Eureka Man: A Novel (12 page)

Prisoner Appreciation Day was the one day of
the year when the three prisoner organizations were able to give
something back to the men who had supported them throughout the
year by paying dues and patronizing their concession stands. The
first round of hamburgers and hot dogs, sodas and popcorn, and ice
cream sandwiches was on the house. Seconds would cost.

It was also, unofficially, the one day of the
year for a truce between all rival parties. For the five years
Prisoner Appreciation Day had been taking place, not a single fight
or dispute had been settled on this day. The beauty of it all was
that even with five hundred men in the yard at one o'clock in the
afternoon, not a single guard would be in the mix. Why would they
be? What would they accomplish? Two with shotguns kept watch on the
catwalk outside the number one and two gun towers, and who knew how
many pairs of eyes were watching through binoculars from the top
floor of the administration building? It didn't matter anyway, for
the administration believed in the old cliché, let sleeping dogs
lie.

The scene outdoors was picture-perfect for a
prison picnic: a cool breeze, sunny blue skies, birds singing in
the hundred year old oak tree, on the barbed wire and in the
rooftop gutters. The sidewalks were still wet from Early's garden
hose and plastic garbage cans were being set out along the fence
line and wall of the big St. Regis. Inside the two cellblocks, some
prisoners were still sleeping while others were just waking up and
heating water for their morning coffee, or on their way to the
shower or curled up in their beds watching cartoons. The guards
patrolling the tiers stayed on the move for the entire hundred
yards down the tier, around the back and up the other side. They
didn't stop when they smelled overripe fruit, hashish or reefer, or
when their peripheral vision picked up six in a cell or a curtain
blocking the entire view. The guards believed in a variation of
another cliché: hear no evil, see no evil.

When Oliver returned from his morning shower
he was setting his Brute shower kit on the shelf when he heard
sudden footsteps behind him. In the time it took him to shift his
feet he felt the palm of a hand slam against the side of his face
and then his world went black. The culprit rammed Oliver's head
into the brick wall a second time and watched him crumble to the
floor. Then he closed the door and pulled the curtain, grabbed
Oliver's legs and slid his body to the middle of the floor. Oliver
was bleeding from his nose and a gash over his left eye. Fat Daddy
stood over him smiling while he touched himself. “Got you now, you
white bitch!” he said softly.

Slowly, Oliver began to move. As he pressed
the palms of his hands against the floor, Fat Daddy stepped on his
neck and held him down while he dug in his back pocket for the red
cord. After tying Oliver's hands behind his back, he grabbed a
handful of Oliver's hair and yanked his head back. “You yell or try
to fight this and I'll put you to sleep, you hear?”

Fat Daddy knelt between Oliver's legs, lifted
Oliver's bathrobe over his back, and then reached for the tube of
Vaseline in his sock. He was unscrewing the cap when the steam
whistle over the boiler house suddenly blasted one long shrill
note, paused and blasted again and again.

“Come on, Fat Daddy! The guards are at the
front of the tier! Hurry!” Donnie Blossom yanked open Oliver's
door. “Come on, Fats! You didn't hurt him, did you? Oh God!”

“What the fuck's going down?” Fat Daddy
asked, his face flush with anger.

“Come on! They're telling everyone to lock
up! Something happened! I don't know! Is he okay?”

“Why the fuck do you care? Get your ass out
of here!” Fat Daddy kicked Oliver's footlocker and looked down at
him. “I'll be a motherfucker!”

“Come on, Fat Daddy!”

Fat Daddy started to untie Oliver's hands,
but changed his mind. He stared down at Oliver's bare buttocks one
last time before he said, “You're mine, Priddy! I'll be back!” Then
he hurried out of the cell, carefully closing the door behind
him.

