I hadn’t been in a fight since the regional jail. Even then, I turtled and let my bigger, uglier opponent whale on me until the other inmates pulled him off before the guards came. Those guards saw the scuffle from their mirrored tower, but when they stormed the block, their cans of pepper spray ready, they found me leaning gingerly against a wall and telling a story about how I slipped in a wet spot on the hard floor and fell on my back, busting myself up pretty bad. I wasn’t a fighter, but I also wasn’t a rat.
Now, three years later and a hundred miles southeast at the Boone County Correctional Center, fighting and rats were all I could think about. Five of us in the six-man cell knew the sixth, Okie Carmichael, had snitched on us, and we needed to make sure he took the beating he deserved. Peterson and Jones saw him talking to the C.O. minutes before the security team rolled in, went straight to our cell, and shook it down for cigarettes, which one of the guards found under Shorty Pauley’s mat. Saunders and I were out on the rec yard walking laps at the time. Still, we believed Peterson and Jones, and we sought revenge for Shorty, who never bothered anybody. All Shorty did was puff on tobacco by the bathroom vent, sometimes sharing and sometimes not. Maybe Okie envied him. Hard to say. But what he did couldn’t go unpunished.
It wouldn’t be easy. Most of the inmates here were trying to make it out of the system and go home soon. This was medium security, and no one wanted to die in medium security. Such a man’s humiliated ghost might hang around whimpering for decades. Here, guards wouldn’t look the other way. A C.O. remained stationed at the desk on every POD at all times. Six stalked the rec yard. Four spread through the chow hall. Beyond that, there were cameras everywhere.
“It has to be when we’re coming back from evening rec,” Peterson said. “We get him in the back stairwell.”
Everyone in the prison knew there was a spot in that back stairwell that cameras didn’t reach. A lot of goods and contraband were handed off. Sometimes a guard would be posted, but not often. Plus, the crowd coming back from evening rec squeezed together in a four-foot space between walls, which got even more crowded during rec change when other inmates came down the stairs. It’d be a perfect place to shiv a man. None of us were willing to go that far, though — not in medium security.
“You have a plan?” Shorty asked. Nothing would come of his write-up for tobacco possession. He knew he’d end up with thirty days of probation or two weeks loss of privileges, maybe a little community service, which meant cleaning bathrooms and hallways other inmates likely already cleaned that day. But he lost his smokes, and that infuriated him. “What are we gonna do to him?”
“We surround him in the stairwell and…,” Peterson said.
I pictured the scene from Julius Caesar that we read in junior high, the one where all the senators swarm Caesar and stab him to death, but it wasn’t that kind of plan.
“…when we hit the blind spot, whichever one of us is on the step ahead of him turns and sucker-punches the hell out of him, busts him right in the face. Then, we all walk away and let him bleed.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. I no longer pictured the careful mob of senators; I envisioned one of us getting whumped and beaten down while the other four strode casually away. Okie stood taller than any of us, his copper hair a lighthouse beacon blazing over the lowly rocks and waves. He had a foot on me, and two on Shorty, who earned his nickname honestly. Jones and Peterson were the most muscular, their arms sleeved with blue tattoos that bulged like painted graves, but I had seen both of them fight, and I wasn’t hopeful. From a distance, Saunders looked like the most evenly matched with Okie. Even so, there was a reason he walked laps with me rather than lift weights with Peterson and Jones. We weren’t getting ourselves in shape for battle; we were getting ourselves in shape to run.
“Sounds like the way to do it,” said Jones.
“All agreed?” said Peterson.
“Let’s take him,” said Shorty, overexcited as if that extra step in the stairwell could bring his short arms closer to the big man’s head.
I looked at Saunders, who shrugged as if to say, Why not? That meant I was in, too. No way I could back out now.
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We kept an eye on Okie throughout the day. When he wasn’t watching _Dog the Bounty Hunter _on the POD television, playing Spades loudly, or resting on his bunk, he ended up at the guard’s desk, talking to C.O. McCallister. The two of them yukked it up like they were old army buddies. They traded gossip about a new female C.O. named Swanson and discussed the action in the latest Batman movie that staff brought in for us to view a few nights ago. This was okay with us. As long as they talked loud enough for us to hear, we knew there’d be no fresh snitching taking place.
“…and then everything blew up,” we heard C.O. McCallister say. He gestured with his hands, like a video of him crushing a man’s skull played backward. McCallister, a massive man, looked like an oak tree wrapped in blue cellophane. His neck, when not flushed, appeared knotty and lined like bark. He was a nice guy — not one of the guards to be worried about, not one to call in the security team even if Okie snitched to him about something minor. He grinned while he talked, as if this were a normal part of his happy life.
