The Endless Fall and Other Weird Fictions

by Jeffrey Thomas

  The girl looked out through the cell’s door, as if she hoped the guard who had locked it only a minute earlier might have a change of heart and come back to release her. “I’m sixteen,” she mumbled.

  At least the girl understood English. Rose said, “Sixteen, huh? Lord almighty. Twenty-eight, here. I’m Rose.”

  “Yeah?” the girl said. But after several moments, without looking around, she said, “Maria.”

  Maria. Well, Rose felt that was enough of an effort on her part. She didn’t want to ask what a sixteen-year-old girl had done to be sentenced here – lest Maria ask her, in turn, what her own crime had been.

  At the time of her arrival at the Yuma Territorial Prison, on October 22nd, 1899, Rose had been given the designation 1551. This number was worn on the front of her respectable blouse with its puffed sleeves and cinched waist, which also bore a tight pattern of thin horizontal lines – a demure and apologetic indication of her status – unlike the men’s uniforms, striped with broader bands of black and white. There were more than three thousand male inmates at the Yuma Territorial Prison, but at this time only eleven females were incarcerated. Their small group, as of today, increased by one.

  The men were stacked six to a cell with one chamber pot between them, but Rose had been fortunate to have a cell to herself these past nine months. (Nine months…nine months…she could have carried a child in that time, and yet it was only the start of a thirty year sentence.) “Fortunate” was a relative consideration, however. The prison was located in the Sonoran Desert, atop a bluff overlooking the Colorado River, and on summer days like this the temperature could reach 120 degrees. Rose had no window in her cell. And she hadn’t truly been alone these past nine months, when one considered the company of lice, bedbugs, and cockroaches. But she had had the luxury of suffering her indignities alone. She had been able to deal with that suffering by sending her mind away, sending it afar, into memories of good times from her childhood and dreams of good times that had never happened. Now, she felt her privacy had been compromised. Now, after having found a way to adapt to her situation, acclimate to it – to accept this existence as her life – she was experiencing an acute sense of punishment all over again. It was as though she, Rose, were the new prisoner, not Maria.

  “I killed my brother Emilio,” Maria muttered with her back to Rose, as if talking to someone out in the hallway. “He called me a whore.” At last she turned around so that Rose, seated on the edge of her bunk, could see that pretty but surly face again. “What about you?”

  Rose hesitated only a second. This had been inevitable, hadn’t it? Best to get it over with. “I killed my husband…William.”

  Maria grinned then. The toothy grin didn’t make her look more pretty; in fact, Rose preferred her looking unhappy.

  Rose decided she hated her.

  Conditions at the prison were unavoidably harsh, owing to the heat and overcrowding, but efforts had been made to enrich the lives of the inmates and one of those efforts was the library. The staff kept the male and female prisoners separate, and so presently the only inmates using the library were women. Rose sat at one of the tables that ran through the center of the room in a long row, while framed portraits of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln watched over her like benign guardians. She had been hunched over the book spread before her – its subject being the marvels of natural history, her favorite book in the library – losing herself in strange untamed lands, open vistas without cages, without men holding guns, when someone sat down on her right so close that their arms touched. She looked up into Maria’s face with its sneering smile...a smile that curled her lip up and exposed her gums, like an animal baring its fangs.

  “So how did you do it, hermosa Rosa? How did you kill your husband?”

  Rose returned her gaze to the book, but could no longer walk within its pages, trod upon distant soil. The book was once more a closed window. “That’s none of your business. I told you all I’m going to say on that.”

  “You didn’t tell me nothing more than his name. William.” Maria drew out the name with mock wistfulness. “Come on now, Rosa,” she purred, “don’t you want me to tell you how I killed my brother Emilio?”

  “No.” Rose didn’t look up. “I don’t want to hear that.”

  “We’re stuck in a cell together, the two of us. Don’t you think you ought to be polite to me?”

  “If you want polite, be polite to me, and don’t ask me about my husband again.”

