by Seth Morgan
Back down the damp cement walkway trudged Belly Blast, past the faded boxing posters from when the auditorium was still called the Redwood and hosted the sweet science; beneath hissing pipes and swirling steam from many leaks that smelled like wet dirty socks and piss she dragged her cape become her shroud of shame. Chica, now you gotta make fuckie suckie loops for Baby Jewels, was the only thought her mind could link up. Gotta feed the monkey before he eats your bahakas up raw. Then a sudden thought sprang fresh sweat to her brow: Maybe Gordo paid Aldo to set this up. The heat was up, his porn players were bolting, he was using every trick to wrangle back his stock.
In the boiler room where her street clothes hung from rustfrozen spigots and gauges, Belly flung aside the cape with a curse. Cold crosses like this, she scolded herself, are the price a dopefiend pays. The Torturer’s betrayal was particularly bitter because Belly had spent her best years making him all kinds of money. The mementos of her career plastered on the boiler room wall proved it. The colorful costumes and masks, the profusion of belts and other ring regalia, the posters of her leaping from turnbuckles, spreadeagle in midair, delivering bodyslams to prostrate opponents. There she was flogging the Iron Maiden with her championship belt, here actually chewing off Inga, She-Wolf of the SS’s ear—and wait, by the door, in case any might snigger she was chicken to take on real men: Belly Blast chasing the Sheik of Pain through the stands with a chainsaw—it’s running, you can see the smoke!
Smoke, she chuckled ruefully. That’s all Aldo was blowing up your culo with that comeback talk. Gordo couldn’t trap you with the kilo, so he used another trick to pin you. She had to go to him now.
She propped her foot on a stool and was unlacing its high red rasslin’ boot when her fingers froze in midflight. Her nose twitched, sifting from the mildewed damp the acrid fume that twisted still through her every childhood memory. Her eyes clicked wide. She snapped her head over her shoulder and snarled, “What the fuck you doin here, Pop?”
He sat in the corner, on an upturned bucket, smoking his black cheroot. “You dont know how long, how hard I’ve looked for you.”
“But I know how fast and easy you could lose me.”
He spoke with his chin ducked, his voice tightly leashed. “All these years you’ve known the truth but I let the lie stand, I …”
She set down her boot and turned on him, arms akimbo, head tilted. “Which lie you talkin about?” she asked in a way that suggested there were many.
“About your mother. How Rosa died.”
She laughed, jiggling unraveled sequins in the oily halflight. “I wasnt the only one who knew, Pop. Everyone knew. The cops …”
A strangulated laugh escaped him. “The cops?”
“Your brothers, Pop. The boys at the Coronado station. They knew.”
“How?” Dubiety twanged his voice.
“I told them, Pop. Not that they would do anything. Half of em were gettin greased by border wiseguys, the other half shaking B-girls down for blowjobs, and they were scared you’d pull their covers, so they entered whatever you told them on their reports to protect their own action. But they knew. Next I went to her brother, Uncle Freddy. But he was too scared of you, too …”
Now apprehension stretched his words. “What did you … tell?”
“I told em Mom was a little light in her huaraches and was seeing a talk doctor, and maybe sex got a little offkey, so you went and got some strange and took her to our Chris Craft at the marina …”
“But you were only nine! How did you figure all that?”
“Pop, I was out of school sick that day. I saw her come home, get the gun, and leave again. She kept jabberin bout yer fuckin love boat. So I knew she dint surprise burglars at the marina the way the reports said. She caught you playin hopscotch on someone else’s block and was going to maybe shoot you both, cept you got the drop on her.”
He said, “It was an accident.”
She slumped her shoulders. High overhead the rain prayed on the roof. “Who cares?”
“Maybe just me. Seems I was the only one fooled by my own lie. I thought everyone believed it …”
“It doesnt matter anymore, Pop.”
It did, he said. He had to hear the truth himself from his own mouth; and he took a breath too long deferred and told how Rosa caught them napping in the fo’c’sle. She must have been drinking because she stumbled down the gangway, awakening him, and he vaulted naked from the bunk and grappled with her; but she was strong, a glandular madness whipped her limbs like sprung tension cable, he still could feel the sugary pain in his wrists. He didn’t know who pulled the trigger.
