PRISON FICTIONS

Summer School

By Joshua Ryan

Part 78

You Will Be Forced to Complete a Battery of Psychological Tests

Between Christmas and New Years there wasn’t a lot more going on.  The DW was giving me more stuff to handle, but Zero was working out OK with the paint job, probably, so that was off my plate.  In a way, though, he just added to the work, because whenever he was in the office, it seemed like I couldn’t get anything done.  I’m exaggerating!  But I did have to sit there while the DW had Zero stand in front of him while he asked him questions about the job, and it seemed like one question would lead to another one and another one, like the DW didn’t want him to leave, except that there was this edgy thing going on between them.

Hard to describe, but it’s like the DW was always trying to make Zero all sharp and focused, like an officer maybe, which with Zero takes a lot of work.  I haven’t seen that many officers who are actually like that either!  But anyhow, that’s as close as I can come to it.  Hard and sharp and precise, instead of loose and sloppy and surly, the way he is.  Also, it was like Zero really wanted to hang out in the office and talk to the DW.  Because actually, he would make up excuses to be there, like, I’ve got this question about the taping on the walls, how do you want that done, and you could see that the DW was happy to see him, although I don’t know why, but he was still trying to get him to figure things out for himself and then report back, “1, 2, 3, this is what I got done.  Any further orders, sir?”  Like I do.  I think I do that.

But it seemed like Zero had these ways of, I don’t know, sort of reminding the DW that he was a person or something.  I mean that he, Zero, was a person, and not just a convict with a bald head and a little brown cap.  Like anybody cared!  I got tired of that right away.  All these small, like, obnoxious things.  Like, he comes in with his shirt sagging out, and the DW tells him, “Stand up straight, convict, and tuck that shirttail in.”  So Zero stands there looking back at him, and slow, real slow, he tucks in his shirt.  Like he’s doing the DW a favor.  Then he says in this low voice you can hardly hear, “Yes sir.  SORRY sir.”  He MUTTERS it.  That’s the kind of crap you’d do with your dad, or some friend of yours that you liked but you thought he was getting too anal or whatever, but it isn’t how a convict talks to the deputy warden.  So the DW looks all disappointed and he says, “Are you being insubordinate, convict?”  And Zero says, “No sir, I don’t think so.  Sir.”  And the DW says, “Remember that in future, convict.”  And the next time Zero shows up, there’s the shirttail out again.

Just stupid like that.  But it was like they were both getting hard on it.  The more the DW pushed him, the more Zero came back with this passive aggressive routine.  Passive aggressive, that’s an idea I got out of one of those books that Navy had.  Just the idea—I didn’t read the rest of it.  So that’s my confession!  But the idea was pretty good, because even when it was just Zero and me, and I was the one that had to boss him, he kept doing this “I don’t hear you” thing, which would drive me crazy if I really cared.  Like I’d say, “Hey Zero, did you round up those ladders yet, or am I supposed to order them?”  No answer-- he just walks away and I’ve gotta chase him.  Then he says “Oh yeah,” with this look like, “Didn’t I answer you once already?”  Which he didn’t.  Or I’d say, “Let me know about that, first thing tomorrow morning.”  “Yeah” he says.  Then the next day, I have to grab him out of the chow line, just to get him to tell me whatever it was.  Totally dissing me.  And I couldn’t get rid of him without snitching to the DW.  Besides, I didn’t want to get rid of him, because who else would I get for his job?  Although I still thought, why doesn’t the DW want to buck him down to the Grunge Gang, if he’s so disappointed with him all the time?

So Zero was a hassle.  But what could you expect, when this little con that’s still wet behind the ears has to boss this old guy that on the Outside would have been giving me a bad grade and threatening to ruin my future and “recommending appropriate discipline” for me if I’d been in his class.  That’s what it would have been like if we hadn’t happened to be convicts in the White Rock Correctional Institution, with numbers one digit apart!  So the only issue was, who’s gonna be the sadist, him or me?  There, I remembered another word from that book.  Sadist.

Another problem was, now that the DW had me and Zero around, it seemed like he didn’t want to have a lot of the other cons coming into his office, except when he was punishing them or something, and after Christmas it was like he didn’t even want Duck in there.  It was like all Duck had to do was running down to the messhall and getting my lunch, or calling an officer to take me back to the block if I got through in the office too late or too early, or maybe telling the DW that the warden wanted to talk to him.  That’s what happens when the warden isn’t on a hunting trip up north, or “studying penal conditions” in Hawaii.  I never get to see the warden, but a couple times I’ve been there when the DW got the call and he had to go out to the warden’s house to talk about something.  They all live in the same row of houses, down the road from the parking lot.  Anyhow, Zero was around, and other people weren’t, and that was making him more important than he should have been.

I wished he’d been out supervising the paint thing all the time, but the way it is when you’re in prison, it takes forever to do anything, so they hadn’t actually started DOING the paint job yet; it was mainly in the planning stage. You’ve got a thousand convicts to do stuff, which means that doing it takes a thousand times too long.  And Zero was one of the thousand, so . . . you’ve got the rest.

Also, the DW had this idea that Zero was the one that was supposed to sweep up around the office and straighten it up or whatever, which I used to do but then there was Zero and he could do it.  And clean up the bathroom.  Since I was his boss, I had to check and make sure he was actually doing it, which he did about five seconds before he thought the DW was gonna come back, so if there was anything wrong he’d be outta there and I’d be the one that had to hear from the DW about how there were pubes next to his toilet and the stuff on the shelves wasn’t dusted, since I wouldn’t have time to check and clean up before he walked in.  I’d have to relay all the criticisms to Zero, and of course he thought they were all coming from me, because I wasn’t gonna hang there like a little puppet and tell him, “The DW thinks you’re slackin off,” because it was my own responsibility to keep him from slacking off.  Which wasn’t easy, because he hated the sight of me.  I knew that now.  But I didn’t want to get into that with him; I just wanted him to clean the fuckin head.

So now it’s New Years Eve, if that makes any sense, and it’s late in the day and the DW’s not in the office and pretty soon it’s gonna be time to form up for chow and I’m hungry and I’m all on edge because is the DW gonna come in and say happy new year or am I just gonna leave the office like I did on any other day when he didn’t get back.  So probably I’d end up missing chow.  Then, naturally, Zero comes in at the last minute and starts cleaning the john, like he couldn’t remember that there was such a thing as shit and piss unless I figured out where he was and went and reminded him about it.

So he goes into the john and slams the door and I hear the noise of swishing and flushing and then some hand washing, and right away he’s outta there and marching toward the outside door, to leave.  That was fast, I thought, so I went into the john and you could still see shit stains on one side of the bowl.

“You missed some stuff,” I called back to him.

He stopped and turned around.  He seemed to be thinking about something.

“So what?” he said.

“Whaddya mean, so what?”

“So what.  That’s all.  So what.”

“Then maybe I should say, So what if you’ve got this sweet little labor detail?  You don’t always need to have it.”

I guess I’m a smartass after all.  But if I’d said the right stuff to the DW, this guy Zero would’ve been back on Grunge and he’d never get off of it.  At least I think so.  Zero thought so, too.  You could almost hear the thought oozing through his brain.  So he stomped back into the john and slammed the door, and I heard a lot of banging around in there and it took quite a while before the door opened again and then he comes out and he says, real sarcastic, “Ready for inspection.  SIR.”

I decided to ignore all that crap and just look at the toilet.  “It’s OK,” I said.

When I turned around I expected to see him calming down or something, but he was standing with the toilet brush in his hand and he was holding it like it was a sword he’d just drawn and he had this mean, angry, red look on his face.  What’s he gonna do, I thought, kill me with a toilet brush?

