What Is Time to a Pig?, page 20
“That . . . they fried you early on. They horsed you. That’s what they call it. They got too rough, too erotic with you early in the process. They didn’t realize how sensitive your feelings for your wife were, that she was the only source of eroticism in your life. They horsed you, and it damaged your psyche for questioning. That’s why it ruined your sex dreams.”
“Now you want to humiliate me in front of the world?” Gloomy was looking at the cameras, which were still pointing at him.
“No, what I want is to let you know that your wife is a lucky woman and when you go to sue the federal government for the harm they did to you, I will happily testify for your lawyers.” She slid a card across the table to him. “That has my real name and a good telephone number on it, and if you give it to any other shit bird I will have you killed . . . but, really, we’ve got to get moving.”
Everyone stood up and started walking toward an open door that led to a helicopter.
“Am I awake now? Is this . . . is this real?” Gloomy asked Lester as they stopped into the outer office.
The well-dressed Lakota man leaned over and held on to Gloomy’s elbow and spoke slowly and clearly, “Yes, the first thing you should know is this is not a dream. There is a bomb. It may or may not be about to explode. You told them something important.”
“What in the heck did I tell them?”
“You told them that Mr. Wild Horses is the only one left who knows where that warhead is stashed. You found the baby sunk in the lake. But the mother had fallen with it and had sunk deeper into the muck. You told Ishmael, and he rounded up the baby, and Wild Horses found the mother probably when he was mucking around getting the baby out. You told them all this even though you didn’t know there were two warheads in that lake. You told them that Wild Horses got ahold of a bigger bomb and was cutting Itchy out of the plan completely. Itchy thought the little bomb was the whole deal. The baby was already on the boat, but Wild Horses’ guys were carrying the mother near the beach when you were coming to the boat. That’s what you saw. Itchy figured that out and that’s why Itchy wanted to destroy the boat. He wanted to undo the plan. He had been betrayed by the professor.”
He helped Gloomy out of his vest, then handed him a cup of coffee to help wake him up. “Can I ask you something, Gloom?”
“I guess.”
“Why didn’t you ever talk about the incident with law enforcement?”
“I killed my sister.” He looked around the darkened room with the computer monitors and the puddles of water at his feet. “It made me too sad.”
The tall man smiled and shook his head. “Fair enough. Clive is not doing well, by the way. That part is true. I really am alive and I really am Lester. Your family calls me L.P., like the records.”
“Nice to meet you,” Gloomy said. “I’m glad you are not dead.” They started walking toward the clattering machine.
“Me too. Like to stay that way.”
“You friends with my folks really?”
“Yeah.” Lester smiled at him.
“Just for work . . . to spy on them?”
“Naw, kid . . . well, a little, you know, but they good people, solid with the Spirit . . . You know that.” Lester Plays with His Face rubbed Gloomy Knob’s back and made sure he ducked his head to get into the helicopter.
Soon the chopper lifted up above them and above the hills of the sheltering islands. They could see the glow of the prison lights floating out on the calm water and up into the air surrounding the island, as if the structures themselves were melting into the rocks and evaporating away. There were two other helicopters clearing away from the landing pad as their chopper approached. Gloomy was not wearing a headset, but he could tell the pilot was arguing with someone. The pilot misjudged his landing and bounced hard onto the deck. Ropes were thrown and orders given. No one, not even the civilians or the officers, could stand and move until the ship was secure and the bell had sounded. Finally Gloomy was led away toward the compound, where he would be strip-searched once again.
Billie Shears turned him around. “I’m going to stay here on the island. I will be available. You can talk to me anytime. Just think about it, Gloomy. I don’t have time to work on you anymore. I have to go all in with Wild Horses, you understand?”
“Yes,” Gloomy said, and he turned and walked toward the chain-link tunnel topped with concertina wire. “Can I talk with my cousin? Maybe he will tell me something.”
