Green River Rising

  She bent over his belly and started to blow him. Fuck. He had things to do. Without losing his hard-on he bellowed through the muslin sheet.

  ‘Tony!’

  Claudine was pumping him ruthlessly. Agry’s eyelids fluttered with a weirdness he couldn’t exactly call pleasure. Tony Shockner coughed behind the muslin.

  ‘Tony?’

  ‘Boss,’ said Shockner, discreetly.

  ‘Get Hector Grauerholz up here. Ten minutes.’ Agry panted for air. ‘All his boys too. I got something special for ’em.’

  He broke off in a strangled groan as Claudine started in with her teeth.

  ‘Do it,’ said Agry.

  Shockner’s footsteps walked away. Agry pulled Claudine off him and dumped her over on her belly. He grabbed the baby oil and squirted a blast between the cheeks of her ass. From one end to the other she’d said. Goddamn. This time, he resolved, he’d even try to remember to give her a reach around.

  NINETEEN

  THOUGHTS TUMBLED THROUGH the gravitational field of Hobbes’s awareness like fragments of falling masonry. Before he could get out of each one’s path it fell onto him and through him and was suddenly gone, replaced by another thought, another fragment, another emotion of awesome weight and power.

  His heart swelled with a pity so deep and all-embracing it bordered on love. The prisoners locked so ruthlessly in the glass and granite boilerhouse were, after all, his men. Their care, their nurture, remained in his hands. That some of them had to be sacrificed in order to pierce the screen of hypocrisy and criminality that prevented a true and utilitarian reformation of the penal system caused Hobbes no satisfaction. Indeed, it caused him an exquisite pain.

  Hobbes had devoted his life – his life– to these most wretched of men. He had ransacked the literature of penology, psychopathology, sociology; of education, psychology and philosophy; he had ransacked his own brain whose intellectual capacity was, at the least, considerable; he had mounted a ceaseless surveillance of his own heart and soul to detect those whispers of hope that kept his back bent to the task. He had endured spasms of melancholia, the devastating depressions that brought him to his knees, weeping to a God he did not believe in for the solace of death. He had not sought the higher office that a man of his abilities might readily have achieved. Instead he had left a modern federal prison in Illinois to re-open Green River and turn it into something extraordinary.

  So far was he now from the visions of reform and social re-engineering that had inspired him, so poisoned was he by the bitter gall of failure, that he could not at this moment scrape from the bilges of his memory a single one of the noble ideas that had so electrified his imagination a quarter of a century before. Something to do, he dimly recalled, with returning men to society scorched clean by the purifying fires of discipline; a fantasy of restoring the dignity of citizenship to lost and mutilated souls. Would he have invested in this fantastic enterprise the accumulated energies of a lifetime if he had known that by its end he would turn out to be nothing more than a glorified turn-key laying slop on the plate of a cringing felon? The bitter gall rose once more into his throat. He could have been anything he wanted. A physician, like Klein. A judge. An academic. Doctor Campbell Hobbes. Professor Campbell Hobbes. Instead he had entered a bureaucracy as foetid and labyrinthine as the sewers beneath Green River and had fought for these, the wretched of the earth.

  As Hobbes stared out of the north window at the twilight redness of the western horizon his shoulders shook with a furious mixture of rage and grief. He was the son of the sun, yet the sun would take aeons to die whilst his own life had passed in a twinkling. There was no justice. The machine had thwarted him at every turn. Not only did no one care for justice, no one knew what the word meant. Sentencing and parole practices were straws blown hither and thither in the flatus issuing from the anuses of politicians. His budgets were slashed, repeatedly; his programmes underfunded; his cells barbarically overcrowded. The naked corruption of prison guards, of suppliers and contractors, of parole board trustees – all was officially sanctioned at the highest level. Anything that kept the wheels turning was acceptable to them. Anything that kept costs down and prisoners docile. And if the inmate population was permanently tranquillised with narcotics, paid for out of their own pockets, then so much the better. As for the Aids crisis, the official reaction was again one of indifference. After all these years the State Governor of Prisons still regarded Hobbes as an East Coast intellectual soft on crime and homosexuality. If the population was reduced by Aids deaths then no one was weeping. To the argument, vehemently advanced by Hobbes, that the inmates represented a hothouse of infection from which the disease would spread into the civilian population, he had been told that they were only niggers and Mexicans and other welfare-seeking trash, and that no one would miss them or their families either. Beyond that, any white person that fucked a nigger, especially without a condom, deserved to die; and even more especially so if that white person were a woman or a faggot.

