“Should we need anything, I promise I’ll call.”
Downing one last swallow of coffee, Don Lee stood, stretched, and headed out for afternoon patrol. June and I sat looking at one another. We heard the unit’s door slam, heard the motor start and catch. Then the low whine of gears as Don Lee backed away. The radio crackled.
“You want to tell me about it?” I asked her.
“Not really,” she said.
Chapter Twenty-two
So Goddamn alone and lost. Not my words but those of my final cellmate, Adrian.
Years later, Lonnie Bates would accuse me of expending too much energy distancing myself from the man I’d been. Maybe he was right, maybe I’d always be trying to get away from that man. Just like a part of me would always be in that prison cell, or another part sitting with a man’s head in my lap, leaning over him as bright blood ran down the street in the rain. Just as a part of me would forever be standing there over the partner I’d just shot.
Amazing how static memory is, most of our lives gathered around a handful of tableaux.
Adrian once told me about African musicians he used to play with. When things became too predictable, too worked out, too repetitious, they’d exhort their fellows to “put some confusion in it.”
I’ve never been able to describe what it was like to kill a man. Remembering the act itself is easy. There he is three showerheads down, makeshift knife held along his leg, now he’s walking up to me, now he’s stepping back, trying to talk with tongue pinned to the roof of his mouth, but what come out are animal sounds. All this is vivid. Vivid for him too, I’m sure, momentarily, these last few moments of his life. There has to be something of weight and substance here, some revelation, you think, there just has to be. But there isn’t. You watch the light drain away behind his eyes, you look around to see who’s witnessed this, you get up and go on. You’ve learned nothing. Death makes no more sense than any of the rest of it. You’re alive. He’s not. That’s what you know.
Cellmate Adrian was a fortyish man of ambiguous ethnicity, Caucasian, Negroid and Asian-Amerind features all boiled dowm together in the pot. He liked to refer to himself as octoroon. “Has to be lots more roons than that mixed up in me,” he’d say, “but eight’s high as they go, back home.” Back home was New Orleans. Sexually, too, he was a puzzle: chocky, muscled frame and a hard, square stride, arms and hands moving fluidly when he spoke, an up-from-under glance. This had ceased being a topic of conversation his fifth week in. One of those who’d seen fit to remark it had a skull permanently deformed, soft as a melon rind, from the time Adrian came upon him with six batteries (taken from appliances and tools in the workshop) knotted into a pillowcase.
“Hear tell you’re a cop,” he said to me our first night together. I’d had a couple cellmates before him. Neither had lasted long.
“Not anymore. Not a lot of cops in here, I’d guess.”
He laughed. “Not enough room for those that should be.”
A guard walked the rows, dragging his baton lightly across bars to forewarn us of his coming.
“Man you killed, he was a friend?” Adrian said once the guard passed.
“Yes.”
“Don’t seem surprised I know that.”
“I grew up in a small town.”
“Small town. Yeah, that’s what this is, all right.”
Two or three cells down, a man sobbed.
“Poor son of a bitch,” Adrian said. “Every goddamn night. Could be you’ll do all right in here, though. What’s your name, boy?”
He had to know already; but I told him. Populated entirely by those unable to adapt to society’s laws or societal norms, prisons have unspoken codes of etiquette such as to put tradition-bound southerners, Brits or Japanese to shame.
“Adrian,” he said, “but most ever’one calls me Backbone. Tend to pick our name hereabouts, or if we don’t, get ’em picked for us. In here, we’re not what the world made us anymore. Long as you can back it up, you’re what you say you are. Best get to sleep now. Sleep’s just bout th’only friend you got here.” Turning on his side, he breathed deeply. ‘Cept me. And that quickly he was snoring.
There in the box that’s become your home and second body, every small sound takes on unreasonable weight. Rake of the guard’s baton along bars, ragged breath of the man on the bunk below, conversations stealing in from adjacent cells or those across the block, coughs ricocheting from wall to wall.
With a sound like a novice’s first attempt at notes on a French horn, someone farts, and someone else laughs. Voices zigzag along the block in response.
“Okay, who smuggled perfume aboard?”
“Hey, he just sendin’ flowers to his honey is all.”
“Big boo-kay a stinkweed, more like it.”
“Some brothers like that brown perfume.”
“Donchu be talking ’bout no brothers over there, boy.”
“Yassuh!”
“I meant like big brothers.”
“Sure you did.”
“Why’n’t you all just shut th’fuck up and go to sleep.”
Which is what that same voice said every night, and what finally happened.
Three walls of the cell, then another wall. Imagine your way past one wall, there’s another, then another. We live in them, in the hollows and crawl spaces, like rats. The walls are what’s important. We’re what’s not, though the walls are here because of us.
“Might dole up s’more roughage for my man here,” Adrian said the next day in lunch line, “boy’s new to the game.” Another gloppy spoonful of cabbage hit my tray. “Good man,” he told the inmate serving. “You’ll be remembered.”
“Move along,” the server said. “Fuck off and die too, while you’re at it.” Hair buzzed to an eighth-inch, sleeves rolled above cable-like biceps, some kind of home-cooked tattoo there, a scorpion, maybe.
That’s when I saw it for the first time. Adrian went dead still, face blank as the walls about us.
“You got somethin’ to say to me back there, tattoo man?”
Briefly the server’s eyes met Adrian’s. Then he cast them about like a fisherman’s net. Being in control of mashed potatoes and lima beans wasn’t going to help him much. Nothing was. Not even his tattoo.
“Sorry,” the server said. “Been a bad day. You know.”
“Ain’t they all?”
We moved along the line.
“Motherfuckers call themselves a brotherhood.”
“White supremacists, you mean.”
He nodded. “They be getting in touch witchu soon enough, I reckon.”
“Damn,” I said, trying my best to sound like Adrian. “All kind of scum in here, ain’there?”
He laughed. “There is, for sure.”
It was a couple of weeks later that they came for me, two of them edging out around the massive dryers on a day I’d been assigned laundry duty.
“You and big nigger been gettin’ on all right?” one asked. He had to shout to be heard above the dryers. From talk on the yard I knew him as Billy D. Barely topping five feet, he looked like steel wire braided into human form. Sleeves split to give biceps room.
Anything you say in these situations usually serves only to make it worse, so I didn’t answer, just stood waiting. See how it comes down. Four or five more of what I assumed to be sworn members of the brotherhood shuffled into place. Two behind Billy D, two or three behind me.
“You’re a white man, Turner. One of us.”
I watched him, waiting for the body shift, the change in posture or expression that would signal we were
