Sugar Land

by tammy lynne stoner

  Huddie tipped his imaginary hat to me. “Miss.”

  The guard wore a close-cropped haircut under his cowboy hat and had muscles that stretched at the edges of his long-sleeved shirt. His hands were the kind that had veins of puffy ivy running all over them.

  With his arms crossed, the guard watched Huddie walk over to me, open Cabinet #3, and pull out a pair of yellow rubber gloves. The music played on from the radio. I nodded to Huddie. He nodded back, smiling big at the radio. This kitchen was his escape too, it seemed.

  There were eight of us working that day since one man had called out sick—eight people to cook for a prison of 950 beds. Beauregard told me that every man who calls out sick means two extra hours of work for the rest. And, as often happens in that part of Texas, we were having a hot February with temperatures in the eighties and that heavy feeling of rain—good for the sugarcane, but miserable for us and even worse for the folks in the fields. I can’t express to you how grateful I was to see Huddie that day, when the ovens were still waving heat even though they’d been off for nearly an hour.

  “They never let coloreds help us,” Beauregard whispered to me, “but the Warden promised Huddie’s daddy a while back to let him rest every now and again—no doubt with some kind of currency involved. Plus, the Warden here fancies himself a progressive.” And here he looked at me. “Obviously.”

  This was how it worked: there were usually nine or ten of us—the head cook, who dictated the menus; the cutters, who chopped and prepped all the meals of the day; and the line servers, who stirred the hot pots, served, and did most of the cleanup—though the cutters helped out by hauling pans after they’d wiped down the metal tables out front.

  The cutters—like Beauregard—were a step above the line servers because they got to stay out of the steam during the cleanup and could grab a cigarette while they took their good old time wiping down the cafeteria tables. Convicts, obviously, could not be cutters.

  I’d never seen anyone move a knife as fast as Beauregard, even with a cigarette in his teeth. He could make chitlins pot-ready in two minutes.

  Since we were short one line server, a cutter had to line serve and the head cook had to be a cutter, when he’d rather be checking the pantry, ordering food, and scratching the inside of his ear with a pencil, which seemed to be his favorite hobby. That inconvenience made the head cook even meaner. And when the head cook was mean, everyone was afraid of dropping something because—according to Beauregard—the head cook had no qualms about hitting someone right in the kidneys if he was in a mood, like he was.

  Huddie hauled a pile of heavy steel trays from the inmate drop-off area. He carried them over to the deep sink where I was scrubbing dishes in the steam, silently cursing Jackson, who had called off because he’d had a fever when no one—and I mean no one—gets a God damn fever when it’s eighty degrees. No one.

  Beauregard, his face red again from lugging trays, smiled over at me. He hauled a load by Huddie. “Glad you joined us, Huddie,” he said. “That there is Miss Dara—the new girl. Well, the only girl, and she’s new.”

  Huddie nodded. He gave me a look that said he hadn’t seen a woman in a while, and he liked women. It wasn’t threatening. He was just a hungry man examining a rack of ribs.

  Temperatures as high as they were that day made the food cuttings stink quicker than usual. The trash was only taken out at sundown—when a guard could attend you—so all the food from breakfast and lunch sat rotting in the heat.

  “Sometimes,” Beauregard told me, “you can hear it buzzing if you got your ear too close to the cans.”

  I cringed.

  “Thankfully,” he said as he raised his eyebrows, “we hardly ever serve fish. Maggots love fish.”

  Beauregard walked off.

  Huddie understated: “Ain’t pleasant.”

  “Not one bit,” I agreed.

  Huddie had creases under his eyes, the kind you get from working outside. Little moles of sweat formed on his forehead and along those lines under his eyes. I watched one fall like a tear when he carried over his second load of trays. He didn’t seem to notice.

  Beauregard walked back past me and whispered, “The convicts love to work in here. They don’t care how hot it is—at least it’s not the fields.”

  The head cook strolled through and tossed his sponge in my sink. “Keep working,” was all he said before going to his office now that we were better staffed.

