Wilson nodded. ‘Sure, why not?’
‘I don’t think Stokely Johnson will let me through without your word.’
‘Give me some paper,’ said Wilson.
Klein pulled a soggy notebook and a ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket and handed them over. Wilson scribbled briefly in the notebook, tore out the page, folded it and handed it back.
‘Obliged,’ said Klein.
‘You like Claude,’ said Wilson.
‘When I first came down,’ said Klein, ‘Claude was good to me, got me in like Flynn with Agry. He invited me to coffee mornings and cocktail parties in their cell.’
‘When he was a lady Claude like to play at that society hostess shit,’ said Wilson.
‘You blame him?’ said Klein.
‘Some do. Not me. Man’s got to survive best he can. Claude had a good deal going over on D. Why’d he move back into B?’
‘The word on D is that he had no choice. They say Hobbes transferred him back on your request.’
‘Shit,’ said Wilson. ‘He told us he requested it himself, got sick of being Agry’s bitch.’
‘Maybe that’s so and he put that story around to protect himself,’ said Klein. ‘If Agry thought Claude had left him he’d have him impaled on a wooden stake by second count.’
‘Agry is one mad motherfucker,’ said Wilson.
‘Agry’s just plain crazy. Hobbes is insane. I mean thorazine and straitjackets insane, or at least on his way.’
Wilson’s expression darkened with concern. ‘The lockdown is insane, right enough. I can’t see any sense to it, less he just wants to show the population who’s really boss. How is it on B?’
‘Hot,’ said Klein.
Wilson shrugged. ‘Well it ain’t your problem. None of it is any more. Like Coley said, you gone, motherfucker.’
Wilson smiled. Klein smiled back. He glanced at his watch. ‘I got to go inform Cletus about Garvey’s death.’
‘Drop by again before you leave,’ said Wilson.
Klein nodded and walked down the ward and out of the door. At the top of the stairs Coley was waiting for him. He glanced at Klein’s eyes, then looked away down the stairs.
‘This ain’t personal,’ said Coley, ‘but I don’t want the woman around no more. I want her gone. Now. I ain’t bein’ spiteful, I just . . . ’
Coley struggled for words, failed, turned to look at Klein.
‘You understand?’
Klein nodded. ‘Sure, Frog. I’ll take care of it.’
Klein put his hand on Coley’s shoulder. Coley shook his head and averted his face. Klein squeezed Coley’s shoulder.
‘I’ll be back after third lock and count,’ said Klein.
Coley nodded without speaking. Klein let go and headed down the stairs for the sick bay office.
Now all he had to do was kick his new lover out of the building and report a death to the Doris Day fan club. He felt depleted. He looked at his watch. If he had time after filling in forms for Cletus he had to brave Stokely Johnson and his long distance runners in the canteen. To say goodbye to Claude Toussaint. It wasn’t something that he had to do, but he wanted to. With a sinking in his gut he turned into the corridor to the office – and Devlin. He hoped she’d understand. He didn’t want a scene. His last day in prison was already more complicated than he’d hoped. Cletus’s warning nagged at him. Still, he’d resisted the smoke Wilson had offered him. And things weren’t likely to get any worse. He shoved open the office door and went inside.
ELEVEN
HECTOR GRAUERHOLZ WAS high. Fizzing. Crackling. Wired. Not with drugs, mind. Hec rarely took them, and then only downers to quell the natural excess of wayward chemicals produced by his brain. At eight a.m. on the average morning Grauerholz behaved like a man hopped up with methedrine. Now he was really soaring. He felt as he imagined an eagle must feel cruising the thermals with a small animal in its sights way down below. A rabbit maybe. Or a pigeon. Yeah. A sudden doubt bothered him. He didn’t know for sure if eagles preyed on pigeons: maybe you didn’t see too many up there in the mountains. They were too busy shitting on statues and living in coops and stuff. Maybe it was the other way round then: he was an eagle trapped in a coop. Fuck, yeah. That was it. A coop big enough to fly in. Electric currents buzzed through his bones. Nitrous oxide pumped through his chest. Sheet lightning danced behind his eyes. Man, this was it, man. Primitive chords jangled in his ears, like cavemen playing guitars in a stainless steel dungeon. Wang Dang Doodle. All night long.
