🕯️🕯️"Goliath" by Tochi Onyebuchi

“He’s got brothers know he’s been arrested.”

“Ain’t had no chance to reach ’em, tell ’em where he’s goin’.”

The sheriff looks for something to hit, tightens his grip on the reins. And because Cayenne is a Special and a marshal and somehow still alive for breathing in planet-poisoned air after all this time, Cayenne cannot be hit. “We’re sure he’s takin’ us to the body? You talked to him during your ride down here. That what he said?”

Cayenne sniffs and spits. “He didn’t say much worth repeatin’.”

The sheriff follows suit, squints at the rolling lumps of hillside in the distance, at the desert past that, doesn’t trust any of it. “Haulin’ us out into the goddamn Whiteland wilderness is what he’s doin’.” He halts his horse. Cayenne clips ahead, then stops, turns around, sees the sheriff cast that calamitous, not-born-yesterday-on-the-lookout gaze over the desert. “I’ve had about enough of this.”

He wheels his horse around, and Cayenne sits quietly atop hers as the mustachioed, ample-bellied, thick-armed sheriff rides to the prisoner’s coach, dismounts, and drags the prisoner out, yanking him by his rope. Cayenne quiets her horse beneath her as the sheriff drags the prisoner across the ground, raising small puffs of dirt, drags him to a small copse of sagebrush and kicks him, twice in the legs, then angles toward the stomach, then the head, each kick building in wordless fury. Cayenne’s deputy trots to her side and the two watch the prisoner’s resistance diminish until each kick becomes an already-accepted fact of existence and it is only the prisoner’s duty to bear it.

It’s the own man’s folly that’s got him here, Cayenne tells herself, on the ground taking a beating from a lesser man than he. And the marshal wonders why the prisoner doesn’t just open his mouth, acquiesce to the strangling, and vomit the location of the body that’s surely buried somewhere in this country. Then she chides herself for wondering. If the train ride proved nothing else, it proved that there was no knowing some white men. That there were those who bled red like her but were governed by impulses alien to her, driven by foreign engines, and that the hurt and the pain that some fled from, others ran toward. White folks were, to one degree or another, predisposed to madness even before the War.

The sheriff’s boot comes off the prisoner’s cheek, then thuds in the man’s stomach again and the sheriff stands over the prisoner, huffing, spittle dripping down his chin. Realizing himself, he wipes it from his mouth then stalks back to his horse, leaving the man’s rope in the dirt.

Breeze from nowhere stirs the prisoner’s clothes.

Cayenne dismounts, walks to the man, gathering rope as she approaches, and turns the man over to see his blood spilling from gashes on his face. The prisoner spits out a tooth, coughs phlegmy red strings into the brush, then comes up to one knee. He topples over, and Cayenne slips the man’s arm over her shoulder, the rope coiled in her free hand, and notices there’s no smile on the prisoner’s face.

“You got a cigarette?” the prisoner asks in a whisper before they get close to the caravan.

Cayenne pretends not to hear, helps the man slowly mount the steps against broken ribs and a new blood-rich cough. She waits while the prisoner takes his seat, then pulls a rolled cigarette out of her shirt pocket.

“The hell you doin’?” the sheriff bellows.

Cayenne looks at him, the gesture explanation enough.

“Put that away. Don’t give ’im that.” The sheriff stomps to where Cayenne stands, snatches the cigarette from her fingers, then looks to the prisoner. “He ain’t gettin’ shit till he’s earned it.” And stomps toward his horse, forgetting that Cayenne is the federal authority of this party of lawmen for the duration of this search, remembering that Cayenne is Black.

Cayenne mounts alongside her deputy, who had remained atop his horse the whole time, and the caravan resumes its course until they come across a stream, whereupon Cayenne dismounts, helps the prisoner down from his coach, and washes the man’s face with water.

The river is already dark, but Cayenne thinks she can see where the man’s blood renders the river violet. She can’t tell. She pauses in the act of drying the prisoner’s face and, on the man’s cheeks, the glistening water melds with the streaks of half-dried blood, like tears.

Almost as though he had been crying.

HER horse moves beneath her.

Her lids drift closed in half sleep.

She removes her hat, wipes sweat from her forehead with her forearm, squints through the stinging moisture.

The sheriff’s horse clops at the same steady pace behind her, the carriages rolling softly over rocks and snakeskin. Cayenne tries to shake herself into wakefulness, fits her hat to her head.

