Just Like That

by Les Edgerton

  We’re sitting there having a smoke and Barry said the captain has put the word out—get this creep in jail before the weekend. I want good statistics this week he said, so somebody was going to have to go and roust this bird before the second shift on Friday came on so his bust would go on this week’s sheet and the captain could tell the mayor that he was doing his job and that he could let another week go by without threatening to fire him or demote him to turnkey status. That would be like the chief of surgery being ordered to fetch bedpans, Barry said. There’s more than one of us would like to see that, he laughed.

  My leg was on fire that night when I laid down. I couldn’t even set up and play in the pinochle game like I usually do, but hit the rack early, not that it helped, laying down.

  Lying there on my bunk when the card games broke up and the bullpen quieted down, everybody hitting the rack, it started to hit me that I was going back to the joint and I thought about what that would mean.

  Survival is what it meant.

  The main thing was to maintain a low profile. You get nowhere but noticed and dead or hurt in a significant manner if you walk around like some kind of badass. Fucking up badasses or those who think they’re bad is what makes reps, and reps are what lots of guys are after. Guys in the joint, some of them anyway, are doing shitloads of time and they’ve got egos like anybody else. Like some dudes who are doctors, say, or musicians or whatever, they’re out to make a name for themselves. About the only way a guy who thinks like that can be a big shot is to kill somebody. There’s just some cons who love to walk around with everybody whispering behind their hands when they go by. Gives them a rush, makes them feel like they’re somebody. I guess that’s it. Erasing some fucker is not something that appealed to me, even if it made people want to line up for my autograph, but there’s plenty in the joint who want exactly that.

  You’re smart, you try and become invisible. Blend. Into walls, furniture. You walk into the day room, say, you pick a spot along a wall. Never in the middle of the room. Paint a bullseye on your back you do that. Never in a corner where lines of sight converge. Not in the middle, even along a wall. Somewhere between the middle and the corner, up along the wall. By an object. Not in the open. A trash can, something like that, something that can take the focus off of you.

  Never make eye contact. That’s definitely a big rule to follow. Never. If you do you keep your gaze flat, unemotional. You don’t look away too quickly or hold your gaze too long. A second either way can get you noticed.

  You adopt a gunfighter’s attitude like in the Westerns. Quiet and controlled, as if you could explode from stillness and wreak devastation. You play-act in your mind, get the mindset, force your body so it’s a top gun’s attitude.

  Quiet means strength. A loudmouth is a motherfucker who’s headed for an I.V. hookup in intensive care, or worse.

  When you go into a room the first thing you do is take a photo with your eyes and locate possible weapons. Even with every precaution you can take, some silly mother can still walk up and front you. You want a mop handle or a heavy ashtray, something to use as a weapon, that happens. You assume the worst will happen and be ready.

  The main thing is, you always try to disappear.

  The times you have to pass by a group of guys who aren’t friends, you do it with quiet, controlled force, not enough to appear threatening, but with your eyes slightly averted, or better yet, looking through the men like your mind is elsewhere. Like, you’re so confident in your badness and abilities you don’t even think to be aware of their potential threat.

  You never smile with your eyes. There’s a trick of smiling with your mouth only and you better learn how to do that. Only with your lips and never a full smile, only a hint. If possible, with a little bit of a sneer, not enough to antagonize, enough to make someone else believe you don’t even know you’re sneering—it’s just the way life has forced your lip to go.

  There’s a lot of shit to staying alive. A lot of acting. You better be going for the Oscar every minute you’re on camera which is always. In some ways, the joint is a place where even the good times are bad.

  ***

  Along about two in the morning, it happened. I should have seen it coming, but no, not me, I’m so wrapped up in my leg that’s killing me I couldn’t see an elephant if it was bearing down on my monkey ass.

  “Wake up.”

  I could feel his breath on my cheek. I started to raise up but the feel of the razor blade on my neck forced me to forget that idea.

