Sweet Hell on Fire (2 page)

There is no stain remover in the world that will get human brain matter out of a poly-cotton blend.

It looks just like they portray it in slasher flicks and gore fests, like some weird lumpy gray sausage straining to get out of its dull casing. There’s blood too. A contrast so stark it seems like someone took a red Sharpie to an old noir movie. Everything fades to the background and all you can see is the red. It sears into your line of sight brighter than the sun so when you close your eyes, it’s still there—burning hot.

I didn’t think about the red and the gray—the blood and the brains—until hours after the first time I saw them spread out before me. Not until I was at home and my uniform pants were splayed out across the washer and I looked at my pretreaters and stain removers, then back at the strange slashes of rusted red.

When it happened, there was no time for reflection, for horror or shock. Only action. Only what my training had prepared me for.

A man on his back in the yard.

Even without the crimson spray on the concrete, I knew he was dead. Prison is the lowest common denominator of civilization, where primal instincts and base needs rule. It’s a place where showing soft underbelly to the other predators is a sign of weakness. For a man to be on his back out on the yard where everyone could see him, his belly exposed, he had to be dead.

Especially with a bloody sock on the ground next to him. Nothing says “pay me” to the rest of your customers like a lock in a sock to the back of the head of someone who
didn’t
pay. I broke into a run before the alarm came over the radio. First responders erupted from the cell houses and other posts they were working, filling the yard like so many soldier ants ready for duty.

I wasn’t the first one on the scene, but it was me on my knees in the gore assisting the officer who began CPR. Pieces of the inmate’s skull were scattered on the ground like broken bits of china, and his head looked like a rotten watermelon. Rescue breaths, CPR, and all the emergency care in the world couldn’t help him.

The memory is stark and faded at the same time, parts of it as if they happened yesterday and other parts like they never happened at all. I know EMS was called, I know I filled out stacks of paperwork, but I don’t remember it. I don’t remember talking to anyone, or doing anything that day. All I remember is the hard concrete under my knees and the blood on my hands, beneath my fingernails. The gray bits on my pants of what used to be a person.

Everything about him that made his place in the world was in that fleshy mess. The bad. His crime, the pain he inflicted on others, his motivations to do violence. The good. The people he loved. His hopes, his dreams. His memories. Everything that made him what he was right there under the afternoon sun spread out for any who cared to look.

I remember wiping my hands on my pants, the red and gray smearing up my thighs when I stood. Then I was at home, doing my laundry and wondering how the hell I was supposed to get a stain like that out of my uniform and if he’d been positive for HIV or HEP-C. There was a good chance of both—he’d been a punk. The tattoo on his neck marked him as Blood property, a commodity to be bought and sold, or rented out as the gang deemed fit. Add to that the infected injection site on his arm where he’d been shooting up, and he was two for two. Unprotected sex and needle sharing.

Even that realization was distant and unreal at the time. The only thing that was real was that I had been wrist deep in meat that used to be a man.

Shout got the blood out, but the gray remained.

“Fuck you, fatasscuntbitch,” the inmate slurred around crooked teeth that reminded me of the bared and gnarled roots of an old weeping willow bleached out in the sun.

Fuck me? No, buddy. Fuck
you
. “Yeah, fuck me. Whatever, man. Cuff up,” I said, bored with the exchange already and indicating he should present his wrists to be handcuffed. I didn’t need this after what had happened on the yard the day before.

But the inmate hadn’t come out of his cell for a week. He hadn’t showered; he hadn’t come out to go to chow, hadn’t come out for yard. He was either afraid of someone or hiding some serious contraband. Most guys were always ready, willing, and able to come out of their cells for anything that could get them there.

I mean
anything
. The price of Madagascarian intestinal fly larvae rose by a quarter of a cent? They had to get out of their cells to call their mothers who invest in that sort of thing, and if they didn’t, said sainted mothers would lose their homes. The moon was full so it was their turn to scrub the lint out of their bellybuttons with a special tool they only have in the clinic and…The reason didn’t matter. Out was out.

This guy wanted no part of anything.

I could tell from the way he narrowed his eyes and the hard set to his jaw he was taking my measure and deciding how far he could push me.

I sighed heavily. “Look, I don’t give a damn when you do it, but you will do it. If not for me, then for the blacksuits.” I shrugged. Blacksuits was another name for our special teams. Not exactly SWAT, but they were the big guns who dealt with combative inmates and other emergencies. They could come hand him his ass on a platter. I’d gain compliance one way or another.

The inmate leaned toward the toilet and shoved something in the bowl.

“Don’t do it! Do not flush that—” I didn’t even get the command out before he’d tried to flush whatever contraband he didn’t want me to find.

Good thing I’d turned off the water to his cell before I’d confronted him.

“You bitch,” he shrieked when the toilet didn’t flush.

Your
mom, asshole
. Of course I didn’t say it. They could call us every filthy name in the book and we had to take it, but we weren’t allowed to insult their mothers. Because it gave them “rage issues.” Whatever. What kind of pussy can dish it out but can’t take it? Oh, right. It’s prison.

But I’m a professional. So I kept my comments to myself.

Even when he whipped his dick out and pissed all over his cell. The arc of urine sprayed his walls, his desk, his bunk, and the pile of clothes in the corner. I had this sinking feeling in my gut he was going to try to spray me too.

“Good luck, bitch.” He turned, the stream of piss arching ever closer to me.

