Homeboy

by Seth Morgan

  Joe snorted.

  “What in hell’s she got to gain lying to a convict?” Earl spit through the window. “Your heart aint no bigger than a mustard seed.”

  “I dont want no trick baby!”

  “What in hell you think you are?”

  Thunderstruck, Joe whirled from the window. “How do you know … that?”

  For a long moment Earl regarded him without answering, his ambivalent gaze melding irony and affection.

  “I asked you a question, you old fart.”

  Earl lifted his bony shoulders, letting them fall with a resigned exhalation. “It’s all in your Central File,” he said softly. “Up in Admin.”

  “So you dont just read my mail, you memorize my jackets.”

  Earl pinched his beak, hiding a sad smile. “Thought I was doin you a favor, amigo. I scratched your silent murder beef.”

  With that the old con shoved off the wall and was quickly swallowed into the Stroll, leaving Joe in a tumult of gall and grudging gratitude.

  Tarzon closed the interrogation room door and returned to his chair. He fixed a Hav-A-Tampa Jewel in a blueshadowed smile and nodded to the other chair across the small table. “Have a seat, Joe Sing.”

  The lanky Chinese youth remained standing, black eyes beneath a red bandanna staring implacably at the Homicide lieutenant. A mop thunked the wall, metering the riverbottom bellyache moaned by a trusty janitor.

  Tarzon said, “I have no interest in your current charges. I’m not here to harass you. You may return to your tank any time you wish. But I’d be obliged if you’d hear me out. I’m here to make a mutually beneficial proposition. In return for your cooperation, I’ll avenge Archie.”

  Without removing his frostbit gaze from Tarzon, Joe Sing sat. His lips barely moved: “How?”

  “I’m sure you know it was Baby Jewels Moses who zipped Sammy Chin and Archie. You also gotta know that he’s after you now. But maybe you dont know why …” Tarzon cocked his brow; Joe Sing’s eyes narrowed. “He wants the identity of the jokers you loaned the guns and masks to caper his bank and cop a diamond that just happened to be in the safe.”

  Joe Sing inspected his nails, elaborately.

  “Dont worry. I cant prove the switch and bill you for the Golden Boar. I dont even want to, I have no interest in gang warfare.”

  Joe Sing shifted in the wooden chair and tilted his head to study Tarzon. Softly he said, “I’ve heard about some ice.”

  “The diamond ties Moses to a One Eightyseven. That’s why I’m trying to get my hands on it before he does, to drop the pill on him.”

  “I cant help you there.”

  “Only the character who’s got the ice can help me, and so far he wont.” Tarzon paused a heavy beat. “Speaker’s holding his mud.”

  “So.” Joe Sing nodded slowly, then said, “I’d do the same. How could I trust you? See, street characters and cops are flipsides of the same coin. Trusting a cop’s as dangerous as trusting yourself.”

  Tarzon frowned rolling the ash off his cheroot on the edge of the table. “Doesnt it steam your pumpkin that Archie and Sammy Chin would be alive if Speaker had given up the ice?”

  “How could it? The Barker didnt know Moses had a switch figured any more than I did.”

  Tarzon nodded. “Good. Because I’m going to ask you to watch Speaker’s back.”

  “I thought you had it in for him?”

  “I did. He’s done … terrible things. But the same as the rest of us, he’s doing life without parole behind the same set of eyes with his conscience for a cellmate … But Moses has no conscience. He’s wrong on the rocks. He’s killed many times before and will kill many times again until he’s stopped. For greed, for revenge … for fun. I need Joe Speaker because I need the diamond. If I lose him, I lose the chance of bagging the Fat Man.”

  “I’m going to the pen,” Joe Sing pointed out. “How’m I supposed to help the Barker?”

  “You’re going to CIM Coldwater. That’s where Speaker’s at.”

  “Oh? You fix that?”

  “No. I could have, but it turns out that’s where all Oriental felons are being sent anyway. They think it’s safest to concentrate the smaller minorities in individual institutions. Something to do with rising racial tension because of overcrowding. Strength in numbers.”

  “Great.” Joe Sing’s lips hinted at a smile. “I’m going where all my enemies are. Maybe the papers were right. Maybe Sammy and my brother were done by the Wah Ching. If so, I’m in bocoo trouble.”

