Instead of shucking his goddamned pants Klein stood paralysed, staring at Devlin’s tumescent lips.
Devlin slid her hand into his hair and round the back of his head. He felt her fingers clench into a fist, pulling him towards her. She opened her mouth and kissed him.
Klein closed his eyes and his nervous system turned into what felt like a sea of molten copper. His arms hung, heavy, by his sides and his entrails, heavy too, sank inside him. He leaned into her, onto her, through her. He felt himself dissolving, vanishing. Even the hard-on of his life, now pressing against her belly, lost its separateness and was swallowed up into the meltdown of his sensorium. He didn’t even know whether or not his tongue was down her throat or hers down his. A groan that fell just short of a whimper escaped from his throat. He would realise later that this was the one and only moment of pure and untrammelled bliss that he had ever experienced. But for the moment he was incapable of thought.
Devlin pulled his head away.
Klein, swaying on his feet, slowly opened his eyes. He found her staring at him. She looked as if she was shocked by what she’d done. Maybe she wasn’t quite as cool as he’d thought. Cool enough, though. A sudden thought sent a bolt of fear straight through him. She had changed her mind. The kiss that had shown him the meaning of bliss had been for her a horrible error. He was after all a stinking convict, unworthy of her attention. The mighty sovereign hard-on shouldered him contemptuously aside and seized control of his limbs. With both hands Klein grabbed Devlin by the waist and pulled her crotch against his. Now Klein felt a moment of shock. She looked up at him for a beat. He waited for her to knee him in the balls. Devlin’s mouth drooped open. Her tongue invited him. They kissed again.
Klein squeezed her waist, the lower edges of his hands digging into the hard bony blades of her hips. Through the cotton of her shirt he felt her flank muscles tense. He pulled the tails of the shirt from out the back of her jeans. He paused with the white cotton bunched in his fists. He slid his mouth from her lips and pressed his cheek against hers. He felt her breath against his ear. It wasn’t simple. It should’ve been but it wasn’t. Suddenly all the needs that he had so ruthlessly welded into the various cages of his psyche started rattling their bars and yelling to be heard. Sex, grief, sorrow, joy, loneliness, hope, excitement, anger, and more sorrow and yet more and then more sorrow still. Sorrow for the autumn leaves and the winter sunsets over the Bay that he’d yearned for and missed whilst trapped in stir. For the friends he’d lost and for those he might have made and never had. For the men who’d died in front of him and for those like Vinnie Lopez who now would die without him. For Earl Coley and Henry Abbott and all the others who would never see the seasons change inside these stony walls. For the pain and rage that had doomed him to this awful place and the pain and rage he’d known whilst stuck inside it. For the man he might have been and the man he merely was. And Klein knew that for all he’d fought and struggled he had, in the end, failed to keep his own ghosts, and the ghosts of this prison, from entering his inmost heart.
He felt Devlin’s breasts against his chest and his cock rubbing her belly and the lonely fire burning in his own. And he found the sorrow there too. The only flesh Klein had touched in three long years had belonged to sick male convicts. Now his fingers were about to touch the skin of a woman, and not just any woman but the woman he felt to be the most beautiful in history. His hands trembled. He lifted her shirt and put his hands inside. As his fingertips brushed the hollow of her back and his skin touched hers a wave of nameless emotion swept through his body and his clenched eyes filled with tears and his anguish tore itself free from its moorings and soared, howling, through the deep and infinite spaces of his chest. In that moment all sorrows and all desires, and all pasts and all futures, were together gathered into this one present. And in this present Klein loved her. Utterly and forever. And he knew that he would love her utterly and forever until he and all his sorrows were turned back into dirt.
‘Klein?’ said Devlin.
Her voice was soft in his ear and filled with concern. Klein realised that she could feel his tears running down her neck. He had never in adulthood cried in front of a woman. Never. An overwhelming sense of shame suddenly extinguished all other feelings within him. He kept his head pressed to hers so she couldn’t look at his face.
‘Are you okay?’
‘I’m fine,’ said Klein, in a flat, hard voice. ‘Just don’t say anything.’
