Stokely Johnson had the bullet removed from his maxillary sinus and was transferred to Huntsville Prison. There his sentence was later extended by a total of eighty-four years for offences committed during the riot at Green River.
Hector Grauerholz also called upon the facio-maxillary surgeons to perform heroic work in the reconstruction of his lower face. They did not fail him and though Hector was left with a severe and irremediable speech impediment he was at least able to chew and swallow soft foods. He was sent to the Federal Maximum Security Facility at Marion, Illinois, where he was kept in solitary under permanent lockdown. As Hector could no longer pronounce a wide range of consonants and diphthongs the lack of conversation was no great loss. He took a creative writing course by correspondence, learned to type with his left hand and produced a novel about a gun-toting female crack-dealer called Deveraux. The novel was published to poor reviews but became a cult hit in paperback. A legendary New York novelist has mounted a campaign to get Grauerholz released to a halfway house, but Grauerholz himself is too busy working on the sequel to care.
Myron Pinkley was discovered crying in the chapel with a fracture dislocation of the fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae and the dread ‘Custer’s Sign’ – a ferocious, but temporary and final, penile erection that indicates total transection of the spinal cord. He survived, but suffered permanent loss of function in all four limbs.
Hank Crawford, to his delight, required an above-knee amputation of his left leg. This enabled him to sue the State for criminal negligence and violation of his constitutional rights. They settled out of court for a figure believed to be in excess of one and a half million dollars. When the lawyer who so ineptly handled Crawford’s original trial developed pre-senile dementia, Crawford also successfully sued the law firm in question, for an even greater sum. Each year, on the anniversary of the riot, he sends Klein a case of The Lagavulin malt whisky plus a recent polaroid of his prosthetic limb being rubbed between the legs of a different bathing-suited beauty.
Victor Galindez was investigated by the State Bureau of Corrections and received a reprimand for a breach of emergency procedures likely to endanger life. He subsequently left the Correctional Service and now works, more contentedly, as a probation officer out of Brownsville.
Dennis Terry, who escaped without injury, finally applied for, and was granted, the parole he had so long avoided. He opened a diner on the outskirts of Wichita Falls and married a part-Navajo waitress half his age who is expecting their first baby.
Bill Cletus transferred to Huntsville where, unable to collect the retainers he’d been used to, he suffered a catastrophic drop in income. He eventually learned to live within his salary and lost thirty pounds in weight as compensation. In a short and rather florid memoir of the riot serialised in a local newspaper, ‘The Great Uprising At Green River State’ was subtly transformed into a battle of wills between the mad criminal genius of Nev Agry and the iron-jawed resolution and unflinching valour of a figure modestly referred to in the text only as ‘the Captain’. ‘Okay, so they’re faggots,’ barked the Captain, as he defied the craven Warden Hobbes prior to his heroic lone rescue of the infirmary, ‘but that don’t necessarily mean they deserve to die!’ Movie rights were optioned and Cletus alienated his small circle of friends by repeatedly asking them whether they thought Schwarzenegger or Stallone would be better suited to play him on the silver screen. The option, however, was never exercised and with its lapsing Cletus fell into a dark and enduring bitterness from which he has yet to emerge.
Claude Toussaint was given a life sentence for the murder of Neville Agry and never got to drink One Hundred Pipers through a straw in Alfonso’s. He too ended up in Huntsville, where he shaved his hair, took to wearing wire-rimmed glasses and started an HIV support group. Because he was the man who’d iced Nev Agry no one fucked with him and this did his cause a world of good. He also became Stokely Johnson’s lover again, though this time out of choice. Klein writes regularly and visits when he can and Claude remains well and in his letters claims to have discovered a sense of self and purpose that had eluded him in his previous incarnations as a transvestite and a pimp.
Eight men escaped during the chaotic evacuation of the penitentiary. Seven were recaptured within a week. The eighth, Reuben Wilson, was reported as last seen fleeing the prison on the day of the riot by Dr Juliette Devlin and Sgt Victor Galindez. He was never recaptured but remains on the FBI’s wanted list.
Juliette Devlin never finished her projected research and she never expanded on the pilot study she’d authored with Ray Klein and Earl Coley, though it formed a model upon which others based work of their own. In fact Devlin abandoned Forensic Psychiatry altogether, arguing that she’d got whatever it was she’d needed from it, and she took what some saw as a dramatic side-step into Child Psychiatry, though this seemed logical enough to her. She proved to be particularly gifted at this work, of course, and was appointed to a two-year Research Fellowship in Chicago. One day a package found its way to her postmarked Paris, France and containing two old door keys. A note inside read: ‘Hero no longer. Balls blue no more. Thanks for the use of the room!’ It was signed ‘W.’ There was no return address but one day Devlin plans to drag Klein over to Paris to track the Whirlwind down, though whether she will get to reap it again depends on too many imponderable factors to predict.
