Kill the dove!

by Francis Kroncke

  Chapter 31: Gods of cruelty—Marion, FCI

  Waking up, Jared’s forgotten where he is, still thinks he’s in Milan. What does it matter?

  Jared is greeting his scar, stroking and rubbing it, picking at specks of scab and dead skin. He’s learning how to be someone with an attractive face, not in the sense of beauty but of horror. From now on people will inevitably ask, “What happened?” His face will have no anonymity.

  With the tattoo of the slash, he needs a story to tell, different versions for different people. But what’s the main rap? That he was heroic and tried to save someone, who then struck him? That he was an idiot who walked into a rabid dog fight saying, “Here, puppy!”? That he’s done time? Been a “prisoner of war”? What’s the theme and its variations?

  For Jared, the scar’s not such a big thing. He’s rarely even given much thought to his face. He’s the type of guy who paid more attention to it when it was a scraggly face eager for a full bushy beard. Since he’s been bearded and de-bearded, who cares? He’s never been into tonsorial style, rarely even looks at himself. In fact, philosophically, he gets a kick out of the fact that humans go through life with other people’s faces. That they spend most of their time seeing themselves through the facial grimaces, smiles, and gymnastics of others.

  “The mirror,” he often commented when speaking about images of maleness, “gave us personal terror. Humbly, the burden of seeing our own ugliness. Before the mirror, ‘I’ takes many faces. A group face; something of a mosaic. And if I don’t like the deformed or the ugly face I’m looking at, I can rush over and contemplate someone beautiful. But, ‘modern man,’ we’re stuck with ourselves! Singularity. Individuality. The curse of too much knowledge. The curse of knowing ourselves!”

  He laughs, remembering how much resistance he always gets from the kids whenever he asked them to live just two days without looking into a mirror.

  As Jared finishes musing on his scar, he sighs deeply and slips into a moment of blissful rest. He leans his head against the wall. Half drags his legs to his chest. A flutter of sunrays brush across his face. He’s warm, slightly blinded warm. Eyes closed, he floats off into a deep red, blood warmth. His teeth unclench and in a blink he droops, sags back under a wave of sleep, a baby’s slumber. Deep into muscular relaxation, leaden in stillness.

  “Jennings!” It’s a friendly holler, like a “My good buddy, Jennings!” hoot.

  “Jennings, get off your duff! It’s rock and roll time!”

  Jared wakes but refuses to rise to face the man he dreads seeing because this fucker sacks his dream world and profanes it. He’s less than you want him to be but more terrifying than you could ever fantasize because he is power in the here and now—he ends things.

  Yet to an outside observer, the Ride is having its effect. A bit like the Stockholm Syndrome where captives begin to befriend their captors, in such a small way Jared has begun to call Witson, “Steve.”

  Steve smashes his face through the cell bars, grinning. Jared doesn’t utter a word, hopes that by not responding the face might evaporate, dissipate, blip out like a TV screen. But the words have a life of their own. They demand, because they are commands, not addresses. He hears the key scratch and the lock’s metallic thonk! The gate opens . . . it’s no longer Segregation, it’s Integration.

  Steve’s pumped up, juiced as if arriving on the scene to announce, “Freedom—the war’s over! You home! Go on, get out of here!”

  He steps in and over to Jared’s bunk, knee-bends, lowering his smallness to poke the con nose-to-nose as if not needing a handshake now that they are good buddies.

  “Glad to see ya!” Steve smiles, pushing out his teeth in mime.

  Two, three seconds and Steve’s back up, swivels and heads towards the corridor, throwing over his shoulders, “Rock ’n’ roll! Rock ’n’ roll!”

  Jared moans, “Fucking no! Fucking shit! Goddamn motherfucking…!”

  But he’s resigned; has no choice but to be. He dresses and shuffles towards the door, the institutional mouth ready to spit him out. Honestly, this morning, Jared doesn’t want out, he’d just gotten in.

  He stops. Turns around. Walks back to his bunk. Stoops and grabs his toiletry box, his ark of the hibakusha, stows it under his arm and proceeds measurably, toe by toe, footprint by footprint, pace by pace into the sea.

