Talking Heads

by John Domini

  Kit still had his pad. “Is that since the disturbance?”

  The guard nodded, tugging at the gate to check the lock.

  “So how come you’re understaffed?”

  The man gave him a look. “Whoa. You’re a reporter and you’ve got to ask that?”

  “The cutbacks are that bad?”

  “Far as I’m concerned,” the guard said, “the cutbacks are what did it. If they’d give us the men we asked for, there wouldn’t have been no disturbance in the first place. This stuff you’re gonna see, this shit downcellar, that was just the excuse.”

  They were in a narrower place now, a corridor of cells. The noise had subsided. Kit got out his pen.

  “You put that in your paper, okay? My name’s Garrison, Charley Garrison, and I don’t care who knows it. You tell them that the way things are this morning, I got less than three years in here and I’m the senior man on duty.”

  “And we gon’ put it in yo ass, Garrison!” a prisoner cried.

  Screeches, catcalls, obscenities. In this space the noise was total, the silence of a moment before inverted. The hallway was worse than the courtyard, more compressed, more metal. A lab rat would have known enough to turn and run. Kit didn’t realize the guard had something more to say till he touched a finger to Kit’s pad.

  “Just tell them,” Garrison repeated.

  He turned his back again, before Kit could respond. Hunched over his notes, his gorge bubbled with coffee. He’d needed a third cup.

  “Better catch up, sweet butt.” A single voice, quiet. When had the ruckus died down?

  “Don’t want to be left all a-lone, sweet sweet.”

  The penitentiary had five levels, “E” at the bottom and “A” at the top. The entry from outside was at the central level. The heat increased as they descended, until Kit felt his ribcage running sweat. He’d wondered about wearing his trenchcoat. Most of the way there were only a couple oversized bulbs for each corridor, the light made hotter by its steel reflecting cone. The cellblocks here were empty except for the occasional white stare. Even in the pen it was a weekday morning. There was the workshop, the law library, classes. No doubt some aired their resentments in the cold yard.

  Kit had seen the blueprints. He’d visited county jails, and by now he must have interviewed a couple dozen cons. He could even recall Monsod’s optimum population, 1,118. He decided to figure out what proportion of the prisoners were where. Start with those in these corridors, a ballpark figure anyway. How many had he seen so far? Okay, now subtract that from—well, there were the cutbacks, the overcrowding. Make the total population more like 1500, a nice round figure. No need to make himself crazy. So, the workshop, the yard, the library … classes and group therapy … altogether make it eight possible locations for any prisoner, with the largest percentage per capita on a Thursday morning either in the shop or in the yard: say 300 “working,” 300 “playing.” No doubt a time-&-motion expert could break it down further.

  In the center of “D” level, an otherwise blank corridor, stood the doors to the workshop. Here the heat was worst. The inmates worked stamping license plates, and the fumes of paint and molten metal made Kit’s eyes water. But the windows showed him nothing. Scarred and dented plexiglass, portholes on fog.

  Okay, my basement boys and girls—how can you tell a tourist? C’mon, punks—how do you know a poser when you see one? I mean, you and me, we belong down in those dungeons. When we feel those club walls tremble with the bass guitar, we know what they’re saying, we read it easy as a blind man reads Braille. Right! We wouldn’t even be reading this kind of newspaper, this proud alternative press, if we didn’t belong down there.

  But a tourist, a fly-by, a fake—how can you tell one when you see one?

  *

  Aw, Viddich. Stay with it. Below “D” level, Kit and the others entered an enclosed spiral stairwell. For the first time he got between the two inspectors. There, almost between one ringing step and the next, it was January again. January and nighttime: down here they left the lights out. Kit’s eyes were still adjusting when the four of them stopped.

  “Wow.” The inspector who spoke was so close that Kit could feel the man shiver. “You can’t even use forced air?”

  “Somebody had the bright idea of using the workshop ovens as the furnace.” The guard tapped his baton across the downstairs door to find the lockbox. “Right now the overhead pipes are so bad we can’t get any circulation.”

  “Ah, Charley …” The inspector’s voice had changed. “Overhead pipes?”

  “Charley,” the other inspector said, “we never heard about no overhead pipes.”