“Well . . . there are things about your cousin . . . Let’s get checked in. Things are shitty in here right now. People are getting rambunctious about the prospect of a bomb going off,” said Shears.
The search was not as rough as it could have been. The guards were polite and welcoming to Gloomy. An escape was a kind of validation for all the regulatory bullshit the guards had to put up with, so they felt a sort of exhilaration when they processed Gloomy back in. The first thing they did was hand him his old tags.
“We found these near the blast site. At first we thought you were dead, but that lasted only about twenty minutes or so. Then word came down from higher up in security that you were ‘signed’ out by security, whatever that means. So we stopped looking for you. You being dead was all part of some spook scene to find something, I guess.” Norm, the really fat guard who was filling out some form on a clipboard, was speaking with the weary cynicism typical of an overworked DOC employee. He didn’t really give a shit either way if Gloomy was alive or dead.
“Excuse me, sir. How’s the fella who injured his arm and shoulder so badly in the explosion?” Gloomy asked.
“Lot of guys like that.” He shook his head and looked mildly bemused at the notion. “There was a guy dressed like a guard who wasn’t a guard got his shoulder mangled. He died. He was in on it.”
Gloomy shook his head and kept silent.
“Now, Mr. McCahon,” Norm said, looking at his clipboard, “Mr. McCahon, we’ve got you on a medical hold for at least the next thirty-six hours.”
“Not punitive seg?”
Norm looked down at the clipboard again with the broad, exaggerated expression of a vaudeville straight man. “Why nooooo, Mr. McCahon. It appears they’ve got something else planned for you altogether.”
When Norm laughed, Gloomy felt sick to his stomach.
He changed into the new suit and was hooked up again, but this time the cuffs were loosely done in front.
“Follow the yellow brick road,” Norm said, and, smiling again, pointed toward the door. Gloomy walked up to it, and it slid soundlessly open. He walked into a segmented hallway. The walls were white with a green stripe and the floors were a light yellow. Gloomy had never been in this section of Stevens before. There were doors on each side and in front of him. Every twenty feet he would come to a dead end, and one of the doors would slide open. He went right and then left and two more rights. It was a mechanically operated maze that could lead prisoners to any part of the prison without being escorted. Sometimes he could hear radios buzzing or heavy footsteps on the catwalks above him. The guards in Heaven were following his progress.
Finally he came to a door that wouldn’t open. Gloomy waited. It may have been five minutes; it could have been a half hour. But he stood and waited without saying a word. The door behind him closed and he found himself standing in a cubicle without noticeable doors or windows. Finally the metal partition to his right slid open and he was on the edge of another cubicle.
It was a room with a large mirror on the right-hand wall and a wooden chair at the far end. Handcuffed to the chair was Norma, the barmaid who had smuggled him out of prison. Her nose appeared to be broken and blood was spattered down her shirt and pants. Her eyes were swollen shut and her breathing was shallow. At her feet was Rocket’s dead body. Blood flowed out onto the floor toward Gloomy’s feet and it puddled under the chair Norma was chained to.
The sight of this bloody woman certainly caught Gloomy’s attention. Her face was battered. She was breathing unevenly and uttered slight, choking whines with each breath. But what alarmed Gloomy McCahon even more was that standing behind her now was not only Ali Wild Horses, but Lester Plays with His Face.
Through the ceiling, a deep rumble started building on the catwalks. People were running. Dozens of correctional officers’ shoes were hitting the walkways like rattling metallic thunder.
“The local cops gave us over to someone with connections here. They are all working for the Iranians. I fucking swear. They brought us here. They beat us. They killed Rocket.” Norma was crying. She felt as if her ribs might be separated.
