The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'

by Lamb, Wally

  When they let you into the visiting room, the inmates are already there, seated on one side of these big gray tables. Visitors sit on the opposite side. You’re allowed a quick hug and kiss at the beginning and end of a visit. No long lip-locks or lingering embraces. They’re awkward, those hugs. For one thing, you have to reach across a table that’s four feet wide. For another, you’re being watched. There’s a camera room where they can look out at you but you can’t look in at them. They’ve got four or five video cameras suspended from the ceiling, another one on a tripod next to the CO’s raised desk. He’s got a microphone and calls you by your seat number if you’re doing something he doesn’t like. It’s weird: if you’re a visitor, you’re a seat number, and if you’re an inmate, you’re Miss So-and-So. “Table F, seat seven, please put your hands on the table where I can see them…. Miss Rodriguez, lower your voice or I’ll send you back to your tier.” Miss Rodriguez: sounds so mannerly, doesn’t it? Like they’re treating them with the utmost respect. Mo said a woman in her unit was walking to the chow hall and thought she saw a CO pointing to her. Goes over to him and asks, Does he want something? “No,” he says. “I’m just pretending I’m at the shooting range.”

  Mo says the women officers are, in general, more decent than the guys, but that they can be chameleons. Depends on who they’re partnered up with. If it’s someone who’s fair, then they’re fair. If they’re working a shift with a hard-ass, then they turn hard-ass. My aunt, when she was a CO, sure as hell wasn’t like that. With Lolly, what you saw was what you got. Which was probably why the good ole boys went after her with a vengeance.

  Those first weeks? God, they were hideous. For one thing, Maureen had arrived with a target on her back because her last name was also the name of the prison. Inmates and staff alike drew all kinds of ridiculous conclusions about that surname. Mo was a rich bitch getting special treatment. She was a plant—a DOC spy. It’s a culture of fear and distrust, that place. Everyone’s looking over their shoulder at everyone else, doesn’t matter if you’re doing time or drawing a paycheck. Everyone’s suspect. So the name “Quirk” gave Mo one more burden to bear at a time when her life seemed unbearable.

  During those visits, she’d sit across from me, sobbing and hugging herself while I racked my brain for things to say. “You know that Korean family lives down the road? They painted their house purple. Looks weird…. I pulled two ticks off of Nancy Tucker yesterday. This morning, she left me a present: a headless mouse. Pain-in-the-ass cat. By the way, she said to say hello.” No smiles, no eye contact. She’d hardly say anything, and when she did, I couldn’t hear her. There’s a din in there—everyone jabbering in English and Spanish, and the acoustics are horrible, all these different conversations bouncing off the cinder block. “What’d you say?” I’d ask, then wish I hadn’t when she repeated it. “I don’t think I can survive in here,” she’d say. Or “I should’ve died that day.” Which day, I wondered. The day they opened fire at Columbine? The day she killed the Sea-berry kid? I didn’t have the heart to ask.

  Half the time during those visits, she acted like she was someplace else—like I was boring her or something. But if I said I might not be able to come next time, her tears would spill onto the tabletop. And her fingers: she’d chewed her nails and the skin around them so raw, it looked like she’d fed them one by one into an electric pencil sharpener. I had to force myself to go over there, frankly. I’d look up at the CO at the desk sometimes, and he’d be looking back at me like I was guilty of something. Then I’d look back at Mo without a clue about how I could help her. I had to recover after those visits, to be honest—recovery being a couple of stiff scotches when I got back home.

  I don’t think I’m going to survive in here…. I should have died that day. Was she thinking about suicide? It’s not unheard of over there—not even uncommon. I got scared enough to call the prison shrink. He took his time getting back to me, and when he did, he told me to call him Woody, too. He was pretty dismissive of what Mo had said. He hears that kind of stuff all the time, he assured me. Acclimation to prison—to any foreign culture—was a gradual process, depression a rational response to the reality of a long sentence. After a while, I was only half listening to him because I’d started making a list in my head of other Woodys: Woody Allen, Woody Woodpecker, Woody the bartender on Cheers. It wasn’t exactly reassuring me. I tried to imagine Dr. Patel taking this guy’s approach: Lovely to meet you. I am Dr. Beena Patel, but please, call me Beena Baby.

