“When you’ve done it for the least of these … ,” she said, then trailed off.
I pulled back from her, searching her eyes for some of the earlier light and life, but it wasn’t there.
“What’d you say?”
She didn’t respond, and eventually I started walking across the room toward the waiting orderly.
“I said …”
I turned.
“… you’re not depressed anymore, are you?”
I smiled. “No, I’m not,” I said. “Confused, shaken, humbled, questioning my sanity, but not depressed.” “That’s something,” she said. “And sometimes, something is all there is.”
I nodded and continued walking.
When I reached the door, I turned again and waved.
She lifted her small hand, but didn’t really wave. “Keep your eyes open, John,” she said. “You’ll be seeing me again.”
Blood Bought
“Something’s wrong with Keli,” I said.
“How can you tell?” Merrill asked. “She look just the same to me.”
He was right. It wasn’t obvious, but I could tell something was wrong from the moment I saw her across the large parking lot. There was nothing overt, but it was there. It was as if she were walking around with the knowledge that the red dot of a high-powered scope was on the back of her head.
“I’m observant,” I said.
We were in the staff parking lot of Potter Correctional Institution. Merrill had given me a ride to work this morning, when my truck wouldn’t start. It was early, the February air still damp, the ground still wet with dew.
“You something,” he said with a smile. “And it may even start with an O.”
“Optimistic?”
He laughed, his bright white teeth contrasting his dark skin. “Obsessive,” he said. “Try that on, see how it fit. How long it been since you had a puzzle to worry your mind with?”
I smiled. “A little while.”
“Aha,” he said, as if a detective hearing an important admission.
I laughed.
Situated on a cleared plot of nearly a hundred acres and surrounded on all sides by planted pine forests, PCI included a main unit, an annex, training facilities, an obstacle course, a firing range, a warehouse, gardens, and an on-site staff housing trailer park—nearly all of which were visible from where we stood.
Merrill wasn’t the only one who didn’t seem to notice Keli’s odd behavior, but in addition to being an amateur noticer, I knew Keli well enough to know when something was wrong.
Keli Linton and I had gone to high school together. A kind, quiet girl with the insecurities that come with having an abusive alcoholic father, a larger than culturally-approved body, and the embarrassment of living in poverty. We had been friends. Many mornings in the school cafeteria, at a table that smelled of a dirty dish rag, I copied her homework while she told me the details of her life.
After graduation, we lost touch. She went into the military, got married, had a baby girl, got divorced, got out of the military, and eventually moved back to Pottersville.
In a small panhandle town like Pottersville, there’s not a lot of jobs that enable a single mom who doesn’t receive regular child support to provide for her family—especially if she only has a high school diploma. The obvious choice, particularly for a woman who’s done time in the armed forces, is the growing field of corrections.
When Keli became a correctional officer at PCI, where I served as chaplain, she came into my life again. Working days put her at the prison during the administrative shift when I was there, which meant we saw a good bit of each other.
Getting out of her car, Anna joined us as we all headed in the general direction of the front gate.
“What ‘O’ word he remind you of?” Merrill asked her.
Anna looked at me, her brilliant brown eyes big and playful. “Orgasmic?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I’m an orgasmic optimist.”
“I’ve got to hear the part of this conversation that took place before I walked up,” she said.
Merrill told her. As he talked, she looked across the parking lot at Keli.
I followed her gaze.
Keli’s posture and movements were that of another person. It was as if she were wearing clothes that were too small, so stilted and strained were her movements.
She had parked on the far side of the lot, in the front row of the section reserved for employees who were having their cars washed. There wasn’t anything very odd in that (though I had never seen her get her old banged up Honda washed before), except that she parked in the very last space on the end, passing several open spaces and nearly guaranteeing hers would be the last car washed.
“I’m with Merrill,” she said. “I don’t see it.”
“He obsessing ’cause he ain’t had a case lately,” Merrill said.
“Obsessing’s better than a seventh percent solution,” she said.
I smiled.
“I thought it was a fifth of something that was eighty proof,” Merrill said with a smile.
I laughed. “Too true, that,” I said.
We reached the front gate and the security check that awaited us in the visiting park of the security building at the same time Keli did. Instead of speaking in her normal, friendly, loud, try-a-littletoo-hard voice, she didn’t speak, and when I spoke, her reply was the barely audible grunt of a distracted person.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
She gave me a quick nod. “I’m fine.”
