Among Women

by J. M. Cornwell

  Horns blared. Tires screeched on the wet pavement, skidding to a stop as the Catalina’s front tires gripped the pavement and headed in the opposite direction, the rear end fishtailing as she floored the accelerator, quickly regaining speed. A fast glance in the rear view mirror confirmed her fears. The cruisers from the roadblock sped through the neutral ground and onto the pavement behind her, one cruiser flipping sideways and landing on its roof. The tires spun as a cop crawled out of the window.

  The Catalina dodged through rush hour traffic, nearly side swiping a red Toyota. She palmed the wheel too quickly and momentarily lost control. Once back on track, she leaned forward, tires screaming on the damp pavement. Metal screamed when she side swiped a car here and there, but she had to reach the Pontchartrain Bridge before the cops caught up with her. She glanced at the fuel gauge. Or before she ran out of gas. She stomped the gas pedal and leaned farther forward.

  The engine coughed.

  The fuel gauge needle juddered near E.

  She was running out of time and out of gas.

  The sirens screamed and whined above, behind and beside her.

  The muffled growl of a voice overhead ordered her to stop. More helicopters beat down at her. More voices echoed the command to stop as if from a whole flock of helicopters.

  “Looks like the whole parish came out for the show.” Grinning a death’s head grin, she risked a glance backward. She had a really big audience. “Let’s give them a run for their money.”

  Ahead the way to the bridge was clear—for a moment. Two cruisers screeched to a halt across the entrance. Foam-capped waves pounded the rocky shore on either side of the bridge. The entrance was blocked but the side routes were clear. She chose quickly. It was now or never. “Good thing I can swim.”

  She palmed the wheel and ran off the road onto the shoulder, down over the uneven ground headed for the water. She bounced in the seat, hitting her head on the roof. “Come on. Come one.” She ignored the pain and clenched her fist, banging the steering wheel and the console. The engine coughed and wheezed. “A little bit more. Please, just a little bit more.”

  The red needle on the speedometer pegged. The car slowed. With just enough momentum, she’d still make it. “Come on. Come on.”

  She closed her eyes and prayed, letting go of the steering wheel. She leaned back against the seat, left hand pressed up against the ceiling, head back against the headrest, right hand limp in her lap. The car slowed, shells and rocks crunching, coughed once and rolled to a stop. Water lapped the front bumper. She looked out. Waves danced up to the wheels and whirled away. The hood of the car was spangled with spray. “I didn’t make it.”

  Lainie looked out. She was surrounded by cops, guns drawn, helicopters buzzing overhead, circling.

  “Come out with your hands up.”

  “One hand better be enough.” She swung around in the seat after opening the door. The right arm dangled by her side. “Wait a minute. Gotta get my leg.” With practiced ease, she pulled the right leg out and set it on the ground then stood up, left hand raised. “Will that do?”

  Seventeen

  “Their faces were red as ripe Creole tomatoes when I got out of that car. They’d been chasing a cripple.”

  “You don’t seem crippled.”

  “Think not?” Lainie flopped her right arm onto the table. “Don’t get much more crippled than that.”

  “Not having a right arm would be more crippled than that.” Pearl stifled a smile.

  Lainie gaped at her, shocked to silence. A slow smile curled the corners of her lips and she pounded her left hand on the table. “You got a point.”

  “You manage pretty well.”

  “I do at that, but those pigs didn’t take my joke too kindly. Snapped the handcuffs so tight on my wrists fingers went numb in both hands. No, they didn’t like me outrunning them.”

  “I guess not. Why were you headed for the lake?”

  “Didn’t plan to drown myself if that’s what you mean.” Pearl shook her head. “The water would’ve taken the evidence.”

  “What evidence. What was in the trunk?”

  Before Lainie could answer, the guards called for lights out. Lainie got up and headed toward the stairs, waving her hand over her shoulder. No more talking tonight.