  To Hobbes they had long ago abandoned the moral authority required to exercise the law. And yet in recent weeks, as the possibility of radical change had offered itself and he had wrestled with his conscience, Hobbes had come to understand that he too had been a slave to his own miserable vanity and grandiosity. The fantasy that he could make a difference alone was nothing more than a flight from true redemption, a wretched craving for the empty plaudits of those he most despised. He would no longer chain himself to the principle of personal identity. He would throw away everything he had in a delirium of liberation. He would turn away from the lethargic suicide upon which he had long ago embarked. Instead he would embrace his destiny, and the destiny of all men, in the glory of irredeemable loss.

  Hobbes stared at the pall of oily smoke that still lingered in the humid air over the rear gate of cellblock B. To control the sense of horror he’d felt during those first moments – when he’d realised just how far Agry had gone – had taken all the will he could summon. But summon it he had. He’d cancelled the alarm to the local fire department. Yes. He’d forbidden any rescue attempt. He had pulled his guards out and prohibited all communication with the prison. If there was any lesson to be learnt from history it was that change could only be achieved by sacrifice and blood, the more senseless and arbitrary the better. What Hobbes had concluded from history was that man could only be shunted forward by violent cataclysms. The historian’s retrospective search for causes and explanations was a vain futility, thick-fingered apes probing a dunghill for grubs. Cause was irrelevant. All that mattered was the spasm itself, endlessly returning to mock the vanity of the humanists and their pitiful institutions. Strength could only be restored by wounding. Virescit vulnere virtus. Perhaps here, on this filthy little piece of Texas swampland earth, a new start could be made, here where Hobbes himself had released from its cage the primitive craving that sought to abolish and thereby recreate reality. Yes. In a stroke of terrifying boldness, John Campbell Hobbes had forsaken reason, motive, or outcome and had tapped directly into the radical unmodified energy of history itself.

  There came a knock on his door. Hobbes turned.

  ‘Come in,’ he said.

  The door opened and Captain Bill Cletus came in and closed the door behind him. His bulky figure was dressed in a black jumpsuit festooned with equipment: radio, Mace, nightstick, handcuffs, a Browning automatic pistol. Cletus saluted.

  ‘Sir,’ said Cletus.

  Hobbes nodded and walked over to his glass-topped desk. He motioned to the chair.

  ‘Sit down, Captain.’

  Hobbes took his own seat behind the desk. There were no lights on in the room and what dim illumination was available from the sinking sun fell through the south window onto Hobbes’s back. Cletus was a heavy-featured man in his forties, a veteran now of over twenty years’ daily contact with the worst that society had to offer. The Captain’s face was tanned by the sun and burnished by the steady caress of callousness. Whenever a visit to a dyin
g relative was refused to a grieving prisoner, whenever a man was dragged off to the hole, whenever a mutilated body was scraped from the flagstones and carted off to the morgue, Bill Cletus was there. After all this time Hobbes knew no more of what lay behind that face than he had on first meeting the young guard, then fresh out of an infantry battalion in the aftermath of Vietnam. No complaint, and there had been many, had ever been upheld against Cletus or his men. It was part of the contract and Hobbes had always kept it. Would Cletus now uphold his end? Hobbes opened the drawer to his desk and took out a glass ashtray. He set the ashtray on top of the desk.

  ‘Feel free to smoke,’ said Hobbes.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Cletus.

  ‘How are the men?’ asked Hobbes.

  ‘Solid,’ said Cletus. ‘They know what’s required.’

  ‘And the inmates?’

