Dragonfly Bones

by David Cole

  Odd, that they’d spend so much time searching him, when he was the person who feared attack from somebody else.

  Little Bill had been shanked before. Once in the right thigh, once a glancing strike across his rib cage, the last time a serious attempt to disembowel him.

  Shanks are prison knives.

  Totally improvised, hand-manufactured from silverware, metal scraps, including bits of motors from razors and tape recorders, from bits of wood, plastic, Plexiglas shards, sharpened toothbrushes or toothbrushes with the heads broken off, cafeteria cutlery, or just about anything that could be turned into a stabbing weapon.

  For most inmates, some degree of intelligent information comes from the physical characteristics of the shank: what it was made from; who made it; how it got passed from one inmate to another; even the gift of design balanced against the quality of the shank and how long it took to be made.

  Simple shanks come from a piece of found material. A sliver of wood or glass, for instance, a metal shaving from a machine shop, a discarded toothbrush melted enough so the con can jam a razor blade in a carefully filed slot at the end. Most shanks aren’t even sharpened by design. A sliver of Plexiglas or a razor blade needs no sharpening. A random piece of metal must be honed to an edge, usually by days of continually rubbing the metal against something as simple as a concrete floor, although COs look on cell floors and walls for signs of rubbing.

  Inmates never ever have the opportunity to get a sliver of glass because they just don’t exist in prison. Toothbrush handles are available, even though inmates only get special super-short-handle toothbrushes, about one and a half inches long, and razor blades always are available from their single-use-type razors, which are supposedly counted when given out and then collected every time they shave.

  Supposedly collected. Not always.

  So shanks can be as found, like the occasional Plexiglas shard or sliver of hard wood, or manufactured. Either way, a shank is a deadly weapon if used correctly on the first strike. Even a good shank has to be used just right or it will slip so the victim won’t be stabbed, just scraped. COs wear stab vests, but most inmates know the vulnerable spots around the vest and occasionally succeed in wounding a CO. Inmates don’t have stab vests, so stabbing is easier. If an inmate goes after his cellmate, stabbing can mean death. One inmate, sentenced to life for three murders, had actually stabbed his roommate forty-seven times, and when the COs came to subdue him, he said he’d make no fuss if they’d give him some over-easy eggs and an extra link of sausage.

  Unlike the movies, Little Bill never worried that somebody would use a shank on him while demanding sex. Or even for murder. Inmates shank other inmates for any reason, usually a gangbanger thing that happens fast, with everybody disappearing even faster. The COs just find a patch of blood on the concrete floor. Most shanked inmates don’t even go to the hospital for treatment, insisting that it was an “accident” and refusing to rat out another inmate, which would only lead to being shanked again.

  Little Bill knew that shanks rarely survive a shakedown search, but that they are made in such numbers that all searches turned up a fairly large quantity. But a lot more shanks are kept in a neutral place. Hidden in the yard, in the machine shops, in the laundry, the cafeteria, in every common area of the prison, usually hidden by somebody to be used either by a gang or by another individual con.

  Anybody in Florence could be shanked.

  Inmates, COs, administrative staff, visiting teachers or preachers, even the warden himself. Nobody was exempt, if the conditions were right.

  Little Bill heard it whispered down the lane that somebody had a contract on him. Little Bill wouldn’t say why he was a target, but he was believed by the warden, who put him in PS, professional segregation, which was essentially being put in the hole. Total lockdown in an individual cell, no contact with anybody except the COs who brought his meals and who supervised his one hour a day out of PS to walk around a walled yard, with nobody else present. Little Bill knew that PS offered him additional protection against being shanked, but there was no absolute protection, no guarantee at all.

  The old name was protective custody. PC or PS, when an inmate believed he was in danger from other inmates, he PC’s up. In prison jargon that means the inmate demands protective segregation. Many times this is done by the inmate approaching an officer and quietly saying, ‘I need PC,’ or something like that. Or the inmate may make a small sign and sit in the back of his cell until the count officer goes by. Then the inmate gives him the sign without saying anything. The point is that if the other inmates find out he’s asked for PC, his ass is grass and he becomes a very serious target; his life is immediately in danger.

