Kill the dove!

by Francis Kroncke

  Chapter 21: Mail call riot

  When Free World folks hear about it, when the reporters at the Minneapolis Tribune get the word, all are sure that Jared’s in the thick of it. “Boy, didn’t take him long to get something going!” How wrong, for he’s only a distant observer. Actually, Jared isn’t doing much of anything. Least of all, organizing a protest.

  He’s hoping not to get mail. His family’s been regularly sending letters that say, “Thinking about you. How are you? We are fine? Did you hear about . . . ?” Letters that are boringly the same. He’s come to Mail Call because he has to accept anything sent to him. Legally, when the hacks open a letter, it’s considered “received.” There’s no way to stamp it, “Return to Sender.”

  Today, he’s relieved when no mail of any kind arrives. He doesn’t want anything. Not from family, friends, lovers, ex-lovers, bitches, queers, Marxists, Maoists, Catholics, fags, congressmen, assholes or saints! Especially Char.

  It begins after Mail Call.

  “Frankel. Phillips. Anderson . . .”

  As soldiers in battle, men at sea, researchers isolated in the nether reaches of the Antarctic know, “Dear John” has slaughtered legions.

  The guy who goes bonkers is black. At first it’s his high-pitched tone, not the words that signals the others. Soon he’s ranting and raving about “dat bitch” and “my fuckin’ ass brudder” and “slicin’ ’n dicin’ ’em.” Several of his buddies try to joke and calm him down but he doesn’t. Then, the mistake.

  “Hey, nigger, shut da fuck up!”

  It’s just some jerk-off white guy who feels secure with the guards in the room. But this Dear John is one mad-ass black brother with a temper more explosive than gunpowder.

  Before anyone can say anything, the black inmate throws a chair at the white inmate knocking him to the floor. Then the Mail Call hack goes down, gets waylaid from behind. He’s unarmed; someone filches his keys. Jared watches this begin and quickly gets out of the way, heads back to his bunk. Past him sprint highly excited cons: black, white, brown, red, a spot of yellow. Fuck, even Clyde’s hot for this! But not Jared. He’s already too far down his own lonely road to be drawn back by this. He chooses to ignore it all from his bunkmate’s upper spot—safely, from inside the dorm.

  How quickly the melee explodes from one dorm into the Yard and then into other dorms will become a fact that really pisses off the Warden. He had just issued a memo to all staff.

  Memo: “ WEATHER CHANGES AND INMATE OUTBREAKS. Riots normally occur from early spring to late August when the residents, having run off their winter lethargy, are feeling their oats and strutting around. Normally winter has a nerve-dulling, soothing, hibernating effect. With the first thaw, be alerted, it is advised . . .”

  True to his prophetic voice, it is the middle of an unusually hot week in late April and the Yard is a rumble.

  Like the theft so artfully consummated, the guard’s keys are rapidly copied and passed along. I mean, who was locked up, seminarians? These guys are criminals! But even faster than the cons, the hacks jump into action. The gun closet is opened and heavy duty hardware passed out. Four tear gas guns explode and warning shots start pinging off the tops of dorm walls.

  The small revenges of prison life will be marked off on many inmate ledgers this day. Nail file-size knives, a refashioned screwdriver, a crude set of brass knuckles, and other assorted folk art of the inmate world will find their targets. Slashes and stabs, abrasions and bashes, such is about to go down. Fortunately, since Millston is a medium security pen, murder more than likely won’t be on the agenda.

  “Stop! Stop!” screams and booms and flies into the dorm from the Yard. It’s the sound of a mob, of a hundred voices. Jared gets off his bunk and goes over to look.

  With a precision belying their inability to practice the drill, two groups of inmates, one ten blacks long, the other ten whites long, form a moving barricade. They sweep across the Yard seeking out, isolating and directing other inmates to safe areas.

  The leader has a bullhorn, stolen. “STOP! STOP!” rises as if this simple word chanted over and over will have a calming effect.

  The guards hold back, watching, waiting. Angry, bewildered and confused inmates attack them. They are kicked and punched, screamed at, cursed roundly. But they are unstoppable and effective. To Jared’s amazement they conjure some magic. Guys start to back off, move away, seek out the safety of their groups. The pacifying action of these inmates, matched with the growing awareness of the presence of fully armed guards, arrests the swell before it savagely crests.