“You did,” she intoned, “but it dont matter.”
“It does!” He beat a fist on his knee, then drew another breath. “All right. Yes. It was … my finger.” He almost had the gun wrestled from her when she yanked suddenly into herself, a fierce hug, and it fired, a shuddering explosion rocking the cabin, and she shrieked wildly, a laugh almost, then doubled over like slapping her knees, collapsing.
“Dead,” he said, staring at the floor as if seeing again her sideways leer. “You’re right. She was going to kill us both. I was defending us. I’m … sorry.”
“Pop, lissen to me. If I could forgive you, maybe I would. If I could overlook you bopping some bimbo on the boat you named after my mother, I’d try. If I could justify you killin her to defend your infidelity, I’d be willing. But it aint in me.”
“Just hate,” he guessed.
“Not even that. Hate needs love to burn and I’m just cold. Through and through.”
The bucket overturned with a clatter and out he stepped from the shadows. “If there was just something I could say …”
“Maybe one thing, Pop. One thing I always wondered. Was it any different?”
“Different?”
“Doin Mom. Did it feel any different from the rest?” His gaze fell before the accusation in her eyes. “Nuhunh. I dint think so. It was just like the legal ones, like flushing a toilet. Just because you had to doctor the facts dint make a difference. You done that before. Written false reports, put throwaway guns in dead hands. You aint protectin the public from homicide, Pop. You are homicide. That’s the big lie of yer life …”
“I want to take you home …”
“This is home.” She swept an arm around the dim damp boiler room. “You’re gettin old and your guilt’s catching up. That’s good, Pop. Maybe if you suffer some you can save yer ass. Just dont come round me with that confession shit. I’m your daughter, not a priest. So do me a big favor and fuck right off with that.”
“At least you arent workin for the Fat Man.”
She stared at him. “You watch the match?”
“No. I wouldnt watch one of those any sooner than I’d watch one of your … movies.”
“You oughta, Pop. Like part of yer penance. Watch what you done … Now get the fuck outta here. I’m tired of lookin at myself all twisted in yer eyes …”
She turned her back, planting her boot on the stool again. “Belinda.” Never had she heard such longing in her name, and she whirled on him, shaking with a fury at the one thing in her life that was better never than late, his love. “Maybe you want it in writing … F-U-C-K O-F-F!”
He winced. “Please think about it … Here’s my number if you want to talk, make this right.”
Helplessly he looked around for a place to lay his police card. She grunted and held out a hand, a hand purple and swollen and pustulant like one he’d seen first in a barrel and last on a morgue shelf. She said, “Dont put on any coffee. Now take yer stinkin pacifier n get out … motherfucker.”
Tarzon left the auditorium by a fire exit. Outside a sagging night sky showered silverdollar wishes in puddles swirled with gasoline. He turned up his collar, shrugging deeper into his raincoat, and hooked up the block. He didn’t notice the Sting Ray across the rainse
ething street, nor remark its windshield wipers swipe once, clearing a view for dead eyes briefly lit by the lightning flickering along the rows of dead windows.
After Lights, Joe stood smoking at his window bars. The moon skulked low over the opposite cellblock, scarved in clouds. Convicts called softly back and forth between the cellblocks; the plinking of radios rose and fell on the black wind chanting through the fences.
They’d brought in the backhoe that morning. Joe saw it from the Mainline window, hunkered in the pocket yard mud. They got the jack during afternoon exercise, he guessed. With Spencer directing, Roy had no trouble finding it in the tool compartment beneath the operator’s saddle. Easy to bring back inside, say under a blanket on Spencer’s lap.
Then what? The jack’s only conceivable purpose was to spread window bars. But they’d never fit the wheelchair through. Spencer would have to direct Roy carrying him across the treacherous yard. And what about the double row of fencing? The searchlights pinning them in a crossfire between the towers? The image of their immolation snatched Joe’s heart with frozen claws.
