Their fight was with a menagerie of microscopic forms which struggled for life in the bodies of the infected, as the men themselves did struggle in the world, in the prison and here at the last ditch, in Crockett ward. Candida albicans, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Haemophilus influenzae, Mycobacterium avium, Streptococcus pneumoniae, pneumocystis carinii, Salmonella, central nervous system toxoplasmosis, cryptococcal meningitis, cytomegalovirus retinitis, multifocal leukoencephalopathy, large-cell lymphoma, and who knew what else besides: a festival of pyogenesis and neoplasia to make God himself wonder at the fecundity of his own imagination. And at the mad defiance pitched against him by these foolish men.
Their morning round followed a routine. They approached each patient together and Coley – who hadn’t left the building in many years – described any overnight developments. Klein showed Coley the few lab reports they were able to afford, and if necessary explained their significance. Coley then methodically examined the patient, going through each system in turn as Klein had taught him. Watching Coley’s hands at work – hands born to pick cotton and plough stony fields – was always a good moment for Klein. A moment of reprieve. During the past three years Klein had taught Coley most clinical medicine worth knowing and Coley had been a sponge, soaking up knowledge with a passion that Klein had envied. In Klein’s mind there was no doubt: the black sharecropper had the gift of hands. Coley was a great natural physician. Bodies spoke their pain into his fingertips and he heard them. Klein had met a few such men in his profession and had always marvelled to see them work but there were not many, and much as he would like to he did not count himself amongst them. Klein had never said any of this to Coley, never expressed his admiration and pride, for fear of mutual embarrassment. He had never felt at home with California-style statements of friendship, love and mutuality and the River didn’t seem like a good place to start. Yet before he left he would like to tell Coley. Maybe that would be soon. Maybe this very day. A clatter of metal on stone rang from the end of the ward and Klein put thoughts of freedom from his mind.
Vinnie Lopez lay staring at the ceiling in a congealed mass of soiled sheets. An IV line in his left arm delivered dextro-saline with added potassium. On the floor by his bed was a stainless steel bedpan that Lopez had tried to grab from the bedside table and had dropped. Lacking the strength to reach for it he lay in the mess with his fists clenched by his sides, his face a mask of shame and humiliation.
Coley said to Klein, ‘Go get some clean linen.’
Klein walked quickly to the linen closet at the end of the room. He accepted Coley’s orders to perform basic tasks in the hospital without question, and they were many. Without this distribution of power Klein would never have been able to use or pass on any of his knowledge. Coley had run the infirmary for sixteen years before Klein had showed up and if he stayed alive he would be running it sixteen years after Klein left. Coley was the wagonmaster. When Klein got back to the bed Coley had taken down the drip bag, which was empty.
‘This one’s through. He’s getting one every eight hours. You reckon that’s still enough?’
Klein nodded, his eyes on Lopez, and Coley disappeared. Klein put the sheets down and drew a screen around the bed. He fetched a bowl of hot water, slipped on a pair of rubber gloves, and washed Lopez from his neck to his knees. In six months the Mexican had declined from being Reuben Wilson’s sparring partner to a ninety-five-pound bag of bones. His CD4 + T lymphocyte count had dropped below 150 and his bowel was infected with a campylobacter organism which had proved resistant to antibiotic therapy. Or at least to those drugs that were available to them. There were newer, more powerful preparations, so Klein had read, but they cost more than they could afford. The chronic bloody diarrhoea had depleted Lopez’s potassium and protein reserves, and caused an anaemia that was getting worse by the day. In addition, his mouth and oesophagus were inflamed with candidiasis.
The necessary blood transfusions, like the drugs, had to be requisitioned by Bahr, the official prison doctor, but Bahr didn’t see the point. Bahr was a local internist who dropped by four times a week, stayed for an hour – all the letter of his contract demanded – and before heading off to the golf course told them to send anything they couldn’t handle to the emergency room at the County hospital. His attitude was to lay heavy doses of sedatives on the Aids guys and let them die in peace. Klein despised Bahr, not because this policy was unreasonable or inhumane, but because it was primarily designed to cut down Bahr’s workload. Bahr collected a good fee from the Bureau of Corrections for his hour or two a week – money better spent on drugs and supplies. But Bahr wielded power. If he’d been so inclined he could have had Klein and Coley removed from the hospital for good. In fact they regularly broke so many prison regulations in there they could have been sent to seg for years. So they kissed Bahr’s ass, kept most problems to themselves and only called him out of hours when there was a death to be certified, to which duty, another generous fee being involved, Bahr had never been known to object.
