Homeboy

by Seth Morgan

  “The institution’s locked down, sir,” the Gate House guard informed him. “No visits until further notice.”

  “Police business,” Tarzon said, flipping out his shield. “I have an inmate to interview.”

  “Have you a firearm to check?”

  “No. I locked it in the trunk of my vehicle.”

  “Oh.” The guard seemed momentarily confused. He leaned closer to the shield. “One moment, Lieutenant. I’ll have to phone Custody.”

  Tarzon fired up his cheroot while the guard made the call. Yes, just maybe he could bring this thing to a head right now.

  The guard hung up. “Your escort will be down in a minute.”

  Tarzon nodded and stepped outside the Gate House. He stood on the cement walk beneath Tower One. Through double rolling gates he could see his own diminutive reflection in the tall glass doors at the head of the Administration Building steps. Then the smokedglass swung his image aside, replacing it with a heavyset man with short, thick butcher arms uniformed in synthetic black mail that shone with an oily luster like snakeskin.

  What are these guys playing, Star Wars? he inwardly sniggered. But his amusement was quickly replaced by queasy incredulity. A patch of platinum blazed the side of his escort’s militant brushcut. Slowly Tarzon removed the cheroot from nerveless lips. Descending the stairs, the costumed guard swung one leg stiffly wide.

  Holy Mary Mother of God, breathed Tarzon. No two men could match the description of the man seen fleeing the Hall of Justice in white orderly ducks. His escort was the Sick Bay killer.

  He wasted no time wondering how it could be; he racked his brain for an excuse for being there. Calling Speaker out would identify him as the diamond’s thief, single him out for slaughter. He only prayed it was a coincidence that the Fat Man’s assassin was posted at Coldwater.

  Lurching down the walkway, McGee waved to Tower One and the gates rolled open. He passed through, unsheathing a hand from its studded gauntlet to shake Tarzon’s.

  “Rowdy McGee’s my name. I understand you need to parlay with one of our … guests.” He spoke in a moany voice Tarzon associated with the retarded, yet a shrewd light flickered in his small mean eyes. “We’re always anxious to be of help to outside police agencies … Which inmate might it be?”

  They stood together in the lengthening tower shadow. Tarzon stalled, slapping his Zippo in his palm and refiring the cheroot. He blew a long stream directly into McGee’s face, shading the eyes a deeper shade of pink. If only he could get this freak in a lineup, he thought.

  “Well?” McGee coyly coaxed. “I take a vital interest in which of our guests are the subjects of ongoing police investigations.”

  Fatal’s more like it, Tarzon guessed. He jutted his jaw, aiming the Hav-A-Tampa between McGee’s eyes. To its side flashed his teeth in a snarl, “Rosemary Hooten.”

  The swift scowl denting McGee’s pocked cheeks confirmed that Tarzon had the right, very wrong man.

  “Did I hear you correctly, Lieutenant? Rosemary?”

  Curtly Tarzon nodded.

  McGee coyly tipped his head. “This is a male institution. Someone’s made a … booboo.”

  Tarzon furiously sucked his cheroot, then snapped it from his mouth and stutterpuffed smoke in McGee’s fleshy smirk.

  “What the—?” coughed McGee.

  “Smoke signals, asshole. They spell fuck you. And I will.”

  With that Tarzon spun on his heel and stalked back through the parked cars. A slow fat rain began to fall, muddying splotches of oil here and there on the concrete. It was growing dark. Over his shoulder he heard the uneven fall of McGee’s boots. He reached his car, unlocked it. He climbed in, snatching the harness over his shoulder. Before he could close the door, McGee grabbed it.

  “This is a state reservation, Lieutenant. Not only aint you got jurisdiction, you aint got no right to verbally assault a correctional officer.”

  Tarzon regretted not retrieving the Walther from his trunk. He’d have liked blasting McGee’s kneecaps, the fate he reserved for those for whom killing might resemble a favor.

  “I got your number, pusbag. That’s all I needed.”

  McGee snatched away his hand the instant before it was amputated by the slamming car door. The rain quickened then, droplets big as bullets dancing on the hood, and the highpressure sodium lights ringing the fencing blazed, staining the rainbullets gold.