But he had to do it, he told himself sitting on his bunk, lighting another cigaret. He owed them this last chance at life. Christ, even if it killed them. Selfsacrifice was every man’s right.
Through the long night watch he waited, lighting one cigaret from another’s butt, conjuring mystic tricks to steel his soul against his heart’s devastation. Yet, despite his best efforts, repeatedly he saw within the moonlit panes shuffling on his cell wall bullets zippering the dirt, plucking poppies from blue shirts; Roy falling to his knees, head lolling, searching in the snap and whine of lead for his music, spilling the bundle from his arms, spectacles smashed, pencil broken in the bluewhite light. What have I done? Then the panes dissolved, becoming fog, and the tip of his cigaret pulsed like a police light, and Rooski’s face lifted in a doorway framed by barred shadows.
Tower One’s siren shattered the slide show. In seconds a hundred clamoring bells and klaxons joined in, followed by the thumping of breaker switches awakening the entire penitentiary and its perimeter in a blaze of light. He heard thundering guard boots on Mainline. An unfamiliar First Watch guard rushed down T Wing, ordering all prisoners to roll out and stand for Emergency Count. Another guard followed him down the cells, thumbing a mechanical counter.
Then, as suddenly as it erupted, the commotion died. First the bells, then the klaxons, finally the lights. The prison was plunged back into seething darkness slanted now with shadows like an old steel engraving as between the cellblocks dawn arose.
No shots, he rejoiced. Christ, no shots!
There was no use going back to sleep now, even if Joe could. He brewed a cup of instant coffee with his heating coil, lit another cigaret and listened to the harsh whisperings up and down the T Wing cells. The convicts concocted increasingly gruesome scenarios to explain the Emergency Count. Fantasies of mass breakouts and the taking of guards for hostages and reprisal raids on X Wing snitches abounded. There was a wishful quality to their imaginings which rattled Joe.
Surprisingly, they were unlocked for breakfast. The Mainline was clogged: it seemed all General Population was making chow that morning. It struck Joe as foolhardy to allow such unrestricted inmate movement while a security breach was still being evaluated.
A cordon of Gooners blocked the W Wing gates. They cut off any questions with gruff orders to keep moving. Slowly passing the gates in the press of blue shirts, Joe glimpsed a confusion of correctional khaki and S&I armor thronging the rotunda. He had almost reached the Chowhall when the call rang out: “MAN WALKIN! Hit the walls and no talkin!”
The convicts scrambled to either wall where they stood three and four deep in absolute silence. An open lane twelve feet wide separated them. The cordon at the head of the Hospital Wing parted and reformed into a gauntlet.
Suddenly it was clear to Joe why they waited until now and didn’t move them before Unlock. Some genius in Custody—and Joe was willing to bet a month in the Hole it was Rowdy McGee—had decided to make object lessons of Spencer and Roy. They were to be led down the Mainline in full view of General Population.
When Rowdy McGee swung out of W Wing first, Joe knew he would have won his bet. Lustrous armored epaulets had been added to his uniform, and to his armament an electric cattle prod, which he swung like a jeweled marshal’s baton. His chin jutted as if he’d been studying photographs of Mussolini. Two Gooners with tasers at high port fell in behind him.
Spencer came out next, his wheelchair pushed by two more Gooners each grasping a handle. Without the necessary extremities to attach the handcuffs and legirons, they were reduced to swaddling the tiny, frail torso in chains. Spencer’s countenance was a beacon of triumph.
Next came Ray in full body restraints, staring upward and clanking stiffly like Frankenstein’s monster in legirons. The remainder of the Goon Squad followed him. One of them carried the hydraulic jack ceremoniously uplifted like the Ark of the Covenant wrested from the heathens.
