Green River Rising, Page 2

  ‘Now return to your cells.’

  The order was ignored, as Hobbes knew it would be. From the line of guards Captain Bill Cletus turned and looked up at him. His florid features were composed and steady. Hobbes nodded and Cletus bent his head and spoke into a radio clipped to his lapel. The steel door of the sallyport behind Hobbes rumbled open and a second squad of sixteen guards charged into the block. Round their necks hung gas masks. Four of them carried tear gas launchers which they trained on the bristling tiers. The rest held riot guns at port arms. When the guards were in place Hobbes spoke again, his limbs humming.

  ‘Return to your cells. Further disobedience will invite needless punishment.’

  From the second tier a dark object flew down towards Hobbes. Though he saw it coming he made no attempt to avoid it. The object struck him on the shoulder, clung on for a second, then dropped to the dais at his feet. The rage of the inmates subsided into curiosity. Hobbes glanced up to the second level then turned to Bill Cletus.

  ‘Wilson,’ said Hobbes.

  Cletus and four of his men clattered up the steel staircase towards the second floor walkway. At the top of the stairs an obese convict – a double rapist named Dixon – deliberately half-blocked their way. Cletus hosed him down with Mace. As Dixon staggered back into the wall, blinded and wheezing, Cletus stepped past him onto the walkway. The two guards following Cletus fell on Dixon like woodcutters, slashing him to his knees with their nightsticks. When he was bleeding and broken to their satisfaction they jacked his arms up behind his back, hauled him to his feet and bundled him violently, face down, into a toilet at the back of a vacant cell.

  Wilson, light on his feet as a dancer, held his fists cocked in front of him. From the dais Hobbes saw the expression on his face as Cletus and his men closed in. Wilson was an ex-number one contender for the middleweight championship of the world and the young bloods from the ghettoes who had never achieved more than the successful robbery of a convenience store worshipped him. In truth Hobbes had the highest respect for Wilson. What’s more Wilson had spent eight years inside for a crime he hadn’t committed. As the guards stalked him along the catwalk Wilson glanced down through the rails of the walkway and saw Hobbes watching him. Again they held each other’s eyes and in that moment Wilson calculated the consequences for the prisoners of his resisting. He dropped his guard and stood up straight in front of Cletus.

  ‘Wasn’t me, Captain,’ said Wilson.

  Cletus rammed the tip of his stick into Wilson’s belly then lashed him across the side of the head with the butt end. Wilson rolled with the blows, spinning into the safety rail as the guards seized him from behind. With as much force as possible they cuffed his arms behind his back and manhandled him down the stairs. Hobbes noted that no one intervened on Wilson’s behalf.

  The block was quiet except for the sound of Wilson and the guards clattering down the steel stair and of Dixon coughing and whimpering in his cell. Hobbes surveyed the inmates. A pall of helplessness and shame had fallen over them. The guards dragged Wilson in front of the dais and let go his arms. Wilson swayed for a moment as if he might fall, then steadied himself. He stared at Hobbes without blinking.

  Hobbes turned away to examine, for the first time, the object that struck him on the shoulder. It was a human turd, now broken into two pieces. Hobbes bent down and picked up the larger piece between his finger and thumb. He paused, still bent, and looked briefly into Wilson’s eyes. The boxer understood: but could do nothing. Hobbes stood up. He raised the turd high above his head, displaying it to the prisoners. A murmur ran amongst them. When he was sure they knew what he was holding he stepped up to the microphone.

  ‘This is what you are.’

  All attention was on him. Deliberately, and with the appearance of relish, Hobbes took the turd into the palm of his hand and squashed it in his fist.

  A subdued exhalation of disgust, a ‘Jesus’ muttered under five hundred breaths, rose up towards the glass vault of the roof. Hobbes turned away from the tiers and looked down at Wilson. Wilson licked blood from his lips and swallowed.

  ‘You any idea what you’re doin’?’ said Wilson.

