The Best American Mystery Stories 2013

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  The Sunday after the grand reopening of the Bailey Café, only three people stayed after church for Helen Bree’s crumb cake social. As if relieved of a great burden, her heart stopped until Pastor Kimble shocked it back to life with the portable defibrillator the church had bought during fatter times. Few of us visited her in the hospital, we’re embarrassed to say, though once she returned home the Bloom boy trekked over from the farm twice a week to deliver groceries, remove her trash, and sit on her couch watching the Nature Channel, which she was immensely fond of.

  As the third Christmas since the plant closing approached, workers put the finishing touches on the prison. In each cell they installed steel toilets that were, strangely, also sinks. They wired up a network of cameras and reinforced the doors with metal plates. In the hallways they passed burly men in shirts embroidered with the Corvus Correctional logo, who stocked the armory with shotguns, rifles, batons, tear gas, and pepper spray. On their belts the Corvus people wore plastic zip cuffs resembling the six-pack rings that poisoned sea turtles or ensnared gulls, and which Helen Bree had once led a campaign to ban. Corvus was hiring soon, was the word.

  “You have no idea what you’re in for,” said Ken Dufresne to a group of young men at Barry’s. They’d applied to be guards. “Corrections officers,” he said, and looked away with a slow shake of his head. The group left soon afterward. Our town hadn’t had a murder in eight years, not since Gene Shipsky, Dufresne’s old fishing buddy, shot his wife and her lover dead in the Shipskys’ bedroom. He then put the pistol to his own temple and pulled the trigger. Ken had been first on the scene.

  There was no horsing around during guard training. The new hires knew what they were up against. They learned the basics of the daily prison routine, the rules for visitors, and how to search a cell for contraband. They had a classroom refresher on the criminal justice system. None of them could exactly remember what the Fourth Amendment was. They wrestled each other until the veins in their necks threatened to burst. Kyle Rouse volunteered to be shocked for the taser demonstration, but then again, Kyle always had been a crazy son of a bitch. They learned how to club an aggressive prisoner—on the biceps, on the legs, but never the skull, which lawyers would eat them for. They were divided on their preferences for straight or side-handled batons. The weapon’s weight on their belts was strange at first. But they got used to it.

  One winter morning a caravan of buses with waffled grating over their windows came plowing down the highway. Those of us who lived within sight of the road watched from our windows as the chain of buses carved a trench in the gray slush, carrying their freight of human cargo to the prison, where so many of our husbands and sons, our friends and neighbors, waited to receive them. The buses were only the beginning—soon retail stores and good service jobs would follow. To the extent that we thought about the men in those buses, we imagined them as one type, multiplied: sullen, dangerous, and deserving of punishment, but potentially redeemable, through faith and good works. Even from afar, they radiated menace. We were thrilled and terrified to see them.

  Slowly, money began to circulate. We drew paychecks instead of unemployment. To our children’s dismay, the town could afford teachers on Fridays again. Ed McConnell’s ranch did well enough that he had to hire a dozen more people. Perhaps best of all, Grace and Robert Chilton were finally expecting a baby. We splurged on $20 bottles of Zinfandel to celebrate our good fortunes, but we still clipped coupons.

  A number of Corvus people moved into town, and while we were friendly with them, we couldn’t say we were friends. The men had a stiffness to them; the women, brittle smiles. We asked them how they were and they always seemed miffed by the question, hiding the answers in their cheeks before spitting them out. Some guessed privately what they thought of us: bumpkins, hicks, rednecks. We chafed at that. We were a distinguished enough bunch. Joshua Bloom, not even in high school yet, was a state fair prizewinner in canning and preserving. We had an active community theater and a two-wing library. Many of us had been to college. To the extent that we had an idea of ourselves as a town, it was as families and good neighbors. The newcomers had pronounced a silent judgment upon us, made sharper by the fact that many of them were our bosses. It almost made us miss the light touch of the German plant owners who ruled our parents and grandparents.

