by J. L. Abramo
“Looks like you’ve been tagged.”
“Whaddya mean, ‘tagged?”
“Somebody musta paid the hack. Why you’re locked in. Bet while we’re at chow, you get a visit. Somebody wants your brown eye.”
My...Oh, fuck!
Then, he told me some other stuff. Something about a hammer...My blood sugar must have been low because I kind of blacked out for a minute. When I gathered my thoughts again, he was gone.
“Guard!” I yelled. “Again. “Guard!” It was more of a scream than a yell, but I couldn’t help it.
“What?” It was the guard I’d seen earlier at the desk. He looked perturbed.
“Have I been tagged?”
“What the fuck? What’s ‘tagged’?”
“I dunno. It’s what he—” Jake was gone.
“Look, Mr. Melon, we can’t let you go to chow. You probably wouldn’t make it back. Somebody will bring your supper to you.”
A long single file of convicts paraded past my cell, exiting at the cellhouse door which was visible from where I stood. More than one looked my way and more than one smacked their lips and winked at me.
I wasn’t that hungry anyway.
That first meeting with Melon was funny. They brought him in just before chow and stuck him in the cell next to mine. At the time, I was over in J Block, kind of the honor cellhouse. Had a first floor cell, smack dead across from where the hack’s desk was. Which was why they put him there, I figured. Keep a better eye on him in case.
Right from the start he was a jerkoff. Asked me what I was doing time for. I just about lost it at that and then realized he wasn’t a real con and just didn’t know any better. So, I decided to fuck with him a bit. When they blew the chow whistle, he asked if that meant there was a riot going down. See? Fruitcake, all the way.
Then, when they rolled the cells, they kept his locked. He freaked out at that and I got to have some fun. I told him it looked like somebody’d tagged him. I just made it up on the spot. Told him some queen musta seen him and paid the hack to keep him locked down when the rest of us went to chow. Told him some other stuff too. That when we left, whoever had the hots for him would come down and he’d know who it was because he’d be carrying a hammer.
“A hammer?” he said. “What’s that for?”
“To bust out your front teeth,” I said. “Lets you give better blow jobs.”
I couldn’t see him when I told him that, but there was a little noise from his cell, like he’d sat down hard. I guess I could understand that, I was him.
Then, we went out to chow and I had to dump half my supper in the garbage can as I’d been laughing too much to eat while I told my buddies what I’d done. That was okay. I still had two bags of Keebler’s back in my cell and I always had my hotspot and a thing of hot chocolate powder. I wouldn’t go hungry.
He appeared to be some kind of pissed off when we came back from chow. I stood outside his cell for the few minutes before we had to go back in for lockdown and tried to talk to him, but he pretty much ignored me. That was okay. I don’t think he knew that in half an hour they’d be rolling the doors again. It was our night to have free time in the cellhouse. Half the cellhouses get to go out each night to the gym or the yard and the other ones got to have free roaming time in the cellhouse. We had a little black-and-white TV on the other side and some rows of benches. You could watch TV if you wanted, or just walk around, shoot the shit, play cards, checkers, shoot craps, play guitars, shit like that. All the cell doors stayed open and you could visit with your friends inside a cell. You could also get shanked, get raped, get your head busted open. All kinds of possibilities...
I figured I’d have some fun with him then...
Hooray! My new friend, Jake Mayes, talked the guard into letting me out of my cell during recreation period. Now I’ll get the real low-down on what it’s like being a real convict.
It turns out Mr. Mayes fancies himself a writer. That was a surprise—a pleasant surprise. It gives me an idea. Something I’ve mulled over at times. While he’s giving me the cook’s tour during rec hour, I’ll pose it to him. My idea? To host a weekly writing class inside the walls! In fact, it’s a done deal in my mind already. I’ll make Jake my convict assistant. See if he does have any talent and if he does...who knows?
Ten minutes until they roll the doors!
