From the Chrysalis (27 page)

“And if I don’t want to?” he hedged, eyeing the open cell door. Yeah, right, as if he could just go. There were six of them and one of him. He had no idea of the building’s layout. He had been bussed here about ten hours earlier and had been sleeping ever since.
 

“Get moving,” the lead guy said again, motioning everybody into the hall.

“At your service,” Dace said, mentally adding
fucking space cadets
as he followed them to a staircase at the end of the corridor. Not that he had an option. Two guards brought up the rear, their black jacks aimed at his kidneys.
 

“You guys showing me the way to the breakfast room or what?” he inquired blandly.

“Or what,” the spokesman said, then snorted. When they reached the landing halfway down the staircase, a pair of grey mechanic’s coveralls smacked him in the face. His eyes watered.
 

“Crybaby,” the spokesman goaded him. “Not such a big man now, are you?”

C
hicken shits. Mother fucking …
He looked down, half-expecting all the obscenities in his head to spill out onto the floor.

“You want me to put this on,” he guessed. He stood on the landing of a staircase so new, he probably could have gotten high on the smell of fresh paint if he’d tried.
 

“You supposed to have a high I.Q., ain’t ya? I’ll bet you think you’re pretty smart, don’tcha?” the guy speculated. Dace doffed his pants and ripped the shirt over his head so fast that several brass buttons popped off and rolled downstairs.
 

A considerate bunch, they waited until he got the overalls halfway on before they started hammering him. The first blow to his head almost knocked him down. Blood dripped into his eyes as he crashed into the wall.
 

“It’s just a head wound,” one of them said helpfully. “Those suckers always bleed a lot.”
 

And, “This is for our buddies,” the rest of them grunted, until he was curled up on the landing with his arms raised to protect his face.
 

But when they hauled him up, dragged him downstairs to the next landing and started beating him again, he’d had enough.
Jesus fucking Christ.
He hadn’t gone through a goddamn riot just to lie down and die. He got in several well-placed kicks before they’d even realized what was going on.
 

A wake-up bell clanged somewhere. One bull was doubled over, protecting his genitals when his buddies lost interest, yanked Dace by the straps of his overalls and tossed him like a bag of garbage through the first open door.

“We’ll be back,” they promised in unison, scattering like the cockroaches they were.

Dace examined his new surroundings, starting at the bottom of the room. At first he couldn’t see much, especially with both his eyes swelling shut. Judging from the pain, some ribs had just been cracked, but a careful inspection of his skull revealed that his brain was still intact. That was all that mattered. Saliva drooled from his busted mouth onto the clean cement floor, but he didn’t pay any attention until a molar followed, square, almost perfect in the low light. He tried to plug it back into his mouth, but his fingers didn’t work.

This cell was like all the ones he’d occupied before, except there were no bars, just an electronically locked door with a slot big enough to accept a tray. There was also a sink and a concrete slab bed. It took a while to figure out where the toilet was, then he saw the hole in the floor.
 

The bed looked good. Craftily, he calculated how long it would take to crawl to the plywood mattress. His mind had slowed, so the calculation took a long time, but the crawling took longer still.
 

He also had trouble retrieving words. Sega … ciga … until the words
segregation
and
disassociation
came to mind. New names, old places. Also known as Solitary or the Hole. At first he startled at the slightest noise, then his eyes rolled back into his head, not caring anymore.
 

Late afternoon light filtered through the slot in the door where he would get his meals.
If they fed him.
And his mail.
If they let him.
His mail, his Liza letters. His … his … he drifted into dreams.
 

He lay on a bosomy, floral couch, its cushions warm and soft. A dark-haired girl pulled a down comforter over his chest, drawing it closer to his stubble-covered chin, but before it reached his face, his teeth exploded into his brain.
 

They shouldn’t have. He was going to live forever. He was a young man. There was still time to make things right.

Chapter 19

Cold Storage

Prisoners Turn on Their Own Kind

Battered convicts told how hundreds of prisoners screamed for blood as the last night of the riot turned into a torture session. The victims were fellow prisoners, stool pigeons and sexual offenders. They were tied in chairs around a radiator. Three teams of five men took turns beating them for hours. The beatings ended when the soldiers arrived, but it was too late for one man. The dead man was found under a mattress.
*[
Maitland Spectator
, September 10, 1971, p.4]

Maitland Supermax, sometime in September 1971:

“He’s dead,” somebody was saying from the other side of the cell wall.
 

Dace lay where he’d fallen, on a concrete slab four inches off the floor. It was covered by a sheet of plywood and a three inch thick foam pad.
 

Dead.
Ha, ha. Fat chance, he thought. He knew he was alive because some pig in the rifle tower shone a light into his cell twenty-four hours a day.
 

“Who, Dace?”

