Protection

by S A Reid

  “Oh, Christ,” Gabriel muttered, seeing Cooper curled up and weeping on the shower floor.

  “Go ahead.” Cooper sounded defiant.

  “What?”

  “Call me a liar. Isn’t that what you said? Every inmate claims innocence?”

  Gabriel finished his Pall Mall, dropping the dog-end and grinding it beneath his heel. “When I came here, I said I’d never turn prison queer. I bit off Carl Werth’s dick and that was the last of any man trying to force me. But turns out that was only half the battle. You can only imagine fucking women for so long before your body needs relief. So I took a girl – Lonnie, the blond from the infirmary. You know him?”

  Cooper nodded.

  “Pretty lad. Brains of a gnat. I never did have him,” Gabriel said. “Was saving myself, don’t you know, like a good Catholic boy awaiting the altar. Awaiting a man who deserved what he got. So I could fuck him into next year and not give a damn what it did to him. And being the sterling judge of character I am,” Gabriel forced a laugh, “I picked the only innocent man this godforsaken place has ever seen.”

  Cooper’s gaze dropped. He hugged himself, trembling, fighting back more tears with all his strength.

  “Cooper. Joseph. Did – did I hurt you so bad?”

  The twist of those red lips was answer enough. Gabriel blew out a sigh. Of all the sins he’d committed, venal or mortal, when he was most ashamed, Gabriel remembered that duckling’s neck, crushed by a slamming door.

  “Fair enough. Joseph,” Gabriel said, wishing the other man would look at him. “Some wrongs can’t be undone. I wronged you in the showers. I know that now. I’ll never use you that way again. But we can start over as cellmates. I meant what I said about protecting you, Joseph. I—”

  “Joey.”

  “What?”

  “My name. It’s Joey.” The younger man let out another bitter laugh. “You’ve had everything else from me. Might as well have that, too. Everyone calls me Joey.”

  “Joey.” Before he knew he would do it, Gabriel tilted the other man’s chin up and pressed their closed lips together. It was just as he’d fantasized – an electric shock, a jolt from his mouth right to the tip of his cock. But the kiss was one-sided. Joey’s lips didn’t part. His whole body went rigid, eyes shut tight as if in pain.

  “Joey.” Gabriel pulled back. “Look at me.”

  Joey obeyed. Gabriel saw the other man’s eyes in the mirror-reflected light. They were blank with terror.

  “Joey,” Gabriel said again, trying to curtail the emotion in his voice. “What I did in the showers won’t happen again. I mean it. But the hard fact is, I’m only human. The price of protection is simple. You have to let me touch you. Kiss you. Not every time the lights go out. Not every night of the week. But – enough.”

  Joey didn’t react. Didn’t agree. Didn’t resist. Looking into those wide gray eyes, Gabriel had the sudden suspicion the other man was fading, slipping away.

  “Joey!” Gabriel shook the other man until he jerked free.

  “Stop!”

  “It’s no good if you go away inside.” Gabriel knew he had no right to be angry or frustrated, but he preferred both sensations to abject shame. “When I touch you, when I kiss you, you have to know it’s me.”

  Joey covered his face with his hands. He had nothing left to give, Gabriel realized. If he pushed any harder, the younger man might break altogether.

  “Away with you.”

  “W-what?” Joey asked, returning from far away.

  Gabriel pointed at the top bunk. “Tonight’s kiss is paid up. Away with you. And not another peep ’til morning.”

  * * *

  Since his realization at age fifteen that he would be a physician, Joey Cooper had read everything he could get his hands on concerning anatomy, biology and pharmacology. But after his sentencing, he’d given away most of his possessions, including his science books. As for the prison library’s nonfiction stacks, he avoided them. Daily life held enough bitter reminders. But unable to survive without books, Joey had thrown himself headlong into fiction, choosing novels set in remote times or places. Within two weeks he’d read David Copperfield, The Last of the Mohicans, Cimarron, The Sea Hawk and The Good Earth.

  “Hard road for those Chinks,” Gabriel had commented when he saw Joey with The Good Earth. “My grandmother used to say it’s no life fit for pigs, being a lass. After reading that, I think she nailed it.”