Five minutes until we get out. I may have made a mistake. I talked the hack into letting Melon outside. He called up another hack so they could keep a better watch on him and Mr. Keyster (the hack) told me that if anything happened to the guy, it’d be my ass.
Just great...
Okay. They just cranked ’em open.
I met him on the walk.
“C’mon,” I said. “Let’s go ’round to the other side. They got a TV over there and it’s where most of the guys go.”
I had to chuckle at him. Out of his cell, walking down the range, every time I glanced around, his eyes were as big as soup bowls. You could feel the fear dripping from him.
We’d just turned the corner when a guy leaped down off the first tier in front of us.
A big-ass black dude.
Who I knew.
Jerome something. He was in for killing his Sunday school teacher or something. Plus his entire family. I thought he was over in safekeeping where they kept the really bad dudes.
Guess not.
He landed like a cat not five feet from us. Took a step toward us...something in his hand...
A bunch of papers.
His novel, turns out.
Turns out he found out Melon was here and he even knew who he was. Turns out he’d also been writing his life story and thought Melon would like it, get it published for him, get it on the bestseller list and make a pile of money. Turns out, he thought once all that happened, he’d be able to snag one of them pardons the governor gives out in honor of his cat’s birthday once every ten years.
Turns out, all of that happened except: Melon didn’t like it, didn’t get it published for him, which meant it never got on any bestseller or even any worstseller list, didn’t make even a small pile of money, and for sure never snagged one of them elusive pardons.
Pretty much no parts of Jerome’s dreams turned out the way he’d envisioned them.
Why he took the early parole...
Seems Melon decided he didn’t want any more of the inmate experience and ended up canceling those writing classes after three or four of them. He did end up using the experience in a couple of his next books. He shoulda stayed a bit longer. He was still calling the hacks “bulls” in those books, which he woulda learned wasn’t what we called ’em if he’d stuck around a bit longer. He still used words like “shiv” too. Our collaboration remained unpublished also. The only place it’s appeared is in my cell. He left me his contribution and that’s why I can let you see it here.
One thing he got out of it was the title to his next book. He called it Snake Farm. That came from me.
About a month after his last workshop, they moved me up to the third tier into the cell next to Jerome. You know, the guy who thought Melon was going to cream his jeans over his “novel” and make all kinds of exciting, magical things happen for him.
Melon didn’t even read it. He told me that. He told Jerome he had but that it wasn’t quite good enough and to keep at it. After that, Jerome sent him two-three rewrites and after the last one, he didn’t even bother to send it back. Just ignored him. I passed on to Melon what Jerome said he was going to do to him next writer’s workshop and that’s when he canceled the gig. Jerome had tried to get into the class but Melon wouldn’t approve him. I guess he saw the writing on the wall—Jerome, that is. A week after the last class was canceled, Jerome canceled himself.
And, that’s where we’re at right now. I’m on my way up to Melon’s apartment. He thinks I’m going to turn in my contribution to our memoir. I kind of am, but not exactly. What I am going to turn into him is the last chapter. Which I’m writing right no
w. Which I’m going to end with a shank.
Schmuck like that shouldn’t ought to be allowed to fuck with guys inside. Guy gets fucked by both his mom and his pop shouldn’t get more grief from a lame like that. Melon shoulda at least read his book.
Just purely irritates me.
Back to TOC
TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES (WAITING ’ROUND TO DIE)
Christa Faust
Don’t you fucking die on me, you son of a bitch. Not yet.
Seems like the sun is never gonna come up. It’s cold as hell, but it’s hard to tell if that’s because it’s actually cold here or because I’m gutshot and bleeding out slow. To be honest, I’m not even all that sure where “here” is. We’re broke down on the side of some long straight road through nowhere. Utah, maybe. I just hope we made it out of fucking Wyoming.
I hated Wyoming like it was the other woman ever since you inherited that spread outside Meeteetse from your fuck-up brother back in ’94. I get that things were rough for us around that time and we were coming off a couple of way-too-fucking-close-for-comfort brushes with the law. You took it real hard when we ended up having to kill that young girl in Quartzite and you were looking for a place to lay low and lick your wounds.