  Beauregard explained: “He has a fan.”

  The radio hissed and clicked, the way it did when the music was being changed to a new record—mostly ragtime, since it was Beauregard’s radio and ragtime was Beauregard’s choice. Without the cook there, Huddie sang along, making up his own words to an instrumental song: “You said you’d wait for me, by the trees and the ramblin’ river, but you never said for just how long.”

  I wiped the side of my face with my forearm and smiled at Huddie.

  The guard nodded to me. “His singing bothering you?”

  “No more than a four-leaf clover bothers an unlucky man,” I said.

  The guard looked genuinely confused by my answer, so he let Huddie keep singing.

  “Few know the way I know how long these nights can be. I know you said you’d wait for me, but you never said for how long.”

  The music ended and another song started up. We could barely hear it, though, since I’d started using the loud water faucets at my station to clean down the trays. I sprayed and glanced over at Huddie, fascinated. Not wanting to get him in trouble, I tried to be casual in my examination. Huddie reminded me of a clown, with those yellow gloves on over his gray striped sleeves and his coal-black face. The guard noticed me looking, cleared his throat, and took a step in, letting Huddie know he had his eye on him.

  “Stay to yourself, boy,” he ordered, as if Huddie had done anything. “Not too close.”

  Huddie hauled another load over, winking at me as he walked by. “You heard him now, not too close.” He lightly hopped a step away.

  I smiled back. From the side, I saw the guard grit his teeth. The light from the only window in the kitchen—a dingy thing covered on the outside by spiderwebs—shone on the side of Huddie’s face and made him look a little crazy, the kind of crazy I was attracted to. The kind of crazy that understood secret things about this world the rest of us walked through blindly. Wisdom rose off him like steam off a simple stew, all deep and calm and comforting without meaning to be. Without caring that it was.

  “Keep decent,” the guard said, as if he didn’t know what else to say, as if he was new to power.

  Off to the far side, the head cook worked with the blunted knives. He accounted for each one on a special sheet that had to be filled out at the end of every kitchen shift—every piece of metal had to be accounted for. The knives were easy, since they were all tied to the wall. The loose spoons took a bit longer to add up.

  In the middle of all the silence, Beauregard burst into the kitchen, lobbing a cloth over my head and into his sink. I turned off my faucets and gave a sloppy dry to the trays. Beauregard wiped down the edges of the huge three-foot steel pot sitting on the floor that we used to make some of the soups. Another song came on.

  For no reason I could see, the guard yelled out, “No more singing!”

  “What kind of man are you to stop a bird from singing?” Beauregard said before he slammed through the doors like he was pitching a fit, when I knew he was just off to the toilet. He’d told me the day before that the sound of water always encouraged him.

  Huddie passed me more trays and hummed quietly to the radio. He hummed and scraped and lifted while I soaped and rinsed and stacked. After a while we developed a private rhythm, with him not once looking over at the guard, even though the guard never took his mean green eyes off Huddie.

  “That bother you?” I asked him when he got close enough.

  “Oh, I’s always been watched, Miss. My whole life I been watched.”

  Huddie’s hands slipped and
he dropped a pan into my sink. The guard jumped.

  “What the hell, boy! Keep it down.”

  Huddie whistled low. “We down, sir, we down.” He smiled at me. His teeth looked bright and slick, as he stood there in that one bar of sunlight.

  I felt afraid for him, knowing about the leather straps and the way they’d put some inmates out in the sun for hours to balance on barrels or hot rocks.

  The guard sucked in some air. “You smarting? That’ll get you time in the Box.”

  “That was me—” I started, but Huddie stopped me.

  “Sorry, sir,” he said. “My apologies, sir.”

  We waited. The guard shifted on his clean boots, but didn’t say anything.

  “Don’t you ever take the fall for someone now,” Huddie whispered, “even for a man as handsome as myself.”

