Hard Time

by McKenna, Cara

  “Sure.” Whatever. Fine by me. God forbid I find out the hard way that something on my person could be turned into a shank on some desperate man’s whim.

  “Crouch and cough for me please.”

  I did, face blazing. Karen had warned me about this, but dreading it and living it just didn’t compare. I wondered how often the inmates had to do this. Daily? Every time they left the yard or the visitation area? Could you even call that a life?

  I survived this first taste of degradation and dressed quickly.

  “We’ll hang on to these,” Shonda said, pulling a small plastic bin from on top of the lockers and tossing my keys and phone into it. “They’ll be kept behind the reception desk for you, but you may access them any time you’re in the secure zone.” She explained this with a robotic passion, clearly a speech she gave many times a week. She locked her eyes on mine, hooking her thumbs under her thick black belt. She spoke crisply, slowly.

  “While you are a member of secondary staff at Cousins Correctional Facility, you will abide by the standards set forth for all CCF employees. You will not access areas denied by your security clearance. You will not film or photograph the facilities without a permit to do so. You will not transport contraband items into the facility. You not accept contraband items from inmates. If you encounter contraband items, you will immediately deliver them to the nearest officer. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  I thought I was done, but she went on.

  “You will not provide acceptable items to an inmate without express written permission from a qualified staff member. You will not accept gifts, either material or as promised via verbal or written contract, from an inmate. You will not speak to or touch any inmate in an inappropriate way. You will not encourage an inmate to speak to or touch you in an inappropriate way . . .”

  This continued for a full five minutes, after which I was handed a four-page, small-print waiver detailing the many rules, plus indexes outlining what qualified as contraband and inappropriate and so forth. I read and signed it with Shonda watching, and the second I handed it over, her demeanor softened.

  “Okay, then. Let’s get you oriented, Ms. Goodhouse.”

  She dropped off the form and my verboten items with a young, crew-cut blond man behind a half-circle reception desk.

  “Ryan, this is Anne Goodhouse, the new librarian.”

  Ryan smiled and shook my hand. He looked like a guy from back in Charleston, the varsity football type or an eager young Marine, pre-deployment. “Welcome aboard, Anne.”

  “Thank you.”

  He took my things, swiveling his chair and jangling keys as he stowed them in one of the cubby lockers banked behind him. “You’re Karen’s replacement, huh?”

  “I am.”

  “The boys took a real shine to her.”

  Did they? Karen was never one to paint herself in flattering colors, but she’d given me the distinct impression the inmates had loved her as they might a rash.

  “I’m sure you’ll do just fine,” Ryan told me. “You let me know if you need anything.”

  “She needs a panic button,” Shonda pointed out. Her raised eyebrow added, You’d have remembered that if you weren’t so busy flirting.

  “Course.” He unlocked a metal drawer and rummaged for what looked like a pager. He clicked something on his computer, pushed the device’s button, clicked some more and typed, and finally handed it to me. I clipped it to my belt loop, praying I’d never find occasion to use it.

  Shonda led me through a heavy metal door and into a short corridor with the turning of a key—one of about a million on her overloaded ring. “You’ll be holding most of your programs in classroom B, and you can use office four when you’re not leading a session. You can’t keep too much there permanently—it’s shared by a bunch of externals—but we’ll clear out a filing cabinet for you.”

  “Great.”

  “It’s got a computer and printer and scanner, and a land line.” Another key turned and another door swallowed us, another white hall. “No cell phones on the inside, not for external staff. Sorry.”

  “I’ll live.”

  “Your clearance’ll get you into the office wing, the break room and kitchen, the restrooms, and the admin wing—we call that the green zone. No unescorted inmates allowed. It’ll also get you into the dayroom and the classrooms—that’s the orange zone, shared by staff and inmates. You’ll be restricted from the yard, cells, gym, and so forth—red zone—as well as all blue-zone areas, which are security personnel only.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t panic if you can’t remember all that—the doorways are painted to tell you what zone you’re entering.” She tapped the metal doorframe we were about to go through. Orange. My stomach flipped. My legs longed to spin me around, march me back out into the sunshine. I could hear noises through the steel, random shouts and muted clanging.

