Coley exchanged glances with Wilson. He came over. Devlin stood up.
‘Sit down.’
Coley dumped his bulk on the chair. ‘You muthas up to somethin’?’
‘Not me,’ said Wilson.
Devlin opened her briefcase and pulled out the green journal.
‘What’s that?’ asked Wilson.
Devlin glanced at Coley. ‘The American Journal of Psychiatry. It’s the shrinks’ equivalent of Sports Illustrated.’
‘No shit.’
Devlin opened the journal and spread it out in front of Coley.
‘This is what I came back for,’ she said.
Coley looked down at the page for a moment in silence. Then he looked up at Devlin.
The muscles round his eyes were trembling.
Devlin’s heart swelled up into her throat. She swallowed. Still looking at her, Coley pulled a pair of wirerimmed spectacles from his shirt pocket and put them on. Then he looked again at the journal. He raised a hand to his head and his fingertips dug into his cropped iron-grey hair.
Aids and Depressive Illness in a Closed Institution: a Pilot
Study at Green River State Penitentiary.
by
Juliette Devlin Ray Klein Earl Coley
Coley looked at the page without speaking for a long time. Then his big shoulders started to shake with emotion. Suddenly he snatched his glasses off and shielded his eyes with his hand. He shouted at them.
‘Don’t you muthafuckas know when a man needs some peace an’ quiet to read in?’
Wilson was staring at Coley in bewilderment. He started to speak but Devlin shook her head and motioned towards the door. Coley kept his face hidden as they walked away. Wilson went out into the corridor. As Devlin followed him she glanced backwards. Coley was still hiding behind his left hand. His right repeatedly stroked the page in front of him, as if it were a thing of great beauty. He lowered his hand and looked up at her. His cheeks were wet. They held the moment between them, without word or gesture. Then Devlin stepped outside and closed the door behind her.
‘What was that?’ said Wilson.
Devlin walked him down the corridor. When she was sure she could speak steadily she said, ‘It’s a research paper we wrote together with Klein.’
‘Coley’s name’s in there?’
‘He’s a co-author, yes.’
Wilson glanced back over his shoulder. ‘I only ever got my name in the sports pages. You done good.’
‘Thanks,’ said Devlin.
Once again she mounted a titanic effort to hold it all in. She felt like she’d been through ten years’ emotion in a day, emotions she’d never felt before, emotions she’d never imagined. But she had to hold them back or fall apart. She turned away against the wall of the corridor. And she found the strength from God knew where and she held them back.
She felt Wilson hover uncertainly behind her. After a moment he said, ‘He didn’t mean nothin’ with that muthafucka stuff, shoutin’ at us, he just . . .’
Devlin started laughing. ‘I know what he meant. I’m sorry.’ She tried to stop laughing, then feared that if she did she’d start crying. ‘I’m just happy he got to see his name. Before . . .’ Her laughter dried up. ‘Before it was too late.’
She fell against Wilson and put her face into the angle of his neck. Wilson stood rigid and awkward. She put her hands on his shoulders and pulled him against her.
‘Hold me.’
Tentatively, Wilson put one arm around her. She felt his cock grow into her belly and in amongst all the crazy emotions it felt right. She lifted her head to look at him.
‘I don’t mean any disrespect,’ he said. ‘I just can’t stop it.’
‘It’s okay,’ she said. Then, ‘I’m glad.’
Wilson swallowed. His eyes flickered briefly to her lips.
‘Come on,’ she said.
Devlin took him upstairs to Coley’s secret hiding-place and opened the door in the wall the way Coley had showed her. She switched the light on inside. Wilson looked at the mattress inside. He hesitated.
‘You sure about this?’ he said.
‘If we’re all going to be dead by morning, who’s going to care?’
‘Klein?’
Devlin stared up at the mildewed ceiling of the office waiting for the words she wanted, then looked into Wilson’s eyes. ‘Klein’s the best man I’ve ever known.’
Wilson blinked and looked away.
‘He doesn’t know it but I’m in love with him, and I pray to whatever God there might be that he’s locked up safe in his cell until this is over. But Klein isn’t here.’