  The cruel sea hums a morning lullaby to him, “and you want to travel with her / and you want to travel blind / and you think you’ll maybe trust her / ’cause she’s touched your perfect body with her mind . . . ” He walks into the sea a drowning man “. . . He said all men shall be sailors then / until the sea shall free them . . .” Buried at sea. “. . . amid the garbage and the flowers / there are heroes in the seaweed . . .”

  It’s the same routine of exiting. No chains, don civvies, hop in the van—as if Lewisburg was just a pit stop. “Have a breakfast brewskie!” shouts Steve as he pops and guzzles one, hits the accelerator and they’re on the fucking-A road, again!

  Curiously, once the van hits the asphalt Jared’s bemused, also a bit perplexed as he realizes that he feels “at home” here in the van with Steve. That he’s happy in this spot, this seat now ass-molded to his fit. He’s really glad not to be in Seg or among denizens of the iron bars. Fucking-A, Kerouac! I’m on the road, digging the Ride! Whoooeeeee!

  It’s a turning point, like the time he sat on the steps outside the College of Saint Clement’s campus church. It’s 1966. He’s sitting under the church’s massive banner of concrete, a trapezoidal affair that rises from arches that span a hundred feet wide and forty feet high. It looms on a horizon seen for tens of miles. As if sacred earrings, it is bejeweled by a set of carillons. He sits and sits, waiting for the death of the last clangorous peal, ending the seductive melody set forth by God as a snare to catch the ear of all wayward worshippers. Jared just sits there, waiting for God’s belled voice to mute, and then does not go in for Mass.

  It’s the first Sunday in his life that he’s ever missed Mass intentionally. For some it would have been a small act, one excusable, forgivable. Without doubt, a grievous sin but one not mortal. Yet for him it is the primal act—chosen, conscious, with bitter intent. It heralds to all, “I am not going in, for my God is not in there!”

  Is God here, on the Ride?

  Steve throws the first cast of the day, snags and reels Jared in.

  “They told me you had a visitor?”

  “Yeah, fucking yeah, man.”

  “Who was it?”

  Jared is touched by the role he now knows Steve is playing. He’s actually grown fond of him, in a zoo animal’s way of appreciating the zookeeper. But no bones about it, Jared’s still convinced that Steve is the ultimate hack.

  “C’mon, good buddy, you know it was youse guys. Hey, shit, maybe even you, man. Was it you who called Aaren?”

  “Cross my heart,” and lies, “I was as surprised as you must’ve been.” Aaren wasn’t surprised. Steve pauses and seeks to redirect the conversation. “Say, I truly didn’t expect to see you again so soon. Thought I might have maybe a couple of weeks off. What did you do this time?”

  “Do? Fuck your ‘this time’!”

  “You can be straight with me. When I left, I was headed for a bit of R & R in Hawaii. Imagine how pissed I was when they told me I’d have to escort you to Marion.”

  “Marion?”

  Marion, Illinois: a maximum security federal penitentiary. One blood-soaked step up from the medium security FCIs that have been serving as Jared’s main lodging.

  “You must’a been a ba-a-a-ad boy!” Steve needles.

  At one time, the sound of Marion would have chilled Jared the way Steve hopes it is doing right now. But Jared’s more curious than afraid. He’s just short of “Eager to see a real slammer, man!” Marion has the reputation Hollywood loves. The Pen, a veritable Big House. He already sees James Cagney walking by his cell. Hears him scream at the hacks who have cornered him as he tries
to escape, “C’mon ’n’ get me, you dirty coppers!”

  Feigning a heart attack at hearing “Marion,” Jared blurts, mockingly, “Okay, okay, shit, you got me, I’m ready to talk. Squeal. Rat out my brothers and sisters! Just don’t take me there!”

  Both half-laugh. Steve hits the accelerator as they speed up and onto the freeway, head west on 80. Jared looks over his shoulder and scans the middle seat. Sure enough, Steve has refreshed the supplies. He reaches for a Coke and a bag of chips and while popping both he falls back into their lying to one another mode: Believe me, it’s true!

  Casting his own line: “Aaren’s changed. She’s not a Weatherman anymore.”

  Steve grabs his throat and gags, “Right. Okay. Yessir. Sure and I’m a virgin!”

