A BRIEF SOJOURN IN THE HOOSEGOW
Opening one eye I determined that the prickly substance beneath my head was straw. The room in which I found myself was dark and suffused with myriad odors so delicately intermingled as to be unidentifiable, though I thought I detected a leitmotif of rancid urine over long-unwashed clothing and chronic mildew. My evening clothes were wet in spots.
“What the hell’s this place?” I said, looking around at a dark room about eight feet by ten, with nine other men crowded into it.
What could I have done to get myself locked up, I wondered momentarily, and then the throb in my jaw brought first one thing to mind, then seven or eight more that, scrutinized in the light of day, might have earned me a trip to the jug. I sat up and sniffed, and identified another scent among the many, an unpleasantly familiar one.
“I smell rotten flesh,” I said, and as sick as I felt I feared it might be my own.
The deformed man’s neighbor, an ectomorph with the matted beard and demented eyes of a prophet, gave a short bitter laugh. “Goddamn City Jail’s nothing but the back room of the Butterick Meat Market.”
I was fortunate enough, then, to have been arrested in my unconscious state by a city policeman and not a county peace officer, who would have removed me to the county jail, a serious place of incarceration. The city facility, on the other hand, was a makeshift pen mostly intended to hold drunks and short-term felons with little motive for evasion. My cellmates were four Chinamen, including the nephew of the magus I’d cut down from the lamppost, and five white fellows. The prophet and his scarified companion and a third man, a hog butcher by trade, had been arrested during the riot. The other two wouldn’t say what had landed them in stir, but the first was a sorrowful drunk, his bender wearing off quickly and leaving him desperate for a cupful. Though the second was seated, I would have guessed his height at six and a half feet tall at least, and he was as thick side to side as a chest of drawers.
The five white men sat on the floor on the left half of the cell, and the Chinese on the right, and there was a certain amount of grumbling from the left half when I first crossed the cell to the right to speak to the old magus’s nephew. The Chinese didn’t much like it either, and one of them rose to his feet in a threatening stance until the nephew said something to him with a gesture in my direction. His compatriot sat back down with no more friendliness showing on his face than before, but the nephew bade me sit. He introduced himself as Fong, without specifying whether that was his first or last name, and said that he believed his uncle had survived. Unsolicited, he also offered up his opinion that Mrs. Fenster had persuaded the old man to provide two advance men to distract and overpower Doctor Marcy while she murdered her brother-in-law. The two men who accompanied her (without, according to Fong, stealing the doctor’s opiates or anything else) were ignorant of her mission there, though Fong’s uncle surely knew why she needed the doctor out of her way.
I returned to the other side of the cell, where I spent the morning striking up no friendships and cultivating no allies. The three rioters, having failed to fold the remainder of the cell’s Caucasian population into their clique, spent their day talking amongst themselves and until the turnkey arrived at noon with tin cups and a bucket of corn gruel their colloquy on the various and sundry character deficits of the Irish, the Jews, the Catholics, and the Chinese were the only words spoken aloud in the cell, apart from the souse’s mostly incoherent whimpering. The gangly jailer, so bent and arthritic he walked nearly sideways like a crab, dropped the bucket on the floor and threw the cups onto the shit-stained straw without a word, then scuttled back out, ignoring my demands to know for what I was incarcerated.
“Are you deaf as well as crooked?” I shouted at the door.
The three rioters laughed. “You won’t get much out of him. He don’t care for our class of character,” the prophet said, dipping his cup into the gruel.
After they ate the foul corn—I felt too ill to partake—the door opened again and a pair of policemen entered with a defeated-looking man in civilian clothes. It took me a few moments to recognize the silhouetted figure as that of Officer Heinecker.
“This the man what took your iron off you?” the first copper asked him.
“That’s him,” Heinecker said, looking me sadly up and down.
“What’s the charge?” I asked the coppers.
“Accessory to murder, as well as unheeling a duly charged officer of the peace,” the second one said, sounding amused.
“Banbury’s dead?”
“He will be soon enough.”
“If wishes was horses, then beggars would eat.” They led Heinecker off and locked the door again.
“Say,” the prophet piped up. “You took that copper’s gun off him?”
