Doing Time

  It is this that Mel sees. The year of recovery after the crime she had had a dream — that in removing herself from the pain she would sense what others could not, she would see differently; she would come to know and to trust people by their light. And slowly, over the years, with practice, the dream came true. So that what began as a nightmare has become for her not only a shield but a treasured advantage, a glimpse into the future, a head start.

  It is a willful act, this seeing — she must allow her eyes to drift out of focus; it is more a sensing, although the qualities of vision are there: color, shape, density, the aspects of movement. And it is a talent she dares not reveal — Hank is the only one who knows — for to tell someone, she is certain, is to bring the sort of attention she most wants to avoid,

  The woman returns towing her blob of tawny light; she carries two cans of cola that appear as dark holes in her glowing hands. She sits and tells Mel her name is Angie and that, of course, she is here to visit her father … as she is every weekend, three years now, back and forth from Colorado Springs — God, the price of gas is killing her! and now this morning the car wouldn’t start and she had to take a bus, a bus mind you, and how will she get back? there are no buses until tonight and she’ll have to leave in an hour, probably have to hitchhike — “say, you wouldn’t be heading that way, would you? I could wait if you are!” , . . abruptly she tilts the can to her mouth and gulps soda, eying Mel. When she finishes, she wipes her mouth and smiles.

  “Why is he here?” Mel says. “Your father.”

  “Because I put him here.”

  Mel waits in the silence that follows. She knows what is coming next, although the words do not form in her head.

  “He molested me,” Angie says, “From the time I was five and until I was eighteen, when I got pregnant with his daughter. But when he touched my baby girl, I called the cops.”

  Mel hasn’t liked canned soda since she can’t remember when, her teens, she supposes, but now she pulls the tab and lifts it to her mouth. The taste is familiar still, the icy bubbles a curious relief. “And you’ve forgiven bim?” she says.

  “Never. I have three brothers who hate his guts — they even hate me for coming here. No, no, we’ll never forgive him. Who would?”

  Mel feels that she has pried, for no good reason. Or perhaps there is a reason, but it is not obvious. Why is this girl sharing her wound? As though they were friends, compatriots.

  Somewhere a metal door clangs, and there is the sound of heavy footsteps on the stairs, laughter, a shuffling as of cattle let out of a pen. And now they enter the visiting room, one at a time through a door in the corner next to the desk. The first is a tall black man with a matted gray beard, hurrying to a table of women with enormous smiles. Two more inmates enter — dark green slacks, green pullover shirts with the all too obvious number on the pocket — then more, a middle-aged man on crutches, another who must be in his seventies, stooped and frail but with a full head of bristly white hair, part of it braided into a rat’s tail at the back of his head. Then Angie stands as the next man enters — he, too, is bent forward, and carries a cane, a large man with bulging arms and a long, sagging face. He smiles at Angie and Angie places her Coke on the table and winks at Mel. “That’s my dad,” she says — proudly, Mel thinks. “That’s my dad.”

  * * *

  Fifteen, twenty men have entered the room, and Alex Pitts is not among them, Mel waits another ten minutes and then finally approaches the officer at the desk who in turn telephones a Control Center somewhere in the prison. “You know how it is, lady,” he says with his hand over the receiver, “some of these guys never get a visit, so they ain’t ready.”

  Mel returns to her table next to the wall. She sits and wishes she had something to read, some way to calm the churning in her stomach. The tabletop has been etched with overlapping layers of graffiti, probably years of work. And with what? she wonders. What sharp instruments ? Some of it is tattoo flash — snakes and dragons and devils’ heads, skeletons and motorcycles — but most is another message: love, loved ones, hearts and arrows and who loves who; and dates: parole dates, release dates, who was here when.

  Still, inmates are arriving. Two more enter the visiting room, and five minutes later, another two. A half hour has passed and Mel is beginning to think she should have handled this differently — she should have called the prison first, she should have written to Alex Pitts and told him she was coming. But she did not want him prepared for her, no more than she, thirteen years ago, was prepared for him. No, she tells herself, this meeting will be what it is — even if he does not show, for her it will be what it is.

