The Four Stages of Cruelty (20 page)

Crowley had said that time crawled slowest when your head was crowded with bad thoughts, and it dragged now. Five days went by, and Roy kept Josh’s files. He wouldn’t allow Josh to see them, but whenever they talked, Roy mentioned some of the legal details he was pondering. He seemed enlivened by his efforts, cheerful.

Josh didn’t like to visit Roy in the intensive care unit because the continued emptiness of Elgin’s bed was an indictment, a finger pointed his way. The lack of any questions about what had happened, the lack of any CO poking around made Josh wonder if what happened had been a dream. Instead, Roy visited Josh a few times every day, his arrival always announced in advance by the tap tap tap of his peg leg on the hallway floor. It got so Josh didn’t even look up when Roy appeared in his cell doorway, just lay there staring at the ceiling trying to pretend Roy wasn’t even there.

“Who died?” Roy asked.

It wasn’t funny, but Roy snorted at his own joke anyway. He hobbled in to sit on the edge of Josh’s cot, and Josh rose up and squirmed aside to make room for the heavy man and avoid touching him.

“You still don’t trust me, do you, Joshy?” Roy said. “The best fucking friend you got.”

Josh asked what he meant, suspicious of all overtures for more intimacy.

“I’m doing all this work for you, digging through your case files. They’re pretty fucking boring, I have to say. Who the hell did you piss off so bad to get thrown in here? I seen this reference to something you drew, but I ain’t seen no drawings. You offend someone’s artistic sensibilities?”

Josh shrugged. He didn’t want to talk about the drawings. He didn’t want to talk about any drawings. He tried not to even think of where he’d hidden them. He knew that Roy could read his mind.

“I need some quid for my quo, Josh. I need some inspiration. Tell me about the things you drew with Crowley. Bore the shit out of me. I want to know more.”

“I’ve told you everything,” Josh said. He’d told Roy about the Beggar and the city and the tower and the demons, and Roy had asked him every possible detail. How many horses were there? What did the tower look like? How many windows did it have? What did the Beggar say to the demons when they tortured him?

“Every time you tell me, you seem to remember a little bit extra.”

“Maybe I’d remember a lot extra if I knew why it was important.”

That shut Roy up, and Josh feared he’d crossed a line. If you tell me more, I’ll tell you more was a proposal, and an implication that he was holding back. It wasn’t true. He just felt pushed into lashing out.

“What do you want to know?” Roy asked. He said it so
seriously, so drily, that Josh wished he’d never asked. He just wanted it all to go away.

“What does the story mean?” Josh said, needing to say something.

A long wait while Roy leaned back against the wall and stared at the other side of Josh’s cell, as if looking out at distant places.

“You ever read
Treasure Island
when you were a kid?” Roy asked.

Josh nodded. “I remember it.”

“Well, Crowley’s story is about another pirate, sailing a different kind of high seas. And this pirate had a crew, and the crew worked hard for him, partly because he was a scary son of a bitch and partly because he promised to make all of them rich. And that’s what happened right here in Ditmarsh. There was this pirate, we’ll call him the Beggar, and he sailed the high seas and collected a lot of treasure over the years.”

“What do you mean treasure? How do you collect treasure in prison?”

A belly laugh.

“How? Everything you want to do in here costs gold. You want to get high? You pay. You want to survive? You pay. You want to visit some sister, take out a brother, or get a jack off your back? You pay. Little bits of that, call them transaction fees, go here and there. But if an organized bunch of pirates happens to control all that buying, selling, and servicing, the gold accumulates. The Beggar got rich, Joshy, inside a fucking prison, and other people got jealous,
so he hid that treasure good, buried it deep before he went away, and all the rest of us are dying to find out where.”

“How can you hide a treasure in prison?” The story was ridiculous to Josh, another bundle of Roy’s lies.

Roy rapped his peg leg on the floor. “There’s tunnels here, Joshy. Caverns. We got demons down below us and elder gods and a lost civilization. Every bit of it mapped out in Crowley’s comic book. You help me find the treasure, I’ll give you a little taste. Polly want a cracker?”

He laughed hard, and maybe that’s why neither of them heard the footsteps in the hall until an inmate stood in the doorway of Josh’s drum. Josh had never seen him before. A bald man in his forties, a spike of orange goatee below his mouth, no mustache. He cradled his left hand in his right, and there was blood soaked into a dirty cloth.

Roy looked pissed off.

“What the fuck you doing here, Cooper?”

“I cut my hand, Roy,” the man said, “doing your kitchen work. We’re all wondering when you’re going to come home.”

“I bet you are,” Roy said. “You did that to yourself to check in on my friend here, didn’t you. Well, you can’t, so get the fuck out, and tell Fenton he wants any more of our time, he talks to me first.”

