto was one of em. Laundry workers found a note from Benny to S&I with love in one of McGee’s tunic pockets. Already there’s a dozen cigaret contracts on Benny’s ass.”

  “Benny wouldnt kite the Man. It’s a forgery!”

  “Yeah you right. But how many handwriting experts work in prison laundries?”

  Joe cursed. “How does McGee get away with it?”

  “Because it works. General Population aint caught on he’s playin the snitch game, no. They believe one or more of them boys turned over. They see lockin up as proof.”

  “Proof of what? They havent braced Girod’s killer.”

  Earl nodded sadly. “Gooners picked up the killer last night. Some kook they call Tin Man, yeah, for the Chowhall trays he used to slide under his blues in the Soledad race riots. He’s a leatherworker, too. That’s what I was waitin to break to you slow. Gooners trashed Hobby big time and found the X-acto knife he used on that kid in his supply locker. They gonna shut Hobby down.”

  The potatochips in Joe’s mouth became peeled paint. He turned and stared out a nearby window. Silver mists flowed fast as whitewater torrents over the high Sierra passes, fanning icy fretwork down the slopes. The air through the open panes was coolly scented with ponderosa pine and chaparral. Nature’s grand indifference to the squalid inventions of its creatures enraged him, the way a negligent parent might.

  “I’m sorry about Hobby, amigo. But maybe it’ll discourage you from believin that cap’s a lucky charm. I tell you true, I’m almost sad I give it to you. Yeah McGee’s scared of it, but scared jist makes him hate harder. You say the cap saved you from goin with Benny. I say, saved you for what? … If Whisper hadnt wore the thing, McGee would never have recognized him, no. Think on that.”

  Fabulous Frank slumped elbows propped on the cushioned ledge of the bar at the Silk’n’Spurs feeling lower than whale shit.

  Darla had packed and gone—that led off the list of reasons for the triple Dewars clutched in his vibrating fist. Mister Fab came back to their hotel the night before, shitfaced and still wearing the Ruger Redhawk .357 Magnum in the Kwikdraw holster Mr. Moses made him wear ever since the theater robbery. Darla was in the bathroom fixing her face and Frank collapsed in the chair before the TV. An old John Wayne flick was on the late show, Los something spic or other. And here came the Duker himself down Main Street, gundueling some desperado. El Fabuloso lurched to his feet, stood spreadlegged like Wyatt Earp, poised to slap leather. He thought the Duke went for his iron first, but couldn’t say for sure. Ka-POW! Fabulous Frank rocketed a slug right through the screen. The cops came and everything. Darla said that was it, she was gone if she had to use the fire escape, and Frank better get some help with his drinking.

  The real pisser was he lost his tweety twat without even findin
g out who was faster, the Duke or Mr. Fab.

  “Anudder!” he hollered at a shape in the backbar shadows. “N leave out the ice … jus gets in the way.”

  A hand tugged his sleeve. Frank turned blearily. It was Ollie O’Conner, a beat cop out of North Station.

  “Frank, here’s two hundred on account.”

  Fabulous Frank frowned thumbing the greasy bills in the envelope.

  “But, Ollie. You’re into us for five yards. And you know the Fat Man’s callin in all his markers now with the heat up.”

  O’Conner slanted both ways to make sure they couldn’t be overheard. “I got a coupla items that’s worth maybe more than a few hundred to the Fat Man.” From inside his sports jacket he withdrew a microcassette and a plastic baggie filled with slips of paper. “I know he’s lookin fer leads on who knocked over the Kama Sutra bank. These come out of Lieutenant Tarzon’s office safe. They was tagged for a homicide jacket.”

  “Tarzon,” Frank repeated. His groin squirmed feeling again the steel muzzle nuzzling his cojones. He stepped to the juke to examine the baggie by its fizzing lights.

  “Those are your own betting slips,” Ollie illumined him.

  “I can see that, asshole. Only why they covered with blood?” Frank swung demented eyes down on the short cop. “And what are they doin tagged for a homicide jacket? Werent nobody killed in the theater … And what’s on the tapes?”

  O’Conner shrugged. “You guys figure it out. Just tell the Fat Man who give the stuff to yuh. See if he wont let me off on what I owe … Now, today, I want to get down on Top Bubble Gal in the third …”

  “You aint gettin down on shit till I see the boss … Check with me tomorrow.” O’Conner turned to leave. Frank halted him with a last question. “Whose homicide jacket?”

  “Some hooker named Gloria Monday. Got iced six months ago on Nob Hill.”

  Frank regained his barstool unsteadily. How had his slips gotten mixed up with a murder? Suddenly the loss of his teenage Hoovermatic paled next to the paranoid fantasies blooming in his bookie bean. He filed the baggie and cassette inside his sharkskin doublebreasted, wrinkling his brow as his wet brain sloshed in search of where he’d heard the name before. He said it aloud, quizzically—“Gloria Monday?”