  But as it turned out, Woody knew what he was talking about. At two months, Maureen was better. Less gaunt, less hangdog and weepy. During our last visit, she’d even smiled. So there’s more good news for you, Dr. Patel. I might have missed it if I’d blinked, but I hadn’t. Maureen Quirk, Inmate #383–642, had finally given me a smile.

  Not that there’d been much for her to smile about. Her first cellmate was wacko—bipolar, Mo thought. Sherry? Cherry? She spent Mo’s first few days sprawled out on her bed like roadkill. Then some switch got flipped in her brain and she started pacing, muttering, screaming for the guards. By the time they took her to mental health, Mo was a wreck. I mean, those cells are eight-by-ten. Got these toilet-and-sink combos parked right out in the open that, Mo says, when you have to take a crap, you sit there for all the world to see.

  Cellmate number two was the really scary one. Denise, her name was, but everyone was supposed to call her D’Angelo after some singer. Apparently, she was the resident ladies’ man—used to wad up socks and stick ‘em down the front of her pants, Mo said—strut back and forth from the chow hall bowlegged, grabbing on to her bulge. First time I saw this D’Angelo in the visiting room, I thought maybe the prison had gone coed. I mean, this woman was a muscle-bound beast. First thing she told Maureen was that she hated white women. She sure loved Mo’s stuff, though: swiped her shampoo, her deodorant, dumped her tea bags in the toilet. She ran out of toilet paper and used Mo’s stationery instead. When D’Angelo realized that loud noises freaked out Mo, she began this thing where she’d hold a stack of books at arm’s length and let them go. She started making these one-note yips and yelps. She’d sneak up behind Mo and yell, “Hey!” Laugh like hell when Maureen cried.

  “Tell someone,” I’d said.

  “Who?”

  “Woody.”

  There was a three-week waiting list for appointments, she said.

  “The tier supervisor then.”

  “Why? So that he can speak to D’Angelo and she can retaliate?”

  I told her okay then, I’d tell someone. She cried, begged me not to. She was shaking so badly that I promised I wouldn’t. You want to know what powerlessness is? It’s when you have to promise your imprisoned wife that you’re not going to do anything about a psychopath who’s terrorizing her.

  I went home that day, got myself half-plastered, and got online. DOC has this database where you can get information on anyone in their custody: name, town of residence, conviction, length of sentence. It took a while, but I found her: Denise Washington, Bridgeport, Connecticut. Murder One. She’d slammed a woman’s head against a sidewalk repeatedly and killed her. I didn’t sleep at all that night, and by dawn I’d resolved to break my promise. I was going to howl like hell until I got her out of that cell and got her protected.

  But I don’t know, maybe there is a God, because the next morning, I got a call from Mo. (You can’t call them; you can only accept the inflated service charges on their calls to you.) Mo said she had a new cellmate. D’Angelo had caught one of her girls in a clinch with another woman and had jumped the competition along the walkway, choked her within an inch of her life, and stabbed her eight or nine times with the jagged barrel of a Bic pen. The victim had been rushed to the hospital, and D’Angelo had gotten hauled off to the segregation unit. “Seg,” Mo called it. She was starting to pick up the lingo.

  Mo’s cellmate since then has been Helen, a grandmother in her fifties and a former town comptroller. Embezzlement, the Web site say
s; she stole to stoke her gambling habit. Mo says Helen’s nice enough but that she never shuts up. Hey, better a motormouth than a sadist, right? … I looked up Maureen’s information on the DOC Web site once. They’ve got the facts right but none of the context. Nothing about Columbine, though, if she hadn’t been in the library that day, she never even would have been in prison. Look, I know the state and the Seaberrys have to take their pound of flesh, as Lena LoVecchio put it; she stole sedatives, drove while she was out of it, and killed the kid. I’m just saying, there’s nothing about the circumstances in that database of theirs. But I guess you could say that about any of them, maybe even D’Angelo. I mean, from the things I’ve read, nature trumps nurture. I get that. But does anyone really come out of the womb a psychopath?

