Part 5 (1/2)

Wallace said, ”I sent you and MacKay in there because I thought you could be nonthreatening, because I wanted to keep the situational dynamics steady, not explode them.”

Implying, somehow, that the old joker and the new broad were too absurd a threat to inflame a disturbance and simultaneously that everything subsequent had been our fault. Should I have waited until I was raped? I wanted to ask. I knew he would counter that no officer (meaning no male officer) should act preemptively because of a rape threat. But I also knew that was bulls.h.i.+t. There were male COs who walked the blocks in constant fear that the big bend-over choke hold waited just around the next corner.

Wearily I insisted that my record of physical encounters with inmates was normal. That I'd never been reported before. Unlike MacKay, I wanted to add, I didn't tase Hadley in the b.a.l.l.s and give them a squeeze for good measure. I am not the kind to stomp an inmate's guts out when they don't jump fast enough. I'd never dipped my finger in CA and jammed it under someone's eyelid when he was zip-cuffed. I'd never shoved a f.u.c.kstick up someone's a.s.s in a blind dissociation cell.

Instead, I ate it all, every bit of p.i.s.sed-off righteousness, and nodded.

I worked the next three days straight, through a haze of chaos and nerve-deadening exhaustion. The only sleep I got came a few hours at a time in the old barracks on the east field, behind what used to be the warden's house but now served as administration spillover. I slammed so many sliding steel doors I could feel the vibrations in the bones of my wrist. I yelled so many orders my throat went raw. I ran enough hallways in heavy gear to qualify for a marathon. We rousted inmates and dumped cells. We emptied tiers and filled them again. We delivered meals and meds and put up with the shouts of abuse. Just when you thought the calm had returned, something new happened and the shouting and the food throwing started all over again.

”It won't settle until after Christmas,” Baumard, a veteran CO, told us. Baumard had the kind of bristly gray hair that was so accustomed to being buzzed short it probably didn't know how to grow long anymore. But he was also one of those COs of rare intelligence. He had made an unG.o.dly amount of money in the stock market in the late 1990s, but had chosen-actually chosen-to keep working rather than powerboat his way off into the sunset. When it came to most matters, including financial, we listened to him like he was Warren f.u.c.king Buffet. ”All those family, spousal, and girlfriend visits lined up since Thanksgiving are f.u.c.ked because of the lockdown, and it's our fault,” Baumard continued. ”They'll be p.i.s.sed until January.”

Too weary to be irate, we sat in the CO room the afternoon of Christmas Eve loosening vests and eating stale sandwiches from a lace-lined caterer's tray. I desperately needed to go to the bathroom, but Franklin walked out waving his hand and laughing about the toxic waste dump he'd left behind, courtesy of a week eating microwave burritos. The howls of offense from those closest to the escaping odor were enough to persuade me to hold my bladder.

At least our common misery reinforced our sometimes shaky solidarity. COs came in multiple shapes and forms. We had an ex-NFL football player and a surprising number of former schoolteachers. We had roofers and firefighters and retail security guards and ex-soldiers. We had men who loved ice fis.h.i.+ng and men who voted Democrat. We had those who were always broke and others who were always flush. We had women who were single and on the d.y.k.ey side, and women who were ripe and curvy from having kids. We could be as varied and unlikely, or as predictable and stereotypical, as the inmates themselves.

”Did you know Crowley was in art therapy?” a CO named Cutler asked, a nice enough fellow who was too out of shape and go-along-with-the-flow to get much respect from me. ”All of this started just because someone didn't like someone else's drawing.”

No one offered any explanations for why that would be so. I said nothing, though the guilt of my inaction around Josh's comic book was a constant throb in my temples. Others, with more energy, mumbled bitter feelings. Some touchy-feely program had contributed to our endangerment. As a CO, you just knew, on a moral level, that the softness was wrong.

A CO named Droune took up the common position. He cursed the weak sister who'd bolted across the yard and prevented a killing that might have solved many problems. The logic didn't hold, but that didn't seem to matter to Droune or anyone else. ”That old son of a b.i.t.c.h, Brother Mike,” he said, ”ought to get his art licence revoked.”

Baumard then gave Droune s.h.i.+t for letting a decrepit weak sister of the religious persuasion pull such a he-man boot stomping when Droune himself was such a floppy p.u.s.s.y. I didn't like Droune; his father and grandfather had been COs, and that made him a kind of third-generation idiot royalty. Baumard riding Droune was the only thing in a week to make me grin.

