‘You fucked up fallin’ off that stool right enough,’ said Stokely, bitingly.
‘What the hell’s he doin’ here?’ said Terry.
‘Why not fix the loop on C first,’ said Galindez. ‘Then they’re sprung as soon as the power comes on line.’
‘That’s not bad for a Mexican,’ said Terry.
‘How long will it take?’ asked Klein.
Terry grimaced and pulled on his cigarette, relishing both the difficulty of the task and the attention it was getting him. ‘Both jobs are a goddamned son of a bitch. Gotta dismantle a lot of casings both ends before I can even start on the fine stuff.’
‘Nobody else can do it,’ said Klein.
‘I know nobody else can fucking do it,’ said Terry, affronted. ‘Not counting travelling time, and everything going smooth, maybe three, four hours.’
Klein nodded. It was a long time but they had nothing to lose.
‘What do you say, Dennis?’
Terry shrugged, ‘Guess I ain’t got nothin’ better to do.’ He smiled to himself. ‘Be the last job Maintenance ever do inside the River.’ He dropped the cigarette butt onto the immaculate grey carpet and trod it out with his heel. ‘How’m I gonna get past all them niggers?’
‘If you’re polite, Stokely here will fix you up with some guys, right?’
Stokely nodded sullenly. Klein stood up.
‘Agry’s got people believing Stokely killed Larry DuBois, started this whole thing.’
‘Lyin’ faggot muthafucka!’ said Stokely.
‘Agry killed DuBois,’ said Terry. ‘I saw it. He’s crazy.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Klein. ‘Takes more than being crazy to run D block. I can’t make sense of it. Agry’s got more to lose from this riot than anyone else. He’s totally fucked himself.’
Terry’s face twisted bitterly. ‘Yeah. He’s fucked me too.’
‘Any idea why?’
‘He’s crazy about that nigger bitch, ever’one knows that.’
‘It’s not enough,’ said Klein. ‘It’s enough to kill Claudine, sure, but not enough to commit suicide.’
At the word ‘suicide’ Terry’s face went red. ‘Ask him yourself,’ he said. ‘An’ speakin’ of suicide what the fuck you doin’ here anyway?’
‘I’m going over to the infirmary.’
‘Ain’t that takin’ that Hippocratic oath shit too far?’
‘Grauerholz is trying to break in there. Agry sent him to wipe out the Aids guys.’
Terry didn’t get it. ‘And?’
‘Henry here managed to convince me we could stop them.’
Terry pushed himself up to his feet. He looked at Abbott, still standing silently by the door, then again at the results of his own botched suicide hanging from the ceiling, then back to Klein.
‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘I’m gonna kill myself I may as well join the fucken professionals.’
Klein shook Terry’s hand. ‘Should never have smashed those Dean Martin records, Dennis. You’ll never get ’em all on CD.’
‘Yeah, well. Maybe it’s time I had a change.’
Klein held Terry’s rheumy eyes for a moment and nodded. Then he let go his hand and walked over to the door. Stokely Johnson held out his hand too. Klein took it.
‘You tell Wilson I want his ass back over here by mornin’,’ said Stokely.
Klein nodded and started down the steps.
‘Good luck, Klein,’ said Stokely Johnson.
Klein nodded without turning around and climbed back down into the dark with Abbott and Galindez behind him. At the bottom of the steps he turned to Abbott and said, ‘Up to you now, Henry.’
There was a pause and Klein suddenly told himself he was out of his mind. Henry was strong in heart but his mind was . . .
Abbott said, in his new, resonant voice, ‘Follow me.’
They followed Abbott into the tunnels through utter blackness. Every few yards Klein blinked the light on to make sure Abbott was still in front of them. On two occasions, when negotiating an intersection in the maze of tunnels, they heard indistinct human sounds off in the dark. Abbott took them down another flight of steps. As they descended the air got more stifling and foul. A layer of mossy slime clung to the walls. Halfway down Klein trod on something soft. He stopped and shone the flash: it was a black baseball cap. He picked it up. It was clean and dry, couldn’t have been there more than a couple of hours. Embossed on the front was a white Spike Lee ‘X’.
