CYCLED SENTENCE - PART 9

BLACK BEAUTY

            I was lost. I couldn’t explain it. It was all so real. It had to be real! The guard put me in cuffs and politely shoved me back to my cell. I was getting out. How?

            “Get your shit bundled up. I’ll be back in an hour or so to walk you to the west gate.”

            It only took a couple minutes to get my things together. I used the rest of the hour trying to figure out what the fuck was going on. It had to have happened. There’s no way I dreamt that shit, especially in the middle of my parole hearing. Soon enough, all doubts of the German and my time in the Nest were vaporized in a blast of H-A-T-E; black across my knuckles. I had become so accustomed to the H-A-T-E; I didn’t see it right away. The same way a new haircut stops looking new, or the way a fresh coat of paint in your home becomes so familiar, you completely forget what the old color used to be. The H-A-T-E became a part of me.

 It wasn’t until I thought about the black ink and my throat, until I thought about the contract and the mark that it even occurred to me to check my hand. After finding the letters, I foolishly tried tucking my chin and looking down at my neck, only to see my big nose and the stubble of my gray whiskers. I knew that all that black ink had to of stained its way into the gapping wounds sliced in my paper thin skin. My fingers found their way to my neck just fine without the help of my eyes, and sure enough they saw something in the rigged scar tissue, but not enough to make it out by touch alone.

Mirrors were banned from all cells, being that they are easily crafted into shanks, so I moved over to the toilet to see if I could make my reflection in the steel seat. The metal was too filthy and scratched up to get a clear look, so I shifted my face over the bowl, gazing for my neckline in the water, but it was no use. The damn thing had a constant stream that bled from the rim, stirring up the water and my reflection with it. I’d have to wait until I came across a window or perhaps the luxury of a mirror on the outside to see what that ghost kraut did to me.

“OK inmate, get your head out of that bowl. You can’t be drinking like the dogs no more. Time to go back out in the real world and act like a real human being.”

The guard rattled his baton across the bars of my cell, playing the music of “Get the Fuck Up and Over Here So I Can Put Your Cuffs On Before I Open This Gate”. The thunderous clank of the gate in motion shook the prison to life. Whooping hollers and clatter came from other cells like howling monkeys in a forest canopy. Such a display was only acted out on three occasions; fresh meat entering, dead man walking, or somebodies getting out. In my case, I had an uneasy feeling that I was all three.

Fearing they might cancel my parole and toss me in La Paloma with the birds, I knew it would be wise not to mention my stay with the German in the Nest. I kept my mouth shut and figured the sooner I could get the fuck out of that place, the sooner I could put it all behind me.

            “Hey guard, do me a favor and tell me what’s on my neck will ya?”

            “You mean besides your ugly head?”

            “Come on, don’t fuck with me!”

He took a carless glance more out of curiosity to see what I was talking about, rather than to appease me.

“Looks like a big mistake to me. Turn back around inmate and keep walking!”

I knew not to ask again or I’d find myself with a busted face and another five years just for asking questions.  He walked me to a small room with white cinderblock walls. As soon as the powder blue latex gloves came out, I knew what was coming.

            “Strip down Inmate.”

            “Really? I can understand coming in, but what am I gonna take out?”

            “You’d be surprised buddy. You think I want to do this? Now, shut your mouth and let’s get this over with.”

            With my hands on the wall, buck naked, I closed my eyes tight, and my asshole even tighter. It was a quick in and out, but something wasn’t right.

            “What the fuck! What the fuck is this? Holy shit!”

            The guard ripped the probing latex inside out from his wrist and ran out of the room in a vanishing act. It took me a few seconds to realize I was now alone. Turning away from the wall, I could see a trail of vomit marking the path the guard took to the exit from the now abandoned glove on the floor. It was withered like a deflated balloon around a small protrusion in the sleeve of the pointer finger (the one he shoved up my ass). I picked the glove up by the wrist and dangled it upside down like utters on a cow. The mass filled finger had a weight to it. Whatever was inside me was now inside this glove. Whatever it was, it was moving.

