by Seth Morgan
“Tch! Your brain needs trainer wheels,” he screamed. Tarzon heard Quick Cicero’s muffled protests. Baby Jewels answered, “What good am I doing kibitzing from here? You want a job right, you do it yourself. My father Izzy taught me that … I’m coming up there.” He waddled to the service door, flung it open, and disappeared.
Tarzon eased around the corner and took up station in the shadows across from the tank. He admired Speaker’s ingenuity. Somewhere in plain sight, among all the phony gems, the deadly diamond blinked as it had blinked for countless other eyes since his search began. He had only to wait for the Fat Man and Quick Cicero to show him where before arresting them for the murder of Gloria Monday.
He heard Baby Jewels’s heavy footfalls on the scaffold above the tank. A glinting hook like an inverted question mark was shuffling the planes of coral and aquamarine. Tarzon saw it jerk as Baby Jewels snatched the gaff from Quick Cicero. The hook quested deeper into the tank, followed by the gaff’s wooden shaft. Tarzon watched the hook tremble with light as it groped the junk jewelry heaped on the sand. He smiled faintly within the wavering shadows recalling how distorted underwater objects appear from above. A jeweled hand broke the surface as the Fat Man reached deeper still. There, the hook snared a necklace, an elegant length of gold beaten into the shape of tongs. Where the tongs were joined, a diamond burned. Funny, Tarzon thought. He didn’t even know diamonds came in blue.
Slowly the Fat Man withdrew the hook. Like an enchanted bird the necklace lifted off the bottom, streaming an opaline train of sand. The Fat Man grew impatient and pulled faster; with an oddly sentient grace the necklace floated off the hook. Angrily the jeweled hand jabbed the gaff after it. The hook grazed a Mako’s flank. Sweeping its tail like a giant sickle, it whirled and seized the gaff in its grinning jaws and snapped it like a matchstick.
Tarzon heard Moses scream in fright and watched the shadows whirling in the tank as he windmilled his arms above, fighting for balance. Then a slimmer shadow grappled with the huge one, Quick Cicero trying to steady his boss, and that’s when the scaffold began to crack under their combined weight. First it splintered, then, with a report like a gunshot, snapped in two, tumbling both men into the tank.
Quick Cicero cracked his head on a scaffold brace. Unconscious, he floated limp and spreadeagle, ribboning the water with blood. Baby Jewels somersaulted slowly underwater, getting his bearings, then began flailing, fighting for the surface. But it was too late. First one shark, then another and a third thudded into them, scissoring off flesh in pulpy chunks.
Baby Jewels tried breaking through the glass with his fists, pummeling a soft slowmo tattoo. Tarzon stepped close and grinned into the mad infant eyes. He pressed a fist with its middle finger straight up against the bloated face. It was the Fat Man’s last earthly sight. A Tiger shark seized the huge cranium in its jaws and, bullwhipping its monstrous sleekness, ripped it entirely off. The slowly falling torso was quickly swallowed within its own billowing blood.
Smiling, Tarzon patted himself down. The smile inverted, becoming a frown. He patted himself down faster. He cursed.
Of all the times to be out of cheroots.
JAILHOUSE ROCK
For hours Joe clung to Earl’s cellgate, listening to the storm of riot rage through the penitentiary; the incessant din of alarms, the screams of terror mixed with bellows of wrath, the furious rumble of convict feet up and down the Mainline. Through the window bars he watched headlights surround the institution, shining inward through the fences.
At midnight the main power was shut off. The prison plunged into a gloom helldancing with red and orange shadows cast by fires set by rioters along the Mainline. Rank smoke coiled down V Wing, through which stumbled a wildeyed youth in ripped and bloody blues, the first convict Joe had seen since the riot ignited. Darting frightened looks over his shoulder, the youth shook the gate of each cell he passed, seeking one unlocked. He’s looking for a place to hide, Joe realized, calling out to him, “Homeboy, find someone with keys to unrack me!” The youth swung a pretzeled mask of horror on Joe. He pointed a shaking finger, babbled a mad procession of obscenities, and rushed off the wing.
