Gods Go Begging

by Alfredo Vea

  Down the long hallway the sound was beginning, just a tense murmur at first. There was a soft breeze of curious whispers that began to blow harder when a certain isolation cell was approached by the hulking forms of Sykes and Porter. Even from this distance Jesse could see that the two sheriffs were huge, their green uniforms stretched to the limit by too many bench presses and too many pork rib sandwiches.

  The murmurs grew into a brisk wind of low utterances as the two sheriffs ducked simultaneously when something was thrown through the bars and at the tops of their heads. The supreme being’s special diet had been splattered against the wall opposite his cell. Sliding down the wall were globules and smatterings of white rice, white gravy, white turkey breast, white potatoes, white milk, and mayonnaise. Behind Jesse, Eddy and Dr. Wooden were standing in the hall now, having left their seats as the tide of sound reached them.

  “Can’t you forget this interview?” asked the officer at post eight. There was desperation in his eyes. “If someone gets hurt on my shift, I’ll be here filling out forms until midnight.”

  “I’ve got to see him sometime,” said Jesse. “And it’s never going to be any different. Besides, I canceled the interview last time. Don’t you remember? I can’t do that again.”

  Down the hallway the two behemoths had managed to unlock and open the cell door. From the darkness behind the bars a raspy and hate-filled voice was screaming the phrase “mud people” over and over again. Sykes and Porter ducked as more of the food flew through the doorway at them and crashed against the wall behind them. This was followed by a plastic spoon, a paper cup, and finally a roll of sheets and bedding. Around the cell the squall of utterances had transformed into a storm of catcalls and loud discord. From there the tempest of drowsy voices became a raging cacophony.

  Suddenly the two officers raised their arms to protect their faces. Then, after counting to three, they disappeared in unison into the bowels of the cell. There was one final cry of “mud people” from within the cage, then deathly silence. A moment later the two officers emerged. There was a tall man hanging limp between them, his feet dragging on the linoleum. He was making no attempt to walk.

  The tall man was Clorox white, chalk white—almost deathly white when contrasted with the two men who were at his sides. Even at this distance Jesse could make out blotches of facial color: the roseate, whiskey-induced stippling of dead capillaries covered the man’s nose and cheeks. Now he could see that the skin of his entire body was mapped with lines of jade and black. He looked like a human who had been turned inside-out, so that his green veins were on the surface of his skin for everyone to see. His skin was covered with tattoos. His left eye was closed and bleeding.

  “Mud people!”

  The words spewed out once again from the man in the middle. From the cells that lined the long hallway, spoons, combs, and wads of trash were being thrown at mr. supreme as he moved down toward post eight. The cacophony had become a din, an assault of words in English, Spanish, and Vietnamese. Jesse could see that each of the two huge sheriffs had one arm jammed beneath the armpit of the prisoner and was using the other arm to control one of the prisoner’s hands.

  “If you spit on me again,” yelled Sykes above the terrible noise of three hundred angry voices, “I’ll bash your goddamn head against those bars. Do you understand me?”

  The prisoner did not respond. He only strained against his human restraints, his green face red with exertion. As he got closer, Jesse could see the shape of familiar forearms and biceps emerging, the result of hundreds of hours in a prison weight room. He could just make out the chiseled, hardened face of his client. Actually, thought Jesse, it was not the face and arms that were familiar but the tattoos on that face and those arms. In truth, no one would ever attempt to describe mr. supreme. Except for the crimson and purple nose, the usual human landmarks were now practically invisible, obscured beneath a collection of acronyms and arcane symbols. Even police bulletins and prison records did little more than describe the writings upon his skin. The identity underneath had long ago been lost.

  The Aryan Nation tattoo was the newest and it was located on the forehead, between the eyebrows. The tattoo was so fresh that the needle holes beneath his hairline were still bleeding. The insignia was little more than a muddle of scabs, blood, and ink. Somehow the supreme being had managed to tattoo himself using the broken refill from a contraband ballpoint pen as a needle, and the metal flush handle on the toilet as a mirror.

  “From here that thing looks like a third eye,” said Dr. Wooden.