  “We’re entering the dayroom,” Shonda said, inserting one last key and punching numbers into a bank of buttons. “It’s the best-staffed area in Cousins. Inmates are allowed to move freely between here and their cells, provided they’re currently what we call ‘compliant.’ They earn movement privileges, through good behavior.”

  This was meant to reassure me, but I all I felt was cold, cold, icy cold.

  “They’re gonna talk to you,” Shonda told me, finger poised over the keypad. “Don’t you pay them no mind. You’ll have an officer in front of you and behind. Keep your eyes forward. Smile or don’t, just try to look confident. Fake it if you need to.”

  Oh, I’d need to.

  “You don’t seem the shimmying type, but I’ll tell you anyhow, walk like God or your mama never gave you no hips or butt.”

  “Sure.”

  She shot me a maternal look and added, “No external staffer’s been assaulted in the dayroom in over ten years.”

  Yay.

  She jabbed the final digit, and the red light above the keypad blinked green and beeped.

  Shonda stepped inside. I followed.

  The air stayed behind, its clearance strictly green-zone.

  The dayroom was long, lined with cells doors along one side and loomed over by two rows of the same, up on a second level beyond a railing. No bars—each door was painted metal with a latched slot, a narrow window, and a pair of stenciled numbers. Bodies milled and loitered—inmates in navy blue, officers in khaki.

  It was a jungle of relentless noise. My hard-soled flats slapped loudly with each step. Everything echoed, a hundred sharp sounds ricocheting off concrete and steel and glass. I was drowning in the volume of it, lost in the thundering waterfall of all those shouts and slams and clanks and thumps.

  A dozen circular table units were bolted in place, each with four fixed seats sticking out at ninety degrees from a thick post. Inmates were hunched in small groups over the tables and standing around, chatting.

  It was all more casual than I’d imagined, and I reminded myself that only men with good behavior were allowed to wander freely. Or to attend the library’s enrichment sessions.

  There were several officers posted at our end, and one of them, a sturdy-looking black guy of about fifty, strode over.

  “You must be our new librarian,” he said. “I’m John.”

  I shook his hand. “Anne.”

  “Where she headed?” John asked Shonda. “Offices?”

  She nodded, and to me she said, “You follow John, and I’m right behind you.”

  I wanted to beg for a moment to collect myself—for a deep suck of oxygen from beyond the heavy door at my back—but John was already moving. Casual, slow steps, exhibiting a taste of the swagger I was denied, as a woman. I kept my hips tight, my spine straight as a lamppost. I shouldered my tote’s handle, letting it obscure the profile of my breasts.

  Eyes followed me. Conversations hushe
d, changing the chaotic auditory rabble into a buzzing hive. There were perhaps forty men on the floor and a dozen more above, leaning along the rail in front of the second-floor cells. Panicky demands begged to burst from my throat. Why are they allowed out, like this? What does it matter if you take away my keys, when I could be strangled to death inside a minute?

  I felt the stares I couldn’t actually see, real as fondling hands, reaching from all angles. I tried hard to look calm. Like I’d done this before. I could never pass for tough, not like Shonda, nor coolly above it all like John, so I didn’t try. I aimed for invisible instead, though of course it didn’t work.

  “Finally,” a skinny black inmate said with a clap. “Conjugal Friday. Where we get in line?”

  A couple of guys laughed, and at my back Shonda barked, “Keep talking, Wallace. Talk yourself right out of commissary for all I care.”

  Wallace muttered something, not seeming especially chastised. My heart and lungs and throat hurt, too dry and tight. My entire body hurt, like their stares were bruising me.

  As we passed a glass-paneled, octagonal station in the center of the dayroom, there was a demographic shift—all the darker brown faces were suddenly gone, a narrow contingent of Hispanic men at the next couple of tables, then all whites. The division was so obvious, I felt embarrassed.

