Sweet Hell on Fire

by Sara Lunsford

  I remember wiping my hands on my pants, the red and gray smearing up my thighs when I stood. Then I was at home, doing my laundry and wondering how the hell I was supposed to get a stain like that out of my uniform and if he’d been positive for HIV or HEP-C. There was a good chance of both—he’d been a punk. The tattoo on his neck marked him as Blood property, a commodity to be bought and sold, or rented out as the gang deemed fit. Add to that the infected injection site on his arm where he’d been shooting up, and he was two for two. Unprotected sex and needle sharing.

  Even that realization was distant and unreal at the time. The only thing that was real was that I had been wrist deep in meat that used to be a man.

  Shout got the blood out, but the gray remained.

  “Fuck you, fatasscuntbitch,” the inmate slurred around crooked teeth that reminded me of the bared and gnarled roots of an old weeping willow bleached out in the sun.

  Fuck me? No, buddy. Fuck you. “Yeah, fuck me. Whatever, man. Cuff up,” I said, bored with the exchange already and indicating he should present his wrists to be handcuffed. I didn’t need this after what had happened on the yard the day before.

  But the inmate hadn’t come out of his cell for a week. He hadn’t showered; he hadn’t come out to go to chow, hadn’t come out for yard. He was either afraid of someone or hiding some serious contraband. Most guys were always ready, willing, and able to come out of their cells for anything that could get them there.

  I mean anything. The price of Madagascarian intestinal fly larvae rose by a quarter of a cent? They had to get out of their cells to call their mothers who invest in that sort of thing, and if they didn’t, said sainted mothers would lose their homes. The moon was full so it was their turn to scrub the lint out of their bellybuttons with a special tool they only have in the clinic and…The reason didn’t matter. Out was out.

  This guy wanted no part of anything.

  I could tell from the way he narrowed his eyes and the hard set to his jaw he was taking my measure and deciding how far he could push me.

  I sighed heavily. “Look, I don’t give a damn when you do it, but you will do it. If not for me, then for the blacksuits.” I shrugged. Blacksuits was another name for our special teams. Not exactly SWAT, but they were the big guns who dealt with combative inmates and other emergencies. They could come hand him his ass on a platter. I’d gain compliance one way or another.

  The inmate leaned toward the toilet and shoved something in the bowl.

  “Don’t do it! Do not flush that—” I didn’t even get the command out before he’d tried to flush whatever contraband he didn’t want me to find.

  Good thing I’d turned off the water to his cell before I’d confronted him.

  “You bitch,” he shrieked when the toilet didn’t flush.

  Your mom, asshole. Of course I didn’t say it. They could call us every filthy name in the book and we had to take it, but we weren’t allowed to insult their mothers. Because it gave them “rage issues.” Whatever. What kind of pussy can dish it out but can’t take it? Oh, right. It’s prison.

  But I’m a professional. So I kept my comments to myself.

  Even when he whipped his dick out and pissed all over his cell. The arc of urine sprayed his walls, his desk, his bunk, and the pile of clothes in the corner. I had this sinking feeling in my gut he was going to try to spray me too.

  “Good luck, bitch.” He turned, the stream of piss arching ever closer to me.

  He could piss on his own things; that’s why we have gloves. But on me? Oh, hell no. “Rack the door!” I called down the run to the other officer on the tier, telling him to open the inmate’s door. He’d be pissing in a bag when I was done with him.

  The cell door dragged open, the mechanism slow and plodding, creaking like an old man’s knees. He let go of his dick and it hung there out of his state-issued boxers like a shriveling sausage. All color drained out of his face in tandem with the dwindling stream of urine. He hadn’t expected me to open the door.

  “Now what?” I’d launch myself into the cell to gain his compliance if I had to, but if I could get it done without touching him that was better for everyone involved.

  To my surprise, he turned around and faced the wall. He put his arms behind his back, showing he was ready to be handcuffed. I locked the cuffs into place quickly, careful to make sure I kept my own stance balanced and a good distance between us. Should he have decided to fight, he wouldn’t have the advantage.

  “I didn’t think you’d open the door, Sarge,” he said this under his breath.

  Yeah, they never do. Lots of officers make a big show of threatening to rack the door, to let the inmate out to make good on his threats and the officer to make good on his, but they don’t. The inmate keeps talking shit, the officer keeps talking shit, and it’s just a bunch of posturing—and more shit. Males circling each other’s territory, waving their dicks around. I didn’t have a dick to wave around, so I had no room to posture. I could only make him feel like I’d slapped him with someone else’s dick, rode him hard, and put him away wet.

  I hauled him out onto the run and directed him down to the office. Catcalls echoed throughout the cell house, calling him a pussy for cuffing up, calling me alternatively a badass and a bitch for cuffing him. A couple of guys even mooed at me, but that wasn’t anything new.

  Even on my first day, when we took the tour, I heard animal sounds and whispers of, “That’s a big bitch.” You got that right, motherfucker. Don’t forget it.

  Down in the office the Officer in Charge (OIC) gave me a stern look, his old jowls shaking with his displeasure. “Why’d you wind them up?”

