by Joan Brady
‘You believe everything you read?’
‘Every word.’
The sale of South Hams State Penitentiary to private enterprise had changed more than the prison’s name. Private accountants had gone to work at once trimming off the fat. They’d contracted out prisoners en masse as a labour force and charged all running costs to a government happy to brag of ‘rehabilitation’ and ‘work experience’. They’d got food per prisoner down to fifty cents a day, a third of the cost of feeding the dogs that guarded the grounds and accompanied inmates on work details. As for the guards, it had taken only months to break the union; the entire staff had walked out, refusing to work for the pittance the accountants offered. Standards for new staff were low, training minimal, turnover high.
Lillian started the engine, stopped it, shook her head. ‘David, you got a passport or something saying you’re this Gwendolyn guy?’
‘Passport, driver’s license, life story – even a national insurance card. Born in Peterborough, Ontario (Canadian Graduate, The University of Toronto).’
‘How’d you get that?’
‘You don’t want to know.’
She shook her head again, chuckled to herself, restarted the engine. ‘I never been to Canada,’ she said.
‘Me neither.’
‘You’re joshing me.’
‘Nope.’
South Hams State Correctional Facility was north and west of town. Thirty-foot high, grey stone walls rose out of flat farmland that stretched away to the horizon in every direction. David hadn’t been back since his release.
‘What’s going on here?’ he said as they approached it an hour later. ‘Boy scouts?’
A series of fences made a large enclosure at the base of those walls. First came a boundary fence, then a high, chain-link periphery with coiled razor wire on top, then two internal chain-link fences, also with razor wire on top. Row upon row of khaki-coloured tents big enough to sleep a hundred people clustered inside.
She snorted. ‘They calls it “boot camp”. Andy calls it “Tent City”.’
‘Yeah?’
‘You build you a prison out of bricks and mortar, it gonna cost you a hundred million. One of these? Just an itty-bitty million, and you just picks it up and moves it when you want. They musta brought fifteen hundred guys down here six weeks ago. Maybe more.’
‘All this for the canal?’
‘Little Andy says the foremen was trained in one of them internment camps near Joliet.’
Details in the media were scanty, but anybody connected with South Hams knew that without chain gangs, the Grand canal would never get built. Leasing prisoners as labour had spread across America; they were making the country competitive again. Why farm out shoemaking, clothes manufacture, computer assembly to China and Indonesia when American prisoners could do it for less at home?
‘You done wash all your clothes like I told you?’ Lillian asked David.
He nodded. ‘I always do what you tell me.’
‘You don’t got no dollar bills on you?’
‘Like I say, I always do—’
‘Okay, okay.’ She handed him a wad of dollar bills she’d washed last night and dried in the oven.
One of the few areas that the prison’s new administration had beefed up was security. The first time Lillian had come to visit Little Andy, the ion sensor that scans visitors had come up with the reading that she was carrying cocaine. They sent her away, told her she couldn’t come back for forty-eight hours. When the forty-eight hours were up, the scanner said she was carrying methamphetamine. They banned her for thirty days. She’d burst into tears right there in the main control room, and somebody else’s mother told her that most likely the problem was the dollar bills she was carrying; every single dollar bill in circulation has traces of drugs on it.
And few people came to South Hams State Correctional Facility without dollar bills in hand. The vending machines in the Visitation Room took only dollar bills, and only visitors could use the machines. Fifty cents a day for food kept the prisoners hungry, and the prison canteen – where inmates could buy toothpaste, candy, cigarettes – charged three times the price on the outside. No food could be brought in. Guards were forbidden to make change, and visiting hours were always over lunch.
After the thirty-day ban, Lillian’s planning had been meticulous, and she’d never had trouble again. There was no trouble this time either.
Nor did the scanner pick up anything on Richard François Gwendolyn.
The Visitation Room was large. Blue and yellow plastic chairs faced each other in rows bolted to the floor. A prison guard wearing earphones walked up and down like an invigilator at a college entrance exam. David used sixteen of Lillian’s one dollar bills to buy two coffees and two sandwiches.
‘They’re making a fortune here,’ he said, handing a paper cup and a sandwich to the convict he’d come to visit. ‘You don’t look as healthy as I remember.’
‘I’m a little tired, that’s all.’ He was the one they called Quack, and his freckled face showed an old man’s tracery of lines, although he wasn’t much over forty. ‘You know, I never thought I’d see Richard François Gwendolyn again,’ he said. ‘It was such a surprise to get your letter – such a pleasure. It’s been so long I can’t even remember where we met.’
‘University of Toronto,’ said David, who had no idea whether Quack had been to Canada any more than he had.
‘Aha!’ said Quack. ‘You mean the Hole.’
‘Precisely.’
‘“Introduction to Management”, wasn’t it?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘Rather a dull course, I always thought.’
‘Did you? I remember it fondly.’
‘That’s because you went into a more interesting line of business than I did.’
