Prison Noir

by Joyce Carol Oates

  I lost all my faith in organized resistance after they took the cigarettes in ’98. I didn’t even smoke, but I’d stood with all the sour faces until they rang a bell and shouted warnings over the PA. I’d looked around and the mass that was originally gathered had thinned down to only a few of us thinking we could change something. I got stuck for a year in the hole, withering away, sleeping, and doing push-ups. The cigarettes were gone, and the joint was back to normal.

  I knew my body didn’t want to go through the same rigor of the blade, or look at the same ghost in the mirror I had the last time. Talking to Rudy had scared me from the noose, but I could sit around forever waiting on something to happen that never would. This was what this place was: a dream crusher, straps and a board.

  Everyone I grew up with in South Minneapolis knew someone in the collage of their lives who had slept in one of these cages. Back then I wanted to pretend it didn’t exist, but some of my friends, like Slick, had been waiting on their trip their whole lives. Its name was passed around offhandedly in conversations about where people had disappeared to, without an exact vision of what really happened there. When I got here, though, I saw it differently, mostly just shrinking space and time to make it as absurd or as monstrous as any of us wanted it to be.

  Fall

  I was on the phone with Mel when it happened. It was the twentieth anniversary of Sonny’s death. By the end, she had broken down to bone holding onto skin. I told Mel how wicked it was that Sonny died, while I had never figured out how to live in the first place. “It’s wrong how fate never lets us switch places.” I was trying to tell her how hopeless the whole place felt. “You become like a robot that resets its feelings every morning.” She said she would send me a Bible. I told her that people’s Bibles were being stolen just so they could set them on fire. They weren’t, but it sounded good.

  Then I smelled the smoke, husky and chemical. I looked behind the back of the cellblock and everything was moving toward me. A wall of guards stormed the door into the commotion of bodies. Guys were coming with armfuls of things retrieved from their cells, some had made satchels with blankets. I could see enough smoke in the back half of the room to know it wasn’t just a garbage can. I tried to go get my photo album, but was stopped by a guard.

  I tried to see it, but there was just too much smoke. Some guys watched without regard to alarms and voices on microphones. Sirens blared in the distance, getting louder the longer I stayed. Guys ran toward the doors, some pumping their fists with crooked smiles and something covering their faces. It moved down the tiers, eating at anything flammable, ducking into cells and consuming. Staff was having a hard time getting at the closest fireboxes—they must have reacted too late, because the combustion was too strong by the time firefighters got there.

  There were guards still walking the tiers to get people out of their cells. Slick had been one of the first out the door, with a blanket that could have had everything he owned wrapped up in it. I saw Mississippi leave his room in his work boots and a mug in his hand. I saw Rudy, barely holding his clothes on his body, glance back at the flames coming at his cell, then turn and walk toward the door. The smoke was too much for me to take now, so I followed the herd, who were yelling and kicking at each other’s heels toward the yard. One old man whacked another with his cane for tripping him in the rush.

  There was a mass convergence with guys from all different cellblocks. “Damn, the joint’s going crazy!” one guy hollered. “It’s about time!” The hallway was filled with coughs and gags. The yard was packed with bodies and there was a steady stream still coming behind me. The last stragglers to find the yard were mostly guards, holding up a few remaining soot-faced inmates. Slick found me; he was eating from a bag of chips he’d brought out with him. I looked around for everybody I knew. Mississippi had a spot against the wall, the flickers of light reflecting off his bald head. There were too many of us to sort everyone out. Hundreds of us standing or sitting like kids on a hill watching fireworks.

  From out of the dark behind me, an old guard I knew slid down on me. “You believe this? This is gonna change some stuff—yeah, it’s gonna change some shit.” Peering out on the yard at everyone, like heads bobbing in the ocean, I knew he didn’t mean it would get better.

  Black smoke and orange flames rose into the sky. Brick and sandstone that was once so secure, collapsed, and was welcomed with applause. Let them try to save it. The water from the trucks and the hydrants attempted to stop it, but it had already burned what it was supposed to. I felt the fire—not its heat, but its history.

  I was looking at that miserable old building that had taken so much more than it would ever give back. It burned for every soul this place ever held captive, every dream broken, every chopped tree. There was fire for every year it consumed, every emasculating word, every memo, every untreated illness, for every bloodred cent stolen and absorbed, every family member who passed away. It told us that for all the things we knew this place to be, even the oldest of institutions can burn, break down into ash. I was proud to watch its destruction. Sirens blared, and the ship sank. It was the moment I survived for, wore my scars for. To see the animals burn down the zoo. I swear I could see the faces of all those trapped souls escaping, William Williams dancing in the smoke. They would find somewhere for us tomorrow, but for this night, a blanket slung over my shoulders, watching flames reach up and nip the stars, I was fine. Let the motherfucker burn. There would be seeds for next year.

  * * *

  Afterward there were details. They said six people died of smoke inhalation, unable to get out of their cells. They said the fire started from a pile of clothes doused with gasoline, in the room of a seventy-year-old man who never left his cell. He was caught on surveillance cameras before the fire, spraying something up and down the tier from a plastic bottle. Another story came out about some dumb kid who died after being rousted from his cell; he had walked the tier, then doubled back to his room only to get back underneath his blanket for the smoke to engulf him.