  Hobbes held his dark eyes for a full ten seconds. Wilson was too intelligent to be left on the block. He could not be allowed to thwart Hobbes’s design. It was unjust but necessary: Wilson would have to go to segregation. Hobbes nodded to Cletus.

  ‘Take him to the hole.’

  The guards yanked Wilson away and shuffled him out through the rear door into the yard. His fellow inmates watched him go in silence. Hobbes returned to the microphone.

  ‘You will now return to your cells. All work, yard and visiting privileges are suspended indefinitely. In other words: total lockdown.’

  In the vacuum left by Wilson’s abduction they took this with relative silence.

  ‘And while you have twenty-four empty hours a day in which to occupy your minds, think on this:’

  Hobbes raised his soiled hand, palm open towards them.

  ‘I can wash this clean in thirty seconds. But you will be niggers for the rest of your lives.’

  Hobbes turned on his heel, stepped down from the rear of the dais and walked out into the yard.

  Out in the open air he realised that his heart was racing and his breathing was rapid. The address had gone better than he dared hope. He pulled out the handkerchief and wiped his hand. As he did so he saw Bill Cletus staring at him. On a gut level Cletus understood the workings of the prison better than anyone except Hobbes. But he did not have Hobbes’s mind. Nor did he have his will. Hobbes glanced up at the sky. The glare of the sun was intense. He looked back at Cletus.

  ‘From tomorrow,’ said Hobbes, ‘I want the air-conditioning system of B block turned off.’

  Cletus blinked. ‘And the lockdown?’

  ‘Indefinite, as I said.’

  ‘There’ll be blood,’ said Cletus.

  Cletus almost doubled his salary with the contraband he smuggled in for Neville Agry, the Lifer crew chief of D block. Hobbes knew this. He considered reminding the captain but decided that at this point it wasn’t necessary.

  Hobbes said, ‘Whatever the consequences of my orders, Captain, your only duty is to obey them.’

  Cletus took a step backwards and saluted.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ he said.

  Hobbes nodded, then turned and walked away across the yard. For the first time in longer than he could remember his conscience was at ease with itself. He was doing what needed to be done. Someone, at last, was doing what needed to be done. It would be ugly. But it was necessary. The temperature was set to rise and the defining hour would follow. Hobbes folded the handkerchief into his pocket and started back across the yard towards his tower.

  PART I

  THE RISING

  ONE

  AN HOUR BEFORE the 0700 first lock and count Dr Ray Klein opened his eyes and thought about the seagulls wheeling high above the outside walls. Or rather he imagined the gulls. As likely as not there were none. If Klein himself had been a gull he would’ve damn sure given this squalid grey shithole a wide berth. There had to be better garbage elsewhere. And if, by chance, the biggest flock of carrion in the history of East Texas was out there – as big and loud and hungry as you please, and wheeling for all they were worth – then Ray Klein would never have heard them above the constant murmur of five-hundred-and-sixty-some convicts as they tossed and grunted and snored in their narrow bunks.

  Klein blinked and reminded himself that he was an asshole.

  Freewheeling birds were a stupid image for a convict to hold in his mind for they brought not a shred of comfort. Yet Klein thought about them just the same, partly because he was an obdurate son of a bitch, and partly because he had not yet conquered his lifelong compulsion to do exactly those things that kept comfort beyond his reach. In this respect he had much in common with his fellow inmates. But unlike them Ray Klein, on this day, had another reason for letting the birds fly about the imaginary dawn
landscape of his mind: after three years hard time there was a chance – a chance – that the bastards who ran this goddamn place were finally going to let him go free. Klein exterminated the birds inside his head and swung his legs over the side of the bunk.

  As he stood up the stone flags were cool and dense against the soles of his feet. He squeezed the flags with his toes, then bent forward in the dim green aura of the night light and placed both palms flat on the floor, squeezing the stale blood out of his hamstrings and spine. He didn’t really want to stand up in the semi-darkness and stretch his body. He hated it. He wanted to spend another hour in oblivion, roaming the dreamy interior of his skull where the space contained therein was as vast as the universe itself and considerably less painful. Yet he spent another ten minutes in a variety of painful contortions. He had long ago taken into his heart the words of William James:

  ‘. . . be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test . . .’

