A man in full, p.46
A Man in Full, page 46
“I SAID I WANT SOME CRANK!”
Someone yelled, “You can crank my johnson, Dead Meat!” Raucous laughter.
The deputy yelled, “Yo! Simms! Look at me!”
Mutt looked up through the screen, and so did Conrad and Five-O, who had now gotten up off the bunk. They could make out the deputy leaning way over the catwalk railing and looking down at them. “Chill down, Simms,” he said. Then he lowered his arm over the railing until his hand was at the level of his groin. He curled his fingers and extended his thumb and began jiggling his hand in the male semaphore that means “Go masturbate.”
Apoplectic with rage, Mutt extended his arm and his middle finger toward the deputy, then wheeled about toward the door and began kicking it even more furiously than before: BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG.
The deputy yelled, “Cut that shit out, Simms! That’s an order!”
Mutt didn’t cut it out. “FUCK YOU!” He was hammering away at the door with his heel.
Another voice from the catwalk, a deeper voice: “Goddamn it, Simms! Cut it out! You want Michael Jackson come gitchoo?”
Heh-heh-hehhhhgggghhhhhhh! That got a big rise out of the chorus over the wire.
“FUCK YOU!” screamed Mutt to one and all.
“’Ey, Mutt!” said Five-O. “Easy, brah! Cool head main t’ing. Laydahs fo’ da Michael Jackson, da kine.”
But Mutt was long past cooling down and taking advice. He was in a frenzy, a rage, which the catcalls from all over the pod only made worse.
Conrad and Five-O had both gravitated toward the other end of the cell, near the toilet and the basin. Presently they could hear the clack of wooden slats being slid shut over the slots in the doors. Only the deputies, outside the cell, could open or close the slats. They always closed them when they had to remove an inmate forcibly, so that the other inmates couldn’t look out and watch. The clacks came closer and closer, and you could hear the sound of a whole group of men speaking in low voices. Mutt stopped kicking the door. Now he just stared at it, but he kept jerking his shoulders and elbows about. Then you could see a pair of eyes at the slot, and a deep Okie voice said, “Okay, Mutt, I’m gonna open this door, and I want you to walk on out like a nice fella.”
“Fuck you. You don’t call me Mutt. You don’t know me. You ain’t no friend a mine.”
“Okay, Mutt, you can be Mutt or you can be Mr. Simms, but I’m gonna open this door, and I want you to come on outta there peaceful, like a good fella. Otherwise, you’re Mr. Ass-out.”
“Fuck you.”
“I don’t wanna have to bring Michael Jackson in ’eh, Mutt.”
Mutt’s response to that was to lunge toward the door and spit through the slot. “Shit! Cocksucker,” said the deep voice. Clack!—someone slammed the slat across, closing the slot. The deep voice now came over the door and through the screen: “Always gotta be the hard way, hunh, Mutt?”
Then silence. All three of them, Mutt, Five-O, and Conrad, stared at the door. The cell doors at Santa Rita opened outward and had no handles on the inside, so that the inmates couldn’t prevent the deputies from opening them. The entire pod was abnormally quiet. The inmates, or most of them, were confused as to their allegiance. Ordinarily they were on the side of any other inmate in a set-to with the deputies, and all the more so when the issue finally boiled down to brute force. But Mutt was the J-cat who had used the N-word. The fans overhead went scrack scrack scrack scraaaacccckkkkkk. Grover Washington’s saxophone went buhoooomuhoooooooom. Conrad’s eyes were pinned on the black door.
Suddenly it swung open, revealing a whole gang of deputies in their short-sleeved gray shirts and navy pants. The lead man held a clear plastic riot Shield in front of him and had a billy club in his other hand. He was the Okie named Armentrout, and he was the most imposing of the deputies who regularly worked the pod. The short sleeves of his uniform blouse, which had obviously been hemmed still shorter, revealed the sort of massive arms that can come only through weight lifting. His was the deep voice they had already heard, and now that voice said:
“Give it up, Mutt, and come on outta there. Use your head. We won’t lay a hand on you, long’s you use your fuckin’ bean.”
Mutt, who was in a crouch, stepped back and then seemed to relax. Nonchalantly he leaned against the wall at the end of the bunk and folded his arms and bent one knee and propped his foot up on the wall as well.
“Good man, Mutt,” said the deputy. “Now just stay cool.”
