DISCLAIMER: The X-Files series, movie, characters, are the property of Chris Carter, Ten Thirteen Productions and the Fox Network. I don't want any credit, fame or fortune from X-Files, I only want to write about your show and characters to entertain myself and others.
As always, I drool stupidly for feedback. avan@home.com or genyah@hotmail.com
SUMMARY: Other character perspective on an Ex-F.B.I. Agent sent to jail for murder.
That Indescribable Something (Part 1) **
They said he was insane.
They say that about all of them that come my way.
This is The Hole, where all the scum is sent. All the worst humanity has to offer and then some.
Serial killers, rapist-murderers, pedophiles - although they have their own particular Block because they are the most hated by all, including the scum.
But The Hole wasn't much better. There was a lot of that here; hatred. Guards hating the prisoners, prisoners hating the guards and each other.
I've seen a lot of new hires come through here. Healthy as a horse their first day. They come in, baton at the ready, gun and the law at their side - impotent, they think. Mind as impenitrable as the stone walls they work in.
And then I see them leave, taking their ulcers, heart conditions and shattered faith with them. Broken men. Only the toughest screws survive the first year and stay on.
I'm the Warden. My name is Amos Crodon. It's the Year of Our Lord 2002, the month is a beautiful June, the twenty- first day. The sun is shining and I just got a new delivery this morning; the one they said was crazy.
Like all of them, along with every new fish came his folder. His record and everything known about him down to the count of his pubic hairs: crimes, convictions, age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, race, number of teeth, tatooes, habits, hobbies, temperment, psychosis, you name it. The works. Whole human beings reduced to ink on paper.
This one's sheet was short and sweet. No priors. In for murder and manslaughter.
Ex- F.B.I..
"Ex" because he'd commited not one murder but five, and a manslaughter thrown in for good measure.
And there was no doubt as to the rightness of his sentencing. He was guilty all right. He'd done 'em. Hadn't even tried to hide it.
Seems a big bust went bad.
Six in the gang - they pulled bank jobs, drug runs, money laundering, a small "protection" racket - two big boys and their four runners. Small organization but real pro's. Deadly.
So in bust him and his partner.
Only that day it was suppose to be just the two big boys home. Not the whole bunch, not the six. No one thought...
Anyway, two were in the room and four were in hiding. F.B.I. got a real bad tip I guess and to make a long story tolerable, the Feds didn't know how the bastards knew they were coming but, like I said, a bad "tip".
That particular day, the Fed's lost. I read about it in the paper. It made the headlines for weeks. Bad guys got the upper hand and while one scum kept one agent in a head lock accompanied by a shiney automatic to his temple, the other five went to work on his partner.
Only thing is, see, she wasn't only his partner, she was his wife.
Just imagine it. Five murdering, morally bankrupt maggots dumping it inside the man's wife while beating on her... Too much for any man to bear.
Things might have turned out differently had it ended there. But maggot number five was one sick fuck and he decided he wanted to know what it was like to "do" a woman cop. And he didn't mean rape, so he shot her.
Prick inside her, pumping away and he shoots her straight through the heart.
Just imagine it...
Seeing your own wife, raped, beaten and murdered before your eyes and then some stinking slime from the deepest part of any road-side slew fucking her corpse.
And you can't do a goddamn thing about it while they make you watch.
'Course, he didn't just stand there and watch. He fought and screamed, begged, pleaded, bargained. And cried when they killed her.
Then, the story goes, he stopped. When the life in her went out, something, they say, went out of him.
They also say he bit the finger off the hand of the arm that was around his throat. Bit it off, turned around when the guy started screaming, and spit it in his face. Then he grabbed the gun and fired two shots straight through that assholes left eye. Then he shot the rest.
They were all standing around watching the fifth guy do his dirty business inside a cooling dead woman, and didn't even know what was happening until it happened.
Just imagine it...
Four scum-sucking assholes all standing around with their dicks hanging limp, guns on a table out of reach. (Can't tuck a Thirty-Eight in between butt cheeks, now, can we?).
