Green River Rising

  SEVEN

  BEHIND HER BACK the great twin iron-studded doors swung shut and Juliette Devlin was stranded in a no man’s land between discipline and freedom. This no man’s land she would carry with her, as she always did, into the teeming chaos of the prison. But for now, for a few moments, Devlin was alone.

  The lights in the tunnel roof were bare fluorescence, harsh on her eyes. In front of her stood a blank steel door big enough when open to allow a fire truck through and heavy enough when closed to resist a rocket-propelled grenade. On the other side of the door she knew someone watched her on a closed circuit TV screen. The watcher would be a man and she knew that when she went inside she would be watched by many men more. No experience in her life had made her more acutely aware of her gender, her otherness. For she was a woman and this was a world of utter maleness. More than that, it contained individuals who endured and inflicted – and who had endured and had inflicted – suffering beyond measure. On one level at least that’s what had brought her here. She had set herself the task of trying to measure some small portion of that suffering without measure and thereby understand the hearts of men.

  As Devlin waited for the steel door to open she experienced a feeling somewhere between anxiety and excitement that she hadn’t yet analysed to her satisfaction. The feeling was bound up with transgression, with doing something she wasn’t meant to do in a place she wasn’t meant to be. The excitement arose from the forbidden and therefore from guilt and dread. The Penitentiary was a monument to guilt and dread: it provoked those feelings in the same way that a gothic cathedral provoked a sense of the divine. But for Devlin there was more to it than that. There was always somewhere in her mind the phantom of her father, Michael Devlin; and in the prison itself there was Ray Klein.

  Her father, retired now to a small ranch outside Santa Fe, had been governor of a federal prison in New Mexico and so Devlin had grown up in the emotional shadow of just such a place as this one. Her father had been a Johnson Democrat, a vigorous opponent of the death penalty, and a man ultimately exhausted by the failure of the Great Society to halt its own slide into polarisation and chaos. At the time of his retirement the Bureau had officially abandoned the concept of rehabilitation and his prison had boasted a recidivism rate of ninety-two per cent, a failure that Michael Devlin had taken for his own. As a parent he’d been officially liberal but actually selfish and demanding; no achievement by his children was ever quite great enough to earn his praise. Certainly if he was proud of Juliette, he had concealed it from her with some success. As an added bonus he was an Irish Catholic with a colossal appetite for Jameson’s whiskey. But he never got mean drunk or raised his hand to any of them and so if he was a bastard, and sometimes a hypocrite, it didn’t matter and she loved him anyway.

  Devlin sometimes asked herself if that was all she was about: an attempt to vindicate her father. She rejected the idea. It was hard enough to vindicate her own life, and anyhow her father thought she was crazy. Perhaps, then, it was an attempt to punish him. Michael Devlin had never spoken to her about his prison and in her mind it had assumed the mystery and fascination of the dark forest in a fairy tale. Only there could certain truths be encountered and only then at tremendous risk. Her father thought she should be researching premenstrual tension, or depression in single parent mothers, or some other such namby-pamby bullshit. So did some of her PC friends. They didn’t really understand why she should want to spend her time with killers and rapists. On some level maybe her work was a big Fuck You to all of them. Who were they to be disappointed in her? Whatever the reasons, Devlin was there: standing under the harsh fluorescence of the lights as she waited to enter the dark forest that was Green River State.

  Devlin – she preferred ‘Devlin’ to ‘Juliette’ – had studied psychology and medicine at Tulane. Her IQ had been high enough to allow her to take enough drugs to fill the Superdome and fuck the brains out of a motley collection of longshoremen and Crescent City desperadoes without flunking any of her exams. It was also in New Orleans that she’d picked up a taste for gambling and found she was good at it. A psychiatry residency had cooled her down a little, but the sensible career path – into something warm and fuzzy and lucrative, like one of the psychotherapies – hadn’t appealed to her. It irritated her that, just as in the movies, the guys got all the best parts – got to blow away the bad guys and drive a semi filled with nitro through a road block – whilst the girls had to hang around the edges of the action being nurturing and empathetic. When forensic psychiatry had presented itself as the toughest game in town Devlin had taken a seat at the table. The intellectual level of her colleagues, in her opinion, was generally feeble. Her research in Green River was unique in the literature and several noted figures in the field had told her it did not fall short of brilliance. Devlin felt she was about to make her mark.

