Two days later Abbott had still not been out of his cell. He had taken no food or drink, and had still found no more words with which to communicate.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello?’
On the third night he subsided into a fragile and terror-stricken silence. When he was loud the hacks had been reluctant to risk dragging him down to the hole for fear of one of them losing an arm or an eye, but when the bellowing of inmates complaining about the smell got angry enough, and became an excuse for throwing burning rolls of toilet paper from the tiers, Captain Cletus turned up and gave the order to roust Abbott out.
When Klein saw them running a fire hose along the catwalk towards Abbott’s cell he realised that ‘NOT MY FUCKING BUSINESS’ wasn’t going to see him through his time here after all. You couldn’t stop them taking most of what you were, but you could stop them taking it all. In the end just exactly how much was still up to you. Exactly how much was the only choice you had left. During the three days in which Klein had left Abbott to suffer, he’d begun to feel himself dying. This wasn’t a metaphysical fancy. It was a real thing that he felt in his body – as a rotting feeling in his guts, an ache in his pelvis and spine, a tightening band that cut into his brain. When he saw the fire hoses he knew that they would wash Ray Klein away along with the excrement smeared over the inside of Abbott’s cell. The burden on him was the burden of knowledge, his medical knowledge, and with that knowledge, obligation.
Klein had called Cletus to his cell and asked permission to go in and talk with Abbott. After a long pause Cletus had said, ‘You wouldn’t be too smart a son-of-bitch for your own good would you, Klein?’
‘I hope I am not, Captain, sir,’ replied Klein.
‘Get yourself killed on my watch I’ll have paperwork coming out of my ass for weeks.’
‘I could just do with some sleep,’ said Klein.
Cletus considered him. ‘Okay, Klein. But it’s your neck.’
Across the front of the stacked tiers there was a stir, a flurry of talk, a movement of faces to cell doors, of hands gripping the bars and ears pressed between them as the realisation spread that the new guy Klein was going to go in there with the booby. Abbott, when steady, had the strength of three; when insane the strength of five; and they all knew that crazies didn’t feel pain. Why the year before last one of them had sawed off his own cock and balls with a broken shaving mirror without making a fucking sound. Klein was a mad fuck himself to even think of it. A short timer who didn’t know the score. That fucker Abbott had the strength of six guys, maybe seven. Guy’s a fucking giant, a freak for Chrissakes.
Abbott the giant sat crouched in a corner of his cell, covered in filth and mumbling incoherently while he picked at a sore on his face. Terror imparts to sweat and excreta a smell all its own – rank, thin, shaming. It drives men away because it evokes from the most primitive lobe of the brain the memory of the original helplessness and terror from which they all have come, their common origin as victims. Klein, mastering the urge to vomit and run, stood on the threshold of the cell door and introduced himself.
‘Hi, Henry. I’m Ray Klein.’
When Abbott made no reply Klein stepped inside and sat down on the bunk. A moment later the cell door thundered shut behind him.
Klein spent the whole night on Abbott’s bunk, saying nothing. He ignored the obscence catcalls and shouts from neighbouring cells and just sat in silence, acclimatising to the stench and trying to find a centre within himself that felt safe and that Abbott too might recognize and therein find some comfort. At some point in the early hours Klein fell asleep. When Klein woke up to the bell at first lock and count, his head was pillowed on Abbott’s shoulder and the big convict’s arm was wrapped around him.
That day Abbott accompanied Klein, without violence or persuasion, to a cell in the segregation block – the hole – and started on the drug regime that Klein recommended. Locking a man in the hole and giving him major tranquillisers wasn’t Klein’s idea of a good time, but he was allowed to see Abbott four times a day, no one got hurt, and Abbott had gradually recovered. Now he was on two-weekly intramuscular depot injections of slowrelease phenothiazines to control his symptoms – the plastic in his face that made it hard to talk and smile.
Abbott never quite made it to normality but he got by. Dennis Terry gave him a job in the sewers that no one else wanted and on the occasions he went crazy again it was Klein who was asked to talk him out and take him to the hole, with which Abbott peaceably complied. But there was one time that Abbott had gone to the hole when he wasn’t crazy, when it had come down to Klein to stake out the other boundary of his life in Green River.
