Vanishing Acts

  "You can't do this," I say, my whole body starting to shake.

  "I do whatever I want," Concise snaps over his shoulder. "Go on, get lost. You supposed to be good at that."

  I am off the bunk and on top of him before he can even finish his sentence. He is, in that instant, Sticks and Flaco and Elephant Mike and every faceless man and woman out there in the world who has passed judgment on me without hearing all the facts. He's younger and stronger, but I've come from behind to surprise him. I am able to knock him to the ground and pin him with my weight.

  "You fool. You know what happen if the DOs find out you sellin'?" Concise grunts. "It's a criminal investigation. It's time on top of the time you already gonna do."

  That is when I understand: Concise doesn't want to end this alliance between us; he wants to protect it. He is trying to save me before I can be implicated along with him.

  At the altercation, a small crowd has gathered around the front of our cell--Blue Loc, poised to jump in and pull me off Concise, a small knot of White Pride boys who are cheering me on, and Sticks, who stands with his arms crossed, an inscrutable expression on his face.

  One of the detention officers pushes through. "What's going on?"

  I relax my hold on Concise. "We're good."

  The DO's eyes hone in on the cut on my neck, still bleeding.

  "Cut myself shaving," I say.

  The guard doesn't buy a word of it. But the spark that could ignite this pod has dissipated; he's done all he needs to. As he pushes at the other inmates, getting them to disperse, Concise gets to his feet and shakes his clothes straight.

  "I helped get you into this," I tell him. "I'm not leaving now."

  *

  The next day is my last day for jury selection, and Concise's first day of trial. We are both headed over to the courthouse at the same time. "Bet you got yourself a Brooks Brothers button-down shirt," Concise says.

  As a matter of fact, I do. "What about it?"

  He grins. "Chemist, Brooks wasn't no brother."

  "I suppose you think I ought to go to court wearing pinstripes and spats."

  "Only if you're Al Capone." Our conversation is interrupted as Twitch flings himself into our cell. "I ain't conducting business now," Concise says tersely.

  The addict's eyes dart wildly. "I'm doin' you a favor, man," he says. "Thought maybe you'd do me one, too."

  What he means is that in return for whatever information he thinks he can provide, we might give him a free teener. Concise folds his arms. "I'm listenin'."

  "I heard one of the DOs talking when I was up in the infirmary this morning--they're using the Boss Chair," Twitch says.

  "Why should I believe you?"

  Twitch shrugs. "I'm not the one with a bullet up my ass."

  "If I come back from court and what you said is true," Concise says, "I'll give you what you want."

  At the promise of another hit, Twitch nearly floats out of the cell. Concise turns to me. "We got to hide the bullet in here."

  I look at him like he's crazy. If we're both leaving the cell, and there's no one to watch over the prize possession, then our modus operandi is to take it with us. "If Twitch ain't bullshittin', then today we ain't just gonna get strip searched. They gonna sit us down on a metal detector chair, too."

  Concise wriggles under the bottom bunk and starts to scrape the cement between the bricks. A few minutes of digging creates a hole deep enough to house the .22. He backs out from under the bed and starts rummaging through his personal items for toothpaste, and Metamucil. He mixes these together in the sink; scoops it into his palm. "Keep an eye out," he says; and he creeps under the bunk again, this time to grout.

  Concise and I are handcuffed together for the trip back from the courthouse to the jail. He is quieter than usual, almost haunted. The sad fact about being in jail is that no matter how bad you think it is there, the reality of what you face in court is worse. I am only beginning to taste that bitter future; Concise has swallowed it whole today. "So," I say, trying to lift his spirits, "you going to pull an OJ?"

  He glances over his shoulder. "Oh, yeah. I got them eatin' out of my hand, man."

  "But can you get a bloody glove over it?"

