CHAPTER 12

 

Turning off the highway to Pendleton, we went by a sign alongside the road that said, in big black letters on a yellow background: “Penitentiary Area - Beware Of Hitchhikers.”

Coming back to Pendleton wasn’t so bad. The same day I got there they were bringing a load in from northern Indiana and one of the guys was Manny Del Rio, a big Mexican I knew back in South Bend. It was his first big bust even though he’d logged plenty of city jail time, mostly for fighting. Turned out he got sent here for fighting this time too. Only he fought the wrong guy.

Said he clipped a dude up alongside his head in a bar we all used to hang at, Studebaker’s. Hit him so hard the guy ended up in Memorial Hospital for an extended stay, the kind where you need help to use the john and it don’t matter how foxy the nurse is—you ain’t gonna be hitting on her, way you feel. It wouldn’t’ve been a problem, Manny told me, except this guy was an off-duty cop. What should have been a ninety-day stretch at the state farm turned out getting cranked up to a felony and here he was on a one to ten. Like, he was supposed to know the guy was the Man. It didn’t matter the guy was all liquored up and had started the beef himself over some bimbo; no, it was the way it always was, cop’s word is gold-plated no matter what the truth might happen to be.

I was sorry Manny was in here for some no-account bullshit like that, but glad, too. He was a pal and I needed a pal for when my two friends from the Fort Wayne jail showed up which would be any day now.

That night just before they turned the main lights out, I looked up at the guy rapping on the bars of my cell with his spoon. It was Larry, my last cellmate.

“Hey, dude,” I said, jumping up.

He had a bigger smile than me. “Jake. I told you you’d be back. I just wanted to see if it was true. Guy in I.D. told me your name was on the incoming roster.”

“Guess you were right, Larry.” Fuck ‘im. All he wanted to do was gloat. Some people are just natural pricks.

“It’s Wherry, Jake. Dave Wherry.”

So fucking what? I never was good with names. I got up, lifted my mattress and dug out a pack of Camels and took them over to him.

“Here, Dave.”

He looked at the pack of cigarettes in his hand and then at me and said, “What’s this?”

“The day I left you said you bet a pack of butts I’d be back. I’m just paying off my debt. I don’t want to die owing a shithead like you anything.”

“Oh, man, I was just kidding! Here. I don’t want these. We never bet anyway. I was just fuckin’ around.”

He laid the pack on the crossbar.

I laid down on my bunk, crossed my arms behind my head.

“Whatever.”

He looked at me another minute and then shrugged his shoulders and picked up the pack and put it in his shirt pocket.

“Well...thanks. Anything I can get you? Anything you need in here till you get in population?”

Nothing I couldn’t get myself. “No thanks.”

“Well,” he said, like he didn’t know what else to say. “Welcome back.” He stood there like he expected me to say something.

“Whatever.”

He turned and left.

There’s all kinds of guys like that Dave. Me, I woulda been happy for him he was the one got cut loose but guys like that can’t ever seem to be happy unless they can find someone they think has more misery than they do.

***

Two days later, coming back from chow, I saw him. Frick. They were bringing him into quarantine, same row of cells I was on, third tier. I was close to the far end by the outside windows and the hack was opening a cell on the opposite end where we come up the stairs. He must have been right behind me.

I ducked into my cell but it was too late. He saw me.

He was bandaged up pretty good which made my day but I could feel the fear in the pit of my stomach which ruined it. When they let us out for recreation I caught Manny, who was two cells down from me and yanked him back into his cell.

“Manny, I got a problem,” I said. I wasn’t about to tell him everything. “There’s a bro just come in that wants to fuck with me.”

“Just point him out,” is all he said. That’s the way it is in here. You got a friend, you got a friend. None of that fair-weather bullshit like on the outside. He didn’t ask me anything else about the guy only what cell was he in and what did he look like.

“You can’t miss him,” I said. “He’s got bandages all over his head, around his throat. I think he’s got a problem with his Adam’s apple.”

Manny gave me a funny look but didn’t say a word.

We stayed in his cell during the rec period. There wasn’t much you could do while you were in quarantine. Watch TV, play cards, walk around, maybe cop some dope. Once we got released into the population, there was the gym and the baseball field, weights, horseshoes, activities like that, but in quarantine there was an old black-and-white TV on one side of the cellhouse and that was it. I hadn’t been back long enough to want to stare at the tube yet—things like that I stayed away from as long as possible until I got bored with everything else. That way I always had something in the back of my mind to look forward to. Save it for when my mind was turning to mush. Manny hadn’t been in before but he wasn’t much for TV anyway, he said.