“I can’t wait for the next one,” Okie said. “I bet you they bring back the Joker. They’re so much cooler when the Joker’s in them.”
I stopped listening. I didn’t care about comic book villains when we had real villainy afoot, and no heroes on either side.
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About an hour later, McCallister called for anyone going out to rec. Half the POD lined up at the back door. Most of us wore tee shirts and sweats. Some stayed in their khakis, though it wasn’t necessary. Peterson and Jones and their crew wore weight gloves and carried towels and plastic mugs for drinking water from the cooler on the yard. All of us maintained the illusion of our rituals, including Shorty who had his earbuds in, jamming to some obnoxious rap or other.
McCallister, standing at the door, shouted, “Rec!” even though we were already lined up in front of him and waiting. The door buzzed and he pushed it open, watching as we filed past and down the stairs.
We scattered when we hit the yard — weightlifters heading to their benches, basketball players racing toward the netless hoops at the other end, walkers moseying along the track with its red out-of-bounds line warning us not to move closer to the fence. Saunders and I joined the ambling crowd strolling in squared-off circles, studying the fence, the slate-gray wall beyond, razor wire like dragon’s teeth above. We watched the guards watching us. We kept our eyes on the other cons who might have their own ideas about seeking revenge for some perceived slight. We checked ourselves in the mirrored windows of the education wing each time we passed, embarrassed from its funny way of bending light so our white tee shirts had us looking fatter and with dark lines on our chest as if we had grown sagging boobs.
This was our everyday experience. We walked. We observed. We talked about Saunders’s mother crying over the phone from down in Alabama and my ex-wife with her new boyfriend up north in Morgantown. I said I couldn’t blame her. He said he wished he could take away all of his mom’s misery. Again and again, lap after lap, the same.
“Joel,” he said, “look.” He nodded toward the rec yard door where Okie, dripping with sweat from an hour of busting ass on the basketball court, stood among guards and all the other inmates ready to leave at rec change.
“Almost time,” I said.
“I wonder if he suspects.”
“Hope not. Gonna be hard enough as it is.”
We finished another lap of the yard, nodding to each of our cellmates in turn. They stopped what they were doing, gathered their stuff, and headed toward the door and Okie. When we finished our lap, we joined them there, forming a crude pentagram with Okie at the center. Saunders and I took positions in back, not wanting Okie behind us, where one of us might have to be the man to strike.
“Rec change,” shouted one of the correctional officers. I didn’t see which, too busy focusing on the back of Okie’s copper fade.
The door buzzed. A guard opened it, and fifty inmates crammed through the small space in clusters, the stairwell packed with men going up and men coming down. The air smelled musty with hints of dead fish and that weird after rain stench of mud. The temperature rose, and all of us sweated in places we weren’t sweating before. I felt my boxers clinging to my thighs. Even my ears were wet.
I kept moving, oozing upward, eyes aimed at the back of Okie’s head, the bullseye I never meant to hit. I was throwing the game, trying my best to lose.
But the crowd had its own momentum — lines of people shifting as if in a dance. Some men went forward, some sidestepped. Shoulders were bumped, mean glares exchanged. Okie almost seemed to be walking backward. I attempted to slow and compensate. Strange shoulders and elbows bumped me, urged me in voiceless demand until, somehow, I ended up ahead of Okie as we neared the blind spot.
Fuck, I thought. The current pushed me along, and Okie bobbed behind me like a piece of flotsam.
It was me. It was always me. The prison gods meant for it to be me.
I took another two steps until I was well within the inky absence between cameras. I clenched my fists, swallowed a full foul-tasting breath, squeezed my chest, and turned. My arm shot its cannon straight to avoid the other inmates, flowing with force like a close-range Bruce Lee punch, lashing like a cobra, slicing like a burning arrow of death, and struck Okie right in the bicep, making a sound like cymbals carved from meat.
My arm dropped to my side, and I had only a second to see Okie grin before the crowd spun me around and carried me off. That expression wasn’t vengeful or scolding like a cruel man about to beat his dog, but more like the dog that comes back after, dumb and playful and in need of love or reassurance. We were wrong. He hadn’t ratted out Shorty — at least, not intentionally. He wanted a pat on the head or a scratch behind the ear. He wanted someone to play with him, and anything he did in future would be innocent. Even if he killed me in my sleep.
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