Babychain Blues Read online

  ‘My brother was the real hunter,’ Buck added. ‘He was a real fine shot.’

  ‘Where’s he at now?’

  ‘Oh, he’s dead now. Got shot down by some nigger with a shotgun when he was on a job.’

  Gil frowned as a quick memory was sent jerking across his brain but the thought was suddenly interrupted before it was fully realized.

  ‘New blood!’ came a whispered voice as a prisoner strolled by the bars and moved on quickly to pass the news.

  Gil and Buck looked up to see the new prisoners being ushered in.

  There were four of them. One hobbled on a gimpy leg and was white; the other three were all Native Americans. Each carried his prison issue blankets, overalls and shoes.

  ‘You’ve got one in with you, Gil,’ said the Guard Captain, appearing at the cell entrance.

  ‘Aw, come on, Boss,’ complained Gil. ‘We’re all choked up in here as it is.’

  ‘Every unit’s full and you’ve got a spare bunk in there, one more won’t hurt.’

  Gil knew what it was about. Payback for his failure to meet his dues. He owed the Captain five hundred bucks but a failure in delivery of his latest drug load had meant a shortfall.

  ‘You know I couldn’t help that, Boss,’ he said. ‘The mule got intercepted by the Feds. There was nothing I could do about it. I’ll make it good once it straightened out, you know that.’

  ‘Nothing to me, Gil. You know the way it works, privileges cost in this life. Enjoy the company.’

  He pushed the limping figure of Demus Barnes into the cell. Demus, who had never been inside before, had the look of a lost soul and stood there waiting vaguely for instruction.

  Gil looked him up and down, then jabbed a finger at the upper bunk. ‘There,’ he said. ‘But don’t get too comfortable, you won’t be in here for long.’

  ‘That a fact,’ said Demus with a sneering display of bravado.

  In a flash, Gil was up and in one fluid movement had Demus by the neck and slammed him back against the cell bars. His biceps bulged and he lifted Demus easily up on tiptoe.

  ‘Don’t,’ warned Gil staring intently into Demus’ bulging eyes and squeezing his throat in a steel grip. ‘Don’t even think it, fish.’

  He let go and gulping air, Demus fell to the floor, his issued supplies dropping as he clutched his sore throat in both hands. Gil turned his back and sat back down again.

  ‘Better learn who’s the big dog around here, fish,’ Buck advised.

  ‘Okay,’ gasped Demus. ‘I…. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.’

  ‘Pick up your shit and get up there and shut up until the man speaks,’ said Buck.

  ‘So, what I was saying,’ continued Gil, as if there had been no interruption in their discussion. ‘Is that its real easy to slaughter the wildlife without due cause. It’s cowardly too. You know, you take on a buck with a high-powered rifle from a mile away instead of facing up to the creature mano a mano. Well what competition is there in that? So, why bother?’

  ‘It’s the skill involved, you have to appreciate that side of things,’ urged Buck. ‘There’s windage to consider, the load in your shells. Let alone how steady your aim is. This is the real challenge, Gil. It’s the skill that counts.’

  ‘So why a living creature? Why not pot tin cans or something like that, same thing, ain’t it? A target.’

  ‘But it don’t move, Gil. Your deer will track through the woods, he can smell you coming and hear real well. It’s a challenge to come up on him in terrain that ain’t to your choosing.’

  ‘Then what? Cut off his horns and go get a drink.’ Gil squinted up at Demus lying uncomfortably on his upper bunk. ‘What you in for, fish?’ he asked.

  ‘Home-invasion, assault,’ Demus answered nervously.

  ‘Assault!’ chuckled Buck. ‘What, you hit on, some old lady?’

  ‘No way,’ said Demus, trying to regain some of his bravado. ‘One mean old sucker.’

  ‘What, you and them three Indians?’

  ‘They’re my crew,’ bragged Demus.

  ‘Not in here they ain’t,’ advised Buck. ‘They’ll be over on the reservation with the rest of the redskin contingent.’

  ‘So how’d you get caught?’ Gil asked.