Myron Pinkley was a petulant, self-centred twenty-one-year-old sociopath with beefy shoulders and a bullet head who’d killed three strangers at a campsite in Big Bend National Park whilst on a mindless sex and murder spree with his girlfriend. Pinkley hovered sycophantically around the fringes of the Agry crew without any real hope of getting in and he was generally regarded as the kind of pain in the ass jerk-off who would one day kill someone in front of a guard and spend the rest of his days in seg. One day – at a Sunday lunchtime not long after Klein had first drawn attention to himself by helping Abbott – Myron Pinkley had stolen Klein’s dessert.
Klein sat with dozens of eyes on him while his guts turned to lava. The stinking little square of bottle-green jello that Pinkley shovelled into his mouth with his fingers wasn’t worth a shit to man nor beast, but the gelatine block represented dignity, respect, power. For Klein it was still too soon, the values of this world still too alien for him to understand. To stop Pinkley would’ve required a violent scene and its consequences. The worthlessness of the jello was so extreme, the price of retrieving it so absurdly out of proportion to its value, that Klein hadn’t been able to bring himself to do anything. He just sat there blushing and trying to control his bladder while Pinkley sucked his fingers clean, grinned and walked away with his chest puffed out like a turkey. Klein passed the day in a torment. All the advice he received was to the effect that if he let Pinkley get away with it he was fucked. The evening of that same day Pinkley took Klein’s chocolate pudding. This time Henry Abbott was sitting alone at the next table.
Abbott lumbered over and grabbed Pinkley’s hand and Pinkley punched him in the mouth. Abbott didn’t flinch and just stood there holding onto the hand. After a few seconds Pinkley’s face began to fold in on itself with pain. When he tried for Abbott’s eyes with his free hand Abbott squeezed harder and Pinkley fell screaming to his knees. Three guards, then four, then five, were unable to get Abbott to release Pinkley’s hand. They threatened him, they kicked him and they bludgeoned him about the head. But Abbott silently refused to let go. Eventually they manhandled him to seg, Abbott dragging the shrieking Pinkley along the floor behind him like a recalcitrant teddy bear. When three hours later Abbott still hadn’t let go of the hand, they put him under with first twenty and then seventy, and then one hundred and eighty milligrams of intravenous valium.
Pinkley lost his right thumb and index finger, hardly much better than losing the whole arm. He also lost credibility. Word got round that he had a shiv with Abbott’s name on it for when Abbott got out of the hole. Big though he was Abbott would be a sitting target. The prevailing mood was that Klein ought to do something about it.
When he came down to it the problem was easy. Everything Klein had done since entering the River had been accompanied by a profound sense of helplessness and fear – taking a shower, pissing in the latrine, going to the gym, talking to a guard, not talking to a guard, choosing a table in the chow hall, who to nod hello to, who not. Every action no matter how insignificant carried a question with it: what will happen and who might I offend if I do this? Can I speak with a Latino, can I afford not to hate the Blacks, can I state a preference for Muddy Waters over Willie Nelson without getting my tongue cut out? Is it really this bad? He could never tell for sure. The terror and uncertainty were fuelled by a mix
ture of fantasy, rumour and brutal reality. Finally enacting a piece of reality of his own was a relief. Klein purchased a six-inch nail from a man out of carpentry and a short length of broom handle from a Cuban cleaner. He drove the nail through the wood like a corkscrew. Then, finding Pinkley in the rear of the kitchens where, with his disabled arm, he’d fallen to the humiliating job of emptying slops, Klein punched the nail through the side of Myron’s head, just behind the temple.
When Fenton, the head chef, found Pinkley an hour later the young convict was still emptying slops as if nothing had happened, with four inches of galvanised iron piercing his frontal lobes.
Pinkley survived the repair of his middle meningeal artery with no memory of his accident, to which there were no witnesses. Nothing was ever proven or even seriously investigated. Nev Agry, a couple of days later, had bent down by Klein’s ear just as he was about to tuck into his chocolate pudding and told him, ‘Nice work, Doc.’
