Prison Noir

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The man from Mississippi didn’t talk much. He communicated mostly in nods and spooky, bloodshot stares from a face without wasted smiles. He was dark—get-lost-in-the-shadows dark—and enormous, like he could carry trucks on his back, with humongous hands that could choke a bear. He walked in patient, deliberate strides with a cup of coffee wherever he went. Even if he was chopping trees, or mowing, there was a Styrofoam cup by him collecting dust or small chips of wood. I knew, though, that his looks were probably mostly just wrinkled expressions of pain. Any real malice he had must’ve been locked in a tight chamber behind those stares.

  “I hope the world does end,” Mississippi muttered.

  Serial Killer chimed in: “I’ll tell you one thing: if you see me anywhere and I have another heart attack, or I’m slumped over somewhere—don’t you dare revive me. Don’t get help, just leave me.” It wasn’t the first time he’d told us this, and nobody in the room ever seemed to have a problem with his request.

  I laughed a little. A simple chuckle came from Mississippi’s mouth, then the cup of coffee went right back to his lips.

  Serial Killer turned in my direction and, without prompt, told me: “I would have done what you did, if I wasn’t such a pussy.”

  I gave him a plain nod and we were good.

  I finished planting a bed of petunias in a plot right next to the guard shack. This was my meditation time, when I could be alone in my mind under the last two trees in the joint. I thought about my friend Sonny, before the leukemia. She was always in the garden. We’d had to chop down all the other trees a few years earlier to make space for the new segregation unit. It left an open field for the sun to burn the grass to cinders.

  After lunch, we returned to work in the same procession of guys, coming back out to the dark factories on the sunny day. Some walked silent, personalities covered by the clouds lingering above. A boot flew off onto the asphalt, and two men, one spraying beads of sweat and blood from his long hair, fell into the freshly watered bed, uprooting and smashing a whole section. I just hoped the mace wouldn’t taint the soil. I spent most of the afternoon with a hand shovel trying to bring the plants back to life.

  * * *

  I attended a group for guys trying to recover from traumatic events. The first time I went, a guard I’ve known for years raised an eyebrow when he saw the destination on my pass. There was another guard standing next to him in the rotunda with a German shepherd at his side, tail down, barking at anything. I think it was supposed to scare guys. I definitely wasn’t scared, I mostly just felt sorry for it.

  I think all the guys in the group had “attempts” too, but most didn’t talk about them. Others wouldn’t stop talking about them.

  “Basically, this is hell,” a mousy old heroin addict who only showed up every few months told the group as I came in. There were seven other guys and the therapist sitting down when I got there.

  “If it ain’t, it’s certainly one of its dimensions.” There were always new guys. They would come once, dominate the conversation, and never return. Only the four of us came every month. There was Landon, who had spent twenty-two of his last twenty-six months in segregation before coming to the group. His dad played linebacker for the Vikings in the 1980s. It overshadowed his date-rape tendencies, and the fact that he was a blaster who would jack-off on the women staff. There was also Greg, a strangely overcomfortable man with a long, greasy ponytail and a mustache covering his harelip. He talked about himself as a Christlike figure, whose death was supposed to save the lives of the rest of us. His failure meant we were all doomed. He didn’t ever discuss how he had doomed the two sons he molested.

  I usually sat next to Rudy, a bald little white kid in oversized, underironed T-shirts, tinted beige. He had slash marks all over both arms, but not the same kind as mine. They teased him because his voice slurred, his hands trembled, and his teeth chattered. It might’ve been because of the dosage of lithium he took, or because before he got here, he was locked up at a place where they strapped him down and gave him shock treatments. He lived in the same block as I did but we didn’t speak, though in group he was my ally. He had hung a sheet several times, but never followed through. I asked him why, and he told me: “I’m afraid of the noose, of suffocating.” (They abolished the death penalty in Minnesota in 1911 because they fucked up while hanging a man named William Williams. The rope was too long and it took fourteen minutes to strangle him to death.)

