The Four Stages Of Cruelty Part 4

"Don't you wish you could have had a hot bath and stayed in bed?" Pinckney said behind me, calmer now, less burdened. He was the type of tall man whose striking height is apparent only when he's standing next to you.

I ignored the innuendo that came with his emphasis on the word "bed." "Overtime suits me fine." With a reasonable number of emergencies to attend to, my salary promised to jump from fifty-two to sixty-five plus a year. That was all right by me.

We both caught sight of the fight that had erupted in D-one of the men inexplicably dragged out of his ground-level cell by two others, dropped into a huddled heap on the open floor, and subjected to a drawn-out performance of stomping and kicking in full view of the camera. Like fake wrestling, except these guys thought fake wrestling was real.

"Looks like Felix Rose," I said. Rose was gang affiliated though none too special, making it likely we were watching a little fringe-level payback.

"What I wouldn't give for some tear gas and high-powered rifles," Pinckney said.

"Just give me a fire hose," I added, sharing his frustration. The COs couldn't do a thing while the range was out of control. Rules were absurdly strict in handling crisis situations. You needed to negotiate for calm, practically beg the men to stop. You even had to keep providing their meals. Forgoing brute force or hunger as a deterrent, you were left only with boredom-eventually, having nothing better to do, the inmates allowed you to resume control of the situation. For the COs it was humiliating because it clarified the degree to which the inmates were truly running the asylum. Pinckney told me to have fun.

In the lockers behind Keeper's office, I got my gear on, a chest protector and fireman-type gloves, a helmet with a visor like some outer-s.p.a.ce welder's, a spool of extra zips, a spare f.u.c.kstick, but no guns, no Tasers, no shield, nothing fun. All dress-up and no party.

In a full-scale riot I would have been on the front lines from the get-go, but this business was contained to one range, and there were plenty of URF COs on hand, so Keeper Pollack asked me to do normal rounds and check on the calm ranges. This was thankless s.h.i.t. The inmates were on full lockdown, probably glad to be out of harm's way, though acting feistier than normal, especially when I was in the vicinity. I withstood more than the usual laughs and calls of abuse.

By midnight it was my turn to join the activity on D block and pretend to be in control of the situation behind the gates. An a.s.sistant warden stood halfway down the tunnel, talking on his cell phone. Of course, no one reminded him that he couldn't have a cell phone inside. Three administrative cronies hovered near him. I didn't glance at them as I pa.s.sed. Six COs huddled at the front line, including Keeper Wallace, the officer in charge. He looked plumper than normal in his vest, his eyes dark with the usual exhaustion. My arrival got Keon, another URF CO, a free pa.s.s to the lockers. He looked at me gratefully. "Hope n.o.body's sleeping on my bench."

Wallace asked me how things were in the other blocks. I had nothing outlandish to report. Everything was restless but under control.

Ray MacKay was there, too. He lifted his visor and grinned at me like a kid out for Halloween. We backed off the cellblock entry so he could brief me, meaning fill me in on all the f.u.c.kups and hilarious s.h.i.t encountered thus far.

"D-one refused to comply when we ordered all ranges into lockdown. Or Hadley and Vargas refused, and the rest of their tier mates followed suit. Couple hours back, Hadley took a nap right in the middle of the floor and asked for a bedtime lullaby. Said it felt like he was camping outside and looking up at the stars."

From the range, Hadley yelled out, "Yo, Lieutenant Wallace, you got yourself an improved situation there. I wholeheartedly appreciate you bringing in cheerleader Williams."

Even in a helmet and body armor.

A few laughs from other inmates. "Send her in for negotiation. Promise we won't bite."

"Much!"

I'd once caught Hadley with Vargas's d.i.c.k in his mouth. I wanted to remind him of that fact right now, but not in front of Wallace.

"How did those two ever end up on the same tier?" I asked. "Didn't they transfer in here together?" I spoke quietly. I did not want the a.s.sistant warden or any of his people to hear my complaining.

"For the same c.r.a.p as this," MacKay said without any discretion. "We're just full of forgiveness."

Wallace shook his head. "They'll get tired eventually." He raised his voice. "You just let us know when we can get treatment for those men in there, Hadley. Every minute that goes by is making it worse for you."

"f.u.c.k you, you fat f.u.c.king pig!" Vargas yelled out.

