Homeboy

by Seth Morgan

  Below him, in the pocket yard between the cellblocks, two convicts sat together in the winnowing silver moonlight. One was passing the other candy from his charity basket. The other handed back his sack of Bull Durham. How could they be out there after Lockup? A match was struck. Joe was blinded for an instant by its flare. Then all he could see was a tongue of fire within a gauze aura, a flaming blue tear. Suddenly it was extinguished, and he was blinded a second time. When his night vision returned once more, the pocket yard was empty, and Joe wondered if the convicts hadn’t been wraiths and the flame a mirage, like those attributed by the bushmen to the Devilstone.

  Joe rolled himself up in dreams of Kitty, her wildsmelling hair like nightmist, her taste like wild fruit and sea spray.

  JACKS

  With the new year came the rains that lasted into March. By day the slow incessant downpour crowded the Mainline with graywoven shadows; by night it haunted convict dreams with its stonethroated whispering down the walls.

  “It’s like a broken record,” they complained over their grits in the charcoal predawn. “Over and over and over till you’re half out of yer head.”

  Yet Joe found just the way to animate this funerary and featureless rotation of days and nights. For months the rutted pocket yard between W and Z Blocks had preyed on his mind. Its muddy moonscape was useless to men on crutches and suicidal to those in wheelchairs. Then it came to him one day that it might be paved. It seemed the perfect project for the Work Order clerk, who controlled the prison’s building trades. Moreover, Joe had become an accomplished convict chamberlain by now, adept at negotiating official channels. He drafted a proposal and within a week had the Warden’s signature. He plunged straightaway into organizing the materials and coordinating the work. Not only did the project accelerate his ayems and peeyems—it helped Joe forget what he thought to be true, that the Fat Man was only awaiting his moment to sic McGee on him.

  At Work Call every morning, Joe stopped by W Wing to report to the assembly of blind, maimed, crippled, and diseased.

  “The work wagons should be rolling soon as the rain lets up,” he cried one drizzly dawn, striding into the wing proper and raising his voice to be heard by the AIDS victims crowding the screened upper ranges. “Your yard will be paved by spring,” only hoping half of them would still be alive. He received the W Wing version of the standing ovation: croaking cheers, wacky clapping, waving crutches. The plaguers shook the screens, a thunderous gnashing like the beating of great steel wings.

  Near the front of the ragtag crowd stood Roy between the handles of Spencer’s wheelchair. Spencer looked worse every day. Only patches of lint remained on his scabbed skull; his body was a bog of suppurating sores. With his shriveled skin and shrunken flippers, he resembled something accidentally vomited up from the ocean floor.

  He stared at Joe with unnerving intensity. Since Joe had last seen him, Spencer had added a pencil, affixed to his brow with a sweatband, to his prosthetic devices; and he aimed it between Joe’s eyes, reminding him of Tarzon’s accusatory cheroot.

  “Are you going to do it?” he asked. “The jack’s our last chance.”

  Joe flung back his head, staring up to the high shadowed ceiling. He puffed his cheeks and released his breath with a pop.

  “We’re both walkin off all day,” Roy rumbled deep in his chest crypt. “And now that Spencer’s comin down with the symptoms …”

  Joe flung an arm up at the carrier ranges, eyes sprung wide in horror. “You mean … Spencer? …”

  The brow pencil flipped up and down. “Any day they’ll lock me in the byebye bird cages. And those boys’ll kill me fast …”

  “What are you talkin about?”

  “They have no immune systems to protect them against the other diseases I carry,” Spencer said. “I dont blame them.”

  “Christ!”

  A smile froze Spencer’s face, the rictus grin of a gambler rolling dice on which his life is bet. With his twisted coathanger he touched Roy’s arm. The pair swung away and was swallowed into the cathedraltall gray shadows.

  Southward under countrymusic stars sped Rings’n’Things on her harebrained hegira, snugly installed in the overcab sleeper of Randolph Scott, But Not the Actor’s tractor trailer, whose bonnet moniker should have read Peterbought, not Peterbilt. They’d dumped the aluminum siding in Council Bluffs and were deadheading down to Dixie where Rings had no old times to be forgotten, lookaway. Never had she known a happiness quite the equal of balling the jack down the highway. She felt everywhere and nowhere at once, free from her future and curtained from her past.