Rocket had run into the woods when the police stopped their van back at housing. The cops caught her after three steps and had smashed her face against the pavement. They wrestled Rocket to the ground in the woods and threw them both on a transport boat out to Stevens. They had been thrown into a segregation unit. All the guards had been antsy and seemed distracted by some disturbance in the prison. Everyone was thinking about the prospect of a thermonuclear explosion. All the radios seemed to be chattering at once, and people were running around above her. At one point a group of men she assumed were convicts opened the door screaming and started beating and kicking her. She had heard something spraying and Rocket screaming, then choking until he was quiet. She couldn’t see through her swollen eyes, but her head remained stuffed with noise. She had tried to stretch her eyes open. She wanted to look up to where the footsteps banged on metal but she couldn’t. She sat there trying to summon her “Dorothy feeling.” She wanted nothing in the world so much as to rise up out of herself and float like a sooty spark through the ceiling. There is no place like home. There is no place like home.
“I didn’t say a thing to them, Gloomy. I told them nothing. You have to believe me.”
Lester stepped behind her. “Calm down, now. Nothing bad is going to happen here.”
“Something bad is already happening,” Norma snuffled through her tears.
Now Gloomy could hear men barking orders and keys jingling on great rings, radios hissing and the clatter of weapons slapping against utility belts.
“Why are you here?” Gloomy asked. His eyebrows were arched and his voice had the pathetic, hopeless tone of a lost little boy.
“Why the hell am I here? Why in the hell do you think I’m here?” Norma screamed. She was weeping openly now. By the time her tears dripped off the tip of her chin, they stained her gray wool pants faintly red. “Iranians bought off some cops and some of these guards. I don’t know . . . why . . . A man promised our group two hundred thousand dollars to break you out of jail,” she wheezed, “half when we agreed, half when we succeeded.”
“Those were Iranian agents. The same people who buried Gloomy’s mother. They wanted him to take them to the bomb. We let you do that, hon.” Lester was trying to calm her down.
“Come on!” Norma wept. “I really need to wipe my nose.”
“What is going on now?” Gloomy yelled.
“It’s complicated,” Lester said, “but trust me. I’m here to help you,” he added, a little falsely.
“We need protection, Lester.” Gloomy reached out his hands toward his friend. Lester backed away. Norma kept swinging her head around.
Gloomy started flailing his arms around and scratching his head and his arms.
“Am I in the tank again? Please tell me. Am I in the tank again?”
“What the hell are you talking about? They’re all trying to kill us!” Norma screamed at Gloomy.
“Hush . . .” Lester said. The partition behind him opened, and he stepped out of the room just before it slid closed again with a hydraulic shudder before Gloomy had time to even think about trying to get out. Muffled voices cried out. It was the slurred barking of doglike men. Hundreds of men calling out behind concrete. Gloomy heard the hissing of hydraulics, then the boom of a gas canister.
“They’ve killed Rocket!” Norma screamed, then she jerked her head toward the sound of the closing door. “Who’s that? Who’s that? I heard someone.”
“It’s just a guy,” Gloomy said absently. He leaned against the partition and slid down the wall to sit on the floor.
“Mr. McCahon,” Norma said, “don’t leave me here. Please don’t . . .” Her voice was heavy with tears.
Gloomy looked at the plate mirror on the wall to his left.
“We won’t be here that long,” he said toward the mirror.
The rumble above them in Heaven grew. Hundreds of leather boots banged on the metal catwalk. Then they heard the crack of rifle shots.
“What’s that? Christ almighty, what’s that now?” Norma was screaming. The noises above the room burned into her skull.
“It’s going off,” Gloomy said with as much calm as he could muster. Then the riot became a slurry of darkness and noise.
Chapter Ten
Silver red flecks swirled up through his field of vision, and he tasted dead leaves and an autumn fire in his mouth. He felt as if he could push his tongue up through the roof of his mouth into the gray mud of his brain. Sparks began to jitter up his fingers with each breath. He couldn’t move; he could hardly remember ever having moved. It was as if his body were a blob of wet clay being lifted slowly up out of a river. But also . . . he was pissed off. He was tired of being someone else’s object to be shaped.
