The way it goes down, I’m more than ready. The moron’s been riding me since the first minute of the first quarter. He does not shut up, not for a minute. You got nothin’, you white bread bitch. You can’t handle my shit. You slow. You old. You ain’t now and you never was.
And me, Bubba Yablonsky, I’m trying to keep the game close because at the end, when we make our move, I want everybody worked up. So I’m letting the moron go by me and I’m missing my shots and this inspires him to even greater rhetorical flights. Where’s yo game, white bread? You leave it with yo mama? Ah think she done stuck it down her panties. ’At’s ’cause it stinks.
I put up with it because I’m basically a goal-oriented guy and because I’ve learned to control my anger.
We’re well into the fourth quarter, the game tied at 38, when their point guard takes a jump shot that comes off the far side of the rim. I box out the moron, who compensates by twisting his knuckles against my spine, then go up for the rebound. The ball drops into my hands, but I don’t catch it. I tip it, instead, toward the sideline.
Spooky Jones, our small forward, is closest to the ball and he fears after it, leaping over the sideline and into the third row of benches. While he’s in the air, I slam my elbow into the moron’s chest, then scrape the heel of my Nikes against his shin. As expected, the moron begins to throw punches, and a moment later both benches empty. Now all eyes are on the combatants, all eyes except those of Road Miller’s wife, Louise. Her eyes are on her work as she yanks at the waist of Spooky’s shorts and jams a small package down into his crotch. The package is bound with double sided tape and molds so nicely to Spooky’s abdomen that when he finally pulls himself up and dashes off to the locker room, nobody notices a thing.
I don’t see the rest of it, of course, because the moron has me by the throat and one of the screws is pounding on my back like I’m the one who won’t let go. But the plan is for Spooky to dump the package beneath a pile of dirty towels in the hamper, then come back on the court. Later, Freddie Morrow will push the hamper to the prison laundry, remove the package, and bring it to yours truly.
It’s an eminently workable prison hustle, brilliantly conceived and elaborately planned. The package contains two ounces of powder cocaine which sells on the inside for two hundred dollars a gram. As there are twenty-eight grams in an ounce and the two ounces are costing me and my partners twelve hundred dollars… well, the math speaks for itself.
I let myself be pulled away from the moron and back to the sidelines where my teammates are already gathered. Spooky Jones isn’t there. That’s because he’s lying in a shower stall, his throat slashed and the product vanished. He’s still bleeding when we find him, his heart still fluttering. His breath whistles through the hole in his throat while a deputy warden screams into the phone for a doctor; his eyes remain open and imploring until the doctor rushes into the locker room. Then Spooky’s breathing stops, for good and forever.
I can’t help it. I’m a criminal. I don’t mourn Spooky. Yeah, he was a good guy and we’d split many a joint during our stay at the Menands Correctional Facility, a minimum security joint with a spectacular view of the Hudson River. But if there’s anything a thief can’t stand, it’s being ripped off. Somebody took my coke and I want it back. As for Spooky Jones, he’s past caring.
Deputy Warden Ezekiel Buchanan rakes me over the coals. Him and Coach Poole, who’s also, technically, a deputy warden.
“You started the fight,” Buchanan tells me. He has a thin face and a long nose and unnaturally red lips. “Can we agree on that?”
I’m thinking, If I was still in Attica, the screws would be working me over with ax handles. I’m thinking, That’s exactly where you’re going, dickhead, back to Attica, where your life is on the line every minute of every day. Say good-bye to paradise.
“Coach,” I finally respond, “I didn’t have anything to do with… with what happened to Spooky. I was on the floor every minute, which you know because you were there. For me, that’s an alibi.”
Coach Poole doesn’t respond. He looks devastated, like a jilted lover. His ebony skin has a grayish cast and his small chocolate eyes are shot through with jagged red veins.
“You wanna answer me, Bubba? Answer the question I asked you?” Buchanan’s a patient guy, a twenty-year man who’s worked a dozen institutions, and he also thinks he’s been betrayed. That’s because he personally recruited the Menands’ basketball team from some of the worst prisons in the system, choosing very carefully from the pool of eligible talent. In the process, he’d put his reputation on the line.
“The only point I wanna make,” I say, “is that the entire team was on the court when this went down. I don’t see how you can blame us.”
“I asked you if you started the fight.”
“It was the moron threw the first punch.”
“After you elbowed him.”
“This is prison basketball, Deputy, which, as you know, is characterized by aggressive defense. You want us to play nice, you tell the officials to start callin’ fouls. They’re your officials, right?” Again, I’m thinking, If you talked like that to a deputy warden in Attica, they’d find pieces of your body in Montreal.
Now I’ve got two goals. I want my coke back and I want to finish my bit at Menands, where life is easy, where the food is edible, where there are no rats, where the screws don’t begin every conversation with Hey, you piece of shit.
“Jones flies into the cheap seats. You start a fight. Jones disappears into the locker room, where he gets killed. Am I supposed to believe this is all coincidental?”
“I didn’t start the fight, Deputy. And I didn’t see when Spooky took off for the locker room. But anybody in the stands could’ve followed him and nobody would’ve noticed.”