  But when in her life hadn’t there been a hitch, and how many times this same one? Like, she wasn’t getting boinked. Randy explained that he had to save Saint Pete’s strength for his prospecting chores. As soon as these were complete, he promised, the Divine Rod would revert to its normal usage, the sacred act of pokeration.

  “But it’s just a piece of gristle,” Rings would beg, “you cant wear it out.”

  At such profanity Randolph Scott, But Not the Actor cemented his jaw and steeled his eyes. He caught her once trying to trick him by whispering subliminal smut in his sleeping ear. Thereafter he fastened a rubberband around it at night, after the fashion of boxers, to awaken him should it thicken.

  It was fur shur beginning to seem to Rings that the only time men wanted her was when they had to pay for it. But she steadfastly refused to accept that because it meant acceding to its corollary, that she would never get to do it for love. Instead she pushed the whole matter from her mind, settling for solos in the sleeper. Cranking up Guns N’ Roses on her Walkman, she’d nibble her clit with the earphones, tingling it until she cried out with such selfmockery and abandon that Randy would reach over his shoulder to shake her from her nightmare. To distract him while she caught her breath she’d ask once more how oil came to be, and patiently he’d explain. Listening to his voice like mint juleps laced with Spanish fly, Rings aimed whiteline tracers out the rig’s rearwindow and imagined that the dark, humped hills skiproped with telephone wire were the graves of dinosaurs who’d followed this same southern route a zillion years ago to croak mysteriously and get mushed into the subterraneous goo of lamister whore dreams.

  Dreams that were about to take shape, taste, and voice because here she was at last swinging on a Louisiana porch shaded by magnolias blossoming on honeysuckle vines. And there, along the lavender horizon flocked with pink, a lonesome figure strolled strumming a Gibson guitar. Rings knew just what Randolph Scott, But Not the Actor was singing, too, “Do Not Forsake Me, O My Darling”—just the tune fur shur to stir the Mesozoic juices.

  “You care for a rootbeer, Mizz Scott?” asked the sugar planter’s wife.

  Rings tilted up eyes brimming with gratitude at the presumption of matrimony. But when she nodded to the woman, her frosted flip wig fell halfway down her brow and Rings had to like grab it, suddenly pretending to swat a fly and push it back up. The wig was part of her new beauty school dropout disguise. It went with the 7-Eleven cherry shades, stems and all, and an armored Maidenform bra exactly like the one Sandra Dee used to speargun Troy Donahue’s last faint aspirations to heterosexuality. It made Rings’s tits look like the original molds for the ’57 Cadillac’s bumper bullets.

  “A rootbeer sounds pretty good, but a real beer would fur shur be better,” chimed Rings, forgetting that she was the guest of evangelic Christians. Hostility flickered between the woman’s eyes like the lightning suddenly forking the horizon, and Rings first noticed thunderheads muscling up behind the cypress stand.

  “Fetch up a case of the real stuff from the storm cellar,” said the man in the shadows at the porch’s other end. “Looks like we’re gonna need the extra room down there.”

  As he spoke, thunder rumbled like distant artillery, and low black clouds floated up like cannon smoke, swallowing the strolling silhouette on the horizon; and before R
ings had time to worry about it happening, it did, a mighty triton of lightning quivered in the ground where last he stood. Randolph Scott, But Not the Actor’s Divine Rod had become a lightning rod before even once poking Rings.

  They collected what looked like a crisp strip of bacon from the canebrake and put it in a box and waked him on the porch where Rings had watched him zapped. The rolleyed preacher hallelujahed Randy a good headstart on the Glory Road, though Rings could see in the mourners’ eyes that they believed it was the Devil’s work he was about, and the Devil’s due he collected.

  In closing they all sang “Nearer My God to Thee,” and Rings joined meekly in, though she couldn’t have felt further from whatever God might be and knew she’d never be any closer until she returned to the Bay City to testify against Baby Jewels. It was the only right thing, the only honest thing, and there was no woman so honest as an honest whore. At the hymn’s conclusion, the congregation sang Amen and crossed themselves, and Rings did likewise, crossing her broken heart, promising to go back just as soon as she found a way to blot out what happened to Glori girl, what nearly happened to herself. Just a little longer, she prayed—long enough for Humpty Dumpty to fall without her.