Oliver lay there trying to distinguish left
from right. Stars flashed in his head and random words surfaced.
Help! Momma! Get up! The left side of his head throbbed and
pulsated; he could hear a high-speed train and the wail of a
whistle. Oh, shit! He rapidly blinked his eyes and the more he did,
the more the stars faded. He tried to move his arms but they were
fused together behind his back. He moved his hands, wiggled his
fingers and turned on his side. Something familiar brushed up
against his fingers. Soft strings. Shoelaces. He touched his
sneakers and heard shouts and an awful banging, then the loud
rick-racking of a train hightailing it down the track. He managed
to sit up, his back pressed against the cold steel of the bed
frame. It was making sense now. He traced his memory. In the
shower. Singing. Up the steps, down the tier, into his cell and
wham! He vomited into his lap-two waffles and Rice Krispies. Get
up, get up!

He moved his wrists back and forth but there
was no give. He heard voices drawing near, shouts, more banging.
“This is an emergency lockdown! Everyone take it in immediately!”
The banging he heard was the long iron lever at the end of the tier
the guards pulled to secure the cell doors. The guard was striking
the bar against the wall, that much he knew.

It took several tries before he was able to
stand. He backed up to the sink and felt for the razor blade he
kept on the ledge. With his thumb and index finger, he picked it up
and slowly touched the blade close to his wrist. Feeling the
restraint, he pressed the blade into it and sawed away. Halfway
through he nicked his thumb. His fingertips were wet with blood
now, and he lost his grip on the blade. Frustrated, he balled up
his fists and with a violent jerk he forced one fist down and the
other one up at the same time. No sooner was he free then he heard
the guard's boots thumping down the tier. He turned his back to the
door and when the guard stopped in front of his cell, Oliver was
sure he was going to be told to turn his light on, but the guard
said nothing. Oliver stood there until he heard the guard's
footsteps fade away down the tier and then he went to the
mirror.

The gash over his eye wasn't deep, but the
blood was still oozing from the wound. He filled the sink with cold
water and stuck his face in it, shaking his head from side to side
to loosen up the blood that had dried in his nose. When the water
turned pink, he emptied out the sink and repeated the process.

He looked at himself in the mirror again. His
eye was swollen but no more than it would have been on his worst
day of sparring. The side of his head was swollen, too, and he
could still hear a train running through it. He had a splitting
headache and wanted to lie down and go to sleep, but he didn't. He
had read somewhere that it could be dangerous to fall asleep after
suffering a head wound. He was sure he had a concussion.

After a moment he sat on the toilet and
noticed that his feet were wet. When he looked down and saw the
puddle of urine in the middle of the floor, he put his head in his
hands, leaned forward and began to cry. Not for Oliver the Victim,
but for Oliver the Optimist, the Oliver who had thought he could
put off for tomorrow what he should have done weeks ago. He had
thought through the details like a battlefield strategist, first
exchanging the ten-penny nail for a ten inch lead pipe, then
practicing the force of the blows on a balled-up mattress so he
wouldn't kill the nasty freak, but merely maim him so he'd drool
spit and slur his words for years to come. The one important thing
he had failed to do was mark the calendar and the time of his
attack. He had been having too much fun studying and going to
college and flirting with girls to carry out a preemptive strike.
As he wiped his tears in the crook of his arm and consoled himself
at the same time, he was firm in his resolve not to play the
waiting game a second longer than it took for the doors to open
again.

After washing his feet and cleaning the
floor, he got dressed and listened to the conversations around him.
Someone up the tier was relaying information down the tier. Police
boats had been spotted near the banks of the river in front of the
administration building. A coroner's van had just pulled up in the
visitor's parking lot. “Somebody drowned!” a man up the tier
shouted.

But there had to be more to it than that.
Someone drowning in the Ohio River had nothing to do with the
orderly running of the prison. Swimmers had drowned right in front
of the prison before and they'd never locked down the joint.

Five minutes later the sergeant's husky voice
boomed over the PA system and the prisoners thought they had the
answer. “Count time! Count time! This is an emergency count! Stand
by your door! Lights on!”

Maybe someone had escaped and couldn't swim.
It had happened before and they'd locked down the prison just like
they did this morning. More chatter along the grapevine confirmed
that they had found a body. The bodybag was coming up over the
riverbank just now. Oliver looked out the window and could see two
speedboats from the McKee's Rocks side of the river, heading
straight toward the prison. As they came closer they veered off
toward the administration building.

