Desire Behind Bars

by Salome Wilde

  “Pretty damned good when I need to be. I’m not hiding anything now, though. Just doing my time, staying out of trouble. No fooling around. No poaching on anybody’s turf. Okay?”

  The eyes were still hard, but there was something else in their depths, a spark that sent heat through my body somewhere decidedly south of my eyes. “I hope you do hide nothing,” she said after a long pause. “But I will be watching you.”

  I would be watching her, too, against my better judgment. I just shrugged. The after-dinner surge swept through the door. I edged my way through it, and out.

  * * *

  Two weeks of learning the routines, chafing at the restrictions and bureaucratic injustices and avoiding the pitfalls left me more and more bored. I spent several days sketching Miss Natalya in various moods, and a few hours each on Ellie, who chattered the whole time, and Carla, who’d begun tentatively to flirt with me, which I ignored. Some others asked for pictures to send their boyfriends or children. The requests from a few who came on to me with more expertise than Carla—including a female guard—I politely declined.

  I was going literally stir-crazy. Too much idleness made it hard to keep from sketching, if only in my mind, the face and body and shifting expressions of someone I saw only across the dining hall or on the other side of the enclosed exercise yard. Someone who watched me as intently as I watched her. Enemy or not, she couldn’t be ignored, and something about her got through to me in ways no one had for a long time. It got to the point where I had dreams of measuring her for a portrait not with my eyes, but my hands. And my mouth.

  Once in a while, I caught Yev looking at me as though she had similar thoughts about me, but mostly her face was unreadable. She’d be jovial, teasing or stern with the girls who flocked around her, and then she’d look up, frown as though I were some puzzle she needed to solve, then look away.

  I was trying to solve Yev too. Finally I gave in to the urge to sketch her, from memory, just quick line drawings of her jogging in place in the yard or passing along one corridor or another. Not in the lavatory. It turned out that her room was in a different block and she shouldn’t have been in our bathroom at all. She’d been there on purpose, to harass me. Or assess me.

  That’s when my subconscious took charge of my fingers and told me a thing or two, not so much about Yev’s body—I’d already noticed plenty about that—but her body language. The set of her head on those wide shoulders. A tension in the muscles of her back. She was hypervigilant, always aware of who was where, how close, who beyond her covey of devoted admirers approached her. And wary of me most of all. It wasn’t likely to be about the possibility of being hit on, so about…what? An actual hit? Did she think I was a “hit man?” If a prisoner knew somebody wanted them out of the way in case they might tell things better left buried, a new inmate like me would bear watching. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. The hitting on part had a certain dangerous appeal. But no. Just get through this prison thing with no complications, no drama. Detached. Yeah, right.

  It was a relief when I was finally assigned to a job. Not just any job, but one that would let me work outdoors, in fresh air, under the sky even if there were still brick walls around the place. “The grounds crew?” Miss Natalya said when I told her. “Yev’s the muscle on that one. New inmates aren’t often given clearance to work in the outer perimeter. She must have recommended you.”

  So much for relief. Boredom, however, was not going to be a problem. “C’mon, you know more than you’ve told me about Yev, which is nothing. What’s up with her?”

  “I know more about most folks than I tell, Alex. Including you. Leave it at that.”

  I left it. Miss Natalya was too damned perceptive.

  * * *

  The grounds crew assembled behind the sprawling garage. The front section housed up to ten vehicles, the warden’s and those of visiting dignitaries and the chief correctional officers. The back part held what could have been a hundred years’ worth of tools in one section and a couple of mowing machines, the sit-on kind with wings of rotary blades extending six feet or so on each side, in the other. Neither machine was less than twenty years out of date.

  There were five of us on the crew, but it was clear right away that Yev, not the official CO Mr. Haynes, was in charge. Haynes mostly left us to ourselves, staying in his office above the garage, but I’d occasionally see him gazing out the window, watching Yev. There was some weird vibe going on there. I already knew that women who had “special relationships” with guards or COs got extra perks and toleration by the other guards, and I’d noticed that nobody in charge ever messed with Yev. Maybe it wasn’t just because she could have tied any one of them in knots. The thought that she might have something going on with Haynes made my insides boil, for reasons I didn’t want to examine too closely—even as it stoked a raging curiosity.