  So Ray Klein finished his stretching and knelt down, sitting back on his heels with his palms resting on his thighs. Even after all these years this part still made him feel kind of cool. Cool wasn’t a quality he readily associated with his own personality and so on these rare occasions he allowed himself to feel it. He closed his eyes and inhaled sharply through his nostrils.

  This was as quiet as it ever got in cellblock D and it was Klein’s Jamesian habit, every day, to get up earlier than he needed to and pretend that the hour was his own. He began with the mokso – the focused breathing to clear his mind – then went on to practise karate until the bell roused the rest of the block to the sullen and paranoid level of consciousness that, in Green River, passed for human existence.

  Klein’s second tier cell was eight feet by six. He made all the karate moves – the kicks, turns, blocks and punches – in slow motion, his muscles densely bunched with maximum tension. This made great demands on his strength, balance and control, attributes with which he was not naturally over-endowed, and after three years he was able to complete his routine in near silence, without panting for air, without breaking any toes and without falling over. Today he practised the kata Gojushiho sho.

  This daily ritual helped to drain off the anger that the prison pumped into his blood. It neutralised the poison and kept him strong, kept him calm, kept him bound apart from all the rest; kept cold and hard the steelwork and ice he had constructed around his soul.

  Since his plunge from grace this architecture had proved a necessary blessing. In the River a soul was a dangerous handicap, a personal torture chamber only to be visited by masochists and fools. Klein had been both in his time but now he knew better. Strangely enough the discipline and self-denial had come to him more easily than it had to most inmates, for his profession had prepared him for it. He had spent much of his adult life steeling himself. As an intern and as a resident and as a chief resident, he had steeled himself. He had hardened his heart against himself; against the endless hours on duty, against the intolerable and yet endurable lack of sleep; against alternating fourteen and twenty-four hour days, year upon year; against the pressure and the fear of making a mistake and killing or disabling a patient; against the horror of mutilated bodies and the naked grief of the bereaved; against the endless stream of examinations; against failure; against the unique dread of telling a man he was going to die or a mother that her child was already dead; against the pain he inflicted on himself and the pain he inflicted on others. Needles, scalpels, amputations, toxic drugs. Through all this and more – and this he shared with his colleagues for he was nothing special – Klein had steeled himself. So that by the time his life collapsed around him and he was sent up to the River he had only needed to add a little ice to the steel and then he’d been ready.

  On the street Klein had been an orthopaedic surgeon.

  Now he was a convicted rapist serving his time.

  Today he might be set free.

  And if he was set free he would have to steel himself again: to a future as featureless and implacable as the granite wall of his cell.

  Klein turned in the narrow space and inflicted an elbow-strike-to-the-face/throat-lock/head-butt combination on an imaginary enemy standing just inside the steel bars of his door. The imaginary enemy’s face collapsed and his body went limp as Klein strangled him. You’re the shotokan warrior, he told himself, you hope for nothing, you need no one, you are free. He smiled and wiped sweat from his eyes.

  Klein had been a student of karate since his college days and nothing else had sustained him more dependably through the years of his medical training. At first, when he’d carried on his habitual morning routine in the River, Klein had felt kind of an idiot posturing this way and that in his cell. The inmates of neighbouring cells, in trying to explain the soft grunting noises he made, had accused him of jerking off, of threading a blunt instrument up his own anus, of unlubricated self-catheterisation and other lone perversions both dangerous and obscure. At the time telling them he was practising karate had seemed even more shameful than jerking off – and in addition much more likely to get him his face cut off – and he had stopped. But he’d argued to himself that if he was going to survive in here he had to keep just a little something for himself, and somehow – whether it made him an idiot or not – karate was it. So Klein had resumed his morning practice and before the mocking voices of his neighbours had become intolerable Myron Pinkley had stolen Klein’s dessert – lime flavoured jello – in the mess hall.