But he was so mad, if he could’ve killed me right then, I know he would’ve done it.  I wondered if he was gonna beat my ass, or if I was gonna have to beat his ass.  Which for me was like, totally strange, but the thing that kept going through my head was: Yeah, if he tries anything, I think I can take him.  Because he was a lot taller than me, but I was a lot better.

So maybe he knew that too, because he jammed the brush back in its little holder and threw it down next to the toilet and then he marched out of the office.  Which was this huge disappointment, since I knew that on January 2 he’d be back on the job again.  Which could be bad or good, but I was feeling bad that I didn’t whip his ass.  And it didn’t look like the DW was coming back to the office that day, so I decided to just turn out the lights and go down to chow, and it was what Navy would call an anticlimax.

Of course I told the whole thing to him that night.  He gave me the look he used when he wanted to say something but he didn’t want me to know what he meant—not most of it, anyway. 

“What would you do,” he said, “if you found out that you were a lab rat?”

“Found out?”

“Yeah.  You know, that being a lab rat was your . . . station in life.”

“I don’t know.  Kill myself, I guess.”

“Rodents don’t kill themselves.  They don’t know how.”

“Then bite somebody?”

“Maybe a better idea.  Now how would you feel if you found out you were a rat in somebody’s experiment, and the experiment didn’t turn out right?  It turned out that the experiment was . . . maybe it was improperly designed.  That the scientist gave up on it.  But you still had to keep scuttling around in the rat maze.”

“Maybe I’d kill somebody.”

“Not bad, Camel.  But then, you’re not a rat.  And you’re not a mouse.  Zero seems to be a mouse.”

“But what was the experiment?”  I wanted to say, WHOSE experiment?  But I didn’t dare. 

“Let’s say that the designer thought he was looking for one kind of result, and when he got it he was disappointed.  He should have been looking for some other result.  Or some other experiment.”

I was feeling very clever, so I said, “Has he found it?”

He gave me his trademark cynical expression.  “I think so.  We’ll see.”

All right, I’ve told you all kinds of things about my dick already, so you know what I’m gonna say right now.  My dick was standing up like a pole.  My dick was raging.  My dick was yelling, Grab me!  For God’s sake grab me!

But the sound must have been muffled by those thick new browns I was wearing, because nobody grabbed it but me, up in my bunk that night.   And that was later.  At the moment, I was so clever that all I could think of to say was “oh.”

“But as far as he goes,” Navy said, “meaning that useless con that you call Zero, don’t turn your back on him.  I don’t want to have to avenge you.”

“Yes sir,” I said.  And giggled.  I was still picturing Zero coming after me with that toilet brush.

“I don’t want you laughing about that,” he said.  When his face got dark like that, you’d think he was joining my own family, lol!  “Let me show you something.  Stand up.”

So I stood up and he grabbed me by the neck and I thought, this is it, we’re having sex!  But the next thing he said was, “I’ll show you how to kill him.”  And for the next half hour he made me practice all these ways to kill.  With my bare hands.  He’d killed Dix with a club, but he’d obviously been learning a lot in prison.  And now he was teaching it to me.  Wow!  How great was that?

It was about one second after we finished when this strange noise started in the block.  It was like these weird noises you hear when you’re in your room at home and you’re gaming or something, and suddenly you hear a noise like the neighbors are all going crazy all at once, and somebody sets off a firecracker and honks a stupid horn, and way down the block you hear a lot of extra sound that’s coming from the party you didn’t get invited to, so then you know it’s New Years—big deal, the minute hand got to twelve.  In the cellblock, it started with some officer down on the pavement yelping Happy New Year to some other officer, and after that it spread up and down the tiers and you heard the cons banging anything they had with metal in it onto the bars, but they weren’t shouting Happy New Year, they were yelling stuff like “FUCK YOU! IT’S FUCKIN NEW YEARS!” or “FUCK YOU BITCHES!” or “ANOTHER YEAR IN THIS FUCKIN BITCH!” 

Then I guess there wasn’t anything else to shout, so the noise died down and Navy and I hit the racks.  He’d got pretty quiet, and I was getting anxious to jerk.

Next day—New Years, of course--was another one of those special holiday dinners in the messhall, except that this time it turned out to be the same chow we had every other day, and because it was such a special occasion they only gave us one meal.  But that was OK--I got to spend the whole day with Navy and not have to leave the cell again.  Although I was sort of nervous because I thought maybe the DW’s gonna call me in, like he did on Christmas day.  I was worried about how maybe that would happen, and then I was disappointed when it didn’t!  I’m weird.  But finally I thought, all right, I’ll have another one of those pills.

So Navy’s laying on his bunk, buried in some book, and he doesn’t look up but he can still tell that I’m fishing out the pills and taking one, so he pulls his legs back and gives me room on the bunk and I sit down with his feet against my leg, which is so cool!  I was looking at the windows going black after the sunset, and that’s sort of fun, especially under the circumstances, and it didn’t take long for that drift to start, for what happens in your mind when everything’s kind of folding up and turning inside out, because of the drug you took, and it was great because I was thinking here I am, locked inside with Navy, and you can’t get more Inside than that. 

So I thought I’d go over all the things that had happened during the last year, and there were so many, the list kept getting longer and longer and I’d forget and have to start again, which was fine, because it was all so amazing.  So, during the past year . . .  I got rid of high school.  I got rid of going to college.  I got rid of panicking every minute about how I had to get good grades and get a good major and get a good job.  I got rid of panicking about money.  I got rid of my parents!  I got rid of my brother!  I got rid of Vinland!  I got rid of my name!  I got a number instead of my name, and I got it stamped and tattooed all over me and my clothes.  I got rid of my puny, ugly, ridiculous, stupid little body.  I got a body that I liked.  Sort of.  Actually, a lot.  I got a home for the rest of my life.  I got free housing, free food, free healthcare, and free uniforms, forever!  I got total security.  I got to be punished like a fucking outlaw gangster big fuckin man.  I got a job that made me a fuckin prison boss (in a way).  I got a cell to live in with the most amazing man in the world.  I learned how to be a criminal.  I learned how to kill!  I even learned how to wear an officer’s uniform!

I mean, picture me a year ago.   Little Ali Ahmad, shuffling along the sidewalk in quaint old Vinland (lol!), trying to walk as slow as possible so he’d have five more minutes before he got home and he had to listen to his father talking about “What are you doing Ali, why aren’t you studying?  You want the Christians to get ahead of you?”  Or listening to Hussein talking about something, probably himself, but he’s actually saying, “You’re just a little faggot, aren’t you?  My brother, the faggot.”  Then suppose you told little Ali that in just a few short months that little FAGGOT would be taking a free ride to a brand new home in the TOUGHEST place in the state, which means being locked up in a steel cell in a stack of steel cells that were walled up inside the White Rock Correctional Institution, which he’d never even heard of before, and neither had Hussein, and in just a few months he’d have all those AMAZING things that I just put on the list. . . .  What would little Ali say?  He wouldn’t just say you were crazy; he’d think you were from Mars.  A man from Mars.  He’d run away from you.  But those are all the great things that happened.  And remembering that officer’s uniform . . . what could happen NEXT year?

I looked over at Navy and it seemed like he knew how happy I was, even though he wasn’t looking at me, he was just saying, “Want some chocolates?”  So yeah!  I love chocolates!  So he reached under the bunk and he dragged out this box full of the brownest, smoothest, most delicious chocolates I could ever have dreamed about, which I guess were just the kind of chocolates he’d shared with me before, but they’re lots better on New Years Day when you’re sharing a bunk with the most beautiful man alive.  And even if he doesn’t reach over and grab your balls and pull your dick out of your pants, you know that in prison, there’s no other place for you to go, because neither of you is going anyplace else.  So it was perfect.  It was all perfect right then.   