We go around and around for another hour. I’m polite and respectful, but I stick to my guns. Fights, I insist, are common under the best of circumstances and this was the New York Prison League’s championship game. High feelings were to be expected and the refs were allowing us to play. Thus, when the very predictable confrontation finally went down, person or persons unknown had taken advantage of the resulting chaos.
Coach begins to perk up toward the end. I’m giving him an out and he knows it. Sure, Menands is a minimum security prison, but it’s still a prison. Assaults among the populace are uncommon, but they happen. Murders are quite rare, but they also happen. I mean, if a murder occurs in the dining hall, do you blame the cook?
When Buchanan finally dismisses me, I plant a seed. “Coach, we’re gonna play a makeup game, right? This is for the championship and we were tied.”
I’m back in living unit 8, locked down, me and the rest of the starting five. Hafez Islam, our starting two-guard, is busting my balls, which I don’t need. Hafez is a prison-converted Black Muslim, the only one at Menands, which has a majority-white population. I’ve never seen him when he wasn’t angry about something, and from time to time (when that anger was directed at me) I was tempted to slap his mouth shut. Unfortunately, our stay at Menands depends as much on our nonviolent behavior off the court as on our game-day ferocity. Which meant that I mostly have to eat it.
“I know you up to somethin’, Bubba,” he tells me. “You coulda took that rebound, only you tipped it out. What’s up wit’ that? You fuckin’ wit’ us?”
“What I’m up to is none of your Allah-damned business, Hafez. In fact, you’re disrespecting me by asking the question.” I pause long enough to let the message hit home. “And you better think about something else. If Warden Brook decides that we had anything to do with Spooky gettin’ capped, he’s gonna ship us back where we came from. In your case, if I remember right, that was Green Haven.”
I gather my troops for a team meeting and explain that there had to be five hundred people watching us when Spooky was killed. “You all are just feeling guilty because you’re criminals and you expect to be accused of any crime that takes place in the neighborhood. I want you to put that kinda thinking out to your minds because a week from today we’re most likely gonna be playing a makeup game. And this game, my brothers, we’d best not lose. Understand what I’m tellin’ ya? We cop the trophy, Warden Brook ain’t gonna send us nowhere. But if we lose, we’ll be on the bus before we take a shower.”
Somber nods, sober looks. Now we’re all on the same page.
At eight o’clock, before I have a chance to meet with my surviving partners, Roger “Road” Miller and Hong “Tiny” Lee, I’m called to the office of Warden Odell Brook. Brook was a Notre Dame shooting guard who’d been drafted in the second round by the Detroit Pistons, only to blow out his knee in a schoolyard game before he signed a contract.
“You start that fight, Bubba?”
It was the same question Deputy Buchanan had asked, but this time I put a different spin on it. “I had a bad game, Warden. Real bad. And the moron was in my face from the opening tip.”
“I saw that,” Brook admits. “He was disrespecting you big-time.”
“And I didn’t answer back, right? Even though I was tossing up bricks. Even though he was goin’ right by me.”
“Yeah, fine. You were an angel.” He waves a long blunt finger in my direction. “But that rebound, Bubba. You coulda taken it down. You know that.”
I nod agreement, then feed him the line I should have fed Hafez Islam and which I’d made up on the way to the warden’s office. “It was late in the game and we were tied. I wanted to start a fast break, see if we could get some numbers on the other end.”
“Bubba, there was nobody within ten feet of that tip-out.”
“What can I say, Warden? I mean, nothin’ went right for me the whole game. Somehow I thought Spooky was there. I thought I saw him.”
“You’re so full of shit it’s leaking out of your ears. I can smell it, Bubba. It’s stinkin’ up my office.”
Ever the humble convict, I lower my head before disagreeing. “Swear on my mother, Warden. When I saw the tip go out of bounds I flipped out. Like, it’s the championship game and I’ve been fucking up and now I fucked up the worst of all.” I raise my eyes, meet his gaze. “You know what I’m sayin’ here because you been there, too. I took it out on the moron, all my frustration, everything he said.” I ball my fists, don the most fearsome scowl in my repertoire. “I wanted to kill him, Warden. I wanted to put the motherfucker down.”
I’m six inches taller than Warden Brook’s six-three, and, at 270, eighty pounds heavier. Still, he’s unimpressed by my ferocity. “You gonna have a bad game next week, Bubba? You gonna tip the ball to a phantom teammate?”
“Does that mean we’re playing?”
“If Spooky…” He pauses, starts again. “If the incident had nothing to do with the basketball game, I don’t see why we should punish the players and the fans. It doesn’t make sense.” He contemplates his hands for a moment. “As for the fight… well, you say he threw the first punch and he says you did. The officials didn’t see what happened and neither did anyone else who counts. I think the league’s gonna be inclined to call it a wash.”
So far, the conversation’s gone pretty much the way I expected. Menands is populated mainly by white-collar crooks: lawyers who raided a client’s trust fund, bankers who robbed their own banks, doctors who plundered Medicaid, boiler room operators who hung around a little too long. These are folks with money; they love to bet on sports and the persistent rumor is that the cons making book in the yard pay off to a certain deputy warden who pays off to Warden Brook. I don’t know if the rumor’s true, but when I finally respond, I’m definitely hoping.
“If you’re worried about the game, Warden, there’s something you might wanna try. You know, to help the team along.”