As regards Bahr’s Aids policy, Klein and Coley had decided that it was up to the guys who were doing the dying. If a man wanted to fight, they would fight with him. By the time they reached the infirmary a lot of them had been ill for as long as they could be without letting anyone else know it. These were men who were used to bad news, who’d been taking it and giving it all their lives, but dying of Aids in the prison infirmary was the one end-of-the-line they didn’t want to deal with. In Green River the appearance of toughness was cultivated with religious fervour. They all accepted the day-in, day-out fear of a shiv in the back, most of them had stared down the barrel of a .38 in their time, and all would at least have tried to spit in the warden’s eye as he walked them to the electric chair should that have been their fate. But a lingering death behind steel bars by this disease – thedisease, the faggot disease – was, in the eyes of the population, as low as a man could fall.
Consequently most guys opted for the tranquillisers and, Klein thought, why the fuck not? Sometimes he felt that life was given a value it didn’t deserve anyhow. People lived and died; who gave a shit about the timing except those who were left behind to grieve? And grief belonged to the griever not the dead. Klein hoped that when his time came he would have the sense to finish it quick and clean, because the final result was never in doubt and what was the point of fighting it?
But Vinnie Lopez was one of the fighters. A boxer. As Klein bundled the soiled undersheet into a plastic bag he glanced into Lopez’s fevered eyes and saw the fiery defiance of terminal despair. For a second the steelwork and ice round Klein’s heart was shaken. Forbidden emotions assailed him. Before they could weaken him, before he could name them, Klein turned away. He snapped off his rubber gloves, bagged them and put on a clean pair. He shook out a fresh sheet. He avoided those dangerous eyes. He rolled Lopez to one edge of the bed and spread the sheet beneath him. As Klein rolled him back onto the sheet, the kid’s face crumpled.
Tears fell down Lopez’s cheeks. He hid his face in the crook of his elbow and squirmed onto his side so that his back was turned to Klein. To Klein’s knowledge, no one had ever seen Lopez cry before.
Klein’s guts knotted inside him. Lopez, who boasted four slayings as leader of a San Antonio street gang and was taken seriously even in here, now looked like an eight-year-old child. Klein shook out the top sheet over the bed and let it drift gently down over Lopez’s clenched figure. Klein knew that sometimes a man preferred to be alone with his pain and shame; yet sometimes that was an excuse for not trying. At that moment Klein found it hard to know. As he tucked the sheet in he shoved thought from his mind and listened to his guts. He straightened up.
‘Vinnie,’ said Klein.
Lopez spoke from behind his elbow. ‘Go ’way, man.’
Klein sat on the chair by the bed. Lopez’s back was hunched towards him under the sheet. Klein rested his hand lightly on Vinnie’s shoulder and felt him tighten up even more. He kept the hand there. After a
moment Vinnie’s body relaxed just a little. Klein suddenly wished he had some Spanish.
‘Vinnie,’ he said. ‘You can tell me to fuck off after this if you want to, but this is mine and Coley’s outfit and you’ve got to understand the way things are in here. The way things are is that there’s no shame in tears, or in shit, or in the sickness infecting your body. Not in here. You understand?’
The thin body under his hand shook with grief.
‘If I was sick maybe you’d do the same for me,’ said Klein.
Lopez turned on him. His eyes were hot with anger and contempt. Klein let his hand fall away.
‘I would spit on you,’ said Lopez.
Klein held his eyes for what felt like a long time, then shook his head.
‘No,’ said Klein, quietly. ‘You spit on yourself.’
The contempt in Vinnie’s eyes dissolved into raw grief. His face trembled and he started to turn away again. Klein put his hand back on his shoulder and stopped him.
‘Die like a man, Vinnie.’
