The Tigers lost their first game 7–2, unable to hit a good rookie pitcher in Reyes. It snowed and rained the next day, a Sunday. Rain and snow were forecasted for game time in Detroit that night, but the Tigers played and won, despite a lackluster offensive performance, as well as a possible illegal substance on the throwing hand of the Tigers’ pitcher. Sundays are always slow and depressing in prison, but the win brought some light to the day’s dreariness.
We were scheduled to play that Monday at 5:50. As the time of the final game approached, I wrote my verses. Pepper Pie lay on his bunk with his eyes closed. He had a tendency to become very nervous before games, so he would visualize performing well. I kept my TV on the Weather Channel to keep track of the time and possible rain. There didn’t seem to be any, except down by the Indiana state line. Five-fifty came and went. “Why aren’t they letting us out?” Pepper Pie asked.
“I have no idea,” I said.
Soon it was 6:00, and Strickland passed by our window on his top-of-the-hour rounds. Pepper Pie jumped out of his bunk and ran to the door. He yelled through the crack: “Hey, Strickland, are we having our game?”
I knew the news was bad when the beady eyes appeared in the glass. If the game was on, he would have simply said so, but because he returned, we knew Strickland had some personal pleasure to indulge in. He looked at us, smiled, and opened the door. “Don’t you geniuses know? It’s raining.”
I had been weaving my pen through the fingers of my left hand. I tapped the TV screen with it. “It shows right here, no rain, genius.”
“If you’d look out the window, you’d see,” Strickland said. Our windows were at ground level. They were clouded and dirty, so we couldn’t see much except a tall light pole, Cyclone fence, and razor wire.
“The point is you could have announced it so we wouldn’t be waiting,” Pepper said. “You know, if you didn’t think of us like rats, you wouldn’t look and smell so much like a fucking rat. How about that, genius?”
“All right, 121, you just got yourself an insolence ticket.” Strickland shifted his pointy gaze to me. “You too, 573. Now neither of you have to worry about your little softball game because you’ll be on sanctions. Season’s over, motherfuckers.”
Strickland pulled his thick policy directive from his back pocket. The tickets were yellow, and the book looked like a miniature notebook in his hand.
What I should have thought about at that moment were my last few minutes as a free man in that beautiful wooden rowboat. Jonnie Rae sat on one of the boat’s benches and we drifted. I had my ear to the hull listening to the very real eternal hum of the river. Then flashlights darted around and I heard someone enter the water, breaking the hum. A beam of light flooded the inside of the boat as we were pulled ashore. I looked around for Jonnie Rae. “Looking for someone?” the cop asked. I thought it was the end. “Goodbye,” I said.
But I didn’t think about that at all. Strickland wrote out the ticket for Pepper Pie, and I watched my bunkie begin to fade. He tossed the ticket into the toilet and tried to press the flush button, but couldn’t. His thumb, then his hand, sunk through the stainless steel. He opened his mouth to talk, but nothing came out. Then he smiled.
“Five seventy-three—give me your ID card,” Strickland said. Pepper Pie was nearly gone for good.
“I have a name,” I said, standing up and pulling the packet of Bugler from my shirt pocket. I kept already-rolled cigarettes in the tobacco pouch, and my bright yellow ID outside in the fold, along with a book of matches. I stood up to walk to the door. “See, Strickland? Right there on my card, I have a name. And I’m not going anywhere for a while, so why don’t you start to use it.”
Near the door, I pretended to fumble with the packet, dropping the rolled smokes and matches past the open threshold and into the hall, which I couldn’t pass through without permission. Strickland watched me carefully and rather than grant me the liberty to come out and gather them myself he kneeled and collected them for me. I felt a brush of air move past me and through the open door. The season was over, but for some of us, a new one was beginning. “Hello,” I said. Hello.
IN THE DAYROOM WITH STINKY
* * *
Stinky walks into the room where the men play cards. They play dominoes and talk. They play chess and sell handmade Christmas cards. They smoke in the corner by the window.
It smells like straight-up donkey ass in here, he says. Stinky thinks everything stinks. He says he’s got extrasensitive smelling and he doesn’t smell nothin’ good.
