Green River Rising, Page 3

  He pulled on his regulation denims: long-sleeved shirt with two breast pockets, pants, a canvas belt. As he sat on his bunk and tied the laces of his training shoes a sudden rumble arose from all around him and climaxed in a teeth-jarring crash that echoed back down from the vaulted glass roof. The first count was complete, the machine was satisfied for another hour, and the one hundred and eighty steel doors of D block thundered open in electronic unison. After breakfast Klein and the other inmates would trail back to their cells and the screws would lock them in again for the second count. Then they would be released again for morning work detail.

  Klein stood up. Men heavy with sleep, their shoulders caved forward with the torpor of those whose day promised nothing but more of the same, trudged past the open door of his cell. None of them was curious enough to look in, none of them cared to call out a greeting to him nor he to them. It was too early, and they were too recently abducted from the peace of nightmare or dream. Men whose future was behind them. If Klein didn’t get the result he hoped for today, if the parole board refused his suit, Klein too would . . .

  He stopped the thought dead and told himself he was a fool for shackling himself with hope. He reminded himself he had nowhere to go but down, that the sanctimonious jerks on the parole board had seen the contempt radiating from his eyes and had decided to keep him caged for another year, or two or even five. He told himself again, for the thousandth time: This is now. There is no past. There is no after. There is no outside. There is no beyond. This is where you are. And all that you are and all that you may be is what you are in this moment. That and nothing more. Now go get your breakfast.

  Klein stepped out on to the walkway, walked along the tier and clattered down the spiral stair. As he reached ground tier Nev Agry passed him, walking towards the main gate sally. Agry was four inches shorter than Klein and about ten pounds heavier. His bulk was invested with the charisma of the tried and tested psychopath and his potency enshrouded him like a forcefield. He was the barn boss of D block and the strongest of the white Lifer crew chiefs. Klein had treated Agry a number of times, for minor ailments and a series of recurrent chest infections resulting from three packs of Luckies a day. Klein was also good friends with Agry’s wife, Claudine, but she was back on B block where she’d undergone another involuntary change of gender and, as plain Claude, was sweating it out under the lockdown. Agry nodded to Klein as he passed and headed off for the mess hall with Tony Shockner at his shoulder. A nod from Agry was considered a great privilege but the only privilege Klein wanted now was parole. At ten-thirty this morning he would find out from Warden Hobbes whether it was his or not.

  Klein could tell it was going to be a long day. So he shrugged and braced himself for whatever it had in store and joined the long line of futureless men as they filed through the gate towards the mess hall.

  TWO

  IN THE PRISON infirmary Reuben Wilson reached for the small trapeze hanging over his head and hauled himself into a sitting position. He gritted his teeth against the pain in his belly. In fact the pain wasn’t that much to speak of. His teeth were gritted because he was scared that the stitches holding his abdomen together would burst apart and empty his entrails into his lap. Frog Coley, the motherfucker, had told him he’d seen it happen more than a time or two, and boy had those suckers screamed. It was thirteen days since Wilson’s ruptured spleen had been removed and Ray Klein had assured him that unless he took a kick in the gut – or tried to kick someone else’s – the wound would hold firm. Wilson believed Klein; but he believed Coley’s stories too so he was cautious just the same.

  To Wilson’s mind the infirmary was the grimmest building in the whole fucking joint – and Wilson was a man who’d done his share and more in Segregation. It had taken him a while to understand why. The tiled magnolia-painted walls of Travis Ward were discoloured with nicotine and age, yet it was brighter and cooler than the Valley. Also Wilson preferred the odour of disinfectant to the mixture of sweat, piss and semen that clung to every stacked inch of the tiers. And despite the constant rustle of coughs and wheezes from the lungs of the dying it was quiet on the ward – tranquil, even – compared to the ceaseless clamour of B block. No, the grimness of the infirmary, he’d come to realise, lay elsewhere: in the white steel grate that divided the ward into two twelve bed sections; in the bars embedded in the thick reinforced glass of the windows; and in the guys dying of Aids in so many of the beds. The conjunction of the bars with the gaunt figures embodied Wilson’s – and every man’s – darkest dread: of dying on this side of the wall. When living in chains became a commonplace, dying in chains became the final bitter defeat. And, as Wilson had seen, these guys had plenty of time to think about it.

