by Mary Karr
For a minute jail seems an okay alternative. Malcolm X started his mission locked up. Think about the yogic meditations you could master. Or the reading you’d do.
But Meredith’s brother writes that his prison’s library holds only grade-school grammar books and detective crap and motor-head mags. (How long’s he been in? A year? Eighteen months?) She and her mother both top out their town-library cards for books to haul up on the bus. Any weekend one can go, they scrape together money for a Motel 6 and the bus fare. Sometimes your pal Stacy even drives them. (But while you’re willing to ride along, you’ve not once borrowed your mother’s car for such forays, though you regularly ferry carloads of whooping hippie strangers stoned out of their gourds on beach runs or to concerts in Houston.)
Maybe prison could mutate you into Cathy. You can suddenly picture your body hung from that door like a simian.
The night gets long, longer, longest.
Before this arrest, you believed neither brutality nor tedium in any measure could break you, for citizens of your region receive black belts in bearing up under both. There’s some contrary regional pride in withstanding it all. Some kids leave elite prep schools like St. Paul’s or Choate with entry into certain colleges, mastery of certain protocols. In the same way, one leaves Leechfield with raw tales on which to dine out, a sense of having escaped, and the capacity for both pathos and pissed-off that would make for either an excellent nun or a fearless infantry soldier.
So decades from now, when your stories cause people to adjudge your personal past exceptionally barbarous or criminal—or they call you strong—you’ll feel like laughing. Horrifying stories could be told by anyone from Leechfield.
Or stories about crushing tedium. The slope of boredom there is steep enough to cast the shadow of an astonishingly high suicide rate. The average Leechfield teen can wring amusement from the most parched possibility, can by-God stand it.
That boast made, less than twelve hours of limbo in a town jail nearly undoes you. Even a prison sentence has an end, but the pretrial, pre-phone-call blankness and the specter of daunting consequence would dwarf and diminish the sturdiest resolve. There’s nothing to watch, nothing to read or write with, and—since the others manage sleep—no one to talk to. Even one more day, and you expect to go mad. One of your favorite poems is by John Berryman:
[My] mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) “Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.” I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.…
For a long time you retell yourself this story of Hogan’s about solitary confinement, what he called the Hole. How the baddest dude in Huntsville—the head of the Black Panthers there, a lifer—got slammed down for some period of months. He was left naked in a lightless concrete room with only a mattress on the floor and a slop bucket they took out twice a day when they brought food. For a while, he kept up his running regimen by jogging in place for hours until—from constant impact with the floor—bone spurs formed on the balls of his feet and stopped even that.
One day or night or day as he lay there immobile, he plucked a metal button off the mattress—one of just two left. When he flipped it away, the click of it hitting concrete was, he realized, the day’s greatest novelty. He felt around the floor for the button, eventually standing up to slide his bare feet in the dark till his toe touched it. By then an hour had gone by. He was sweating. He stood there holding the button with a small rush of triumph, also wondering if he listened hard enough, could he find it quicker next time. Which he did. By dividing the floor into quadrants, he could isolate the area the button fell to and limit his search to there.
Eventually he could bend to within a square yard of it, then a square foot. So he had to jack up the ante, make the game harder—dividing the floor into smaller squares, a grid he numbered longwise from the x axis and heightwise from the y. He cut the imagined tiles smaller and smaller till he had thousands of squares burned into his memory, each just big enough to accommodate the button. Then he kept a running curve of his improvement.
As he gained expertise, he toughened the rules again to keep it challenging. So he began more complex throws with ricochets—the button bouncing from multiple walls. Over time, he learned to predict them in the same way he’d mastered bank shots in pool, which required understanding the cant of each angle.
But one day he threw the button, and it didn’t come down.
He felt over each square meticulously up and down, time and again. Still the floor was bare of it. So was the slop bucket and the mattress’s soft edge of piping where it perhaps—in a fluke move—balanced. He crawled the cell on his hands and knees for days, up and down like a farmer hoeing along tiny inch-wide rows.