  “That’s good, Jim. Now. I want you to swing your legs over and hop down. Easy, white boy.”

  I knew what was coming, but I didn’t want to think about it. I couldn’t see him, he was behind me, but I knew it was Little Raisinet.

  I did what he said, dropped my pants, didn’t talk, all that. All the time, I’m waiting for my break, a split second when he would drop his guard. And I’m thinking about my father. The whole fucking time. Like, what would he’d’ve done if he got caught in this situation. That was a no-brainer. He wouldn’t care if the nigger cut him from ear to ear, he’d have to make a play.

  I wasn’t my father. I found that out in that moment. My father, I knew, would rather die than have someone do what this guy was going to do to me. Me? I guess I just don’t have the guts my father did, the guts I always thought I had. Because I didn’t want to die. I’d rather be shamed than die.

  All I could feel was that razor blade against my throat. Wouldn’t it be something I remember thinking: if this motherfucker screws me and then decides to cut my throat anyway?

  Part of me was somewhere else, logical and detached. Would a little razor blade like that cut deep enough to reach an artery? If I twisted to the side could I escape? If I did, could I still keep this asshole from cutting me and killing me? I considered each possibility as it occurred, all the while he’s doing his thing and the longer I hesitated and didn’t commit to some kind of action the less chance there was of doing anything at all. It was like being in a football game with the clock winding down and you’re out of time-outs and you’ve got to call a play, you’re the quarterback and you’ve got to come up with something, save the day and while you’re still thinking about it time runs out.

  I hardly felt his dick. It was crazy—I almost laughed. I almost said to him, “Hey, I thought niggers were supposed to be hung. You feel like a Bic lighter.” I didn’t, of course but isn’t that wild? I’m getting nailed—raped—why call it anything but what it was and I’m thinking up funnies. It was all over in a couple of minutes and then he was out of my cell and I just stood there another minute wondering if it had really happened or if I was still asleep, dreaming, and then I went over to my bunk and climbed up and laid down on my stomach. I lay there awhile and then pulled off my pants and underwear and wiped myself with my shorts. I wanted to go out to the bullpen to the sink and wash myself—but all I could think of was that everybody there—in the cells that ringed the bullpen—that everybody had heard what was going on. I was too embarrassed to show my face. I closed my eyes, blanked my mind and tried to sleep. I guess it must have worked because the next thing I knew it was morning and the hack was hollering that our rolls and coffee were here.

  Gotta get up sometime I thought and walked out and got one of the day-old breakfast rolls and a tin cup of coffee and took it back to my cell.

  I just stayed in my cell all morning and after a while I heard Frick and Frack’s voices getting louder and louder where they were playing cards at one of the tables. The louder they talked and the more they laughed, the more I couldn’t handle it. The big one wandered over and stuck his head in the door and gave me an exaggerated wink. “I’ll be by later tonight, sweet meat,” he said and went back to his partner, the one from the night before. They both laughed and I heard a couple of the other prisoners snicker this time.

  For some reason, I couldn’t work up a mad. It was as if I had given up the right to be angry by allowing myself to be fucked like that. All
the time before in the joint, I had thought about what I’d do in a situation like that and never had I imagined it would turn out like it actually did. What felt worse—getting nailed by a punk like that—or the fact that I let him do that to me, without any resistance—I don’t know, but it was as if all emotion in me had disappeared, like I was dead inside only my body didn’t know it yet.

  I rolled that around in my head, trying to figure it out, what it meant, and an incredible sadness filled me the more I thought about it. The same exact kind of sadness you feel when someone you love has died.

  An article I had read years before popped into my head. This guy was talking about relationships between men and women and he said most people get divorced at the seven-year mark in their marriages. The “seven-year itch” is what he called it. His explanation was that all the cells in your body died and were replaced by new cells every seven years and so what you had was two new people living at the same old address. He was wrong. You become a different person when you got raped or something big like that. It was like a big switch was thrown inside and you became this new person, nothing like the old one. Like maybe one of those Hindus who come back to life in a different body. Somebody had taken over my body, that was it. I died and someone else was born. Pretty soon I’d forget the old me and the new soul in me would go on until it too died and moved on. Or was killed.

