by Seth Morgan
Joe had missed the brute’s Catholic chapel wedding to the woman surgically paroled from Magdalena’s body. Her whole street family had been there, crying their cholo eyes out. Billy wanted all spiritual bases covered and had Swami in attendance. Warden Gasse even showed up to buss the bride—despite the effrontery of the most writtenup cocksucker in Coldwater’s history wearing virginal white. Although Joe had to admit, once she got the tuckenroll she really was some kind of born again virgin.
Joe couldn’t resist. He stuck his head out the window and mouthed at the cumdrunk villain—“How’s it taste?”
Billy joined the tips of his forefingers and thumbs to tongue the teardrop of air in between, then swung his hips and smacked his lips loud enough to be heard over the pickup’s engine.
Joe laughed, “Six in the meat,” and Fortado slapped the pedal to the metal, peeling out of the boneyard. A travesty of holy matrimony, he ground his teeth, a crime against nature. Joe knew better than to crack wise just then, although he ached to ask whose nature.
The spectacle of Skaggs miming cunnilingus made Joe smile thinking of his bustout babushka, her big ass and chichis, her screwball comehither eye. But his child—a boy, almost four months old by now, figuring from the card Kitty had sent to Oblivia to coincide with Joe’s birthday two weeks earlier—his son? That notion recalled his own faceless convict father, and he balled his fists until his knuckles popped, shunting aside that fugitive grudge. Christ, just so the child doesn’t curse his creation the way I have cursed the incidental hip thrust spawning me.
“Four in the meat,” Fortado tallied the heads of convicts setting up running silhouettes of their own kind on the rifle range.
Joe ticked off the Rifle Range and called, “Three on the Staff Service station sheet,” and off they sped.
On one side the Sierras swept up to the sky; the penitentiary walls turned slowly on the other. It was hard for Joe to conceive of having spent almost a year of his life inside those colossal stone blocks. The walls seemed unreal, fantastical almost. The stilted guntowers interspersed along the fences could have been designed by the special effects genius who contrived the Martians on flexible steel legs who attacked the San Fernando Valley in Hollywood’s version of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds. Joe entertained himself with such thoughts and by occasionally sticking his head out the window and stretching his cheeks to scoop in the rushing air making his skull sing. He felt free outside the fences, from both the prison and himself.
Yet the illusion of freedom wasn’t the only reason Joe enjoyed helping the Outside Sergeant make count. He genuinely liked Gene Fortado. A handsome man in his late forties with a high clear brow, a straight thin nose and wavy white hair, he was a careerist who wore the service stripes marking his years on the line proudly. He was intelligent enough to perceive that California’s penitentiaries were human waste dumps breeding criminals the way other dumps breed rats, yet not so soured by cynicism that he didn’t take his sworn duty to heart and extend convicts his best efforts. He was the apotheosis of the oldline guard with whom Joe was most comfortable, a known quantity in a world of X’s, Y’s, and Z’s.
“Three in the meat,” caroled Fortado at the service station.
“Three in the meat,” Joe repeated. “Seven in Sewage.”
Their last stop was the Sewage Plant situated a mile from the fences to spare the institution its fumes. Gunning through the orchards, Fortado told Joe he was following his brotherinlaw into early retirement. “McGee’s forcing me out. He wants someone out here with a chaingang mentality. He has me frozen at my present pay level with no hope of promotion. He’s logging derogatory reports on my personnel file, saying I’m too lax, when all I wont do is coerce convicts, play the snitch game …” Fortado sighed. “If I dont retire soon, he’ll have me cashiered with a demoted pension.”
“How do the McGees get the power?” Joe asked in a ruminative vein.
“The same way the violent criminals are getting them on the other side of the bars. By default. When power loses all its positive sources, it reverts to the violent … McGee uses his position as Teamster rep here at Coldwater to consolidate and validate his power. He’s organizing the guards to agitate for better pay and more manpower. Half the guards are already Teamsters. The other half soon will be or’ll be handed their pink slips like me. It’s just a matter of time. With population and violence on the rise, the guard force is startin to run scared. And when men run scared, they run to power, not reason.”
