Tim Curran - Fear Me

Soon as Romero saw the new meat, he knew there was going to be trouble. He felt it down in his guts, something cold and inexplicable that just started chewing through him. You were sitting on ten years hard time and wouldn’t see parole for another three, you got real good at spotting trouble. Knowing how it smelled, how it walked, and how it talked.

The sergeant hack, Jorgensen, brought the new meat in, said, “Here you go, Romero, we got you a new cellmate. He’s young and pure, don’t go dirtying him up.” Jorgensen thought that was funny, took the kid by the arm and pushed him at Romero. “He’s all yours now, don’t break him.”

Then Jorgensen stepped out and the cell door slid closed. He went on his merry way, twirling his stick, laughing with the other hacks, looking for cons to hassle and heads to crack.

Romero just stood there, giving the new meat the look. You did enough time, you got real good at “the look.” This was Romero’s second stretch. He’d already done five years at Brickhaven for grand theft and an illegal weapons charge when he was twenty. Now he was forty, doing a dime for aggravated assault and battery of a police officer, staring down the long tunnel at the light flickering at the end. Romero wanted to feel that light on him real bad, on his face and hands, making things glow inside him where there had only been darkness for too long.

What he didn’t need was this skinny little boy fucking things up for him.

“You got a name, Cherry?” Romero put to him, crossing his muscular forearms over his chest, letting the kid see the jailhouse tats on them. Letting him know right off that he was a ballbuster, a hardtimer that would bite out your eyes and fuck your skull if you got in his way.

“Danny, Danny Palmquist,” the kid said.

Romero shook his head. Candy-ass name like that. Palmquist. Damn, the cons were going to eat that up with their bare hands. “Good, Danny, I’ll call you Cherry. You got a problem with that, Cherry?”

Little shit didn’t have anything to say to that. Just stood there in the corner, that lost puppy hang-dog look on his face. But then, Romero knew, that’s what guys like Danny Palmquist were: hang-dog puppies.

Jesus, look at the kid.

Not more than 5’6, 5’7, maybe 140 pounds, more meat on a taco than this one. The cons were probably already arm-wrestling to see who got to pop his puppy ass first. Sickening. Just a skinny little nothing. Size didn’t always matter-some of the meanest pricks behind those walls were little guys with shivs and acid attitudes-but you could see that Danny Palmquist was a zero. He wouldn’t be able to defend himself, which made him prey. Within 48 hours, he was going to be somebody’s punk old lady.

Romero was hard.

Before he took this fall, he’d worked the streets, pushed coke and junk, stole cars, busted skulls, even had himself a few bodies out there. A life like that made a guy ready for the joint. Made him lean, mean, ready to bust if you looked at him the wrong way. But this kid? No, he didn’t have any streets on him. He was small town, junior glee-club material. Probably pissed himself when the local bully gave him a shove. There was just nowhere for a guy like that in a maximum security joint. Blacks would sniff out ve d sniffhis sugar-ass. If they didn’t, spics would take him. Shit, cons his own color-bikers and Aryan Brothers-they’d be all over him, be selling his ass first thing you knew.

He needed somebody to watch over him, protect him.

But he wasn’t tough enough for the ABs, Skinheads, or redneck whiteboy traffickers. No gang would touch a cherry like that. And Romero? He had his own problems.

He sat on his bunk, lit a cigarette. “You’re on top, Cherry.”

But the kid didn’t move. “What you in for?” he asked.

Stupid little peckerwood. What you in for? Kid saw too many prison movies, James Cagney and shit. “Like I said,” Romero told him. “You’re on top.”

“I guess you don’t like to talk much.”

Romero gave him the look. “Shut your pisshole, Cherry. You don’t, I’ll shove something in there, shut it for you. You know what I’m saying to you?”

The kid did.

The second day.

The kid was still a virgin and still hadn’t been extorted, but it wouldn’t last. Out in the yard, all the cons were watching him, smelling that new meat, wondering whose punk he was going to be.

Wasn’t going to be long, Romero knew.

First, they’d take his food in the mess hall, then they’d throw him a beating out in the yard, maybe try to rape him in the laundry or showers. That’s how it would begin. Pressure would build. Cons would get randy like starving dogs circling a fresh, juicy bone. Decide who was going to get the first bite. Then some ballbuster would come along, tell Palmquist that he’d protect him for money. Didn’t matter where he got it-mother, father, sister, brother, priest-long as he got it. And if he couldn’t get it? Then he’d be a punk for some hardtimer, sucking the guy’s dick and bending over for him. Because that’s how it worked inside: You weren’t part of a gang or tough enough to do your own fighting, somebody had to do it for you.

And it never came free.

Not at Shaddock Valley.

It was a real hard-time sort of hole. You locked up thousands of guys like animals for months and years, pretty soon even the good ones lost their humanity and showed their teeth. It was a grim, gray concrete world where you buried hope with the biggest shovel you could find and yourself with it. Violent guards, bad food, cramped conditions, loneliness, frustration. Hot in the summer, like an icebox in the winter. Bugs. Rats. Throw into the mix dehumanizing treatment and the constant invasion of privacy, the degradation of strip searches and cavity searches…it took away what was left. Then all you had were predators and prey. Guys with tattoos and dead eyes wandering the yard, sniffing around the block, looking for the stragglers, the weak ones, anything they could bring down, sink their teeth into that wouldn’t bite back.

The inmates at Shaddock robbed each other, fought each other, pushed drugs and booze, smuggled porno and contraband, sometimes even women. They killed for money and sometimes for free. They made weapons and stabbed each other, beat each other, raped each other, murdered each other, snitched on each other. Most of them had absolutely nothing to lose. Shaddock was a bubbling, seething cauldron flavored by the very worst society had to offer-bullies and rapists, serial killers and racists, Jesus freaks and gangsters, psychopaths and fanatics-only in there it was compressed, localized, compacted behind barbwire and high stone walls. Refined, if you will, into a toxic brew that stank like shit and body odor, vomit and pain and blackness and you could smell it the moment they processed you through.

End of the line.

And in such a place, a guy like Danny Palmquist didn’t stand a chance.

“You don’t say much, do you?”

Romero was laying on his bunk before lights out, trying to read a book about some guy surviving in Antarctica. He liked books like that because he understood survival real well. “Why don’t you shut the fuck up, Cherry?”

The kid sighed, sitting at the little desk against the cement block wall, staring at those bars. “Just saying, shit, we’re locked up together, might as well pass the time.”

“Listen, Cherry. I ain’t trying to get in your asshole or slit your throat…why don’t you be happy with that?”

“I’m just saying we could talk.”

Romero didn’t want that, didn’t want nothing to do with the little bastard. You talked to a guy, then you started feeling like he was your friend. And when that happened, y heou felt like you had to take care of him.