And F.B.I. man, he shoots the guy still humping his dead wife through the head. Half his skull came away and he joined the red devils in about two seconds.
The others he made line up on their knees in a row and then he made them beg for mercy. He made them pray to their gods, if they had any, for it. He made one guy pee himself when he placed the barrel of the gun in the guys ear and said: "I'm already dead and I want you to know how it feels too."
Then he shot them all, one by one, through the backs of their skulls and, after they went down, all twitchy, he leaned over each and said: "This is for Scully" before shooting each of them again through the center of their backs after _they_ were dead.
We know all this because one of those sons-a-bitches actually survived.
He kept breathing and lived to tell the tale. He's in a wheelchair and will be for the rest of his life in a prison designed for such accoutrements, but he's alive and he told his version on the stand.
So did F.B.I. man. He told the truth. His lawyer had to convince him not to plead guilty so at least there would BE a trial.
He, the lawyer, wanted him to plead temporary insanity.
They say Ex-F.B.I. laughed.
I agree.
In that room that day, with all the inhumanities inflicted on him and his poor wife, all that evil shit that makes you wonder if the human race is worth all the trouble the universe goes to, his act - shooting those mother-fuckers the way he did - was the only rational one.
The only one that made sense.
But the Law's the Law and, extenuating circumstances or not, he with forethought and intent, murdered five people if they could so be called.
In my opinion, they should have hung a medal on him.
Six shit-holes like that gone from the earth? Fine by me.
***
So, as I said, here he was standing more or less at attention in my office, waiting to be taken to his cell which would be his home for the rest of his natural life.
It just didn't seem right.
"Fox William Mulder." I said, trying to sound mean but fair. I'm not mean. I'm hard and insist on the rules being strictly obeyed, but not mean.
The cons here all know that. They get away with,.. well, murder, on occassion, but other than that, they mostly play by the rules because they know I'm a fair minded man. I'll give as good or as bad as I get.
"Ex-Law enforcement." I commented aloud, reading his file while he stood there, a presense so quiet and insubstantial, it was like addressing a ghost.
"You should have known better." I said for the benefit of my new guard. Best not to let the young-uns think I was more inclined to shake the new con's hand.
F.B.I. said nothing.
I pushed a small pile of items across my desk to him. Most were just standard issue: toothpaste, toothbrush, shampoo, a bar of soap, a hand towel, a razor (the disposable kind), a roll of ass-wipe...but the top one -
"The Rule Book." I said. "I expect you to learn them and obey them. Behave yourself and we'll all get along just fine."
That was a lie of course. This was The Hole. One of the roughest and dirtiest penetentaries in the United States of America. W.V.M.S.C.F.. West Virginia Maximum Security Correctional Facility. Small wonder the cons just call it The Hole.
New fish here were treated the worst until the seasoned cons decided they'd put enough "time" in, meaning served a few months and survived the initiations that went on.
We're not talking fraternity pranks either.
Next, F.B.I. was ex-law enforcement. That made him a target right away for every con screwed by a cop , a lawyer or a judge, and if you believe everything you hear that comes out of a number's mouth, that meant all of them.
And lastly and much to his detriment in a place like The Hole, F.B.I. was a looker. He'd have to literally watch his backside every minute for the bull queers who love nothing better than fresh, tasty ass. Being good looking in here meant ending up as someone's puppy or everyone's, depending on which one you felt was the least repulsive choice. And by the look and build of this guy, some senior queer was going to try pluggin' his socket first chance. How to run far and fast was probably going to be F.B.I.'s first lesson of prison survival.
When McKerness , that's my new youthful guard, escorted F.B.I. down those rows of cells with the two pairs of eyes staring out of each, to his tiny eight by six foot kingdom, you could almost feel the hard-on's.
No, F.B.I. wasn't going to be making many friends here.
****
F.B.I. settled in pretty well. Didn't speak to anybody and ate his meals alone. It was customary for new fish to sit at least two seats away from any seasoned con.
Another unwritten code and it's funny but new fish always seem to pick up on things like that.
