Hock Spit Slurp

Heading back to your cell after a visit could be dangerous. Mike knew it, they all knew it. Just because he was pissed off, pumping his arms and walking stiff-legged, didn’t mean he wasn’t on alert. Once you got past the search and lock-in by the re-entry guards, good chance you’d be isolated in a corner for a few seconds, out of camera range, or be alone at the back of the common area in your wing.

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So if someone had a beef—which you might not be aware of—and spotted you under reduced-staff, weekend conditions, you had to be ready for an ambush and maybe lose blood, whether or not you fought back and won. The guards’ batons didn’t care who started it. And forget anybody helping out or serving as a witness, not even your buddies, if you had them. All he had now was the sound of own footsteps in the long gray hall.

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            But the most dangerous time was crowding up for meals. Less so in the jostle of coffee and bacon smells at breakfast. Most guys weren’t awake enough and organized that early. It was lunch and dinner that bred trouble. The hall was a good six feet wider than the cafeteria door, which always caused jams, the lighting was dim, and with everybody bunched together, the guards and cameras couldn’t really see.

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If your attacker had a razor blade or ground-down spoon handle, and could elbow in while he was screened off, a quick stab to the gut or sickening slash to the face, like the one Mike saw last week, weren’t so hard to get away with. Revenge-wise, the perp would likely take a hit too, sometimes weeks or months later, but nobody would say a word then either.

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Mike hated to worry Wes or Cass with any of that during visits. For them, just his being here these past months was worry enough. Today they’d worked it to stay a solid three hours, but by now must be outside again, under the wide-open sky Mike never saw anymore, where Cass would be starting Wes’s car for a return to Quincy. The saying goodbye part was the worst of it, though, and with the visitor setup at Susanville so much more hands-on and personal, tougher than county jail.

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Tough to stay on alert, too, when your lady has left a cloud behind and you can’t get your mind off it. Without stopping, Mike swung sideways and kicked at the baseboard, followed by another one, harder. Turned out that last spring Beryl Watson, Cass’s boss at the ranch in Lamoille, had threatened her and basically run her out of town for refusing to have sex with him. The fat old fuck was even married. She’d already moved to Quincy and was settled in, so she said Mike ought to know the story, but urged him to just let it go. Wes also put an oar in about letting it go. They’d probably rehearsed beforehand.

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Sure, good advice, easy to say, but at this point being locked up might be a plus, ’cause from the moment he’d heard, all he wanted to do was go to Nevada and bust the damn guy’s face. Morale-wise, how fucking strong was he supposed to be? And Christ! When he made the corner into another long gray hall, it sounded like footsteps behind him, but he looked and they were just his own echoes. Going out hadn’t seemed half this long.

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The touch of Cass, the smell of her, walking together in the mostly cement prison garden or side-by-side at their visitor table, about made him crazy. Even the ordinary pleasures of playing chess, like he and Wes used to at the cabin, hadn’t seemed to work in the commotion of that echoing, low-ceilinged room—all the other families, their squealing kids, the heavily armed guards, the ka-chunk of the coke machine, and inmates in their baggy prison blues roaming the aisles like they were free.

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Still, he’d never loved a man the way he did Wes, and aside from Cass wanting to marry him after Mike thought he’d lost her, Wes’s having figured a way to gift them the cabin up on Mineral Creek was the best news he could think of. How was it possible, after the crazy life he’d led, and his manslaughter conviction, that he could end up with not just a wife, but, in Wes, someone to look up to and replace that fake of a father who’d raised him?

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 Day by day, picturing the cabin, its swimming hole and the mining claim that went with it was his go-to for calming down, because it meant he and Cass would have a place of their own—a beautiful place—once he got out. Sometimes the miracle of it about put tears in his eyes, which you didn’t dare do as a prisoner.

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Mike paused and checked over both shoulders. OK, good. The last thing he wanted was extra trouble, and as he crossed the common area, its only two occupants, watching TV well toward the front, paid him no attention. He realized that his temper was mainly what had put him here, and with so much to lose by fucking up, he’d better rein it in.

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Best case, an attacker would be caught and thrown in solitary, what they call SHU, but anyone fighting got the same, no matter if you went to the infirmary first. Then came the other restrictions, like no visitors, no training perks and time added to your sentence.

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You were doing well, in fact, if you could even trust your cellmate, and Mike’s, a very reserved twenty-something named Frank Torrantes, seemed  like a maybe. A beanpole of a guy, with no visible tatts, unusual for an inmate. Even Mike had an old-fashioned gold pan on one forearm. And if you could trust a couple of more guys, better yet. Mike wasn’t to that point but there were candidates. Spreading trust too far made you a fool.