With eyes half open, I held the glove as far from my body as my arms would reach. All in one motion, I flipped the latex back to right-side out, and dropped it to the floor.  I didn’t want to look, but I had to. Just like when you pick a scab from your head or a booger from your nose. You don’t want to look, but you have to. Moving about the shit stained latex finger, in twitching jitters, were six or seven big maggots, the cause to the guard’s mad dash from my ass. 

All I could think about was my time in the Nest, it had to be real. I must have swallowed a few of the buggers alive. In fact I knew I did, at least at first. It wasn’t until I developed a strange desire for the taste that I started to chew’em dead. The maggots I took whole must have somehow made it from one end to the other; it was the only reasonable explanation. I’m just surprised they came out still wigglin’. 

“Hands back up on the fucking wall inmate!”

A black female guard known to the inmates as “Black Beauty” rushed into the cavity search room like a mother looking for the bully that beat her child. Her nickname had nothing to do with her being black, and at two hundred pounds with a face leathered in acne scars, she sure as hell wasn’t Mrs. America.  The ox of a woman always referred to her black baton as “Black Beauty”, and with a back swing that could knock your head clear out of Wriggly Field; it was her baton that the inmates feared. She was merely and extension of the baton, thus, she was “Black Beauty”.

“Now what the fuck we got going up in here? My friend tells me you got some bugs and shit coming out yo ass, you sick mutha fucka!”

“I…”

“Shut the fuck up before I take Black Beauty here and shove her so far up yo ass them bugs be coming out yo mouth! I didn’t ask you to talk!

She bent down and picked up a maggot from the floor.

“This some real shit right here. I aint even gonna make this my problem. You about to be a free man now. Way I sees it, you can take yo free ass to the clinic and let them fuck wich’ya worms.”

She dropped the maggot and stomped it flat with her black polished boot.

“Now turn around and face me inmate, and keep yo hands up.”

I did what she asked.

“You think you some bad mutha fucka don’t’cha, fighting niggas in the yard?”

            “What did you say?”

            “You heard me white boy! Don’t be acting like you don’t remember me bustin’ you upside yo Nazi head.”

            “I aint no fucking Nazi!”

            “Is that so? Last I remember, you was on top a brotha fixin to put his brains all over the pavement, fighting side by side with a bunch of skinhead punks!”

A chill danced its way up my spine into my brain, causing me to momentarily drop my arms to my side.

            “That really happened?”

“Get yo mutha fuckin’ hands back up! I know how it is, you gonna play stupid with me. You should be down on yo knees kissin’ my boots. Had I let you put that rock in that niggas head, aint no way you be ever getting out.”

The guard that puked his way out of the room, returned three shades pale with a brown box labeled “0032186, W. Blake”, in his arms. He sat it down next to Black Beauty and made haste back out of the room.  She kicked the box, scuffing it across the floor, where it came to a stop at my toes.

“Trick or treat white boy. Get dressed.”

Expecting to find the clothes I was wearing when I got locked up, I was annoyed to pull out a thrift pair of jeans and an old orange shirt with black triangles that made a jack-o-lanterns  face on the front, and read “This is my Halloween costume”, across the shoulders on the back. Then I remembered that I was covered in the guy’s blood when they booked me. My old threads were probably locked away forever in some evidence baggy or burnt in a furnace or some shit.

Half dressed; I looked up to see that Black Beauty was looking at me as if I were the scum of the earth. It was the kind of stare you get from somebody who knows something about you that you don’t want them to know. The kind of stare that sees through you but also pushes you back. I pulled the stupid Halloween shirt over my head.

“You know, I was only trying to survive. He attacked me first.”

           

Before I could get the shirt pulled down off my face she was up on me with a velocity that kept her body moving long after we came to a crushing dead end against the cinderblock wall. Her baton was holding my head against the wall at my neck.