Of course, there was another button on the mattress. He could have started over with it. But that was cheating, he told himself. Besides if there was some warp in the physical universe that could gobble up one button, why feed it two?
As time stretched vacant without the button and the game, doubts about that last throw began to erode his former confidence in memory. Perhaps he only imagined he’d thrown it. He ran the scene over and over, till doubt tore holes in his reasoning.
That’s how, over time, he posited that in some deranged instant, he’d ingested the button. Just eaten it—that was the only solution. That’s how he wound up mashing through his own shit every day. Why he pleaded with the guards to let him get into the septic tank and crawl through the excrement he’d passed weeks before—or was it months?
You knew as Hogan told the story where it was headed. This rock-hard man started to rave like a dog. He ripped apart the mattress thread by thread, began a systematic chewing and spitting out of its stuffing. Once done with that, unable to bear the total disintegration of his sense of control, he decided the entire game had been a child’s fantasy only. If there was not now a button, then there never had been.
They found him hung by lengths of mattress ticking he’d tied together.
Where was the button? you’d said. There’s gotta be a punch line.
And there was, of course. When they cleaned out the cell and hosed down the shit-smeared walls, they washed a spiderweb from the high corner. A little disc swaddled in white silk fell and lodged in the drain at the cell’s center.
Chapter Twenty
KARR, THE VOICE SAYS. A nightstick raps the door. You come back with your least ironic Yessir.
He leads you out, saying it’s two A.M. (You would have thought daylight or even two days beyond.) You’ll never know if they kept you from calling till two just to fuck with you, or if they were waiting for the circuit judge to finish some July Fourth picnic. Whatever the case, you’re brought into the office of a man whose clothes make him an aberration. At this ungodly hour in this unlikely place, he’s wearing a three-piece seersucker suit with an honest-to-God watch fob, his silk tie held down by an American flag stickpin. He must have bought the suit about 1940 and slept in it every night since then to convey the weathered, Mr. Chips style he greets you with. He gestures to the phone, saying, Go on and call who you need to, honey.
You dial, and Lecia answers. Why she was sleeping over there, you’ll never know, but without her—because your parents’ room sits on the far side of the house—the call would’ve gone unanswered (unless, of course, someone was up roaming sleepless). But Lecia, God love her, can snap up a receiver from dead sleep in half a second, which is what she does, albeit sounding all blurry and slurry.
Lecia, don’t wake up Daddy. I’m in jail in Kountze.
Fuck you, she says, and you hear her fumble to hang up. You know that if she hangs up, she’ll purposely cover her head to sleep through the call back. That is, if they let you call back.
So you bay shamelessly in a voice you hardly recognize, Don’t hang up! Don’t hang up! This causes the judge to look up from whatever he’s scribbling. You turn your back to him, cup the phone an
d say sotto voce, I swear to God this isn’t a joke. I’m in jail. In Kountze.
Well I’m not coming to get you, you little freak. Actually, you know this bluster for horseshit: she’d be there fast if you asked, albeit chewing your ass out every mile home. You can hear her shift around. She says, Do you have the foggiest idea what time it is?
They tell me it’s two-something, but they don’t keep a clock in the drunk tank, you say. You feel the judge’s eyes on your back and glance over your shoulder. Sure enough, his pen has ceased to move across the legal pad, and he’s staring full bore at you.
You’re drunk? Lecia asks.
No, I’m not drunk. I’m not anything. I’m in jail. This is my only phone call. Remember on Dragnet they get one phone call? This is mine. Please, Lecia. I’m begging you. Don’t hang up. Sneak in there and get Mother to the phone. She’s gotta drive up here and make them let me out. And don’t wake up Daddy!
For fuck’s sake, she says. The receiver drops into soft covers.