  If we were unprepared for anything, it was the number of visitors. They trickled in at first, women and the occasional child, mostly, until it seemed they were everywhere. A group of us would be holding a book club at the Bailey Café and a red-eyed stranger would order a coffee and sit at the window for an hour, steeling herself for whomever she was about to see. Three blocks and one diner booth away, an unfamiliar mother and her teenage son chewed sandwiches in silence, then departed in a car with Kentucky plates. We saw couples at the gas station on the outskirts of town, buying trail mix for the squalling children on their hips as we stood in line for cigarettes, their faces washed free of any emotion but a trace of shame.

  On the street, we snuck glances at the young women coming to visit their husbands and boyfriends. They wore painted-on jeans and shirts with plunging necklines, and if a group of us happened to catch an eyeful, we weren’t above a murmured joke about conjugal visits. Other times we saw older women, who we guessed were the mothers of inmates, in floral-print dresses and hats piled with elaborate confections of silk, wool, and felt. Sometimes we saw strangers in sweatpants and T-shirts, and we imagined that they dressed modestly so as not to make the prisoners feel shabby.

  On summer weekends we hosted a parade of cars with license plates from Missouri, Indiana, Kentucky, and as far away as Wisconsin. We were grateful for the business, but we weren’t prepared to handle the busload of suited and gowned seniors from a charismatic church in Missouri, who arrived without fanfare and stayed for three days to minister in the prison. Nor were we prepared for the hundred-odd carousing attendees of the Corrections Officers Convention, whose location was changed to our town with little notice. We were not prepared for the mothers and wives who lodged in our attics and spare bedrooms, whose footsteps creaked above our heads when they were unable to sleep, who sobbed into our guest pillows, who filled our houses with their grief.

  Oh, to hell with that, some of us said. We were decent people, faithful to our wives and husbands. We tithed and donated sweaters and jeans to the Salvation Army. We flew the flag from our porches and took it inside when it rained. We visited Helen Bree, whose heart was failing, which marooned her indoors most of the time. Were these things not proof of our largesse, our essential goodness?

  On a trip to Helen Bree’s house, Pastor Kimble and the church vocal quartet sat with her to watch a nature documentary. It concerned a fish that attached itself to a shark’s skin and lived off scraps by cleaning the shark’s teeth. They left after the first commercial break, which in retrospect was a shame. Some of us would have liked to learn how those fish managed to avoid being eaten.

  When Grace Chilton gave birth to a boy three months prematurely, Pastor Kimble collected donations to help with the family’s hospital bills. By that time most of the town had reconnected their satellite TVs, so it was no great burden to pitch in a twenty for little Anthony’s medical fund. During those months it wasn’t uncommon to see Robert Chilton walking around ashen-faced with worry, until he took a job as a prison guard.

  Those of us who worked as guards wondered whether he had it in him. We’d developed something of an edge, a hyperalertness that was lacking in gentle Robert. Corvus paid well enough, we couldn’t complain there. But just being in that place chiseled away at our composure. The smell of sweat permeated the building. It was worse after lights-out, as if the concrete walls and floor had absorbed the stench all day only to release it all night long. Sometimes we’d catch a group of prisoners staring at us, and flowers of ice would bloom in our chests. Never for a second could we forget they would kill us, given the chance.

  That was a hard notion to shed after work, when the same dozen
or so of us gathered at Barry’s for drinks before going home to our families. We made overtures to the Corvus people, the more senior guards, but they never joined us. You could tell by looking that they never would. We became body-language experts, sizing up everyone we met. We instinctively looked for the half-closed fist hanging at someone’s side, a slight bunch in the shoulders, tense little pulses in the jaw and temple. Even a clean-cut prisoner like Howard Albright—White Bright, other inmates called him—all downcast eyes and mumbled Yessirs, set our hearts racing if he shuffled by too close or approached from behind. We couldn’t turn it off, that hypervigilance. The best we could do was manage it.

