by Les Edgerton
And that’s another thing. Guards. In the flicks you’ve got these hacks that are either James Cagney tough or a Bing Crosby type in the old movie Boys Town, but one thing they all seem to be is smart. Hah! At Pendleton, at least when I was there, the pay scale for officers was barely above minimum wage and you don’t get Einsteins for that kind of money generally. There was a standing joke that they recruited the hacks from among the bums that rode the rails, that jumped off that midnight train that rolled by every night. When the whistle blew, guys would yell out that the warden must be hiring. Most of them were borderline criminals themselves and more than a few were downright sadistic. The average hack couldn’t get a steady job in a 7-Eleven mopping floors and stocking potato chips. Give them a uniform and badge and half an hour training on the firing range and they’re Super Cop in their little pinheaded minds. Worse than rent-a-cops.
Oh, sure, there’s one or two good ones. Like Jonesy. It was funny, though. The best hacks were almost always black. They were the opposite of the blacks who were incarcerated. I couldn’t figure that out for the longest time, but now I think it’s because this was the best job they could get because of their color and inside they were decent people who took their jobs seriously. The white guards, though, they were the worst white guys out there, couldn’t get a good job in spite of their color. So what you get is the best blacks and the worst whites, got to be hacks and the opposite are the guys they’re guarding, the inmates.
And the white hacks were the most prejudiced people I ever knew. They were all the time cracking on the black guards. Not in front of them of course, but in front of white inmates they did it all the time. I never heard the black officers do the same.
Black and white are weird the more you think about it. Just when you think all blacks are the same, up pops a Jonesy who’s a better man than any twenty white guys, and then there’s white hacks like the Delaneys who are pure assholes, somebody you wish would get caught out in the middle of the yard during the next riot by all the guys he’s dropped a bench on.
The long and short of it, though, was I couldn’t bribe a guard and get over to the infirmary where Boles was. I had to figure something else out and it looked damned near impossible.
I was still trying to cook up a scheme when the situation changed three days later. For the better. Boles got released from the infirmary, and just like that guard had predicted, he was put in the library. Good news. He’d be much easier to get to there. I just had to dope out a way to get there without getting caught. That meant I couldn’t get a pass to the library since that’d leave a record on somebody’s pass sheet.
The smart thing to do was get to Boles quick. He was still weak from his wounds. Also, he hadn’t talked yet. If I waited too long he’d not only be stronger and harder to take down but he might have a change of heart and snitch me out.
I wished this was the movies. In the movies all those little technical difficulties wouldn’t matter. Somehow, miraculously, I’d find myself alone with Boles and no one in the entire joint would know I was there. Like we can walk around wherever we want anytime we want! Right.
My man Dusty came through though. Just like in the friggin’ movies. Go figure.
“I got something for you,” he said when we came in that night from chow.
“What?”
“You got to fix that guy over at the library, right?”
He knew I did.
“You told me you might need some help sometime with this guy.”
I was surprised he remembered and then I wasn’t. Dusty was no lame-o.
“So what you got?”
“Here.”
He put a piece of paper in my hand. It was a pass. “Free-walkin’” passes we called ‘em. Only trusties got this kind of pass. It allowed you free movement wherever you wanted to go inside the walls. The best thing was it didn’t have your name on it. A solid gold pass, especially for what I needed it for.
Dusty told me one other thing.
“Do it tomorrow morning,” he said. I wanted to know why then. “‘Cause, stupid, you’re gonna need an alibi maybe and I can give you one. I’ve got to take the barber shop towels over to the laundry and I’m going to ask for you to help me. You got twenty minutes to do it in. I got a buddy at the laundry I already talked to. He’s gonna say you came in with me, dropped the laundry off.”
It’s things like this let you know who your friends are.