  Mo said the inmates refer to strip-searches as “drop, squat, spread your twat.” She said this one woman, Gigi, is famous for cutting farts in the officers’ faces when she has to bend over and show them her anus. She’s like a jailhouse legend or something, from the sound of it. That was what Mo had smiled about, come to think of it : this woman, Gigi, passing gas in the guards’ faces. I had tried to smile back when she told me about it, but I couldn’t quite manage it. Makes me wonder, you know: If this is what makes her smile sixty days into it, what’s she going to be like at the end of five years? Who’s Maureen Quirk going to be by the time Quirk CI gets done with her?

  “Grandma’s prison,” Lolly used to call it. The other day, I went into Lolly and Hennie’s bedroom and stared at that wooden sign that used to hang on the wall above Great-Grandma’s desk—the one Lolly took with her when they gave her the bum’s rush out of there. Place had traveled light-years away from the place Lydia P. Quirk had run. They’d gone from “A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity” to “Drop, squat, spread your twat. And show me pink.”

  * * *

  I PULLED INTO THE ALLEY between the Mama Mia and Mustard Insurance and parked by the back entrance. Grabbed my copy of Ancient Myth and Modern Man and got out of the car. I doubted I was going to get any reading done that night, though. I’d started dozing about an hour or so before it was time to leave, and now I was running a good forty minutes late. I was going to have to hustle. If you want full cases of product out front by six a.m., you’d better get your ass down there before midnight. Takes a good half hour for the oil to heat to three seventy-five, and in the meantime, you’ve got to get the mixes started for your cake doughnut and your yeast doughnuts. And believe me, yeast doesn’t hurry for anybody. Back in college when I was working nights for Mr. Buzzi, he and I made everything from scratch, but these days Alphonse orders these kits where everything comes premeasured and premixed. It costs more, but it’s cheaper than hiring a helper. The night guy can fly solo, but he’d better be organized and he better not be late.

  I’d just barely gotten the lights on and the fryer fired up when the phone started ringing. That, and someone was rapping at the front door. I looked out and, Jesus Christ, it was her again. Velvet Hoon. Third night in a row. I held up a wait-a-minute finger and grabbed the phone. Alphonse was on the other end.

  “I got Ma in her bedroom, whimpering rosaries all day to make the pain go away, and I got him over in the hospital, being a prick to everyone. You know what he pulled yesterday? Kicked the priest out of his room. Little Cuban guy—comes in, asks does Pop want to take Communion, and Pop goes, ‘Get the hell out of here!’ If Ma had been there, she woulda broken his other hip.”

  I asked him what his father had against the priest.

  “Nothing. It’s God he’s pissed at. Hasn’t been inside a church since my brother died. Ma’s convinced he’s going to hell, and after yesterday maybe—”

  “Hey, hold on a sec,” I said. I put down the receiver and went to unlock the door. I couldn’t let her just stand out there. Two nights earlier? When she’d shown up the first time? I probably shouldn’t have started it. But it was safer for her to be inside the bakery than out there by herself in the middle of the night. There’s some seedy characters hanging around Three Rivers at night. She knows some of them, too, from the soup kitchen and the Silver Rail.

  “What’s up?” I said.

  “Need any help?” She’d asked me the same thing the two previous nights and had gotten the same answer: “Nope.” She nodded and strolled past me to the coffeemaker. I’d shown her how to use it the night before. Shouldn’t have started that, either. By the time she left, she’d drunk a pot and a half, and it wasn’t like she’d paid for it. I’d paid for it—threw a fin in the register and rang up five bucks.

  I grabbed the phone again. “Yup.”

  “This trailer park they’re in? It’s like everything’s miniature, Quirky. I’ve hit my head on the door frame so many times, I oughta wear a fucking helmet. A hundred fifty units here in Oldie-But-Goodyville, and I don’t think anyone’s taller than five-foot-three. I’m like whoozie-whatsis in that story—the one that lands where all the midgets live.”

  “Yeah, well, try clicking your ruby slippers together,” I said.”

  No, not the Munchkins. Smaller. The Lillipoppers or something.”

  “Lilliputians,” I said, crooking the phone against my shoulder and prying the lids off the mixes. “Gulliver’s Travels.”

