Urban Renewal (12 page)

Viewed from above, the institution appeared to be a huge starfish entangled in wire, its five arms radiating out from a fat central hub. This man-made starfish had a rapacious appetite. Teenaged boys entered at various tips of the arms and were pulled inside, to be devoured. Loops of razor wire coiled from one arm to the next
.

Inside, a fifteen-year-old boy walked the full length of one of the starfish’s long tentacles, his hands cuffed behind him. A burly guard kept one big hand on his elbow
.

“Here,” the guard said, stopping in front of a door marked

The guard opened the door, guided the boy inside, and pointed at a long wooden bench already occupied by a slender black youth
.

“Sit,” the guard snarled, then went through the inner door that led to the office
.

The two boys did not look at each other, did not speak. They sat uncomfortably on the front edge of the bench, keeping the handcuffs clear of their backs only with continual effort
.

The guard reappeared and gestured for both of them to go into the office
.

The office was carpeted and air-conditioned, dominated by a large wooden desk. On that desk, a brass nameplate:

On the wall behind the desk were various framed photographs, certificates, placques … and, hanging from an embedded brass spike, a thick, heavy, well-worn leather strap
.

Paul Landers was a big, beefy man with small blue eyes set close together. His brown hair was cut in a military flattop. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt and a narrow dark tie; his thick wrist sported a gold watch with an expandable band. He pulled a file folder to the center of the desk and opened it slowly, as if the contents were sure to be disagreeable
.

“Marlon C. Cain,” he said, glancing up. “Thief. Chronic criminal. Anderson Hall at age nine. Carleton Reformatory at age thirteen. Two escapes.”

Paul Landers closed that file, opened another, glanced at the boy next to Cain. “Vernon D. Lewis. Attempted murder. First offense.” The director of the Sterling Youth Correctional Facility looked up at the guard standing behind
Cain and the other boy. “The little bastard stuck a butcher knife into his mother’s boyfriend,” he said, nodding his head at the black youth. “Damn near killed him.”

Paul Landers put one finger under the expandable band of his wristwatch, stretched it, and let it
snap!
back into place. Neither of the boys reacted. This practiced move had always made frightened boys flinch. Or at least blink
. Probably too stupid to get the message,
he thought to himself
.

“Well, Mr. Cain, Mr. Lewis, welcome to the big time. Take the cuffs off them, Sergeant.”

The guard stepped behind the white youth first, removed the handcuffs, then stepped in behind Lewis
.

“Face that wall,” Paul Landers ordered, his voice suddenly metallic. “Strip down to your shorts.”

While Cain and Lewis did as they had been ordered, Paul Landers moved in behind them
.

“We don’t take any nonsense here,” he said
. “None.
No back talk. No escapes … no escape
attempts.
”

Suddenly Cain felt the heavy leather strop placed on his bare shoulder
.

“No stabbings. No shakedowns.”

Paul Landers placed the strop on the nape of Lewis’s thin blue-black neck. “That okay with you, ace?”

“Yes, sir,” Lewis replied quietly. His voice was adolescent-pitched, but held as steady as a deeply driven tent stake
.

“Good. Then we understand each other. Isolation. Fifteen days,” the director said to the guard. “Let them get the feel of this place.”

Cain glanced out the director’s window, taking one last look at the sunshine he knew he would not see again for over
two weeks. Through the heavy steel bars, in the yard outside the fence, he saw the institution’s twin flags, American and state, on separate tall poles. As he looked, he saw the other boy watching him. They locked their glass-reflected glances. In that thin, ghostlike reflection, each recognized in the other the hard, hypervigilant gaze of an unbroken, still-dangerous POW
.

The guard handcuffed the boys again, then walked them up one arm of the starfish and down another, parading them barefoot and in their shorts in front of the other boys. Unconsciously, Lewis imitated Cain’s relaxed stride, a silent communication to other inmates that he’d walked this path before and knew it well
.

Months later, Cain walked onto the paved space between two arms of the starfish, which the prison called a “yard.” His eyes darted back and forth, taking it all in: a basketball game in progress, weight-lifting apparatus, handball courts, a young boy plucking his eyebrows
.