They turned off the road skirting the fences and galloped along a dirt track, across barren open fields to the Sewage Plant. Joe reclined against the jostling seat, his brogans up on the dash, dreaming out the window where a cloud’s purple shadow shimmered up the winedark mountain slopes like a chill breeze over still dark water.
“I’m sure when X Wing tried a mass breakout last night,” Fortado remarked sourly, “McGee won some more converts …”
“Last night?”
“Guess the news didnt hit the line before you broke out the Sally Port this ayem. About five in the morning an inmate on a lower range cried to the First Watch guard that he was suffering an appendix attack. When the guard keyed his cell, the inmate jumped up and overpowered him. Got the keys to two other ranges and the deadbolt box. By the time the Goon Squad arrived, there were fifty convicts runnin loose.”
“How’d the Gooners get there?”
Fortado snorted. “The guard called the medics before he went down to the cell. When the medics got to the wing gates and saw what was jumpin off, they called the Squad.”
“How’d those guys expect to get off the wing, let alone over the fences?” Joe asked. “What was their plan?”
Fortado swerved to evade a pothole and shrugged. The backward world jiggled in his darkglasses. “They didnt have a plan. Those informants down there in X are just gettin desperate. They sense they’re being corralled for slaughter. They’d rather take their chances on the fences or against the Gooners than with you guys.”
“Come again?”
The glasses turned to show Joe his own bemused features. “Last night the Gooners killed two of their usedup snitches. The body count’s gonna be a mite higher if you guys take over.”
“Christ! I guess I never thought of it like that.”
“You better start. Mass escape attempts most times signal a major riot in the offing. That loony Hospital attempt was the first signal. Men who’ve lost their last hope of survival. And those boys in Protective Custody are more desperate than the plaguers. AIDS takes longer to kill than a shank. Call it herd instinct, the guys in P.C. sense what’s comin. The convicts can take over this pen any time. We’re sittin on a gasoline drum with a fistful of matches … Here. Let’s count the shit stirrers.”
The Sewage Plant was a squat cinderblock building connected by huge pipes to a vast, round, open tank. The sulphurous stink was overpowering. At the blow of the truck horn, the Sewage Workers emerged in their kneehigh rubber galoshes.
The Outside Sergeant’s walkietalkie crackled. He stepped from the pickup and walked several yards distance to get better reception. One of the Sewage Workers took the opportunity to approach Joe. Joe had heard this old lifer with a face like a wrinkled oil rag called Dinky.
“I wanter meet witchoo …” Dinky winked and smiled slyly. “Inside.”
“What for?” Joe leaned back from the stench seeping from his coveralls.
“Got a lil prepsishun to make yew … Very profitable,” Dinky added with another salacious wink.
Mention of profit recalled Joe’s obligations to Maas Dinero. “How about Evening Yard Call? By the horseshoe pits.”
The oldtimer nodded and laid a cautionary grimed finger beside a nose twice as crooked as Joe’s and slunk back to the Plant Building.
“You’re Miguel’s first visitor in weeks,” the nurse said.
“Mike. His name’s Mik
e Quintana,” Kitty corrected her.
“Here he’s Miguel,” the nurse said primly. “We have to use the same names that appear on the government checks.”
Kitty’s faint smirk couldn’t give a fuck if they called him Cantinflas. Serves him right, she thought. All his badass life he wanted to be Iron Mike. Well, Papa, for the last act you’re little Miguel again, the dirty bordertown Chicklet boy.
“My, what a nice baby,” the nurse said, though her small grimace pitied it. The girl wasn’t even married: she signed Kitty Quintana in the Shadowbrook Convalescent Home guest register.
Kitty glanced down at the infant asleep in the canvas papoose harnessed to her breast. “I just hope he stays that way until I get out of here.” She clicked a smile on and off.
The nurse stepped from behind the counter, gesturing down a corridor streaky with sunlight. “If you’ll follow me, Miss Quintana.”
