Rizzo, page 1
RIZZO
A NOVELLA IN THE WORLD OF ‘STONE’
HO CHE ANDERSON
Based on characters created by OTIS WHITAKER
Illustrated by BENJAMIN MARRA
Cover design by WBYK
Published by NeoText, 2020
Copyright © 2020 Ho Che Anderson and Otis Whitaker
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in
any form or by any means without permission of the author.
All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, is purely coincidental.
DENNIS
MOHAMED
RHINO
1
SWAMP RED
EVERY MORNING they awoke to the sound of dogs.
Even before the bell sounded or the boots started yelling and
hitting their sticks against metal, it was the dogs barking, excited to
be dogs doing what dogs do, that signaled it was go time.
Rizzo sat on the edge of his bunk, watching his breath wisp and
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H O C H E A N D E R S O N
dissipate, listening to the hounds, trying to isolate one bark in
particular. Nothing.
Now came the boots, barking loud as the dogs. The only
detainees who required a little incentive to rise from a short troubled
sleep were the new ones, not yet used to existence as an ex-human,
the ones still clinging to the memory of when their lives were their
own. A broken finger, plus a work detail minus their footwear, plus a
garnished day’s rations and the fish soon realized down whose
stream they swam.
Rizzo at the front of the twelve-man line, gang leader and not a
job he ever wanted, ever asked for. But Rizzo was Rizzo. Six-six, two-
forty-five, all of it muscle and brains. So there he stood on point, the
first to have his hands cuffed and chains shackled to his ankles. The
dogs sniffing his crotch and his crack, leaving wet patches. The bulk
of the chain weighing him down, hurting his joints, making it diffi-
cult to walk, to work, to think, to breathe, that weight, always there,
even when the shackles were removed.
Out of the chain house they marched, past tent city and the
canteen and on toward the kennel. Rizzo spotted what he was
looking for: the cage just outside the kennel. Empty this morning.
Rizzo’s eyes swept the grounds, searching, seeing nothing but broken
men, crumbling brick and concrete walls, barbed wire, and shabby
canvas tents.
Yelling and scuffling at eight o’clock. The entire chain turned to
watch two boots dragging a detainee by the ankles from one of the
tents out to the yard. Screaming for his mother. His hands bound
behind his back, a rope strung through the binding. Watched the
boots put the rope into a metal loop in the rafter of a burned out
portable at the base of the smoke stack, and hoist the man two feet
off the ground by his wrists. Basic stress position.
“Eyes forward, detainee,” the boot demanded.
“Sir,” Rizzo said, watching the stain form and spread in the man’s
crotch. If only shutting out his screams were as easy as looking away.
Rizzo
13
“Chain-hut!” Rizzo yelled, and the men stood at attention, all of
them by now veterans of the chain gang.
They marched past the train tracks leading around the mountain
and into the camp, marched beneath the flashing red neon
“vacancy” sign hanging beneath the South guard tower and out of
the grounds of the Mountainview Detention and Re-education
Residence, and as they marched, Rizzo led the chant:
There goes Swamp Red
Swamp Red, he’s long dead
He’s long dead, long dead
If I’d only listened
What the yard they say
I’d have saved them bank notes
‘Stead of drunk them all away
Instead I laid down my hat
Got to running ‘round
Missed a few payments
Found myself big house bound
They call me Swamp Red
You wanna know why?
Mama told me I was a man
So I rose and looked the man in the eye
There goes Swamp Red
Swamp Red, He’s long dead...
Those words kept the men in step. Kept their heads in the game.
Kept them unified, a team, comrades in misery and degradation. He
never wanted the job but Rizzo had to admit leading the chain was
in many ways like leading his warriors on the court. Those years as a
baller had prepared him for moving the chain along better than he
could have imagined in even his darkest fantasies.
But that was all over now, if it had ever really existed. It’s possible
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H O C H E A N D E R S O N
that life was something that had only ever played out in his mind.
Right now the chain was the only thing that felt real. The chain and
the cold.
Through the forest and down the mountain they marched, past
the dorms for the women and the one for the children. Two sets of
junior chain gangs filed past them, boys and girls, the oldest no
more than thirteen, on their way to an endless day of breaking rocks
with sledgehammers and moving the stones and shards out with
shovels and wheelbarrows. Because the state and the corporations
behind it were generous and kind, children only worked nine-hour
days. That generosity did not extend to three full meals per day,
ensuring for many of them a stunted growth physically and mentally
even if they were to escape the gang through means other than
death.
