CHAPTER 15

 

We stood there a moment just staring at each other and all kinds of things went through my mind. Fear wasn’t one of them. Oh, a bit I guess but not much. My first thought was that he most likely wasn’t aware I had a shank. Easy pickings is what he must see, standing there looking at me the way he was. Carve me up some honky, I bet is what he was thinking. Otherwise, he would have just snuck up behind me which would have been easy, all the noise I was making, breaking open cabinets. No, he figured I was unarmed so he’d have himself some fun, scare the honky, maybe fuck him.

I thought about taking him right then and there and then I had another thought. At least ten guys saw me go back this way not counting Manny and Dusty. There’s gotta be one snitch in any ten guys and if I fucked up this cocksucker back here my ass would be in slam, guaranteed, and one more sentence to serve. No, I had to get him someplace else.

There was a back door just to my left, maybe three feet away. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the chain lock was off, but I didn’t know if the regular door lock was on or off. I decided to chance it was unlocked. If it was locked, he’d be on me before I could unlock it and open it but if I was in luck, I’d be out of there and he’d have to come after me. If worse came to worse, I’d take him on in the room and there was no doubt in my mind how that’d turn out. Dead nigger is how that would end.

Cool. It was unlocked. I was out the door before he knew what happened and booking across the yard toward the chow hall. I knew where I wanted to go and only hoped I could outrun him. My goal was the roof of the laundry.

I was halfway up the fire escape before I saw him, and up over the top just as he was grabbing the bottom rung.

I don’t think the little punk even knew what hit him. I think he was expecting to come up, chase me around a little bit and then repeat our little tete-a-tete back at the city lockup, and then take me out, cut through the fine veins and capillaries of my neck. It didn’t work out that way and I’m sure he was disappointed.

What happened was, when his head came up over the top I grabbed his fro and pulled him bodily the rest of the way up, at the same time I’m jabbing him with my straightened out laundry pin. He must have been one cocky sonofabitch ‘cause he didn’t even have his shank out yet, had it stuck in his back pocket. He fucked up. Like the old joke goes, “Don’t bring one knife to a two-shank fight especially if you’re climbing up a fire escape and don’t know what’s waiting.”

I must have went a little nutsy because I didn’t nail him just once or twice which would have done the trick. Instead, I performed needlepoint on him, punched a whole bunch of holes in his punk ass. I guess it was the music of his screams. Every time I stuck him he’d give out with an E-flat screech and I played an inspirational kind of tune on my instrument. It felt so fucking good. I think I tried to poke him about as many times as he had me, back in city lockup. Maybe a few more. The only reason I finally quit was, in all honesty my arm just got tired. I simply couldn’t lift it one more time. Besides, he had shut up, wasn’t playing the game anymore.

I looked around but I knew no one had seen us. Nobody else was on the roof, which was why I had headed there and I was certain no one had seen us come up. Everybody was too busy robbing and pillaging each other.

First thing I did after I climbed down was walk over to the barber school. The inmates owned the institution, at least for a little while longer and I could go just about anywhere I wanted. I had to get rid of my clothes being as they were pretty nasty, what with the blood and all and I kept an extra change at the school.

Once there, it was a piece of cake to bust a window in the door, reach in and unlock it. Inside, I shucked my bloody clothes and threw them on the floor of the shower stall and turned the cold water on. I remembered hearing someplace that cold water washes out blood better than hot. When they quit running red, I squeezed out the excess water and threw them out on the floor, adjusted the water so it was comfortable and stepped in, lathering down with shampoo all over. All the time I was doing this, I could hear guys running by outside, yelling and stuff. Drying off, I grabbed my extra jeans and shirt and dressed, grabbed the lump of wet clothes and took off. At the dumpster out back, I threw the wet clothes in and went off to find Dusty and Manny. As I passed by the chow hall, I took the laundry pin and dropped it on the grass in plain sight. Someone would find it and grab it I figured. Then, if there was an investigation and it turned up, it would turn up in someone else’s possession and heaven help whoever had it try and explain how he came to have it and where he was during the riot when Frick had bought it.

Pretty slick, I thought. Just your genius criminal mind at work.

I went back to the hospital, back to the room where I’d found the drugs. It was cleaned out. I hurried up to the front, looking in each room to see if Manny and Dusty were still there. They weren’t. I didn’t have a clue where they had gone so I just went out in the yard where there must have been five hundred inmates running around. Back and forth I went, but they weren’t out in the yard unless I missed them somehow. On a hunch I walked over to K Dorm and went inside and up to the dorm. The fires had died down and all there was was a little smoke in layers coming from some of the bunks in the rear. Dusty and Manny were sitting on his bunk with all kinds of shit spread out between them.

“Hey, where you been!” They looked up and grinned and pointed down to the stuff on the bed.

There must have been six dozen bottles of different pills and stuff piled up there. They were putting them in baggies and twisting them shut.

“Separate the uppers from the downers and put six in a bag,” Dusty said. I jumped in and began sorting out bottles. When we were done he told Manny to go stand by the door and keep watch.

“Anybody comes up you let me know right now,” he said. We gathered up an armful of baggies each and went over to the far wall. Dusty still had the same hiding place he’d had when I was in before, a concrete block that he pulled out from the back wall. It was a tight fit, but we got them all crammed into the space behind it. Before he replaced the block he took the little can of gray paint he kept in the space and poured some on a paper towel. Putting the block back into place, he took his finger and repainted the lines around the block, filling in the gap. When he was done you couldn’t tell the block had ever been out.