  “You’re too smart to believe what you read in papers.”

  “But dumb enough to believe a cop?”

  Tarzon laughed. “Next you’ll tell me the Wah Ching run you off the streets.”

  “What gives you the idea anyone beat me off the bricks?”

  “Your uncle, Woh Ping, owns the biggest liquor distributorship in Chinatown, right?”

  Sing shrugged.

  “And you get popped boosting a case of Hiram Walker from a mom n pop store? Cmon, Joe Sing. It doesnt take a rocket scientist to figure you’re P.C.’ing from the streets. Hauling your ass out of the Fat Man’s reach. And I think it’s a smart move.”

  “I feel better already … So let me get this straight. You want me to watch out for the Barker …”

  Tarzon nodded leaning back, rolling the cheroot in his fingers. “Dont mention the diamond. He’s gotta be paranoid by now and he’ll suspect you’re in cahoots with me or the Fat Man. Just keep an eye on him. Let me know if he’s getting into trouble he cant handle. There’s a guard at Coldwater named McGee, Rowdy McGee. If he gets on Speaker’s ass, let me know immediately. He’s all the way wrong.”

  “Rowdy McGee,” Joe Sing repeated. “That’s one with a rep on the streets even.”

  “I bet.” Tarzon slid a business card across the table. “This is an attorney in Sacramento. You can send uncensored letters to attorneys, make unmonitored phone calls. If anything comes up …”

  Joe Sing stood. His hand snaked the card into his hip pocket. He knocked on the door for a deputy.

  “Sing, you’ll be on a pen chain by next week. Meanwhile dont let Vice or Narcotics call you out of the tank. Not without an attorney present. They’re also all the way wrong.”

  Joe Sing’s eyes disappeared. “Thanks.”

  QUARANTINE

  HELP. BRING BLEACH, SPENCER … The desperate kite was penciled on a candywrapper, folded three times and tucked into a triangle. Joe found it on his bunk when he returned to his cell for 1630 count. He stopped to think how long it had been since he’d seen the quad. Months, he realized, glancing away through window bars where other kites of life and death spun golden in distant trees, about to fall. It came then, a thought as cold and still as eternity itself—a first frost soon would turn Rooski where he slept to stone. A shiver shut Joe’s eyes.

  For three packs of Camels he scored a gallon of Clorox from Laundry the next afternoon and humped it on his shoulder down the Mainline to W Wing, the Hospital Unit. He hesitated at the gates, peering through the bars into the crowded rotunda. The inmate patients sat at tables playing desultory cards, they moved in slow circles; they leaned motionless against walls, staring into nothingness. The cellblock smelled of unchanged bandages and stale medicine and loose bowels. Through the high windows in the block’s rear wall ramped steep, greasy light writhing with motes the size of gnats.

  Joe took a deep breath and rang the gate buzzer. A Medical Technical Assistant keyed him onto the block and offered him a pair of surgical gloves and mask. “The screened upper ranges,” he answered Joe’s questioning stare. “Plague quarantine.”

  Joe asked what about the men in the rotunda, why weren’t they gloved and masked? The MTA explained that Administration wouldn’t pay for the number of gloves and masks needed to protect the unit’s other tenants twentyfour hours a day. Only
visitors rated. Joe elected not to exercise this dubious rating, yet declined to enter the cellblock either. He dispatched a runner—actually a onelegged man who used a crutch much like a vaulting pole to hurtle himself down the cell gates, chattering like an organ grinder’s monkey—to page Spencer.

  While he waited, Joe leaned as warily as a man over a pond of piranhas from beneath the gate area’s corona, peering squeamishly upward. Cyclone fencing had been welded on both sides, from the second tier catwalk clear to the high ceiling indistinct from its shadows. The incessant squeak of crutch tips, the shriek of rubber wheels, the shrill flightly echoes—in Joe’s heated imagining it became a surreal human aviary, where scavengers of infected carrion were shackled to their roosts. Convulsively, he ducked back beneath the overhang.

  Finally he saw Roy’s unmistakable monster gait approaching out of the cross stitched stygian gloom. When he’d come close enough Joe asked, “Where’s Spencer?”