  When Pearl reached the bottom of the stairs, Martha beckoned her closer. “Find out what she had in the trunk?” Pearl shook her head. “I couldn’t neither. I bet she gonna give it up to you, but she’ll make you wait first. Want to be sure you talk to her again. That girl been watching you from the first. She got somethin’ on her mind. Count on it.”

  “I figured that out when we were in the holding cell.”

  “True that.”

  With a few minutes remaining before the lights went out, Pearl made notes. There could’ve been anything in the trunk and it would’ve taken some time to drag the lake if Lainie had made it. Even if she had made it into the lake, it wouldn’t have been deep enough to hide the evidence if it was substantial, like a body. The police would’ve been more interested in catching her than searching the car, so the trunk could’ve contained just about anything. Yes, she wanted to know, but what bothered her was that she probably wouldn’t have talked with Lainie so long if she had not been approached first. There was something creepy in the way Lainie looked at her, something that raised all the hairs at the nape of the neck and all along both arms.

  The lights snapped out and Pearl rubbed her arms. She undressed in the dark, rinsed out underwear, hung them to dry and then slid beneath the covers facing the door, ears alert to every sound.

  Pearl couldn’t sleep. Words and thoughts tumbled over each other in her mind. She tossed and rolled over, resting her forehead on the cold white painted cement blocks under the window. Her fingers cramped and ached from gripping the pen, but she wanted to write more. The sickly pallid light coming through the window barely reached beyond the sill. The moon was dark. The quad lights were out and the silence was deafening. Her heart thudded in her ear where it lay against the pillow—lub dub, lub dub, lub dub—marking the seconds that stretched across the forever desert of night toward an unseen horizon. Would the morning ever come?

  She counted her heartbeats—one and two and three and four and, one and two and three and four and—until her eyes grew heavy, her cramped fingers uncurled. Coherent thought fuzzed around the edges and melted into the silence. She snored softly once, rolled over and settled into the rhythm of night.

  Somewhere a muffled bell jangled and she sat in a bathroom stall, the pressure and ache of a full bladder throbbing in time to her beating heart, but she was unable to go. Something kept her from relieving her bladder. The bell clanged louder. Voices were louder. She reached for the stall door. It was missing. She would be exposed. Straining against the sudden urge to void, she struggled toward the bell and the voices, bright lights spearing her eyes. She blinked and rubbed them, clambered out of the bunk and stumbled to the toilet. The icy steel seared the backs of her thighs and dispelled the last dregs of dreams and heavy sleep.

  She was in jail and it was morning.

  Weak green light fumbled through the bars and onto the tangled blankets. Rough night. She wiped and stumbled on numb feet to the desk. Half of the first legal pad was filled with black spiders. Pearl blinked and rubbed her eyes, chasing away the clouds and scooping at the sand collected in the corners of her eyes. The spiders cleared, coalescing into words and sentences that filled half the page. It was not a dream. She had written, was writing, still wanted to write. There was so much to say, so many things to describe and exorcise from the past three weeks, from the past ten years.

  “She’s coming,” a voice hissed from the corridor. “Roll call.”

  Roll call then breakfast and then she would continue writing.

  Pearl rushed to the door just as the guard reached the door, checked her off the list and moved on.

  She fell in behind the women streaming past, feet tingling. Shoes. And s
ocks. Two minutes later, she followed the herd up the stairs and through the vestibule between the quad and the hallway to the cafeteria line. Get a tray, take the food, march back to the quad, sit and eat, toss the debris and clean the cell. The same old drill, but with a different ending for once. Today, she would write.

  Lainie bumped her arm, nearly spilling the tray. Pearl shuddered remembering the first night in the tank downstairs when Lainie was thrust through the door and nearly fell face first onto the bench on the wall opposite her. Lainie had grinned up at the closing door and laughed out loud as she gathered the limp and wasted weight of her right arm in her left hand and dropped unceremoniously onto the bench when her right leg gave out.

  The hippie girl smoothed the pastel flowered shirt down over the soft mound of her belly and shook mousy brown hair back from her face. She flowed over the sides of the low slung jeans where the side of the shirt hitched up.

