Pain Killers (10 page)

“Around here the Devil wins more than he loses, you know what I mean?”

“Not exactly.”

“Let me rephrase, Your Honor. Think there’s such a thing as a good prisoner?”

“You’d know better than me. Do
you
think people can change?”

“Oh, they can change all right. I’ve seen ’em. The problem is, they keep changing into the same thing.” This came with a full frontal of the CO’s perma-grin. “Have there been some famous convicts beloved by the outside? Sure. Hell, they’re the ones they make movies about. But the guards always know.”

“My favorite’s
Birdman of Alcatraz.
”

“You have got to be kidding!”

For the first time since we’d met Rincin slid off his shades, revealing pale green eyes of such startling luminosity I wondered if he wore the reflectors to keep from showing them to the lifers. “No knock on Burt Lancaster,” he went on. “The character’s real name was Robert Stroud. Stroud was at Leavenworth when my great-uncle was a hack. Forget the birds. All he did was write letters to kids, describin’ stuff he wanted to do to ’em.”

“The Birdman of Alcatraz was a pedophile?”

“That part didn’t make it into the movie.”

“Thanks for clearing that up,” I said. “I was going to try and find a guy serving life to babysit my child, but not now. I owe you.”

Shades back on, Rincin shook his grin. “You’re a funny guy. All I’m sayin’ is, you walk out that class today, you might think you met some of the greatest guys in the world. Just remember, they didn’t get here for skipping jury duty.”

“Point taken,” I said, eyeing the low building just off the yard where a group of cons had already gathered. “You know why I’m here?”

“Do-gooder, I guess.” He made sure I saw him spit. “Looks like your students are waiting. Maybe one of ’em brought you an apple.”

He came around the passenger side and grabbed my arm as I got out. “I’m pulling your leg about the apple. They bring you any kind of foodstuff, I was you, I’d check it for feces and ground glass.”

“Will do,” I said, freaked by the mention of ground glass. Was Rincin letting me know he knew how my second wife did her first husband? That he knew everything about me? Did everybody know everything? Was anything accidental?

Fuck.

“We’re in the old furniture factory. We got a li’l conference room in the corner.”

That’s when it hit me: I had made no preparations for class. I’d become so obsessed with Mengele, I had no idea what I was going to say.

Mister Addiction Specialist.

We passed the open garage of the fire department. A tiny muscleman in big black boots stood on the front bumper of a midsixties Mack fire truck. He leaned over the hood, one hand inside a chamois mitten. He polished slowly, in tight, soft circles, as if stroking an ass he couldn’t get enough of.

“Showtime!” Rincin hissed. “Bring snacks!”

I turned, but Rincin wasn’t talking to me. He was talking to the fireman. The mini-Schwarzenegger saw me looking and grinned, giving the air in front of him a few mocking little mitten-spanks.

Except for Davey, the guy with the half face, I didn’t recognize any of my students. Mengele wasn’t there. I hadn’t considered that possibility. With him absent, I’d have to fake competence for no other reason than to keep anybody from finding out I was incompetent. If I had to pick a place to get drug sloppy, where better than state prison, after showing up to teach the inmates how they, too, could live the dream of being clean and sober?

I was two seconds from full spinout. A door across the room banged open. A wheelchair rolled in, bearing a slender, slightly hunched old man with glowing skin, perfectly parted peroxide-blond hair, matching brows and mustache. He looked like a two-hundred-year-old Billy Idol. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. But it didn’t seem smart to show it. Pushing him was Movern Dinkle. The free-for-six-hours guy.

Movern’s plump baby cheeks rested on top of a string-bean neck and shoulders, as if his face needed to go on a diet and his body needed nutrition shakes. I nodded at him and he nodded back. Not friendly, not unfriendly. A professional.

The chairs were arranged in a circle. I grabbed the one up front, next to Davey, whose remaining face appeared strangely chipper. He’d shaved his head.

“Hey, I’m Manny,” I said, extending a hand. “You must be Davey.”

“How’d you know? My good looks?”

Despite the fact that the bottom of his face was blown off, enough of Davey’s mouth had been put back to let him talk normally, if a little Tom Brokaw–ishly He must have been a handsome kid. Above the catastrophe of scars and skin grafts, where his chin would have been, he owned all-American features. Reconstructive surgery had not reconstructed him so much as rounded him off. Up close, I spotted fresh scarring. The last surgeon to have a go at him had tried to fix his lower lip so it covered his gums. But the graft had not quite adhered, and the skin of his lip on one side flapped a little, like peeling wallpaper. He was basically lipless.