He did not acknowledge the greetings and glances directed to him, walking straight ahead to where Vernon Lewis was leaning against the chain-link fence. The slender black youth had a dumbbell from one of the weight sets tied to his side with a shoelace that ran across his chest. As he spoke, he lifted the dumbbell and lowered it in measured repetitions, using his free hand as cover, hiding his words from any lip-readers who might trade information for a favor from one of the wall-posted guards
.

“They just brought in a real monster—I heard he hit the scales in Processing at two ninety-five.”

“Yeah, I heard that, too,” Cain replied
.

If Lewis was surprised that Cain already knew about the new arrival, he didn’t show it. But he didn’t doubt the other boy—Cain was immune to exaggeration, and would have triple-checked any passed-along word
.

“We’ll get to him later,” the white youth went on, his eyes flickering across the yard. “Here comes company.”

The youth approaching from across the yard was more man than boy, heavily muscled, broad-chested like a Rottweiler. He eye-locked Cain and moved forward behind his own stare. As he did so, two other boys fell in beside him
.

Cain stood motionless, his eyes fixed on their approach
.

Lewis continued his repetitions. Up, down. Up, down
.

The three boys approached in a V-formation, the heavily muscled one at its protruding tip. When they closed to within a few feet, he said: “So, Cain … what’s happening?”

Cain knew him only as “Bull,” a blood-certified young man who’d swept into Sterling on a wave of respect because he’d killed a rival on the streets. But Cain had read the killer’s eyes for an ugly mixture of bluff and cruelty. He did the math and came up with the one record that would never make the charts at Sterling
.

Weakness
.

“Fresh fish,” Bull went on when it became apparent that Cain was not going to say anything. “Three of ’em.”

Cain acknowledged that with a slight nod. He was always the first to get to any newcomers, always offering them protection. The mixed-race crew he and Lewis ran wasn’t the biggest in the institution, but it was the most feared … maybe for exactly that same reason
.

The price of protection varied. A percentage of any package the new arrival received from home, access to whatever he could steal from his institutional assignment, cigarettes, soft money … Some accepted. Some refused. Some said they weren’t sure. And others said they just couldn’t afford it. “Everybody pays, one way or another,” Cain always told them all, something he knew for a fact
.

Now Bull was showing respect, clearing the new names with Cain before he took the boys for his own. If Cain’s crew had them covered, they were safe
.

“Vincent Collona,” Bull said
.

Cain shook his head no. Collona had been assigned to the laundry and had access to spot removers such as naphthalene. More flammable than gasoline, and twice as handy
.

“Joseph Clinter.”

“Wait on that one,” Cain said. “I’ll tell you next week.”

“Roland Spector.”

Cain raised and dropped one shoulder in an I-don’t-care motion, sealing Roland Spector’s fate
.

A slow smile crept across Bull’s face. He glanced back across the yard at a slightly built boy standing off by himself. Bull’s eyes were lit from within
.

“I guess I’ll go tell him to cut the back pockets off his jeans.… Better yet, I’ll do it myself.” Bull lifted his shirt to show his new toy, tucked into his pants. The shank was crudely notched for cutting, like a rip-saw’s blade, each tooth razor-sharp
.

Lewis did another repetition, slowly, almost casually. But not with the dumbbell
.

“Maybe I’ll just cut him a new—” Bull began. The words froze in his mouth when he found himself looking at
a short length of pipe taped to a piece of wood. Inside the pipe he caught the glint of sunlight on jacketed copper. A bullet
.

“Whoa, Ace!” Bull said, holding up his hands, palms out, backing away
.

“Don’t
ever
show steel around us,” Cain told him quietly. “I’ll never say that again.”

Bull looked into the eyes of the slender black youth who had taken the warden’s racial slur as his name, symbolically returning fire. His were a light brown, almost tan, soft, with a gentle, liquid quality. And utterly devoid of bluff. “Man, I was just showing it off!” Bull said
.

“One other thing,” Cain added, ignoring the stupidity of that explanation. “The monster who just checked in, I’m telling you now—he’s with us.”

“Yeah, sure,” Bull said. “You got it. He’s not worth anything anyway.”

Cain watched without interest as Bull walked away, happily slapping one of his flunkies on the back. The three of them went over to the slightly built boy and began to taunt him. Bull’s two boys easily lifted him up by his back pockets, turning him around as they did so. The boy kicked and struggled. Bull made a quick move with his hand and suddenly the boy’s pants were split, front to back. Bull’s laugh echoed across the yard
.