That night I had the weirdest dream. Practically every night I had a dream—nightmares most of the time—while I was behind bars. On the bricks I never dreamed. This one was about Donna. When we first hooked up, Donna had gone off the deep end right away, was all over my case with phone calls and stuff, all the time telling me how much I drove her ass crazy. I was seeing lots of women then and wasn’t pussywhipped over her at all. Oh, I liked her then and she was great in the sack and all but I wasn’t driven like I got later.
I was asleep (in the dream—don’t think about that—I did and got a headache) and something wakes me up and it’s Donna. She’s got this knife and she’s trying to cut off my johnson and I’m half-awake in the dream and probably in real life too and I’m holding her off when she drops the knife and I relax my grip on her hands and she rakes her fingernails across my face and I can’t see, whether it’s the blood from where her nails dinged me or because I’m not all the way awake I don’t know and she’s screaming at the top of her lungs, “If I can’t have it nobody can!” I woke up because of what I said to her, got me to laughing, both in the dream itself and then I knew I was awake, really awake and I was laughing so hard I had tears. What I said (in the dream) was, “Does this mean we’re not going to the prom together, honey?”
Bud was in there, in the dream somehow I forgot how and a bunch of other stuff like you get in dreams, falling off cliffs and stuff. Dream stuff, who the fuck knows what it means.
That’s when I woke up, my heart beating like I’d been doing amyl nitrate poppers and I’m laughing like somebody in the Squirrel Factory and there was some fucker in the back of the dorm ripping out these horrible sobs.
I felt the sweat chill as I threw off my blanket. I yelled, “Somebody put a dick in that asshole’s mouth!” I barefooted it over to the window and looked out and the cooking crew was heading across the quad to the mess hall in their whites so I figured it was four-thirty since that’s when they went over to start destroying breakfast.
There was no use trying to get back to sleep. They’d be rousting us for wakeup in another hour anyway so I went and got my shaving gear and took a shower and shaved, brushed my teeth. Nice, I thought. You could actually take a shit without ten thousand guys screaming six feet from you. I’d have to remember that and get up early from now on.
I sat on the stool longer than what I needed, just thinking. About the dream and Donna and Boles and all kinds of shit like that. Just sat there getting madder and madder. It wasn’t like I was building a hard-on so’s I could jack up Boles, later on. I never needed that shit. You know, get mad so I could jump on somebody. That kind of shit’s for punks. The best way is to not even think about it. Just do it.
That’s the best way to do anything major. ‘Specially when you got a choice, got two roads you can take. Like I could whack out Boles or I could do something else. Like nothing. Just not do it at all, see what happened then.
Fuck that. Boles was going down. I couldn’t believe a guy could get stabbed that many times and still live. What was he, some kind of vampire? Thirty-some holes this punk gets with a laundry pin and he’s over working in the library like he just got over the flu. I shoulda put a wooden stake through his motherfucking heart is what I shoulda done, prevented all this happy horseshit.
It’s like a stickup. Most outlaws I talked to got busted ‘cause they plan too much. Figure out what to do if this happens, that happens. The best way is not even know you’re gonna do it till it happens. Like, you’re in a supermarket, buying some gum, whatever, and on the way out you see all
the checkout girls heading with their money trays to the office on account of the next shift is there. Before you walked in, robbing somebody maybe was the last thing on your mind. You see that, all them trays stacked up on the desk in the office, the safe open and the smartest thing you can do is walk over, pull out your piece and tell the guy in the bowtie to bag it up, hand it over. Zip, boom, bang, you’re out of the place and cruising down the road before you even know what you did. Just like that.
I never once in my entire life got caught on a job when I did it like that. The ones I keep getting busted on are the ones where you cased and planned and schemed for eleventeen years before and always—always—the one little thing you never thought of happens and the next thing you know is you’re trying to wipe black ink off your fingers with that one little paper towel they always give you and you feel you’re waking up from a bad dream. Into one that’s worse.
I’m thinking all this and then I just did it. Dropped a sheet over all them other thoughts about Donna and even Boles and just went into another part of my mind.