Cons have their own rule book, nothing written down anywhere, but told by looks and gestures, small move- ments of the body. Learned quickly by new fish and it was a damn good thing for their own sake. It was the generally accepted proverb that said new fish think they smell better than the rest, so they're not welcome to rub elbows with those who'd been hanging in the smoke for a while.
Our F.B.I. boy was no dummy. I knew that by his file. Oxford for christ's sake. PhD. Even better: criminal profiler. A man who could get inside the heads of the worst kind of human being produced, and here he was, living among them. On top of that, despite six killings under his belt, he was totally out of place.
Go figure.
F.B.I. picked up on everything real fast. So far, the bum boys were leaving him alone but he knew they were just biding their time. He would have to've been blind not to notice the leers he was getting from that particular club. They were planning a suprise party for him and both sides were playing the waiting game. The one with the unspoken questions of where, when, how many and who would come out with their dignity and testicles still intact.
It a hard game to play and some new guys don't come out of it the same ever again.
F.B.I., he stayed real quiet and close to his cell most days. Like I said, he was no dummy. Sometimes you could see him out in the Yard though, sitting on his behind against the wall or on the bleachers, just watching everything that was going on.
One hour a day was all anyone got outside. One hour to wash the smell of the sweat stink of the guy in the next cell out of your nostrils and the fear out of your mind. Just for a while.
When I told you that F.B.I. wasn't going to make any friends, he up and made me a liar the very next week, and the con he befriended might surpise you.
Suprised the hell out of me.
**
"What are in here for? What did you do?"
Archibald, a nine year con as big as a house, didn't mince words; he didn't have that many to spare.
"Why do you want to know?"
Arch blinked, squinted in the bright sun that was baking all of them shades of brown and red. "I dunno. Just wondered. I'm gonna si' down."
F.B.I. watched him lower his bulk carefully on to the wooden and aged bleacher seats. They groaned.
"Murder, that's why I'm here. Why are you here?"
"I killed some men."
"Are we going to compare notes now?" F.B.I. used his sarcasm in vain on Arch. Arch didn't get a whole lot of humor.
"No. The men I killed were no good. They needed to die. One guy used to beat his wife so bad, she have to go to the hospital, get stitches. I hated that son-of-a-bitch. Her brother payed me two thousand dollars to kill 'em."
F.B.I. said nothing. Arch wanted to swap kill stories but F.B.I. wasn't in the mood.
Arch didn't say anything more about killing however. "You should come see my zoo sometime."
F.B.I. raised his eyebrows and it was as close to an real and for true facial expression he'd had since his arrival. ""Zoo"? You have a zoo?"
"Yup. You oughta' come see it."
F.B.I. didn't know, really, what to make of his companion. It was the first words anyone outside of a guard had said to him since joining the minority.
"Maybe I will."
Big Arch stood, letting out a huge rush of air, walking away.
"Hey!" F.B.I. called after him, "what's your name?"
"D Block. Just ask for Big Arch."
F.B.I. muttered it to himself and nodded, though Big Arch wasn't looking his way anymore.
Twelve sentences. Someone had spoken twelve sentences to him. The longest conversation he'd participated in since his conviction. Suddenly, as he watched Arch's Utah-sized back move across the Yard, he already felt the loss of it.
***
Archibald Morehouse.
Big Arch. That was the only way to describe the man. Seventy- nine and one quarter inches of muscles and bone and the I.Q. to match. One of the biggest land mammals _I've_ ever seen to walk the surface of the earth. And you wouldn't know it to look at him, but when he wasn't killing men bare handed, he was as gentle as a lamb.
That's what he used to do on the outside, that was his trade, killing men. Twelve kills to his credit by the time he was caught. (What did the cons used to say about him? - big as a bear and twice as smart). He did it for money because he didn't know how the hell to do anything else.
Twelve kills by age twenty, that's what they say.
He shared his cell with animals. A bird, a mouse, a rabbit, all in cages he'd weaved out of straw he'd gathered in the Yard. That was the ONE other thing he could do. He could weave things. He even kept a water beetle in an old tin pan he'd lined with pebbles.
No body liked Arch much because he was dumb and talking to him would put you to sleep. But nobody bothered him either. You don't bother a man that size.
