Urban Renewal

by Andrew Vachss

  The youth approaching from across the yard was more man than boy, heavily muscled, broad-chested like a Rottweiler. He eye-locked Cain and moved forward behind his own stare. As he did so, two other boys fell in beside him.

  Cain stood motionless, his eyes fixed on their approach.

  Lewis continued his repetitions. Up, down. Up, down.

  The three boys approached in a V-formation, the heavily muscled one at its protruding tip. When they closed to within a few feet, he said: “So, Cain … what’s happening?”

  Cain knew him only as “Bull,” a blood-certified young man who’d swept into Sterling on a wave of respect because he’d killed a rival on the streets. But Cain had read the killer’s eyes for an ugly mixture of bluff and cruelty. He did the math and came up with the one record that would never make the charts at Sterling.

  Weakness.

  “Fresh fish,” Bull went on when it became apparent that Cain was not going to say anything. “Three of ’em.”

  Cain acknowledged that with a slight nod. He was always the first to get to any newcomers, always offering them protection. The mixed-race crew he and Lewis ran wasn’t the biggest in the institution, but it was the most feared … maybe for exactly that same reason.

  The price of protection varied. A percentage of any package the new arrival received from home, access to whatever he could steal from his institutional assignment, cigarettes, soft money … Some accepted. Some refused. Some said they weren’t sure. And others said they just couldn’t afford it. “Everybody pays, one way or another,” Cain always told them all, something he knew for a fact.

  Now Bull was showing respect, clearing the new names with Cain before he took the boys for his own. If Cain’s crew had them covered, they were safe.

  “Vincent Collona,” Bull said.

  Cain shook his head no. Collona had been assigned to the laundry and had access to spot removers such as naphthalene. More flammable than gasoline, and twice as handy.

  “Joseph Clinter.”

  “Wait on that one,” Cain said. “I’ll tell you next week.”

  “Roland Spector.”

  Cain raised and dropped one shoulder in an I-don’t-care motion, sealing Roland Spector’s fate.

  A slow smile crept across Bull’s face. He glanced back across the yard at a slightly built boy standing off by himself. Bull’s eyes were lit from within.

  “I guess I’ll go tell him to cut the back pockets off his jeans.… Better yet, I’ll do it myself.” Bull lifted his shirt to show his new toy, tucked into his pants. The shank was crudely notched for cutting, like a rip-saw’s blade, each tooth razor-sharp.

  Lewis did another repetition, slowly, almost casually. But not with the dumbbell.

  “Maybe I’ll just cut him a new—” Bull began. The words froze in his mouth when he found himself looking at a short length of pipe taped to a piece of wood. Inside the pipe he caught the glint of sunlight on jacketed copper. A bullet.

  “Whoa, Ace!” Bull said, holding up his hands, palms out, backing away.

  “Don’t ever show steel around us,” Cain told him quietly. “I’ll never say that again.”

  Bull looked into the eyes of the slender black youth who had taken the warden’s racial slur as his name, symbolically returning fire. His were a light brown, almost tan, soft, with a gentle, liquid quality. And utterly devoid of bluff. “Man, I was just showing it off!” Bull said.

  “One other thing,” Cain added, ignoring the stupidity of that explanation. “The monster who just checked in, I’m telling you now—he’s with us.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Bull said. “You got it. He’s not worth anything anyway.”

  Cain watched without interest as Bull walked away, happily slapping one of his flunkies on the back. The three of them went over to the slightly built boy and began to taunt him. Bull’s two boys easily lifted him up by his back pockets, turning him around as they did so. The boy kicked and struggled. Bull made a quick move with his hand and suddenly the boy’s pants were split, front to back. Bull’s laugh echoed across the yard.

  “Let’s go,” Cain said, ready to get on to other business.

  “Since when did we take on this monster?” Ace asked.

  “Since he weighed in at two ninety-five.”

