When I went to bed, I stared at the ceiling in the dark, thinking of that guy walking around the pond, connecting him to my mom, sister, and brother. I kept spelling the word: p-o-n-d, keeping it as mine. I mouthed it over and over. I dozed off, blending Cool and Word into my memories of Mother at the pond, in the sun, the breeze blowing over her, and all of us lying in the grass and napping as dragonflies skimmed the surface and fishes popped the silver surface, rippling rings.
The next morning I was back in court, admiring the stenographer’s legs as she stocked her machine with paper. Handcuffs had become as normal to me as a wristwatch is to a free man. The DA glared at me with hard gray eyes. I watched him grab my folder from a stack on his table and give it to the bailiff, who in turn handed it to the judge. The bailiff called my name and pronounced my crimes. As I stood before the judge, adrenaline raced wildly through my body. Gripped with fear, I wanted to say that I was willing to go to a drug program, a halfway house, do community work, anything but prison. I didn’t say a word—yet I couldn’t help but hope that somehow a merciful Samaritan would burst through the doors and set things straight. But these officials were not in the business of pardoning poor people. Their faces only reflected impatience, with no inclination for listening to convicts’ explanations or litanies of regret. The process had a momentum all its own. For it to work, there could be no sentiment or discretion. To them, I was a criminal without soul, heart, or feelings.
Standing before the judge, I remembered an event that happened when I was fourteen. I’d been staying with my Aunt Charlotte, one of my mother’s sisters, and one morning my Uncle Tranquelino, her husband, asked me to go with him to the pigpen. I grabbed a pail of grain and shook it as a pig innocently came to the feeder. It was a beautiful morning, resinous with manure and livestock smells, birds in the blue sky, a comfortable awakening chill in the air that excited me. When the pig muzzled his pink snout into the pail and crunched up the grain, my uncle shot it between the eyes. It shuddered, awkwardly spread its legs to hold itself up, and flopped to the ground. My ears ringing, my nerves shredded, I dropped the pail as its brothers and sisters trundled around to slurp the blood up. “We’ll butcher it today,” my uncle had said.
“Do you have anything to say before I pass sentence?” the judge asked.
I remained silent. I felt ashamed because I was the first one in my family to go to prison. I’d sold drugs only to get back to Albuquerque, to be with someone I loved, to be respected, to be part of a community. I didn’t wanted to be like Galvan or these lawyers, earning money by screwing people.
“Very well.” The judge sighed and sentenced me to a mandatory no-parole five to ten years, with five years flat, day for day, in a maximum-security state prison. They were giving me six months, the three I had put in at Albuquerque awaiting extradition and the three at the Yuma jail. I was twenty-one and I figured I’d be out when I was twenty-six. It was no surprise that the judge had given me the harshest sentence allowed by law. The nuns had always said I was a bad boy, and here was the judge making the same condemnation. I was sure I was convicted mostly because of who I was, expunged from a society that didn’t want people like me in it. I sat back in my wooden chair as they signed the paperwork and stared down at the arm rests, studying the various layers of paint, the chips and cracks. How many hands had gripped them? I wondered. What lives were attached to those hands, what dreams were shattered, what sorrows were they trying to squeeze out of their souls?
At daybreak on January 2, we got on the road to Florence State Prison. I was brought out to the booking desk and chained up with another prisoner, Wedo, a tall wiry nineteen-year-old Chicano with green eyes, tattoos, and a crew cut. He had a disarming grin that conveyed mockery, defiance, or genuine cordiality, depending on his mood. He engaged anyone in his vicinity in small talk, making fun of the guards, jiving at cons in cells. Muscled like a gymnast, he looked at me and smiled ear to ear.
“Be nice to rabbit-hunt today. Ever see a mountain lion? I seen one. Since I was a boy I’ve camped around these hills.”
The marshals chained us and stuffed Wedo’s ring, watch, and pocket change into a manila envelope. Wedo harassed them the whole time.