“And what would that be?”
“Well, you could put a little bug in the ears of the officials. I’m not talkin’ about high pressure here. I’m talkin’ about very low-key so it doesn’t get around.”
“Bubba, you wanna make your point.”
“Okay, Warden.” I lean a little closer, drop my voice. “The way it looks right now, what with all the bad attitude out there, the first hard foul next week and somebody’s gonna go off. Unless the officials take control of the game in the first two minutes. Unless they call a few touch fouls, a few offensive fouls. Unless they send a clear message.” I lean back. “Later on, the refs wanna let us play, that’ll be great.”
Though Warden Brook says, “Bubba, you don’t have a redeeming bone in your body,” his smile, as I read it, is purely admiring.
It’s after midnight when I’m finally hunkered down with Road Miller and Tiny Lee in the day area of our housing unit. There’s a forty-watt bulb over the door, enough light for the three o’clock count, but not enough for me to read the messages in my partners’ eyes.
“Talk to me,” I tell Road. “Tell me what’s on your mind. ’Cause I know you been thinkin’ about it all night.”
Roger “Road” Miller is our starting power forward. He’s a little too light for the position, especially on the defensive end, but he can elevate on the jumper and he rolls to the basket with determination. I’ve always wondered if Road’s mother deliberately named him after a white country singer. Road is ebony-skinned and proud of his heritage, but he’d once admitted to me that his nickname was derived from the Roger Miller hit “King of the Road.”
“Freddie is what’s on my mind,” he tells me. “As in Freddie fucked us.”
Freddie Morrow is the team drudge. He does everything from stacking the equipment to washing our dirty uniforms. I knew when I recruited him that he was the weak link in the chain, but I had no other way to get the coke out of the locker room.
“Freddie was sitting on the bench when Spooky went down,” I point out. “Plus, he hasn’t got the balls of a canary.”
“I didn’t say nothin’ to nobody,” Road insists, “and Tiny didn’t say nothin’ neither. We ain’t stupid enough to brag on our business, not when we ain’t done it yet.”
“What about Spooky?”
“No way.”
“And me? What about me?”
“Don’t be an asshole,” Tiny Lee declares. Tiny’s our point guard. He’s five-eight and doesn’t weigh more than 150 pounds. Meanwhile, he fears nothing. “If Spooky got whacked over some beef with another con, the coke would still be there. It wasn’t and that means somebody had to tell somebody else. There’s no way around it.”
We’re sitting at a rectangular plastic table bolted to the floor, on gray plastic chairs, also bolted down. We’re supposed to be in our bunks, but we’re the basketball team and the screws won’t bust us for petty violations.
“I don’t know about you guys,” I say, “but I want my coke back.”
Tiny says, “That or somebody’s blood.”
“No, Tiny. I want the coke, which, if you recall, we still haven’t paid for.” I rub my fingertips together, then sing, “Money, money, moneyyyyyyy.”
I came into the deal as part of an effort to turn my life around, an effort which included my anger-management and computer classes. Though I’d been incarcerated for a crime of violence, then passed four years in a very violent prison, my short stay at the Menands Correctional Facility presented me with an inescapable truth: when it comes to white-collar crime, the profits are long and the sentences short. And what I figured, when Tiny first approached me, was that if I sacrificed and worked very hard, I could accumulate enough capital to buy into a top-tier boiler room operation when I finally made parole.
“Oh, man,” Road moans. “I’m gonna catch hold of Freddie and rip his arms off.” It was Road’s Aunt Louise who stuffed the coke into Spooky’s shorts and it was Road who arranged to have the coke fronted. And it was Road, of course, whose ass was on the line.
“Nobody talks to Freddie,” I tell him, a calculated act of disrespect. I’m Road’s partner, not his boss. “Let’s take a little time, take a look around. We got nothin’ but time, right? Time is what we’re doin’.”
Road smiles, cheered, perhaps, by my attitude. “Wha’chu thinkin’, Bubba? I know you schemin’ somethin’.”
“Look around you, Road, next time you’re in the yard. How many cons you think you’re gonna see out there with the heart to cut Spooky’s throat? Because Spooky was spooky.”
Tiny has a terrible burn scar on the right side of his face, and he scratches it when he’s lost in thought. He’s scratching away now, and I lean in his direction as I continue. “You see Spooky’s hands, his wrists? You see any cuts? Spooky came down from Clinton, where you can get your ass shanked for brushing up against somebody’s shoulder. There’s no way he’d let anyone he didn’t trust get close enough to take him out before he could put up his hands.”
By this time, I have a pretty good idea who capped Spooky. What I don’t have is a way to get the coke back. I don’t know where it is, and this particular individual can’t be approached directly. I can’t lay my suspicions on my partners either. I have to keep them under control, especially Tiny, who’s liable to go off, do something stupid, get us all shipped out.
“Like I said, let’s take a few days, look around, see who’s out there. Meanwhile, come Tuesday’s practice, we’ll send Freddie a little message.”
I go to my computer class on Monday. I’m learning how to keep books using Windows NT and Lotus. Hafez Islam is there, and a few other cons, but more than half the desks are empty because most of the prisoners at Menands are familiar with computers. Though I’m also on good terms with the technology, I’m an avid student, more often than not staying after class to work directly with my instructor, Clifford Entwhistle. Cliff came to Menands via one of Manhattan ’s most prestigious accounting firms. In class, he teaches me to keep the books. After class, he teaches me to cook them.