  A broadside of membrane-ripping coughs erupted from the other side of the ward, the kind that made Wilson’s chest ache just to hear them. Wilson looked up. In the bed opposite the spectral form of Greg Garvey had slipped down from his pillows so that he was almost flat on his back. Too weak to drag himself upright, or even to roll over onto his side, Garvey tried feebly to spit out a cupful of infected phlegm. Half of it hung from his lips in a green mucoid mesh that stuck to his chin and neck. The rest clung to the insides of his throat and set him coughing again: racking spasms that scraped away the last of his strength.

  Garvey was a white junkie serving two-to-ten for wounding a convenience store owner in a robbery. He was twenty-three years old.

  ‘Shut the fuck up, Garvey, you stinking faggot.’

  The shrill voice belonged to Gimp Cotton, a murderer whose thin face was covered with a lacework of blue-black self-inflicted tattoos. When Garvey fell into another, weaker, paroxysm Cotton threw back the sheets and hobbled to his feet. His left leg was in a cast. Cotton had sawed through his Achilles tendon – for the third time in five years – in order to take a vacation from C block. He limped across the aisle towards Garvey.

  ‘If nobody else wantsa deal with these goddamn Aids fuckers, I will,’ shrieked Cotton. His face shone with the satisfaction of mindless hate. Reuben Wilson knew this hate, this mindlessness, for it was his life.

  ‘Leave him alone, Gimp,’ warned Wilson.

  Gimp turned on Wilson. His tattooed face writhed with malice. ‘He’s been coughing that shit on us straight guys all night long. It ain’t right.’

  ‘You can’t catch nothing from a cough,’ said Wilson. ‘Klein said so.’

  Cotton paused at the head of Garvey’s bed, supporting himself with his left hand against the wall. He looked at Wilson.

  ‘Bullshit. That short-timing bastard’d tell us anything.’ He squinted at the melting tallow of Garvey’s face. ‘I’m gonna get rid of him.’

  With his right hand Cotton grabbed a pillow.

  ‘I said leave him alone.’

  Wilson leaned forward in his bed, his voice big with menace. His stitched belly contracted with the effort. For an instant Wilson saw the entrails tumbling into his lap, heard the sound of his own screams. Wilson had never screamed in his life. It wasn’t something he was keen to check out. His hand flew to his wound: it was fine. He leaned back and saw Cotton watching him, looking smugly at the hand cradling his stomach. Wilson’s guts contracted again, this time with humiliation.

  Cotton said, ‘I’m doin’ us all a favour. Including him, the poor fuck.’

  Cotton crammed the pillow over Garvey’s face, then leaned forward with all his weight. After a long pause a thin hand rose from the damp sheets to paw at Cotton’s wrist.

  Wilson dragged his own sheets aside and clambered down from the high mattress. He hadn’t exercised as much as he’d been told to and his legs felt like jelly. He steadied himself on the bedstead and asked himself just what the fuck he planned to do when he got across the room. Normally the Gimp would’ve soiled his shitstained skivvies if Wilson so much as looked at him, but the tattooed killer knew what Klein said about the stitches. The thin hand clawing at Gimp’s wrist gave up and fell back onto the bed.

  ‘Cotton,’
said Wilson, ‘you get back in the population I’ll have your fucking lips cut off.’

  ‘Kiss my ass, coon.’

  There was a clang as a steel door was slammed in anger. A bass voice shook the room with outrage.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’

  Earl ‘Frogman’ Coley was five feet eight inches tall and weighed two hundred and thirty pounds. His skin was a lustrous, bituminous black and his skull was a huge and craggy rock, softened only in its lower regions by the fat of his neck and jowls. Twenty-three years ago he’d been a sharecropper in the East Texas wetlands round Nacogdoches, with a wife, four kids and a mule. One day he found two white teenagers pouring drain cleaner into the mule’s eyes while it was tethered to a fence post. Coley took a rope hackamore and gave the boys the thrashing they deserved and sent them on their way. But niggers raise their hands to white boys at their peril, and the county court found Coley guilty of child abuse and attempted murder and sent him down for ten years to life. He hadn’t seen his wife in seventeen years nor any of his children for twelve. For a decade-and-a-half past Earl Coley had been the superintendant of the prison infirmary.

