Sleepers (27 page)

“You fucker!” Nokes shouted, slapping and punching at me with both hands. “I’m gonna fuckin’ kill you!”

“Get off him!” Juanito screamed, pulling at Nokes’s hair, grabbing one of his arms. “Get the fuck off him!”

Michael and another guard were pushing at each other. Two of the inmates were squared off against two other guards. Punches and kicks were being tossed up and down the field. Bodies were crumpled on all sides. Shrill alert whistles were going off in every direction. Guards, in uniform, armed with Mace cans and swinging batons, were running onto the playing area. The warden and his assistants were being driven down the sidelines, in a car with siren blaring, coming in from the goalposts to our backs.

Then the crowd, long silenced, erupted.

They stomped their feet against the base of the wooden stands, clapped their gloved hands in a wild frenzy, and screamed out in a uniform chorus of cheers.

Michael fell to his knees and pumped a fist in the air. Downfield, his arms raised to the sky, Rizzo basked in the applause, waiting for the guards to come take him away. He held the football in his good hand, a smile as open and as free as the emotion he felt spread across his face.

Styler’s body lay inches from Rizzo. He was faceup, his legs spread, his head at an angle, motionless.

From inside the prison we heard shouts and yells.

The other inmates, forced to watch the game from their cells or outside open gym windows, celebrated the moment, many screaming out Rizzo’s name. A number
of the players rushed toward Rizzo, hoping to get to him before the guards, to lay a hand on the hero of the yard.

Nokes stood up on one knee, staring at me and Michael, the blood from his nose running into his mouth.

“You’re dead,” he said. “You are gonna pay for this in ways you never dreamed of. All of you. You’re all gonna pay.”

“You ain’t worth shit, Nokes,” Juanito said to him.
“We
always knew it. After today,
everybody
knows it.”

“Outta my way, you fuckin’ spic,” Nokes said, standing on both legs, limping away to join the rest of the guards.

Michael walked up to him, waiting until he was inches away. “Hey, Nokes?”

“What?” Nokes said, turning, the hate in his eyes enough to chill the blood oozing out of our bodies.

“Good game,” Michael said.

8

I
T WAS MY
second day in the isolation ward, my back against a damp wall, my knees tight against my chest, sitting alone in darkness. I was brought down to the place the inmates called “the hole” immediately after the game, dragged down by Ferguson and a heavyset guard with a red beard. They threw me face forward to the cold cement floor and watched as I crawled about, looking for a way to lift myself up.

They laughed at me and mocked my movements as I
tried to make my way around the room. Then they slammed the door behind them, bolting it from the outside, their heavy footsteps soon an empty and distant echo. There was no bed in the hole. There was no toilet. There was no noise. There was no food. There was no water and there was no fresh air. There was only darkness and large, hungry rats.

In the hole there was only madness.

I inched my way toward a corner of the room, trying to ignore the dust, the blood that still flowed from my football wounds and, most of all, the soft squeaks of the rats moving somewhere in the black of the cell.

I spent my first day in the hole sleepless, moving my legs from side to side, hoping to keep the rats away from my cuts, knowing that sooner or later I would have to give in and close my eyes and they would make their move.

My hours were filled with terror. Any noise, even the slight whine of a floorboard, sent fear through my body. My clothes were drenched with sweat, my face was wet to the touch, my hair matted against my forehead. I took deep, shivering breaths, my eyes open wide, looking out into the stillness that surrounded me, my hands and feet numb from the cold.

I could not distinguish morning from night, dawn from dusk, each passing moment awash in a darkness that promised no rescue. The guards had not brought in any food or water, and the stench of dried urine and feces was overwhelming.

I was not alone in the hole.

I knew that my friends were somewhere down in the depths with me, each in his own cell, each in his own pain, suffering his own demons. Rizzo was there too, brought down by the guards, his other hand broken on his way in. There was no use shouting out to them; the walls and the cell door were much too thick for sounds to slip past.

I knew enough about the hole to know it was the
place where the guards put inmates who had trouble adapting to their system. It was where they earned their control. The usual length of time spent in isolation was a week, never more than two. No one came out of it the same.

I had been there only a matter of hours when I began to think about death. It was what I most wished for, the only thing worth praying for to any God willing to listen.

I do not know how long I had been there when I heard the click of the lock, the bolt being pushed back, the handle as it snapped down. The sharp light that filtered in sent the rats scurrying into corners and forced me to shield my eyes. I heard footsteps approach as a large shadow hovered near.

“Thought you might be hungry, football star,” a voice said. It was Nokes, standing above me, a large bowl in his hand. “I brought you some oatmeal.”

He placed the bowl down by his feet, in the center of the room, sliding it closer to me with the edge of his shoe.

“Looks a little dry though,” he said. “Nobody likes dry oatmeal. Tastes like shit.”

I heard a zipper slide down, watched him spread his legs and listened as he peed into the bowl of food.