My good feeling lasted until I opened my locker. I dialed the combo and tugged. The lock snapped off. When I creaked open the door, I saw a drawing taped to the inside. The rush of embarra.s.sment caught me hard-maybe my tiredness, maybe my sense that they never gave me a f.u.c.king break no matter how hard I worked to ignore it. But instead of reacting, I forced my voice into that tone of a teacher in a room full of grade school students, and said, ”I suppose this delivered itself?”

Josh again. A similar drawing to the one Brother Mike had shown me. This time the female barbarian had a sword in one hand and decapitated head in the other, a snake tattoo winding around her wrist. She was s.e.xy and saucy, hip thrust in exaggerated fas.h.i.+on to one side. She wore furs on her waist, high boots, and nothing on top, those well-endowed b.r.e.a.s.t.s with dark, l.u.s.ty, and, once more, remarkably upward-pointed nipples. My distinguished colleagues gathered around.

”Amazing how those things get around,” Cutler said.

”You mind if I make a few copies?” Droune asked, the twitters about to erupt.

I had no doubt they'd already xeroxed the s.h.i.+t out of it.

”Maybe blow it up, frame it, put it on the living-room wall,” Franklin suggested.

Then: ”Howdy, Radar,” Baumard said in a loud voice. Everyone knew it was a warning, that Michael Ruddik had just walked into the room, meaning there was a rat on deck. Instantly I felt the dynamics of the school yard play out in predictable fas.h.i.+on. From being the target, I became another bystander. That didn't mean I sympathized with the new victim. Instead, I shared the group's disdain as much as I felt personal relief. On the surface, there was nothing about Ruddik to inspire any particular loathing. He was early forties, experienced, tall, athletic, even good-looking in a dark-haired, brooding kind of way. But he was widely suspected to be the resident Secret Sam, a member of the corrections staff covertly a.s.signed to investigate inmate complaints against COs. Every inst.i.tution had one or more-sometimes FBI, sometimes DEA-someone watching the watchers. Coming off my recent meeting with Keeper Wallace about my actions involving Shawn Hadley, Ruddik was the last person in the world I wanted to run into. I shoved the drawing into my locker and got out my jacket.

”Check this out,” Franklin said. Ruddik ignored him.

”Oh, come on, Radar,” Droune said. ”Don't be such a prude. That's a work of G.o.dd.a.m.n art.”

Ruddik, who hadn't said anything, merely got a pair of rubber gloves from his locker and gave Droune a mock salute. Then he left.

I was about to do the same, given the freedom to go home for that most silent of nights, watch some taped talk show, and pa.s.s out in front of the TV, when Baumard asked me if I'd work his bubble s.h.i.+ft for him so he could read his grandkids The Night Before Christmas.

9.

How could I say no? Single me. No children of my own. No brothers or sisters with cute nephews and nieces. No parent to look in on. No husband or boyfriend to fear offending. No presents to buy. I needed the cash. A bubble s.h.i.+ft was as good as a night on the couch, except you got paid for it. With all the inmates snug in their cells and a complete lockdown enforced, there would be little need to pay attention. Safe, all-seeing, and powerful, requiring no physical exertion. If you kept one ear c.o.c.ked for the radio and your partner kept his mouth shut, sweet dreams awaited.

So I said yes-before I learned that Cutler would be my s.h.i.+ft partner, a man who couldn't keep his mouth shut for more than two minutes at a stretch.

Still, when we settled in for the duty after a dinner of pizza and chicken wings ordered in special by Baumard, even Cutler seemed subdued by the night and the long s.h.i.+fts leading up to it. The floor of the bubble was raised inside, and you felt like you were floating above the ground. The caged and gla.s.sed windows ran a complete circle around and above you, giving you full vision of the main hub. At night you kept the lights dim. On the console desk you had black-and-white cameras directed at fixed spots in the hub's major access points and the corridors of each wing. The grainy screens showed concrete, stone, and steel bars, like images of s.h.i.+pwrecks in deep water.

”Wish I was home,” Cutler said, letting out a yawn. ”Wish I was pretty much anywhere but here.”

I rogered that and tried to keep my eyes from falling shut. The chicken wings, so tasty in the moment, had made me feel bloated and drugged. Soon Cutler was sleeping, his head thrown back, his bulbous neck doing something tuba-like to the snores that bellowed forth.