You don't bother his pets.
Anyone who had the misfortune of hurting one of his little friends, even accidently, well, it's reasonably sure that would be that man's last act as a living soul.
But Arch hadn't hurt anyone since he came here. And he didn't do much except lift weights and take care of his animals.
Until F.B.I. came.
Nobody knows what made Arch walk up and just start speaking to the man. Maybe because he'd heard F.B.I.'d killed six men.
Maybe because he liked that F.B.I. had an animal's name; "Fox" (though nobody else in The Hole would have been caught dead saying it).
Or maybe because he thought F.B.I. was lonely and it was something Big Arch identified with.
I myself am inclined towards the last option. Looking back now, though, I think it really came down to one simple thing: they needed each other.
**
F.B.I." Arch said when F.B.I. tapped his cell bar.
F.B.I.. his new friend. Arch was happy he'd come. Arch wasn't as dumb as most thought he was. There were some things he knew right off. Like who you can and can't trust. Who was all right and who wasn't. F.B.I. was okay. There was just something about him he liked.
For one thing, he showed a nice interest in his animals and asked how he got them all. Wanted to know all the details about Floppy, the rabbit, and Speedy the mouse and Tweety-Bird (Arch wasn't much on imagination), and F.B.I., his brown head nodding, listened to each and every story with rapt attention.
They say by the end of that visit, Big Arch was showing teeth.
F.B.I. had even shown forethought enough to visit the galley and ask for tidbits to feed each of Big Arch's charges. A bit of carrot for the rabbit, a morsel of bread for Speedy and a few sunflower seeds for Tweety-Bird. Together they caught flies for the water beetle (who didn't have a name yet).
"What kind of name are you thinking about for him?"
"I like to study them first. I haven't figured out much about beetle yet. He doesn't do much. It's hard." Arch frowned over it. "I don't know his personality yet."
Arch was an animal pychologist I suppose.
"What about that he likes to swim. And dive. And he's black with a hard shell..."
"Ummmm, I don't know. I thought maybe "Skimmer" 'cause he skims along the top of the water so good."
F.B.I. got real quiet.
That bothered Arch.
"What about "Skinner"? 'Cause he doesn't need a wetsuit."
Arch liked that and it stuck.
F.B.I. had to go back to his cell 'cause it was lights out in a few.
They spent a lot of time together after that. It was almost comical. One big dummy and his Oxford educated pal.
But Arch and F.B.I. just seemed to go together. It was a nice deal for both of them. F.B.I. had someone to talk to and Arch had someone who'd listen to him and teach him things.
Like I said, it suprised the hell out of me but F.B.I.'d just made his first friend.
***
F.B.I., (that's how he was called now. It was his inside name), worked in the woodshop for the most part. Occassionally, they'd put him to work doing the toilets or the showers. Sometimes the supply room, under guard.
And one night in the toilets, because that was unsupervised work, the party got under way.
I won't let you in on all the details because I have an idea you know. Interestingly enough, there were six.
"Hold him still for fuck's sake. Grab a leg, each a' you." Lead bull was barking the orders and getting his pants un-buttoned. He was first.
They made short work of F.B.I.'s clothes. Then they made short work of him. The next best thing to busting some fresh guy's asshole was busting his head, and in between uglies they went to the bank on him until he was just about gone.
"You liked it! Didn't you sweetass?! Wasn't that nice?!" Kick to the head. "You're a pretty one." Kick to the ribs. "God almighty, we're gonna get to be real close, just you and me."
When they'd each had their fill of busting and bruising, they left him be, right there on the floor of the John, bleeding out of every orafice in his body. Probably made one or two new ones. He was in the infirmary for three weeks.
When Big Arch found out where F.B.I. was, that explained to him how come his friend hadn't been around to see him or his animals in a while. When he learned why F.B.I. was where he was, Arch did the thing he did best.
He tore the head off of bull queer Number One with his bare hands. God only knows how, but the other bulls saw it all and when they did, it must have instantaneously transmuted them into eunichs. After that day none of them ever touched F.B.I. again.
Or anyone else for that matter.
