The Best of Lucius Shepard (75 page)

There
was in his voice an evangelical tremor, as if he were hearkening back to the
memory of god and not a prison cell. I’d come to realize he was a strange sort,
and I wondered if the reason he had been released might be due to some
instability developed during his sentence. He started to button his shirt, and
I studied the tattoo again.

“Doesn’t
look like a jailhouse tat … ‘least none I ever saw,” I said. “Doesn’t even look
like ink, the colors are so clean.”

“The colors come from within,” Ristelli said with the pious aplomb of a
preacher quoting a soothing text. “There are no jails.”

·
· · · ·

That conversation stayed with me. If Ristelli was not certifiably a whacko, I
assumed he was well along the road; yet while he had given me no concrete
information about Diamond Bar, the commingling of passion and firmness in his
voice when he spoke of the place seemed evidence not of an unbalanced mind but
of profound calm, as if it arose from a pivotal certainty bred in a quieter
emotional climate than were most prison-bred fanaticisms. I believed everything
he said was intended to produce an effect, but his motives did not concern me.
The idea that he was trying to manipulate me for whatever purpose implied that
he needed something from me, and this being the case, I thought it might be an
opportune time to make my needs known to him.

I
assumed that Pork understood how the relationship between Ristelli and me was
developing. To discourage him from lashing out at me, I hired a large and
scarily violent felon by the name of Rudy Wismer to watch my back in the yard,
at meals, and on the block, paying for his services with a supply of the
X-rated Japanese comics that were his sexual candy. I felt confident that
Wismer’s reputation would give Pork pause-my bodyguard’s most recent victim, a
bouncer in a Sacramento night club, had testified at trial wearing a mask that
disguised the ongoing reconstruction of his facial features; but on the
Wednesday following our discussion of tattoos, Ristelli took sick midway
through class and was forced to seek medical attention, leaving Pork and me
alone in the art room, the one place where Wismer could not accompany me. We
went about our cleaning chores in different quarters of the room; we did not
speak, but I was aware of his growing anger, and when finally, without overt
warning, he assaulted me, I eluded his initial rush and made for the door, only
to find it locked and two guards grinning at me through the safety glass.

Pork caught hold of my collar, but I twisted away, and for a minute or
so I darted and ducked and feinted as he lumbered after me, splintering easels,
scattering palettes and brushes, tromping tubes of paint, overturning file
cabinets. Before long, every obstacle in the room had been flattened and,
winded, I allowed myself to be cornered against the sink. Pork advanced on me,
his arms outspread, swollen cheeks reddened by exertion, huffing like a hog in
heat. I prepared for a last and likely ineffective resistance, certain that I
was about to take a significant beating. Then, as Pork lunged, his front foot
skidded in the paint oozing from a crushed tube of cadmium orange, sending him
pitching forward, coming in too low; at the same time, I brought my knee up,
intending to strike his groin but landing squarely on his face. I felt his
teeth go and heard the cartilage in his nose snap. Moaning, he rolled onto his
back. Blood bubbled from his nostrils and mouth, matted his beard. I ignored
the guards, who now were shouting and fumbling for their keys, and, acting out
of a cold, pragmatic fury, I stood over Pork and smashed his kneecaps with my
heel, ensuring that for the remainder of his prison life he would occupy a
substantially diminished rank in the food chain. When the guards burst into the
room, feeling charmed, blessed by chance, immune to fate, I said, “You assholes
betting on this? Did I cost you money? I fucking hope so!” Then I dropped to
the floor and curled into a ball and waited for their sticks to come singing
through the air.

·
· · · ·

Six days later, against all regulation, Frank Ristelli visited me in the
isolation block. I asked how he had managed this, and dropping into his yardbird
Zen mode, he said, “I knew the way.” He inquired after my health-the guards had
rapped me around more than was usual-and after I assured him nothing was
broken, he said, “I have good news. You’re being transferred to Diamond Bar.”