Vinnie stared at him, bewildered, his lips trembling. His voice was a whisper. ‘I want to.’ He struggled for his tears not to return. ‘Tha’s all I want. Tha’s all, man. Tha’s all.’
Klein swallowed thickly. ‘This is how men die.’
Vinnie shook his head for it not to be true. Klein nodded.
‘It’s easy to feel like a man with your foot on someone’s throat,’ said Klein. ‘It’s a good feeling, I know. To hold onto your pride when you’re lying in your own shit is something else. That feeling I don’t know. Maybe I could never find it even if I tried. But the man who could – the man who could find his pride and feel it and hold onto it – he would be a great man.’
This time the tears came back to Vinnie’s eyes and he clenched them shut. With an effort he looked up at Klein. ‘I’m frightened, man,’ he said.
‘I know, Vinnie.’ Klein took his hand.
‘I’m frightened.’ Lopez started sobbing softly.
Klein sat there in silence and let the ache that was as big as the world fill his chest. For he had learned that any comforting words he might have mustered would have been for himself, and not for Vinnie. There was no comfort in rotting to death at twenty-two. For a second the steelworks and ice collapsed entire and Klein was possessed of a need, terrifying in its force, to cast some spell which made them all healthy. And happy and rich and free. And himself with them. And with that he was suddenly afraid that his parole application would be successful, and maybe understood why he had blown them out at his last year’s review: if they let him go he would lose all this too. Here he was still a doctor; out there he would be a bum. For a moment he wanted to go and break a chair over Captain Cletus’s head and get himself sent to seg. The moment passed. Instead he cleared his mind and held onto Vinnie’s hand and listened in silence to the wasted lungs heaving quietly under the sheet. After what seemed like hours but was only a few minutes, Vinnie fell limp and quiet. A voice growled out from a few yards the other side of the curtain.
‘Put that fucker out, Deano, we got oxygen in here. I tol’ you before: you fit enough to smoke you fit enough to drag yo’ worthless ass down the TV room. We don’t want to inhale your shit in here.’
Lopez stiffened and scrubbed his face with a handful of sheet. ‘I don’t want the Frogman to see me this way,’ he said.
‘Sure.’ Like most everyone else Vinnie held Coley in awe. Klein nodded and stood up. ‘I’ll see you later.’
He picked up the laundry bag and paused by the screen curtains. ‘Vinnie, I want you to do something for me.’
Vinnie looked up at him.
Klein said, ‘Let me invite your mother for a visit.’
Vinnie turned away.
Klein said, ‘Think on it. Think on what we talked about.’
As Klein reached for the curtain Lopez said, ‘Klein.’
Klein looked over his shoulder. After a pause Lopez nodded.
Klein nodded back. ‘Thanks, Vinnie.’
He slipped out between the screens and intercepted Earl Coley on his way in.
‘Vinnie needs some time on his own,’ said Klein.
Coley glanced at the screens then back at Klein. He hefted the bag of IV fluid in his hand. ‘Guess this can wait till later.’
‘Thanks,’ said Klein.
Coley looked at his watch. ‘Thought you had an appointment with great God Almighty, find out how sweet you sucked them stubby white dicks on the parole board.’ He showed his watch to Klein.
Ten thirty-five.
Hobbes was waiting.
‘Balls,’ said Klein.
Klein dragged his white coat down over his shoulders and started at a run for the door.
FIVE
‘KNEEL DOWN, NIGGER.’
Stokely’s hoarse whisper was loud against her ear.
‘I don’t wanna have to look at your muthafucken face.’
Sour breath drifted into her nostrils, then the rank, ruttish smell of Stokely’s cock as he hefted it free of his shorts. Above the sound of Stokely’s voice Ice T injected heavy vocal menace into a war song blaring from the tape deck.
‘Make it quiet too. Like I tol’ you befo’, this gets out I cut yo’ black faggot dick off and shove it up your ass.’
