Mighty Unclean

by Cody Goodfellow

  “We have to have men on the force like you, Friendly. You’re an example to us all, an example of–what we could become.”

  Friendly went to the locker room, and realized just how filthy he was. Black gobs of guano under his fingernails, in his hair, and… The buds were gone, but the thing he’d had to be with to get rid of them left him unable to touch or look at himself. He’d never been able to bring himself to use the locker room showers–homophobia or fear of athlete’s foot, or enjoyment of his own B.O., or all of the above–but he knew he couldn’t go another moment coated in the slime of the night-hag.

  He stripped and wrapped in a towel, went into the shower room. A misty steam-tunnel, the shower room curtained each of its bathers from each other, so that as Friendly tore off the towel, turned the water as hot as it would go and scrubbed the purifying stream into his crotch, he didn’t see the other cops. He noticed their feet as they came out of the steam, a cordon hemming him into the corner. His eyes wandered up to their faces, but never got there, because for the first time in his life, Friendly stared deliberately at male genitalia without questioning his own manhood, and understood why the other cops all looked at him like he was some kind of freak when he’d tried to get them to go cruising.

  Each cop’s penis dangled down to his knees, studded with prickly-pear purple buds, swollen fit to burst.

  “You smell like Her,” one of them said, and came closer.

  The Weak Sisters Bust Out

  By Cody Goodfellow

  hen the Aryans took over B Block right after dinner, everyone in the prison knew who they wanted, and got out of their way. Once the few unlucky Mexican Mafia and Bloods trapped in the block were put down, they converged on the secure cells. They carried shanks, machetes, bedspring garrotes and gasoline. They climbed to the top tier and pounded on the bars of the separatee cells, howling for the Weak Sisters to come out to play.

  Yogi squatted atop a bunk to hold the mattresses up against the bars. “Come on in, motherfuckers! We’ll kill you all! See if we don’t!”

  The Aryans barked and bayed like horny pit bulls. “Keep running your neck, foolio! When we get into that control room, you all mine…”

  Yogi always trembled, but today, it was not with rage or fear, but raw, red anticipation.

  “What we gonna do, Yogi?” Osmond stammered, wetting his pants, but he took the batteries out of the radio and stuffed a sock with them, like Yogi told him to. Bucky sucked his thumb and jacked off on the naked springs of his bunk.

  “Show them, Osmond. Be a man and fucking show them how we roll. Show them what happens when they fuck with us blood-brothers.”

  “We ain’t brothers, Yogi,” Osmond said in a choked little voice. A stupid, all-day sissy, but he knew the score. “We weak sisters, like they all sayin’.”

  Outside, they splashed gas on the mattresses and stabbed through them with long steel shanks. Yogi fixed the Eye on Osmond and didn’t say a word.

  Osmond looked down at the spreading apron of urine on his bright orange jumpsuit. “You right, Yogi, you right.” Osmond took out a shiv, a dirty icicle of melted plastic. “I am a man, ain’t I?”

  “You can be, Oz. Do it for Shy Girl.” Yogi stared him down until Osmond stabbed the palm of his other hand.

  Yogi pried open a crack in the mattresses. Osmond shoved his bloody hand through the bars. Osmond screamed and bit into the mildewed mattress.

  Someone must have stabbed or slashed at Osmond’s hand, because the force of the blast blew the gasoline-soaked mattresses off the bars and toppled the bunk beds. Yogi saw cartwheeling bodies wrapped in dancing white fire so hot it roared like the afterburner of a jet fighter, reducing whatever it touched to crunchy ash.

  They crawled, they prayed, they melted away. Yogi crowed and danced on flaming mattresses.

  The fire alarm went off. Prisoners howled to be let out of their cells. Yogi wrapped Osmond’s bloody hand in a wet towel. Loose droplets of blood on the floor sizzled and burned out like phosphorous in water.

  The door of their cell buzzed and clanged open. “I got it, bros!” an Aryan shouted, down below. Yogi decided not to stay in the cell until the Crisis Containment Team broke in and took over. “Come on, bitches. We’re busting out.”