The shame was of that unique form which a man only ever feels in front of a woman, never in front of another man and never in front of himself: the shame of showing her your weakness and pain. Klein was all too well aware of the acreage of literature devoted to the benefits of this sort of display, all of it heavily fertilised with bullshit. He did not believe a word of it. Since it was not within the power of woman to understand or comfort the pain their only gain in being witness to it was that of emotional advantage, which in his experience they invariably seized on with clawed hands. Maybe it was sad that Klein would be happier to kneel weeping in front of Nev Agry than in front of a woman he loved, but it was true nevertheless. The contempt of a man, if that be his response, could be dealt with. That of a woman – and who amongst them did not harbour it in their heart? – felt like a sickness worse than death. Devlin would have thought him crazy to hear any of this and maybe he was. But Klein had heard enough men weeping, and seen enough of them with their wives and girls and enough boy children with their mothers, to think otherwise. Klein lowered his lips to Devlin’s neck and licked away the tears and with them his shame. He willed his heart to match the hardness of his cock. Then he kissed her again on the mouth.
This time bliss and the angst of shame took a back seat to raw sexual convulsion. No more censorship. No more sorrow. He bit her lips, her face; he scraped his fingertips down the long white curve of her throat; he grabbed the flesh of her back in handfuls as if he would tear it away from her ribs and spine and consume it. From Klein’s larynx came bursts of hoarse, amorphous sound, a primal stridor punctuated by the suck and smack of saliva and tongue, the howl and lament of a deprivation so brutal and a need so deep that it chanted its wordless song from the very marrow of who he was. He held her grappled tight against his chest and lifted her half off her feet and reeled backwards, manhandling her across the room, all the while his teeth gnawing at the angle of her jaw, her neck, the thin stretched skin over her collar bone. He felt his back thud into the wall by the door and rolled, still holding her, so that she was pinned against the yellow-painted bricks. Klein paused and leaned back to look at her.
Devlin’s chest heaved in shallow gasps. Her eyes were huge, with awe and the shadow of fear. She tilted her head and shoulders back against the wall, arching her belly into his cock, her mouth, red and wet, lifting towards him. Klein held back, poring over her features, the sight of her filling him with an ache more terrible than any he had known in the darkness of confinement. Devlin turned her face to one side and looked down at the floor. Her eyelids drowsed half-shut. She took hold of her shirt and pulled it up over her breasts. She wore a white lycra bra that held her tits tight against her chest. The dark, hard stumps of her nipples stuck out towards him and Klein’s soul went into free fall, tumbling towards oblivion. Her abdomen, stretched taut from her heaving rib cage, undulated in and out with the beat of her breath. Still looking away from him Devlin reached up with her left hand and pulled one cup of the bra down, releasing her tit. The muscles in Klein’s cock and balls clenched and he felt a thin trickle of pre-ejaculate flow out. He lifted his hand to her jaw and turned her to face him. She opened her eyes, now black and turbulent as the sea. Klein held her gaze for an endless pulse of time. Still looking at her, he put his hand on her cunt and lifted her onto her toes.
Devlin’s breath shuddered out, a deep guttural exhalation, and her eyes never blinked, never wavered from his own. She pushed down into his fingers and he felt the denim of her jeans give just a little as the lips of her cunt
parted. The spots of colour on her cheeks were now a fierce red. Klein felt her hand on his cock, a strong, full-blooded grip. She tugged upwards. He trembled as he felt the slickness of his own moisture on his glans. They kissed, sucking, her teeth banging hard into his. Klein grabbed her hips and turned her, her mouth still clinging to his, to face the wall. He pushed his cock against her jeans, into the cleft of her ass, and felt her push back against him, her forearms braced to the wall, her head sagging down between them. He slid his hands under her armpits and pulled her tits free. She squirmed as he pulled hard on her nipples. He closed his eyes and bit the skin over her vertebrae where they curved down into the nape of her drooping neck. He felt the gathering momentum of ejaculation swell up through his pelvis. It was too soon. He stopped his thrusting and hung onto her back, his sweat drenching her shirt and skin. The moment of his coming receded and Klein immediately wanted it back. He heard the brassy clink of a belt buckle falling open and groaned. Devlin was popping the buttons on her flies, shoving and wriggling her jeans down over her hips with one hand. Klein saw the black of a G string disappearing into the cleft of her ass.
