John Domini - Talking Heads - 77

The guard was the big surprise. Garrison took time to check the cells and the rig on the door to the utility closet. But then the man left. There was more code at the call box, and then he was up the stairs. Before going he actually wagged his finger at Kit: “Stay put, kid.” Kid? The man was gone a while before Kit thought to check his watch. After that it was twenty-one minutes that they were alone.

Ad and the other inspector went on as if nothing had changed, taking measurements mostly. More ordinary tools, levels and tape measures, T-squares and a plumb bob. More of that wordless tune from one of the cells. A couple of the feeding slots opened for a peek, but nobody called, though maybe Kit heard a mutter, a cough. He felt as if he and the inspectors were ghosts. Once, Ad tugged up his workbooks and splashed out to the center of the seepage, walking on water.

Kit struggled for a story lead, a fix on Monsod that could jump-start his work here. The obvious analogy of course was to hell, the Inferno, but Kit thought he could do better. He started with the contrast between the outside appearance and this stinking core. As you approached Monsod it looked stupendous, a command center in black concrete and steel. But the life of the place was down here.

“1st glance:,” he wrote, “high tech in icy waste. Nuke site Antarctica. Last glance: swamp graveyard erupt’n. Bones & bodies exposed in muck.”

Everything he’d seen was part of the same, too. “Diff betw towers & E Level — mislead. Fact: tech dominance & swamp nakedness stages of SAME.”

Better, editor. Kit found his voice, enough at least to go after the inspectors. The two men first ignored him, then insulted him. “You’re so worried about the overhead pipes, kid, the door’s right there. Go check ‘em yourself.” Kit kept at it, but by and large their answers proved as simple as their tools. Metal strain, loose bolts, damage to the foundation. Kit would get a copy of the report as part of the deal. When Garrison returned, the inspectors were squatting in a huddle, in the opposite corner of the cellar. Whispering.

Garrison headed straight for the inspectors and stopped over them arms akimbo, so Kit had to circle the pool to get a decent view. Ad stroked his bald spot, his look unhappy. It was the other inspector who spoke. He said it was time to get into the crawlspace.

“Fucking A, Amby.” When had the guard had gotten this other one’s name? “You got to go down there?”

“Come on,” Ad said. “The word we got was, we can’t mess around.”

“Fucking A. ”

With that, Kit was once more the center of attention. Ad kept on with his hair, Amby squinted, and Garrison crossed his big arms high on his chest. State employees. Of course the three men were concerned about the utility closet. The hatchway to the crawlspace was in the closet. You saw the blueprint, Viddich, you shouldn’t mind the stares now.

“Hey, smart boy,” the guard asked. “What’s the name of that paper you work for?”

Mildly Kit met his glare.

“What’s the name , smart boy?”

“The only name you need to worry about,” Kit said, “is Forbes Croftall.”

The guard flexed his crossed arms. The move made his holster squeak. Kit recalled Leo, his chesty macho, and then one of the lines The Godfather had made famous.

“Charley,” he said, “this is business.”

Unhappy, Ad got slowly to his feet.

“Charley,” Amby said.

“I don’t like it,” the guard said. “The whole setup’s fucked.”

“Charley, the word we got was, he’s seen the blueprints already. He knows where that hatch is.”

He knew more than that. He knew they’d rigged the closet as a cell for Junior Rebes.

“He’s seen the blueprints already,” Amby said.

Garrison flexed again. This time there was squeaking all along his belt. The man had plenty there, God knows. A clutch of keys the size of an axe head, a stick and a gun and a can of Mace, a radiophone as black and weighty-looking as a dumbbell. The four of them waited through a few beats more of the voodoo song from the cells. When Garrison broke away, whispering a blue streak, Kit managed to stifle the urge to flinch.

But the guard went out the door. Out the door, for the second time in five minutes. Kit again suffered the place’s stench, a cavelike mung that went to the roof of the mouth. But the big guard returned quickly, toting an iron rod over one shoulder. A rod more than half his height, heavy enough to make his upper body bulge as he shrugged the thing down. The end rang against the floor.

“He-ey!” The voice was from one of the cells. “What’s that shit?”

“Hey, I’m tryin’ to jerk off in here. Trying to concentrate.”

“You whuppin’ on somebody else , Garrison?”

“Aw. Mothafuck bad enough down here without—”

“Shut up!” Garrison screamed.

The cons shut up. Kit had his writing things pressed to his chest, his coat buttons digging into his bare wrists. A silly, overcomplicated trenchcoat. Ankle-length and double-breasted, all buckles and buttons and epaulets. Gear worthy of Byline: Ernest Hemingway .

Byline: Fuck you. Kit pricked up his ears, confirming that the chanting and handclaps had gotten louder. And could hearing the other voices help him pick out which cell?

“Junior?” He wheeled round, facing the closet. “Hey, Junior Rebes? Is that—”

“You shut up too,” Garrison said.

The closet door could only open halfway. Before going in, the inspectors shrugged and cricked their necks. Kit was last, holding his pad to his heart as he peered under the sill.

First, there were the walls. Kit’s man might have been off in the corner, his mother’s son, his “amalgam”—that might have been him, Junior, that gum-colored limpness in the corner. But first Kit needed a minute elsewhere. First, these walls. The steel in here had been coated with a layer of plaster. “? Plaster ?” he noted. “?Other cells too?” Plaster, or some kind of mudding anyway, a good half-inch deep. “Contrctrs crazy? Crl & unusl pun.” Cruel and unusual punishment, because a man in solitary would start clawing the stuff from the walls even before the seepage softened it. He’d enjoy a moment’s hope that he could tear his cell apart. Junior Rebes especially must have held out that hope, since it wasn’t till recently that the overcrowding had forced the prison commissioners into using this space. Junior was the first con in here. He must have seen the virgin whitewash on the walls and dreamed of clambering out, an inky-dinky spider climbing the Man’s own waterspout. But here too he’d hit steel plate, half an inch in. The Man never stopped messing with your head.

So the prisoner had started to decorate. In Junior’s misshapen cell, women lounged and spread their legs across two walls, while elsewhere stretched erect cocks, one with most of a muscled stud’s torso attached. Rebes showed talent: the lips of one cunt fit the corner of the wall between two properly proportioned legs, and the bulb of a cock was sculpted in low relief. Also he’d put in a calendar. Boxes marked off Sunday to Saturday, boxes like cells. X’s within like stick prisoners. Some of the X’s had dangling cocks, a few others, the paired U’s of naked breasts.

The work took up most of the room’s sloped ceiling, from the underside of the stairway out. The space was narrow and low but surprisingly deep. The visitors had room enough, so long as Garrison squatted over his long iron as he moved in, and Kit never went farther than the door. There was a hanging iron cot, chains sweating in the cold. The space heater remained off. The portapotty was red with obscenities, words that appeared to have been scrawled in shit and blood.