Green River Rising by Tim Willocks

Author:Tim Willocks [Tim Willocks]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2007-05-03T04:00:00+00:00

Hobbes sat in the centre of the universe and listened to the loathsome song grind round the interior of his skull.

TWENTY

LIKE A TROPICAL wind the ancient violence of men swept in random gusts and sudden squalls throughout the interior of the Green River Penitentiary. It sucked men from their cells and pitilessly exposed them to fire and blade. It revealed without mercy the ugliness, the virulence, the heavy stench of man in his uninhibited purity of being. As it howled up and down the stacked cages of cellblock D Ray Klein lay on his bunk and waited, with all the resolve he could muster, for the less than desirable circumstances in which he found himself to improve.

His cell door was closed but wasn’t locked down. If he’d had the equipment he would have welded the steel shut. Instead he’d tied a tin cup to the bars and placed it on his locker. In the unlikely event he fell asleep and someone slid the door open the cup would fall to the floor and wake him. Paranoia suggested an alternative: the intruder could cut the string first. Klein scratched sleeping off his list. In an attempt to relax he closed his eyes and constructed fantasies of being free: reading the New York Times and drinking fresh orange juice in a diner; going to bed at three a.m. and waking up at ten; driving Devlin along I 90 to New Orleans where she’d fuck him in a cheap hotel where the ceiling fans were too slow to stop them slathering in each other’s sweat. He wondered what Devlin was doing now. Maybe soaking in a tub, or eating goat cheese salad in an air conditioned café. No, she’d be settling down to watch the Lakers game. He wondered if the Knicks would keep them to a six-point spread.

It wasn’t working.

None of the fantasies were powerful enough to divert his mind from the maelstrom of noise and suffering beyond the bars of his cell.

The rioters had devoted their first hours of command to the business of blind destruction. Anything that could be smashed, bent, dismantled or spilled had been thus smashed and spilled. Anything that could be advanced from a state of order into one of chaos had been thus advanced. And as men shat and pissed themselves in fear, the ambient smell became viler and more pervasive than usual. It put Klein in mind of Ludwig von Boltzmann and his theory of entropy. Maybe he should have laid that one on Hobbes: Disorder always increases in a closed system. Hobbes probably knew that already. From Nev Agry’s ghetto blaster on ground tier came a sound to bewilder even Boltzmann: drifting surreally through the bedlam was the genteel sound of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys.

The moon in all your splendour,

Know only my heart,

Call back my Rose, My Rose of San Antone.

Lips so sweet and tender,

Like petals falling apart,

Speak once again of my love, my own . . .

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