***
We were walking out of the dorm after breakfast and Manny was saying something to me. In fact, he was almost screaming before I noticed anything.
“What?” I said, wondering why he was yelling at me and then Dusty who was walking with us, said, “Leave him alone, Manny. He’s in the zone.”
He gave me a look and took a quick glance around and then his hand touched mine and I knew what it was. I slipped it into my shirt. Without looking I could feel it was a knife, a regular hunting knife, not some piece of shit that had been jury-rigged from a piece of metal from one of the shops. This was a serious killing weapon. What he did, what I had in my hand, registered, not in the front part of my mind but in the back, where I was.
We got to the barber school and I just went on back to stand behind my chair instead of screwing around with the others. A couple of the guys walked by, said something and I just nodded. I didn’t have a clue what they said to me.
Then Mr. Dillsie came to the door of his office and yelled at me to come up front, help Dusty with the towels. I could see Dusty behind the glass. There were five large sacks. I grabbed three of them and Dusty the other two and we went out the back door.
“Run,” Dusty hissed, once we were out of sight of the school. “You gotta book, man!”
We ran all the way to the laundry and his man was standing outside waiting for us. “You got fifteen minutes, maybe twenty,” Dusty said. “Go!”
I threw down my sacks and took off again, heading up toward the quad, around the chow hall and luck was with me. I didn’t pass a single guard, only one inmate. I kept my head down and I don’t think the guy even noticed me. The library was two buildings down from the chow hall and nobody was on the walk in front of me. Clear sailing. This was the best time. There shouldn’t be anybody else in the library except for the librarian for at least another hour.
There wasn’t.
I went in quick, closed the door behind me. I could feel the knife where I’d put it under my shirt, the handle stuck down behind my belt.
At first, I thought nobody was there and then I heard something sounded like a book drop back in the office. I walked back and went into the room. He was there, bending over. He straightened up, a book in his hand and looked at me.
CHAPTER 24
“Boles,” I said. I could see the fear in his eyes.
“I didn’t snitch you out, man,” he said, laying the book down on the desk in front of him and stepping back. He moved kind of stiff-like and I guess I would too, I had that many holes in me.
“I know. I couldn’t be here if you had, could I.”
I pulled out my knife.
“Why you gonna do this?”
“You know why.”
He took another step back and was up against the wall. I started toward him.
“Oh, man.” His voice broke. He put his hands up, palms facing me and began edging along the wall toward the door. “Man, you’re safe. I’m not going to tell who shanked me. If I was gonna tell I would have already done it. I’m sorry for what I did to you. We’re even. Don’t you see we’re even?”
In a way, he was right. I’d had the same thought myself. The pain I’d put him through almost certainly matched what he’d done to me. In one way the score was settled.
I didn’t even feel the same anger I had when he’d raped me. The day I’d shanked him up on the laundry roof it had disappeared, vanishing a little bit with every hole I put in him until it was all gone. There was no revenge left in my heart, none at all. It was just pure-d empty of everything, all malice.
I walked over to him and he just stood there. I don’t think his knees would let him move. His eyes told me that. I stopped inches from him. His hands went down to his sides.
“You won’t talk? Ever?”
“Oh, man! No! I swear t’God! You’re safe, man. I just want to do my time, get the fuck out of here, that’s all.”
I believed him. I could hear it in his voice.
“You don’t even know my name, do you?” I said.
“No.” He was telling the truth.
“My name’s Jake Mayes,” I said. Then I stabbed him. Who knows why? Just like that. It started in easy enough, then hit something solid so that I had to push harder on the handle before it went all the way in. I looked him in the eyes the whole time. It seemed like it lasted for hours, us standing there, and his eyes changed, just the least little bit, in realization of what was happening, I guess, and his eyelids started to quiver like he was trying to keep from blinking, as if once he blinked it was all over and then all the bones just seemed to go out of his face. I reached up with my other hand, grabbed his shirt and eased him on down to the floor. His eyes were still open. He hadn’t blinked but he was dead.
