Sweet Hell on Fire

by Sara Lunsford

  When the guy came back, he looked like he’d had an industrial zipper implanted in his skin.

  And he was still acting like an entitled cockbag.

  Inmates don’t get showers in the first forty-eight hours that they’re in Seg. This bitch was crying about how he had to have a shower and he had to wash his stitches and we had violated his rights and he was going to sue us and…I don’t even know what else he said because we stopped listening.

  Then the Sergeant looked at me. She had The Look. The one she got on her face when she thought of something truly magnificent. She suggested that we give him a shower. And put him back in the showers with two of the biggest, angriest guys we could find who were scheduled to shower. It just so happened we chose a Crip and a Blood.

  Yeah, buddy. Fuck you. That’ll teach you to keep your racist shit to yourself and to shut the fuck up and do your time with your head down.

  He should have known when all three of us came to get him for his shower, but no. He thought he was just getting his due. Which I guess he was. He had it coming.

  Everything went smoothly until we went back to take them back to their cells, and one of the guys asked how he got those stitches. I wanted to raise my hand and say, “Pick me, pick me. I know!” He said it was a misunderstanding. Oh, I wanted to say something so badly, but that would have been endangering his life. He had enough rope; he could hang himself with it on his own.

  If looks could really kill, the one he gave me would have dropped me. He knew we’d put him in the showers with those other inmates specifically because he’d been spouting his racist crap and otherwise being more trouble than he was worth. I just shrugged. And the other two inmates both laughed, and one said, “Yeah, you push these bitches, they push back. I bet you’re that guy the old man shanked ’cause you called him a nigger.”

  When loudmouth went back to his cell, we didn’t hear anything out of him for the rest of the night.

  I’m a big fan of inmates policing themselves.

  I learned that the Sergeant on nights was fucking one of her corporals in the office upstairs. They found a used condom and she’d admitted to it.

  I can say this for her: at least she wasn’t inmate fucking. That was something.

  But at work? Damn. Getting naughty in a prison isn’t like other places. If you work in an office, you can get down in a supply closet, or the bathroom, or any number of places. When I worked for an airline, I had sex on the bag belt. And in the cockpit of a 747. So I understood the allure.

  But it comes back to the fact this is a prison. Yes, we have supply closets and desks and bathrooms. But it’s fucking prison. There’s scabies, herpes, crabs, lice, shingles, Hepatitis Alphabet Soup, tuberculosis, fungi, meningitis, gonorrhea, MRSA, and HIV. Some of these things can live on surfaces and who knows what else. I wouldn’t have been surprised to have found traces of the bubonic plague with all the roaches, rats, and vermin crawling around the place. And these people wanted to bear their soft mucous parts and expose them to all of this?

  They weren’t the only ones.

  People used to fuck in the weight room until the administration installed cameras. In the yard bubble the windows are tinted, and the officer on duty in the bubble was caught jacking off while cruising the inmate database on the computer, talking to their pictures and calling them all sorts of naughty names.

  The worst were the officers who got caught screwing the inmates. A girl I knew got fired for taking two inmates in the porter’s closet and fucking them both. A food service worker was caught on tape doing two at a time in the kitchen and committing unholy acts with peanut butter. A male officer was caught on his knees in the library sucking off any inmate who’d pull down his pants. Incidentally, this service was advertised in graffiti in two of the cells in Seg.

  A lot of what happened in the prison could be found recorded in graffiti. It’s like a living history. Some of it was like a secret language that only the inmates knew. It was ever-evolving and ever-changing. As soon as we’d crack one code, they’d come up with something else. Most graffiti would be recorded and sent to investigations and then promptly painted over or destroyed.

  It was frequently used to identify gang presence and members, contraband trafficking, and like the above-mentioned example, officers to watch because they’d stirred the pot and crossed a line.

  My mom finally had her surgery.

  Recovery didn’t go well.

  It took days for the anesthesia to wear off, for her to realize who she was and where she was. One time I went down to see her, she told me to leave because she didn’t want to buy any Avon. Then another time, she asked if I’d seen her dog and talked about how much she loved living in Kenosha.

  We were told there was a chance she wouldn’t ever come out of the anesthesia.

  I still didn’t know if I’d have the chance to tell her I was sorry.

  Part of me wanted to try to strike a deal with the universe, that if the powers that be would let her be okay, I’d forget all the other bullshit.

  But I knew better than that. It didn’t work that way. When I was in seventh grade, I sobbed on my knees praying every night to make my grandfather better when his kidneys shut down. I thought he was the only person in the world who understood me and I couldn’t imagine a world without him. I didn’t want to.

  His shunts collapsed and the doctor refused to replace them, so he died.

  I knew it didn’t matter what I promised, or how good I said I’d be. If this was it, then this was it and there was nothing I could do about it.

  I was in the Max again. I usually loved working the Max, in Seg especially, but I could tell that today was going to be one of those days.

