by Ninie Hammon
“Fine by me.” Rhonda Jo was mad. She turned in a huff and flounced out in a cloud of Blue Waltz perfume.
Joy looked around. The classroom studio was emptying. Just as she knew it would. Mrs. Stevenson would have to leave in a minute, too, because she was directing the work on the decorations for the prom in the gym.
The little bird of a woman in her paint-splattered smock flitted over to her and smiled approvingly, then saw the title and giggled.
“You’re going to be alright working by yourself now, aren’t you?” she asked.
Without waiting for an answer, she fluttered toward the door, tossing absentmindedly over her shoulder, “You’re going to be fine, too, aren’t you Phoebe, dear?”
Phoebe Elrod was such a complete loser that even Mrs. Stevenson blew by her like she wasn’t there.
“Yes ma’am,” Phoebe said, without lifting her head from her own artwork—something that looked like the floor after a tribe of monkeys had a paint fight. Phoebe wasn’t staying to finish her painting before the watercolors dried—she was working in oils. No, Phoebe was staying because she had nowhere to go, didn’t belong to a club, wasn’t involved in a single extracurricular activity.
Phoebe had been consigned to the bottom rung on the teenage social ladder. She had a bad reputation, had been branded a skag because she put out, slept around. Joy was popular, not glitzy-cheerleader popular, but wholesome, preacher’s-daughter popular. Those two social classes were separated by a cavern vast and deep. Joy had never before tried to cross it.
But Phoebe was the reason Joy had stayed behind, the reason she’d started the un-finishable watercolor—so she’d be stuck here, alone with Phoebe. For weeks last year, Joy had heard the talk in the girls’ locker room about Phoebe, how she kept throwing up in her first-period class. Morning sickness, the girls had giggled; Phoebe had gotten herself knocked up! When Phoebe’s bouts with nausea stopped abruptly, the locker room was abuzz with speculation. Could she possibly have “gotten rid” of the baby?
Joy had to find out, and if Phoebe had, how she’d managed it. And she had exactly forty-five minutes to do it.
Her heart was a lunatic woodpecker in her chest, her palms wet, her mouth dry. But she had no time for nerves, had not the luxury of giving in to anxiety and embarrassment.
As soon as the door closed behind Mrs. Stevenson, Joy pretended she needed more water for her brush from the sink in the back of the room. She had to pass by the easel where Phoebe was working to get it.
She walked slowly by, her heart hammering. But she couldn’t make herself stop, just continued to the sink and filled the glass, her hands trembling.
What am I going to say?
Turning resolutely, she headed back toward the front of the room, slowed as she passed where Phoebe was working and acted like she’d just noticed the painting.
“That’s nice,” she said.
Phoebe jumped like she’d poked her with a cattle prod.
“Thanks.”
She didn’t look up, just kept painting—well, smearing the paint around, mixing the colors, doing exactly what Mrs. Stevenson had warned them not to do when working with oils.
“If you just keep picking at it, the colors will all smear together,” she’d told the class probably a hundred times. “Be confident with your stroke, put the color where you want it and then leave it alone.”
“You like to work with oils better than watercolors?” Joy heaved the question out into the dead air just to have something to say, to have some reason to keep standing there.
Phoebe turned and looked up at her then, and Joy was struck by a couple of things. One, she’d never seen that much mascara on a human eyelash in all her life and wondered how the girl could keep her eyelids open under the weight of it. And two, her eyes were a pure, pale blue—Mama would have called it cornflower blue—that was really pretty.
The rest of her face was a train wreck, though. Nose too big, with blackheads so thick some of them stuck out. Her oily forehead was a forest of yellow pimples, as was her chin. And the white lipstick she wore gave her the look of a three-days-dead corpse. Her hair was ratted out in a big bubble held rigid by the contents of the Revlon Hair Spray can Joy could see in her purse, and she wore her straight skirt rolled up at the waist. School policy dictated that girls’ skirts had to be long enough to cover their knees, and the principal wasn’t the least bit shy about singling a girl out and instructing her to kneel. If her skirt didn’t touch the floor when she did, she’d be sent home. So all the skags rolled their skirts up at the waist and then pulled them back down when they feared they might get caught, up and down all day long like window shades.
