by Ed Gorman
“Well say hi to your Mom.”
“Thanks Riley. I’ll be sure to.”
“She’s a hell of a nice lady.” Riley and his girl came over one night when Ma’d had about three beers and was in a really good mood. They got along really well. He had her laughing at his jokes all night. Riley knows a lot of jokes. A lot of them.
“I sure hope we make our goal today.”
“You just relax Tom and forget about the store. OK?”
“I’ll try.”
“Don’t try Tom. Do it.” He laughs, being my uncle again. “That’s an order.”
In the kitchen, done with packing her paper bag, Ma says, “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Said what?” I say.
“About you being like your sister.”
“Aw Ma. I didn’t take that seriously.”
“We couldn’t have afforded to stay in this house if you hadn’t been promoted to assistant manager. Not many boys would turn over their whole paychecks to their Mas.” She doesn’t mention her sister who is married to a banker who is what bankers aren’t supposed to be, generous. I help but he helps a lot.
She starts crying.
I take her to me, hold her. Ma needs to cry a lot. Like she fills up with tears and will drown if she can’t get rid of them. When I hold her I always think of the pictures of her as a young woman, of all the terrible things that have cost her her beauty.
When she’s settled down some I say, “I’ll go talk to Sis.”
But just as I say that I hear the old boards of the house creak and there in the doorway, dressed in a white blouse and a blue skirt and blue hose and the blue flats I bought her for her last birthday, is Sis.
Ma sees her too and starts crying all over again. “Oh God hon thanks so much for changing your mind.”
Then Ma puts her arms out wide and she goes over to Sis and throws her arms around her and gets her locked inside this big hug.
I can see Sis’ blue eyes staring at me over Ma’s shoulder.
In the soft fog of the April morning I see watercolor brown cows on the curve of the green hills and red barns faint in the rain. I used to want to be a farmer till I took a two week job summer of junior year where I cleaned out dairy barns and it took me weeks to get the odor of wet hay and cowshit and hot pissy milk from my nostrils and then I didn’t want to be a farmer ever again.
“You all right, hon?” Ma asks Sis.
But Sis doesn’t answer. Just stares out the window at the watercolor brown cows.
“Ungrateful little brat” Ma says under her breath.
If Sis hears this she doesn’t let on. She just stares out the window.
“Hon slow down” May says to me. “This road’s got a lot of curves in it.”
And so it does.
Twenty-three curves—I’ve counted them many times—and you’re on top of a hill looking down into a valley where the prison lies.
Curious, I once went to the library and read up on the prison. According to the historical society it’s the oldest prison still standing in the Midwest, built of limestone dragged by prisoners from a nearby quarry. In 1948 the west wing had a fire that killed 18 blacks (they were segregated in those days) and in 1957 there was a riot that got a guard castrated with a busted pop bottle and two inmates shot dead in the back by other guards who were never brought to trial.
From the two-lane asphalt road that winds into the prison you see the steep limestone walls and the towers where uniformed guards toting riot guns look down at you as you sweep west to park in the visitor’s parking lot.
As we walk through the rain to the prison, hurrying as the fat drops splatter on our heads, Ma says, “I forgot. Don’t say anything about your cousin Bessie.”
“Oh. Right.”
“Stuff about cancer always makes your Dad depressed. You know it runs in his family a lot.”
She glances over her shoulder at Sis shambling along. Sis had not worn a coat. The rain doesn’t seem to bother her. She is staring out at something still as if her face was nothing more than a mask which hides her real self. “You hear me?” Ma asks Sis.
If Sis hears she doesn’t say anything.
“How’re you doing this morning Jimmy?” Ma asks the fat guard who lets us into the waiting room.
His stomach wriggles beneath his threadbare uniform shirt like something troubled struggling to be born.