“No, one of the unwanted ones, you dumb cunt. His head was all busted up. Somebody pounded the shit out of him. He croaked in the army hospital today.”
 

Maybe Steve’s name was mentioned too, maybe not. He felt like he was in a coma, aware of what was going on, but not really there.

“Holy shit. I mean, who cares?”

Max, the prison trusty, a joint man, a stoolie, a rat, pushed food through a five inch square window in Dace’s solid steel door. “Yeah, a second diddler died,” he muttered. Dace learned more from tiny notes rolled and buried under his cold toast. Like the reefers he used to get.

 
“Rick’s all right,” Max added, then, “Watch the new Warden. He’s been reviewing your file and has it in for you.” The old Warden, so close to retirement, had left in a flood of post-riot criticism.
 

“Jesus!” Dace exploded.

“Ah, take it easy, man.”

“Right. You got it right. I’m a man. Tell the Big Cheese that, too. You tell him everything else. At least I can live with myself when I wake up in the morning. Did he read the part where it says I never touched those fucking screws?”
 

Max didn’t reply but shoved more items through the slot. He’d brought what Dace had requested based on the strength of Dace’s promises:
I’ll protect you right or wrong when I’m in Gen Pop.
Out in the regular population, a prison trusty needed all the help he could get. That’s how Dace scored an almost full blue fountain pen and some unlined paper, water damaged but still usable. And that’s how he got his books, mostly classics nobody else wanted to read, but also a coverless copy of
The Godfather
, a book he’d enjoyed several times before.
 

I’m fine
, Dace lied, practice-sitting on his concrete cot with his cracked ribs. His journal, in the form of letters, he addressed to both Liza and himself. He wrote her almost every day. If she got his letters, she’d understand. She always had, even his conviction for manslaughter. He didn’t like to think what that had cost her. He hated what he had put his family through, especially her. She was his future, his bright light, his … Aw, shit. He was getting emotional again. He had to get a grip.

“Hey, guy,” Max whispered through the slot in his door. “What are you doing in there?”

“Planning your demise. Yours and all the lying, cock-sucking …”
 

“Duh-mize. Funny, man. Real funny. What’s
duh-mize
?”
 

Although his parole was coming up, even taking into account the institutional charges and the “good time” he was likely to lose for this beef, he was considering serving all his time so he’d eventually be completely free and unsupervised when he did get out. He and Liza could go anywhere then. Anybody with half a brain could make a good living in this country. They’d find other people like themselves: people who liked to live and knew how to live good. “Good” as in really
living
, not necessarily as in living moral.

My cousin, my self
, he wrote in every salutation. Sure, it was a little more maudlin than he liked, but that’s what happened to a guy in the clinker, in the Hole. First you got cold, then your nerves went and the next thing you knew you were bawling like a girl. Her address—what the hell was her address? Oh, right, she was living in Maitland now, in the student rez. She’d visited him … wait. Was it just last week? No, it couldn’t be.
 

I don’t want to leave you,
her eyes had said when Savage led him away.

I feel so close to you,
he added, rereading the last page. Christ, what a goof. He crossed out a line and tried again. There, that was better. He wanted to tell her everything. Well, almost everything, he thought, sifting through key events and the role he had so reluctantly played. The last thing she needed was to get all her facts from the press. Somebody should know what had really gone down. And who better than her, his repository, his alter ego, the only person in the world capable of relating to his point of view?

It was hard to explain about Rick, though.
He’s my friend,
he wrote in the end, never mind if his loyalty hadn’t helped him.
He asked me to watch his back, that’s all. Then we took control of the guards. If we hadn’t … if anything had happened to the poor buggers we were all as good as dead.
 

The only thing he didn’t tell her was how sorry he’d felt for the guards.

His decisions had made sense at the time, but they didn’t now. If he’d had any brains, he would have crawled up into the ceiling and stayed there. Plenty of others had, men who valued their own skin.
 

Stabbing his pen into the tablet of writing paper, he crossed out another whole section and started again. After six weeks in solitary, he’d revealed more than he’d planned, his anger spilling out in a rush of words that were sure to worry Liza sick when the letter finally arrived.
 

What kind of man do you think survives this human pressure cooker for five or six years? That’s easy. A strong, violent man. Some say that’s me. A former Warden (a man I admire) used to call me a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but I haven’t seen Hyde for a while.
 

Okay. So let’s say a man understands this. He even realizes he’ll have a difficult time surviving in society with the temperament he has. What then? What can he do to readjust himself so he fits the outside environment?
 

Nothing! Because to fit those surroundings would be to disgrace himself. Besides, a man isn’t a robot, Liza. He doesn’t change with a bolt here or a spring there. If he could change so easily, he wouldn’t have survived all that time in prison, either mentally or physically. Also, he would find it totally impossible to understand why society would force him to be of such a violent disposition for such a long time, then abruptly force him into another entirely different personality.