Joy tried to concentrate on Phoebe’s eyes, wondering as she did what she must look like to Phoebe. She’d taken her bath and dressed quickly and quietly this morning so she could get out of the house before Daddy woke up. But she’d studied her face in the mirror as she removed the bristled, black-mesh rollers she slept in to tame the natural curl in her long, burgundy hair.
A foggy reflection had stared back at her with wide, almond-shaped eyes the same light brown as her mother’s. The image had looked … tired. She’d used a Cover Girl vanishing stick to hide the dark circles, rubbed it back and forth, but you could still see the smudges on her fair complexion. No, not fair, pale. So pasty-faced the dusting of freckles on her nose stood out like polka dots. Even so, with her full lips and heart-shaped mouth, and her hair teased and sprayed to turn up at her shoulders in a single, neat row like Annette Funicello’s, Joy McIntosh was pretty. She recognized that, and with the same objectivity acknowledged that she wasn’t beautiful. Mostly, she looked wholesome, like her picture belonged on a front of a Wheaties cereal box.
Yeah, right. Wholesome!
“I don’t like to paint at all, with oils or water colors or anything else,” Phoebe told her. “Why do you care?”
“I was just making conversation, that’s all.”
Phoebe picked up her brush and turned toward the painting, dismissing her.
“I like your picture!” Joy blurted out and Phoebe looked back over her shoulder. “I like the colors. And I like—”
“No you don’t.” Phoebe cut her off and turned to face her again. “It’s uglier than fresh road kill and you know it. I keep smearing this oil around and eventually the whole dern thing’s gonna be the same color.”
She put her brush down, sat back, and studied Joy. “What do you want?”
“Nothing, I just … ”
“Yeah, you do. You want something. What is it?” She gave a short, mirthless laugh. “You want to bum a fag, that it? You taken up the habit, a PK like you?”
Joy was certain if she took even one drag off a cigarette she’d cough for a week.
“Well, as a matter of fact, yeah, I do smoke. I started when I was a freshman.”
“You gotta be kidding me. You smoke?” Phoebe cocked her head to one side. “No you don’t.”
“Yes, I do. I—”
Phoebe grabbed Joy’s hand, turned it over and looked at her fingers. “No nicotine stains. This …” she held up her own fingers, with distinct yellow marks on her index finger and the one next to it. “… is what your hand looks like when you smoke.”
“Well, I …” Joy stammered and felt her face flush a deep red.
“Why would you tell me you smoke when you don’t? Trying to be all friendly like. And how come you’re shaking worse’n Barney Fife?” She was studying Joy, eyeing her up and down.
Joy hadn’t counted on this, hadn’t expected the girl to be astute enough to figure out the little game she was playing.
Light suddenly dawned on Phoebe’s face.
“You’re in trouble, aren’t you!”
“What do you mean I’m in—”
Phoebe didn’t let her finish. “That’s it! You’re in trouble and you came to me because … ” She stopped, her face darkened and she spat out the next words like the taste of them in her mouth made her nauseous. �
� … because everybody knows Phoebe Elrod’s a slut and sluts know what to do when you’re knocked up!”
All the color drained out of Joy’s face, bleaching the crimson to chalky pale. She stood speechless. This wasn’t how she’d imagined the conversation would go.
“No,” she whispered, shaking her head in a denial both of them knew was a lie. “Listen, I …”
“Let me tell you something, Sweet Cheeks.” Phoebe glared up at Joy, her words carried on a rush of decayed-teeth bad breath. “From one slut to another. You spread your legs and go ruttin’ around in the back seat of some football player’s new Ford—you deserve what it gets you.”
“No, I didn’t! I wouldn’t. It was just the one time, right after Mama … “ A sudden, fierce wave of nausea sucked the air out of her lungs before she could finish the sentence. She didn’t need to, of course; everybody in town knew Joy’s mother had died last fall.