He grunts something none of us can understand. He obviously doesn’t believe in being nice to Ma no matter how nice Ma is to him. Would break prison decorum apparently the sonofabitch. But if you think he is cold to us—and most people in the prison are—you should see how they are to the families of queers or with men who did things to children.
The cold is in my bones already. Except for July and August prison is always cold to me. The bars are cold. The walls are cold. When you go into the bathroom and run the water your fingers tingle. The prisoners are always sneezing and coughing. Ma always brings Dad lots of Contac and Listerine even though I told her about this article that said Listerine isn’t anything except a mouthwash.
In the waiting room—which is nothing more than the yellow-painted room with battered old wooden chairs—a turnkey named Stan comes in and leads you right up to the visiting room, the only problem being that separating you from the visiting room is a set of bars. Stan turns the key that raises these bars and then you get inside and he lowers the bars behind you. For a minute or so you’re locked in between two walls and two sets of bars. You get a sense of what it’s like to be in a cell. The first couple times this happened I got scared. My chest started heaving and I couldn’t catch my breath, sort of like the nightmares I have sometimes.
Stan then raises the second set of bars and you’re one room away from the visiting room or VR as the prisoners call it. In prison you always lower the first set of bars before you raise the next one. That way nobody escapes.
In this second room, not much bigger than a closet with a stand-up clumsy metal detector near the door leading to the VR, Stan asks Ma and Sis for their purses and me for my wallet. He asks if any of us have got any open packs of cigarettes and if so to hand them over. Prisoners and visitors alike can carry only full packs of cigarettes into the VR. Open packs are easy to hide stuff in.
You pass through the metal detector and straight into the VR room.
The first thing you notice is how all of the furniture is in color coded sets—loungers and vinyl molded chairs makes up a set—orange green blue or red. Like that. This is so Mona the guard in here can tell you where to sit just by saying a color such as “Blue” which means you go sit in the blue seat. Mona makes Stan look like a really friendly guy. She’s fat with hair cut man short and a voice man deep. She wears her holster and gun with real obvious pleasure. One time Ma didn’t understand what color she said and Mona’s hand dropped to her service revolver like she was going to whip it out or something. Mona doesn’t like to repeat herself. Mona is the one the black prisoner knocked unconscious a year ago. The black guy is married to this white girl which right away you can imagine Mona not liking at all so she’s looking for any excuse to hassle him so the black guy one time gets down on his hands and knees to play with his little baby and Mona comes over and says you can only play with the kids in the Toy Room (TR) and he says can’t you make an exception and Mona sly like bumps him hard on the shoulder and he just flashes the way prisoners sometimes do and jumps up from the floor and not caring that she’s a woman or not just drops her with a right hand and the way the story is told now anyway by prisoners and their families, everybody in VR instead of rushing to help her break out into applause just like it’s a movie or something. Standing ovation. The black guy was in the hole for six months but was quoted afterward as saying it was worth it. Most of the time it’s not like that at all. Nothing exciting I mean. Most of the time it’s just depressing.
Mostly it’s women here to see husbands. They usually bring their kids so there’s a lot of noise. Crying laughing c
hasing around. You can tell if there’s trouble with a parole—the guy not getting out when he’s supposed to—because that’s when the arguments always start, the wife having built her hopes up and then the husband saying there’s nothing he can do I’m sorry honey nothing I can do and sometimes the woman will really start crying or arguing, I even saw a woman slap her husband once, the worst being of course when some little kid starts crying and says, “Daddy I want you to come home!” That’s usually when the prisoner himself starts crying.
As for touching or fondling, there’s none of it. You can kiss your husband for thirty seconds and most guards will hassle you even before your time’s up if you try it open mouth or anything. Mona in particular is a real bitch about something like this. Apparently Mona doesn’t like the idea of men and women kissing.
Another story you hear a lot up here is how this one prisoner cut a hole in his pocket so he could stand by the Coke machine and have his wife put her hand down his pocket and jack him off while they just appeared to be innocently standing there, though that may be one of those stories the prisoners just like to tell.