When F.B.I. got out of the infirmary, Arch was gone. He came back a week later, though, with another twenty-five years tacked on to his current sentence making a grand total of one hundred and fifty years Arch was going to have to serve before applying for parole. He was tweny-nine years old, so a sentence like that was kind of like punishing a starving man by removing the plate that was empty to begin with.
I mean, how long did they think this guy was gonna live?
**
I said before that F.B.I was a PhD in his former life.
A Federal Agent who pursued some pretty weird stuff hear tell. He had brains and tenacity and to survive The Hole, you sometimes need both.
Prison was a great equalizer, though. There wasn't much use on the inside for a college degree.
But again, F.B.I. proved us wrong.
It was about a year after his "initiation" by the BQ's that we all saw something kind of happening around the Blocks.
F.B.I. knew how to listen to folks and some were bringing words to him. Words they wouldn't have spoken to anyone else. I suspect that Arch was partly responsible for F.B.I.'s gradual change in status among the veterans.
That and the fact that F.B.I.'d been beaten and sodomized by the BQ's and survived it. Three weeks in the infirmary was a kind of stamp of approval. A Coat of Arms.
The fact that he'd murdered six men was mixed in there and that personal "acheivement" was asserting itself in the minds of those who'd at first taken him for nothing but a pretty boy who had had all the breaks in life and too many months at his mother's tit.
(An interesting sidenote to those murders is, up until that time, F.B.I. had been only a mediocre shot. But when he gotten hold of Number Six Assholes weapon and pointed it across the room, blowing out the brains of Number Four Asshole who was humping his wife's dead body, his aim was dead on perfect.)
Funny how preconceptions can be picked apart bit by bit, and through nothing but words and ears.
See, F.B.I. started to come to _me_ occassionally. He was always very quiet and polite, asking if I had a minute. The first time he knocked three times at the glass windowed door and waited until Oscar, my guard and secretary (they allowed us one of those back in 2002) answered it with his gun drawn. I mean, no cons ever visited the Warden! F.B.I. had brought himself a cup of coffee and one for me and I think it was a bribe.
We'd sit in my inner office away from the ears and eyes of all other beings and just chat.
Chat. Me and a felon.
He and Big Arch were friends but the intellectual in the man needed feeding on occassion and though my education and life-scope might not have the same pizzaz as his, (I went to Yale and have worked in prisons my whole life), we could talk about things other than Floppy's cud chewing.
That's one reason I was in a position to learn so much about the man.
And then there was Big Arch, who never shut up about how F.B.I. helped him figure out stuff in his head; how to think about things; how to feel about them. How to control those feelings. How not to devalue other people, how not to get lost inside one's own thinking. How to deaden the pain.
Guess F.B.I. was an expert on that. He helped a lot of guys in The Hole, those who had the guts to admit they might have a problem to begin with.
But I noticed, as we all did because one day he made it as plain as the peeling paint and graffitti on the mortar walls, he didn't have the guts to face his own. His one problem.
F.B.I.'s Big Hurt.
He made that as plain as the bars on the high windows way up there where just a few sun rays managed to work their way the whole distance to the chipped floor. A few patches of barred light in a very dark world.
***
"Somebodyyy!!!! SOMEBOODYYY HELP. COME HEEELP!"
Big Arch's thick legs gallopped down the center of C Block, moving his fridge-like body faster than anyone had ever seen.
"C" Block held F.B.I.'s cage at one end and that's where Arch had come from that cold afternoon in October, two years to the day of F.B.I.'s wife's murder. I guess it must have brought up some pretty painful memories for him.
"What the hell are you yelling about, Arch?!" Marcus, the head screw was a hard-ass but he did his job. He did it well and he did it fairly but there was one thing he wouldn't tolerate and that was yelling, unless it was offically "okay" like when the Blocks gathered in the movie theatre and watched a bare-assed blind Uma Thurman climbing into a bathtub or some such spectacle.
"FOX. FOX!"
Arch couldn't seem to get past the initial stage of shock-and- scream at finding his friend's unconscious and barely breathing body. Swallowing a whole bottle of gravol has that affect.