Clamping her hand over her mouth, Joy dashed to the sink in the back of the room and barely made it before she vomited noisily. Then she stood there heaving, her eyes blurred with tears. There was only the little bit of cereal she’d been able to choke down for breakfast and after that just stomach bile. But she continued to dry heave until she was weak and breathless.
When it was finally over, she washed the foul smelling mess down the drain and turned around. Phoebe Elrod was gone.
Joy staggered back to the work table beside her easel and collapsed in the chair, struggling not to burst into tears. Then she noticed the piece of notebook paper folded on her stack of books. She opened it, her fingers trembling.
“Call me tonight, 272-5469. I’ll tell you where to get help. Phoebe.”
Chapter 6
Graham was located beyond where Arkansas’s Ouachita Mountains edged into southeastern Oklahoma. The low range of mountains, blanketed with hardwood forests of red oak, white oak, and hickory trees, flattened out after it crossed the state line, left its trees behind and morphed into the featureless prairie that marched northwest toward Oklahoma City.
But the Indian Bluffs were an odd range of almost-a-mountain hills that somehow got cut off from their brothers and sisters to the east, dawdling ducklings that straggled behind the rest of the flock. The hills sat by themselves on the flat prairie, and the state of Oklahoma had seen fit to locate the Oklahoma State Penitentiary for Women just south of them, six miles northeast of Graham. You could see it from the highway, a collection of ugly gray buildings that nobody would mistake for any other structure than a prison.
When the first building in the complex was constructed in 1917, it was dubbed the Iron House because it was designed to house Oklahoma’s worst offenders and the state’s lone execution chamber. In 1941, the state added on to the state prison in McAlester and transferred all the male prisoners there, then consolidated the female inmate population from three other facilities and moved them to the Iron House. Since that time, it had become a run-down hellhole with precious little heat in winter and no air conditioning at all. Within five years, the 500-capacity facility was overcrowded. The current inmate population ranged between 750 and 800.
The electric chair in the Iron House had been the final earthly resting place between heaven and hell for the backsides of seventy-nine male inmates before a new execution chamber for men was built in McAlester. Not a single woman had been executed in the Iron House in the twenty-two years it had been a women’s prison. In fact, not a single woman had been executed in Oklahoma since it became a state in 1907.
All that was about to change.
Mac stopped at the main gate security station on the east side of the building that granted admittance to a graceless gray tunnel, a road between two twenty-foot concrete block walls topped with razor wire that led to a second gate. Behind it was an open area in front of the administration building. Affixed to both ends of the tunnel were twenty-foot electrified fences also topped with razor wire that encircled the whole facility. The area between the two fences was a vacant space a hundred feet wide, a no-man’s land, lit up bright as daylight at night.
As the guard called the warden’s office to confirm his appointment, Mac tore the top off a roll of Rolaids and popped two into his mouth. The burning sensation in his gut had begun as soon as he hung up the phone from his conversation with Oran Blackburn and had been building in intensity ever since. It was a three-alarm fire now and if the pack of Rolaids he’d purchased at the 7 -11 store on the way out of town didn’t quench the blaze, he might have less time to live than the woman he’d come to comfort.
He’d been to the prison several times since he took over as pastor of New Hope when he and Melanie moved back to their hometown after he returned from Korea in 1953. But the place had never seemed quite as depressing as it did today, cold gray walls and gray slate roofs in the sparkling May sunshine.
The administration building was as run-down and dreary as the buildings that housed inmates. Hard to tell who was a prisoner here and who wasn’t. After he was frisked and emptied his pockets into a metal basket at the security station in the check-in center, he followed a uniformed woman who could have snared gold for the Romanian women’s wrestling team. She led him through a labyrinth of hallways, locked doors, checkpoints, and staircases to the warden’s office on the fourth floor. The halls were poorly lit, probably painted institutional green, though it was hard to tell. They had the stale smell of old sweat and thrift store clothes, with the faint underlying aroma of sewage.