  There was another issue brewing, one that we mostly didn’t talk about: the town was nearly all white, and the inmates were nearly all not. Likewise, many of the visitors were black or Hispanic, and their skin announced them as citizens of Chicago, or Joliet, or Plano, or any of the other towns up north from which we siphoned and warehoused young men. It was Isaiah Bloom who first spoke about it, at a town meeting where a revitalization of the town square was under debate.

  Bloom was tall and rangy, perpetually sunburned, with sandy blond hair and a chinstrap beard. “You know how I feel about this prison,” he said, quietly enough so that we had to strain to hear him from the back of the hall. He put his hands—large, gnarled mitts—on the podium, his pale eyes casting about for a sympathetic face. “And I know a lot of you don’t feel the same. But this money—it’s not rightly ours.”

  It turned out that the census counted every prisoner as one of us—two thousand extra unemployed men. Our swollen ranks earned us more federal dollars. To hear Isaiah Bloom explain it, we were the beneficiaries of a cruel trick played on poor blacks and Latinos. It was true that among many of us, a mental shorthand had developed: if we saw white strangers, we assumed they were police, or lawyers, or with Corvus. If they weren’t white, we assumed they were visiting an incarcerated friend or family member. This mental routing, this either/or, was so fast and seemed so natural that its profound weirdness didn’t really register with us until Bloom went on to point it out. It wasn’t clear whether these kinds of thoughts had always been with us or we’d been tainted by the prison’s arrival.

  The prison was segregated, too. Out in the yard, surrounded by towers with riflemen silhouetted against the sky, inmates broke into racialized clusters. Gang fights erupted in brief but frequent bursts, like chamber musicians tuning their instruments before the commencement of some terrible overture. Even unaffiliated prisoners got caught up. During one of these fights, another inmate punctured Howard Albright’s thigh with a sharpened toothbrush before we pulled him to safety.

  “I mean, Christ,” said Kyle Rouse, three beers deep at Barry’s. “Puerto Rican, Mexican, what’s the difference?”

  Robert Chilton looked as uncomfortable as some of us felt, but with Kyle paying for round after round, we said nothing. With his clear, open face and Cupid’s bow mouth, Robert looked much younger than the dozen or so of us, despite being a few years older. We could only imagine how he must have looked to the prisoners.

  “I heard that Corvus is looking to build another facility,” said Kyle, who labored under the impression that he’d purchased our ears along with our drinks. “They’re closing some place in Indiana and shipping everyone here.”

  “Eh,” said Herman Floss, curled over his drink at the next table over. “Put a bullet in each of their heads and be done with it.”

  There were times when we all came to feel that way. A few weeks later, a prisoner known as Skinny Charles flung a slurry of fluids at Kyle, who ducked the missile but still wound up with foul-smelling flecks spattered across his shoulder. It took three of us to hold Kyle back—carefully, so as not to get any stains on us—while all of C block laughed and hollered.

  We rousted everyone after that. We shoved inmates against the walls chest-first, kicked their legs apart, and patted them down. Flicked open personal switchblades and Leathermen and ripped through mattresses. We left boot prints on pictures of their families. We tore apart their cells, looking for contraband, and boy, did we find it: razor blades, screwdrivers, shivs. Plastic bottles of pruno fermenting in toilet bowls. An exquisitely detailed portfolio of hand-drawn pornography. A tattoo gun cobbled from a Bic pen, an eraser, the motor from an electric toothbrush, and a length of guitar string for the needle. In Howard Albright’s cell, shears and actual needles. We marveled at their stupidity: how could they have imagined they could keep anything from us, some of whom had built those very cells? So no—whatever it might have meant for the town, we guards were not looking forward to another thousand Skinny Charleses coming in.

  “He knows what he did,” said Skinny, when questioned about the attempted sliming of Kyle Rouse. “That motherfucker’s gonna get got.”

  In three cells on C block, we found knotted condoms filled with brittle rocks. In Skinny’s cell we discovered an empty condom with traces of powder, which the lab confirmed was cocaine. As soon as that news came through, he couldn’t stop talking.

  “What the fuck?” said Kyle, when he happened into the changing room as two guards rummaged through his locker.