  Cletus shrugged. ‘We believe that C block are still locked in their cells from the midday count. Mostly Mexicans and blacks so I reckon Agry’s keeping them cooped up. The rest are running wild. The power lines to the main building have been cut but not those to the infirmary or workshops. As you ordered we’re enforcing a complete communications blackout and we won’t be plugging into the emergency power generator until it suits us. Basically we’re leaving them to it and tonight’s gonna to be hot, dark and bloody. By morning most of ’em will be begging to turn themselves in.’

  ‘We can’t accept a piecemeal surrender,’ said Hobbes. ‘They all come out together or not at all.’

  ‘I agree. There’s a herd instinct in there. At the moment it’s for blood, but when it turns, we want it working against the die-hards. I don’t want my men trapped in there with thirty or forty hard core crazies, otherwise this could go on for a week.’

  ‘You’ve confirmed the final count on the hostages?’

  ‘Yes, sir. There’s thirteen men trapped inside the main building.’

  ‘And the injured who got out?’

  ‘Mainly cuts and bruises, but Officer Perkins is in the burns unit in Beaumont. If he survives the night he’ll have a chance. Sung, who got him out of there, got hit with a piece of flagstone. They removed a clot from inside his skull this afternoon and he’s going to be okay. As far as we know there are no hostages inside the workshops.’ Cletus took out a pack of unfiltered Camels. ‘All things considered the evacuation procedure went pretty well.’ He tapped a cigarette loose and put it in his mouth.

  ‘What about the infirmary?’ asked Hobbes.

  ‘No personnel in there. Just Coley and the other inmates.’

  ‘Were any other officers caught in the fire that might still be inside?’

  ‘Not as far as we know. Sergeant Galindez broke procedure by re-entering B block after the evacuation was ordered.’

  ‘He went into the fire?’ said Hobbes.

  ‘He opened the cell doors to let out the inmates. He’s one of the missing thirteen. Kracowicz saw him clubbed down, couldn’t get to him. How badly hurt he is we don’t know.’

  ‘He must have saved many lives,’ said Hobbes.

  ‘He broke procedure,’ said Cletus flatly. ‘And he left Perkins and Sung when they needed him.’

  ‘Surely he acted with valour,’ said Hobbes.

  ‘If he survives,’ said Cletus, ‘I’ll be putting him on a charge.’

  Hobbes decided not to argue. He knew that to Cletus the whole population, all two-and-a-half thousand of them, wasn’t worth the life of a single guard. The riot procedures had been developed in the light of experiences at Attica, New Mexico and Atlanta. When a disturbance reached a point at which it was considered uncontainable the guards abandoned the prison. The ultimate restoration of order was not in doubt; only the number of casualties.

  ‘How are the men responding to the hostage problem?’

  Cletus lit his cigarette. ‘They want them out, naturally, but they trust me to tell them when and how. They don’t want any of that Waco shit. As for the guys in there, well, they’re as well prepared as they could be.’

  This last was stated with some pride. Cletus had sent his men on regular seminars in psychological preparation for being taken hostage. It was a fact that guards were rarely killed in these circumstances. Rioting inmates vented themselves on each other, usually along racial lines. Even in the midst of chaos the power of the state, embodied in the khaki uniform, made itself felt and the prisoners still feared it. The trapped officers were going through hell but they were unlikely to die, unless the more vicious inmates were provoked or panicked by an untimely rescue attempt.

  ‘What’s the Governor’s position?’ asked Cletus.

  Hobbes looked Cletus in the eye.

  ‘He supports us one hundred per cent. He’s put the National Guard on alert but he agrees with me that there’s no sense in deploying them at this stage. He is particularly keen to maintain a media blackout for as long as possible, as am I.’

  Apart from this last statement Hobbes was lying. He had not contacted the state governor at all, nor did he intend to until the last possible minute. This was not their affair.

  ‘I want the media blackout to be very clearly understood, Captain,’ said Hobbes. ‘I don’t want TV cameras in helicopters hovering over our heads.’

  ‘Me neither,’ said Cletus.

  ‘I won’t have Green River turned into a menagerie. This is not the streets of Los Angeles. This is the panoptic machine. Our duty is to discipline and punish, not to provide a circus for the debilitated intellects of our citizenry. By their choice this is a place of obscurity and pain wherein the citizen’s eye has forsaken the right to count its victims.’ Hobbes paused and wiped a fleck of spittle from his lips. ‘This is not their business.’