  The room is noisy. Half a dozen children have taken to the floor in a game of hide-and-seek, and the officer at the desk is frowning at them. Angie and her father are eating sandwiches purchased from the vending machines. Most of the inmates and visitors are smiling and talking and holding hands; except for the bars on the sally port and the heavy metal doors, it is a church social in a church basement. And out the corner of her eye Mel sees the guard point his pencil at her — as she turns, another inmate enters the room.

  He is younger than she expects, her age, but so much younger than the others. He is tall and powerfully built, with a narrow waist and wide shoulders — a build she does not remember — thick, sinewy arms filling the short sleeves of his green pullover. He is staring at her perplexed, now glancing self-consciously at the others in the room, then back at her, wondering. She does not recognize this man — the wide brow, the long and slightly crooked nose, the angular jaw — certainly not from the night long ago when he wore a mask, but not even from the news photos or the mug shots she saw months later at her brother’s house, during the court proceedings. She had gone to the sentencing — a plea bargain to avoid the death penalty — in a wheelchair, still too weak to carry herself, but she had arrived late, nearly an hour after it was over and they had taken him back to his jail cell where she could not see him, could not look into his eyes and glimpse there the knowledge of his future, the suffering that would never be enough. Because it is the eyes she remembers — blue, with flecks of gray, the color of winter sky, but framed, made violent by the mask holes, huge and desperate.

  The same eyes, only softer now, questioning. Mel stands. She must force herself to keep her hands apart, to keep from picking at herself like a bird. He looks back at the guard who has not moved, still with his elbows on the desk, hands folded, pencil dangling from his fingers, pointing at Mel. So he turns and walks up to her.

  It was a foolish thing to say. She will think later, driving home, that it was dumb, silly. “I didn’t bring quarters,” she says, “I can’t buy you anything from the machines” — Mel who is quick but who rarely speaks before thinking, who is ahead of possibilities.

  He does not talk. She knows this, she has known it all along, since before the sentencing when her brother discovered that the man who shot his father and his sister could not talk, had not talked since childhood.

  And now she wishes she had her notebook with her, a pen, although she supposes these items are not allowed in the visiting room. He is questioning her with his eyes, saying Who are you? What do you want? But then he tenses and she knows he has just now figured it out, has recognized her. He blinks and clenches his jaw in a controlled expression of pain and surprise, saying God! And Why?

  Mel sits. She reminds herself that she is not here for revenge — she cannot erase the memory, or the fear, but she is not here to vent an anger she long ago buried. She has come to resolve something, to untie a knot in her head, although she is not sure how, or even if she is right to try.

  His face is tanned, clean-shaven, and there is a faint odor of soap about him. Unlike the other inmates he has no tattoos she can see, no scars. His hair is dark and straight, combed back. His wrinkles are sun wrinkles; he has the leathery skin of a man who has labored outdoors for years. And those eyes — blue, and too easily read, studying her.

  “You’re Alex,
” she says. “You shot me. You killed my father and then tried to kill me.”

  He sits across from her, wary, on the edge of the chair. He does not seem to know what to do with his hands.

  He had gotten in through a window in the basement, crept up the service stairs and into her bedroom, woke her by shoving a gun in her mouth. Then marched her to her father’s room and forced them both to lie on the floor, tied their hands and feet. The safe — Mel will never forget — the note held to her face, the childish scribble on paper torn from a school notebook — Where was the safe and what was the combination? But there was no safe, there was never a safe in the house, and her father told him, pleaded with this man who would not believe them, who ransacked the house, tore the paintings off the walls and toppled the dressers, emptied the closets and returned in a rage, wild-eyed and shaking — and shot them. Killed her father with a bullet to the head, there, next to her on the rug, murdered him. Then aimed the gun at her hair as she turned, the final instant, the endless hollow roar …

  “.. . Wait,” Mel says. She stands and walks to the desk, asks the officer for a pencil and paper. The guard grunts and hands her his pencil and opens a drawer, finds a sheet from a notepad. She returns to the table where Alex Pitts sits with his shoulders hunched, arms on the table, perfectly still. “Here,” she says, placing the paper and pencil before him.