“Listen here mutha fucka, you don’t know shit about surviving! Surviving is knowing to keep yo cracker ass out the slammer in the first place! Surviving is getting yo ass to work so you can make a paycheck to keep yo babbies fed and roof over they head! It’s doing what you have to do, not what you want to do. When you go and get yourself locked up in a place like this, full a killas, you aint doin’ so good at surviving is ya?!”

She let off me and took a step back. I finished putting the shirt on. Winded from screaming in my face, she went from a roar to a whisper.

“Surviving is watching yo mama get hauled off to prison for killin’ yo pervert daddy because he didn’t know well enough to leave his little girls alone. Then growing up to spend every day working in a place full of rapist and perverts just like yo daddy, but having the strength to fight yo urge to kill every last one of’em.”

She walked back up to me and put her hand on my chest.

“Killin’ is the easy part. Actin out on temptation is the easy part. Caving in to what rules you aint surviving, it’s giving up.  It’s fighting the animal within, keeping the beast at bay that’s the hard part. Knowing when to take responsibility for what you are. That’s surviving.”

She put her baton back in a loop holster on her belt and walked out of the room. No amount of clothing could cover my naked shame in that moment.  She was right.  I had been nothing but a captive to the animal that ruled me. A prisoner long before I ever got locked up in this place. A prisoner locked up in the solitary confinement of my own cells.

Her words beat me harder over the head than her back swing ever could. I knew in those few short sentences spoken, that she was a master of control, a control that I never could obtain. A control that so little of us ever will be capable of displaying. She was an angel in the chaos and struggle that is existence. Black Beauty, the toughest bitch I ever met.

I looked down at the box to see that it still had some more shit in it. I was happy to pull out my old black leather jacket, still folded and wrapped in rope, just how I left it on the back of my motorcycle; no longer attached to the motorcycle of course. I rummaged through the pockets and found two cigarettes and a black and white photograph of Olivia.

She was sitting naked like a pinup model in a folding lawn chair. It was my going away present to take over seas. She kissed the back side with red lipstick that has long since faded. I still remember her forcing me to promise that I wouldn’t show it to anyone and that she put it in-between the pages of a small pocket sized Bible thinking that would keep me honest to my promise. It was the only promise to her that I ever broke. How could a guy not want to show off a doll like that? Let’s just say that before the war was over, that small Bible made many a solider true believers.

When we said our goodbyes, I knew it might be the last time I would ever see her. I just didn’t think that with me going to deaths doorstep to dance in the garden of war, that he would chose to spare me, and pick instead, the rose of my life from the garden of peace.  Her face still haunts me more than any ghost I’ve ever come to encounter.

A few smaller objects were scattered about the bottom of the box. A book of matches, a pair of crooked black Wayfarers, and I don’t know how it wasn’t placed with evidence, but the red bandana that belonged to the man I killed. Perhaps they thought it was mine when they brought me in. I stuffed it in the inner pocket of my leather jacket as another guard led me to the West Gate. Then, I took my first step into the outside world in over thirty-one years.

I had no place to go and nobody waiting for me. I wandered the streets until sundown and found a park to make camp for the night. It didn’t bother me sleeping under the stars. I don’t think I would have stepped in another building at the time anyway, even if it was a nice warm home with a soft bed to sleep in.  Midnight came and went, but I couldn’t find sleep. I was afraid that I would somehow wakeup back in the Nest with the German.

I felt like I had traveled thirty years into the future. The street signs, cars, and people all looked so alien. I heard music coming from buildings that sounded like it was from another world. It was as if my mind was placed in an ageless sleep while my body and the world around me grew old. In all the distractions of this new world, my new environment, I somehow forgot about the mark on my throat. By the time I remembered, it was too dark to see for the night.

