Green River Rising

  Wilson and Coley stared at her dubiously.

  ‘If he can walk up to this door and knock on it within two hours I’ll open it for him myself.’

  ‘You see, Frog, it’s okay,’ said Wilson, drily. ‘Hec won’t be back for least two hours.’

  ‘One thing I’m grateful for,’ said Coley.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Least you tried to be a boxer an’ not a comedian.’

  Coley winked at Devlin and walked through the door of Crockett ward.

  ‘Tried?’ said Wilson. ‘What the fuck you mean, “tried”?’

  In the ward the glass in two of the reinforced windows had been smashed out but the assault had bated. They laid the two injured men out on the floor. Vinnie Lopez offered to cut their throats but Wilson told him that was cheating. As Devlin knelt down to examine one of the wounded a vile odour drifted into her nostrils. She looked up. Wilson and Lopez were also wrinkling their noses. She turned.

  Standing in the doorway in a small pool of stinking water was a grotesque figure, bleeding from a dozen cuts and smeared from head to toe with foul-smelling slime. Behind him stood Victor Galindez, not as wet as Klein, but just as dirty.

  ‘Hi,’ said Klein. ‘Anybody know how the Knicks got on?’

  Devlin’s stomach contracted. Too many different emotions assailed her at once for her to be able to speak. While the others gaped Lopez walked across the room, proud to show Klein he was up and about.

  ‘They lost. How you doin’, man?’

  He pumped Klein’s hand and Klein grinned at him. He turned the grin on Devlin and her heart melted. She walked over and kissed him on the lips.

  ‘Hey.’ Klein backed off. ‘I’m on the shit list.’

  ‘I don’t give a fuck,’ she said.

  She threw her arms round his neck and tried not to cry. She heard Klein speak to Lopez over her shoulder.

  ‘What was the score?’

  ‘Ninety-three Lakers, eighty-eight Knicks.’

  Klein pulled her head back to where he could see her. He saw the tears she was holding back and smiled.

  ‘Damn. Must be my lucky day,’ he said. ‘Won me two new pairs of Calvins just when I need ’em.’

  TWENTY-NINE

  WHEN KLEIN HEARD that the water supply had been cut off he was none too pleased. He didn’t fancy spending his time shouting across the ten-metre distance people felt inclined to keep from him to protect themselves from the smell. After he’d suffered the thought of this prospect long enough to drink a litre of vile prison cola, Frog reminded him that the showers were supplied by an old-fashioned water tank. Klein belched mightily and dragged Galindez through the dispensary into the shower room.

  Klein stood under the hot water and leaned against the wall with his eyes closed. When the worst of the slime was washed away he scrubbed himself with a liquid iodine soap from top to bottom, rinsed himself down, then started again. He did this three times. Each time he discovered a fresh crop of cuts and abrasions. The only ones that troubled him were the three knife wounds on the inside of his left ankle and calf. They were already an unhealthy red at the edges and had to be infected with a cocktail of unpleasant life forms he preferred not to think about. He just hoped the blade hadn’t given him an osteomyelitis of the bone. He’d stuff some antibiotics down his throat after the shower.

  Next door Galindez climbed out of the shower and towelled himself down and left. Klein stayed on. He wondered – he hoped – that Devlin would pay him a visit. The thought provoked a ranging hard-on and Klein washed his genitals and ass for a fourth time to be on the safe side. A man, after all, never knew when his luck might be in. He squirted a jot of soap into his mouth and rubbed it into his teeth with a finger. After the sewage he’d been swallowing all night it tasted surprisingly good – artificial, chemical, man-made, clean. He’d experienced enough organic products to last a lifetime. Better than the cola too. He opened his mouth under the sprinkler and rinsed it out. He felt good. He slapped his belly, a taut, satisfying sound. He was a fine figure of a man, by God, and he was alive. Devlin was a lucky woman, goddamn it. He wondered what was keeping her. Caring for the wounded was all well and good, noble even, but what about hail the conquering hero comes? He admitted, magnanimously, that they’d done a terrific job of withstanding the siege so far. But there was only one door left, the windows were almost down and only the shotokan warrior stood between them and oblivion. And Galindez. But Galindez was a guard and it was his fucking job, so he didn’t really count.