Naturally, given such peace and quiet on such a blessed night, I succ.u.mbed to dark thoughts. My life at Ditmarsh had the taste if not the quality of failure. The job was a trap born of a momentous decision in my mid-thirties to enlist in the military before it was too late. But in my glorious 187 days of boots on ground in Iraq, all I did was live on a base, guard trucks, and feel grimy and sunstroked. The CO bit had not been in the plans. As soon I returned home, I looked into law enforcement, but there was nothing local going on. Then my father got sick. Despite feeling resentful about the situation that put me in, I took a job with the state corrections service to stay near at hand, and I ended up at the oldest penitentiary in the system, where none of the teachings and tactics I learned at the six-week corrections academy training course seemed to matter. The cliche of prison guard life was for real. I felt as if I too were doing time. My life outside was pared down, my belongings, my relations.h.i.+ps, my routine all simplified. In Iraq I'd thought about friends and relatives all the time, wrote letters, sent intense feelings through e-mails, pictures, jokes. After my first year at Ditmarsh I stopped working so hard at keeping people near. And n.o.body seemed to notice.

I sat and counted the reasons I wished I had said no to Baumard's s.h.i.+ft. Then I saw the sign.

In the middle of the bubble was a hatch where the floor opened up, and under it was a stone staircase going down to the armaments room below, and below that to the sealed-off dissociation holding cells we called the City. Above the door, on the wall, was an old fallout shelter sign: two yellow triangles on the bottom, one on the top within a circle. Except someone with a sense of humor had unriveted the sign from the wall and secured it upside down, like a distress signal, and scrawled the letters NOYFB beneath, like a Latin expression on some crest. NOYFB meant ”none of your f.u.c.king business,” and it was typical CO machismo. When I saw the mark in Crowley's comic book, I'd felt some vague recognition, but it was not until I was leaning back in my chair at the console deck and staring at the upside-down fallout shelter sign that I made the connection. Good G.o.d, I thought. How had that sign ended up in the drawing of an inmate?

It wasn't my job. None of my f.u.c.king business. And still I rose from the chair, gently, so as not to disturb Cutler, and walked over to the hatch.

Once, it had seemed like a juvenile prank, but the fallout shelter sign was ominous to me now, as though the menacing face were guarding the entrance to something wrong. The most common reason to descend the hatch stairs was to check the armaments or urinate in a corner, an unlikely act for me. We stored weapons down there along with a.s.sorted tools like fire hoses and canisters of chemical agent. Off the armaments room were four brick-sealed alcoves. Once upon a time, those alcoves were the beginnings of tunnels that led to other buildings within the complex, a means of escaping in case of dire emergency, but they were closed now, and anyone stuck in the bubble during a major disturbance would be holed up until the cavalry arrived.

Below the armaments room was the City. The old dissociation unit had cells so small and dark and inhumane that after a history of bad incidents and suicides and accidental slips, the door had been finally closed for good. I'd never been down there. The welding had taken place a few years before my time. The warden declared that sealing off the City was a gesture symbolizing the beginning of a new era. The old-timers were not happy about losing the best threat they'd ever possessed. The new dissociation range was like a stay at a Holiday Inn by comparison.

I felt gravity itself pulling me down. I would merely look, duck down quickly, and make sure the door to the City was still sealed shut. I gripped Cutler's damp shoulder until he blinked.

”Sorry,” I said, guilty for stirring him. ”I'm going down below. Something's not right.”

He reached for his baton and rubbed his eyes to wake himself up.

”What do you mean?” he asked.

”Nothing,” I said. ”I'll be right back. I just want you to know where I've gone.”

Before I descended the stairs of the hatch, I wanted someone to know where I was going.

The armaments room felt completely cut off from the world above, the bricked-up alcoves like four blinded eyes. The staircase to the City below was behind a heavy wooden door in the west wall, which was blocked by crates. A good sign, I thought as I heaved them to one side. There was a key hanging on a hook on the wall above it. Not so long ago, jailers had carried rings of such keys. The old padlock was as heavy as a cannonball. The lock opened, and I pulled the doors back.

”Everything okay?” Cutler called down. I could still see his shape in the entrance above me.

”Yes,” I said. ”I think it's all fine.” Hoping it so.

The air that lifted up to me was mildewy and cold. I shone my flashlight on the wet walls and the narrow rounded steps. It was a steep walk down, and I had to lean back to avoid hitting my head. When I reached the bottom and came to the second door, I saw the propane canister on the ground. They just left the G.o.dd.a.m.n blowtorch right there. I felt my anxiety soar. A bar had been fitted back into place to keep the door locked from the outside.