There was a lot of talk, in the River, of cutting, ripping and stomping, most of it bullshit. When it came from Stokely Johnson you took it seriously. No one had forgotten what Johnson had done to Midge Midgely’s nuts. With the top of her head pressed into the thin pillow, her weight on her elbows, Claudine took some deep breaths and relaxed her thorax and abdomen. The smell of sour breath was replaced by that of latex, its clinical odour contrasting sharply with the hot, rank air as Stokely struggled with a condom.
‘Shit, man. I hate these muthafuckas.’
Claudine waited. A moment later, when she felt the tip of his sudden raw hard-on between her buttocks, she inhaled deeply and bore down, as if she were attempting a rock hard shit. Stokely slid in with a muffled exhalation of satisfaction. Suddenly his voice was soft.
‘Sweet,’ said Stokely.
The cell was hot and moist and reeked with the smell of hashish, rectal mucus and sperm. This was the cooler part of the day, before the sun got high enough to bear down directly on the glass roof of the block. Apart from meals three times a day they’d been confined to their cells for two weeks. For the last ten days there’d been no airconditioning. Broken down, the screws had told them, awaiting repair. By mid-afternoon the temperature would be over a hundred and saturated with the sweat and breath of half a thousand men packed into cells built to house three hundred. In some ways Claudine welcomed the heat. It induced a sense of lassitude and inner deadness that made submitting to Stokely’s assaults easier to bear.
‘Baby,’ said Stokely.
He caressed her scalp and she wondered what pictures were going through his mind and whose muthafucken face he did want to look at. It was said that Stokely had a woman somewhere in California, maybe Bakersfield, and two kids. Sons. Stoke was a long way from home.
‘Baby,’ said Stokely again.
His hands gripped her waist, strong but no longer brutal, the hands of a man who in his heart wanted to hold and take care of a woman, and be held in his turn by the gaze of a woman who saw him for who he was and wanted him just the same. Sadness squeezed Claudine’s insides and she wished Stokely’s lovemaking hadn’t betrayed him that way. Then it would’ve been easier to hate him.
She wished suddenly that she had all her hair back, long and lustrous with oil. As a woman she’d found it easier to hate. And easier to comply. Easier to believe that Nev Agry’s brutal shunting fucks were all she deserved. Her transfer back to B block and the black population where she’d first started out had plunged her into confusion. She didn’t know who she was any more.
As Agry’s wife Claudine had been, by universal consent, a beautiful woman. Agry had bought her clothes, perfumes, a real Ladyshaver for her legs. Silk camisoles. Red
nail polish. And her hair had hung halfway to her waist. Agry had called her – without irony – his queen. Swift and appalling punishment awaited anyone rash enough to threaten the illusion she and Agry had created. Agry had given her a white wedding right there in D block – the most extravagant party in the prison’s history – with gifts from the other crew chiefs, bridesmaids, and a three-tier cake with their names entwined on top. A convict from A who was a licensed minister out of Oklahoma City had performed the ceremony. Everyone understood: no insults, no fag jokes, no sniggers or insinuations. To be the object of envy and lust was acceptable – that, after all, was a woman’s right – but no hint, no rumour, no whisper of the fact that beneath her dress hung a cock and balls was allowed to pass without violent retribution. Even the screws understood. After four years Claudine’s awareness of her true gender had disappeared into some obscure recess of her mind – like an immigrant forgetting his native tongue. Pitching her voice an octave higher, her feminine gestures and flirtatious glances, the way she held a coffee cup or smoked a cigarette, all became second nature. She was Claudine Agry. Nev Agry had purchased her transfer to his luxury four-man cell for an undisclosed sum, believed to amount to an ounce of quality cocaine and a case of Maker’s Mark. Now she was back where she started, on B block.
No one knew it, especially not Agry, but she’d requested the transfer herself for reasons too dangerous to reveal. If Agry discovered the truth before she was out of here she was dead.
On her return to B block she – he – had cropped her hair off, cut her nails, scrubbed her face, exchanged her silk for prison denim, her body lotions for sweat. Claudine Agry – tall, slim, elegant – had turned back into Claude Toussaint – skinny, boyish, clumsy. The queen of cellblock D was now a less-than-zero ex-crack dealer – a nigger despised by niggers for sucking the whiteman’s cock. She was a he again but it was too soon for it to make sense.