  IMMIGRANT SONG

  BY MARCO VERDONI

  Marquette Branch Prison (Marquette, Michigan)

  Celso had never seen snow before. Up here it was everywhere. Beyond the fences and coils of concertina wire, there was no horizon. The sky and earth were just an endless white void.

  The cold seemed to make everybody angry. The COs were always yelling at him in a language he didn’t understand—and when they realized this, they’d just say everything louder and VEY-REE SLOW-LY, as if that made it easier for him.

  Comprende? They always knew that word. Even the nurses who stuck him with needles and drained his blood and told him to piss in this cup and clip his nails and strip naked and stand over here, turn your head, cough, and sign this form, okay? Just put your name here, comprende?

  His attorney spoke Spanish, but that didn’t help Celso understand any of the legal jargon. The deal he signed might as well have been in braille. In any language, he didn’t know how to read.

  It was spring when he came to the States; summer when they arrested him. The jail didn’t have any windows, so when the van came to take him to prison, he didn’t know what the brown slush was on the floor. He thought it was vomit.

  “It’s a blizzard,” the driver said, pulling out of the jail. “Total whiteout.”

  Celso knew that word—blizzard. Marichuy taught it to him.

  “It means snowstorm,” she said. “They have them all the time in North America.”

  La Ventisca. That’s what he started calling Marichuy’s mother after that, because whenever she showed up, Marichuy got cold. Sometimes she’d catch him in Marichuy’s bedroom and would have to chase him down the dirt road with a stick. But he could always outrun her. He couldn’t say the same for Marichuy’s brothers. The first time, they just roughed him up outside the church. The second, they chased him through the jungle, all the way back to the farm, and knocked some of his teeth out in the bean field.

  “I warned yo
u,” his father said. “Didn’t I warn you? Those schoolgirls are only trouble. If you want to get your dick wet, go see Cande and her whores at the cantina. Those boys will kill you if they catch you again.”

  At the time, he thought the old man was just being dramatic. But when Marichuy could no longer hide her pregnant belly, and Celso came home to find the severed heads of his guard dogs laid out on his doorstep like some sort of ritual sacrifice, his father put him on the first train to Nogales.

  * * *

  The cellblock stood four tiers high. Celso and the other new arrivals waited in line as a young CO read off their numbers and directed them to their cells. When Celso’s turn came, the officer told him to wait.

  Celso sighed—more awkward translating, more confusion.

  Down the block, a chubby CO was tearing down a barricade of yellow tape so an inmate porter could mop the area. The CO headed toward them, wadding up the tape into a ball.

  “Fadeaway!” he shouted, as he jumped back and shot at an open trash can next to Celso. The ball came undone in midair and spilled into a tangled web of tape all over the mouth of the can. “Damn,” he said.

  The CO led him to an empty cell, next to where the porter was mopping, and locked him inside.

  As he left, he said something that made the porter laugh. It was a high-pitched, girlish laugh. On a second look, Celso realized the porter was a woman. (An ugly woman, with greasy hair, pitted skin, and tiny breasts.) Celso looked at the floor she was mopping—a huge puddle of dried blood.

  The woman caught him staring. “Hi,” she said, waving her hand.

  She asked him something else, but he didn’t understand her. He just nodded and smiled, nervous, hoping it was the right response.

  It wasn’t.

  Confused, she raised her overly tweezed eyebrows at him.

  “Don’t talk to that maricon,” an unknown voice said in fluent Spanish.

  Another inmate with a mop and bucket walked over to the cell door, this one male, Hispanic. His neck tattoo said AZTECA in big, bold letters. “Mexican?” he asked.

  Celso smiled. “Yes.”

  “Guerrero?”

  “Chiapas.”

  “What’s up, brother?” the man said, extending his arm through the bars to shake Celso’s hand. “I’m Flores. Listen, man, you got to watch who you talk to around here. People see you hanging with these mariquitas and they start to wonder.”

  Celso was puzzled. He looked back at the female porter. She seemed suddenly muscular. Her chin seemed stubbly. It was all so obvious now.

  Flores could read his face.

  “Aw, fuck no, vato!” he said, laughing. “What? You thought you were going to get some chocha in here, didn’t you? Ha!”

  Embarrassed, Celso tried to change the subject. “What happened there?”

  Flores glanced over at the blood. “Somebody jumped, I guess. So how long have you been in Michigan?”

  “Not long,” he said, staring at the streaks the mop left behind. “Where are we, exactly?”

  “This here is Jackson.” He held up his right hand and pointed to the base of his palm. “Right here.” People from here were always doing that hand-as-state-map thing.

  “So how much time you got?” Flores asked.

  Celso shrugged. “They said I can go home when I’m twenty-two.”

  “How old are you now?”

  “Eighteen.”

  Flores lowered his voice. “So what did you do?”

  “Oh,” Celso said, “I didn’t do anything, really. I was just there.”

