Present value, p.34
Present Value, page 34
“So, what’d you do, anyway, Bluebaker?” Jessup kept asking as he paced.
Fritz guessed he was in his early twenties. He had thin blond hair and pale, blotchy skin and the limp outlines of a goatee around a chin that sloped softly toward his neck. But did he ever have arms. His pumped arms bulged with tattooed muscles: death’s heads and screaming eagles and knives and scorpions, and right where the left biceps bulged, the open mouth of a rattlesnake. Jessup had a habit of flexing his muscles as though they had too much power and he had to release some of it. This contraction and expansion made the rattler spread its ugly jaw wider and appear to strike. Jessup had a cocky bantam strut, too. He sprang up and off his back foot as he paced, his thighs as uncontainable as his biceps.
“Securities thing,” said Fritz vaguely. “You?”
Jessup nodded, not quite certain what securities were but knowing they had something to do with big business. As for him, he and two of his buddies had graduated from an apprenticeship in gas stations and convenience stores. “Me and some guys hit a bank,” he said.
He tossed it off nonchalantly, in a practiced way, as if hitting banks was just something guys did, like hitting golf balls. No big deal. He strut-paced from the wall to the bars, then back.
Jessup had hit the Sun Country Bancorp branch in Guymon, Oklahoma, and thereafter enjoyed nineteen minutes of exhilaration, feeling like Jesse James himself. But in the twentieth minute he was in custody, and he’d been in custody every minute since. Although Jessup had visited county lockups in western Oklahoma since just after his eighteenth birthday, this was his first trip to a maximum-security hellhole like FCI Springfield, and that fact had him agitated.
“So where you from, Bluebaker? Where you live? You some kinda businessman?”
Fritz hesitated. “Back east,” he said.
“Where exactly back east?” Spring went Jessup’s stride, spring-spring to the cell door. He stopped, turned, flexed, then sprang-sprang back.
Fritz thought about Jessup showing up on the front step someday, flexing his rattlesnake biceps, and asking if Kristin might be free for the evening. “Doesn’t matter,” he said.
The bantam stopped pacing. “You fucking with me, Bluebaker?”
“No.”
“Anybody fucks with me in this place,” Jessup continued, pacing quicker now, “I’ll fuck them up bad.” He glared at Fritz. “You sure you ain’t fucking with me?”
Fritz stared back. Jessup had reared himself up, his face now reddening. He inflated his chest so his arms didn’t touch his sides. He was small, this Jessup, but he sure was pugnacious. And he had those arms. “Don’t show fear,” a voice told Fritz.
Fritz forced a smile.
“You fucking with me?”
“Just following orders.”
“Whaddayou mean, orders?”
“Did you have a lawyer? When they sentenced you?”
The bantam glowered, pondered, decided he could answer maybe that much without being fucked with. “Yeah. ‘Torney Costello. Gonna take care of that fuck the first thing I do when I get outta here. Another guy that thought he could fuck with me.” He shook his head, contemplating darkly the vengeance that awaited Attorney Costello. His rattlesnake biceps seemed to hiss as the snake’s mouth inflated and deflated in rapid, involuntary flexions.
Jessup looked up again. “What’s that got to do with you?”
Trying to seem unruffled, Fritz carried on from his bunk. “He say not to answer questions?”
“What again?”
“The lawyer? He say you don’t have to testify, don’t have to answer questions?”
“Sure. What am I, stupid? I know that.”
“That’s what mine said, too, Jessup. So I do what I’m told. I don’t answer questions.” He smiled politely.
“Don’t answer questions?”
“Nothing personal,” Fritz explained.
Jessup considered this explanation. He strut-sprang to the bars and back. “Long as you ain’t fucking with me, Bluebaker,” he said.
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
“It would not be advisable. No sir.”
For three days Jessup paced back and forth in the cell, strut-springing and flexing, pursuing a soliloquy on his imminent cell assignment, and generally reinforcing the theme of the inadvisability of anyone fucking with him.
“And they better not ‘sign me with no fuckin’ Ricans, that’s alls I can say, Bluebaker.”
“Ricans?”
Jessup stopped and stared at Fritz. “Don’t you got no Ricans where you come from?”