  In the tunnel there arose the grinding of gears and the creak of bearings and Devlin cleared her mind. In front of her the steel door jolted from its moorings and rolled open.

  On the other side Devlin was glad to see Sergeant Victor Galindez waiting to take her in. Like the servants of any institution the guards at Green River regarded a privileged outsider like Devlin with fear and suspicion, but Galindez was more courteous than most. He greeted her and took her through to reception where she deposited her keys and pocketbook. She signed the visitor’s book and a liability waiver. Galindez checked her briefcase then took her through the second studded gate and out into the yard.

  Devlin wore a white cotton shirt, buttoned to the neck, faded black Levis and cowboy boots. Under the jeans, as was her habit, she wore a G string. Under the shirt she wore an athletic bra that she otherwise used only when working out. The bra stopped her tits jiggling about and her nipples from showing through the shirt. She wasn’t afraid of provoking an assault but she did want to spare the prisoners who stared at her the pain of seeing too much flesh. Maybe they would’ve preferred to see more of her legs and tits, even if it was painful, but she didn’t know. Anxiety about appearing vain had prevented her from asking Klein’s opinion on this. She didn’t even know if Klein himself would like to see more of her. Somehow he’d imposed a distance between them that she hadn’t been able to bridge. Devlin didn’t consider herself particularly attractive. She looked okay, she guessed, but nothing special. She was tall, five-ten, and slim but she felt that her hands and feet were too big and her face too boyish to be feminine. Her hair was thick and black and these days she wore it cut short at the back and sides. She used to wish that she had bigger tits and a smaller ass, but now that she’d become an official serious person she felt that she should leave such worries behind her, and by and large she had done. Yet she still wore her G string under her jeans to make her feel good and she occasionally wondered what Ray Klein would make of that if he were ever to put his hand on her ass. To date he had not done so and in a work situation she was sure he never would, but in the right time and place Devlin would’ve liked him to.

  In fact she’d told her friend, Catrin, that she wanted to suck Klein’s cock, and have him fuck her from behind on the deck of a shrimp boat on the Gulf during a thunder storm while she reached back between her legs and stroked his balls. Catrin’s reaction had made Devlin wonder of herself if she really was as fucked up as she sometimes felt herself to be. Or maybe she just wasn’t as sexually confused as most of her peers. Catrin, who had picked up too many of her opinions second hand from glossy magazines, had told her she demeaned herself with such fantasies and that she really needed a man who was in touch with his inner feminine. That is, someone who would lie in bed next to you with a hard-on and smile understandingly and go do some yoga or something when you told him you didn’t want to fuck him tonight. Devlin hated all that bullshit. Speaking for herself, being a woman, there wasn’t anything about her, much less in her, that was masculine. If she was occasionally ambitious and decisive it was her, not some inner man. If she was at other times vulnerable and needy that was her too.
It was all her and she didn’t see why it should be any different for a guy. She wanted someone who acted like a man and expressed himself like a man, who when he was compassionate and vulnerable did it in his own male way, as men always had done. And she wanted him to have a man’s sensibilities and desires, like wanting to fuck her on a shrimp boat while she stroked his balls. Sounded good to her. Maybe too many guys had been reading the same magazines as Catrin. It was a painful thought but most decent men she knew of her own age preferred jerking off to the tedium of negotiating their sexual relations with women. Maybe she was just moving in the wrong circles. One circle she knew that wasn’t wrong, even if it was a circle of Hell, was the hospital here at Green River, where she’d got to know Klein.