  Most of the guys in the group seemed way more gone than I was. Most of them were on varying dosages of lithium, I was not. My therapist tried several times to get me to take something, but I saw the other zombies. Being around them didn’t stop me from wanting to die—instead, it just made me feel more alienated. But even if I didn’t particularly like all of them, I related to them more than I wanted to. I couldn’t be shocked by the extents they might go to—after all, I had the scars to show I could go to some wicked places myself. In their faces I saw an East Indian man I’d met in the county jail who tried to off himself by bashing his head against a steel sink. He could only do it for so long before the noise gave him away, or his neck got too tired and injured to keep going. I mostly remember the rage and fear in his purple and turquoise eyes as he jerked and flung in his cuffs.

  Coming into the room it was hard to gauge individual moods. We were swept into personal tirades of whoever’s mania was strongest that day. No matter what kind of topic the therapist presented.

  “Lately I’ve been crying a lot. Is that strange? I mean, sometimes I’ll be watching TV and a commercial will come on and I’ll start crying, and I don’t know why,” a new guy told us.

  An alarm went off just as we were released from the meeting, so we got stuck against the wall while guards ran full speed down the hall, handcuffs jangling, rubber-soled boots thudding, before they tackled the two guys in the main rotunda. The cloud of pepper spray misted, numbing my lips. Our eyes burned and our noses ran.

  Summer

  It got hot, really hot, where the heavy blue sky pressed down on me. Serial Killer, Mississippi, and I had been out in the nuclear sun replacing mulch in every last one of the mulch beds. The heat put extra rot to discarded milk and eggs in the dumpsters, and the crows stalked leftovers in the bins waiting to be picked up by the pig farmers. It was the third morning in a row I’d found a pigeon in the grass with its head missing and its belly ripped open. They often stayed cooped up, hiding from that hawk. It was so hot, the asphalt melted the soles of our boots. Serial Killer had a stream of sweat dripping down his seventy-year-old nose that looked like a melting icicle at the tip.

  Flowers wilted while weeds kept growing. There wasn’t any air-conditioning in the cellblocks, so the whole prison was miserable; everyone slept in sweat-soaked sheets. Even the shadows were deadly, swallowed up by the heat and made into mirages. Most of the conversations I had were with people coming out of those shadows. They said something, then fell back into them. Guys would sit on the floor in their cells and make statements like: “The world really is gonna end.” It would have been fine with me, but I knew we wouldn’t be that lucky.

  The hotter it would get, the greater the delirium. Guys walked the tiers and their lips moved, but they weren’t speaking to anyone we could see. They had stories, names of individual souls that visited them on their tiers and in their dreams. People swore the spirit of a kid who killed himself ten years before was living in one of the showers. I used to believe them, but now I don’t believe anything. The dreams I have are usually either Mississippi choking me with his enormous hands, or Serial Killer shoveling dirt over my head.

  End-of-the-world hysteria was going full tilt. It wasn’t just the group—the whole joint had gone apocalypse crazy. After setting off the metal detector and being asked to back through, a guy just stared the guard down—“It’s the end of the world, what?” It was everywhere, it was included in greetings and leave-takings. It became comical, except to the people who were coming to rely on the cataclysmic ending to
their suffering, like most of the guys in the group. I was kind of hoping for it too—but I knew it would end up just another disappointment.

  There were more fires. Guys in the block across the hall set a bundle of towels and T-shirts aflame in their cells. On their way out in cuffs, one of them said: “Fuck it. It’s the end of the world.”

  When it wasn’t too hot, I still went to the yard to play basketball with Slick, until a chubby Mexican guy crossed the court without a shirt on and sat down to take a shit in the old bathroom shed right next to it. Me and Slick walked the track, with the big smokestack in the background that changed positions like an illusion. We passed by the push-up squads, and watched a pair of eagles gliding over the river. An itty-bitty woman walked the gangplanks in sunglasses carrying an assault rifle that looked heavier than her. We talked about all that had changed. It meant something different to him, he was going home. The old horseshoe tournaments, the time Old Green Eyes with the cane beat up the young nappy-headed kid on the bleachers—Slick remembered things I did not. I resolved it was because he made them up.

  Rudy walked the track by himself, going the opposite way. I gave him a nod as he passed; he nodded too and put his head back down.