  “McKenna!” Yev said that first day, after she’d set the others to sweeping the front section and trimming the token shrubbery along the sides of the building. “You know machinery?”

  “Pretty well. What do you need?”

  “Number one mower hit a rock, bent a blade. It needs to be straightened and sharpened. You can do that?”

  “I’ll give it a try.” The challenge in her eyes was getting familiar. Either she hoped I’d fail at the job, or she was tired of wondering and decided to see what I’d do with dangerous tools in my hands. I looked along the jumbled shelves and racks lining the walls, then picked out a heavy hammer, a mallet, and an assortment of files. Yev took a set of wrenches. It seemed strange that we weren’t even allowed to take knives and forks from the dining hall to our rooms, but here we were with a potentially deadly arsenal of mostly blunt instruments. “Lead on.”

  I was looking forward to a close rear view of those powerful haunches and thighs, and I couldn’t even convince myself that sketching them was my first concern. Yev, though, had no intention of turning her back on me.

  “Over there.” She jerked her head toward the other room, so I led the way, my own butt tingling with the sense of being watched. It didn’t occur to me until we reached the mower that maybe I should have been worrying about how good a weapon the metal wrench case Yev carried could be. She might have a preemptive strike in mind.

  I survived the walk, however, and we pushed the mower out into the sunlight. It took both of us to get the bent blade out, Yev loosening the bolts with a powerful grip on the biggest wrench, me steadying the blade and hauling it free. Seemed like as good a chance as any to get chatty and maybe find out a thing or two.

  “How come they let us use all this stuff? There were even wire cutters hanging over there. Don’t you ever think about trying to escape? I guess Mr. Haynes is watching us from a distance, but still.”

  At the mention of his name, her grip on the wrench tightened until her knuckles went white. “They want to get plenty of work out of us.” She bore down with a grunt. The rusty nut turned just a bit. “But some might feel more safe inside the walls than out.” The nut moved more. She turned that steely gaze on me. “Or not.”

  I met her eyes squarely. “So what’s out there? What’s your story?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Miss Natalya told me to mind my own business when I asked.”

  She steadied the mower while I tugged at the bent blade and edged it out. “So what is your own business?”

  “Okay, I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours. I’ll even go first. Just let me get this done first.” The sun was hot for October; I shucked my baggy prison-issue shirt and went to work with the hammer, working up a sweat that made my sleeveless undershirt cling to my torso. I trusted she was appreciating the view.

  When the blade was as straight as it was ever going to get, I stood up and raised the hammer. Yev tensed but didn’t shrink away. I tossed it into a double flip in the air, caught it, and knelt down again to work on the blade with a file.

  “My business is using tools like mallets and chisels and drill
s to etch words and pictures into stone, and sometimes to carve away the stone to leave figures in bas-relief. Once in a while I’ll do freestanding figures, but I’d rather let most of the stone speak for itself.”

  “And how does this get you imprisoned?” The arch of her brows indicated skepticism.

  “Only very rich people can afford my work. It’s not my business how they get rich. And if they want me to carve a stone garden bench that conceals the entrance to a secret vault, it’s not my business what they hide in it. Having a dragon-and-treasure motif on the backrest was a bit obvious, but still, not my business. I did find out, though, and at their trial I wouldn’t lie and say I didn’t know to save my own skin, so here I am.”

  “No more than that?” More skepticism, though no less appreciation of my back and butt as I bent over my work.

  “Not much. Except that the police wanted me to tell them who else I’d done jobs for, and who else I thought might be hiding contraband. I didn’t know about any others for sure, so I wouldn’t talk. Finally, I told the prosecutor the cops could do their own damned detective work. Which they will. And in the process they’ll destroy some of my best work. They left my dragon in shards. Maybe nobody else will turn out to be guilty of anything, but I’ll never be able to work in Bar Harbor again. Probably not anywhere on the east coast.”