  Despite his loneliness in PS, Little Bill sometimes refused his one-hour walk in the yard. He knew that most attacks were like a blitzkrieg. Somebody rushed at you, maybe that somebody got passed the shank at the very last moment, he came past you and stabbed, sometimes stabbed many times if no CO was nearby, then the shank got passed off to yet another person and the only real evidence was somebody like Little Bill bleeding to death on some dirty concrete floor.

  He felt truly vulnerable. Little Bill had applied to be transferred out of Florence, but even urgent paperwork took its time working through the red-tape cycle. So he finally refused even the hour’s freedom from his cell, refused all contact with any other inmates in Florence, even inmates he knew to be friends.

  The only people in Florence called convicts were the real old-timers, the professionals. A few old-time white brothers from the South called the black brothers coonmates, but all other people were inmates.

  Segregated in PS, even Little Bill had no control over the COs.

  One morning CO III Beethoven came to Little Bill’s PS cell and said the warden wanted to see him. Little Bill said there was nothing to discuss with the warden and he wasn’t leaving his cell anyway, even if Jesus Christ himself wanted a visit. CO III Beethoven had a Taser and shot it twice into Little Bill, the second time a freak where one hook and wire of the Taser stuck into his shirt pocket and the other hook went into his right pants leg, so the heavy voltage went clear down his body and pretty much drove Little Bill out of his mind.

  Unfortunately, Little Bill thought that CO III Beethoven was just another kickstarter, going out of his way to cause trouble. This was a bad mistake.

  Fifteen minutes later, he was walking from Unit Three to Unit Six when CO III Beethoven stepped into the hallway, turned toward Little Bill, walked on past him, and that was it. A five-inch-long nail went neatly between two ribs and directly into Little Bill’s heart, killing him almost instantly.

  The criminal investigators’ attention was turned away from CO III Beethoven, who left work early that day, pleading stress and fatigue, drove to the Tucson airport, and paid cash for a one-way ticket to Nome, Alaska.

  laura

  12

  I hadn’t done this for over ten years. In one day, leave my lover in a helicopter to meet another guy, have that new guy and my lover together with me, and wind up that same night invited to the new guy’s house.

  Brittles lived near Casa Grande National Monument. Somewhat north, out in the desert, but we drove through Coolidge, past the entrance to the monument, on our way from the place where Rich was examining all the bones.

  “You ever been in there?” Brittles asked.

  “Never.”

  He turned around and onto the entrance road, then up to the main building.

  “I know a lot of the park rangers. I come here often, I have a season pass. I come here just to get some peace from the day.”

  Parking, he led me through the door, said hello to the ranger on duty, and we went through an exhibit to the back glass doors that opened up on the monument itself about fifty feet away. It was an old, simple place. An ancient building from many centuries before. A tour of high school kids chattered past us to the exit, and when we got near the monument we were all alone.

  “Want to go i
nside?” Brittles asked.

  “No.”

  “Me neither. I just like to look at it against the sunset.”

  Probably four stories high, the wind-and-rain-worn reddish building sat underneath an elaborate metal roof set on four huge corner posts. We sat on a wooden Park Service bench amid the low-lying smooth ruins of the original complex, but the monument was the only real building left.

  “Grand, isn’t it?” Brittles said. “Built by the Old People.”

  “Anasazi?”

  “Hohokam. Maybe the same thing. Who knows, six centuries later?”

  “Hey, Nathan.”

  A park ranger stopped to shake his hand.

  “Laura, this is Dave Winchester. Dave, Laura Winslow. Her first visit here.”

  “Visiting the state?” Winchester said.

  I really didn’t want to talk at all.

  “Yeah,” Brittles said, “you could say that.”

  “Well, park’s closing in five minutes. You know the way out.”

  “How do I get back to Tucson?” I said as Winchester moved away.

