ONE
It was Haystack’s job to pick his uncle up from the Scott Street bus station. Haystack’s given name was Daniel Mercy and his uncle’s name was Elias Mercy, but the uncle was pretty much known everywhere as Creature. The family had pretty much assigned Haystack to the job because the next day his probation would probably be violated and he’d be where Creature had been, prison. His uncle had just done eleven on an aggravated twenty.
They say there is a fool on every corner when you’re trying to get home and it hadn’t gone smoothly for Creature at the Abilene bus station. He’d sat there the entire day and half the night watching busload after full busload of Hondurans and Guatemalans pass. In frustration for being stranded, he had told a carload of blacks to turn down the thump thump and they’d stabbed him in the hand.
Creature got off the bus in Wichita with his hand wrapped in his prison boxers. Evidently, he wasn’t wearing any underwear because the only pair he had left the prison with was now tied around his hand. They got in Haystack’s old pickup truck.
“Want me to take you to eat?” Haystack offered.
“Where?”
“IHOP.”
“Oh, hell no.”
“Why what’s the matter with that?”
“I’ve been in prison for eleven years, that’s what.”
“What? You guys have pancakes all the time?”
“You’ll see.”
“Your ma gave me $20 to fed ya.” Haystack said.
“TDC gives you $100 when you’re released - fifty at the gate and fifty when you get to parole.”
“What ya gonna do with it?”
“I’m thinking about stickin’ it to the man. Reinvesting it directly back into the underworld where it came from - a prostitute, that or a hundred dollars worth of dope. But we got to get the second fifty from the parole office cause all I got right now is the fifty.”
“Well, it’s right up here on Seymour. But you ain’t gonna pay nobody no $100, are ya? There ain’t no call for that. You feeling generous?”
“My aim is to overwhelm the criminal justice system with their own money.”
“Well, I don’t know if you’re ever gonna bankrupt them, apparently they’re loaded enough to want to lock me up. They got half the state already
locked up. Pretty much everybody I know anyway.”
“It’s an industry. You’ll see.”
“So, then you need to maybe split it between the two - sixty for dope and forty for the girl. That would be the smart way to go about trying, I figure.”
“Huh?” Creature didn’t understand.
“Do the math. If you spend it all in one place then best case (and you get busted) you and for example the girl. That’s only two arrests. But like you said, invest some of it in dope, there might be three arrests and in this county, an arrest is as good as a conviction. You might hit them for three incarcerations, instead of just two. Your hundred dollar investment might cost them hundreds of thousands, depending on the situation. Fight them and cost them even more.”
“Ever since you was a kid you been kicking my ass.”
“Well, I never thought about investing like that.”
“Like people, money is most happy when it runs in it’s natural circle. To spend the hundred on food or clothes just ain’t natural to that particular TDC money.”
“You ain’t no slouch. I understand and I’m glad you’re home. You can help me figure out how to not go to prison.”
“I don’t know about that?”
“So, let’s go buy some dope?”
“I gotta get the other fifty from the parole office.”
“There ain’t no ‘forty dollar’ in this town gonna be awake until this afternoon at least ‘till we’re done at the parole office.”
“So, the meth first and then parole.”
“I’m gonna have to piss in a cup, I’ll bet.”
“Okay, the parole office first and then the dope.”
“I heard they’re building a new big jail now, over a thousand beds.”
“Well, there is some kind of election going on. I don’t know much about it. Seventy million, I know that. He’s got the jail full, on purpose, like politics, so there’s an actual need for the jail to win.”
“Serious?”
“There ain’t an outlaw or even a homeless person in this town loose, leading up to the election. Both missions are empty. They’re all locked up.”
“My friends? They’re all in jail? Kartoon and Squirrel? What about D-
Rock?”
“He’s gonna fill that jail.”
“He must want a new jail really bad.”
“The sheriff’s an ass, but he ain’t dumb.”
“No, he ain’t.”