‘Henry,’ whispered Klein. The giant stopped. Klein showed him the cap and said, ‘There’s someone down here.’ He found himself wishing he could impersonate Stokely Johnson.
Abbott took the cap from Klein’s hand. He seemed unperturbed. His new voice was more sonorous than ever. ‘There’s only one way to the River. And this is it.’
They continued down the steep, slippery steps. At the bottom the stench became overpoweringly noxious. The food served by the prison mess generated a repellent and universal halitosis so tenacious that even the infinite ingenuity of the inmates had failed to find a cure. Here that same food celebrated its final transubstantiation into a faecal miasma as tangible as it was vile. Klein, gagging, snorted deep breaths through his nostrils to try to acclimatise himself as quickly as possible. It didn’t work. He felt a thick scum coating his throat.
‘Jesus,’ he gasped.
Klein switched the flash on. They were standing on a kind of concrete jetty that opened out to their right into a work area, an underground yard scattered with pallets of bricks, dredging gear, bundles of canes tipped with brass threads that screwed into each other to form long unblocking rods. At the rear of the yard Klein’s torch picked out a crude wooden shed. To their left the jetty ended in three steps that disappeared into the dark. Abbott took the flash from Klein’s hand and pointed. The beam struck out over a glittering, scum-flecked stream of black, infected water. The stream flowed slowly away down a perfectly cylindrical brick tunnel about eight feet in diameter. Klein’s stomach lurched at the thought of wading through the waist-deep sewage.
Abbott said, ‘Green River.’
Klein stood in silence for a moment, contemplating Abbott’s Green River. If he could have separated the sight of the sparkling water and the smooth tunnel walls from the stench he might have found it mysterious and beautiful.
‘The starry floor, the watery shore, is given thee till the break of day,’ said Abbott.
Galindez too was finding the atmosphere difficult to breathe. ‘You can get us to the infirmary through there?’ he said to Henry.
Abbott crammed the Malcolm X cap onto his head. Klein thought it made him look oddly distinguished.
‘This is the way,’ said Abbott.
Galindez stared at Abbott and Klein could hear him thinking: there must be two fucking miles of tunnel down here and this guy is a retard, insane, and a mass killer to boot. He glanced at Klein and raised one eyebrow.
‘If Henry says he can take us, he can take us,’ said Klein.
‘I have some masks in the cabin, if you want them.’
‘We want them,’ said Galindez.
They were halfway across the yard before they saw them: young Black cons armed with knives, Bloods, lupine and hungry for prey, emerging from the foul and stinking darkness and silently bearing down on them from two different sides at once. This was it then.
Their voyage down the River had begun.
TWENTY-SIX
DEVLIN DREAMED. SHE dreamed of playing a bizarre video game, the rules of which she did not understand with a man she did not recognise. She dreamed of being locked in a room for a group therapy marathon facilitated by her old psychotherapy supervisor with a bunch of people that included a number of ex-lovers she didn’t particularly want to see again. She dreamed of escaping the room and wandering through an adobe-walled village whose streets she was convinced she knew by heart, and yet where each turning she made took her into a strange street she did not recognise. She sat down by a stone water tro
ugh to rethink her bearings. And then she woke up.
For a moment, with her eyes half-closed and her head pillowed on her arms on the desk, she was able to recall these fragments of the dreams and she thought about them but could make no interpretations that made any sense. She opened her eyes and raised her head. She was in the sick bay office and Reuben Wilson was standing on the other side of the table holding a cup of coffee.
‘I didn’t mean to wake you,’ he said.
‘It’s okay,’ said Devlin. She felt embarrassed to have been caught sleeping, as if it were a sign of feminine weakness.
‘That’s pretty cool,’ said Wilson, ‘bein’ able to catch some Z’s at a time like this.’
‘You’re mistaking cool for exhaustion,’ she said. She looked at the coffee. ‘Is that for me?’
Wilson nodded and handed her the cup. She sipped it. Wilson hadn’t put his shirt back on since she’d taped him up. Her eyes flickered briefly across the wide, flat plates of pectoral muscle above the tape. She looked back down at her coffee. Wilson pulled a pack of Camel filters from his pocket and shook one into his mouth.