“I needed it.”
“When’d you do that? On the street?”
“During the riot.”
“The Chinee riot? Then what the hell you so friendly with that chink for? Don’t you know they killed a poor old man in his sickbed?”
I sat down without answering, and as the others gulped their swill Fong leaned over to me and spoke very quietly.
“Five prisoners escaped this same jail six months ago. Broke bars out of the window.” He nodded at the window; the bars had been reinforced with what looked like cement.
“Might be worth a try,” I said.
The prophet dropped his empty tin cup and rose. “I want you to stop talking to that son of a bitch.”
I glanced at him without answering, and when I turned back to Fong I noted that his companions were watching the group with concern, though Fong was careful to ignore them.
“Did you hear me? Come on over to the white man’s side or I’ll crush your skull like a fuckin’ melon.”
I turned to find that the three of them had risen. The one with the ghastly scars was laughing through mostly toothless gums as though Christmas was coming. I stood and faced them, and I supposed I’d have to drop the prophet first and hope the other two would be intimidated into backing down. Lacking confidence and feeling weak as a babe from fever besides, I was trying to calculate the likelihood of Fong and his comrades coming to my aid when the gigantic, speechless man on the floor rose to his full height and width—even more massive than he’d appeared when supine—and spun the prophet around with one big paw, then cuffed him solidly across the face with the other. I thought I heard the smaller man’s nose crack, and he collapsed like an abandoned marionette onto the pissy straw.
“Gott-dam tired of listening to you,” the giant said, and then he returned to his seated position on the floor. That was the last we heard from the rioters until the evening meal, when the prophet tried to elicit assistance from the turnkey.
“That big Dutch son of a bitch knocked me down,” he said.
The turnkey shrugged painfully and spat at the ground. “Be glad he don’t fancy fucking you in the bargain.” He left another bucket of corn gruel, and after he went off for his own meal we decided to try our luck first with the bars, while the others disinterestedly concentrated on their unappetizing meal.
I rotated one clockwise, then counterclockwise, and it gave easily in the concrete the jailers had haphazardly poured after the last escape. The bar was long, however, and though we could move it vertically two or three inches it wouldn’t come out far enough to allow our egress. After watching us for a minute the giant grunted, dropped his cup, and drew up to his full height, then moved to the door and started pounding.
“Jailer! Dem crazy chinks has done and caught the straw on fire!”
I looked over at Fong, who looked puzzled for a second and then let out a scream of such convincing pain I thought he was truly injured. “I’m on fire! Help!” he shouted, and I joined my own voice to the chorus. Fong yelled something at his friends in Chinese, and they commenced screeching as well in their own tongue. Only the drunk and the three rioters kept eating, looking puzzled by the cacophony.
“Pipe down,” the prophet said. “Ain’t nothing burning.”
The giant reached down and backhanded him ever so gently across the face. “Shut it or I’ll break it.” The prophet shut it, his eyes glistening.
I heard the turnkey coming then, keys jangling, yelling for us to hold on, and when the door opened the big man gave him an uppercut that lifted him into the air before depositing his skinny, bent frame on the ground.
He looked around and then scowled. “Ain’t no goddamn fire in here.” He started to stand and then he was looking straight at a fist the size of a ham hock. “Now hold on a goddamned minute.” The rioters had stopped eating, though the drunk was taking advantage of the confusion to drink his muck straight from the bucket, and spilling the stuff down the front of his gray shirt, from which he scraped bits of wet corn with his grimy finger, which he then licked more or less clean.
Fong slipped out the door and returned with a set of wrist irons. He took the keys from the jailer, who was quietly making predictions about our speedy capture, and he chained the poor fellow to the bar we had failed to remove.
He looked sadder than he did angry. “You sons of bitches are going to get me fired,” he said as we filed out of the room calmly.
Outside on Thirteenth Street we could hear him yelling immediately. The giant wanted to go back inside, but Fong stopped him. “Always outside the jailhouse people hear yelling.”
The giant nodded. “Best ve split up now,” he said, and all concurred but the three rioters and the drunk, who were headed straight for the nearest saloon, the Rusted Nail. The last I saw of them they were whooping in harmony as they entered.