The Four Stages of Cruelty (3 page)

Then he twisted and torqued in the seat in order to reach down to his ankle with the hand that was not zipped. He lifted his left foot higher until his fingers could touch his white sock, pulled out a thin roll of stiff paper, and passed it to me with two fingers like crab claws. I received it, shocked and baffled.

“I was supposed to deliver this,” he said.

I felt my heart thudding hard. I felt fucked over and fooled.

“Deliver?”

I kept my right hand on the fuckstick under my left thigh. With my left hand I flattened the roll. A booklet, about half the size of a regular piece of paper, the binding sewed carefully with black thread—thin, but maybe twenty pages long. A black circle was drawn on the cover, and within it were three white triangles or pyramids, a single triangle on the bottom balancing two above it. In an instant, with a different take, I saw the drawing as the face of a crude and menacing pumpkin with two broadly sliced eyes and a mouth. The book had a title in bold square letters—
THE FOUR STAGES OF CRUELTY
—and it was probably the word “cruelty” that evoked the subliminal Halloween menace. A subtitle read
The Beggar Restored to Life
.

I teased open the pages and began to glance through. On the first page was a drawing of a desert, empty except for a
distant hooded figure walking along the horizon line. The text read
“God promised a prophet but sent a warrior instead.”
On the next page the man walked a cobblestone road that led to an elaborate medieval city with castle walls and peaked towers. The road itself was lined gruesomely with decapitated heads propped on the tipped points of spears. In the next box the perspective came from over the edge of his cloaked shoulder, revealing the jut of his chin but nothing distinct about his face.
“The rulers of the city had long feared that the Beggar would return
…”

I felt no reaction other than a mild revulsion. Technically, it was impressive: a series of incredibly precise, almost photographic ink drawings, the kind inmates generate when they have the talent, too much time, and too little paper. But the chopped-off heads and the exaggerated physique of the “Beggar” had the flourish of brutality, the muscular pornography favored by teenage boys without girlfriends. I looked at Josh for some kind of explanation.

“They wanted me to give it to my mom.” He was utterly flat now, beaten down, worn-out, and devoid of emotion.

“Your mom?” I thought of the woman in the hotel room, those pink cheeks.

“For safekeeping. A place no one would look. But I couldn’t pull her into this. Not on the day my father got buried.”

“So you want
me
to take it?” The tone in my voice questioned not only his reasoning, it questioned his intelligence.

He shrugged. I don’t think it mattered to him whether I kept it or threw it away. I think he was beyond the mattering. He just wanted the weight off his shoulders. There was no
malice or manipulation in him, only resignation. I’d bought him some french fries, so he figured he could give up in my presence. A part of me jumped into a new line of thought: well, well, well, what have I stumbled onto here. I wondered whether his weakness represented any opportunity for career advancement.

“Who?” I asked. “Who’s they?”

“Jon Crowley,” he answered.

I knew Crowley, though not well. He was hard-core but a loner. As a CO, I treated him decently because he never hassled with trivial shit and seemed straight-up and composed, characteristics that could be confused with intelligence. He lived in the howler ward now, and had for about a year, because of a broken arm that kept getting rebroken. I had not thought deeply on Crowley’s proclivity for unfortunate falls, but it didn’t take much imagination to see it as a message from some dissatisfied customer or upset business partner.

“Why did Crowley ask you to put this somewhere for safekeeping?”

A long pause while he seemed to test the logic of his own argument. “He didn’t. I borrowed it from him.”

Now he’d stolen it. “Do you know what a box thief is?”

His face changed, a ripple passing through it.

“Yes.”

“You don’t want to steal something from another inmate’s cell.”

“I didn’t steal it.”

“Because if you take something from someone else’s cell, they will figure it out and fuck you up.”

“Crowley wouldn’t do anything bad to me.”

“And if they don’t, someone else will, just out of principle.”

“Crowley’s my friend.”

Crowley was his friend. I could not help but shake my head. “You don’t want friends. Don’t trust anyone who says he’s your friend.” And then I stopped myself. He was a nineteen-year-old kid in a fragile mental state. You learn, as a CO, that some arguments can not be won by force of reason.

