'Oh, just one more thing,' I told him, 'I got to make sure you don't forget, Mark. And, like I told you, pain goes away. So I'm going to leave you something permanent as a souvenir of your little war-games today.'
The freak's eyes turned crazy when I pulled the butcher knife from my coat, watching his one hand resting on the tree stump.
'Don't move,' I told him, but he whipped back his hand and tried to run. You can't run on a broken leg. This time we let him scream.
Max hauled him back to the chopping block, holding the freak's forearm down like an anvil on a feather.
'Now, see what you did to yourself, Mark?' I asked him. 'You turned a nice clean broken leg into a compound fracture. You jump around too much now and you're liable to lose an arm instead of just a hand, okay?'
The freak's slimy smell mingled with his urine as he lost all control. He was making sounds but they weren't words. Max grabbed the freak's fingertips, stretching the hand out for me. I raised the butcher knife high above my head and brought it flashing down. The freak gasped and passed out.
I pulled the knife short, looked back at Max. He immediately grabbed the freak's hand and stretched it again, but I waved him away. If the freak hadn't learned from what had happened to him already, he was past anything we could do.
Time to go. Max picked up the two cartons of filth in one hand and we worked our way back to the blind. I pulled out the screen and carried it to the hidden Plymouth. Another two minutes and we pulled out of the forest onto the pavement. I left Max in the car and used some branches to sweep away the tire tracks.
Another five minutes and we vanished onto the Inter-Boro, heading for Brooklyn.
3
IT SHOULD have been over then, except for picking up the money. You don't get cash in front from a man like Julio-it's disrespectful. Besides, I know where he lives, and all he has for me is a pay-phone number in Mama's restaurant.
I gave him three weeks and then I called the gas station from a pay phone near my office. You have to call early in the mornings from the phone-it belongs to the trust-fund hippies who live in the loft underneath me. They generally stay up all night working on their halfass stabs at self-expression, and they usually fall out well past midnight, dreaming of a marijuana paradise where all men are brothers. Good thing they never ride the subways. I don't pay rent for the top floor and I never expect to, unless the landlord sells the building. His son did something real stupid to some people a few years ago, and I passed the information only as far as the landlord. Like I told him one time, the top floor has lots of room to store information like that, but if I had to move to a smaller place…you never know.
I don't abuse the privilege-never stay on the phone for more than a minute, no long-distance calls. I put a slug into the pay phone-another slug answered.
'Yeah?'
'It's Burke. Tell your boss I'll meet him tonight on the third shift.'
'I ain't got no boss, pal. You got the wrong number,' he said, slamming down the phone. The Strike Force is making all Italians nervous these days.
The 'third shift' means eleven at night to seven in the morning, just like it is in prison. When you're doing time, you learn that each shift has its own personality. The first shift, the joint is on its best behavior; that's when the visitors are allowed in and that's the only time the Parole Board comes around. The jerkoff therapists and counselors and religious nuts all make their appearances on the first shift too. The second shift is where you settle all your disputes, if you're serious about them. Prison fights only last a few seconds- someone dies and someone walks away. If the guy you stab lives, he's entitled to a rematch. And the third shift is where you check out of the hotel if you can't stand the room-that's where the young ones hang up in their cells. Prison's just like the free world: bullshit, violence, and death-only in prison it's on a tighter schedule.
Maybe you never really get out of prison. I don't have bars on my back windows- the fire escape rusted right off the building years ago except for the stairs to the roof-and Pansy was ready to discuss the ethics of breaking and entering with anyone who might show up-but it was another day coming on and my only goal was to get through it.
Inside the walls, they don't leave you with much. That's why the body-builders treasure their measurements more than any fashion model.
You can die for stepping on another man's little piece of the yard-or on his name. You either stand up to what they throw at you or you go down-it's that simple. In prison, you go down, you stay down.
The redhead was a standup broad. She didn't like doing that number in the park, but she went the route for her kid. She did the right thing-it made what I did right too. I'd never see her again. I didn't want to-the whole thing made me think of Flood.
Until Flood came along, I had survival down to a science. Like the redhead, she had a job to do, and I got brought in. She took her share of the weight and carried it right to the edge.
Flood was a state-raised kid, like me. 'I'm for you, Burke,' she told me just before she went back to another world. I was okay before I met her-I knew what I had to do and I did it. You don't miss what you never had. But ever since Flood, the pain floats around inside me like a butterfly. When it lands, I have to do something to forget. A piece of that song Bones used to sing in his cell late at night came to me:
I wish I had a dollar,
I wish I had a dime.
I wish I had a woman,
But all I got is time.
'Maximum Security Blues,' he used to call it. Bones wasn't used to big-city jailing. He'd done most of his time down in Mississippi, on the Parchman Farm, a thirty-thousand-acre prison without walls. They didn't need walls-a man can't run faster than a bullet. Bones said he got his name years ago when he was working the dice circuit, but we called him that because that's all there was of him-he was about a hundred years old, as sharp and skinny as an ice pick. Bones did things the old way-he'd be so respectful to the guards with his thick Southern voice that they'd never listen to what he was really saying.
One of the young city blacks didn't listen so good either. Bones was sitting on a box on one of the neutral courts in the Big Yard, playing his battered six-string and singing his songs. The young stud came up with his boys, all dressed in their bullshit back-to-Africa colors, 'political prisoners' one and all. I didn't know mugging old ladies for their welfare checks was a revolutionary act, but what the hell do I know? The only Marx who ever made sense to me was Groucho. The leader insisted everyone call him by his tribal name, and the new-breed guards went along with it. He rolls up and tells Bones that he's a fucking stereotype- a low-life Uncle Tom ass-kissing nigger, and all that. And Bones just strums his guitar, looking past the punk to someplace else.
The only sounds on the yard were the grunts of the iron-jockeys and the slap of dominoes on wood-and Bones's sad guitar. Then we heard a loud slap; the guitar went silent but the rest of the joint started to hum. The cold gray death-shark was swimming in the prison yard, but the guards on the catwalks didn't know it yet. Men were getting to their feet all over the yard, drifting over to where the punk was standing over Bones, holding the old man's guitar in his hands.
'This thing is nothing but an instrument to play slave music with, old man,' the punk leered at him, holding the neck in one hand and the body in the other. 'Maybe I'll just snap it over my knee- how you like that?'
'Don't do that, son,' Bones pleaded with him.