  “So what happened then?”

  “A couple of people got killed.”

  Flores peered at him suspiciously. “Man . . . what?”

  Down the block, the CO yelled at Flores to get back to work. He stepped away from the bars.

  “Listen, vato,” he said, grabbing his mop bucket. “When they break the doors for yard, come find me. And bring your paperwork with you.”

  “Okay,” Celso replied, unsure of what he was agreeing to, but too afraid to refuse his only source of conversation in months. “Hey, wait!” he said, before the other man left.

  Flores stopped.

  “How do you know the guy wasn’t pushed?”

  Flores shook his head. “Not likely. I mean, don’t get me wrong, you can get killed in this bitch. But this is quarantine, man. This is where it starts. When that door closes, and you start thinking about all the time you got left to do . . . For some guys, it’s just easier, you know?”

  * * *

  The sun in the desert was so much hotter than back home. Its blinding rays pierced right through the chaparral, making it a constant struggle to stay in the shade, to sleep.

  Celso was exhausted. His mouth was parched and dry. But the thought of waking his cousin Eleonel for another drink of water was too embarrassing. He had already made an ass of himself the night before.

  They had set out from Nogales at dusk in groups of twenty-five. They walked all night, stopping for fifteen-minute breaks every four hours. By the second break, Celso had drunk all of his water. (Meanwhile, his cousin, having made the trip before, had barely broken a sweat.) When they finally stopped before sunrise to make camp, Celso almost collapsed.

  “Here,” Eleonel said, handing him an extra bottle from his backpack. “But go easy on this one.”

  Celso didn’t dare mention how hungry he was either. But he didn’t have to: as if on cue, the coyote pulled out a bulb of garlic, broke it, and passed the cloves among the migrants. Everyone took a clove.

  A strange meal, but Celso was too famished to complain. He frantically peeled off the skin and started chewing. He’d never eaten one whole before, and this was probably why: it had an acrid taste that burned all the way to the top of his skull and made his eyes water. It didn’t so much sate his appetite as it castigated him for having one at all.

  Eleonel hadn’t eaten his yet. Instead, he stood up and pulled off his shirt. He took the clove in his palm, mashed it into a paste, and proceeded to rub it all over his body.

  Celso swallowed. All around him, everyone was rubbing themselves with garlic.

  “Did you drop yours?” Eleonel asked.

  Celso pretended not to hear him.

  His cousin started laughing. “Well,” he said, as he lied down under a tree to sleep, “at least the snakes won’t try to kiss you.”

  It seemed everyone was sleeping soundly but Celso, even the nosy little kid from Jalisco. Miraculous, really, because the kid didn’t seem like he’d ever slow down the night before. When everyone else was taking their water breaks, the boy was kicking dirt at tarantulas and throwing rocks at lizards. He ran circles around everybody.

  Eleonel thought it was hilarious. Celso couldn’t have thought it more annoying. The kid kept pestering him with stupid questions: Where are you from? Where are you headed? Have you had pizza and french fries before? I have. And hamburgers. Do you know who Harry Potter is? My mom says they have roller coasters in every city in the States. Do you know what a roller coaster is?

  Still, it was the kid who spotted the drone. At night, the buzz of countless rattlesnakes drowned out most every other sound. Everybody was focused on the horizon, trying to spot the patrol trucks before they could spot them. But the kid kept pointing to the sky, saying he heard something. When the coyote figured it out, he yelled for everyone to take a sharp left and start running. They managed to evade the drone by running parallel to it. Later, they watched the desert light up a few miles east as one of the other groups was found and captured.

  The kid hadn’t moved all day. He was still dead asleep.

  When the sun finally set, the coyote stood up and announced that it was time.

  “Everyone get your stuff,” he said. “One more night until Phoenix.”

  When Eleonel got up to take a piss, Celso stole a deep swig of his water. The garlic had been fermenting on his gums.

  Suddenly, a woman started screaming. Everyone stopped.

  �
�No, God!” she cried. “Please, someone help! My boy! It’s my son!”

  The woman sat on the ground cradling the kid in her arms, desperately shaking him.

  “Let me see,” the coyote said, checking the boy’s limbs for marks. He found two huge red bumps on his neck. “He must’ve been sleeping on a snake pit.” He lifted the kid’s eyelids, revealing only white.

  The mother just kept shaking her son. But it was no use; his body was already stiff.

  “There’s nothing we can do,” the coyote told her. “I’m sorry, but he’s gone.”

  Celso was flabbergasted. Why couldn’t the damn kid have been more careful? The woman should’ve been keeping a better eye on her little bastard.

  The coyote tried to pull her away from the boy’s body, but she wouldn’t let him. She just screamed louder.

  “We can’t stay,” he said. “And you can’t take him with you. It’s too far.” He paused for a solemn moment, then turned back to the crowd. “Let’s go.”

  A few followed him. Still, others lingered, including Celso.

  “Come on,” Eleonel urged, pulling his cousin’s arm. “We have to go. We can’t help her.”

  The woman kept weeping.

  “Maybe La Migra will find her,” Eleonel said. “You want to stay and find out?”