The people who really have it worst are those who are in the hole or some other kind of solitary. On the west wall there’s this long screen for them. They have to sit behind the screen the whole time. They can’t touch their kids or anything. All they can do is look.
I can hear Ma’s breath take up sharp when they bring Dad in.
He’s still a handsome man—thin, dark curly hair with no gray, and more solid than ever since he works out in the prison weight room all the time. He always walks jaunty as if to say that wearing a gray uniform and living in an interlocking set of cages has not yet broken him. But you can see in his blue eyes that they broke him a long time ago.
“Hiya everybody” he says trying to sound real happy.
Ma throws her arms around him and they hold each other. Sis and I sit down on the two chairs. I look at Sis. She stares at the floor.
Dad comes over then and says, “You two sure look great.”
“So do you” I say. “You must be still lifting those weights.”
“Bench pressed two-twenty-five this week.”
“Man” I say and look at Sis again. I nudge her with my elbow.
She won’t look up.
Dad stares at her. You can see how sad he is about her not looking up. Soft he says, “It’s all right.”
Ma and Dad sit down then and we go through the usual stuff, how things are going at home and at my job and in junior college, and how things are going in prison. When he first got there, they put Dad in with this colored guy—he was Jamaican—but then they found out he had AIDs so they moved Dad out right away. Now he’s with this guy who was in Viet Nam and got one side of his face burned. Dad says once you get used to looking at him he’s a nice guy with two kids of his own and not queer in any way or into drugs at all. In prison the drugs get pretty bad.
We talk a half hour before Dad looks at Sis again. “So how’s my little girl.”
She still won’t look up.
“Ellen” Ma says “you talk to your Dad and right now.”
Sis raises her head. She looks right at Dad but doesn’t seem to see him at all. Ellen can do that. It’s really spooky.
Dad puts his hand out and touches her.
Sis jerks her hand away. It’s the most animated I’ve seen her in weeks.
“You give your Dad a hug and you give him a hug right now” Ma says to Sis.
Sis, still staring at Dad, shakes her head.
“It’s all right” Dad says. “It’s all right. She just doesn’t like to come up here and I don’t blame her at all. This isn’t a nice place to visit at all.” He smiles. “Believe me I wouldn’t be here if they didn’t make me.”
Ma asks “Any word on your parole?”
“My lawyer says two years away. Maybe three, ‘cause it’s a second offense and all.” Dad sighs and takes Ma’s hand. “I know it’s hard for you to believe hon—I mean practically every guy in here says the same thing—but I didn’t break into that store that night. I really didn’t. I was just walking along the river.”
“I do believe you hon” Ma says “and so does Tom and so does Sis. Right kids?”
I nod. Sis has gone back to staring at the floor.
“‘Cause I served time before for breaking and entering the cops just automatically assumed it was me” Dad says. He shakes his head. The sadness is back in his eyes. “I don’t have no idea how my billfold got on the floor of that place.” He sounds miserable and now he doesn’t look jaunty or young. He looks old and gray.
He looks back at Sis. “You still getting’ straight A’s hon?”
She looks up at him. But doesn’t nod or anything.
“She sure is” Ma says. “Sister Rosemary says Ellen is the best student she’s got. Imagine that.”
Dad starts to reach out to Sis again but then takes his hand back.
Over in the red section this couple start arguing. The woman is crying and this little girl maybe six is holding real tight to her Dad who looks like he’s going to start crying too. That bitch Mona has put on her mirror sunglasses again so you can’t tell what she’s thinking but you can see from the angle of her face that she’s watching the three of them in the red section. Probably enjoying herself.
“Your lawyer sure it’ll be two years?” Ma says.
“Or three.”
“I sure do miss you hon” Ma says.
“I sure do miss you too hon.”