Wilson looked back at her face.
‘And if he knew about this I know he would understand and I know he would want it to be this way.’ She stopped and took a deep breath, startled at the power of her own feelings, the heat in her cheeks, the ferocity in her voice. ‘Because that’s the kind of man Klein is.’
She saw Wilson’s eyes veil over with jealousy and suspicion and she almost put her hand to his lips to stop his mouth. But she knew that he had to say it just like she knew she had to hear it.
‘What’s this ’bout then?’ he said. ‘You want to fuck you a nigger before you die?’
She flinched, because it was worse than she’d expected and she saw for the first time the cruelty that Wilson, of necessity, had had to possess somewhere within him in order to chop down thirty-three men in the ring. And although his sudden cruelty was needless, she forgave him, because she knew enough about him not to judge him on that alone, and because what she had to say herself was true.
‘No. I’ve fucked niggers, as you put it, before.’
Wilson’s lip curled and he turned to walk away.
‘I love Ray Klein and I don’t love you and none of this will change that,’ she said. ‘I brought you up here because you’re as good a man as he is.’
Wilson stopped. Devlin watched his back. After a moment his shoulders sagged and he breathed deeply.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He took another breath and swung round to face her. ‘I’m sorry. I disrespected you, I disrespected me, I disrespected my people. That’s it.’
He turned away and walked to the door.
‘All the people we’re ever going to be is right here and now, in this building. Isn’t that what Coley means when he says “my people”? You don’t have to qualify. You don’t even have to be sick.’
Wilson leaned against the doorway and doubled forward, stifling a groan. Devlin rushed over and took his arm.
‘You okay?’
‘Yeah,’ gasped Wilson. ‘Just a cramp. Going now.’ He slowly straightened up. ‘Maybe Coley’s right about me bein’ a pussy too.’
Devlin took his hand. ‘I don’t think so.’
She pulled on his hand. ‘Come with me.’
She took him into Coley’s room and stripped off his clothes and he lay down on the mouldy mattress. Then Devlin took her clothes off while he watched. She’d never known anything like this. She didn’t feel vain or ashamed or coy. She didn’t feel hot, like she had with Klein that morning, but sexual in some other way, as if about to perform an ancient rite. Watching Wilson’s face watching her she felt desired but also honoured, treasured, a sense that she represented more than just herself. She knelt straddling his thighs and took his cock in her hand and squeezed it. It was hard. Wilson groaned and closed his eyes and pulled away as if it were too much. A pearl of semen appeared at the tip of his glans and she realised that he would probably come very easily after so long without a woman. She knew this wasn’t safe, but safe seemed absurd and she badly wanted to make this gift to him. With her free hand she parted the lips of her cunt and gently, because of his wound, lowered herself onto him. The first inch slid in and Wilson gasped and dug his fingers into the mattress.
‘Easy, easy,’ he said.
She paused, feeling him, feeling herself get wetter. She rose back up a little, holding him in place with her hand, then sank down slo
w and steady. Wilson cried out and pushed himself in all the way. He grabbed her waist with both hands and pulled her onto him, straining up inside her, and she squeezed him and suddenly he jerked half-upright and she felt him come, and come. She put her arms round his head and pulled him against her breasts. A wave of tenderness moved through her as she squeezed him and felt his spasms and thought he would go on coming forever. Then he went limp and slowly lay back, his eyes closed tight, on the mattress.
Devlin climbed off him and lay beside him with her head on his chest. She wondered what was going through his mind, if he was disappointed with her, or ashamed at coming so quickly. She felt his arm wrap across her shoulders and press her against him. The pressure increased and his fingers dug into her and for a moment she felt scared. Then she realised, though she couldn’t see his face, that Reuben Wilson was crying very quietly, and didn’t want her to know.