  “Hey, fucking-A no surprise, maybe you are. I never said I ever believed anything you told me. Like this Hawaii thing—c’mon, ‘Agent Steve,’ level with me. You knew Milan was a stopover. Lewisburg, too, I bet. Tell me, is Marion the end or are you also working for Greyhound?”

  “Nice scar,” Steve answers as a distraction. “Want to tell me about it?”

  Reflexively—and it’s a reflex he will not consciously control for some time—he touches it as if reminding himself that it’s truly there. “Just a lousy shaver, you know, that’s why I always wore a beard. Just cut myself, man.”

  Both realize that neither wants to be the mouse today. Steve knows what he’s got to do, so this chatter isn’t that important. He pushes in a Rolling Stones tape.

  “Jesus, I hate those motherfuckers!” Jared bitches, but Steve leaves it on. He can’t resist the barb, “What’s the matter? Can’t deal with Altamont?”

  Jared reclines his seat. He isn’t going to listen to Steve or tune in on the Stones. After Altamont—“Fuckheads!” is all Jared ever says about them, “Great music but real fuckheads!” From his perspective, the Rolling Stones gave back to the Establishment—America with the two k’s, “Amerikka!”—what Woodstock had set free.

  At Altamont, four months after the first kosmic! rock gathering of the Age of Aquarius in upstate New York at Woodstock, the Stones let the Hells Angels run security. Whether they sought them or they just came, Jared didn’t care. They delivered the ulta-violence and black death that “Everyone knows is the dark heart of rock ‘n roll.” Four people dead.

  Steve knows his game, Jared is convinced. He has it all choreographed. But what is the final dance? And who’s calling the tune?

  Jared is highly confident that Marion is not going to be the end of the line. He knows that he’s on the Ride and it is the end of the line. He knows this with an acceptance of Matt’s summation, karma. Pissed, Jared disconnects from Steve and rolls back into himself.

  Whether it was the steadiness of the road—a steadiness accompanied by several routine stop-piss-coffee events, at times a few stretching calisthenics—or the line crossed when he was slashed, whichever, Jared can now enter and exit daydreaming like clicking on the TV. At one moment he’s jousting with Steve and the next he’s actually living a scene from the past or the anticipated future.

  “Okay, Pretty Boy, we’re almost there, yessir, so listen to me.” The allusion to pretty is in line with the new moniker Jared acquires. In prison vernacular he’s now both Big and Pretty. But the latter carries the perversity that prison is, meaning that he’s ugly in body and soul. To his benefit, to be Big and Pretty is to make the first impression of being “one badass motherfucker!” Or a “Down on ya dude!” Steve uses it to let Jared know that he has his number.

  Aaren’s changed. She’s not a Weatherman anymore, hasn’t left Witson’s mind since Jared spoke it. It can’t be true! He must be lying.

  He can’t accept that in one of these visits Jared and Aaren have not violently attacked or harmed the other. He’s genuinely baffled. He cleared the way from the Boss down through the Wardens and Watchers, setting it up so that it would be inevitable. How could he not fuck her? Why isn’t she blowing him to Wargasm and back? Steve expected reports of wild, brutal sexual violence but none came.

  Their visits are filmed and he’s spent nights watching each several times. It boggles his mind that Aaren acts the way she does. He’s convinced that she’s acting. “That bitch! She’s a better actress than a cocksucker!” he swears after he ends his monthly report.

  Am I in control?

  Aaren’s failure spawns a wild plan. Witson smiles at himself as he silently shouts, “That’s it! The only way to really fuck him up is to turn him into a guard.” In his mind’s eye a file is stamped, “Genius!”

  An hour outside of Marion, Steve’s flying down the road, fearful that Jared might suffer a reverse mood swing. He’s still somewhat unbelieving as they finally drive through the gate, park, and Jared jumps out, ready to go!

  Within fifteen minutes, Steve has set the stage, dragged Jared through “Costume and Make-up”—has him put on a hack’s uniform! (What the motherfucker now?)—and signaled Control to roll back the gate to Cell Block D on B Wing. Without a mirror, Jared can’t gauge how the audience sees him. He still feels like the hobbling convict, chained and linked from hands to feet, a transfer shuffling behind his keeper. Yet something inside—Quinn?—shouts, Do it! … and so he does.