Joe scarcely had time to wonder at his terror. Within seconds he ran back down the wing, chased by four other convicts wielding bunkframe sections and baseball bats. Three were masked with pillowcases; the fourth wore a Gooner helmet, faceshield down, and carried a taser. Cornering his quarry at the rear of the wing, he fired the stun rifle, sinking the electrodes in the youth’s belly. The fifty thousand volts jumped him three feet in the air, flinging him against the wall. There, pinioned by the charge, the youth convulsed grotesquely, squirting piss down his pantleg. Finally the helmeted hunter released the taser’s trigger, breaking the circuit, and the youth dropped to the floor. There he lay, convulsing still, legs and arms loudly slapping the concrete, until one of the other masked rioters crushed his skull with a fire extinguisher wrenched from a wall bracket, spurting brains like pulp from a burst fruit. The hunters celebrated the kill by cinching their arms with bandanna tourniquets and injecting themselves with drugs looted from the Y-l Clinic. Blissfully stupefied, they slumped to the floor beside their victim, nodding to the fevered rockenroll echoing through the cellblocks from a thousand convict boomboxes.
Next a boy unknown to Joe marched down the wing. Around his waist were tied tin cans, which he beat with broken chair spindles; eyes turned up showing white like the eyes of the truly holy, mad, or dead, tapping a metallic rattatat like a drummer boy in antique battle.
“They’re using stump blasting charges to blow the X Wing gates!” screamed the next convict to rush down V Wing, a black armed with a shovel. He paused to straddle the dead whiteboy and hack off his head. A terrific boom cannonballed down the Mainline. “They done it!” he exclaimed, severing the neck with one last chop. “Now they gonna torch into the cells so’s we can kill up all them snitches.”
Dawn drenched the walls with red. For those convicts for whom violence awakened its companion urge, several enterprising queens were running a combat whorehouse in the cell opposite Earl’s. Their pimp stood at the cell gate collecting drugs, ducats, cigarets. The convicts in line were mired in offal. Some fingered the prophylactics it was their prudent habit to employ. They called to their mothers while sodomizing the yelping punks. Finished, they swept out of the cell, buttoning their trousers to rejoin the massacre.
In numb amazement Joe watched a number of Hole in the Wall convicts return to their cells to collect their dirty laundry because it was the wing’s assigned day at Clothing Exchange. Others he heard organizing betting pools for baseball games to be played in distant cities. In the course of these mundane prison pursuits, they joked of the wholesale carnage. Childish delight shone in their bloodspattered faces. A surreal circus feeling was abroad, a lunatic holiday spirit infiltrating the rockenrolling gloom. Death left behind his cowl and scythe when he came to Coldwater, donning instead his motley with its squirting lapel flower, gladhanding his delegates with a shake disguising a trick buzzer.
Up front in the wing’s TV Room, the set was turned up loud, flickering the shifting murk with bulletins of the riot. Calmly munching zuuzuus and whamwhams looted from the Commissary, the convicts gathered there stared raptly as the electron beams bore belated witness to their grisly festival. For these children of the global village the images on the screen were real and those populating the Mainline phantoms. Their reality required the certification of the video eye: helicopter aerials, ranting newscasters, blustery officialdom, anguished families … body counts.
They brought the three correctional officers being held hostage onto V Wing before noon, corralling them in the rear of the wing near Earl’s cell. Two of the hostages were gravely injured. Joe overheard their convict guards say they couldn’t be defended in the Gym from marauding bands of blooddrunk rioters. One of the convict guards Joe knew, a plumber from the Maintenance Yard named Owen Jenks.
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“You’re better off in there,” Jenks said when Joe asked if there wasn’t a convict with a torch who could cut him out of Earl’s cell. “Look what happened to your friend, the Rubber Queen. The plaguers rushed the Hospital Yard fence and the National Guard started bustin caps. She ran to the fences and started pullin em down. One of the weekend warriors drilled her through the neck … Stay locked, Joe.”
The two wounded hostages died while Joe watched. One, a black officer whom Joe saw once hug a convict whose wife had died, bled to death from the repeated anal rapes by riot baton administered him in the Gym. The second, a burly white officer whose face was obliterated by a teargas canister fired pointblank into it, from massive brain hemorrhaging.
The third hostage was the idiot who blew the hole in the guntower roof. Though terror verging on madness glazed Ray Savage’s eyes, he was drinking the coffee and eating the donuts brought to him by sympathetic convicts. His wounds appeared limited to a broken leg, which Jenks was setting, using a broken mop handle for a splint.