  ‘I agree, sir,’ said Cletus.

  He took a puff on his Camel and hid behind the smoke. Hobbes experienced a spasm of doubt. Was the Captain humouring him? Did he think him a fool? Would he make coarse jokes at his expense when he got back downstairs? Hobbes felt dwarfed by the task, by the impossibility of communicating even a fraction of a per cent of his vast insight, an insight as monumental and punishing as the stones of the prison itself. He suddenly wished that Klein were back in the room. There, he felt, was a man who might understand, who might just catch a glimpse of the beacon that flickered in an immense darkness. Klein was trapped too. But for Agry’s impatience Klein might have been free tomorrow. But there was no point dwelling on the merciless humour of fate. And anyway in every crisis dwelt the secret of power.

  ‘Do you know what the word “crisis” means?’ asked Hobbes.

  Cletus frowned. ‘I think I do, yes, sir.’

  ‘The Greek root means “to decide”,’ said Hobbes. ‘But the Chinese is better, a combination of two characters: one meaning “danger”; the other “opportunity”. Are you following me?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Cletus from behind his smoke.

  ‘In order to discover the opportunity, in order to make the decision, one must plunge into the whirlpool of danger and surrender to its pull.’

  Cletus looked at him for a long beat. ‘You sound like you think this riot is just what the doctor ordered,’ he said.

  Hobbes paused. In the dim light it was difficult to make out Cletus’s eyes. Did he have the capacity to understand? Probably not. Was the attempt worth it?

  ‘In the city of justice,’ said Hobbes, ‘we are the sewer, the darkest region, where the power to punish no longer dares make itself known to the people it serves. We no longer treat the sewage and we lack the nerve to flush it away. Nor are we physicians, examining the faeces of the sickening body in order to identify the disease. Neither toilet cleaners nor diagnosticians, we have become hoarders of turds. Is that fit work for men such as we, Cletus? Collecting shit?’

  ‘It ain’t perfect. I know that as well as anyone. But somebody’s got to do it,’ said Cletus.

  Hobbes reeled inwardly as a wave of despair verging on nausea swelled through his entrails. He closed his eyes as he spoke.
br />   ‘There was a time when the problem of incarceration exercised the greatest minds of the enlightenment. De Tocqueville. Bentham. Servan. We’ve given up, Cletus. This is the end of an era and reason has lost.’

  ‘You okay, sir?’

  How foolish he had been to imagine that this brute would be capable of grasping his vision. Hobbes opened his eyes.

  ‘When justice abandons those moral and rational principles that gave it its original authority the time has come to give the prison back to its inmates. Let them generate a new morality more fitting to our times.’

  ‘I just want my men back safe,’ said Cletus. ‘I wouldn’t know about the rest.’

  ‘Your wife’s born again isn’t she, Bill?’

  Cletus shrugged and indicated the Camel burning between his fingers. ‘Won’t let me smoke at home if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Then you should know that there is no safety here on earth. Or maybe in heaven either. After all, even the brightest of God’s angels fell. The only place of safety is hell, where there’s nothing left to lose.’

  ‘I may not be much for Jesus,’ said Cletus, ‘but I do believe that God put the kind of animals we got in this prison on earth to test us. Like they say, we got a short time for to be here and a long time to be gone. I reckon sooner or later we’re all called on to do what we think is right.’

  Hobbes nodded gravely. ‘Few of us are privileged to meet the immensity of fate head on. Most men avoid it, even in the moment of their own dying.’

  ‘I guess that’s what I mean,’ said Cletus.

  The last glimmerings of light were fading and they were talking in near darkness. The end of Cletus’s cigarette glowed close to the tips of his finger and thumb. He took one last drag and crushed the butt out in the glass ashtray and stood up.

  ‘Best get back, if that’s alright with you, sir.’

  Hobbes stood up too. ‘If I could exchange places with your men, I would.’

  Cletus looked at him steadily. ‘I know you would.’