  It started when I realized I had nothing for lunch in the fridge and no money to buy any groceries for two days. Yes, way to be a responsible adult. I was late to work because some asshole sideswiped my car and took off my mirror. I had to file a police report so I’d have an excuse for not registering my car. I still had to get it inspected, but it wouldn’t pass without a side mirror, and I couldn’t register it without the inspection. And after I got to work, I found a hole in my boot where the tread had peeled away.

  I collected my keys and equipment as quickly as possible so the officer I relieved could be on her way. We were already locking up for Count so I headed down to the showers and flipped the lights to let the guys know to finish up.

  I gave them five minutes and flipped the lights again. This asshole yells at me and says he’ll be done when he’s done. I told him he had one minute before I turned off the water. Count Time doesn’t wait on inmates. Inmates wait on Count Time. It happens at the same time every day and you know when you have time to wash your ass. The whole institution operates around Count Time—the set times every day when each inmate had to be counted. Numbers were measured against rosters, which were measured again against a master list to double-check every one of our residents was where he was supposed to be.

  He still hadn’t come out a minute later and told me to fuck myself, to come in and get him.

  So I turned off the water and I did go in and get him.

  As soon as he saw my face inside the shower, he stormed naked to the OIC’s office, dripping wet, and I followed behind him, ready to cuff him if I had to. The OIC told him they would talk after Count, preferably when he wasn’t naked.

  The inmate said he didn’t give a fuck what I did or what I said because he’d get out the next day. I said that was fine, but I was still writing him a disciplinary report for interfering with Count and refusing a direct order. He could spend the last of his time in Seg.

  After locking him up and performing Count, I finally had time to take note of a little motherfucker up on the second tier who kept running his suck every time I walked past. He’d say things like for me to move my fat ass on down his run, to not come
back, to go fuck myself, etc. and so forth.

  Finally, after handling most of my business, I stopped in front of his cell and leaned back against the railing. I was prepared to be camped out there for a while. He had to learn it wasn’t his cell house, his tier, or even his cell. While I was in that cell house, that motherfucker belonged to me. He was just renting it and I would have respect from him, or at least a closed mouth for the rest of the night.

  “What do you want, bitch?” he demanded, standing there, skinny and pale white in the neon of the overhead light.

  I didn’t answer him. I just stood there, staring. Inmates walked past me going to work, going to callouts. Some stopped and talked. The ones who knew me just laughed and kept walking.

  I stood there silently. When he couldn’t get a rise out of me, couldn’t get me to answer, he came unhinged. I almost wished I could have recorded it for posterity. He was zinging around his cell screaming at me like some possessed pinball.

  When he finally started to settle down, I asked him if he was finished. He nodded. So I turned to walk away. Then I heard, “That’s right, bitch. This is my tier.”

  So I came back to my perch. I’d drawn the line in the sand and I couldn’t and wouldn’t back down. It was a small thing, but it was something. I was going to have my way come hell, high water, or the Second Coming.

  “Don’t you have somewhere to be? Like the buffet?”

  “I have lots of places to be. Right here is one of them.”

  “Aren’t you tired of being insulted? Why don’t you run along like a good little piggy?”

  He was obviously trying to make me angry, but for me to be angry, I had to care what he thought of me. And I didn’t. What I cared about was my reputation and how I was treated on the run. “Actually, I’m pretty tired of looking at your dumb freckled face, but you won’t act like an adult so I can leave you alone. So, until you act like a grown-up, my ass is going to be parked right here.” I pointed to the rails, where I’d sat down.

  “You can’t do that.”

  “I’m the officer. I have the keys. I can do whatever I want.” I stayed there for another thirty minutes, the OIC seeing what I was doing and leaving me to it.

  “If you stand in front of my cell, they’ll think you’re trying to get some of this.” He pointed down at his body. He could have been built like one of the cover models for the romances I write, as quite a few of them were, and I still wouldn’t have looked twice.

  I laughed really hard. And loud. “No they won’t. My OIC already knows what I’m doing and the inmates who know me know better. And you’re about to know better too.”

  Although it was coming close to time to shit or get off the pot, so to speak. It was almost time for chow. I’d have to let him out. He was being aggressive, so technically, I didn’t have to, but I didn’t want it to escalate that far.

  Finally, he said, “Sarge, I get the point.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “All I ask is that you treat me with respect and I’ll give you the same, okay?”

  “Yeah, I got it.”

  But he didn’t get it. After chow, he refused to lock up. He said I wasn’t such a badass when he was outside his cell. Of course, he said this all the way down the tier from me, but I’d learned a few tricks from some of the old-timers. So, rather than chase him all over hell’s half acre, I went up to the second tier where his cell was and I had the OIC rack the door for me.

  I went inside and shook the hell out of his house. He had a ton of nuisance contraband. Magazines that didn’t have his name on them, extra pairs of state-issued whites like socks and underwear he wasn’t supposed to have, an extra blanket, cleaning supplies that weren’t allowed inside the cells except when the porters were passing cleaning materials. He had three indigent packs of grooming items even though he was only supposed to be issued one when he needed it. (They were for inmates who didn’t have an industry job within the prison and had no family to put money on his accounts so they could buy things like soap, a toothbrush, or other necessities.) He also had an extra canteen bag that wasn’t his. That was just the beginning.