Lewis unfolded his middle finger on his good hand and let it remain extended for ten seconds before slowly walking away.

Josh’s heart went all pitter-patter to hear himself talked about. Roy met his eyes.

“A good reminder, Josh, of the kind of rogue I protect you from, with or without your gratitude.”

Then another figure appeared in the doorframe, this time a pissed-off jack.

“What the fuck are you doing in that fish’s drum, Wobbles?”

Promptly Roy rolled to one side and the other, built up momentum, and heaved himself off the cot.

“Nothing, sir, just taking a breather while I do my rehabilitation walk. Can’t wait to get back to population, boss. This place makes me sick.”

“I fucking bet,” the jack said as he stepped away to allow Roy room to exit. Neither man gave Josh a glance.

I didn’t know how to approach Fenton, didn’t want to approach Fenton, but I understood why Ruddik wanted me to. Fenton had his fingers in every pie. Fenton was a big node on Ruddik’s map.

It took me three days to work up the nerve. I told myself the delay was about timing and opportunity, and the importance of not getting caught. But it was also about lacking the right plan, something I could believe and Fenton might believe. Otherwise any overtures of mine would smell like a setup. Ruddik called me each day to check and see whether I’d
gone through with it yet, and when I confessed I still hadn’t, I either got another speech of encouragement or the silence of disappointment. The very thought left me exhausted, spiritually and physically. It was never easy to shake Ditmarsh off at the end of a day, but even the most elusive sense of ease became impossible. When I wasn’t thinking about Fenton, I was thinking about Shawn Hadley. I got an update in my memo box each day about the status of the complaint against me, more paperwork being filed as the dates and duties got ticked off. The union had promised me a lawyer, but so far no one had been in touch.

I called Ray MacKay up one morning to see if he was getting memos, too.

“Memos?” MacKay scoffed. “Any memos I get from Ditmarsh go straight into my ‘I could give a fuck’ file. You worry too much.”

“How come?” I asked. I honestly wanted to know.

“Because you got scruples.”

He made the word sound dirty. I laughed.

“I just wish they’d release those goddamn tapes.”

It was a stupid thing to say. Releasing those tapes might implicate MacKay as much as they might ease the scrutiny on me. The words sounded like the kind of whiny protest that comes out when you’re trying to grab onto others during your downward spiral.

But MacKay didn’t take offense. “Kali, you are one naive little girl.”

I waited for another detailed explication of my gender-and experience-related inadequacies.

“Why would they release those tapes if they didn’t have to?” MacKay continued, a teacher in the classroom.

“Jesus, Ray, I don’t know. Maybe because I work at Ditmarsh and Hadley’s complaints about me have made the newspaper.”

“What fucking newspaper, that shit rag? Nobody is worried about a female CO stomping an inmate. That’s practically porn site material. But as long as they hang on to those tapes, and as long as you give a shit, they’ve got a bit of sway over you. Who knows what’s really in them, right? Could be you ass fucking Hadley with your CO dildo. Let the imagination run wild. You’re at their mercy for a while, Kali. Face it.”

Fuck that, I thought. MacKay gave me the courage to kill two birds with one stone. If I hadn’t been on my way to Ditmarsh, rocked by my persecution complex and those little revenge fantasies, I might not have followed through. By the time my half-hour shift break came around, I was still angry. The Keeper’s Hall was light of COs. One at the counter. Another at the desk below the board. “Paperwork,” I said when I arrived at the file cabinets. “Incident report,” I clarified. Neither of them gave a shit.

I found the right forms and glanced at the movement board. Fenton was on rec time in the gym. Scraden was the senior CO watching the gym. I knew Scraden through MacKay and figured I could chat him up about what MacKay was doing with his life, what a drag it was to not have him around. I set out through the main hub, past the bubble, and down the tunnel, like I was on a mission.

I saw Scraden in the corner nest, paying no attention to
the scrum on the gym floor. I didn’t see Fenton on the floor and knew he must be in the weight pit doing the clank and clunk. But when I stuck my head inside the weight pit, I saw only two inmates within, both heaving hard, bare-chested, covered in tattoos and sweat and wearing fingerless gloves. Their swollen biceps, skinny little legs, feathered hair, and headbands made it look like 1980 all over again.

I went back to Scraden and stood outside his cage.

“MacKay says hey.”

Scraden looked unimpressed. “I’m touched. Did he mention he owes me forty bucks?”

“He did not.”

“Must have slipped his so-called mind.”

“Heart attacks will do that to you.” Ever amazed by the soft caring of an old-school CO.

I decided to go for broke, pretend I was there to collect Fenton for a visit, and not even bother to explain myself, because I’d never explain myself normally.

“Where’s Fenton?”

“Tummy ache,” Scraden answered. “You need him or something?”