  There was nothing in his locker, but word went out that Kyle was being watched. He stopped going to Barry’s for a few months. When we patrolled the upper tier of cellblocks with him, we could feel CentCom watching us through the compound eye of cameras, noting whose cells we lingered at, how long it took us to complete a loop. We’d always watched out for each other—maintaining sightlines with fellow guards was crucial to making sure you were covered—but now we watched each other.

  Early one morning, while the prison slept, our supervisor tacked the following month’s schedule to the locker room’s corkboard and announced extra shifts. We didn’t know it at the time, but Kyle had been in custody for hours, and his pickup—one of the models built at the plant, a lifetime ago—had been impounded by Corvus’s investigators, after they’d found a dozen condoms filled with rock cocaine in its glovebox. But we didn’t know that yet. We finished dressing and signed our names in the empty boxes, grateful for the overtime. Once we’d divided up Kyle’s hours, we secured our batons to our belts, stepped out onto the tier, and threw the power switch, flooding the prison with light.

  While it was probably no comfort to his wife and young son, it was a small mercy that Kyle got sent to a facility a few hours north. In the months he’d been selling drugs in the prison, passing them between a visiting gang contact and a crew inside, he’d begun to adulterate the shipments, diluting them so much that he’d earned the enmity of casual users and addicts alike. It wasn’t hard to find inmates willing to testify against Kyle, and he wound up pleading out for eight years. Some of us heard rumors that Sheila knew about his dealing the whole time, but we were in no mood to cast aspersions.

  In hindsight, we’d felt it building all through the end of that year. The gen pop had been on edge since the drugs dried up, though the occasional shipment managed to slip in. All it took was one sign of disrespect—cutting in line, a walk-by shoulder check—and though none of us knew what the exact offense was, the prison cafeteria exploded at dinner a week after Thanksgiving. A scrum of men tackled two lone prisoners, bringing them to the ground with a flurry of little jabs. They dispersed, leaving growing blots of red on the chest of each twitching victim.

  At that, the cafeteria broke into waves of scrambling bodies. Most of the inmates flattened themselves against the wall. Others bellowed as they kicked and punched and choked each other. Skinny Charles took a tray to the jaw and went sprawling. Howard Albright fell backward and skittered into a corner, arms braced over his head. Prisoners pinned one another to the ground and pummeled away.

  The adrenaline hit like a shock wave, made our eyeballs throb. Someone’s tear-gas canister struck the floor with a dull metallic thunk. We shouted and swore as we rushed to seal our helmets, the canister belching smoke. Prisoners stopped fighting and fell to their knees, wheezing. We waded
into the thick of it, bleary-eyed, the sound of our own rasping breath deafening in our helmets. Images swam through the haze—an outstretched hand, a face twisted in pain. Fear deformed every thought in our heads. We unsheathed our batons and laid waste to anything in a blue jumpsuit. We let the full force of our rage find expression at the end of those clubs. We split open scalps, made men spit teeth.

  A quarter-hour later, when the last inmate had been carted off to the medical wing, we received word that both stabbing victims would live. Robert Chilton was in the infirmary, scrubbing off blood with soap and saline. A trace of gas lingered in the air, sour in our throats. Our hands trembled. But there was no time to consider what had happened. A caged light bulb above the cafeteria door flashed red, and the lockdown alarm rang.

  One of the inmates lapsed into a coma and stayed under for weeks. When he awoke, he couldn’t walk or talk, and the right side of his face was slack. Robert Chilton quit that day. By then he looked as if he hadn’t slept in forever. The inmate was transferred to a state hospital soon afterward, where someone could help him eat and bathe.

  After that, a parade of lawyers came through. Groups of them came and went in shifts, day after day, men in discount suits carrying thick file folders, conferring with inmates in low voices so we couldn’t overhear. A kind of submarine pressure began to fill the prison walls. We felt fragile and exposed, ignorant of what was happening up on the surface, afraid that depth charges could detonate at any moment.