Eureka Man: A Novel (30 page)

Afterwards, they sat together in silence, one
grateful as could be for their physical reunion and hopeful it
wasn't the last, the other scratching and nodding in a drug-induced
stupor. “You said we need to talk,” Oliver said at last. “Okay.
Let's talk. What's on your mind, B.J.? You cutting me loose?”

AT 11 A.M. ON A
dismal Friday morning in
October, Hambone stood underneath the number one guard tower
waiting to feed the old guard Mills who was lowering a galvanized
bucket down to him. As the bucket reached eye-level, Hambone
dropped two hot roast beef sandwiches, a banana and a carton of
milk inside the bucket, then rapped his knuckles on the side to
signal he was through. When the bucket didn't move, Hambone looked
up just as Mills keeled over on the catwalk, violently clutching at
his chest. Crazy Bell, who had been sitting alone in the bleachers,
saw Mills, too, and sprung like a jack-in-the-box from the top
bleacher. After shoving Hambone to the side, Bell grabbed the rope
that was attached to the bucket and tugged on it to make sure it
was secured tightly to the catwalk railing. Then he shimmied up the
wall with the agility of an alley cat. When he reached the top, he
ducked between the railing and snatched Mill's sidearm .38, then
tossed it down to a young buck in the courtyard who caught it like
a baseball and then ran off with his gang. With one horrendous
kick, Bell sent the dead guard over the side. He didn't waste
another second before he grabbed the automatic rifle that was
leaning against the tower, aimed and shot the guard in the
number-two tower right between the eyes. “VC that, motherfucker!”
Bell cried. Then he shot the guard who was inspecting a delivery
van at the rear gate. The bullet traveled right through the man's
Adam's apple and exited the back of his neck. Bell finally
barricaded himself inside the tower where he would stay for two
more days taking pot shots at anything that moved in a uniform.

Only a few minutes after Bell declared war,
Officer Wayne St. Pierre was leaving the hospital with a brand-new
first-aid kit in his hand when an urgent cry came over the airways
of every walkie-talkie in the prison: “Officer down in front of the
dining hall! We need help over here!” Wayne St. Pierre rushed to
the scene and almost instantly became the next officer down. As he
fell to the ground, he saw the blur of a pipe, a chair leg, and
five angry faces-black ones, brown ones, white ones.

The rioters snatched Wayne St. Pierre's ring
of keys from his fingertips as they dragged his body down the
street with no name and through the sweet peas and clover that grew
around the forsythia bushes on the side of the prison chapel. When
they reached the sports equipment shed behind the chapel, the
enraged prisoners hauled him inside and tore off his clothes.
“Break this stick off in his ass!” shouted one man. “Let's kill the
cockroach!” added another. One prisoner pushed his knee into the
back of Wayne St. Pierre's neck, another held down his legs, and a
third one sodomized him with a broom stick until he finally passed
out. Before the prisoners left, they kicked him in the face and
beat his body thoroughly with a lead pipe and a chair leg. Wayne
St. Pierre lay on the floor twitching lightly among the smashed
bags of lime, his face a mask of meat and agony so fierce that for
months afterwards the people who rescued him would shake their
heads in disbelief at the memory of what he had looked like.

Inside the cellblocks the riot spread down
the tiers like a brush fire. Prisoners, armed and unarmed, bit
their lips, snarled their teeth and turned on their keepers like
dogs that had been kicked once too many times. Some prisoners were
armed with knives, cans of lye soap and shards of glass slicing
through the riotous mob, picking out the uniformed culprits and
choosing the spot to abuse their flesh. Two of the most sadistic
guards on duty were hung by their wrists side by side, in the
shower pit of the big St. Regis. Two others were chased all the way
up to the fifth tier and given a choice of jumping off or being
torn apart by the pack of salivating young dogs. One leaped, the
other was beaten senseless.

The riot continued for three days and three
nights and so many guards, pedophiles and snitches were maimed that
the authorities could not keep the numbers straight. On the morning
of the fourth day, after the rioters had lost their muse, had done
all they could to show their keepers what it felt like to lose all
hope, they surrendered to the national guardsmen who were standing
in wait at the front gate.