***
When I turned to walk away, the damndest thing happened. My back tooth hurt like hell and when I felt it with my tongue I knew why. It had bust clean in two. Man! Talk about something smarting! Instantly, I knew what had happened. It was the same tooth I’d chipped the last time I was in here, over to the chow hall. That time when the inmate mess cook buried the cleaver in the dude’s stomach.
The next day I’d gone to the worthless third-world dentist over at the infirmary and he’d given me half a shot of Novocain and did a patch job of sorts on it. Musta been a better job than I thought, to last all this time. I guess I bit down kinda hard on it when I stuck Boles.
Reason I know the fucking dentist only gave me half a shot was I could feel every twitch he made with his stinking fingers and tools inside my mouth and I also knew why he’d been stingy with the juice. Bastard was getting rich selling shit like that to inmates who weren’t particular about what kind of crap they ran in their veins.
Thinking about that made me remember that jerk Larry betting me I’d be back.
Whoa. I was walking toward the library door when that hit me. Motherfuck! I hate it when an asshole like that turns out to be right. And he was. All of a sudden I knew just how right he was. I’d been on my way back here before I’d ever left. I stood there and thought about what that meant for a minute or two and then it struck me that it wasn’t the smartest thing in the world to do—hang around a room with a dead body—so I made tracks on out of there.
I got back to the laundry and Dusty was still there talking with his friend. I knew I had been gone longer than I should have.
“What you doing?” Dusty said, when I came up. “You’re walking like you got all the time in the world, moron. C’mon, let’s get the fuck out of here.”
The other guy turned and went back inside the laundry and we started walking back to the barber school. On the way, Dusty asked me questions. “You get rid of the knife? Anybody see you?”
Back at the school I had a customer waiting for me. Dusty did too. The guy wanted a flattop. I got out the triple ought blade, rinsed it in the sterilizing solution. When I got done, I stepped back and looked. It was the be
st flattop I had ever cut. It was a fucking masterpiece, it was. You could land a plane on that flattop. I just laid down my clippers when the steam whistle blew. I knew what that meant. I looked over at Dusty and he at me and he held his hand down low so nobody else could see and gave me a thumbs up. I just nodded. Ice-cold, that’s the way I felt. Frosty. Peaceful. When that whistle blew, something happened inside. Time, as a concept, just disappeared. Just blew away in the wind, went over the wall. History...just like that tooth.
***
A couple of months later, Bud came down and Dusty got him into K Dorm with us. It was Kimmie he’d killed, but he told us it was an accident. She was giving him some grief, yakking that he was always out too late, lame crap like that and he’d tapped her.
“I didn’t even hit her that hard,” he said. “I hit her lots harder lots of times. It was just a freak accident.”
“Fucking life’s a freak accident,” I said and we all laughed, me, him, Dusty and Manny. We were all outside on the ball field, sitting at one of the picnic tables, eating Oreos and smoking tightrolls, playing dominoes.
This was as good as it gets, I thought, looking around. I saw a bird fly up to the wall and then it was gone, flew over the side. That was all right, I thought. Good fucking riddance. This was okay too, sitting out in the grass with my buds. The green, green grass of home. No fucking broads hassling us, just good friends sitting around, having us a ball. I started to think of Donna but got that shit out of my mind. Thinking about broads is what fucks up your time in here. All I want to do now is my time.
Eight more years, thanks to Boles. Yeah, they found out it was me. Fuck it. Like I give a shit.
I can do eight years standing on my head.
Got my shit together, now. I could do eight times eight, snooze all the way through the whole thing. In the zone, man; I’m in the zone. You’re in the zone, you’re free. Fuck, you’re freer than free. You’re a man nobody fucks with. You’re the fucking Master of the Universe. People step aside when you walk by. You stare at any motherfucker you want, all day long, you feel like it. Cracks me up, way these chumps try and become invisible, they see me coming down the tier walk.