Such contraband was easily obtained with a number of cons sporting price lists and instructions on how many and with what to produce what high or low required and desired by the purchaser.
"Fuck!" Marcus swore and checked the eyelids of the prone OD-er. "Get a geurny in here!" He yelled down the hall to the guards stations desks with the two newbie screws standing around with their thumbs up their asses, hoping it was a false alarm. At Marcus's bellow, they all but fell over themselves and went seaching for a roll-away.
Arch cried for the whole week that F.B.I. didn't wake up.
We were all kind of holding our breath. There was something about the man and somehow, the cons had come to believe that he was an innocent in his own way. And that he cared about people and those who suffered.
Cared about everyone except himself.
They even let Arch into the infirmary to visit him. F.B.I. was his one friend in the whole world and Arch went in there and held his hand, slobbering like a baby. F.B.I. was lost under all the bags and the tubes snaking out of the mask over his face, making him look like some kind of synthetic octopus was trying to crawl down his throat.
Some of the other cons even went so far as to start talking to Big Arch while F.B.I. was away. One brought a whole bag of breadcrumbs for his mouse.
"You aint s'ppose to die, Fox." (Arch was the only one who ever used F.B.I.'s given name). "It aint right, what you did. It wasn't very nice." Then he'd cry. The nurses would bring him a drink of orange juice sometimes, guilt written in big letters all over their faces. Maybe because F.B.I. wasn't waking up yet and most of them didn't think he would. The infirmary at The Hole wasn't exactly state of the art.
On the seventh day, with Arch holding onto his friend's hand so tight the fingers were turning blue, F.B.I. flickered his eyes and turned his dough-white face in Arch's direction, wondering at the hulking human weeping at his bedside.
Arch, at seeing F.B.I.'s lids open, all but gave his newly awakened friend a coronary with his "NURSE!" that made the walls vibrate.
Four days later, F.B.I. was back in his cell and feeling pretty shitty about the whole thing.
Arch wouldn't let F.B.I. out of his sight after that, so F.B.I.'s visits to me increased and I think it's because he needed respites from Arch's kindly but annoying omni-presense. I think the only other time he was alone was in his cell at night. We had him on a suicide watch now which meant a guard would pass by his cell every ten minutes until the staff shrink decided he'd passsed the "danger stage" whatever the hell that meant.
How can you tell a thing like that? F.B.I.'d been here two years with nary a hint of suicidal tendencies. Then one rainy day, he up and trys to off himself.
But it was a day with meaning for him and I suppose if you celebrate a wedding anniversary with wine, food and promises for a bright and happy future, it's a weird kind of logic that says you commemorate a death with a grief and a sorrow that says the future aint coming.
They say he missed her.
***
A day came when all that pain and hurt putrifying inside him like a carcass spilled out.
That was bad day.
The week leading up to it - everything was fine. A-okay as far as could be told. But F.B.I. was nothing if not a deep water. Deep water full of silt and things floating just below the surface that would bob up and show their distortions only when something came along and stirred.
It was his old life. They say you leave it behind when you come to a place like this. But he didn't. His followed him here. It was the nature of the beasts in his old life, where they travelled and how, that it was only inevidable that one should find it's way to the shore of that deep water we spoke of.
**
"Fox. New fish comin' in. Wanna go watch?"
F.B.I. shook his head. He was reading. Arch didn't know what because he couldn't read. F.B.I. had taken many hours trying to teach him, but Big Arch, except where his animals and F.B.I. were concerned, had no patience for anything. Not for waiting in line to eat (everybody always let him go first), or for a shower (where he took up two stalls and used a half bar of soap each time), and not for trying to put little markings on paper into some kind of order in his head so they'd magically turn into words.
F.B.I. experienced Arch's frustration with the lessons when Arch grabbed the text book out of his friends hands and tore it - hard cover version - in half.
Arch didn't hide his disappointment that F.B.I. didn't want to gawk at other people's misery, but he wasn't so stupid as to know when not to push his pal too hard. Arch still thought about how still F.B.I. had looked on that infirmary bed, and how dead. He still had bad dreams about it.