"That's a write-up, Vargas," Wallace said. "I'm taking note of everything."

Vargas and Hadley laughed like orangutans inside a cage at the idea of being written up for bad language.

"Don't think I won't," Wallace said, as much to himself as anyone else.

An hour and a half later, at two-twelve in the a.m., Hadley agreed to let Felix Rose be taken to the hospital. "I am tired of this sorry motherf.u.c.ker whining and crying all the G.o.dd.a.m.n time," Hadley said. "You think it's so tough losing your precious kidney? That ain't the worst way you can p.i.s.s blood, you hair-icle c.o.c.ksucker."

I looked to MacKay. "What does hair-icle mean?"

"Don't ask me," MacKay said. "I thought Felix Rose was bald."

I tried not to laugh.

"He's saying heretical," Wallace explained, impatient with our joking. "He keeps calling him heretical."

"Jesus Christ," MacKay muttered. "Religious intolerance is at the root of all conflict these days, isn't it."

"You two quiet down and get ready," Wallace said.

Wallace informed the a.s.sistant warden and was told to proceed. He opened the gate and let me and MacKay go through. I was surprised that Wallace would ask me to step into a crisis situation, given his reluctance to have me on URF at all, but I was sure as h.e.l.l not going to turn down the opportunity. I kept my riot mask up. I wanted full eye contact with everyone. I wanted Hadley, Vargas, and every other s.h.i.tbag to know I was not afraid to be walking among them. There were syringes and homemade knives on the floor, tossed out from every cell in preparation for the inevitable shakedown after the reign of glory had pa.s.sed. Hadley kept his distance, but he held a metal pipe in his hand with a duct-taped handle. A few of the inmates hooted and whooped to have two COs in their grasp, but n.o.body made a move forward. They're as worn-out as we are, I thought. When it came down to it, all inmates craved routine. It was their comfort blanket and their teddy bear. Mini-riots launched by s.a.d.i.s.tic a.s.sholes like Shawn Hadley were disruptions to the natural flow.

The range smelled sour and grim. Unwashed bodies. An acrid odor that reminded me of cat p.i.s.s. I wondered if Felix Rose really was having kidney failure. He lay in his cell on the floor. He'd pulled a sheet off the cot to cover himself. The sheet was wet and sticking to his body. He wasn't moving. "Felix?" I called. He still didn't move. I stepped in closer and pulled back the sheet, fearing the worst. His face was drained white and drizzled with sweat. There were serious contusions on his forehead, purple mounds that stuck out like erupting volcanoes. Between and beneath the bruisings I saw something that startled me, a triangle deliberately burned into his skin like a brand, all welted and seeping. His eyes opened, a frightened rabbit staring. He started breathing rapidly, like a woman in labor, and muttered a few "please G.o.ds."

"We're going to need a stretcher," I told MacKay. Felix groaned at my touch. "I'll stay with him."

MacKay backed out of the small s.p.a.ce. I kept my fingers on Rose's neck, checking the weak pulse. "We'll get you out of here, Felix," I said. Back in the world, Felix was a drug-addicted break-and-enter lowlife who'd started a house fire to destroy the body of an old woman he'd clubbed to death. In here, he was just another sorry sack of s.h.i.t. Despite it all, you care about the human life. Time on my hands, I looked up and around. Besides the usual amenities I noticed a postcard-size drawing taped to the single shelf above Rose's desk. The same pumpkin face, the same stack of pyramids.

Were they everywhere? I remembered that Rose was a friend of Crowley's. Did that put them together in some common cause? I thought of the Beggar walking across the desert toward the towered city, the many minions there who knew him.

"What a sweetheart you are," Hadley said behind me.

I whirled around, almost kneeing Rose in my haste.

"Couldn't have asked for a better Christmas present."

I was used to being in intimate contact with thugs and f.u.c.kheads, but I had never been trapped inside an enclosed s.p.a.ce by one before. Hadley blocked the door, the pipe in his hand, his shirt wide-open, his free hand dipped into the top of his sweatpants. Of course I imagined the worst. The last time a female staff member had been raped-a nurse in the howler ward-the URF team, unwilling to break in and risk the nurse's life without negotiating a stand-down first, sat outside the door and listened for hours while the son of a b.i.t.c.h sodomized her. There was no way I would ever let that happen to me. I had my f.u.c.kstick at my belt and figured I could get it before he came down with the pipe, but then it would be hand-to-hand combat, and I had no illusions about any certainty of outcome there.