We talked, shot the shit, made a connection. It happens quicker on the inside than it does out on the bricks. There’s no bullshit to get over, trick each other with. We all know why we’re here so there’s no need to put up a front. All of us are wearing blue dungarees with a number over the shirt pocket and black state shoes.

I told Manny some of the things were gonna happen to him, what to watch out for and who.

“There’s one calls herself Alice,” I said. “She’s a big nigger, almost seven foot tall and about that wide. You can’t miss her. She’s a mean sissy, has this favorite trick of hers.” He got interested in hearing this. “She likes to wait until we’re coming out of the movie on Saturday morning. There’s a place where there’s a bunch of bushes just before we hit the quad and that’s where you want to watch out. Alice picks out her meat in the movie and then tries to be just in front of the guy right before they walk by those bushes. You’ll see guys hurrying to get around her when we come out. Or, laying back.”

This was the real deal I was laying on him. Alice was an institution at Pendleton, even the baddest guard wouldn’t mess with “her” less he had to.

“What she does,” I went on, getting a kick out of watching Manny’s face, “is stop sudden-like like she’s digging around to get out her pack of Hoosier and roll one and then just as the guy she wants walks up she turns and thumps him on the top of his head. Knocks ‘em out, every time. Never heard of her missing. She just picks up the chump and throws him in the bushes and walks over and takes one while everybody’s walking by peekin’ over and giggling. Only reason we’re giggling is we’re just glad she didn’t pick on one of us.”

“I thought there weren’t any women in here?” Manny said and I wondered what the hell he was talking about and then I remembered this was his first fall.

“Oh, shit, yeah. I forgot this is your first time. Alice is a guy...well, sort of,” I said. “He’s a queen, Manny. A faggot. Well, maybe not a complete queen. He’s a... whaddya-call-em, a transvestite. After a while you get to thinking of them as women. They just seem that way to you. You’ll see.”

“Not me, man. I ain’t never gonna see some guy as a chick. I don’t care I’m in here a hundred years. And I don’t get it. I thought sissies all wanted to suck your tool, not the other way around.”

“On the outside, yeah. It’s not like you think in here. This ain’t the street.”

I never, never understood it. In my mind, a guy goes down on another guy or fucks him or has it done to him—it don’t matter which—is a fag, but the guys in here, they don’t see it like that. They see it as getting over, being a man. Go figure.

And it don’t matter if they been inside a day or ten years. It isn’t some thing like they’re just so horny they just got to get their trouser worm stroked. Actually, it doesn’t have anything to do with sex I don’t think. It’s to do with power, who’s got the hammer.

I got in this discussion once with this black guy in the barber school who was a righteous dude, didn’t fuck with the whites, didn’t fuck with anybody, not even his own. Did his own time, kept to himself.

“Yarrow,” I said, “how come the brothers don’t know that’s being queer, fucking white boys?”

“‘Cause it’s not,” he said. “You don’t think they’d do it on the outside, do you?”

That was true. I’d see the biggest faggots in Pendleton, the daddies with the most kids, black guys, and out on the street I’d run into them and they’d have a babe on their arm. They really didn’t see it as a homosexual thing at all.

Manny said, “But why do you call them ‘she’ or ‘her’? They’re guys, whatever they call themselves. Doesn’t make sense.”

I laughed. “Look around, Manny. You see anything makes sense?” I walked over, lifted my mattress got another pack of butts and came back.

“Fags like Alice, they’re different in here too. Sure, they’re uptown hoes, put it out on Front Street whether they’re in here or out, but in here they play a different role. They play the same role the other daddies do. Back out on the street you walk up to them and say ‘boo!’ they’re gonna fall down actin’ like they’re some kind of helpless little lamb or something. Don’t ask me to explain it. It don’t make sense to me either but it’s the way it is.”

We talked about some other things. I tried to explain how things were in here so Manny’d know what to do, what to expect.

I remembered the first time I got sent up. I told Manny about it.