They escorted us to the car, handling Wedo rougher than me, grunting that they were going to kick his ass if he didn’t shut up. We waited by the car as one marshal went inside to get some papers while the other sat in the car eating a sandwich. Even this early, it was starting to get hot. I gazed at the facade of Yuma County Courthouse, a squat sandstone building that housed the jail cells, courtrooms, and the office for paying traffic tickets. Visitors clustered around the doors, waiting to attend a family member’s trial. Two women had infants in their arms, screaming as their mothers shifted them around to the other arm. A younger kid with black hair and large brown eyes clung to his mother’s hand. He could have been me, when I was visiting my father in jail.
The familiarity of the summer streets I had once driven had a desolate, barren sadness. Pigeons on concrete ledges of municipal buildings cooed and cuddled wing to wing, staring down at us; blue-collar Chicanos with black lunch pails and white construction hard hats, waiting for the bus to take them to job sites, eyed the marshal’s car with a cold aloofness; store windows facing the bright sunny street glimmered, tempting the customers who were already waiting, parked in their cars, for the doors to open. That I was actually going to prison made the sights and scenes all the more unreal. Life would go on without me.
Soon, we were accelerating away from a café, where the marshals had picked up a box of doughnuts and filled their coffee thermos, up the ramp, and onto the freeway, heading east toward Florence State Prison. Lonnie, Carey, and Rick had already been sentenced; she to time in the Florence State Women’s Prison and they to sentences in the men’s. Wedo started badgering the marshals again. Heat shimmered above the asphalt as we headed out of Yuma in the same direction I’d once intended to leave with Lonnie.
On the road, the marshals turned the radio to a hick station playing a cowboy tune about riding the range. Through the grill, I could see a double-barrel shotgun, set upright and strapped between them. I fantasized putting it against their double chins, making them undress, watching them walk naked, two albino buffaloes across the prairie, as I drove straight to the border, dumped the car in El Paso in the Kmart parking lot, and walked across the International Bridge to Juarez. There were a million places to hide in Mexico. I imagined myself living in a highland village in El Canyon del Cobre—Copper Canyon—near Chihuahua, which my grandfather had told me was beautiful and wild. I imagined apparitions of my grandmother under a salt cedar, strapping the infant cradle to her back as she prepared to walk to the village with medicinal herbs she had collected in the prairie. I’d lie down and press my ear to the ground to hear Mother Earth breathing.
Looking out the window, at the open space all around me, I saw myself as a boy on the prairie, my legs pumping fast and sweat beading my forehead. More than anything else, I loved open space. I had always run to the fields. Escaping from the D-Home, I’d crawl over security fences, belly and arms cut by barb wire; the pain was worth it to be walking happily along a winding dirt road in the South Valley. I’d run when my parents fought; when my purple-faced brother raged jealously after me; when Theresa slapped me and I dashed from the trailer across frozen fields to the Sandia Mountain foothills in a heavy snowfall. I always felt more comfortable alone. I’d cup my palms under the cold windmill-tank pipe and splash my face with cold water and keep moving; while everyone else was in the company of friends and family, I enjoyed nature in the open fields.
I drew kindness from the silence of the prairie at noon and the streams trickling between rocks and through canyons where I roamed; from the birds that crowded fence lines, the horses I stopped to pet along the road, the dogs that trailed me. In the same way that nature broke down leaves and stones, it broke down the hardness in my heart.
On the way to Florence, among the cactus, tumbl
eweeds rolled like buffaloes and dust devils spun up whirling into cones. Our car sped around a sharp curve and startled prairie doves feasting on a dead rattlesnake in the middle of the road. I thought how even my last years with Marcos and Lonnie now seemed like a long run to get away from my past life. Running had always cleared my mind, had always been my escape from the violence in my life: over the next wall, across ditches, under branches, fleeing like a fugitive, hiding in trash cans, alleys, neighborhood nooks, and abandoned houses. The reality was that for a very long time I would not have open space to run to anymore.
