Eureka Man: A Novel (22 page)

“How can you be so sure? You can't! And I
can't chance losing my career either. Oliver, I love you and I
won't stop coming over, but-”

“This was my fault.”

“How was it your fault?”

“Come here, let me show you something.” She
followed him back into the classroom and up to the front corner of
the room where they had made love. “You see that hole in the
baseboard? I know that's how he did it. He was in the room next
door. If we had stayed back in my office this would never have
happened.”

“It's not your fault.” She walked in front of
him and he watched her go, instantly aroused at the sight of the
sensual tension of her back legs and buttocks as she walked into
his office. He could see both their reflections in the window. She
never took her eyes off him and he doubted if she was all that
interested at the moment in how her backside and long legs looked
in the black knee-length skirt and matching stockings she was
wearing.

“What if I told you we could get rid of
him?”

She stood there with her hands folded across
her stomach. They exchanged glances, her eyes begging for
restraint, his promising none. “Oh, come on. How could you possibly
do that? Or do I want to know?”

He sat at the edge of his desk in front and a
little to the right of her and looked at her steadily. He went on.
Went on trying to make an impression. “One of Champ's people is a
clerk in the major's office. He's made transfers happen before. The
guy wouldn't even know who he's doing it for.”

“I don't know, Oliver. I'm all nerves right
now. I don't know what to think.” She looked at him, trying to
figure out if he was the man who understood theories of multiple
intelligences or the one who worked his way through one catastrophe
after another. Or both.

“There's only one catch.” Oliver said.

“And what's that?”

“It would cost money to have it done.”

“Everything costs money. How much?”

“I don't know. I would have to talk to
Champ.” He dropped the cassette on the floor and brought his heel
down on it with force. The case cracked and scattered across the
floor. He gathered up the spool of tape and tore it to shreds.

“Here, give me that.” She opened the top two
buttons of her blouse. He watched her left breast rise as she
stuffed the ball of mangled tape inside her bra. “Tell me more
about this Champ person.”

“What do you want to know? You want to know
about the stories I've heard or about the things I've read about in
old newspaper clippings?”

“Both.”

“Well, they say when he was thirteen he cut a
boy's face from his earlobe to the corner of his mouth just for
being in the wrong neighborhood. And when he was fourteen he took a
screwdriver and made three evenly spaced holes in the chest of a
rival gang member. Now what I read about him is even worse. He came
to prison for hanging a storeowner in the back of his store. Then
while he was in prison waiting to go to trial, he killed an
informer inside the prison. He hanged that guy, too, from what the
papers said, and then he buried a ten-inch knife in the guy's
rectum. He's the most feared man in this prison. He's also the most
well-liked. He and his crew have their hands in everything that
goes on around here. Victor LeJeune's not in his league, B.J.,
believe me.”

She combed her hair with her fingers while
looking at him. “So what's the catch, Oliver? He's looking out for
you, why? Because you tutored him in math?”

“That's one reason. Remember the guy we saw
two years ago being escorted across the walkway in handcuffs?” She
nodded yes. “His name is Fat Daddy Petaway and he's a notorious
sexual predator. Okay. Remember the guy on the gurney who was
bleeding like a stuck pig? Well, Fat Daddy stabbed him like
twenty-seven times. The guy on that stretcher could have been me,
B.J. Fat Daddy had been stalking me since the first day I got here.
To make a long story short, a few years ago I found out he had been
in my cell two or three times looking around when I was at work.
The minute I found out, I decided to get him before he got me. I
was less than twenty four hours away from bashing his head in when
they moved me off the block.”

“My God, I had no idea you'd been through
this sort of thing. But how does Champ fit in?”

“It's a long story. He came at me with a deal
that I couldn't turn down. He knew Penelope was visiting me every
week so he offered to make me a member of his crew in exchange for
a couple of ounces of weed every month and some math lessons. I
took the deal and it was the best thing I ever did for myself.
Champ made it so I didn't have to carry an ice pick around
everywhere I went and sleep with one eye open all the time.
Penelope got the weed from my friend Albert. Champ paid the
wholesale price of the weed and it didn't cost me a dime.”

