“Yeah,” Iron Balls said and laughed. “They’re from England, and that makes them queer. The whole fucking country’s full of fruitcakes. The men all wear lace, and the women smoke cigars.”
Todd said nothing back, but kept humming the song as he walked down the rows of cells, checking each inmate and making a corresponding note on a clipboard he carried. Then he walked back to the port where Iron Balls now stood, his nightstick withdrawn from the silver ring on his Sam Browne belt, and spinning it like a yo-yo with the leather thong on its handle. The corporal gave the gunny a thumbs-up signal, and he pulled a handle that released all cell doors and slid them open.
“Stand up and step out!” Corporal Todd ordered. “Put your toes on the red line and come to the position of attention. Prisoner Elmore, you will remain in your cell.”
All fourteen prisoners on the row stepped to the red line except for James Elmore, who stood in the back of his small space, glad to remain behind.
“Right face!” Todd shouted at the two lines of inmates from the center of the hallway. “Forward march!”
Iron Balls used to herd the prisoners to their meals and the recreation yard until two days ago, when he and Bad John got relieved for cause by Chief Warrant Officer Frank Holden, the deputy brig officer under First Lieutenant Schuller. While in the recreation yard, Mau Mau Harris and Ax Man Anderson, along with several other members of the secretly organized Freedom Hill chapter of the Black Stone Rangers, had cornered Iron Balls and Bad John and laid hands on the two guards, triggering a full lockdown of the entire brig.
When Holden questioned Harris and his yahoo buddies, they lied and said that Turner and Brookman had gotten into a card game with the inmates, and when they lost they refused to pay up. In retaliation, the wronged prisoners turned on the two Marines.
While Nathan Todd and Gunny MacMillan both stood up for their two fellow guards, claiming that the prisoners flat-out lied, and that in no way had Turner and Brookman played cards or in any other way fraternized with the inmates, the deputy brig officer relieved the pair anyway. It staved off trouble.
Seeing the two men relieved of their principal duties of handling prisoners and reduced to watching the hallways put Mau Mau Harris and his right-hand man, Ax Man Anderson, at the top of the food chain in the hierarchy of who’s who inside Freedom Hill.
“So they let us out every day like this?” Brian Pitts asked James Harris as the two men set their meal trays on a long bench table and sat down. Mau Mau had faithfully carried his wounded friend’s drink with his own and helped the one-handed Snowman get seated without spilling anything. Celestine Anderson glared at the white man from the other side of the seating arrangement until Harris frowned at him.
“Yeah, man. We get lunch and then three, four hours rec time in the yard,” Harris said, and then gave Anderson a hard look. “Yo, Ax Man, this my blue-eyed soul brother. Call the dude Snowman. He cool, so lighten up. He one of us, bro. A ranger.”
“Ain’t no white dude no Black Stone Ranger,” Anderson grumbled, digging his spoon in a pile of mashed potatoes.
“I say what go and what don’t go,” Harris barked back at the insolent gang brother. “In Chicago, we got white dudes not in just the rangers, but Black Panthers, too. Pitts and me, we go way back. He one smart motherfucker. You hang with him, life get good. I know. We have it good, right, brother?”
James Harris put his arm around Brian Pitts’s neck and gave him a good squeeze.
“We play it cool and smart, my men, and we can have it good once again, too,” Brian Pitts said with a smile, looking cold at Celestine Anderson, and with his good arm giving James Harris a hug back.
“So, my man the Snowman, he one of us,” Harris said, spooning meat-loaf and potatoes in his mouth. “I got two more white dudes we need in our brotherhood. Word come around that this Chu Lai Hippie he have people on the outside that can get shit done. So he’s in.”
“Fucking Randy Carnegie? You talking about him? He’s in here?” Brian Pitts said, surprised and smiling.
“You know the dude?” Harris said, smiling at Pitts.
“I know of him,” the Snowman answered and shrugged. “He bought shit from me, but I could never get him into my regular program. He was always sort of a maverick. Independent. He’s okay, though. If he’s got somebody hooked up outside, he’s worthwhile having in the club.”
“Glad you approve, ’cause I already sent word to tell him he’s a ranger,” Harris said, stuffing his mouth while talking.
“Who this other cracker motherfucker you want with us?” Anderson said, wiping up gravy with a slice of bread.