  In some senses she knew Klein deeply from watching him work. In others she didn’t know him at all. She knew little of his past except that he came from New Jersey and had trained in New York City. Before coming up he’d been an orthopaedic surgeon in a public hospital in Galveston. It was strange to know someone purely as you found them, without re-inventing them from a patchwork of dead facts about their life. In some ways it was scarey. She didn’t know what crime Klein had committed to get himself sent up to Green River. She’d once asked Coley and Coley had looked at her darkly and said that wasn’t a question folk put to each other in here. You could be told, but you didn’t ask. She was pretty sure Klein would have told her if she had asked, but Devlin didn’t want to be seen as some asshole outsider who didn’t respect the rules of this dark world and so she hadn’t. Alternatively she could’ve found out from Hobbes or one of the guards but that would’ve seemed like a betrayal of trust.

  Galindez led her out from the gate of the reception centre which opened onto the yard. Beyond the yard and its mesh fences stood the main prison complex: six great cellblocks radiating from a domed central tower. The groping arms of the cellblocks were always quietly chilling and for a moment she imagined them reaching right across the surface of the globe until they met again on the other side of the planet in an identical domed plexus. Then all the prisoners of the earth could have roamed its walkways forever without ever knowing where they were. Perhaps, she thought, that was all any of them were doing anyway, herself included. She and Galindez turned left and walked along the concrete path that ran around beneath the sheer perimeter wall.

  Each section of the hexagonal wall was a quarter of a mile long and topped with multiple banked coils of razor wire. Devlin felt the eyes of the riflemen watching them from their towers. The two sections of the wall that met at the main gate were of bare stones, unencumbered by any other buildings. Under the shadow of the other four wall sections crouched the workshops, the visiting hall, and the segregation block for punishments and special category prisoners. Nearest the main gate as they turned west was the infirmary. At this hour the exercise yards were empty. The noise of a band saw drifted from the carpentry shop. In the shade of the perimeter wall it was cool but Devlin could see the sun turning the roof of the prison into burnished plates of gold, welded together by the black iron girders. Under the glass it would not be so cool. She noticed Galindez looking at her and nodded towards the roof.

  ‘Why did they build it with so much glass?’ she said.

  Galindez’s cheeks were gaunt and badly scarred by childhood smallpox. He wore a heavy moustache. In repose his face was quiet, sombre, almost sad. Now he smiled.

  ‘The warden says it’s so that God can look down from his heaven upon the prisoners. Myself I don’t think he bothers.’

  He lapsed into silence and his face turned sombre again. Devlin was glad to reach the entrance to the infirmary. They stopped and Devlin turned to thank Galindez.

  ‘This is a bad place for a woman to work,’ said Galindez.

  Devlin didn’t answer. If she’d argued with this kind of shit every time it came up it would’ve been a full-time job. Galindez must have seen it in her face because he added, ‘For a man too, I guess.’

  ‘Then why are you here?’ she said.

  Galindez smiled and she suddenly felt naive.

  ‘The pay’s good. Very good for a Latino immigrant.’

  ‘Where was your original home?’

  ‘Salvador.’

  ‘You still have family there?’

  ‘Only in the graveyard,’ said Galindez. ‘I was in prison there too, on the wrong side of the wire.’

  Devlin flushed with the embarrassment of the white liberal. She was irritated with herself. Galindez had been through what he’d been through. If he could deal with her questions she could deal with his answers. ‘What for?’

  He shrugged. ‘For praying in the wrong church, reading the wrong newspaper, having the wrong friends. The usual reasons.’

  Devlin wanted to look away but didn’t.

  He went on. ‘At first it was hard in this country. Of course I would like to teach school again, but it’s not possible. At least since I work here my wife doesn’t have to scrub any more floors.’

  Devlin nodded. She couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t sound phoney and irrelevant. Galindez touched his cap.