  I was embarrassed that I’d tried to take the blame, but before long Huddie was humming again. I wanted to cover his mouth or nudge him or something, but I realized he knew what he was doing. He was making a choice to be who he was, despite the consequences. Few folks are capable of that kind of bravery—definitely not me.

  The gray concrete floor made my feet ache down the middle, where I wished for a stronger arch. We had to be careful when we walked across that floor carrying wet pans, since the water made the concrete slippery and the head cook still seemed mean, over there counting his spoons.

  Huddie and I each took an edge of a massive stack of trays. The metal was still hot and a little wet. The stack pressed hard into the crease where my palm ended and my fingers began, and caused me to strain so much that I grunted.

  In this way, we carried several stacks over to the drying counter, where we towel-dried them, along with the mountain of pots and pans. Drying each deep pot was like drying off a fire engine—you had to approach every side of the big thing as a separate, individual area to keep from getting overwhelmed.

  After everything was dry, without saying a word, we placed them in the order they always went on the tall metal racks along the back wall. Huddie flipped one of the biggest pots over by its thick steel handles and landed it with a gentle clank on the top shelf. I was moving some pots around on the lower shelves underneath him so the smallest ones could fit inside the bigger ones.

  Huddie looked down to me. “I just can’t seem to stay on the outside of a prison these days, but why you here?”

  “Work,” I said.

  “No other kind of work out there? Sure a girl like you with some schooling under you could get a bird’s nest on the ground, if you wanted.”

  “I like this job fine.”

  He shook his head. “True now, why you here?”

  “It’s easy for me to hide in here, I think,” I said, surprised by my honesty.

  “Who you hiding from?”

  “Everybody else, I suppose. Me, maybe.” All the while I thought: I’m hiding from being me—the girl who loves another girl.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Because I can.”

  “Must be nice,” he said, “having a chance to hide every now and again.”

  Huddie walked back across the wet concrete, grabbed another big pot, and flipped it to the top rack. He acted as if he had to wipe some water from the metal bars of the shelf so he could talk closer to me.

  “Seems strange, you feeling the need to be here,” he whispered, “when you could be out there.” He looked down at me past his armpit stains. “If I was out there, I’d have me a bottle of liquor, a guitar, and a woman—no, two women—right now, in the middle of the day.”

  “Sounds good.” I smiled, adding: “For you.”

  “What’d you have if you outside right now?”

  “I don’t know,” I lied.

  “Maybe you gotta be out there to learn it, then.”

  “Nigga, shut the hell up!” The guard took five giant steps over and smacked Huddie on the back of the head. “You finished yet?”

  “Yes sir,” we both said.

  The kitchen was empty now. At some point the radio had been clicked off and all the dish towels had been thrown into the laundry. The utensils were locked up. The rags had been moved under the sink. Not one thing was left out.

  “Stand over there, both of you.”

  We stood against the now-dry edge of the nickel counter at a right angle from the pot rack. The green-eyed guard counted the pots and pans, matching them to the diagram while the two of us waited, our arms at our sides, my left forearm warming in that ray of sunlight.

  “All’s here!” the guard yelled and jerked his neck left for a fast crack.

  The head cook emerged from his office to confirm the count. We waited until he was done. He gave a head nod, which meant all was accounted for, then sized up the guard, who had at least fifty pounds on him, but looked like he’d lose in a fight.

  “For clarity’s sake, this one here is on my team,” the head cook sneered as he lit up a cigarette, “so you take mind not to line her up again with the convicts, especially niggerly ones. Understood?”

  The guard’s neck bloomed angry red. “Understood.”

  The head cook left and the guard walked to the door. It took him a minute to get it unlocked, just enough time for Huddie to turn and grin, showing me an extra bit of biscuit he’d tucked inside his cheek.

  × × ×

  At the end of my shift, I walked alone down the dark hallway to the kitchen time clock, which sat across from the head cook’s office. His name was Billy. Billy watched me and I knew there was some evil in it, so I tried to stay in the best-lit portions of the hallway.