  Joey hadn’t known how to reply. Whatever traits he’d imagined in Gabriel, compulsive reading wasn’t among them. During those early days Joey never spoke to Gabriel unless he had no choice. But protracted silence during the hours of confinement was hard to bear. And Gabriel was surprisingly easy to talk to, quick-witted and intelligent. More than shrewd, as Joey first assumed, Gabriel was self-educated in many areas. He knew the Bible like a seminarian, quoting it chapter and verse, and could recite several poems from memory.

  “Ah, but I’m a man who likes the sound of his own voice,” Gabriel said when Joey was startled by his word-perfect rendition of “The Tyger.” “A poem’s no poem at all ’til you deliver it with an Irish lilt.”

  Joey’s first two weeks under Gabriel’s protection took some getting used to. Few inmates spoke to Joey without first receiving a silent assent from Gabriel. No liberties, not even joking offers or lascivious remarks, were tolerated. One day a G-block Lovely named Petrocelli had offered Joey “something sweet to suck on.” Before Joey could decide if he should feign deafness or hurl back an insult, Gabriel steered Petrocelli to one side, talking quietly to the man while Gabriel’s F-block cohorts hovered just out of earshot. To Joey’s relief, no physical violence ensued. But it was a very near thing. White with fury, Petrocelli had shambled off. Then Gabriel reappeared at Joey’s side with fresh perspiration on the back of his neck and damp patches beneath each armpit.

  “What did you say to him?”

  “Never you mind.” Gabriel sounded unconcerned. “Fetch your supper and think no more on it.”

  The story of Gabriel’s conviction came to Joey in multiple forms, none of them dovetailing sufficiently explain why Gabriel was serving two life sentences, yet hadn’t gone to the gallows. Joey was curious, yet refused to ask. Asking was expected. Inside Wentworth, asking was the universal connection: hearing a man’s story of how his personal liberty had been lost, squandered or in Joey’s case, stolen. But Joey couldn’t make that ritual gesture. The moment he asked Gabriel how he’d come to Wentworth, he might as well have declared it was no hard feelings between them, water under the bridge, a bad moment in the showers and best forgotten. And Joey wouldn’t do that. It was one thing, answering a direct question about a novel, or a meal, or who would shave first. But the idea of behaving as if he and Gabriel were friendly, much less friends, made Joey want to jerk the blade out of a safety razor and open his own wrists.

  And maybe he’d do that before long, anyway. But not just yet.

  Joey, expected to sit beside Gabriel during common time, learned to endure the hand on his knee, the smiles, the quick kiss when the guards’ eyes were elsewhere. Joey had thought it over endlessly, weighed the cost and decided in order to survive Wentworth, he’d have to accept conditions that would have been unbearable in his former life. After the rape – except he couldn’t call it by that word, it made him feel too weak; inside his head he simply called it what happened – Gabriel’s little ways of publicly declaring ownership seemed small indeed. Joey had needed four sutures after what happened. Then the first time he shit he burst two and had to have them redone. The humiliation of lying on his belly and letting Dr. Harper repair his intimate injury had pained Joey almost as much the memory of Gabriel forcing himself inside.

  “You’re too pretty for your own good,” Dr. Harper had said, stripping off his gloves and tossing them in the rubbish bin. “Let me give you a piece of advice, Cooper. Next time it happens, bear down instead of clenching tight. I don’t enjoy putting in these sutures any more than you enjo
y receiving them.”

  Dr. Harper hadn’t meant to be cruel. Neither had he meant to be kind. He was simply imparting information. That first night locked in a cell with Gabriel, Joey had been too shell-shocked to think rationally. But afterward, the logic was simple. The most dangerous man in Wentworth had offered him protection. Joey would not be beaten, raped or killed by the other prisoners. Gabriel had even promised not to revisit what happened, but on that score, Joey didn’t believe him. Sooner or later, Gabriel would expect all the sexual repayment Joey could give. Still, the conclusion was obvious: appease one man, remain alive and uninjured. Or anger that man, make an enemy of him and take on all of Wentworth in the bargain.