This
hardly struck me as good news. I understood how to survive in Vacaville, and
the prospect of having to learn the ropes of a new and probably harsher prison
was not appealing. I said as much to Ristelli. He was standing beneath the
ceiling fixture in my cell, isolated from the shadows-thanks to the metal cage
in which the bulb was secured-in a cone of pale light, making it appear that he
had just beamed in from a higher plane, a gray saint sent to illumine my
solitary darkness.

“You’ve
blown your chance at parole,” he said. “You’ll have to do the whole stretch.
But this is not a setback; it’s an opportunity. We need men like you at Diamond
Bar. The day I met you, I knew you’d be a candidate. I recommended your
transfer myself.”

I
could not have told you which of these statements most astonished me, which
most aroused my anger. “‘We?’ ‘A candidate?’ What’re you talking about?”

“Don’t
be upset. There’s …”

“You
recommended me? Fuck does that mean? Who gives a shit what you recommend?”

“It’s
true, my recommendation bears little weight. These judgments are made by the
board. Nevertheless, I feel I’m due some credit for bringing you to their
attention.”

Baffled
by this and by his air of zoned sanctimony, I sat down on my bunk. “You made a
recommendation to the Board of Prisons?”

“No,
no! A higher authority. The board of Diamond Bar. Men who have achieved an
extraordinary liberty.”

I
leaned back against the wall, controlling my agitation. “That’s all you wanted
to tell me? You could have written a letter.”

Ristelli
sat on the opposite end of the bunk, becoming a shadow beside me. “When you
reach Diamond Bar, you won’t know what to do. There are no rules. No
regulations of any sort. None but the rule of brotherhood, which is implicit to
the place. At times the board is compelled to impose punishment, but their
decisions are based not on written law, but upon a comprehension of specific
acts and their effect upon the population. Your instincts have brought you this
far along the path, so put your trust in them. They’ll be your only guide.”

“Know
what my instincts are right now? To bust your goddamn head.” Ristelli began to
speak, but I cut him off. “No, man! You feed me this
let-your-conscience-be-your-guide bullshit, and …”

“Not
your conscience. Your instincts.”

“You
feed me this total fucking bullshit, and all I can think is, based on your
recommendation, I’m being sent to walls where you say hardly anybody ever gets
out of ‘em.” I prodded Ristelli’s chest with a forefinger. “You tell me something’ll
do me some good up there!!”

“I
can’t give you anything of the sort. Diamond Bar’s not like Vacaville. There’s
no correlation between them.”

“Are
you psycho? That what this is? You’re fucking nuts? Or you’re blowing somebody
lets your ass wander around in here and act like some kinda smacked-out Mother
Teresa? Give me a name. Somebody can watch out for me when I get there.”

“I
wish I could help you more, but each man must find his own freedom.” Ristelli
came to his feet. “I envy you.”

“Yeah?
So why not come with me? Guy with your pull should be able to wangle himself a
ride-along.”

“That
is not my fate, though I return there every day and every night in spirit.” His
eyes glistened. “Listen to me, Tommy. You’re going to a place few will ever
experience. A place removed from the world yet bound to it by a subtle
connectivity. The decisions made by those in charge for the benefit of the
population enter the consciousness of the general culture and come to govern
the decisions made by kings and presidents and despots. By influencing the rule
of law, they manipulate the shape of history and redefine cultural
possibility.”

“They’re
doing a hell of a job,” I said. “World’s in great goddamn shape these days.”

“Diamond Bar has only recently come to primacy. The new millennium will
prove the wisdom of the board. And you have an opportunity to become part of
that wisdom, Tommy. You have an uncommon sensibility, one that can illustrate
the process of the place, give it visual form, and this will permit those who
follow in your path to have a clearer understanding of their purpose and their
truth. Your work will save them from the missteps that you will surely make.”
Ristelli’s voice trembled with emotion. “I realize you can’t accept what I’m
saying. Perhaps you never will. I see in you a deep skepticism that prevents
you from finding peace. But accomplishment … that you can aspire to, and
through accomplishment you may gain a coin of greater worth. Devote yourself to
whatever you choose to do. Through devotion all avenues become open to the
soul. Serve your ambition in the way a priest serves his divinity, and you will
break the chains that weigh down your spirit.”