  ««—»»

  Yogi knew right away what the riot was about. Slocum, Jughead and a couple lesser Aryan warlords took Shy Girl in the showers, dragged the tranny into a janitor’s closet that they paid for and outfitted handsomely as a fuck pad. When Shy Girl told them he had AIDS, they laughed, because they did, too. When he resisted, they cut him.

  They ID’d Jughead and Slocum by dental records, but the other three had to be pegged by head count, because they couldn’t find enough teeth.

  As the surviving senior Aryan Brother, Thor was honor-bound to kill the Weak Sisters, but they huddled in their secured separatee cell. After trying to bribe and poison the problems away, Thor snapped, or maybe just decided to do this for giggles, since he was serving five lives, already.

  What he didn’t know and was too dumb to figure, was that the Weak Sisters were not so weak, anymore. He never guessed why they were separated from general population, and probably never heard of the experimental treatment for which the four of them volunteered.

  They were told it was a cure for AIDS.

  ««—»»

  Yogi leaned over the tier railing and scanned the black smears on the concrete below. None of them was Thor.

  The other cons in the housing unit huddled under the tiers or in their cells. Yogi could see the whites of their eyes from across the block. All eyes on him, and his crew. Nobody would ever call them Weak Sisters, now.

  Alarms screamed lockdown all over the prison, but no guards came through the door to the block, which was jammed open. No Aryans held it now, either. Yogi strolled down the stairs and crossed the common area as only a man with a leash of pit bulls or a vest of dynamite sticks can, as a master of his own destiny.

  He went to the control room, found Thor’s stooge Orvis Buchannan standing over the guards. He looked fit to shit himself when Yogi stepped into the booth with his empty palm out. “You want some, trash? You want to burn?”

  Orvis tugged his long ZZ Top beard and tried to look casual. Orvis’s come tasted like rubber cement, and when he got off, he liked to choke you. “Come on, Holly, we all white men, here–”

  “I’m the only man here, and my name’s not Holly, bitch!” Yogi’s other hand lashed out, the sock with the batteries in it connecting with Orvis’s jewels so hard he lifted off his feet and whistled like a teakettle.

  Orvis came at him with a toothbrush shiv, but Yogi was short and wiry, and he’d been dreaming of this moment for two years. His heel sheared down Orvis’s right knee and smashed it off, so the hillbilly buckled and fell on the guards. Yogi beat his head to pulp until Osmond caught his arm. “We gotta go, Yogi, gotta go – “

  “Pick a guard,” Yogi said. Castillo and Pomerantz lay at their feet. Castillo had a black eye and a dislocated shoulder, but Pomerantz just looked stoned.

  When Guard Pomerantz fucked you in the ass, he made you call him Coach. “Osmond, get Castillo out. Come here, Bucky. You know Bucky, don’t you, Pomerantz?”

  Osmond hoisted Castillo up by the plastic zip-ties around his wrists. The guard grunted when his shoulder popped back into its socket, but said nothing.

  “He hurt me,” Bucky whimpered.

  Pomerantz shook his head and tried to spit his gag out.

  “Well, he won’t never do it again, Buck. You show him.”

  Bucky’s hands hid behind his back like kicked puppies. “It hurts. I don’t wanna—”

  “Didn’t it hurt when he drilled you? He turned you out, Buck, hung the bitch jacket on you. Didn’t that shit hurt?”

  “I ain’t no bitch.”

  “That’s right, Buck. Show him what you are.”

  Bucky reached for the bloody sock, but Yogi dropped it. “No. Burn him.”

  Buck
y looked long and wetly into Yogi’s eyes. “He jumped you, too. Whyn’t you do it?” Afraid of everything, a big dumb baby, but Yogi knew where the levers were.

  “Army’s got generals, Buck, and Indians got chiefs. Every family’s got a daddy, right?”

  Bucky nodded, already holding out his big, meaty hand.

  Yogi took it, stroking him the way you had to, to make him let go of his fear and realize how afraid the world should be of him. He never broke the locked gaze, even when he slit the fat of Bucky’s forearm. “Daddy says burn.”

  Bucky bit his lip. Blood drizzled all over the wriggling guard’s face, and ignited.

  ««—»»

  They used Castillo’s keys to get off the block and down the corridor to the dining hall and the door to the yard.