Stinky in the dayroom: Is that thunder in fucking October? The trees are changing. I think that one’s dead though. These planes fly low because they’re keeping an eye on me. When I leave, you watch—you won’t see no more planes around here.
Stinky sits down across from me, lays a deck of cards on the table. He got some new T-shirts and what he really likes about them is that the tags have been removed, so it’s impossible to put them on backward. He was married—still is, technically—to a prostitute he calls Scared Sarah, who took her medication one night with a Wild Turkey chaser, and then the story gets fuzzy. The only indisputable fact is that she disappeared. Scared Sarah had a bad heart. Her teeth fell out because all the enamel was gone.
Nash is out of cigarettes, and his coffee’s gone. He’s at the next table and may have the flu.
I would like to be able to see movies again.
I hate the loudness here.
I sleep a lot.
I wonder if the four guys playing their vampire role-playing game know that it isn’t real. I don’t think it’s something they consider.
I’ve gotten used to instant coffee. It’s all right.
Most of my friends have killed someone. Most of my friends were notorious once. A couple of them you can see on A&E’s Cold Case Files. Stinky’s case shows half a dozen times a year. A guy behind me thinks my writing looks like Arabic. He locks in 92. I know because I take in laundry, then hand it out. I know where everyone locks. Almost. There are 240 men in this unit.
Is your name Sam? says Stinky. No? Good. I’ll hang around killers but not pedophiles.
People here talk way too much. No one cares what they have to say and I really think some people stay here or keep coming back because they like to talk and people on the outside are tired of listening to them. I heard Leonard Cohen once say he spent five years in a monastery and he compared the experience to being a rough stone in a small cloth bag with other rough stones. The friction between the stones buffs them all to a flat shine. These guys, though, they don’t think of prison that way. They think they’re here by accident.
The hardest thing to get used to is the play fighting, learning the difference between real violence and two guys acting like kids. For the first couple of years, you turn around at every loud noise.
What’s the name of that card game you’re playing? Casino, says Stinky. I mean solitary. You mean solitaire? And then he shuffles the deck, lays the cards in thirteen piles of four. He asks me what I think the odds are there are four of a kind in one pile. About a million to one, I say. Then he turns over four aces in the first pile and all the rest in sequential order.
I should have been a card shark, he says. Hey, maybe if we showed that trick to the judge, he’d let us go.
Yeah, maybe.
I think the correct term is cardsharp, but I’ve always thought card shark was the better description. I would rather be a shark than sharp, though I keep that to myself.
All the old grifters had names for the tricks they used: the Lefty Lucy, the Turn and Run, the Disappearing Deck, the Bloody Valentine, the Bootless Jack. And though Stinky knows a lot of card tricks, he has no names for any of them.
* * *
Here are the facts of his case as reported to me by Stinky himself and Bill Kurtis of Cold Case Files:
Scared Sarah Brown née Novak and Stinky are married in 1978. She wears white and he pays fifty dollars for a nice, tall wedding cake, which she picks up and
throws at him during the reception in the basement of the American Legion Post 714. The wedding gala is attended by a who’s who of Kalamazoo County’s dealers, pimps, and thieves. The marriage is rocky, and in a couple of years, it’s completely on the rocks. There is a well-documented history of domestic incidents with the two of them alternating roles as the aggressor. She passes out nightly with a couple of Valium (she disliked the newer generation of benzodiazepines) and a half pint of Wild Turkey. He takes out a term life policy on her for $100,000, and a month later, she disappears. There is no body—no trace of a body found. Ever. Even to this day. The case goes cold with no insurance being paid because there’s no proof Scared Sarah is dead and not in Cancún living on the beach. Six years later, some nutcase barfly named Monica “Deadeye” Silver says on the stand that Stinky told her all about how he smothered Scared Sarah, ran her through a meat grinder he used for venison, then fed her ground remains to a pen of thirty hogs north of town. Stinky says he has never even seen Monica. Her statement comes two weeks before the coroner was to pronounce Scared Sarah presumed dead, the insurance money paid to Stinky.