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Susanville was officially medium security and not for the hard-core, which made it less subject to gangs than places like High Desert or Folsom. Mike himself was on an SNY—Sensitive Needs Yard—where they put lower-grade first offenders, assuming there was room, along with guys who were scheduled for release, medically fragile or needed protection, like the child molesters inmates called short-eyes. Since gang allegiances followed racial/ethnic lines, mainline yards were segregated. SNYs weren’t. Everyone here was vetted to weed out gang bangers. Even so, gangs recruited moles to monitor the flow of contraband.

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Razor blades were prized, drugs fairly available and pre-paid, burner phones most prized of all. Mike kept himself away from that stuff, read books, mainly, but it was still prison, still being penned in week after week. The rest of his two years just needed to be survivable somehow, with the hope that fire-fighter training, when it started, might give him something useful to do.

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            Approaching the turn into his block, Mike heard high-pitched whimpers, then a muffled, “Please, please!” Then a hushed baritone, “Shut the fuck up!”

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            Around the corner this rangy six-foot guy, a new transfer named Clay, had wimpy little Daniel pinned against the wall, his hands pressing Daniel’s shoulders and his knee between Daniel’s. “Hey!” Mike said, pissed already, and this pissed him more. “Cut that shit out!”

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            Daniel’s face and lips were contorted as though he’d cry if he weren’t so terrified, and his saucer eyes and pasty skin completed the Three Stooges look of his weird, parted-in-the-middle haircut. Poor bastard had an IQ of ninety, tops, and prison might be the only place he’d been except his own bedroom, jacking off to a computer screen. The towel draped over his underwear said he’d probably run into Clay while headed for the shower. His cell was next-door to Mike’s, and as a short-eyes, he bunked solo. Down near Oroville, at his parents’ house, the neighbors had caught him finger-fucking their nine-year-old daughter after luring her upstairs one afternoon.

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            Clay turned to Mike and glared. There was an Iron Cross tattoo under his left eye and a bunch of others on his arms, beneath thickets of strawberry-blonde hair, same color as the buzz-cut inch on his head. “Fuck off!” he said. “This creep’s gonn’a blow me. If I say so, he’ll blow you too.” Daniel loosed another round of whimpers.

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            From two steps away, Mike closed the distance fast and ripped Clay’s arm off Daniel’s shoulder, partway yanking Clay around. “Leave him alone!”

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Clay’s other arm pushed Daniel aside along the wall, made a fist and swung at Mike’s head. Mike extended an elbow, blocked it, then lunged into Clay, immobilizing him on the wall where Daniel had been.

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But Clay shot a knee into Mike’s nuts, which hurt enough to force him back, letting Clay regroup. Piece of shit, Mike thought. Since this now just had to happen, bring it on. And who he saw in front of him was Beryl Watson as much as Clay, but Mike had twenty pounds on this Beryl, twenty pounds of muscle, dating from the high school wrestling team. Grab a leg, take him to the floor and game over. Choke-hold, fuck his face up on the concrete, and maybe break his arm. It’s what goddamn Beryl deserved, and Clay too.

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Besides, Mike knew the type. About thirty, loved to play Mr. Big against the weak, but probably convicted for a pathetic meth habit and a garage full of stolen car parts. Daniel, meanwhile, his towel barely around him, had collapsed to his knees, still whimpering.

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            Mike feinted with a left and was on the advance when a blur of motion arrived from the right, wedging between him and Clay. “Mike!” it said. “Don’t!”

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Frank Torrantes, his cellie, something Mike sensed before seeing. Newly back from the shower, Frank wore only the standard string-tie blue trousers, with a towel hung across his chest and his shoulder-length dark hair, rumpled and damp. He also had no particular muscles and stood half a head shorter than Clay or Mike.

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            “Stay out of this you crazy fuck!” Clay shoved Frank into Mike, knocking them away.

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            Frank planted a foot and whirled back to Clay, voice low and hard. “You don’t want to mess with me, bro! You’re not messing with my cellie either!”

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            Clay laughed, squaring up in front of Frank. “I’ll snap you like a fucking toothpick!”

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            Frank stood his ground but now had an ice-hot look to match his voice. “Seriously, bro, you don’t want to do that. Mike, let this drop. He ain’t worth it!”

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            Clay seemed to think for a moment, then put on a leering grin, just as the large, black, interior-lineman body of fifty-year-old Vernon Stivers slid in to lay an arm across Clay’s chest. “Hear me, Clay. If you expect to live out the year, back off on Torrantes.” His voice was calm and clear. “I’ll fill you in, but there’s way more here than you know.” He lowered his arm and gradually disengaged.

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            The rapid pounding of boots sounded from the common area and a pair of guards in blue-gray, prison-cami fatigues charged around the corner. Their looped belts were studded with weapons, one had his baton out and the other a canister of pepper spray. “In your cells now!” the baton guy yelled. “All of you! Move!” As they drew closer, the pepper spray guy demanded, “Stivers, what’s this about?”

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            “A little disagreement is all,” Vernon shrugged. “Just words. Done now, and nothin’ to worry about.” Amid the turmoil, with additional thudding footsteps approaching from the other direction, Daniel had already slunk into his cell and Vernon placidly followed Clay back toward his own. “You’re on lockdown, assholes!” baton guy said. “This whole wing, effective immediately.”