I let go of his hand and turned to the other side, where a wiry African-American, middle-aged with old-school processed hair, slunk in his chair, arms crossed over his chest. “Do not even,” he said. “I hear you a cop.”

My surprise must have shown.

“Ain’t no secrets up in this bitch. First thing you be learnin’ is how to spot a UC. Right after how to keep your tush cherry and get your womens in here to visit.”

This was going well! A paunchy white Rasta in wire-rims dropped in the chair opposite. “No disrespect, but ease the fuck up, Andre.”

My neighbor was instantly upright. “Motherfucker, I tol’ you, I don’t go by Andre. I go by Reverend D.”

So Rev. D was the mysterious empty file, Andre Duquesne. The skull of the white kid ragging him sprouted broccoli dreads. A few of them stuck straight up at least half a foot. I didn’t recognize him from the files. One more way the warden was letting me know he cared.

The white Rasta covered his mouth with his hand and giggled. “I’m Jimmy. I didn’t have dreads in my mug shot. You’re a friendly policeman, huh?”

“Was.”

“You ever shoot anybody?”

People always ask that. I always answer, “I don’t remember.”

This bought me a few more seconds to study my new friends. I recognized Roscoe, the Panther turned philosopher. Older by far than everybody else, Roscoe’s salt-and-pepper goatee graced a lean, serene and unsmiling face. He might have been a black yogi. A solid
ése
to my left sat tapping his fingers on the desk, chewing his lip. If it was Cranky, the Mexican trying to kick crank, he’d obviously been lifting weights. Maybe that’s what Mexican speed freaks did up here. His blue shirt was open over a wife beater, revealing the top half of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

“I was gonna go around the room, talk a bit about who I am, all that crap, but what the hell, let’s start with the shooting thing. It’s an honest question, and I wanna give you an honest answer.”

I glanced at Mengele again. I couldn’t resist. Underneath the Rutger Hauer–circa–
Blade Runner
hair, his anthracite eyes were piercing and suspicious, the taut skin over his face weirdly smooth. But what really creeped me was the globe of muscle in his bicep. Not large so much as tight. I thought of the switch-handed twins and wondered,
Can a surgeon transplant his own arms?
Obviously not both on the same day. No way to check for a scar unless he wore a sleeveless T-shirt. But from his ironed, buttoned-to-the-top shirt and buffed fingernails, he didn’t seem like the sleeveless type.

Our eyes met and I thought I could see what was in Mengele’s head:
Dance, little Jew-monkey, dance.
The race scientist had written his PhD thesis on how to tell Jews from the folds in their ears. Ten seconds with the calipers over a lobe, no need to check for foreskin. He must have been the life of the party.

Tearing my gaze away, I met all the eyes in the room, then went into full blurt: “Toward the end, it was no big deal to come to with blood on my shirt or a clump of hair stuck to my dashboard. Little things…”

“If thass what the man call little, Movern gonna shit his drawers he hear what’s
big.
” Movern laughed at his own joke, but no one else did.

“Movern, mouth,” Rincin said from his post in the corner. He jingled change in his pocket and popped his gum. I realized that I was no longer high. I also realized that I’d stopped talking. But I was a professional: I knew how to make a flake-out look like a pause.

“One time I came to with a couple of clips missing from my nine. This time there was a puddle of blood in the backseat. But I never got that knock on the door.”

I looked at each of them individually, wrinkling my forehead to signify depth.

“You know the knock I’m talking about. Like when you drive home in a blackout and next day your bumper’s bashed in, and there’s a flattened high heel trailing panty-hose stuck to the front tire. You’re scared and hungover, so what do you do? What do you think you do? You stick the hoopty in the garage or steal some license plates from a Denny’s parking lot to switch up. Hit-and-run’s a total loser crime,” I said, looking at Mengele, who was in there for it. “Scum of the earth. But some people have no self-control.”

What was I doing, trying to flush out a mass murderer with vehicular manslaughter insults? I rubbed a hand over my stubble and winced at the eau de trailer on my fingers. I didn’t need a shower as much as I needed steam-cleaned.

