by Cathy Lamb
224 Cathy Lamb
But this time, when the red car came into view, instead of crashing straight into me, the driver, a woman, turned the wheel to her right when we were still ten feet away from each other and sent her car flying off the side of the road and down the cliff.
I stopped and I ran out of my truck. I saw the woman’s head hanging limply out the window, her short black hair still.
She looked dead, and I scrambled down the cliff and ran to her.
Then I lost my footing and started to fall. I screamed as I crashed down the cliff, rolling, flipping, landing hard.
One of us died. Probably. I felt a death, then it skittered away.
I can’t believe that this premonition does not give me more clarity. All my premonitions give me clarity. I see what’s going to happen.
Why does this premonition change and shift? I have no idea why, and that makes me worry more than anything else.
Mr. Jamon came in on Friday. The store was jammed, the line to get treats at the café ten people long. It was the Toffee Crunch and Candied Pretzel cake we were selling. Bettina knew how to bake.
“Hello, Mr. Jamon.”
“Hello, Evie,” he croaked out. “I’ll need another book by Mrs. Macomber and I need something that’ll keep me thinking, using the ol’ noggin all night.”
I gave him a historical fiction book about slavery—“history with a magical twist”—and a current book about social issues, minimum wage, and staying broke in America. “Nonfiction. We can all learn from this.”
He was quite pleased, especially with Mrs. Macomber’s book.
“She believes in love,” he told me.
“Yes,” I said. “She does.”
Then he leaned in and whispered, “I’ll take another bodice ripper, too.”
C h a p t e r 2 2
Betsy Baturra
Women’s Correctional Prison
Salem, Oregon
1976
Prison was a torture for many reasons. Betsy was trapped behind bars, like an animal. She was told what to do and when to do it. Some of the prisoners were mentally ill. Some were mentally ill and dangerous. Some weren’t mentally ill but were dangerous. Some of the women were nice enough, or interesting, or even friendly, and others were to be avoided at all costs.
It was gray, it was depressing, it was hopeless. Betsy had been given a life sentence. She might get out early for good behavior.
She might not.
She had lost Rose. The only reason she decided not to kill herself was because of her premonition: It looked like one day, in the future, she was out of prison. Either she died or the other woman in the truck died, but maybe she had weeks or months or years to live outside of prison before that. She could hope.
Her first roommate attacked her with a piece of wood that she had sharpened into a tiny knife. The blood soaked through her orange prison shirt and she was sent to the infirmary. The roommate was sent to isolation and then transferred to a mental hospital. Her second roommate was schizophrenic and mean.
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She and Betsy had a physical fight, and Betsy won. She was small but strong, and her survival instinct kicked in.
But they both ended up in isolation.
That was where Betsy came into contact with a guard named, ironically, sickeningly, Duke.
Duke was in his midthirties and already balding. He had a heavy stomach that dripped over his belt. He had bad skin; bad teeth; and the deadened, soulless eyes of a panther.
The first time he saw Betsy, on duty in the isolation ward, he stopped making crude jokes to two other guards, who clearly couldn’t stand Duke, to pant over Betsy.
“Whoa. Look at that beautiful bitch,” Duke breathed.
“Hey,” one of the other guards said. “Knock it off.”
Duke didn’t even bother to glare at him. He watched Betsy being led into an isolation ward and said to himself, “Yum.
That one is mine.”
And that’s when Betsy’s life in prison became even worse.
On a blustery night, Duke slid Betsy’s dinner in through the tiny slat of her isolation cell designed to break people in half, to bring them to their knees, so that they obeyed forevermore.
“Hello, sexy lady.”
She didn’t bother to hide her disgust. He saw it on her face, so he dumped her food on the floor. “That’ll teach you to be more friendly to me.”
The food dumping happened on the second night, too. Duke said, “Give me a pretty smile, darling,” and leered at her. Betsy did not smile. He threw the food through the slit, angry, but enjoying the power struggle. She would be on her knees soon. He was practiced at this with the “captives.”
The third night he said, “Betsy, I can make your life easier or harder. Understand? Now show me what’s beneath that shirt.”
Betsy was demoralized, near deranged from isolation and grief and used an expletive that started with an F to tell him what she thought of that. He tossed the food in once again.
On the fourth night he opened up her door, furtive, quick,
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knowing he wasn’t supposed to be there and said, “Do you want to eat?”
She blinked at him. The less she spoke to that vile man, the better.
“I said, bitch, do you want to eat?”
“Yes.”
He undid his pants. “You know what to do.” He leered at her. He was proud of his size. He was big, longer and wider than other men, he believed. Like a stallion. He could drive women crazy with The Pistol. He hung well. He was blessed.
She screamed as loud as she could, and it echoed off the beige-yellow concrete walls. He clocked her, on instinct, right across those high cheekbones, barely missing those puffy lips.
“Bitch. I will make you pay for that.”
He shoved his little snake back in his pants, enraged at the screaming, and slammed the door.
“What’s going on, Duke?” Coralee, another guard, asked.
Coralee was twenty-eight and had a degree in criminology and wanted to go to law school. She couldn’t stand Duke.