“Don’t know what I’d do without Tom to lean on.” She makes a point of not mentioning Sis who she’s obviously still mad at because Sis won’t speak to Dad.
“He’s sure a fine young man” Dad says. “Wish I woulda been that responsible when I was his age. Wouldn’t be in here today if I’da been.”
Sis gets up and leaves the room. Says nothing. Doesn’t even look at anybody exactly. Just leaves. Mona directs her to the ladies room.
“I’m sorry she treats you this way hon” Ma says. “She thinks she’s too good to come see her Dad in prison.”
“It’s all right” Dad says looking sad again. He watches Sis leave the visiting room.
“I’m gonna have a good talk with her when we leave here hon” Ma says.
“Oh don’t be too hard on her. Tough for a proud girl her age to come up here.”
“Not too hard for Tom.”
“Tom’s different. Tom’s mature. Tom’s responsible. When Ellen gets Tom’s age I’m sure she’ll be mature and responsible too.”
Half hour goes by before Sis comes back. Almost time to leave. She walks over and sits down.
“You give your Dad a hug now” Ma says.
Sis looks at Dad. She stands up then and goes over and puts her arms out. Dad stands up grinning and takes her to him and hugs her tighter than I’ve ever seen him hug anybody. It’s funny because right then and there he starts crying. Just holding Sis so tight. Crying.
“I love you hon” Dad says to her. “I love you hon and I’m sorry for all the mistakes I’ve made and I’ll never make them again I promise you.”
Ma starts crying too.
Sis says nothing.
When Dad lets her go I look at her eyes. They’re the same as they were before. She’s staring right at him but she doesn’t seem to see him somehow.
Mona picks up the microphone that blasts through the speakers hung from the ceiling. She doesn’t need a speaker in a room this size but she obviously likes how loud it is and how it hurts your ears.
“Visiting hours are over. You’ve got fifteen seconds to say goodbye and then inmates have to start filing over to the door.”
“I miss you so much hon” Ma says and throws her arms around Dad.
He hugs Ma but over his shoulder he’s looking at Sis. She is standing up. She has her head down again.
Dad looks so sad so sad.
“I’d like to know just who the hell you think you are treatin’ your own father that way” M
a says on the way back to town.
The rain and the fog are real bad now so I have to concentrate on my driving. On the opposite side of the road cars appear quickly in the fog and then vanish. It’s almost unreal.
The wipers are slapping loud and everything smells damp the rubber of the car and the vinyl seat covers and the ashtray from Ma’s menthol cigarettes. Damp.
“You hear me young lady?” Ma says.
Sis is in the back seat again alone. Staring out the window. At the fog I guess.
“Come on Ma, she hugged him” I say.
“Yeah when I practically had to twist her arm to do it.” Ma shakes her head. “Her own flesh and blood.”
Sometimes I want to get really mad and let it out but I know it would just hurt Ma to remind her what Dad was doing to Ellen those years after he came out of prison the first time. I know for a fact he was doing it because I walked in on them one day little eleven-year-old Ellen there on the bed underneath my naked dad, staring off as he grunted and moved around inside her, staring off just the way she does now.
Staring off.
Ma knew about it all along of course but she wouldn’t do anything about it. Wouldn’t admit it probably not even to herself. In psychology, which I took last year at the junior college, that’s called denial. I even brought it up a couple times but she just said I had a filthy mind and don’t ever say nothing like that again.
Which is why I broke into that store that night and left Dad’s billfold behind. Because I knew they’d arrest him and then he couldn’t force Ellen into the bed anymore. Not that I blame Dad entirely. Prison makes you crazy no doubt about it and he was in there four years the first time. But even so I love Sis too much.
“Own flesh and blood” Ma says again lighting up one of her menthols and shaking her head.
I look into the rearview mirror at Sis’s eyes. “Wish I could make you smile” I say to her. “Wish I could make you smile.”
But she just stares out the window.
She hasn’t smiled for a long time of course.