  The huge, blank-faced boy was strapped into a wheelchair—the old-fashioned kind, made of wood, straight-backed, without arms, with a stabilizing set of little wheels behind the large rollers. Sometimes the guards released the straps long enough to allow him to use the nearby bathroom. Sometimes they didn’t.

  The boy had been in the chair for over four weeks, presumably so that the doctors could adjust his medication. There were festering sores on his buttocks and on the backs of his legs. He was not sure he could even stand unassisted, not anymore.

  The shackled boy was sitting at the bottom of some deep lake, under its calm-looking but troubled top. The water and the thin, flickering light were always pressing down on him. Still, whenever a guard came to unstrap him or to force the plastic-coated capsules down his throat, he summoned the energy to speak.

  “I never did a crime.” His mantra: “I never did a crime.” The one thing he clung to, no matter what new tortures were devised by his captors.

  It was the truth. Repeatedly and violently abused as a small child, he had been removed from his parents and sent to a series of “homes.” He was savagely beaten in some, sexually assaulted in others. One day, he screamed before he blindly struck out at his attackers.

  That ended the “homes.” As both his displays of temper and his physical stature grew, he was sent to ever-higher levels of institutional security. The doses of medication they originally administered to “calm him down” increased as he grew. Raging against the chemical bonds had the effect of a constant isometric exercise, turning the tranquilizers into red-zone levels of HGH.

  He could hardly speak. One night, right after he had first been strapped into the chair, a boy named Orville sneaked up behind him and held his nose. When the huge boy had gasped for air, Orville poured caustic drain cleaner down his throat. By the time the guards came the next morning with his medication and saw the chemical burns on his lips and his chin, the acid had destroyed most of his voice box.

  When Orville passed by again, to laugh at the gobs of slapped-on salve intermixed with the drool, the huge boy had popped the first set of straps in a futile attempt to get to him.

  The guards had come back with heavier straps—and more medication. Classification had determined that his “unprovoked attack” on Orville proved him to be as dangerous as others claimed. So the thirteen-year-old had been transferred to maximum security. The arms of the starfish had taken him in—he would not be disgorged until old enough for adult prison.

  In Sterling’s processing room, they helped him to stand on the scales.

  Two ninety-five. And still growing.

  “We call him Rhino,” the guard who had driven the transfer van sneered, playing to his audience. “He gets six hundred milligrams of Thorazine three times a day—enough for a rhino. You figure the dosage by body weight, just like in the zoo.”

  When a heavy steel door closed somewhere behind him, Rhino tried to say, “I never did a crime.” But his words came out as a slurred squeak.

  “See?” the guard said. “It trumpets. Just like the rhinos on those nature shows.”

  Everyone laughed at that. Everybody except for one of the boys. That boy just looked at the monster, his face impassive, unamused.

  “What are the marks on his arms?” Cain asked. “Some kind of drug reaction?”

  “The boys where he came from,” the guard explained. “They liked to see if they could get a rise out of him. It got to be kind of a thing—everybody did it.”

  Cain stepped closely enough to see the fresh cigarette burns and the scars from the old ones.

  “What for? To use him as an ashtray?”

  “The guy is a retard.” The guard laughed it off. “He got no idea
what planet he’s on. He don’t feel pain. Hell, he don’t feel nothing.”

  Rhino moved his head from side to side. Even from the depths of the Thorazine lake, he struggled to register a protest. In the pre-violence stare-downs that characterized Sterling’s processing room, his motion was barely discernible.

  But Cain saw it.

  Later on, he returned to where Rhino was strapped down. He went back again and again, seeming to come and go without regard to the time of day. And soon the monster realized something was different—for the first time he could remember, the other boys left him alone.

  “I have a plan,” Cain told him one winter afternoon, “but you have to play along for it to work.”

  Late that night, he loosened Rhino’s straps, then sat on the floor next to the wheelchair. He knew the monster couldn’t speak, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t hear. And if the drugged boy was surprised at a prisoner roaming free, he gave no sign.

  Some nights Cain read to him, usually from a book of poetry he’d traded for. In an environment where a porno paperback cost a minimum of three cartons to “rent,” the poetry was a one-pack purchase.

