While the recreation yard bustled with confinees yammering and grabassing, waiting for the sky to finally go dark so that the projectionist could spread the Technicolor entertainment across the main cell block’s white concrete wall, kicking things off with a Woody Woodpecker cartoon, Celestine Anderson took his seat at the end of the picnic bench closest to the sidewalk that led to the sally port where Bad John and Iron Balls stood duty.
Brian Pitts took a seat at the opposite end of the bench next to James Harris while Randal Carnegie, Sam Martin, and Clarence Jones sat between him and the Ax Man. Robert Matthews and five other Black Stone Rangers sat on the bench across the table.
“As soon as you pop open the gates, up in control, I want you to beat feet back down here,” Pitts reminded Harris, whispering so that no one could overhear their conversation. “All hell’s gonna break loose, so I don’t want you getting caught up in the confusion and other bullshit. Me and Bobby Matthews will shoot the gap down to that head, right over there by the fence. He grabbed a pair of diagonal cutters in the tool shop yesterday, and stuck them in his mattress. He has them in his pocket tonight. We’ll start chopping through the wire as soon as we get down to the fence, whether you’re with us or not. Once shit starts happening, we won’t have but a few minutes to bust out before the guards start lighting up the fences and putting out the dogs. So you better cut a trail as soon as you pull those handles.”
Harris nodded and then laughed with excitement, pounding his right fist in his left palm. “We gonna bring down this motherfucker! Rangers gonna put it to the man! First thing we gotta do, we kill that piece of shit Elmore!”
“You ain’t heard shit I just said!” Pitts snapped, grabbing Harris by the sleeve. “Fuck Elmore, man. We got two million in cash and fifty million dollars worth of dope tucked in a tunnel out west of Saigon. Focus on that, motherfucker!”
“Shit, man,” Harris said, “I thought we kill Elmore, then go. It take me no time to waste that rat-bag pile of dogshit.”
“Mau Mau,” Pitts said, and then turned the man’s face with his hand so he could see his eyes and his seriousness, “forget Elmore. We kill him, they come after us for murder. They’d have us dead to rights. Us murdering Elmore now would be stupid. My lawyer, Lieutenant Ebberhardt, told me that Elmore’s statement got burned up a few weeks ago, and now he ain’t talkin’. So CID’s out of luck. That’s why they stuck him in the cell across from us. So we’d scare him into cooperating. Right now all they got on me is desertion, and they’re trying to say I collaborated with the enemy because my cowboys opened fire on them. They ain’t got shit.”
“My lawyer, some cracker look like a zombie with white hair and pasty skin, Captain Carter,” Harris said, and laughed. “Man, the dude got breath that peel paint off the shithouse wall. He feedin’ me that same line, too. Say all they got on me is dope and sellin’ the shit, but they lost the evidence now. So they ain’t got much more than desertion and escape. That captain say I probably walk out here with six-six and a kick. ’Course, that don’t mean shit, ’cause tonight we gonna bring this motherfucker down.”
“Yeah, that’s about what Ebberhardt told me, and that’s what Matthew’s lawyer told him, too. I think six-six and a kick’s a standard package for turds like us,” Pitts nodded. Then again he took Harris by the chin. “We’re getting out of here tonight, though. Six-six and a kick doesn’t cut much against two million in cash and fifty million in dope.”
“No shit, man,” Harris agreed, now locking eyes with Pitts.
“So you need to get all this riot nonsense out of your head. Don’t get sidetracked in it, and don’t fuck with Elmore,” Pitts said, narrowing his eyes so that Harris understood him. “We leave him alone, he keeps his mouth shut. Since they ain’t got squat on us, nobody will really care that we escaped. They might look a little while up here, but they won’t look that hard for us. With this war, the Marine Corps got more important fish to fry. We just quietly disappear, and slip on down to Saigon. We pull out the cash and the stash, close the deals to get our dope on the market, then shoot on over to Cambodia, where my man with Bird Airways will haul us out to Bangkok. When we get there, we’ll start living a life so rich you can wipe your ass on hundred-dollar bills if that’s what tickles your fancy. So don’t fuck up, Mau Mau! You do, and you’ll stay here while me and Bobby go south. You might have a few kicks bringing down this motherfucker, but you’ll always be poor.”
“I ain’t fuckin’ up, man,” Harris said, and pulled Brian Pitts’s hand off his chin.