  Now Coley charged down the centre aisle of the ward, rolling up the sleeves of his whites. Cotton let go of the pillow over Garvey’s face and hobbled back across the ward, his tattoos stretched tight across his cheekbones with panic. As Cotton reached his bed Coley grabbed an aluminium water jug from the table and punched it into Cotton’s face. Even Wilson, with fifteen years in the ring behind him, flinched at the clank of the impact. Cotton spun and sprawled face down on the mattress, whimpering as he shielded his head with his arms and elbows. For a moment Coley stood over him, shaking with rage, murder in his eyes. With an effort he glanced across at Garvey. The junkie wasn’t moving. Coley dropped the water jug dented with the imprint of Cotton’s face, and hurried across the ward.

  Coley tore the pillow from Garvey’s head then slid both his arms under his limp body. He rolled him over onto his side. Garvey was just barely breathing. Coley reached a finger into his mouth and raked out a clotted skein of infected mucus. Garvey emitted a feeble rattle. Coley looked over his shoulder at Wilson.

  ‘Hand me that sucker, man.’ Coley pointed at a plastic contraption with two flexible tubes that hung from a wooden box at the foot of the bed. ‘That plastic shit, there. Quick.’

  Wilson strode forward but his legs betrayed him, just turned to spaghetti underneath him. He grabbed the rail at the bottom of his bed. He felt ashamed. At least he managed not to clutch his stomach the way he wanted to. He looked at Coley for help.

  ‘Fighters,’ said Coley, with contempt. ‘Outside the ring you just a bunch of drippin’ pussies.’

  A flame of anger pushed Wilson across the ward at near-normal pace. He snatched the suction pack from the box and handed it to Coley. Coley put one of the tubes between his lips and sucked; the other he slipped down Garvey’s throat, siphoning the mucus into the plastic container. Wilson, squeamish, yet in awe of Coley’s expertise, watched. By the time Coley had finished Garvey’s breathing was back to the shallow gasp that for him counted as normal. Coley rolled him onto his back again then lifted him into a sitting position.

  ‘Fix them pillows,’ said Coley.

  Wilson hesitated again, this time not for fear but for pride. In the Valley he was lord of life and death. No one spoke to him this way.

  Coley stared at him. ‘You ready to go back to B block?’

  Wilson squinted at him. It was a long time since he’d been both insulted and threatened before breakfast. Words crossed his mind: People had their tongues cut out for less than that, Old Man. Could Coley read the essence of the thought in Wilson’s eyes? Wilson couldn’t read Coley’s eyes at all. Here Coley was lord. Wilson reached over, not caring any longer if his guts fell out over Coley’s big flat feet, and stacked the pillows behind Garvey’s shoulders. When Coley was satisfied that the dying man was comfortable he turned his hooded eyes back on Wilson.

  ‘You didn’ give me no answer.’

  ‘You mean ’bout going back to the Valley?’ said Wilson.

  Coley nodded.

  You must be fucking kidding, man, thought Wilson. Coley’s massive face confronted him with silence. The crack about drippin’ pussies returned to Wilson’s mind. He swallowed.

  ‘I ain’t due back on the block. I got ten days’ punishment in the hole to serve out,’ said Wilson. ‘But if you say so I’ll go.’

  Coley looked at him gravely. Something in his eyes changed.

  ‘I know it ain’t right,’ said Coley, ‘but I got sick men down below sleepin’ on camp beds.’

  ‘I’ll be glad to get away from the Gimp,’ said Wilson.

  ‘You can stay a couple more days, long as you get some exercise.’

  Coley looked across the room and saw Cotton watching and listening with his ballooning face cradled in his hand.

  Coley smiled. ‘You go back this afternoon, Gimp. Cast and all.’

  ‘You fat nigger fuck. You caved my face in. You gonna pay for this.’

  Coley crossed the room with the speed and momentum of a linebacker. As Cotton scrambled away Coley grabbed a fistful of skin and hair from Cotton’s scrawny chest. He half-lifted him from the bed. Cotton screamed.

  ‘You touch any of my people again, you find out just how small a shit the medical examiner gives ’bout what’s in them plastic bags we send him.’

  Cotton squirmed free and crawled to the far side of the bed where he curled whimpering with pain. Coley turned back to Wilson.