Thing is, I never signed on to be a rancher’s wife.
When we first met, you were everything I ever wanted. The outlaw cowboy poet of my teenage dreams. It was 1966, and I was a sixteen-year-old runaway from the Bronx playing gypsy across the Great American Southwest. I had ridden a variety of forgettable men through San Angelo and Roswell and Las Cruces, but when I saw you smoking and squinting against the gritty wind outside a dive bar in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, I knew you were the only one that would ever matter.
Less than five minutes later, you were fucking me against the rusted husk of a wheeless pickup truck out back.
Twenty minutes later, we were robbing the joint.
In the heady aftermath of that first time, everything felt so true, remember? So raw and real and like everything that had happened in our lives up until that moment was just some depressing show on black and white TV. Driving a stolen car across the Arizona border with the windows down and my hair whipping across my lips, I felt like somebody different and special. Not just the third of five unwanted daughters with a drunk loser dad and a faded ghost of a mom all packed into a cramped basement apartment on 231st street. I left that girl behind for good that night. That night, I became the woman in the songs you would later write about me. I was Truth, and you were Consequences.
It was true love, with a bullet.
Fuck, babe, that was so long ago. Before Wyoming. Before all the lies and drunken tears and other men. Before cancer. Before either one of us really understood the way things are.
Look, you knew I’d get bored in Wyoming. I got a restless spirit and an even more restless pussy. Up until then, you always gave me the action I needed, both in and out of the sack. You swore you’d rather die than settle down. Don’t fence me in and all that cowboy bullshit. But watching you sit there on that rickety old porch every morning, looking out at the cold, indifferent mountains with a notebook balanced on one knee and that smelly mutt at your feet, I saw my hot-blooded partner in crime slowly fossilizing into an old man I didn’t recognize. Maybe you were scared or tired of running or what fucking ever, but it drove me nuts that you didn’t seem to need anything else anymore. Because I was always burning up inside with dark and ever-changing needs. Needs that could never really be satisfied, no matter how many men I fucked, robbed, or killed.
I probably should have left you for good years ago. Not like I didn’t try, over and over again, but I kept on coming back. I’d take off for a few months, pull a quick score or a short con to pay for whatever plastic surgeries I needed to stay fuckable as long as possible. But I’d inevitably find myself in a ritzy hotel, coming down hard off a coke bender with some kid less than half my age passed out next to me, and I would suddenly need you so bad I could barely breathe.
When I would pull into your dusty driveway and get out of whatever bullshit luxury car I’d bought myself that week, I’d see you there sitting on the porch with your dog just like always. You’d stop playing that beat up old Washburn guitar, put out your cigarette and hold out your hand to me.
“Come on, then,” you always said.
Then you’d take me to bed and it would be like it was 1966 all over again. Afterwards, I would fall asleep with my head on your chest, cheek resting against the scar from where I stabbed you that one time over that Mexican bitch in Bullhead City. I’ve fucked thousands of men in the past fifty years, but I could never sleep with anyone but you.
Of course, that all stopped when the doctors had to take your jaw off seven years ago. It didn’t even work, because the damn cancer came back anyway. We had to have that Shoshone woman come in to take care of you, to clean your feeding tube and help you in the bathroom. She was good and strong, but I would have rather had somebody uglier. You liked her, though. Don’t think I didn’t notice you trying to look down the front of her scrubs while she was giving you a sponge bath. It’s too bad I didn’t come up with this blaze-of-glory plan until after they moved you to the nursing home. I would have liked to shoot that big titty bitch just for touching your dick.
Things got a little better between us when you were in the home. I was old enough by then that I couldn’t get myself into too much man trouble. I spent most of my time by your bedside, pouring whiskey down your feeding tube when the nurses weren’t looking, singing half-remembered songs and reliving all the wild stories of our bad old days. I kept thinking about how we swore they’d never take us alive, how we were gonna go down in a hail of bullets like Bonnie and Fucking Clyde. Live fast and die young, only that’s not how it went at all and there we were on the other side of a mountain of hurt and disappointment and torn off calendar pages. You were dying, old and slow, and the surgeons just couldn’t keep me pretty anymore. That was when I started to think maybe it’s not too late for us to ride off into that lead sunset like we always wanted.