Part 79

Auld Lang Syne

This is Zero.  That’s still my name in here.  It looks like I’ll be wearing it for a long, long time.   Right now, you can picture me lying on my bunk, listening to my cellie standing at the bars, screaming, “Happy New Year, bitches!”  I know that at times like this you’re supposed to think back sentimentally to your last New Years.  So I will.

A year ago I was a thin, shy little guy with a sweet little haircut.  I had a job.  I had “colleagues.”  People called me Mr. Schuyler.  I had a car.  I had a home with my own address, and a computer full of pretty guys to jerk off about.

But I was frustrated.  I was awkward.  I needed love.  So I spent New Years Eve getting wasted in a bar, then limping home at 20 minutes after midnight because I’d already given up on the year.  I walked past the lights and the drunken faggot shouts from inside the bars, trying not to look through the windows to see what I was missing.  I was Grendel, roaming the moors, looking at the real people packed into the party in the big warm house.  So I decided to take a brief vacation. . . .

That was then.  This is now.  I’m not Mr. Schuyler anymore.  I’m 45890, a hard bald ugly convict with thick hard arms and a bad fucking attitude.  I wear brown shapeless clothes with a number on my butt, my back, my leg, my pec.  I’ve got the same number tattooed on my body--twice, so I can’t get lost.  I spend my time painting cellblocks and cleaning my keeper’s toilet.  I’m not on the outside, feeling lonely.  I’m locked in a cage the size of a closet, and there’s another convict locked in with me, and the cage is locked in a stack of cages, all loaded with convicts dressed in the same brown numbered suits.

So I’ve come a long way.  With Nick’s help.  Nick, Navy . . .   I used to want to kill him, and I still do, but I no longer want to fuck him first.  Four cells down from me, he’s in his cage, enjoying domestic bliss, counting his money and fucking his little Arab cunt.  I can’t even get hard over that.  Now when I need something to jerk about, it’s the fuckin deputy warden.  I thought when I got my new labor detail, my life might change.  And it did.  Instead of being stuck on Nick, I’m stuck on the DW.   The DW, my keeper.  The man who can throw me in the Hole, just because he feels like it.  The man who can cuff me up and paddle my ass like a kid.  The Man.

So all these cons are yelling through the bars, and I’m thinking, at least now I’ve got something interesting to jerk about.  The DW.  The Man.  My Keeper.  When I jerk, I like thinking: Is he inside the bars or outside?  I like thinking about switching him around.  How do I want him—inside, or outside?  My bitch, or bitchin me out?  Yeah, I’ve come a long way since last New Years Eve.  Even my fuckin fantasies have changed.

Part 80

Tracks in the Snow

This is Camel, the former Ali.  The formerly happy convict.

Why “formerly”?  Because it’s two months later, and a lot has been happening, and now I’m confused again.  Confused and worried.  All right, worse than worried.

So I’ll calm down and go back to the beginning.

It’s January 2, and Navy and me are walking out of the mess hall feeling all warm and great inside because of the greasy coffee and the mush and the turkey sausage (one per customer), lol! and we get out to the yard for form up, and it had been snowing that night, so everything was white white white and cold cold cold, and we were all just lines of brown bugs scuttling across the snow heading for some kind of shelter and leaving big black bootprints behind.  So how great was that!  I’d wondered what White Rock was gonna look like when the real winter hit.

After that there was form up, and I left for the office and Navy left for his big important labor detail in the laundry, which as you know was actually his office where he made his deals, a lot of them anyway.  When I turned I could see him, way on the other side of the yard, going along with the other laundry boys, and also the steam coming out of the laundry windows, waiting to welcome them into their den. 

I’m blushing when I write this, but my heart was pounding because it was . . . perfect.  Almost perfect.  Great, anyhow.  It seemed like I’d been climbing up and up and up, and now I was at the, what’s the word . . . plateau.  Not the peak, because . . . you know why.

I mean, everything is great with Navy and me.  We wake up; I make the bunks; I clean the toilet for him (and me, but he’s the one in charge); I get into my uniform and I watch him getting into his.  Which is something that, if I ever knew about anything like that when I was back in Vinland, needing something to make me jerk . . . .  I mean, it’s about a thousand times better than the locker room at Vinland High!  Even with Justin Adamski in the picture.

OK, I lost the track a little bit there.  After that, we go to chow.  Then we go to our labor details.  Then at night, we get locked in together, two men—I guess I’m a man now!—in a space the size of a closet, like the closet at home that got me into so much trouble, back in Hussein’s time.  It goes on like that, every day: totally secure, totally great.  But one thing is still missing, and you know what it is.

Yeah, Navy is locked in with me, and in the beginning he even paid to be locked in with me.  He PAID to get me.   Maybe he didn’t know what he was getting into at the time, but he did that!   But no sex.  Not even close.  I guess he never wants to have the same thing happen with me that happened with Dix.  That’s my explanation.  I don’t want that to happen either.  The killing part, I mean!  I just want the other part.  Unless . . .   Let’s face it, I can’t stand to think about how it would be if he, like, just doesn’t want me.  But I keep thinking that can’t be true.  I don’t mean because I’m so great, because I know that I’m not, although I’m lots better than I used to be. . . .  OK, let’s start over again.  You don’t say the things that Navy says to me, to just some random con you bought off the fish line cuz you wanted some dude to clean your toilet.

So OK.  I want to go back to talking about the good things.

One thing I love about prison, besides being locked in with Navy, is also, yeah, you guessed it, working for the DW.  Because who would ever think I could get to be the, like, second in command in a fuckin PRISON!  Not really, of course; I’m not really that important, but it seems like I’ve been banging away on more and more stuff for him.  I mean, a message comes in about some plumbing problem, and he forwards it to me with “handle this” in the subject line.  So I get ahold of the ghost that’s supposed to run the plumbing gang and I get something to happen.  I’m finding out how to do it without getting snuffed.  Like I told you, when those ghosts finally got some discipline smacked onto their butts, that was a huge heads up, even if they didn’t figure out it was me that got it for them.

So all that’s good.  But that morning, January 2, when I walk into the office, the DW isn’t there.  OK, not unusual.  He’s got things to do.  But he isn’t there all day.  So I do my work, and, OK, play a few games with the computer and fuck around for a while, but now it’s late afternoon, and he’s still not around.  So I head out at the end of the day and form up and eat my chow with Navy and then back to the cell . . . and the same thing happens the next day!  That makes three days straight, counting New Years, when he never called me in.

So I’m thinking maybe I should call up the DW’s house and talk to his pissy gay houseboy, but naturally I didn’t want to do that, and when I was almost ready to, Captain Blair walks in and says that the DW is “not feeling well,” so “in his absence” the captain is there to sign anything that needs to be signed, etc.  OK, no problem.  Actually, about a month ago—I’m skipping around some—Captain Blair got promoted and now he’s Major Blair, which is a big deal because if anything ever happens to the DW, it’s the Major that is like the DW of the DW, so he would probably just take over.  You gotta pay attention to this stuff when you’re serving life in prison like me.  Lol!

So like I said, he’s now Major Blair, which is totally cool.  First, because I like to look at him.  Second, because I guess he’s sort of my discovery, instead of Navy’s.  Not that it means anything, but Navy always sort of underestimated him.  I think I said that before.  So I was the one that had faith!

