In the Sanctuary of Outcasts

by Neil White

According to Ella, a doctor had visited the one-room schoolhouse to administer shots. The raised oval spots on her leg where the pigmentation had disappeared had caught his attention. He pricked the blotches with a needle. Ella felt nothing.

  “Next week, white man drives up,” Ella said, “and I seen the Carroll boy pointin’ outside. ‘Oooh, Ella,’ he say, ‘bounty hunter fixin’ to carry you away.’ I look out and seen the man leanin’ on his truck, wearin’ the dark glasses, arms crossed all tight.”

  A hand-painted sign—large enough to be seen from neighboring farms and which would later be nailed to the side of her family’s tenant house—extended from the back of the white man’s pickup truck. Ella couldn’t read the long word scrawled in large red letters. Later she would understand: “Quarantine.”

  The schoolteacher put a hand on Ella’s shoulder, pulled her up from her desk, and led her outside. The other children ran over to the window. The teacher walked her across the small schoolyard toward the truck that idled at the edge of the field. The bounty hunter uncrossed his arms and pushed back his coat to expose a pistol. The teacher stopped and took her hand off Ella’s shoulder. The man pointed to the back of the truck, and Ella climbed in.

  As he drove away Ella looked out through the wooden slats. Her teacher stood with her hands over her mouth. Her classmates’ frozen faces filled the schoolhouse window.

  Ella sipped her coffee and took a break. I didn’t say a word. I waited for her to go on with her story. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I was patient. I had no place to go. No meetings. No deadlines.

  There was something remarkable about this woman. The way she held herself, and her eyes. She seemed to possess unwavering confidence. Or maybe it was strength. But at the same time, she was gentle and friendly.

  For a moment, I had forgotten she might be contagious. She was so vibrant. My mother would have been able to tell me all about her wonderful aura. It was hard to believe Ella carried a debilitating disease.

  A guard pushed through the swinging kitchen door and called out for me. “Inmate!” he yelled. “Get over here.”

  I hurried toward the kitchen. The guard was a short white man with red hair and a moustache that needed to be trimmed. His pants were too tight. The gray material was stretched tight against his thighs. He looked uncomfortable.

  “No fraternizing with patients,” he said.

  Ella heard and looked directly at the guard. “We jes talkin’.”

  “Yes, ma’am, sorry to interrupt,” he said, with deference. “I need this inmate in the kitchen.”

  Ella called out to me, “See you tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Toward the end of my first week of work in the cafeteria, I was drawing a hot dog in handcuffs on the menu board when a guard told me to report to the visiting room at 9:00 A.M. for admission and orientation.

  About twenty other prisoners were already seated at round tables. On one side, a group of young black men slumped down in their chairs. On the other sat an assortment of white and Hispanic men, young and old, and a couple of men in wheelchairs. They all wore orange jumpsuits, the kind criminals wear during transport by the U.S. marshal. They looked as if they hadn’t slept or bathed in days. I was the only inmate wearing green. I felt uneasy and took a seat in the back away from the others.

  Three men sat at a long table in the front of the room: a prison guard, a man who was dressed like the surgeon general, and the monk I’d seen on my first day. The monk stood and held up his arms. The room quieted.

  “Hello,” he said in a soft voice, “I’m Father Reynolds. I’m glad you’re all here.” He realized what he’d said and tried to back up. “I don’t mean I’m glad you’re here. What I mean to say is—uh—as long as you have to be here…I’m glad to see you.”

  Father Reynolds stammered nervously for a few minutes. When he finally calmed down, he told us we were welcome at the Catholic church on Wednesday evenings or Sunday afternoons. He added that we could attend the Sunday service with our families during visiting hours. Then he prayed. I was relieved that I would be able to go to church with Linda and the kids when they visited. I had assumed we’d be without church together for a long time. I looked forward to holding Linda’s hand while a priest talked about forgiveness.