David had started trafficking in drugs in South Hams while Quack actually was studying a course called Introduction to Management, although not at the University of Toronto; he was a Chicago graduate, known as Brendan Kolb back then. These days he served as the prison’s medic. Not that he was a real doctor either – he’d picked up medicine behind bars – but prison suited him. A prison medic has respect. Outside, he’d been just one more middle management nobody going nowhere, doing work he despised.
‘This won’t be the only visit, will it?’ he said to David.
‘Now you’re going to tell me you miss me.’
‘Of course I miss you. How could it be otherwise? I don’t have anybody to talk to, and you’re so’ – Brendan searched for the word – ‘so unpleasant. But I have four men in the ward recovering from something in the gut. Dunno what it is. Makes me nervous when I got four down with something I don’t understand. I need to keep a careful eye on them.’
‘Flu or something?’
‘The medical service says gastroenteritis. I’m inclined to think food poisoning.’ Medical Services Direct was a subsidiary of the St Louis-based parent corporation that owned and operated South Hams as well as dozens of other prisons in the Midwest. They consulted only by telephone; in all his years as a prison medic, Quack had encountered only two real live doctors and a handful of nurses. The subsidiary that had just taken over the catering was the one that had reduced the costs to fifty cents a day per inmate. At that price, food poisoning was the most likely explanation.
‘I wish I could persuade myself it was my charms that brought you here,’ Quack said, ‘but I know better than that. Is there something you want me to do for you?’
‘Skinny black kid.’
‘There’s no shortage of them in here.’
David tilted his head towards Lillian, who was sitting at the other side of the room opposite her son.
Brendan glanced over at him, then frowned. ‘Oh.’
‘Looks like I might need a favour.’
‘He doesn’t look like your type.’
‘Doesn’t he?’
Quack gave a sad shrug. ‘I wish I’d had a mother like that.’ He
frowned again. ‘She can’t want to know. You going to tell her?’
Twenty years ago, Brendan Kolb had been a 23-year-old case of arrested development, obsessed by the desire to shock his hippy parents out of the belief that he was the world’s next Lenin. Lenin said, ‘Religion was the opiate of the people’: Brendan became a Catholic. ‘Superlative cover,’ they laughed. They churned out leaflets against the ‘pigsty of capitalism’ and the corporate exploitation of workers; he majored in business administration for no other reason than to outrage them. Result? They bragged to their friends that he was preparing himself to ‘work from within’. They marched against Barbie dolls’ degradation of women; he used his college education to get a job with Barbie’s manufacturer, Mattel, Inc. Result? His parents glowed with pride about his revolutionary self-sacrifice.
So one night, he turned on the gas in the fireplace in their bedroom while they slept. They never woke up. A Mattel lawyer defended him – not with much enthusiasm – but Brendan’s own shock at what he’d done was so obvious and so pitiful that it kept him off Death Row. As for life imprisonment, he saw it as no more than he deserved.
Within hours of his arrival in South Hams, he was gang-raped in front of a yelping crowd. When that was over, a group of cons played poker for him. Education had a far higher value in prison than it did outside, and he was a prize worth some effort. The Shark won. Brendan became his wife, his punk, his bitch. It’s a lot easier to break a man than people think. Within a couple of months, he’d lost a quarter of his body weight.
David was eighteen years old then, barely more than a boy. They were both murderers, but David had beaten his victims to death. He’d been a 15-year-old illiterate at the time; his state-appointed defender had entered a guilty plea without even interviewing his client, and he’d escaped lethal injection only because of his age. Back then the state of Illinois required schooling for convicts that young. That’s how he’d met Helen’s father, Hugh, eminent Springfield lawyer, educated in England, paying what he felt was his own debt to society by teaching the likes of David to read and write. David turned out to be a star pupil, even picking up those traces of Hugh’s accent. At South Hams State Prison, egghead punks like Brendan commanded high prices; straight-up eggheads-to-be like David were aristocrats.
Brendan used to envy David from across the yard. The boy seemed to shimmer with anger. A single breath of air, a single mistimed glance, a single word out of place, anything at all was going to be a match tossed in a gas tank. One day – it was one of those slow-motion terrors – Brendan saw David heading towards him. Not just towards him either: for him. Right up to him.
‘You got a college education, right?’ David said. Brendan just stared. The faint English accent and the absence of prison argot were far less terrifying than a gaze that didn’t waver and conceded nothing. Only cops stare like that – and crazies. ‘Come on. Talk to me. You got a college education or not?’ Brendan gave a quick nod. ‘That include algebra?’ Another quick nod. ‘You want out of the Shark’s bed?’
To Brendan’s enduring shame, he began to cry.
‘You’ll have to kill him.’
Once the wife of an inmate, always the wife of an inmate. That was prison law. Unless you killed your abuser with your own hands.
Brendan shook his head. ‘I just can’t. I just . ’ He gestured helplessly at his emaciated body.
‘Suppose I trade you for it,’ David said.
‘Trade?’
‘Yes.’
‘Trade what?’
‘The Shark for something I want.’
‘What could I have that would be of any interest to you?’
‘Algebra.’