  “I’ll drive you down.”

  “I’m so tired. Too much today.”

  “How long since you’ve seen your daughter?” he asked.

  “Don’t want to talk about her,” I said, leaning back on the bench and falling asleep in an instant, groggy and defensive when Brittles palmed my shoulder.

  “My house is only five minutes away,” he said. “I’ve got lots of extra rooms. Why don’t you just come, spend the night, take care of yourself?”

  “I can’t do that. You can’t do that. You’ve got to start the process, get me to this call center, to these computers, so I can find out whatever you want to know and my daughter can get out of prison.”

  “It’s not that simple,” he said. “Some other things have happened.”

  “I don’t care about other things. Fix the deal. Get me to work, then get my daughter pardoned.”

  “We have to talk about this.”

  Next thing I knew, he was shaking me again.

  “Look. I’ve really got lots of space. Five minutes away. I’ll fix you something to eat. You sleep. When you’re ready, I’ll have worked out exactly what we’re going to do with this whole mess.”

  “Were you really named after John Wayne?”

  “Yup. Nathan Cutting Brittles. That’s the character he played, and my father was one of the extras for John Ford. Made a lot of movies with Wayne and Ford at Monument Valley. My Navajo name is actually Cutting Tongue. When I was five or six and kinda wild, my mother said I ran right through some wooden fence slats, broke two of them apart with my nose.”

  Ran his tongue around his lips, remembering.

  “Just a scratch on my nose, but I bit through my tongue, blood everywhere. They thought I’d broken the fence with my tongue. Before I could convince them they were wrong, it was all over the village. Cutting Tongue.”

  “What’s the Navajo name?”

  “I don’t remember. Getting too far away from my roots, I guess. You got a Hopi name?”

  I hesitated. Many Indians don’t like to say their special name. Maybe Brittles hadn’t forgotten, he just didn’t want to say it.

  “Kauwanyama,” I said. “Butterfly With Wings of Beauty.”

  “You’re one good-looking butterfly, Laura.”

  “Just drive,” I said with a smile. “Just take me away, wherever.”

  Set a hundred feet from the nearest road, Brittles’s house spread out in modules around an atrium center. His dirt driveway led to a six-car garage separate from the house. Parking in front of a roll-up door, he opened it for me, turned on some overhead lights and showed me three motorcycles.

  “Some people paint, sculpt, throw pots, whatever. I restore old motorcycles, and these are my babies. Over there is a 1952 Vincent Black Lightning. Guy set a world speed record on it. Made several runs, couldn’t break the old record, finally took all his clothes off, laid on his belly flat-out horizontal. Set the record. I paid sixty-two thousand for that one. Not many around. Jay Leno has one.

  “Over there is a 1931 Henderson KL inline four-cylinder. Back at that time, it was clocked at almost one-twenty miles an hour. I got it from a guy named Dennis Henderson. Henderson, selling one of his Henderson bikes. Couldn’t resist. This one’s my prize. A 1928 Cleveland inline four-cylinder.”

  I briefly thought of Rey Villanueva, my onetime partner. Meg Arizana’s husband, who rebuilt old cars and took me on the only bike ride I ever had, in Sonora, Mexico, when we were looking for my ex-husband Jonathan Begay.

  Inside the house, he took me straight down a hallway to a room filled with photographs. Picking up an ornate silver frame, he showed me an old picture of a woman in typical Navajo dress, a velveteen blouse and long skirt, sitting at a weaving loom. I couldn’t see it well, so he turned on a strong light, revealing two walls of the room that were covered from floor to ceiling with photographs. Many of them were of Indians, but some were also of smiling young soldiers around helicopters.

  “Nam,” he said when I looked closely on one picture. “That’s me, on the right, with my crew chief for that bird. I had a lot of crew chiefs. I was kinda crazy back then. A young, wild guy from the rez, never been farther than Phoenix until I enlisted at sixteen, my mother signing a paper that I was two years older. I flew the old Huey gunships, I flew slicks, carried Marines in and out of LZs that were so hot nobody else would take the chance. I was drunk or coked up all the time. Guys would say, over there, the greater the incoming fire, the tighter your ass puckered. The pucker factor. I never had it. I was crazy.”