Grauerholz was in the builder’s shop in the lee of the north wall, right opposite the rear gate and loading doors to the mess hall and kitchens. The shop was kind of a big open hangar, with a corrugated perspex roof and folding aluminium doors. It was jumbled with pallets stacked with brick and breeze block, lumps of pre-cast concrete; bags of cement, steel mesh, iron girders coded with white numbers and coated dull red with weather-proof paint. Lounging on a stool by the folded back doors, reading the sports section, was a black screw called Wilbur. Agry had said to go easy on the guards. Grauerholz didn’t quite get that one but he was game to try. Larry DuBois’s gun, tucked against his belly under his shirt, felt like a hard-on. He reminded himself to save ammo, not to go wild. That would be tough too. Some guys liked a blade, liked the feeling, the personal contact. He remembered Agry rooting around in old Larry’s jowls with the razor, the look on Agry’s face. Grauerholz could dig all that sure enough, but he preferred guns, no question. He was still full of wonder that they worked the way they did. Pop, pop, pop and man that was all she wrote. Awesome. Too fucking amazing for words. Horace Tolson lumbered past him with a sack of cement balanced on his shoulder. One side of his beard was grey with dust.
‘Get Bubba to fetch Sonny Weir,’ said Grauerholz. ‘Then tell the guys it’s time to run old ninety-nine.’
As Horace changed course across the yard towards his brother, Grauerholz walked over to Wilbur. As Wilbur saw him coming he stood up, folded his paper away and shoved it in his back pocket. Folk were always edgy around Grauerholz, ever since he could remember. He’d never understood it until one day he’d asked Klein what he thought their beef might be. Klein had told him it was because Grauerholz was the purest example of a psychopath he’d ever even heard of. As he approached Wilbur Grauerholz put on the choirboy smile that he imagined people liked. Wilbur looked more nervous than ever.
‘Permission to use the saw, Boss Wilbur,’ said Grauerholz.
Wilbur relaxed a little. ‘Sure, Grauerholz. And cut out that smartass “Boss” shit. It’s “Mr” and “Sir”, you know that.’
‘Yessir, Mr Wilbur. Thank you.’
Grauerholz walked to the rear of the shop. On his way, arms held out for balance, he trotted along the top of an iron girder that lay on the ground waiting to replace a corroded vault rafter in the roof of C block. The prison was so fucking old there was always something needed replacing. Both ends of the girder were bevelled, like wedges, where they would be bolted to the ridgepiece and wall plate. It was thirty feet long and had the number ‘99’ painted in white on its side. Threaded through the bolt holes at three points on either side were loops of thick nylon rope for ease of carrying. Grauerholz jumped off the end and skipped towards the heavy iron bench at the rear of the shop.
The breeze block saw was bolted to the back of the bench. It was currently sheltered from Wilbur’s view by a large sheet of steel leaning against the front end. Grauerholz switched on the power at the wall and hit the red button on the saw unit. The dark grey circular blade started spinning with a nerve-grinding whine that was amplified by the sheet of steel.
Holy shit. Suddenly Grauerholz remembered the feeling he’d had whilst raping a woman in her Fort Worth apartment, one of those bitches who wore a suit and pulled down sixty G’s a year. As he’d fucked her without coming he’d listened to Howlin Wolf at top volume singing ‘Wang Dang Doodle’ on his walkman and had carved his initials – H G – on her tits with a linoleum knife. It had given
him the same light-headed feeling he was getting now. Man. He hadn’t killed the woman. Instead he’d left her with the scars and hundred thousand dollars’ worth of psychotherapy to pay for. If he’d thought about getting caught – and he hadn’t been – maybe he would’ve killed her, but the thought had never crossed his mind.
That was because, as Klein had carefully explained, Grauerholz was one of those individuals – rare even in Green River – for whom there was no gap between thought and action, and for whom any consideration of future, of consequence, was quite alien. Some folk talked of taking each day as it came. Grauerholz took each minute. The only time he thought about the future was when he reminded himself that win, lose or draw he would one day end up exactly like his gentle law-abiding Pa: fat, forty and totally fucked. In other words worse than dead. So why the fuck worry? He liked prison life. Free bed and board with a constant vibe of impending action, a game played day and night for heavy stakes. He’d missed the pussy at first, of course, but after a while you just forgot about that shit. Most guys only jerked off or purchased blow jobs – or got freebies from certain of the screws – to reassure themselves that their equipment still worked. They sure as hell didn’t get much pleasure from it. At least Grauerholz hadn’t. The best part had always been hearing those bitches weep when he punished them and now that they weren’t around to provoke him any more he’d more or less forgotten all about them, and sex too.