  The guard reviewed the prison rules and gave us each a set of written regulations. He covered inmate boundaries, visiting hours, contraband, and requests for medical needs. He spent an inordinate amount of time on mail restrictions, emphasizing that nude photographs of spouses were prohibited. He also warned that any mail containing pubic hairs would be confiscated and discarded. The guard cautioned that any violation of the rules would result in time added to our sentences. I tried to pay close attention, but I was distracted. One of the men in an orange suit, a black man in his late twenties, had turned his chair away from the presenters. He didn’t listen to what the guard said; instead, he stared directly at me, squinting like he might need glasses. Every so often he shook his head and looked around the room like he expected others would be staring at me, too. He was a small man with huge teeth. He didn’t look particularly dangerous, but I realized I probably wasn’t good at gauging that sort of thing. I tried not to look in his direction, but I could feel his stare.

  After the guard finished, a few inmates asked questions about money and television access. Another asked if the female guards were allowed to strip-search us. “You wish,” the guard said.

  Then the man who stared at me put his hand in the air and turned back toward the front. “I heard there was a 50 percent chance we was gonna be leopards when we get out of here.” The other men in orange nodded and said they had heard the same thing. The man dressed like C. Everett Koop said he would cover that after a break, but he assured us we were not at risk.

  We were released for fifteen minutes. Most of the inmates went outside behind the building to smoke. An elaborate wooden deck had been built onto the back of the visiting room. Picnic tables and bench seats were scattered around. The deck led to a small grassy yard surrounded by a low picket fence. A wooden playground set built to look like a pirate ship had been erected for the children of inmates. Neil and Maggie would like it.

  I sat on a bench and listened to the inmate with big teeth announce to his friends that he hoped he did turn into a leopard because he could sue the prison for a million dollars and he would be the richest damn leopard in America. Then he noticed me sitting alone. He motioned to his friends and walked toward me with five of his orange-clad buddies in tow. “Goddamn!” he announced. “You look just like motherfuckin’ Clark Kent!”

  His friends laughed. I straightened my glasses.

  “What you did?” he asked. “Fuck the judge’s daughter!?” His voice, high pitched with the tempo of a comedian’s, didn’t sound dangerous at all. He talked loud and laughed at his own words. The other inmates moved closer.

  I told him my crime was bank fraud.

  “You a goddamn bank robber!?”

  “No, no. Bank fraud.” I explained I had encountered some difficulty with cash flow. My crime, I told him, involved the transfer of checks from one account to another in order to buy time to refinance my magazine business.

  “I don’t know nothing about no checks,” he said, “but let me ask you a question.” He looked around to make sure he still had an audience. “Did you take money from a bank you wasn’t supposed to have?”

  The other inmates waited for my answer. “Yes.” I nodded.

  “Then you’re a goddamn bank robber!” I didn’t argue the point. No one would have heard me over the hand slapping and laughter anyway. He leaned toward me. “How much you get?”

  I told him I used the money for payroll, taxes, printing, and other publishing expenses. I could tell he didn’t believe me.

  “How much the bank lost?”

  “Two banks were involved, actually,” I said. “Together their losses were about $750,000.”

  He looked excited. “So, how much you
got?”

  “I don’t have any of it,” I reiterated. “I paid bills.”

  “I been in jails all over this country,” he announced, still playing to the other inmates, “and you the stupidest damn criminal I ever met.”

  I was embarrassed to be the brunt of his routine, but he had a point. I was in prison and I had nothing to show for it. I had to admit the guy was pretty entertaining.

  “By the way,” I said, “my name is Neil.”

  “Ain’t no more,” he said. “You got a prison name now. And it’s motherfuckin’ Clark Kent.”

  I asked his name.

  “They call me Link.”

  “Why Link?”

  Another inmate interjected, “As in ‘the missing…’”

  I stood and held out my hand, “Nice to meet you, Link.”

  “Goddamn!” he said, looking at my extended hand. “This is prison. You ain’t got to be using manners and shit.”