“You holding?” he asks. Cliff will put virtually anything down his throat or up his nose. He’s an incredibly hairy middle-aged man with a beard that starts at his cheekbones and runs all the way to his ankles. In the shower, he looks like a bear with an ass.
I shake my head. “Look, I need you to do me a favor. And I need you to keep it quiet.”
“What’s that?”
“I want you to get me the name of the screw who worked the door to the locker room last night.”
Cliff is a very soft guy with a very hard mind and he gets it right away. “You think a screw killed Spooky?”
“That’s the wrong question, Cliff. The question you’re supposed to ask is, What’s in it for me?” I shift my chair closer to his, until our knees are touching. I can see the fear in his eyes and address myself directly to it. “One other thing, my friend. You’re gonna have to keep this to yourself. That’s because if anybody finds out, I’m gonna kill ya.”
Cliff’s lips curl into a little pout. All along, he’s thought us, if not friends, at least comrades. Now he knows better. “You didn’t have to say that,” he says.
“Yeah, I did, Cliff. I had to say it because I meant it and because it’s very, very important. You fuck up, you’re gonna die.”
I give him a second to absorb the information, remembering that I’d issued the identical threat to Freddie Morrow and it hadn’t stopped him from shooting his mouth off. For a moment, I wish I really meant what I said, but then my anger-management training kicks in, and I move on.
The central computer that runs Menands cannot be reached via the computers available to inmates. But Cliff works in the accounting office, where he routinely processes the Menands’ payroll. From there, he once explained to me, it was just a matter of looking over Deputy Warden Monroe’s shoulder as Monroe entered his password.
When I’m sure he’s not about to put up even a token resistance, I put my hand on Cliff’s shoulder and say, “You do this for me, I won’t forget it. I’ll keep you high for as long as we’re in Menands. You have my word on that.”
I offer my hand, just as if I hadn’t threatened him, and he takes it because he has no choice, sealing the pact.
There are eight or nine serious bookmakers in population, and maybe double that number of contraband dealers who peddle everything from dope to steroids to pornography. I’m sure they had nothing to do with stealing our coke because all the inmates-players and spectators-were subjected to a very intrusive strip search before returning to their cells. But the dealers do figure on the other end. Sooner or later the coke will have to be sold off and one (or more) of them will have to do the selling. As a group, they’re not nearly as vicious as their counterparts in Attica, but they’re not punks either.
I watch these players as Road, Tiny, and I walk along a jogging track that frames the yard at Menands. Wondering if one of them has already taken delivery. If my coke is already disappearing up some rich con’s insatiable nose.
“No sign of Freddie Morrow,” Tiny observes.
“As expected.” I want to tell my partners what I think and what I’m doing about it, but I still can’t risk either (or both) of them blowing their cool. “We need eyes and ears,” I say. “Anybody starts moving coke, we have to know right away.”
My partners solemnly agree and we break up a short time later. I stroll across the yard, graciously accepting the adulation of my fans and the advice of my critics. By this time, everybody knows we’re going to make up Sunday’s game and the question of the day is how we’re gonna do. The Menands’ bookies originally made us ten-point favorites to win the championship, but not only didn’t the Menands Tigers (and especially yours truly) meet expectations, Spooky’s loss at the small forward position has weakened the team. All of that was okay with me because I intended to get a bet down (through a third party, of course) on the Menands Tigers. That was another reason I’d kept Sunday’s game close, why I’d let the moron have his way. With a little luck, the makeup game will be pick ’em by the time we step on the court. Maybe we’ll even be underdogs.
I help my luck along, as I make my way across the yard to where Clifford Entwhistle stands with his back against the outer wall of D Unit, by sticking to the party line. I had a bad game, but I expect to get it together. Though we all miss old Spooky, Bibi Guernavaca can do the job for us at small forward.
The last part is pure bullshit, and though I’m shown no disrespect, everyone I speak with knows it. Bibi, our sixth man, is a good point guard and a decent shooting guard, but he’s too short and too light to play small forward. Somebody else is gonna have to have a big game and I expect that somebody to be me. I’d faced the moron for the second time in yesterday’s game and I knew I could take him. Especially if Warden Brook convinced the officials to call the game tight in the opening quarter.
As I approach, Cliff pushes himself away from the wall and we begin to walk. I don’t say anything, just wait for him to get to the point. The sun has dropped to the ridgeline of Blue Top Mountain at the western edge of the Menands Valley. It sparkles in the chain-link fence surrounding the prison, in the razor wire that tops the fence. Prisoners huddle in small groups. They speak softly, their collective conversation an insectlike hum, a swarm of bees heard at a distance. Suddenly, I feel very good about myself. I’ve set goals and I’m moving toward them and I’m not letting obstacles throw me off course.
“Percy Campbell,” Cliff tells me, “was manning the door outside the locker room last night. He’s the one who found the body.”
Cliff is wearing a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball jacket and I slide a small package into his pocket, a down payment (and all the payment he’s likely to get) on my promise. “Now remember,” I tell him, “the only way to keep a secret is not to tell anybody. Anybody.”