  Peering at Pearl from between the straight fall of lank hair, a secretive smile flashed briefly on her lips and in her eyes. Was it cunning? Was she trying to tell Pearl something? Pearl shifted uncomfortably on the hard seat, a splinter poking her thigh so that she jumped. The girl snorted and laughed. Pearl glanced hopefully at the door. A key grated in the lock and Pearl tensed to rise and run.

  A guard took two steps into the tank and dropped a paper sack on the center bench. “There’s food,” he said. He turned and locked the door.

  The hippie girl ripped open the sack. Wax paper wrapped sandwiches—white bread and gray-brown meat—tumbled onto the bench.

  “I’m not going to be here long enough to eat,” said the small dark woman in the corner near the door. “The judge be having me out ‘fore long.”

  “More for me,” the girl said, scooping up two more sandwiches. She sat back and placed the sandwiches on the bench beside her. She moved her right hand into her lap, took one of the sandwiches and braced it against her limp right hand as she unwrapped it, picked it up and took a bite. “Bologna.” She faced the door. “You forgot the mustard,” she shouted. “Jerks,” she mumbled. “Stupid pigs.”

  Pearl’s stomach rumbled. Bologna and bread was better than starving and she hadn’t eaten in hours. She ate quietly while the girl stared at her. No, she wasn’t staring at Pearl but at her arms. Why?

  She folded the wax paper and wedged it under the sack with the last bologna sandwich. The girl’s eyes followed every move, brown eyes blazing with intensity and focused on her arms. Pearl sat back down and crossed her arms, sliding them into the loose sleeves of her shirt.

  “You have beautiful arms.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Beautiful arms,” she said. “Such strong veins, so blue and open and welcoming.”

  Pearl stared at the girl and then down at her arms. “How can you tell?” she asked.

  “I can tell.” Lainie crumpled the wax paper in her left hand and tossed it on top of the sack. “Ever do drugs?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. Your veins are too blue, too straight, too . . . there. I’m Lainie.”

  “Pearl.” She might as well be polite, especially since there was nowhere to run and no way to get away from Lainie’s avaricious stare. Pearl tugged at the three-quarter length sleeves, but the cotton would not stretch, so she tucked her hands between her legs and shifted a little closer to the door. With any luck, someone would come for her soon and she would never have to see Lainie again. She gave Pearl the creeps.

  Lainie still gave Pearl the creeps, but not nearly as much as when they were brought up to the quad together that first day. Both of them went into the same room down the hall where they were strip searched and probed one after the other, naked and vulnerable. Pearl felt more violated by Lainie’s avid stare than by the guard’s rubber gloved finger ramming into her tender bits.

  There was no way to get far from Lainie on the quad either, not even in the bathroom where Lainie always seemed to need to go every time Pearl went. There was no privacy. Two toilets sat side by side across from the communal showers. A short wall screened the toilets from the quad; the showers were completely exposed. On that side of the guard station, anyone sitting at the picnic tables got a free show. New inmates were a big attraction and most of the population gathered to watch the inmates stripped, showered and deloused. It was better than television some of the women said, watching trembling newbies trying to find some small corner where they could shield themselves. There was nowhere to hide.

  When Pearl went to the bathroom up on the quad, which was seldom, Lainie showed up just as she sat down, settling onto the next toilet, jamming the roll of toilet paper onto her dead right hand and unwinding the paper with her left hand as she stared at Pearl’s arms and muttered about strong blue veins waiting to be filled with hot white light.

  Lainie bumping her reminded Pearl of the questions she still had. Who would think someone born with cerebral palsy would lead the parish police on a wild chase that ended up almost in Lake Pontchartrain? She doubted when the cops crashed their cars trying to catch up, while Lainie sailed through evening traffic without a scratch, the cops were happy. It was probably like watching the Keystone Kops, except people died and ended up in the hospital. More damage and more charges. She would never get out of jail, but at least she knew what she had done.

  Lainie was eerie and sometimes amazingly sinister when she fixed the dark pits of her bottomless brown eyes on Pearl’s arms. She felt exposed and a little as though she stared into an infernal abyss. Pearl imagined that is how vampires must look when they caught the scent of blood—all eyes and naked hunger.