  “Yeah, that’s it. I used to have the Gold Key comic.”

  “Probably the closest you’ve ever come to a literary experience,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah? Well, fuck you, professor, because it just so happens I been reading a book while I’m down here. What the hell else am I gonna do? No Internet, no NESN, and all’s my parents have is basic cable. You can’t get a Sox game to save yourself. The Da Vinci Code. You ever hear of it? I gotta hide it under the couch cushion because Ma thinks it’s sacrilegious. Hey, by the way, did you know Jesus was doing Mary Magdalene?”

  “Al,” I said. “If you don’t let me get off, I’m going to be serving raw batter to your early risers.”

  “Yeah, okay. Hey, before you go, you happen to know how we made out yesterday? Receipt-wise?” I reminded him that Tina, his day person, was taking care of the books—that he should call her later. “Yeah, okay. I’ll let you go then. Hey, I heard the door before. You letting customers in?”

  “Uh, no,” I said. “Not really.” Velvet was tearing sugar packets and pouring them into a paper coffee cup. She was up to four.

  “‘Not really?’ What’s that mean?”

  “Look, Gulliver, I gotta go.”

  I got back to the business at hand, wondering, was Gulliver’s Travels a quest story? Had Gulliver gone off in search of something?

  Velvet had toned it down since high school, I’d give her that much—had lost the blue crew cut and the silver combat boots. Her hair was short, still, but brown now, her natural color. She still had that fire hydrant build, but her face had lost some of its baby fat. Army jacket, T-shirt and miniskirt, black tights bagging at the knees. She was what now? Twenty-two? Twenty-three?

  The day of Maureen’s sentencing? After Carole Alderman had begged the judge to throw the book at her and Velvet had caused that commotion? She’d followed me out of the courthouse. I’d just watched them haul my wife off to prison, and all I wanted to do was get the fuck out of that parking garage before my head exploded. And Velvet had run after me, calling, “Mr. Quirk! Wait up!”

  I’d pivoted and faced her. “What are you doing here? How’d you even find out about this?”

  She said she’d been cleaning offices someplace down South and had lifted a bunch of magazines from waiting rooms. Taken them home, and opened up to “A Victim’s Victims” in the New Yorker. It was “a sign,” she’d said. She’d started hitchhiking up to Connecticut the next morning.

  “Well, hitchhike back,” I said. “There’s nothing for you up here.”

  Yes, there was, she said. Her “mom” was here, and she was going to stand by her. Visit her and give her moral support. She asked me if I wanted to go someplace and talk—get a pizza or so
mething.

  “A pizza?” I said. “Velvet, after what just happened in that courtroom, do you think I’ve got an appetite?” I got into my car and slammed the door. Backed out of my space and took her out of reverse. But just as I was about to give it the gas, she stepped in front of the car.

  “It was Columbine,” she said. “That’s what messed up her head.”

  “Gee, really? You think? Get out of my way.”

  “Could I crash at your place? Until I get a job and a room someplace?”

  “No!” I was fighting back tears.”

  Can I borrow some money then?”

  I fished two twenties out of my wallet and threw them at her. And when she bent to pick them up, I swerved around her and got out of there.

  That was the last I’d seen of her until two nights earlier, when she’d shown up at the locked door of the Mama Mia. Which is not to say she didn’t call me five or six times in between—so much so that I thought about getting caller ID. She kept bugging me about asking Maureen to add her name to her visitors list. Mo had enough to contend with, I figured, so I kept saying no, it’s not a good idea, maybe down the road sometime. What were they going to do: reminisce about Littleton? I could spare Mo that much. And anyway, when an inmate puts someone on her visitor list, they do a security check to make sure the person doesn’t have any felony convictions. I figured Velvet might very well have racked up one or two of those, and that it might raise a red flag with DOC.

  Velvet circumvented me, though. Wrote to Mo, Mo put her on her list, and, what do you know, they approved her. I didn’t know all this had gone down until after the fact—after Velvet’s first visit. It was hard seeing her at the place, Maureen said, but she appreciated the kid’s effort. “She’s still so needy, Caelum. And it’s not like I can help her while I’m here.”