Chapter 27
Tabatha Christa Brenckmann was tired and fractious the first time her father laid eyes on her. He would have taken her in his arms in a flash if his hands had not been chained to the table at which two lumbering, sweating oafs in grimy prison guard uniforms had sat him in the humid, dirty visiting hall. His table was one of twenty and the squalling of babies and the ceaseless clamour of insensible, incomprehensible chatter had been wearing him down until he set eyes on his daughter.
No physical contact.
That seemed to be the only rule but it was applied with immense determination by the guards who patrolled the rooms wielding dark night sticks, all of which had had lumps chewed out of them; presumably from frequent employment over a period of many years. Everything in the prison was old, neglected, in need of care, attention, patching up or renewal. What with one thing and another the California Correctional System was clearly not at the top of Governor Brown’s list of priorities.
In fact it probably was not on any of the ‘action this decade’ lists in the Office of the Governor of California in Sacramento.
NO PHYSICAL CONTACT.
That was unnecessarily cruel even in an overcrowded concentration camp like the California Institute for Men. No concentration camp was unfair, at least a guy got two, sometimes three half-way square meals a day in this dump. Assuming somebody did not put a knife in his ribs or brain him with a brick for not having the right expression on his face when he was unknowingly walking past a psychopath, Sam could be relatively confident that he was not about to starve to death in the ‘CIM’.
Judy sniffed back her tears; and tried desperately hard to be brave.
“Tabatha Christa,” she blurted. “I lied to them about us being married. Being married makes things simpler…”
“Tabatha,” Sam Brenckmann muttered, gazing distractedly to his daughter and up to his lover’s face, lost in his wonder.
“Tabatha with an ‘a’ not an ‘i’,” Judy explained, knowing she was gabbling. “Sabrina said it should be with an ‘i’ but I said I’d seen you write it with an ‘a’ in the lyrics of Tabatha’s Gone…”
Sam parents had been so surprised by his kid sister’s safe and healthy birth that, normally regular people, they had lost the plot when Tabatha had been born and they had been required to register her birth.
“Ma and Pa were so relieved that Tabatha was okay after all the things the doctors had said when Ma got pregnant that they spelled Tabatha wrong on all the hospital forms,” Sam told Judy, “and by the time they found out they’d spelled it wrong it was too late. Anyways, they decided they liked Tabatha with an ‘a’ better than with an ‘i’.”
Judy was cradling their daughter in her arms, holding her a little above the level of the table. The table was bolted to the floor, as were the chairs in which she and Sam sat. The chairs were made for six foot tall felons, not more daintily built new mothers struggling to introduce their babies to their fathers for the first time.
“Christa?” Sam asked.
“It was my aunt’s middle name. I always liked it.”
Judy’s aunt had lived in Chilliwack, British Columbia; Chilliwack and a large oval swathe of the Fraser Valley had ceased to exist on the night of the October War.
“Oh.”
“They wouldn’t let Sabrina or Vincent Meredith in.”
“Bummer.” Sam’s expression was momentarily quizzical. “Who is Vincent?”
“He’s your attorney. Sabrina hired him.”
“Oh, right.”
“The cops said you were shot, sweetheart?”
“Buckshot. I was as sore as Hell for a couple of days but as you can see I can sit down again now, babe.”
Judy rocked her daughter; realising with a start that her baby had quietened and was myopically peering around her. She stared at the cuffs on Sam’s wrists and the retaining ring which meant he could not more his hands more than an inch in any direction. Sam’s right cheek was puffy, his eye darkened.
“I’ll be okay,” he insisted the moment he sensed what she was thinking. “I’m a tough guy, remember.”
Judy tried to force a smile.
If Sam Brenckmann had not been a tough guy they would both surely have died last winter in the nightmare of the refugee camps of British Columbia and the holding cages of Tacoma.
“They said I had twenty minutes,” Judy apologised like it was her fault. “What actually happened at The Troubadour last week, Sam?”
Sam hesitated.
“It’s all a bit blurry,” he confessed by way of a preface to his account. “I was on stage and suddenly the whole place was in flames. I didn’t hang about. I just got out of there. It was like being back in that camp in Tacoma, I suppose. I just did what I had to do to get out of there. I probably stomped all over people.” He felt bad about that but what was he supposed to do? Burn to death? Suffocate in the smoke letting other people get out first? “Out in the parking lot people were falling over and puking up their guts. Me, too, I suppose. Then two guys, bikers, came out of nowhere. They were looking mean, swinging chains. Doug Weston let them have both barrels before I knew what was going on. That’s when I got hit with half-a-dozen lumps of buckshot.”
Judy frowned. That was not the way the cops had told it to Sabrina or to Vincent Meredith.
“One of the bikers was bleeding real bad,” Sam continued. “I tried to apply pressure to the worst wound,” he shrugged, “I stuffed by jacket into it but the cops weren’t interested in helping the poor guy when they arrived. The only thing they wanted to do was jump on me and Doug like that was what they planned to do all along.”
Judy chewed her lower lip.
“Tabatha Christa,” the man smiled.
“We didn’t really talk about names,” Judy said defensively.
“Tabatha Christa is just fine,” Sam said hurriedly, feeling their time together fast ebbing away.
“Good, I was worried….”
Sam ached to reach out and touch Judy.
“We’ll do the marriage thing when I get out of here,” he offered.
“We don’t have to.”
Sam fixed his eyes on his baby daughter and then sought Judy’s troubled eyes.
“I think we do,” he murmured almost inaudibly in the background mush of voices and babies caterwauling.
When the warders called time about five minutes later and ignored all protests about how long everybody was ‘supposed’ to have; Judy was swept out of the hall in the slow, grumbling crush of bodies.
She was reunited with Sabrina and Vincent Meredith in the darkness.
“How is he?” Sabrina demanded bouncing up and down with uncontainable existential angst.
“Sam is Sam,” Judy sniffed, philosophically. “He looks a bit scarecrow and somebody gave him a black eye. He says he’s still sore from getting shot at The Troubadour but sitting down is okay now.”
“Did you tell him what the Police said happened at The Troubadour?” Vincent Meredith prompted as he began to shepherd the two women back to where he had parked his Lincoln. His eyes darted all the time, wary of any sign of danger.
“No,” Judy admitted. She recounted what Sam had said to her which was nothing like the LAPD’s story.
The attorney listened.
“Okay, at least we know what we’re dealing with now.”
“The Police lied about what happened!” Sabrina hissed angrily.