“Dude named Watts, Kevin Watts,” Harris said, drinking red Kool-Aid from a paper cup. “He got three years for trying to hijack a plane to fly him out of ’Nam.”
All three prisoners laughed.
“I ain’t totally sure about the dude, but I say okay when Jones and Martin tell me about him,” Harris said and shrugged. “Only thing I don’t like about this turd, he ain’t never told the truth in his life. He always trying to say shit just happen, and he fall in it.”
The three prisoners laughed again.
“We need a fall guy, then he’s our man,” Pitts said, and smiled at Anderson, who simply glared back at him. Then he looked around and watched the guards talking with each other, relaxing.
“So tell me, Mau Mau,” Pitts said in a low voice, looking at his food as he spoke, “when we go in the yard, after we eat, we can just mingle?”
“We ain’t supposed to, but we do,” Harris said, looking back at Pitts. “Guards is cool for the most part except for Iron Balls and Bad John. They two genuine pieces of shit. When me and the Ax Man do the job on that rat-shit motherfucker Elmore, we figure we take down Turner and Brookman, too. We go down, we gonna do it all. They write about our black struggle back home when we do it.”
“Do what?” Pitts asked, frowning.
“Bust up this place, man,” Harris said with a smile, eating his black-eyed peas and the last of his bread.
“We gonna take it down, man,” Celestine Anderson offered and then smiled, thinking about the day he could lash out in open rebellion.
“Whoa,” Brian Pitts said and raised his eyebrows. “Taking the place down might work for the short term, but in the end we got to have an objective. Not just a bunch of newspaper headlines, but something that will pay us a few dividends, for our old age.”
He smiled at Harris and winked, and then shook his head that Mau Mau should say nothing more.
“I got another man I want to recommend for our brotherhood, if I may,” Pitts said to Harris and then looked at Celestine Anderson.
“Hey, fuck you,” Anderson snapped at Pitts.
“Man, we gonna get along,” Harris commanded with clenched teeth, and scowled at his lieutenant, the Ax Man. Then he looked at Pitts. “Who you want in the rangers?”
“Guy I had working with me in Saigon,” Pitts said, and smiled at Anderson, who glared back at him. “Dude named Matthews. He’s here someplace. His buddy, Tom Joyner, got whacked when they took us down. Mau Mau, he’s one of our brothers and we’re gonna take care of him.”
“Anything you say, man,” Harris said, wiping his mouth and getting his tray in his hands. He looked up and nodded at Nathan Todd, who nodded back at him, giving him approval to stand and take his dirty dishes to the brig scullery. “I’ll pass the word to Martin and Jones. They working back there washing trays and shit.”
When Mau Mau returned to the table, Pitts and Anderson followed suit, turning in their dirty trays and dumping their paper trash. Once the prisoners had finished their meals, Todd blew a whistle and then marched them into the prison yard for their daily afternoon recreation.
SHORTLY AFTER THREE o’clock, Terry O’Connor and Jon Kirkwood sat down in the warden’s office at Freedom Hill brig and sipped coffee with their friend First Lieutenant Michael Schuller.
“We’ve got some formal complaints to issue, Mike, and I hate doing it,” Kirkwood began, shaking his head as he laid the written objections on the lieutenant’s desk.
“Why do you have my client James Elmore locked in a cell directly across the aisle from the man who tried to kill him?” O’Connor said, setting his coffee on the table and frowning at the lieutenant. “Now I hear that the man who probably orchestrated the attempted murder, and the key person against whom my client has agreed to testify, also resides across the aisle from Elmore.”
“I’ve got no choice,” Schuller said, leaning back in his chair. “I can release Pitts and Harris into the main population, or I keep them where they sit now, in our highest-security cell block. We can trust them to live in the hooches with the general population, or we can keep them under lock and key. You tell me.”
“You mix them most of the day anyway, what difference does it make where they sleep?” Kirkwood said, sipping coffee. “That leads me to my complaint. You already know what it is.”
“Your client Wilson?” Schuller asked, raising his eyebrows.
“Yes, my client Wilson,” Kirkwood said. “He has not yet gone to trial and he is with the general population. Mixed with convicted felons. Also, written in those formal complaints, we have concerns about two new clients here awaiting trial, and you have them both working in the kitchen like convicts, too.”