  “A third eye that’s bloodshot,” added Eddy.

  “Given enough inbreeding…” mused Jesse aloud.

  On his chest, covering his upper abdomen and pectorals, there was a huge American bald eagle with green wings that swept upward to touch each of the man’s shoulders. The defiant head and beak of the creature reached up to his Adam’s apple. On the man’s arms were several swastikas, a topless hula dancer, and a list of arcane numbers that commemorated the dates when federal authorities had abused their powers by oppressing the only real human beings on earth. Interspersed among these were various badly rendered symbols of the White Aryan Resistance, the Silent Brotherhood, and even the Aryan Olympics.

  “What the hell is an Aryan Olympics?” asked Eddy.

  “They have events just like any other Olympics,” answered Jesse, “only they’re held in a trailer court somewhere up in Idaho. They have tobacco-spitting marathons, and I think they toss cans of Spam for distance. There’s only one running event because they believe there’s only one race.”

  The din on the mainline diminished and died away when the supreme being was taken through post eight and dragged into the interview room. Sykes pulled out a chair, and his partner roughly shoved mr. supreme into it. The huge black man bent down until his face almost touched that of his prisoner.

  “Listen here, Mr. Skelley,” growled Sykes, “my name is Norman Sykes, and my partner here is Norman Porter. Any more shit outta your so-called Anglo-Saxon ass and we’re gonna have another Norman Conquest right here. Do you get my drift?” He turned to face the lawyer. “Do you want one of us to wait outside the door?”

  “No, thank you, officer,” answered Jesse, “I think Bernard will be fine.”

  “Fuck you!” screamed the tattooed man. “Don’t ever call me Bernard.”

  Outside the interview room the huge officer lifted his walkie-talkie to his lips to answer an inquiry about their 10-20, their location.

  “Roger, post nine, we’re ten sixty-six at post eight, over.” There was a huge smile on his face as he slapped his partner’s open hand. All the sheriffs who heard it knew that 1066 was not a proper call sign. Most just shrugged and went about their business. Few if any of them remembered what had taken place in the British Isles in that distant year.

  “Bernard Skelley,” said Jesse, “that’s your true name, isn’t it? Your Christian name?”

  “I don’t want to talk to none of y‘all muddy son of a bitches! I didn’t ask for the last interview and I ain’t askin’ for this fuckin’ interview ! If y’all want to talk to me, you can address me correct, as a foot soldier of the New Aryan Army.”

  “Aryan Army?” asked Jesse incredulously. “Soldier?”

  Dr. Wooden and Eddy glanced at each other warily. They had both seen the veins rising in Jesse’s neck. They noticed that his fists were clenched and bloodless.

  “What would you paintball, potbellied militia idiots know about being soldiers?”

  Dr. Wooden placed a firm hand on Jesse’s shoulder. The lawyer understood the gesture. Once again, a sudden slice of the nightmares that haunted his nights had lit up his mind like a flare. There had been this hill, a small hill near the Laotian border. He leaned back and closed his eyes for a moment to compose himself. The holographic image that had invaded his thoughts slowly dissipated.

  “What you might want, Bernard,” continued Jesse in a stern but controlled voice, “and what you ask for are
irrelevant here. In fact, you are irrelevant. Do you understand that? It’s not my job to help you or to care about your sorry ass. It’s not my job to worry about what you want. I can’t waste my time with menial garbage. My job is to try and beat this case. You’ve done your job, Bernard, and you’ve done it to the best of your very limited ability. You’ve succeeded in being arrested and charged with a hideous crime.”

  “Irrelevant!” screamed Bernard. “Irrelevant? Whatever in hell that goddamn word means! You must’ve learned that big word in some white university on one of them affirmative-action scholarships that I couldn’t never get. You sure as hell didn’t learn to talk like a white man at no spic university.”

  “Bernard, you couldn’t get a scholarship to pet obedience school. You certainly must enjoy being wrong,” said Jesse with a grin, “because you do it so often and so very well. As a matter of fact I went to a spic university. You’ve heard of Brown University, haven’t you? Everybody there is brown-skinned, the whole student body and faculty are as brown as mocha java. Even the buildings are brown. The school is named after Osawatomie John Brown and James Brown, the godfather of soul, the famous Brown brothers.”