  A guy pissed all over his cell, wouldn’t come out to shower, called me every name in the book, and I’d wound them up?

  “Had to be done.” I shrugged.

  “I heard them mooing at you. You can’t take it out on them because you’re fat. You need a thicker skin.”

  My jaw almost fell off my face it dropped so fast. “Right. Let’s look at this again. A targeted search of an inmate’s cell because it hasn’t been searched in weeks coupled with the inmate’s unusual behavior makes me doing my job some sad, fat-girl vendetta?” I stopped and turned around, trying to look at my own ass. I looked back up at the OIC, incredulous. “Well, fuck me. Where did that come from? I went to bed skinny and woke up fat.” I rolled my eyes, and the other officer in the room clamped his mouth shut and buried his head in his arms on the desk as he shook with laughter. “I know what I look like and I don’t care what they think of me. Or you for that matter.”

  He looked at me. “You’re a woman. Of course you do.”

  I’d forgotten this guy believed that because I had a vagina, I wasn’t capable of concerning my little head with anything beyond my next pair of shoes and what I should make my man for dinner.

  I really didn’t care what the inmates thought of me. For someone’s opinion to matter, you have to give a shit about them. You have to care for someone’s words to hurt you. Some snaggle-toothed, illiterate ghetto rat doesn’t like looking at my ass? I’m certainly not going to cry about it. A thicker skin? I have an outer shell like the tiles of the space shuttle. Further, if I did care, that would mean I wanted to be attractive to the inmate.

  Yeah, I’d rather gargle with razor blades, thank you very much.

  I got on the PA system. “Attention in the cell house. The OIC is irritated by your barnyard sounds. I, however, find them amusing. But Mamma already knows what sounds the cow makes. Can anyone tell me what sound a horse makes?”

  The cell house erupted in laughter, breaking the tension that had been building from the interaction between me and the inmate. Whenever something like that went down, it was never just about the officer and the inmate. So keeping a situation at the lowest level of escalation was important.

  He snatched
it away from me. “This isn’t your cell house, little girl. You can’t just come in here and—”

  “And what?” I snatched it back. “I can’t come in here and do my job? Why don’t you give it to me in writing that you told me not to search cells?”

  His mouth hung open, a rusty hinge swaying back and forth in the wind. He couldn’t say anything to that. Some of the old-timers were tired and didn’t like to upset the status quo. But I wasn’t an old-timer and wasn’t tired. Whatever the inmate had hidden was something he wasn’t supposed to have. There were reasons for rules and reasons things were contraband. I was looking out for my fellow officers by getting that crap out of population. I was looking out for the inmates too.

  I was also building a reputation. Fair. Firm. Consistent. Not only was that my training, it’s what worked. Reputations are like trust. Hard to build, easy to shatter, and it doesn’t matter what the truth of the situation happens to be, only how the others perceive it.

  Women have to be harder in this environment. We’re seen as the weak link by both officers and inmates until we prove otherwise. Something as simple as doing my job went a long way for a solid reputation.

  Later, when I followed through searching his cell, I found the contraband he’d tried to hide. Not only did he have a baggie of weed under the clothes he’d pissed on, but he also had a joint in the toilet.

  But that wasn’t the important find.

  The important one was the seven steel rods that had been stolen from the metal-working shop and taped underneath his cell door.

  He was making shanks.

  I’d done the right thing demanding to search his cell. I also knew I was lucky he hadn’t gone for one of those steel rods and put it through my face when I’d ordered his door opened.

  After what had happened in the yard, it was also a sign that the shit was about to get deep.

  Work seemed unnaturally quiet, and while I was sure something big was brewing, I admitted it could be just another day.

  Nothing happened. Everyone went home safe. That made it a good day above everything else.

  But there was no rest for the wicked.

  My husband and I had separated almost a year ago, and I lived with my parents. That hadn’t been an ideal situation at seventeen, let alone at thirty. I loved my parents, but we had different ideas about how I should live my life and how I should raise my children. I appreciated their input, they’re fantastic to my kids, but ultimately, I didn’t want their advice unsolicited.

  My mother had been so angry when I took “The Job.” I’d had another job offer from an airline the same time the offer from the prison came, but my car had a catastrophic blowout and I had to accept the job at the prison. I could get rides in town, but all the way to the airport was another matter entirely. She told me she’d spent twenty years worrying if my father was going to come home every night working at the federal prison, and now she had to worry about me at the state prison and it was a shitty thing for me to do to her.

  My dad acted differently. He asked me if I had all the equipment I needed to start. He told me I would see people carrying these huge Maglite flashlights so they could use them like billy clubs, but that I shouldn’t take anything behind the walls I wasn’t prepared to eat, meaning nothing I wouldn’t want used against me or stuffed in any various orifices.

  When my estranged husband caught me trying to fit my flashlight into my mouth, he asked me if I was planning on trying to promote early by showing off that I could, in fact, fit it inside.

  Anyway, when I got home that night, my mother was screaming—it was a high-pitched sound, horrible and shrill, like something being torn out of her.

  She was in the bedroom where she spent most of her time in those days, and all she could do was howl. The kids were spending the night with their dad and my father was at work. The dog came to me, crawling on her belly and whining, obviously afraid. This had been going on for some time.