“What’s wrong with Ricans?” Fritz asked carefully.
“What’s wrong with fucking Ricans?” Jessup shook his head as he repeated the question, as if to assure himself someone had really asked him something that stupid. “What’s wrong with fucking Ricans?” His whole muscled frame seemed to tremble with the inanity of it. “Can’t stand the motherfuckers, that’s what’s wrong with Ricans. They ‘sign me with a Rican, I’ll fuck him up!”
Having explained what was wrong with Ricans, Jessup now gathered steam on the subject of other people they’d better not assign him with. Strut-springing rapidly, he allowed as how they’d better not ‘sign him with no queers, Chinks, wops, kikes, dot-heads, camel jockeys, spicks, niggers, or wetbacks, neither, because if they did, Jessup would be obliged to fuck them up, too.
“And Indians,” added Jessup, realizing he’d forgotten a category. “I hate fucking Indians.”
“Kind of particular, aren’t you?” Fritz asked.
“I don’t mind micks too much,” Jessup allowed.
The temporary cell to which Jessup and Brubaker had been assigned was in a row of cells along a corridor between the infirmary and block one of the prison. As Jessup pursued his argument over the course of several days, from time to time, noises were heard off in the bowels of block one—a vague clatter and the rumble of voices. This indistinct but alarming racket was unearthly, like a roar from the nearby dragon’s lair to which Jessup, after this hiatus, was going to be sent. The noises always got him going. “Bluebaker, I don’t fuck with nobody, nosir, but the fuckers fuck with me, I’ll fuck them up!”
He spat out the word with a terrible gusto. But then the indistinct clatter, the distant crashes and shouts and yammering, would break out more loudly, as if the dragon had heard him and didn’t take him seriously (and was fucking with him even now), and the affront would agitate Jessup even more.
By his third day at FCI Springfield, Fritz had made a curious observation. The more jittery Jessup became, the more his sobriquets began to take on a black cadence: he began to slur “motherfucker” and opted for a jive emphasis on the ultimate syllable.
“I’ll fuck some muhfuckers up, they fuck with me!”
Jessup’s notion of tough black jive seemed unconvincing. The combination of geography and passionate race hatred had kept him so far from any actual black people that his only source was made-for-TV movies. Jessup flexed and paced and fired off his painful clichés until he was promising a world of hurt and sorrow for any muhfuckers who even thought about fucking with him.
Came again the shouts and clatter, the roaring dragon of FCI Springfield.
“I’ll fuck some muhfuckers upside the head,”declared Jessup, pacing.
Fritz watched politely from the bunk. He felt weirdly sorry for the bantam. If anything, Jessup seemed like he was getting whiter.
Jessup was still pacing the cell when, at last, a guard appeared at the door.
“Brubaker, grab your shit, sunshine.”
“The fuck?” asked Jessup. “Brubaker?”
“You’ll stay put, son,” the guard said to Jessup. The guard was black, maybe in his late forties, grizzled and broad across the chest. Soft-spoken but tough: the kind of guy bored by the Jessups of the world; the kind who, while not particularly interested in people who bored him, didn’t take any shit from them, either. His voice had an authority that instantly chastened the Oklahoman.
“Brubaker?” Jessup tried to appeal to the guard in what he thought was his native tongue. “Muhfucker told me his name was Bluebaker!”
“I said you stay here, son,” the guard repeated.
“Fine, fine,” Jessup said contritely. “Fine. I ain’t fucking with nobody.”
Fritz hopped down from the bunk. “Good luck, Jessup.”
“Let’s go,” said the guard.
“Go? Where you going?”
“Elreno Express,” said Fritz.
“The fuck’s that?”
The guard led Fritz out and slammed the door. Fritz last saw Jessup clinging to the bars, flexing like mad, his biceps bulging, his rattlesnake hissing, his eyes narrowing with the recognition that he had been seriously fucked with. As the guard led Fritz down the corridor, Jessup yelled bitterly, “Muhfucker told me his name was Bluebaker!”
Maybe. But at last Bastille Day had come. Binghamton, New York, had shown up on the itinerary of the Elreno Express, and Fritz was to be liberated.
