Lightning Coggins (Cumberland Saga)

 Lightning Coggins had not been called by his given name, except when in front of a judge, since he had received his first prison tatt. It was supposed to be an SS tatt on his forehead but the artist had botched the pencil lead-and-spit tatt so that it looked like a couple of confused lightning bolts searching for the ground. Henry, could live with that. Thankfully, he had received the tatts before Harry Potter was popular.

Six-foot-two and 220 pounds, Lightning was fitter and angrier than 98% of the general population. In prison, he was just another prisoner.

Lightning hated niggers, spics and country-club whites. He didn’t even get along with most Skin-heads even though that is the group he identified with.

Most of the “niggers” were bigger than he was and more muscular.

Lightning easily outweighed any one “spic” but you never fought just one spic, they all joined in. And you could count on one of the spics who joined in to have a shiv, even if it was just a temple broken from a set of eyeglasses, stiffened with adhesive tape stolen from the dispensary and sharpened on a concrete floor. Lightning has seen one of those used on the eye of a fellow neo-Nazi. It had not been pretty.

Lightning was doing hard time. It was his third trip to prison and he knew the score. Not too many people messed with him and, mostly, he didn’t go looking for trouble. That was not a trivial task. He had a volcanic temper and only controlled his rage with great effort. But, as stated earlier, he was just another prisoner. The prison was filled with virtual clones of Lightning.

Nobody was more surprised than he was when he got released.

The ACLU had filed suit against the state corrections department because the system was inherently racist since there were a disproportionate number of Blacks in prison relative to the population.

The skids had been greased beforehand. The new, Progessive Attorney General settled out-of-court (as had been the plan all along). The new, Progressive Governor signed the pardons and all Blacks with “simple” drug possession convictions were released as perpetrators of “victimless crimes”.

Conservatives attempted to raise public awareness. They claimed that “simple drug possession” convictions were almost always a plea-bargain where the defense attorney bowed to the inevitable and accepted the slam-dunk case based on the indisputable fact that their client had been found in possession of over 25 grams of a controlled substance in return for the non-pursuit of the constellation of the more difficult(and expensive)-to-prosecute charges their clients were also undoubtedly guilty of.

The media ignored the conservatives’ warnings and heaped praise and laud on the officials who “sought to undue the systemic racism blah, blah, blah, blah…”

As predictable as the rising sun, after the peoples-of-color who had copped a plea to the “Possession” charge had been released, the ACLU filed another suit that claimed that retaining white prisoners for charges that had not been sufficient to keep prisoners-of-color in the pen was inherently racist.

This had all been planned in smoke-filled-rooms in posh resorts beforehand. The smoke was from cannabis, but that is a trifling detail.

The AGs and Governors in countless states “accepted the inevitable” and released/pardoned vast numbers of white convicts, and at the same time reduced  the drain on their budgets by $40,000 per year for each prisoner they released.

And that is how Henry (aka Lightning) Coggins found himself birthed out into a world that was totally unlike the world he had left 15 years ago.

With the flood of felons being broomed out of the prisons, there was no oxygen for a white, neo-Nazi with no particular skills in large cities.

Fifteen years ago he didn’t have any skills that were in demand in the legal-economy. His skill-set was even more stale now.

He was a sociopath, ADHD and oppositional-defiant. And while not very bright by conventional measures, he possessed an animal cunning. Loathing “niggers”, “spics”, Jews, “rag-heads”, “fags” but most of all hating anybody in a position of authority, Henry decided to relocate to the one region where those undesirables were less common: Rural Appalachia.

And he was going to become a businessman. He was going to make and distribute the one commodity he knew how to make that had street-value.

METH. He was going to ride that pony and ride it hard!