  “Bar Harbor?”

  “Way up in Maine. Big old family mansions, some on private islands, owned now by newcomers. Fantastic scenery, mountains rising from the sea, hundreds of yachts coming and going in the harbor. So much space, and sky…” My arm slowed, the file scarcely moving. I looked up at the brick walls, then quickly down. “I’ll miss it.”

  A big hand touched my shoulder gently, then not so gently. For an instant a fierce current of sexual magnetism flowed between us. When Yev snatched her hand back, my skin ached with the loss of that heat.

  I tossed aside the file and turned to face her. “Now for your story. I showed you mine. You show me yours.” I lay back on the grass, propped up by my elbows.

  She moved away to lean against the riding rig of the mower. “Fair enough.” For a second she reached down and I thought she was going to shed her shirt as I had. She looked slantwise up toward the window of CO Haynes’s office and changed her mind, instead rolling up her sleeves as far as they’d go. I could tell that beneath the shirt she wore a binder that couldn’t quite conceal the swell of full breasts. I had too little in that department to bother binding, but enough to make a sweaty undershirt interesting. The fact was not lost on Yev. And, possibly, CO Haynes.

  “I too would not speak at my trial. I have family yet in Chechnya…if indeed they still live.” She was silent for a moment or two. “There was a time, long ago, when I imagined a different life. Just need a little while, I thought, to save up money. But to work as bodyguard to a Chechen drug lord is a road to nowhere but destruction, even in America. He enjoyed humiliating men by having a woman rough them up. For a few, who liked very much to have a woman rough them up, he used me as a reward—and then blackmailed them. If I tried to get out…” She shrugged. “Now he is dead, but I could tell more than is known, and there are men still free who would pay much to have me dead as well.”

  I nodded in understanding. Yev’s level gaze acknowledged our mutual attraction without diminishing her suspicion one bit. I gave it a try anyway. “If somebody put out a contract to get rid of you in prison, wouldn’t a cute young femme be the natural choice? Plenty of them manage to get close to you. A blade between the ribs or a contrived accident wouldn’t take much muscle.”

  “Pah! Those children. Them, I can read. If not, they do not get close. But you…either you tell the truth, or you are very, very good at what you do.”

  “Why not both?” My wry grin coaxed one from her. I turned back to the mower. “Come on, let’s get this rust monster put back together.”

  Crouching together beside the machine, conscious of being watched from above, we worked quickly, not touching except when necessary, not needing touch to feel each other’s heat.

  “Yev?” One of the other crew members peered around the corner of the garage. “Fifteen minutes until count!”

  “Go then. Shoo, shoo.” She waved an arm. “You too!” Yev could probably get away with not being in her assigned room for the thrice-daily count by the guards, but I couldn’t. Her big hand gripped my ass hard before shoving me in the direction the others had gone. I let her get away with it. Anyone else who’d tried it would have had that wrist in a sling for at least a month.

  At dinner we kept to our opposite sides of the dining hall, casting the usual enigmatic glances at each other. A shadow of a knowing smile drifted across Miss Natalya’s face.

  The next day Yev and I mowed, while the others trimmed the hedges along the drive. I stopped and got off at the rock that had bent the blade to take a look. “No digging out this one. There’s a whole lot more of it down there, like an iceberg. Was it sticking up this much last year?”

  “A little more each year I have been here.” She saw the question on my face. “Three years. Six more to go.”

  “By that time they might as well just make a rock garden here and stick some kind of plaque on this. ‘In memory of’ somebody or other.”

  “You could kindly offer to carve the words into it. Some fine lines about the greatness of prisons.”

  “Let’s see. I could do some sort of wreath made of coils of razor wire around the edges. And in the middle…hmmm…there’s a verse I inscribed on a marble mantelpiece once, for a rich guy’s bedroom. Lines from an old poet, Andrew Marvell. They’ve been on my mind lately, anyway.” I paused for dramatic effect.

