* * *
Sammy was released. She said she was nervous and didn’t want to go. I felt her excitement, underneath what she claimed. The reentry program was on skid row and she was worried. “Hang around the barbershop long enough,” she said, “and you’ll end up with a haircut.”
She gave me her piggy-printed eye mask and some other stuff. Promised she’d write me. We hugged goodbye.
* * *
People say your time hits you in waves. Mine was hitting me. I could see no way to accept this as life, to live it to the end.
I was depressed and sleeping a lot. One Sunday, I missed breakfast and the first unlock. At lunch I went out to the yard to find Conan.
Laura Lipp and her yard crew were sweeping dirt. It was a sunny day and the yard was packed. There were probably two thousand women out there.
I pushed through the turnstile and when it squeaked open it was like everyone had owls’ heads, on swivel. I didn’t know what was wrong but the tension was thick.
I walked past the basketball courts, looking for Conan. There was a game happening, girls on the sidelines picnicking with canteen spreads.
“Here she comes!” someone screamed.
I thought the screamer meant me and I panicked. People came running toward the main entrance from all over the yard. The players on the court stopped their game. The ball rolled into the basket but no one was under to claim it. It bounced on its lonesome across an empty court. Everyone was running toward the turnstiles.
Serenity Smith passed through. She had come on the yard alone. Walking tall, and proud, a beautiful black woman with long and graceful arms.
Laura Lipp and her gardening gang moved toward her with shovels and rakes in their hands. I heard a shriek. It was the Norse, running toward Serenity. Conan, Reebok, and their crew ran to attack the Norse and the gardeners. People were coming from all directions.
The first person on Serenity was the Norse. The Norse grabbed her and tried to pull her down. Serenity fought back. Conan pushed the Norse down and started monkey stomping her. Every bit of anger that had ever been in Conan came out of the sole of his boot, which connected over and over to the head and face of the Norse. The Norse’s head started to leak.
Serenity was running to escape Laura Lipp and her horde. Laura Lipp hit Serenity across the back with the flat side of her shovel, knocking her down. Laura fell on Serenity and was scratching her face. That is how some women fight. They can’t help it, it’s instinct. Serenity got up, pushed Laura against a spider table, and started punching her. Alarms sounded, the deafening zonk-zonk-zonk that means GO PRONE.
The other gardeners were tugging on Serenity as Serenity punched Laura. Garbage cans were hurled at them. The alarms kept sounding. Everyone fought.
Teardrop got hold of a shovel and was beating Serenity with it like you might beat a rug to get the dust out of it. Slow, heavy thuds, one after the other. Serenity screamed. The alarms zonk-zonked. I had the thought that maybe the cops were letting this happen. Letting Serenity be hurt or even killed.
No one went prone. The yard was in chaos. Orange clouds of pepper spray were directed at the piles of fighters, who kept on struggling. The cops retreated to the watch office, for their own safety. There was a sound I’d never heard, like an air siren. They had a situation. It was out of their hands. Alarms and sirens wailed.
I backed behind Tower One. There was a guard up there, but he had his weapon trained on the rioters. He was shooting wooden projectiles at them.
I dug and claw-tore at the earth behind Tower One until I found what I was looking for.
* * *
The way razor wire tugs on fabric: it holds you like hands pulling you back. Saying, Don’t go. Stay. Stick around. Don’t leave. If I stayed in this place, it would be slow death until I found a way to do it quick.
I sliced myself up good making a hole big enough to get through the inner fence.
I got through to the second fence, the electric one. The alarms were wailing and I was ready to risk death. I touched the fence with the dowel I’d made in shop.
No shock.
I nudged the bottom of the fence, wedged it upward, and slid, in the dirt, underneath, breath held, prepared to fry.
* * *
But then I was on the other side, on the dirt road where the perimeter truck travels. I had reached the edge of the universe.
One more fence to cut through. I could still hear the alarm, the repeated command to heed commands, the pop of projectiles.
I clipped quickly, worked a hole, pushed it open with the piece of wood, to avoid cutting myself worse than I already was.
I was in an almond grove. I heard the alarm in the distance. I ran under the trees, crossed a road, and kept running.
27
When Gordon Hauser was twelve years old, there had been a community-wide crisis, an excitement, when a convict named Bo Crawford escaped from the old county jail in downtown Martinez. An occupying force descended around San Pablo Bay. There were stakeouts, armored military vehicles, sharpshooters, teams of dogs, road closures, and thrilling reports that Bo Crawford had left traces or been sighted in Pinole, in Benicia, in Vallejo, Pittsburg, Antioch. For ten whole days, the county was on lockdown, until they finally caught Bo Crawford, hiding in an abandoned shack along the Carquinez Strait just beyond Port Costa.
To be on the run was no vacation. You had to look over your shoulder every second. People said it was worse than prison, but, as Gordon had imagined things, it was too late for Bo Crawford to put himself back. He was forced to survive in the cracks, the margins, hiding in a world with no good places to hide. Where everyone bought guns, including Gordon’s own father, and waited to spot the escaped man on their property.