Devlin kept her face to his chest. She didn’t say anything, she didn’t look at his face. She just lay there while he held her and pretended not to notice. And she wondered at the mystery of it all and at the same time deeply understood it, understood what it was that she meant to them, these men Wilson, Coley, Klein, these tortured minds and bodies who endured extremes of pain and fear without showing it to each other, and who now broke down because she was near. The sense of representing more than just herself became intense. She was more than Devlin, more even than a woman. She was all that they’d yearned for and had missed, all that they yearned for and could not have. She was that which they needed to make them fully men, not just to fuck, even when they couldn’t fully fuck her, but also to protect, even when they couldn’t fully protect her, to be strong for, even when they were weak, to be proud for, even when they were ashamed, to love, even when they lived with so much hate. Perhaps then – amongst hate – more than at any time else. Thinking of hatred she thought of Grauerholz and knew that even he – even Grauerholz – in the dark mirror, the photographic negative, of his evil, needed her in all the same ways. In an instant she no longer hated Grauerholz for wanting to kill the men – for that was between him and them – and she no longer feared what he would do to her, for she was what he would do to her, and she now accepted that terrible portion of her identity as she now accepted the good. She would kill him if she could, for herself and the men, but she would not hate or fear him. In a moment of revelation Devlin suddenly felt that she understood something of men for the first time, something that could not be evaluated scientifically, as she had tried to do, nor even conceived in words nor written down. It was something to do with them being them and her being her and the one seeing the other for all that they were and that being enough. Enough to close the gap between them, just for a while. She’d found, at last, the answer to Galindez’s question, to her own and others’ endless enquiries, about why she had chosen this work at Green River State Penitentiary. She’d found what she had come for: this moment that she would never be able to explain to anyone else.
‘You okay?’ said Wilson.
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘I’m fine.’
‘Guess we’d better get back.’
They dressed hastily without looking at each other. Devlin realised that she hadn’t kissed Wilson at any time. She decided not to let it bother her. As they stepped over the joists to the hole in the wall Devlin caught Wilson’s eye and grinned at him. Wilson shook his head. He grinned back.
‘Coley said you were a muthafucka. I didn’t believe him.’
‘He also said you were an asshole,’ said Devlin.
‘Guess that makes Coley one smart dude. Thanks, Devlin.’
‘Thank you.’
Wilson looked at her until he saw that she meant it. He nodded and turned and clambered through the hole. ‘Why the hell Coley build this place anyhow?’
On the way back downstairs Devlin explained the escape plan Coley had never got the chance to test out and Wilson reckoned it just might have worked. As they reached the ground floor corridor Deano Baines, one of the Aids patients, came hobbling from the entrance to Crockett ward.
‘Vinnie Lopez says they bringing cutting gear up the front steps.’
Devlin opened the door to the sick bay office. Coley still sat at the desk in his spectacles, poring over the journal in front of him. He didn’t look up.
‘Coley,’ she said.
Coley put the tip of his right index finger on the sentence he’d got up to and raised his head.
‘They’s two – two– spellin’ mistakes on the third page! What the fuck kind of standard is that? Don’t these high and mighty cocksuckers realise what they got here?’
‘Grauerholz is back,’ said Devlin. ‘Lopez says they’ve got cutting equipment.’
Coley reverently closed the journal and put it into the drawer of the desk. He stood up.
‘We’ll see ’bout that,’ he said. ‘Ain’t no goddamn crackers comin’ in here till I finished my readin’.’
His gaze fell on Devlin’s crotch then flicked up to her eyes. She found herself blushing uncontrollably. Coley looked at Wilson, darkly. He put his spectacles away and stood up. Devlin reached down and discovered three buttons of her flies gaping open. As she did them up Coley lumbered past without looking at her and went down the corridor. She felt numb. She exchanged glances with Wilson and they followed Coley. They passed through the inner wooden door, stepped over the coiled fire hose and stopped at the solid steel door. Coley opened the sliding peep hole and bent forward to peer through.
‘Fuck,’ he said and straightened up.
Devlin bent down to look through the hole. At the other end of the corridor, beyond the steel gate, Grauerholz was watching a pair of his men dragging a trolley loaded with two gas cylinders up to the bars. A third man carried a cutting torch connected to a length of double hosepipe. The pipes fed into the cylinder heads. Grauerholz squinted down the corridor at Devlin. His left eye was still glued shut.