  Now Jesse sat nose to nose with the supreme being.

  “After a couple of wonderful years at Brown,” continued Jesse, “I went down to Rice University in I Houston. It’s a school dedicated to the rice-growing regions of Asia and the Southern United States. A lot of Chinese and Thai students go there. But you must’ve known that!”

  “Gook school,” muttered Bernard.

  “Then I went to Morris Brown, a Jewish-Mexican school where I got a master’s degree in shtik—humor from the Catskills, with a minor in Mexican cooking. Are you following all of this, Bernard? When I’m done you can fill me in on your progress toward a GED. For my law degree I went to Cisco College down in Texas. The Cisco Kid started that school after he and Pancho broke up the act and the television show went off the air. Duncan Reynaldo and Leo Carillo were two of my favorite professors.”

  “Ah, the Robin Hood of the Old West,” announced Dr. Wooden with a childish grin. “I myself went to Auburn. It is a school of great traditions. Since time immemorial they have hung a brown paper bag in front of the admissions office, and if your skin was lighter than that bag, you just couldn’t get in, no matter how good your grades were.” Dr. Wooden closed his eyes to better remember the happiest days of his life. “Before I lost all of my hair, I had the most beautiful three-finger wave you ever done seen.”

  “Where did you go?” scowled Bernard as he turned to face Eddy, “a fucking Jap school?”

  “As a matter of pertinent fact,” said Eddy Kazuso Oasa without changing expression, “I attended college at picturesque Peru State up in Nebraska. As you might expect, the student body is mostly Peruvian, though there are a few Bolivians and an Ecuadorian or two. At Peru State llamas and alpacas are allowed free run of the campus. and the dormitories. There is a full-scale replica of Macchu Picchu on the campus quad. Japanese students go to school there, then go down to Peru and get elected president. In fact, it will be my turn to be president of Peru in the year two thousand and four. I’m just working as an investigator for fun until I can get my hands on the keys to the presidential palace down in Lima. I can’t wait.”

  Bernard stood up suddenly.

  “I’m gettin’ the fuck out of here,” he announced. “I don’t want to be around you fucking mud people and all your bullshit universities.”

  Jesse rose from his chair and stood in front of Bernard, blocking his pathway to the door.

  “You’re gonna hear me out, Bernard. If you move one more inch I’ll send the doctor and Eddy outside and they’ll close the door behind them. It’ll be just you and me. Ten minutes from now, everybody—every black, brown, yellow, and red man on the mainline—will know that their favorite prisoner, mr. supreme, got his ass kicked, one on one, by his own lawyer. Believe me, Bernard, it will be my pleasure.”

  Bernard and his lawyer were face to face, their noses still almost touching. Bernard’s face was glowing a beet red around a clenched set of tan, pitted teeth. His eye had swollen shut. Bernard felt the heat in his own face and was proud of the feverish, crimson blush. Blood in the face was the mark of a true white man. No one else could blush like this, not Hindus or Mexicans or Jews.

  Bernard Skelley looked down into Jesse Pasadoble’s face and despised it. It was so goddamn brown… so inhuman. But the son of a bitch didn’t seem to be afraid. Bernard considered punching that face—a quick left jab, then a right. But something held him back, kept him from the risk. Why, Bernard wondered sadly to himself, did that traitor Max Schmelling have to go and lose to that black monkey Joe Louis? The whole American South had once gathered around their radios to pray for Max Schmelling. His father had wept with each telling of this tragic story. Every real human being had suffered so much from that defeat. Then there had been those other losers Henry Cooper, Ingemar Johansson, and Jerry Cooney.

  “If you hear me out,” continued Jesse in a calmer voice, “we’ll be gone in ten minutes and you can go back to your cell with all of your personal bullshit intact.”

  Bernard slowly lowered his body back down to the chair behind him. Jesse nodded toward the doctor.

  “Mr. Skelley,” said the doctor in a professorial monotone, “on the test that I administered a few weeks ago, you got thirty-one correct answers out of a possible one hundred. Your lawyer got ninety-seven correct out of the same one hundred questions.”