AT CLUB FED, there were no high walls, no razor wire or prison yard, no gun turrets; there were no Dobermans baying for you, no searchlights plodding lazy laps at night. Deer Path sat out in the hill country of north-central Pennsylvania, separated from the surrounding dairy farms by horse fences. There was one guard shack by the entrance road.
Nobody was going to fuck with you at this place. Hell, Playtime had about as much security. Deer Path didn’t even have cells.
Nevertheless, Fritz was at a penal camp, not a country club, and the first order of business in any federal institution is rebirth. They made that clear as soon as he arrived at receiving and discharge—R&D, as they called it. They took everything from him: his clothes, his wallet, his watch, $5.85, a pen, his shoes, his belt. Everything.
“You have to take my wedding ring?” Fritz asked.
“It’s contraband,” said the guard, a beefy fellow with a crew cut. He wore a gray uniform. C. Hardy, read the nameplate on his pocket.
“It is?”
Apparently so. C. Hardy took the ring and put it in a gray envelope with Fritz’s wallet and watch, then packed the envelope in a Bureau of Prisons pouch with the shoes and belt and clothing. In place of these items, the guard handed Fritz a thin beige stack of neatly pressed prison clothes and a duffel jacket. Then he led Fritz in sock feet down a corridor to the shoe room, where they fitted him in steel-toed leather boots and a pair of cheap canvas sneakers. He would also be issued an identity card, a small toothbrush and razor, and a pen.
“You can upgrade at the com,” said C. Hardy.
The com, Fritz would learn, was the commissary, a kind of prison general store, where all kinds of things were for sale, including fleece jackets, Nike sneakers, serviceable plastic watches, paperback books, magazines, and that most important obsession of the camp, food. Prisoners could establish an account with money sent in from the outside. The prices were exorbitant.
“My stuff,” Fritz asked, “do I get that back when I leave?”
“Negative,” said Hardy. “We ship it home. You get it there.”
When Fritz had dressed and finished with R&D, Hardy packed some papers into his aluminum case with a clipboard on the top, grabbed his jacket, and led Fritz outside. Fritz followed through a quadrangle where the snow had been neatly shoveled from the paths. He was wearing his new clothes: beige khakis and shirt, prison-issue duffel coat, black leather boots.
It was midafternoon, and the light was beginning to fade. Hardy led Fritz across the quad to a large brick building about three stories high and as long as a large milking barn. a unit, the sign said. Fritz followed Hardy up the stairs to a landing, then through a swing door and onto a sort of balcony. It overlooked a cavernous space divided into cubicles. They didn’t seem all that different from the cube spaces in the Playtime Tower.
He followed the guard down six steps and along the corridor that bisected this large room. To each side were open doorways, or entrances, rather, because there weren’t any doors. They went past four or five of these, and inmates looked up as they passed. Almost all were middle-aged white guys wearing the same uniform. It was scary how much it resembled Fritz’s memory of prep school.
Hardy glanced at his clipboard and stopped. “This is you,” he said.
Fritz peered across the threshold into an eight-by-ten box. On the right side was a wooden bunk bed whose bottom bunk looked like it had been slept in. The top was acting as a credenza, holding stacks of papers, magazines, and journals. Along the left wall of the cube was a fiberboard module with hangers and shelf space and a built-in writing cubby on each side. And leaning into the far cubby was Fritz’s cube mate.
Just as Jessup did, Fritz had worried most about that—the prospect of a cell mate. Sometimes he pictured a white supremacist with a hair trigger, a buff World Wrestling Federation castoff in sleeveless leather with a bald head and biceps like cantaloupes, hungry for violation. Sometimes it was a lean angry black, young and smoldering, with the muscles of a prizefighter, in whom two centuries of racial injustice had bubbled like molten lava and was about to explode. Fritz had, after all, seen the movies, and he’d been to Columbia and Springfield.
But Fritz’s flesh-and-blood cube mate would disappoint these fears. He was a slight man of perhaps fifty-five who wore thick horn-rimmed glasses. As Fritz would discover soon enough, he did have an urge to violate his fellowman, but only conversationally.