  I felt more embarrassed when one of the Hispanic guys let out a low whistle. I felt menaced when the white inmates didn’t say anything at all. Nothing I could hear, anyhow. They whispered instead, or licked their lips, making me nearly miss Wallace and his gregarious breed of harassment. I was grateful my face had gone so cold and numb, bereft of blood; blushing seemed an incriminating act. A declaration of weakness of a dangerously coy, female persuasion.

  One inmate stood out among the group, even sitting down.

  Stood out in his stillness and his focus, even as a buddy elbowed him in the arm.

  My pounding heart went still, eerie as birds fallen silent in the wake of a gunshot.

  He was big. Tall frame, wide shoulders—but not burly.

  Unlike many of the inmates, his head wasn’t shaved. His near-black hair was due for a cut in fact, curling under his ears. Dark brows, dark stubble, dark lashes and eyes.

  And he was handsome. So handsome it broke your heart.

  A deck of cards was split between his hands, paused midshuffle. Some of the men wore navy scrub tops and bottoms, some navy tee shirts, a few white undershirts. This man wore a tee, with COUSINS stenciled on the front, above the number 802267. Those digits imprinted on my brain, burned black as a brand.

  He watched me.

  But not the way the others did.

  If he was trying to picture me naked, his poker face was strong, though his attention anything but subtle. His entire head moved as I passed through his domain, but his eyes were languorous. Lazy and half-lidded, yet intense. A hundred looks in one. I didn’t like it. Couldn’t read it. At least with the horny jerk-offs, I knew where I stood.

  I wondered what the worst thing you could do and still only get sent to a medium-security prison was.

  I hoped not to ever learn the answer.

  And I hoped to heaven inmate 802267 hadn’t signed up for any of the day’s programs.

  Chapter Two

  Once the day was actually underway, my panic eased some.

  I was in classroom B all morning—not unlike a schoolroom, though the painted cinderblock walls were windowless and posterless, and the vibe was grim.

  Four metal chairs were bolted into the concrete behind each of eight long tables in four rows, accommodating thirty-two men total, with an aisle down the middle. My chair was free moving, but no more comfortable than what the inmates were stuck with—the theme of the décor was minimalist. Minimal detachable pieces, minimal hardware. Minimal materials from which to fashion a weapon capable of stabbing me to death.

  Before the inmates arrived, an older officer took up his post by the door, hands clasped before him, back rod straight. John had introduced him as Leland. His mustache was steely gray, trimmed to the textbook profile of the top half of a hamburger bun. I will not be fucked with, that mustache told the world.

  The door was opened from the outside at two minutes of nine, and my heart leapt into my throat. I forced a smile. Forced a swallow. Forced my hands to stop shaking atop the primer set before me on my small, scuffed desk, and forced my knees to quit knocking.

  Inmates filed in, chatting and arguing. The class was full, every single chair, leading me to imagine Literacy Basics must have a waiting list. They came in all sizes and ages. Same navy blue uniforms. I didn’t spot 802267 among them.

  “Good morning,” I said. My voice was warbly. I could hear it, so they could hear it. There was nothing to be done about it.

  “I’m Ms. Goodhouse, the new outreach librarian from Darren Public Library. Welcome to Literacy Basics.” I took a deliberate breath to stop my words from racing. I wanted to shut my eyes, squint to blur their facial hair and tattoos and stenciled numbers so I could pretend they were teenagers, and that I was in a high school classroom.

  “I’m going to hand out some worksheets,” I said, giving stacks of four to the men in the first-row aisle seats. “Please pass them down.” I held my breath as I moved to the second row, but no one touched my butt. Eyes everywhere, and somebody muttered, “Southern gal,” but no hands. Third row. Fourth. I strode back to the front of the room, masking my relief.

  “This is an eight-week course. If I cover material you’re already familiar with, please consider it a refresher. The lessons will intensify as the weeks go on. All right? Now, does anyone here not know the alphabet?”

  No one replied or raised their hand, and I had no choice but to assume they were being truthful.

