I exchanged with Davidson and grunted when the full weight became mine, surprised as usual at how heavy a human body could be. We shuffled along, passing the assistant warden who was striding fast the other way, calling out to Wallace for a situation report. The riot helmet was jiggling and slipping over my eyes, off kilter, as though I were suddenly a little kid wearing a fireman’s costume for Halloween. Fuck fuck fuck, I thought, wishing that someone else was carrying Felix Rose’s dying ass.
MacKay needed to rest three times along the way. I was thankful for each break. The stretcher was an old-fashioned canvas job from some
M*A*S*H
episode. There was no elevator to the infirmary. By the time we finally made it, Felix Rose had stopped moaning. The male nurses took him. I leaned against a table and felt my age, all thirty-nine years weighing on my lungs.
“Give me a minute?” I asked Ray. “Something I want to check on.”
He nodded, just as beat. “Take your sweet fucking time.”
I exited the triage room and headed down the main hallway where the full doors lined those private drums. At DI-2, I stopped and looked in. Crowley’s cell. Empty, so I knew he must be in the dissociation unit. Without opening the door, I scanned the walls for drawings, scratches, some of the circle and triangle marks I’d been seeing around, but I noticed nothing. I moved next door to DI-3 and peered inside. Josh lay on the mattress, his eyes closed. I hissed his name, and he looked up.
“It’s me,” I said, feeling like an idiot for entering into such Romeo and Juliet mode.
“Officer Williams?”
“Yes.” I winced. I fished my keys and unlocked his door, stepped inside, and kept it propped open.
He looked terrified, as though his purest fantasy had suddenly turned real. Me in my body armor, all sweated up and ready.
“We’ve got two minutes, and you’re going to explain some things to me.”
He nodded. “What things?”
“The fight in the yard. Is that what you were expecting to happen to Crowley?”
A blank stare, then a nod. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Did Elgin jump Crowley because of that fucking comic book?”
Another careful nod. “I think so. A lot of people were really upset because they didn’t know Crowley was still working on it.”
“A lot of people?”
“Elgin. Roy. Others I heard about.”
“Roy?”
“A little. He called Crowley crazy one time when he came to visit, and they were pretty mad at each other. Crowley wanted me to keep six for him.”
Keep six. Watch his back.
“And where’s the comic book now?”
Another shrug. “I don’t have it.”
“Crowley have it?”
“I don’t know. Where is he?”
“Doing time,” I said. I heard a noise on the infirmary range, some door opening and closing, and I felt panicked about getting caught in this impromptu moment of impropriety. I slipped out of Josh’s open door and closed it behind me.
“Where’s Crowley?” Josh asked again. But I ignored him and headed back for triage.
I peered into the caged beds in the intensive care unit, searching for Elgin. I could at least check on his status, but then I saw MacKay sitting on the edge of a desk in the triage area, looking bewildered and out of sorts. Something bad has happened, I thought, and hurried over.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “You all right?”
He didn’t look good. He coughed, a hacking that grew worse until it sounded as though something loose were flapping inside his chest. He wiped the sweat off his forehead. “Bad time to catch a cold,” he muttered.
I relaxed and found myself a chair and swung into it. We’d both take it easy, rest off the hard haul.
“You always got a cold,” I said. “You caught it from cigarettes and rye.”
I thanked him for helping me out back there, even though
I was mildly horrified by what he’d done with the Taser. He must have picked up on my queasiness because he started in about the old days. How things used to be handled. If a prisoner fucked with a guard, there’d be time for payback at leisure. I understood the reasoning, but I was too tired to voice any nuances about more humane options. All I wanted was food. I had a can of tomato soup in my locker, a year old if a day. It never seemed so tantalizing as now. If I could only get there, take off my helmet, and spend fifteen minutes by myself, I might just be all right.
MacKay stopped talking. I watched his gaze fall, an odd look of dismay in his eyes. Before I could reach his shoulder, he slid deeper into the chair. Then his hands flew up, and he tipped out completely. I yelled for an orderly and started loosening his vest.