“I don’t know. She’s crazy.” He was panting. His anger always made it hard to breathe. Black was edging his vision, his body ready to attack. “I put her food tray through the opening and she tossed it to the ground like she’s done the other nights. I went in to talk to her, calm her down, pick up her food for her, and she swung her fist right at my face twice. She should be in the psych ward.”
Through the tiny slat, Betsy said calmly, loudly, “He opened the door, called me a bitch, pulled down his pants, showed me his tiny pencil dick, and told me what to do with it if I wanted to eat.”
“She’s a liar,” Duke said, agitated, his fat face scrunched up.
“That didn’t happen. I was trying to help her. I was going in to talk to her so she’d eat.”
“He wanted me to eat him,” Betsy said. She tried to keep her voice strong, but it cracked. She tried not to cry.
Coralee and the other guards didn’t believe Duke. Betsy may have been a murderer, but they knew Duke, the warden’s nephew, was a lying, scheming jerk.
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“Get out, Duke,” Coralee said. “Go to the warden’s. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“You believe this liar? This murderer?”
Coralee peeked through the slat at Betsy, on the ground, her skinny arms wrapped around her skinny self, then at Duke.
Duke was a craven, disrespectful, nasty liar. A man who was not half as smart as any woman here but believed himself to be twice as smart because that’s what he wanted to believe. “Yes.”
Betsy felt her face swelling up. She was dizzy. She was aching.
She felt sick from the punch.
“We’ll get you another tray,” Coralee said, “but first you’re going to the infirmary.” One of the guards headed off to get the tray, following Duke, who was punching the air with his meaty fists and swearing. That Coralee
could order him around, that infuriated him, too. Women should never be in charge of men.
Stupid woman. Stupid whore.
He listened, seething, to Coralee telling the warden, his uncle, what happened to Betsy, the murderess in isolation. Duke called Coralee a liar and pretended to be outraged.
Coralee told him that his nephew wasn’t fit to be working in the jail, that he was an egomaniac, a danger to the women prisoners, continued to insist on unlimited power, and had a problem with authority, especially with women. “I’ve worked with him for a year now. Look, sir, we’re not responsible for our family members,” she told the warden. “We’ve all got relatives who are loony or corrupt, but you are responsible for this prison and the people in it.”
The warden told Coralee not to tell him how to do his job, and Coralee apologized.
The warden sighed. He knew his nephew had a brain filled with filth, but he loved his older sister. She was the sweetest woman he had ever met. It was Rosalind who had comforted him when their parents were screaming at each other when they were kids. So he didn’t fire Duke. He told Duke, “Stop making problems for me here, and keep your damn hands to yourself or you’re out of here.”
That set Duke off, too. He had a miserable job. There had to
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be some perks. All these women. Some were butt ugly and fat and gross. Others weren’t so bad. They even did things for him when he promised them perks. But Betsy was the most beautiful woman he’d seen in his life.
She was his.
And he would have her.
He would get his revenge on Coralee, too.
Betsy was given a job in the prison cafeteria as a short-order cook, so to speak. It wasn’t the worst job. She liked to cook. It was the one thing she and her mother did together. Her mother had taught her how to make everything from scratch to save money: Bread. Pies. Cakes. Casseroles. Chicken dishes. Turkey dinners. It was all centered around Betsy’s mother “performing her wifely duties in the kitchen,” as her father always said, but it did give her time alone with her mother.
The food in prison was flat, but maybe she could make it better. She would try. She had nothing else to do. Plus, in some small way it reminded her of her and Johnny’s plans. They were going to farm together. They would sell the food they grew on the farm. It would be organic. Their organic food would make people’s lives better, healthier. They would have a farmhouse and acreage. They would have apple, pear, and cherry trees.
They would have blueberries and potatoes and carrots and let-tuce.
Every time she envisioned that farm, selling at farmer’s markets or a small grocery store, she would feel a sense of hope, of light, but then her reality would crash in on her along with the bars in her cell and the group showers, and darkness would descend. Still, she hung on to that image, that future.
Her new cellmate was named Eartha. Eartha was twenty-two. She was in for attacking her stepfather. He had beaten up her mother one too many times. She had tried to kill him, but it hadn’t worked. “I could not tolerate seeing my mother’s face bashed in one more time,” she said. “He always threatened to kill her if she left him, so I decided to take things into my own hands with a hammer when he was drunk and passed out.”
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Her defense attorney literally fell asleep at her trial, twice.
The judge had to shout at him. In the end, she was found guilty of assault and was in for three years. “Hopefully we can stay roommates for that long,” Eartha told her after a week. “You ain’t crazy and you ain’t mean, and you haven’t tried to kill me yet, so we’re good.”
Betsy liked Eartha. She was almost six feet tall, smart, loud, opinionated, interesting, and funny. They were an unlikely best-friend pairing, with Betsy being small, quieter, reserved, and depressed. But perhaps because they were so different, they got along. It was the only thing about prison that Betsy liked. She even shared her future plans with Eartha.
“I like it,” Eartha said. “I’ll be your manager.”
So Eartha and she made plans for their grocery store even though Eartha thought Betsy was dreaming. That girl was probably never getting out of prison.