“You got it lucky, man. First day I got here they’d had a riot the day before, busted out all the windows and burned everything there was to burn. They burned the sheets, blankets and pillows, the whole wazoo. The old warden, guy who was here then was a hardass. He said you burned your shit you can just do without. It was February, man! I got off the bus from South Bend, got deloused and my hair cut and got my clothes and then they put me in a cell down on the second level, almost right under where we are now. I went to sleep on steel slats—remember, there was no mattresses. They did give us a little bitty Army blanket, didn’t even cover my feet it was so short. I woke up the next morning with snow on my toes where it come in the windows that night. About half of us come down with pneumonia and worse and that bastard still wouldn’t give us mattresses or sheets or even fix the windows.”

A guy walked in front of Manny’s cell and looked in. “You Jake?” he said. Fuck me, I thought; Frick is calling me out already, but then I saw the guy’s shirt and knew he was an old-timer by the number stenciled on it—it was older than mine—and I remembered seeing him in the yard from before when I was here. I think he worked over at the auto shop.

“I’m Jake,” I said, standing up. “You’re Walter, aintcha?”

“Yeah,” he said, putting his hand out, turning the palm up. There was a piece of paper there. I took it, stuck it in my shirt pocket. “Welcome back, Jake,” he said. “Your friends know you’re here. I got to get back. The hack only let me in for a minute.” Cons in the population weren’t allowed in quarantine except if their job took them there. Like the new guys would get contaminated by them or something in the two weeks they spent there before going out in population. He was gone before I could say anything. I took out the piece of paper and opened it. All it said was, “Fucked up, didn’t you partner? See you in pop.” It was signed D.B.

Sonofabitch! It was Dusty! I thought he’d be gone by now, up in Michigan City.

***

Next morning it happened. We’re coming back from chow, same fucking powdered eggs and cold, greasy bacon I’d have to get used to all over again and coming up the staircase to our cells for the half-hour lockdown and count before we got let out again for the different shit we went through in quarantine. Meet your counselor, get photographed and printed in I.D., take a bunch of tests, crap like that. Put in for your work classification. I was going to put in for the barber school, see if I could get back in.

We’re coming up the stairs, Manny and me and behind us I hear a commotion. I looked back and sure enough it was Frick, shoving his way through guys and yelling at me to wait up.

“That’s him,” I said to Manny. I wasn’t scared of him at that moment. There was no way he’d have a shank. It was almost impossible to get a shank in quarantine. We got shook down every five minutes and every time we left our cells the hacks would be in there, tossing it. Out in the population it was a lot easier to come up with weapons but here in quarantine, in cellblock H, it was just about impossible the way they kept an eye on us.

I had to give the punk credit. Here I’d already half-killed him and he was going to get in my face. It was ‘cause he’d fucked me, was what it was, give him all those guts. He figured he was over, psychologically. Surprised is what he was going to get, I thought. I knew how these cockroaches worked. I was glad he picked quarantine to make his move. Out in the population, later, it would be different. There he’d have a weapon, probably a bunch of his rappies with him and I’d be up Shit Creek I didn’t watch my step, be careful where I went, what kind of situation I walked into. Here, up on the third tier, it was just me and him and I had no doubt how that’d turn out.

I could read this little slime like a book. He was gonna come up and break bad, get in my face and start talking about how he was gonna fuck me up. He was the kind had to talk about it first, what a badass he was and that was going to be his mistake. Soon as he got close to me and started running his mouth, I’d pop him. Hit him in the throat, see if I could finish the job. Hit him where he was already tenderized and that’d take all the sand out of him. I was going to break every bone in his body.

I never got the chance.

Just before he reached me, Manny stepped forward and grabbed him, one hand in his nappy hair and the other on the seat of his jeans and flipped him over the side of the railing. It happened so fast, it didn’t register for a second. Man! Manny Del Rio wasn’t the biggest guy in the world, actually, he was a couple of inches shorter than me, but he was just about as wide as a Maytag. He was one of them body builders, always working out with the bench presses and the wrist curls.

I thought he’d dropped him. From three tiers up. He hadn’t though. He just let go of the guy’s hair and grabbed him by the ankle and then let go of his jeans. He was holding him by the one leg with his left hand like you’d hold up a rabbit you just shot to show your ma. Frick was crying like a baby. He’d skipped the screaming part it’d happened so quickly. And water was running down his face in a steady stream and it smelled terrible all of a sudden. It took a minute to figure out he was pissing his pants. And shitting. He couldn’t even talk, just kept whimpering some kind of mumbo jumbo like a little kid.