“Okay, then,” Pitts said and stood up. “Let’s do it.”
Lance Corporal Kenny Brookman and Sergeant Mike Turner had just walked to the edge of the prison yard so they could watch the movie. When Brian Pitts stood up and James Harris began yelling obscenities at him, the two men backed away and let Corporal Nathan L. Todd and Lance Corporal Paul Fletcher take charge of the disturbance.
“Fuck getting my head bashed in,” Iron Balls said to his sidekick. “The Chief and Fletch need a few lumps, after what you and me got the other day.”
“What if they get a hoorah going?” Bad John asked, watching Paul Fletcher, a twenty-year-old kid who stood six-foot-three and tipped the scales at 219 pounds, all muscle.
The lance corporal whom fellow guards and prisoners alike called Fletch had grown up in Ardmore, Oklahoma, where he played high school football and spent his summers harvesting wheat from North Texas to Canada, working seven days a week from the day after school let out in May until the end of August, just before Labor Day weekend and the beginning of a new school year. Most boys didn’t last the summer. Fletch did it every year since junior high, when his mother relented and let her thirteen-year-old child travel that long, hard road with his big brother, sixteen-year-old Raymond.
Then, right in the middle of the 1966 wheat harvest, six weeks after Paul had graduated from high school, the dutiful lad called home on a Sunday night and his mother told him that he had a letter from the draft board waiting in the mailbox. The next day, in North Platt, Nebraska, he found a Marine Corps recruiter and joined up, rather than landing as a draftee in the army and taking the same kind of abuse his drafted brother had endured. After boot camp and a tour in Vietnam, Ray Fletcher told Paul to join the air force or run to Canada, but don’t get drafted. It ain’t worth it.
Not one to take advice well, Paul enlisted in the Marines and then told his brother, fresh out of the army, who howled laughing.
“You’d been better off getting drafted!” Ray said on the telephone after the lad had told his mother the news.
However, Paul Fletcher breezed through recruit training and graduated as platoon guide and meritorious private first class. He drew the occupational specialty of 5800, military policeman, and out of boot camp went to the U.S. Army Military Police and Criminal Investigation schools at Fort Gordon, Georgia. When he got to Da Nang, four months ago, he volunteered to work in the brig. He told Lieutenant Colonel Webster that he hoped to become an officer and a provost marshal, and that working in corrections would round him out. The colonel agreed. He needed good men in the brig, especially an intimidating, muscled hulk with a brain.
Seeing Paul Fletcher come at him and then clamp a death grip on the nape of his neck made Mau Mau Harris immediately cooperative.
“Yo, Fletch, man, hey, I’m cool, man,” Harris whined, dancing on his tiptoes as the lance corporal led him from the table.
Then Corporal Todd got in Mau Mau’s face.
“What is your major malfunction, Mister Harris?” Todd growled while Fletch still held the prisoner dangling like a marionette.
“That motherfucker, Pitts, he pinch my ass while I waitin’ to see the flick, man,” Harris said, pointing at Brian Pitts, who smiled innocently. “Piss me the fuck off, man.”
“Keep you hands to yourself, Mister Pitts,” Todd called to the prisoner seated at the picnic table.
“Hey, Chief, I ain’t done nothing,” Pitts said, shrugging and smiling at the corporal the inmates and guards alike called Chief because of his Cheyenne heritage.
“You two will sit down, and keep your hands and your remarks to yourselves, or you will go to your cells. Clear?” Todd said in a strong voice.
“I ain’t sittin’ by that motherfucker,” Harris said, crossing his arms and shaking his head after Fletch had let him go. “I want to see Gunny MacMillan, let him straighten that cracker motherfucker Pitts out, since you won’t. You white boys be stickin’ together, I know.”
“Fletch, haul Mister Harris up to control and let the gunny talk to him, and then lock him in his cell,” Todd said, and cast a menacing look at Brian Pitts.
“What?” Pitts retorted, holding his hands up in innocence. “I ain’t done shit. Harris just fucking with you, Chief.”
“He’s gone, Mister Pitts. One more word from you and I will take you to your cell as well,” Todd said, walking back to his post at the front of the recreation yard, standing among the left bank of picnic tables filled with prisoners. Lance Corporal Fletcher would watch the right grouping of tables once he returned from upstairs.