  This guy too sounded off-key, forced. Kit wondered about the stairwell’s echo, and when the door opened, the group hustled through faster than necessary. Was there something worth knowing about overhead pipes? Kit tried to make a note in the dark, but a new dampness made his lungs catch. The smell was a thousand miles out of place, the skunk-cabbage chill of his uncles’ creekbed. When the fluorescents came on overhead, coffee pulsed under his scalp.

  “What is this?” he said. “What are you so scared of?”

  The inspectors had slipped past him. As he blinked and focussed, Kit could see they had no time for him anyway. The room looked wrecked, uninhabitable. Down here the cells weren’t lined up in rows like on the upper levels, and the doors didn’t have openings. Instead the place was arranged like a suite of offices around a vacant, phlegmy lounge. The offices were bolted top and bottom, and the floor had no rug. Standing water stretched across the room, maybe a yard shy of wall to wall. It was green with institutional paint.

  On the unrippled surface of the pool, the lights’ reflection—the fluorescent strip, the tin crosshatching—suggested the ribbed back of a crocodile. One of the inspectors knelt beside the pool and, another surprise, he could dip his finger only to the second knuckle. But then, Kit reminded himself, Junior Rebes couldn’t have tested the depth. Chances were that Junior hadn’t even seen how far the green scuzz rose up the walls. Over the frame round the exit, flakes of paint lifted off the steel like lichen. The smell was fungous and rust trailed in stripes down from the bolts.

  The only sounds were the movements of the inspectors and a rhythmic babble from inside one of the cells. A chant, punctuated by handclaps.

  Kit went back to his pad: “?overhead pipes?” Then, okay, six cell doors on the floor plan. One, two, three, four, five and six. Doors not quite tall enough for him to enter without bending, with sliding panels at nipple height. Plus a seventh: shorter still and without a food slot, placed so its ceiling must be sawed off by the spiral stairs. God, was that the closet? The so-called utility closet? Angled against the door stood an ordinary police lock, the bar and hook cleaner, newer metal than the door itself.

  Garrison spoke up: “We’re not scared of anything.”

  Kit touched his neck. It took a moment to recall his question.

  “I mean,” Garrison said, “there are lights in each of the cells. Lights and a space heater. The animals we got down here don’t need no more than that.”

  “What about the stairwell, then?” Kit asked.

  “The seepage musta got to the wiring already.” This was the inspector testing the water. “Wouldn’t you say so, Ad?”

  “Looks that way,” Ad said. Neither of them glanced at Kit.

  “Seepage in the wiring,” Garrison said, “whoa. The electric chair, you know, that’s been outlawed in this state.”

  The three men laughed. They were nowhere near each other, the inspectors on opposite sides of the puddle, the guard across the room. But their echoes linked up over the water and, laughing, they became a single unit. A bloc. Kit kept frowning, thinking about the state payroll. These inspectors must have been just as scared and he was, but for them, the guard’s one-liner was a reassurance, a union card. A reminder that even in Monsod, you didn’t make waves. You didn’t ruffle the surface of pay grade and job title. A “corrections officer” like Garriso
n, if he started young enough and stayed with it, could retire at forty-five. A “maintenance engineer” like Ad—now nervously fingering hair over his bald spot—was a construction man who’d lucked onto a desk job.

  The men grew quiet. Their look settled on him. The chanting continued, the spacey clap, clap.

  Kit bent to write, tucking his elbows.

  *

  He’d half-expected briefcases filled with instruments. Syringes, weights and measures, test tubes. But aside from the tool belt, all these men had with them were a box of zip-lock Baggies. The belt held only one tool of any size, a foot-long wrench with a head big enough to open pipe fittings. In the other large holster, the inspector kept a couple of half-pint bottles. Baby bottles, Kit guessed. One still bore the white fuzz of an old label. When the man scooped the puddle Kit imagined him drinking the scum. Meantime the other inspector used a jackknife to take scrapings from the walls.

  The guard was the big surprise. Garrison took time to check the cells and the rig on the door to the utility closet. But then the man left. There was more code at the call box, and then he was up the stairs. Before going he actually wagged his finger at Kit: “Stay put, kid.” Kid? The man was gone a while before Kit thought to check his watch. After that it was twenty-one minutes that they were alone.

