Free The Four Stages of Cruelty by Keith Hollihan Page A

yard. Sometimes it happened that way, a little thing leading to greater confusion, and you wondered if it was all connected or just random reactions or even the full moon.
    I felt amped up driving back to the prison, a little overtired and adrenaline pushed, but excited to put on the battle rattle and do some actual emergency work. The gate camera was hooded over with snow when I got there, but they buzzed me in anyway. I stomped my boots off on the mat, adding to the dirty slush.
    Tony Pinckney—Nosepicker to his closest friends—sat at the receiving counter in the cage behind the metal detector. Though five years my junior, we’d joined at the same time, so our work lives had often overlapped. We’d done rounds together many times, spent two weekends shooting guns, squirting chemical agent, and tasering each other at training courses. He’d once invited me to a minor-league baseball game—whether as a date or a guys’ night out I never learned, because I turned him down. Now he was all business.
    “I need a piss break and a coffee,” he announced, as though my arrival were long overdue. He asked me to man the station for five while he relieved himself. That meant a further delay in my URF response time, but what could I do? I took off my parka but remained standing in the booth, all the video monitors in the world for my entertainment. I could see the blurry commotion on a stretch of D block, some inmates in their cells like good doggies, some sitting quietly on the floor grinning and chatting to show they were tough, afew shit disturbers pacing drunken angles and occasionally throwing up their arms at the camera to shout unheard rebukes about terrible injustices. I felt my heart tick up a notch, seeing the brutal undercurrent come to the surface, the rage that some felt was their God-given right to express. It was just for show, a make-believe fantasy of revolt, but it could easily go too far. I’d seen men commit violence and look bewildered about it later, as though they’d been forced to go through with something just to live up to the expectations of the situation at hand. The last thing I wanted was to be trapped inside some sick fuck’s private delusion.
    “Don’t you wish you could have had a hot bath and stayed in bed?” Pinckney said behind me, calmer now, less burdened. He was the type of tall man whose striking height is apparent only when he’s standing next to you.
    I ignored the innuendo that came with his emphasis on the word “bed.” “Overtime suits me fine.” With a reasonable number of emergencies to attend to, my salary promised to jump from fifty-two to sixty-five plus a year. That was all right by me.
    We both caught sight of the fight that had erupted in D—one of the men inexplicably dragged out of his ground-level cell by two others, dropped into a huddled heap on the open floor, and subjected to a drawn-out performance of stomping and kicking in full view of the camera. Like fake wrestling, except these guys thought fake wrestling was real.
    “Looks like Felix Rose,” I said. Rose was gang affiliated though none too special, making it likely we were watching a little fringe-level payback.
    “What I wouldn’t give for some tear gas and high-powered rifles,” Pinckney said.
    “Just give me a fire hose,” I added, sharing his frustration. The COs couldn’t do a thing while the range was out of control. Rules were absurdly strict in handling crisis situations. You needed to negotiate for calm, practically beg the men to stop. You even had to keep providing their meals. Forgoing brute force or hunger as a deterrent, you were left only with boredom—eventually, having nothing better to do, the inmates allowed you to resume control of the situation. For the COs it was humiliating because it clarified the degree to which the inmates were truly running the asylum. Pinckney told me to have fun.
    In the lockers behind Keeper’s office, I got my gear on, a chest protector and