Coach Poole begins Tuesday’s practice with a moment of silence in Spooky’s honor, then declares that because we played so poorly on Sunday, every starting position is up for grabs. “It’s preseason all over again. It’s training camp. You wanna play, you gotta make the team.”
I’m not particularly worried because I know that if the Tigers blow the championship, Coach Poole will have to answer to Warden Brook, and the Tigers can’t win without me. Nevertheless, because I’m a team leader and I don’t want Coach to lose face, I practice hard. By the time we begin our regular scrimmage two hours later, my knees are aching. Both knees, so I don’t know which one to limp on first.
“You ready?” I ask Road as I take the ball out of bounds a few minutes later.
“Yeah. Past ready.”
I toss the ball in, nod to Tiny, then set a pick at the top of the key. Tiny goes by, dribbles to the baseline, then passes back to me. As I receive the ball, Road, posted in the opposite corner, takes off for the hoop. I fake left, then put everything I lave into a pass that misses Road’s outstretched fingertips by a good six inches before slamming into the side of Freddie Morrow’s traitorous head.
We catch a break here. Freddie’s ear is torn halfway off and the doc ships him to the infirmary for an overnight stay. That evening, I pay him a visit, but I don’t tell him how sorry I am for my errant pass. Instead, I sit at the foot of his bed, take his hand in mine, and say, “Who’d you blab to, ya little fuck?”
“Bubba, I…”
I’m an ugly man. I have a jaw like the prow of a ship, a pronounced underbite, a small flat nose with perfectly round nostrils, tiny eyes overhung by a slab of a brow. For most of my life, I’ve been extremely self-conscious about my appearance. It’s only recently, since coming to Menands, that I’ve made a more positive adjustment. Everything in life, I now understand, has its uses. You just have to look on the bright side.
The bright side here is that I don’t have to lay a finger on little Freddie. All I have to do is stare at him.
“You snitched us out, Freddie. You ratted on us. I just wanna hear it from your lips.”
“Bubba, I…”
“We’re not gonna kill you, Freddie. We’re not even gonna hurt you any more than you’ve already been hurt. That’s because you’re gonna help us get our product back.” I pull him toward me, until we’re nose-to-nose. “Take the first step,” I tell him, my voice steady, my tone encouraging. “The first step is always the hardest. You take the first step, the rest is easy.”
“Bubba…”
“No, don’t start with Bubba. You’ve done that three times and it hasn’t gotten us anywhere. Start with somebody else’s name, like the name of the screw you told about the coke.” I give his hand a playful squeeze. “You confess, maybe we can dream up a way to protect you.”
I can hear the little switches in Freddie’s mind as they click into position. With Spooky dead, he’s now the weak link on two chains.
“You know what I think, Freddie? I think it was pure accident. I mean, we didn’t run the scam until near the end of the fourth quarter and the screw had to be in and out before the end of the game. Most likely, when he snuck into the locker room, he figured Spooky was already back on the court. ‘Turn around,’ is what I would’ve said in his place. ‘Face the wall. I’m gonna search you.’ Then out comes the knife and it’s judgment day for Spooky Jones.”
“Bubba…”
“Start with the name, Freddie. You’re gonna feel so much better when you tell me the name.”
“Percy Campbell,” he finally blurts.
Freddie may feel better, but he looks terrible. He’s gasping for breath and he’s bright red from his forehead to his throat. When I let go of him, he falls back onto the pillow and brings his hand to his chest. Freddie’s twenty-two years old, a computer nerd who created a virus that shut down six of the biggest Web sites on the Net.
“How long have you been Campbell’s snitch?”
“Since I got here. He grabbed me the first week and took me to his office. You know about the office?”
I shake my head. Campbell is a middle-aged muscle brain who’s been walking a tier for three decades. A veteran of the worst prisons New York State has to offer, he generally manages to restrain himself at Menands. Still, his personal violence surrounds him, a sour stink detectable by an experienced con at a distance of a hundred yards.
“That’s what Campbell calls it: my office. It’s behind the main furnace, a coal room. You know, from the time when they heated with coal. It’s not used for anything now, and when you’re inside, the furnace is so loud nobody can hear you even if there’s someone around. Which most of the time there isn’t.” He pauses long enough to wipe his nose, then jumps back in. “Campbell told me things… things he’d do to me if I didn’t… I was scared, Bubba. I was never in trouble before I came here. For all I knew, Campbell could do anything he wanted to and get away with it. I didn’t know where to turn.”
Now that I see a way to get my coke back and exact a little revenge for Spooky at the same time, I can’t even fake being mad. I stretch, yawn, take a breath. “I’m gonna need you, Freddie, so I want you to stay alive for a few days. Don’t be alone, no matter what. Stay in a group and Campbell won’t be able to get to you. Remember, it’s only for a couple of days.”
“What about tonight?”
“I’ll talk to the trusty on the floor, see that he watches your back.” I get up, take a step, then turn back to Freddie. I’m smiling now, a genuine smile. “Was I right?” I ask.
“Right?”
“Do you feel better? Now that it’s out in the open.”
“Yeah,” he tells me, “I do.”