‘May I?’ said Devlin.
‘Sure.’ Wilson handed her the pack. ‘I didn’t think doctors smoked.’
She drew on the flame from his lighter and inhaled deeply. ‘I didn’t think boxers smoked either,’ she replied.
‘That was a long time ago,’ he said.
As the nicotine and tar flooded her grateful nervous system Devlin felt a fleeting dizziness and Wilson’s words reached her as if from a distance. Her limbs tingled. The rush vanished as quickly as it had come and left her with a deep sense of relaxation. It was terrible, but she couldn’t think of a single thing on earth that at that moment would have made her feel better than the cigarette between her lips. She slumped back in the chair and took another drag.
‘How did you know about that fourth metacarpal bone?’ said Wilson. ‘That was top secret.’
‘I was a med student at the time doing orthopaedics,’ she said. ‘The surgeon advising you showed us your X rays. I read your name on the film.’
‘I’ll be damned.’
‘What it’s worth I thought you should’ve got the decision in that bout. But it’s not often the judges get to let an Italian beat a black fighter.’
Wilson smiled and nodded.
‘Why did they set you up for murder?’ asked Devlin.
Wilson sat down gingerly on the edge of the desk.
‘Most fighters get ripped off, I mean like eighty per cent of the purse ripped off, by their managers. You want the big fights there’s only a few guys can get them for you, then they take most of your dough in what they call “expenses”. I was bringin’ a law suit against my manager and he was managed by some wise guys owned hotels in Vegas. A dead whore didn’t cost much and it sent out a message that every other fighter in the game heard loud and clear.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s the way it is.’
‘You don’t sound bitter,’ she said.
‘Bitter?’ He looked off into space. ‘I came down here I didn’t sleep for two months. I’d lost everthin’ I could lose. Shit, I still owe my lawyers money. Lyin’ awake waitin’ for the first count I tortured those guys to death a million different ways, killed their fam’lies in front of ’em, had their wives fucked to death by wild dogs . . .’
He paused and looked at her. He blinked twice and the rage in his eyes snuffed out.
‘Excuse me,’ he said.
‘It’s okay,’ said Devlin softly.
Wilson took a hit from his Camel. ‘Anyhow when I found myself holding a Zippo under an aluminum foil of heroin with a cardboard tube in my mouth, just to get some rest, I realised “bitter” was just another knife they had in my guts, and I was twistin’ it for ’em. I’d already started on these,’ he raised the cigarette, ‘but I flushed the smack down the toilet and went to sleep.’
‘I’m glad,’ said Devlin.
Wilson smiled. Devlin felt the awkwardness again. Wilson’s suffering, the injustice he’d endured, was so atrocious she felt shrivelled. She didn’t consider herself a white liberal guilt tripper, she’d seen enough of misery to appreciate the random ferocity of fate, but with Wilson standing in front of her she was at a loss for something to say that wouldn’t sound trite. She’d smoked the Camel down to the filter. She stubbed it out and picked up the pack from the desk.
‘I take another?’
‘Sure.’
She lit it with a match from her own pocket. ‘So you took up politics instead,’ she said.
Wilson snorted. ‘Politics?’ He shook his head. ‘Politics turns you to shit, don’t care who you are or where. That’s just how people see what I do. It’s their conception not mine.’
‘So what is it that you do?’
‘I give advice. Mainly I try to get the younger guys ready to return to the street. Way I see it, if you can learn to live right in here, back out in the world you walkin’ in high cotton.’
‘How? I mean how do you learn?’
‘The Man expects us to live like animals, in here, out there, the same. I guess you read Malcolm.’
She nodded.
‘Same thing. I ain’t a believer but I respect religion. I respect myself, I respect you. That’s it. That’s all it takes. Most of the young bloods done wrong to get here. Even if they’re proud of their crimes, and I understand that, they still know how hard their mamas tried. I don’t want them to use me as an excuse to give up hope. It would be easy for ’em to point at me and say, “See! Don’t make no fucken difference! Live right and the Man will fuck you anyways!”’