As the lava of impending orgasm again surged through his cock he realised that he hadn’t jerked off in a week and that at this instant there was no way he’d be able to fuck her for more than a dozen strokes before he came. A whiff of panic smoked through his guts. He wanted to give her the fucking of her life but it had been too long. Three years. He wasn’t ready. He had to be ready. He was the Nietzschean. The shotokan warrior. By force of will he would override his autonomic nerves and fuck her until she could no longer stand. The smoke of panic became acrid and dense. The Nietzschean coughed and spluttered. An alarm bell started ringing.
It took several seconds, and Devlin twisting towards him with an urgent expression on her face, before Klein realised that the ringing came not from within his head but from the bell bolted to the far wall of the office. Klein turned, dazed. Beneath the bell a red light bulb flashed on a board next to the words ‘Travis Ward’. Devlin hauled her jeans up.
‘Cardiac arrest, Klein,’ she said. ‘Klein?’
‘Fuck,’ said Klein.
He slid both his hands up across the sweat slicking his face and ran them through his hair.
‘Stay here,’ he said.
He checked the red bulb again and bolted for the door.
‘You want help?’ called Devlin.
‘No.’
Klein hit the corridor at a sprint. Travis ward. Second floor. He took the stairs three at a time. At the top of the first flight his foot slipped and he crashed his shin into the edge of the step. He swore vilely and sprinted on, shards of pain shooting up through his knee. An image of ultimate horror sprang into his mind: Frog Coley slumped in a great heap on the floor with Gimp Cotton going through his pockets for the keys to the dispensary. No: only Frog would have had the sense to set the alarm off. As Klein shouldered through the door at the top of the stairs he heard the roar of Coley’s voice.
‘One of you fuckers give me a hand! Wilson!’
Klein hit the ward running, between the rows of beds. The gate dividing the ward in two was open. At the far end Coley stood over Greg Garvey, both palms on his sternum pumping his chest. Klein passed through the gate and reached the bedside. He pulled Garvey’s head back, pinched his nose closed and put his mouth over Garvey’s lips. The lips were dark blue. He blew into Garvey’s lungs, let the chest deflate, blew again. As he did so he reached down into Garvey’s groin and felt for the femoral pulse. It was there but only faintly and only in time to Coley’s pumping.
‘Stop a minute,’ Klein said.
Coley stopped and wiped his brow on his forearm. Under Klein’s fingertips the pulsations stopped and didn’t come back. Klein lifted Garvey’s right eyelid. The pupil was dilated and did not react to the light. The left pupil was the same. Coley started pumping again.
‘Did you see him go?’ said Klein.
Coley shook his head. Sweat fell from his nose onto Garvey’s chest. ‘I was changing a bed at the other end. Found him like this on my way back from the sluice.’
‘He’s gone, Frog,’ said Klein. ‘There’s nothing we can do.’
He put his hand on top of Coley’s. Coley stopped pumping. After a moment he pulled his hands away. He stared at Klein’s sweat soaked shirt. ‘Where were you?’
Klein’s jaw clenched. ‘I was in the office. You know that.’
Coley just looked at him.
‘Greg was terminal. We did our best for him,’ said Klein.
‘We?’ said Coley. His voice was fierce with suppressed loss. ‘You gone, motherfucker. Ain’t got no “we” round here any more. Why would you give a shit?’
‘Frog,’ said Klein, softly.
Coley had seen hundreds of men leave the infirmary wrapped in plastic and headed for Potter’s Field. Klein knew this wasn’t about Garvey’s dying. So did Coley. Coley heaved in a big breath and let it out through flared nostrils.
‘Sorry, man,’ he said.
‘Forget it,’ said Klein.
Coley drew the sheet up over Garvey’s face. Then he stood upright and stared across the aisle at Gimp Cotton with a blank expression that prickled the hairs on the back of Klein’s neck. Cotton cringed back into his mattress. Klein noticed a large black haematoma covering the left half of his face.
‘I didn’t do nothin’!’
Cotton’s voice was a squeal of terror. Coley moved towards him. Klein stepped round the bed and stood in his way.