By one or two in the morning, the stars retreated behind fast moving clouds and the weather took a turn to freezing autumn rain. I decided to duck out the downpour in a cathedral that I had noticed peaking over the tree line a couple blocks from the park.  It was the only place that was open and not asking for money. The Priest new well enough that the only thing I was there to save was my clothes from getting soaked. He didn’t preach at me or ask too many questions.  After bringing me some warm towels to dry off with, he slipped me ten bucks and told me that the church serves hot meals on Wednesdays, until then, I should go get something to eat.

I split the church just before sunrise. The storm had passed and I didn’t want to give any nuns a heart-attack, walking into the chapel to see a crazy old bastard in a Halloween shirt spread out on the pews. Back near the park, I sat at a bus stop, shivering as I eagerly awaited the sun to peak its warmth over a small diner called “The Scramble” across the street, or for the neon flash of life in the “OPEN” sign on the glass door, whichever came first. The wind was starting to pick back up in the dusk and with it a strong aroma of something wonderful was carried alongside the orange and yellow leaves, something that I had completely forgotten about in prison. Coffee!

I dug around my leather jacket pockets looking for the ten from the priest. The money was in the same pocket that I stuffed the red bandana, reminding me that I had the damn thing.  I hesitated to use it, but the ice wind was too much for my ears and cheeks so I wrapped the bandana around my face like a train robber in an old western movie. The thin paisley fabric didn’t do much to block the cold out, but helped keep the sting of the wind off my face. I even put the crooked Wayfarers over the brim of my nose to shield my watering eyes from freezing shut.

I thought about things the German had said, things Black Beauty said, and the things I had done.  I thought about my past and the ghost that haunt me, metaphysically and in memory. My only fear was that I may never shake the ghost of my life, and that I would always be locked up in the haunting of it all, at least in my mind.

Just as the sun came up, the “OPEN” sign of the diner buzzed its welcoming neon glow, and I carefully cracked and jarred the ice in my blood as I stretched out stiff limbs and pulled myself from the bus stop bench. Before I could take a step out into the street, a big city bus pulled up and screeched to a stop, letting out a blast of hissing air. The bus door cranked open; an old black man was at the wheel. He took one look at me and said,

“You some sort of bank robber?”

It took me a second to understand, but then I remembered the bandana over my face. I pulled it down around my neck.

“No sir.”

“Good, because I can’t give bank robbers rides. Besides, this bus don’t make for a good getaway vehicle. Too easy for the police to make out.”

He chuckled at himself and I gave a fake smile and a huff to humor him.

“Well, you getting on or what?”

“Nor sir, I was just about to head over to that diner across the street.”

“Oh really? Be careful, they say that dinner is haunted. Spooky Scramble they call it. ”

“I’m not too worried about it.”

“No, really. They say it happened probably about thirty years ago. Some stranger to town got off at this bus station and ate his last meal in that place. I guess it was a gang of bikers that cut him up real bad after he did something to provoke them in the dinner. They killed him just down the road from here, and some of the waitresses at the Scramble say his ghost returns every now and then to order some grits from beyond the grave.”

            He busted up laughing again, but this time I didn’t humor him.

            “Ok, well if ya aint coming, I got to get going. Auf Wiedersehen.”

            “What did you say?”

            “Auf Wiedersehen. It’s German for goodbye.”

He closed the bus door and revved the hunk of metal away from the bus stop. I couldn’t believe it. How could I of sat across from the place this whole time and not noticed?  The parking lot was smaller now, and the paint on the walls had faded, but sure enough, it was the same diner where I encountered the man with the red bandana. That meant I wasn’t far from the road where I hunted him down. The road that I covered in his blood, laying the red carpet for death to make its grand entrance.  

It was then as I crossed the street that I decided I would return to the place where I took his life over thirty one years ago. I hoped that maybe, by revisiting the killing grounds, that I could, in some way, say that I’m sorry. In some way, find forgiveness.

****

But first, some coffee!