Devlin shivered at the sudden change in Wilson’s voice. If the words were someone else’s, the shattering pain and anger were his own.
Wilson nodded. ‘They know I know, see. They know I been there. And I tell ’em one thing, an’ I tell ’em till they sick of list’nin’ me tell it, an’ sometimes I beat ’em till they hear me, cause it’s real simple. But it’s real hard too.’
He paused. The fire drained from his voice and became concentrated in his dark eyes, and he spoke quietly and with great intensity.
‘I tell them: in spite of all they’ve done to you – in spite of all that– you still can be the man you are, instead of the animal they want you to be.’
Devlin felt tears prickling her eyes. She blinked them away. Wilson stubbed out his smoke. He smiled, relaxed.
‘Lot of ’em can’t be reached. That’s your bitterness again, workin’ for the Man. But some can. Smaller proportion of my people on smack and crack than any of the other blocks. Maybe of all the young guys come through here just ten or twenty don’t come back again that would’ve done, it’s enough. Maybe a few more stay out on the street a coupla years ’stead of a coupla months, or maybe don’t pick up a smack habit in here to take on home with ’em, it’s enough. It’s enough for me.’
Devlin wanted to tell him how extraordinary she thought that was but again all the words she could think of sounded trite. She said, ‘Then why does Hobbes have it in for you?’
‘I’ve been thinking about that ever since I went to seg and I didn’t know the answer till today. Hobbes always treated me straight. He’s got eyes and he knows what this shit is all about. And he never called us niggers before. The lockdown was bullshit. I couldn’t figure it out, but when this came down today I knew: Hobbes wanted this riot to happen. This is his baby.’
‘But why?’ said Devlin.
‘I don’t know. It’s funny, but this mornin’ Klein told me that Hobbes was insane, not crazy insane, he said, thorazine and straitjackets insane.’
‘What did he mean?’
‘Don’t know that either, but it looks like he was right.’
Devlin asked the next question as matter-of-factly as possible. ‘Do you think we’ll get out of here alive?’
Wilson considered her frankly. ‘Coley says the guards don’t know you’re in here.’
She nodded.
‘Then they ain??
?t gonna do shit to help us. We hold out long enough maybe some of my guys come for me, but I reckon they must be in bad shape.’
‘You’re saying we’re not going to make it, then.’
‘The authorities aren’t too keen on breaking sieges by force any more. You remember Waco an’ all that shit. Unless they start killin’ hostages, an’ Agry’s too smart for that, this could go on for a week, maybe more. And Grauerholz will be back. He got all the time he needs.’
‘Why should they want to kill all the patients?’
Wilson shrugged. ‘You watch CNN, you tell me. You’re the shrink. Same all over ain’t it? Bosnia, Lebanon, South Africa. Race, religion, family, tribe. Folks killin’ their brothers all the time. You think they don’t hate the Aids guys in here? Sure they do. Got more reason to hate them than most the other folk they hate.’
The door opened and Coley walked in.
‘What’s up, Coley?’ said Wilson.
‘Things quiet out there, they waitin’ on something. Lopez is keepin’ watch. Muthafucka hasn’t looked so well in weeks.’ He looked at Devlin. ‘Grauerholz set fire to our box of drugs.’ He smiled, ‘But we got half a dozen crackers out cold out there, an’ maybe half a dozen more pukin’ their yellow guts up.’
‘So what’s next?’ said Devlin.
Coley shrugged. ‘They got two choices: the windows on Crockett and the doors. Windows’re high up an’ they’d have to climb through one at a time. I reckin they’ll try to get the gate open again.’
‘Maybe they could spread the bars with a car jack,’ said Wilson.
Coley shook his head. ‘Then they one at a time again. No, they waitin’ on somethin’ else. We just gotta wait too.’
Coley padded towards the door to the shower room and dispensary. ‘I’m gonna take me a snort, no one objects. Might be my last.’
Devlin caught sight of her briefcase leaning against the desk on the floor. ‘Coley,’ she said. ‘Come here.’