Slouching still farther, Mutt lowered his head and eyed the deputy dubiously, but with no great concern, the way you might check out a stray dog that happened to be walking by. For a few seconds it was a Mexican standoff, with the adversaries looking each other in the eye and doing nothing about it. Behind Armentrout and his shield and his club was another deputy, a lean, rangy Okie with a rubber glove on his right hand. It was a great ugly thick black thing that came all the way up to his elbow. And in that instant Conrad got it: that must be the “Michael Jackson,” named for the singer whose trademark was a single glove. The rest of the deputies were bunched in the doorway. The cell was too small and crowded for them all to come inside at once.
Armentrout took a step forward, his shield before him—
—and suddenly, more suddenly than Conrad would have thought humanly possible, Mutt sprang off the wall with a kick, the same karatestyle kick he had been giving the door. It caught the shield on one edge, spinning the deputy around and knocking him off balance. Mutt was on top of him, in too close for the big man to use either his club or his shield, and he drove his right forearm into the deputy’s face and his left forearm into the side of his head, across the ear. Stunned, Armentrout staggered, slipped on the pizzooka mess, and fell. Blood was streaming out of his nose. Mutt was on top of him. The rangy deputy leaped forward on top of Mutt and clamped his huge gloved hand on Mutt’s upper left arm. Mutt’s body stiffened. There was a smell of burning flesh. His arm and his shoulder began convulsing; and then his entire body. His eyes rolled back into his head, and his mouth opened, and his tongue filled his mouth like a big fish. He looked like someone having an epileptic seizure. He was sprawled on the floor, on his back, shuddering. His head kept clattering against the metal leg of the bunk. The inflamed red half-an-AK-47 on his chest stood out redder, more feverish, more grotesque than ever.
The big deputy, Armentrout, managed to regain his feet. He still had a compulsive grip on his club and his shield. His face was a stream of blood, from the nose down, and his nose was swelling up. It looked as if someone had taken a wide paintbrush and stuck it under his nose and painted a swath of red straight down over his chin. There was blood on his blouse and on his chest and chest hair where the blouse was open at the top.
“Oh, you little cocksucker,” he said, and he lifted the club and bent over as if to smash Mutt in the head. But two more deputies squeezed through the door and restrained his arm. “Goddamn it, Armie! Motherfucker’s out cold!”
The rangy deputy released his grip with the rubber glove on Mutt’s upper arm. Conrad could see now that there were two metal prongs sticking out of the palm. However they managed to store it up in the contraption, it had a tremendous electrical charge. Mutt’s body was still convulsing and struggling to take in air. The smell of burnt flesh was sickening.
They hog-tied Mutt’s wrists together behind his back with plastic cinches, and then they hog-tied his ankles together the same way, and then they ran a length of plastic from his wrists to his ankles, so that he wasn’t going to hit or kick a living soul if and when he came to. By the time they carried him out, he had grown still. He appeared shrunken. He was so limp and fragile, it was hard to imagine the rage and animal strength that had exploded out of that little creature just a few minutes earlier.
The last deputy out of the cell was Armentrout, who now had a handkerchief pressed against his streaming nose. The handkerchief was soaking red, and there was more blood on the back of his right hand and forearm, from where he had first tried to wipe it away from his nose and mouth. Conrad and Five-O couldn’t keep their eyes off it. Armentrout must have detected that, because he stopped and stared them down until they looked away.
Then he took the handkerchief from his mouth, and, through that maddog crimson orifice, in his deepest voice, soaked through with threat, he said, “Shit removal’s free a charge around here. Have a nice day.”
Then he slammed the door shut and locked it.
Conrad looked at Five-O. Five-O arched his eyebrows and opened his eyes wide and twisted his lips into a half-smile and began nodding his head slightly, in the way that says, “Wow! Astounding! What is one to make of all that?” To Conrad the man’s expression offered hope. Perhaps this big Hawaiian would now stop freezing him out. Perhaps he might even have a cellmate he could talk to. For that reason, not because he had any interest in the answer, he asked, “Where they taking him?” He motioned his head in the general direction of the departed Mutt.
“From now,” said Five-O, “Armentrout-dem going broke his face, if I know dem. Den dey goin t’row ’im in da Rubber Room.”
“The Rubber Room?”