  I studied his young face, an insane grin, arms around two buddies.

  “Doesn’t even look like you,” I said.

  “Ever think about being something else?” Brittles asked abruptly.

  “Like…who? What?”

  “Anybody. Anything.”

  “No.”

  “Not ever?” he said.

  “Well. Yeah. Sure.”

  “Sure, what?” he asked.

  “I think about it,” I said.

  “Doing something else? Or being somebody else?”

  “Done that. I’ve had so many fake identities, I’ve lost track of the real ones.”

  “Lost track of the real you?” he asked.

  “Yeah. God, why am I telling you this?”

  “Because you know I’ve got the same problem.”

  “You’ve been thinking about this lately?” I said, more than a bit incredulous.

  “For years.”

  “Huh.”

  “Yeah. How about that?”

  “Do you ever really let your head just relax?”

  “You mean, relax from thinking about it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Never,” he said. “Not since that first group of North Vietnamese regulars I lit up with three rockets in 1974. My crew chief raked them with the .50 cal. Made sure they were KIA. Come on. Let me show you your bedroom, get you settled.”

  But I never made it to the bedroom that night. We had more wine, I watched him light some incense stalks, watched him play with his two German shepherds, listened to several of his Indian flute CDs while I looked over his monster collection of DVDs.

  “You watch a lot of movies,” I said. “Why?”

  He finished playing something on the CD, set it back in the rack.

  “Nobody’s ever asked me that.”

  “I watch them with the sound off.”

  “So do I,” he said. “Sometimes I do. Like, I watch continuity. You know, from scene to scene, where the continuity checker is supposed to take Polaroids and make sure both costume and makeup fit the matching scene before. Like, my favorite example is Run Lola Run. Most all the edits show her bra straps in different places.”

  “And you watch bra straps because…?”

  “When I’m trying to piece together bits of a case I’m working on. Like this thing with the bones and all. None of it fits. So I look at
the jump cuts, try to imagine what happened between.”

  “When do you turn the sound on?” I asked.

  “Say, Robert Altman. Say, McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Altman had all these different sound mikes set up on the set. He’d take all the voices, throw them in the pot, do a master mix, totally confuse the obsessive in the audience who had to hear every word. With Altman, you never really heard every word. He layered them on top of each other in crowd scenes. So I close my eyes and listen. Same kind of thing as the jump cuts. Try to eliminate the crap. Sort out what’s important.”

  “Look,” I said, setting my wine glass on the floor, standing up. “I can’t do this stuff right now. “I…this is confusing…I really need to go home.”

  “Let me drive you.”

  “No! Just loan me a car.”

  “You’re in no shape to drive all the way to Tucson,” Brittles said.

  “A car. Just…anything.”

  “Okay.”

  He wrote a cell phone number on my palm.

  “Call me. Here. If there are any problems.”

  “Sure,” I said, not wanting to call him at all.

  He saw that in my eyes and wrote the number on my other palm.

  “It’s nothing personal. Just don’t forget your daughter.”

  “You bastard,” I said. “You’re playing me.”

  “So go home. Get a good night’s sleep. We’ll talk again tomorrow. Just don’t go washing your hands before you write this number down on a piece of paper. Promise?”

  “Sure,” I lied. “You’ve got this all figured. You’ve got me all figured.”

  “No!” he said, folding both my hands into fists, holding the fists. “I have absolutely no idea what this is all about. I have absolutely no idea why your daughter just happens to be the one person who connects to the prison, and connects me to you. Like it or not, you’re in this now. Up to your neck.”

  “That’s from a movie.” I giggled. “Gregory Peck says it to David Niven. Guns of Navarone. But Gregory threatened David with a pistol. All you’ve got are words.”