  There were times, Klein reflected, when he regretted being an asshole and others when it gave him a certain amount of pleasure. This was one of the latter. Beyond the shower curtain he heard the door open. Klein thought about breaking into a nonchalant whistle but the only tune that sprang to mind was Doris Day. He refrained.

  ‘Klein?’

  It was her voice. Indecision seized him. Should he whip the curtain aside and stand there quivering, a sullen sneer on his face? The memory of a zillion shower scenes in every tenth-rate movie he’d ever seen swilled across his mind. Show a little style, man. Be cool. He coughed and lowered his voice.

  ‘Yeah?’ he said.

  ‘We need to talk,’ she said.

  Few words struck more dread into his heart, or, he reckoned, any man’s, than these when uttered by a woman he had the horn for. His erection started to wilt. As if on cue the shower above his head spluttered a couple of times and stopped. The tank was empty.

  ‘Is that okay?’ she said.

  ‘Sure,’ said Klein, without enthusiasm.

  ‘I’ll wait for you in the office.’

  What? What the fuck? Didn’t she want to watch him towel himself down? He heard the door open and shut again. Devlin was gone. So what? Come on, forget it. She’s probably peeking through the keyhole. Except women didn’t do that except in porn vids, and only then when there was more than one guy to spy on. Even so just in case, square those shoulders, sullen sneer. Good. He stepped out through the curtain and almost slipped on a glob of slime. He started to dry himself. Be cool, Klein. Don’t be in a hurry. Be a man for fuck’s sake.

  After all it was three years since a woman had seen him naked. As it happened, what with his morning karate routine and working out in the yard, he was in the shape of his life. When he got out he’d have to get down to the waterfront in a body shirt while it lasted. He should have got himself some tattoos. He’d always felt it would have been inappropriate in here given he wasn’t considered a real con. Now it was too late, especially as he recalled that Colt Greely was reputed to draw the best tats in the prison. Might put Devlin off too, although the kind of woman he wanted would be turned on by them. Maybe that was it: she was just embarrassed to watch him. His raw hands stung against the towel. Maybe all that tough cocksucking talk was a front. He seemed to remember she was some kind of a Catholic, an all or nothing religion. Mortal sin and all that shit. When they were uptight they were a nightmare. When they were wild they were wild. Sometimes the wild ones needed just a little boost to get them over the line. Klein wrapped a dry towel around his waist and combed his hair with his fingers. There was no mirror in here in which to check himself. Probably a blessing. He sucked his belly in and went into the office.

  Devlin was pacing the mustard yellow room smoking a cigarette. She glanced at his body, smiled at him nervously, then stared at the end of her cigarette.

  Klein’s heart sank. He couldn’t help thinking it was typical that, despite the fact it was he who hadn’t been laid in what felt like several decades, and he who had spent the night playing the part of a butt plug in the anus of God’s creation in order to be here, it was nevertheless he who would have to be duly sensitive to her, the woman’s, sexual anxieties. Maybe she’d changed her mind since that morning. It was a long time ago. Maybe she’d spent that time dwelling on the rank stupidity of getting involved with a bum like him. But hell, he’d never felt less like a bum in his life.

  Hold on, Klein. The flower
of Texan psychopathology was out there trying to kill them all and gang rape her. Give her a break. He took a deep breath. He was the shotokan warrior. He was cool. At last, he really was. He could deal with anything. Just a question of saving the sullen sneer until later. He smiled back at her.

  ‘You look great,’ he said.

  Terrible line. Fuck.

  ‘All things considered,’ he added.

  ‘So do you,’ she said.

  Klein felt that she could have put more feeling into it but it was a start. There was an awkward pause.

  ‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ she said.

  Terrible didn’t even begin to describe that one. Alarm bells rang in his head. He wanted to say, ‘Can’t it wait till later?’ but that would’ve required raising his voice an octave. The wife of a friend of his had once confided to him that a deep, confident voice was the best way to convince a woman that you had a big dick.

  Without thinking about it Klein said, ‘Is that, “I’ve got something to tell you” or “Have I got something to tell you”?’

  ‘I guess it’s a bit of both,’ she said.

  She pulled a pack of Camels from her pocket and shook one into her mouth. She offered him the pack.