Two children saw Bo Crawford near the parking lot of the C&H refinery in Crockett.
A waitress at Flippy’s in Rodeo said he came in one morning at dawn, ordered bacon and eggs. When she ducked into the kitchen to call the cops, he fled.
He entertained the whole county, people in every community, and the loners, too, with no community, everyone hoping for and fearing his arrival. He was famous and would make them famous. They could be the ones to have been touched by his escape. He was a wanted man. A dangerous man.
What was he wanted for? Escaping. Also, armed robbery.
* * *
A woman who worked in the jail’s laundry facility, Vena Hubbard, had fraternized with Bo Crawford, developed feelings for him. She began dreaming of a new life. It all came out later, in newspaper exposés that attempted to narrate the breakdown of security at the jail. There had been talk of Mexico between Vena and Bo and, before heading there, a quick stop off at Vena’s place to kill her husband, Mack. They would drive to the border in her car, a Honda Civic. They had maps and her savings, as well as a shotgun that belonged to Mack, which they would take with them after killing him. (Would a shotgun even fit in a Honda Civic? Gordon had wondered.)
Bo had native intelligence and impeccable self-control. He did two hundred push-ups a day. He meditated. He sawed, little by little, a hole in the rear wall of a storage closet of the laundry facility, while his work crew partner ate the fried chicken and macaroni salad that Vena brought into the jail to feed the men on her laundry crew. Later, there was intense focus on Vena’s role in illegally bringing food into the laundry, a sign of her weak character and submission to prisoner cunning. “I only let ’em have what I couldn’t finish and was gonna throw out,” she testified at an inquest. She had brought in, according to inmates who worked in her laundry facility, meals to feed twenty men, which included party-sized submarine sandwiches and entire flats of Costco lasagna. Fat-Ass was how Bo referred to his work crew partner, whose real name was J.D. Joss, and who was in on the plan, but was not the same high caliber of escapee as Bo. While it was Bo whom Vena truly loved, J.D. carried on with her in a more explicit manner, which gave Bo the time and space he needed to investigate the hatch he’d breached in the laundry closet. J.D. had sew
n, using the laundry facility’s machine, a secret flap in his jail pants, so that Vena could play with his cock under the supervisor’s desk where she sat, with J.D. next to her. Meanwhile, Bo was tracing an escape route through a pipe that led under the jail and, eventually, to a storm drain in the street.
On the assigned day, Vena’s one day off, she was to meet Bo and J.D. on a designated corner, with the Honda Civic, the maps, the shotgun, and the money. J.D. and Bo left the laundry facility through the opening in the storage closet, while the fill-in supervisor ate his lunch. They made it through the storm drain and walked to the corner in Martinez where Vena was meant to pick them up. A car drove past, not the Civic. J.D. jumped into the bushes of someone’s yard. Bo, as he later told police, yelled at J.D. to Act Fucking Normal. Like a free person, and not like some idiot jailbird on the loose.
No Civic came to rescue them, and so they were quickly both jailbirds on the loose, who could only hide, who had no maps, no weapons, no plan, nothing.
* * *
When the hour had come for her to pick them up, and then scoot back over to her place to kill Mack, Vena and Mack Hubbard were watching a TV movie on the couch. It kept being time to leave and the movie kept playing. Mack, for the first time in months, was paying attention to Vena. He put his arm around her on the couch and his arm seemed to say, “I know you had a plan for Mexico, and murder, but this isn’t so bad, is it?” The time to meet Bo and J.D. melted away. Probably they had not really gone through with the escape. That was her hope. But what if they came for her?
She lay awake all night, started at every sound. Mack snored like an idiot, with no understanding that his life was in danger. But he was a simple man, and that was why she’d fallen for him, and then it was why she despised him, and now it was why she liked him again. She hugged the mound of his back and prayed for her own salvation, for her and Mack, for every small thing in life she had not known to appreciate.
* * *
J.D. Joss and Bo Crawford separated. J.D. broke into an abandoned house, ate spoiled food, drank spoiled water, soiled his pants, and left clues. He was caught almost immediately, drunk, covered with insect bites, with a backpack that held a half-eaten package of Oreo cookies and a hammer.
Bo eluded capture for ten days. He created a legend in the small factory towns around San Pablo Bay, like the one where Gordon Hauser grew up. Authorities later closed the jail in downtown Martinez. Built a new one. Modern, state-of-the-art. There would be no more escapes.
* * *
During the tense ten-day stakeout, a woman called a local radio station. She lived on the outskirts of Crockett and had seen Bo Crawford emerge from the trees, down near the railroad bed. She faced him unafraid, she said, tried to catch his eye, to let him know. Gordon remembered that so well. Her voice over the radio.
I wanted to let him know.
* * *
What did the woman want him to know? Gordon wondered, when he thought about this many years later, after hearing the news about Stanville, about Romy Hall.
What did she let him know, down by that railroad track? And what did she know?