The caravan moves onward.

Something pointed and invisible knifes Cayenne in her chest. She sees a young man’s face in the waking dream that haunts her, and it is Jacob’s face. The air is thick with him, his smell, the heaviness of his voice, the swelter of his rage. Then Lincoln’s dark, star-dappled face fills her vision. Placid, settled but all the more terrifying for carrying Jake’s rage too. I left you, she wants to hiss and weep at once. Leave me alone.

A homestead looms in the twilit distance.

[May 18th, 20—, 12:41 a.m.]

Word got in through the prison admin grapevine about these new inmates, and as soon as they got to Gladden, they were held in keep-lock. Twenty-three hours a day in their cells. Half an hour for rec, sometimes meals brought to their cells, sometimes not. I don’t know what the thinking was but it just made everyone harder, and that’s why we did that first hunger strike. For a lot of the guys, they didn’t even need that much pushing. The food had started to taste worse, and the water was coming in a different color. Kinda had a reddish tint to it, like the dishes and cups they came in were rustier than usual. Was only twenty-four hours, but a few of the guys got sick. Would turn out, they had cancer, and I figured they came from places like I came from, brought a piece of home into prison with them. So you got the sick bay overcrowding and our medical care already left a lot to be desired. But it was getting bad for some of the guys. Vomiting and some had sores coming up on their skin, nasty stuff. Real nasty stuff. Either the prison staff didn’t know or they didn’t care what was going on. Besides, only quarantine option was to throw the sick guys in AdSeg. Some of the guys caught fever, others got really bad headaches. After the hunger strike, the commish sent word to Gen Pop that he was willing to hear our grievances. By now, some of the guards were starting to worry too. We noticed that there was a lot more bottled water on their side of the bars. There were some staff reductions and that didn’t make things any less tense. You had a lot more guards calling in sick. Some mighta actually been sick. Some probably just figured the overtime wasn’t worth walking through what the place was turning into.

Now, if you look at Gladden from above, get some drone footage, you see there’s a spine in the middle, connected at the long ends by an overground tunnel to two main admin buildings. Then on each side of the spine, you got these smaller, what we called “dorms” or housing units. They look like butterfly wings. You had about 250 inmates to a dorm, but apparently, the day of what happened, there were about forty staff on hand to handle about fifteen hundred, sixteen hundred inmates.

Anyway, everybody’s already tense, and we go out into the yard for our rec time, and two of the guys from my dorm start getting into it. Turns into a little scuffle, nothing big. Couple of the other guys watch, some of the younger dudes wanna jump in, because they ain’t get the violence they came in here with drugged outta them yet. But one of the COs comes over to break it up. I think the guy’s name was Roof or Ruuf or something. I remember us thinking it was funny, what his name was. He comes over, and usually when that happens, there’s a little bit of shouting and everyone calms down. But, for whatever reason, maybe it was the wrong kinda summer-hot—you know, the type that gets angry kids out on the stoop, the type that gets kids shooting each other, that type—but Officer Roof comes over and tries to calm people down, and before you know it, Joaquin—he was Freddie’s friend—he hits the CO. Right in the chest. He didn’t get him across the face or nothing, nothing to leave a bruise or anything like that. But he hit dude so hard he took a couple steps back. Maybe Roof was just stunned more than anything else. Like he couldn’t believe something like that could happen to him. As scared as the COs are all the time, they still fancy themselves some kind of invincible, you get what I’m saying? Anyway, Roof goes back to the other guards, and gets one or two of ’em—I think it was two—to come back. And by now, everyone’s pretty shook, as tense and jumpy as we all been. Because we know something evil’s about to happen to Joaquin. But the guards that come, they just say that there ain’t gonna be no reprisals, no payback. They get that everybody’s tense, conditions have been rough. And the guy’s actually talking about what we been going through. Like he gets it.

Anyway, next day when our block’s off to breakfast, Joaquin’s cell won’t open. He’s been put in keep-lock. And we figure we know what’s gonna happen if we leave him alone. They already don’t need a reason to beat you, but because of what he did, they just might kill him. So we stop. Right there in the hall. None of us move. Somebody says we ain’t eatin’ if Joaquin ain’t eatin’ with us. Then another guy chimes in with the same. Pretty soon, we’re all sayin’ that out loud, and, sure enough, they pop the lock on Joaquin’s cell, and he makes it to mess with us. Turns out, it was the CO who popped the lock, and he called an audible. None of that went through the higher-ups. We didn’t know that at the time.