  Roy turned in slightly the wrong direction and Joe craned his neck, guiding the blind man’s head around with his voice: “How is he?”

  “Oh it’s you, Joe … He only gets worse. They upped his meds today and he’s crashed.” Roy stood just outside the shadow holding Joe, his haggard head backtilted, swaying to his silent music. His head still suddenly, and his empty eyes narrowed as if hearing an illtuned instrument in his ethereal orchestra. “What’s wrong, Joe? Spooked by the carrier ranges?”

  Joe felt himself pulled forward again by that loathsome fascination which slows rubberneckers at freeway accidents. Once more he stared up the cyclone fencing disappearing into the noisy shadows crowding the cellblock’s high reaches. Hooked everywhere through the links were white, brown, and black bony knuckles.

  “How many they got up there?”

  Roy dipped his stubbled head, fixing dead eyes on Joe’s breast. His voice rumbled up from somewhere deep. “Couple of hundred.” Joe whistled softly. “That’s nothing. Another two years every swingin kickstand in the system’ll be contaminated. There’ll be just one sentence left—death.”

  “Here’s the bleach.” Joe slung the gallon jug into Roy’s outstretched fingers. “What’s Spencer need it for?”

  “Not Spencer. He asked for the plaguers. They catch any germ flying around this hospital unit. They use bleach to disinfect their cells. The guards wont give em any. Claim they’re using it to flush syringes.”

  “What else wont they give em?”

  “Caulking guns. They need them to seal their window cracks. When the cold nights come in another month, the winds’ll blow in all the pigeon shit on their window ledges … Also surgical gloves for tending to each other. The MTA’s wont give em any.”

  Joe quickly explained that the Clorox and caulking guns would be no problem. In a matter of days he’d be working where these supplies were bountiful. Rudy Malec, the lead convict on the welding crew, had arranged for his assignment to the Maintenance Yard where Joe could be of assistance in contraband hustles.

  The surgical gloves, Joe assured Roy, he could obtain in plentiful supply from the Y-l Clinic. Y-l was run by the Chinese the same way the Maintenance Yard was run by whiteboys. Whiteboys also ran Custody and the Library, with the same tightfisted sovereignty that the Mexicans ran the Chapels and Laundry, and the blacks, the Kitchens and Gym. None could say how long these territories had been staked out. By the time Joe came through Coldwater, each sphere of operations was under the immemorial domination of a racial click.

  Joe’s contact in Y-l was Joe Sing, who had just arrived at Coldwater. When they first met on the Yard, something in Joe Sing’s voice sounded strained; and when Joe extended his condolences for Archie, the Chinese gangster just lamped him with a freezedried smile. Joe wrote it off to Mainline mores. Interracial relations that were tolerated on the streets were taboo behind prison walls.

  “Look, Roy,” Joe blurted on sudden impulse, “if Spencer could afford it, could he have competent outside medical help and obtain his transfusions from streetside blood banks?”

  Roy nodded, facing up into the high shifting panes of greasy gray light, bathing his face with a gentle back and forth motion in his music, basking in its still and silent sorcery.

  “Tell him I’ll be calling,” Joe said with emphasis, forming a plan already.

  That evening Joe and Earl made Yard. Before they even reached the Sally Port, Earl apologized for dipping in Joe’s business about Kitty. Joe told him never mind, scratching the silent beef more than made up for it.

  “You just lucky, yeah, yours aint written in blood,” the old coot said sententiously.

  Out the Sally Port they passed into the indolent crepuscular yard. Joe felt queerly as if he were walking onto a stage production of someone else’s Indian summer night’s dream. Fireflies blinked softly in the taller grass along the fencing; blue nightlights blurred from the guntowers. Like bit players in a shadow play, convicts glided heads bent in hushed conversation; here and there laughter burbled. The Sierras might have been cut out of black cardboard; the sky could have been indigo silk pinpricked with stage starlight. A polished silver moon hung from wires. The prison walls throbbed banana yellow and acrylic magenta from an inner source. The tableau seemed to Joe too vivid, like a Disney cartoon. He decided it must be a distortion of his atrophied perceptions, an exaggeration of his starved sensibilities. The scene discomfited him the way beef bourgignon sickens a new parolee, the way simple bread may convulse the malnourished.

