guards would bring in anything for a price. But for poor trash like Johnny Walsh his days of pussy were history, for guys like him there were only the queens and Johnny preferred to do without. In fact, he Thump.
Johnny heard it. Felt something wither and die in his guts, curl-up and tremble. That sound. Couldn’t be no sound like that here, not here. His heart pounding, that cigarette welded to his lower lip, Johnny just stood there as cold as shrimp in an ice bucket.
Thump, thump.
Johnny’s heart almost blew out of his chest on that one.
He looked around, saw his reflection again. Saw the sink and the desk and the file cabinets. Saw the waste paper basket, the girly calendar on the wall showing him a fine set of Asian tits…but right then his business was shriveled-up like a breakfast link.
Licking his lips, he made himself walk first this way, then that.
The gray cement-block walls were sweating an icy moisture. He saw those walls and figured suddenly that this was no easy bit, it was the worst cage of all. There were two doors in that room. One led into an entry and out into the world, the other led into a corridor that led to the freezers and the garage where all the cheap pine caskets were stored.
Thump.
Johnny knew then that the sound was coming from the corridor…or, and more precisely, from one of the rooms back there. A wild, freezing terror flooded through him and he could feel it right down to the balls of his feet. Insane. That’s what. Because, because there could not be sounds back there. Sounds meant something was alive or at least in motion and nothing back there was capable of either.
He thought: Don’t go on like this, don’t mean nothing, just the foundation contracting or some such shit, it don’t mean…it don’t mean that Thump, thump, thump.
Johnny let out a little involuntary cry, pressing himself up against that concrete wall that was just as cold as graveyard marble. His fingers were pressed flat, drawn taut like the rest of his body, some hot blue electricity arcing through his bones now. His eyes were wide and refused to blink.
Something in his brain reminded him of those bodies that had disappeared at the mortuary. It couldn’t be, it wasn’t possible what he was thinking. The dead were dead and nobody since Lazarus had ever gotten up and walked afterwards.
But those sounds, Jesus, what was making those sounds?
*
The guy who ran the mortuary was named Riker.
He was a large, heavy man with arms like railroad ties all painted-up with jailhouse tattoos. His neck was thick as a pine stump and the head it supported looked like something you hammered iron on. He’d already put in twenty-five years of a lifetime sentence and before this joint, he’d done six years at Angola for armed robbery. He was a rough customer, but years of permanent confinement with no hope for parole had sanded off the rough edges, planed him just as smooth and even as a caged violent offender can be.
He was a trustee like Johnny, but he was the senior man in the trustee system and could have had any job he wanted in the prison industries. He could’ve stamped plates and gears in the metal shop or pushed a book cart in the library or even supervised the road gangs, but he liked the mortuary.
“The dead ones are okay with me,” he often said. “You never have to push ‘em on account they never push you.”
When he found out that LaReau was putting a con on the night shift, he didn’t like it much. He started swearing and spitting, saying the dead don’t need no watching, it was the living ones you had to keep an eye on. But the warden wanted it that way, so that’s how it was going to be.
When he got a look at Johnny, he just grimaced, shook his head, mumbled something. But then Johnny-using that brain his mama said was never worth a shit-offered Riker a cigarette and that warmed the old guy fine.
Riker took a drag and smiled thinly. “You up to this, boy?”
And Johnny didn’t like being called “boy”, but he got used to it. Riker was a Southerner and they called everybody “boy”. You couldn’t take offense to it like you might on the streets. And besides, even though Riker was pushing seventy, those fists still looked very capable of breaking skulls.
“I can do it fine,” Johnny said.
“Just saying, boy, ya’ll don’t look real comfortable around them dead ones. Like maybe they make you uncomfortable or some such.”
But Johnny gave him the line, telling him he liked the stiffs just fine, they were okay with him. You didn’t have to watch your back with stiffs and that was something, all right. In this place, that was really something.
“What you in for, boy?” Riker finally asked him.
“Stupidity, boss, plain and simple,” Johnny told him, none too proudly. Pride, like hope, died a quick death behind those walls. “Let me tell you about it. There I was working me a job at the foundry, sweating and straining and a-busting my ass, but pulling down a living. And feeling good, you know? Good like you can only feel after putting in your shift, working for a living. Anyhow, had me a cute little lady name of Tamara, was crazy about her. She’d been a runner up in that Miss Louisiana thing and was just as pretty as they come. So I’m working at the foundry stamping out manhole covers and she got herself a receptionist job for this white cat owned hisself an insurance company-”
“I can see where this is going, boy.”
Johnny just nodded, dragged off his cigarette. “Surely. I come home one night, twisted my ankle and had to take a few days off, and what do I see? Right there in my bedroom? Just that white ass planted in Tamara’s saddle, humping and pounding and slamming away and Tamara moaning and squealing and saying, gimme it, gimme it, oh you fucking me fine. Bitch never did nothing but lay there for me. Shit and shit. So I stabbed old whitey forty times, they said, and Tamara…something like thirty, give or take.” Johnny started laughing then, seeing his wasted life play out in his mind like some sort of cheap, unpleasant situation comedy. “Yes sir, you can just go on ahead and forget that business about going black and not going back, because-at the trial-well, I found out my Tamara was going back again and again, setting the cause back a hundred years.”
“What cause is that, boy?”
“Freedom for my people, mister, what else?”
Riker thought that was hilarious. “Freedom? What fucking freedom, boy? You a convict, case you didn’t notice. We all work for massah here. We all just trash society put out to the curb.”
Johnny told him that was certainly true.
And then Riker admitted he was doing life for multiple homicide. Had waltzed into a bank, planning to rob it. Guard saw him and went for his piece, so Riker drilled him and then, feeling funny that day, he killed four more people so they wouldn’t be able to identify him.
“My head was full of kitty litter back then, boy,” Riker told him, “and I ain’t so sure they’s not a few turds still stuck between my ears even now.”
Stories told, Riker gave him the grand tour.
Took him down that grim concrete block corridor that smelled like wet steel, tears, and pesticide, showed him the freezers. Behind iron doors, bodies crowded under stained white sheets, arms hanging out all gray and blotched from lividity. Riker showed him the cold cuts, how bad it had all been. Here a couple blacks with slit throats, there a Hispanic that had been kicked to death so that his jaw was planted by his left ear now, and here some dumb white guy who’d decided to intervene and had his head split clean open. The dumb and the dumber. In the drawers, no better. Eyes punched out and faces erased and bones sticking through dirty canvas skins like broomsticks.
Then Riker showed him the garage out back where all the caskets were piled up-cheap pine things hammered together in the carpentry shop.
“They two kinds of dead here, boy. Them what get claimed by their kin and them what end up out in potter’s field. Most of these boys will end up out there on account they families is ashamed of ‘em.”
Back in the office, Riker parked Johnny at the desk, gave him some fuck books and a few paperback westerns, told him to just pass the time, keep the doors locked. That was it.
Then he gave him a Thermos of whiskey.
“Drink your fill, boy,” he said. “A little taste is one of the benefits of sorting out the dead ones and they troubles.”