  ‘When you need an escort back to the gate, ring the reception and ask for me.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Devlin watched him walk away for a moment, then she turned and went into the infirmary. Despite her years in hospitals the smell, as always, gave her a second of nausea: disinfectant with a strong undertow of poisoned human effluent and death. By the time she’d passed Sung and made her way to the sick bay office the smell had faded into the background of her awareness. She set her briefcase on the cluttered table. Frog Coley wasn’t to be seen and she wasn’t sorry. She had mixed feelings about Coley and as far as she could tell, he about her. He had a cruel tongue. Yet he also had a gravity, a moral power rooted in the pain he had embraced as his due portion. She would never possess such power. Her portion, in comparison, had been purchased cheap and she had some idea why someone like her might arouse the resentment of someone like Coley. Maybe he also felt threatened by the professional background she shared with Klein, though no more than she felt excluded by his closeness to Klein. The two men shared a strange kind of reciprocal mentor deal. Whatever, she felt that Coley had never given her her due. Maybe today she would get that due. In her bag she had the first fruits of their work together in the infirmary: a paper based on their research published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

  Devlin’s research had evolved from a question that had haunted her for years: Is the tragedy of death, and therefore of life, an absolute right of all men and women? Or is the tragic a commodity doled out according to an unexamined set of social criteria? It was clear that in a worldly sense the latter was the case. If she herself were to die tomorrow in a car wreck the tragedy would ring clear: brilliant young psychiatrist cut down in the prime of her . . . et cetera, et cetera. But if Coley were to break his neck falling down the infirmary steps the world would little notice and would care even less. These values, it seemed to Devlin, were everywhere inscribed: in the law; in medicine; in the slaughter of war; in the indifference of governments; even in bumper stickers exhorting the salvation of the whales. Why not squid or hyenas? This arbitrary allocation of value galled her for in the end it trapped her along with the rest on a ladder without a top up which, as high as she was, she could continue to haul herself forever. Or at least until age and decay, white hair and sagging breasts, began to snap the rotten rungs beneath her feet.

  Comforting then – no, exhilarating – was the utter indifference of the universe that contained this flyspecked world. In her mind were inscribed these words from Kant’s Critique of Judgement:

  Deceit, envy and violence will always be rife around him, though he himself is honest, peaceable and kind; and the other righteous men he meets in the world, no matter how deserving they may be of happiness, will be subjected by nature, which takes no heed of such deserts, to all the evils of want, disease and untimely death as are all the other animals of
the earth. And so it will continue to be until one wide grave engulfs them all – just and unjust, there is no distinction in the grave – and hurls them back into the abyss of the aimless chaos from which they were taken – they that were able to believe themselves the final end of creation.

  Devlin thought: we that are able to believe ourselves the final end of creation.

  And this brought her back to the focus of her research: the individual locked in the cell of personality. Was the same value system inscribed within each of us and did we judge ourselves in front of ourselves by that same ruthless and arbitrary calibration? Devlin was attempting an answer.

  Her idea had been to assess psychological function in two different populations of hospital in-patients diagnosed as having Aids. The first study group was in the University Medical Centre in Houston. The second was in the infirmary at Green River State. Devlin had chosen two standard questionnaires designed to evaluate mental health with a particular emphasis on depression. She had designed a third of her own, tentatively called the Existential Trauma Inventory. These were administered to both study groups. Patients suffering non-fatal illnesses in both hospitals provided control groups for comparison. Both groups of Aids sufferers were doomed to die. But who coped best? And how? And why?

  The civilian cases of Aids at Houston received a high level of medical care and psychological support but were faced with losing a life that in conventional terms was ‘good’: free, affluent, full of hope and promise. By contrast the treatment the prisoners received was disgraceful; yet they appeared to have less to lose. The outer world placed a minimum value on their lives and cared only that they died as quietly and cheaply as possible. The key question was: was this so for the men themselves? Was losing a ‘good’ life more traumatic to the dying man than losing a life which was desperate and squalid? Which lives were more precious to their owners? Which deaths more tragic? Was it easier for the wretched of the earth to die in the River than it was for the free men in the high tech unit at Houston? Devlin wanted to take science to that boundary where it crossed over into philosophy. Was it possible to formulate, and answer, these questions in a way that was scientifically valid?