  But he does not write. He looks at her with his winter blue eyes, the long lashes beneath the thick, sunbathed brows. His jaw is square, his chin strong, and yet his mouth is small and moist, nearly heart-shaped, which lends a boyish and oddly vulnerable look to his face. His eyes are worried.

  “You’re in the labor gang, aren’t you?” Mel says. “Is that why they keep you here, to do the jobs the old prisoners can’t? Because they need you? You went to school, you took college courses and earned your degree, you’ve been here thirteen years and have only one report. That’s pretty good, isn’t it! …” She sits straight in her chair, feels an urge to clear her throat, but does not. “… Look, I know a lot about you from my brother. He calls here to check. You can understand that, can’t you?”

  But Alex Pitts does not answer. His body is as rigid as hers was the night he shot her. He is even beginning to tremble, ever so slightly, a nervous hand on the table.

  The police had caught him in another house, a block away. A house with a safe. Melody had come to in a drying pool of blood, inched her way to the telephone and managed with her teeth to pull the old metal phone off her father’s roll-top desk. The man with the ski mask — Alex Pitts — had fired the gun into her hair, her wild, curly hatr, just as she had turned — and had wounded her, the bullet taking a piece of her skull but leaving her alive. And all because, as the police would tell her brother weeks later, a crazy kid, a drug addict named Alex Pitts, had mistaken her father’s house for another. Had shot them because he was frightened and sick and maybe didn’t know any better.

  She sighs. “I didn’t come here for this, to convict you again. But I have to tell you what it’s like for me. You changed my life. I can’t say you ruined it because that’s up to me, but you hurt me beyond measure. Do you see that?” Mel catches herself staring at him, tapping her knuckles on the table. “Right now I’m not sure why I’m here. I don’t know you. I don’t know if you feel bad about what you’ve done, but by the look in your eyes I’d say you do … after all, you could have left, you could have walked out of the visiting room the moment you realized who I was.”

  Alex Pitts lowers his gaze. He exhales through his mouth. It is the first time Mel has noticed him breathe,

  “Why did you shoot us? Were you frightened? Desperate? Did you care that little for life? Were we like dust to you, something you could brush off your sleeve? Am I still that to you?”

  There it is again, a shiver, that nearly imperceptible trembling of the hand.

  “I want to know why.” Mel picks up the pencil and holds it out to him, “You owe this to me. Tell me why you shot us. I don’t care if it’s not enough. I want to know what you were thinking. I want to know why I’m the way I am today.” She waits, holding the pencil. .. a second, five seconds … then finally withdraws it. “Don’t you realize?” she says. “What you did happens to me every day, and in a sense, what I do, what becomes of me, happens to you now. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?…

  “. .. Or is this your power? Was that why? Was it my loss and your gain? You shot me, so you own me, the rest of my life?”

  She leans forward on the table, close to him now, as if to reveal a secret.

  “Then let me tell you what you bought. Thirteen years, and I’ve had no home and no friends, because possessions and relationships can be merciless, when they’re taken away. I have nightmares. I see things. Sometimes hooded faces with eyes like yours. I see all sorts of things, like auras and halos and even events before they happen. I’m afraid most of the time. I have this idea, as crazy as it sounds, that I’m worth shooting. That no matter what I do or who I become, I should be punished. So I compensate — sometimes I’m cruel, usually I’m blunt, unforgiving. Does any of that sound right to you? Is that what you wanted?”

  But Alex Pitts does not respond. He sits there, looking at her, hardly breathing. He should leave, she thinks. Why doesn’t he leave? A chorus of “Happy Birthday” begins at a table in the center of the room. The old prisoner with white hair flamboyantly opens a bag of popcorn and dumps it on the table, and everyone cheers and claps. The sound echoes off the walls and ceiling, reverberates in the sterile air above her head. Mel feels herself dwindling, folding into herself, losing her sense of time and space.