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Half an hour later, Mike lay in his bunk trying to decompress, something he’d never been good at. He was too tense to read and knew how close he’d come to really fucking up. Images of the creek and cabin wouldn’t stay with him either, and the deep breathing Cass believed in made so much noise that Frank had asked for quiet. With nothing but a soft pencil, the guy could draw super well, and he was currently parked in a front corner, butt on the floor, shoulders against the bars and a sketchbook propped on his knees.

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The September sun would be up for hours yet, but the dim, grayed-out light in the cells was never much affected. From his time in county jail, Mike had come to hate the color gray, and he hated the fucking raw concrete this whole place was made of. Everything except the metal bars of their freak-show cages, which were that same damn gray anyway. It felt as though his hair and skin and fingernails would turn that color before he got out.

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Finally, Mike couldn’t stand it. “We’ve got to talk,” he said. “First off, you saved Clay’s ass, not mine.”

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            Frank lowered his pencil. “Gonn’a end up with a great profile of you here, my man, above the waist and all sprawled out. A present for your lady if you want. And fuck Clay. I don’t give a shit about him. You saved that perv Daniel…why, I can’t imagine…and I saved you… from the warden…and from SHU, but mostly from yourself. Don’t be startin’ shit.”

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            Mike sighed. “For a minute,” he said, feeling he had to push back, “looked like I’d be saving your cocky ass, barging in how you did. What the hell’s Vernon talking about?”

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            “Might be better you don’t know. I never bring it up…with anybody.”

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            “Too late,” Mike said. “If you don’t tell me, Vernon will.”

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            “Huh,” Frank grunted. “OK…at your own risk. My uncle, Esteban Torrantes,” he spoke as though Mike would know what this meant, “founded the South City Cobras.”

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            “South what city?”

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            “LA…Compton area. Something had to give the Latinos a voice.”

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            “Never been there,” Mike said.

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            “There is here…and everywhere. Uncle E they call him. My father, my mother, all my brothers, most of my cousins, and even Uncle E, once, have been in and out of jail and prison for thirty years. High Desert, Pelican Bay, New Folsom, Corcoran, Soledad, you name it. Drugs, mostly…coke, meth, weed…using and dealing and whatever else it took to take care of our own.

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            “I was the baby of the family,” Frank went on, “and the runt. Had seizure disorder most of my life and grew up in foster homes. But Uncle E protected me, and told me to prove a Torrantes could live straight. That if I ever went wrong…unless he asked me to…he’d turn me in himself.”

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            “You’re here for armed robbery. That much I know.”

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            “Would it surprise you if I wasn’t guilty?” Frank said.

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            “No surprise you’d say you’re not. Like everybody in this place…except me.”

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            “Look, inside or back home, the name gets noticed. I won’t deny it. And I’m used to hanging out with criminals. Who else do I know? My two roommates robbed a cab driver… and never told me…roughed him up with a hand gun…didn’t fire it, but you can leave scars other ways, and my phone was at the scene. I’d loaned it to Raymond the day before, and as soon as he had cash he called his dealer. I was back at our place, smoking weed and drawing. Later, the cabbie identified my roomies and thought he’d seen a third guy standing watch. Cops knocked down the door, busted all of us.”

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            “Truth?” Mike challenged.

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            “With you, would I waste breath on a lie? At least I’m in SNY instead of High Desert, ’cause of the seizure meds I’m on.”

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            “So they nailed you as an accessory. Carries what, five years?”

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            “Normally. For me, fifteen…on a first offense. The DA said Raymond’s gun was mine and the judge ran with it. You can guess why.” Frank stood, moved toward Mike and nodded at the bars and the corridor. “But Uncle E can always use another pair of eyes.”

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            Every damn inmate Mike talked to made him feel lucky. He’d thought his background when he was arrested was so fucked, not to mention that he’d killed somebody and fled, but his sentence was nothing compared to Frank’s or Vernon’s. The capriciousness of it broke guys, sank them in grievance and self-pity. Those feelings could sneak up on Mike, too, especially after saying goodbye to Cass. But from day one, Frank never showed a sign of it. Describing his conviction, his voice had stayed as smooth as an altar boy reciting psalms.

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            “Hey, take a peek,” Frank said, handing Mike the sketchbook.             “I throw out most of ’em, but this one pops. I’ll even sign it. Might add value someday.” His attitude suggested some kind of inside joke. “Prove you actually knew a Torrantes.”

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            So Mike was suddenly facing himself on paper, his features and his upper body better looking than in real life, with his sometimes brooding expression, which Cass had teased him about ever since they’d met, rendered in a way that didn’t fit how it usually felt from within. There was restraint to it this time and more hope, apparently, than anger. But Frank’s pencil had perfectly caught the gray of the place, more perfectly than any oil painting would do.