Duke would not leave Betsy alone. He always tried to be near her whenever he could. He watched her. He stalked her. Betsy was elegant and petite, and she disdained Duke. Who was she, he thought with a burning rage, to reject him? Does she think she’s better than him, the little murderess? Does she think she can treat him with such dismissiveness and rudeness and get away with it? This was his domain. His. Not hers. He was the guard. She was the prisoner. She should be subservient to him.
He would try to talk to her when she was in her cell. He would try to touch her when she walked by in a line with the other prisoners. She would yell at him, “Get your paws off of me, you animal.” He would try to rub up against her any time he could, which wasn’t often, as there were other people around and he knew where all the cameras were, but he was always there, waiting to rub.
Duke tried, for a short time, to sneak behind her while she was doing dishes in the cafeteria. As soon as she saw him coming, his beady eyes locked on her, she would get a bowl ready.
When he stepped up behind her, she would pretend to be surprised, turn, and toss a bowl full of soapy, dirty, preferably hot
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water on him. The first time she did it, he ripped the bowl out of her hands and threw it. It shattered on the floor. He then turned her around and put her hands behind her back and cuffed her, shoving himself up behind her.
“Get off of me!” she screamed, gasping for breath as his weight pressed in on her. “Get him off of me.” Other prisoners turned to help, but it was no use. He was a guard and no one was allowed to touch a guard. Plus, Mrs. Grisham, their boss, was out that day—her daughter had given birth to twins—so there was no one to ask for help from.
“You attacked a guard,” Duke panted, so excited, thrilled!
“No, I didn’t. I defended myself because I didn’t want your sweaty, fat hands on me again. Quit trying to touch me, Duke!”
He dragged her off, her arms almost being pulled out of their sockets, to isolation. He would teach her a lesson as soon as he could. When Coralee came in for her shift, she complained to the warden about Betsy being there again. She knew what was going on. “He came up behind Betsy, again, and attacked her,”
she told the warden. “Then Duke blamed her for it.”
“He said she turned, unprovoked, and threw scalding hot water on him in order to make an escape,” the warden said. He couldn’t look Coralee in the eye.
“You have got to be kidding,” Coralee told him. She was getting more bold in her speech. She figured she’d make a competent lawyer. “You can’t possibly believe that. You know your creepy nephew is obsessed with her.”
The warden sighed. If it wasn’t for his sweet sister, he would have fired Duke long ago. He sighed again. He should have been a grocer. Or a plumber.
Coralee made dang sure that Duke didn’t “visit” Betsy on her shift or on any of the other shifts. No one crossed Coralee, so when Duke tried to sneak down there when Coralee was off shift, he was refused by other guards.
Betsy only had to spend two days in isolation, because the warden intervened. If hot water had truly been thrown, she would have been in there far longer than that.
When she was released she was confused and exhausted,
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which is what isolation does. Plus, it makes you feel like you’re losing your mind as the walls close in ever closer. When Betsy was headed to the cafeteria a week later, Duke grabbed her and dragged her out to a supply closet and shut the door. He knew that supply closet, and the short hallway on either side of it, didn’t have a camera on it.
He didn’t realize that Betsy would fight as hard as she did, especially after he smacked her so she would obey and shut up. In the end, his testicles were smashed by her raised knee so hard, and wit
h such force, that he fell to the ground. She stumbled out of the closet, her prison shirt ripped. Mrs. Grisham, back from helping with her daughter’s twins—they were so adorable—
saw Betsy, her face bruised and swelling, and complained to the warden.
But there was an ol’ boys network in the prison, and the warden was his uncle, so no one did anything to punish Duke, but Mrs. Grisham told him to “stay the hell out of my kitchen, you piece of crap, Duke.”
Betsy cried in her cold, bare cell that night, Eartha’s arm around her. “I’m gonna kill that son of a gun for you, Betsy,”
Eartha said.
“Please don’t,” she sobbed. “I don’t want you in here any longer than you need to be.”
Betsy hated prison. Everyone did. It was dangerous. It was de-void of all elements of a normal human life. Freedoms. Choice. A job. Family and friends. Weather. Walking. The beach.
But Betsy found two surprising things.
For many women there, they’d made one mistake. One. Usually in conjunction with a toxic relationship with a man and/or with drugs. There wasn’t much that separated most of the women in prison from the women outside of prison. Once sober, once they were out of the way of bad influences, they were like everyone else.
About thirty percent, Betsy figured, were mentally ill. She couldn’t understand why they were there in the first place. Prison was enough to make anyone lose their mind. It was worse for
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those who had already lost it. The vast majority of the women in prison had been poor all their lives. Many were minorities and clearly had had grossly inadequate defense attorneys representing them. They were sentenced for things that Betsy knew a wealthy white woman would not go to jail for. Or their sentences were way too long, overly punitive.
Now many of the women, they deserved to be there. They were sick and dangerous and had no morals or empathy and they were a danger to society. She avoided the monstrous ones as best she could.
The monotony in prison killed her spirit. The fear killed her soul. The loss of Rose killed her heart. The abuse from Duke disgusted her, scared her, repelled her.