Phoenix Noir

And crazy stared back at him.

Eddie leaned into the strip of sheet metal above the cell’s sink, not trusting the reflection. He recognized the face but it belonged to someone else, some other Eddie.

The knife wound was gone.

No bloody track. No itch of stitches. No trace of the jagged white scar. He could still feel the icy kiss of El Gato’s razor. Remembered the patchwork repair job by prison docs and the forever-after taste of antiseptic.

But the reflection face was unmarred, as if the fight never happened.

“Keane! Visitor!” Eddie jumped away from the mirror. The CO stood three paces from the bars, khaki-bland, indifferent. “Stand your gate. You know the drill. Move before you’re told, you forfeit your privilege.”

“Who?”

“Says he’s your father.”

Eddie barked a laugh. “Right. My father’s—”

He’d been about to say dead—before memory stopped him: The old man stooped over a plastic visitor’s chair, humiliated and embarrassed, talking about death. Cancer. Eating him from the asshole out. Sitting there, too selfish to beg sympathy, too full of pride to realize that’s what he was doing. Looking into that bulldog face, Eddie had experienced an overwhelming urge to embrace his father, to let go all of the history and hate between them. Because for the first time his father was here, reaching out to his only son.

Then the flash of judgment in those rummy eyes, the same smug look on the old man’s face that had chased Eddie out of childhood. And bitter realization. His father hadn’t come to make peace. He was making a point. Like a miser arranging bundles of cash in the bottom of his coffin. Preparation. Telling Eddie death didn’t change anything. I own you.

Eddie felt the hurt, fresh. Which made zero sense. The old man was five years dead and gone. Cancer had done a bang-up job. Turned his body into a busted stack pipe that kept leaking until the guy in the unit below complained about raw sewage dripping from his ceiling.

So, anyone care to explain how the old man could be waiting to talk with him?

Slowly, Eddie swiveled back to the mirror. The face—stripped of its hardest time and wounds—was his. Only years younger. And Eddie knew he hadn’t been remembering events. He’d been reliving them.

Growing backwards.

“C’mon, Keane,” the guard pressed. “Enough preening. Let’s go.”

Eddie wanted to scream in protest. He could already hear the old man’s voice, the leathery gloat roughing its way past Redman chaw.

“See you got yourself branded. Didn’t take long.”

“Thought you of all people would understand.”

“I understand fine, boyo. Skinheads made you their punch.”

“I’m nobody’s—”

“You’re everybody’s punch, Eddie. Always been, always be.”

Eddie shook his head against his father’s words. Told himself that if he refused to leave his cell, his father would stay a memory, stay dead. The face in the mirror told him different. Against his own volition, Eddie let the guard take him—to what?

His past.

The dark cord of memory dragged Eddie toward its umbilicus. Time warped as his life played out in reverse. Days and weeks compressed into emotions, tight fistfuls of grief and rage that pummeled Eddie with savage intensity. Single events stretched out in slow-second madness, suspending him in acts of cruelty and degradation. He fought to reassert his indifference, tap into the Fury’s narcotic rage. But Old Granddad had left the building. And Eddie fell victim to his own torment.

Zip.

There was the kid’s face, fear flushed with betrayal and begging Eddie not to let it happen. Eddie backed out of the showers as the crew of Level 5 meat packers moved in. He had sold the kid’s drug debt to the faggots for pennies on the dollar. Call it a refinancing plan. Watching the attack, the men throwing themselves at the quivering and mewling flesh, Eddie got a hard-on. He imagined his dick as a knife. Not fucking. Cutting.

Zip.

DT demons whispered in Eddie’s ears. He was in the hole. A sensory-deprivation chamber where the Arizona Department of Corrections turned out snitches and bitches. Eddie fought the voices. He talked over them, yelled, sang, recited goddamn Motörhead lyrics until he ran out of words and gushed gibberish. They had dropped him cold turkey into an SMU II isolation cell. All Eddie needed to do was renounce the brotherhood. Roll over. Three days later the detox demons came, ripping his insides, twisting his spine, loosening his bowels. He blew chunks, gagged air, shouted at the walls. Then he beat on them, hitting the concrete as if working a heavy bag. Each blow accompanied by the mash of gristle and Eddie’s roar. “You!” CRUNCH.“Don’t!” CRUNCH.“Own me!”

Zip.