Coach Poole makes an announcement after Wednesday’s practice. The league’s championship game will be made up on the following night with no civilians present. This is good news for me because there won’t be a practice on game day and I’ll have enough time to get to the coal room unseen. Unlike Attica with its many checkpoints, Menands runs mostly on the honor system. The fence and the razor wire surrounding the prison are there to reassure the community, not to prevent an escape. The population is controlled by a very simple and very potent threat: you fuck up, you get sent to some horrible place where your survival (not to mention your sexuality) is anything but assured. Most prisoners at Menands aren’t willing to risk their privileged status.
Later that night, Tiny and Road press me, but I don’t reveal much. I tell them to be patient and to stay clear of Freddie Morrow. I tell them I hope to recover the product soon and that I don’t need their help. They don’t care for the underlying message, but they seem to accept it. Nevertheless, within a few days, should I fail to deliver, I know they’ll begin to suspect a double cross.
I wake up on Thursday, take a shower, then skip breakfast and head for the locker room. Freddie’s already there, hanging our pressed uniforms in our metal lockers. Once upon a time, the lockers were a uniform gray, the color of pewter, but they’ve tarnished over the years and now have a mottled overgrown look, as if the victim of some exotic fungus.
“You ready, Freddie?” I ask. “You ready to go to work?”
“Bubba, I…”
“Don’t start that Bubba shit again. I have something I need you to do.”
“What is it?”
“This afternoon, two o’clock, Campbell is gonna be workin’ in the library. I want you to go there, talk to him, tell him that I know you snitched us out.”
“He’ll kill me.”
“For Christ’s sake, you’re gonna be in the library. You even enough, you get eighty-sixed.”
“Then he’ll get me later.”
“He’s already gonna get you later.” I put a foot up on the bench that runs in front of the lockers. “It’s your chance, Freddie. Your chance to be a man for the first time in your miserable life, your chance to stand on your own two feet.” I hold up a finger. “Plus, you can help yourself at the same time. Because I’m telling you, when Campbell hears what you have to say, he’s gonna be a lot more worried about me than you.”
Freddie thinks it over for a moment, the possibility of deflecting Campbell’s wrath onto me obviously appealing. If he gains an ally in the process, so much the better. “Whatta ya want me to say?”
“Tell Campbell that I put the pieces together on my own. I know he killed Spooky and snatched my product because he was the only one who had the opportunity. I know you snitched because… well, I know you snitched because you’re you. Likewise, because you’re you, when I threatened to shank your ass, you confessed. Those stitches in your ear and that bandage oughta be proof enough that I meant business.”
“And that’s it? Just that I admitted talking to him?”
“Yeah, you opened up because you were in fear of your life and now you’re trying to make it good by telling him the truth.” I put my arm around his shoulder, let my voice drop. “Campbell’s gonna ask you a lot of questions. He’s gonna want to know everything you said to me and everything I said to you. It’s only natural, right?”
Freddie nods. “Right.”
“So you tell him everything you told me about his threats and where he took you before he delivered them. The only thing you don’t tell him, Freddie, is that I asked you to come forward. That’s the one teeny-tiny thing you keep to yourself.” I give his shoulder a squeeze. “That’s gonna be our little secret.”
I go from Freddie to Warden Brook’s office. He tells me that he’s spoken to the two refs, and I guarantee him a win. We’re one-point underdogs by now.
“You’re not worried about losing Spooky?”
“You remember when you brought me here, Warden? You remember I promised you a championship? Well, tonight I’m gonna keep that promise.”
I know the warden bets on every game, always on the Tigers, even when I tell him the team’s so worn-out we’d get our asses kicked by the Menands High School Barracudas. He’s a fan is what he is, a former athlete who lives through his favorite team, which is us.
“So make room in the trophy case,” I declare, “because we’re bringin’ the cup home.”
My next stop is in the computer room, where I find my teacher, Cliff Entwhistle, hard at work. Cliff is a big-time gambler, but unlike Warden Brook, he’s willing to wager against the Tigers. Though I only bet with the team (and once threatened to crush the fingers of a skinny point guard I thought was shaving points), I don’t bet every game.
“What’s the word?” I ask him. “Out on the yard?”
“Without Spooky, Menands doesn’t have a chance.”
“Good, because I want to get a bet down.” I retrieve a pair of C-notes from their resting place in the crotch of my underwear and hand them over. If the coke deal had gone down as planned, it’d be a lot more, but I’m doing the best I can. “I guarantee a win here,” I tell him. “You can take it to the bank.”
Cliff nods. “Thanks, Bubba.”
“Don’t thank me. There’s something I need you to do. Like, right now.”
An hour later I make my way down a long flight of stairs to the furnace room. Two stories high and at least a hundred feet long, the room houses a state-of-the-art, fully automated boiler the size and shape of a diesel locomotive. It being May and warm, the unit is only producing hot water. Still, the steady hiss of the flame is loud enough for my purposes. I work my way along the north wall, the route taken by Campbell when he recruited Freddie, avoiding a pair of cameras mounted on the ceiling. The cameras use heat-sensitive film and are in place to detect fires.
The coal room, Campbell ’s office, is not as Freddie described it. I expect a large empty space, but the room is cluttered with discarded desks. There are desks upside down, on their sides, on three legs, desks piled one on top of the other. Desk drawers, heaped in a corner, rise halfway to the ceiling.