  Ad and the other inspector went on as if nothing had changed, taking measurements mostly. More ordinary tools, levels and tape measures, T-squares and a plumb bob. More of that wordless tune from one of the cells. A couple of the feeding slots opened for a peek, but nobody called, though maybe Kit heard a mutter, a cough. He felt as if he and the inspectors were ghosts. Once, Ad tugged up his workbooks and splashed out to the center of the seepage, walking on water.

  Kit struggled for a story lead, a fix on Monsod that could jump-start his work here. The obvious analogy of course was to hell, the Inferno, but Kit thought he could do better. He started with the contrast between the outside appearance and this stinking core. As you approached Monsod it looked stupendous, a command center in black concrete and steel. But the life of the place was down here.

  “1st glance:,” he wrote, “high tech in icy waste. Nuke site Antarctica. Last glance: swamp graveyard erupt’n. Bones & bodies exposed in muck.”

  Everything he’d seen was part of the same, too. “Diff betw towers & E Level—mislead. Fact: tech dominance & swamp nakedness stages of SAME.”

  Better, editor. Kit found his voice, enough at least to go after the inspectors. The two men first ignored him, then insulted him. “You’re so worried about the overhead pipes, kid, the door’s right there. Go check ‘em yourself.” Kit kept at it, but by and large their answers proved as simple as their tools. Metal strain, loose bolts, damage to the foundation. Kit would get a copy of the report as part of the deal. When Garrison returned, the inspectors were squatting in a huddle, in the opposite corner of the cellar. Whispering.

  Garrison headed straight for the inspectors and stopped over them arms akimbo, so Kit had to circle the pool to get a decent view. Ad stroked his bald spot, his look unhappy. It was the other inspector who spoke. He said it was time to get into the crawlspace.

  “Fucking A, Amby.” When had the guard had gotten this other one’s name? “You got to go down there?”

  “Come on,” Ad said. “The word we got was, we can’t mess around.”

  “Fucking A.”

  With that, Kit was once more the center of attention. Ad kept on with his hair, Amby squinted, and Garrison crossed his big arms high on his chest. State employees. Of course the three men were concerned about the utility closet. The hatchway to the crawlspace was in the closet. You saw the blueprint, Viddich, you shouldn’t mind the stares now.

  “Hey, smart boy,” the guard asked. “What’s the name of that paper you work for?”

  Mildly Kit met his glare.

  “What’s the name, smart boy?”

  “The only name you need to worry about,” Kit said, “is Forbes Croftall.”

  The guard flexed his crossed arms. The move made his holster squeak. Kit recalled Leo, his chesty macho, and then one of the lines The Godfather had made famous.

  “Charley,” he said, “this is business.”

  Unhappy, Ad got slowly to his feet.

  “Charley,” Amby said.

  “I don’t like it,” the guard said. “The whole setup’s fucked.”

  “Charley, the word we got was, he’s seen the blueprints already. He knows where that hatch is.”

  He knew more than that. He knew they’d rigged the closet as a cell for Junior Rebes.

  “He’s seen the blueprints already,” Amby said.

  Garrison flexed again. This time there was squeaking all along his belt. The man had plenty there, God knows. A clutch of keys the size of an axe head, a stick and a gun and a can of Mace, a radiophone as black and weighty-looking as a dumbbell. The four of them waited through a few beats more of the voodoo song from the cells. When Garrison broke away, whispering a blue streak, Kit managed to stifle the urge to flinch.

  But the guard went out the door. Out the door, for the second time in five minutes. Kit again suffered the place’s stench, a cavelike mung that went to the roof of the mouth. But the big guard returned quickly, toting an iron rod over one shoulder. A rod more than half his height, heavy enough to make his upper body bulge as he shrugged the thing down. The end rang against the floor.

  “He-ey!” The voice was from one of the cells. “What’s that shit?”

  “Hey, I’m tryin’ to jerk off in here. Trying to concentrate.”

  “You whuppin’ on somebody else, Garrison?”

  “Aw. Mothafuck bad enough down here without—”

  “Shut up!” Garrison screamed.

  The cons shut up. Kit had his writing things pressed to his chest, his coat buttons digging into his bare wrists. A silly, overcomplicated trenchcoat. Ankle-length and double-breasted, all buckles and buttons and epaulets. Gear worthy of Byline: Ernest Hemingway.