The nurse’s nylon stockings and layers of complicated underwear made squinchy noises as she walked, like termites gnawing dead wood. The corridor smelled of unemptied bedpans and unchanged bandages and dead skin. A lunch wagon was left forgotten beside a mop closet. A cluster of flies on a halfeaten plate of macaroni and cheese swarmed as they passed, then clustered back once more. A withered crone in a wheelchair with plastic tubes in her nose clutched Kitty’s arm. Kitty looked down into the black toothless hole of a mouth suckling empty air. She shuddered, prying loose the monkey grip, and hurried to catch up with the nurse. Instinctively she touched the sleeping infant’s head.
“In here, please.” The nurse ushered her into a room divided by curtains on ceiling runners into four cubicles. Papa’s was the last, by the window. He also had tubes in his nose. When he saw his daughter, his black eyes flared and turned away. His right arm, the one not paralyzed, pointed furiously downward. His slack jowls trembled making a gurgly noise.
“Oh dear,” the nurse said turning an indulgent smile on Kitty. “Miguel’s pan is always full. Here, I’ll empty it. But first, let me get you comfortable, Miguel. Up!” The nurse reached behind his neck with one hand and lifted him. With her other, she punched the pillows. She settled him back down. Shitfire, Kitty gasped inwardly, he’s light and dry as an old stick.
“There.” She reached the brimming pan from beneath the bed and stood back, beaming. “He’s such a dear,” she told Kitty. “He only gets grumpy when his roommates die on him …” She turned back to Papa and trilled, “But that’s to be expected here at Shadowbrook, Miguel!”
Papa’s eyes followed the nurse from the room. They remained fixed on the empty doorway a moment before tracking back to his daughter, flooded with fright.
Kitty stared dumbstruck at the frail invalid. For years she had waited for this reckoning, rehearsed it a million times. Now suddenly her passion had deserted her; her gall was evaporated. She felt only pity. An abject and all encompassing pity staining herself even. Because she’d been cheated. She wanted so much to beat him fair and square. Not like this, not now.
She pulled a molded green plastic chair to the bed. She shrugged out of the harness and sat with the papoose in her lap.
“Long time no see, Papa,” she said finally. “How’s the chow in this dump?”
The bastard’s eyes could still smile. Though his face hung in flaccid folds, his black heart still showed. The smiling eyes then posed a question, looking to the baby and back at her.
“I forgot,” she said, turning the papoose to face him. The infant awoke and twitched out a tiny fat arm. “This lil buckeroo’s your grandson, Joseph. How about them eyes …” She pushed the papoose closer. “One’s blue, one’s gray. Doctor called it heterochromia. Said it runs in families. Says it skips generations …” She reversed the papoose, looking curiously in the baby’s eyes herself. “Thing is, I don’t know anyone on our side … must be his daddy’s people.” She shrugged.
A part of her still didn’t believe her own gentle voice. It had been so long her intention to flaunt her womb’s second bloom at him who’d blackened its first, prove that another man wanted her despite his defilement of her. Now all that was dead and gone and briefly she felt even more bereft of her hatred for Papa than her love of Mama … and then Kitty remembered why she’d come to the home in the first place, that with Mama alive she’d never have seen Papa again.
She set the papoose on the foot of the hospital bed and took his hand and folded hers over it. Again she saw a bright sheet of fear across his eyes, and she said: “Papa, listen to me good. Mama’s dead, died natural and peaceful and she spoke last of you …”
A shadow fell across the eyes, a veil immediately lifted, and they shone with a soft, sad light while Kitty told how it happened, of the services in the little church of white stones on the grassy bluff over the Gulf, where she herself had been baptized and confirmed; told which cousins came and what they said and what Mama wore and how she looked when they closed her up; then on about the house, which Kitty listed for sale. Already a motel chain had made an offer, Kitty didn’t know how much, a lawyer was handling it and if there was enough left over after taxes and fees and all the bills Mama left in the breadbox, well … then the lawyer would have Papa moved out of this dump to someplace more comfortable.
She peered critically around the room as she spoke and gripped his hand tighter; and when her eyes returned to his, she felt they were moist, so she weakly joked, “Coupla nurses on the sunnyside of menopause might liven things up, eh Papa?”
