Gods Go Begging (10 page)

The seventh floor was a horizontal world where all of the inhabitants lived in a position that was at total odds with the rest of the world, perpetually perpendicular to the working men and women on the floors and streets beneath them. This was the supine floor. Except for stilted and shackled movement to and from the courts, prisoners seldom if ever stood up in these long, barred bays. They all clung to their thin bedding and small cots in the same dull way that stunted, unmetamorphosed caterpillars might cling to their ill-woven cocoons.

These recumbent males, unable to change their own botched lives, had somehow managed to partially transform their bunk beds and cots. Simple metal and spring frames with cloth coverings had evolved into complex, finely tuned machines capable of travel through time and space. Their beds were geared for long distances, for trips to Alpha Centauri and the Sombrero Galaxy. Everyone doing time knew you had to sleep the years away in a state of suspended animation in order to reach your destination alive. All you had to do was format the mattress computer, load in the linen software, and program it for two years, nine years concurrent, or two life terms back to back. Few, if any, of the prisoners would ever really learn to fly their four-cornered ships. Most were limited to clumsy flights backward into the past. It was the rare prisoner who could move forward.

For most prisoners the bed, powered by a decent pillow, would merely calculate your good time credits automatically and wake you up when your time in stir was done. Someday these stunned and immobile travelers would step blinking and yawning from their time capsules. As Einstein had predicted, their souls and their futures would be completely unchanged, while the world around them had evolved and gone on. Men who barely belonged in one era were doomed to be set loose in another, even stranger time.

Jesse Pasadoble knew that those men lying down up there were all stuck on cruise control, going from place to place without any discernible motion. They moved from county jail to state prison to federal prison and even to death row in the same insensible condition: half alive and asleep, moving only in the fourth dimension.

Jesse walked through the electric gate and toward the third interview room on the right. The door was open and he could just make out the voices of Dr. Wooden and Edmund Kazuso Oasa, Jesse’s investigator. The psychologist was a tall black man with a wide smile. He had a beneficent face, large eyes, and a tiny set of metal-framed bifocals that were perched precariously on his nose. Jesse guessed that he wore the bifocals for his clients’ sake. He needed them to compensate for his boyish, almost childish face.

Jesse laughed to himself. The effort to look more professional had been a total failure. But Jesse liked his face. It effectively draped a kind demeanor over a gentle soul. He shook the doctor’s hand, then smiled at Eddy. “You ready for this?”

“I’m never ready for this,” sighed Eddy, who nevertheless slid a chair out from beneath the table and sat down. Eddy was a Hawaiian man of Japanese descent. He wore a mustache and a short beard that was just beginning to gray. His hair was jet black and combed straight back in a long sweep that went down past his neck and rested on the collar of his brown leather jacket.

“Are you ready? ”Jesse asked the doctor. Dr. Wooden only smiled patiently. Jesse inhaled deeply, then turned and walked down the hall toward the small office at the head of the mainline.

“Can I see mr. supreme?” Jesse asked the deputy sheriff at post eight. There was a full apology in his voice and in the droop of his shoulders.

The deputy sheriff was a huge, grimacing black man.

“Shit!” he grunted. “You want that crazy son of a bitch?” He cursed again under his breath, then lifted his walkie-talkie to his lips and shouted, “Post nine, this is post eight, send me up Sykes and Porter…. I don’t give a shit what they’re doing. We got to get the supreme being outta his cage for an attorney visit.”

“Roger that,” said a voice in the walkie-talkie. “Jesus, not again!”

“Well, Mr. Lawyer,” said the sheriff, “I just now ordered up two of the biggest, blackest bloods in the house to manhandle that fool out here for his visit. Six hundred pounds of angry African flesh is gonna drag that idiot out here because you want to see him.”

There was a look of disgust on his face as he accosted the lawyer with his index finger. “Do me a favor, man, the next time you want to see that damned fool, do it on a Tuesday or Wednesday. That’s when I’m off work.”

Down the long hallway the sound was beginning, just a tense murmur at first. There was a soft breeze of curious whispers that began to blow harder when a certain isolation cell was approached by the hulking forms of Sykes and Porter. Even from this distance Jesse could see that the two sheriffs were huge, their green uniforms stretched to the limit by too many bench presses and too many pork rib sandwiches.