What your mother says you won’t recall. (Lecia in the background did say as Mother closed the door on her, Now you’ve done it, shit-for-brains.) Ultimately, she asks to speak with the judge, who—from your end—gets downright friendly. The whole time he’s talking, your hand is out, waiting for the receiver again.
The judge finally says, We’ll be here, Charlie. But the phone he hands you back issues a dial tone.
Still, your mother must have convinced the judge that you were some wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time case, because after you hang up, he offers to buy you a soda (the machine being unfortunately empty of all but unpalatable root beer and Dr. Pepper). Then rather than send you back to your cell, as he calls it, he lets you sit in one of the faux oak chairs outside his office.
You’ve waited about thirty minutes when you glimpse two of the Colorado boys (minus Big Foot) across the room. Rather, it’s only their heads you see bobbing along, above the low wall of a cubicle. It takes you a second to twig to who they are, for these disembodied heads have been shorn, electric-razored down to Marine Corps prickles. You can picture the clippers, gliding up the back of each skull—all that glistening hair waterfalling to the floor. The result is a mutation: the boys suddenly appear overtly criminal—characters from the grainy wanted posters tacked in the post office. If one of them were hitchhiking on the beach road, even in daylight, you’d lock the car doors.
An hour or so after that, a short black man comes in the front door to the counter holding a long pistol that resembles a six-shooter from Gunsmoke. He sets it down on the counter, saying to the deputy, I just shot my old lady. His eyes are watery and bloodshot, the whites yellowed. He’s wearing a beige leisure suit that might be made of molded plastic. Like doll clothes, you remember thinking. He’s ushered to a chair. Somebody even washes out a coffee mug for the fellow and brews up a fresh pot. Before they close the door where the tape recorder’s already running, you catch sight of him once more. He’s interlaced his fingers and carefully placed his weeping face into that mask while this stout cop stands behind him patting his back says ts’ok, ts’ok.
By the time your mother arrives, a chill has settled inside you, a slight, marrow-deep tremor. When she bends for a hug, you cling to her neck like some marsupial, and she asks one of the cops for a blanket because her baby here’s freezing to death.
She winks before pulling the judge’s door shut. Then you sit extra still, wrapped in the rough wool blanket straining to hear. Mostly you expect her to talk in tones of shock and outrage at your behavior, convincing the judge she plans to take you firmly in hand. Saying blah blah blah some limits. Saying yakkity-yak her father! If she persuades the judge that she’ll ride down on your ass like the hound of hell, maybe he’ll set you loose.
Instead, after twenty minutes or so of low tones barely perceivable through the shut door, you hear laughter, greedy bursts of it. This goes on and on until you realize they’re discussing some topic wholly unrelated to your plight. In fact, they’re kind of whooping it up.
The judge opens the door with your mother still laughing broadly. He’s squeezing her hand in a grip that doubtless started in a goodbye handshake but which he’s stayed fiercely committed to and which she’s tolerating. He says, Charlie, Charlie, you’re still a piece of work. In the harsh light, he suddenly looks much older than you’d thought. Maybe eighty. Under thinning white hair his shiny pate has brown spots big as quarters. His tie must sport reminders of every soup he ever ingested.
But she’s treating him like some hero. She ducks her head at this kittenish angle that sets your skin crawling. Inside, you’re screaming, What about me?
The judge turns to you and settles a hand on your shoulder as if you’re standing on a church step after services, this far-off look in his eyes. He says, I met your mother twenty years ago when she was the police reporter for the Gazette. She’d been doing a lady’s column, but the editor got in a bind and bingo! He sends her to cover this murder trial—big case I was prosecuting. Trial of the century and so forth. Imagine! This dame on heels yay high comes clicking up the courthouse steps!
His face wears this beatific expression—like one of Giotto’s angels staring up at light from God’s throne.
He says, I was a young DA then. Let me tell you, little darling, she walked through those big oak doors, and I had to catch my breath. I thought, That’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life.