  To Joey, the greatest irony was, if it hadn’t happened, if he’d met Gabriel during common time and received the exact same offer, he probably would have accepted. Joey had never been squeamish about sex. And given all the male advances he’d fought off in his boyhood – including the vicar, the green grocer and a professor of English literature – homosexuality was no foreign concept. Joey had long ago decided if he were ever seriously tempted, he’d try it. But there had always been plenty of girls available to keep him busy. And the men bold enough to try and seduce him were much older, convinced they could buy him with fine dining, liquor and gifts. Joey had felt sure any real temptation would come from someone close to his own age, well built and attractive. And if not for what happened, Gabriel would have fit the bill.

  Gabriel was six feet tall, compactly muscular and handsome. That was a surprise, that Wentworth’s resident devil could look so angelic when he willed it. His dark brown hair was always neat, never overdue for the prison barber. His hazel eyes could be soulful or soulless, depending on his mood. Gabriel’s working-class background, coupled with his strong native intelligence and adoration of the English language, made him all the more compelling. Once upon a time, Gabriel would have been exactly the sort of man Joey might have experimented with, even made love with. But after what happened …

  Until that morning in the showers, Joey had never thought of himself as a coward. He’d grown up fatherless in a village that never let him forget it, taking odd jobs to supplement his mother’s income as a laundress. Sometimes the other children teased him, throwing his natural father’s name – Lionel Coates – at him, calling Joey a bastard and his mother a whore. It didn’t help that Joey grew up so closely resembling Mr. Coates’s daughter, Virginia, they might have been twins. The similarity led to a fresh line of harassment – village children pretending to mistake Joey for Virginia, asking why he was in trousers instead of a frock. During his early life Joey developed a knack for sensing which insults should be ignored and which required a rebuttal or a swift physical response. Decent with his fists, he also learned there were worse things than being knocked about, and that friendships frequently arose from scuffles. By his teens Joey was well liked throughout the village. No one teased him about his natural father or his pretty face anymore. And for his part he learned to hold no grudges, not because he wasn’t tempted but because they were utterly without value.

  But in the showers Joey had failed to defend himself. Failed to keep from screaming, begging, weeping. Dr. Pfiser and the courts had taken everything external from Joey, but Gabriel had taken everything internal – his optimism, his self-assurance, his belief that no matter how bad things got, he could cope. Just the thought of Gabriel touching him made Joey tremble. Being locked with Gabriel in their cell at night, aware of his presence on the bottom bunk, was torture. The first two nights Joey had hardly slept. Could he remain still for Gabriel, endure whatever happened without retching?

  But the first week stretched into the second, and still nothing happened. Gabriel never went into the showers until Joey was done, though he lingered in the towel room to be sure no man tried anything. They ate together, smoked together and gradually began discussing books together. Those rituals grew more and more familiar. But every night Joey climbed into his bunk in his prison-issue pajamas and lay on his back, staring at the ceiling and wondering if this would be the night. And every morning he awakened as the overhead lights snapped on to find Gabriel up and already shaving in front of the cell’s small rectangular mirror.

  Often Lonnie turned up at their table during supper. From what Joey could deduce, Lonnie was still Gabriel’s, though sexual activities between them had ceased. Yet Lonnie didn’t seem jealous of Joey. He was a happy-go-lucky sort, cheerful and frequently idle, except for his mouth.

  “Do you miss it?” Joey asked Lonnie one night over supper. Gabriel had gone off to roust the gang taunting Benjamin Stiles. The big man couldn’t abide raised voices and frequently found himself backed into a corner, the candy bars he bought in the commissary stolen away.

  “Miss what?”

  “You know,” Joey said softly, making certain no one else heard. He’d never met a man willing to admit to homosexuality. Even the men who’d tried to seduce Joey denied it. There was always an excuse – special circumstances or some fleeting appetite. “Being Gabriel’s only lover.”

  “Ah. Well. I suppose.” Using his spoon, Lonnie heaped his mashed potatoes into a hill. “Gabe’s my sort in lots of ways.”

  “Your sort. So you were …?” Joey glanced around surreptitiously. “Homosexual before you were incarcerated?”