The murmurs grew into a brisk wind of low utterances as the two sheriffs ducked simultaneously when something was thrown through the bars and at the tops of their heads. The supreme being’s special diet had been splattered against the wall opposite his cell. Sliding down the wall were globules and smatterings of white rice, white gravy, white turkey breast, white potatoes, white milk, and mayonnaise. Behind Jesse, Eddy and Dr. Wooden were standing in the hall now, having left their seats as the tide of sound reached them.

“Can’t you forget this interview?” asked the officer at post eight. There was desperation in his eyes. “If someone gets hurt on my shift, I’ll be here filling out forms until midnight.”

“I’ve got to see him sometime,” said Jesse. “And it’s never going to be any different. Besides, I canceled the interview last time. Don’t you remember? I can’t do that again.”

Down the hallway the two behemoths had managed to unlock and open the cell door. From the darkness behind the bars a raspy and hate-filled voice was screaming the phrase “mud people” over and over again. Sykes and Porter ducked as more of the food flew through the doorway at them and crashed against the wall behind them. This was followed by a plastic spoon, a paper cup, and finally a roll of sheets and bedding. Around the cell the squall of utterances had transformed into a storm of catcalls and loud discord. From there the tempest of drowsy voices became a raging cacophony.

Suddenly the two officers raised their arms to protect their faces. Then, after counting to three, they disappeared in unison into the bowels of the cell. There was one final cry of “mud people” from within the cage, then deathly silence. A moment later the two officers emerged. There was a tall man hanging limp between them, his feet dragging on the linoleum. He was making no attempt to walk.

The tall man was Clorox white, chalk white—almost deathly white when contrasted with the two men who were at his sides. Even at this distance Jesse could make out blotches of facial color: the roseate, whiskey-induced stippling of dead capillaries covered the man’s nose and cheeks. Now he could see that the skin of his entire body was mapped with lines of jade and black. He looked like a human who had been turned inside-out, so that his green veins were on the surface of his skin for everyone to see. His skin was covered with tattoos. His left eye was closed and bleeding.

“Mud people!”

The words spewed out once again from the man in the middle. From the cells that lined the long hallway, spoons, combs, and wads of trash were being thrown at mr. supreme as he moved down toward post eight. The cacophony had become a din, an assault of words in English, Spanish, and Vietnamese. Jesse could see that each of the two huge sheriffs had one arm jammed beneath the armpit of the prisoner and was using the other arm to control one of the prisoner’s hands.

“If you spit on me again,” yelled Sykes above the terrible noise of three hundred angry voices, “I’ll bash your goddamn head against those bars. Do you understand me?”

The prisoner did not respond. He only strained against his human restraints, his green face red with exertion. As he got closer, Jesse could see the shape of familiar forearms and biceps emerging, the result of hundreds of hours in a prison weight room. He could just make out the chiseled, hardened face of his client. Actually, thought Jesse, it was not the face and arms that were familiar but the tattoos on that face and those arms. In truth, no one would ever attempt to describe mr. supreme. Except for the crimson and purple nose, the usual human landmarks were now practically invisible, obscured beneath a collection of acronyms and arcane symbols. Even police bulletins and prison records did little more than describe the writings upon his skin. The identity underneath had long ago been lost.

The Aryan Nation tattoo was the newest and it was located on the forehead, between the eyebrows. The tattoo was so fresh that the needle holes beneath his hairline were still bleeding. The insignia was little more than a muddle of scabs, blood, and ink. Somehow the supreme being had managed to tattoo himself using the broken refill from a contraband ballpoint pen as a needle, and the metal flush handle on the toilet as a mirror.

“From here that thing looks like a third eye,” said Dr. Wooden.

“A third eye that’s bloodshot,” added Eddy.

“Given enough inbreeding…” mused Jesse aloud.

On his chest, covering his upper abdomen and pectorals, there was a huge American bald eagle with green wings that swept upward to touch each of the man’s shoulders. The defiant head and beak of the creature reached up to his Adam’s apple. On the man’s arms were several swastikas, a topless hula dancer, and a list of arcane numbers that commemorated the dates when federal authorities had abused their powers by oppressing the only real human beings on earth. Interspersed among these were various badly rendered symbols of the White Aryan Resistance, the Silent Brotherhood, and even the Aryan Olympics.

“What the hell is an Aryan Olympics?” asked Eddy.