·
· · · ·

On my first night in jail, at the age of fifteen, a Mexican kid came over to
where I was standing by myself in the day room, trying to hide behind an
arrogant pose, and asked if I was jailwise. Not wanting to appear
inexperienced, I said that I was, but the Mexican, obviously convinced that I
was not, proceeded to enlighten me. Among other things, he advised me to hang
with my own kind (i.e., race) or else when trouble occurred no one would have
my back, and he explained the diplomatic niceties of the racial divide, saying
that whenever another white man offered to give me five, flesh-to-flesh contact
was permitted, but should a Latino, an Asian, an Arab, an Afro-American, or any
darkly hued member of the human troupe offer a similar encouragement, I was to
take out my prison ID card and with it tap the other man’s fingertips. In every
jail and prison where I had done time, I had received a similar indoctrination
lecture from a stranger with whom I would never interact again. It was as if
the system itself had urged someone forward, stimulating them by means of some
improbable circuitry to volunteer the fundamentals of survival specific to the
place. Ristelli’s version was by far the most unhelpful I had ever heard, yet I
did not doubt that his addled sermonette was an incarnation of that very
lecture. And because of this; because I had so little information about the
prison apart from Ristelli’s prattle; because I believed it must be a new style
of supermax whose powers of spiritual deprivation were so ferocious, it ate
everything it swallowed except for a handful of indigestible and irretrievably
damaged fragments like Ristelli; for these reasons and more I greatly feared
what might happen when I was brought to Diamond Bar.

The
gray van that transported me from Vacaville seemed representative of the gray
strangeness that I believed awaited me, and I constructed the mental image of a
secret labyrinthine vastness, a Kafkaville of brick and steel, a partially
subterranean complex like the supermax in Florence, Colorado where Timothy
McVeigh, Carlos Escobar, and John Gotti had been held; but as we crested a hill
on a blue highway south of Mount Shasta, a road that wound through a forest of
old-growth spruce and fir, I caught sight of a sprawling granite structure
saddling the ridge ahead, looking ominously medieval with its guard turrets and
age-blackened stone and high, rough-hewn walls, and my mental image of the
prison morphed into more Gothic lines-I pictured dungeons, archaic torments, a
massive warden with a bald head the size of a bucket, filed teeth, and a zero
tattooed on his brow.

The
road angled to the left, and I saw an annex jutting from one side of the
prison, a windowless construction almost as high as the main walls, also of
weathered granite, that followed the slope of the ridge downward, its nether
reach hidden by the forest. We passed in among the ranked trees, over a
rattling bridge and along the banks of a fast-flowing river whose waters ran a
mineral green through the calm stretches, cold and clouded as poison in a
trough, then foamed and seethed over thumblike boulders. Soon the entrance to
the annex became visible on the opposite shore: iron doors enclosed by a
granite arch and guarded by grandfather firs. The van pulled up, the rear door
swung open. When it became apparent that the driver did not intend to stir
himself, I climbed out and stood on the bank, gazing toward my future. The
ancient stones of the annex were such a bleak corruption of the natural, they
seemed to presage an imponderable darkness within, like a gate that when opened
would prove the threshold of a gloomy Druid enchantment, and this, in
conjunction with the solitude and the deafening rush of the river, made me feel
daunted and small. The engine of the van kicked over, and the amplified voice
of the driver, a mystery behind smoked windows, issued from a speaker atop the
roof: “You have ten minutes to cross the river!” Then the van rolled away,
gathering speed, and was gone.