  “What’s up with dude’s arms?” Slick asked me.

  “He’s fine,” I told him.

  Then he asked me again about my wrists. “What am I supposed to tell our people in the world, Clyde?”

  “We still have people in the world? I never expected this would be my life and I don’t consider this living.”

  He told me, “Shit, I knew I was coming. Since the fifth grade people been telling me I was coming here. My dad done broke out some of them windows. I used to come here in the ’80s when they had banquets right here in the yard, family and all that.”

  Those days were definitely gone. I told him he could break as many windows as he wanted when he got out.

  At the end of the yard period, when the bats started coming out of the old powerhouse chimney, Slick pointed toward the basketball courts: “Ain’t that your boy?” A line of guards were running across the yard at somebody butt-ass naked who was yelling something. It was Landon, jogging in circles. It took them ten minutes to tire him out enough to catch him. “What happened to that dude?” Slick asked me.

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. This ain’t no way to live.”

  That night they hit us with another memo, telling us that due to the costs incurred by all of the fires, there would be no holiday meal for the Fourth of July this year. With it came division—division and blame thrown at each other. Our side hated the youngsters for setting the fires; the youngsters hated us for being passive. Even the weirdos and the punks started throwing garbage around and slamming phones. The old walls were sweating under the heat. Guys were starting fights with each other just to go to the AC in segregation. Until the AC broke and they were stuck in the death chambers. People sat on their steel toilets and flushed them over and over to stay cool. Guys were trying to corral others to do something, but nobody had a clear “what.”

  My friend Melanie started coming around more. She used to visit once a year, now it was every couple of months. She said it wasn’t because of the marks on my arms, but I sensed it was. We shared Sonny, who had died a couple years before I got locked up. Sonny and Melanie were the kind of people who made the world better; I was not. I thought that if they could take Sonny away, and leave me, then there was something irreparable about the world. Melanie was the only person I still spoke to outside the walls. My mom told me she was tired of explaining to people that her son was in prison. Now she tells people she doesn’t have a son. She’s still my emergency contact, but she never even reached out to me after my incident.

  The problem with Mel was I wanted to look at her shape, but she wanted to bring me to Jesus. A guy came in the visiting room one time with a book. “What’s that he has in his hand?” she asked.

  “A Bible.”

  “People can bring Bibles in here?”

  “You can’t,” I told her.

  She asked me why not. I told her that if she brought a Bible, I would walk out on her. There was enough Jesus in here already. Every book cart was stacked with Bibles and tracts. I thought we were good until I brought up all of the end-of-the-world stuff and she quoted a verse from Revelation. She squinted at me, crinkling the little scar on her right brow from when her dad hit her with his belt buckle when she was young. I guess she had scars all over her body that she just didn’t talk about.

  * * *

  Those of us on higher tiers woke up dizzy and light-headed. We came back from work one day and a water main had broken, so we were stuck without plumbing in the middle of Minnesota’s hottest summer. Guys fought over the last of the ice in the machine, most of it ended up on the floor. People fought until tears came to their eyes. Most didn’t know why they fought. It didn’t matter to the administration, they locked us down anyway. It only took a couple of hours before the whole place smelled like shit and piss.

  In the cell I usually felt safe, insulated, but in the heat I lost breath. My fan wheezed heavy air at me, its motor had run for days in a row and simply swirled heat. With no water I was thirsty, and dizzy from the smell of baking urine. I lay on the floor, hoping it would be cooler, but it had absorbed too much of the heat. At first guys started to yell in the most base kind of logic, every woman was a whore or a cunt, every man was a bitch or a fag. It only lasted a few minutes until they were exhausted and overheated. Twenty minutes into the lockdown everything was still and silent. Even the old man’s voice, riled up and quoting scripture, faded to a murmur. I panicked. I swore I had heatstroke. I wanted to holler something. I wanted to yell to send a wheelchair to take me to the air-conditioned infirmary, but several people had already beaten me to the idea; when I opened my mouth no sound came out.

  I woke up on the floor bone-dry with a puddle of drool and sweat around me, two guards pounding at my bars. “Clyde! Clyde—you all right?”