Now, it’s standard procedure to have all the gates open at times of the day when there’s a lot of foot traffic. By the time we’re heading back from breakfast, word comes down that our dorm ain’t gettin’ rec time. None of us. Apparently, letting Joaquin out was some sort of security violation, even though none of us was really responsible for that. Wanna know how we find out we ain’t gettin’ rec time? We get to our gate to get out into the yard, and it’s locked. Nobody told the CO, either. That’s right. Singular. One CO.

There’s another group coming back from mess and they’re in our dorm too. They see that we’ve been locked in our tunnel, and they figure out pretty quickly that it happened on purpose. The COs start ordering us to stay in line, but soon as you hear that quiver in their voice, you know it’s over. I can’t remember who snapped. Mighta been somebody who wanted to protect Joaquin or maybe somebody who wanted revenge for their cellmates—couple guys had got it bad from COs last week for another yard incident—or maybe it was one of the metal shop boys. [Note: the previous April, a work stoppage organized by Muslim inmates at Wateree River Correctional Institution turned into a six-month protest against the conditions of confinement, which included a lack of religious reading material and violation of dietary restrictions during Ramadan. Violent reprisals occurred just after that year’s Eid al-Fitr celebration and dozens of the victims were subsequently transferred to Gladden. The event is known as the Eid Uprising.] But all of a sudden everyone’s lashing out. It’s like don’t nobody care about these guys carrying guns or pepper spray or nothin’. Doesn’t take long to overwhelm them. One of the guards, pretty quick actually, has blood streaming down his face. I mean, comin’ down in waterfalls. And I ain’t got no grudge against them personally. Whole time I’ve been in, I’ve managed to dodge the worst of what happens here. But you could see on some of the guys, they had the sores, and I seen some of the guys in there that had been coughing up blood. Seemed like after mess, even more guys had gotten sick. We wouldn’t find out till much later that there was stuff wrong with our food and water. There’s theories that we were being poisoned. Some sick way of reducing the prison population. Call it “reform.” But I known it was the reactor.

There was a nuclear station. V.C. Summer Nuclear Station. In Jenkinsville. Fairfield County. See, there’s Fairfield County, then east of that, Kershaw. Then, next is us.

THE place is a mystery to me.

I can’t figure out how that cow in their yard manages not to look sickly or how storms haven’t already pulverized their house into nothingness or how the beginnings of a community (seen in the distance, but of which this homestead is very much a part) can contemplate itself in so barren a wasteland. It is a different post-apocalypse than what had swept other parts of Texas that Spooks had charioted through and claimed with their flags. If that was the barrenness of after, this is the barrenness of before. Makes me think of what the Earth mighta looked like before the Lord spoke its flourishing into being. Before He conjured up plants and healthy animals and people to eat them. When the place wasn’t yet meant for living.

And it shows on the homesteaders’ faces. The man with a hat that’s falling apart and a gun in his hands in about the same condition and that defiant snarl-frown melted on his face by the desert’s night-heat. The wife in a threadbare gown, standing in the doorway, backlit by an oil lamp as her cow-faced daughters stir to wakefulness. The homesteader stares us down. Every muscle hardened by difficulty, every wrinkle in his face and elbows chiseled there by bad luck and climate, by calamity and cataclysm and misfortune.

They look feral more than anything else.

I wonder, then, stepping down from the carriage—minding my ribs—to stare at them alongside the gravediggers, when was the last time they saw this many humans at once.

The sheriff detaches from our group and, with the marshal at his side, ambles over to the homesteader, who hasn’t let his gun drop an inch, and the three speak in whispers, mostly the sheriff speaking with the odd, brief declamation from the marshal, and the homesteader listening in coiled silence. The homesteader sees that the marshal is Black. Maybe he wonders if she’s come into Whiteland to kill him. Maybe he wonders what she’s doing with all these whites that are somehow, by the grace of God, still breathing.

The marshal breaks away from them to contemplate the landscape alone, and after a few more moments the sheriff returns and the deputies leave their wagons and follow him back into the homesteader’s building. One of them holds the other end of my rope and pulls me forward, lest I think I’ve been forgotten.