The point Klein had tried to make was that it was the absence of any gap between impulse and action that made all these assholes fear him. He wasn’t big and he wasn’t strong and he wasn’t particularly bright; but he was crazier than a snake humping a goat, a sheep-killing dog who needed chaining up and shooting, and that’s what people shied away from. He didn’t know if it had been Klein’s intention or not, but he’d left Grauerholz feeling pretty good about himself.
Grauerholz’s reverie ended as Bubba Tolson brought Sonny Weir stumbling over, poking him in the back with a thick finger. Sonny’s face was a pale green colour and his lips trembled and writhed like a box of live fish bait.
‘Hey, Sonny, where y’at?’ said Grauerholz with his choirboy smile. He had to speak loud over the screech of the saw blade. Weir managed a simpering smile in return.
‘I got diarrhoea,’ he said.
Grauerholz tutted and shook his head. ‘Shoulda called in sick,’ he said. ‘Don’t take care of your own health ain’t nobody else gonna.’
‘I don’t like goin’ to that goddamn sick bay in th’infirmary. All them faggots, you know?’
Grauerholz nodded to Bubba who towered over Weir’s scrawny form.
‘Fraid I might catch something worse, you know,’ continued Weir. ‘Hey, Jesus!’
Bubba seized Weir from behind with both arms, one encircling his thin body, the other clamping a thick dusty hand over his mouth and nostrils. Weir struggled and kicked his legs. Bubba lifted him off the ground and carried him behind the steel sheet concealing the breeze block saw. Grauerholz looked over to the far corner near the doors, where Horace Tolson was hefting a sack of cement onto the top of a pile. Horace stopped to look at him. Grauerholz gave him a thumb-up sign, then clenched the thumb into his fist as if pressing a detonator.
Horace picked up a brick, strolled over to Boss Wilbur, and coshed him to the ground with a single blow.
As Horace dragged Wilbur’s body inside, out of sight of the gun tower on the west wall, Grauerholz stepped behind the steel sheet and smiled at Weir. The screeching whine of the breeze block saw increased in shrillness and intensity. Behind Bubba’s immovable hand Weir’s face was all puffed up and purpled red, his eyes rolling and bulging above his cheeks.
‘Okay, Stoolie,’ shouted Grauerholz above the noise. ‘Which one of them arms you wanna hang on to?’
TWELVE
WITH A MIXTURE of infuriation and bewilderment Devlin watched Klein walk away across the yard towards the main prison and third lock and count. Her liberal mental health professional instincts called upon her to understand why he’d bundled her out of the infirmary and dumped her at reception, why he’d been so cool and inaccessible so soon after the sexual fury she had unleashed in him in the sick bay office. Greg Garvey had died in difficult circumstances. There was a bad feeling on the ward. Coley was down about it. It was better she wasn’t around that day. Blah, blah, blah. The liberal instincts nodded empathetically and told her it was natural for the death to affect Klein and Coley and the others. Her gut told her: bullshit. Prisoners had died before while she was there. They dropped like flies, usually to the accompaniment of tough-guy ribaldry and displays of defensive machismo. It had to be bound up with the sex, and Devlin wondered if somehow she’d fucked up.
Thinking back now, as she sat enduring the usual interminable wait to be cleared through reception, she was shaken, and disturbed, by how much she’d wanted Klein to fuck her, standing there bent over against the wall. And not just fuck her but fuck her savagely and recklessly in that humid, squalid room surrounded by hurt and dying. Guys had been hot for her before, plenty, but nothing she’d experienced came close to Klein’s weeping, sweating, rageful carnality, at once tender and frightening, animalistic and lovely. She’d had her own moments of lust too, but nothing like the delirium she’d felt in that room. No condoms. No precautions. My God, she must have been out of her mind. Or maybe, for once, she’d just been out of her mind and in herself. Something in her rebelled against the chiding voice of sense. She wished he had fucked her and come, dangerously, inside her. She wished he’d returned from seeing Garvey die and finished the job. The voice of sense, the liberal instincts, reeled with horror. What was she saying? Her gut answered: I’m saying fuck you all. I want his cock inside me, I want his hands on me, I want to hear him moaning in my ear. I don’t care what he’s done or where he’s been or where he’s going. I know him. I want him. For a few minutes I knew him better than I’ve ever known anyone. And he knew me. I love him.