  Peripherally Rose saw Maria sit back a little in her chair, felt the girl’s glare burn on her skin like the hellish sun that baked them in this oven of adobe and stone. “Maybe I’ll just ask the other girls what they know about it, then.”

  “You do that. I can’t stop you. But you won’t be hearing anything about it from me.”

  Rose continued flipping through the book, feigning nonchalance, waiting for her cellmate to move to another chair to strike up a conversation with someone else. But she didn’t. Maria was now staring down at the book, also, and Rose thought she could sense the anger circulating through the girl’s veins without release. A turned page: picture of a leopard. Another page: cougar.

  “Ah!” Maria said when Rose turned the next page. She reached in front of Rose to tap the black and white illustration with a fingernail. “Tigre.”

  “Jaguar,” Rose said.

  “We say tigre.”

  The densely detailed engraving portrayed a wild-eyed, startled jaguar apparently in the act of clambering up a tree. Rose knew that – though their numbers were diminishing, owing to the guns of man – jaguars could still be found in Mexico and as far north as Arizona. Rose’s husband had had a friend who claimed to have shot one, once, and sold its gorgeous pelt with its camouflage of intricate rosettes. “But you get a black one sometimes,” William had told Rose. He had been drinking when he related this story about his friend, and had reached out suddenly to take Rose’s chin and jerk her head around to face him. “Just like I got me a black one right here. All beautiful on the outside…but a black soul inside.”

  Rose broke free of the memory with a little start. This was not the way she had hoped to be transported when she cracked this book open today.

  “Tepeyollotl,” Maria whispered, as if speaking only to herself, still staring at the jaguar. “He is the god who looks like el tigre. He is the heart of the mountain...the god of dark caves and echoes.”

  Rose didn’t meet her eyes but asked, “Why echoes?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe a long time ago, people didn’t understand who it was talked back to you when you were talking alone.”

  “This is the stuff you Mexicans believe?”

  “The Aztec people. You ever read about them in your books, Rosa?”

  “No…I haven’t.”

  “That’s where we come from. A magic people. But the only magic you believe is Jesús Cristo. That magic...and the magic of love. You loved your William so much, huh? That’s why we kill people, right, Rosa? Because we love them too much, or we hate them too much. You…I think it was love.”

  “You don’t know a goddamned thing about me, little girl. What I’d love is for you to go bother somebody else right now.”

  As if she hadn’t heard her, Maria went on, “I hated Emilio. Always hated him, because he thought I was nothing. He couldn’t see inside of me. I’m not just this raggedy little girl people think they see.” She thumped her breastbone, thrusting out her jaw defiantly. “I don’t like it when people see me as nothing, Rosa. I hope you don’t make that mistake, too.”

  Rose finally cranked her head up slowly to regard the girl. “Why can’t you leave me alone?”

  Maria leaned her face in close. “Because you ain’t alone, pretty Rosa. I’m like your echo.”

  “Get away from me,” Rose said in a barely audible voice.

  “Can’t.”

  Rose broke their gaze, looked down to close the book – like a barred door clanging shut, locking her out
– and maybe Maria felt Rose was dismissing her, saw her as nothing, because that was when the Mexican girl picked up another heavy book from the table and swung it in both hands against the side of Rose’s head.

  The guard who walked alongside Rose had hold of her arm, but not roughly; it was more that he was helping to hold her up. She seemed to hurt all over at once, as if every nerve were a glowing hot wire. Fistfuls of hair had been pulled out of her scalp, her cheeks were plowed with long claw marks, and her muscles felt deeply compressed where Maria had bitten her in the side of the neck. In the prison infirmary they had wound gauze around her throat.

  “That wasn’t smart, Rose,” the guard said. His name was John and he was tall, husky like her William had been, but his voice was soft and more regretful than accusing. “It ain’t often we got to put you ladies in the Dark Cell.”

  “It’s her you ought to be throwing in the hole, John, not me,” she mumbled through her purple, swollen lips.