Rizzo pushed these thoughts from his mind, focusing instead on
the tale of Swamp Red as he emerged from the bog and enacted
revenge against the men who had laid him there.
On an empty stomach the gang marched. The boots rode in
transports and sipped coffee. They marched past people staring at
them from the windows of their cars or their homes. They saw no
one without a barrier between them. The locals knew that when the
chain marched through town you kept something between them
and you.
A vast field on the outskirts of the town, the gravestones on its
edge slowly proliferating. Once it had been an open area the town
kids congregated in, away from their parents controlling eyes. Then,
in a rare and unrepeatable moment of compassion, the town had
allowed some of the land to be used as a burial ground for the
homeless and a generational change had been made.
Rizzo watched four kids on the far end of the field—was that
basketball they were playing? Practicing this early, in this cold? Out
here in Buttfuck, Nowhere? Rizzo had to nod his head. He watched
as the kids stopped what they were doing and peered back at the
Rizzo
15
mass of detainees and guards and transport trucks forming down by
the boneyard.
“How many times today am I gonna have to tell you to keep your
fucking eyes on your fucking work, detainee?” Detention Officer
Shaquile yelled at Rizzo—known more popularly as DO Shitheel by
his fans in the chain house.
“Sorry, sir, won’t happen again,” Rizzo said. Another boot
unshackled the gang from each other and Rizzo directed some of his
guys to help unload their gang’s designated truck.
Four gangs had gathered this morning to spend their shift
digging graves for the indigent. One gang connected a series of large
heaters to generators and started blasting hot air at the ground; a
futile endeavor no doubt, but when trying to break frozen ground
even scumbag criminals and air tax evaders needed all the help they
could get.
Rizzo helped unload his gang’s master lowering device to lower
the casket, metal detectors to find the grave markers, planks of wood
to mark the new grave borders. When he was done he helped
distribute shovels and pick axes. Rizzo judged they weighed about
the same as the M15s the boots wielded. He looked back at the kids
by the courtyard. They’d lost interest in the chain gang. One of them
threw a hook from twenty feet back. The ball caught air and sailed
through the net without hitting the rim.
Rizzo smiled. It was time to get to work.
2
THREE CARTONS
RIZZO AND COLE rolled the tiny casket along the placers. Velez
waited by the crank, ready to pop the break on the lowering device,
not that they really needed anything that fancy for a casket this
small.
Wa
at the head of the grave and called the men around it. It was the fifth
burial of the day but the first time Walton had chosen to speak. The
first time he had ever spoken since Rizzo had dug his first grave on
the chain.
“This burial is for a child just three months old,” Walton said. “A
month given to every member of the trinity before they saw fit to
bring her home. Let us pause a moment and pray for all the children
of the world. If some of you have children you will never again see,
remember them. Remember all those who are abused and left to die
like this innocent soul. Pray that someday there will be an end to
violence of any kind. Pray for the parents that abandoned their child
and reflect on the pain they will have to endure until their reckon-
ing. Pray for justice. Pray the sun will rise on the soul of man.”
The cheap cloth casket was returned to the earth without
another word.
Rizzo
17
The men dug. Members of every tribe, the Kinfolk, the Woods,
the Pisces, the Chicanos, the Gold Mountain, marching, digging,
dying, side by side. They may have eaten and bunked with their own
kind back in the chain house but on the chain itself every shade
formed the same pile of dirt.
“You see that calamity this morning walking outta there?”
Simonson said to no one in particular.
“I didn’t see shit,” Cole said. “Neither did you.”
“Who was that kid?” Simonson said. “I ain’t never seen him
before.”
Rizzo stopped digging and removed his coat, overheating despite
the cold.
“I seen him,” Xochitl said. “Come up through Arizona, come in
here making a whole lot of noise about this and that, lotta talk. Inno-
cent of whatever brought him here, hear him tell it. Me and Rizzo
was both there his first day on the yard.”
Everyone turned to Rizzo. “You know that fish, Riz?” asked
Chung.
Rizzo stiffened. “Like Cole said. I don’t know shit. And neither do
any of you.”
“What I know is that kid cut off a couple toes thinking if he
couldn’t walk he’d be able to sidle out of fourteen hours outside
building roads in the snow,” Xochitl said, staring at Rizzo with his
remaining eye. “I know they’re making an example of that white
boy.”
Hezekiah hocked a loober into the grave-in-progress, two feet
deep. “Guess we’re not all cut out for the chain, boys.”