  What Jared doesn’t see is himself as hack—as that image of ambulatory authority, instant executioner, existential judge and jury. More astounding, he’s an icon. The uniform draws out the savagery of his Celtic and Teutonic genes. It’s a cloth of transformation. Steve notes, Great! He looks . . . a nip of jealousy, envy, a touch of a lack of self-worth cut the sentence short.

  Jared: Tall, broad-shoulder muscular, with a face that bears a battle scar. Armed to the teeth: pistol, cuffs, blackjack and “the bat,” that cross between a baton and whip, the bastard son of modern chemistry, a plastic composition which, in creative hands, can bludgeon or whip— “plastic steel.”

  What follows is Marion as a Disney attraction, “Prisonland.” Steve tows Jared and barks like a tour guide. Jared is amused, disconnected in a way, sort of observing himself from above, floating, not really in his body. Through the Inside magic of the moment Jared is securely tethered. Steve’s the slave master bringing his Northern abolitionist cousin onto the plantation. It’s all attraction/repulsion, approach/avoidance but, at the bottom, a pure validation of the cruelty. Jared doesn’t revolt. He is now a god of cruelty.

  “Hey, nigger boy, Old Tom there, quit playing with yourself and get over here,” Steve commands a barely awake elderly black convict. He’s rattling, clanging the bars with his bat. The old man walks over, not cursing, not hurling obscenities, just quietly; he places his hands on the bars.

  “Yasser.”

  “How long you been in here, Tom?”

  “Twenty-five, sir.”

  “Have you learned anything, Tom?”

  “Yasser.”

  “Tell me, old nigger.”

  “I’se learned not to mess with The Man.”

  This the old con says with steady fire, with a peculiar dignity. It’s as if the sentence sums up his caginess, all his street smarts. Conveys why he’s alive and still pulling time. But more, it’s a statement of his history, his grounding in his own story, a connection to his people, time and—although it escapes Jared at this moment—his God.

  Steve stretches his hands through the bars and pats the old man on the head. Not with the vigor that one tousles a boy’s hair but with the same intent.

  “Good, Tom, you can go back.”

  “Yasser.”

  Without comment or question, the two move along. Steve picks up the pace, quickening, as if sensing his quarry.

  “Are you two fag breaths licking each other’s assholes again?” Steve fearlessly presses his face between the bars as he raucously laughs at two overly-tattooed guys. Jared notes they’re adorned with Hell’s Angels and White Power symbols and slogans. The two inmates bound over to him, a kiss away from his face. “Ya la’tel shitface, puke ass cocksucka,
ya ain’t man ’nuf tu open thes cage en fight me lake a man!”

  It’s clear that they’ve met before. “Your schlong must be ten feet tall by now, cranking it like you do. Here,” and Steve makes as if pulling something from his shirt pocket, “here’s some pussy perfume. Go bang the toilet, fag breath.”

  Why the inmate doesn’t rip Steve’s eyes out is beyond Jared. Who is Steve? What’s his real story? Unspoken, these are not questions to break the spell. Performance over, Steve is now several steps ahead of Jared. Behind him, all Jared hears is laughter. He doesn’t look. He’s jogging to catch up. If Jared had looked, he’d see a con, arm hanging out the cell, pumping a finger of fuck you! as the scene closer.

  Steve and Jared quickly pass through several cell block gates and arrive at what is obviously Segregation. Here there are true torture holes. No pastel blues, no simple isolation. Nothing solitary about it at all. It’s dark, and many uncountable creatures are present. The smell of the site—phew!—weakens Jared. His knees quaver imperceptibly, like when he walked into the cemetery to bury his dad.

  “This one’s yours,” Steve says as if they’ve been keeping score and Jared’s been complaining about not enough times at the plate.

  “What?”

  Instead of answering, Steve firmly shoves him inside a cell. Jared’s facing a wall of darkness. For a suspended moment he just stands there—“hung out” as the lingo goes. Vulnerable.