“They’re all three low-risk confinees, so we keep them in the low-risk area with other low-risk people,” Schuller said and sighed. “Like I told you at Colonel Prunella’s party, I wish we had better facilities. Appropriate facilities. We don’t, and both the wing and the two divisions keep shipping more prisoners in here every day.
“Now, what I am about to say, you did not hear it from anyone in this brig. Do I have your words?”
Both Kirkwood and O’Connor nodded their agreement.
“We not only have prisoners who await trial mixed with convicted inmates,” Schuller said, and then leaned over his desk and whispered, “we have Marines locked in this brig who have not even been formally charged with a crime! At least a dozen of them right now, and more coming each day. One or two at a time. They pissed off a captain, major, or colonel, and he ships them to Freedom Hill, using our prison facility like a correctional custody platoon or motivation squad in boot camp. No charge sheet. At his discretion, the commander just locks them in jail. They may have mouthed off, embarrassed the command, or failed to show up for chow on time. Maybe they just pissed in the wrong shitter. Who knows?
“These no-trial Marines get slammed in jail for the flimsiest of reasons, and then their units move on without them. They send no one to visit these men. No one to counsel them, or see if they need anything. No one to offer them any sense of hope. The troops call it getting shit-canned.
“In my opinion, these are innocent men inappropriately incarcerated at this level, and abandoned. They were basically branded as shitbirds by their units, and got dumped here because most of our line officers have the decency not to poison anyone else’s unit with what they consider human waste. All I can do is turn the key and try to keep them warehoused until they get flushed on down the pipe. Yeah, I have convicts mixed with pretrial confinees. I also have no-trial confinees mixed with them, too. What about these men? You going to stand up for them?”
“Eventually they have to get a charge sheet,” Kirkwood started to say and then Schuller stopped him in midsentence.
“I have a Marine private first class here who we’ve had locked in general population for more than six months,” Schuller said and slammed his hand on his desk. “He’s due to rotate! He’s supposed to go home and get out of the Marine Corps in a couple of weeks. He’s never been charged! His unit forgot him.”
“What are you going to do?” O’Connor asked, narrowing his eyebrows and feeling his heart pound as anger surged in his chest.
“I’m going to let him out, and ship him over to headquarters battalion at Third Marine Division with a letter signed by my boss, Lieutenant Colonel Webster, stating that the Marine has finished his tour in Vietnam and is due to go home and be released from active duty,” Schuller said, and then blew out a deep breath.
“Think it will work? Shouldn’t he have some kind of orders?” Kirkwood asked, now feeling a sense of the frustration that Schuller lived with daily.
“He’s a nonrate Marine,” Schuller shrugged, and took a drink of coffee. “Lucky for him the battalion can cut orders to Pendleton for the kid and assign him to RELAD. They’ll have to fish out his service record book, if they can find it, or just rebuild a new one once he gets to Pendleton. I think the officer who sent him here long ago rotated. The poor kid will wind up in limbo at RELAD until the personnel division at headquarters Marine Corps ferrets out some paperwork on him and documents his release date. But that’s a damned sight better than rotting in this brig.”
“How can this happen?” O’Connor sighed, and slouched down in his chair.
“The freewheeling way commanders can arbitrarily toss these kids around, with little to no accountability to higher authority,” Schuller said, leaning his elbows on his desk. “Field commanders do what works, bend the rules, break them, make them up as they go along. We’re at war, and units do what they have to do to succeed with their missions. I understand it, but I don’t like it. It’s a throwback to the almighty ship’s captain, when we operated on the rocks and shoals system. Still alive and well. Like a jungle rules basketball game. Only we gamble with lives and play for keeps.”
Chapter 17
PENANCE AND CONSPIRACY
A TRAIL OF white dust boiled behind T. D. McKay’s brand-new, blue-and-white two-tone 1969 Chevrolet pickup truck with a genuine 327 power-pack Corvette engine blowing hot smoke through dual-tuned exhaust pipes. He had written his dad back home in Dumas, while he was still in Vietnam, and told him of his dream pickup truck: a blue-and-white Chevy with chrome bumpers, trim, and grill; a tucked and rolled interior of blue-and-white leather; and a Corvette engine with tuned exhaust. A short bed. Had to be a short bed. Tommy told his dad that long beds looked out of proportion, even though they hauled more bales of hay.