Rizzo, still staring back at Xochitl, sensed the commotion
moments before he saw the movement of the boots in his peripheral
or heard their barking amplified by bullhorn. DO Shitheel’s voice
rose above all:
“DETAINEES! STOP YOUR WORK IMMEDIATELY! DROP
WHAT YOU’RE HOLDING AND ASSUME FORMATION!”
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H O C H E A N D E R S O N
Rizzo immediately took his place at the head of the line,
followed by O’Riordan, Cole, Velez, Simonson, Xochitl, Hezekiah,
Chung, and the rest of the twelve-man chain, a well-oiled machine
from months working as a unit, military in their background, mili-
tary in their precision.
The four gangs were lined up along the edge of the gravestones,
facing the heavily armed ten-member guard unit. DO Shitheel
paced along the line using his bullhorn.
“Detainees. Our sincere apologies for the interruption in your
work. You can thank one of your fellow cuntwipes for the disrup-
tion of our schedule, a schedule, for the record, I personally
designed on my own time, on my own initiative. We’ve been
informed that a surprise SRT raid conducted this morning back at
Mountainview revealed the existence of contraband in tent city,
would anyone like to step forward with any information? Anything
at all.”
Men looked around at each other. No one moved or said a word.
“No?” Shitheel continued. “Perhaps I’m not being specific
enough, this was contraband of a, shall we say, edible nature?”
A ripple, starting at the end of the line and making its way to
Rizzo. He looked over, saw an older Pisces in another gang shuffling
his feet. He knew the detainee a little, name of Asturias, he was old
school Mexican, lived and worked over the Rio Grande twenty years
successfully without the need to learn much English then got busted
in a fluke raid on his place of business and found himself on the
chain mining and digging despite arthritis bending his hands near
into stumps. That same shitty luck had targeted him again this
morning.
Shitheel noticed his foot shuffling too. He nodded to a couple of
the boots who were on the old timer in a shot, unshackling him from
his gang, hauling him off his feet and dumping him on the ground in
front of Shitheel.
Another ripple along the line, an angry one. Jeers and cries and
Rizzo
19
hollers, cut off as some of the boots raised their carbines and
pointed them at the detainees.
“You pieces of shit forget whose toilet you’re floating in?”
Shitheel said. When there was no response he turned his attention
back to the old Pisces. “Anything you’d like to confess to your
cohorts, detainee?”
Asturias on his knees, afraid to look Shitheel in the eyes,
speaking rapidly in Spanish.
“We speak English on the chain, detainee! English! If you will not
confess, I will confess on your behalf. Not one. Not two. But three.
Three cartons of milk, discovered on the light fixture above your
bunk. Wanna know how they found it? Milk dripping down onto
your mattress. You put one of them right beside the bulb, you
fucking greaser, it exploded on you. If you hadn’t been so greedy,
taken just one, who knows, you probably wouldn’t have gotten away
with it but who knows. But no, you see fit to take three and shove ‘em
up there. Your inside in the canteen, your familia, he’s already given
you up in case you were planning on, oh, I don’t know—”
Asturias, making the mistake of grabbing at Shitheel’s ankle as
he begged, understanding enough English to know that he was
fucked.
Shitheel kicked him the face. The old man howled and hit the
dirt, whimpering as Shitheel got down and personal.
“You fucking touch me? You are never to touch a DO, ever,
detainee!”
Rizzo looked around at the men—the tide of anger rising among
the four gangs, showing it despite the presence of fingers hovering
over triggers. Various cries now to leave the old man alone.
“He’s just an old Mexican, man, what does he know, can’t barely
speak the language,” someone called out, probably louder than they
meant to, a voice from the Woods that Rizzo didn’t recognize.
Without hesitation Shitheel unholstered his taser, marched over
to the detainee, put the weapon against his balls and squeezed the
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H O C H E A N D E R S O N
trigger. The man chomped down on his tongue and dropped to the
ground, quivering violently and gurgling as he foamed at the mouth.
The men surrounding him jumped back, their chains stopping them
from retreating very far.
“Don’t call me, ‘man’. You are to refer to me as, 'Sir'. Or Detention
Officer Shaquile. Or God. Those are your options.” Shitheel took his
finger off the trigger and the man’s quivering eased but only just.
Shitheel stood and addressed his audience. “I just don’t under-
stand you detainees. The house feeds you. Clothes you. Shelters you.
Provides you with an opportunity to atone for your crimes and rein-
vent yourselves as productive members of society instead of the
leeching maggots you’ve lived your lives as, and this is how you
repay us? By stealing from us? By stealing from yourselves? If one of