  ‘You want one?’

  For once he wasn’t tempted. He shook his head.

  ‘You see,’ she paused to light the Camel and inhale. ‘I’m in love with you.’

  ‘Goddamn,’ said Klein.

  Suddenly the depth of his voice no longer mattered. He wasn’t a bum after all. He was the shotokan warrior and she was in love with him. He felt his cock rise majestically against the rough cotton of the towel. He quashed the urge to whip the towel aside and dance a jig. His cool was too hard and recently won to abandon it just yet. Sullen sneer, yelled a voice in his head, it’s the perfect moment. He resisted. Instead, he settled for stupefaction.

  ‘But there’s something else,’ said Devlin.

  Klein’s hard-on held firm but the urge to dance withered inside him. Before his mind could stampede into further speculation the door opened and Coley lumbered in. Under his arm was a bundle of prison blues. He took in the scene with his yellow, bloodshot eyes. He nodded at the desk.

  ‘I wanna get on with my readin’ while I got the chance.’

  ‘Reading?’ said Klein.

  As far as he knew Frog didn’t even read the sports pages. Coley tossed him the bundle.

  ‘Clean clothes.’ He glanced at the bulge in Klein’s towel. ‘That is you got any use for ’em.’

  Klein twisted the bundle in his hands. His palms burned and the burning made him feel better.

  Devlin, who seemed glad of the interruption, said to Coley, ‘What do you think so far?’

  Coley raised an eyebrow as he walked to the table and dropped into the chair.

  ‘I’ll have to finish it before I can give a proper opinion.’ He looked at her. ‘But so far I have to say it’s a goddamned masterpiece.’

  Devlin grinned properly for the first time since Klein had seen her. He felt vaguely excluded.

  ‘What goddamn masterpiece we talking about exactly?’ he asked.

  Coley opened the desk drawer and pulled out a copy of The American Journal of Psychiatry. He flicked it open, his chest swelling as he laid it open where Klein could see it.

  ‘This masterpiece, asshole.’

  Klein leaned over and read the title. Then the list of authors. Juliette Devlin. Ray Klein. Earl Coley. Klein swallowed and looked up at the Frogman.

  Coley’s froggy yellow eyes, looking back, were full and for the second time that night Klein’s heart almost cracked. He knew Coley better than any man alive. And vice versa. If anyone could know what this meant to the black sharecropper, cast into hell twenty-three years before, Klein knew. He knew. And if the Tolsons had come through the door right then and hacked Klein’s head from his shoulders, it would have been worth it all, right then, to see what he was seeing now in Coley’s eyes and to feel what he was feeling in his chest. Coley clenched his hands together into a huge trembling fist. Klein put his hand on top of it.

  ‘We did it, man,’ whispered Coley.

  ‘We did it,’ said Klein.

  ‘We told those fuckers out there,’ said Coley.

  ‘We told ’em,’ said Klein.

  ‘We told ’em the goddamned truth,’ said Coley.

  ‘We told ’em the truth,’ said Klein.

  ‘And she wrote it down,’ said Coley.

  ‘Every word,’ said Klein.

  They heard movement and looked up in time to see Devlin disappearing through the door. Klein looked back at Coley. Coley relaxed his fist and stood up. He put a big hand, surprisingly soft, on Klein’s bare back.

  ‘Listen to me, man. She’s had a day like you wouldn’t believe, and she’s done right. Wasn’t for her you wouldn’ of found nothin’ in here but corpses. She special, man.’

  ‘I know that, Frog.’

  ‘You jus’ treat her gentle, hear me? Gentle. Or your ass answer to me.’

  Klein swallowed. He nodded. Coley fumbled with his keys, pulled one off the ring.

  ‘Now you take her to my billet. I already put some clean linen down. Under the bottom left-hand foot the bed they’s a loose board. You look in there, find a bottle of wine, best in the house. From that mad Irish fucka I tol’ you ’bout. Drink it. And treat her right.’

  He pressed the key into Klein’s hand.

  ‘Thanks, Frog,’ said Klein.

  ‘I reckon the crackers lay off a while. Anything happens you’ll know. Now leave me to my readin’.’