The man had been writing when Fritz arrived, listening through headphones to a CD of the Stokowski Bach transcriptions. If this guy is in the WWF, they must have a flyweight division, Fritz thought. He introduced himself, extending his hand.
“Yes, Brubaker, I know. They told me. What are you here for?” the man asked.
Fritz gestured toward the guard. “They assigned me.”
“Take the top bunk,” the guard ordered. “Esperance, you’ll have to clear that shit offa there. You know you’re supposed to keep it in the library.”
Fritz would learn that rigid hierarchies applied at FPC Deer Path. The top bunk was the lowest rank. You couldn’t graduate to a lower bunk without seniority. Esperance sighed with a pained look and blinked at the guard. “Do you find there are insufficient nouns in the language?”
He did seem to have a little hostility, or at least impatience, but it wasn’t the physical kind, at least.
“C’mon,” said the guard.
Esperance got up and began gathering his materials from the top bunk. “Papers, sheaves, sheets, pads, notes, foolscap, journals, magazines, writings . . . it’s not like there aren’t words available,” he mumbled.
“College professor,” the guard explained to Fritz.
As he gathered his papers, Esperance renewed his question. “What was your crime, I meant?” he said.
“My crime?”
“Or perhaps I should say your mistake. You’ll be encouraged here to acknowledge your mistake. Everyone’s made one.” The fellow had finished bundling his materials onto his cubby. He smiled ironically, then blinked, waiting for an answer. He blinked a lot, Fritz noticed.
“Johns and showers are through that way, at the end,” the guard said, indicating. “TV room to the right. You can buy headphones at the com. Next count’s at four. Be at your bunk for count.”
“Terrible sin to miss count.” Esperance shook his head. “The whole community atones.”
“The professor here will show you to the cafeteria at six. A Unit eats second this week.”
There would be seniority even in eating. For the sin of untidiness, A Unit had this week yielded pride of place—the five-fifteen dinner slot—to B Unit.
“Compound’s closed at nine,” Hardy was saying. “In the cube at ten-thirty, lights out at eleven. It’s in your materials. Welcome to camp.” The guard glanced at his watch and then left.
Fritz looked down at the pamphlet he’d been given in processing. Orientation, they called it. Just like prep school.
A minute later the guard returned. “Brubaker, I forgot. You got this.” He opened his aluminum clipboard and withdrew a letter.
“Stock fraud?” Esperance asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Your crime. Stock fraud?”
Fritz was looking at the envelope. He recognized Kristin’s hand. She had written out “Mr. Phineas A. Brubaker” in purple felt-tip marker, with a little heart over the i.
“I was accused—”
“No, you were convicted,” Esperance corrected him. “Or you pled. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.” He blinked.
All Fritz wanted to do was read the letter. “Right,” he answered, a little distracted. “Ah, what was your name?”
“It was and is Gerard Wright Esperance, professor of biochemistry, University of Washington. I pleaded guilty to criminal trespass on a federal facility. I already know your name. Phineas A. Brubaker. They told me yesterday you were coming.”
“Nice to meet you,” Fritz said. He sat on the corner of the bed and tore open the letter.
“Ah, Brubaker . . .”
“Oh, sorry,” he said, at once understanding that at Deer Path, you didn’t sit on another inmate’s bed, not even a college professor’s. Privacy was scarce. He climbed up to the top bunk and began to read.
Dear Dad,
I’m really sorry for the way I acted the morning you left. I was sad. I love you Dad. I hope you are okay in jail. Write soon.
Love,
Kristin
p.s. Sorry I didn’t kiss you goodbye and I’m kissing the letter right here XXX so if you kiss the letter then thats my goodbye kiss. Au revore (≡ until we meet again in French) and love Kristin.
“So, your mistake?” Esperance insisted. He had resumed his seat at the cubby and was looking up at his new cube mate, who seemed to be kissing his letter.
“Excuse me?” Fritz looked up, his eyes glistening.
“Your crime. What was your crime?”
“Insider trading.”
“Figures,” said Esperance with evident disappointment. He turned back to his writing.
ON THE WHOLE, Fritz thought, FPC Deer Path’s accommodations weren’t quite up to prep school. On the other hand, prep school had more psychopaths.