  “She’s already there, Rose.”

  Rose turned toward him as they walked. “You can’t put the both of us in there!”

  “The both of you were fighting...the both of you have got to pay. People get put in the Dark Cell for less. I’m sorry, but it ain’t up to me.”

  “I was only protecting myself! Look what she did to me!”

  “You gave her some, too, Rose. You closed up both her eyes pretty good. Busted her lip, bloodied her nose. Her face was red from eyes to chin. Course, it wasn’t all her blood. That girl’s an animal, I’ll give you that.”

  “Do you know how she killed her brother?”

  “Don’t know much about that story. Just heard that she made a god-awful mess of him.”

  They were coming close to the chamber they called the Dark Cell. Because it was near to the women’s cells and the library, Rose knew its location well enough, though she herself had never been inside it before. She had heard troublemakers might spend anywhere from one day to a few weeks in the Dark Cell, but she’d also heard of one inmate who had spent over a hundred straight days in there.

  To change the topic of conversation, or maybe to somehow make Rose thankful that she was secure on the inside rather than outside these walls, John said, “Hey, you should see the dust storm moving in out there, Rose. Looks like a solid wall rolling across the world, tall as a mountain. A mountain made of cotton.” He struggled to convey it. “Can’t see past it. Must be quite a thunderstorm stirring up all that dust, pushing in behind it.”

  “Seen them before,” Rose said bitterly.

  “Well, I’m sure you have.”

  “John... I’ll take the blame for the fight. It was all my fault, all right? I’ll do my time in the hole myself, all alone. But you can’t put me in that little cage with that girl.”

  The big guard stopped walking, and thus so did she. Looking down at her with sincere concern etched on his face, he said, “Rose, like I told you, it ain’t up to me. Look, I don’t think that little senorita will go at you again no matter how loco she is...nobody wants to do any more time in the Dark Cell than they have to.”

  Rose sighed, and then asked, “You have a wife, John?”

  “Yes, I have. Married twelve years.”

  “You love her good?”

  “Good as I can.”

  “I reckon she’s a lucky lady.” She gave him a tremulous smile.

  “You’d have to ask her that.” He took her arm again gently. “Come on, Rose...let’s get this over with.” And they resumed their march.

  Only a little further along they came to their destination, its entrance gated by a door of riveted metal bands. Like the women’s cells and the library, the Dark Cell had been carved directly into the rock face of Caliche Hill. Another guard, Martin, stood waiting for them outside the metal door, carrying a Winchester loosely in both hands. John nodded at the rifle and asked, “What’s that for, Marty?”

  “Heard stories about that little Mexican girl,” and he tipped his chin meaningfully toward Rose’s marred face, “but she didn’t give me no trouble. Bob helped me lock her in, but he’s gone back to his post.” Martin returned his attention to Rose as he stepped aside to unlock the door. “We emptied eight men out of the cage before their time to make room for you, Miss Rose. Don’t that make you feel better? Maybe they’ll say a prayer for you tonight.”

  Beside Martin’s boot was a kerosene lantern. John squatted by this to light it, and when he straightened he carried it before him.

  The gate screeched as John pushed it open, and he ventured first into the narrow passage with it rough, leprous walls. Rose followed, with Martin behind cradling his rifle. At the end of the little tunnel, a room opened up like a hollow pocket in the granite, about fifteen feet by fifteen feet. And in the center of this room was a cage fashioned from metal bands, like the gate. Aside from the shifting glow cast by the lantern, only a miserly portion of light leaked into the cell through a small air vent in the stone ceiling.

  The restless lantern light caused a crosshatched pattern of shadows to move across the cage’s sole occupant, who was crouched down in one corner because the cage was only five feet in height. Through the shadowy stripes on her face, Maria glared out at the trio. No, Rose knew, glared at her. Even in this insufficient light, though, Rose could see that the young girl’s eyes were swollen almost shut from the blows she had landed in self defense. Maria’s contused eyes put Rose in mind of a drowned man she had once seen fished out of the river, dead in the water for days, his face bloated and monstrous...transformed into something inhuman.