  They walked slowly along the perimeter track while Joe related his visit to W Wing and discussion with Roy. He was going to save up to pay for street doctors and plasma, he said, and Earl could no longer count on Joe subsidizing his gambling jones. Earl nodded now and then and grumbled deep in his throat, indicating he was listening and thinking at once.

  “I’m proud of you, amigo,” he said when Joe finished. “And dont worry bout me, no. I’ve placed my last bet.”

  Joe puffed his cheeks. “Good idea, with your track record.”

  “It aint whether I win or lose. It’s a habit either way.”

  “Just so you know you cant count on me any more. I gotta do this. For myself as much as Spencer … I knew another dude once who counted on my help and I stabbed him in the back instead.”

  Earl used his gnarled halffingers to squeeze the bridge of his nose.

  “See,” Joe said, “I got my own silent beef that’s written in blood, and I got to wash it away.”

  They walked on in silence save the esophageal grumblings of Earl’s lungs turned into leather bags by emphysema. They wandered off the track and climbed the bleachers. They sat on the top row. The Yard was streaked with nebular blur like a fallen sky. From below Joe heard the moist oomphy sounds of two men fucking. The sound used to disgust him, then lately it had become merely a distraction. This evening he actually welcomed it, found it soothing. The strenuous, cyclical pulsations old as the cadences of the sea rooted the Kodachrome gloaming in reality.

  Earl lapsed into half growling, half humming the bluesy dirge “Saint James Infirmary” again.

  “Earl,” Joe asked presently, “tell me about it down there.”

  “Nawlins?” Earl softly spoke the city’s name like that of an old lover; then told again of her French Quarter until Joe could almost smell beignets and chicory, see Creole painted pigeons swinging sweet toottoots down leaning streets of rainslick cobblestone, hear the ragged sob of a Dixieland horn, the harlequin hoot of a riverboat’s steam calliope, the threshing of the paddlewheels in big muddy waters; then Earl conjured steamy bayou nights until Joe saw moonbeams splashing in mason jars and felt through a gingham dress a slender back supple as tupelo stripling swaying to a Cajun waltz dreamed on pearly accordion keys.

  Joe laughed suddenly.

  “What’s so funny, amigo?”

  “I was just thinking that the aim of prisons is to correct criminals, make adults out of overgrown ch
ildren. The first object you’d think would be to force them to stop living fantasy lives. But that’s all prison is, fantasy finishing school. I never learned how to direct my dreaming until I got here.”

  “Yeah you right.”

  “I wish they’d hurry up and lower my custody so I could get to work in the Maintenance Yard,” Joe said. “These Mainline ayems and peeyems got me doubleparked in the Twilight Zone. Instead of me doin the time, it’s startin to do me.”

  “Hurry up and wait,” Earl repeated the timeworn institutional shibboleth.

  High overhead a lone nocturnal hawk gyred in a thermal chimney, leaning into its windy sinews. It screamed twice suddenly and flashed toward the darkling Sierras. The Yard whistle blew. Below the lovers climaxed simultaneously, as if by practice.

  “Guess they’re cured for the night,” Earl said arising and taking the first rickety step down.

  “That might be all this joint cures,” Joe cracked, starting down behind him, “heterosexuality.”

  SUNNY DEELIGHT

  Miss Kranz asked Sunny to dress demurely and please go easy on the vampire makeup and for godsakes leave the punk jewelry wherever she called home. The Moses jury was going to have a hard enough time believing her without the miniature handcuff earrings and slave fetter bracelets and padlocked necklaces. It didn’t matter that these items were all the rage, the jury was concerned with truth, not trends. Miss Kranz promised to pay personally for the hairdresser to rinse out Sunny’s tangerine cockatoo and, once the jury was sequestered, redye and style Sunny’s tresses in a titanium Mohawk—if Sunny promised in return not to chew gum on the stand. For the trial, she wanted Sunny to look like a Bible student, not burner. Miss Kranz was about a hundred and fifty years old and worked for the D.A.’s office.

  At their last session she bit her lip thinking up a role model, then asked hopefully, “Do you know Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm?”