Prison Noir

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The investigator pushed a button and the recorder began its slow spin, hissing faintly. He cleared his throat and covered the microphone with his hand. “I’m sure you were sleeping again, Cotton, but we’ve gotta put it on tape. For the record, you know? Funny thing, though—so far nobody has made a statement. I know at least ten inmates witnessed this homicide, but nobody wants to talk.” The investigator shook his head slowly, as though deeply hurt by rejection. “You reckon I’m losing my touch, Cotton?”

  Cotton stared at the sleek computer on the shelf behind the investigator. Desktop computers were not even available when Cotton was last on the streets. All Cotton knew about them was what he saw in magazines. Cotton had never even used a microwave.

  The investigator cleared his throat again, removed his hand, and then dutifully spoke into the microphone, loudly pronouncing Cotton’s full name, prison number, and the date, along with an assigned case number.

  Cotton sighed. He was suddenly weary, tired of memories littered with the compost of life’s worst moments, tired of having to explain everything. Why was it, anyway, that some people thought they should know everything? Figuring out life’s most difficult questions was hard enough, but when it came to finding the answers—well, even a stupid man knows that many things are simply unknowable. And who’s to say that’s not the way it should be? Life is bigger than the questions we frame, and a man could go crazy trying to understand everything. Cotton had seen it happen.

  He once believed his life could still be a triumph of hope over experience, but now he only knew a certain weary dullness—like a grinding clock inexorably running down, like a looming pressure pushing him off life’s narrowest margins. He glanced up at the spear again, Ninety-Nine’s dried blood still visible on the linen strips tying the knife to the broom handle. That blood was all that remained of a once-living soul. At this moment, Cotton experienced the same sense of his life hanging in the balance, and again he felt that same coppery taste in his mouth.

  “Okay, Cotton, do you have a statement to make at this time, or were you sleeping again?”

  “No,” Cotton replied. “No, I wasn’t sleeping. I saw the whole thing. It was horrible.”

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  Eric Boyd is a short-story writer living in Pittsburgh. He is an advising editor for theNewerYork; his own writing has been featured in several publications. Boyd is a winner of the 2012 PEN Prison Writing Contest, a program for which he is now a mentor. In 2008, he briefly studied at the Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa; currently he commutes, via bus, to New York every week to study at the Writer’s Foundry MFA in Brooklyn.

  Kenneth R. Brydon’s stories have been included in the anthologies of the San Quentin creative writing program, and can be found at brothersinpen.wordpress.com. He wishes to thank writing instructor Zoe Mullery and the San Quentin Prison University Project for guidance and mentoring. Brydon, incarcerated for thirty-five years, feels that his writing untangles his thoughts, and he is still counting on his faith in Christ.

  Zeke Caligiuri is a writer/poet from south Minneapolis. He has been incarcerated since 1999 and is the recipient of several awards through the annual PEN Prison Writing Contest. He has recently completed a full-length memoir, and he currently resides at the Minnesota Correctional Facility at Lino Lakes.

  B.M. Dolarman writes under a pseudonym. He has been behind bars for fifteen of his thirty-five years and is currently serving a federal prison sentence. He is a voracious reader, a writer of fiction, and a creator of pencil-drawn artwork.

  Stephen Geez is the pseudonym of a TV and music producer on prisonly hiatus. He exploits this temporary respite to write and publish novels, essay collections, websites, and writers’ how-tos while editing for other authors, teaching prison writing classes, and advocating for the wrongly convicted. A longtime fan of Joyce Carol Oates, he can be contacted at info@StephenGeez.com.

  Scott Gutches was born in 1970 and grew up in and around Paterson, New Jersey. He won first place for fiction in the 2012 PEN Prison Writing Contest and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Gutches currently resides at Fremont Correctional Facility in Cañon City, Colorado, where he continues writing short fiction.

  Linda Michelle Marquardt is a forty-two-year-old mother of three sons. Each day she tries to live by her father’s teachings and be thoughtful, kind, and considerate toward others regardless of her current incarceration at Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Marquardt is a college graduate with a bachelor’s degree in English from Pennsylvania State University. She appreciates the unconditional support of her family and friends.

  Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, and the National Book Award. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national best sellers We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, and The Falls. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and is the editor of New Jersey Noir.

  Bryan K. Palmer grew up in the Detroit area and is currently incarcerated in Jackson, Michigan. He has been published by the University of Michigan’s Prison Creative Arts Project, College Guild, and in various publications. His work includes historical fiction, short stories of the noir variety, and poetry. He hopes to pursue writing as a career when he is released in December 2015.

  Timothy Pauley has been in prison since 1980 and is currently at the Washington State Reformatory. Over the years he has seen some very bizarre things in the alternate reality that is prison. His stories bring the reader into that world and show another side to this subculture.

  Ali F. Sareini was born in Kharbit Selim (Valley of Peace), Lebanon. He left the Lebanese Civil War in 1985, was a political prisoner in Berlin, Germany, joined the US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division in 1986, and holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Campbell University and Spring Arbor University. He has just completed his twenty-fifth year of incarceration for second-degree murder.

  Sin Soracco does not deal well with idiots so she lives far away on the banks of a Northern California river and writes stories. She is the author of the novels Low Bite, Edge City, and Come to Me.

  Christopher M. Stephen was raised just outside of Chicago (Westside!). At the age of twenty-two he left home with no specific destination and no plan except to have a good time. He’s been in and out of prison ever since. (Let that be a lesson to you, kids.) He is currently serving time for a bank robbery conviction in the Federal Correctional Institution in Pekin, Illinois, and is due for release in 2014.

  William Van Poyck was sentenced to death for his part in the 1987 botched attempt to free his best friend from a prison transport van, during which a guard was killed by Van Poyck’s accomplice. A certified paralegal for over thirty years, Van Poyck is the author of an autobiography, A Checkered Past, and two novels, Quietus and The Third Pillar of Wisdom. The State of Florida executed him on June 12, 2013, but his messages of love, hope, and redemption live on in his writings.

  Marco Verdoni received a Short Story Award for New Writers honorable mention from Glimmer Train. In 2003, as a fifteen-year-old, he was tried as an adult for assault with intent to murder and sentenced to ten years in the Michigan Department of Corrections. He was released on parole in June 2013 and currently lives and writes at home in Saginaw, Michigan.

  Andre White is originally from Detroit and is currently incarcerated at Central Michigan Correctional Facility. He feels that telling tales and tall tales are as distinguishable as “tell” and “tail”; he’s not known for the former, though he prefers to describe and detail the latter.

  BONUS MATERIALS

  Bonus Short Story: "Run Kiss Daddy", by Joyce Carol Oates

  from New Jersey Noir, edited by Joyce Carol Oates

  Sneak Peek: USA NOIR, edited by Johnny Temple

  RUN KISS DADDY

  BY JOYCE CAROL OATES
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br />   Kittatinny Mountains

  "Tell Daddy hello! Run kiss Daddy.”

  He’d been gone from the lake less than an hour but in this new family each parting and each return signaled a sort of antic improvised celebration—he didn’t want to think it was the obverse of what must have happened before he’d arrived in their lives—the Daddy departing, and the Daddy not returning.

  “Sweetie, h’lo! C’mere.”

  He dropped to one knee as the boy ran at him to be hugged. A rough wet kiss on Kevin’s forehead.

  The little girl hesitated. Only when the mother pushed more firmly at her small shoulders did she spring forward and run—wild-blue-eyed suddenly, with a high-pitched squeal like a mouse being squeezed—into his arms. He laughed—he was startled by the heat of the little body—flattered and deeply moved, kissing the excited child on the delicate soft skin at her temple where—he’d only just noticed recently—a pale blue vein pulsed.

  “What do you say to Daddy when Daddy comes back?”

  The mother clapped her hands to make a game of it. This new family was so new to her too, weekends at Paraquarry Lake were best borne as a game, as play.