“You know, he’s got so many people working for him, just them ‘re probably enough to get it passed. People naturally want to vote for their boss.”
“Seventy million though?”
“It’s a thousand beds, a thousand extra people they’ll want to arrest.” “They’ll be doing that for sure.”
“Finally, they’ll be arresting people I don’t even know, people that ain’t never been to jail. There ain’t no 500 of us.”
“That’s the idea; I’m sure. Filler up.”
“Sheriff said on TV it would make money for ‘em.”
“Jails for profit. We’re screwed and not just us.”
“Seems the only people that got money ‘re them.”
“It’s already bad enough. The cops just ain’t gotta like you and, if they don’t, you’re out a there. And now add profit to the math…”
“You got a point there. If they like you, well ‘we can’t lock everybody up’ and if they don’t like you, ‘you’re goin’ to jail.’”
“So what’s it like?”
“Prison?”
“Your ma told you already, huh? I’m probably going over this damn chicken.”
“Well, you’re gonna meet some of the world’s most despicable people there.”
“Well, it is a prison. I figured that.”
“Oh, I ain’t talking about the inmates; it’s the guards.”
“Most of the inmates are there for having too much fun. It’s the guards that are trash. Paul Harvey (the radio guy) a long time ago said ‘you want to see the lowest form of life, be in the parking lot of a Texas prison at shift change.’ It’s true; I guarantee it.”
“Hang on. You shot someone.”
“No, I shot at someone.”
“They blasted you out there on the news; said you emptied seven into a bathroom stall and missed. I was just a kid but that was a big deal.”
“I’ve had enough ribbing about that, eleven years of it, frankly. If we’re gonna get along, nephew, you’re gonna need to cut me some slack on that one. Besides, maybe I wasn’t trying to hit him, maybe just scare him a little.”
“Well, sure. I’m just telling you what they said on TV.”
“Well, what I was trying to tell you is that prisons ain’t full of violent bad men anymore like the politicians want you to think. And it ain’t full of thieves either. I had a question about boosting these new cars and it took me two weeks to find a car thief. Imagine that. In a prison?” “Okay, now about these guards…”
“Well, the first thing you notice is that they curse more than the inmates. ‘Wake the f#$% up!’ and ‘What the f#$% you want?’ if you have a question and ‘Get the f#$% out of here’ if they don’t know the answer, which they typically don’t. The F word in every sentence and they wear a cross; that means to them, they’re better than us.”
“Really? They cuss more than we do?”
“Good for you. It sound’s like you’re ready to go, that ‘we’ stuff.”
“I don’t want to go.”
“Well, it ain’t like in the movies. Now that everything is against the law your getting an entirely new breed of prisoner. Take a clue, they call us ‘offenders’. Like, we offended someone? But think about it. It’s free rent. It’s free food. It ain’t no good but it is free. Somebody does your laundry and someone even scrubs your toilet. You want something you can buy it. Hell, Clements unit up there was bangin’. I saw more dope up there than I ever saw on the streets.”
“Well, things have probably changed here. Wichita done grown up since you been gone. We got dope.”
“Well, you ain’t got nothing to worry about.”
“I heard they make you work.”
“Well, there is that. You’re young, ain’t sick; they’ll have you out in the hoe squad, but even that is something of a scam. They have these fields where they grow crops, but they let us out only on the side of the highway. Like fur politics. It’s so the voters can see it. Robbed and kidnapped and removed from their families, understandably we do more damage to the crops than to the weeds, so they aren’t out there for any real reason. Back in 2009, I took out an entire row of tomato plants with that hoe; wack, wack.”
“What’d they do?”
“They fired me and I didn’t have to hoe anymore.”
“Don’t the guards get mad?”
“They’re mostly fat and lazy; and mad takes work. Up on a horse with a shotgun, they’re not about to get down off a there and let someone take that gun from them. And besides it’s all for show. That’s why they don’t put us on the other side of the prison, the side you can’t see from the road. But you ain’t going down for no two years. You’ll go down get a number and you’ll be right out on parole.”