Brian Pitts smiled and slouched back against the table, watching the empty wall, waiting for the cartoon to begin, and the fight that would set off the riot.
Celestine Anderson kept smiling more and more as the sky darkened. He knew that as soon as Bad John and Iron Balls stepped to their usual spots where they could see the cartoon projected on the wall, he could attack them. The Ax Man relished the idea of putting the hurt on Iron Balls, a guard he had hated more than others since the day Turner arrived last December.
His partner, Bad John, came on the scene in May, but had served in Vietnam since February. One day in April he dumped a peasant woman on her can who had stopped to pee on the side of the road, right next to the spot where Lance Corporal Brookman stood sentry duty at the main entrance of Three-MAF headquarters compound. The woman, squatting low and pissing down her splayed fingers, sending the yellow stream out her rolled-up pants leg, fell in the puddle of urine when the Marine shoved her on her shoulders and told her to get the fuck out of the area.
A Vietnamese policeman saw the incident, and took offense at the belligerent lance corporal’s assault on some poor old lady whose only crime was to stop and take a leak in front of the Marine headquarters gate. The cop complained to his boss, who shared in the patrolman’s anger and sent the incident up the flagpole. The local constabulary demanded that the offending military policeman should get run up the target carriage and disked.
In turn, Colonel Webster received a call from the Three-MAF chief of staff, who angrily advised him that the commanding general did not want Bad John any longer standing sentry duty at anybody’s gate. So the provost marshal shit-canned Brookman to brig duty.
Iron Balls got dumped on Freedom Hill after continually loafing at all his other military police assignments, and soon no staff NCO in the provost marshal’s office wanted him working in his duty section.
“Look at that splib smiling at me like I might suck his dick,” Iron Balls said, and nodded toward Celestine Anderson, who grinned even more now.
“Think he might want to start a hoorah?” Bad John said nervously, seeing the excited look that the Ax Man had in his eyes.
“Just let him try,” Iron Balls said, grinning back at the prisoner. “I passed word to the guys up in the watch posts on top of the blockhouse and at the fence corners that anybody start a hoorah, they needed to open fire in the air.”
“Fuck nuts Holden or the gunny buy that?” Brookman said, raising his eyebrows and blinking at the sergeant.
“No. You think I’m gonna tell those two pansy-asses something like that?” Turner sneered. “What they don’t know won’t hurt them. Meantime, any of these knuckleheads go to throw down on me or you, and my boys in the towers gonna start shooting.”
“In the air, though,” Bad John affirmed, wanting reassurance that he would not get connected to any incident that led to bloodshed.
“Fuck, yeah,” Iron Balls said, and wrinkled his lip. “Be nice, though, if somebody slipped up and shot that Looney Tunes spook over there that keeps smiling at me like a queer in a boys’ camp.”
Brian Pitts had wanted to wait until Paul Fletcher had returned to his post in the recreation yard before he sent Celestine Anderson after Iron Balls and Bad John, but he had overheard Corporal Todd’s instruction to lock Harris in his cell once he had talked to Gunny MacMillan. Mau Mau couldn’t pull the control center’s handles from his cell. So the Snowman had to improvise, and estimate that his partner had time enough to get upstairs, but not enough time to finish his informal request mast with the gunny.
“Go ahead, Ax Man,” Pitts said, taking a chance based on his instincts, and then nudged Sam Martin to give Anderson a hand.
Celestine Anderson let out a war cry and sprang to his feet, bouncing on his toes as he dashed toward the sally port where Bad John and Iron Balls stood outside, far enough to see the movie and too far from the cubicle to take advantage of its iron-barred shelter. Both Martin and Jones joined the Ax Man in his pursuit of the two guards, who had now turned and tried to run to the reinforced concrete booth where they had truncheons and tear-gas grenades, and where, despite orders against weapons in the yard, Sergeant Turner had stashed a Remington model 870 folding-stock shotgun loaded with ought-two man-killers.
When the Ax Man and his two accomplices started at the pair of loafing guards, all fifty-seven members of the Freedom Hill Chapter of Black Stone Rangers jumped to their feet and began shouting, “That’s one black motherfucker!”
Raising their fists and chanting, the rangers spread among the three hundred other prisoners, encouraging them to join the harangue. If an inmate did not voluntarily get up and start participating in the hoorah, they yanked him to his feet and slapped him around until he changed his mind.