Then third, it’s because the major pays attention to me.  Not in that way.  Actually, I think he’s got a boyfriend.  For one thing, he’s gone every other weekend, down to Ann Arbor.  Everybody knows that.  It’s somebody that works for the college, I guess.  I was in the office one time when the DW said to him, “Going to Ann Arbor on Friday?”  And the major said, “No, he’s gonna meet me up at Marquette.”  Then he stopped talking, like he’d said something he didn’t mean to say, and he sort of muttered, “Cross country skiing.”  So you get the whole picture, from that.

But back to how he pays attention to me.  It’s just that when he’s in the office and the DW and him are going over something, he has this way of looking over at me, and if I look like it’s a good idea, he says, “That sounds like it will work, sir,” and if I just sit there or look down, he says, “Maybe we should talk a bit more about this, sir.”  Not always, but a lot.  So I figure we know each other pretty well.  And now he’s the third in command of the whole place.

Anyway, when I get back to the cell I talk to Navy about how the DW isn’t around, and he says, “I see it’s happening again.”

He said it real flat, so I couldn’t tell what he meant.  I mean, whether it was supposed to be good or bad.  From our standpoint.

“From time to time he goes down to Chicago,” he added.  “Near there.  In his new car.”

“He got a new car?”

“Yeah.  Pretty new.  He bought it right after they bused you in.  No connection, I guess.”  I saw the cynical smile starting to come. “It’s a TCT.”

He looked totally cynical now, so I waited to hear the rest of it.  But he stopped with that.  I didn’t ask any more questions, because I didn’t want to hear anything bad about the DW.  But I probably looked all worried, because then Navy said, “He’s under pressure.  He needs a release.” 

Which was worse!  I mean, a deputy warden that needs a release.

But that was the end of the conversation.

Then on January 5, the DW walks into the office, same as always, like he just got back from taking a piss or something, and he drops a drive on my desk and he says: “Annual Financial Summary, convict.  Work up the figures.”

“Sir?”

“Usually have an accountant do it, but why should we pay?  It’s only two pages.  Goes on the web someplace.  Data’s in there.  And the past few summaries.  Just do it that way.  What’s the matter?  You feeling all right?”

This was a good time for me to say, “I guess I’m a little bit under the weather, sir.”  And he’d know what I meant.  He’d get the accountant again.  But I didn’t.  It wasn’t the summary I was worried about.  Sure, I could do it.  Whatever.  We’d got to the point where it was like I had everything except the gray suit.

“No problem, sir.  When do you want it?”

So that was that. I plugged in the drive, and whoa!  There were 30,000 files in there.  Of course.  But it wasn’t a test.  At least, I didn’t think it was.  He knew I could find my way in there.  So that’s what I did.   And it was interesting, you know, dealing with all that stuff.  You learn a lot.  And there wasn’t any deadline.  Not really.  All he said was, “Whenever.”  But by the time I got through with it, what I was looking at. . . .

It wasn’t like that beautiful snow in the yard, where you know that it’s covering up some ugly old concrete, but you don’t really care.  It’s still pretty.  It actually is pretty.  But no.  It was like the snow on the next day and the next day, when it’s all crisscrossed with footprints and it’s all turning to slush.

I told you I’m confused right now.  But I’m thinking about slush, and that naturally gets me to thinking about Zero, who’s as close as you can come to slush, in my humble opinion.   And he’s part of this whole picture. 

You’re probably sick of him by now, so I won’t try to give you all the details.  Summary:  Right about then, Zero decided that he wouldn’t even speak to me.  No reason.  Just stopped.  I tell him to do something, he shuffles around and does it.  Or he doesn’t.  No explanation.  If he doesn’t, I remind him.  By the third reminder, it gets done.  Right.  But he doesn’t TALK to me.  He doesn’t TELL me it got done.  I have to go and check on it.  And he doesn’t even ANSWER me!!!  Except, of course, when the DW’s in the office.  Or the major.  He’ll talk to me then, so it looks like he’s “adjusting” to his “status as a convict” or something like that, but he won’t say ANYTHING to me outside of that, and that’s because he knows that I won’t snitch on him for pulling all that crap.  Because I’m still a convict.  And because he knows I’ll take all the responsibility for whatever happens.  He figured that out, and he takes it as far as it will go.

So this is a real piece of shit!  But the worst thing happened a couple weeks ago, when the painters finally got to our part of the tier and Navy and I had to clear out of our cell.  What the cons are supposed to do is take all their stuff—their uniforms and their wash cloths and their bedding and their “personal items” they’ve got under their bunks or whatever—and they’re supposed to stow them on the walkway, down at the end near the stairs.  Then their cell can get painted.

But of course, there’s no way Navy and I are gonna stow our stuff—I mean Navy’s stuff—out on some walkway with a bunch of cons walking around, “painting.”  So Navy got a pass from his labor detail, which wasn’t exactly hard, and I came down from the DW’s office, which wasn’t hard to do either, and we both stood around, just watching our stuff and chatting off and on and watching the so-called painting.  I mean, you have no idea how SLOW a gang of convicts can be!  It made me nervous, not having anything to do, just hanging out and having all the other cons sort of walking around me and looking at me.  But that was just me being a jerk, because they all knew who we were and they all nodded or said whazzup or shot the shit or whatever and painted our cell.  Also the cells on this side and that side of it.  They were going three or four at once.  I thought they could do ten at once, if Zero was anything like knowing his job, but OK, the painting happened. 

And now we’re almost to chow time and the painters are finishing their shit and Navy and me are sort of getting ready to put our own shit back in the cage after spending all that time watching the paint dry, and here comes Zero—sort of late, eh? like MAYBE he planned it that way—and he looks at Navy sitting on the rail that goes along the edge of the walkway, which by the way I would never sit on, no matter what! because it’s 40 feet down to the nearest landing place—and Navy says “Zup, Zero?” and Zero says, “What the FUCK do you mean hanging out here?  You’re causing delay, DUDE!” 

Which was such an obvious fuckin fake!  I mean, Zero wouldn’t say “dude” to anybody, anytime but then.  It’s beneath him or something.  And OK, I didn’t used to say it myself.  But now he’s standing there like, actually in Navy’s face, getting all red and creepy about this horrible thing that Navy is doing, sittin on the rail, watchin our stuff, and Navy’s just smiling back at him, laughing in his face.

I’m not kidding you, I was having a fuckin heart attack right there.  I mean, one wrong move and in less than a second you’ve got somebody going head first over the rail.  I said “somebody” because you shouldn’t believe that a guy like Zero would be able to knock Navy over the side without going over himself.  And probably by himself.  Like he always is. 

So now they’re literally face to face for like, half an hour!  Cuz that’s what it seemed like to me.  OK, it was probably more like 30 seconds than 30 minutes, but that’s a long long time at a point like that.  With Zero getting madder and madder and Navy just relaxing there on his steel rail, just smiling in his face.  If I was Zero, I think I would have pushed him over, just for smiling like that!  But it’s lucky for everybody, I’m not him.

Somebody had to give up, and it was Zero.  Like you guessed.  He dropped his eyes and walked off down the tier, and he didn’t even yell anything back.  It was like he was going off to kill himself or something.  Which would be fine with me, only he didn’t.

I guess the only person who would have felt bad about that was the deputy warden.   So now we get back to him.

I don’t know how, but the DW kept on having these serious talks with my friend Zero.  Not talks exactly, but lots of stuff about shaping up and standing up like a man, and I kept thinking, if he isn’t shaping up, for fuck’s sake send him back to his cell.  But he didn’t.  It was like he wanted something out of him.  Like he wanted something to happen, but neither of them knew what it was supposed to be.  It wasn’t just tucking his shirt in!  I know what you’re thinking, but I don’t want to think it’s that!  Anyway, I didn’t feel good about whatever it was that was building up there.  I didn’t like thinking about how I’d wake up some morning and walk out on the tier and the next thing I knew I’d be hitting the concrete 40 feet down.  It was beginning to get to me, not being able to turn my back on some guy because he might sneak up on me and fuckin KILL me.