‘That you, Coley?’ called Grauerholz. He grinned. ‘We gonna cut through this here gate, then we gonna cut your fat black balls off.’
Devlin closed the slot. Coley was unlocking the steel door. Wilson was standing by the faucet supplying the fire hose.
‘Crackers want dousin’ down agin,’ said Coley. ‘You ready?’
Devlin picked up the hose, avoiding his eyes. There was a steel handle on the nozzle to control the jet. She pulled the hose snug against her hip. She was more preoccupied with what Coley thought of her than she was with Grauerholz.
‘Hey,’ said Coley.
She looked at him as best she could.
‘Don’t pay me no nevermind,’ he said. ‘I just old-fashioned.’
‘Okay,’ she said.
‘Okay.’
Coley swung the door open and stepped through. At the far end one of Grauerholz’s men held out a burning lighter whilst a second dipped the nozzle of the cutting torch towards it. A yellow flame billowed out. The cutter brought the flame to a roaring blue cone three inches long. He pulled a set of goggles over his eyes and crouched down by the lock. Grauerholz looked at the fire hose in Devlin’s hand. He put his face between the bars and grinned at them. Devlin felt uneasy.
‘Hit it,’ she called to Wilson.
Wilson turned the faucet on. There was a pause. A slight bulge rippled lethargically along the length of the fire hose, no sign of the whipping serpent of several hours before. As the ripple reached Devlin she opened the nozzle. A weak jet of water spurted in a six foot arc and splashed harmlessly onto the flagstones a yard short of the gate.
‘Surprise, cornhole fuckers!’ Grauerholz was jiggling against the bars with excitement.
‘Damn,’ said Coley.
‘It’s wide open!’ called Wilson. ‘That’s it.’
The spurt from the hose degenerated into a trickle that made a shallow pool at her feet. She glanced at Coley.
‘Musta cut the water off from the mains supply outside.’
The corridor was filling with the stench of burni
ng steel.
‘Get back,’ said Coley.
Devlin dragged the hose back through the solid steel door. Coley followed her, slammed it shut and locked it.
‘We’re fucked,’ he said. ‘They be through the gate in ten minutes, through this door in twenty-five.’
‘We’d better start a barricade,’ said Wilson. ‘Other side here.’ He jerked his thumb towards the wooden door behind him.
‘No,’ said Devlin. ‘I’ve got a better idea.’
Coley looked at Wilson.
‘When this lady says she’s got an idea,’ said Coley, ‘I tell you, you’d better listen.’
‘Frog,’ said Wilson, ‘you ain’t tellin’ me nothin’ I don’t already know.’
They both looked at her.
‘How many cylinders of oxygen do we have?’ asked Devlin. Frogman Coley raised one eyebrow and nodded thought fully. ‘Goddamn,’ he said. ‘We got just as many as you need.’
TWENTY-SEVEN
THE BLOODS SWARMED from behind the workshed and across the underground yard from an ambuscado silent as disease. They came in two bunches of five or six guys each, dark huddles, shadows amongst shadows, mobile, dense and impenetrable against the shifting gloom. At fifteen feet Galindez snatched a brick from a pallet and hurled it overarm amongst the heads of the nearest group. There was a thud and a groan and a shape staggered away and fell to his knees. Klein flashed the beam from one group to the other catching black angry faces, men who had been stomped down and burned down without mercy and who now thirsted for payback on anything with pale skin and a pulse. A sense of confusion, of impending panic, blurred Klein’s mind. He pulled the revolver from his pocket and held it out in the light.
‘No one has to die!’ he shouted. The echoes made his voice bigger and more threatening than it really was.
‘He’s got a piece!’
The groups slowed and split up but kept on coming. Klein had to shoot up or put up and he didn’t want to shoot. Five little bullets and ten big men. There’d be no quarter then, no chance of a stand-off. The die would be cast and only the bloody victors would leave the jetty alive. As his finger closed on the trigger a hand enveloped his shoulder.