Roscoe, who thus far had said nothing, regarded me mildly. Nonjudgmental. Which only made me feel more judged.

“Why am I standing here telling you the demented shit I did?”

“’Cause you demented?” offered Andre, AKA Reverend D.

Half-faced Davey glared. I noticed that his eyelashes were thick as Bambi’s, as if in compensation for the tragedy underneath.

“Guys,” I soldiered on, “demented is five flights up from where I was. Sometimes it still is, but that’s a different story….”

Silence. Neurosis didn’t play well in the penitentiary.

Cranky piped up. “C’mon, homes, you a cop.” Every few words he had to stop to grind his teeth and chew his lips. “Cops are your gang.”
Chew. Grind.
“They ain’t gonna snitch you off.”
Grind, grind.
“And it ain’t like you gonna kick the door down and cuff your own white ass.”
Grind, grind. Chew chew grind chew.

“You sound kinda pissed, Cranky. So, you ever had a problem with drugs?”

“My name is Ernesto, mang. I’m Cranky with my family.”

“Me too,” I said, “and the Lexapro didn’t help. I still hated them. Shit’s supposed to be an antidepressant. But how can you not be depressed when the shit turns your dick into a doorbell?”

Shut the fuck up!
I screamed at myself in my head, then wondered if I’d been talking out loud.

It didn’t matter, at least not to Cranky. He’d twisted around to make sure Rincin was listening, giving me the chance to admire the fresh “XIII” inked on the back of his head. For the thirteenth letter of the alphabet. M.
La eMe.
Which had just made doing meth a beat-down offense.

“Here’s the deal,” I said, my voice low so it would sound serious, if not entirely coherent. “You want to stop using, you have to find out why you started. You got to look at all the shit you got high ’cause you couldn’t face….”

Then the white Rasta threw down a challenge. “This is just me, Jimmy, talkin’. But I didn’t get high for none of that, man. I got high ’cause I liked fuckin’ two hos all night with that chronic and cocaine. And some Hennessy for when the sun come up.”

“That’s what I’m talkin’ about,” echoed Reverend D. “’Cept you should lose the alcohol, son. Womens you can enjoy till you eighty, but you gots to lose the booze. Man, I had this little Chinese girl once—”

“Hold that thought, Rev.” I knew I had to chime back in or lose the semblance of control. “What I wanna know, Jimmy, is how you felt when you
couldn’t
get the hos or the drugs.” This sounded school-marmy, even to me. I was so ill prepared I was defaulting to Nancy Reagan. I had spent all my time on Mengele. But if anybody asked about real-skin Nazi sex dolls, I’d be all over it.

Jimmy threw his arms out and mugged for the class. “Look at this face. Dude, I always got the hos and the drugs. And when I’m on the outs, I intend to get ’em again.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Why you think? Addiction education’s gonna look real sweet to the parole board.”

“When’s your hearing?”

“Twenty twenty-nine.”

“Well, don’t rush into anything….”

Somebody let out a loud, whistling fart, after which Mengele stirred in his wheelchair and declared, “That’s the first intelligent thing I’ve heard all day.”

This got some chuckles.

“A fart joke, thank you.” I pretended to be offended. Superior. Trying for a tone I imagined a vain man might find infuriating to his vanity. “What took you down, Mr. Burgermeister? Bratwurst and beer?”

Mengele stiffened. “It’s doctor.”

“Of course it is,” I said. “And does the doctor have anything in his past that makes him want to blank himself out when he remembers it?”

Mengele met my gaze steadily. “I have done nothing regrettable. I have had regrettable things done to me.”

“Such as?”

It was just him and me now. The room disappeared. I hadn’t expected to get this lovey-dovey until later on.

“I have been denied recognition for my achievements! I have made extreme sacrifices.”

“That sounds like resentment to me. You got a lot of resentments? No need to be ashamed. We all do. Problem is, resentment is like taking poison and hoping somebody else dies.”

“You do not know what you are talking about.” He slammed a hand down on the arm of his wheelchair, startling Movern, who’d begun to doze.

Rincin eased away from the door. One hand on his billy club. “Easy now, Doc.”

Mengele regarded him with a raised peroxide eyebrow, upper lip curled in a sneer of infinite weariness. His accent was comprehensible—once I stopped trying to pick metal shards out of my ear. “No one in this country has a concept of how to run a prison. Do you know the resources you are wasting? The benefits being squandered?”