She returned the grin in his eyes, then looked quickly down at his hand. She stroked it for a moment, then remembered the letter in her purse from Joe’s lawyer saying it wouldn’t be long; she looked up.
“I’m taking Joseph here back to California so we can be with his daddy, Papa. So I guess this is sorta hasta la bye bye.”
The eyes leaped up in panic, then sank back in his skull, shining softly.
She said nothing more. She sat still holding his hand, watching his eyes in the long Texas twilight falling through the windows.
The Yard was gripped in an enormous rustling silence. Never had Joe seen it so crowded, nor felt it so palpably tense. The vast blue vortex of convicts trudging sluggishly counterclockwise shrank the hundredacre enclosure to the size of a holding pen. An eerie blue nightmist avalanched down the Sierras, sweeping across the plains to billow at the base of the fences. Through it shone a too yellow moon, jaundicing faces. The wind rising up from the valley was sweet, like a corpse, with doom.
Joe spotted Dinky from a distance loitering near the horsehoe pits. Joe suggested meeting there for no better reason than it was where he first remembered seeing Dinky, holding forth to a bunch of youngsters. He was telling them about the old days at San Quentin when the Death House still was smoking. The day they gassed Caryl Chessman, he recounted, all the cons on the lower Yard knew two minutes afterward because the pigeons roosting on the North Block roof keeled over the moment they opened the exhaust vents.
“Let’s walk n talk,” Joe tersely invited the Sewage Worker.
The way Dinky laid out the drawings, it was so simple Joe was surprised it had been so far overlooked. Huge grills out at the Sewage Plant filtered solid trash from the excremental waste to be chemically degraded. It was amazing, Dinky said with yet another wink, the things people flushed down shitters. Once he’d even recovered a Seiko watch which he used to grease a guard.
“The grill teeth are spaced so …” Dinky measured an inch between his fingers. “Anything bigger gets trapped and I haul it out.”
“But what do you think you’re gonna get from convict shitters?”
Dinky showed sharp blackened teeth in a laugh. “You gotta remember, the Sewage Plant soivices the entire institooshun, not jist the cellblocks. Like all the Admin terlets, frinstints. Like where do the Visiting Room wimmens flush their tampoons? And knowing the size of them things, what do you imagine could be hidden inside em?”
Now Joe got the picture. He rubbed his chin, lit a Camel, adjusted his cap. “What do you need me for?”
“To mule em through the gates … See, they shake me down purty thurrah on account I got priors fer sech stuff from other joints. Only reason they give me the custody to work outside is I’m the only man in camp what knows his shit … Hee, hee … Also I’m gettin older n dont know so many line hustlers no more, n you could hep me line up the wives n goilfrens nail.”
Joe carried away a sulphurous reek on the hand he used to shake the deal closed.
Back on the wing, Gerald Irons gawked at Joe. “You mean, all my ole lady’s gotta do is flush a tampoon loaded with dope down a shitter? You take care of the rest?”
“Yeah … But is Dinky regular?” Joe was being careful not to blow his coffee break parole in the process of paying for it.
“Dinky?” Irons laughed. “In Quentin I watched him slide a redhot bunk spring through one of a snitch’s ears and out the other.”
Joe had to agree, you couldn’t get much more regular than that.
The manager of the Rexall’s in downtown Coldwater already suspected there was a cathouse booming in the hills east of the prison. What other explanation could there be for the huge prophylactic demand? When a Mrs. Reba Irons came in and placed an order for ten cases of Super Tampax, he was certain he’d met the establishment’s madame.
Two weeks later Maas Dinero received by registered mail a personal check from Reba Irons in the amount of five hundred dollars to be credited to the file of SPEAKER, B-83478. The next day he received a check drawn from Joe’s Coldwater inmate trust fund for another seven hundred. The Special Circumstances parole was paid up front in full. It only depended now on how fast Maas could get the board members to take that coffee break. A matter of time. That same stuffless matter separating Joe from oblivion at the whim of Rowdy McGee or the rage of riot.