  Tarzon pulled away. He looked back once at a curve in the drive. There McGee stood, staring after him, oblivious to the downpour, looking in his shimmering skin of scaly goldblack like something half man, half reptile. Before the road swept McGee from view, Tarzon saw him in a flash of lightning throw back his head and laugh.

  Captain Reilly couldn’t trace which one, Reyosa or Mendoza, was the culprit. The orders weren’t logged; the paperwork “lost.” But he was sure it was one of those Custody taco tenientes who called the Kwik Fixx market Ray Savage listed on his application as his home. His real home was a freight container in the parking lot, where the clerk went to get him. The clerk rapped the secret code on the box’s side waking him up to come to the store phone. Then whichever bean dip it was told that calamity awaiting its occasion to doubletime it back to the pen, he was needed for Second Watch tower duty.

  The alarms had tripped just before noon; wild rumors of gunfire on the Yard swirled through the penitentiary; General Population was recalled and locked down for Emergency Count. Once in motion, the juggernaut of emergency procedure was hard to arrest. It was two hours before it was established no riot or mass escape or guerrilla attack on the penitentiary was in progress. It took another hour to identify the gunfire’s source. It wasn’t until late afternoon that Captain Reilly finally had C.O. Raymond Savage in his office again, this time with Outside Sergeant Fortado.

  “At oh eleven hundred,” Sergeant Fortado delivered his narrative of the incident, “I collected C.O. Savage at the Rear Sally Port and transported him by institutional pickup along the access road between fences …”

  “Gene, save the officialese for your report. Just tell me what you know.” The Captain was Fortado’s brotherinlaw.

  “Officer Savage and myself got to the tower about eleven fifteen. Halliday lowered the key. I opened the tower door and admitted Savage. Halliday descended and exited. I secured the tower and reattached the key to its line, which Officer Savage raised. I drove Halliday to the Rear Sally Port … Next thing I heard was BOOM! I looked across the Yard. Debris was floating from the top of the tower. There was a hole blown in its roof.” Fortado shrugged and darted a chary look at C.O. Savage in the chair beside him.

  Captain Reilly transferred his gaze to Savage. “Hello, Ray.”

  “Hello, sir.”

  “Ray, did you know that almost singlehandedly you’ve driven me into early retirement? This is my last watch.”

  “El Bummero! You’re like a father to me.”

  Reilly closed his eyes slowly and reopened them. “Ray, how did you blow a hole in the tower roof?”

  Savage slitted his eyes in the manner of a professional indignant that his judgment has been questioned. “Sir, there’s a sign on the wall up in the tower. It says all guards should check to make sure their firearms are in working order.”

  “And?”

  “So I checked the shotgun first. I looked it over, pumped a shell in the chamber, and pulled the trigger …”

  “Aannnd?” Captain Reilly’s voice rose cracking with horror.

  “And what, Captain?” Savage spread his palms in frustration at having to belabor the obvious. “Sucker worked!”

  Alone in his cell, Joe turned on his radio. Some prairie punk with a bushwhacked heart twanging his inflamed adenoids about a hightone twat from Tucson who was weekends at the Ritz while he was pork cracklings and grits—she was Moët and Beluga, this cowpoke was Thunderbird and Bugler. Sometimes Joe fel
t just as grateful as Moonpie for the guntowers and double ranks of lethal fencing.

  On the dark plain beyond the town’s claptrap outskirts, bonfires were lit along the baselines of the Little League diamond. A night game was about to be played. Headlights snaked across the plain and halted facing inward, their beams crisscrossing the field.

  Joe enjoyed watching the Little League games from his cell window. The distant shouts and blaring horns, the regular and orderly rotation of miniature players, the march of numbers down the scoreboard assured him that human values endured beyond this place of stone, passed from fathers to sons through their enactment in innocent pastimes.

  Beside the bleachers a stakebed sound truck was parked. Faintly Joe heard an amplified guitar torture the national anthem. At its blatting B-flat conclusion, trucks and cars blew their horns for the Land of the Free and Home of Baseball.

  But before the first side could take the field, the breeze quickened and thunder grumbled high in the Sierras, and the rain began, great heavy drops splashing on Joe’s cell windowsill.