"You ready for a s.h.i.t kicking, Hadley?" I asked.

He stared at me, the same stupid smile weakened ever so slightly.

"Go ahead, Ray, f.u.c.k him up," I said.

Hadley bit and looked around for Ray. I whipped out and down with the f.u.c.kstick as hard as I could, snapping the outside of his knee. He dropped like he'd been shot, rolled onto his side curling both hands over his kneecap, and called me every name I'd ever heard.

My breath heavy, I watched him for sudden movement, any sign that he was just waiting for me to step closer.

"You okay in there?" Wallace called out.

I didn't answer, and I couldn't will myself to walk past Hadley.

MacKay appeared, the stretcher under his arm.

"What the f.u.c.k?" he said.

"He made a move," I told him.

MacKay's face twisted into a sneer, and he pulled out a stun gun the size of a penlight from his waist belt and pointed it down at Hadley's groin.

"I'll cut your f.u.c.king b.a.l.l.s off," he promised.

Don't, I thought, and turned my head away. The stun gun arced its electric jolt across the foot of s.p.a.ce toward Hadley's crotch. Hadley's back arched for a frozen second, then released, and he lay on the stone floor moaning like a sick puppy, little spit bubbles specking the corners of his mouth. MacKay reached down and grabbed him by the sack, slowly but lazily, the way you'd pick up a bowling ball before a meaningless shot. "I bet you can't feel anything down there right now." And Hadley moaning no, no, no. "I bet it's all numb, like you sat on your foot for the last half hour, like you got a novocaine shot in your lip." Twisting hard, talking gentle. "You let me know later how it feels when it wakes up. I'm curious." The fat knuckles on his hand blotching white and pink.

Needing to get away, I stepped over Hadley and squeezed by MacKay, picked up the piece of pipe and walked over to the gate. Vargas watched me from the middle of the range, p.i.s.sed off but not moving. "You f.u.c.king b.i.t.c.h," he said with as much hatred as I'd heard in a voice in some time. I pa.s.sed the pipe through the bars to Wallace and kept my eyes on Vargas. MacKay released Hadley and let him crawl away from the cell. He twisted painfully along the floor, wishing us slow, horrible deaths. It would have been easy now to tag him and drag his a.s.s out, but the order was not given, the protocol so extra-cautious it boggled the mind. A CO named Davidson came through the gate to help load Felix Rose onto the stretcher. I leaned against the bars, trying to get my breathing under control. G.o.dd.a.m.n lucky, my racing heart told me. I avoided any glance back at Wallace, wondering how much he'd seen, whether they'd heard MacKay's Taser. Lucky, lucky, lucky. When Davidson and MacKay huffed back with the stretcher, Wallace told me to take Davidson's end and get out. "I can't look at you right now." So he had noticed. My first time with a little danger pay on URF, and already I'd been involved in a f.u.c.kup.

I exchanged with Davidson and grunted when the full weight became mine, surprised as usual at how heavy a human body could be. We shuffled along, pa.s.sing the a.s.sistant warden who was striding fast the other way, calling out to Wallace for a situation report. The riot helmet was jiggling and slipping over my eyes, off kilter, as though I were suddenly a little kid wearing a fireman's costume for Halloween. f.u.c.k f.u.c.k f.u.c.k, I thought, wishing that someone else was carrying Felix Rose's dying a.s.s.

MacKay needed to rest three times along the way. I was thankful for each break. The stretcher was an old-fashioned canvas job from some M*A*S*H episode. There was no elevator to the infirmary. By the time we finally made it, Felix Rose had stopped moaning. The male nurses took him. I leaned against a table and felt my age, all thirty-nine years weighing on my lungs.

"Give me a minute?" I asked Ray. "Something I want to check on."

He nodded, just as beat. "Take your sweet f.u.c.king time."

I exited the triage room and headed down the main hallway where the full doors lined those private drums. At DI-2, I stopped and looked in. Crowley's cell. Empty, so I knew he must be in the dissociation unit. Without opening the door, I scanned the walls for drawings, scratches, some of the circle and triangle marks I'd been seeing around, but I noticed nothing. I moved next door to DI-3 and peered inside. Josh lay on the mattress, his eyes closed. I hissed his name, and he looked up.