Mac barely had time to warm up the chair in the waiting area before a phone on the secretary’s desk buzzed and she gestured down a short hallway to a large oak door at the end. The door opened as he reached for the knob.
“Good to see you, Mac,” Warden Blackburn said and clasped Mac’s hand in a firm handshake, lingering the extra beat or two that translated: I really am glad to see you.
Oran Blackburn was an odd-looking man. Taller than Mac by several inches, and Mac was six feet two. The warden was completely bald, with a red birthmark inconveniently placed on the top of his head so it always looked like he’d just whacked himself on some low-hanging beam. His shoulders were narrow and rounded, and the pronounced contour of his considerable paunch strained at the buttons on his white shirt. Mac was sure Oran hadn’t been able to fasten a suit jacket around that belly in twenty years.
But he had a kind face and a surprisingly gentle manner for a man who’d spent his career with the dregs of society.
“Come in and have a seat.” Oran gestured toward a matched set of high-backed leather arm chairs that faced a low table where a coffee pot and two cups rested on a silver tray. “Loraine just made the coffee, so it doesn’t taste like road tar. You take cream or sugar?”
“Thanks, but I’ll pass on the coffee.” Mac seated himself in the nearest chair.
Blackburn raised an eyebrow at him.
“Indigestion.” Mac fished the Rolaids out of his pocket as if to prove his point, then plucked the top one off the roll with his thumb and popped it into his mouth. “Lunch didn’t agree with me.”
Mac hadn’t eaten lunch. Or breakfast. And he couldn’t for the life of him remember what he’d had for supper last night. Surely to goodness he’d had something!
“Bless your heart,” Blackburn said, and settled himself in the other chair. “You’ve got heartburn going into a meeting with Emily Prentiss. Most people don’t have it until they’re coming out.”
“Swell.”
But for a pile of mail on the desk and a stack of recent newspapers on a nearby chair, the office surely had not changed in any fundamental way since the building was constructed forty-plus years before. Bookcases sagged with dusty, unread tomes Mac would have bet his pension—if he’d had one—had all been published before either of them were born. The desk was utilitarian, the chair obviously uncomfortable. There was a Royal Electric typewriter on a stand in the corner.
“Like what you’ve done with the place, Oran,” he said.
“Nobody likes a smart
ass; you know that, don’t you.”
Mac leaned forward and rested his forearms on his knees. “Okay, serious now. What have I gotten myself into?”
“You? Nothing at all. You’ll go spend an hour with this woman—or five minutes or three hours, however long it takes. You’ll leave and that’s that. Now me? That’s another story altogether. What I’m in is ...” His voice trailed off.
“Is what?”
Blackburn let out a slow breath. “Readers’ Digest Condensed version? At five o’clock this Friday afternoon, the Oklahoma State Penitentiary for Women will impose the death penalty on one Emily Gail Prentiss, age thirty-one, for the murder of her two-year-old sister. She’ll be executed in an electric chair that hasn’t even been turned on in twenty-five years.” He paused for a beat. “If you had a toaster hadn’t been turned on in a quarter of a century, you think it’d work?”
“That thing might not function? You’re joking!”
“Serious as a heart attack.”
“But how—?”
Blackburn held up his hand for silence. “Another story for another day.”
Mac nodded. “Why five o’clock? I thought all executions were at midnight.”
“Not midnight. Typically, they’re held at 12:01 a.m. A death warrant is only good for one day. If the execution isn’t carried out during that twenty-four-hour period, the state has to re-petition the court for another death warrant. Scheduling the execution for a minute after midnight gives the state time to deal with last-minute legal appeals and temporary stays. But this particular inmate has no pending appeals, doesn’t even have a lawyer.”
Blackburn grimaced. “And executions are also held in the middle of the night because the prison is in lock-down at that hour. But it doesn’t really matter. The whole inmate population goes psycho after an execution no matter what time it’s held, like they all got some low-powered electric shock themselves—just enough to make them mad, like slamming a thumb in a car door. Happens every time. At least it does in a men’s prison and I’m assuming it’ll be no different here. There are fights, stabbings. They throw feces at the guards.”