  Ultimately, the brain damage Pinkley sustained proved irreversible and he was born again and joined the Jesus Army. The only tears shed over this incident fell from the eyes of Pinkley’s mother, who wept for joy at her son’s spiritual redemption. And Klein’s neighbours had stopped asking what went on in his cell at each day’s dawning, because they all understood thereafter that it wasn’t any business of theirs.

  The hammering of the bell and the bellowing of sour-faced guards marked the end of Klein’s routine. Soaked in sweat, he wiped his face on a dirty shirt and stood at the front of his cell. There were six lock and counts every day and the first began when the lights came up and the cellblock lumbered awake with a cacophony of coughs and hawked phlegm, of muttered obscenities and loud complaints about the stench of farting cell mates. Then came the mounting redneck blare of radios and cassette decks, and the shouts of the guards, ritually made and ritually ignored, to turn the goddamn music down. Finally came the count itself, the sullen litany echoing back and forth across the tiers as each man, six times a day, proclaimed his identity as a state-given number.

  A Cuban screw named Sandoval appeared beyond the bars of Ray Klein’s door.

  ‘Eighty-eight-four-one-nine, Klein,’ said Klein.

  Sandoval nodded without speaking, checked his list, moved on.

  Klein’s feet slapped the sweat-spattered stone as he walked to the back of his cell. He pulled back the hanging blanket that covered the toilet and took a piss. The cell had been built for one man and since he had accumulated enough wealth to afford it Klein had lived there alone. Most of the single cells held two men and the doubles four. Everything had to be paid for and living space was expensive. The private medical practice Klein had established in the prison had made him wealthy enough to afford it. There were rich and poor in here just as there were in any society and like anywhere else the ability to buy special medical treatment was seized upon as a badge of social power. Klein washed himself down at the sink and dried himself on a large bath towel, another luxury item. By the time he’d finished he was again drenched in sweat, such was the humidity in the cellblock and the heat of his engorged muscles. He delayed dragging on his denims until his sweat had evaporated some into the stagnant air. He stood naked before his shaving mirror, the drone of his electric razor blending with that of hundreds of others. Blades wer
e forbidden. On the lower edge of the mirror was a strip of grubby white adhesive tape. Written on the tape in black ink, where he could see them every morning and remind himself, were the words:

  NOT MY FUCKING BUSINESS

  This aphorism was the top and bottom of the moral, political and philosophical system whose mastery was necessary to survival in Green River State Penitentiary. Its importance had been impressed on Klein early on by Frogman Coley, the trustee superintendent of the prison infirmary. Klein had asked Coley how it was that one of the patients recovering on the ward had come to have both his testicles severed and inserted into his own rectum. And Coley had gripped Klein’s shirt-front and told him:

  ‘You don’ ever wanna know, whitefish. You don’ ever wanna find out ’bout nothin’ goes down in here. You do, you don’ stick your pecker in. Anywhere. Look, say one day you passin’ the shower room, you hear a guy bein’ cut, or he gettin’ his ass raped. Maybe he’s your friend. Your best friend. Maybe you like to be in there yo’self, gettin’ some. Or maybe like this po’ sucker here they takin’ his balls off with a blunt razor and you can hear him screamin’ through the washrag they stuck down his throat. Walk on by, brother, cause there always a reason for it you don’ know about. An’ even if they ain’t no reason at all, it’s not your fucken bidness.’

  And on a couple of occasions – rare but indelible – Klein had witnessed atrocities and heard the screams of pain. And he had indeed walked on by. In fact it had been easy. The words on the tape caught his eyes once more: NOT MY FUCKING BUSINESS. Klein switched off his razor. Flushed as he was with the energy of his karate routine it was easy to feel ballsy and tough. He wondered how he would feel when he got out on the street again; if he got out. The middle-class world he’d left behind would be an alien landscape, the bland, narcissistic and ill-informed chatter even more of an irritant than it always had been. He warned himself again not to set himself up for a fall: he was still a convict. Until they released him that’s all he was.