“They have events just like any other Olympics,” answered Jesse, “only they’re held in a trailer court somewhere up in Idaho. They have tobacco-spitting marathons, and I think they toss cans of Spam for distance. There’s only one running event because they believe there’s only one race.”

The din on the mainline diminished and died away when the supreme being was taken through post eight and dragged into the interview room. Sykes pulled out a chair, and his partner roughly shoved mr. supreme into it. The huge black man bent down until his face almost touched that of his prisoner.

“Listen here, Mr. Skelley,” growled Sykes, “my name is Norman Sykes, and my partner here is Norman Porter. Any more shit outta your so-called Anglo-Saxon ass and we’re gonna have another Norman Conquest right here. Do you get my drift?” He turned to face the lawyer. “Do you want one of us to wait outside the door?”

“No, thank you, officer,” answered Jesse, “I think Bernard will be fine.”

“Fuck you!” screamed the tattooed man. “Don’t ever call me Bernard.”

Outside the interview room the huge officer lifted his walkie-talkie to his lips to answer an inquiry about their 10-20, their location.

“Roger, post nine, we’re ten sixty-six at post eight, over.” There was a huge smile on his face as he slapped his partner’s open hand. All the sheriffs who heard it knew that 1066 was not a proper call sign. Most just shrugged and went about their business. Few if any of them remembered what had taken place in the British Isles in that distant year.

“Bernard Skelley,” said Jesse, “that’s your true name, isn’t it? Your Christian name?”

“I don’t want to talk to none of y‘all muddy son of a bitches! I didn’t ask for the last interview and I ain’t askin’ for this fuckin’ interview ! If y’all want to talk to me, you can address me correct, as a foot soldier of the New Aryan Army.”

“Aryan Army?” asked Jesse incredulously. “Soldier?”

Dr. Wooden and Eddy glanced at each other warily. They had both seen the veins rising in Jesse’s neck. They noticed that his fists were clenched and bloodless.

“What would you paintball, potbellied militia idiots know about being soldiers?”

Dr. Wooden placed a firm hand on Jesse’s shoulder. The lawyer understood the gesture. Once again, a sudden slice of the nightmares that haunted his nights had lit up his mind like a flare. There had been this hill, a small hill near the Laotian border. He leaned back and closed his eyes for a moment to compose himself. The holographic image that had invaded his thoughts slowly dissipated.

“What you might want, Bernard,” continued Jesse in a stern but controlled voice, “and what you ask for are irrelevant here. In fact, you are irrelevant. Do you understand that? It’s not my job to help you or to care about your sorry ass. It’s not my job to worry about what you want. I can’t waste my time with menial garbage. My job is to try and beat this case. You’ve done your job, Bernard, and you’ve done it to the best of your very limited ability. You’ve succeeded in being arrested and charged with a hideous crime.”

“Irrelevant!” screamed Bernard. “Irrelevant? Whatever in hell that goddamn word means! You must’ve learned that big word in some white university on one of them affirmative-action scholarships that I couldn’t never get. You sure as hell didn’t learn to talk like a white man at no spic university.”

“Bernard, you couldn’t get a scholarship to pet obedience school. You certainly must enjoy being wrong,” said Jesse with a grin, “because you do it so often and so very well. As a matter of fact I went to a spic university. You’ve heard of Brown University, haven’t you? Everybody there is brown-skinned, the whole student body and faculty are as brown as mocha java. Even the buildings are brown. The school is named after Osawatomie John Brown and James Brown, the godfather of soul, the famous Brown brothers.”

Now Jesse sat nose to nose with the supreme being.

“After a couple of wonderful years at Brown,” continued Jesse, “I went down to Rice University in I Houston. It’s a school dedicated to the rice-growing regions of Asia and the Southern United States. A lot of Chinese and Thai students go there. But you must’ve known that!”

“Gook school,” muttered Bernard.

“Then I went to Morris Brown, a Jewish-Mexican school where I got a master’s degree in shtik—humor from the Catskills, with a minor in Mexican cooking. Are you following all of this, Bernard? When I’m done you can fill me in on your progress toward a GED. For my law degree I went to Cisco College down in Texas. The Cisco Kid started that school after he and Pancho broke up the act and the television show went off the air. Duncan Reynaldo and Leo Carillo were two of my favorite professors.”