Edward Lee - Dahmer's Not Dead

But then there was Dahmer—“J.D.,” as he was called by most everyone on the block. His parole didn’t come up until 2927. Gee, Wells thought in jest. I wonder if he’ll make it? Kind of a quiet sad sack, which surprised every DO in this 676-man Rock Ramada. When a guy strangles and dismembers seventeen people, and eats some of them, you expect him to have a certain look, a certain aura. But Dahmer didn’t have any of that. He was a pud. He’d cranked on thirty pounds since coming here in February, 1992. Sat in Cell 648 most of the time, smoking cigarettes and listening to religious music. Weird thing was he’d asked for general pop, which sounded pretty stupid to Wells. Every black inmate in the joint wanted Dahmer’s ass, yet the guy gets his lawyer to plead with the director to give him main line habitation. Some schmuck last July tried to cut Dahmer’s throat during a church service but botched it because the blade fell off his shank. Still, though. Dahmer knew people were gunning for him yet he insisted on living in the general prison population. “I want to see the world,” he’d told Wells. This ain’t no world, you meat-head, Wells had thought. It’s a fucking county max full of killers, and half of ‘em want to kill YOU. Didn’t matter to this guy, though. It seemed almost like he was begging for it. So the director gave him tee-seg—therapeutic segregation—and let him be on the clean up crew for seventy-cents an hour. He was out four hours a day on detail, and he attended the service in the chapel every morning.

“Dahmer, hey, Dahmer,” Rosser taunted. “What human meat taste like?”

“Shut up, Rosser,” Wells ordered. Dahmer remained silent, shuffling along next to Vander. Vander’s bald head gleamed in the caged line lights. “Don’t listen to him, J.D.,” Vander said aside. “He’s an asshole.”

“Dahmer, hey, Dahmer—”

“Goddamn it, Rosser, I said shut up,” Wells repeated. “You don’t and I throw your big bad killin’ ass straight back into bev-seg where you can count the lines in the cinderblocks for twenty-three and a half hours a day.”

“Ain’t no cell on earth can hold the Son of God,” Rosser whispered. “You are the number of the beast, and that number is six-hundred, three score, and six.”

“Cut with the Ganser shit. You’re just making an asshole of yourself.”

“You callin’ the Son of God an asshole?”

Wells couldn’t help but laugh. He followed them up into the gymnasium, then pointed out their assignments. “Vandie, J.D., you two split between the weight room and the treadmill cove, and Rosser, you mop the latrine. Got it, guys?”

Dahmer and Vander nodded. But Rosser? No way. He’d always be running his yap about something. “Aw, man,” he complained. “You’re gonna make the Son of God mop the latrine, man?”

“That’s right.”

“But-but, I am the million-year-old Son of God !”

“Fine,” Wells said. “And you’re gonna get that latrine so clean that God Himself would happy to drop His poop in our bowls, so tell that to your Dad. I’ll be right outside but I got my eye on all of ya’s. Get the job done and no dicking around.”

The three inmates dispersed with their forlorn buckets and mops. Wells went back out on the main line, tapped out a cigarette.

No sign of Perk. Christ, I wonder how bad the Redskins lost yesterday. Wells had a fin on a tight spread, but Shuler was looking hot.

Early morning, the main line seemed oddly quiet, a Zombieville of shuffling men all dressed in the same muck-green prison utilities and all wearing the same drained faces. Wing sectors of four to six men each were being escorted to and from chow. Wells thought it was funny; this morning Dahmer had eaten only one hard-boiled egg—he ate the egg white only, leaving the solid yolk—and some cereal with no milk. Said he was on a diet, of all things. Who the hell do you need to look good for? Wells thought. The wall?

Wells drably smoked half his cigarette, then tamped it out in the red butt-can. Perkins must be on drive detail, escorting inmates to the county courthouse in downtown Portage.

About ten minutes later, at precisely 8:10 a.m., DO Wells turned to go back to his supervisory post, but he didn’t even have time to finish the turn before the lock-down alarm began to blare through the prison like an air raid siren, so loud that even the dense block walls seemed to throb outward with each blast. The prison was having a heart attack.

««—»»

The nightmare-face hovered so close she could smell it. Yet it didn’t smell real, it didn’t smell human. Like clay, it smelt, like damp, creeky earth. The face seemed gray in the dream, as though its features had been crudely gouged from a blank of—indeed—clay. A slit for a mouth, a slit for nose. Twin slits for eyes. But whose face was it?

Help me, help me! she squealed amid the REM-sleep turmoil. Get it away from me!

It was the insuccinct face of any cop’s fear, the face of the symbolic death that waited around every corner.

“Helen? Helen?”

The jostling felt earthquake-like. The walls of her dream vomited sound akin to echoic demolition. The hand, from another world, continued to nudge her.

“Helen?”

Her eyes slid open. Now, another face, just as obscure, hovered above her, just as pale and as inhumanly defeatured. Her mind seemed to slide with the unbidden opening of her eyes. Then the real world cleared as did the visage. Of course, it was Tom.

Immediately she caught herself rubbing the silver locket between her fingers. It was a big locket, big as a Bicentennial dollar, and deep. It had her father’s picture inside. Through a variation of necklaces, it had hung around Helen Closs’ neck for close to three decades, a present her father had given her on her thirteenth birthday. “Welcome to teenagerhood!” he’s celebrated. He’d died the next day, a massive coronary at the realty office he owned.

“Honey, are you all right?” Tom asked.

Why shouldn’t I be all right? her first thought hastened. If I’m not all right, it’s only because you just woke me up.

“You’ve been sleeping since eight this morning.”

“I know,” came her graveled reply. “I worked a nighter last night.”

“Well, so did I but…”

Her shoulders jerked, as if to verify she was no longer asleep. “But what?”

“Well, I worked a nighter too, but, Christ, honey, it’s past seven now. I got up hours ago.”

And what did that mean? Her attitude, as always, honed to knife-sharpness fast as current through a copper wire. What’s he implying? “What?” she challenged. “I sleep till seven and that means I’m just a lazy, over-the-hill cow?”

Tom’s countenance gave up its expression of concern and immediately reverted to something terribly weary. But of course, she’d seen it many times before. “Aw, come on, Helen, get off that, will you? I’m not saying you’re lazy, I’m just a little worried. You never sleep so long. I was worried that maybe you’re sick.”

Helen’s gaze focused upward.

“You really are making this hard,” he said. Then he walked out of the bedroom.

She simpered were she lay. A conflux, then, of more realities. I slept for eleven hours? Jesus Christ, get a life, Helen! And she’d screwed it up again, hadn’t she? It seemed miraculous that Tom hadn’t written her out of his life months ago, considering her bitchiness. I snapped at him again, she realized, and all for what? Because he was worried about me. How many past relationships had provided the exact opposite? One rough spot after the next; after so many rough spots, they’d cut you loose. And why shouldn’t they? Who needs a bitchy headache like me?