  Randy died intestate as well as intesticled, and no one knew what to do with the Peterbilt until a man claiming to be his cousin showed up, a spry little guy with wirerimmed spectacles who’d read of the freak accident all the way in Little Rock. Rings was like, Hey, the rig’s worth twenty large, this geek better have some proof. “What’s your name, buster?”

  “Harry Truman,” he chirped, “no relation to the president.”

  “His cousin fur shur,” Rings promised the parish justice, who released the Peterbilt. She agreed on the courthouse steps to have a beer with Harry Truman, No Relation to the President. They crossed the road to a crawfish stand and bought two Dixies, which they took out back to a long wooden table littered with bleached crab shells. There as the evening drew on they drank beneath drapes of moss like moldering lace, while fireflies sparked in the cattails and blue herons haiku’d through the swollen purple monotone of frogs and insects.

  “I’m a chemical toilet contractor by trade,” Harry Truman, No Relation explained. “But by vocation an inventor. Right now I’m designing a zerogravity toilet. Fascinating ergonomics. I hope to have its plans perfected in time for the Mid-South Plumbing Convention in a couple of months. They hold it in Houston, home of the Space Center. My ambition is to sell the zerogravity toilet to NASA and be set for life.”

  Rings looped a lazy brow. “No shit?”

  “Why dont you come along? You dont want to be stranded in this swamp. Plus I bet you could show me all the ins and outs of …” He paused a beat, poking her with hard eyes, “trucking.”

  “Quit lookin at me like I’m lunch,” she squalled. After all, a girl’s gotta put up some resistance.

  Joe first missed its mutter on the roof of the Chief of Plant’s office and was whiplashed with a chill. He sprang to an eastern window and exclaimed out loud. It had been weeks since the spiny peaks of the Sierras were visible. Trailing tatters of mist, they resembled the overwrought mountains of Chinese watercolors. He heard insects harping, and faintly from the orchards, a dove speaking of sorrow amid the tremolos of meadowlarks.

  The rains were over, it was time to roll the dice.

  The Maintenance Yard whistle shrieked. Joe snatched the memo typed days ago off his desk and joined the rest of the outside workers thronging into the prison through the Rear Sally Port. With the lifting of the weather, spirits rose; Mainline twostepping resumed and brash dozens rang down the walls. Joe felt alone on the raucous blue flood and judged it was the warrant in his hand to live or die that set him apart.

  Custody was bedlam as usual, a hive like a big city squadroom. Loud voices lobbed over the ringing of phones, the crashing of drawers, and everywhere the clacking of typewriters. Joe went straight to Ramsey’s desk, dropping the memo in his box. “Baa Baa, expedite this to Tower One. It authorizes the backhoe to enter the Truck Sally Port, circle the access road and enter through the gate in the pocket yard separating W and Z Blocks. They need it to level the new Hospital yard. Soon as the fuckin ground’s hard enough not to swallow the thing, that is …”

  “Good as done,” Baa Baa said. “It’s a fine thing you’re doin for those dudes …”

  A dim light flickered in the shadow of the cap. “We’ll see.”

  Baa Baa shrugged. “It’ll look good on yer parole jacket.”

  Joe laughed a single note. Coffee break paroles were bought, not earned. He’d managed to scrape together a couple of hundred to send Maas the week before. The bloodsucker still needed more than a grand. He was going to have to land a windfall hustle fast.

  Suddenly he was jostled from behind, knocked half over Ramsey’s desk by a gang of guards. Between them they carried a black convict by his chained arms and legs. They tossed him on a bench outside S&I’s frosted-glass door, where he lay rocking from side to side, moaning wretchedly.

  “Christ! Why not take him straight to X Wing?” Joe asked Ramsey. “Why the pit stop in Custody?”

  “He’s slated for the front gate, not the Hole. His parole date’s today and he wont cooperate.”

  “He wont … leave this place?” Loathing curdled Joe’s stomach.

  Ramsey shook his head. “There ought to be a way they could just reup, like in the service.”

  Joe’s throat swelled, blood kettledrummed in his ears. Flipping the cap backward, he bounded to the bench and hoisted up the black convict by his shirt front. Shaking the sickeyed face inches from his own, he choked on the closed wing stink.