  Lainie’s arms were scarred by old needle marks, the veins barely visible beneath the pitted scars that ran from wrist to elbow. Her legs, when they were visible, were a network of scabs and scars and pits rimmed with purple so dark they were almost black. Some areas had the faded greenish-yellow of old bruises. She nudged Pearl on the stairs. “What you writing now?”

  “Whatever comes to mind.” She headed down the stairs. Lainie followed.

  “You writing about me now? Can I read it?”

  “I’m not finished.”

  “Is it any good?”

  “I don’t know yet.” The look on Lainie’s face changed from hungry vampire to prancing puppy. She was excited and anxious. “It won’t be like the newspapers. This will be your story.”

  “When can I read it?”

  Now was her chance. “When I’m finished, except I can’t finish.”

  “Why not? I told you everything.”

  “Not everything.”

  Hopeful eyes switched to something darker, sneakier, a cat playing with a mouse. “You want to know what was in the trunk.” Pearl nodded. “Let me read what you’ve already written and I’ll tell you. Not what you’ve written about me, but what else you wrote.”

  “I’ll bet you were a camel trader or a car salesman in a previous life. I’ll think about it.”

  Lainie gently gripped Pearl’s arm. “Please?”

  “When I finish what I’m writing, I’ll let you read it. If you still want me to write about you, you’ll have to tell me what was in the trunk.”

  The hopeful look was back. “Thanks.”

  Lainie limped back to the stairs, grabbed the railing and dragged her right leg up one step at a time. She limped across the quad headed for the picnic tables near the showers and sat down to read a discarded newspaper, deliberately turning away from the showers. No one worth watching today.

  Lainie hadn’t shown any interest in anyone else’s arms, just hers, and that made Pearl feel uncomfortable.

  There are lots of other women here who had not used drugs, so why me?

  Something cold and wet slipped down her back setting her teeth on edge like a decomposing corpse’s finger.

  Most of the other women talked fondly about drugs, about the floating highs and the crashing lows when all they wanted was another hit—the hair of the dog that bit them, a lot of hair. Many of the
m, most of the prostitutes and thieves, had ropy tracks up and down their arms. Betty’s arms had never seen a needle, nor had Martha’s, Joo-Eun’s, or Maureen’s, and yet Lainie did not get the hungry gleam in her eyes looking at them. It reminded Pearl of what she must have looked like there she had gone for days without food and the smells wafting out from Popeye’s every time the door was opened filled her mouth with water.

  Lainie mentioned her boyfriend, the one who put whatever it was in the trunk of his car, so she wasn’t a lesbian—or was she? Pearl shook the thought away. There had to be another reason. She definitely hoped so since she was beginning to like Lainie. She didn’t swing that way, not even a little, and being caught in the shower or cell or under the stairs was not on the agenda. She would have to be careful and time her shower so there was no chance of running into Lainie the way she ran into Joy all the time.

  She didn’t exactly run into the red-headed, freckled woman so much as Joy hovered just out of range like a fleeting speck at the corner of the eye, there and not there. Then there was Letty, who seemed to be on the edge of every conversation where Pearl was concerned. Letty also gave her the creeping willies.

  Pearl sat down at the desk. Uncapping the pen, she read the last few lines on the page and started writing, getting up only to get lunch and give it away before returning. At dinner time, she bolted the food, nearly choking once, dumped the rest of the lettuce (what passed for salad) and bread on Betty’s tray and continued writing as soon as possible. She finished Lainie’s story as lights out were called, capped the pen, climbed into the bunk and settled in, hands behind her head.

  The chaotic thoughts of the previous night were gone, exorcised onto the page. The sum of the past two weeks took shape in sarcasm and humor and irony. She had not been allowed to plead her case to a lawyer or judge, and no one seemed to know she existed outside of roll call—so there was at least some record of her. She was nothing more than a body in cell 110. The only recourse left to her was to plead the case on paper.