Dr. Raggedy Mouth suddenly rushed down the wing, towing Nefertiti by the hand. “I wants to see Savage suck some of this geechee poontang,” he shouted, pointing where the black queen’s diseased dick dangled through her fly. She began milking it erect; it oozed from a dozen sores. She spread a smile at the quaking hostage.
“It was Savage,” Raggedy added for justification, “who run his mouf how the plaguers oughta be taken out to the range n shot. I wanna see how he feel once he got it.”
The convict guards shrugged at one another and raised eyebrows sympathetic to the Doctor’s logic.
“No,” Joe shouted through the bars. “Savage is the last hostage. If we harm him we lose our last bargaining chip. They’ll slaughter every last swinging dick in the joint when they retake it.”
“Yo, Joe!” Raggedy exclaimed, seeing him for the first time. “What you doin in there.”
Joe explained how Earl had locked him.
Raggedy’s eyes widened. “Earl’s dead, Joe. He was the first, they killed him in the Gym. It kicked off the riot.”
Joe laughed. “No he isnt dead. Dont put me on.”
“Yes he is, Joe.” It was Bony Maroney. In his hand he held the Dodger cap. “I found this beside his body. He was wearin it in the Gym n a gunsel mistook him for you in the dark n stabbed him eleven times …”
“Shut up!” Joe cried. “Dont fuckin do this to me!”
“Here,” murmured Bony, passing the cap through the bars. “I reckon you want it.”
Joe snatched the cap with a howl of unutterable anguish. He shook the bars until the concrete seating them showed cracks. He cried aloud, demanding the gunsel’s name, swearing to kill him.
“That aint why he died, Joe,” said Bony.
Joe sagged at the bars, swaying helplessly. “Noooo,” he moaned. Earl hadn’t died so that his blood could be avenged; he died so his spirit might be vindicated. But what gave him the right? Joe balled the cap in his fist and slammed his head against the bars. Christ! To die in my place! You’ve gone and hogged the high road to Heaven and left your son with the work of angels cut out for him …
Fitting the cap to his head, he told Bony in a fierce mutter, “Get me outta here. I got things to do.”
Bony nodded knowingly. He disappeared to return momentarily with a scrofulous whiteboy who lugged two fistfuls of keys conveniently tagged for identification. In no time Joe was unracked.
“Dont you jist hate it when they start the party without you,” this keykeeper’s carious grin asked.
One of the convict guards had Savage’s head in a choke hold; Nefertiti was spreading her legs, straddling his face, guiding her ulcerated penis into his slack mouth.
Joe jumped between them, pushing the black transister back. “No!”
“Aint your beef, homeboy!” Raggedy cried.
“You’re wrong, Doc,” Joe said implacably. “Only I aint gonna explain. Just this. You gotta kill me first.”
“You dead, then, punk,” said Raggedy. He ripped off his shirt and shot Joe a crab, a ritual fighting pose like hugging an invisible tree trunk that flared his massive deltoids and trapeziuses. Calmly Joe reversed the cap on his head in preparation for battle.
“Stop!” cried Bony, thumping his bulbgripper on the concrete. “Fighting over Savage would be paying him the biggest compliment of his life.”
Raggedy snorted. Together he and Joe unlocked their stares. “Dont give a fuck what you do with him,” Raggedy said, taking Nefertiti by the arm and leading her off the wing. Over her shoulder she snarled at Joe, scorching him with coalbright eyes.
“Thanks,” Joe told Bony. The ancient murderer stroked his beard and nodded.
Joe turned and looked down at Savage. Christ, if any guard deserved annihilation, it was this vicious little idiot, which was precisely why he must be saved. Joe was wondering how when he noticed the radio on Savage’s service belt and was seized by an inspiration.
“Quick, Jenks. Help me make a stretcher. He cant walk …”
“Where you takin him, Joe?”
“I’m surrenderin him at the Yard gates …”
“You cant!”
“I have to. We cant protect him in here. If they kill him, that’s all the hostages dead. It’ll be a real bloodbath then when they retake the joint.”
“He’s right, my homeys,” Jenks told the other convict guards.
“Just dont ask us to help drag him down the Mainline,” one said. “The others spot us, they’ll kill us.”