Arch left to inspect the dozen or so new fish being paraded into The Hole's "proccessing" rooms at the lower level.
All were murders, extortionists, rapists, armed robbers. The usual grab bag.
It was one in particular that ended up being the cause of F.B.I.'s gut agitations.
*
"Mulder. Fox Mulder."
The scum in question addressed himself to the man lying on his bunk, reading a book on criminal law. He had a stack of same on the floor beside his bunk.
"Yeah? Who are you?" F.B.I. glanced over the rim of his cover and took in the tall, older man with the greying, balding head and the flat expression laying on a face the flesh of which was leaning towards mushy.
"You don't remember me, do you?"
"Tell me what's on your mind or take a walk." In any prison community, one learns to speak one's mind and not to prolong any conversation that begins with: "You don't remember me, do you?" Thats always a hint you're about to hear something unpleasant.
"_She's_ on my mind. All the time."
The old man spoke the words quiet and serene as though he were speaking of his beloved grandmother waiting for him back on the farm with an oven full of raisin cookies. Then he walked away.
F.B.I. sat up and watched the retreating back. He knew better than to just confront his mysterious visitor.
The look in his eyes...when he came to see me about this particular new fish...to find out who the hell he was...
Christ, I'll never forget the look in his eyes...
And his question...
**
"You married?"
I shook my head. "I never had the pleasure." Never met the right woman. Never found the time. Never had the inclination, truth be told.
For lots of reasons.
"Well, it's nice, being married." F.B.I. said to me. He'd forgotten both our coffee's. I gave him a donut, but he didn't eat it. Just rolled it around in his fingers like it was an elastic, until all the sugar had sprinkled to the floor and his hands were covered in that rusty stain of cinnamon spice. "It's nice."
His eyes scared the bejesus out of me. Not that I was afraid of him, I wasn't. I knew he knew that if he'd ever layed a finger on me or even looked like he was thinking about it, Oscar'd blow his Oxford brains all over my sugared tile.
It was what his eyes said that made me _think_ what he might be thinking. Something goddamn foolish and something that would end him up in the Hold for a month.
"Who's this new guy? Older. Grey. No expesssion."
Now we come to it. F.B.I. thinks he knows him or the guy knows F.B.I. and F.B.I. can't remember where or when.
"You've never taken an interest in anybody here except Dumb Arch and your "clientel" who come to you to pour some of the sludge out of their so-called minds. What makes this new guy so damned interesting?"
When F.B.I. didn't look at me, it was a sure fire bet the next words out of his mouth were going to be a lie or a confession, because most cons don't like to look the warden in the eye when they're asked to deliver their stinkies; the things that serve them as motivation; all that fucked up shit that makes them keep on being who they are. Since F.B.I.'d never offered me either one, I didn't know what to expect.
"Well?" I said. He was being more evasive than usual when it came to his own little stinkies. As a matter of fact, I don't think I've ever been party to anything he's got buried down there. So I decided to play the game, just this once.
"Donald Pfaster." I said.
F.B.I. buried his face in his hands and started shaking like he was going to fly apart right there in my office. Jesus-H-Christ. And then he was crying. Weeping like a child, rubbing his face up and down inside those wood-shop caloused palms. He wanted to rub his skin off, I swear to God. He wanted it to roll up and blind him so he'd never see again.
Did I mention before I was scared?
Scared he'd finally snapped.
At least his pill popping was a calm event. This turned my guts inside out, I wasn't going to be able to eat for a week.
He started talking to me, then, and right away I realised something. I was a priest. His absolver. All those murdering thieves, the ungrateful pigs who talked to him, using him like a public service and who were going to rot here for the rest of their lives, brought everything to him. All their dirty little secrets. And he'd try to help them. Help them figure out their pathetic selves. Why they'd sliced that little waitresses throat or why they had to bash in the skull of the man they'd just robbed of every last dollar...
There they'd be, sitting across from him in his cell. One of those pricks spilling all, those guilty bastards who'd murdered the innocent, and he'd sit there, trying to help.