  I went into the bedroom and my mother was crying, holding her belly with vomit in the trashcan and burning cigarettes in the ashtray. She had a window open; it was summer. But she had the electric blanket wrapped around her and she was shaking.

  I didn’t know what to do. These attacks had been coming more often, and due to her other illnesses, she hadn’t been able to leave the house so she could go see a doctor.

  “Help me,” she begged.

  Oh, God. How? I didn’t know what was wrong with her, so how could I help her?

  “Help me,” she cried again, louder.

  I sat down on the bed next to her and tried to rub her back, to soothe her as she’d done to me when I was sick. It didn’t help. Nothing did.

  Her cries for help got louder until she was screaming again and I was at a loss. She screamed and screamed at me to help her and when her voice cracked, she’d whimper. All she could tell me was that it was a pain in her belly.

  I called my dad and asked him to come home. He told me he would and to call an ambulance.

  She screamed until they arrived, begging me the whole time to help her. To make it stop. EMS shot her up with painkillers and took her to the ER.

  She spent twelve hours in the ER only to be sent home with a referral to an ob-gyn.

  Still in pain and with no answers.

  She begged me to stay home with her.

  But I didn’t.

  I couldn’t.

  Not only because I had no idea how to help her, but because I was still on probation at work. I could be fired for absolutely anything in the first year. If I called in sick during this time, I could lose my job. There was literally nowhere else in town I could get a job where I could get insurance and still support myself. The pay was horrible, barely a living, but the benefits were good.

  My starting pay was around $12 an hour; I made approximately $24,000 a year. The poverty level guidelines for my state and a family of three sit at $27,000 a year. Incidentally, the federal average for corrections officers was $53,000 a year in 2009. I made less than half of the national average and under the poverty level.

  As a kid, I’d quit so many jobs because I didn’t like them, or just didn’t want to do them. Like I thought they grew on trees. I’d never had a problem getting hired until I was a stay-at-home mom for eight years suddenly thrust back into the job force.

  Although my husband and I were separated, and we’d had some really awful fights, he was never mean about money. He was happy to provide for his children and even gave me the money to get my own apartment.

  But I couldn’t keep relying on him.

  The worst part was I didn’t want to stay home with her even if I could. Honestly, I had enough shit on my plate to deal with without my mother screaming and sobbing all day long and demanding I stay in the bedroom with her while she did it.

  I know, that’s horrible. She’s my mom. She was afraid and hurting, and she needed me. I wasn’t there for her.

  We didn’t always have a good relationship and she was sick a lot when I was growing up. Her illnesses were due to nervous conditions. I didn’t have much patience for her through those times, and I guess I thought this was the same thing. I don’t know what else to say without sounding like I’m badmouthing her and making excuses. So I’ll just own it. My reasons were my own, but I didn’t want to do it. So I didn’t.

  Instead, I went to work.

  I left an hour early so I had time to drive around, to ditch all my baggage at the door before I went behind the walls.

  Any shit I would have carried in with me would have been twice as heavy while I was there, and I would have been distracted and maybe even a danger to my fellow officers. The inmates see those things, know to look for them.

  If an officer didn’t shine their boots, if their normally clean and crisp uniform was rumpled, if the way a person carried themselves was diff
erent—they’d use it to slide in. To bond. It would start out simple enough with something like: “What’s wrong, Sarge? You don’t look like yourself.”

  Do they give a shit? No. They’re trying to get over on someone, have some officer cull themselves from the herd and spill their guts all over the place, telling personal business. Then suddenly he’s the one who understands you, who cares about you, convinces you he’s the only one…

  Yeah, puke.

  So I drove around with the windows down and Pantera’s Vulgar Display of Power album as loud as it would go.

  The lyrics to “Walk” have always spiked my adrenaline and amped me up, ready to go, fight or flight. In this instance, it helped me get to that constant state of alert where all corrections officers have to be to get the job done.

  I dropped my baggage at the door to do my eight, then the gate, as they say.

  My Friday.

  I think it was a Tuesday in the outside world, but for me, it was Friday. Last day of the workweek. Two days ahead with more bullshit, but at least it was a different flavor and I’d see my kids.

  I also went out on my Friday nights. Just a couple of beers, maybe some dancing and a few games of pool. Something to decompress, to not have to be anywhere or be anything. I wasn’t even going to go home and change. I’d brought my clothes with me.

  Yeah, smart one that I was, I brought clothes, but no lunch. So I got a cupcake out of the vending machine.

  I could have gotten a tray from the chow hall like some of the other guys I worked with, but I’d seen roaches crawl out of the trays down in Segregation. I’d accidentally jostled the cart and it looked like the tower of trays was doing the hula. Until I realized it wasn’t the trays, but the roaches crawling out of them. Sadly, that wasn’t specific to Segregation but the whole prison. Exterminators were in all the time, but it never seemed to do any good. All officers were advised to shake out all of their belongings before we left the institution after shift so we didn’t take any of the roaches home. Anyone working there longer than five minutes probably has a roach story that would make your skin crawl right off your body.