  The door to his office opened and I heard him shuffle up behind me. He leaned over my shoulder, the way he did, and talked into my ear.

  “Seems you got yourself a Negro boyfriend,” he said, making those wet noises with his mouth again.

  I punched my time out, willing my hand not to shake. I swallowed, then managed to say: “No, I don’t.”

  “No? Why’s that?”

  “Because that’s ridiculous.”

  “I can’t hear you.”

  I had no choice but to turn around since there was nothing else to look at, so I did. “I said, ‘Because that’s ridiculous.’ ”

  He pulled a Lucky Strike from behind his pink ear, where his blond hair was nearly white, and lit it using one hand. The spent match he’d bent out from the matchbook hung there like a tree hit by lightning. “Love can be found at work, and maybe you love the coloreds. You, a woman in a prison kitchen filled with hungry nigger men. I said no women should be in this kitchen.” He sucked the smoke in so deep that it took a few words to start coming out again. “You feedin’ them all right, but not food. You feedin’ their dreams. You enjoy doing that to poor niggers?”

  Just then I heard Beauregard’s telltale whistle as he strolled toward the time-clock hallway. The head cook heard too, but he took his sweet time moving out of the way, blowing a line of tight white smoke before nodding to Beauregard and making his way back to his office.

  Beauregard gave me a hard look while he searched for his timecard, though he knew where it was, of course, there only being three lined up. “Anything happening here?”

  I looked down and pushed strands of flyaway brown hair behind my ear. “Gossip, I suppose.”

  “He doesn’t seem much the type.”

  “Hmm.” I nodded.

  “You doing all right?”

  “He’s just peacocking.”

  “Well, you come get me if he starts to play rooster.” Beauregard leaned in and curled his mustache up in that charming way he did. “Don’t let my thin arms fool you. I am all muscle. Lean, strong muscle that strikes terror in the hearts of men. Terror, Miss Dara.”

  “I will make note.”

  He held out his bent arm for me. “For now, allow me to escort you down through this rank dancehall to the well-lit gardens.”

  “Thank you kindly, sir.”

  We walked arm in arm out across the dry patch and through the sickly-lookin
g front gate. All the while, I could feel the head cook staring at me from that dirty kitchen window.

  BUTTERFLIES & BULLFROGS

  This is how it goes in life: sometimes you’re born with a cleft palate or rickets, like my bow-legged granddaddy, or a touch short on brains, like my Great Aunt Cal who everyone called “Stool.”

  Me? I’m a double hitter. In addition to being what folks call “large-boned,” I came into this world with homosexual tendencies—though back then I thought of it only as my strange, strong affections for some female friends, having no such notion of “homosexual tendenries” as a thing, at least not in my hometown of Midland, Texas.

  Notions of this nature found footing in me eight months before I ran away to work in the Imperial State Prison Farm kitchen, when I got a job at the egg store in Midland, Texas.

  The egg store was all wood. Wood floors, wood ceiling beams, wood shelves—that rugged, knotty, reddish wood. The simple kind of wood they used to bury folks in before the floods, when rotting coffins popped from the ground like splinters and dead bodies dropped out in maggoty heaps.

  The egg store smelled of wood, too, which I liked. That and just the tiniest hint of smoke from Bibby’s metal pork smoker two streets over. I swear he ran that thing day and night, crazy redneck. And that’s where I fell in love for the first time, there in the egg store that smelled of wood and smoked pig fat.

  When she came into the store, her brother—this short little thing with ears like filthy cauliflower—called her Rhodie. She had light brown hair slicked off in a part on the left. Her glasses were round wire and she carried an archery bow, but no arrows. Her tangerine skirt came down to her knees and she wore a matching jacket with a white V-neck shirt underneath. The scarf around her neck had painted butterflies on it.

  “Six eggs, please,” she said, “and some beef jerky for my brother.”

  I reached into a nearby crate filled with eggs nested in straw, while squinting at her scarf. “Those butterflies?”