From the Chrysalis (7 page)

Rick’s face lit up and he actually did a little jig. “Really? When?” His words tumbled over one another. “Why didn’t you say something before?”
 

“Jeez, I dunno. I guess she’s coming when school starts.”
 

“So when the hell’s that? Do kids still start school in September? Hey, can I read it? I like the stuff she writes about the I.R.A. and her dear old Granny. Let me over there and I’d bomb the hell out of those bastards too. She’s cute, right?” Rick asked, shaping an hour glass with his hands.
 

Dace groaned. God, maybe the prison authorities—make that “Authorities” with a capital A—were right. Cons didn’t learn fast. Talking about a girl around here? How stupid was that?
 

“Yeah, I guess,” he said. He had to say something. Rick hardly ever got any mail. Jesus, could the guy even write? He’d had a lot of trouble in their parochial school and the nuns hadn’t helped. “At least she
was
. But you’d look cute too if you were the last set of tits I saw before coming to the Joint.” He stopped, a bit uncomfortable. “Ah, scratch that, she was just a kid.”

At this, Rick looked even more interested. “Well, if she’s eighteen or nineteen now, she’s probably done it.”

Done it? Done it?
What the hell did that mean?

“You hear the stuff that’s going on out there,” Rick waxed on. “Everybody’s getting it on. No more of this wait-until-we’re-married shit. And if something does happen, you don’t even have to marry the broad. They’ve all been living together in little free-love communes since about 1967, man.”

Dace tried butting Rick on the shoulder, but he danced out of the way. Little Liza with somebody else? Crazy. She wouldn’t, would she? Not that she belonged to him. Or ever would. What the hell did he have to offer a girl like her? The way he was, the place he was in. Not to mention she was his cousin. Sure she flirted a little in her letters. To pass the time. For years, she had been a young girl far from home, far from everybody who loved her.

Somewhere a door slammed shut. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Anyway, who cares? You know me. It’s her mind I love.”
 

“The hell you do. Give me that,” Rick said, making a grab.

Dace feigned an upper cut, but Rick ducked out of the way. “Not here,” he said, nodding at Sandy McAllister, whose head and shoulders had just popped up above the crowd, straight across the yard.
 

“Ah, he’s just a lunatic,” Rick said, grinding his cigarette butt into the dirt.“The silly bugger never knows when to stop.”
 

Maybe, Dace thought.

Sandy was about their age, but he wasn’t getting out anytime soon. Nobody knew exactly what he had done, but he was a lifer, so it probably had something to do with a cop. With nothing to lose, Sandy usually had something up his sleeve. A born storyteller and a natural agitator, he was responsible for most of the rumours circulating the Joint. The proposed move to the new Supermax had really got him going, and he’d let everybody know it. He said he wasn’t putting up with that electronic surveillance shit. As if he had a choice.
 

Sandy’s solution was a takeover. Every so often he buttonholed a couple of strong guys like Dace and Rick to make them see things
his way. Somebody had squealed to the Authorities, but they didn’t care. For once, they were relying on their shrink. The shrink speculated that Sandy had a “conspiracy mentality.”

 
Sandy McAllister altered his looks from time to time, depending on his target, but it was always something showy: a sports figure, a circus ring master, a Bible salesman. Right now he was aping Jesus with disciples at his feet, but Dace thought he looked more like Rasputin, with his long, stringy hair slicked back from his forehead and his mad monk eyes. He had quite an audience, though. A bunch of dumb cons.

Dace glanced back at Fat Frank in the tower. He was cradling his assault rifle like it was his firstborn child. The jerk even kissed it from time to time.
 

“C’mon. Give me the effing letter.” Rick spat on the ground. “What do you think I’m gonna do with it, use it like the Bible and light up a smoke?”

“Not on your fucking life,” Dace said. “The rest of these goons will just want to read it, too.”

Nobody got the mail Dace did. Like a good book, Liza’s letters transported him right out of jail. He kept them in his mattress, removing just enough stuffing to make room. The screws were supposed to check the bedding, but they never did.

Rick looked so agitated that Dace almost relented. The poor guy probably just wanted a diversion. Maybe he’d read him a chunk. He wasn’t fast enough, though.

“Keep your kite,” Rick said, then took off to talk to a man from another range. A short termer who was due to be paroled in a few days. Most of those men, short termers, were future oriented. Almost nobody talked about their pasts and only a real goof asked. B Block had their hour in the exercise yard every morning between 7:30 and 8:30. This was their only opportunity to talk to people on other ranges without bringing down the heat. Whatever happened in the Yard, the guard in the gun cage turned a blind eye as long as he could. There was supposed to be a guard walking along the inner wall, but he was usually busy someplace else.
 

Dace wanted to talk to a couple of guys too, but he got distracted. A hawk soared over the barbed wire and he thought about the farm. He walked the perimeter of the yard, checking for a nest.

Minutes later, Rick caught up with him again. He’d found a hardball some place. An older con and a few companions were hunkered down in a corner of the yard shooting craps, but nothing else was going on. Even broom ball, an easy game to equip, had been nixed. Too many people getting hurt. Yeah, right. He’d never met a screw who gave a good goddamn about cuts and bruises.
 