“How do you know?”
“Seen it. The revolving door. Look they have 166,000 in the seventyseven regular I.D. units and they won’t tell us how many are in the transfer units. But there is a computer program that runs the entire thing; parole board just does what the program tells them to do. If someone in a county is coming in, someone’s got to get up leave. They need your bunk. Think about it like a Sam’s or a Walmart. They only have so much shelf space.”
“This guy in county said the guards can do whatever they want.”
“Well, that depends; some will simply lie on you. Basically, the answer to any question is, ‘it depends on who the guard is’. Will we get to eat? Will we get clean uniforms? Yes, they can do what they want. No chow; they just claim your group was talking, turn you all around and march you back to the dorm.”
“You can’t talk?”
“At chow? Security risk. Some jackass judge ruled they might not be able to hear the radio if we’re talking out on the bowling alley or in the chow.”
“That’s messed up.”
“It ain’t about security. Talking is like the only thing we got on ‘em. The county auctioned our cars; the bondsman and the lawyers took everything else. Conversation is about all we got left and that’s why some of the guards want to take even that. Ruthless if you think about it.”
“You gotta eat.”
“Well, if you want, act like you might riot, they might back down and let you eat. Seen that. But most of these guys are just looking to go home so they just roll over and take it. So, yes a guard can take away your parole, all they gotta do is lie on ya. And maybe the next day a different guard won’t care if you talk and you get to eat and talk.”
“So, it’s like that huh?”
“And, some judge ruled that they can wake you up, I mean you might be dead, once every two hours. So guess what? They wake you up.”
“They don’t let you sleep?”
“No, they wake you up and ask you if you’re dead. Everything happens because they can. Because they’re allowed. They aren’t used to having power in the world and now they get a little inside and they use every bit of it.”
“What are they a bunch of Nazis?”
“I don’t know; it ain’t no holocaust because they just warehouse everybody. They don’t believe in no limited government; that’s for sure. A lot of little bitty people and of course obese ones too. The few straight guards wanted to play football in high school; you can ask them and they tried. But they’re not just mentally small but they’re just tiny. Been holding an anger ever since then, seems to me.”
“Sounds like the guards at the county jail. Losers every one. Applied with the sheriff’s office but all the patrol positions were full, given to the guys who played before them in high school. Big wide guys. So the little guys are left to take the jailer’s jobs.”
“Either that or they were too dumb for the academy.”
“They are dumb, that’s for sure. But they don’t want to be.”
“A lot of Mexicans with TDC, them and their parents looked down on and put down all the while they been here. And now this is their revenge. In prison, you want your hair cut, either you got to be a Mexican or have a stamp.”
“You have to pay to get your hair cut in prison?”
“Only if you’re black or white.”
“A lot of homosexuals?”
“Guards? Half of them at least. There are the lesbians trying their best to do a man’s job. There are the punk guards; they’re on vacation, working a dream job where they can ogle other men all day. It’s like me, checking out all the women, that time at South Padre. Most of them are so obviously gay, totally warped, they can’t work anywhere else. Not in public.”
“Yeah?”
“How’d you like walk into Applebee’s and Cinderella walks up, “Hey, big boy, can I take your order. This and a lot of towns are church towns, these people can’t work anywhere else.”
“I think maybe you’re just making this up. It can’t be that bad. They’re the government.”
“No. They want them that way. Think about it. They’ll never ask you want you did. They’re not allowed to and that’s a strict rule.”
“How come?”
“Look. You stole a chicken and they gave you four years. They simply won’t hire anyone smart enough to figure out that’s wrong. An expense of, let’s see, $138,000 if my math is right, all that for a four dollar chicken?”
“It was actually $4.99, plus tax.”
“Okay, what happened there anyway? Your ma wrote me but I couldn’t really tell what happened.”