We pulled in at a weathered truck stop to use the bathroom and fill up the gas tank. Wedo and I had to sit in the car while the two marshals went in and ate, made calls, had coffee. The attendant, a wiry farm boy, avoided my eyes as he wiped the bugs off the windshield, checked the oil, and aired up the tires. Finally one of the marshals let us out, sore and stiff, and we walked past the cynical glares of customers staring at us in our shackles hobbling into the bathroom. Wedo didn’t care; he smiled at them and mouthed the words fuck you. But I felt ashamed. I assumed an attitude of disregard and they pretended not to notice me, their passive ranchers’ and glum truckers’ faces turned down to their coffee and plates of sausage, scrambled eggs, and toast.
On the road again, with the two marshals up front munching another box of doughnuts and sipping coffee from paper cups, we sped past parched junipers, piñon trees, sage, and scrub brush. I stared at a decrepit holding pen in the trees and, beyond that, barely visible, nestled in and blending with the brown surrounding hills, a rough-hewn lumber shack with a man standing at its side in worn workman’s clothes, a shovel in his right hand. The man looked like my Uncle Santiago, broad and thick-muscled, with a red clay complexion. The sun had passed its apex and moved west with us, throwing the landscape into shadows and light. I peered at the man, craning my neck around, until the trees and hills erased him. He’d be the last farmer I’d see for a long time.
I leaned back in my seat and closed my eyes, trying to ignore Wedo ordering the marshals to give him some doughnuts. He wouldn’t let up; high-strung and cocky, he was getting under their skin. He didn’t flinch when they pulled over and threatened to beat him if he didn’t shut up. He just glared at them and leered.
“Oh, yeah, let’s see what you got. Ain’t nothing but a bunch of meatball muthafuckers.” When they didn’t respond, he turned to me and declared that he’d lived in the prairie outside of Tucson all his life, and these fat-ass marshals would die out there without their doughnuts and badges. He turned back to them and challenged them to give him five minutes to run, and if they caught him they could kill him.
The driver smirked at his buddy. “Where you’re headed, you’ll get fucked soon enough.”
The steady hum of the engine, the sizzle of tires, and the whir of the air conditioner made me think of times when I rode in the new red-and-white Ford with my father. He was probably out there drinking in a cheap motel with a prostitute, whiskey drippings at his mouth as he chain-smoked Pall Malls. When I rode with him, his Old Spice cologne would fill the car. My eyes would water from the cigarette smoke as I’d gaze at the moon, wishing we could catch up to it. It always seemed so close, only to settle just beyond my reach, in a pasture over the next hill.
The spell of reverie was broken as we passed a dairy plant with hundreds of cows muzzling hay in troughs facing the highway, because suddenly a black dog darted from the manure lots into the road, and the driver veered sharply to the right. “I oughta shoot that sumbitch!” the driver huffed. Red-faced and unnerved, he let go two shots from his pistol and missed. Wedo laughed at them and told the marshals to turn that hick shit off the radio. He kept interrupting my thoughts, boasting about all the things he could do. He sounded the way my father did when he bragged what he was going to do: buy a new house, land, get us new clothes, be home every night, stop drinking, take us to the zoo, eat out. How he could have been a senator or congressman; he was always on his way; every bartender between Albuquerque and Santa Fe knew him; the politicians liked him.
This kind of empty braggadocio ran rampant among criminals, and I was looking at five long years of listening to it.
The wind rushed through the marshal’s open window. The sun shone harshly over the prairie. In the distance, beyond low rolling hills to the south, was the town of Florence. I smelled the green resinous scent as trucks passed us, bulging with brown gunny-sacks of fresh-picked green chiles. An old woman was washing clothes in an old roller-wringer washer in the yard. Work jeans and shirts hung on the clothesline. Her husband was out back burning weeds. Farther down the road, Wedo pointed out the Florence State Prison. My throat constricted. Rows of convicts were burning ditch weeds and others were cutting weeds on the roadside. Menacing granite and razor-wire coils unspooled the length of the looming wall enclosing the prison. Manned gun towers jutted up, with guards in sunglasses cradling rifles and pacing catwalks, clocking the cons, monitoring their every step.