You couldn’t speak but you could write, although you didn’t seem to have much to say. Over the years, you’d filled hundreds and hundreds of notebooks with tightly handwritten lines, mostly heavy shit I didn’t really understand. The only part I could relate to was the stuff about how terrible I was.
How terrible and how wonderful.
But in the home, you mostly just wrote requests for more dope or to be changed or repositioned in bed. Sometimes, you would write that you loved me. You wrote it when I told you I was gonna bust you out of that place. Tapped the word LOVE with your pen three times like I might miss the point.
You’re moving your fingers now, a feeble gesture that means you want to write something. There’s blood and bile dribbling out of your feeding tube and what’s left of your face has gone ashen and waxy. It takes a minute for me to find a pen and something to write on in the broke down stolen car. My hands are cold and not working so good, but I eventually find a cheap giveaway pen from an insurance company and a Walmart receipt. It takes you a long time to scratch out what you want to say and it’s hard to read in the faint yellow glow from the cracked dome light, but I get it eventually and it makes me want to punch you.
GO HOME NOW.
You tap the word HOME like I might miss the point. I take the pen from you and throw it out the broken window.
You thought I was taking you home. Home to Meeteese and that shitty ranch. I killed seven people and three cops trying to give you the badass outlaw death you deserved, motherfucker, and all you really wanted was to go home? What are you Dorothy in the Wizard of Fucking Oz all of a sudden?
Okay, so maybe I fucked this up a little, since the hail of bullets that was supposed to take us home to glory only left us wounded and dying the hard way. What can I say? I’ve been killing cops for too long to not shoot back. But it’s not like I didn’t try. It’s the thought that counts, right?
You’re not listeni
ng anymore, are you? Your eyes have that cloudy, half-moon Frankenstein look now, the one I know way too well. It means you’re as good as gone, and I might as well be talking to myself.
I can’t help thinking of that young girl in Quartzite, remembering how her pretty brown eyes had gone Frankenstein like that after I’d cut her throat. I remember yelling at you to help me lift her into the motel bathtub so I could scrub your spunk out of her pussy. You were standing naked in the doorway, face sweaty and red from drink and you yelled at me.
“I never wanted this,” you said “I just wanted you.”
At the time, I figured you meant the admittedly ill-advised threesome thing. But now, watching you die years later, I have this cold, sickening feeling in my ruptured belly because I think I finally understand.
I thought I knew you all this time, but maybe I only ever knew the fantasy version of you that I created in my own head. Maybe the real you was that old man sitting on his porch with his dog, writing shit I didn’t understand in a battered notebook. I thought I was giving you the outlaw death you really wanted, but you never wanted to be an outlaw in the first place, did you? You only played outlaw for me because that’s what I wanted.
I’d take you back home now if I could, babe. I would, I swear, but it’s too late. You’re already gone and I’m coming up fast behind you. All I can do now is sit here in the blood-slick driver’s seat of a stranger’s car and wait for the sun to come up.
Or death.
Whichever comes first.
Back to TOC
THE CULPRITS AND CONTRIBUTORS
J. L. ABRAMO was born in the seaside paradise of Brooklyn, NY on Raymond Chandler’s fifty-ninth birth-day. Abramo is the author of Catching Water in a Net, winner of the St. Martin’s Press/Private Eye Writers of America prize for Best First Private Eye Novel; the subsequent Jake Diamond novels Clutching at Straws, Counting to Infinity, and Circling the Runway; Chasing Charlie Chan, a prequel to the Jake Diamond series; and the stand-alone thrillers Gravesend and Brooklyn Justice. www.facebook.com/jlabramo or www.jlabramo.com