"It's me," I said, feeling like an idiot for entering into such Romeo and Juliet mode.

"Officer Williams?"

"Yes." I winced. I fished my keys and unlocked his door, stepped inside, and kept it propped open.

He looked terrified, as though his purest fantasy had suddenly turned real. Me in my body armor, all sweated up and ready.

"We've got two minutes, and you're going to explain some things to me."

He nodded. "What things?"

"The fight in the yard. Is that what you were expecting to happen to Crowley?"

A blank stare, then a nod. "I don't know. Maybe."

"Did Elgin jump Crowley because of that f.u.c.king comic book?"

Another careful nod. "I think so. A lot of people were really upset because they didn't know Crowley was still working on it."

"A lot of people?"

"Elgin. Roy. Others I heard about."

"Roy?"

"A little. He called Crowley crazy one time when he came to visit, and they were pretty mad at each other. Crowley wanted me to keep six for him."

Keep six. Watch his back.

"And where's the comic book now?"

Another shrug. "I don't have it."

"Crowley have it?"

"I don't know. Where is he?"

"Doing time," I said. I heard a noise on the infirmary range, some door opening and closing, and I felt panicked about getting caught in this impromptu moment of impropriety. I slipped out of Josh's open door and closed it behind me.

"Where's Crowley?" Josh asked again. But I ignored him and headed back for triage.

I peered into the caged beds in the intensive care unit, searching for Elgin. I could at least check on his status, but then I saw MacKay sitting on the edge of a desk in the triage area, looking bewildered and out of sorts. Something bad has happened, I thought, and hurried over.

"What's wrong?" I asked. "You all right?"

He didn't look good. He coughed, a hacking that grew worse until it sounded as though something loose were flapping inside his chest. He wiped the sweat off his forehead. "Bad time to catch a cold," he muttered.

I relaxed and found myself a chair and swung into it. We'd both take it easy, rest off the hard haul.

"You always got a cold," I said. "You caught it from cigarettes and rye."

I thanked him for helping me out back there, even though I was mildly horrified by what he'd done with the Taser. He must have picked up on my queasiness because he started in about the old days. How things used to be handled. If a prisoner f.u.c.ked with a guard, there'd be time for payback at leisure. I understood the reasoning, but I was too tired to voice any nuances about more humane options. All I wanted was food. I had a can of tomato soup in my locker, a year old if a day. It never seemed so tantalizing as now. If I could only get there, take off my helmet, and spend fifteen minutes by myself, I might just be all right.

MacKay stopped talking. I watched his gaze fall, an odd look of dismay in his eyes. Before I could reach his shoulder, he slid deeper into the chair. Then his hands flew up, and he tipped out completely. I yelled for an orderly and started loosening his vest.

8.

I'd been told once, by one of the COs who did summer work as a volunteer bush firefighter, that a forest could burn under the ground. Instead of a wall of flame eating its way across the woods in an organized front, there was another kind of battle in which wildfires burst out spontaneously at random spots. You could be walking through the trees in the dim smoke, feel the hollow heat of the ground below, and see a demon shoot out from the earth to consume a birch tree to your left, or a flame spiral in the air like a will-o'-the-wisp. You didn't understand the mechanism of the fire-where to intervene with it, how to antic.i.p.ate or fight it-because it was actually going on below you, unseen. I felt that way about Ditmarsh during the double shifts that followed MacKay's coronary. C block burst out the next night, for reasons no one attempted to explain. It wasn't hard to douse those flames-the inmates gave themselves up like Iraqi soldiers, worn-out and thankful, biding their time for a later insurgency-but the preponderance of other isolated disturbances kept you wary and tense, dreading the next surprise. A hot shot on D-1, the needle still stuck in the dead inmate's arm. A CO nailed in the neck by a pin from a zip gun, attacked by some sniper with extraordinary aim, the pin probably tipped with contaminated blood or fecal matter. We all feared invisible arrows after that, listened for tings, slapped at the slightest itch.

I had no time to think of MacKay, yet I was sick over him and could hardly bear to ask for news. When the siren blasted an inmate escape two mornings after MacKay fell, the noise cracked the just brightening sky and obliterated all rational thought, as though the confusion had shrapneled and the fragments were whipping past our ears. An inmate escape? Why the f.u.c.k not? As good a time as any to jump the wall. Soon the word went around. By all counts, a single man down. Who've you got-who've you seen-when did you last see them? I knew the names of all the inmates I'd escorted and signed away at the dissociation unit with its hallways of isolated cells. But like everyone, I feared the kind of mistake you could make lockstepped into the forward march of turmoil.