I’d been told once, by one of the COs who did summer work as a volunteer bush firefighter, that a forest could burn under the ground. Instead of a wall of flame eating its way across the woods in an organized front, there was another kind of battle in which wildfires burst out spontaneously at random spots. You could be walking through the trees in the dim
smoke, feel the hollow heat of the ground below, and see a demon shoot out from the earth to consume a birch tree to your left, or a flame spiral in the air like a will-o’-the-wisp. You didn’t understand the mechanism of the fire—where to intervene with it, how to anticipate or fight it—because it was actually going on below you, unseen. I felt that way about Ditmarsh during the double shifts that followed MacKay’s coronary. C block burst out the next night, for reasons no one attempted to explain. It wasn’t hard to douse those flames—the inmates gave themselves up like Iraqi soldiers, worn-out and thankful, biding their time for a later insurgency—but the preponderance of other isolated disturbances kept you wary and tense, dreading the next surprise. A hot shot on D-1, the needle still stuck in the dead inmate’s arm. A CO nailed in the neck by a pin from a zip gun, attacked by some sniper with extraordinary aim, the pin probably tipped with contaminated blood or fecal matter. We all feared invisible arrows after that, listened for tings, slapped at the slightest itch.
I had no time to think of MacKay, yet I was sick over him and could hardly bear to ask for news. When the siren blasted an inmate escape two mornings after MacKay fell, the noise cracked the just brightening sky and obliterated all rational thought, as though the confusion had shrapneled and the fragments were whipping past our ears. An inmate escape? Why the fuck not? As good a time as any to jump the wall. Soon the word went around. By all counts, a single man down. Who’ve you got—who’ve you seen—when did you last see them? I knew the names of all the inmates I’d escorted and signed away at the dissociation unit with its hallways
of isolated cells. But like everyone, I feared the kind of mistake you could make lockstepped into the forward march of turmoil.
Then the word came that inmate Jon Crowley was the wall hopper, and the information gave me a bad feeling all over. How had we missed him? A full three days following the yard incident, no one could account for where he’d been escorted, nor by whom, whether he’d been shuffled to the infirmary for treatment like the others involved in the fracas or whether he’d been sent straight to dis without delay. It baffled me that no CO put up his hand and claimed responsibility for having brought Crowley somewhere. Surely the trail would lead to that CO eventually. Wouldn’t it be better to admit a mistake now rather than later? I kept thinking, he’ll just show up. Someone has stashed him somewhere odd, lost him like a wallet or a watch or a set of keys, and then they’ll remember. It had to be some bureaucratic oversight, some institutional fuckup—you did not escape from prison, not these days, not when your arm was in a half-body cast.
During my duty wanderings I kept an eye out for everyone who was part of Brother Mike’s group. I located Screen Door and Horace and Bradwyn in gen pop, and although I saw no opportunity to talk to them, by sight each of the three seemed to share a timidity and wariness, or maybe it was just something I imagined. Josh was ensconced in his cell in the howler ward, and Roy Duckett was lodged in an open triage bed because of some head injury, while Lawrence Elgin lay in a similar bed within a cage, his wrists and ankles belted to the bed frame. More disturbing to me were the marks I began to
notice on walls and floors and etched into doorframes and drains. Sometimes sentence fragments, with the occasional warped poem. “Shoot now.” “Liquor up.” “God Bless Ditmarsh.” “Electricity is Zappy!” “Humpty Dumpty is the baddest of them all.” But also curious scratches: lines and dots that looked deliberate but indecipherable, circles, loops, the outlines of unknown countries, other details that seemed randomly and fiercely scratched out. And finally, pictures everywhere, crudely drawn animals like cave paintings, huge penises, gashlike vaginas, melon-size breasts, contorted sexual acts of every deviant position and combination, swords and spears, hot-rod cars, the sun, the moon, the towers of a city.
Was I the first CO to pay them any attention? Through the filter of my overtired imagination, it seemed to me that the symbols were multiplying, that marks and drawings and depictions and scratches were growing thicker in hallways and walls the second or third time I came back to look. I longed to document the mess with my cell phone camera, though I knew that was crazy.