  I wasn’t sure.

  A fat one, sweating heavily and holding a bottle of water, said to me: “What’s the matter, you take too many pills, Clyde? You’re not trying to kill yourself again, are you, Clyde?”

  Wounded, I just shook my head, and for some reason, probably shame, I couldn’t tell them. They left, and once I realized where I was, I was stuck to panic again. I spent the night shivering, and throwing up a radioactive green substance I didn’t know was in my body. Without plumbing, guys threw bags of piss and milk cartons of shit out of their cells onto the flag. One guy set a bag of shit and shredded paper on fire and threw it out onto the tiers. Then, sometime in the early morning, toilets started flushing. By midafternoon they let us out. It was a zoo. I could see then how quickly a block could transform, people’s natures could change.

  The heat broke for a couple days, making a lot of guys believe it was over. The sickness had run its course and moved on, they said. But those of us who had been here long enough knew the sickness was always there, dormant, picking its times to infect us.

  Soon it got hot again.

  We went back to work, spraying Japanese beetles and trimming weeds until I got sand in my teeth. I came back to the shop for water one afternoon and caught an angle of something moving in an unlit cubby. I was aware right away of the gas, strong but mildly sweet. I took a glance and saw Serial Killer bent at his knees, with one of the lawn mowers tilted to its side, the gas cap off, draining into a small bottle he held in his hand. He didn’t notice me, so I played it off and left. But he must’ve heard my footsteps because he straightened up and came back out with the mower. “I accidentally filled it with fifty-fifty. God, what a stupid old man.” I didn’t need an explanation. He did weird things every day. Maybe he was huffing it—guys did a lot of crazy shit to get high.

  Me and Mississippi were resting in a shadow after watering flowers. He was telling me that back home they had pecan trees which hung low enough for them to reach up and pick.<
br />
  “You ate them right off the tree? Damn, you is country.”

  “Say, what’s the old man doing?” He pointed his huge finger at a group of shrubs the sparrows used for nests and the wasps made hives in. Serial Killer was underneath one, slumped over on his side, motionless.

  “I don’t know. You going over there to check on him?” I asked.

  “Hey, man said leave him if we found him like that. I ain’t fonna have him all mad at me for saving him. Let the police find him.”

  The old man had made the point clear many times. We watched the stooped old body lay there for a while, then finally wheeled our hose carts back to the shop again and left them under the shadows of the powerhouse. I was envious that time might release him without a noose or lots of blood. Thirty-five years just to go away in a pine box to the cemetery out back.

  When we got back inside the shop, we sat down without a mention of it between us. We just anticipated someone would find him and commotion would begin. Instead, though, the door opened and there stood a ghost. A ghost of that ornery old man with a set of hand trimmers and mulch stuck to his clothes, babbling away about something or other.

  “We thought you finally kicked it.”

  “Unfortunately not,” he answered, wiping the sweat from his nose.

  “You fall asleep?” Mississippi asked.

  “Maybe I did.”

  * * *

  Landon wasn’t at the next group. Apparently he was strapped to the board back in segregation for blasting off on nurses when they came to bring him his dope. A couple of the guys were so proud to tell us their doomsday preparations. They had stockpiled bottled water and noodles. Rudy was in the corner with a hand holding up his face, shaking—part tremor, part disgust at the discussion. If the rest of the joint had end-of-the-world hysteria, this group was the nerve center for it.

  We were all injured, the whole joint shared it. It seemed like every day we heard the damn dog barking and boots running into the unit for something. Every day guys were hauled out for something petty. People who hadn’t been in trouble for years were getting jammed up. The whole water-main thing really broke me. Staff claimed they were just regaining control, while most of us never believed we had any control in the first place. I just wanted it to be over. Throughout most of our lives, we had gotten used to being told we were like animals in a zoo or a jungle. We got used to being the kind of animals that every day thought about devouring these people, that would devour each other if we starved enough, or even ourselves if it got bad enough. It felt like that’s where we were headed. I knew it would only get worse, because we were being told everything was our fault. Before too long they would have us eating out of troughs.