  Other nights Cain just talked, his voice pitched very low.

  “The way I figure it, you’re in there somewhere,” the gang leader said quietly. “You, the real you, whatever that is. If you ever want to get out, we got to change your medication.” Cain reached into his pocket and took out two bright-blue capsules marked “T69” that he had “obtained” from the inmate-clerk who worked in the dispensary. “We’ll start you on these. I fixed them myself, replaced half of that tranq-out crap with Contac—that’s a cold medicine. We reduce your dosage gradually, okay? It could be a hard ride—let me know when you’re ready.”

  Cain put the capsules back into his pocket and opened his book to read aloud from a collection of haiku.

  The next night, when Cain opened the book, Rhino opened his hand, revealing the capsules that had been put into his mouth that day. Capsules he had tongued to the side instead of swallowing them.

  Cain looked at the capsules. His nostrils flared slightly—the closest he got to a smile.

  “Good!” he said, standing up to give Rhino the reduced dosage. “Payback’s coming. Just be patient.”

  Cain opened the book on his lap, and spoke as if reading from it, “The time does itself—we just have to stay alive inside it until we can make our move.”

  Even after he was released from the chair, Rhino was careful to slump around as if he was both profoundly stupid and heavily drugged. Once he became able to stay awake nights, he worked as Cain directed him.

  First the gang boss braided a string of dental floss. Then he wet the woven string and spun it slowly and carefully through an abrasive cleanser before setting it aside to dry. The string itself eventually became as sharp-edged as a piece of hacksaw wire. Inside Cain’s cell, the monster used his enormous strength to saw tirelessly, night after night. “We need them all sawed through,” Cain told him. “I could maybe get through with just two, but you’ll need them all.”

  Some nights Cain read to him. Other nights he worked silently, braiding a much thicker rope from dental floss, or writing in some code he had devised. Cain’s cell held a large volume—a dictionary and a thesaurus bound as one, stamped “Property of Sterling YCF.” Although it was stolen from the prison library, its absence had gone unnoticed.

  Ace passed by regularly but kept his distance. A model inmate, he was too close to parole to attempt an escape.

  Cain was still reading aloud when Rhino finished—the bars were sawn through.

  “I like that one,” Rhino whisper-squeaked.

  Cain looked up in amazement, even more astounded at Rhino’s words than by the fact that the bars were already cut through.

  Another week passed. On the yard, Cain said to Ace, “See you in a few weeks, right?”

  Ace nodded solemnly.

  Later that night, Cain said to Rhino, “Let’s do it.”

  Rhino pulled the sawn-through bars aside as if they were strands of spaghetti.

  Ace, watching, touched two fingers to his right eyebrow, brought them to his heart, tapped twice, and left the cell as silently as he had entered.

  Cain secured the rope he’d fashioned from endless strands of dental floss and threw it down. He rolled a blanket lengthwise and tied it across his chest—even if he made it to the ground, there was still the razor wire atop the fence to negotiate.

  “I’m going down first because I’m faster,” he told Rhino. “If I don’t make it, you get back to your cell—they’ll never figure out how I got through the bars, and nobody’s gonna suspect you. Ace is still here, so no one’s gonna rat you out, either. But if you see me start up the fence, then make your move. Time you get to the fence yourself, I’ll have the blanket draped over the wire.”

  Rhino put one huge hand on Cross’s shoulder. “Later,” he said, his voice a painful rasp.

  Cain put his hand over Rhino’s. “If you can’t make the fence, I’ll come back for you, brother.”

  Rhino looked into the first eyes that had ever viewed him as human, and nodded his understanding.

  Cain turned away, slipped through the bars, and swung out on the dental-floss rope. He seemed to dance down the side of the building. The grass was wet with dew, further silencing his rush to the high fence, where he started his climb.

  Rhino watched. As soon as he saw that Cain had unfurled the blanket over the wire, he wrapped the rope through his fingers and moved ponderously out the window.