Earl Coley’s body remained unclaimed and seemed destined for Potter’s Field until Klein claimed it himself and shipped it back to New Jersey where he buried the Frogman next to his father. Both tombstones carry the names and dates of the dead men and beneath each the inscription ‘The Bravest’. Devlin did find Coley’s family and sent them each a copy of the paper, but received a reply only from his daughter, who thanked her for her kindness.
The only other funeral Klein attended was that of Vincent Lopez. Indeed Klein was the guest of honour and as night fell on the trestle tables laid out in that shabby back street in San Antone, many tears were shed and many chests were swollen with pride, as Klein told the story of how Vinnie had saved Klein’s life in the terrible final assault and of how, in the end, Vincent Rodrigo Garcia Lopez had given himself for his compadres and died like the man he was.
After the riot Klein spent ten days in hospital, under prison guard, with a raging cellulitis of his left leg as the microbes he picked up in the Green River finally had their way. In the same ward, game rooster that he was, was that same Sonny Weir whose impromptu left arm amputation had initiated the violence. In the next bed to Klein, recovering from burr holes and a reconstruction of the knee, was Colt Greely. Colt figured he owed Klein because if Klein hadn’t fractured his skull and crippled him and dumped him in a toilet on B block, Stokely Johnson would’ve strung him up with the other guys who’d helped cut off the nigger’s head. After a certain amount of persuasion Klein agreed to Greely inscribing a tattoo on his left shoulder with a sterile needle and syringe. It showed a dark tower struck by lightning and in a semi-circular scroll beneath it the words VIRESCIT VULNERE VIRTUS. Despite the initial horror inspired by her better judgement Devlin found that Colt’s artwork further inflamed her desire to take Klein home and fuck his brains out. Klein thinks it’s the coolest thing he’s ever done for as he never tires of reminding her, it’s the genuine prison article and – at least in principle – the last tattoo ever to be done in the Green River State Penitentiary.
So Ray Klein and Juliette Devlin did get together and even in the darker moods that afflict him Klein has to admit that it’s pretty goddamn good. Whilst it remains a theoretical possibility he has given up hope of ever getting back his licence to practise surgery, though he sometimes fantasises about taking off to some war zone with his tools. When Devlin moved to Chicago he upped and followed her and on the strength of his martial arts and convict credentials got a job as a bouncer in a jazz club. To his surprise he enjoyed the nocturnal life and eventually approached millionaire Hank Crawford for a loan to set up a little bar and blues lounge of his own.
Crawford was delighted to come in as a one-legged sleeping partner, as he put it, and enjoys showing up unannounced from time to time with a tall Texan girl on each arm like some latterday Alfonse Capone. Klein called the club ‘Nine Below Zero’ and its reputation in the Windy City continues to grow. Occasionally one of the many itinerant graduates of the riot shows up and sits with Klein into the wee hours, smoking Klein’s Camels and resurrecting the ghosts of times past. One of them, Albert Myers, who lost the sight in his left eye, stayed on at the Zero as a bartender.
And speaking of ghosts the prison itself was abandoned and sealed and was never used again for any purpose, disciplinary or otherwise. It stands there still in the bottomlands of the Green River and for all that anyone knows is home only to rats and bindweed and a few vagrant families of nesting birds. Anyone, that is, except Ray Klein.
For now and again, when his heart is heavy and he can’t shake off the blues, Klein makes the long drive south and spends the night alone, wandering around those high stone walls whose granite roots are sunk so deep in earth. And sometimes, when a warm wind blows in from the Gulf and makes the empty watchtowers moan, he hears a voice within: of The Word. And Henry Abbott. For Klein believes, and no one will convince him otherwise, that the Man and his God, Man and God both, still roam those empty walkways hand in hand, of the universe they’ve chosen for their home. And as Klein sits in the starlight, with his back against the iron-studded gates, he listens, enthralled, as The Word beckons Henry from the dark and tells him one more time: of the things that were done, and the tortured and incomparable race that fought and died, in the tale of the Green River Rising.
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Epub ISBN: 99781448191277
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Published by Vintage 2013
Copyright © Tim Willocks, 1994
Tim Willocks has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape in 1994
First published in Great Britain in paperback by Arrow Books in 1995
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ISBN 9780099590279
Tim Willocks, Green River Rising
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