So all right.  But meanwhile, I’m trying to deal with the DW, which is the main reason why everything seems to be getting so weird.   He kept coming into the office like usual, most of January, but by the time we got into February and the really big snows, it seemed like he was spending most of his time at his house—his “residence,” like the officers say.  It’s not like the snow was keeping him away.  The reason he’s out there all the time is that he’s “working on the remodel.”

Did I mention that before?  All these top officers have houses on Officers Row.  Now that Captain Blair is Major Blair, he’s entitled to a better one.  He just moved in last week.  But the DW’s place was supposed to need this big remodel, so he’s made me order a whole new kitchen and a whole new bathroom and a bunch of new bedroom furniture and on and on, and this whole thing down in the basement where there’s supposed to be a steel cell for the houseboy with its own toilet and sink, just like at White Rock.  Like the houseboy has to stay overnight, which he doesn’t.  Or like there has to be all those other things.

So some of it doesn’t make sense, which is a sign that there’s trouble in there someplace.  But OK, I ordered all the stuff, including the cell—and you’d be amazed to know how many people manufacture prison stuff like that, only you’ve gotta watch the prices.  I even started getting Major Blair involved, because I needed him to fix up some more work gangs to install all the stuff.  I guess I could’ve just gone out and fixed them up myself, but I wanted to get him in on it because . . .  Just because I wondered whether it was right.  I mean, how were we paying for it?  There were some of these things I just thought I didn’t want to be responsible for.

Anyhow, it was happening.  But it kept gnawing on me, where was the money coming from?  I felt so stupid, worrying about that, I didn’t even tell Navy about it.  Actually . . . I’m in here for life, why should I care?  Not to mention all these big illegals I’ve done myself!  After I got locked up and then got into the DW’s office.  I told you all that.  So what if the DW’s done some too?  But since I was doing all that financial shit, I wanted to know.  I was curious.  It was like that Greek king that had to know about everything--the one that ended up gouging out his own eyes.  Which I hope doesn’t happen to me!

Anyhow, a couple weeks ago I finished the Summary, which was just a list of numbers that didn’t really mean anything, you could put anything in there and I guess people would believe it.  If anybody ever read it.  Which I doubted.  I mean, who reads stuff like that?  It’s supposed to be in some thing that goes on the web in June or whenever.  With a copy to the DOC-HQ, which is what we call the main office of the Nokomis Department of Corrections, lol!  But there was nothing on there about where did the remodel money come from.  Or the remodel itself.  Or the car.  The TCT!  So OK, the warden had a TCT.  Everybody knew that.  I’d never met that many cons that ever saw the warden, but they still knew about the car.  It was supposed to be a convertible, which nobody ever said that the DW’s was.  But he made a lot less money.

OK, I’m wandering again.  The point is, I was curious, and after I researched all that remodel stuff and made the orders I had time on my hands.  And I was getting anxious.  Not because I wanted everything to be seriously legal and so on, lol!  Maybe I just wanted to know if I needed to be anxious.

So the way it went, I’d make whatever kind of orders the DW wanted, and I’d go over the invoices and then I’d authorize a check, which would be issued by the Accounting people, who were in some office in the state capital where nobody ever went.  Sometimes I’d hear from them over the phone.  Also, they were the ones that put the money in all the different accounts.  Like, they’d get a state appropriation for, I don’t know, the General Fund or Road Repair or Painting or whatever.  There were accounts for all those things, and finally the money would end up in Payables—like, Payables (Construction) or whatever--and the check would go out and pay for something.  So when you were doing a summary, you could say, Road Repair, 200K Expended; Salaries, Whatever Amount Expended—you could get the totals.  But it was like there were millions of pipes coming in, and then there were millions of other pipes going out, and if you wanted to follow one bunch of water going all the way through, you’d have to know more about the plumbing than I did.

But I just wanted to figure out one or two things.  There were a lot of files I hadn’t looked at before, but I found one called Depreciation Subsidy, Officers Housing, and I thought that was the jackpot.  But when I looked at the credits for that account there was only 20K for the warden’s house and 10K for the DW’s house and just some change for those cottages where they put the major and so on.  The DW’s money was almost all spent, which made sense, but 10K wasn’t enough to even start covering all the orders I’d approved.  The cage in the basement, that alone cost more than 10K, because I’d paid 21K to the manufacturer and 1K more for shipping.  Which shows you something about how much a whole cellblock would cost, if you multiplied that amount by the total number of cells.  Although naturally there would be economies of scale.  I found that online--“economies of scale”—and I really like it.  It’s great when you’re thinking about a prison, where all these cons that would take a lot of money on the outside, just to keep living, they can all be housed and fed and so on for lots less than that, despite the price of the cells.  Which we already have, so we don’t need to buy any more of them, except for the DW’s house.

But OK, the cage money went into Payables (Construction), so I could approve the, guess what?, payment.  When I went there, I recognized the cage thing right away.  But where was the input for that?  It was hard, because money was coming into that account from all kinds of other accounts, but this is what accountants do, they look for accounts.  So I spent a few days just excluding this account and that account.  But one of the accounts was the Painting account.  You remember how I saved a lot of money on that.  So now a bunch of that money was going into Construction, but first it was in this account called Normal Needs, about three steps up on the food chain.  I never heard of that one before.

So I checked.  And it was big.  A couple hundred thousand, almost, if you took it back a ways, with some money from Road Repair, etc.  Then 67K from Normal Needs had routed from one account to another and another and wound up in Payables, right when I was authorizing 67K to write checks to vendors on the remodel.  But what happened in August was that another 60K went out from Normal Needs, and then 42K of that turned up in Payables (Transportation Subsidy) two days before a check for 48K went out to Peninsula Motor Works, which I found out was a car dealer in Grand Rapids.  That was before I went to work for the DW, but I knew what it was for.  The rest of it went to someplace with numbers that looked like somebody’s bank account.  Then there were two amounts that went from Normal Needs to Continuing Education, Deputy Warden, and then to Payables, and they added up to the same amount we paid to an Indian tribe in Illinois.  Even I knew that meant a casino.

You know what I thought, and I told Navy about it that night.

“I guess you’re the only one that didn’t know,” he said.

“You mean all these cons out in the yard know that . . . . “

“No, not the typical brownback out there.  But it took you a long time to catch on.  You’re a pretty slow learner, Camel.”

“I know.  But maybe I’m wrong.  I’d like to figure out where all that Normal Needs money came from.  I just sort of scanned down the Credits line, and I saw a lot of bank numbers.  Some of them had “ST. APP.” in front of them, which is ‘State Appropriation,’ although some of the others . . . .  But it might be legitimate after all.”

He looked at me, like, yeah, I know you’ll figure it out, and you’re not gonna be happy when you do. 

I thought about it for a minute.  Then I said, “I just don’t understand how the DW could be . . . “

“Stealing?”

“No,” I said.  “Gambling.”

I might be a slow learner, but I didn’t care about stealing anymore.  What got to me was the idea that the DW, who was, like, so controlled and orderly and neat and clean and so on, would be risking everything at some blackjack table in Joliet, Illinois.  Besides, he wasn’t even good at numbers!  If he had been, I wouldn’t have been able to find it that easy.  But right away, I was sorry I’d said it.  Because of the Dix thing.  You remember, Dix was a gambler, and Navy ended up having to execute him.  