  “Say Hi Daddy!—Kiss-kiss Daddy!”

  Obediently the children cried what sounded like Hi Daddy! Kiss-kiss Daddy!

  Little fish-mouths pursed for kisses against Daddy’s cheek.

  Reno had only driven into the village of Paraquarry Falls to bring back semi-emergency supplies: toilet paper, flashlight batteries, mosquito repellant, mouse traps, a gallon container of milk, a shiny new garden shovel to replace the badly rusted shovel that had come with the camp. Also, small sweet-fruit yogurts for the children though both he and the mother weren’t happy about them developing a taste for sugary foods—but there wasn’t much of a selection at the convenience store.

  In this new-Daddy phase in which unexpected treats are the very coinage of love.

  * * *

  “Who wants to help Daddy dig?”

  Both children cried Me!—thrilled at the very prospect of working with Daddy on the exciting new terrace overlooking the lake.

  And so they helped Daddy excavate the old, crumbled-brick terrace a previous owner had left amid a tangle of weeds, pebbles, and broken glass, or tried to help Daddy—for a while. Clearly such work was too arduous for a seven-year-old, still more for a four-year-old, with play shovels and rakes; and the mild June air too humid for much exertion. And there were mosquitoes and gnats. Despite the repellant. For these were the Kittatinny Mountains east of the Delaware Water Gap in early June—that season of teeming buzzing fecundity—just to inhale the air is to inhale the smells of burgeoning life.

  “Oh! Dad-dy!” Devra recoiled from something she’d unearthed in the soil, lost her balance, and fell back onto her bottom with a little cry. Reno saw it was just a beetle—iridescent, wriggling—and told her not to be afraid: “They just live in the ground, sweetie. They have special beetle work to do in the ground.”

  Kevin said, “Like worms! They have ‘work’ in the ground.”

  This simple science—earth science—the little boy had gotten from Reno. Very gratifying to hear your words repeated with child-pride.

  From the mother Reno knew that their now-departed father had often behaved “unpredictably” with the children and so Reno made it a point to be soft-spoken in their presence, good-natured and unexcitable, predictable.

  What pleasure in being predictable!

  Still, Devra was frightened. She’d dropped her play shovel in the dirt. Reno saw that the little girl had enough of helping Daddy with the terrace for the time being. “Sweetie, go see what Mommy’s doing. You don’t need to dig anymore right now.”

  Kevin remained with Daddy. Kevin snorted in derision, his baby sister was so scaredy.

  * * *

  Reno was a father, again. Fatherhood, returned to him. A gift he hadn’t quite deserved the first time—maybe—but this time, he would strive to deserve it.

  This time, he was forty-seven years old. He—who’d had a very hard time perceiving himself other than young, a kid.

  And this new marriage!—this beautiful new family small and vulnerable as a mouse cupped trembling in the hand—he was determined to protect with his life. Not ever not ever let this family slip from his grasp as he’d let slip from his grasp his previous family—two young children rapidly retreating now in Reno’s very memory like a scene glimpsed in the rearview mirror of a speeding vehicle.

  “Come to Paraquarry Lake! You will all love Paraquarry Lake.”

  The name itself seemed to him beautiful, seductive—like the Delaware River at the Water Gap where the river was wide, glittering and winking like shaken foil. As a boy he’d hiked the Appalachian Trail in this area of northeastern Pennsylvania and northwestern New Jersey—across the river on the high pedestrian walkway, north to Dunfield Creek and Sunfish Pond and so to Paraquarry Lake which was the most singular of the Kittitanny Ridge lakes, edged with rocks like a crude lacework and densely wooded with ash, elm, birch, and maples that flamed red in autumn.

  So he courted them with tales of his boyhood hikes, canoeing on the river and on Paraquarry Lake, camping along the Kittatinny Ridge where once, thousands of years ago, a glacier lay like a massive claw over the land.

  He told them of the Lenni Lenape Indians who’d inhabited this part of the country for thousands of years!—far longer than their own kind.