“There,” he said when he had finished. “That’s better. That should help it go down easier.”

He walked out of the room, a set of keys rattling in his hand.

“Enjoy your meal, football star,” Nokes said, closing me back into my dark world.

The minute I heard the lock turn and the bolt shut down I rushed for the bowl and ate my first meal in the hole.

I
STARED AT
the rat, inches from my face, watching him nibble on the skin of my stretched-out fingers. I was
resting flat against the hard surface of the cell floor, my clothes soiled, my body empty of feeling. I had lost any sense of time, any grasp of place, my mind wandering back and forth on the cloudy road between delusion and nightmare. Rats crawled up and down my back and legs, feasting on my cuts and scabs, nestling in the holes in my clothes.

One of my eyes wouldn’t open, feeling sticky and swollen to the touch. One of my hands was balled into a tight fist, the fingers locked in place. My lips were swollen and dry and there was steady pain from my neck to the base of my spine. I couldn’t compose a complete thought, and when I tried to call up memories, I could see only fragments of faces. I heard the voices of friends and enemies, the thick tones of my father and King Benny, the empty sounds of Nokes and his crew, the gutter accents of Fat Mancho and Father Bobby, floating in and out, words and faces mixing as one.

I felt the open hydrants of Hell’s Kitchen on my body, the cool spray of water stripping away summer heat. I tasted Sno-Kones and hot pepper sandwiches and listened to Frankie Valli hit a high note and Dinah Washington ache with the blues. I tossed pennies against the side of a warehouse wall, dropped water balloons on the head of a passing stranger, ran into the winds of De Witt Clinton Park, and fished off the piers of 12th Avenue. Left for dead in that hole of despair, I sought refuge in the safest spot my mind could wander—the streets of Hell’s Kitchen.

Only then, during those rare cloudless moments, could I escape my dark surroundings, clear away the dirt and the pain, the rats and the pools of urine.

Only then could I move away from the wails of the walking dead and feel, for a fragment of time, that I was still alive.

I
WAS RELEASED
from the hole after two weeks and sent to the prison infirmary, where my wounds were cleaned, my clothes thrown away, and my meals served on plastic trays. I was carried into the twenty-two-bed ward fifteen pounds lighter than the day of the football game, my body wracked with a high fever and a series of infections.

The medical staff at Wilkinson was a small one, led by an elderly doctor with a chronic cough and three nurses years past their prime. For each, it was a last stop in an otherwise undistinguished career. While they all must have been aware of what went on, they lacked the desire or conviction to question it, let alone bring the abuse to the eyes of a higher authority. They had more to lose than to gain by such confrontation and would be outmanned, outmaneuvered, and outsmarted if they dared.

“You’re lucky,” I heard the prison doctor say to me. “Another day in there and we wouldn’t be any help.”

“I wasn’t alone,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper, my mind still circling around empty spaces.

“They took everyone out,” the doctor said.

“Were we all lucky?” I asked.

“No,” the doctor said. “Not all.”

R
AYS OF SUNLIGHT
came down through an open window, warming my face, my left eye still sealed shut. The bed and the sheets felt soft against my bare skin, white bandages covering whole sections of my chest, arms, legs, and feet. An IV bag dripped fluid into one of my arms and two plastic tubes were in my nose, feeding me air from an oxygen canister off the side of the bed. Somewhere in the distance a radio played a song I hadn’t heard before.

I turned my head to the right and saw Michael in the bed next to mine. His left arm and right leg were in soft
casts, his face was puffy and bruised, the rest of his body bandaged as heavily as mine.

“I thought you’d never wake up,” Michael said, looking over.

“I never thought I’d want to,” I croaked.

“John and Butter are at the other end of the hall,” Michael said.

“How are they?”

“Alive.”

“Who isn’t?”

“Rizzo,” Michael said.

“They
killed
him?”

Michael nodded. “They took turns beating him until there wasn’t anything left to beat.”

Rizzo was dead because of us. We made him think that going up against the guards in a meaningless football game had some value, would somehow make us better than them. That it would give us a reason to go on. And, once again, we were wrong. We had made another mistake. While it is normal in the course of growing up to have lapses in judgment, our errors always seemed to carry a deadly price. We were
wrong
to take the hot dog cart, and that mistake nearly ruined a man and landed us in a juvenile home. We were
wrong
to go to Rizzo and talk him into taking part in our silly plan. That conversation cost him his life.

The mistakes we were making could never be repaired. I could never give James Caldwell back the feeling in his arm or take away his pain. I could never give the hot dog vendor back his business or his dreams. I could never bring smiles back to John and Tommy, return the sweetness that was at the core of their personalities. I could never take the hardness out of Michael and the hurt out of me. And I could never bring Rizzo back to life. A young man was dead because he went deep against the guards and reached for a ball he shouldn’t have caught. Who went deep because we asked him.