“It’s his way of losing control,” Navy said.

I didn’t say anything, because I knew I should have known what he meant, even though I didn’t.  But of course he saw that.  So he explained.  “Some people need to keep control.  Some people need to lose it.  Maybe you saw that, when you got processed.  Remember that?”

“Sure.”  You bet I remembered being processed, the day I came to White Rock!

“Remember how some of those fish wanted to fight it.  But some of them”—looking at me—“let’s just say they didn’t swim that way.”

Yeah, I remembered how I didn’t.  So, OK, maybe it isn’t the right word, “happy.”  But it was something that wasn’t sad!  Compared with what I was like before, it was fuckin ecstasy.  I didn’t remember much about anybody else.

So now I was back in the past, hovering someplace above that piss-colored room where they processed me in.  Watching myself, I guess.  That was a fuck of a long time ago!  The way it seemed.  Actually, it was last June.

“So back to the deputy warden,” he said.  “And the gambling shit.  And the stealing.”

My head bounced up at that word, it sounded so weird to say right out loud that the DW was stealing.  But yeah, that’s what he was doing all right, with his “Normal Needs.”

Navy’s voice was going on to the next step.  “Maybe it’s just another one of his experiments.  Like you, Camel.”

“Me?”

“You’re one of his experiments.  Come on, don’t give me that look.  He gambled on you.  And so far, he’s winning.  Just be careful.  More careful.  I don’t want you scraped off the table when they count the chips.”

I nodded, like I understood.  But I didn’t.  Not really.

Part 81

Ichthyology 101

That was Tuesday.  On Wednesday there was going to be another bunch of fish shipping in, so I made up an excuse to watch it.  I got to Processing just before the new cons arrived.

Hector was there, like he was when I got processed back in June, but he was a lot nicer to me this time.  I was pretending to be down there because somebody mentioned water damage to the walls, and I needed to check it out.  That excuse was so bad that then he was sure I was there to inspect his operation.  Which gave me the chance to act friendly and . . . what’s the word?  Reassuring.  Now that I’d won, that was the thing to do.  So I acted like every convict acts, just hanging out and looking around, in case I could see anything or anybody I could put to use.  Chatting with the ghosts whenever they weren’t busy.  Which was pretty much all the time.  Boring, but I did it.

It had been snowing again, so when the door opened and they marched the fish in they were all sort of cold and shivery, shaking the snow off their clothes the best they could with their cuffs and shackles on, and even shakier than I must have been when they marched me in.  I looked at their faces to see if Navy was right about some of them wanting to be there and some of them not, and I couldn’t see any difference.  Of course, none of them really knew they were convicts yet.  I mean, no matter what the judge told them, in their heads they were just normal guys that happened to get off at the wrong bus stop or something.  Sure they were scared, but you could see them telling themselves all kinds of crap so they didn’t look that way, especially to themselves.  

I didn’t stay for the officer’s lecture or Hector ordering them into the showers or the tattooing or anything, because how could you see any difference when they were going through that stuff?  Anybody would get depressed, except maybe me, because I’d be looking at guys getting naked and so on.  But it was too early in the day for me to get excited.  Besides, I remembered that I was anxious and depressed, so I told Hector I’d be back when things were less busy down there, and he thought he was probably passing the test, which never existed, lol!, so he said, “Coo’, man.  Later.”  Very friendly.  It was good for me to have one less thing to worry about.

So I went back to the office and I actually did some work and then I came back in the afternoon.  By that time they were all washed and shaved and tagged and ready for their uniforms.  There were six of them sitting on the benches.  Two of them were completely zoned, staring straight ahead like if you hit them with a brick they would sit there waiting for the mortar.  Another couple of them were nervous and fidgety.  They were playing with their knuckles or something and looking down at their tatts from time to time, whenever they dared, and they were like, DUDE! I can’t BELIEVE this shit! 

That left the other two.  I’ll call them A and B, because I can’t remember their numbers.  A was like the other fish, totally surprised by all the stuff that happened.  But he wasn’t just suffering along, minute by minute.  He looked like he was all wrapped up in himself, like he was in one of those garbage compressors that squeezes everything together into this ugly bunch of shit, and he was totally concentrated on what was going on with him.  His forehead was all wrinkled up, like he was taking a shit, which is always funny, but even more when you see some convict’s skull with no hair to shade all that wrinkling; then it really stands out.  But with this guy, it was like he was totally obsessed with figuring out how none of these things should ever be happening  to a guy like him--like whatever he’d done to get sent to White Rock, he still shouldn’t be all naked and shaved and tagged like that.  You could tell he was as mad as hell, except he wasn’t getting hard or anything, he was just burning away with his mouth twisting around, and you could tell that he felt like yelling something out but he would be all embarrassed to do it, because he came from some place where people were always getting embarrassed.

That was a lot to say about him, but I guess you get the picture.  Maybe he didn’t exactly want to be in control of the whole place.  But he did think he should be in control about what was happening to him, which was maybe keeping his street clothes and his hair and getting offered any dude in the place that he wanted, and he wasn’t getting any of that, so he was totally pissed!  Then when they called him up to get his suit and he was putting it on, he was always, like, looking down and pulling at the sleeves or straightening his shorts or something, and it was like every fucking thing he put on was one more layer of shame to him.  But the shame couldn’t be his fault; it must be somebody else’s fault.

So I didn’t like him.  But then there was B.  I guess this con came from the same kind of place, because he was looking even more embarrassed and self-conscious, like everybody was staring at him all the time and he had to do exactly the right thing or they’d make him cry.  Just like me!  Back in Vinland! I was so self-conscious I had to plan how I’d walk down the hallway at school.  You know, not too masculine, cuz then I’d be showing off, but not like a queer, either.  Etc.  So I looked closer at this con, because he started to remind me of me.  He wasn’t an Arab or anything, but once they’ve cut all your hair off, you aren’t much of anything anyhow except a dick and a big naked head, lol!  But he was about my size and he had about as much muscle as I used to have, meaning nothing.  He was sitting on the bench, sort of looking shyly at his chest, when he dared, because that was where his new tatt was.  Did I say “new” tatt?  Like he’d ever even dreamed of having a tatt before!  And he looked ashamed, all right.  But the shame I was feeling from him wasn’t from the tatt; it was from not wanting to show how, like, interested he was about the whole thing.  Like he was really really interested in what he was right now, which wasn’t what he was when he came in on the chain, when he was probably feeling all shamed and yelled at by society and all. 

Maybe I’m doing what you’re not supposed to do, according to another word in that psychology book that Navy had, I mean “projecting.”  Of course, I couldn’t remember exactly how I felt when I got processed in and shaved down and numbered and tatted and all of that, but I know it was really interesting, just knowing that you’re in this new place where you’ve gotta be a man and it looks like maybe maybe maybe you are, and you’re never going back to that other place where you were not, absolutely not, a man and you didn’t have any chance to be one.  Ever.  OK, maybe I’m projecting onto this kid, who was, like, no older than 18, but that’s what I thought he was feeling.  Even if he didn’t know it exactly, I could see this little glint in his eye.  He wasn’t unhappy, that’s for sure, even though he was, yeah, TOTALLY not in control.  Because everything that happened to him, none of it came out of him.  It couldn’t have.  He couldn’t even have imagined it.