  For the second time since I’d been at Carville, my hand had been rejected. I wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  CHAPTER 8

  After work the following day, I returned to my room to find Mr. Flowers, a tall black man in a cowboy hat, standing in the doorway. Flowers was the case manager for our dorm, which meant he had complete authority over us, including our release dates, security level, recommendations for halfway house, and approval for home confinement. The white inmates in our dorm hated him. Most called him “Le Roy Rogers.” Flowers motioned with his clipboard. He and Doc were engaged in a heated discussion. Mr. Flowers said that all federal inmates who were not U.S. citizens were to be deported, and, according to his records, Victor Dombrowsky was born in Portugal.

  “I wasn’t born in Portugal,” Doc told him.

  Flowers insisted the prison records verified his Portuguese birth. If Doc was lying, he said, he would make it a personal priority to see him deported immediately.

  “Fine by me,” Doc said. “I was not born in Portugal.”

  Nothing seemed to bother Doc. He put his hands behind his head and lay back on his cot. Flowers gave him a long stare, tapped his clipboard, and walked away.

  “What was that all about?” I asked.

  Doc shrugged and picked up a medical journal. He was a reading machine. Night and day, he spent every spare moment with his medical publications.

  “Where were you born?” I asked.

  “Russia,” Doc said.

  Doc’s Russian heritage, in a roundabout way, had led to his imprisonment. As a bright, young, bilingual physician, Victor Dombrowsky was hired by the U.S. government to translate Russian medical documents into English. In an obscure paper, Doc found a detailed account of a chemical used by the Russian army. It was not a compound to be used against enemies; it was used on the army’s own soldiers. The chemical, DNP, when ingested, kept Russian soldiers warm in battle during winter months. It increased the soldiers’ body temperatures by three to four degrees. They could bear the bitter cold while the enemy froze to death or retreated.

  A tiny footnote, buried among the documents, had caught Dombrowsky’s attention. It was a detail any other translator might have overlooked. The chemical had an unusual side effect. In addition to raising the body temperature, the drug elevated the basal metabolic rate of the soldiers. The result: dramatic weight loss.

  Doc held both medical and pharmacy degrees, and he had dabbled in drug development, for which he had earned a number of patents. He never forgot what he’d read about in the Russian archives. Two decades later, in the mid-1980s, Doc opened dozens of clinics that specialized in weight loss. He treated obesity with a “heat pill.” Its primary ingredient was the formula used by the Russians. The advertisements promised that patients would lose up to fifteen pounds per week with no exercise.

  “Fat women loved it,” Doc said.

  Everything went well for Doc until his financial adviser, the man he considered his best friend, became a government informant. The man wore a wire for almost two years, gathering evidence for the federal investigators. He exposed Doc’s offshore accounts. He even recorded Doc talking about how best to evade taxes.

  “The fucking rat told the bastards where every penny was stashed.”

  “So you’re here for tax evasion?”

  “Not exactly,” Doc said. “The FDA got involved.”

  It turned out that DNP, the primary component of Doc’s heat pill, had been outlawed as a drug in 1938, though it was still used as a weed killer. Prescribed in the 1920s as a weight loss drug, DNP had caused skin rashes, cataracts, and other medical problems, including loss of the sense of smell. A Viennese physician who wanted to achieve rapid weight loss had taken large doses and literally cooked to death from the inside out. DNP’s side effects were the catalyst for the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938.

  Doc insisted there were no permanent side effects to his heat pill because he supplemented the DNP with hormones. In the doses he had prescribed, a patient’s body temperature would level off at about 101 degrees. “Some of our larger patients perspired a lot,” he said. “A small price to pay.”

  With DNP outlawed and with Doc’s clinic serving Medicaid patients, prosecutors tacked on Medicaid fraud charges.

  “How much Medicaid fraud?” I asked.

  Doc said that depended on who you listened to. Doc’s lawyers argued that $40,000 might have been fraudulent. The U.S. attorney’s conservative estimate ranged between $15 million and $37 million.