A brief legal primer: corpus delecti literally means “body of a crime.” Generally, in a homicide case, there must be proof that someone died and that the deceased came to their end via foul play. Generally, it takes more than a recovered memory from a crazy woman to convict someone. But Michigan is funny that way.
Generally, it takes proof—unless $100,000 is involved, Stinky says. He thinks Scared Sarah most likely died en route south with a guy she probably barely knew. One day Stinky thinks she’s in a ditch somewhere between Michigan and Mexico. Another day he thinks she’s going to show up alive. Maybe here.
Also, I miss good music. I miss alternative music you can’t hear on VH1.
Someone on B-Wing took thirty of something. Thirty what? It don’t matter, he took thirty of them. You take thirty of anything and that’s a wrap. It’s that time of the year. People get depressed. They think enough’s enough.
When I get back to court, Stinky says, for my opening statement I’m gonna show the judge a razzle-dazzle card trick that’s going to blow his mind.
You’ve got to come up with a catchy name for it, Stinky. You can’t just say to him, Okay, Judge, here’s my card trick.
He looks out the window. Snow is possible today, or tomorrow.
A name, huh?
Someone stands up: I’ll tell you one thing; I’ll tell you this—all that medication they got me waking up for at five-thirty? They can stick it straight up their ass!
The one part of Stinky’s story I always get hung up on is this: why get rid of her body if you’re trying to collect insurance money? And this too: he still seems stunned that she threw a beautiful fifty-dollar cake at him. It was over thirty years ago.
Judge Peckerneck, for my opening statement, Stinky says he’ll say, I’d like to call your attention to this deck of cards for a little something I call Aces-in-the-Middle-Razzle-this-whole-thing-stinks-like-a-monkey-took-a-shit-in-an-old-boat-Dazzle.
Another thing I miss: when I would mow my yard, my dog followed close behind me, and when I would stop, he’d run into the back of my legs. There was something very comforting about that.
It’s laundry day. I’m going to take a shower. On the way to lunch Stinky told me good things were going to happen to me today because he prayed for me and my kids for a long time last night. I’m going to take a shower then wait. I’m going to drink strong coffee and wait for good things to happen.
SWANS
* * *
A-Ward at the Michigan Reformatory is a converted gym with a peaked roof and a dozen ceiling fans that whip warm air around the eight-man cubes like hot wind from the wings of desert vultures.
The first third of A-Ward is a dayroom with a wall-mounted TV in front of five rows of chairs. There are a dozen circular card tables, two microwaves, two toasters, and an ironing board with an iron that occasionally works and is permanently connected to the wall by the kind of chain old ladies use to keep their glasses around their necks.
Behind the officers’ desk there are generally two COs keeping an eye on things, and behind them is the bathroom, with a row of individual showers, toilets, and stainless-steel urinals. I am responsible for scrubbing these urinals Monday through Thursday right after noon count.
Last Tuesday I did not scrub the urinals. It is December and for Christmas, as a present for myself that morning, I traded three bags of instant coffee at $3.15 a piece for a small amount of weed. After doing seven years of a natural life sentence, I bought prison drugs for the first time, unless you count the Faygo bottle full of potato hooch last year, which I could not drink because it smelled and tasted like potato soup left on the stove for a week.
I bought the weed from Russell, a bald, skinny white man missing nearly every tooth between his canines. When he handed me the little folded piece of paper holding the tiny square of familiar dark green, I had to ask him how to light it. I already knew how to roll it, as smoking was allowed until three months ago, and now without rolling papers we used the onionskin wrappers that held our rolls of toilet paper. Sitting beside me on my bunk, he gave me a quick lesson with an AA Energizer and a copper wire stripped from an earphone cord, so thin I had to look twice at his palm to find it.
So last Tuesday, instead of scrubbing the urinals with the frothy, fragrant soap and the worn-out scrubber, I sat on the thin rim of a toilet behind the closed stall door, beneath the exhaust fan ten feet above, and I held the nearly invisible wire to the positive and the metal ground (the battery’s body reached by scratching through the label), searing the end of my index finger and thumb. The crimp in the middle of the wire turned red and I lit the toothpick-size joint. I coughed and was briefly dizzy. I flushed the jet-engine-loud toilet, I suppose in order to cover the sound of the cough, albeit too late. The only other person in the bathroom was the shower cleaner, Wilhelm, a short, quiet German man who had pushed his wife from a building in Saginaw. I didn’t know him and I didn’t want to. He might be a snitch, or worse, he might knock on the door and want a hit.