Even though they had all been gypped out of a
free picnic, the prisoners were excited over the events that were
unfolding. The media had come to Riverview. Channel Two news trucks
were in the parking lot, along with real cops and the county
coroner.

“Holy fuck! This is serious, y'all! They just
found another body! They're bringing it up the bank right now!”
Some fool yelled they were probably just filming an episode of
“Hill Street Blues,” and that was what the commotion was all about.
Someone else discredited the fool when he yelled back, “'Hill
Street Blues' ain't filmed in Pittsburgh, dumb ass!”

“Oh yeah? Well, this episode is! And who you
calling dumb ass?”

“You, dumb ass!”

It went on like that all morning until the
reporter Cindy Burns of KDKA news brought them the truth on the
twelve o'clock news. “Two bodies were found floating near the banks
of the Ohio River this morning in front of Riverview Penitentiary
on the North Side of the city. An unidentified white female
believed to be in her late twenties, and a black male in his early
thirties were discovered a little after nine by passing boaters.
Both victims were fully clothed. Police have identified the male
victim, but are not releasing his name at this time. We'll have
more details on this story tonight at six.”

After hearing the story the prisoners'
emotions were jolted from excitation over the speculation that one
or two of their own had almost gotten away to sheer indifference
over learning that the victims were probably just some white trash
hooker and a trick, and then to blatant anger over their day having
been ruined for no good cause. The mood in the cellblock reminded
Oliver of being in the dining hall on evenings when liver was the
main entrée-in a fume. It stayed that way for several hours.

To take his mind off his own anger Oliver
wrote two letters. One to his mother June telling her he might be
losing his phone privileges and not to worry if he didn't call for
a while; he was fine, just a blunder in judgment. He would let her
know when it was okay for her and Skip to visit. Then he wrote a
letter to Albert and told him the whole story about Fat Daddy and
what he had to do to settle the matter once and for all. When the
doors opened again he would give Early the letter to deliver to
Albert before he climbed the back stairwell to the fifth tier and
split Fat Daddy's head open to the bone.

Others around him spent the day turning the
wheel on the rumor mill. The dead woman was the superintendent's
daughter. The black man was a former con named Bub Dukes. But it
would take one ignorant prisoner to believe that story, for Bub
Dukes was a notorious dope addict who had been out on parole long
enough to have a heroin habit so vicious he couldn't get a hard-on
if he'd wanted to. No, it wasn't that. It was simply two lovers who
had been walking along the bank and fallen into the river. Maybe
one fell and the other drowned in the rescue. And then there was
the one about a white woman who was kidnapped and raped by a black
man, and somehow they had both ended up drowning. With all their
clothes on!

Before the six o'clock evening news came on,
every gambler in the cellblock had put down a bet on the lead
story. By the time Ed Burns told it all, the five hundred men in
the little St. Regis were rattling their cages and laughing
hysterically. The dead woman had been identified as thirty-two year
old Melinda Cain, third wife of forty-five year old cult leader and
polygamist Virgil Cain, a prisoner at Riverview. Virgil Cain was
serving fifteen to thirty years for having sex with underage girls.
The black male, thirty-one year old Caesar Holmes from Lock Haven,
Pennsylvania, was a professional welder by trade. He had apparently
been hired by the Cain wives to help break Virgil Cain out of
prison. The medical examiner said the two had been dead for up to
three days.

From there the story took on the details of a
Hollywood blockbuster. There was a labyrinth of tunnels under the
prison, the newscaster reported, and one of the tunnels led to the
banks of the river. The opening was closed off with a two-inch
thick steel grate that had been welded and padlocked shut for a
hundred years. Apparently, the victims had climbed down the bank
and entered the niche that led to the tunnel grate after the tide
had gone out sometime late Wednesday night. Found ten feet from the
sealed grate was a set of portable welding tanks, complete with a
cutting torch tip. According to Port Authority investigators, the
two victims were trapped and drowned when the high tide came in
suddenly sometime around twelve thirty a.m. on Thursday.