  “Excellent. We’re going to begin with basic phonics. Phonics is a way of learning to read and write by listening to the sounds of words . . .”

  My brain detached from my mouth—I’d given this intro many times before, having worked as a lower-grade substitute teacher and private tutor through much of grad school.

  It was deeply weird, though. Saying all this stuff to full-grown, incarcerated men, not antsy kids.

  As the lesson progressed, some men kept completely quiet—deep in concentration or totally checked out, it was hard to say. Others were chatty, wanting to ask questions for no reason other than to talk to me. Usually to flirt.

  “Hey library lady,” one man cut in. “You a miss or a missus?”

  His buddy added, “Yeah. Who you be readin’ bedtime stories to when you at home?”

  “Shut your mouth,” a man in the front row swiveled to say. “Like you got a chance? Shit. Some of us is here to better ourselves, motherfucker.” That was another contingent, the hyper-earnest types with no patience for nonsense, quick to demand I explain something they hadn’t understood.

  No one was outright disrespectful or threatening, not in the way they spoke. I could sense what Karen had said was true—the chance to spend an hour with one’s attention locked on an unfamiliar woman was a coveted one. I hoped some of them truly cared about becoming literate, but failing that, their willingness to abide by the rules in exchange for an hour’s permission to mentally undress me would suffice. Though let’s be real—I wasn’t getting paid nearly enough for this.

  After Literacy Basics came Composition. I asked the attendees as they filed in to please sit in order of their writing proficiency, by those who found it “very challenging,” “somewhat challenging,” and “not too challenging.” A few nodded acknowledgment, but once again they sorted themselves at the tables strictly according to color.

  It was obvious that trying to lead them as three separate levels was a lost cause. Instead I handed out sheets of lined paper and golf pencils—the latter were provided by the prison—and read them a prompt.

  “Everyone please write for three
minutes on the topic of ‘my favorite season.’ I just want to see where we all are with our writing skills.”

  I wandered around, my butt as yet untouched. Some men managed a couple of sentences, writing in the slow, mindful capitals of children, others a paragraph or two. As they set their pencils down, I gathered a few pages of varying length to read aloud. I’d be careful to praise what they’d done well before extracting usage or grammar mistakes to make lessons of.

  “‘My favorite season is summer,’” I read out, glossing over misspellings, “’cause as a kid we had no school and got to play all day and didn’t nobody tell me where to be ’til dinnertime. I hate winter it is too long here in Michigan not like it is in Virginia where I’m from.’ Right. This is very good. It addresses the prompt with strong, declarative statements. Now let’s have a quick lesson about using punctuation to show the rhythm of our words . . .”

  The remainder of the writing session went . . . not disastrously. It got hauled off track when I tried to impart some simple grammar tips. Perhaps sensing my unease, someone took the opportunity to spin it into a political debate on the topic of “the black man’s voice,” and how street slang was more authentic than what he called, “Your fancy white-people vernacular, you feel me?” Terrified of sparking a fight, I wussily let the inmates engage in a semi-civilized dissection of the subject, butting in with the odd, limp, “Yes, that’s an interesting point,” before things grew heated and Leland thumped the wall with his baton and told everyone to shut up.

  The session wrapped, and as the inmates filed out, my smile muscles hurt, and my shoulders were practically hugging my ears. I eyed Leland in the corner, pleading for a sign—any sign, good or bad—that might indicate how I’d handled that.

  He offered a thumbs-up, his showy, dismissive frown telling me, Don’t sweat it, kid. You’re doing fine.

  I took the deepest breath I could manage, willing myself to believe him.

  The next session was Resources. Cousins had a strong—if not revolutionary—rehabilitation ethos, and they relied on the visiting librarians to teach inmates how to use the Internet for job searches, and to practice filling out online applications. It wasn’t quite a class, more a free-for-all. There were only two computers, so men had to sign up for them in advance. The rest of the guys came and went freely, asking me to proofread the resumes they’d drafted, to explain paperwork they’d received, help them write letters and so forth.