Within hours, the worst of the militant
rioters were handcuffed, shackled and loaded on a bus headed to an
underground prison in Illinois. Another six were carried through
the rear gate, stacked three high in the back of a coroner's
van.

A SATIRICAL ESSAY in the lifers' newsletter was,
according to the authorities, what had incited the prisoners to
riot. Five days before they had marched through the joint
advertising their rage over the loss of their last rights and
amenities, Oliver's essay, HOPE FOR THE HOPELESS, had appeared on
the front page of the October issue of The Wire. By noon of the
same day, Superintendent I.M. White had read it and turned three
shades darker than mud before he instructed his secretary to find
out who in his administration was responsible for approving the
publication and distribution of the newsletter. What made I.M.
White's skin itch so deep below the surface that he couldn't
scratch it was something he thought he had read between the lines
of Oliver's essay: Listen to me, Brothers! We may as well tear the
entrails right out of the belly of this prison because every lifer
in this state is a walking dead man anyway! Late that afternoon,
after his assistant reported that she couldn't determine who, if
anyone, had approved publication of the offending newsletter, I.M.
White ordered his security lieutenant to immediately escort Oliver
to the redbrick Home Block.

This wasn't the first time Oliver had given
I.M. White that deep-down-worse-than-poison-ivy itch. Six months
after he had taken over as warden at Riverview and begun to strip
away one amenity after another, I.M. White had become the target of
Oliver's diatribe against African-American professionals who say
and do whatever they need to say and do in order to gain the white
man's graces. Oliver's biting satire, “Uncle Tom's Cabin of
Step-And-Fetch-It Politicians”, had ultimately blamed the new
snoop-doggie-gangsta-rap culture not on white racism, but on black
conservatives like I.M. White himself. On that occasion I.M. White
had refused to address the notion that he was indeed a bojangles,
ass-kissing negro, a race traitor, and that the term Black
Republican should be deemed an oxymoron. I.M. White was far too
dignified to respond to the bombastic rants of a white man who
didn't have a clue what it was like to be a black man struggling to
get ahead in racist America. This time was different, though. This
time it wasn't personal, it was business-a matter of dealing with
what he perceived to be a major threat to the safety and orderly
running of his well-oiled maximum security prison.

When Oliver's friends and professors inquired
about him two days after the riot had ended, I.M. White informed
them that Oliver was under investigation for publishing and
distributing an unauthorized document, and for possibly instigating
the riot.

“You don't go around telling a bunch of
ignorant-ass ghetto niggahs that they may as well be dead because
they're never going to see the streets again. Not in my prison you
don't. That's what Priddy did. He poured gasoline on the fire.

“I'm not new at this. Priddy's not the first
slick white man I've come across in my career, either. I've been
dealing with them ever since affirmative action came about. Don't
get me wrong, I'm not a racist by any means, and it make my skin
crawl when these white boys call me one. Hell, I'm married to a
white woman. This isn't about racism. This is about what happens
when you educate one of these prisoners. They get a little
knowledge and think they can be slick. I'm educated, too, I can
read between the lines. I know what Priddy was doing when he
capitalized and underlined those fifty-cent words. INSURRECTION,
RANDOM SLAUGHTERING, ANARCHY. Instigating, that's what he was
doing.

“Now he has all these reporters and liberal
educators sticking their noses in official business, and that's
where I have to draw the line. I don't care how many phone calls
they make or how many letters they write demanding to see this man,
no one but his attorney will see him until this investigation is
concluded.

“I've got five dead officers and six dead
prisoners on my hands and on top of that a prison to rebuild. This
place is on lockdown and will stay that way until we get to the
bottom of all this mess. And mark my words. If my hearing examiner
finds Priddy guilty of instigating that riot, he can forget all
about his little PhD pursuit, which, if you ask me, is a waste of
everyone's time anyway in light of the fact that the pardon's door
to freedom has been closed once and for all on these lifers. They
have about as much chance of getting out of prison now as I do of
becoming the next commissioner of corrections.”