  Concise laughs. We are buzzed in through the level slider, and strip searched once again before being allowed back into our pod. I follow him upstairs to our cell and fall onto the lower bunk. Distantly, I am aware of one of the DOs beginning his security walk. Late afternoon, the general noise level is at a high hum--guys hollering to one another across the common room or slamming a hand of cards down on a metal tabletop when they get gin, televisions blaring, toilets flushing, showers running.

  Concise sinks down onto the stool, his hands between his knees. "My lawyer says I'm looking at ten years," he says after a moment. "By the time I get out, my boy's gonna be as old as I was when I got jumped into the Crips."

  There's nothing to say; we both know that no matter how we try to convince ourselves we'll outrun our past, it always crosses the finish line first.

  "Hey," he says. "Do us a favor and check the goddamn bricks."

  I get down on my hands and knees and start to crawl under the lower bunk. But I can smell it before I can even see the telltale hole: the pungent mint, the ground powder that dusts the cement floor.

  Then there is a shot.

  *

  It is louder than you think. It echoes against the walls, and leaves me deaf. I shimmy out from underneath the bunk and catch Concise as he falls off the stool. His eyes roll back; his blood soaks me. "Who did this?" I scream into the crowd that has already gathered. I try to find the shooter, but all I see are stripes.

  Concise falls on top of me in a heavy tangle of limbs and desperation. What is black and white and red all over, I think, a joke Sophie once told me. I cannot remember her punch line, but I know a different one: a black man dying in jail; a white one watching him go.

  I hear the crackle of a radio, and the jail comes alive with a web of response: Officer needs assistance in three-two B pod. Man down. All officers on levels two and three respond to three-two B pod. David two, did you copy?

  David two copies: Ten-seventeen.

  Inmates in B pod, lockdown.

  Steel scrapes as the cell doors are shut.

  I am dragged away from Concise. Someone is asking me if I'm hurt and looking at my arms and chest--places where I am covered in Concise's blood. I am handcuffed behind my back and led to the ghost town of the East Dayroom.

  In the middle of all this, no one has bothered to turn off the television. Emeril's bursts of instruction are interrupted by the RN shouting to call 911; by a deep voice saying, "More pressure"; by the jangling arrival of the Phoenix Fire Department paramedics.

  "This is hot hot hot," Emeril says.

  They will take Concise to Good Samaritan Hospital, the closest trauma center. "Hey," I yell out, as he is carried past on a stretcher. "Is he going to be okay?"

  "He's dead," a voice replies. "But then, you already knew that, didn't you?"

  When I look up, I see a tall, well-dressed black man with a detective's badge clipped to his belt. He stares at my uniform, covered with Concise's blood, and I realize that, like every other black man in the Madison Street Jail, he believes I am a killer.

  The Homicide Division Offices at the General Investigation Division are near Thirty-fifth and Durango. I am kept waiting while the detectives systematically interrogate everyone else in the pod--from the officers and the blacks who say that just days ago Concise and I were fighting, to Fetch, the young white boy who watched me vomit out the bullet after the rec yard fight.

  Whoever did this knows that no one will believe a white man and a black man in jail might forge a friendship. Whoever did this knows that the blacks will assume I was the one who killed Concise--after all, everyone knows it is my bullet that went into him. The whites, for once, will agree with them.

  Whoever did this was trying to punish both of us.

  Detec
tive Rydell has hooked me up to a CVSA--a voice stress analyzer. It's like a polygraph, only more accurate: It doesn't measure physiological reactions due to stress, but instead microtremors in a voice frequency range that the human ear can't hear. Microtremors are present only when a person isn't telling the truth, or so the detective tells me.

  "I took a shower that morning," I say. "I knew I was going to court."

  "What time was that?"

  "I don't know. Maybe eight o'clock." I do not tell him about Twitch, and the Boss Chair, and about the way Concise and I carved a hole in the brickwork for our bullet. "Then I read until it was time to leave the pod."

  "What did you read?"

  "A novel, something from the jail library. Baldacci."

  Rydell folds his arms. "You did nothing between approximately eight-fifteen A.M. and eleven?"