  “I missed three?” exclaimed Jesse. “I demand a recount.”

  “It is my strong suggestion, therefore,” continued the doctor. “that you let your lawyer handle your case. You have to fight with your best weapon, Mr. Skelley. You know his reputation. I’m sure that some of your friends in the jail have told you about Mr. Pasadoble. Think of it as your using him to get out of jail. Can you do that? Can you use him, Bernard?”

  A small smile began to cross Bernard Skelley’s lips. Even a clouded mind like his realized that this day could be salvaged. After all, he wasn’t paying anything for the services of Jesse Pasadoble. The smile grew wider. He could easily think of his brown lawyer as a slave. This whole building was filled with niggers in black robes and judges with tits. His slave lawyer would know how to handle those kinds of people. He could use him.

  “Defend me!” he said suddenly. “Y‘all do what I say, now, y’hear? I order you to defend me.”

  Bernard turned his head toward the wall and spat. A huge wad of speckled spit stuck to the wall, defying gravity. Proud of his work, Bernard turned toward his lawyer and grinned a wide, broken-toothed grin of disdain.

  “No doubt about it,” said Jesse in a low voice, “the lower your IQ, the more you need to floss. Now, here is how we’re going to work this. There will be no more of these useless interviews. I will write out my questions to you on a sheet of paper. I will put a signed court order on the outside of the envelope telling the sheriff’s department that they are not to read the contents of the writings, though they may perform a cursory tactile search for contraband.

  “You will read the questions and answer them as well as you can. If you have a problem with spelling, just sound out the words or try chewing on your tongue.”

  Bernard’s broken capillaries were glowing with rage.

  “If you want to avoid life in prison, answer the questions, no matter how much you may hate doing it. In other words, Bernard, if you ever want to run out to the outhouse again and flog your log to a crumpled picture of Betty and Veronica, answer the questions. If you ever want to drink cheap whiskey for courage and wear that dear white sheet again, answer the fucking questions. Eddy here will pick up each envelope and bring it to me. He and I will work on the case. I don’t want any phone calls from you—”

  “You sure don’t have to worry about that,” interrupted Bernard.

  “I’m the one talking now,” hissed Jesse through tightly clenched teeth. “You’re charged with over a hundred
counts of molesting one Minnie Skelley, your own niece. When asked who it was that was molesting her, she pointed to a photograph of you in a photo spread of eight people. You could get up to eight hundred years if you’re found guilty.”

  Jesse pulled a photograph from his binder. It was a full frontal photo of the supreme being with his shirt removed. There was the eagle. With her tiny index finger, little Minnie had reached out and touched the right wing.

  “At least it’s not life,” Eddy said. He laughed. Dr. Wooden smiled, then quickly reassumed his professional demeanor.

  “Eddy will interview everyone in your family, including little Minnie. I don’t want to hear from anyone you know unless it’s about the case,” continued Jesse. “I will not see you again until we are in a trial court picking a jury. Anything I have to say to you will be in those envelopes. Do you understand that?”

  Bernard said nothing.

  “Do you understand me?”

  “I’m just using you,” said Bernard as he jumped to his feet. “The white race doesn’t need any of you.” He leered at the three men. “Pretty soon we’re gonna take our country back.”

  “I think there’s a big Apache fellow down in cellblock C-3,” said Jesse. “Why don’t you go down there and tell it to him? And while you’re at it, tell him your charges. All the boys down on the mainline would love to know that you’re charged with having short eyes, with dancing that old ballet rose. Besides, you idiots need everybody. Other than inbreeding and rifle racks, no redneck has ever invented anything. Bernard, if someone like you ran the world,” shouted Jesse, who had moved back to a position just in front of Mr. Supreme, “we would still be five hundred years away from inventing the wheel.”

  “From now on,” sneered Bernard, “you will address me as Sergeant Skelley.”

  “I know about sergeants,” said Jesse softly but with great intensity, “and you’re no sergeant.”

  Bernard stepped angrily out into the hallway and walked silently toward post eight. The two huge deputies saw him and ran to intercept him.