Riverine

by Angela Palm

  After the kittens’ demise, my eager brand of love landed on an abandoned baby bird. I found it in a nest that had fallen from our sycamore tree. The nestling survived under my care for one blissful day of chopped worm meals and soft strokes to its downy head with the tip of my index finger. After it died, I watered the sun-scorched grass, but it would not perk with color as it should have. I aligned a series of shells on our front steps, inviting any passing crustacean friends to adopt them as homes. I sang loudly at my window, but not even a mockingbird replied.

  Though many functional aspects of the prefrontal cortex are not understood by the scientific and medical communities, it’s well established that this particular area of gray matter regulates high-order decision making, the expression of individual personality, social responses, and emotions—including both romantic love and violence. In individuals who experience outbursts of aggression, prefrontal cortex functioning is often lower than normal. The prefrontal cortex’s functioning level is also related to obsessional jealousy, obsessive-compulsive behaviors, emotional overwhelm, dark mood swings, and poor self-esteem. The brain as landscape, barely mapped, seems a most isolated frontier. I would like an English word for “fear of sitting alone with one’s own unknowable frontal lobe.” Or “being loved and still lacking meaningful human connection.” Or “the feeling that the self has unhinged from the body.”

  There are countless case studies that demonstrate the range of psychological and physical effects that solitary confinement, imprisonment, and deprivation of affection produce in humans. But perhaps the clearest anecdote is that of the infant monkeys on which psychologist Harry Harlow conducted his famous experiments on the nature of affection. His studies showed that monkeys, when confined without love and care from birth, will nuzzle a wire doll representation of another being. And, barring even that illusion of physical contact, will simply freeze up, rock, cry, or curl up. It would be unethical to conduct such a study on humans, but certainly we have all seen a variation of this case before.

  Whenever a boxing match was on cable television—a novelty at the river in the early 1990s—my family would gather in the living room to eat Red Baron Supreme Pizzas and cheer as we watched two men pound each other. I’m not sure how it happened that one of the few happy traditions that we collectively enjoyed was a celebration of organized violence, of refereed concussive strikes to the head, but I grew to love these rare, sacred evenings. Together, we rooted for the favorites: Julio César Chávez, Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield, and Oscar De La Hoya. What I liked most about boxing was not the hit landed squarely on the contender’s brow bone, which in fact made me shudder, but his getaway, the near miss. Just out of reach, like a secret. My enthusiasm expanded into the space created by the unexpected sashay that drew the boxer out from under a punch that would have wrecked him. What I loved next best was another negative space: the sweat-drenched theater that occurred in the corner between rounds, where the cutman’s hands tidied ravaged blood vessels with salve and the cornerman leaned over the ropes, shouting and waving his fingers in front of the boxer’s face. I loved the boxer shaking with adrenaline as he leveled his eyes in preparation for the next round. I loved the boxer on his back, briefly unconscious. I loved the idea of the TKO’s afterburn that bleated in his brain like a black curtain closing and opening behind his eyes.

  We awaited the much-anticipated Tyson-Holyfield match set for 1991, but it didn’t happen. Tyson, the reigning champion, seemed to me as ruthless and powerful outside the ring as in it, behaving as though his boxing titles had granted him superior status in the rest of his life. Above law, above consequence, above rational decision making. Had he always been that way? Or had too much time in the ring changed him? Tyson pulled out of the fight after breaking a rib and shortly thereafter was convicted on one rape count and two criminal deviant conduct counts, crimes committed against women in Indiana, a jurisdiction that had landed him in my home state for trial. He did not win his case, and was sentenced to two ten-year sentences, to be served simultaneously in a state prison.

  I watched my father fight another man once. He prepared us for it before it happened, telling us to stay in the house when the man, whom he worked with, came over.

  “Why do you have to fight him?” I asked my father. “We like him.” He was a friend of our family we had known for years. Once, during a barbecue at our place, he told me he’d marry me when I was old enough.

  “He called me a liar,” my dad said. As if that were the worst a person could do.