  Suddenly Jared is vigorously and harshly shoved backwards, body-slamming Steve who’s behind him against the doorframe as a dark voice growls, “Ya muthafuckers stay outta my face!” It’s a voice that could kill—it has a metallic edge. Again, Steve shoves Jared forward and this time, somewhat adjusted to the dank darkness, he staggers to a standstill in front of a large black youth. The guy’s not as tall as him but wider, sculpted like a Nubian Adonis. His body glistens as if he’d just been doing push-ups. A keg of rage!

  The con swings at Jared, batting down his raised left arm. The force of the blow pitches Jared off-balance. He awkwardly hops and half-jumps a step backwards. He fires a bewildered glance at Steve who’s leaning against the cell grate, at rest in an observer’s pose, arms folded, almost like a professor—lacking a smoking pipe!

  “Hey, man, cool it, shit, I’m friendly . . .” But the guy knows all types of cop talk and takes this bullshit jive as a trap. He jumps on Jared, moves expertly with street smart battle skills, locks his neck, a death choke. Stunned, not prepared in the least for this—not thinking that this is what Steve meant by “being a hack for a day, take a trip to my side!”

  Before Jared even taps into his fear he feels his throat being crushed, can’t draw in any air, claws at the guy’s hands, wrists, desperately trying to loosen the grip as everything quickly turns dark and fuzzy . . . He’s wrestling with Quinn! Overpowered, freaked, fearing death…blacks out.

  “Aw, shit . . .” Jared doesn’t hear as Steve comes to the rescue. He flies from the guy’s blind side and with a few quick and expertly placed karate chops lays him out. The guy’s sprawled out, ass up on the floor, partly on top of Jared.

  In a vale of semi-consciousness, Jared starts writhing, gasping for air. He’s smothered by a weight of blackness, deafened by screaming shooting stars of silver pain and red-hot blood comets and drowning in black sweat. Steve hefts and heaves the inmate with his right foot, rolls him off Jared. Then, without even asking if Jared’s okay he glowers and chastises, “Are you totally insane?” Sternly, before the question’s fully heard, Steve answers himself, “Good God, you’re a fool!”

  For several minutes, the scene is a diorama. No one moves. Then, as if the final bell has rung—it’s over!—Jared catapults up, heaved by some alien force. He’s standing tall and pumping his chest with rage. Without intent, Jared stands menacingly over Steve, the Short.

  “You’re the fool! You walked me into this blind. What the motherfuck did you think I was going to do? Shit. Walk in here and beat the crap out of him?”

  “He’s black.”

  “What the fuck?”

  “Can’t figure it out?” Steve abruptly turns and starts to whack the back of the unconscious youth with his bat.

  Dikbar! Jared forcefully grabs Steve’s baton, lifts and heaves him away from the body.

  Steve taunts, “Do it! Show me you have some balls!”

  Stunned, Jared flicks an intentionally symbolic bat swing at Steve. It catches Steve’s nose and, to Jared’s astonishment, blood flies, a soft crush! whimpers and Agent Witson crumples into unconsciousness.

  Steve’s slumped body—a heap of powerlessness.

  “Quinn at the ready, sir! A fiery match? A kick to the head? Perhaps a blow to the groin?”

  Jared’s deeply, deeply encaged chthonian fury for revenge is aroused.

  “What did you do to get him so angry?”

  What did I do? Dad . . . . What did I do?

  Revenge: His scrawny body he’s worked so hard to build up—willed it to grow tall and taller! A hundred push-ups, a hundred pull-ups, a hundred sit-ups, a five-mile run every day, every week, every year—his own boot camp regimen. Quinn joins the para-troopers—Jared enters the novitiate. Dragging himself, kneecaps scraping every inch around the perimeter of the chapel: thirteen Stations of the Cross. Scourging. Tears of blood. Hammer and nails torturing out the weakness.

  Jared hears the mythic invitation. Every male seed hears it: Revenge is redemption! Be a man, son. Don’t cry! Yes! Jared feels in his clenched biceps the urging of all who have done it. “In His Name!” “God wills it!” All who have sought validation through this one redemptive act, hidden in the abode of the powerless, here, within a recess of a penitentiary.

  Who’ll know? It’s not an FBI trap. No one’s filming this escapade. He notes, he’s obscured by the hole’s intestinal darkness. Who would be the wiser? Who would come forth to testify?