“Well, I was dating this chick with two kids and it was Mother’s Day. I was broke and you know she was broke, a woman with two kids, but it was Mother’s Day, you know, so we went to that chicken place out in Dog Patch. They’re in the car waiting. They put a bag up on the counter, so I picked it up, smiled at the girl and say, “Happy Mother’s Day.” I figure what the heck is she gonna do, raise a big stink? I don’t think she even realized it wasn’t my order.”
“And you just walked out?”
“I was broke. So, I’m in the parking lot, almost to the girl and kids in the car, and this manager comes running out tries to tackle me. Another one of these failed football players, I swear, he misses and breaks his arm on the curb.
“They’re not supposed to do that.”
“Well, he did. Aggravated robbery with assault is what they called it.”
“Hell, that’s on him. You didn’t break his arm.”
“Don’t matter. Two shoplifting arrests.”
“Misdemeanors.”
“You know I got probation.”
“And now they want to violate you?”
“Lawyer said.”
“They violate everybody.”
“He said he’s gonna try to get me a week to get my affairs in order. But the jail is full at least ‘till after Tuesday. You can stay with me over in Vidaville ‘till I leave out. My roommates are in county. Ninety days for pitching nails in WalMart parking lot.”
“Roofing nails?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s funny. I bet they’re pretty popular for doin’ that. I freakin’ hate those assholes at Walmart.”
“So, prison ain’t really that bad, if you don’t mind Mexican’s and gays?”
“Well, and dumbasses.”
“I was just curious.”
“It’s a waste of time and counter-productive.”
“Obviously.”
“It’s like summer camp for bad kids; so long as you’re bad you’ll fit right in. Your ma told me you punched a cop.”
“Yeah.”
“You’ll be fine.”
The two men arrived at the parole office.
TWO
Julie O'Kane was getting dressed for work, as a probation officer, when her cat bolted into the bathroom. She’d been outside and came inside through the cat door. Among cats, K Kat was a self-aware and fierce creature. She almost never meowed or cried. And she was feared by every rodent, bird, and reptile in a ten square block area. They all risked a trip kicking and screaming to Julie’s kitchen floor if they encountered her.
Her tail was puffed up enough to brush out a coke bottle and she shook her head as if she was trying to rid herself of a ringing in her ears. Then she hid in the closet.
K was Julie’s cat. The cat wanted nothing to do with anyone else but her. One afternoon, when she was still at Midwestern, the botany professor, constantly out making observations of the campus plant life, had taken her over to a large dense bush.
“Look what I found,” he’d said and gently pulled the branches apart. Three tiny kittens stared back at her.
“Take one,” she reached in for the nearest kitten, a solid feral baby, who unlike the others didn’t hiss. But still, the kitten was a tiny beast waiting to happen and her heart was pounding like a racehorse.
Julie would always remember the moment when she reached into the closet. She parted a few hanging clothes and found her on a stack of old jeans rapidly blinking one eye. Julie felt her. She seemed fine. She’d had cat emergencies before, everything from a cat caught in her mother’s fan belt to canine-inflicted lacerations. Relative to the other bloody emergencies, today K Kat was fine. No real harm. All four legs still there. Both ears still attached. Neither eye was gouged out, but K sure was blinking up a storm.
Yet, Julie knew immediately and intuitively something wasn’t right. She dumped all but one towel out of a Rubber-Maid tub and placed her cat inside for the trip to the vet.
Once she arrived, the vet staff listened politely not wanting to offend Julie; who might eventually write her a check. Nothing visibly wrong with the cat, Julie admitted. But something still was wrong. The cat stayed for observation, naturally.
Only when Julie got home did she realize that she was still only half dressed for work. She had pulled on the slacks of a suit but she still had her pajama top on. And she realized that the all-woman vet’s office must have got a chuckle out of that or maybe they thought she was a crazy cause of her cat situation.
THREE
“Probation is that door and parole is the that one.” Haystack pointed to the two doors, next to each other in an old rundown strip mall. Leaky roof.