  Joe started to turn from the window when his eyes popped wide, spotting two familiar figures crossing the visitors parking lot. He hugged himself to the bars, straining his eyes until their sockets ached.

  There was no mistaking McGee. But the other, smaller one in black … He turned then, opening his door, and Joe saw the cheroot. Christ! It was Lieutenant Tarzon! Joe’s sweatslick hands slipped down the bars. He wiped them on his pantlegs and gripped the bars once more. Now Tarzon was driving off, with McGee looking after him. Laughing.

  Christ! Moses and Tarzon were in this together. And he’d been on the deadly verge of trusting the cop, surrendering the diamond, giving up his life.

  Joe shrank from the window until the wall stopped his back. There he stood in the raindeafened cell, transfixed with the certitude that now he must guard the secret of the Devilstone with his life.

  Sluicing through the rain past the Coldwater Chamber of Commerce’s meretricious lawn, Tarzon radioed for McGee’s jacket to be on his desk when he returned. It had to be a coincidence that McGee was posted to the same prison where Speaker was doing his time. If it weren’t, Speaker would already be dead. Hanging up the mike, he slapped his palm on the steering wheel. It was still a damn ominous coincidence.

  Passing the Little League field where players and parents were rushing to their cars with newspapers over their heads, Tarzon’s mind clacked like an abacus, adding his options against their consequences. With McGee at the prison, he couldn’t warn Speaker of the imminent danger, he couldn’t even communicate with him without becoming an accessory to his murder. Could he segregate Speaker? Hardly. Even were it possible, were the Department of Corrections not a bureaucratic fiefdom with closed borders that only complied with outside police agencies under court order, putting Speaker in Protective Custody would have the opposite effect, it would offer him up for assassination.

  Okay, so he could have a judge release Speaker for time served. But then the crafty thief would smell a rat, he’d know Tarzon was setting him up to lead him to the diamond, and he’d go to ground. And Tarzon would lose his chance of recovering the diamond, bringing down Moses, and saving his daughter.

  No, he realized on the edge of town, the only way of protecting Speaker and getting the diamond too was to arrange for Speaker to be released and believe it was his own doing. Tarzon would have to recheck the penal administrative codes, but he thought he knew of a way already.

  But it would take a little time. And a little time could become eternity for Joe Speaker. Tarzon would have to recruit an agent inside Coldwater to warn if Speaker’s life was in jeopardy, whereupon Tarzon would release him immediately. He couldn’t sacrifice Speaker. Not even for Belinda’s life.

  On the highway outside town he passed a cutrate gas station, its pennants snapping shiny in the rain. At the pumps he saw a red Corvette, a ’65 Sting Ray he thought. The same car in which he first made cramped and clumsy love to Rosa at the drivein. Shamefully he recalled the movie more clearly than the sex. It was Desire Under the Elms. “Phew!” Rosa gasped rolling down the windows when they finished. “Desire under the arms is more like it.” Her tongue then still was servant to a nimble mind. He proposed to her before dropping her off that night.

  Rosa’s memory conjured that of the child she carried in her to the altar, the child conceived in the red Corvette, perhaps the very one tanking up back there. Guilt gripped his chest. Where was she? Somewhere, slapped the windshield wipers. Some where some where in that hazy haunted zone where the private Rick Tarzon converged with evil.

  He jammed the accelerator to the firewall, harrying his fate down the highway, so intent on what lay ahead that he didn’t note what fell in behind, the red Corvette, keeping careful distance.

  THE STROLL

  Evenings after chow the Mainline became a promenade. What duties hadn’t been discharged that day could wait on the morrow. Full bellies were a repletion of one sense; the other could await the furtive stairwell rendezvous, the quick blanket curtaining cell bars, the clammy reaches of sleep. For now all anyone had on the Mainline was time. Time to play the strap and run the rap, lay the note and twostep the Tale.

  Joe leaned with Earl against the wall, hands thrust flat in his pockets, Whisper’s cap pulled low, shading his gaze. One avoided eye contact on the Mainline unless one wanted to fuck or fight. Lamping a statuesque black queen with orange Frenchbraided hair, however, Joe thumbed up the bill, saying, “Man, that’s a pretty nigger switchin her stuff there. She lets her walkin do her talkin …”

  “You dont want no part of Nefertiti. She’s plagued, yeah.”