I watched him when he was called up to get his suit, and he was putting it on real slow.  Which was partly because he wasn’t sure how to do everything, like the crotch buttons and so forth.  I guess that gets to everybody!  It did with me. I never saw anything but a zipper on my pants before.  Or those big Frankenstein boots.  So you’ve gotta learn how to deal with it.  But it wasn’t just that.  It was like he was sizing everything up before he put it on.  Like I used to see these guys in the store when I needed to buy a new sports coat or something because I had to go to some cousin’s wedding, ugh!  All of them were, like, fingering the merchandise and figuring how they would look in this and how they would look in that, and then when they came back from the little room where you go to try on your clothes--and maybe shoplift some of them, which I never did but of course most every con in White Rock stole stuff all the time--they’re looking down at their chest and their legs and their crotch and they’re already thinking how good they’re gonna look, way before they even get to the mirror.  Me, I just wanted to get it over with!  Just buy the shit and take it away before anybody starts looking at me and commenting.  Like those faggy clerks that always act like you’re such a dope for wanting to save twenty dollars, and they know you don’t know what you’re doing so fuck you, they’re just gonna keep harassing you.  It took me till I got to White Rock to know what to wear and how to wear it, and that was because I had to wear the gear I was issued.  No choice.  Totally controlled.  .

So that’s what that new little con was getting into, while he was seeing and touching and smelling all that White Rock gear.  Yeah, I actually saw him look around and then start smelling his new boots.  So he was definitely getting into his life in uniform.  Then when he got it all on, he was, like, turning around and looking down at himself and checking himself out and, yeah, pulling at the sleeves and so on, like the other con, but he wasn’t all worried about the bad fit, he was getting off on how suddenly he’d changed into this big bad convict with the big thick heavy ugly repulsive convict suit.

So how do I know that?  Well, unless the guy had a, like, 12 inch dick on him when he walked into Processing, I’d say he was getting off on his new clothes.

Meanwhile, I was sort of easing around the place, like I was checking out the walls for cracks or whatever, and the fish didn’t pay much attention because they obviously had other things on their mind at that point, and they already knew what they were gonna look like, so what I looked like didn’t tell them anything, except I kept thinking maybe if they noticed how even a little guy like me can really fill out his shirt (shorts and trousers also!) once he gets his membership in the White Rock Fitness Center, maybe they’d feel different.  But while I was thinking that, I came back to where Convict B was standing up in his new boots and getting ready to cap off his baldy with his brand new prison hat, and he noticed I was looking at him, so I said, “Don’t let me see you wearin that like a baseball cap, convict.  Your cap points forward at all times.”  I knew he was the kind of guy that was too self-conscious to wear a baseball cap anyway, much less turn it around backwards!  But he’d get off on this big experienced convict telling him he wasn’t supposed to do that.

“Yes sir!” he said, all happy that an actual, live-action convict would be actually talking to him, so maybe in five or six years he could actually open his own mouth and say something.  He was a little skinny kid and you could tell from his blue eyes that he used to be blond.  So I thought I’d give him some more.

“Put that cap on!” I said.  Because he was just standing there with the thing in his hand.  “And don’t call me sir.  See this brown coat?”

“Yes sir.  I mean no sir.  I mean . . . “

“Cut the crap, convict.  See this brown coat?”

“Yes.”

“See this number on the chest?”

“Uh,  yes . . . ”

Fuck!  He was already getting self-conscious again.  “You got one too.  What is it?”

That was a gamble, but it turned out all right.  He remembered his number, and he said it.  Loud.  Didn’t even need to look down on his shirt.  He was the kind of guy that wants to do what he’s told. 

“All right,” I said.  “I guess you’ll make it.  Convict.”

It was like saying that he’d been to the whorehouse and now he was a man.  He straightened up and looked at me like, I’m ready for my fuck now, SIR.  I’m not kidding you, that’s the way he looked.  So I’ve gotta make sure to look up who he is, in the Processing invoice.  Sort of make sure he got sent to the right cell.  But speaking of fucking, if there hadn’t been anybody else around, I would have tossed that little con over a bench and fucked him right there.

I know you’re thinking, Camel! What’s happened to you?  You never had sex in your life.  And you get in your bunk every night and you dream about being fucked.  Well yeah.  But like Navy said, there are guys that want to be controlled, and there are guys that want to control.

Part 82

Yeah, It’s a Mystery, Inside an Enigma.  Or the Other Way Around.  Now Deal with It

So then it was Thursday.  Which was today.  Is today.  A big day in the history of Convict Number 45889, otherwise known as Camel, a convict who definitely wanted to be Inside.  So now he is.  Unfortunately.

I told you I was going through the financials, and I got to this mysterious Normal Needs account, and I noticed that a lot of the incomings to Normal Needs were bank account numbers.  Most of them were from the state, and they were labeled that way.  Then there were a bunch of other ones.  I didn’t want to go through every one on the ledger.  But one of them stood out, like I’d seen it before.  Maybe just because it had a funny ending—777.  Anyway, I took it back a ways, and what I saw was, it only came up four or five times, but every time it had a big round number right next to it.  Like, blah blah blah 777, June 23, $4000.  That sort of attracted me, because June 23 was the day I was processed in.  Sigh—what a great day. Not like today.  So that was stupid, but it got me more interested in, like, which vendor was putting in a refund or a kickback or whatever, right when I was being hustled through the gate and getting processed.  Call it sentiment, but I checked a bunch of stuff around that time.  There wasn’t any pattern.  But then I thought, yeah, maybe it’s some employee, that’s why it looks familiar, so I went to Salaries and bam!  There it was.  Every fuckin month, a deposit to 777.  The numbers on that list didn’t tell you the names, but if you knew who made what, which I did, you could figure it out.  It was the DW.

Why was the DW actually contributing to this funky Normal Needs thing?  So his own money could get laundered back to pay some casino where he was gonna gamble, a long way down the road?  Yeah, sure!  I needed to check those contributions, and if you’re a con like me, that likes numbers, and you’re hangin with Navy and his crew, how long does it take you to learn a little bit about banking?  I was into the DW’s bank account in 15 minutes. 

Also if you’re me, once you’re inside something, you want to look around for a while.  And your dick is raging when you do.  But I stayed focused.  In all those cases, there was the same amount of money put into the bank account as went out of it, into Normal Needs, maybe two days later, or the same day.  And it was put into the bank account in cash.  And one of the amounts was that $4000, put in on June 23.  The day I processed in.  Me and Zero.

I was alone in the office.  I don’t know where the DW was.  But if you’re 19 years old, and you’re a convict, and you’re working with some old pieces of shit like the computers in the DW’s office, it doesn’t take you long to worm your way through the system and into the DW’s text files.  I mean, none of the equipment is newer than three years old, and the security is a joke.  Once you get onto an office computer and you aren’t as dumb as, say, Duck, you don’t need to do much to get all the way inside.  So the only problem was, don’t stay inside too long.  The screen freezes, and the DW walks in, and suddenly you’re toast.

But I didn’t need to panic.  There was even a fuckin file named “Nick”!  And it turned out, it wasn’t about Navy.  

At first I had that problem you get when you’re going on and on in some message thread, because that’s what it was.  It was a ton of emails, with threads going back to the Ice Age or something.  You look at it, and you scroll, and you look at it again, and fuck! you’re already dizzy in the head.  I could tell it was about somebody named Nick, all right, and it was emails he was sending back and forth, and he wasn’t any good with his laptop or whatever he was using, because the format was all goofy and the line lengths were all over the place . . .  Ugh!  I scrolled down, looking for some other name I’d heard of, but I was going so fast I didn’t see any till I got to the dates from a few months ago.  And there was a name that sounded familiar.  Sort of.  Andrew.  Andrew Schuyler.  The last section had a heading called Andrew Schuyler. 

So right away I went to Inmate Search.  And there he was: Andrew Schuyler, Convict Number 45890.  Nine-Oh.  Nine-Zero.  Zero.  Fuck.  My friend Zero.