  ‘Hell of a story,’ Demus warmed to his tale, thinking it best to impress and acquire some friends and he might do it in the telling. ‘We was hit on by a naked lady.’

  That peaked interest and the others in the cell listened whilst Demus regaled them with an exaggerated version of events where he came off best and it was mere bad luck that they were taken unawares. He began by reporting how he had needed to chastise his girlfriend for her clumsiness and how the plumber sneakily interfered and took an unwarranted hand in something that was none of his business and how things went from there until a naked nurse got the drop on them.

  ‘Sure would’ve liked to have spotted those titties,’ allowed Buck. ‘Been a long while since I rubbed my nose in a pair like that.’

  ‘They were something else,’ slavered Demus, laboring the point. ‘Real heavy in the hand and all soft and round.’

  ‘What? You got to heft them whilst she’s holding a pistol on you? I don’t think so,’ said Gil dismissively.

  ‘No, but you could tell just by looking. You know what I mean?’ Demus said.

  ‘I think you’re all bullshit, fish,’ growled Gil.

  ‘My name’s Demus Barnes.’

  ‘Round here, you’re a ‘new fish’ ‘til you’re told otherwise,’ warned Buck.

  Gil raised his head to look narrow-eyed at the man above, ‘Way I see it, you little prick. Is that this plumber, what’s his name? Cole Junger. He took you on and busted up your knee all on his lonesome and it needed four of you to go get your payback. How old’s this guy, forty or so you said and you’re what? Twenty something? He’s got twenty years on you and you still couldn’t nail him on your own. Little pissant, I don’t see you lasting long in here.’

  Buck agreed, ‘About twenty four hours I reckon, it’ll take that long ‘til the Brotherhood smell fresh poontang.’

  ‘Hey, no,’ said Demus. ‘I don’t go for none of that shower room stuff.’

  Gil grinned, ‘We’ll see, sport. Real soon, we’ll see about that.’

  ‘Come on, guys. I ain’t like that, I got me a girlfriend and everything.’

  ‘Not any more, fish,’ smiled Buck. ‘I reckon your plumber friend will be warming his toes against her long legs whilst you’re in here.’

  ‘Shit! I hope not,’ grumbled Demus.

  ‘Sure he will,’ teased Buck. ‘Why’d you think he slapped you around, if he didn’t have an interest?’

  Demus frowned. ‘You think so? I never thought of that. You mean….’

  ‘Aw, shutup. You little weasel,’ growled Gil, growing tired of Demus’ petulance. ‘Thing you’ve got to learn is that you’re in a different world now. Out there don’t matter no more. This is all there is and you’d better learn it real fast.’

  Chapter Seven

  As Cole drove her home three weeks later, Caitlin studied him from her side of the cab.

  ‘What happened to you?’ she asked, taking in the scabbed cuts and bruises. The bruises were fading now but the mark of their passage was still marked alongside Cole’s face.

  ‘It don’t matter.’

  ‘It was Demus wasn’t it? Did he beat you bad?’

  ‘He won’t be beating anybody now, not where he’s gone,’ said Cole, his eyes fixed on the road ahead.

  ‘Why? What happened?’

  Her tone was full of concern and Cole glanced across at her. She looked a whole lot better now. The swelling around her eye had gone and the bruising subsided, there was something that was intimating at relief or possibly hope in her features.

  ‘How’d you feel now?’ Cole asked ignoring her direct question.

  ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘They were real nice to me in the hospital. Seems there was something wrong with my retina but they fixed it
good and I can see okay now. This nurse, she said she was a friend of yours, Martha Jane, she was something special. Came visit with me every day, brought me chocolate bars and new clothes. It was wonderful kind of her, I never met anyone like that before.’

  ‘She’s a good woman.’

  ‘She is. You seeing her, Cole?’

  ‘Now and then,’ he allowed.

  Caitlin pouted, ‘So I guess you’ll be busy and I won’t see you no more.’

  Cole let a small grin cross his face, ‘Don’t bet on it. I still got a shower unit to fix, remember?’