  Byline: Fuck you. Kit pricked up his ears, confirming that the chanting and handclaps had gotten louder. And could hearing the other voices help him pick out which cell?

  “Junior?” He wheeled round, facing the closet. “Hey, Junior Rebes? Is that—”

  “You shut up too,” Garrison said.

  The closet door could only open halfway. Before going in, the inspectors shrugged and cricked their necks. Kit was last, holding his pad to his heart as he peered under the sill.

  First, there were the walls. Kit’s man might have been off in the corner, his mother’s son, his “amalgam”—that might have been him, Junior, that gum-colored limpness in the corner. But first Kit needed a minute elsewhere. First, these walls. The steel in here had been coated with a layer of plaster. “?Plaster?” he noted. “?Other cells too?” Plaster, or some kind of mudding anyway, a good half-inch deep. “Contrctrs crazy? Crl & unusl pun.” Cruel and unusual punishment, because a man in solitary would start clawing the stuff from the walls even before the seepage softened it. He’d enjoy a moment’s hope that he could tear his cell apart. Junior Rebes especially must have held out that hope, since it wasn’t till recently that the overcrowding had forced the prison commissioners into using this space. Junior was the first con in here. He must have seen the virgin whitewash on the walls and dreamed of clambering out, an inky-dinky spider climbing the Man’s own waterspout. But here too he’d hit steel plate, half an inch in. The Man never stopped messing with your head.

  So the prisoner had started to decorate. In Junior’s misshapen cell, women lounged and spread their legs across two walls, while elsewhere stretched erect cocks, one with most of a muscled stud’s torso attached. Rebes showed talent: the lips of one cunt fit the corner of the wall between two properly proportioned legs, and the bulb of a cock was sculpted in low relief. Also he’d put in a calendar. Boxes marked off Sunday to Saturday, boxes like cells. X’s within like stick prisoners. Some of the X’s had dangling cocks, a few others, the paired U’s of
naked breasts.

  The work took up most of the room’s sloped ceiling, from the underside of the stairway out. The space was narrow and low but surprisingly deep. The visitors had room enough, so long as Garrison squatted over his long iron as he moved in, and Kit never went farther than the door. There was a hanging iron cot, chains sweating in the cold. The space heater remained off. The portapotty was red with obscenities, words that appeared to have been scrawled in shit and blood.

  Off in the corner leaned the man himself, still trying to chant away his time.

  The overhead bulb played tricks on his skin. His bare feet were the pink and brown of funeral makeup, and the scabs on his fingertips glistened. If Junior hadn’t been proven correct so often, Kit would have doubted anything he had to say. Wiry and long-stemmed, the man sagged over gum-soft extended legs, singing to himself. His handclaps were so limp the palms popped, and his broad eyelids never opened. Whatever syllables he was speaking went on unbroken.

  Kit noted: “?Drugs? Downs?”

  The words were helpless. The ink skipped on the greasy paper. Kit sagged against the low doorjamb, rocked by the utter silliness of the hard-nosed muckraker. What was he doing? What, dragging another two-bit legal hassle into this naked indifference, this listless offering up of every filthy little secret the con had? Here every passing day was another stick nude exposed in a cage, and every wall showed him another unembarrassed tidbit straight from the yearning crotch. AC, DC, lazy greedy lying whatever. Here a former live wire lay preferring the back of the brain, caving happily inward. Should Kit burst in shouting Drugs!, shouting Corruption!, Junior would roll his languid eyes and say: No shit, college boy. He’d say: “Hey, I’m trying to jerk off in here.” And Kit’s white lie about the man—his sin of ambition—hadn’t even begun to approach the fuck-happy venality in the bodies and faces and boxes that swarmed over Junior’s cell. Compared to this, what were all Kit’s words, words, words? What exactly were they supposed to haul back to sea level?

  *

  The hatch for the crawlspace was a circular plate in the floor. The crawlspace, the reason they’d come in. Garrison had already undone the locks on the restraining bar. The big rod the guard had brought in was a lever for the hatch, an oversized tire iron. Now Ad worked the lever while Garrison folded the cot against the wall, out of the way. The bed chain’s bolts trembled as the cot slammed to.