He was in Medical Ward 11. This was the holding clinic for the “meat pumps.” There were three hundred beds in one open ward. All of them held men hooked to machines. There had been court cases that forbade the “mercy killings” of prisoners. There were too many men who wanted to be killed before they had suffered enough. As a result, a life sentence meant a life sentence and the higher courts had upheld the proposition that inmates were entitled to the best of Western pharmacological treatment and cheap nutritional liquid supplements to keep them alive in whatever condition for as long as possible. Some said it was a waste, but no one could find an acceptable way out of the dilemma. The courts hadn’t given the doctors the authority to kill the aged inmates and no one wanted to give the inmates themselves the option to escape punishment by fleeing into the arms of death. So they ended up here: hundreds of old men serving out the last of their life sentences in a warehouse filled with cheap—if not so comfortable—life-support systems.
When Gloomy opened his eyes, he could see the rounded pinnacles of his feet under the covers. Beyond were row after row of metal beds beside monitor/respirator pedestals; bed turners to mitigate bedsores. Automated bedpans adapted from dairy machines, and catheters with the latest antibacterial agents. The good thing about limited human intervention was fewer chances of introduced infections. The room echoed with the soft churning and sighing of machines. The monitor lights blinked like fireflies. Gloomy was laid out flat in his bed. He was breathing on his own, though he had oxygen tubes up his nose and an IV needle in his arm. He could see no bags hanging above him, for the ward was plumbed directly to a secure pharmacy on the floor above. The ward was designed to be served from above and secured from below. Gloomy’s head lay directly on the mattress, turned slightly to one side.
He lifted himself up and looked farther down the ward to where the exit sign was lit up like a distant cocktail lounge in the desert. Six beds down from him, he could see Norma, laid out on a bed, her arm hooked to a tube. Her eyes were closed, her face calm and wiped clean of blood.
It took him a moment to realize that he was now sitting up without any effort or pain, and he wondered how this could be, just as he wondered how he could be sitting up so straight without moving his feet at all. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to ask Karen about it.
“Am I dead, Karen?” he said to his wife out loud.
“No, honey, not yet. You’re hurt pretty bad, though.” Karen sat next to him on the bed, and when he saw her, the fire ants and burning leaves turned into a warm elixir coating over the pain.
He couldn’t guess her age. She was not the girl in the mountains with the gear and livestock spilling out on the road. She was not the woman in labor delivering their daughter. Still, she was beautiful: black hair across the shoulders of her western shirt, her tight jeans and silver buckle clearly visible at her narrow waist. Somehow he couldn’t touch her. Gloomy started crying because he wanted, with everything in his body, to reach out and put his hand against her soft cheek but he couldn’t.
“I’m sorry,” he said finally.
She put her fingers through his hair and shook her head slowly. Her face was kind and concerned and there was the slightest hint of mocking in her expression, as if she were scolding him for his childishness.
“I know you are, honey,” she said in the softest voice. “I know you are.”
Gloomy looked around. Old men were walking slowly up and down the rows of beds; the backs of their hospital robes were open and their shoulders stooped. Old white men with thick muscles gone to sagging flesh, tattoos faded and pulled out of shape by loose skin. Old black men with white hair and pomegranate jowls. Indian men with long gray ponytails making slight gestures with their hands at their sides. They wandered up and down the rows of beds, looking idly at the bodies breathing into the machines. Gloomy could not hear their bare feet scuffing the hard tile floor. There was just the ticking of machines, like crickets.
Above him he saw birds, great black birds flying in the dark corners of the ceiling. As they flew, they trailed strings of light through the darkness, thin and filmy like spiderwebs on a clear, damp morning. Gloomy thought he could smell fire. Karen pushed her fingers through his hair. Gloomy turned and saw Billie Shears was also sitting on his bed, and it occurred to him that it was rude for the assistant district attorney to be there interrupting him during a visit from his wife.
“I brought her out to the prison. I’m sorry, Gloomy. I shouldn’t have, but we don’t have all that much time. They haven’t got the riot clamped down. Someone has been tampering with the main security system. It’s a mess out there.”