  But then across the room she sees Angie and her father rise, hug for a second, and slowly head for the door. Suddenly Mel wants out; she is tired of feeling trapped, she knows in her heart she was wrong: that the power was never his, was hers all along. She feels ridiculous — for trying, for talking to this man, for even coming here. She also has an urge to cry, something she has not done since before the crime.

  She stands, steadies herself for a moment — she is lightheaded, sweating now — and walks to the desk, asks the guard where the bathrooms are. On her way she stops and tells Angie to wait — not to hitchhike, please don’t hitchhike, she’ll be glad to drive her home — and then finds the women’s room where at the sink she runs cold water on her wrists, cups her hands and splashes it on her cheeks, her neck. But this time she does not look at herself in the mirror, worried that she will see there the face from the past, unchanged, the face in the mirror at her father’s house all those years ago. Still Melody.

  In the visiting room again she walks directly to the table to tell Alex Pitts she is leaving, but as she arrives he stands and hands her the sheet of paper, folded. He lingers a second, blinks as though he wishes to say something, then starts across the room. At the desk he hands the pencil to the guard, and as he turns for the door Mel sees his light — a symbol of blue, clear and close to the body, but wispy, flickering, as though starved for fuel, a pale blue flame in the wind — and then he is gone, through the door and into the interior of the prison, Mel looks at the guard, who shrugs as if to say, “You know how it is, lady,” and then she joins Angie who waits for her at the entrance to the sally port.

  Outside, Mel and Angie are silent as they walk to the parking lot. The sky is cloudless, the sun high and unusually brilliant in the crisp air above the foothills to the west. It is a winter day, cold and fixed, and yet there is a hint of spring in this light, a fragile notion. At the car Mel fishes the keys from her pocket, but before she unlocks the door she unfolds the paper in her hand. “I’m sorry . ..” it begins.

  1993 Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility

  Canon City, Colorado

  Getting Out

  In a conversation about this book’s design, William Aberg suggested it include a section on release. At first I thought he meant the kind of escape, imaginative or physical, that inmates dream and lie about together in his poem “Reduc
tions” (Time and Its Terms) and that shape Johnson’s poem here, “Dream of Escape.” Imagination is always escape, as M. A. Jones’s poems pre- and postrelease testify. In “To Those Still Waiting,” he is surprised by the ache of longing that accompanies recall of prison, then by the persistent habit of dreaming of better, even when life is splendid.

  But what Aberg had in mind was the difficulty of effecting changes one had promised oneself in prison, the reunion instead with the reprobate self, and the ensuing pain. On the phone, he read me “Devotions,” * in which his striking a match to cook his drug reminds him of his mother lighting votive candles to pray “that I might find / healing, keep healthy, have enough / to eat. That I know how much / she loves me. But that I never come home again.” In his poem “Stepping Away from My Father” here, Aberg takes on the grief he caused his father.

  Writers wrestle to understand why getting out feels so little like release. In her poem “Stigma” (1996),* Allison Blake struggles to shake off the clinging monster the world imposes on the ex-convict. And with longer sentences and less training and education to prepare for release, it is harder than ever to counter the world’s inhospitality.

  In “After All Those Years,” Ajamu C. B, Haki assesses the internal damage of institutionalization, showing how much easier it is to get out of prison than to get prison out of oneself. On the same theme, M. A. Jones writes in “Coming Out: The Man Who Fell to Earth”“‘: “To trust another man in prison was to risk my life. Outside it was different. Outside it was just as deadly not to trust, to remain apart. Because I didn’t understand that, I stayed apart from other students and after a while I felt as if I were fine. I was free, but I acted like I was doing time.” The responsibility of freedom so weighed on him that, unable to talk about his feelings, he returned to drugs — and prison. For others, after so many years, the social world of doing time has come to be the only one they understand.