“Let’s go,” Cain said, ready to get on to other business
.

“Since when did we take on this monster?” Ace asked
.

“Since he weighed in at two ninety-five.”

The huge, blank-faced boy was strapped into a wheelchair—the old-fashioned kind, made of wood, straight-backed,
without arms, with a stabilizing set of little wheels behind the large rollers. Sometimes the guards released the straps long enough to allow him to use the nearby bathroom. Sometimes they didn’t
.

The boy had been in the chair for over four weeks, presumably so that the doctors could adjust his medication. There were festering sores on his buttocks and on the backs of his legs. He was not sure he could even stand unassisted, not anymore
.

The shackled boy was sitting at the bottom of some deep lake, under its calm-looking but troubled top. The water and the thin, flickering light were always pressing down on him. Still, whenever a guard came to unstrap him or to force the plastic-coated capsules down his throat, he summoned the energy to speak
.

“I never did a crime.” His mantra: “I never did a crime.” The one thing he clung to, no matter what new tortures were devised by his captors
.

It was the truth. Repeatedly and violently abused as a small child, he had been removed from his parents and sent to a series of “homes.” He was savagely beaten in some, sexually assaulted in others. One day, he screamed before he blindly struck out at his attackers
.

That ended the “homes.” As both his displays of temper and his physical stature grew, he was sent to ever-higher levels of institutional security. The doses of medication they originally administered to “calm him down” increased as he grew. Raging against the chemical bonds had the effect of a constant isometric exercise, turning the tranquilizers into red-zone levels of HGH
.

He could hardly speak. One night, right after he had
first been strapped into the chair, a boy named Orville sneaked up behind him and held his nose. When the huge boy had gasped for air, Orville poured caustic drain cleaner down his throat. By the time the guards came the next morning with his medication and saw the chemical burns on his lips and his chin, the acid had destroyed most of his voice box
.

When Orville passed by again, to laugh at the gobs of slapped-on salve intermixed with the drool, the huge boy had popped the first set of straps in a futile attempt to get to him
.

The guards had come back with heavier straps—and more medication. Classification had determined that his “unprovoked attack” on Orville proved him to be as dangerous as others claimed. So the thirteen-year-old had been transferred to maximum security. The arms of the starfish had taken him in—he would not be disgorged until old enough for adult prison
.

In Sterling’s processing room, they helped him to stand on the scales
.

Two ninety-five. And still growing
.

“We call him Rhino,” the guard who had driven the transfer van sneered, playing to his audience. “He gets six hundred milligrams of Thorazine three times a day—enough for a rhino. You figure the dosage by body weight, just like in the zoo.”

When a heavy steel door closed somewhere behind him, Rhino tried to say, “I never did a crime.” But his words came out as a slurred squeak
.

“See?” the guard said. “It trumpets. Just like the rhinos on those nature shows.”

Everyone laughed at that. Everybody except for one of the boys. That boy just looked at the monster, his face impassive, unamused
.

“What are the marks on his arms?” Cain asked. “Some kind of drug reaction?”

“The boys where he came from,” the guard explained. “They liked to see if they could get a rise out of him. It got to be kind of a thing—everybody did it.”

Cain stepped closely enough to see the fresh cigarette burns and the scars from the old ones
.

“What for? To use him as an ashtray?”

“The guy is a retard.” The guard laughed it off. “He got no idea what planet he’s on. He don’t feel pain. Hell, he don’t feel nothing.”

Rhino moved his head from side to side. Even from the depths of the Thorazine lake, he struggled to register a protest. In the pre-violence stare-downs that characterized Sterling’s processing room, his motion was barely discernible
.

But Cain saw it
.

Later on, he returned to where Rhino was strapped down. He went back again and again, seeming to come and go without regard to the time of day. And soon the monster realized something was different—for the first time he could remember, the other boys left him alone
.

“I have a plan,” Cain told him one winter afternoon, “but you have to play along for it to work.”

Late that night, he loosened Rhino’s straps, then sat on the floor next to the wheelchair. He knew the monster couldn’t speak, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t hear. And if the drugged boy was surprised at a prisoner roaming free, he gave no sign
.

Some nights Cain read to him, usually from a book of poetry he’d traded for. In an environment where a porno paperback cost a minimum of three cartons to “rent,” the poetry was a one-pack purchase
.