  Cain scrambled over the wire on the doubled-up blanket, dropped lightly to the ground on the other side, and vanished.

  Rhino felt the makeshift rope stretch with his weight even before it snapped. He felt the ground rush up to meet him. He hit hard on his back and just lay there, unable to move, his head lolling to one side, seeing only darkness where Cain had been.

  For a few moments Rhino looked up at the stars, the same words playing over and over again in his mind: “I’ll come back for you, brother.”

  The empty darkness behind the fence seemed to answer him with a vast internal echo. Rhino felt himself slipping back to the bottom of the familiar lake. He felt the weight of the water and the thin, flickering light pressing down on him. He never felt his own tears as they welled up and coursed down his cheeks.

  Seven weeks later, Ace’s things were all packed. He was ready to go, his get-out papers in one hand. Rhino was back in his chair, drool once again wetting his chin. Now they used a syringe—no more capsules for this one.

  Ace stepped close to the monster’s ear, speaking softly but in a voice devoid of doubt. “I passed it down. None of the punks here are gonna come near you.”

  After Ace left, Rhino’s protection stayed intact. It wasn’t long before some of the boys began the same games they had played before, in the other place. They urinated on him. They stubbed cigarettes out on his arms. They spit on him, and when they could, they tipped over his chair.

  But before the week was out, every one of those boys met with some sort of prison misfortune. Two were stabbed, one was clubbed with a battery-loaded sock, and another woke up to find himself in flames.

  “Word better be around by now,” a Puerto Rican with two tears tattooed on his right cheek told the group of five youths as they stood together on the yard. “Ace passed the reins to me—you all know that. That means we got to carry it on if we want to keep what’s ours. Anybody messes with that thing in the wheelchair, they messing with us. And nobody gets to do that, am I speaking the truth?”

  Five fists came together in unspoken agreement.

  And no matter how deeply he sank into the Thorazine lake, no matter how many times they injected him, Rhino heard the same words, over and over. “I’ll come back for you, brother.”

  Months passed. Cain was officially listed as an escapee still on the run, although a better description would have been “vanished.”

  Ace had abandoned any hope of earn
ing an honest living. But prison had taught him a trade. A well-paying one.

  “I made sure nobody would mess with him, but I could give a fat rat’s ass about that monfucious, whale-scale pal of yours,” he sneered. “And this deal you got … it’s gonna cost us, big-time. You want to explain that to me, my brother?”

  Cain nodded slightly, as though pondering the question. In reality, buying time. The bottom line, he concluded, was simple enough: he had to go back for Rhino. In some part of his work-in-progress mind, he understood that he had no choice.

  Just as he knew that Marlon C. Cain no longer existed, he knew that the freshly minted assassin standing before him wasn’t bound by any promise of his own. But even as a teenager, the man who would be known as Cross for the rest of his life had known what buttons to push. He’d spent his whole life learning the lessons. And paid an immeasurable tuition before he passed the course.

  Cross had already paid a well-connected lawyer to track down Rhino’s institutional history. The monster had told the truth—he had never even been charged with a crime. The lawyer had told Cross that springing Rhino was a piece of cake—no court was going to tolerate what had been done to that “child.” But that could take years. And even though a much faster route was available, it would take a lot of cash to grease those wheels. More cash than Cross could hope to accumulate by his low-level, low-risk thefts.

  He had stared flat-eyed into the face of a lawyer who made his living representing truly deadly men. And the lawyer blinked. Obliquely, he told Cross that he was about to start trying a big criminal case. A mob guy was accused of shooting a rival. The mobster had a dozen people supporting his alibi, but there was this one pesky witness, a civilian who had been walking past when the street-side killing went down. If something were to happen to that witness, the case would collapse. And the lawyer then would have time to work on poor Rhino’s case. Pro bono, of course …

  “When I first started to cut down his Thorazine, it was—”

  “Yeah,” Ace interrupted. “I got that part. You needed those humongous arms to saw through the bars.”