  ‘I need some help with the breakfasts.’

  Wilson said, ‘Sure.’

  Coley smiled. ‘Help you get that belly back in shape.’

  Coley turned and lumbered down the ward towards the gate.

  Reuben Wilson, warlord of B block and feeling obscurely privileged by the Frogman’s smile, stepped into the aisle and followed him as fast as he dared.

  THREE

  UNDER NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES Henry Abbott had a particular fondness for oatmeal. His grandfather, who had ridden with Colonel Chivington at Sand Creek, had eaten oatmeal every day of his life and had lived to be ninety-three years old. Now the experts had announced that it was good for the heart and circulation, and the secret was out. Abbott did not object to this, but the oatmeal sitting in front of him on the mess hall table was not good. Abbott knew. He pushed the plastic bowl away untouched. This oatmeal was full of ground glass.

  From his shirt pocket Abbott took a cheap notebook purchased in the prison store and a black Sheaffer fountain pen with a gold nib. The pen was the only object Abbott possessed that wasn’t prison issue. He opened the notebook to a fresh page and wrote today’s number in green ink: ‘3083’ then beneath it: ‘Oatmeal not good – full of ground glass.’

  The powdered eggs, on the other hand, Abbott found acceptable. He put his pen and book away, laced the eggs with ketchup and shovelled the mixture into his mouth with a plastic spoon. Things didn’t taste so good off plastic. Like coffee from a styrofoam cup. In the canteen everything was plastic and Abbott hated it. Now they had put plastic in his face too – packed it tight under his cheekbones to make it harder to smile, and down inside the canals of his teeth to make it harder to chew, and in and around the angles of his jaws and under the root of his tongue to make it harder to speak. They’d injected the plasticating chemicals into his left buttock yesterday morning. Now, twenty-four hours later, the chemicals had been processed by the liver while he slept and had worked their way into his face – as they were designed to do – and plastified so that he couldn’t smile so good or talk so good and had to work hard at chewing and swallowing the rubbery breakfast eggs. Most of all, the chemicals placed a shroud of freezing fog around The Word so that its voice became muffled and distant. Yet despite the icy shroud The Word was always there: beyond him, about him, above him. At The Word’s suggestion he had already documented the plastication in his book for the benefit of future generations, yet he rarely felt that his not
es did The Word justice. Despite his continued failure as a scribe Abbott tried. After all, they would have silenced The Word forever if they could. And Abbott suspected it was this very motive that had compelled them to put ground glass in his oatmeal.

  The Word knew and only The Word. And they knew it. And they would go to any lengths to prevent The Word’s knowledge from getting out. If the oatmeal failed to make Abbott’s inner organs bleed – and fail it would because he had been warned not to eat it – then the plastic in his face, distorting his speech, would ensure that no one would believe him. Abbott couldn’t quell a certain admiration: they certainly knew their business. And yet they would fail, for The Word would be heard, at least by one. By him if by no one else. By Henry Abbott.

  The canteen was busy, as Abbott had observed it always was at certain times of the day. Breakfast was one such time. The inmates queued up at a row of metal tubs. The tubs were suspended in a pool of hot water secretly concealed – as so much else was secret and concealed – behind a polished steel partition. Behind the tubs the cooks ladled luke-warm food into the plastic trays held out by the inmates. The cook who had laced Abbott’s oatmeal with glass had been very quick: a wink to his partner, a smile at Abbott – he hadn’t smiled at anyone else – and while the smile distracted him, the powdered glass: released from a concealed pouch up the cook’s sleeve. Before Abbott had been quick enough to actually see the glass it had dispersed, invisible and deadly, into his breakfast oatmeal.

  Close, but no cigar.

  Abbott looked up from his eggs and saw Doctor Ray Klein walking towards him between the rows of noisy, crowded tables. Abbott, as usual, had a table to himself. This wasn’t something that he chose or even wanted; it was just the way of things. The Doctor carried over his tray and sat down facing him. The Doctor was just under six feet tall and yet the top of his head was barely level with Abbott’s collar bone. The Doctor looked up. His face was lean and behind the bones Abbott felt the flames of a pale, pentecostal fire that burned without warming and consumed without replenishing the Doctor’s spirit.