The Tower (1999) (3 page)

When Cyprus had first moved to his unit, Spade, the powerful black prisoner in Unit 10B, urinated through the floor bars into his open mouth every time he fell asleep.

"You stupid fuckin' nigger. I ought to lynch your sorry ass. You're a fuckin' gorilla."

"Yes," Spade smiled back, "but who's the one with a mouthful of piss, 'Bama boy?"

Eventually, at the command of the guards, Spade had toned down his urinary assaults in exchange for more Sketch Duty.

Chapter
4

C L A U D E Rivers lived right above Allander, in Unit 11A. After a killing spree in 1992, Claude had come home, decapitated his mother, and lived quietly in the apartment with her head impaled on a coat tree. He'd kept her corpse in the bedroom, using it to fulfill his sexual needs. He was captured after neighbors complained about the smell emanating from his apartment.

In the Tower, Claude spent his time sleeping. Balding, his gut protruding from beneath his shirt, his skin greasy and red, he looked more like a seedy hotel manager than an accomplished killer. Allander had heard stories about him back at Maingate, and was amazed that someone with such an egregious appearance could have committed that most challenging of crimes.

Spade lived in Unit 10B, across the hole from Allander. Like the pairs of prisoners on each level, they were both locked together and apart in their tight circle. Spade stood a solid six foot four, two-forty, and he was as bald as an eight ball. He was still known by his street tag, which he carried with him like a weapon. None of the prisoners knew his real name.

Through a rigorous routine of exercises during his eight years at Maingate and the Tower, Spade had maintained his muscle from his gangster days. In the late-night hours, Allander watched through the thick air as Spade contorted his frame, twisting backward and upside down.

Spade alone could reach through the bars that composed the ceilings of the cells. He did pull-ups on them until one day Jonsten Evers gleefully overturned his bed on top of Spade's hands, which peeked through his floor. Spade was stuck dangling five inches above the ground, swaying painfully back and forth. Jonsten had giggled hysterically during the thirty minutes the guards took to respond to Spade's roars. It was very hard to hear what went on in the Tower from certain areas of the roof (one of the flaws of its design), and this, in addition to the guards' general contempt for the prisoners, accounted for the slow response time when mishaps did occur.

After the tops of his fingers scabbed over, Spade stood on his bed for hours, his hand extended through Jonsten's floor bars. Jonsten, still under the sway of his heady delirium, played with Spade's hand at first. He taunted it with strokes, jerking back his hand as Spade's snapped shut like a Venus's-flytrap. He would spit on the hand, pinch the back of it--even try to step on it and pin it wriggling to the floor. Spade's hand responded so quickly, however, that it avoided much of the punishment from above.

"On the street, you'd be my little bitch," Spade growled at Jonsten through the bars. "I'd own you. These metal bars protect you from the beast. Just a couple feet between us. If I could touch you, I'd rip you apart with my hands and teeth. Rip you apart. Come on, just reach down. Reach on down and touch my hand."

Jonsten tittered nervously, his high-pitched laugh echoing through the elevator shaft.

"But we're not. We're not on the street. You can't touch me. I'm up here and you're down. You're down on Level Ten." He giggled as he writhed about the floor, singing ecstatically. His halting song came in tortuously rhymed couplets: "On the street a wild killer he made. But in the Tower, Spade finds himself caged."

As Spade persisted in his efforts, Jonsten's hyper-delirious mood was replaced with concern, then fear, then despair. He began to obsess about the hand's minuscule intrusion into his world. He stopped playing with it, then touching it at all, and soon he withdrew to his bed and refused to leave.

"Spade, I didn't mean it. With the bed. The bed. The bed that tipped over. I'm sorry."

But Spade said nothing, and day after day, he stood on the bed with his hand extended patiently through the bars.

Jonsten began screaming and moaning in anguish, but he was generally ignored. This was nothing new in the Tower. "The hand. Make it go away. Away, hand! Away, Spade's hand. I'll bite it. I'll bite it off."