“I’ll do it,” Joe said.
Jenks and Joe fashioned a trace stretcher by knotting the corners of a blanket and rolled Savage onto it. Then Joe dragged him sliding off the wing onto the Mainline.
By now plumbing had been ripped everywhere from the walls and the Mainline was kneedeep in water that swirled with every conceivable scrap of prison garbage, including human parts. Joe reversed the stretcher, hauling it with one hand by the knotted corners supporting Savage’s head so he wouldn’t drown in the muck. Surprisingly, the roving bands of masked killers paid Joe no mind. Perhaps they guessed he was dragging Savage to a secret place to perform a private horror.
He passed X Wing, its gates blown wide. Through the ringing shrieks of the snitches and the oaths of their killers Joe heard the lisp of acetylene torches breaching cells and the hollow thud of teargas launchers pulping skulls.
Sloshing down the Mainline, he flexed the fingers of his free hand and marveled that he could live so long without once considering what intricate miracles hands were. He lifted it before his eyes; its skin was translucent, he could see right through it; the tendons, bones, the flowing veins. Everything was brightening, brightening, lost in a gauzy white world; the gloom banished by a sourceless aortal light, the rockenroll muted by the silent music of those same spheres that once sang for Roy.
Then he was out the Yard gates. He dragged Savage to the nearest fence, propping him against it. Savage started to sob and Joe slapped him, saying, “Just be grateful you’re alive.” He unhooked the radio from his belt and dashed back through the gates before he drew any fire from the guntowers.
Inside he crouched beneath a Mainline window, from which obelisks of slategrey sunlight pierced the roiling smoke. He snapped out the radio antenna and punched CALL.
“Voice One to Outside Command … Voice One to Outside Command. Surrendering hostage Savage at the yard gates. Repeat, surrendering hostage Savage at the Yard Gate fences. Have ambulance standing by southern perimeter, his leg is broken … Do you read me?”
He held the radio to his cocked ear. The airwaves were a flatulent sea of static. He gritted his teeth listening to the hysterical, garbled call numbers. He recognized National Guard and State Police and CDC units. He repeated his call. So intently did he listen for an answer out of the crackling morass, so singleminded was he in what he must do,
that Joe didn’t notice the convicts running up the Mainline, nor hear their shouts: “That’s him, the one with the cap we just seen on TV givin up the hostage. He’s no better than snitch his own damn self. Kill him!”
Suddenly, as if in answer to the first prayer in Joe Speaker’s life not for himself, the radio fried: “We read you, Voice One … Identify yourself by name and number … Identify …”
Before he could respond Joe was hit on the head from behind, sent chuting down sparkly corkscrewing walls that echoed Bony Maroney’s voice: “No! Dont kill him. Joe Speaker’s a homeboy. He only did what he had to. Just lock him in his cell.”
Two hundred miles away, Lieutenant Tarzon in his office was listening to the riot bulletins over his police scanner. When Maas said the joint might blow, he imagined a bunch of convicts barricading themselves in the Chowhall, demanding chickenfried steak once a month. He didn’t expect Coldwater to become a war zone. Tarzon half expected to hear an air strike ordered next.
He was worried about Speaker, and he wondered why. He had no further professional interest in him; the diamond had been recovered and traced by a police gemologist to Justice Bell. Neither did he feel a personal responsibility for his life any longer. Were Speaker to die in the course of the riot, it wouldn’t be Tarzon’s fault. Any harm in whose way he had placed Speaker was removed with Moses and McGee both dead.
Nonetheless, Tarzon felt a keen personal stake in Speaker, and he judged it was because the wily dope addict’s life had intersected in a fatal way with Belinda’s, and that finding a meaning in that convergence might unlock the significance of her tragedy. Rick Tarzon’s was not an accidental universe. All things happened for reasons, revealing truths.
The scanner blurted with sudden excitement. An inmate was radioing from inside the charnel house of Coldwater. “Voice One, Voice One surrendering hostage …” Tarzon laughed aloud. He didn’t need graphs this time to identify Speaker’s voice. You sweet motherfucker, it isn’t just a hostage you rescued. Rick Tarzon’s spirit, so accustomed to famine, was glutted, making him giddy. He clapped his hands and lit a fresh cheroot.