by Deeanne Gist
They try to keep their voices down, but it never works. They talk and talk. The guards talk about the warden, about the lady—they can spend days talking about her and the priest—about the other guards and the budget and the hiring and promotions and corruption and dope and new inmates and everything else in between. It is like a pipeline of information to our cells.
Today the guards sound sad. It comes through in the morose clanking of their utility belts as they shift on the stools, in the bitterness underlying their voices.
“New shipment of men coming in,” one of them says.
The other guard is silent for a moment. They both know what this means. We all know what it means.
“Tomorrow?”
“Yeah.”
“More numbers,” the first guard says, and you can hear his discomfort in how he shifts on the stool.
“Conroy will be happy,” the other one whispers, almost too quiet to hear, but we all do, and the walls sigh with sadness.
The warden is thinking about the new shipment of men coming into general population when he sees the lady sitting patiently in the death penalty visiting room. The wood Dugdemona cage in front of her is empty. The lady sits in the chair, waiting for York. She sits very still, as if in waiting, her soul has left her.
The warden has come to tell her that the guards bringing York are running late. She looks up at him as he enters, his feet politely halting as he steps past the threshold. It is just the two of them, the lady and the warden, their eyes meeting.
For once he doesn’t know what to say. “What, no attorneys?” he finally jokes.
She smiles. “I try to avoid them.”
“Like wardens?” It is out of his mouth before he thinks twice.
Delight fills her face. “No, I always want to talk to you.”
“That would be a mistake on my part,” he says, coming toward her.
Suddenly he wants to talk to her, wants to face her, wants to ask her how she feels, trying to get killers off. Doesn’t she care about what they did? Doesn’t the reality of it ever bother her? Instead, he remarks of York, “The prince apparently woke up with his head on a pea called his ass.”
She’s not offended. “It’s not like I would invite him to tea.” She smiles.
He is standing close to her now. Close to the cage where she will talk to York, hunting for secrets to get him off the row.
“It’s just a job to you,” he says.
“It’s not just a job to either of us.”
“Aha.”
“You like being the jailer,” she says calmly.
“That I do. And you like being what?”
She stares up at him. With her short black hair and her gaze—so intense—she resembles a cat, a tiny, beautiful cat, born to hunt, to drive her prey from the woods. She is tougher than any convict, he thinks, harder than the men she frees from the row. She is more dangerous than all the killers combined because she is aware of what she does—and she chooses not to stop.
The smile vanishes and she just looks sad. Her eyes tell him she wishes it weren’t so. But it is.
He thinks of the lady as he leaves work that evening, as the sunset illuminates the sky with gold shot through with streams of ocher. Everyone says bye-warden, bye-warden, as he makes his way through the locking doors. The words are like grooves on the stones. He waves to the female guard working the front tower, her rifle at the ready.
He is glad that women work here now. When he was younger and now starting in corrections, it was only men. The prison was harder and yet somehow weaker. Now the women put pictures of their kids up on their lockers and leave brownies in the lunchroom, but when they go on the rows, they go hard—and laugh while they do it. Even the hardest male convict wants a mom, he thinks, and these rough-and-ready women are ready for that role.
When he drives home, he tries to think of all the good things in his life. Fishing for sturgeon. Elk hunting in the woods. Baseball. His wife once accused him of being like all men by trying to make his life into a picture book and ignoring the next page.
None of the happy thoughts work. As always after he has talked to the lady, he is angry. She infuriates him in a way no one else ever has.
He has spent his life being the jailer. He knows he has his faults—he can be surprisingly naive for a warden. There are things that happen in the prison that he doesn’t know about and doesn’t want to know about. He is wise enough to know that as long as the wheel turns, a certain amount of dust gets thrown.
But after seeing the lady, he can’t help getting angry. He takes his job seriously. Every day he protects inmates from one another and society from the inmates. It is not an easy task. He wants to tell the politicians to try policing three thousand men who spend their time trying to disembowel one another with shanks made out of sharpened table knives. Get back to me on how it goes.
And then the lady comes in and pulls a few tearjerkers for judges who have never stepped foot inside his prison, who have never met the victims or their families. And the next thing he knows, she is walking another man away from his deserved death.
It isn’t that he minds when it is fair. There have been times when she walked guys and he was okay with it. He remembers one guy whom she got off. The guy had been convicted of murdering a drug dealer. The lady got him a new trial, and the jury decided it was self-defense. He himself walked that guy off the row and into freedom. He got heat for it later, but he stood by it. It was the right thing to do.
He knows there are too many black men on the row. He knows there are too many men who had Grim and Reaper for their defense attorneys. He tells his new guards there are more than enough guilty men to go around, we don’t need to invent more. He is the first to admit the system needs fixing.
What he doesn’t understand is helping the rape killers and serial killers and baby killers, the men like York and Striker and Arden.
When he thinks about what men like York and Striker and Arden have done, he is firm in his truth. Enough years of being the jailer—of seeing men kill one another in prison riots, of holding the hands of rape victims as they testify in front of parole boards—and he knows that some men deserve to die. He can chat with a man like York, he can even show kindness to a man like Arden, but he knows in his heart that they deserve to die. Such men are like diseased dogs or demented animals. You can bemoan what made them killers, but once they are, the best thing is to put them down with mercy.