“Told you,” Merrill whispered to Anna.
Keli had said it in such a way as to discourage further discussion, but I didn’t let that stop me.
“You sure?” I asked. “You seem—”
“I’m fine.”
“How about Kayla?”
Kayla was the thirteen-year-old daughter she was raising by herself.
“She’s fine,” she said. “Everything’s fine.”
Because of the steady flow of contraband into the institution, we started each workday with a pat-down. Herded like cattle into the sally port, through the security building, and into the visiting park, we placed our belongings on long folding tables, behind which were correctional officers who went through them. We were then taken into the restrooms—the men into theirs, where male officers waited, the women into theirs, where female officers waited— took off our shoes, our bodies then traced with a metal detector wand and an officer’s hands.
You’d think all of this would prevent contraband from being introduced into the prison, but it didn’t even slow it down. Part of the problem was how inconsistently and casually the searches were performed. Three shifts a day entered and exited the institution. These types of security measures would only work if applied to every shift, every day. They weren’t, and most volunteers and contractors were never searched. The other problematic part of the equation was that the searches were performed by friends and coworkers, who already felt awkward and ambivalent about what they were doing.
After being searched, Keli hurried out of the visiting park without speaking to everyone she passed as she normally did.
Adjusting his uniform, Merrill walked up beside me. “No better way to start the day than gettin’ felt up by a cracker ass redneck motherfucker,” he said.
In another moment, Anna rejoined us and we began walking down the compound.
“How is she?” Anna asked.
“Fine,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”
“Told you,” Merrill said.
“Something’s wrong,” I said. “How about you two help me keep an eye on her?”
“Sho,” Merrill said. “Gots nothin’ else to do ’round here, boss.”
“If we do, won’t we be enabling your obsession?” Anna asked.
“Look at it as keeping me from drinking,” I said.
My morning went as it usually did, filled mostly with the crisis counseling of inmates, their families via phone, and a few staff members. I had e
ven managed a little time to reflect on what Merrill and Anna had said about me obsessing, because I was bored. I knew there was truth in what they said, but I also knew that awareness and observation, being mindful and meditative, were the keys to enlightenment— in life as well as detection. And since I didn’t want to obsess about obsessing, I didn’t do it for long.
I had wanted to check on Keli, but it was nearly time for lunch and I had yet to have the opportunity.
As the last of the inmates were leaving the chapel to return to the compound for count, followed by chow, the phone on my desk rang. I picked it up.
“Good morning, Chaplain Jordan,” I said.
“What’re you doing for lunch?” Anna asked.
“I’m open to suggestions,” I said.
She laughed again. “How’s Rudy’s sound?”
“Not very good, but about our only option,” I said.
“Oh, I asked around a little about Keli,” she said.
“And?”
“Girl’s just as much a saint here as everywhere else,” she said. “Patient with the inmates, even kind.”
“I knew that.”
“Until today.”
“Told you.”
“So she’s having a bad day,” she said. “She’s probably on her period.”
“I realize I’m a guy,” I said, “but—”
“And a celibate,” she added.
“Not by choice,” I said, “and it’s a temporary condition.”
“Okay, okay,” she said. “Do you remember what you were saying or is your sexual frustration finally getting the best of you?”
“I know enough to know that she probably has a period about every twenty-eight days—and probably has since she was fourteen. Why is it just now turning her into Mrs. Hyde?”
“You know, if you put as much obsessive energy into dealing with your forced celibacy as you do little things like this, you might actually be able to renounce this vow you say you haven’t taken.”
“Is that what you really want?”
“Like I was saying, something is obviously very wrong with Keli, and you need to spend every waking moment trying to figure out what it is. How can I help?”
“Where is she posted right now?” I asked.
“She’s over outside grounds,” she said.
“Thanks.”
“So how about lunch?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll see if Keli can join us.”
“You go from celibate straight to threesome.”
“I’m freaky like that,” I said. “It’s part of my addictive personality.”
As Anna and I were hanging up, Merrill walked in and took a seat in one of the two chairs in front of my desk.
“Word on the pound is Keli’s catching for the other side.”
“Lesbian?”