I was not the only one mentally taxed by the prolonged situation. Among the inmates and COs the usual rumors achieved an unusual frenzy. Someone had found an ingenious tunnel from the infirmary to the loading dock of the old furniture warehouse—that’s how Crowley must have escaped. Other rumors focused on his current whereabouts. Crowley was on a Mexican beach having a last laugh, inmates claimed, and COs half believed. Crowley was in witness protection, whatever intelligence he’d offered up to the FBI so valuable
they’d sneaked him out during a manufactured riot and made it look like an escape.
The four keepers were on hand almost all of the time, and I’d never seen that before. At various lulls I stoked myself to approach Keeper Wallace and inform him of the comic book that Josh Riff had shown me after the funeral outing. But each time, I let the opportunity go by and told myself that the knowledge I possessed was just more meaningless noise, that the graffiti and markings I noticed everywhere had always been there and were random and pointless. Then Wallace pulled me aside to give me shit about Shawn Hadley.
I couldn’t believe, in the midst of everything else going on, that Wallace would even think to go back over the incident in D block, but he acted as though nothing had ever pinched his asshole tighter. “You jumped the force continuum,” he informed me. I knew the speech, the hierarchy of physical engagement. Verbal warnings that went unheeded were followed by control holds, body blocks, and sanctioned takedown techniques. If the inmate did not stand down and submit, then the corrections officer applied chemical agent, or CA. Only if CA was deemed ineffective did the corrections officer resort to the fuckstick. Any head shots with fuckstick, fist, or boot needed to be reported and recorded in the head shot log. Of course the COs thought it was nonsense. We’d invented a head shot shooter to celebrate such occasions—tequila with a blood-red drip of Tabasco—but it still killed you to get singled out.
Wallace said, “I sent you and MacKay in there because I thought you could be nonthreatening, because I wanted to keep the situational dynamics steady, not explode them.”
Implying, somehow, that the old joker and the new broad were too absurd a threat to inflame a disturbance and simultaneously that everything subsequent had been our fault. Should I have waited until I was raped? I wanted to ask. I knew he would counter that no officer (meaning no male officer) should act preemptively because of a rape threat. But I also knew that was bullshit. There were male COs who walked the blocks in constant fear that the big bend-over choke hold waited just around the next corner.
Wearily I insisted that my record of physical encounters with inmates was normal. That I’d never been reported before. Unlike MacKay, I wanted to add, I didn’t tase Hadley in the balls and give them a squeeze for good measure. I am not the kind to stomp an inmate’s guts out when they don’t jump fast enough. I’d never dipped my finger in CA and jammed it under someone’s eyelid when he was zip-cuffed. I’d never shoved a fuckstick up someone’s ass in a blind dissociation cell.
Instead, I ate it all, every bit of pissed-off righteousness, and nodded.
I worked the next three days straight, through a haze of chaos and nerve-deadening exhaustion. The only sleep I got came a few hours at a time in the old barracks on the east field, behind what used to be the warden’s house but now served as administration spillover. I slammed so many sliding steel doors I could feel the vibrations in the bones of my wrist. I yelled so many orders my throat went raw. I ran enough hallways in heavy gear to qualify for a marathon. We rousted inmates and dumped cells. We emptied tiers and
filled them again. We delivered meals and meds and put up with the shouts of abuse. Just when you thought the calm had returned, something new happened and the shouting and the food throwing started all over again.
“It won’t settle until after Christmas,” Baumard, a veteran CO, told us. Baumard had the kind of bristly gray hair that was so accustomed to being buzzed short it probably didn’t know how to grow long anymore. But he was also one of those COs of rare intelligence. He had made an ungodly amount of money in the stock market in the late 1990s, but had chosen—actually chosen—to keep working rather than powerboat his way off into the sunset. When it came to most matters, including financial, we listened to him like he was Warren Fucking Buffet. “All those family, spousal, and girlfriend visits lined up since Thanksgiving are fucked because of the lockdown, and it’s our fault,” Baumard continued. “They’ll be pissed until January.”
Too weary to be irate, we sat in the CO room the afternoon of Christmas Eve loosening vests and eating stale sandwiches from a lace-lined caterer’s tray. I desperately needed to go to the bathroom, but Franklin walked out waving his hand and laughing about the toxic waste dump he’d left behind, courtesy of a week eating microwave burritos. The howls of offense from those closest to the escaping odor were enough to persuade me to hold my bladder.