I went back to the “Nick” file and I saw “It’s three thousand dollars for three days, or eight thousand dollars for nine days (two weekends).  That’s our discount price.”  And a lot more things.

I did check up on the other ones that had emails in the file.  They were all convicts.  Sluggo.  Dobie.  A guy that died, so I couldn’t look up his cell number.  I didn’t read much of it.  I was feeling pretty sick.  But the thing was, right after one of those long trains of emails stopped, the DW would deposit a lot of cash.  Not the same amount that was in the emails, what they said that the dude was supposed to pay.  It was always minus quite a bit.  That part must have gone to law enforcement personnel, if you know what I mean.  But there it was.  Case closed.  Nick was the DW.

I don’t know how long I sat there, just staring at the screen.  A while.  I remembered I had to get out of all those files, so I did.  After that I remembered I had vendor receipts to deal with, so I did.  Duck came in.  “Why you sittin around in the dark?” he said.  “Makes no difference,” I said, but he flipped on the light switch anyway.  The sky had been dark all day, and it was darker now.  With the lights on inside all you could see was the bars on the windows and your reflection in the glass. 

The DW finally came in and asked if I had all the invoices for his house remodel and I said I thought I gave them to you already, sir.  “Is that all so far?” he said, like he hadn’t been following the conversation.  “Yes sir.”  He stopped and looked at me like something had happened, and I was scared that maybe I’d been acting different and he would pick up on what I’d been doing somehow, but all he said was, “They need to be checked against the goods,” and I said, “Yes sir.  I think you have them at home sir,” and he nodded and left.  So then I was alone and that was better.

When I went to chow I didn’t do much talking, and when Navy and I got back to the cell and got locked in I still wasn’t saying anything.  I guess I was just looking at our cell because now it was different than it was before.  Even though nothing had happened.  The way it was before, it always seemed like, hey! I live in a fuckin BOX with a LOCK, and the box is made out of steel, and it’s held together by about a million steel rivets and it’s inside a mountain of steel which is inside a mountain of concrete, and nothing can move it or bend it or break it, not even an earthquake, so it is totally solid and secure and squared away.  But now when I looked at it, it looked like the walls were only about as thick as that paint that Zero’s crew just slopped onto it, and if anything moved real hard, anyplace in White Rock, or anybody just said a word or two, down in the yard or up in the DW’s office, the whole thing would start falling over.

“You know, don’t you?” Navy said.

“Yeah,” I said.

Then neither of us said anything for a while.

When you’re been locked in a cell with somebody, you get to know what he means even if he doesn’t say anything.  Especially if he’s Navy.  Or me, I guess.  Even though I’m the one that’s always wanting to talk.

“You disappointed?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“About me not being Nick?”

The real answer was yeah.  Yeah, I was disappointed.  Real disappointed.  I liked to think about Navy being totally in control.  Not just half, with the business deals and all the . . . other stuff, but totally.  I know what I mean, but I can’t say it right.  I was disappointed that he wasn’t behind everything that went on.  That when there was a shadow, he wasn’t in it.  That he couldn’t do anything he wanted to do.  But I couldn’t say that to him.

“No,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “You are.”  He was starting his cynical grin, but for the first time I didn’t want to see it.

“I just thought . . .”  I was struggling to get something out.  “I . . .  Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I guess I wanted to see if you’d figure it out for yourself.”

Then I was mad.  I never thought I could be mad at him, actually mad.  But I was.  I didn’t understand it, all of it, but I was.  All those thoughts went through my mind, like, “don’t fuck it up, don’t let him know what you’re thinking!”, and “go ahead, see if you can hurt him, the way he hurts you all the time!”, and “it doesn’t matter anyway, nobody cares what you say!” and some other stuff.   Too much stuff to remember.

So while I was still thinking those things I heard myself saying, “Some kind of experiment I guess.”

“That’s right,” he said.

“To see if I was good enough.”

“Right.”

“For something.”

“Right.”

Then I was scared.  What is “something”?  Is it sex?  Are we right at the edge, right now?  And yeah, am I fucking the whole thing up?  Is THAT what he means? 

But I couldn’t ask.  I couldn’t ask what I might be good enough for, if I passed enough tests.  I couldn’t ask because maybe if I did it would screw up his fuckin experiment.  And besides I was scared.

So then there was another one of those silences.  He wasn’t smiling anymore, and I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to say.  So I started fixing the blanket on my bunk so I could climb in there and hide for the next thousand years or so.

Then I remembered.  There was something I did want to tell him.  And half of it was true.

I turned and looked at him.  “I wasn’t disappointed with you.  I was disappointed with the DW.”

I expected him to give it a smile and a smart remark.  But he wasn’t smiling. “Yeah,” he said.  “That’s too bad.”  Then he turned away and lay down on his bunk so I couldn’t see his face.

So what the hell? I thought.  Is that it?  Is that all?  Nothing more to say?  No cynical remarks?  No fuckin good advice?  I couldn’t believe it.  Now HE’S mad!  What a fuckin asshole!

Then, suddenly, I figured it out.  He was jealous.  He was fuckin JEALOUS about me feeling bad that the DW was . . . whatever he was.  Because it meant I’m feeling all those things about the DW that I should be feeling about him, Navy.  I stood there with my hand on the blanket, and I asked myself if it was true.  Was that the way I felt?  It was all so confusing.  But fuck!  The huge thing was, he was actually jealous!  About ME!  And that couldn’t be bad!

So everything was, like, coming back together again.  The world was going back to being solid and secure and all those things, and I could even see it was all in my mind, the way everything had been changing all day, because nothing had actually happened, it was all just stuff that Navy knew and the DW knew but I was just getting around to knowing, so everything was good again, in fact better!  Except that I felt sorry for the DW, although I wasn’t sure why.  But if Navy was jealous . . . !

And then it got bad again.

“Dude!”

There was actually somebody standing on the other side of the bars.  Talking.

“Camel!”

“That’s me,” I said.  And now I could see it was Duck.  Working late.

“DW called up a couple hours ago.  Wants to see you at the house tomorrow.”

“The house?”

“His house.  Here’s the pass.  Catch the truck at form up.”

He handed me a pass with TRUSTY stamped on it.  “What . . . ?” I said.  But by then he was gone.  It took him two fuckin hours to get the fuckin message to me, and he wouldn’t spend two fuckin seconds talking about it.

Navy pulled himself up in his bunk and looked at me.

“Don’t tell the DW you know,” he said. “Make sure about that.”

“Uh . . . I won’t,” I said.  I was trying to put this thing together, but it was like Navy didn’t even have to try. “Why do you think . . . ?”

“Just watch yourself,” he said.  Then he got up and we were facing each other.  I don’t know . . . for a minute there, I thought he was Nick again.  I thought he was as strange and mysterious and all those other things as he ever was.  I also thought, he’s about to kiss me!

“Let’s see how you do on the Outside,” he said.  And his smile came back.  And that was it.  He went to the toilet and took a piss, and then he started to pull out of his uniform, the same way he does every night.

I like to look at Navy while he’s stripping out of his browns.  Sometimes he catches me looking and he slaps me and calls me a faggot, but I always think that means he likes me to do it.  But tonight I didn’t care.  When he was finished he got into his bunk and I stripped out and crawled up in my own bunk.  That’s where I am now.  I’m lying here in my brown, numbered tee and my brown, numbered shorts, underneath my brown, numbered blanket.  45889.  That’s the number.  That’s me.  Experiment No. 45889.  Let’s see how No. 45889 performs.  On the Outside.  The outside of everything.