I love him.
The competing thoughts were wiped away. For a moment Devlin sat within a powerful inner silence. Unlike her conscious mind the ancient core of herself, a wise crone ten thousand years old, was not surprised or shaken or horrified. The crone knew that Devlin had watched Klein for a year. Watched the crinkles of concentration round his eyes when he sutured a wound, watched the muscles moving under the thick-veined skin of his forearms, watched his hair grow long and his habit of slicking it back with the sweat that forever poured down his rawboned face. And she’d listened to the rise and fall of his voice and of his laughter, and to his use of profanity and to his easy way with the men, who leaned on him more than he could ever bear to let himself know. And she’d smelled his prison-food breath and his useless prison-store deodorant, and the smells of the infirmary clinging to his hands and clothes, and the smell of him that leaked out from his pores. And all this time she’d been falling in love. And the wise crone had known it and she, Devlin, had not. And now she did.
Devlin stopped herself thinking about what Klein felt in return for her. She knew there were a hundred and one interpretations she could put on his actions, some that she wanted to be so and others that she feared. She wasn’t going to play he loves me, he loves me not. She would wait and see and the silence inside would see her through the wait. Klein would be free of this place tomorrow and they would meet again in a different world. That scared her too. If it scared her, she reasoned, then it must be scaring Klein a hell of a lot more. Klein had convinced himself he was a look-out-for-number-one, not-my-fucking-business, get-out-of-my-face-or-I’ll-fracture-your-fucking-skull, hard ass. In fact his failure to actually be so at times verged on the comical, at least to Devlin. He thought he was too cool and too shrewd to get involved – with the Aids guys, with Coley, with any of the other convicts. She didn’t blame him for defending himself that way, she just didn’t think his armour was as tough as he thought it was.
Perhaps in her way she herself was not so different. She’d invented herself in
much the same way, justifying her toughness as a necessity if she was to compete in a tough game. Sometimes she’d wondered if she’d overdone it. Her mother still asked Devlin when she was going to give her some grandchildren. Typically she never asked her sons, Devlin’s two brothers. Two guys had asked Devlin to marry them. She’d refused and broken off with them. She had too much to do, though sometimes she wasn’t sure exactly what that too much was. The more achievements she accumulated the farther away whatever it was she was looking for seemed to go. She’d had a hunch that she’d find it here in Green River State Penitentiary. After all, she’d told herself, it was just unlikely enough a location for her to be right. And for a moment back there with Klein she had found it. It had flowed through her, startling and clear, and through the strong fingers melting into her flesh. Now, sitting here feeling rejected and confused, she wasn’t so sure. How could something so immutable change so quickly to doubt? Klein had twenty-four hours to go and she would be waiting for him at the gate. Then she would find out. A phrase appeared in her mind: Give me to drink mandragora, That I might sleep out the great gap of time My Antony is away. She blushed in front of herself. Christ, Devlin what’s going on with you?
An officer called her to the window of the reception office and she collected her belongings and signed out. As she put her pocketbook back into her briefcase she noticed the green journal. Fuck. She’d forgotten the only reason she’d had for coming here today: the first publication of their research work in the infirmary.
Aids and Depressive Illness in a Closed Institution:
a Pilot Study at Green River State Penitentiary.
by
Juliette Devlin Ray Klein Earl Coley
She’d sat on the news of the paper’s acceptance by the journal for weeks without telling Klein or Coley, so that she could surprise them. But Klein was leaving tomorrow and she couldn’t be here before noon at the earliest. She was chairing a case conference in Houston. The three of them would never be together again to celebrate their achievement. An image of Earl Coley lumbering down the ward alone came into her mind and tears sprang to her eyes. It was for Coley most of all that she was proud of the publication. She wanted to see his face when he saw his name next to hers. She wanted to see how much it would mean to him. Her own first publication had thrilled her and that had been routine, expected, her job. She hoped that for Coley it would be some small tribute to the vast but invisible contribution he’d made to the sick men flowing through his hands. She had to get the journal into his hands today. Sergeant Victor Galindez walked past her and stopped.