“Maybe not, but he was using you just the
same. Now I know how you've survived this place all these years.
You've been through so much, my God.” She pushed the door closed
with the point of her high heel and moved to him slowly, her hand
reaching out for his. She pressed herself against him and brought
his hand to her lips. After several seconds, he replaced his hand
with his own lips and kissed her gently. When he moved his hand up
between her legs she said, “We can't, Oliver. Not as long as he's
around.”

THOUGH IT HAD BEEN
a moneymaking enterprise
since its inception in 1972, the Pennsylvania Lifers Association
was never a very productive organization until around 1980. That
was the year the membership acquired a large enough constituency of
Philadelphia voters to oust the old president, sixty-four-year-old
Homer Dunn, and install Champ Burnett as their new one. Champ's
first order of business was to change the organization's
constitution so that its main mission statement no longer read,
“merely to encourage members to become model prisoners.” Its new
mission became “to change the public's perception of convicted
murderers.” Champ embarked on this formidable task by setting up
generous annual donations to several local charities-a North Side
homeless shelter, an after-school community center, a nursing home
for retired veterans, and the Ohio River Boulevard Volunteer Fire
Department. His next step was to increase the organization's
productivity by making its members more productive. To that end, he
created a new legal committee, a public relations committee, a
newsletter committee, an entertainment committee and a welcoming
committee that showed up at each new lifer's cell door with
greetings and a goodwill bag stuffed with toiletries and other
daily necessities. When Champ had difficulty finding willing
volunteers to fulfill these committees, he resorted to the one
asset that had never failed him-his guile. When asked to head the
legal committee because he had the best legal mind in the state,
Omar Ali had flat-out declined until Champ told him that all the
legal books he wanted, plus a brand new Olivetti electric
typewriter, came with the job. And when Oliver was recommended to
head the newsletter committee, he said he needed time to think
about it. Champ gave him ten seconds, glared at him and said,
“Time's up, Priddy. Here's the file. Now get the show on the
road.”

Many thought Champ's first real challenge
would come after he fired the five concession stand workers from
Pittsburgh, who had been on the job for as long as the organization
had been in existence and skimming graft for just as long.
Complaints among these men flared like snake cowls: Whatever
happened to respect? We've been here a lot longer than those Philly
guys. Who in the hell do they think they are, anyway? This is some
geographical bullshit! But when it came time to hand over the keys
and records they were as cordial as church ushers.

Six months after Champ installed his own
people to run the year-round soda and popcorn concession stands the
organization began churning out record profits, and morale among
its members actively engaged in making a contribution to one
committee or another was at an all-time high. Champ's ingenuity had
brought a measure of pride and stature to the organization that had
never before existed. The Pennsylvania Lifers Association was
functioning like a big city Chamber of Commerce.

For the next nine years, while the
organization and its members thrived, life in the free world
experienced an explosion of violence and crime in every major city
across America. As the usual swarm of talking heads sounded off
about the best way to handle the problem, op-ed editors found
themselves in a buyer's market. While one side of the page demanded
more prisons, longer sentences and harder time, the other side
pointed out the obvious root causes to the problem: poverty;
truancy; media violence; poor nutrition; the erosion of family
values; godlessness; the absence of moral training in schools;
insufficient funding for social programs; and the unrelenting
infestation of drugs in the inner cities. By 1989, a steady rise in
Riverview's population, along with the accompanying daily violence,
underlined the growing discontent within the penitentiary walls. A
reduction in food portions and other amenities added to this
undercurrent of tension, which only reinforced and heightened the
rumors that the worst was yet to come. Consequently, every
anarchist, misanthrope and conscientious objector among Riverview's
four hundred and three lifers were urging their peers to store up
knives, razor blades, matches, rope and jars of paint thinner.
Champ, a natural leader, urged the membership to come up with a
nonviolent plan of action. “Aw, no!” shouted a former Black Panther
at one of their monthly meetings. “That shit didn't work for Martin
Luther King! How you think it's going to play out hear? By the way,
I thought you had a reputation to keep.”