Then the word came that inmate Jon Crowley was the wall hopper, and the information gave me a bad feeling all over. How had we missed him? A full three days following the yard incident, no one could account for where he'd been escorted, nor by whom, whether he'd been shuffled to the infirmary for treatment like the others involved in the fracas or whether he'd been sent straight to dis without delay. It baffled me that no CO put up his hand and claimed responsibility for having brought Crowley somewhere. Surely the trail would lead to that CO eventually. Wouldn't it be better to admit a mistake now rather than later? I kept thinking, he'll just show up. Someone has stashed him somewhere odd, lost him like a wallet or a watch or a set of keys, and then they'll remember. It had to be some bureaucratic oversight, some inst.i.tutional f.u.c.kup-you did not escape from prison, not these days, not when your arm was in a half-body cast.

During my duty wanderings I kept an eye out for everyone who was part of Brother Mike's group. I located Screen Door and Horace and Bradwyn in gen pop, and although I saw no opportunity to talk to them, by sight each of the three seemed to share a timidity and wariness, or maybe it was just something I imagined. Josh was ensconced in his cell in the howler ward, and Roy Duckett was lodged in an open triage bed because of some head injury, while Lawrence Elgin lay in a similar bed within a cage, his wrists and ankles belted to the bed frame. More disturbing to me were the marks I began to notice on walls and floors and etched into doorframes and drains. Sometimes sentence fragments, with the occasional warped poem. "Shoot now." "Liquor up." "G.o.d Bless Ditmarsh." "Electricity is Zappy!" "Humpty Dumpty is the baddest of them all." But also curious scratches: lines and dots that looked deliberate but indecipherable, circles, loops, the outlines of unknown countries, other details that seemed randomly and fiercely scratched out. And finally, pictures everywhere, crudely drawn animals like cave paintings, huge p.e.n.i.ses, gashlike v.a.g.i.n.as, melon-size b.r.e.a.s.t.s, contorted s.e.xual acts of every deviant position and combination, swords and spears, hot-rod cars, the sun, the moon, the towers of a city.

Was I the first CO to pay them any attention? Through the filter of my overtired imagination, it seemed to me that the symbols were multiplying, that marks and drawings and depictions and scratches were growing thicker in hallways and walls the second or third time I came back to look. I longed to doc.u.ment the mess with my cell phone camera, though I knew that was crazy.

I was not the only one mentally taxed by the prolonged situation. Among the inmates and COs the usual rumors achieved an unusual frenzy. Someone had found an ingenious tunnel from the infirmary to the loading dock of the old furniture warehouse-that's how Crowley must have escaped. Other rumors focused on his current whereabouts. Crowley was on a Mexican beach having a last laugh, inmates claimed, and COs half believed. Crowley was in witness protection, whatever intelligence he'd offered up to the FBI so valuable they'd sneaked him out during a manufactured riot and made it look like an escape.

The four keepers were on hand almost all of the time, and I'd never seen that before. At various lulls I stoked myself to approach Keeper Wallace and inform him of the comic book that Josh Riff had shown me after the funeral outing. But each time, I let the opportunity go by and told myself that the knowledge I possessed was just more meaningless noise, that the graffiti and markings I noticed everywhere had always been there and were random and pointless. Then Wallace pulled me aside to give me s.h.i.t about Shawn Hadley.

I couldn't believe, in the midst of everything else going on, that Wallace would even think to go back over the incident in D block, but he acted as though nothing had ever pinched his a.s.shole tighter. "You jumped the force continuum," he informed me. I knew the speech, the hierarchy of physical engagement. Verbal warnings that went unheeded were followed by control holds, body blocks, and sanctioned takedown techniques. If the inmate did not stand down and submit, then the corrections officer applied chemical agent, or CA. Only if CA was deemed ineffective did the corrections officer resort to the f.u.c.kstick. Any head shots with f.u.c.kstick, fist, or boot needed to be reported and recorded in the head shot log. Of course the COs thought it was nonsense. We'd invented a head shot shooter to celebrate such occasions-tequila with a blood-red drip of Tabas...o...b..t it still killed you to get singled out.