I tried next to avoid the downward spiral. “How long have you been in the infirmary?”

“About four months,” he answered. “Ever since I got to Ditmarsh.”

“Why?” My curiosity was unwarranted. It wasn’t my business what arrangements had been made and why, but I also felt I was owed something, an acknowledgment of a favor.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I wish I was in gen pop. I want to start my real time, get it over with. I keep asking Keeper Wallace to give me a regular cell, but he won’t let me leave.”

I felt the pitter-patter of my heart to hear him cop so openly to the special treatment. “You don’t want to start your real time, Josh,” I said. “You don’t.”

He nodded as if he understood, but then he began to talk about the pluses of his situation. “Crowley’s drum is next door. It’s been great getting to know him. I don’t think I would have survived my first week otherwise. We talk a lot. I help him get his shirt on once in a while. He gives me advice about inside. And we got a lot in common.”

My arched eyebrow. “What kind of friends are you, Josh?”

“He draws,” Josh explained. “I draw, too. He got me into the art therapy class, way ahead of other people. Everyone wants to get in there.”

Art therapy. I bet they were breaking down the doors for that one.

Josh sighed. “I’m just trying to help him. I’m worried he’s going to get into trouble.”

“Why would he get in trouble? What has he done?” I wanted an answer. I wanted it spelled out. But Josh gave me nothing to work with.

“It’s not him, it’s the drawings. Drawings can be misinterpreted,” he said.

How was a kid like Josh Riff supposed to survive inside Ditmarsh? He didn’t have the sense for it. Other inmates, with IQs a third as high, had better instincts for minding their own business, keeping their mouths shut. I looked through the pages of the book again. The Beggar wandered the city, unrecognized. His face in the hooded cloak was always hidden by shadow. In scene after scene he encountered people who lived in the city, barkeeps, prostitutes, merchants, temple priests. Some were old friends who looked shocked when they recognized him. Others seemed to have known him only by reputation but genuflected with respect and fear when his identity was understood. No one used any other name for him than Beggar—even the group of brigands who surrounded him in a dark alley and attacked. Pushed to fight, the Beggar threw off his cloak, revealing a muscular but scarred body, and he whirled among them, swinging a wooden staff, caving in their teeth, cracking their heads. “Brothers!” he cried out to the fleeing survivors.
“We all suffer under the same cruel masters!”

“Who’s the tough guy?” I asked. It was rhetorical, I suppose, because I wasn’t expecting any kind of answer.

But Josh said, “That’s the Beggar.”

I counted four, five, six seconds.

“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

“Crowley said he’s a prophet.”

Good grief. I flipped toward the end. The Beggar had been captured by soldiers, men wearing bird’s masks and feathered helmets. He was brought to a central keep and then led down steep stone stairs to a cavern below the city. The door was marked by a jack-o’-lantern stamped into the page with raised outlines. I’d seen the circle and triangles before. I tried to remember where. When I turned the page, I saw the Beggar shackled to a wall, guards torturing him with poles and knives.

So this is what prison looked like through an inmate’s eyes. I’d seen enough. I had no desire to entangle myself further. It was not my business if Crowley had offended someone or otherwise gotten himself into trouble, and I felt foolish even contemplating handing over such meaningless nonsense to the Keeper. I spoke slowly to Josh, wanting him to understand me on every level.

“I’m going to pretend you never showed this to me, and I’m going to forget we had this conversation. This comic book is not your property, it’s Crowley’s, and I think you overestimate the depth of your friendship with him. Inmates don’t want other inmates to fuck with their stuff. If you want to drop this in the snow before we get back inside, that’s your choice. If you
want to rip it into shreds and burn it in your toilet, you can do that, too. But do not ask me to get involved in your problems. I’ve had enough of them today.”

Josh started to argue but then recognized that whatever opening I’d offered to him before was closed now. And with my decision he was suddenly no longer human to me. He was cargo—walking, talking, bullshitting cargo—that needed to be watched over, knocked about, and told what to do, mechanically, without feeling, and definitely with a well-founded sense of superiority.