  “Why did they kill him?”

  This is the prosecutorial question Jared presses against the dorm’s pane. “Why? Why?”

  Jared watches the bullet jerk him. Observes the body recoil as if to deny the bullet its ferocity, then collapse. He’s remotely observing from within the dorm and fantasizes that if he could just reach up and turn the dial that the picture would dissolve into electronic Never-Never Land. But it doesn’t.

  “Why?” is the question asked during the press conference.

  Warden: “It was an accident. A ricochet.” It’s a feeble answer; cowardly. Most know it as such.

  “But Harley’s dead, that’s a fact.”

  The CO Group is devastated. Not one of them has ever been in a protest that ended with a murder. The Blacks don’t say it but they’re absolutely shocked that it was not one of them. Some just believe that it was a mistake.

  “That white boy must’ve shanked when he should have shimmied.”

  “White folk ain’t got no rhythm!”

  Still, the fact that they killed one of their own when it was as easy to kill one of them mystifies many blacks. For the COs, it says clearly all that they refused to hear was what Kent State said, that even white boys—Bad, bad white boys!—should be back-alley scared. Slap that bitch! means us!

  As Harley falls, Jared bolts from the dorm but his steps peter out before he can work his way through the crowd thickening around the body. Who am I? What do they care what I think? His questions slow him down. He slinks back, away from the scene. But there’s something greater, deeper that wonders, Why wasn’t I with them?

  Hey, Jared, let us in! Dikbar and Bruiser are just outside the fence, calling.

  With Harley’s murder, Jared has no ally inside the Group. I’m off the train. He feels alone, abandoned. Sean is here. Matt too if he needs them. But somehow, somehow goddamn it, I’m not on the train. These other guys are in prison but I’m in here.

  Here: a place the bullet takes him. Jared knows that the bullet was for him. Black Intelligence! He knows that he’s as dead as Harley is alive.

  From this day forward there’s no need for sleep, though he does sleep. There’s no need to wake up but he gets up every day. He’s scared out of his mind, body and soul.

  It’s at this time that he swears to always wear the hibakusha. It—did Uncle Sam know this?—is his only safe grounding. Fitting to this strange time, he invokes its abysmal power. And so they come to him, these hibakusha. They sit at his bed’s edge, assist him when dressing, hold his garments as if they were the priest’s alb. They turn on the shower faucets with the reverence he displayed as he poured water over the priest’s hand. Lavabo me!

  They . . . they are now his new companions. Whose whispers about the suffering of the world, the cruelty of the world, the unexpected horrors that flash in an instance override the sounds that come from the inmates who walk about in the Yard. These hibakusha occupy stage front and center in his waking and his sleeping.

  Did Harley die so that I could live? Harley is whisked away. Was it a body bag? Zipped and swished. His death spot sprinkled with disinfectant. Another con is assigned to slip into his used air and outdated dreams, for Harley is no more. Others have disappeared as rapidly from Millston. Some COs were beckoned from the chow line or a workplace and in a flash transferred to some other Joint. They were gone, but at least Jared knew they could be still found, if d
esired. But not Harley.

  “Harley now knows the answers? Or has all the new questions?” is how Jared sums it up for Sean.

  “What the fuck does that mean, J?” Sean walks away from Jared. Strands him, pissed off because he can tell that Jared has crossed some line. Sean has no clue about the hibakusha. “What’s with fucking Jared?” others ask. All Sean can say to Group is, “Got me, man, he’s out of line, off track. I guess he just needs some time to himself.”

  At the start, Sean was sure that Jared’s past years in the monastery were going to make prison easier for him. Now he realizes that he’s never fully grasped what those monastery years might have been like for his best buddy.

  While all of this is going on in the invisible world of inmates, those who control at the macro level are pushing their levers. The Warden has finally convinced “up the line” that he must shuffle his “deck of weirdoes.” He sees Harley’s death as someone’s act of revenge. More than likely it was a jealous lover, a bad dope deal or some other perversion. He knows that his guards are not all choirboys but he’s confident that he would have known had it been something else .

  Did Harley die so that I could live?