We went back over and sat down on his bunk and Dusty reached up and pulled down a bag of the peaches we’d copped at the chow hall.

“You gonna make some applejack?” I said.

“Naw. Let’s just eat these. I got something better.” He reached back in the bag and brought out a loaf of bread. I didn’t understand what was so exciting about that until he reached back in the bag and pulled out a couple of bottles of aftershave. Aqua Velva.

“Oh, man! This is great!”

“We’re gonna get so-ooo drunk!” I said.

“On that?” Manny said.

“Yeah. Just watch.”

Dusty and I grabbed our coffee cups and told Manny to get his too. Dusty opened the bread and handed us each a stack. I held three pieces of bread over my cup and Dusty began to pour the Aqua-Velva over it slowly.

“Hold it!” The stuff had started to eat a hole through the bread. I grabbed another stack and he began pouring again. It took six more slices before he emptied the bottle.

“What’s that do?” Manny asked.

“Cuts the oil,” Dusty said.

It wasn’t Jack Daniels, but it did the job. After the first couple of sips it didn’t even taste too bad. We finished both bottles.

“Now,” he said. “Let’s go turn ourselves in. I don’t want to end up in the hole with the rest of these clowns, do you?”

We walked up to the front gate at the visitor’s room, our fingers laced behind our heads and sure enough, all the hacks were gathered there, milling around on the other side of the bars like a herd of cattle.

They acted tough, grabbing us and shaking us down and even doing the body cavity routine, but we expected that. You could tell they were scared. I couldn’t tell if they could see that we were half-drunk or not, not that I cared.

“How come your hands are sweaty?” I asked the hack who was having trouble getting his hand into a rubber glove. “This your first date?”

They put us in the officer’s barber shop along with about a dozen other inmates who had had the same idea, mostly old hands who knew what was coming. There was a window where you could see the parking lot outside the main administrative building. I knew then that time would slow down for a while when this was all over, with the memory of that view of freedom just inches away.

Most guys who’ve done any time at all will tell you that being in the joint is a thousand times easier than doing time in a city or county lockup. The reason is, in the joint you never see the outside. That may sound tough but believe me, it’s far worse in most city jails where you can see the streets outside. All it does is remind you of where you’re not. Outside, where you can go buy a beer, talk to a lady—shit—even turn on the TV and watch some stupid show. Freedom. The last thing you want when you’ve got a stretch of time ahead of you to pull is to be reminded of what you’re missing. Inside the walls, you never see it and you get so you can keep it from entering your mind and time goes easy.

That’s why guys hate to have to go testify at trials, which happens from time to time when somebody gets killed inside. It means you have to climb in a van and get driven to some court, usually in Indianapolis, where you give your testimony. What’s hard about it is you’re on the road with regular folks, people on their way to their jobs or maybe to get laid, whatever. You see a car go by and there’s a guy driving and a girl sitting next to him and then you see her bob down and you know what she’s doing and it just kills you. For months afterward, that’s all you think about. Some guys though, they’re just the opposite. Every chance they get to get out, trial, whatever, they’re first on the bus. I guess they just like to torture themselves.

I remember the time right before I did my first bit, sitting in the South Bend city lockup staring out a window at the cars going by. Sundays were the worst because there wasn’t much traffic or people going by and when they did, like say a couple walked by beneath you arm in arm, you had plenty of time to fantasize about where they were going, what they were going to be doing, and here you sat with your willie in your hand and it sure wasn’t going to be the same and wouldn’t be for a long, long time.

Jail time just murders you. Give me six months in the joint where I don’t have to be reminded of what’s out there to one day in jail where all you see is assholes walking around, taking for granted what you’d give your left nut for. I’ll take six months in a real joint over six days in the classiest city lockup there is.

I tried to stay away from that window in the officer’s shop, but couldn’t help myself. It just kept pulling me over. Every five minutes I’d get up off where I was sitting on the floor and wander over and look out.

After a while, Dusty said, “You’re fucking up you know, dontcha?”

I knew, I knew. Still, it was like some kind of forbidden fruit you know is bad for you but which you can’t help eating. Must be how a junkie feels, why they keep sticking that needle in their arm even though they aren’t stupid—they know they’re killing themselves, but man! how sweet the poison!

We spent the night on the floor, about fifteen of us, and the officers brought in pillows and blankets. They even brought us in Big Macs from the town’s McDonald’s. They were cold time we got them, but who cares? They were delicious. Freedom food.

Along about daybreak it got quiet. All night we could hear the murmur of officers outside the barber shop and then it got deadly still just before the sun came up. That meant one thing. They’d gone in to take back over the institution.

“We’ll be back in our bunks before noon,” Dusty predicted.

Actually, it was almost three in the afternoon before they came and took us back down to K. It seems they found a guy up on the roof of the laundry with a bunch of holes in him and once they got everybody rounded up and locked down they brought in the state police crime lab boys to check it out. They kept us up front until the state boys were done.

Going back inside, we passed a group of guards and I overheard one of the hacks say to another, “Can you believe this shit? Guy’s got thirty-three stab wounds and he’s still alive!”

Fuck me.