Oh horseshit, your mother says. Her grin is so self-satisfied, you imagine offering her a silver-tined fork, with which to gobble up all this slobbering praise.
And if anything ever happens to your daddy, the judge says, I’d marry her in a Yankee minute.
You old fool, Mother says. She jerks her hand back from his, adding, You just want somebody to nurse you till you die.
Mother! you say. But the old man doesn’t even flinch either from the rejection or the curt mention of his mortality. If his circulation were better, he’d be blushing.
He escorts her around desks and cubicle walls while you follow, more pissed with every step at being so disregarded. This is, if anything, your deal. Only Mother could make you a minor character in it.
At the door, one of the cops who rousted you is coming in with a white sack of something and two paper cups of coffee. His presence shifts the judge’s demeanor several degrees. The old man suddenly beetles up his eyebrows and turns to you to say, loudly, You’ll hear from the court soon, Miss Karr, about your trial date. But the broad grin he gives to your mother as she opens the car door makes you doubt that. (None of you are even charged with anything, though you suspect the Colorado dudes, who vanished, were less lucky.)
The whole time you’d been in that tank, you’d vowed to cherish freedom if you won it, to take no breath for granted, to get into your mother’s car spewing oaths to reform. Instead you’re steaming. You ask what the hell happened in there.
She lights a Salem then waves the smoke out her cranked side window. She says, It’s no big deal. I’m pretty sure it won’t come to anything, honey. That’s probably the last we’ll hear of it.
This breeziness with what school authorities have trained you to view as the stone tablets of Your Permanent Record cranks your own volume higher. So you’re hollering, You’re pretty sure? Pretty sure? Well since it’s gonna be my skinny ass going to jail if you’re wrong, let’s drum up a lawyer and get a little bit more sure. I like the sound of absolutely sure. Or real sure.
Don’t worry about it, baby. Stop being so silly. Just trust me, she says.
Long ago—aged seven or eight maybe—you’d loosed the grip on the tether that held you to the confidence she’s so glibly asking for. Since then, you’ve been floating along pretty much on your own, especially since Daddy vanished into wherever Daddy goes to, and Lecia took her right-wing turn just as you hooked to the left.
None of this is consciously understood, only intuitively acted on. You can barely contain the annoyance that sweeps through when you should be happy—
both to be loose and that your mother’s not hopping up and down in your ass. Anybody else would sing hosanna.
Instead, you do what sixteen-year-olds girls do best. You slouch down into a glower. About halfway home, she starts talking about what she plans to do with your room when you go off to college.
If I can get into college, you say. If my parole officer’ll let me go.
Oh hush. I was just saying that you won’t be home that much longer, and I might move my painting stuff in your room. You wouldn’t mind, would you?
Do what you want, you say. Though you do mind. You’d imagined some eternal home that waited for you post-college, your room sealed and shrink-wrapped—a museum to your exploits.
The car glides over Cow Bayou Bridge, and there’s a roadhouse Lecia frequents where Jerry Lee Lewis probably hit the stage last night pounding piano.
How far apart we’ve grown, you think, Lecia and me. Once you did Supremes routines in your bathing suits before the long hall mirror, synchronizing every step. Now if you’re home at the same time (a rarity), you pester her by playing Hendrix full volume, or the Mothers of Invention (“Suzy Creamcheese, what’s got into you, nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah…”). Mother actually likes this stuff, and even Daddy thinks your liking it is hilarious. But it drives Lecia gaga—completely affronts her. Which is partly the idea—her ire constituting the biggest response you can draw from the whole indifferent household. Apparently, even getting thrown in jail doesn’t register a jag in your mother’s heartbeat. No big whoop.
You ask her how she got that judge to let you off.
Oh honey. That was his idea. I’d never presume—
Mother, the old letch was dripping all over you. Like you’re not fifty-some-odd years old.
Oh I see. You mean, How does an old hag like me turn the head of anybody possessed of a pecker? The light in her eye at this instant is knifelike and slant.