And there he'd be, sitting across from them. After having put out of the world's misery six of the filthiest insects ever to crawl out of a sewer pipe in order to save the innocent, he himself had no one to go to. No one who would listen to him. No one to hear his one secret; his greatest motivation. That which had become his sole reason for who he was and which had been taken from him in such a violent way.
Fate is a bitch with a real sick streak of irony in her.
I was his confessor. The only one in this whole damn place who not only understood when he touched on the more elite topics of the day, but maybe, just maybe understood him a little. The wheels than ran him. The cranks that turned him. The pully's that had told him to exit those sons-a-bitch's from the face of the earth. The demon angel that whispered in his ear that they had deserved it.
I understood, you see. I've seen those kind of men. I know what they do. I had forgiven F.B.I. long before ever meeting the man.
And I think maybe he knew that. I think that's why he came to me. Shit, we were both law enforcement. At least, he used to be.
How can I make you understand us? Maybe by saying that I would have pulled that trigger too.
What he said to me that day in my office wasn't a history of whatever it was that Pfaster had done to his wife and partner I was suprised to hear, (of course I knew it was his wife and him who were responsible for putting that disease behind bars, it was there in his voice. A deaf man would have heard it).
No. F.B.I. cried and spoke of her.
Such tender words all about a woman I'd never met but when he was done, I felt like I known her too, like she was my own sister.
He cried a long time, then he got up like a man in a dream and shuffled out of my office.
I think something broke in him that day; whatever it was that had held him together since the suicide attempt.
He never came to me again. We never spoke after that.
All the cons left him alone and though F.B.I. still visited Big Arch's cell, he never said anything.
He was like a spirit walking around trying to remember what it was he was suppose to do: rattle his chains or moan.
And he cried, real quiet like, all the time. Didn't even bother to hide it. I guess it's true that grief knows no bounds in power or time, and man is a creature that must eventually bend under both.
Big Arch got pretty depressed about F.B.I. being so sad but I think he somehow understood why, and that his friend just needed some time. Time to figure out himself. Time to decide if he was willing to go another day or not.
Not everyone survives this place. Some people go mad in prison, bit by bit or all at once.
But my money was on F.B.I., not his place. I think...
I think he was going to come out of this all right. You could say I had a feeling. I'm not one who puts stock in E.S.P. or psychic phenomena or any of that paranormal crap.
But even so, I just knew. Couldn't get it out of my mind.
I wish I could make you understand the sense of it, that gut instinct I had that told me F.B.I. was not going to rot in a cell and die before his time for a crime that all honest men would admit to being hardly any crime at all.
I wish I could make you see and know it.
But it was just...something indescribable...
**
Epilogue: March 22, 2011:
I retired as of last month and yesterday in the paper, on page 52 there was tiny paragraph on him.
You know who I'm talking about.
He's out. Got out on a technicality a week after I left after serving nine years of his sentence. He's got a good lawyer and he'll most likely stay a free man now.
I'm taking a cruise this winter.
I wonder sometimes, what's he's going to be doing...
**
Epilogue II:
January 09, 2016:
We've been living with my step-son (yes, I got married) for a while and we like it. Seperate entrance and two poodles. It sure beats a nursing home.
I heard he got married again. I saw a picture of them in the paper (I went looking for it). She's younger than him by a good fifteen years, a smart looking brunette. They have a new baby daughter, Kathline. He runs his own small security, & private investigation business.
Hear tell every Christmas and every birthday, Big Arch gets a big box of goodies from his old F.B.I. pal. Like I said and like you've heard, there was something about F.B.I.. Something you couldn't put your finger on deep down inside. It was a thing you don't often see in this world anymore.
He had killed six men. Put a gun to their heads and pulled the trigger over and over on purpose.
Everyone's entitled to one really bad mistake during their life. That was his.
Funny thing was, the world did nothing but benefit by it. Those in The Hole and those who would never again be bothered by six principle-free bottom feeders who didn't give shit who they hurt.
A least F.B.I. had been discriminating in his choices.
F.B.I. came out of it okay. He's doing all right.
A free man, and I'll tell you something...
That's fine by me.
**
END.