It’s now one o’clock. Freddie’s scheduled to make his confession at two. That leaves me an hour to find my product. Assuming it’s here at all, that Campbell doesn’t have another hideaway, that he didn’t take his prize home with him, maybe peddle the weight to a street dealer.
I begin to search, at first systematically, then more and more frantically as time passes. A pair of overhead lights don’t respond to a switch next to the door, and the only illumination splashes in through the open doorway. The desks are extremely dusty. The dust coats my throat and mouth as I work. When I run my fingers over my brush cut, it feels like I’m dragging them through mud.
Somewhere around one forty-five, I force myself to slow down. I tell myself I have one of those unforeseen problems that crop up from time to time, no matter how carefully I try to plan my activities. I tell myself they happen to everybody. It’s not God getting me, like I sometimes thought before I learned to control my anger.
I set out to draw ten deep breaths, each one slower and deeper than the last, just the way I’ve been trained. I don’t get past the fifth before I realize there’s another way, and if I’d only taken a moment to think before I started ripping desks apart, I could have saved myself a lot of work.
I’m standing just to the left of the door, looking for a good place to hide, when Campbell walks into the room. He is not alone. A dealer named Redmond Mitchell is with him. At the tail end of a ten-to-life bit, Red is also a veteran of New York’s maximum security institutions. His stay at Menands is theoretically the final step in his rehabilitation.
Coming from the intensely bright furnace room, neither Red nor Campbell sees me until I step in front of them.
“What’s up, guys? You lookin’ for me?”
Campbell is maybe five-ten. A layer of fat covers a much thicker layer of muscle on his heavy boned frame. At one time, I suppose, he was quite the brawler, an upstate redneck who would have been a convict if he hadn’t become a screw But now he’s nearing fifty, a hard drinker who maintains his self-image by terrorizing inmates, like Freddie Morrow, who are in no position to fight back.
Red is another matter. He’s younger, in much better condition, a man who maintained his personal dignity over many years in many prisons. I see Campbell glance at him, smiling, convinced that Red is an ally in this war. He’s wrong.
“Red,” I explain, “what I gotta do here is convince this dumb-as-shit screw to show me where he’s hidden my cocaine. Most likely, it’d be better if you weren’t here to see it.”
I know that Red’s not afraid of me. I also know that he’s got a release date for the end of the summer and the last thing he reeds is a serious beef. “No harm, no foul,” he says. “I’m not out no money and I ain’t got a dog in this fight.” He backs through the door, then asks, “You gonna win tonight, Bubba?”
“I guarantee it.”
“Thass good, man. ’Cause I took the points big-time.”
Red steps into the furnace room and his footsteps are instantly masked by the hiss of the boiler. He might be lingering a few feet from the open doorway, or he might be on the moon. Campbell stares up at me and I stare down at him. I wonder if he’s looked through my file, tried to get an idea of who he was up against. But, no, careful is not his style. Freddie told him about the coke and he wanted it and that was all she wrote. When he found Spooky in the locker room, he could have backed off, or busted Spooky and taken the credit. But he was already counting the money, already holding it in his sweaty palm.
“Where’s my product, Percy?”
The shiny white surface of his bald scalp slowly reddens. Most likely, in his entire career, no con ever spoke to him this way. But then, in times past, he always had plenty of backup. Now he’s on his own. He can’t call for help, even if he could make himself heard over the din of the furnace, without everything coming out. Spooky, Freddie, the cocaine, everything. Officer Percy Campbell is helpless.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Yablonsky.”
“You can do better than that.” I watch his hand inch toward his back pocket. It’s pathetic, really. “You wanna go that route, Percy, it’s all right, but I don’t see how it’s gonna do you any good.” I step forward until we’re less than an arm’s length apart.
Credit where credit is due, Campbell’s right hand dives into his pocket and he snarls, “See you in hell, ya Jew bastard.”
Despite the epithet and the made-for-TV dialogue, death is not on today’s agenda. First because I’m not a killer, and second because Officer Campbell’s body would draw far too much attention. Most likely, he’s already a suspect in Spooky’s murder.
I grab his wrist, pin his hand in his pocket, then put all 270 pounds into a looping right that makes a sound like a bat slammed into a watermelon as it crashes into his chest. His eyes roll up, his legs wobble, then fail him altogether. He drops to the floor and stops breathing.
For a minute, I think I’m gonna have to give him CPR, maybe catch some fatal screw disease, but then his eyes snap into focus as he rises to a sitting position, draws a painfully ragged breath, and begins to gasp.
I squat down, remove the knife from his pocket and a can of pepper spray from a holder on his belt. I toss them into the furnace room where they can be easily recovered.
“Time for a reality check, Percy. First, you’re completely on your own here. You couldn’t call for help even if there was someone to hear you. Not without risking a murder charge. Second, you’re a middle-aged, out-of-shape, alcoholic sadist who’s been caught with his hand in the cookie jar, while I’m a hardened, merciless criminal who wants his cookies back.”
I grab him by the collar, yank him to his feet, deposit him on one of the few upright desks. Campbell probably goes about 220, but I handle him easily enough. Last time I was in the weight room, I benched 350 for the first time.
“Where’s my coke., Percy?”