  Bucky walked point with a wet rag pressed to his arm. Yogi steered the guard down the hall and Osmond loped along in the rear. At every intersection, they stopped and looked around, but they saw no guards, just cons running, laughing and pointing at the Weak Sisters like they were new fish. It hurt, but Yogi ignored them. He was used to it. Scorn and abuse made the Weak Sisters a family.

  The doc singled them out because they were all AIDS-positive, and because they all, by choice or grand penal design, got their shit pushed in regularly.

  He told them it was an experimental AIDS vaccine. They all signed up, but Yogi pushed for favors. Got them the segregation cell, cable hookup and a little ten inch with a shitty old VCR. It was Yogi’s idea to tape shows for smokes, and to boost drugs from the doc to peddle on the block.

  Every week, they got injections. For six months, the doc pricked them, blood out, drugs in, but none of them felt any different. Maybe they weren’t falling apart as fast as some of the AIDS victims on the block, but they’d never gone so long without getting beat up or raped.

  Then one day, the doc was gone. The trustee who usually took them to the infirmary dropped a note on Yogi’s bed, and split.

  On a slip of prescription pad, it said, There is no project. Say nothing. Eat this note.

  Yogi pulled sick to get to the infirmary, and grabbed the doc’s files. They weren’t in the locked file cabinet, but hidden in a false ceiling panel in his office. Yogi read them, or tried, because he dropped out of middle school and never looked back. The folders told him little about the project, which had nothing to do with AIDS, but he learned a lot about himself and the other Weak Sisters.

  Subject 001© (“Yogi”) is a classic Napoleonic passive-aggressive, short, submissive, but driven to psychotic agonism by his acute sexual panic, acting out to dominate other outcasts and “prove” his heterosexuality.

  There was more, and worse, so nasty that he wished the doctor was here, so Yogi could refute his theories on abuse as a determiner in character with an unlubed mophandle. But compared to his cellmates, the stuff on him was a love letter. Abuse. Brain damage. Bedwetting.

  Levers.

  The doc and his experiment made them freaks. Yogi and the files made them a gang.

  ««—»»

  They stepped out into the big yard. Sirens honked and wailed. Cold white stadium lights gave them each three shadows, and the towers swiveled spotlights on them. “Go back to your cells, or you will be shot.”

  “Our cell’s on fire, fuckers!” Yogi shouted. He jerked Castillo up by his wrists. The guard yelped through his gag. “We’re going to a hotel!”

  They didn’t say anything for a while, sweating him out. They doubted him.

  Yogi’s blood surged in his ears. He got hot and itchy all over. He had to fight down panic, deep breaths and soothing thoughts like the doc taught him, or his blood might just blast out the top of his head and nuke the whole prison.

  This was, all of this, God’s fault. Had he been born into a bigger, badder body, he might never have had to commit a crime, to get his share in life. Nobody ever believed him, and so everything he’d ever gotten busted for, he’d done to prove a point, to get respect.

  He reached around Bucky and jabbed the shiv into Castillo’s ear. The guard whipped his head around, so the shiv sliced through the cartilage and skidded up his temple, laying a flap of scalp across his eye. Castillo screamed now, and he knew they heard it.

  “Stop! Jesus, don’t hurt him! Nothing’s happened that can’t be fixed, right?”

  Funny, they must not have camera feeds running in the block. Thor thought of everything. He wondered how much of the prison the Aryans controlled. “We want the warden!”

  “We want a Playstation,” Bucky added.

  “Sure, Yogi, we can get him—”

  A stream like piss from a racehorse hit Yogi in the eyes. He threw up his arms and screamed, “Pepper spray,” but he heard the others catch it as he fell down.

  His eyes closed over and his sinuses swelled shut and blew mucus out in streamers, but the scalding, searing pain that hit his brain left him a tiny bug in a burning house, and he couldn’t even look out the windows.

  He lurched into someone and punched out, heard Osmond shriek, “I WANNA GO HOME!” and then a plastic shield slammed him to the ground.

  Drowning in snot, crushed under dogpiled bodies and pummeling clubs and booted feet, Yogi couldn’t get breath in to curse his attackers, let alone beat them back, but he gouged with his fingers and bit something until it came off between his teeth.

  Pure, flaming jungle rage surged through his bloodstream, a rush so great he wanted it to happen, for his blood to ignite and blow them all away, to leave a crater so big, they’d name it after him. The beating on him fell off, but only because he was smothered.