  “Good God!” I said. “How much time did you get?”

  “Fifteen years,” Doc said, calmly. “The system’s fucked. Like I could really get a trial of my peers.” Doc insisted a jury of physicians would have understood that his heat pill wasn’t a drug violation; it was part of a total treatment. And according to Doc, it fell under the FDA’s Investigational New Drug exception.

  The U.S. attorney threatened to prosecute Doc’s children, who were peripherally involved in the business. Doc agreed to a plea deal. He expected a five-year sentence. When Doc appealed the judge’s fifteen-year sentence, the U. S. attorney described in dramatic fashion how Dombrowsky had stolen nearly $40 million by prescribing weed killer to desperate, obese women and harbored the profits in the Cayman Islands.

  Doc lost the appeal and was stuck with the sentence. But he was determined to spend the time wisely, learning everything he could about medicine, devouring every medical paper published in America, planning the launch of his impotence cure.

  My grandfather Harry, who tried to teach me the value of a dollar, and me.

  CHAPTER 9

  The guard who had caught me talking to Ella gave me an additional daily task—mopping the inmate cafeteria. My instructions were to move all the tables and chairs, nearly three hundred, to one side of the room, mop the empty side, and then move all the chairs and tables to the opposite side to complete the job.

  The cafeteria floor was checkered linoleum, so I outlined a ten-by-ten square grid with the mop, careful not to go outside the lines. Then I covered the interior squares with soapy water. To divide the floor into small jobs, sets of perfectly square, manageable quadrants, was satisfying. I have a minor, but not debilitating, obsession with symmetry. Once a square was evenly covered and cleaned, I could admire a job well done, then move on to the next.

  The repetitive motion, the back and forth of the mop, was strangely relaxing. The job required no mental energy, and my mind wandered.

  My pay for this work was fourteen cents an hour. The meager wage reminded me of my grandfather Harry’s attempt to teach me the value of a dollar. When I was four years old, we began a Saturday morning routine. As we would drive to downtown Gulfport, Mississippi, he would remind me of my budget. I could spend exactly one dollar on a toy.

  “What if I find something I really want?” I would ask. “And it’s a little bit more than a dollar?”

  “You’ll have to wait,” my grandfather said. I would need to save the dollar from this week and add it to the dollar I would get ne
xt week, he explained gently, hoping the lesson would sink in.

  We would park in front of the old gray post office. Men and women darted in and out of the department stores, restaurants, and shops. My grandfather would introduce me to his friends as we passed on the sidewalk or met in the aisle of a store. When my search for a one-dollar toy ended, we would find a seat at a drugstore counter and order a malted milk shake or french fries. Our last stop every Saturday was always the same. My grandfather would take me to Hancock Bank. It was where everyone in our family banked.

  We would wait in line on the black-and-white marble floor with the other customers. When it was our turn at the teller window, my grandfather would prop me up on his knee and introduce me to the teller, as if he knew this bank and its employees would play a vital role in my future. Then he would say, “We need to check on our money.” The teller would walk away to check the balance in my college savings account. Upon her return, she would present us with a handwritten balance. I would look at the figure and read it aloud to my grandfather, who, when I got the balance right, would nod and smile.

  I was glad my grandfather wasn’t alive to see me in prison. I would be ashamed for him to see me like this. But I was determined not to get beaten down by incarceration. I wanted to hold on to, even hone, my skills so I could start a new publishing business when I was released. With a felony conviction, I might have trouble getting hired, but there was no law that prohibited felons from launching magazines. Doc was planning his future, and I would do the same. I had a year to plan, to design mock-ups, and to create a great business and marketing prospectus. I would use this time to plan my financial resurrection. If I could repay my bankers, investors, and creditors—give them a return on their money—it would feel like the money had been invested instead of lost. And I could be back on top.

  In the middle of my fifth square, as I neared the five hundred mark of small tiles mopped and cleaned, a guard walked into the cafeteria.