Captain Bill Cletus had taken him to one side. ‘Understand me, Klein, you fucken smart ass. Don’t let this thing go to your head.’
If Klein’s conscience had ever asked him if a crippled arm and permanent brain damage wasn’t too severe a retribution for stealing four ounces of lime-flavoured jello, its voice was drowned by the shouts of triumph and glee from every fibre in his body. As if by magic a substantial wedge of fear disappeared from his life. For the first time he found himself able to piss in the latrine whilst standing between two lifers. He assuaged any guilt he might have felt with the fact that Pinkley emerged from the affair with an altered personality which, even his mother agreed, was an immense improvement on the one that his creator had given him. Docile, obedient, almost irritatingly pleasant, Pinkley joined the Jesus Army – ‘LOVE FAITH POWER’ – continued slopping out in the kitchens – a labour he was happy to offer up to God – and spent an hour twice a day in chapel redeeming his soul. If Pinkley had died – and the nail might have killed him – maybe Klein’s conscience would’ve given him a harder time than it did, but hell, he’d had a fair notion of just how much the frontal lobes could take and anyway, all that counted in the end was that for ever after his desserts were his own to dispose of as he chose. His habit was always to give his jello away.
Klein’s thoughts returned to the present as he approached the inner gate of the General Purposes wing and saw the guard – Kracowicz – scowling at the prisoners walking past him. As Klein drew level Kracowicz pulled a Latino from the line for a body search.
The corridor of General Purposes, because it was built of regular floors and rooms rather than towering stacks of cages, was less oppressive than the cellblocks. Above your head as you walked – and only a few feet above at that – was a real ceiling instead of the damned glass roof. The wing as you passed down it contained the library, the chapel, two rooms where the ludicrous group therapy sessions so beloved of the parole board took place, and the gym. The gym was an ongoing source of conflict between the boxers, who saw it as theirs by right, and the basketball players who had a concrete court outside but coveted the gym’s sprung wooden floor. As Klein walked by he avoided – by unthinking reflex now – bumping shoulders with anyone who might take it as an excuse to start a fight.
At the outer gate the guard Grierson stood under the air-conditioning vent sweating lightly into his khaki uniform. Klein was rarely frisked and even more rarely was he frisked thoroughly. A decent search by practised hands, taking into account the sullen and reluctant compliance of the inmate and the ingenuity lavished upon methods of concealment, took five to seven minutes. Pockets emptied, collars, cuffs and seams fingered for inserts, shoes off, toes opened, genitals lifted, unsavoury buttocks spread apart. It was a tedious and unfulfilling task. Most such searches unearthed contraband too trivial to command more than mild punishment – a toothpick joint cost you telephone privileges for a week – and discretion calls varied widely depending on the anality of the guard in question. The resources to search every con every day at every gate were far beyond Green River’s means. There were metal detectors at every gate but they were twenty years old, easily fused when necessary and often out of order awaiting repair by Dennis Terry’s maintenance crew. Grierson nodded at Klein and waved him by.
Outside the sun was high and bright in a blue-white sky and after the mixed effusions that permeated the interior of the prison the air in the yard was sweet. To his left, between General Purposes and D block and surrounded by high steel mesh, was the white muscle yard where the cons, particularly the meatbags from Grauerholz’s clique, pumped iron. Since Myron Pinkley got religion Klein had been allowed to work out three times a week amongst the twenty-inch arms. To his right, between the gym and B block, was where the blacks pumped up. Klein had only strayed onto that turf twice, on each occasion by invitation when someone had let slip a two hundred pound barbell and collapsed their thorax.
Klein walked along the concrete path that led to the main gates proper: an arched tunnel sandwiched between two pairs of giant oak doors studded with wrought iron. Between these inner and outer doors was a third, of Pittsburg steel, that was operated electronically. A vaunting granite wall built in symmetry with the six spokes of the main prison formed a huge stone hexagon sealing in two thousand eight hundred inmates and their keepers. The foot of the wall, it was said, lay buried dozens of feet below the earth so that no man could tunnel his way out. On the rim of the great wall were two banks of razor wire that always reflected the same dull grey no matter how bright the sun. At regular intervals around the wall riflemen in watchtowers cradled M16s and kept a bored eye on the yards and workshops below.