  From out of the hole—truly the sphincter of life—Jared excretes the black youth, not in body but in soul. Hack talk: You’re just a piece of shit! He whacks him again and again. Strike, blow, lash, wop, smite . . . ! There’s a pleasure registered on a scale measuring historical pain. Jared—Quinn!—becomes giddy at the thud! thump! crack! jolt of the body. Rise up, my son, for today you are a man! Profound moral and physical release and relief spurts from him as he watches the whites of his victim’s black eyes roll around, deliriously. Quinn is dead! Long live King Jared!

  The gods of cruelty are well pleased.

  Gasping awake, Steve is half up, still on the ground, grasping his knee; blood crawls from his nose. Jared picks him up, literally hoists him with both of his hands, clawing his chest, and brings him lip to lip. “You’re just a piece of shit,” he says quietly as if intoning the Mass’s dismissal: Ite missa est.

  Jared places Steve, carefully and gently, just outside the door of the hole, sets him there as calmly as if taking out Thursday’s trash. As he shuts the cell door, he pauses a second. Why did Steve beat that guy senseless? It’s the mythic trick—flash!—Jared instantly flips and his role is forgotten.

  Tears flood his eyes, tears boiling with rage and fury at Steve’s brutal beating of this helpless black guy. Jared raises his hand in blessing, strokes the air with a sign of the Cross, whispers a kind, loving, priestly, “God help you, my son!”

  Steve’s a flop of semi-consciousness but he can hear himself being praised; lauded for evoking from within Jared that simple urge to kill, to defend. Even if he, Agent Steve Witson, is the designated enemy! Not that Steve expected Jared’s attack. Hardly, he had long doubted that he would—no, could—do it.

  Jared, beyond weary, chooses a spot across the hallway from Steve. Back against the wall, he slowly slimes to the floor. Then he closes his eyes and labors unsuccessfully to bring to rest all the conflicting emotions. He’s totally battle-fatigued, plunging into utter exhaustion of mind, body and soul.

  How long did each guy snooze? Whatever, it’s Steve who blasts back into Jared’s con
sciousness as if what just went down juiced him.

  “C’mon, Pretty Boy, the show’s not over yet!”

  Steve’s back! He’s upright, bandaged, smirking; waking Jared by play-kicking his humongous feet. Not pausing, Steve exits the scene, struts down the hallway, assured that he’s the shepherd and his lamb is following. Jared the Obedient, Jared the Amazed—truly amazed at Steve’s resiliency—ambles behind him.

  Steve, without turning around to observe the impact shouts, “I’m glad they shot Harley by mistake!” He doesn’t wait for Jared or say anything more about what’s just gone down or about Harley. His banter and romping gait indicate he’s in a better mood than ever. It’s as if they’ve bonded through this escapade. Jared hurries to keep up with him, striding in silence.

  As everywhere else, so here inside Marion, they simply stroll past a couple of Control units and through a handful of sliding gates as if walking through a mall. In several minutes they come to an area with single cells like Seg. But it certainly isn’t Seg. Several of the cell doors are wide open. Streams of bright light stream out and bathe the corridor. Jared has a fleeting image of hothouse flowers growing inside these cells.

  At the last door on the block, Steve stops and raps with his baton as if tapping a gong. He stands back, poised, clearly anticipating a response. The door is just a quarter open when “Stevie!” is half-shouted, carried by a voice filled with age, as if overjoyed and surprised to see a relative. “Steve! Stevie, my boy! Come on in.”

  Just a step behind him, Jared is inside before his mind acknowledges what he sees. He’s inside a scene clipped from Architectural Digest.

  The room—for inside it’s certainly not like any cell he’s seen—is fully decorated. It’s slightly more than a studio apartment but appears huge and lavish in respect to its neighborhood. Almost all the wood and furnishings are pure mahogany. The knobs and faucets are shiny brass. A ceiling fan, containing a crystal glass light fixture, spins dreamily overhead. A full range of kitchen essentials fill a nook—tightly compacted but with all the necessities—which is separated from the rest of the room by an artful divider that exposes cherished items which reflect both a cultivated personal taste and substantial wealth. Jared’s eye is caught by what he knows to be a reliquary: baroque, small but fabulously crafted. He recognizes it as a depository for a martyr’s bones.