“Who’s your probation officer?” Creature wanted to know.
“Julie something. Moderately hot. A new ho’. Well, not new; she’s been here. You’ll get old man Mac. He won’t remember you next month.”
“I heard about him; supposed to be seventy.”
“He’s over that, I’m sure, but that only means you can probably outrun him.”
“So how come you ain’t locked up?”
“I told ya. County’s full. Got to keep it full to win the bond election, you know. Can’t build a new thousand-bed jail if there’s room in your crummy old jail.”
“I see.”
“Fed’s eyeballing them, TV said. Overcrowding.”
“That’s fake news.”
“I’m just saying.”
“I wouldn’t put it past that sheriff if he didn’t call and report the bad inhumane conditions. Or just said the feds were looking to close the old jail.”
“Ohhh. That would leave us without a jail. That ought to scare the hell out of everybody down at First Baptist.”
“That’s why he said it, so they’d get off their ass and vote.”
“Sure gonna help him with the bond election.”
“No room in the county, but they can send a man down-state for stealing a chicken. Hah!”
“Hell, TDC’s free for ‘em.”
“Them?”
“County. They figure, let’s send all of Vidaville down, and Dog Patch too; it’s free. Since Dallas, San Antonio, everybody, got to pay taxes, Wichita might as well get one (or sixty) up on everybody else and get rid of the ones they don’t like. Like it’s a contest who can clean their streets at the other’s expense.”
“If Wichita County was footing the bill, they’d be more reasonable.”
“It’s like TDC just put out a sign that says ‘FREE PIZZA’ and it’s a contest what county can fill their belly first.”
FOUR
In the afternoon, the vet called Julie to say that cat’s cheek had swollen, but that was all she could say. Perhaps it was the result of a spider bite.
FIVE
“We’re headed out to the Flying J.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s not just for truckers. Tweekers go there too.”
“New?”
“Not really, but new for you. The meth whores will be waking up and getting out. They’ll be out there.”
“Okay.”
“Only downside. Sheriff’s deputies sit there looking for skitzers.”
“Wait. This is in the city limits. Shouldn’t it be the police.”
“The sheriff’s a businessman, you know. So, they think they’re smart, just sitting there parked like their filling out paperwork. I just go over to Wendy’s, there and wait them out. They’re on call and every once in a while they’ll burn off. Then you can buy or sell whatever you want.”
“Well, we’ll just wait.”
“But there’s a downside to even that. Damn Wendy’s and Burger King both are like spoiled meat to flies, I guess they give the city cops free food.”
“So the girls come to this Flying J.”
“Backpack girls. What’s what you want, right?”
“What?”
“White. They got a backpack or a really big purse.”
“Why?”
“Well, that’s all they got. But, you get them high and eventually they use that backpack to steal your shit. The bigger the purse the more shit you’re gonna lose.”
“Getting to be where a fella needs a set of scales by his front door to weigh them coming in and going out.
“Well, I ain’t got nothing for them to steal.”
“Minus that purse, they’d all weigh-in about ninety pounds, the ones that’s been doing it a while. But put them on the scale with all their junk and it’ll read about one-thirty.”
“Damn.”
“But, I steal from them; I get their cell phone. Man, there is nothing mad like a strung out minx without a phone. She’ll be hot, looking for it.
Plumb freaking berserk. Freaking nuts. They dork out.”
“Dork out?”
“That’s what they call it now, when they get gettered out and screw up. They can’t figure you for taking it; you’re giving them the meth, so they think they just lost it. They run around looking for it everywhere. It’s fun.”
“That’s where we’re going?”
“That’s the way it is; go over in Dog Patch and you’ll see. You got to get them before they get you.”
“Good to know.”
“Hey, one time I get three bitches phones and pitch ‘em out about a block from the house. All in one night. They’re looking everywhere. I thought they might clean the house but they just turned everything upside down. But, what’s funny is you get them together like that and they think the other ones got their phone.”