“Get rubber walls, get rubber floor, li’dat, fo’da crazy people. No mo’ blankets, no mo’ baferoom, no mo’ basin, no mo’ notting. Ass why hard, bruddah. Da Rubber Room stay nails.”
Conrad could feel a strange wave spreading through his central nervous system, and he could hear a sound like rushing steam inside his skull. It was the rush of madness, the incorrigible madness of this place. He had just witnessed something horrible. Before his very eyes, barely an arm’s length away, a tormented little man had lost his mind and turned into a cornered beast. Then they had attacked and reduced him to a grisly, spastic, convulsive length of live meat burning in the throes of neurons gone amok and hauled his shriveled carcass off to some madhouse called the Rubber Room. And yet that was the least of it, wasn’t it … There was something much worse … His mind fought against sorting it all out and letting it up to the surface, but the wave was irresistible, and he already knew the source of his terror. Live meat!—to be devoured! And now he stared the terror right in its filthy face. Mutt Simms!—the reduction of that little Okie to such a pitiful state had begun with a homosexual rape in a county jail when he was seventeen years old, not all that much younger than he, Conrad, was now. Such things did happen! In an hour they would be turned out of their cells and into the pod room, where all the mad creatures were thrown together and it was every man for himself. Dead meat! Dead meat! Dead meat! Dead meat! Hi, Conrad. How you doin’, bro?
chapter XVI
Gotcha Back
AT ABOUT 7:15 P.M., WITH SERENA IN THE PASSENGER SEAT, Charlie drove the Ferrari up the slope of the Piedmont Driving Club’s driveway and stopped under the porte cochere, muttering imprecations about Serena and anybody else who might have had anything to do with this useless fucking evening, which was called the Mayflies Ball. Why did he have to put on a tuxedo and leave home and have dinner with the likes of Tilton and Elaine Lundeen and Freddy and Whatthehell’shiswife’sname Birdwell and that kid Perkins Knox, who was old Governor Knox’s nephew, and Whatthehell’shername and Slim and Whateveritis Tucker, who Serena thought were such a great catch—and pay for it? Pay for it! He had reached that stage of depression in which going out in public seems fraught with the danger of exposing the sorriness of your sorry fucking self to the entire world.
On top of that, his right knee was aching so much; just putting on the brakes was a killer. He had even thought of having Serena drive, but that meant that when they arrived here under the porte cochere, he would have to come teetering out of the car in full view of the club members going in or out of the main door. Poor old bastard has to have his young wife drive for him … How old is he, anyhow? … This way only the parking attendants would notice the old man with the rusting joint, and what difference did they make?
Actually they did make a difference. The egotism of the male of the species is such that he is embarrassed to let another male get an eyeful of his infirmities, no matter who it is. Charlie’s plan for exiting the driver’s seat was to plant his left foot on the driveway pavement and then thrust himself upright with his arms, so that when he dragged his right leg out of the car his weight would be fully supported by his left leg and his sound left knee. But when he tried to thrust himself up, he didn’t make it and went keeling over backward onto the seat.
“Cap’m Charlie—”
Don’t need anybody’s fucking help!
“Cap’m Charlie—”
Stop fucking hovering over me!
This time he pulled himself upright by planting his left foot and then grabbing the door frame with both hands. Took forever … plus a lot of trembling of his right arm and shoulder, but he was standing and prepared to go gimping into the Piedmont Driving Club.
“Cap’m Charlie,” the parking captain, whose name was Gillette, said once more, “let me give you a hand!”
Two parking attendants, younger black men, were looking on impassively and no doubt thinking, These old crocks with their Ferraris and their money …
“Thanks anyway, Gillette,” said Charlie. “Just don’t take up football, Gillette. It always racks you up in the end.” It seemed supremely important to let Gillette know that it wasn’t age or plain old arthritis that had done this to his knee. It was football, which qualified it as an honorable wound of war.
“I don’t speck I will, Cap’m Charlie,” said Gillette, shaking his head and smiling and chortling, as if Charlie had delivered one of the funniest lines he had ever heard here at the portals of the Piedmont Driving Club.
Gillette made Charlie feel marginally better. Cap’m Charlie … Charlie couldn’t even figure out how the employees here at the club had ever learned that he was called Cap’m Charlie down at Turpmtine. But they had, and Cap’m Charlie he was. But then his spirits fell all over again. What if … the word … concerning Cap’m Charlie Croker gets out to everybody, to all the world … The bank seized his airplane! … Who would feel like calling him Cap’m Charlie Croker then?
