Part 4 (2/2)

”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, wis.h.i.+ng 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, wis.h.i.+ng 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 s.h.i.+fts 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.

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