Pain Management: A Burke Novel

The first time you end up Inside, you think serving your sentence is going to take forever. But soon you learn: no matter how much time you have to do, some parts of it never take long. The Aryan clenched his fists, glancing down at his cartoon-huge forearms as if to reassure himself all that cable-tendoned muscle was real. He was on the downside of steroid burnout, dazed and dangerous. The Latino wouldn't know a kata from the Koran, but he was an idiot savant of violence, with the kinetic intelligence of a pit bull. They faced each other in a far corner of the prison yard, screened off from the ground-level guards by the never-intersecting streams of cons flowing around them. Any experienced gun-tower hack could read the swirls below him, see something was up. But the convicts knew the duty roster better than the warden. They knew the tower closest to the action was manned by a tired old guy with thirty years on the job and a good supply of gash magazines. All they had to do was keep the noise down. "Only play is to stay away." The Prof spoke low to me. "Yeah," I said. "Larsen's not built for distance. If Jester gets him tired, he can--" "Our play, fool!" the Prof hissed at me. "The fuse is lit; it's time to split." We faded, working our way back through the crowd sneaking glances at the duel. By the time the whistle blew and the first shots sounded from the tower, we were standing on either side of the sally port as the Goon Squad rushed through, hammering wildly at every con within reach. Larsen didn't run. He was facedown on the filthy asphalt, Jester's shank protruding from the back of his neck. The matador had gone in over the horns. They locked the whole joint down, tore up everyone's house looking for weapons. But all that did was simmer the pot more, as plots and counterplots festered into a Big House brew of pus and poison. Usually it was black against white, with brown trying to stay out of the crossfire. But this one had rolled out different. Larsen rode with a motorcycle gang; there were a lot of bikers Inside then. And Jester had been flying colors at sixteen, when he'd taken the life that had bought him a life sentence. The kid he'd killed was another PR, from a rival club, but that didn't matter anymore. Back then, when it came to prison war, race trumped tribe every time. You never got a choice about that. The cons had all kinds of names for areas of the prison--Times Square, Blues Alley, D Street--but I never heard of one named Switzerland. "On the bricks, niggers do the paper-bag trick," the Prof told me. "But Inside, you can't hide." "What's the paper-bag trick?" I asked him. The Prof had been schooling me for a while, so I didn't even blink at a black man saying "nigger." I knew words were clay--they took their real meaning from the sculptor. "I ain't talking about passing, now," the Prof cautioned me. "It's a class thing. Motherfuckers'll hold a paper bag next to they faces and look in the mirror, okay? If they darker than the bag, there ain't but so far up the ladder they can climb, understand?" "I . . . guess." "Nah, you don't get it, son. I'm talking about the colored ladder, see? Mothers want they daughters to marry light. They know high-society niggers don't want no darkies at their parties." I just nodded, waiting for mine, knowing it was coming. "Yeah," he said, softly. "It's different with white folks. Color ain't the thing. Boy like you, you was born trash. You could be light as one of them albinos; wouldn't make no difference." I knew it was true. By the time they ended the lockdown and we could mix again, the clay had hardened. Larsen's crew called it for personal, put out the word. They weren't going rVachss, Andrew is the author of 'Pain Management: A Burke Novel' with ISBN 9780375413223 and ISBN 0375413227.