  So I yelled “yard sale” at the top of my lungs during the mass movement to chow and threw everything he wasn’t allowed to have out of his cell down to the flag. He hadn’t paid for any of it, at least not legally. It was all state-issued—or stolen—which I could take from him at will. The magazines I could have thrown away, which was essentially what I was doing.

  Everything I threw down on the flag disappeared almost cartoonishly fast.

  He charged up the stairs screaming at me, but when he got to his cell, he stopped. I half expected him to come in the cell and take a swing, but he didn’t. Yeah, who was a badass only when he was locked up? This guy finally went into his cell cursing at me the whole way.

  But I made my point.

  Something he never let me forget. He held a grudge better than any woman I know. I ended up getting him down in Seg later, and we had another run-in. This one was a little more intense because he threw things at me and threatened to shank my “pink piggy ass.” When I asked him why he was looking at my ass, he reached through the bars to choke me and jerk my head against them.

  Rather than fight with him through the bars, I simply dropped to the floor and jerked his arms through, taking him with me. The momentum brought him crashing forward, smashing his face up against the bars like he’d tried to do to me.

  Then it was really on.

  So I followed procedure and told him he’d be losing his privileges and going to a slam door cell and to turn around and face the wall with his wrists at the opening of the bean hole so I could cuff him. I knew he wouldn’t comply. He was good and wound up by then.

  Then he really lost his shit, so the other officer who’d seen the whole exchange went with me to tell the OIC and the OIC went back with me to try to get him to cuff up so we didn’t have to call in the blacksuits and get them all dressed up in riot gear if this could be resolved at a lower level. But I knew it wouldn’t be. This guy hated me.

  I think because I made him feel powerless, but fuck him. This is prison. If being told what to do knots your knickers, don’t go to prison. I’m not going to give him his way just so he can feel like a special snowflake. Treat them all the same.

  And when he told my OIC to go fuck himself and to fuck me too, I couldn’t stop smiling because I knew he was going to get his ass handed to him on a blacksuit platter.

  “Are you sure?” I asked him like I would a kid who wanted to ride a roller coaster that I knew would be too intense for him.

  “Fuck you.”

  “Really? Are you really, really sure? You can cuff up now.”

  “For you? Fuck you.”

  Okay, fuck me. Whatever. I wouldn’t be the one going to sleep on a concrete slab in a paper dress with all of my mucous membranes burning like death.

  I was firmly reprimanded with a smack to the back of the head when we got to the office. The Old Man said it was unprofessional that I would look so happy. I couldn’t help it. This guy had been a huge pain in my ass. He obviously had something to prove.

  Some of these blacksuit guys I hung out with outside of work. We were drinking buddies. One even told God and everybody I was his little sister. He was black, so no one saw the resemblance, but I made sure to tell them that this inmate had said he was going to shank me.

  They tried out the new pepper spray gel on him. Had a much better focus for the spray with gel rather than the aerosol. Better for the environment.

  It burned hotter than the aerosol as well. This guy erupted in welts and blisters just from the spray. He still fought when we racked the door and the blacksuits went in on him to cuff him up and drag him out of the cell.

  He must have been allergic to it because everywhe
re it touched him had swollen to twice its normal size. They had to walk him to the showers to rinse that shit off him or it would have just kept burning, and they passed by me.

  The inmate tried to charge me, but I didn’t move. If he’d have made it to me, I would have fucked him up, but I had complete faith in those guys and it wasn’t misplaced. They launched themselves at him and buried his face in the concrete of the run to subdue him again before dragging him into the showers.

  After that, he finally kept his mouth shut and his head down.

  Several days ago, I’d found an inmate passing a book around from the Law Library. It hadn’t been checked out to anyone in the cell house. I confiscated it and sent it back to the library. The inmate who’d been in possession of the book got very angry that I’d taken it. He told me I’d be sorry. So he riled up his little fangirl bitches who were on the block with him to find things to grieve me for. The first few weren’t a big deal and didn’t even make it past the first stage of complaint, meaning I didn’t have to answer them. They wrote up their complaints and filed them with the administration, but they didn’t make it past the Grievance Officer and were thrown out.

  This grievance was different.

  There was going to be questioning and, depending on my answers, possibly an investigation.

  When I came into work, the relief OIC pulled me aside and kicked everyone out of the office before she sat me down and looked at me for a long time.

  “What the fuck?” I knew she was about to lay something huge on me. This woman had no qualms about speaking her mind and suddenly she had to think about what she was saying? It couldn’t be good.

  “God, Sara.” She sighed heavily. “I don’t want to do this. But you should know, this happens to all of us. Especially those of us who are really good at our jobs.” She shoved a paper at me and as I read, my knuckles whitened on the arm of the chair and if I could have shot fire from my eyes, I would have. It made me so nauseous, I promptly threw up. I scrambled to the bathroom and didn’t even manage to close the door before I spewed my lunch.