Manny held him farther out from the railing, still by one hand and it looked like he wasn’t even breaking a sweat. I don’t think his arm muscle was even flexed. I looked at his face and he had this gentle smile on it and he leaned over and said, “Punk, I’m having a hard time deciding what to do with you. Do I drop you or do I haul you back up? That’s the question that’s rambling around in my head. Maybe I ought to ask my friend Jake here what I should do. What do you think?” Fucking Clint Eastwood movie!

Some more baby talk from Frick, nothing you could really understand. The words anyway. I think we both knew what he was trying to get out.

All along the tier I could see guys stopped, watching. Some of them were grinning, the white ones, and others, mostly the black guys were standing there like they didn’t know what they should do, help out the brother or stay the fuck where they were. Since nobody was moving, I guess they decided to stay out of the play. Just then, I seen a hack walk around the corner downstairs and look up. He must have realized what was going on because he just turned around and walked back the way he’d come, disappearing around the corner. He didn’t hurry, went back at the same pace he’d come in on. No way he was going to get involved in this business by his lonesome. Smart hack.

“I’m gonna be a nice guy,” Manny said in this slow and easy voice. He hauled the guy up and back and laid him sandwiched over the top bar of the railing. Frick grabbed the middle rail and pushed himself the rest of the way over, falling to the walk, and lay there on the concrete curling up like a baby. You could smell the stink.

Manny leaned down close to the guy’s face. “You a lucky bro,” he said softly. “You fuck with my friend, you fuck with me. You want to keep that in mind, sissy. You understand?”

It had been deathly quiet up till then, although I didn’t notice it until the whole row of guys started babbling and I saw four hacks come around the corner down below. “Time to go in, Manny,” I said. All of us along the walk melted into our cells. All except Frick who just laid there. Somebody, one of the guards, pulled the lever and all the cells swung shut leaving Frick outside. The four guards came and picked him up, arguing about who was going to have to hold his legs.

They kept us locked up for a good hour longer than usual but nothing ever happened. Usually something like that goes down, we all get questioned but for some reason they didn’t this time. The only thing was, when they let us out for noon chow, the guard who pulled the lever to let us out said to Manny when we walked by, “Good thing you didn’t drop that nigger, boy,” but he was smiling.

Frick didn’t show up the rest of the week and a half Manny and I were in quarantine and about a week later, one of the guards I knew from before, Mr. Jones, told us what happened, strolled over to us during recreation one night while we were playing bouree and give us the lowdown. He requested solitary and they gave it to him and then they let him go out into the population a week early. He was over in J House and had a job in the laundry.

“You’re lucky Dobbs was on duty that day,” he told Manny. “Dobbs is a KK’er, hates niggers. That been anybody else, you’d be in the hole, half your ribs caved in.” It was funny to hear Jones say the word “niggers” being as he was as black as two ayem in solitary his own self. Or to hear him talk about the KKK, like he was a redneck himself.

I was glad Manny’d done what he done but I knew it meant more trouble down the road, this guy had any pride at all. He’d been fronted big-time in front of fifty guys and the only way he’d ever get his face back, he’d have to kill me and Manny. I told this to Manny, but he was sharp, even though it was his first time in the joint.

“I know that, Jake. I knew that before I made my move. Things here aren’t that much different than on the street. Don’t worry about it, amigo. That little pissant ain’t gonna bother us none. Next time I’ll drop him. I think he knows that.”

“You better hope he’s not a dopehead,” I said. “He gets shit in his arm he’s gonna think he’s Superman again.”

“Then I’ll kill him,” was all he said, like he was talking about the chance of rain tomorrow. Manny was solid.

They put us out into population and we both got our request granted to go to K Dorm and when we got there it was great. Ol’ Dusty was waiting for us, sitting on a bunk, had a pile of cigarettes and Oreos next to him.

“For you guys,” he said, handing each of us half a dozen packs of cigarettes each and a package of cookies. Manny looked at me, left eyebrow arched and I said, “It’s all right, Manny. He’s a good guy. Manny, meet Dusty. Dusty’s a homeboy.”

Dusty had a good gig going and he was gonna cut us in on it. Dusty had become a principal loan shark it turned out.