  “So what?” I said. “Talk it out.” I looked at my mother in hopes that she would support me. She offered nothing but a shrug.

  “He’ll be here soon,” he said to me and my brother. “You go to your rooms and stay in the house.”

  I refused. “If you’re going to do it, you’ll have to do it in front of me.” But even that wasn’t enough to change his mind.

  I watched them from the kitchen window, my mother trying to pull me away the whole time. The men’s bodies, bathed in porch light, moved irrationally before me. They lacked the control and grace of professional boxers. There was no dance, no sport, to an unorganized fight between men who had been drinking. When it was over, I wiped away my tears and lay my disgust at the doormat. My mother nursed my father’s damaged knuckles. “He shouldn’t have said that to your dad,” she said. My parents were a lot of things, but liars they were not.

  . . .

  During my first prison visit with Uncle Pat, he nodded to his right and told us quietly that Mike Tyson was sitting nearby, visiting with professional basketball player Chris Webber. My brother and I were ecstatic, starstruck, and we gawked at them for a few minutes. I fumbled with my quarters, eager to beeline to the vending machine because the path would put me within five feet of Iron Mike. Tyson noticed us, my brother and I, unable to contain our excitement, and told us to come over, he’d have Webber buy us some chips and pop. We ran across the room, and I stood in front of Tyson, smiling, as Webber handed us our treats. Tyson was everything you saw on television, only slightly smaller in real life. He seemed dulled, less shiny. I’d only ever seen him sweating and waxed with salve. As he spoke, you could time the pauses between one sentence and the next, as if he might be trying to see through permanently starred vision or still counting down a knockout in his mind. How many times to ten? How many times straight to black? He told us a Bugs Bunny joke, slowly, as if he’d nearly forgotten the punch line, and though I’d heard it before, I laughed anyway and admired the gap in his smile.

  When we left the visit with Uncle Pat, I imagined the men returning to their cells, or “cages,” as they are crassly referred to on the inside by both guards and inmates. Slightly renewed, momentarily cheered. As we drove away I gazed up at the tiny rectangular windows that lined the exterior walls of the prison’s housing units. One window for each cell. I wanted to know what they were doing behind the bars. Uncle Pat said many of them read. They slipped through the pages of books as if they were the back panels of magic wardrobes and came out the other side in Narnia. But all the bad things you heard were true, too—guards abusing their positions, racial divisions, gang violence, sexual exploitation, dehumanization. He had seen it all. I wondered what the men saw from their cell windows. Small bits of sky, clouds, a sliver of moon, sometimes the wings of a bird? What effects did those views have on the men? What did they think of when they looked at the sky? Of what came before? Or of what would come after? Of anything at all but the present? I wondered whether seeing the sky had a positive effect, translating in some way as hope, or if it made their confinement all the more difficult, the sun like a bully waving a long stick and stars like a thousand knives. I waved at the windows as we drove away. I don’t know whether anyone on the other side was looking.

  When I was eighteen, studying criminal justice as a freshman in college, my uncle Dave, Mandi’s dad, was the lieutenant of a nearby county police precinct. He offered to take me along on a patrol ride. I didn’t know what I
wanted to be—I thought I might go to law school and become a public defender or start a nonprofit that provided education and counseling to incarcerated youth. I had built up empathy for them over the years—first through Uncle Pat and Mike Tyson, then Corey. I didn’t think Corey’s attorney had represented him as well as he could have, and I thought that becoming one myself would be a karmic deposit, a righted wrong. I didn’t want to be a cop, but I wasn’t afraid of criminals. To me, inmates were regular people who had been caught doing something society deemed impermissible and who had likely had some misfortunes along the way. I was optimistic about the prospect of rehabilitation.

  We toured the jail first, and I peered up at the familiar barred windows, which I had eyed with intense curiosity from the street since I was a girl. I was fascinated by incarceration as place: they couldn’t get out and I couldn’t get in. Uncle Dave paraded me around inside the joint, introduced me to everyone, and gave me a fried chicken leg from the break room. He showed me where they processed people and let me get fingerprinted for fun. I signed a waiver and he strapped me into a bulletproof vest. My fingers itched with adrenaline. I somehow felt I could move faster under the weight of the vest. The illusion of police invincibility was real. We got into his car, cranked up the dispatch, and drove around until a call came across the airwaves.