  "I might have gone to the bathroom."

  He stares me down. "Piss or shit?"

  I rub a hand down my face. "Can you tell me why the answer to that is going to help you figure out who killed Concise?"

  Rydell exhales heavily. "Look, Andrew. You got to see this from my point of view. You're an educated man, thirty years the victim's senior. You aren't a career criminal. Yet you're telling me that you bonded with this guy. That you actually found something you had in common."

  I think about Concise, talking about his little boy. "Yes."

  There is a moment of silence. "Andrew," Rydell says, "help me to help you. How can we prove you didn't kill this guy?"

  There is a knock on the door of the interview room, and the detective excuses himself to go speak with another investigator. After he lets himself out, I look down at my shirt. The blood has started to dry, stiff, against my chest. I wonder if someone has called Concise's son. I wonder if they'd even know how to find him.

  The door opens again, and Rydell approaches with a face as blank as glass. "We just found a zip gun in your buddy's locker. Care to comment?"

  I can see it, buried under the stash of medications and food items that Concise had gotten from the canteen: the zip gun that he had been dutifully crafting to prevent a moment like this. I had assumed that it, too, had been stolen. But apparently, someone else had been making one, too.

  I find myself fighting for breath, for logic. "It wasn't used."

  Rydell doesn't even blink. "There's no ballistics testing for a zip gun," the detective says. "But I bet you know that, being educated and all."

  I swallow hard. "I'd like to speak to my attorney."

  I am given a telephone with a long cord, and Rydell stands over my left shoulder while I dial Eric's cell phone. I try three times, and am told over and over by a tinny voice that the person I am trying to reach is not available.

  I am beginning to think that single sentence is the story of my life.

  I am kept alone in a cell, since the detectives can't interrogate me until I reach Eric. In spite of the isolation, however, the rumors reach me. Flaco has been bragging to the carnales, the patch-holding New Mexican Mafia members. The white boys, he says, are too wimpy to pull off a stunt like this. Chicanos are the ones with the big juevos. The detectives ought to be speaking to the real man who killed that nigger.

  Forty-eight hours after Concise's death--forty-eight hours during which I am unable to reach my attorney--the detectives take Flaco up on his offer to talk. During the interview, Flaco whips out a zip gun he's hidden beneath his testicles during the pat-down search prior to transfer to GID, and presents it to Detective Rydell.

  There is only one inconsistency, one that anyone in B pod would realize and that the detectives don't: In jail you know exactly who has what weapon. Concise had been making a zip gun, one that has already been found in our cell, where he'd left it. Only one other zip gun existed in our pod, the one Sticks had tried to use on me during the rec yard fight.

  The only weapon Flaco was known to have was the shank he'd made out of that toothbrush.

  I think of what Concise told me once, of Flaco screwing up his first assigned hit. Killing Concise would help him save face and prove he's macho enough to be a soldier in the Mexican Mafia. If Flaco knew he was headed for a long prison sentence anyway, maybe he'd rather do it with the respect of the carnales.

  But how had he gotten Sticks's zip gun?

  *

  The next day, I am brought back to GID to speak with Detective Rydell. "Barium," I say, the moment he comes into the room. "And antimony compounds. Even if you can't match a bullet to a zip gun with ballistics, you can test for gunshot residue."

  "You can also test it for blood, since the most accurate way to use one is to press it up against the victim's head." He leans forward. "I've got two zip guns. One of them had blood residue on the edge. Coincidentally, that same gun tested positive for the chemical compounds you get when you fire a .22 round, which happens to be what was in your cellie's brain. The other zip gun," he says, "was the one we found in your cell."

  I fall back against the chair. I cannot find the strength to answer the detective when he tells me I am no longer a suspect.

  I am relocated to general population again, this time on Level 2, and placed in a cell with a man nicknamed Hazelnut who has a habit of pulling his hair out in small tufts and weaving them with threads from the blanket into macrame. This, though, is better than the alternative--even if Flaco's in custody, I cannot expect the blacks to protect me anymore, and my status with the whites will not have changed. I wonder how long a body can last without any sleep; how many nights it will take me to make a shank.

