Fear Me

First, they’d take his food in the mess hall, then they’d throw him a beating out in the yard, maybe try to rape him in the laundry or showers. That’s how it would begin. Pressure would build. Cons would get randy like starving dogs circling a fresh, juicy bone. Decide who was going to get the first bite. Then some ballbuster would come along, tell Palmquist that he’d protect him for money. Didn’t matter where he got it-mother, father, sister, brother, priest-long as he got it. And if he couldn’t get it? Then he’d be a punk for some hardtimer, sucking the guy’s dick and bending over for him. Because that’s how it worked inside: You weren’t part of a gang or tough enough to do your own fighting, somebody had to do it for you.

And it never came free.

Not at Shaddock Valley.

It was a real hard-time sort of hole. You locked up thousands of guys like animals for months and years, pretty soon even the good ones lost their humanity and showed their teeth. It was a grim, gray concrete world where you buried hope with the biggest shovel you could find and yourself with it. Violent guards, bad food, cramped conditions, loneliness, frustration. Hot in the summer, like an icebox in the winter. Bugs. Rats. Throw into the mix dehumanizing treatment and the constant invasion of privacy, the degradation of strip searches and cavity searches…it took away what was left. Then all you had were predators and prey. Guys with tattoos and dead eyes wandering the yard, sniffing around the block, looking for the stragglers, the weak ones, anything they could bring down, sink their teeth into that wouldn’t bite back.

The inmates at Shaddock robbed each other, fought each other, pushed drugs and booze, smuggled porno and contraband, sometimes even women. They killed for money and sometimes for free. They made weapons and stabbed each other, beat each other, raped each other, murdered each other, snitched on each other. Most of them had absolutely nothing to lose. Shaddock was a bubbling, seething cauldron flavored by the very worst society had to offer-bullies and rapists, serial killers and racists, Jesus freaks and gangsters, psychopaths and fanatics-only in there it was compressed, localized, compacted behind barbwire and high stone walls. Refined, if you will, into a toxic brew that stank like shit and body odor, vomit and pain and blackness and you could smell it the moment they processed you through.

End of the line.

And in such a place, a guy like Danny Palmquist didn’t stand a chance.

3

“You don’t say much, do you?”

Romero was laying on his bunk before lights out, trying to read a book about some guy surviving in Antarctica. He liked books like that because he understood survival real well. “Why don’t you shut the fuck up, Cherry?”

The kid sighed, sitting at the little desk against the cement block wall, staring at those bars. “Just saying, shit, we’re locked up together, might as well pass the time.”

“Listen, Cherry. I ain’t trying to get in your asshole or slit your throat…why don’t you be happy with that?”

“I’m just saying we could talk.”

Romero didn’t want that, didn’t want nothing to do with the little bastard. You talked to a guy, then you started feeling like he was your friend. And when that happened, y heou felt like you had to take care of him.

And I don’t need that, he thought, I really don’t.

Thing was, Romero wasn’t sure that this is what was bothering him about the kid. That he’d have to fight his battles for him. There was something else, something about the kid he just didn’t like only he wasn’t sure what it was.

“Okay, Cherry, give it to me then. Tell me your sad fucking story. What did you do? Rape somebody’s poodle? Go after a couple kids? Tell me the kind of pathetic shit that landed you here.”

“Manslaughter.”

Romero almost laughed. Man-slaughter? “You? What’d you do? Run down some old lady in your mommy’s car?”

Palmquist wasn’t biting. “No…there was a girl. We were sort of going out, you know? Nothing major. Just some dates and things. She got killed, murdered, and they blamed me for it because I was the last one with her.” The kid studied his hands, maybe wondering if they were capable of doing what the courts charged him with. “So…I don’t know, I copped a plea. Took five years for manslaughter, otherwise the DA wanted to prosecute me for capital murder.”

Romero did laugh now. “Why the fuck you do that, Cherry? DA was just dancing, you stupid shit, bobbing and weaving. They try you for murder one, they got to prove it.”

“My lawyer said that, too, but I went for it.”

“You should’ve listened to him, Cherry. You’d be out there now.”

But Palmquist just shook his head. “No, you don’t understand. I didn’t kill that girl, my brother did. And, well, I didn’t want any of that coming out.”

Romero chuckled, lit a cigarette. “That’s some kind of brother you got there, letting you do time for him.”

“My brother…Damon…he’s not like us, he’s different. I didn’t want it coming out about the way he was, the things he does.”