  The call was for a domestic violence report. We flipped on the sirens and raced over to the address with intoxicating speed. The house was a modest ranch, completely average. “Do you want to go in with me?” my uncle asked as he got out of the car.

  “Hell yes,” I said.

  “Okay, stay behind me and don’t say anything. Let’s hope he hasn’t chopped her up yet.” He started laughing. It was police humor, sick humor, he explained. The same kind prisoners resort to, warding off hopelessness by forcing the least appropriate joke. People try to make light of facing the worst there is in humans, or in themselves. Striving for civility and sometimes failing. Pressing onward anyway. It is one reason some police officers have resisted cameras that run continuously. Aside from any argument about what they might see, the public would find the audio unpalatable.

  I followed him to the door. We were ushered into a sparsely furnished living room. Lots of shades of brown—sofa, carpeting. Paneled walls. He began questioning the couple and pulled the truth out of them like a pro by getting them to talk. “You have kids here?” he asked.

  “The baby,” the woman said.

  My uncle nodded to me. “Go find the baby and stay with him until I tell you.”

  “10–4,” I said, and he gave me a look like don’t be cute.

  I walked down the hall and poked my head into the rooms. It was strange being in someone else’s home like this, intruding into their lives. Being in a position of authority among someone else’s belongings was private and vulgar. I thought of Corey, who had broken into the home where he committed crimes that would land him in prison for the rest of his life. It was one thing to cross property lines, to trespass onto land or into vacant buildings as I had done many times, but it was quite another to enter someone’s private residence without permission. Surely he had felt this sensation of utter violation of a personal space. I was still slipping from my mind into his, as if there was something there that I needed to extract.

  A curling iron sat on the back of a toilet. Clothes were strewn around the couple’s bedroom. Drawers hung open. The baby was in the room at the end of the hall. I could hear him whimper. The light was on. I bent over his crib and placed my hand on his fat tummy. He smiled at me, then looked scared, so I picked him up.

  I cradled the child against my chest and the bulletproof vest. I sang to him softly, then louder. I didn’t want him to hear anything being said in the living room. I was afraid it would taint his childhood. Some foreshadowed future hung in the balance and I wanted to clear it away for him. But it was probably too late for all that. I looked around his room—the walls were still white. I had thought one of the primary things you did when preparing for a baby was to paint the nursery, prepare the space, creating the feeling of love and safety. The expression of emotion via decoration was a function of place I found fascinating. I had transformed my cinder-blocked dorm room with blues and greens, with posters and a new rug. These parents had done nothing. This oversight of care, however insignificant, spoke to lack—a metaphor of irresponsibility and a shotgun start.

  When my uncle walked into the bedroom, he gave the baby’s toes a soft pinch. “Hey, kiddo. You’re going to be all right.”

  “Do we go now?” I said.

  “We go now.”

  I carried the baby into the living room and shifted him from my arms into his mother’s. Back in the squad car, I asked my uncle what he said to the couple.

  “Not much. They needed someone to listen.”

  I looked out the window and tried not to cry over the fact that I had soothed a stranger’s baby. It confirmed what I already knew—I wasn’t cut out for my uncle’s job. I was too emotional and prone to overthinking. The reality of the world was too much a shock for me. The child’s tiny fingers curled around my finger, his white walls that wanted for pale yellow or blue—that was too close. I thought I would be better off looking at it all from a slightly greater distance.

  “Now let’s do the fun part,” Uncle Dave said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Get free doughnuts, of course.”

  Uncle Pat and Mike Tyson were freed the same year, both having served less than four years of their original sentences. It was decided in an appeal that Uncle Pat’s acts had been justifiably committed in self-defense, a claim previously disallowed as a defense in his trial, and thus the sentence was overturned. Tyson, by all appearances, got out on good time and good attorneys.