“Kids, these days. Ain’t you got anything better to do than mess with addicts?”
“So I give them my truck and send them to the store to buy new phones. I wanted them gone so bad I gave them the keys.”
“They stole your truck?”
“They did. Gone two days. She’d of gone to jail except it was me and I’m ain’t gonna call no cops. I don’t call the law.”
“So what happened?”
“Eventually? She came back. Apologized and you know nothing was missing from the truck but my cup and a set of jumper cables. I let her back in.”
“Just like that?”
“She’d left all her stuff over. They’d left their Sharpie bags, whatever you want to call it. I’ve dumped all their shit in one big pile. She, they, don’t have a place to stay. Never. Everything they got is in that bag - makeup, their coloring pencils. That’s all they do is get high and color with their markers and lick each other’s box.”
“So you mixed all their stuff together?”
“And I dumped it back in the purses all jumbled up.”
“Was this after they didn’t come back from the store?”
“No. I waited ‘till they got down the street a bit. Bras, panties, pencils, makeup, playthings. I don’t understand it. They want to play with each other and hit each other with toys but they don’t want the real thing.”
“I don’t understand it either, but that’s screwed up.”
“They were messed up about that for a week and wouldn’t come over.”
SIX
The phone rang early the next morning. K Kat was paralyzed. She could only move the tip of her tail. It was the work of a rattlesnake, probably a baby or a juvenile, though which variety the vet couldn’t say.
Wichita County had several types – blacktail, timber, rock, prairie, diamondback and once they even found a Mojave rattler out on a drilling site south of Electra. Of course, there were “deniers” who said that was impossible. Julie was now a “believer”; those Mojave rattler bites were notoriously known to cause paralysis but little swelling. The Western diamondbacks, on the other hand, typically caused swelling and rarely paralysis. So, K must have stumbled one of the “out-of-place case” snakes.
SEVEN
Haystack argued that he didn’t figure he’d done anything to violate his probation.
“What’s wrong with going to a strip club?”
He’d only gone to meet a buddy, drink a beer and see what was out there. One beer and now they wanted to send him to prison. He’s minding his own business, drinking his beer, when this one-armed meth-whore, wearing an athletic sock on the end of her amputated arm, started giving him a lap dance he never asked for.
“She moved my legs apart so she could get this clean shaven thing right close,” Haystack explained. “So, it’s right there in my face. This one’s called Gidget, something about Inspector Gadget is why they call her that. I fell sorry for her, but I told her I wasn’t interested; they ought to know when a man ain’t got no money. But she kept right on doin’ it; so I got up and walked out. I can get that for free right down the street you know. But the bitch starts screaming that I owe her twenty dollars and the bouncer starts to get in my way.”
Julie said, “You tried to leave, okay; you shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”
“Listen. I didn’t do nothin’. I dodge him and I’m out the door. This bitch, still naked follows me outside the club, and she brings the bouncer. She says, ‘Give him what for.’ What does that mean? I don’t know what that means. The bouncer shoves me in the back for the head. I’m outside of the club walking away. He’s showing off; probably does this for all the girls he ain’t screwed yet. So I turn around and pop him.”
“And so you see nothing wrong with that?”
“I feel really bad. I mean it must be tough making a living with one arm and all.”
“So you hit the policeman with your fist in the face?”
“How was I supposed to know he was a cop? Clear he was off duty, but now they’re saying he was on duty.”
“The report says he was wearing a uniform.”
“Bull shit. You people lie more than we do.”
“We might, but that’s only because there are so many of you guys.”
“Hey, you’re supposed to be on my side.”
“I’m not your momma. I’m your probation officer.”
“I mean you’re supposed to keep us out of jail.”
“That’s not my job.”
Haystack was growing more desperate. “If you send everyone down what walks into a strip club, you’ll be out of a job.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. There’s always some other sap standing in line for prison, like it’s a real popular summer camp or something.”