  Lonnie’s head jerked up. “Oi. ’Course not.” The denial must have sounded unconvincing even to him, because he added in a suddenly accusing tone, “Why, were you?”

  “No.” Joey smiled. “I was all set to get married. The girl said yes, the ring was purchased, the church was engaged. Then my life fell apart. But I didn’t mean to upset you,” he added, resisting the impulse to place a friendly hand atop Lonnie’s. The nuances of Wentworth’s prison culture were still strange to Joey – God knew what meaning such an otherwise innocent gesture might contain. “I’m merely curious. To know if my turning up here has – well, caused you any grief, I suppose.”

  Lonnie chuckled. “I do love the way you toffs talk. And if you really want to know,” his eyes sparkled, “I weren’t exactly what you’d call a virgin before I got sent up. But the geezers round here don’t want to hear that. Think they’re all proper men, hot for pussy or nothing.” Lonnie pronounced the last word “nuffink.” “Six months later those same geezers are bending me over, going to town like they’re riding a thoroughbred. But I’m the dirty pervert ’cause I tried it of my own free will. They think they’re better than me ’cause they was driven to it.”

  “Gabriel says he was driven to it.”

  “I know.” Lonnie glanced around, then leaned across the table, whispering, “But he knows about me. Knows I was queer when I was outside, and never beat or cursed me. He protected me all the same and still does, even now that you’re here.”

  “But have I done you a bad turn?”

  Lonnie shrugged, flattening his mashed potato hill into a plain. “Told you. I like Gabe. But I couldn’t make him happy. Maybe you’ll have better luck.”

  Joey thought about that. Across the cafeteria, Gabriel was prodding Stiles, still crying, through the food line, forcing him to select meat and vegetables as well as pudding. The convicts who’d tormented the big man had disappeared. They were unlikely to try it again, at least in Gabriel’s presence. Gabriel was treated with friendly respect or overt fear by almost everyone, but among the inmates he seemed to have no friends.

  Of course not, Joey thought. Most of them are mentally subnormal or sociopathic. Their only pursuits were physical exercise, smoking and cards. Gabriel’s intellectual curiosity was alien to them. And he could only win so many games of poker. Afterwards, his restless mind would seek fresh stimulation, at least during those hours he wasn’t using his carpentry skills toward Wentworth’s ongoing renovation.

  Joey had assumed that when it came to work detail, he would be sent to the infirmary, but instead he found himself assigned to B-block’s overhaul. Governor Sanderson, emboldened by the use of British prison labor to
improve roads and dig tunnels, intended to completely rebuild Old Wentworth over the next several years. Gabriel, as Wentworth’s only skilled craftsman, a master carpenter, was indispensible to the project. Joey was just another pair of hands, one of over fifty inmates supervised by an architect, an engineer and the guards.

  Despite the tools at hand – picks, shovels, hammers, ropes, pulleys, large S-hooks and trowels – the outbreaks of bad behavior had been few. Many inmates seemed to relish hard physical labor, particularly when they could see the fruits of their efforts rising around them. And corporal punishment loomed for any man caught misusing or stealing a tool.

  Joey and four others had been set to bricking-in the walls of B-block’s new office. Joey alternately mixed mortar and trowelled it into place as the others laid bricks and wiped away globs of oozing mortar. By afternoon, two walls were up. Then the engineer swept through, noticed their progress on the third wall and demanded they stop at once. The specs for a window space had been completely overlooked.

  The guard in charge of Joey and the others turned belligerent, insisting the plans were unclear and no one could have interpreted them properly. More progress that afternoon looked unlikely – the guard was digging in his heels and the engineer was fit to be tied. So Joey and the others had sat down within the shelter of two and a half walls, smoking and laughing as they speculated on how they’d finally be directed to continue.

  “Cooper! Bet you can read better than Bynum,” one inmate said, meaning the guard who’d misread the plans. “Why don’t you volunteer to supervise us?”

  Joey smiled. The F-block men were easier with him now, occasionally calling out greetings or stopping to pass the time of day. But Joey recognized a challenge when he heard one.