  “St. Francis of Assisi,” clarifies his unasked question, “and the craftsman is Borghilini. It’s the only one extant after the Frisco quake.”

  The voice belongs to a slightly stooped, half-bald old guy whose once proud Roman posture and bearing have been relatively uncrushed by age and physical deterioration. His voice glides through the air with a confidence that it will be welcomed by whomever hears. The old man looks towards Jared with eyes that dance and express a merriment that betrays the environment.

  Steve handles the formalities. “Mr. Fraticelli, this is Jared Jennings.” He doesn’t pause or lose inflection, “A rookie with the team.”

  Fraticelli has a firm grip, a smile that draws folks closer, and the steely eyes of a leader. Steve and Jared both sit as he points to the chairs he wants them to occupy.

  Without comment, Fraticelli tinkles a bell and in line with all that is transpiring another convict appears at the doorway. “Bring some coffee for mio figli.” Then he walks over and slides open a cabinet panel, exposing a golden thermos and several liquor bottles. “If I remember correctly, my dear Stefano, you like a bit of the snake about this time of day.”

  “Ah, Papa, you have an exquisite memory!”

  The old man laughs as old men do when flatteries are offered which affirm that they are losing their faculties. “I am not dead yet, carissimo, but even if I live forever, I will never remember a scintilla of what you have forgotten.”

  The substance of this exchange eludes Jared but the warmth, mutual knowledge and genuine affection do not. He has fully forgotten where they are.

  As the trio drink, refill, and smoke the largest but most sensually gratifying cigars Jared has ever had—hand rolled, private stock, Cubanos—Papa and Steve gambol back and forth across names, events and memories that underscore the character of their relationship. It isn’t that they ignore Jared, rather, that they permit him to be an observer of their intimacy is compliment enough.

  The old man accepts Jared’s unexplained presence. He knows more than anyone about Steve’s role in the Agency—anyone except the Boss.

  When the sandglass falls to empty, they rise and take their leave with the same gestures of politeness that marked their entrance. Papa places a hand on Steve’s shoulder and gently shakes him, the affection of a man saying a small goodbye, in case they aren’t together for the big one.

  When asked, “Now?” Steve responds, “To the airport.” As he drives, Jared jostles out of his hack costume and slips and jerks back into his traveling clothes.

  “I guess you want to know about old man Fraticelli?” Steve wants Jared to know.

  “Yeah, sure, man, shit . . . him and the rest. What was that all about?”

  “I’m trying to unmake a fool! Fool, you tell me what that was about!”

  Jared snaps at the bait. He’s genuinely pissed about being jerked around. “I’m no one’s fool but my own! I’m a fucking fool for putting up with this.” He yanks at the door handle, not that he’s going to jump out, just that he wants to dramatize a point—but it doesn’t open!

  “Fool!” Steve gloats.

  “You even control the power locks! What a fucking hack!” Jared ramps up his attack. “You’re the fool, Steve—or should I say, Stefano? You think that what went down back there means something?”

  Steve snickers at Jared’s bravado.

  “Good God, kid,” he condescends, “you are really a jerk. You’re making a believer out of me. I’m almost believing all the innocence you’ve projected.”

  Jared shifts his body sideways, ass to Steve. With no apparent gain at hand, Steve stops sparring. Both simply distract themselves through enjoying the beauty of the sunset that singularly blesses the Heartland.

  “Mr. Fraticelli,” Steve commences the lesson out of nowhere. “Mr. Benedicto Fraticelli has been living in Protective Custody for twenty years. Did you figure it out? That it was PC?” He states all this with a tone that betrays his astonishment and amusement that genius Jared has probably not figured it out.

  “He’s an underworld legend. There’s more power concentrated in that room than in all of your Fortune 500 board rooms. He has a staff there, guys who are fully versed in all this latest stuff on computers and satellite communication. Guys even take falls just to serve on his staff. Incredible, right, isn’t that what you’re thinking?”

  “Well, fucking-A man, I saw it. It wasn’t just Hollywood.”