Watching this bizarre procession form up, Joe heard a convict behind him lay down the inside skinny: “This bitch, yuh see, she goes into the onliest hardware store in Coldwater and buys threefoot bolt cutters, so natchly the store calls S&I soon as she books with em. Then last night they found the bolt cutters lyin on the access road between the fences … Along with enough C2 to blow down the cellblock wall. They was fixin to free all the plaguers. Might uh, too, if the bitch had the strength to throw the stuff over both fences. Natchly, since they landed next to the new Hospital Yard, it was pretty obvious who the stuff was meant for. They shook down the wing and found the jack … Man, that pair woulda stood a better chance runnin through hell in gasoline shorts.”
“How’d dem crips get the jack inside?” asked a second.
“How do I know?” snapped the first. “Aint no clear voyeur.”
“However they did it, them boys got heart,” said a third.
By then Spencer’s wheelchair was passing abreast of Joe. Without looking, the quad hailed him with a jaunty salute of the coat hanger. Up to this moment the convicts crowding the walls had been subdued. Not by fear, but awed respect. But the spell was broken by the cavalier flip of the twisted bit of wire. First several began clapping, then more and more, louder and louder, cheering and stamping their feet until the Mainline resounded like a conch shell big as Dallas.
Spinning around, McGee nearly capsized on his gimpy leg. He realized quickly that there was no quelling this inspired outburst. Terror spurting from his eyes, he ordered his men to doubletime the escapists to X Wing.
The convicts were too gladdened to bother jeering McGee and his flunkies. They closed ranks after the retreating procession and redoubled the cheers for Coldwater’s very own heroes who had mocked all odds and found the way to win for losing.
All they got was thirty days in the Hole for possession of unauthorized state property—to wit, a jack. Escape charges were referred to the Madera County Attorney, who declined them. The girl was never identified, so no one could be charged with either possessing the explosives and bolt cutters or importing them onto a state reservation.
That memory is brief can be as cruel as it is kind. By the time their durance in the Hole was up, Spencer and Roy were no longer cynosure of all Mainline adulation. Population hikes, rumors of brewing gang warfare, the snitch game, and baseball pools had become the foci of convict attention.
They returned to the Hospital Wing unnoticed. Spencer was gaffled straight to the carrier ranges. Less than a week later he was found smothered to death on his bunk, killed in selfdefense by the other plaguers as he had predicted.
Roy went clean Eleven Ninetyeight and punched out three guards and was sent to Z Block. There he was put on a Prolixin regimen until he managed to prop his chin beneath the rim of his cell toilet and flush himself to kingdom come.
When the green smells of things growing in the ear
th arose and tiny buds like powdered snow sprinkled the apple orchards; when melting snowcaps festooned the high Sierras with trembly silver ribbons and the uplands swirled their massy wildflower skirts; when the conversations of tanangers and gosbecks on cell ledges roused convicts before the Wakeup bell, which every day followed dawn at a wider interval, the Hospital Yard was paved as Joe had promised. In the corner by the fountain he crouched and wrote their names, their birth and death dates, with his finger in the wet cement.
Standing then, Joe slung his hands on his hips and tipped his head back staring up into clouds like bearded cheeks with seams which seemed to smile. Slowly, deeply through his nose he drew a draught of chilly upland ether and held it till it hurt; then, ballooning his cheeks, held it a bit longer, almost afraid to loose it, until his eyes floated and his face prickled and all the guilt and pain burst from his breast at last with an explosive gasp whose violence bent him double, hands on his knees, dizzy, staring swimeyed at the tracks of his fingers in the cement.
Quickly then, before it set up, he stooped and added the days of Rooski’s life.
MATTER OF TIME
“Six in the boneyard,” called Joe.
The pickup rattlebanged between the conjugal trailers slouched on cinderblocks and fourbyfour pilings. At each, Sergeant Gene Fortado braked and blared the horn, and a convict waved through a window or door, and Joe ticked off a number on the count sheet.
“Dont know why their women stay with them,” Fortado said.
“The ladies love outlaws,” Joe pointed out. “Plus they want to make sure these men are availed their inalienable right to pussy.”
“You mean the right to alien pussy,” Fortado growled, screeching to a halt at the last trailer. From its door, uxurious and connubial, the proud groom Billy Skaggs waved. He wore ribbons in his long greasy curls and a shiteating grin big as Dallas.