That Bo Crawford existed. That he was a man on the run. She saw him, and she wanted him to see her. She was willing to take the risk. He was dangerous and possibly armed and she stood unhidden and adamant. She looked right at him. If he looked back at her, he would know that she knew that he had no right on this earth to freedom.
They will get you.
That was what she wanted to tell him with her look.
28
Part of the intimacy with nature that you acquire is the sharpening of the senses. Not that your hearing and eyesight become more acute, but you notice things more. In city life you tend to be turned inward. Your environment is crowded with irrelevant sights and sounds, and you get conditioned to block most of them out of your conscious mind. In the woods you get so that your awareness is turned outward, toward your environment. You are much more conscious of what goes on around you. You know what the sounds are, that come to your ears: this is a birdcall, that is the buzzing of a horse fly, this is a startled deer running off, this is the thump of a pine cone that has been cut down by a squirrel. If you hear a sound that you can’t identify, it immediately catches your attention, even if it is so faint as to be barely audible. You notice inconspicuous things on the ground, such as edible plants or animal tracks. If a human being has passed through and has left even just a small part of a footprint, you’ll probably notice it.
IV
29
Kurt Kennedy woke up with two empty rosé bottles and a headache. The stewardess, he gets that you don’t call them that anymore, but the other term has never taken up residence in his mind, anyway the bitch took his drink away while he slept. Not the rosé, which had been in the knapsack between his knees, but his rum and Coke, which he’d ordered, and wasn’t finished drinking when she removed it from his tray, and that was the thing about an international flight. The booze was free and you drank it and no one bothered you about how much. They weren’t supposed to cut you off. He put on the help light over his seat. He was going to insist on another drink because he wasn’t done with the one she took away. The stewardess arrived and told him she took his drink because he was sleeping. He said that it exactly helped him sleep and was why he needed it back.
She bent down close.
“You and I know it’s a silly rule, but you can’t bring your own wine bottles on the plane.”
Trying to butter him up with her “you and I.” I’ve got plans when I step off this bird and you aren’t coming with me, old lady.
She was probably forty. Actually, she was a good-looking broad and he’d take a forty-year-old. Kurt himself was fifty-four. A woman his own age, the thought of it made him want to puke. But a lot of things were suddenly making him want to puke. He might puke for no reason. He didn’t feel very good. He’d been out all night in Cancún and had about ten nightclub stamps inked over the back of his hand. The last half of the night he could not remember. He had an image of getting into someone’s jeep, a man older and even drunker than he was, and the guy could not get out of his parking spot, just kept ramming the car in front, and then the car behind, then repeating, until Kennedy yelled at him to stop and got out of the guy’s jeep, but what happened then? He doesn’t know. He woke up at his Novotel and had pissed himself in his clothes.
At least he would not miss his flight. And he had time to shower, because, as every man knows, that’s supposed to wash off the misery and get him shipshape for traveling. He retched into the methane-fuming drain. People don’t know how to make anything. Can’t even vent a sewer pipe.
He got the wine at duty-free because he could, and because he wanted something of his own to drink on the plane. Made him claustrophobic to have to sit and wait for them to bring you something. Just watching the cart not come down the aisle made his mouth drier than Death Valley, and his medication already made his mouth dry. He wasn’t going to wait, he was going to bring his own beverages on the airplane for the long flight from Cancún to San Francisco. Got the two bottles and a coffee cup. Opened one of the bottles at the gate and starting pouring, tipping the knapsack like it was a drink, a T-shirt wedged between the two bottles to keep them from clinking.
He would not call it loaded, how he felt when he got on the plane. He was only starting to relax. He’d been on edge the whole time in Cancún. It was supposed to be a vacation but minute by minute he kept checking in with himself to find out if he was having fun, and he didn’t know and this made him anxious, so he took another Klonopin and lay down or got up or went to the bar or walked around on the sand, but it burned his feet and he had to face down the fact that he was not a beachy-type person and just wanted to get home and go to the Mars Room and see Vanessa, put her body on his lap. It was the only way in the world he knew to get peace. Every person deserves peace. He meant, whether anyone deserves anything is beside the point. He needed certain things to feel okay. Vanessa wa
s among those things. He needed dark and heavy curtains, because he had a sleeping problem. He needed Klonopin, because he had a nerve problem. He needed Oxycontin because he had a pain problem. He needed liquor because he had a drinking problem. Money because he had a living problem, and show him someone who doesn’t need money. He needed this girl because he had a girl problem. Problem was maybe the wrong word. He had a focus. Her name was Vanessa; that was her stage name but for him it was her name-name because it was the one he got to know her by. Vanessa filled in around all the hazier thoughts in his mind with something that was specific, and real. When he was near her, he felt good. Every person deserves to feel good. Especially him, since he was himself.
“Sure you can bring wine on the plane,” he told the old stewardess, crease lines forming around her mouth as she took in his reply. He gestured to the overhead bins, full of other passengers’ bottles of duty-free wine.
The Mars Room Page 25