Maybe, he thinks, the lady forgets about what these men did. She forgets that men like York hurt women, or men like Striker killed so many, and what Arden did is too horrifying to consider.
He stops himself. No, he thinks again, the lady does know those things. She talks to the men’s families, she plumbs their lives, she has to know the pain they have caused. Yet she still tries to get them off, and this he cannot figure. This is the part that makes him mad.
He realizes with a start that he is home. The brown ranch lies at the end of a cul-de-sac in a neighborhood that is comfortingly monotonous. Black bugs whirl against the front door, and as dusk falls, the bats will whirl like brown darts from the trees, getting ready to celebrate the feast of the porch light.
As he parks in the driveway and opens the garage door, he sees a For Sale sign in the front yard. He blinks and the sign is gone.
It is only eight o’clock, but he knows his wife will be in bed. If he goes upstairs, there will be a ring of sweat in the tub and moisture on the curtain. Her medication holder will be on the counter beside a glass with melting ice and gin. With dullness, he will see the empty wig stand and the litter of pill bottles, an army accumulated against the enemy of cancer, which is winning.
He will go into the bedroom they have shared for twenty-two years, listening carefully for the tiny gasps of pain that will tell him what number she is today. Are you a four, dear? he wants to ask. I am a six, honey, he wishes he could tell her, just from the ache in my heart.
She will turn over in bed, hiding the pain an
d reaching for the wig at her bed stand. No matter how many times he tells her “I love you no matter what,” she wears that damn ugly wig, even in bed. She will say, “Oh, honey, are you here?”
And he will say, “Yes, honey, I am.”
The white-haired boy has a mouth like Cupid. The girls at school used to say his red lips were sexy. He rides in silence along with the others on the transport bus, nervously biting those red lips. He is only sixteen, but in our state, you can be judged as an adult even younger. It is not unusual for boys this young to be sentenced to our enchanted place.
The older, con-wise men on the prison bus look at the white-haired boy. Some look with sadness, others with appraisal.
The bus bumps down the prison road, under the watchtowers. The gates are slowly raised, and the bus pulls inside. The men are hustled off the bus. For some this will be the beginning of forever. They are not thinking about that. They are stiff from the long drive—the transport bus picks up new inmates from jails all over the state. They are bored and ready for their new life to commence, whatever it is.
The white-haired boy blinks in the sunlight, his chains dangling off slender arms, and the guards look at him and wince without knowing it. They know the score. Things happen in this enchanted place that no one can control.
The new men are quickly herded into a prison door. WELCOME TO THE STAT PRISON says a sign on the wall with crooked stick-on black letters under bolted glass. The E has fallen off and lies at the bottom of the frame. The men are ordered to sit. A guard moves along the row and takes off their shackles. The boy stares at the guard standing by a door and holding a rifle in his hands. The boy stares at the rifle. He realizes with a start that he has never seen a gun except for the ones on police officers and sheriffs.
When it comes his turn, the white-haired boy is called through the door. Inside a small concrete room waits a bored-looking guard wearing blue latex gloves.
“Undress,” the guard says in a nasal voice. The boy quickly strips. The boy has the soft belly of youth. His tender penis has curled up into its nest of white hair. “Turn around.” The boy turns. “Bend and spread.” The boy bends and spreads. The guard only looks. “Turn and lift.” He turns and lifts his penis. The guard reaches under his ball sack and feels with slippery-gloved fingers. “Dress.”
The boy feels relief. That wasn’t so bad. He picks his prison uniform from the large industrial laundry bins lined along the side of the room. Even the smallest size floats on him. But after months dressed in jail clothes, waiting for trial, the orange uniform feels like a relief to the white-haired boy. In jail, waiting for trial, he wasn’t allowed shoes with laces. He laces his work shoes with satisfaction.
When they are all dressed, the new men are led down a hall into a large room. They sit in folding chairs and hold their new papers in their laps. It could be a classroom except for the bars on the windows.
“You came to prison as punishment, not for punishment,” the guard at the head of the room tells them. “Make the most of it.”
The new men are quickly led through the system. They are given a sheaf of papers: work assignments, cellblock assignments, a small manual of religious services, and a thicker manual of disciplinary rules.
The guard tells them if they have a problem to fill out a kite. The boy is confused until he realizes a kite is a complaint form. Each man is given a dozen.
Orientation is over. The white-haired boy is told to report to Cellblock G after free time in the yard for his cell assignment. He is surprised. He had thought he would be dragged to a cell and locked up. Instead, he and the others are let into the yard. The new men walk outside and look around the yard, and it seems the whole enchanted place stops for a moment and takes a breath. The guards stand rigid at the towers. When there are new arrivals, they are always like this. They scan the acclimation carefully.
Some of the new inmates who have done time before casually walk over to old buddies. Others head to the picnic tables in the shade to read their papers. The others stand there, confused. The shot callers at the weight pile study the incomers with smiles.