  Something in me clicked. I shoved my feet over the edge of the bunk and jumped down. At the other end of the bullpen I could see a mop bucket and mop. I walked out of my cell and straight to the mop, picked it up and broke off the mop part with my foot against the concrete. I walked down to the other end where Frick and Frack were and they must have been hypnotized watching me because they didn’t even get up when I came up to them, only sat there laughing.

  I didn’t go after Frick, the one who’d raped me. Not at first. I swung the mop stick as hard as I could and caught the big one square in the mouth. I came from the right, just like I was hitting a baseball off a tee, like I seen little guys doing it out on playgrounds. I finished my stroke and came back from the other side, got him alongside his head, smacked his ear. I think I was screaming something.

  Then, I just got the biggest shit-eating grin. I figured I was going to die and I didn’t give a shit. I turned around jabbed the end of the stick into the smaller one’s Adam’s apple—he’d gotten up and was sneaking around from my blind side—and it felt better than anything I had ever felt before in my life, better than the best sex I’d ever had. When I rammed the end of my stick into his neck I heard my old high school football coach, teaching us how to tackle. Drive through his body, he said. Pretend there’s a point on the other side of him you’ve got to reach. I don’t know how I didn’t kill him right then, hard as I poked that stick but he just went straight down, his hands at his throat, and blood started coming out of his mouth and he was choking but he was still alive. I drew back and hit him as hard as I could with the mop stick and it broke clean in two and over he went. Looked like the side of his head was caved in. You could see the dent where I’d smacked him, and this time he just lay there quietly, blood dripping out of his mouth onto the floor.

  The big one was getting up. I’m six foot and a half inch tall and this guy had at least four, maybe five inches on me. I could see half his front teeth were gone and blood was everywhere but he acted like all he’d gotten was a bee sting maybe and he was trying to decide whether to get mad or not. Kind of slow on the uptake. Before he could react I hit him again with what was left of my stick, this time up along the other side of his head. I don’t know if his ears were ringing or not but he shook his head like he was hearing something in there.

  He took a step toward me and that’s when the fear returned. And, lucky for me, that’s when the guard walked up to the cage.

  “Hey!” he yelled, coming around the corner and seeing what was laid out in front of him. Some of the other guards must have been nearby because in a second there were four or five of them there unlocking the door and rushing in. I didn’t see Barry but I wouldn’t have since he didn’t come on until the second shift.

  They put me in solitary which was fine. About an hour later a guard came up and got me and took me down to the day room, the place they use for visits from your family. There was a guy there, all duded out in a suit, tie, briefcase, the works. I sat where he indicated and he introduced himself but I forget the name.

  “What caused the fight?” he said.

  “I’m white and they’re black,” was my answer.

  He didn’t like that answer.

  “You attacked them for no reason?”

  “You got it,” I said. “I asked them to shine my shoes and they got offended.”

  There was some more of this and then the guard came and took me back to solitary.

  The next day they took me on down to Pendleton in one of the blue busses they use for transporting prisoners. I was the only one on the bus so they must have relaxed their rule that said they had to have five before they made the trip. I guess I qualified for the deluxe ride by busting Frick and Frack’s heads.

  I wondered when I’d see my new friends again. They were headed for the same place I was. I thought about that a lot all the way down. I’d have to figure something out. I felt good about one thing though. Actually, two things. One, I felt like I’d regained some measure of honor. Not a full measure, but some. Two, I was going home. I had family there, in Pendleton, homeboys. I was pretty sure this was the first fall for both those niggers. I hadn’t seen them around my first stretch. That gave me an advantage.

  I just had to figure out how to use it.