  After Tyson’s release, he racked up insurmountable debts, his wealth evaporating in a cloud of smoke shaped like Vegas, and eventually wrote an autobiography called Undisputed Truth. As if anything could be considered absolutely true, much less undisputed. The Associated Press reported that Tyson said that while he was incarcerated, “I was having so much sex [with female prison visitors and a prison drug counselor during his three-year prison stint in the ’90s] that I was too tired to even go to the gym and work out.” The AP reported, too, that since his release, Tyson “constantly warns that he’s not far from slipping off the edge, or slipping back into a strip club to party with drugs and women. ‘Sometimes I just fantasize about blowing somebody’s brains out so I can go to prison for the rest of my life,’ he writes. ‘Working on this book makes me think that my whole life has been a joke.’” Kid Dynamite was about to implode. The Baddest Man on the Planet, they called him. Another self-fulfilling prophecy?

  I remember the day Uncle Pat was released from prison. Though they had overturned the ruling, they could not give back the time, nor erase it from his record. I was there with my mom to pick him up. He emerged from the razor-wired gates carrying a wrinkled paper bag. His clothes sagged from his body; his long beard, graying and frayed, grazed his chest. The sun on his face illuminated a man unconvinced of reality. Maybe a place is a turnstile that you pass through on the way to somewhere else. A small token for each ride is dropped into a narrow slot. Over a lifetime, a fortune piles up in the meter. The price of a prison sentence, exorbitant, no matter how long.

  Postincarceration, Uncle Pat’s depressive states worsened, and he isolated himself from people by staying in his apartment most of the time. My brother and I would walk over from the Boys and Girls Club, where, as teenagers, we sometimes spent our summer days while my mother worked, to visit him, but we would quickly feel trapped in the tiny studio and wouldn’t stay long.

  During my first year of college, Uncle Pat met a woman online. She lived in Texas, and he asked me to write her an e-mail that would vouch for him in anticipation of their first face-to-face visit—to ensure he wasn’t an ax murderer, I assume, but I suppose that was relative. If the bullet he’d hit his boss with had lodged a few
inches to the north or south, everything would have been different. He would have been categorized as a murderer, like Corey. This difference, while having vastly different consequences for the victims, struck me as also a rather small difference with respect to the violent act itself. Was there much difference, then, in the person who had almost killed someone versus the one whose act had resulted in death? Measuring out the wrongness, the badness, of a person, was therefore complicated. Nonetheless, Uncle Pat was happier than I’d seen him in years, which left me little choice but to agree to help. Regardless of the gravity of his near-murderous act, be it self-defense or not, I believed he was still good enough to deserve love. Within the space of two paragraphs, I talked him up as kind, loving, good-hearted, funny, and well-intentioned. I wrote nothing that was not true, then sent it off to her using the e-mail address he’d given me. When he set off to marry her, a road trip with a wedding waiting at the end, it was with fanfare elicited by his enthusiasm. We crossed our fingers and waved him off, sharing his hope. But a week later he came back alone, and we never spoke of it again.

  A few times, I went over to clean his first-floor apartment. It was sparsely furnished with an alcove that held a daybed that doubled as his sofa. The space was small enough to discourage inviting visitors over. I did my best not to show a physical reaction to the stench that had built up inside, tried to make it a bit homier for him by hanging a few pictures on the wall and ordering his canisters by size on the short length of kitchen countertop. I coated his counters with 409 and scrubbed them clean. I removed the yellowed light fixtures, dumping dozens of bugs into the trash, and wiped them clean with Windex and paper towels. After another surgery, I came to change the dressings on his scars and examine his stitches for infection, even as my stomach threatened to empty itself onto his kitchen floor. Not long after, my aunt found Uncle Pat face down in his apartment, unconscious and nearly dead. He had gone and done it, finally, we thought. At the hospital, his stomach was pumped, the liquid mass of dissolved pills extracted from his body through a thin tube. Death, redacted.