Champ pursed his lips and let his tongue
stroke a gold inlay before he replied, “Don't let your mouth
overload your ass, Jack.”

STAMPED OUT INTO THIS WORLD under the name Theodore
Elijah Burnett, Champ was raised on a street in Philadelphia called
Oxford. Early on he learned that a brick was as good for keeping
other boys in line as it was for building a house. His father
Jerome had managed to keep Theodore close to the front stoop of
their Oxford Street row house and out of any real trouble until he
died of a heart attack when Theodore was thirteen years old. After
that, Champ's mother and older sister Shirley gave up trying,
though not for lack of love. It was a matter of practicality. Who
could expect a thirteen-year-old boy with ants in his pants to sit
on his front stoop all summer when ten other boys were instigating
him to “come on”? So he took to the streets with the other boys
from Oxford Street, and together they refined their skills in a
sport called gang war. After gang-warring with the boys from the
Valley, the Zulu Nation up on Diamond Street, and the 16th and
Norris Street gang, Theodore and his Oxford Street pals played a
one-round elimination of fisticuffs to determine their leader.
Theodore was the last boy standing.

Though he wasn't the biggest or strongest
member of the Oxford Street gang by any means, what he lacked in
those areas he more than made up for in his viciousness. One or two
blows with a length of pipe was never enough. He loved to hear the
crunching and splintering of bones. One slice with a knife led to
two-and another and another. He wouldn't stop the assault until his
mind registered the urgency in his fellow gang members' voices when
they shouted that the sirens were getting close and it was high
time to beat feet.

Theodore's troubles with the law began in the
spring of his fourteenth year, when he and three other gang members
went to see a Temptations concert at the Uptown Theatre one
blisteringly hot Saturday afternoon. Waiting in line right behind
him was a pretty red-boned girl from Norris Street, who was eyeing
and vibing with Theodore when her older brother told him to find
somewhere else to stand. Theodore smiled at the older boy and told
him he didn't want any trouble. But the boy wouldn't just leave it
at that. He profiled on Theodore, stuck out his chest and sneered,
“I know motherfuckin' well you don't, chump!”

After the show Oxford Street followed Norris
Street down Broad Street and into an alley that was supposed to be
a shortcut home but ended up being the scene of a homicide. On the
day of Theodore's preliminary hearing the prosecutor sighed and
told the judge there were no witnesses and no evidence other than
the three evenly spaced holes in the dead boy's chest. Theodore and
his homeboys were free to go.

A week later Theodore's mother placed him on
a Greyhound bus, destination Orangeburg, South Carolina, to spend
the summer with his Aunt Beulah and cousins Joanne and Leon. They
were waiting for him when the bus pulled into the small college
town, and though he had only met his aunt once when he was five
years old, he recognized her immediately for she resembled his
mother right down to her marcelled silver-gray hair. She embraced
Theodore tenderly and then introduced him to her beautiful
eighteen-year-old daughter Joanne, and son Leon, who was Theodore's
age. A chubby boy, Leon wore a mini-Afro, baggy bib overalls and
peach fuzz on his chin.

Aunt Beulah and her family lived in a
two-story yellow clapboard house on the edge of a farm two miles
outside of town. When they got out of the car, Theodore could smell
the simmering aroma of food before he saw the steam rising from the
pots of potatoes and collard greens on the stove, and the sizzling
country ham and two hot fruit pies waiting on the counter.

For the two months he was there, Theodore
enjoyed the food the most and his cousin Joanne's complacency the
least. She was a student at South Carolina State University in
Orangeburg, and on Friday evenings her college friends came to the
house to eat pizza and talk. One evening while they were discussing
a tragedy that had occurred on campus a few months back, Theodore
and Leon were sitting at the kitchen table eating blueberry pie and
drinking ice-cold milk chasers while they listened. Apparently,
there had been some kind of demonstration on campus and the police
arrived to try and break it up. When the demonstrators refused to
leave, the police opened fire on them killing three students. With
a mouthful of blueberries and a scowl across his face, Theodore
told Leon he wanted to know the whole story. Leon informed him that
Joanne had been on campus the night of the incident and she could
relate all the details.