  He couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or shut, if he was screaming or coughing, if he was alive or dead, but he knew he should let some of his blood out, that would show them who they were fucking with.

  Then all he could see was red and it was hot like the yard opened up and gave him to Hell. The guards on top of him flew away, whooping fireflies in mating frenzy, and Yogi jumped at the nearest one and kicked, punched and tackled him. He could hear shots in a wild volley from somewhere above, and he tried to use the guard as a shield. He screamed, “Bucky! Osmond! Where you at?”

  “Yogi—”

  “Oz, you alright, where are you, brother?” Yogi flailed out with his free hand. The guard crumpled from the beating. Yogi could sort of see Castillo at the end of his arm.

  Osmond’s hand caught his and turned him around. Osmond’s piss-stinking odor choked him. “Yogi,” he cried, “I’m on fire—”

  Yogi let Castillo drop and wiped the foamy tears out of his eyes. Osmond’s other hand was a Roman candle shooting sparks out of the slash in his palm, which he must have opened in the dogpile.

  He almost laughed, because Osmond’s own expression was more one of terrified wonder than pain, but then he always was slow to catch on. What wasn’t catching on slowly was the spread of the flames, which ate up his arm like a fuse.

  “I WANNA GO HOME, YOGI!” Osmond wailed.

  Yogi shoved him away and started running for the administration gate. “Come on, Oz, let’s go home!”

  The guard towers were shooting at each other. The catwalks above the yard got taken over by the Mexican Mafia, cadres of hardcase vatos with riot shotguns trading wood slugs with the snipers. Nobody thought the Weak Sisters were worth stopping.

  Osmond ran right past Yogi towards the administration gate, and Yogi stopped dead, throwing his arm across Bucky’s flabby torso and folding him to the ground.

  He saw the hunched men with rifles through the heavy-gauge chainlink fence, and the one sniper in the tower who was very unconcerned with the Mexican problem, and gave Osmond his undivided attention.

  They gave him fifty new ways to breathe with every step he took, but sheer inertia carried him all the way to the gate. Blood spouted out of him and caught fire in midair, and when he arched his back and slopped into the fence, one of the guards cried out, “My eye, it’s in my eye—”

  Osmond exploded.

  The
blast from Shy Girl getting stabbed in the heart destroyed the whole shower wing. Shy Girl was no girl, but he did weigh in at about ninety-two pounds soaking wet, anemic and raddled with full-blown AIDS. Osmond was only HIV-positive, and a robust two-twenty. When he went off, he knocked the earth out of its orbit and made the day a minute longer.

  White high noon sunlight blew down the fence and bent the tower over, scoured the yard, burned the chore jacket off Yogi’s back, knocked Bucky on his tubby ass. Masonry and steel hurtled through space and glass rained down, half-melted from touching the heat inside the blood of Osmond Dickson.

  Gray smoke gurgled out of the hole in the prison, but Yogi could see into the gutted admin compound, all the way through to the front gate.

  Was it luck? It would sure be the first time. What it was, was how it had to be. “Come on, Buck. We’re walking out.”

  They walked across the yard like they were going to buy smokes. Stepping over a yard sale of guards and charred parts of guards, Yogi picked up shotguns and sauntered into the checkpoint for visitors and employees.

  The air smelled like lightning and hot dogs. Bucky had his shotgun cradled against his face so he could suck his thumb.

  Inside, there were more bodies, a mess of cons and a couple of guards stabbed or shot, and Yogi thought how beautiful it was, that the riot had spread so far. They might not even be noticed for days. Sometimes it paid to be small fish.

  Yogi made for the gray light of the front doors. He still couldn’t see too well from the pepper spray, so he stepped over a big bloody corpse and never looked twice until it reached out and twisted his ankle so he crashed into the floor headfirst.

  Bucky yelped, “Thor!”

  Yogi tried to roll over. The shotgun was pinned under him, but he had his thumb in his teeth like the pin on a grenade.

  Slow reader that he was, he could read THOR on the knuckles of the fist that smashed into his face.

  ««—»»

  “You tried to do me, Holly,” Thor growled in his ear, and the worst part was, he sounded hurt.