WORDS

WORDS

Michael Welge

         That day, I had a bad feeling about Arnie. He was in one of his moods. When he got like that, it was always best to try to avoid him. He could be obstinate, obdurate, obstructionistic, and, in general, just pretty damned hard to get along with. Most of the other inmates were keyed in to the situation, as were the CO's--- the Corrections Officers; what most of you folks would call the prison guards.

         As usual, Bad Bird was clueless, and he was displaying his usual bad attitude. Those traits are how he got the Bad Bird tag--- he was a birdbrain, and he was nasty mean. Bad Bird was more than nine years into a sixty month sentence--- additional time having twice been added for getting into fights that caused "...great bodily injury..." to fellow inmates--- and had three years more to serve. No, Bad Bird wasn't too bright, but, on the other hand, he didn't really give a damn.

         Yeah, if Arnie and Bad Bird got together, it could make for a truly precipitous situation. And, as the Fates would have it, the two clashed in the gym, right in the aisle between the treadmills and the stationary cycles.

         If anybody saw what set off their confrontation, nobody was saying. Of course, that was par for the course--- in prison nobody ever admits to seeing anything that was not supposed to be happening.

         My first intimation that something was out of order was when I heard Bad Bird disparaging Arnie in a loudly bellowed series of obscenities, profanities, and vulgarities.

         "And I repeat," Arnie countered in a soft voice, "are you a congenital idiot, or do you spend all of your days practicing?"

         "Are you callin' me dumb?" Bad Bird shouted. "Are you callin' me stupid, you..." He proceeded to tack on another series of foul expletives, thereby questioning Arnie's heritage, his parentage, his sexuality, and several of his possible sexual proclivities before starting to wind down.

         Arnie still did not raise his voice. Instead, he quietly replied, "I think the matter is self-evident."

         "You're callin' me stupid, ain't you?" Bad Bird screamed. After launching another volley of vituperation, he looked around and asked, "He's callin' me stupid, ain't he?"

         As he asked the fatal question, he looked right at Geek, a former carny who was always willing to see trouble stirred up or to stir it himself, as long as he wasn't caught in the middle. "Sure sounds that way to me, Bird," Geek agreed, nodding his head vigorously.

         About that time, two of the rec CO's had come to realize that something was going on that should not be going on. They started to cross the gym toward the small crowd that had gathered around Arnie and Bad Bird. Their actions were much too little much too late.

         Bad Bird whipped out his shiv. Not one of those little shivs made by sharpening a pen or a comb--- no, Bad Bird had found a hacksaw blade somewhere and had put a razor's edge on it. He struck outward and upward, the blade cleaving Arnie from belly button to throat. Blood gushed forth, and Arnie fell back, dead almost before he hit the floor.

         As the CO's closed in, Bad Bird threw down his shiv. "It ain't my fault," he declared. "He called me stupid."

         One or both of the rec CO's had hit his panic button, and CO's came pouring into the gym from all over the compound. Bad Bird was handcuffed and led off to the SHU--- the Segregated Housing Unit, generally known to the public as "solitary" or to inmates as "The Hole." The rest of us were ushered back to our units and locked down for the next twenty-four hours.

         Before we were all led from the gym, I got one final look at Arnie, lying lifeless in a spreading crimson pond of his own blood, his eyes staring upward, placid pools of death.