Off to one side of the prison a bunch of cons were playing baseball. I watched them as we slowed and turned down a long tree-lined lane with a checkpoint midway. The baseball game reminded me of a story I was told by a healer-man, a friend of my grandpa’s. My mother was playing baseball in the scrub-brush field beside the ranch house in Willard with her four sisters late one afternoon. After catching a long fly ball she’d doubled over in pain. Too pregnant to ride one of her brothers’ horses, she’d dashed off to the healer’s house two miles away, her four sisters laughing one moment and throwing the ball and the next worriedly looking at each other across the breeze-blown dust and sunlight. Holding her enlarged abdomen, my mother ran like any country girl, across the arroyos and over chamiso, and then felt a rattler’s sting at her ankle. At the healer’s house, on a blanket under the stars and moon and prairie night sky, I was born. It was a special birth. Since the venom had mixed in my blood, I’d have skills to see in the dark, and I’d change many times in life just as the snake sluffs its skin.
We pulled up, went through a series of checkpoints, and parked in front of a massive iron gate. The guards wore beige uniforms, caps, and black boots and carried lead-filled batons. Some were leaving and others arriving for shift change, joking and giving each other last-minute job details. I tried to look without being noticed, wearing an attitude that it was no big deal, just another day, that I had done this before, but my survival instincts were red hot. A few cons walking with brooms and rakes glanced over as if I had insulted them, coldly and frankly appraising Wedo and me and then looking away as if they knew everything they needed to know about us.
My stomach churned. We got out and were escorted to the gate. The marshals turned to leave after signing us over; then one glared at Wedo and smacked him across the mouth. “You’re going to get fucked here, punk!” Wedo lunged at him, forgetting he was wrapped in waist and wrist chains and hobbled at the ankles; he fell to the ground, cursing. The marshals mocked him, laughing, and left. A guard yelled up to another guard on the catwalk above the main gate, and he lowered a tin bucket from a rope on a pulley. The guard took a key out of the bucket, turned the lock, deposited the key back in the bucket, and the guard hoisted it up again. Another guard came with a roster and jotted our names down. With a wave he signaled one of the tower guards up on the main gate, and it slowly and begrudgingly creaked and squealed to the left, opening on my new world. Maybe I could get some schooling and learn to read and write. Maybe I could learn heating and refrigeration to go with my plumbing trade. It was time to change.
SIX
I had made up my mind to blend in, attract no attention, do my time, and get out alive. It’s true, as convicts know, that you seldom make real friends in prison, just acquaintances, allied by mutual need. All of us had lived in projects, reservations, and barrios, as addicts, hustlers, or nothing at all, existing in aimless desperation. And though we didn’t want to admit it, many of us were begrudgingly relieved to have three meals a day, a bed, and a
roof over our heads. The key was to survive prison, not let it kill your spirit, crush your heart, or have you wheeled out with your toe tagged.
DC—Diagnostic Center—the block I was temporarily in, housed all new arrivals. Florence is in the desert, so like almost everyone else I wore boxer shorts, dressing in prison blues and brogans only for family visits, counselor interviews, chow time, or infirmary. Even if you had been here ten times, you started here, the newest high-tech cell block in the yard, four tiers high, thirty cells a tier, facing one another across a broad landing. There were three cell blocks in the main yard, all with various security levels, and every block had one or two tiers reserved for special cases: Nut Run for the mentally disturbed; lockdown cells for suspected gang members; the Dungeon for dangerous psychos; isolation cells with degrees of deprivation; and then maximum-security and protective-custody cells. For various reasons, I would eventually visit all of them.
When I first came in, every eye in the block checked me out. I felt vulnerable, with nothing to hide behind, veil my confusion, or conceal my fear. When cons looked at me I would turn away, not wanting to provoke a confrontation by returning an icy glare back. But I felt their eyes on my back, gauging my walk and gestures, searching for anything that might expose a weakness, looking to detect the most insignificant sign that would give me away. Nothing went unnoticed by them. It was useless to try and fake my way through this world where the weak were devoured.
A Place to Stand Page 12