In a moment, the joint was done, the roach flushed, the battery and wire in my pocket. I washed my hands then went to the front row of seats to watch the last fifteen minutes of the twelve o’clock news. At 12:30, count would be cleared, then chow called.
Watching the news was my daily routine, only now I was high. The minutes passed, and a tingly blanket slowly wrapped around my body while my mind alternated colors, switching from dark paranoia to bright, absurd hilarity. I tried to focus on the news but a feeling of unhinged laughter had broken out somewhere above my knees, a place I had forgotten about.
The weatherman seemed to be talking directly to me: “It’ll be cold, but very sunny today—you’ll want your knit hat, as well as your sunglasses.” He seemed like an old buddy genuinely concerned about my being prepared for the day. When the weather was over, the scene shifted to a lake, placid and bright, surrounded by beautiful homes. According to the anchor, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources had spent the morning out there culling swans with twelve-gauge shotguns. The camera shot tight on a white Ford pickup with a windowed bed cover. The shot moved tighter still, through the back window and into a pile of at least fifty stone-cold swans, which looked to me like a pile of surreal pillows on the way to a fairy-tale home for orphans.
An emotional monologue began from a local lady—pretty, middle-aged, exactly the sort of woman you would expect to see gardening outside one of those beautiful homes on the lake. She had tears in her eyes. “I know they have to control the swan population,” she said, “because of disease or whatever. I just question the methods.” The scene flashed to a couple of pump-action shotguns leaning against the front bumper of the white DNR pickup. “They just came out without telling anyone and then . . . bam, bam, bam.” She made the universal sign for a handgun with her index finger and thumb and jerked it back through several recoils.
I lo
ved the way she couldn’t speak of death. I loved how she could only act it out, miming the entirely wrong symbol for the guns they actually used. It was perfect for her—girlish, innocent, somehow sexy. She had never made that sign before. She’d never had to.
Behind her, the camera zoomed in on a thin stream of syrupy blood snaking through the gate of the truck and puddling on the corner of someone’s white concrete driveway.
But the final shot of the story, in calming opposition to the violence, was a scene of a dry creek bed spanned by a long bridge, some faded, illegible graffiti tag written on the side of its I-beam. The camera panned slowly through the black branches of the bare winter trees to a shot of the cold, glimmering lake, radiant, not a swan in sight.
I hadn’t gone with the camera, though. I had stayed with the graffiti, under that bridge, which in my current state I was certain was a bridge I’d known back in high school, the graffiti freshly painted by my buddy, Ricky. It was a Zeppelin lyric—Have you seen the bridge?—scrawled in bright orange spray paint, still wet and dripping as Ricky walked from the bank, smiling and rubbing his fingers on his jeans, smearing paint in a permanent dull smudge.
Crash was with us, as he always was when we ditched school for his shack during lunch break. He’d brought us down to the river to show us his latest project. “They mate for life, you know,” he said, talking about the swan, his swan. Not dead, but brand-new and very much alive as it swam in confused, abbreviated circles in the center of the dirt-brown Little Wabash River. Apparently, he was going to breed them.
A couple of things should be said about Crash. First, there was some dispute that his nickname was actually Chunk, but had evolved over time into something less offensive. In 1979, after a Flatlanders Motorcycle Club party, he had missed a curve on his Harley and was found the next morning broken in half, heels wrapped around the back of his head, rendering his legs useless along with everything else below his severed spine. He had become a “chunk” of flesh. He drove around in a specially equipped van, and spent his first disability checks not on something practical like wooden ramps up to the shack just a few feet away from where we sat under the bridge but on a thousand dollars’ worth of Swiss-made speakers no one could pronounce the name of. He also would not reveal where or how he’d gotten them, as if they were a secret of national importance.
The Graybar Hotel Page 8