He shook his head. “Only two sides in here,” he said. Brown and blue.”
I nodded, and thought about it. If Keli were involved with an inmate, it would explain a lot.
“Say she hooked up with Josh Miles.”
“Inmate who washes cars?”
“Four-one-one is her car ain’t the only thing he hosin’.”
I smiled.
The number of female officers who get involved with inmates is staggering, especially since they are warned from day one of training and orientation of how smooth and persuasive so many of them can be. After all, they don’t call them cons for nothing. It’s an epidemic, but one to be expected with the sheer number of hours they spend together in this cauldron of desperation. No one is immune, but vulnerable, lonely women are especially easy prey for the predators that have spent a lifetime perfecting the hunt.
“He assigned to outside grounds?” I asked.
He nodded. “And the control room. Why?”
“She works outside grounds.”
“So there may be somethin’ to it,” he said.
“Or not,” I said. “You know how reliable the vine on the pound is.”
“Say it is,” he said. “She upset because of the guilt or because he broke it off or he whitemailing her?”
“Let’s go ask him.”
“What you mean we, white boy?” he said. “Some of us gots jobs and shit to do.”
Working in the exciting and expanding field of corrections doesn’t just provide a member of a rural community job security with great benefits and state retirement, but also the opportunity to have an inmate wash their car, as well. For just six bucks (or nine with a wax job), an employee of PCI can purchase a ticket at the canteen and have his or her car washed while they work.
Small wooden stakes holding square white boards with CW and the numbers 1 through 9 carved into them stood in the ground before nine spaces in the front right corner of the employee parking lot. Keli’s car was in CW9, and I found Josh Miles buffing the last of the wax off it.
Keli’s old champagne-colored Honda, dented and scratched though it was, actually looked a lot better than it had this morning.
“You work miracles,” I said.
“Hey, Chaplain,” he said.
The inside of Keli’s cluttered car looked even worse than usual now that the outside was gleaming in the midday sun. In among all the half-consumed Sprite and Dr Pepper bottles, old newspapers, fast food bags, and wrinkled clothes, I saw Kayla’s schoolbooks and gym bag, and Keli’s Bible and Sunday school book.
“I may have to let you do that to my truck,” I said. “I always thought it wouldn’t do any good, but after seeing what you did with this one.”
He looked up and across the lot.
Josh Miles was thick and square with blond hair and blue eyes. If I had to guess, I’d say he had German ancestry. He was soft-spoken and serene, hard working.
“It’s not here today,” I said. “It wouldn’t start this morning.”
“Is it that old white Chevy S-10 I’ve seen you in?”
I nodded.
“I’m good,” he said, “but not that good.”
“Really?”
“Man’s got to know his limitations,” he said with a smile.
“I respect that,” I said. “Still, you did an amazing job with Sergeant Linton’s.”
He nodded as he walked over to the cart that held the brown plastic crates filled with his cleaning supplies.
“Looks like it took some time,” I said.
Pulling out various crates, he returned his sponges, rags, soap, and wax to their containers. “I can usually do three to four cars before lunch,” he said. “Today, this one took the entire time.”
“Sounds like she owes you a big tip,” I said.
“No, sir,” he said. “’Course not.”
“What did she do to earn such special treatment?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “I just wanted to do it for her. She’s so nice. One of the few kind officers around here. Plus, she’s my boss.”
“There’s a rumor going around that she’s more than that,” I said.
He shook his head. “It’s not true,” he said. “I swear. I’m married. Got kids. I’m about to get out. I would never—I swear. It’s just talk. There’s nothing to it.”
If he were lying, he was good at it.
“How long you got?”
“Little less than a year if I get all my gain time.”
I nodded.
Something caught his eye, and I turned to see Keli walking toward us. Average height and heavy, Keli carried most of her excess weight in the lower half of her body. Whatever was wrong with her accentuated her bulk because of the labored way it made her move.
“Miles, you ready?” she asked. “It’s time for lunch.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and looked over at her car.
She followed his gaze and her face fell. “What did you do?”
“Detailed it for you,” he said. “It turned out—”
“I told you to do it last,” she said.
“I know, but—”
“I even parked in the l
ast spot,” she said. “Look at all these other trucks and cars.”
Most of the spaces were filled.
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