  CHAPTER 12

  Turning off the highway to Pendleton, we went by a sign alongside the road that said, in big black letters on a yellow background: “Penitentiary Area - Beware Of Hitchhikers.”

  Coming back to Pendleton wasn’t so bad. The same day I got there they were bringing a load in from northern Indiana and one of the guys was Manny Del Rio, a big Mexican I knew back in South Bend. It was his first big bust even though he’d logged plenty of city jail time, mostly for fighting. Turned out he got sent here for fighting this time too. Only he fought the wrong guy.

  Said he clipped a dude up alongside his head in a bar we all used to hang at, Studebaker’s. Hit him so hard the guy ended up in Memorial Hospital for an extended stay, the kind where you need help to use the john and it don’t matter how foxy the nurse is—you ain’t gonna be hitting on her, way you feel. It wouldn’t’ve been a problem, Manny told me, except this guy was an off-duty cop. What should have been a ninety-day stretch at the state farm turned out getting cranked up to a felony and here he was on a one to ten. Like, he was supposed to know the guy was the Man. It didn’t matter the guy was all liquored up and had started the beef himself over some bimbo; no, it was the way it always was, cop’s word is gold-plated no matter what the truth might happen to be.

  I was sorry Manny was in here for some no-account bullshit like that, but glad, too. He was a pal and I needed a pal for when my two friends from the Fort Wayne jail showed up which would be any day now.

  That night just before they turned the main lights out, I looked up at the guy rapping on the bars of my cell with his spoon. It was Larry, my last cellmate.

  “Hey, dude,” I said, jumping up.

  He had a bigger smile than me. “Jake. I told you you’d be back. I just wanted to see if it was true. Guy in I.D. told me your name was on the incoming roster.”

  “Guess you were right, Larry.” Fuck ‘im. All he wanted to do was gloat. Some people are just natural pricks.

  “It’s Wherry, Jake. Dave Wherry.”

  So fucking what? I never was good with names. I got up, lifted my mattress and dug out a pack of Camels and took them over to him.

  “Here, Dave.”

  He looked at the pack of cigarettes in his hand and then at me and said, “What’s this?”

  “The day I left you said you bet a pack of butts I’d be back
. I’m just paying off my debt. I don’t want to die owing a shithead like you anything.”

  “Oh, man, I was just kidding! Here. I don’t want these. We never bet anyway. I was just fuckin’ around.”

  He laid the pack on the crossbar.

  I laid down on my bunk, crossed my arms behind my head.

  “Whatever.”

  He looked at me another minute and then shrugged his shoulders and picked up the pack and put it in his shirt pocket.

  “Well...thanks. Anything I can get you? Anything you need in here till you get in population?”

  Nothing I couldn’t get myself. “No thanks.”

  “Well,” he said, like he didn’t know what else to say. “Welcome back.” He stood there like he expected me to say something.

  “Whatever.”

  He turned and left.

  There’s all kinds of guys like that Dave. Me, I woulda been happy for him he was the one got cut loose but guys like that can’t ever seem to be happy unless they can find someone they think has more misery than they do.

  ***

  Two days later, coming back from chow, I saw him. Frick. They were bringing him into quarantine, same row of cells I was on, third tier. I was close to the far end by the outside windows and the hack was opening a cell on the opposite end where we come up the stairs. He must have been right behind me.

  I ducked into my cell but it was too late. He saw me.

  He was bandaged up pretty good which made my day but I could feel the fear in the pit of my stomach which ruined it. When they let us out for recreation I caught Manny, who was two cells down from me and yanked him back into his cell.

  “Manny, I got a problem,” I said. I wasn’t about to tell him everything. “There’s a bro just come in that wants to fuck with me.”

  “Just point him out,” is all he said. That’s the way it is in here. You got a friend, you got a friend. None of that fair-weather bullshit like on the outside. He didn’t ask me anything else about the guy only what cell was he in and what did he look like.