  As a boy he’d never found arrowheads at Paraquarry Lake or elsewhere, yet he recalled that others had, and so spoke excitedly to the boy Kevin as if to enlist him in a search; he did not quite suggest they might discover Indian bones that sometimes came to the surface at Paraquarry Lake, amid shattered red shale and ordinary rock and dirt.

  In this way and in others he courted the new wife Marlena, who was a decade younger than he; and the new son, Kevin; and the new daughter who’d won his heart the first glimpse he’d had of her—tiny Devra with white-blond hair fine as the silk of milkweed.

  Another man’s lost family. Or maybe cast off—as Marlena had said in her bright brave voice determined not to appear hurt, humiliated.

  His own family—Reno had hardly cast off. Whatever his ex-wife would claim. If anything, Reno had been the one to be cast off by her.

  Yet careful to tell Marlena, early in their relationship: “It was my fault, I think. I was too young. When we got married—just out of college—we were both too young. It’s said that if you ‘cohabit’ before getting married it doesn’t actually make any difference in the long run—whether you stay married, or get divorced—but our problem was that we hadn’t a clue what ‘cohabitation’ meant—means. We were always two separate people and then my career took off …”

  Took off wasn’t Reno’s usual habit of speech. Nor was it Reno’s habit to talk so much, and so eagerly. But when he’d met a woman he believed he might come to seriously care for—at last—he’d felt obliged to explain himself to her: there had to be some failure in his personality, some flaw, otherwise why was he alone, unmarried; why had he become a father whose children had grown up largely without him, and without seeming to need him?

  At the time of the divorce, Reno had granted his wife too many concessions. In his guilty wish to be generous to her though the breakup had been as much his wife’s decision as his own. He’d signed away much of their jointly owned property, and agreed to severely curtailed visitation rights with the children. He hadn’t yet grasped this simple fact of human relations—the more readily you give, the more readily it will be taken from you as what you owe.

  His wife had appealed to him to be allowed to move to Oregon where she had relatives, with the children; Reno hadn’t wanted to contest her.

  Within a few years, she’d relocated again—with a new husband, to Sacramento.

  In these circuitous moves, somehow Reno was cast off. One too many corners had been turned, the father had been left behind except for child-support payments.

  Trying not to feel like a foo
l. Trying to remain a gentleman long after he’d come to wonder why.

  * * *

  “Paraquarry Lake! You will all love Paraquarry Lake.”

  * * *

  The new wife was sure, yes, she would love Paraquarry Lake. Laughing at Reno’s boyish enthusiasm, squeezing his arm.

  Kevin and Devra were thrilled. Their new father—new Daddy—so much nicer than the old, other Daddy—eagerly spreading out photographs on a tabletop like playing cards.

  “Of course,” the new Daddy said, a sudden crease between his eyes, “this cabin in the photos isn’t the one we’ll be staying in. This is the one—” Reno paused, stricken. It felt as if a thorn had lodged in his throat.

  This is the one I have lost was not an appropriate statement to make to the new children and to the new wife listening so raptly to him, the new wife’s fingers lightly resting on his arm.

  These photographs had been selected. Reno’s former wife and former children—of course, former wasn’t the appropriate word!—were not shown to the new family.

  Eleven years invested in the former marriage! It made him sick—just faintly, mildly sick—to think of so much energy and emotion, lost.

  Though there’d been strain between Reno and his ex-wife—exacerbated when they were in close quarters together—he’d still insisted upon bringing his family to Paraquarry Lake on weekends through much of the year and staying there—of course—for at least six weeks each summer. When Reno couldn’t get off from work he drove up weekends. For the “camp” at Paraquarry Lake—as he called it—was essential to his happiness.

  Not that it was a particularly fancy place: it wasn’t. Several acres of deciduous and pine woods, and hundred-foot frontage on the lake—that was what made the place special.

  Eventually, in the breakup, the Paraquarry Lake camp had been sold. Reno’s wife had come to hate the place and had no wish to buy him out—nor would she sell her half to him. In the woman’s bitterness, the camp had been lost to strangers.