  I stop speaking, because I can't trust ordinary language anymore. Words, in spite of what you think, don't always stay fixed. Take "emancipation": it might be reconfigured into a maniac night op or an inanimate cop or maintain, cope. "Madison Street Jail" becomes rationalism jested or slanted majorities. "Delia Hopkins," by another name, could be diaphone silk, akin polished, oedipal knish. And "Andrew Hopkins"? Shake it up a bit and you find dank ownership. Orphans winked. Kidnaper shown.

  *

  Only twenty-four hours into my residency on Level 2, I'm moved. Another inmate has requested a switch because he's been threatened by his cellie--a white boy named Hayseed. Hayseed specifically asked the DOs if he could cell with me instead, saying we are old friends.

  We aren't friends. I don't even know him. My best guess is that he knows about the meth; maybe he thinks I have some on me. I enter the cell and take his measure: Hayseed is still a kid--all yellow hair and buck teeth. "I hope you don't mind, man, about the switch. That other guy, he reeked. I don't think he showered in, like, three months. And I knew you were stuck with the Human Hairball; so I figured you might not mind a change of scenery."

  Hayseed likes to talk. He segues from the merits of Kabuta tractors over John Deere, to the fact that Nebraska is where Spam is made, to the barrettes he stole from the girls he raped and hid in the rotten core of a Ponderosa pine tree. I spend a lot of time staring at the upper bunk. Hayseed: ash eyed, ye hades. I count the number of coughs that ripple through the quiet after lights out. I do what it takes to stay awake, and think I've succeeded until the middle of the night, when I wake up to find that my nostrils and mouth are blocked, Hayseed's hand pressed tight against my flesh. I thrash out with my arms and legs; I try to reach for his wrists, but he is standing behind me and there are already stars at the corners of my vision.

  "Wake up, Nigger-lover," Hayseed whispers. "Your spook shouldn't have refused to sell to the Brotherhood. It was enough to make the boys upstairs give the green light for the hit." His palm grinds down against my jaw, my teeth. "My brother said the nigger never even saw it coming."

  His brother killed Concise? What about Flaco?

  "It was almost too easy, the way the spic volunteered to hide the gun after it was done. But Flaco didn't tell no one he was gonna say he'd made the hit, just so he could get his wet patch with the Mexican Mafia. You were supposed to go down for doing the deed."

  Hayseed leans close. "My brother also
wants me to give you something," he says, and he parts his fingers wide enough for me to gulp for air. He kisses me full on the mouth. Without missing a beat, he backhands me across the cheek, so hard that I start bleeding.

  "I don't know your brother," I choke out, terrified.

  "Guess he never did get a chance to tell you where he got his nickname," Hayseed says. "But then, a smart guy like you already knows that Nebraska's out in the Sticks."

  When Eric arrives the sun is just coming up. I still have cotton wadded into my broken nose, courtesy of the infirmary. One of my eyes has swelled shut. My throat is raw from the yelling I did to call the detention officers to the cell.

  Eric stands up when I open the door to the conference room. "I know I've been sort of ... unreachable ... for the past couple of days. I've been going through a rough--holy shit, Andrew!" When he sees the condition of my face, he goes pale. "They didn't tell me--"

  "I can't stay here," I say wildly. "You have to get me out."

  "Andrew, your trial starts in two--"

  "I won't go back to that cell, Eric!"

  He nods tightly. "All right. I won't leave here until they put you in administrative segregation." The words are a balm; all I've needed to hear. I find myself sinking to my knees, bowing to the floor like a supplicant.

  I do not think I've ever cried in front of Eric; I don't think I've ever cried in front of anyone until two days ago. You make yourself strong because it's expected of you. You become confident because someone beside you is unsure. You turn into the person others need you to be.