  “Bet your booties it wasn’t. Dig this, hippie Resister, the thing about power is, it plays both sides of the street. Papa—that’s what he likes to be called—got the Agency off the ground by being its biggest nemesis!” Steve laughs at his own cleverness. “He was ferrying dagos and other aliens in here and causing all types of troubles, till he and the Boss met. Then things changed. Papa’s our first relocated witness.”

  Jared wants to say something but doesn’t.

  “He was sent up on a bogus murder-one rap, but some say he really wanted in. That he chose Marion and personally designed his whole operation from A to Z.”

  Jared can’t resist trying to untie the knot. “Where do you fit in?”

  “Right. Fair. Yessir. That’s—that’s—okay, that’s too long a story, and there’s nothing you need to know about it. Just trust me. Just accept that I’ve been very useful to him, and he’s been very useful to me.” All of this makes Jared half-expect to look at Steve and see Humphrey Bogart or H.G. Robinson behind the wheel.

  Dikbar! appears, jolts Jared’s memory. “But the others, especially the black kid in the hole?”

  Steve heaves a heavy sigh, like a man throwing off an
immense weight. Annoyed, instead of speaking with relief, he expresses the desperation of a teacher who has repeated the same lesson a hundred times over only to see the student repeat his initial mistake. “Power. P-O-W-E-R. Power! What is wrong with you? Do you come from a different planet? Do I have to tell you how to think, tell you how to feel?”

  The hum of the road becomes slightly audible. Jared blurts, “That’s not power, that’s abuse of power. You can’t have power over someone who’s powerless. That’s just murder.”

  Steve: “Power’s only defined by its abuse. Who would know the power of the State if prison was not degradation, humiliation and murder?” He pauses, waits for the correct answer, hoping he can give his favorite student an “A.”

  “You felt that power?” Steve asks, expecting the worm to turn.

  “You mean the black kid? Shit, he only took me by surprise.”

  “But you—”

  “But I what, motherfucker? You kicked him when he was down. You think that’s power? It’s shit. Only nonviolence is power. Only it can change things. I pulled you off of him.”

  Righteousness is Jared’s hammer. “I protected that kid from you, asshole, even in the fucking-A hole in fucking-A Marion. That’s power!”

  Amazing! Denial. Delusion. Self-deception. Steve can’t believe it. Jared flipped out like he planned but not into acceptance of his violence—into further denial! Should I have expected a conversion? But then he gets it. He remembers ’Nam. So many guys after doing shit after shit, senseless rapes and murders, would say, “What?” if asked how they felt. “About what?” from some nineteen-year-old who would be on Death Row back in the States if he’d done it here. Jennings is shell-shocked, in night-terror denial. Damn.

  Steve snorts and sneers, rolls down the window and spits. With dramatized moves he takes out and finger-rolls a Fraticelli cigar, bites the end, licks it gratifyingly, and with a Zippo flames it. All this is but a delaying action. He waits until he exhales several fluffy clouds of smoke before responding.

  “If we gave power to that black jackrabbit, he’d just kill you. Fool, he almost did. You’d be talking with God right now if I hadn’t been there. If we gave power to that white queer trash, they’d just fuck your asshole and jack off in your mouth until you died. Then they’d crush you. Fraticelli, he has power, and he lives at its source. It’s the source that the ole nigger testified to. Papa is the power. That what his ‘Yasser’ was all about.”

  Jared feels compelled to testify, knows that he believes, wants to believe: “You think the old black dude is under your power? Jesus, Steve, you’re the naïf. He was the only truly free person in that whole fucking joint, including you and me and Fraticelli. Man, fuck, you’ve got it all ass upwards and backwards. You wouldn’t know power, shit, if it was bottled and you got a magnum for Christmas.”

  These words close down the day’s chatter. Truth be told, Steve and Jared are seriously wearing on each other in a way they haven’t before. Stoned on the Ride and coming down!

  Steve’s relieved in a way Jared is not because he knows that the Ride is soon to end. Just one more act to go! After tonight’s plane ride and the next stop, Jared will either be ready to meet the Boss—for what reason Agent Witson has no idea—or . . . Steve’s not sure what comes after “or.” Just knows that Jared Jennings, 8867-147 will be out of his hands. Finally!