“Yeah.” I didn’t elaborate.

“Fenton’s clunk buddy Mendero told me he went to the infirmary in the a.m. all sick and moaning. But unless he’s got cancer or a burst appendix, I imagine he’s back in his cell taking a pharmaceutical nap. That fucker gets more candy than a kid on Halloween.”

I knew it. I’d passed it over to him. All those red, blue, and green pills in a little Dixie cup.

“Thanks,” I said, and raised a hand in farewell.

Walking there, I wondered, did I still have the guts? It would be easy to let it go. Try again on another opportunity. But everything was flowing so easily and freely—so inevitably—that I felt invisible. I couldn’t be sure I’d get that feeling back again real soon if I passed it up now. I went for B block.

My luck was back. The nest was unoccupied. I didn’t even have to explain myself. I just called in for entry, popped the cage, and walked inside.

Up the stairs to the third tier. The cell doors were closed, and all the cells were empty. I counted the cells leading up to Fenton’s and glanced in as I passed by, saw him lying on the cot, arm thrown over his eyes. It was the most privacy I was ever going to get. I forced myself to walk all the way to the end of the tier, as if doing a normal round, then made my way back. By the time I got to Fenton’s cell again, he was sitting up on the cot, a grin on his face, looking pleased to see me. He mentioned my catlike steps. He mentioned my good smell. I ignored him, but in a different way. I wanted him to think I liked it, or at least didn’t mind.

“I heard you had a bad stomach,” I said.

“Nothing a nap and a surprise visit couldn’t cure.”

I stood at the bars to his cell. I could have opened them up, probably should have to avoid being seen, but I didn’t. Partly I feared being in an enclosed space with Fenton. Partly I didn’t want the block supervisor or another inmate to come back and spot me walking out of Fenton’s cell. Oh, the stories they’d share. But Fenton knew I was out of sorts. It was nine, ten, eleven seconds of silence.

“I need some help,” I said. My face wouldn’t contort the way I wanted. My lips had drawn down into a quivering line, all my confidence drained away. Fenton would see through my act like an audience watching a high school play.

But he thought I was distraught and reached up to touch my hand through the bars. I let the touch stay.

“What’s wrong, baby?” he asked.

You didn’t call a CO baby. But a CO didn’t stand in front of your cell and tremble.

“I’m going through some heavy shit with Shawn Hadley.” The words barely made it out of my tight throat. In my moment of untruth I was crumbling.

Fenton looked surprised. A wariness came over his face, and maybe a twitch of opportunity. He was all business. But he kept his charm on the uptick. He knew how to progress a deal.

“Hadley’s got a lawyer,” I said, as if Fenton didn’t know. “I’m in big trouble if the trial goes bad for me. I didn’t do anything wrong, but it doesn’t look good.”

He wouldn’t give a shit if it wasn’t coming from me, a reasonably attractive cougar on a cellblock for men. Just the same, I did my best, the lie spooling out like a badly cast line.

“Officer Williams. You have my deepest sympathies. Nothing hits me harder than you being distressed. But what can a guy like me do about that?”

Here it goes, I thought.

“I was hoping you might talk to Hadley and convince him to drop the complaint.”

He didn’t say anything for a long minute. I expected laughter, a guffaw, maybe a punch in the face through the bars.

“And why would I do that?” he said, all caution now.

He wanted me to spell it out.

“You must need an item or a bit of info once in a while. I could do something for you. And don’t get any wrong fucking ideas. I’m not talking about anything disgusting. I’m talking about getting you something you need. Maybe bringing you in something from the outside. I don’t know how this works. I just need some help.”

I didn’t need to sell it any more. We were dealing straight up in lies, and for some reason, that made our communication more direct and honest.

“I’m not a dealer,” he said. “I’m just a stand-up cat doing too much time who enjoys a taste once in a while.”

Bullshit. “Yes, but you must know people who are. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m doing here. I’ve got to go.” Act or not, I wanted away and would have scooted off, but he stopped me with pressure on my hand.

“Hey, you’re a little desperate. I know how that is.” I remembered Julie in the turtleneck gripping the daiquiri. “You give me your number. I’ll get someone to call you. One of these cage monkeys must want something. Maybe I can trade a favor for a favor, discreetly, of course.”

My number? It was the last thing in the world I expected. You never, ever let an inmate latch onto your outside life. You didn’t tell them where you lived. What you ate. Where your kids went to school. Your hobbies. But I gave him my cell phone number. I could throw the phone away afterward. Get a new number. Move to another state.

The bell signaled movement. I pulled away as if a Taser had touched the bar.

“Thanks,” I said.

And I was gone, fleeing like a little girl, face flushed, dirty all over. I forced myself to slow down, lift my head, and walk out like nothing had happened. Like I was bored as hell.