‘Frog,’ he said.
Coley’s eyes stayed on Cotton for a another full ten seconds. The Gimp squirmed, twisting the sheets between his hands.
‘I didn’t do nothin’! Tell ’em, Wilson.’
Coley looked at Klein. He spoke loud enough for Cotton to hear him.
‘I was gonna send the Gimp back to the population this afternoon.’ He turned deadly eyes back on the cowering figure. ‘Think I’ll keep him here for a while after all.’
Coley pushed past Klein and walked off down the ward. As Klein watched him go Reuben Wilson caught his eye. Wilson was one of the few well-balanced minds in the joint. At that moment Klein didn’t feel that his own mind qualified as one of them. A word with Wilson might do him some good. He walked over to his bed.
‘Garvey looked like he was sleepin’, Doc. Nothin’ I could do.’
‘Garvey’s number was up,’ said Klein. ‘Don’t worry. How’s your belly?’
Wilson shrugged stiffly. ‘Fine, I guess.’
‘Let me see,’ said Klein.
He sat on the edge of the mattress. Two weeks before Wilson had almost died in the segregation block. A blow of considerable force, the exact nature and circumstances of which would never be officially established, had been delivered to Wilson’s left ninth and tenth ribs from the rear and ruptured his spleen. Wilson had leaked two litres of blood into his peritoneal cavity while he lay on the floor of his cell calling for help. Captain Cletus, who despite being a professional motherfucker knew a dying man when he saw one, had been on night watch and had roused Klein from his cell. Klein, finding no blood pressure and a pulse over a hundred and sixty, had shoved a line into Wilson’s subclavian vein and squeezed in two bags of saline whilst waiting for the ambulance to take him to the general hospital. Three days after receiving twelve units of blood and emergency surgery to remove his spleen, Wilson had been transferred back to Green River.
Wilson lifted his T-shirt for Klein. A fresh scar ran from Wilson’s sternum almost as far as his pubic bone. Inside his abdomen the muscle layer was held together by number two nylon sutures. The skin wound had healed well. Klein ran a hand over Wilson’s belly.
‘Looks good,’ said Klein.
‘No kidding,’ said Wilson. ‘It’s the biggest fucking scar I ever seen, and I seen my share.’
‘The surgeons needed space to work and they didn’t have time to worry about what the ladies sucking your dick would think.’
‘I guess th
at’s one problem I don’t need to worry about,’ said Wilson. ‘Least for a while.’
‘I guess not,’ said Klein.
A cold hand squeezed his heart. Wilson was serving ninety-nine to life for a murder that even Cletus had difficulty believing he’d committed. Wilson had been a contender for the middleweight world title, upset some big promoter with Mafia connections and had woken up in a Dallas motel room to six armed cops telling each other that this was one loud nigger was going all the way to the chair. In the room next door was a dead whore, strangled, her mouth stuffed with a pair of Wilson’s monogrammed Versace underpants. No drugs or alcohol were found in Wilson’s bloodstream nor any other evidence linking him to the dead woman. Just the underpants and a few of Wilson’s pubic hairs. It seemed unlikely that a stone cold sober Wilson would strangle a stranger and then bed down for some Z’s in the adjoining room. But this was Texas, Wilson was a nigger who wore expensive foreign underwear, and the woman was white. A number of pop stars and Hollywood actors had mounted a campaign on Wilson’s behalf and he had become a cause célèbre, but once the brief flare of publicity had died down the stars had lost interest. When he finally got back to court two years later no one remembered who Wilson was any more, especially in Hollywood, and the judge had rejected his appeal. He would be free to apply for parole in twenty-four years’ time.
Wilson pulled a pack of Camel filters from under his pillow. He tapped one loose and offered it to Klein. Klein sighed and shook his head. Wilson stuck the butt in his mouth.
‘I heard what Coley said back there. That mean you got your parole through?’
Klein nodded. Wilson smiled and held out his hand. They shook.
‘Well done, man. Don’t pay Coley no mind. He’s just crazy about you,’ said Wilson.
‘You can do me a favour before I go,’ said Klein.
‘Name it,’ said Wilson.
‘I want to see Claude Toussaint, say goodbye,’ said Klein.