He never really slept anymore, existing instead in that bitter dream world that lies between sleep and waking. He squirmed in his bed, his disheveled hair flipping from side to side. "The hand! Don't! It's reaching for me. It's coming for me."

A chorus of shouts answered him. "Shut the hell up, Jonsten. Or I'll come for you. And I'm worse than some fucking hand."

Jonsten peered anxiously over the edge of his bed to see if the tell-tale hand had sunk away, but it had not. For days it did not depart; it stayed and watched him, a shark's fin emerging from a metal sea.

When Jonsten had to go to the bathroom, he leapt from the bed and made his way to the toilet, his back mashed against the wall bars so he could watch the hand. He balanced over the toilet, his bulging eyes still fixed on the hand as he defecated sloppily into the steel bowl. Aside from such ventures, he remained sitting Indian-style on his bed.

All the while Spade waited calmly.

Jonsten got weaker and weaker. He was afraid to cross his cell to pick up his loaves; they accumulated just inside the slot in his door, collecting swirls of flies. After a few days, he became afraid even to make the brief journey to the toilet.

Eventually, his exhaustion caught up with him and he began to nod off. His head lolled forward and his weight started to shift him over the side of the narrow bed. He jerked awake in a panic, his wild eyes flashing, then orienting on the hand and setting themselves again with determination. He had glimpsed his final weakness, however, and now he knew, as Spade had all along, that it was just a matter of time.

Finally, one night he fell asleep completely and he slumped forward, his arm dangling above the floor. His eyes opened in terror as he realized where his lapse had landed him, and then the hand seized him around the wrist.

Spade leapt from his bed, maintaining his viselike grip on the wrist and bringing his two hundred and forty pounds to bear on it. Jonsten's body slammed flat against the floor, smashed by the force pulling his arm downward. His hand snapped back against his arm to accommodate the gap between the bars, and he squealed as his wrist broke in two.

Spade's size-fourteen feet were finally touching the floor. He gazed up at the limp piece of meat in his outstretched hand. His face and bald head were splattered with blood from the wound where Jonsten's bone had punctured the skin, and he laughed deeply as he licked the spray from around his lips.

Dropping his weight, Spade swung from Jonsten's arm, which was taking on the appearance of a grotesque chandelier. There was another pop (accompanied by more screams) when Jonsten's shoulder left the socket, and the flesh around his upper arm bunched up above the bars. It began to give way, and as it tore, bone, muscle, and ligament came into the dim light in front of Spade. He no longer had to stand on his toes.

He heard a series of whimpers coming through the ceiling, and he smiled before climbing on the bed and reaching through the gap again. He grabbed a handful of Jonsten's hair, and using his body weight again, ripped it out.

Jonsten passed out, giving the other inmates a break from his delirious screaming. Mercifully, he didn't have to be awake as Spade's meaty hands closed around his neck, and with a single quick jerk, snapped his spinal cord.

The only prisoners who actually witnessed the episode were those on the eighth and ninth levels and, of course, Allander. He lay on his bed, watching Spade's exertions with a mixture of amusement and contempt. The inmates on the lower levels realized something was wrong only as the blood made its way down, dripping from the ends of Jonsten's fingers through the floor bars. A few of them cackled and cheered, licking the blood gleefully from their fingers, remembering the flavor and the hot scent.

Spade settled down on his bed. Lying back, he opened a book and began to read as Jonsten's arm swung lazily overhead.

Chapter
5

J O N S T E N ' S death came on Allander's tenth day in the Tower. Prior to that time, Allander had been largely ignored by Spade, who had been too preoccupied with the cell above to notice him. Shortly after the incident, the guards had arrived to view the scene. They reprimanded Spade, showering him with obscenities and turning a hose on him. Spade merely laughed and flexed in the water's spray. "Whatcha gonna do, put me in prison?" he taunted.

After the guards cleared Jonsten's mangled body from his cell (the warden decided to leave 11B vacant for the duration of Spade's sentence), Spade focused on the small, shivering prisoner across the Hole.