The white-haired boy feels sudden panic. He stands there, frozen. He is not sure what to do. How did I get here? he wonders. One day he was in math class, and then he was in jail, waiting for trial on auto theft charges. He knew what he did was stupid: He and his buddies took a car for a joyride. Now he is here, sentenced to two years. When he was being sentenced, the judge told him this was his wake-up call.
The guards watch from their towers. The sky wheels above them.
The guard Conroy has deliberately guileless eyes. Watching him cross the yard, you might think, What an ordinary-looking man. From the slope of his belly over his service holster to the dust on his black dress shoes, there is nothing to distinguish him—until he turns his cold blue eyes on you. And then you think, Ordinary men can be more dangerous than any other.
Conroy works intelligence, which tells you enough. He wanders the yard, looking for the tallest trees. He knows them all by sight. Conroy likes the tall trees. He likes to stand in their shadows. It makes him feel powerful.
The tallest tree on the yard is a shot caller called Risk.
Risk has spent his time on the weight pile—so much that he looks like a steer on steroids. He has a tangle of long brown hair and a face scarred from fighting. He fell for opening up a drug mule with an X-Acto knife and then rummaging around his stomach for the balloons the mule had swallowed. This normally wouldn’t get much attention, but in his case, the drug mule was his own five-year-old son. Apparently, by the time Risk was done, his boy looked like a piece of pink and white meat.
You would think a guy like Risk would be a pariah on the yard. But that is not the way it is inside. As much as I love books, I have never read one that tells what it is really like in a prison. In the books, the baby killers and rapists are hated inside prisons. That is not the truth. The truth is, it doesn’t matter what you did on the outside. If you like to take it by force, if you want to beef up on the pile, you, too, can grow taller than the tallest tree in the forest. You can be the worst baby killer or rapist and still beat and rape your way into power inside.
What matters in prison is not who you are but what you want to become. This is the place of true imagination.
Cronies surround Risk. They are all huge guys grown into monsters on the weight pile and the extra food that comes with being shot callers. They have little kitchens in their cells, complete with battery-operated camp stoves. They dine in their cells on meals that would be unthinkable for the rest of us—gourmet concoctions made of the food sold in the prison commissary, where a candy bar costs five dollars. They cook packets of Top Ramen and mix them with huge chunks of cheese and cans of chili—chili with real meat—and they top these meals with real coffee and cream and sugar. The hot, delicious smells drift from their cell windows to drive the rest of the prisoners mad.
The shot callers are our kings. From their halls comes a constant supply of shanks, a regular prison industry where Risk will loan a blade for fifty dollars if he approves the death. They supply endless dime bags of heroin to the prison addicts, the tiny blobs of black tar wrapped in the crinkled wrappers from the candies left by the church women who come to pray and sob through their hands at the plight of these poor men—as a result, the heroin sold in here has been nicknamed starlight candy. The treasured few kits are kept in their cells, to be loaned for a steep price unless you are one of Risk’s crew, and then you get to use the blood-spotted, dull syringe at no cost. They make fortunes out of selling pruno, the homemade alcohol grown in plastic bags and fed with bags of sugar, and for weeks their cell rows erupt with raucous, drunken laughter. They know that having too much money on their books is dangerous, so through corrupt guards, they send thousands of dollars in drug money to wives and girlfriends on the outside. All of this made possible because the guards don’t turn their cells.
Conroy walks across the yard, the dust rising from his dress sho
es and the medals on his regulation shirt gleaming. He comes up to Risk and slaps his shoulder. They walk off together, heads bowed. The whole yard sees the intelligence guard and the shot caller talking.
When they come back, both are laughing. Conroy grips Risk on the shoulder as if they are good buddies.
The entire enchanted place sighs with sadness.
The next day Risk saunters across the yard to the old black telephone hanging near the activities room. It is one of the few phones that is not recorded. Risk dials the extension by heart.
The phone rings in Conroy’s office. Conroy calls it his yes telephone because when it rings, he picks it up and says one word: “Yes?” And then he listens. “The Norteños are bringing some black tar in through that dirty guard up front,” Risk tells him. “The one that picks his teeth. They’re dropping it for keister tomorrow. Enough fucking tar to pave this place twice.”
Conroy hangs up the phone, and a loving smile wreathes his face. He knows exactly what to do. He will turn on the cameras in the visiting room and catch the guard accepting a package of black tar heroin—thousands of dollars of tar. He will catch the guard passing these bindles of heroin to one of the Norteño inmates working the visiting room. The camera will show the inmate going into the restroom with the package under his shirt, where he will tuck all of those bindles one by one up his works, in practice known as keistering.
Conroy will later show the incriminating video to the guard. The guard will grow pale and stammer. He knows this is not only a firing offense; it is a criminal offense. He could be convicted and thrown in here as an inmate. All the beatings he has given, all the twisted arms while cuffing, all the times he has walked away from the sounds of rape—those are the times that will be remembered by the other inmates if he returns as one of them. Nothing is despised more in our enchanted place than a castrated duck.