From the Chrysalis (23 page)

“Let me get this right. You’re asking me to take over for Sandy and babysit the most hated fucks in the Joint. Is that right? Fuck that. Do I look like I’m crazy? What do you think is gonna happen when the party’s over? My guess is everybody will dummy up and we’ll end up with a couple of shivs in our backs—if we’re lucky!
”
 

“Yeah, you’re right. I’m a crazy man. Fuck, fuck,
fuck
!” Looking slightly surprised at his own daring, Rick grabbed Dace’s green lapels and shook him with each emphatic
fuck
. “I’m losin’ my cool! You see me running back and forth between the army outside and the hostages in here? Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he repeated. “Where’s it going to end?”
 

When Dace went limp, Rick backed up and smacked his own forehead with the heel of his hand.

“That’s it for me,” Dace said, straightening up and clapping his friend so hard on the back that he almost fell over. “I’m going back to my cell to get some shut-eye. Wake me up when the party’s over.”

Rick stared at him, looking surprisingly close to tears. “We’re all going to die,” he said with the deadly calm of a true believer, leaving the righteous implication that Dace was a deserter.
Like you were on that day so long ago,
his underlying tone implied. “They’ll blow this fucking place sky high if anything happens to those guards. You know that. I need you to watch those hostages, Dace. You know I’d do the same for you. I’m the guy who stuck around to face the music when that stupid shitass—what was his name again? Turpin?”

“Turbot,” Dace said.

“Yeah, well when
he
died. Jesus Christ, clean out your ears and listen to Loony Tunes! Sandy’s in a fucking fever and there’s no telling what he’ll do. I heard the shrink call him a megomaniac. That means—”

“It’s
megalomaniac,
and I know what the fuck it means!”

“Well, he’s recruiting every homicidal maniac in the Joint! They’ll kill the hostages, man. You know that. Then they’ll bring back the death penalty.We’ll hang for killing coppers or we’ll die in a hail of bullets.” His eyes narrowed dangerously. “And your pretty little cousin will bawl her eyes out over a pauper’s grave.”

Dace stood up so fast Rick backed away. It was just like last time: a balls up, a fuck up, a big mess. Except this time he had no place to run. He shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. Rick had bent his ear for so long he was starting to make sense. Dace glared at him, clenching and unclenching his fists as he thought. He could see Sandy—or Loony Tunes, as they had taken to calling him—was up to no good.
 

As if to underscore the dilemma, Sandy chose that moment to toot through his bullhorn, his voice loud and clear. “Get the hell out of your chicken shit cells!”
 

The hair on Dace’s arms prickled.
What cells?
he wondered. Everybody had already been liberated, except … Jesus, if Sandy was sniffing around the segregated men in the west wing, things were really bad.
 

Crashes replaced shouts. He’d never heard a porcelain toilet breaking before, but he recognized the sound now. He could almost visualize the water on the floor. Filthy water dumping from brown-stained porcelain. Where did the stupid fucks plan to piss if they wiped out the toilets? It wasn’t like they could just go outside and spray the rhododendron bushes in the visitors’ area.
 

Almost simultaneously, some of the segregated men started screaming—a sound he had heard before. Noise like this usually brought the screws running, like jackals to a fresh kill.
 

“They’re trying to get the diddlers,” Rick said, confirming their worst suspicions. His facial expression was a cross between
I told you so
and despair.
 

Dace leaned over the railing. “Shut the fuck up!” he shouted into the dome area.

“Easy, easy,” Rick said, trying to ease Dace’s quick temper.

The Joint was never quiet for long and the noise made Dace nuts. People had a habit of goading him: a raucous neighbour in the next cell refusing to do his own time, a power drunken guard bullying a new fish. He had kicked the noisy neighbour so bad he had even scared himself. Not that anybody minded. Even the guards had looked the other way.

“I’m okay, Rick,” he said, the closest he could get to an apology. “But I don’t want to start singing evangelistic hymns like Sandy just to drown out his crap. You
could
let him keep the hostages. He might be doing us a favour, you know. And maybe he’s no worse than you or me. How does anybody know how they’ll behave? It’s a rare day goes by that I don’t have a crazy desire to pick any three pigs in this shit-house and beat the living slime from their bodies.”

“Yeah, but look at you. Strength always overrules insanity. Well, usually,” Rick said when Dace scowled. “And I’m willing to bet that it would this time, too.”

It cost him though, Dace thought. He enjoyed the strength his hatred gave him. Every time he subdued a violent impulse, he felt a little disappointed. Like he’d left something important unfinished.

Rick kept on him. Man, the guy was persistent. Like white on rice. “Listen, man, I know the pigs have tried to destroy us with every method they can conceive of, but those hostages are collateral and I don’t know what else to do.”

Christ, Rick was never going to shut up. “All right,” Dace said, surprising even himself. Maybe, just maybe, he was thinking too much. He had always preferred to make decisions on the spur of the moment or not at all.
And look where that got me,
he thought. “Give me the fuckin’ extra keys to the guard room,
friend,
”
he said sarcastically, not entirely convinced he was doing the right thing. “I’ll watch the goddamn screws. And I’ll keep watching your back while you’re hobnobbing with the big shots. Just don’t ask me for nothing more.”

For a moment, Rick almost looked a rested, happy man. His sinewy body sagged, like somebody who had tapped into his final reserve of energy and could now afford to relax. “I won’t ask for anything more,” he promised.