Above the main gates rose a thick, squat turret that somehow managed to combine elegance and brutality in equal measure. Inside the turret Warden Hobbes lorded it over his delinquent charges. The elaborate architecture spoke with the massive confidence of another age and as a relic it was awesome – even beautiful – but to Klein it was a shitheap of misery for which he could find neither respect nor admiration. Under the gaze of the nearest rifleman Klein turned away from the gates. That afternoon he would hold his private clinic in the underground room he rented from Dennis Terry and whose security was guaranteed by Nev Agry. There a stream of convicts would visit him with their ailments and infections, and pay him in cigarettes, porn mags, prison scrip, cash dollars, or whatever other coin Klein decided was acceptable. Now he rounded a corner in the maze of wire mesh and headed towards the infirmary where he spent each morning.
The hospital was a two-storey structure built in the lee of the south-west wall. Klein ran through the week’s schedule in his head: Juliette Devlin wouldn’t be there today. With the visit to Hobbes on his mind he wasn’t too sorry, though he always looked forward to her visits. He recalled that she’d bullshitted him into making a bet on tonight’s game between the Lakers and the Knicks. He had wagered a carton of Winstons against two new pairs of Calvin Klein underpants that the Knicks wouldn’t lose by more than six points. As the underwear manufactured by his more glamorous namesake was an unheard-of luxury Klein thought this represented good odds. He jogged up the steps to the infirmary and through the big double doors which in daylight were usually wedged open. On duty at the second door, a barred gate, was the Korean guard, Sung. As Sung took him through and unlocked the third door, of plate steel, to let him into the wards Klein wished him good morning and as usual Sung did not reply. Sung had travelled halfway round the world to guard a bunch of killers in Texas and maybe didn’t see the sense in wishing them good anything. Klein went down the corridor past the dispensary and into the sick bay office. The office had been painted mustard yellow fifteen years before as if to remind the sick and their keepers that they weren’t there to have a good time. The yellow paint now bubbled and peeled from the sagging plaster of the ceiling. Klein grabbed a white coat and a handful of lab reports and headed down to Crockett ward. When he got there Frogman Coley raised his great grizzled head from examining a patient and walked down the aisle towards him. A ste
thoscope was slung from the nape of his neck and he wore rubber gloves.
‘What’s new, chief?’ said Klein.
‘Lopez is still shitting what blood he’s got left in him. See what you think. I reckon his Mama should be warned. She knows Vinnie don’t wanna see her, but she said she wanted to know.’
‘Sure.’
‘I think Reiner’s got PCP. Deano Baines’s haemoglobin is up. And the Gimp tried to kill Garvey with a pillow.’
‘He still alive?’
Coley raised an eyebrow.
‘I mean the Gimp,’ said Klein.
Coley nodded grimly. ‘Let’s check these mothers out.’
Coley snapped his gloves off, rolling them inside out, one into the other so that his skin didn’t touch the outer surface and get contaminated. It was a habit he’d picked up from Klein and Klein enjoyed seeing him do it. Coley tossed the gloves into a waste bin and followed Klein to the foot of the first bed.
Klein sometimes thought of Green River as a Russian doll carved from increasingly dense layers of horror. At the centre of the doll was a black void called Aids. It wasn’t a topic with which Klein had previously been well-acquainted but in here he had learned.
No one knew what proportion of the population was infected with HIV but it was high. Large numbers of inmates had abused IV drugs on the outside and many had brought the virus in with them. Once inside continued addiction, the sharing of syringes and injection works, dangerous sex and a lot of spilled blood combined to raise the prevalence even higher. In the outside world Aids had provoked safe and sober men with fat salaries, good educations and faithful wives to acts of stupendous incompetence and bigotry. To Klein’s mind they had no excuse. In Green River things were different. In Green River the fear of contagion was so intense that it had disappeared from the surface of life – taboo, forbidden, unmentionable – and churned instead through dark cisterns hidden within the mind of every man. The infirmary was swamped with cases. Ray Klein and Earl Coley bore the brunt.