I took my cell phone out and dialed Wallace’s desk number, and when he answered, I told him we’d arrived. I’d expected his personal escort again, some cover for the illicit trip, but Wallace seemed too tired and distracted to give a damn. I told him Josh had gotten sick in the car. He told me not to worry and to return inmate Riff to his cell. I didn’t want to do it alone and asked, “Are you sure, sir?” But Wallace was sure. I didn’t argue. To put up any kind of fuss risked scrutiny over other things—the fact that Josh had required attending to on the highway, that we’d stopped at McDonald’s, that we’d sat in the parking lot for fifteen minutes while we talked about a comic book. Instead, I hung up, swore, and went around the car. The kid stank, and he didn’t want to go inside again. I gave him a push. Forced to move or trip, he obeyed.

No one was in the waiting room, thank God. We got buzzed in, the heavy doors releasing and then slamming behind us with that sound of all life being sucked out of the universe. Bruno, an old hack who probably knew Wallace well, was minding the
control deck. I unshackled Riff and put him through the metal detector doorframe; then I walked around it, as COs always did. I could understand Wallace’s indifference better now. Bruno would do what he was told without question. “You smell like you’ve been in the bathroom of a nightclub,” Bruno said through the cage. My female presence was the best thing that had happened to him in three shifts. “Bruno, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” I answered. And Bruno said, “I don’t know. I’ve got a teenage daughter.” And for some reason we both thought that was funny.

I unshackled Josh and left the bracelets and chains with Bruno. Then I walked Josh home. He was silent all the way to the infirmary. After I keyed his door, he sat on the edge of the bed without looking up, his face slack and dour, as though the intensity of emotion had drained out of him and left his features formless. I did not say goodbye.

Instead, I stepped over to the cell next door. It required deliberate effort to see inside. The cells in the infirmary had private doors with slots at eye level, an inconceivable luxury to anyone used to the cave-like lifestyle of gen pop, all bars and cold stone. I shone my flashlight inside and saw Crowley sitting on the steel shitter with his pants around his ankles. He smirked into the glare. He had that emaciated, bony, grayish-tattooed look of an ex-junkie, his eyes dark smudges, his hair wet and long, his chin unshaven. His right arm was in a cast, one of those half-body sheaths that wraps around the torso, the broken limb propped up like a gnarled tree branch, fingers dangling over the unit sink. His good hand braced the wall as if the room could tilt like a ship at sea.

“Right on,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for someone to wipe my ass.”

I said nothing and stepped away and walked back down the hallway, past Josh again, lighting up each cell in turn as if doing a count. Most of the drum rats were asleep and curled over or flat on their backs and staring skyward, flabby, old, weak. But in the third cell past Josh’s, I saw the inhuman mess. His name was Donald Lorrey, but we called him Occupant. A bloated, obese body, an awkward imbalance in the way he sat in a corner of the bed, propped against the wall, stunned by medication. Most of his fingers and toes were gone, soft nubs left over on the ends of swollen diabetic appendages, and his face was gone, too. The goneness started at the lower right chin, where a jaw had once been, and it cleaved upward to clear out the palate and much of the nose and separate the forehead into two unevenly furrowed portions. The head was tilted up in the way the blind seem to sniff the air. A failed suicide, a big-time loser, a bullet doing the trick but not the job, the sight a source of occasional wonder and glee for the COs, who sometimes dared new colleagues to enjoy their lunch and then walk over and take a look.

You forget sometimes. In the outside world, there are accidents and oddities and strange events, but nothing like here. Inside Ditmarsh, there be monsters.

For a long time he sat in silence on the edge of the mattress, almost physically sore from the many blows of the day. Then he slid Crowley’s small graphic novel back into the slot in the
bedpost and started to take off his clothes. When the night deepened and all rustling stopped, he heard a whisper. It was Crowley from the next cell, asking how everything had gone down. Getting no answer, Crowley asked louder how he was doing. There was care in his voice. Guilty, worn-out, and frustrated, he told Crowley to leave him the fuck alone.

He got silence in return and hoped, wavering between anxiety and exhaustion, that Crowley was the understanding type. A half hour later he heard a tap and saw a flickering shape in the cut in his door, hovering for an instant like a moth batting against a window. It disappeared and then reappeared. Standing at the cut with his fingers extended, it took him three tries to catch the book of matches on a string.