  ‘Oh, right,’ she slumped back with a look of satisfaction. ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘You know Caitlin, maybe you should think about getting yourself a job again.’

  ‘Don’t know about that. I got welfare and I never did too well at work and I don’t like all the menial things that I usually end up with.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you take a course on something you really want to do? You know, get a qualification.’

  ‘Don’t really know what I want to do.’

  ‘There must be something. What do you like best?’

  ‘Well, I guess I always had a hankering for animals. Small one you know, like puppy dogs and kittens but most of all what I really wanted was to travel. See something of the world.’

  ‘Like in all the magazines you have?’

  ‘Uhuh, but I guess that will never happen.’

  ‘Why not? You could find work with a travel agent or get a job with an animal clinic and make enough money to take a ride.’

  ‘You ever been abroad, Cole?’

  ‘One time, yes.’

  ‘Where’d you go?’

  ‘South East Asia.’

  ‘Oh, like back in that war in Vietnam?’

  Cole nodded but Caitlin noticed his hands gripped the steering wheel a little tighter.

  ‘What was it like over there?’ she asked. ‘The country I mean.’

  ‘I didn’t get to see it under the best of circumstances.’

  ‘No, I guess not. Killing all them Asian people. It looked pretty wild; I saw this movie about it one time. Seemed real crazy to me.’

  Cole drew a deep breath, ‘It was crazy alright. Plumb loco in fact. And it wasn’t nothing like Hollywood. You know? Where the good guys always win, no, a lot of our own people died as well as the Asians. Good men too. It was such a damned waste.’

  ‘You don’t like to talk about it, do you?’ her question was innocent enough but it held an edge of sharpness about it that sounded almost accusatory to Cole.

  ‘Most folks don’t want to hear and those that do don’t really approve. Besides its all ancient history now.’

  ‘I want to hear,’ she said. ‘I want to know about you Cole.’

  ‘I will tell you this Caitlin, coming back here was almost as hard as being over there.’

  ‘That sounds pretty rough. What was so bad about it?’

  They pulled up at a set of lights and as they waited for the change, Cole looked across at her and she noticed the sadness that had come into his eyes.

  ‘It was mad out there and it made you kind of mad too. So when you came back you were this crazy person trying to fit into a sane world. All the regular people that made up your life at home and hadn’t been over there couldn’t understand you no more.’

  She nodded thoughtfully, ‘I can associate with that. I always felt alone when I was a kid, like I didn’t belong in this world. Kind of cut off. The orphanage I was brought up in was full of nuns, you know, all dressed in black, with rosaries and crosses and things. It felt kind of alien to me, sometimes I thought maybe I landed from another planet.’

  ‘You never knew your own folks, not any idea of who they were?’

  Caitlin shook her head, ‘No, they even gave me my name as I didn’t have one. Caitlin May. It was an Irish nun who laid it on me, the Caitlin part and May because that’s the month when I turned up on their doorstep.’

  ‘The month of May, huh? Them nuns must have liked that. Wonder they didn’t call you Mary, it being her month and all.’

  She slid a sly look across at him, ‘I was never the virginal type, Cole.’

  The light was green and he slipped the shift into drive and pulled away. Cole faced front and Caitlin could see he disapproved of her loose talk by his set features. She smiled to herself in an impish way, pleased to have teased him.

  ‘You got any friends, Cole?’

  Cole thought on that for a moment. ‘I had one once,’ he admitted, rolling back the years.

  ‘Was that the army?’

  ‘Uhuh, Benny was his name. He wasn’t too bright but he was big as a mountain and his heart matched in size too.’

  ‘What happened? You lose touch or something?’

  ‘No, he died.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Well, you got a new friend now, Cole. That’s right, isn’t it? We can be friends.’

  Cole looked across, ‘Sure thing,’ he smiled amenably.

  His mind was racing though. The thought of Benny was bringing it all back again. That and the damned TV show that still played on his mind. Like old wounds revisited it bored into his brain and Cole was filled with a sense of entrapment in the strange way in which he was being forced to recall it all. How he had left his friend’s body on the hillside under a pile of stones, taken the hippy’s rucksack and placed the baby inside, then trekked across the cold mountains like an Indian squaw humping a papoose on her shoulder.