  “So tell!”

  I basked in Yev’s impatience as I sat down on the new-mowed grass. And I told:

  “Let us roll all our strength and all

  Our sweetness up into one ball,

  And tear our pleasures with rough strife

  Through the iron gates of life.”

  The words hung between us. “Is that how you like your pleasures, McKenna?” Yev said at last. “With ‘rough strife’?”

  Something about her expression told me to tread carefully. A hot, sweaty bout of rough strife with Yev had certainly been on my mind (and in my dreams), but now I remembered the way her old boss had pimped her skills. And what about her new boss, if Haynes could be called that?

  “It depends,” I said, glancing back toward his office window, but it was out of sight around a corner.

  “It does.” Yev slumped to the grass beside me. “Sometimes…” Her voice was so low I could scarcely hear it. “Sometimes one does things to protect others.” She jerked her head back toward where I’d looked. “Yes, he found out, somehow, about what I’d done, and he wanted some of that for himself. Humiliation, games of punishment, the usual. But he has a wife and cannot afford so much in the way of visible injuries, so he asks for other things. And of course he provides his own…implements.”

  “Pegging?” Even as I said the word I was trying to shake that image of Haynes out of my mind.

  Her laugh was harsh and abrupt. “There is a much better word for that in Russian! But yes.” She shrugged. “The hardest part is not leaving bruises, or more, on him. But now he leaves others alone and does all he can get away with to please me, for the moment. No more need be said.” She stood and climbed back up on the mower. “But what about you, McKenna? Alex, the girls call you when they speak of you, which is often. You did not give me much of an answer. It depends on what?”

  “On being equally matched,” I said. “Strength for strength.”

  Her wide grin was wolfish now, and genuine. “Perhaps I should have mentioned my silver medal in Olympic wrestling.”

  “Thanks for the warning!” I looked her over. “I’d sure like to meet whoever won the gold!”

  “Ah, Anneliese!” Yev rolled her eyes in remembered bliss. “We still correspond. Even here she sends me letters now and again. Who knows? Maybe some day you wi
ll have the pleasure of meeting her, in Norway. Where mountains also rise out of the sea.” Her mower sputtered into life, and she drove away. By the time I caught up we were back at the garage and I had to bolt for the damned count.

  * * *

  The next day it rained. Thunder rumbled in the distance. So, the grounds crew worked inside the garage, washing and polishing the vehicles. Yev roamed restlessly between the front section and the back while I worked with the others, chatting and joking. A burst of general laughter brought her, frowning, until she saw the elaborate dragon I’d drawn in streaks of polish along the side of the warden’s black car.

  “Write something under it,” one girl said.

  Yev made an effort to lighten up. “Just don’t scratch it into the finish.”

  “How about ‘Puff, the Magic Dragon?’ somebody piped up.

  “Or Puff the Magic Warden?”

  Yev nearly smiled, but got back to business. “How about Puff the Disappearing Dragon. All this must be done and cleaned up before count time. Go as soon as you finish. The storm is coming closer, and there’s no more for you to do here today. Everyone but you, McKenna: come with me to chip the rust off some of the tools out here.”

  In the back, she bolted the connecting door and then resumed pacing while I dutifully chipped away at rust and filed dull edges into some semblance of sharpness. A paint-streaked tarpaulin heaped in a corner caught my eye. I filed it in my mind for future reference.

  “You look like a caged lioness,” I said after a while. “That marble mantelpiece I told you about had a lioness crouched above the poem, looking ready to spring.” If she didn’t spring pretty damned soon, I would. The thunder grew louder and ever closer, heightening the sense of urgency.

  Yev didn’t spring, exactly, just took one long stride. “So, you like your pleasures with rough strife?” Her growl vibrated into my ear, no distance at all between us now, bodies moving against each other slowly to savor the rising heat of friction. Her arms wrapped around me, mine around her, grasping each other’s butts, pressing into each other—but I raised my hands and bent my torso back just enough to yank my shirt up over my head first. I hadn’t bothered with an undershirt.