  Klein, a little confused, grabbed his bundle and went out into the corridor. Devlin was standing with her back to the wall and her eyes clenched shut. Klein took her arm and she opened them.

  ‘Okay?’

  She nodded, smiled awkwardly. ‘It was your moment, yours and Coley’s. I didn’t want to intrude.’

  ‘You heard him,’ said Klein. ‘You think “we” didn’t mean you too? You wrote it down. Every word.’

  She nodded. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be.’

  Klein remembered Coley’s instructions. His own high spirits in the shower now seemed juvenile. Or maybe just out of place and he hadn’t known it. He put his arm round her shoulders and she put her arm round his waist and he led her up the stairs to Coley’s room.

  Klein unlocked the door and they went in. The room was small and as spartan as a zen monk’s cell. No books, no music, no pin-ups. Just the bed, a small table and a single framed photograph on the wall by the bed. Coley had left two candles burning on the table and a heap of incense homemade from sawdust and charcoal and deodorant smouldering in a metal tea-strainer. The bed was narrow but freshly made-up, the sheet turned down.

  ‘That Frogman is something, you know?’ said Klein.

  He leaned across the bed and looked at the photo in the flickering light. It was in colour and depicted a broad-shouldered, grave-faced farmer standing next to a strong-featured, lighter-skinned woman. The woman held a baby and before them stood three children, two boys around ten years old and a girl around six.

  ‘He hasn’t heard from any of them for a dozen years,’ said Klein. ‘Won’t hear a bad word said against them.’

  He turned. Devlin was dipping her finger into the wax of one of the candles. She looked like she hadn’t heard him. She turned.

  ‘I want you to sit down and listen to me for a minute,’ she said. ‘And if you speak I won’t be able to get through it.’

  Klein sat down crosslegged on the bed, his back to the wall, and waited. And while she smoked three cigarettes and paced up and down in the candlelight she told him what had passed between her and Reuben Wilson and tried to make him understand what it had meant to her. And Klein listened without speaking. When she’d finished she stubbed out her cigarette and hovered by the door with her back to him.

  ‘You want me to go now?’ she said.

  ‘I want you to stay,’ said Klein.
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  The fact was nothing that she’d told him changed the way he felt about her, except maybe to increase both his lust and his admiration in roughly equal measure. He didn’t even worry about the size of Wilson’s dick. He had something else on his mind. Devlin looked at him.

  ‘I think what you did was great,’ he said, quietly. ‘I want you to stay.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I may be an asshole, a big asshole, but I’m not that particular category of asshole that would find this a problem. Wilson’s a hero. I’m flattered.’ He smiled at her. ‘On the other hand if you’d fucked Gimp Cotton I might’ve had a problem.’

  Devlin wiped something from her eye. ‘I meant what I said downstairs. I love you.’

  Klein nodded. There was nothing for it but to get his own business over with too. He’d never actually decided to keep it from her, it was just that he’d never had a good reason to talk about it. Now he did.

  ‘While it’s time for dark secrets I’d better tell you mine. It might change the way you feel.’

  ‘I doubt that.’

  ‘I was sent up for raping my girlfriend.’

  There was a long pause as she looked at him, searching his face. Within him Klein felt a stirring, the impending eruption of feelings he’d hoped he’d buried and ploughed under with his work, his discipline, his pursuit of survival. He’d buried the feelings out of fear for they were composed mainly of bitterness and rage.

  Finally Devlin said, ‘I think you owe us both a bit more background than that.’

  ‘Do I?’ said Klein.

  Devlin breathed deep. ‘I’m staying whether you tell me any more or not. I don’t believe you could do anything I couldn’t live with. But I’d like to know.’

  Klein stared at the flame of the candle.

  ‘We’d been going together four years and it turned sour way long time before the finish.’

  ‘How?’

  Klein kept his eyes on the candle. The rest of the room became invisible, including Devlin.

  ‘Usual shit. Trivia, I guess. Stuff keeps divorce lawyers and therapists in clover. No grand crimes or betrayals. Kind of things that always seem trivial from the outside and make your gut bleed like ground glass when you’re on the inside. We were very ordinary. Just another fucked-up couple working their variations on an old theme. Mutual torture. It was compelling enough while it lasted, then we both outdid ourselves and it ended.’