"So . . . you're the clown boy. We heard about you. Heard you all in the news and on the TV. I remember that. Young boy gettin' fucked in the ass, and not even in prison. We were waiting for you though."

Allander said nothing, remaining collected and distant.

"Let me ask you, child. You glad you don't live upstairs from me?" Spade tilted his head back, indicating the bars, which were still caked with blood and hair despite the hosing. "Guess I'm not too good a neighbor." He laughed his deep, booming laugh and climbed into bed.

Allander awoke to a tapping on his forehead. His hands moved over his face in a rush and he realized it was wet. He looked through the ceiling and saw Claude Rivers standing directly above him, his legs slightly spread so Allander was gazing up at his crotch.

Claude held his shirt, which he had doused in the toilet. He twisted it, forearms cording with muscles, bringing down another slow series of drops on Allander's head. Allander stood up, rubbing his forehead. It was sore, as if the water had worn a groove in it.

Claude watched him with interest, but said nothing. Allander crossed his unit to the vents. Overhead, Claude slowly shadowed his movement. He paused, wringing his shirt again, bringing a few plump drops down on Allander's head. Allander looked up at him, but no change of expression flickered over Claude's face. His eyes were light and wide, like holes through his head. When Allander went back to his bed, Claude did not follow.

Allander fell back into an uneasy sleep. When he jerked awake later, it was pitch black. He sat up in his cot quickly, glancing through the bars of the ceiling, but it seemed Claude was asleep.

The Hatch was open and the noises of the guards on duty drifted in. It was a moonless night and Allander peered around his cell, trying to adjust to the lack of light. He had the sense that something was in the cell with him, something was watching him. Finally, his night vision eased into effect, and he could see Spade's enormous meat-cleaver hands around the cell bars.

Allander sat up and stared across the Hole at Spade's cell. Spade's eyes slowly emerged from the darkness, then his white teeth flashed in a smile and Allander sensed a reflection from his skull. In that faint light, Spade looked as if he was made of only two hands and a floating head; the rest of his body faded into the black cell.

His voice came low and he articulated each word fully, playing with it in his mouth before releasing it to the air. "Welcome back, my child. Welcome to the cage. At first I didn't think you belonged here. But now I've seen you sleep and I know. I know you do. No one in here sleeps, and it's not the sound, it's not the--" he gestured grandly--"ambiance. And it sure as hell's not our consciences. You see, those of us in the Tower, we 'Boat Pokey boys,' we're different. We've seen too much to sleep. We know too much to sleep. What do you know, my child? What do you see?"

"Nothing," Allander said. "I don't see anything."

"BULLSHIT!" Spade boomed. The word echoed through the Tower. No one yelled for him to shut up, and the lapping water outside filled the silence. His voice dropped back to its deep whisper. "I see you turning and rolling and panting, and it's not from jackin' off. What do you see in your dreams, my child? What do you see in your heart of hearts?"

Allander remained quiet.

"Is it the clowns? The ones you're always drawing? There?" He pointed at Allander's drawing. Allander glanced over at it, amazed that Spade could make it out through the darkness.

In the drawing, an enormous clown loomed over the horizon of what appeared to be a medieval castle on a hill. The clown had dismantled one of the castle's towers and held it menacingly in its spidery fingers. Its long fingernails were wrapped around the tower, and a small maiden, hanging from a window, shrieked for help. The clown had a large, painted grin on its face. Its expression was that of a fat child about to indulge in an ice cream cone. The artwork was spectacular; the intricate details betrayed the labored minutes Allander had spent hovering over the paper.

"No," he replied.

Spade drew air in loudly through his teeth. "Clowns to the left of me, rapists to my right, here I am, stuck in the Tower with ya'll." He laughed. "Tell me, my child, why are you too good to talk to the rest of us murderers and molesters?"

Allander did not reply.

"I know your story. We all know your story. You're probably the most famous one in here. All the attention you got in court because of your--what'd the judge call it?--'environmental conditioning'?" He sounded out the syllables of "environmental," making it sound like en-vi-ron-mental.