He could piss on his own things; that’s why we have gloves. But
on
me?
Oh, hell no
. “Rack the door!” I called down the run to the other officer on the tier, telling him to open the inmate’s door. He’d be pissing in a bag when I was done with him.

The cell door dragged open, the mechanism slow and plodding, creaking like an old man’s knees. He let go of his dick and it hung there out of his state-issued boxers like a shriveling sausage. All color drained out of his face in tandem with the dwindling stream of urine. He hadn’t expected me to open the door.

“Now what?” I’d launch myself into the cell to gain his compliance if I had to, but if I could get it done without touching him that was better for everyone involved.

To my surprise, he turned around and faced the wall. He put his arms behind his back, showing he was ready to be handcuffed. I locked the cuffs into place quickly, careful to make sure I kept my own stance balanced and a good distance between us. Should he have decided to fight, he wouldn’t have the advantage.

“I didn’t think you’d open the door, Sarge,” he said this under his breath.

Yeah, they never do. Lots of officers make a big show of threatening to rack the door, to let the inmate out to make good on his threats and the officer to make good on his, but they don’t. The inmate keeps talking shit, the officer keeps talking shit, and it’s just a bunch of posturing—and more shit. Males circling each other’s territory, waving their dicks around. I didn’t have a dick to wave around, so I had no room to posture. I could only make him feel like I’d slapped him with someone else’s dick, rode him hard, and put him away wet.

I hauled him out onto the run and directed him down to the office. Catcalls echoed throughout the cell house, calling him a pussy for cuffing up, calling me alternatively a badass and a bitch for cuffing him. A couple of guys even mooed at me, but that wasn’t anything new.

Even on my first day, when we took the tour, I heard animal sounds and whispers of, “That’s a big bitch.” You got that right, motherfucker. Don’t forget it.

Down in the office the Officer in Charge (OIC) gave me a stern look, his old jowls shaking with his displeasure. “Why’d you wind them up?”

A guy pissed all over his cell, wouldn’t come out to shower, called me every name in the book, and
I’d
wound them up?

“Had to be done.” I shrugged.

“I heard them mooing at you. You can’t take it out on them because you’re fat. You need a thicker skin.”

My jaw almost fell off my face it dropped so fast. “Right. Let’s look at this again. A targeted search of an inmate’s cell because it hasn’t been searched in weeks coupled with the inmate’s unusual behavior makes me doing my job some sad, fat-girl vendetta?” I stopped and turned around, trying to look at my own ass. I looked back up at the OIC, incredulous. “Well, fuck me. Where did that come from? I went to bed skinny and woke up fat.” I rolled my eyes, and the other officer in the room clamped his mouth shut and buried his head in his arms on the desk as he shook with laughter. “I know what I look like and I don’t care what they think of me. Or you for that matter.”

He looked at me. “You’re a woman. Of course you do.”

I’d forgotten this guy believed that because I had a vagina, I wasn’t capable of concerning my little head with anything beyond my next pair of shoes and what I should make my man for dinner.

I really didn’t care what the inmates thought of me. For someone’s opinion to matter, you have to give a shit about them. You have to care for someone’s words to hurt you. Some snaggle-toothed, illiterate ghetto rat doesn’t like looking at my ass? I’m certainly not going to cry about it. A thicker skin? I have an outer shell like the tiles of the space shuttle. Further, if I did care, that would mean I wanted to be attractive to the inmate.

Yeah, I’d rather gargle with razor blades, thank you very much.

I got on the PA system. “Attention in the cell house. The OIC is irritated by your barnyard sounds. I, however, find them amusing. But Mamma already knows what sounds the cow makes. Can anyone tell me what sound a horse makes?”

The cell house erupted in laughter, breaking the tension that had been building from the interaction between me and the inmate. Whenever something like that went down, it was never just about the officer and the inmate. So keeping a situation at the lowest level of escalation was important.

He snatched it away from me. “This isn’t your cell house, little girl. You can’t just come in here and—”

“And what?” I snatched it back. “I can’t come in here and do my job? Why don’t you give it to me in writing that you told me not to search cells?”

His mouth hung open, a rusty hinge swaying back and forth in the wind. He couldn’t say anything to that. Some of the old-timers were tired and didn’t like to upset the status quo. But I wasn’t an old-timer and wasn’t tired. Whatever the inmate had hidden was something he wasn’t supposed to have. There were reasons for rules and reasons things were contraband. I was looking out for my fellow officers by getting that crap out of population. I was looking out for the inmates too.

I was also building a reputation. Fair. Firm. Consistent. Not only was that my training, it’s what worked. Reputations are like trust. Hard to build, easy to shatter, and it doesn’t matter what the truth of the situation happens to be, only how the others perceive it.

Women have to be harder in this environment. We’re seen as the weak link by both officers and inmates until we prove otherwise. Something as simple as doing my job went a long way for a solid reputation.

Later, when I followed through searching his cell, I found the contraband he’d tried to hide. Not only did he have a baggie of weed under the clothes he’d pissed on, but he also had a joint in the toilet.

But that wasn’t the important find.

The important one was the seven steel rods that had been stolen from the metal-working shop and taped underneath his cell door.

He was making shanks.

I’d done the right thing demanding to search his cell. I also knew I was lucky he hadn’t gone for one of those steel rods and put it through my face when I’d ordered his door opened.

After what had happened in the yard, it was also a sign that the shit was about to get deep.