Charlie went limping around the front of the car (not the back, where the lights of the car behind him would illuminate his decrepit old carcass for one and all) and caught up with Serena, who was patiently waiting near the door.
The doorman, Gates—Charlie had never known whether Gates was his first name or his last name—said, “Evening, Cap’m Charlie. Evening, Miz Croker.”
“Evening, Gates.” And thank you for not offering to fucking carry me over the threshold or otherwise calling attention to my fucking knee.
“Charlie,” said Serena, taking his arm as they entered the club, “are you sure you’re all right? I’ve never seen your knee flare up this bad before.”
Testily: “I’m fine.” And thanks so much for making sure I couldn’t fucking set foot inside the club without being reminded of my knee. Which, by the way, is a football injury, not arthritis, for your fucking information.
“Why don’t you go see Emmo Nuchols again?”
“I don’t need to see Emmo Nuchols again. I know exactly what he’ll tell me. I need a knee replacement. I don’t want a plastic knee.”
“Well—it’s up to you.”
Thanks, thanks a lot. And thanks for forcing this stupid evening on me. I really am going to enjoy an evening with some of “the younger crowd,” aren’t I … That was one of Serena’s … themes … It was necessary to keep in touch with “the younger crowd” in order to stay current on the ideas that were circulating. Too bad, sister, you knew how old I was when you married me. Besides, Freddy Birdwell and Tilton Lundeen—Christ, they’re children! I doubt that either one of them’s forty yet. I know their goddamn parents! I know their parents a whole lot better than I know them. Ike Birdwell’s son and Tilty Lundeen’s son … saw them when they were still wearing seersucker sunsuits and playing in the sandbox … They’re going to have to fight the impulse to call me Mr. Croker … Mutter mutter mutter mutter …
As a piece of architecture the Driving Club was one surprise after another. Visually it unfolded like the chambers of a nautilus. Because of its position on a hill, it was impossible to grasp the size of the place as you drove up. Neither the porte cochere nor the main entrance was very imposing. The rough stone of which the porte cochere was made gave it a rustic rather than a grand look. The main entrance opened into a hallway of adequate but by no means elegant proportions. The surprises lay beyond. The original building, back in 1887, had been a farmhouse—with rusticated brick and stone. Since then the club had burned down three times and been rebuilt and enlarged three times and expanded some more in flush times, so that it had rambled on across the hillside in stages. Some of the grandest parts of the interior, such as the lobby and the ballroom, bore the signature of the most hallowed name in Atlanta architecture, Philip Shutze. The members loved the fact that the club and the building had such a rich archaeological history. In Atlanta anything that dated as far back as 1887 was ancient.
Up ahead, in the lobby, in a cackling throng of black tuxedos, white shirts, and party dresses, he could already see Lettie Withers, Ted Nashford, and Live-in Lydia—what the hell was club policy toward Live-in Lydia?—a guest fee anytime she set foot in the place?—and Beauchamp Knox and Lenore—if even one of them brought up the subject of the G-5 and its “arrest,” he was going to drive his—and maybe her—teeth down her gullet—or else go out and find a rock to crawl under … His face was already scalding with shame and nobody had even seen him yet, much less said anything.
This was a big night at the club. The ecstatic cries of the crowd in the lobby, the straining voices and constant yawps of laughter, made it seem as if nothing could be more rapturous than being together in this place beneath such a high ceiling and so many of Maestro Shutze’s intricate moldings. If he hadn’t had eight guests, plus Serena, dependent on his generosity, he’d leave right now. Why did people want to belong to the Driving Club in the first place? Everybody said that the day when the Driving Club had been the center of the most important network in the city was long gone … that the Atlanta definition of an aristocrat was someone whose parents knew the doorman at the Driving Club by name, too … that the club was filled with old people who didn’t mean much one way or the other … and yet, much as he might want to, nobody could convince himself that that was actually true … You might have the grandest house in all of Buckhead and the summer place on Sea Island and the biggest private jet and the ranch or two in Wyoming, every toy a man could possibly long for—and yet your failure to make the roster of the Piedmont Driving Club would always be hanging over you, like a reproach. The mere fact that it was … there … that it … existed … was a challenge you didn’t know how to meet …