THAT PLACE IN THE PRISON where men's minds easily
disconnected from their spirits did a flourishing business in the
days following the riot. And although the riot was over, everyone
knew the violence wasn't. The guards would have the final say. On
the south side of the Home Block, fifth cell, second tier, Oliver
looked up each time a triangle of guards swept past his cell
carrying one of the rioters, shackled and hogtied. And each time he
turned away, nauseated by the sounds of the guards' heavy boots and
arrogant camaraderie and the metallic clanging of keys. When he
heard a cell door open or close, he listened for the blows, the
pounding of flesh, the wincing in pain. After he heard a tap on the
wall late one morning, he thought he recognized the voice that
called his name. “Oliver, you awake?”

“Yeah. Who's that?”

“Oyster Bey.”

“Oyster? Man, I didn't see them bring you
in.”

“I came in early this morning. You were still
asleep.”

The moment he heard Oyster's voice, Oliver's
spirits lifted. He hadn't spoken to a single soul in three days and
he was thankful and relieved to hear a friend's voice. “What did
they lock you up for, Oyster?”

“Two rookies shook my cell down yesterday.
One of 'em said the nail I pounded in my wall to hang my coat on
fifteen damn years ago was a weapon. I'll be out of here as soon as
I go to my hearing. What's the latest with you, Oliver?”

“They charged me with instigating that riot.
My hearing's in the morning.”

Oyster's laugh was an explosion. “Those
rotten crackers! We heard that but we didn't believe it was true.
They were going around confiscating all the copies of your
newsletter they could find. That was some funny shit you wrote,
Ollie. Where'd you come up with that stuff?” Oyster's laugh was
contagious.

“In my head. What the hell happened out
there, man?”

“During the riot?”

“Yeah.”

“These young bucks tore the roof off the
place, that's what happened. I guess you didn't hear. Bell's
dead.”

“Dead? How?”

“He started the whole thing, Oliver. You know
how little he was. He climbed the wall right underneath the
number-one gun tower. That screw Mills had a heart attack while
Hambone was feeding him. Bell grabbed the rope and shimmied up the
wall. In less than twenty-four hours he killed three guards and
wounded four others before one of them sharpshooters blew his head
off two days ago.”

“We could hear the gunfire, but we didn't
know what was going on,” Oliver said. “So that was Bell, huh? My
God.”

During the pause in conversation they heard a
prisoner screaming obscenities and then the responding blows
followed by more obscenities. After a long lull, Oliver asked,
“Early okay?”

“Early's been in the hospital, Oliver.
Gallstones. He was all right the last I knew.”

“What about Peabo?”

“Peabo's fine. Another long pause and Oyster
continued. “I didn't leave my cell for three days, not until the
fourth morning when Donnie Blossom brought me some coffee and told
me the young bucks were about to throw in the towel. You shoulda
seen what those boys did to Sergeant Dewey. They didn't hurt him
too bad, mainly his pride. Made him piss his pants when they
smacked him upside the head with that pistol they had. They told
him to listen and remember everything they was saying. 'We ain't
taking this shit no more. We ain't going back in time. You tell
Uncle Tom that, Nigger Ned,' they said. 'You tell him we ain't
never tucking our shirttails in, we ain't wearing our hats straight
and we ain't never gonna be part of no standing counts. And as long
as we ain't got nothin' more to lose, we gonna keep tearin' shit up
every chance we get, even if we die doin it. You tell em that,
Nigger Dewey.' Poor old Dewey just sat there shaking his head and
stuttering like an idiot. Oliver, these young niggahs are a new
breed. They ain't got the sense God gave a turnip. They don't care
if they live or die. I guess they figure they going to die in here
anyway. Sooner or later. Just like you and my sorry ass is.”

“Yeah, that's the way it looks, Oyster. What
about Champ and one-eyed Melvin? Are they all right?”

“Oh, man. Listen, Oliver. Champ, just about
his whole North Philly crew, Melvin, the Lynch twins, the Solomon
brothers, LaMumba, Anwar Dukes, Charlie Redshaw, Milky Way,
Popalou, Duck, Major Tillery, L'l Ali, Chief, that white boy they
call Sonny Corleone, and a couple hundred more are either already
shipped out or on their way out. They got so many locked up they
using the bottom two tiers on both sides of the little St. Regis as
the hole. Hell, they need cells over here in this Home Block so bad
they let Fat Daddy out two months early.”