Dace glanced at the ball in Rick’s hand. It was perfectly round, the soft curve of a woman’s breast. Christ, he wished he was still dead down there. It had been easier that way.
 

“Nah,” he said, nodding towards the crowd at the bottom of the yard. “You give me that ball and I might—”

“—ram it up Rasputin’s ass.”

“Yeah, well, look at him. Thinks he’s a Prophet or something. And the screws let him. Sure he’s harmless, but there’s no way he should be here.”

Rick rolled his eyes. What the hell did he care? Cons like Sandy came and went. With any luck, somebody would ice him in the shower. “Absolutely nuts,” he agreed, tossing the ball from one hardened palm to the other as he scanned the yard for another partner.
 

“He’s up to something. Maybe I’ll go have a listen.”
 

“Yeah, you do that, buddy. You’re shit for company today.”

Dace hadn’t gone more than ten steps when he heard somebody say, “Hey! That’s mine.”
 

By the time he’d spun around, a well-built farm boy was staring Rick down. Where the hell had he come from? Dace had never seen him before, but he knew his kind. The guy didn’t want a friend, he wanted a name. Dace started back. Somebody behind him caught the half-smoked cigarette he flicked to the ground.

Sandy McAllister heard the farm boy, too. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord!” he shouted, trying to divert attention from the new kid on the block.
 

Every eye had shifted to Rick and the kid, though. “Nobody owns anything here,” Rick said softly, his voice cool, his eyes hard and flat, his reputation on the line.
 

Christ, Dace thought. Why the hell had he left him?

Many of the spectators were already drooling with anticipation. “It’s a fight!” they crowed. It shouldn’t have been, except the fish was too stupid to know it. To cross a solid like Rick or Dace, you had to be pretty damn new.

The kid had time to say, “Well, I do,” before Rick clocked him in the mouth.

In the commotion that followed, Dace lost sight of them both, but the kid was awfully confident for a fish in a fight. Then he saw it: a little spark of light. Aw Jeez, another stupid punk. They were hatching in the dirt today.

“Watch it,” he yelled at Rick. The kid pretended to fall to the ground, but pulled a thin-bladed knife from the seam of his pants instead. “He has a shiv. Or did,” he said, coming up behind him. He kneed the kid in the kidneys, grabbed something and twisted hard. Luckily, it was just the boy’s arm. The shiv clattered to the ground. A loud snap elicited a single scream and the next thing Dace knew, the boy was sliding like water down his legs.
 

His heart beating fast, he sidestepped the mess. The boy, who looked about eighteen, was twisting in the packed dirt. Dace’s eyes raked the ground, but the weapon, a homemade stiletto probably made from a sharpened spoon, was gone. Maybe it was under the boy, but Dace didn’t dare touch him again. If he did he’d kill the little bugger for sure. The boy rolled on the ground, clutching his wrist. Dace could see the kid’s fat tonsils when he screamed. By this time, everybody had taken a giant step back.

Fat Frank was still in the gun cage. “Shut the fuck up,” he shouted, before radioing for more help.
Not supposed to be by myself, not with all these bloody cons,
they heard him say.
Why the hell are we always so short staffed? What’s the point of sending everybody to the new place? What am I supposed to do with this crazy lot? My gun? Of course I have my gun, asshole.
Dropping the radio, sweating hard, he bolted downstairs in his steel-belted boots. Dace half-expected him to keep on going, but he didn’t.

The boy’s screams had downgraded to moans, but he was still writhing around. Two or three more minutes passed. The guard’s eyes darted over the scene, rabbit-like. Nobody moved while he made up his mind what to do.

“Everybody up against the wall,” he finally bellowed. Pointing his gun straight at them, he spat out some stale gum. He was shaking a little, but trying not to show it. He sighed and smiled, displaying a set of stumpy teeth. Oh, Christ, he must have an idea. “Well,” he said, “Let’s have some fun here. Everybody strip! You guys were fighting over something. I want that shiv or whatever it was. And somebody’d better tell me who started this, or you’re all in the Hole.”

When they didn’t move straight away, he hollered again. And waited some more. It was the boy on the ground who finally broke the silence. “Nobody started anything,” he gasped, his face wet with tears. “But I think I broke my goddamn wrist playing ball.”

“You ain’t supposed to have no ball,” the guard said, kicking the boy in his left side and getting another piercing scream.

Everybody started to undress, almost welcoming the hot air on their sweat-soaked skin. The wounded boy was exempt.

“Hey,” Rick whispered to Dace as they shrugged off their pants, “For a punk, he sure learns fast.”

Chapter 5

The Convict’s Cousin

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea

*[ Eliot, T.S.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock
]

Maitland, Ontario, August 26, 1971:

Liza folded Dace’s most recent letter, already a month old, and put it inside a suede shoulder bag with her wallet, her passport, some bits of Kleenex, a lipstick tube and her new keys. She had a couple of paperbacks, too. The downtown Maitland bus was here, its doors gaping open. She climbed the steps behind a couple of older ladies, thinking someday she’d be old too, but it was hard to imagine. The steps shook under her feet. What if she hadn’t tightened the ankle straps on her wedged sandals enough?