There’s no more fight in Campbell’s eyes. There’s hate in abundance, and fear, but no fight. He points up, to a ventilator shaft in the wall. “Behind the grille.”
A moment later I’m holding the package in my hand. It’s a joyous moment, even triumphant, but it’s not enough.
“Now you gotta pay for Spooky,” I tell him.
“What?” He seems honestly confused, as though I’d brought up the name of a mutual acquaintance he can’t quite recall.
“Spooky was my teammate and my friend. You killed him and now I’m gonna punish you, and there’s not a fucking thing you can do about it. You’ve already been checked out on the computer, by the way. You’re on sick leave.”
I push him backward off the desk and onto the floor. I expect a struggle, but Campbell’s eyes reveal only a rapidly enveloping panic. He slides away as I approach, until he comes up against an overturned desk. “Please, please,” he moans. “Please don’t.” I wonder how many times he’s heard those words from the mouth of a Freddie Morrow. I wonder how many times he’s shown mercy in the course of his long shitkicker career.
A long wet stain runs along the inside of Campbell’s thigh, from his crotch to his shins. As I kneel beside him, he rolls onto his side and curls into a fetal position. “Please, please, please.”
In the locker room, before the game, I tape my knees using a pair of Ace bandages that haven’t been washed since the season began. The bandages are still damp from yesterday’s practice and they feel slighty gritty against my skin. They stink, too, stink something nasty. The bandages are part of a ritual that started five years ago when my legs began to give out. As I wind them around my knees, I put on my game face. No mercy is what I tell myself. Take the moron’s game, take his heart, crush his soul.
I flex the knuckles of my right hand. Though I kept well away from Campbell ’s head and face, both hands are a little sore.
“Bubba?”
“Yeah, Road?” I’ve already spoken to Road, Tiny, and Hafez Islam about the officials calling the game close. I left out Bibi Guernavaca because he’s a Pentecostal and begins every encounter with the words Cristo salva.
“You found our product, bro. You the best, you the baddest. You saved our asses. I love you, man.”
A poignant moment, by prison standards. I rise, thump Road’s chest. “Forget that bullshit,” I tell him. “You wanna show your gratitude, hit the jump shot when I pass out of the double team.”
I let the moron win the opening tip. A few seconds later, when the ball comes to him maybe fifteen feet out, I let him drive by me. The packed stands, ablaze with energy a moment before, grow silent. I hustle up the court and plant myself just outside the paint and Tiny gets the ball to me before the double team closes down. I fake left, then spin to the baseline, where the moron checks me with his hip, as he did twenty times in the first game. From fifteen feet away, the senior official, a screw called Dashing Dan Thomas, blows the whistle as I toss the ball in the direction of the basket.
I make both free throws and the crowd wakes up. Red Mitchell, sitting four rows back at midcourt, grins and shakes his head. The moron sets up fifteen feet from the basket, well outside his range. I know he’ll go right and that he’ll bump me with his shoulder on his way across the court. I know because he bumped me in the first game and got away with it. This time, however, Dashing Dan…
The moron goes ballistic, launching a string of epithets at Dashing Dan, who, very predictably, tees the moron up. Satisfied I watch Tiny make the free throw while the moron’s coach drags him over to the bench.
By the end of the first quarter, we’re up 25-9. The fans, even those who bet against us, are on their feet with every play. I’ve scored thirteen points, most of them against the moron’s sub, who’s slow and short, but at least knows when to keep his mouth shut.
As a high school senior, at seventeen, I was already six-six. My knees were coiled springs and injuries were catastrophes that happened to somebody else, somebody smaller and weaker. I was never tired in the last quarter. No, fatigue was what I felt after the party that followed the game, at six o’clock in the morning, with my equally spent girlfriend lying beside me.
I experience all of that again. Just as if I hadn’t thrown it away in a moment of rage. My body is sweat-slick. Sweat drips from my headband into my eyes. I’m completely alive in my flesh now. Flesh is the only reality I have. I measure time in the thump of the ball on the floor. I’m unstoppable.
The moron comes back at the start of the second quarter. By that time, the refs are letting us play again. Meanwhile, the moron backs off when he should be aggressive, then complains bitterly when I hand-check him in the post. I’m being triple-teamed now, the minute I touch the ball, and I’m passing out to Road Miller, who’s draining fifteen-foot jumpers, one after the other.
It’s all over by the middle of the third quarter. We’re up by twenty-two points and the crowd is on its feet, chanting Bub-BA, Bub-BA, Bub-BA. Warden Brook can barely contain himself. He’s dancing around, smacking his fist into his palm. Coach Poole is standing with both arms in the air. He’s shouting instructions, calling a play, but I can’t hear him as I sprint up the court. It doesn’t matter anyway, because Tiny steals the ball and we’re off and running. I’m the trailer on the play with Road coming up fast on the right. Tiny fakes a pass to Road, fakes a layup, then flips the ball over his left shoulder. I receive the pass at the head of the key, take a step to the foul line, then elevate. From a distance, I hear myself scream and I hear the screaming of the fans, a great roar only a half-step removed from utter madness. Then I’m coming down, slamming the ball through the hoop, slamming the palms of my hands into the rim. The backboard jerks forward, then back, then finally shatters, burying me in a sparkling wave of broken glass.
God, I love this game.