At least our common misery reinforced our sometimes shaky solidarity. COs came in multiple shapes and forms. We had an ex-NFL football player and a surprising number of former schoolteachers. We had roofers and firefighters and
retail security guards and ex-soldiers. We had men who loved ice fishing and men who voted Democrat. We had those who were always broke and others who were always flush. We had women who were single and on the dykey side, and women who were ripe and curvy from having kids. We could be as varied and unlikely, or as predictable and stereotypical, as the inmates themselves.
“Did you know Crowley was in art therapy?” a CO named Cutler asked, a nice enough fellow who was too out of shape and go-along-with-the-flow to get much respect from me. “All of this started just because someone didn’t like someone else’s drawing.”
No one offered any explanations for why that would be so. I said nothing, though the guilt of my inaction around Josh’s comic book was a constant throb in my temples. Others, with more energy, mumbled bitter feelings. Some touchy-feely program had contributed to our endangerment. As a CO, you just knew, on a moral level, that the softness was wrong.
A CO named Droune took up the common position. He cursed the weak sister who’d bolted across the yard and prevented a killing that might have solved many problems. The logic didn’t hold, but that didn’t seem to matter to Droune or anyone else. “That old son of a bitch, Brother Mike,” he said, “ought to get his art licence revoked.”
Baumard then gave Droune shit for letting a decrepit weak sister of the religious persuasion pull such a he-man boot stomping when Droune himself was such a floppy pussy. I didn’t like Droune; his father and grandfather had been COs, and that made him a kind of third-generation idiot royalty.
Baumard riding Droune was the only thing in a week to make me grin.
My good feeling lasted until I opened my locker. I dialed the combo and tugged. The lock snapped off. When I creaked open the door, I saw a drawing taped to the inside. The rush of embarrassment caught me hard—maybe my tiredness, maybe my sense that they never gave me a fucking break no matter how hard I worked to ignore it. But instead of reacting, I forced my voice into that tone of a teacher in a room full of grade school students, and said, “I suppose this delivered itself?”
Josh again. A similar drawing to the one Brother Mike had shown me. This time the female barbarian had a sword in one hand and decapitated head in the other, a snake tattoo winding around her wrist. She was sexy and saucy, hip thrust in exaggerated fashion to one side. She wore furs on her waist, high boots, and nothing on top, those well-endowed breasts with dark, lusty, and, once more, remarkably upward-pointed nipples. My distinguished colleagues gathered around.
“Amazing how those things get around,” Cutler said.
“You mind if I make a few copies?” Droune asked, the twitters about to erupt.
I had no doubt they’d already xeroxed the shit out of it.
“Maybe blow it up, frame it, put it on the living-room wall,” Franklin suggested.
Then: “Howdy, Radar,” Baumard said in a loud voice. Everyone knew it was a warning, that Michael Ruddik had just walked into the room, meaning there was a rat on deck.
Instantly I felt the dynamics of the school yard play out in predictable fashion. From being the target, I became another bystander. That didn’t mean I sympathized with the new victim. Instead, I shared the group’s disdain as much as I felt personal relief. On the surface, there was nothing about Ruddik to inspire any particular loathing. He was early forties, experienced, tall, athletic, even good-looking in a dark-haired, brooding kind of way. But he was widely suspected to be the resident Secret Sam, a member of the corrections staff covertly assigned to investigate inmate complaints against COs. Every institution had one or more—sometimes FBI, sometimes DEA—someone watching the watchers. Coming off my recent meeting with Keeper Wallace about my actions involving Shawn Hadley, Ruddik was the last person in the world I wanted to run into. I shoved the drawing into my locker and got out my jacket.
“Check this out,” Franklin said. Ruddik ignored him.
“Oh, come on, Radar,” Droune said. “Don’t be such a prude. That’s a work of goddamn art.”
Ruddik, who hadn’t said anything, merely got a pair of rubber gloves from his locker and gave Droune a mock salute. Then he left.
I was about to do the same, given the freedom to go home for that most silent of nights, watch some taped talk show, and pass out in front of the TV, when Baumard asked me if I’d work his bubble shift for him so he could read his grandkids
The Night Before Christmas
.