  Having set his lantern on the floor, John bent forward to unlock the cage’s door. As he did so, he said, “You got three days in here, ladies. I suggest you don’t add to that. It would be a good idea for you to use this time to talk out whatever it was got you so fired up in the first place.”

  “Bread and water every day,” Martin added. “That’s it. No blankets, no pillows, and you see that grate?” The grate formed the floor of the cage. “That there is where you’ll be taking care of your business.” But he hadn’t needed to explain that part; the hot, boxed-in air reeked of urine and excrement.

  Rose thought of the man who had spent over a hundred days in this room, in this cage, and shuddered. The door of the cage squealed open, and then Martin was giving her a nudge forward with the length of his gun. For one hallucinatory moment – a disorienting fragment of memory, like a suddenly remembered nightmare – Rose thought it was her William behind her, pushing her with that shotgun of his. And then she was bending down to step into the cage. Too cruelly small, she thought, even for an animal.

  The wind howled past the air vent in the ceiling of the Dark Cell, like ghostly lips blowing into the mouthpiece of some hellish instrument. A ululating wail, rising and falling as the gusts rolled past like the titanic phantoms of dead gods in an otherworldly procession. Though evening had not yet fallen, the dust storm had blotted out whatever meager light the vent offered. The man-made cave might have been the bottom of a well filled with inky water.

  Rose could even feel the desert sand sifting into the cell, a gritty pollen against her face in a nearly imperceptible caress. It got into her nose, her mouth. She became conscious of how thirsty she already was. When would they bring them water, as Martin had said they would?

  Pitch black. Had Rose ever known such a blackness? A person could not close their eyes to approximate this profundity of darkness...unless perhaps they did so in a room at night with all lights extinguished, curtains drawn, but Rose thought even that might not approach this total lack of light. Perhaps if one’s eyes were burned out with a heated poker. Perhaps then. Perhaps if a person floated in the heavens after the last star had burned out.

  But she was not alone in the void. Though she could not see her, not the slightest reflected glistening of an eye, she knew Maria was still there squatting on her haunches in the far corner of the cage. In lulls between the wind’s banshee cries, she could just barely hear the girl’s raspy breathin
g. Sometimes, the faintest tinkle of metal links as she shifted her position slightly. The two of them had had shackles affixed to the ankles of both legs, their shackles chained to opposite walls of the cage.

  Yet the cage was small, and Rose knew that Maria could reach her if she wanted to.

  Rose sat with her arms wrapped around her knees, her skirts doing little to cushion her behind against the hard grate of the floor. She wanted to change positions, to try lying on her side with her arm as a pillow, but feared the sound of her own chains moving might startle Maria into action. And she was afraid that if she reclined, she might fall asleep.

  Three days. Could she go without sleeping for three days? Of course not. Well, if she did sleep, how would Maria know the difference? But then, though she had never heard it herself, Rose remembered William complaining about how she snored at night. In the early days – before the drinking had got bad, before the pain of the toothaches that he said were demons excavating their own little hell inside his head – he had teased her about her snoring in a good-natured way. Later, however, he would elbow her awake irritably. Tell her the sound she made was so loud and ugly it gave him nightmares. “My Daddy used to snore,” he said, “and it always scared me at night. I didn’t know what the hell that was. I thought it was some animal outside the house...or in the house, prowling around.” And he said, “I swear some night I’m going to wake up and grab my shotgun to shut you up for good.”

  Then, without really planning to, Rose said aloud into the darkness, “I don’t want any more trouble.” She heard her voice echo. It sounded like a ghost imitating her, mocking her. “I’ll tell you about William...about me and William...if that’s what you need to hear.”

  She waited for some kind of response or acknowledgement, even a grunt, but there was nothing. Could the girl have fallen asleep? No...no...even through the blackness between them, Rose could still feel that unabated glare boring into her.