  Goddammit! Why had he done that?

  Had it just been Benny’s scrawled request, the poor dumb fool guessing he wasn’t going to make it and having the note ready just in case. Benny had always been that way, believing in all that superstitious hoochie-coochie mojo stuff and sometimes over there he had been right too. Almost as if he’d had some sort of prescient nature and could foretell when something tricky lay ahead in the jungle. It had been a real bonus sometimes on patrol. He must have guessed that Cole would have left the kid and run – that’s how he was in those days.

  Something though had touched him in that moment on the hillside. His best friend’s body lying there and the wailing child becoming so still when he picked it up, like it felt safe in his arms. Something other had come over him and the more he thought about it, he realized that it had been a moment of catharsis for him. Perhaps the point where he had left his old ways and all the brutalizing the war had put into him. Because that was where he had altered.

  Okay, so he had dumped the child with the nuns. It had been in May too. The merry month of May and this meant it had to be her. The kid he had left there. It was like some fantastic act of destiny that all the head freaks talked about, an unbelievable act of synchronistic coincidence that could turn the world full circle and bring him back to the point as if the past twenty years hadn’t happened at all, other than the fact that they’d all gotten older.

  He was responsible for this child he realized that now and maybe it was fate telling him it was time to take up the reins of that responsibility. He wouldn’t run away from it, or rather he couldn’t, at least not the man he had become. Back then, yes, but now…. he knew that if he did he wouldn’t be able to look in the mirror again without seeing a stranger looking back.

  He played the TV program again in his head. Gil Gurns and that other fellow, what was his name? Randy something. Both of them hauling hard time for the crime he and Benny had committed.

  Why the hell had he and Benny gotten into that damned mess in the first place? Had they been so hard up for direction they had slipped over to the dark side without a moment’s consideration. He couldn’t recall how he rationalized his life back then, just knew he had been a bitter soul with a lot of pride and malice to keep him company. It was like a whole different person, someone who had existed on the surface with coldness and violence whilst a whole heap of turbulence went on down below.

  It had been Benny’s fault.

  It was he who had dragged them in at the start.

/>   Benny had known the guy over in Nam. A quartermaster at Can Rahn Bay with the 262nd, he had been a big wheel alright, working the system as if it was going out of style. Back then the quartermasters were shifting twenty-two million gallons of fuel and a ton of supplies from the depot up to forward supply points during the war. A massive undertaking and one where items could easily go astray with the right kind of attention and connections. The fellow behind the scams had been a major called Leeward Barton Penevale and despite his fancy name he had been a serious contender for the title of the Al Capone of South East Asia.

  Benny and Cole had been at a loose end when they had invalided out and Benny had run into Penevale in a hotel bar in Portland. With nothing but piss-poor attention from the military and little hope of finding employment, one thing had led to another and before long the two of them were part of an ex-military crew under Penevale’s direction.

  He was smart, he paid them and the others attention, listened with understanding to their distress and praised their loyalty to the nation. Giving them due respect for their courage and bravery, something that was spare on the ground in those days of antiwar feeling when homecoming soldiers were spat on and abused as being baby killers.

  Cole could still picture Penevale on the day he had outlined his plan for to the big one.

  A tall man, fair-haired and above average height with a high forehead and a large, almost outsized dome that doubtless encased a big brain. Penevale used all of its capacity for the most devious and ruthless acts of criminality yet hid them all under a front of gentile diplomacy. He was a quietly spoken man with hypnotic, deep-sunken reptilian eyes of a dense, impenetrable color, almost totally black and they were never still. Cole thought it was like looking into a black hole. Some void that if you fell into you’d never escape from or see the light of day again.

  Penevale was an intelligent and cultured man, the black sheep of a good Southern family. He had a taste for classical music and was never without it, always playing some string quartet or piano concerto in the background. It seemed to pacify his thinking as he decided on life or death for some poor sucker or counted the pros and cons of an illegal undertaking.