  “Why dont they blood test her, yank her off the line?”

  “Even if they observe the symptoms they cant make em give up blood. Unconstitutional without their consent. N them gal boys wont do it on their own, no. They know if they test positive, it’s straight to Quarantine until they roll out the back gates in a body bag. Nefertiti there, she havin too much fun to go wait in lockup to die.”

  “Christ, some people’ll ride their rights right to the grave.”

  “N take some others with em, yeah. Not just convicts neither. Every day plaguers are bein paroled to spread it in the real world. We livin in an AIDS incubator.”

  Locking on Joe’s stare, the black queen veered out of the Stroll to stand before him with her weight on one leg, hand on its shot hip; pinning him to the wall with icebright eyes that traveled down his body to halt, dilating, at his crotch. A long tongue studded with cysts snaked out to search crayoned lips that lisped, “Wanna burn some coal, whiteboy?”

  “Hook it up, Nefertiti,” Earl said with unmistakable menace.

  Nefertiti started with mock innocence, and Joe first noticed the polished wishbone through her ear. “Who dis ole man,” hissed the viral tongue. “Yo dingdong daddy?”

  Joe found his mouth too dry to answer.

  Laughing deep in her throat, the black queen swung her haughty hips back into the Stroll.

  Joe turned and looked westward across the institutional acres lying barren and black beneath the August half moon as though the prison walls were leaking their poisonous effluvium, blighting the surrounding soil.

  “I think I’ll head back to my house to read,” he said. In the falling distance he could see the lights of the town, a revolving gas station sign, a dingy motel, headlights blinking between buildings.

  “Not yet, amigo. You got a letter from your gal today.”

  “Wha—?” Joe swung on the old con. Earl’s right eye flared gasblue in the dusky halflight.

  “Custody intercepted it yesterday, yeah. Katherine Quintana’s listed as one of your crime partners. Correspondence with crime partners is contraband.”

  “What isnt?” Joe turned back to the window. The wind between the cellblocks picked up the dust and swirled it, reminding him of the way she tos
sed her hair.

  “Butthole, yeah.”

  Joe tittered looking up at the nervous evening sky, seeking escape. He tried to project himself into the fleeing clouds, far away from this concrete box filled with other men and their noises, smells, filth … and disease. Something inside Joe was broken and leaking blood the way the walls leaked their misery, paroled their plague.

  “Dont you want to know what she wrote?”

  “You read it?”

  Earl shrugged. “It was lying on the Captain’s desk.”

  “No, I dont care what she wrote.”

  A sharp urgency honed Earl’s voice. “Well I’m purely bound to tell you. Letter was postmarked Mexico. She said she’s pregnant, yeah, with your baby. She’s headed to her people in Galveston to have it.”

  “My baby? That’s close … Earl, put a blindfold on that bustout and spin her around with her finger out in the middle of Market Street and whichever swingin dick she pointed at would be as good a bet as me. She’s a whore.”

  “The right whore holds more mud than a nun …”

  “Fuck it.” Joe looked back to the darkening sky where the moon like a silver scimitar sliced a ragged cloud.

  “You wouldnt be so upset if you didnt believe her, amigo.”

  How could he tell the old man it was purely the notion of his rogue seed multiplying its heartache and misery? Its own plague?

  “Earl, what’s the word of a whore?”

  Earl’s right eye arced a blue spark. “The word of the right whore’s good as a guvmint check. I learned that comin up in Nawlins. Folks referred to socalled good women as women of character. Well, I learned it was the other way around. It was the socalled bad ones, the whores and strippers and all who had the market cornered on character, yeah. Good girls was plain as grits, it was the bad uns had the gumption of gumbo. Only they understood when you down and out, when life’s laid you low, your word’s all that’s left to save you. The others, the ones who never had to fight to keep their souls, they never learned they had em to lose, and their word aint worth the breath they spend on it … Show me a gal who’s scuffed and scratched to save her heart and soul and I’ll show you God’s best version of a woman.”