“Yeah, I bet.”

“And I’ll take the rap when it’s over,” Rick assured him. “Like I tried to last time. You know I did. And you almost got away, didn’t you? All the way to Timmins. At least you had a little fun,” he said, almost wistfully.

Yeah, I almost got away, with a man dying on the floor and you stuck there,
Dace thought.
“Forget it,” he said. “This is my trip.”
 

For starters, he would move the hostages somewhere safe. It was no good down there on the first floor. Yeah. That should be easy. No problemo. Piece of cake. He rhymed off all the like-minded clichés he knew. If only he could have traded places with Rick, so he could be the emissary to the outside world, the person everybody wanted to hear from, the man who would save the cons and the fucking hapless hostages as well. But it was too late for that now. Dace was brawn, not brains. Besides, he had as good as given his word and, well, he owed Rick. He really did. Christ, what a stupid little fuck he’d been.
 

“Hey, bring me back a beer and a cheeseburger,” he yelled, watching Rick head off towards the enemy world.

Chapter 16

Inglorious Babysitters

Maitland Penitentiary: Trouble Doesn’t Show.
 

On the outside, everything looks quiet. Prisoners are no longer clanging on their cell bars and they have stopped booing our troops. There is no sign of surrender. It is reported that inmates have homemade weapons but no guns or knives. Although one guard has been released [see sidebar], authorities are convinced the prisoners will kill the hostages if necessary. German Shepherd dogs arrived to stand guard during the night.

*[
Maitland Spectator
, Sept. 7, 1971, p.1.]

Maitland Penitentiary, September 6-7, 1971:

Dace led his inmate police force downstairs and through a snarl of add-on halls, to get the hostages. Steve and Big Alf swaggered after him, lords of whatever remained. Broken furniture, sodden mattresses and garbage littered the Dome area: the pristine public place the Joint had always presented to the world.
 

Nobody else was around. Anybody with half a brain was fast asleep under a bed. On the second day of the riot only a couple of men—burglars mostly—had moled through the ancient dropped ceiling in the Administration wing, looking for break and entry points into rooms below. The noise of them skittering and clunking around him made Dace nervous. What if some of the army guys got in there?
 

“So where the hell are they?” Steve demanded.

“Ah, Jesus, kid, can’t you smell them?” Big Alf said, halting in front of a half door nobody had noticed before.

The door opened as if on command and Dace found himself face-to-face with inmates he didn’t know. “Get the fuck out of here,” he said.

“Yeah, assholes, we’re taking over,” Big Alf said, pushing in ahead.

From a distance Dace thought he could hear Sandy shouting. Without their leader around, Sandy’s henchmen didn’t put up much of a fight. From the bored expressions on their faces, Dace figured they must have guarded the hostages while Sandy partied.
 

Stooping down, Dace peered through the entrance, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. Part of him was afraid of what he might see. Eventually their outlines came into focus: six screws, facedown on the floor, hands bound behind their backs. Dace entered the room and forced himself to take a good look around. None of the captives were moving, but that was probably because any sort of movement would have hurt, not because they were dead. The room was tight and hot. He doubted there was much air left, especially if Sandy’s boys had kept the door shut all night.
 

It also stank. Urine accounted for part of that, as did sweat, but Dace could also smell fear. Somebody coughed and tried to move his bound arms. Christ, it looked like Murray. Too bad they’d gotten him. He was one of the few guards who had even attempted to be fair.
 

“Easy, guy,” Dace said, bending down to loosen Murray’s ropes. None of the hostages said anything. They were listless, their faces bovinely blank with despair.
 

“Hey asshole, it’s for their own protection,” one of Sandy’s thugs said.
 

Dace sweated with the half-hearted help of Steve and Big Alf, who had followed him in. It took a long time to untie the captives in such a confined space. None of former guards had said anything when they came in, so it was a bit of a surprise when Murray spoke up.

“Thanks,” he said.

“I’m not doing this for you,” Dace said. The last thing he wanted was their thanks.

“When are we getting out of here?” the youngest hostage, Saksun, whined.

“Shut the fuck up,” Big Alf said, waving his bit of steel in the general direction of the boy’s head.
 

Cursing and grunting, they pulled their prizes into sitting positions. Dace felt sick. He couldn’t look anybody in the face. He sent Steve for some cheese sandwiches instead. The sandwiches were sent in from outside, but all the hostages wanted was water.
 

“See? They’re not even hungry,” a Sandy clone observed.
 

“They ain’t wanted for nothing,” a second one said.

“They’ve got it way better than us. They always have.” And so it went.
 

“This is the turd who gets his jollies using the strap,” one of them said, kicking the rear of one unhappy man.

“Shut up and back off,” Dace said, wishing to hell the job was just done.
 

With his arms folded across his chest and his head almost touching the ceiling, he waited, marvelling at his own patience. Jesus, if he didn’t watch it, he was going to start feeling sorry for the screws. They were such sitting ducks! Then again, they all were. One little stink bomb and they could all end up dead. If this had occurred to anybody else, they didn’t appear to care. Big Alf and Steve sat on the floor, a little apart from him and the hostages, arms wrapped around their knees. In the almost airless room, Big Alf’s head lolled forward on his chest. The big man was so relaxed he’d actually fallen asleep.