  “What are you?” he shouted. “Some kind of animal that’s scared to leave an unlocked cage?” He banged the wooly head on the back of the bench, spraying drool. “There’s dudes fuckin dyin to get out of here …”

  A sudden billyclub beneath Joe’s chin snapped back his head and lifted him to his toes. His hands went numb, dropping the black convict. Then he heard that rabid slur he knew from nightmares: “Dont choke him out …”

  The club whipped away, dropping Joe to his knees. Everything was misted with blood.

  “Are you one of those dudes dyin to get out of Coldwater?” the slurp fingerfucked his ear.

  Trying to speak, Joe spit up blood. He gained one foot, then the other, and stood shakily, staring into McGee’s gloat. Just as the shotgun was slung over his shoulder when he last spoke to Whisper on the fence, now a taser nestled his meaty neck. Joe had seen these weapons used already. He’d watched them sink twin copper electrodes into men, girdling them with lightning, melting them into puddles of feces and semen. He swayed, grabbing a desk corner for support.

  “What are you waiting for?” he croaked, thinking, It’s the cap, it must be the cap, fucker knows I’ve got the rock.

  “What’s the hurry, Speaker? None of us is going any place. Except Robinson here …” He prodded the black with the taser. “But he’ll be back soon. See, he’s scared to death of the streets. Someone else’s death, that is. He’ll kill and kill fast to get home for good …”

  “Fuck you,” it spurted like pus from a wound, and Joe swung, tottering from Custody on unsprung legs.

  GASOLINE SHORTS

  Belly Blast left the ring trailing hoots and jeers like tin cans tied to a dog’s tail. Yeta the Abominable Snowgirl had just whipped her mercilessly in the main event. Hey, this whirleytwat hadn’t even been in the national computer ratings until last week and she beat Belly like a rug on a line.

  First she used Belly’s own championship belt to snake a cobra choke around her neck, then lifted her with her hightop red boots kicking, spun her in a highspeed helicopter and flung her, twirling up into the fourth row of seats. Nothing like that in the script. Belly was ready to walk out of the Martin Luther King Auditorium right then and there if the fans hadn’t handed her bodily over their
heads and boosted her back into the ring.

  With a banshee scream, the Snowgirl then seized a handful of Belly’s sequined crotch and another of her bangs to loft her high, turning, holding Belly up there for the screaming geeks, before flinging her down on her uplifted knee, snapping her back like trying to break a dead branch. The ole wheel of torture, that was in the script, only as Belly’s last move, the one to lay the Snowgirl out for the count. Either the Abominable Snowgirl was making up her own moves as she went along or the promoter, Aldo Tortoricci—“The Torturer,” in his ring days—had switched scripts to retire Belly on a stretcher. Ugly biz either way, though in a daze Belly chose the latter scenario as truth: the Torturer was promoting his latest bimbo basher. He’d promised Belly a comeback and used her for a fall bitch.

  With Belly blocking heavy traffic on Queer Street and the fans screaming bloody murder, the Torturer’s new protégée climbed the turnbuckles to balance herself on the topmost, tearing her frosted hair and screeching the Himalayan Hootnanny before executing a flying somersault slam, crushing Belly to the mat, nearly spewing her guts out her mouth.

  Some comeback, chica.

  But the crowning indignity, the stuff of every prowrestler’s nightmares and direct evidence Aldo was eightysixing Belly, the Abominable Snowgirl saved for last. Arising after the ref counted Belly out, the Snowgirl brandished a fist with a meaningfully protuberant knuckle. “Noogie time, noogie time,” the morons chanted. The Abominable Snowgirl snatched Belly’s arm and triplenoogied it! Now one of the bank tellers or bus drivers out for a night of wholesome fun had an even better idea. “Indian rope burn!” a delirious voice cried out. The crowd, quick to fan the spark of genius, ignited a raging fire. “Rope burn! Rope burn! Burn the spic bitch!” Belly was climbing up the ropes, shaking stars out her ears, when the Abominable Snowgirl twisted a hellacious Indian rope burn on her noogiedout upper arm.

  Now any wrestler who suffers the insult added to her ring injuries of a single noogie should take a serious look at her career. That kind of humiliating kids stuff just wasn’t professional. Then compound that indignity with an Indian rope burn … well, you shouldn’t need a crystal ball to gaze into or a wrecking ball whuppin’ you upside the head to know you were washed up in wrestling circles.