‘Algebra?’ Brendan almost shrieked the word. ‘You want . Algebra? Why?’
David’s gaze took on a harder edge. ‘I don’t want a wife if that’s what’s worrying you – especially such a scrawny one.’
Brendan hadn’t believed him. He knew it wasn’t true. But what choice did he have? David was younger and stronger. If he wanted the Shark’s meat, he’d have it. That too was prison law.
A week or so after that meeting, the Shark was dead, and Brendan was moved to David’s cell.
As soon as the guards left, David said, ‘I got requirements.’ Brendan had learned more than he wanted to know about sexual perversions during his time with the Shark, but he was sure there was lots more to learn.
‘Um,’ he said in a tiny voice.
‘I like things neat.’
‘Things . ’
‘I hate disorder.’
Housework was a wife’s traditional duty in prison just as it is on the outside. ‘You want me to . ’ Brendan trailed off.
‘Yeah. Right,’ David said. ‘I keep my stuff neat, and you got to keep your stuff neat.’
‘What about your stuff?’
‘Like I say, I keep it neat. You leave it alone.’
Brendan glanced at him, glanced away, glanced back, then said tentatively, ‘It’s algebra you have trouble with?’
The lesson began at once. It didn’t take Brendan more than ten minutes to recognize how quick David’s mind was. In ten minutes more, he’d established that David’s trouble wasn’t algebra at all but fractions. David had long ago trained himself not to smile, but it was clear he was delighted.
Before Brendan even knew he was going to say it, he’d blurted out, ‘You killed a man just to find out you didn’t know fractions?’
‘You complaining?’
‘No, no. Oh, no. Not me.’
‘What then?’
‘I don’t know how to survive in this place,’ Brendan said.
‘I already talked to the guys that need talking to. You get trouble, you come to me.’
‘Why?’
David turned that unflinching gaze on him. ‘I get a kick out of it.’
‘But why . ’ Brendan shook his head and sat down on the edge of the cement shelf that served as his bed. ‘Why are you helping me?’
David surveyed him. ‘Look at you. You’re a bag of bones. I seen guys go like that. Another month and they’d be zipping you in a black bag. It was you or the Shark.’ There was a pause, a shrug. ‘The Shark didn’t know algebra.’
David and Lillian didn’t speak until they were almost halfway back to Springfield.
‘You gonna tell me something or not?’ she said.
David lit a cigarette, took a deep drag on it. ‘South Hams is a hard place.’
‘You’re lying to me, David Marion.’
‘I haven’t said anything.’
‘That’s what I mean. And don’t you look at me like that. Ain’t nothing you can do to make me scared of you. I just talked to my boy. He lost maybe twenty-five pounds. His hands is shaking. He’s scared out of his wits. He got five years to serve, and he ain’t gonna make it alive.’
‘Kind of little for his age.’
‘They beating up on him?’
‘That guy – the one I was talking to – he’ll take care of it.’
‘He ain’t nothing but little hisself.’
‘The kid does what he says, he’ll start feeling better.’
They drove in silence for another few minutes. Then Lillian said, ‘He’s HIV positive, ain’t he?’
‘How would I know something like that?’
‘David, I love that child. You’re not supposed to love one child more than the others. I tried. I prayed ’til my knees was sore, but Little Andy, he’s like my brother Joshua. There’s just something about him that makes my heart turn over.’
The outskirts of Springfield are a tangle of highways that loop over each other, then straighten out as though the looping had all been just a game, town planners at play over a drunken lunch, hurriedly covering up their traces for the wife and kids at home.
‘If he’s sick,’ David said, ‘he needs a diagnosis and a medication protocol. He won’t get better care in Springfield. In my day, even the Warden went to Quack.’
‘“Quack”?’
‘That guy.’
‘He can get him medicine?’
‘I said, “if he’s sick”. Maybe he isn’t.’
‘How do I pay him?’
‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘David, I got money. I can get it to him some way or other. I don’t want you paying for nothing.’
David stared out at the road ahead. ‘There’s a company called Ward that makes paper model skeletons for about forty dollars. Send him one of those.’
‘Forty! That won’t buy nothing. I’m supposed to send a skeleton to this here Quack? How come a doctor needs a skeleton?’
‘Not to Quack. To the kid.’
‘What is it anyhow? Some kind of voodoo or something?’
‘You have objections to voodoo?’
‘David, I don’t got no objections to nothing. You wants a skeleton. You gots a skeleton.’
8
SPRINGFIELD: Lunchtime the same day
‘This is very inconvenient,’ Becky said as Helen put a tray down on the table in the conservatory. It was a simple lunch – cold grilled chicken, potato salad, iced tea – that Lillian had prepared yesterday because of today’s trip to the prison.
Becky’s gardener grew vegetables in this conservatory all winter long. In summer as now, when Illinois boils, air conditioning made what should have been an oven into a cool garden, a few discreet single roses but mainly greenery, fruit trees for shade and scent: peach, apricot, blood orange, lemon.
‘It’s a picnic,’ Helen said.
‘Picnics are for children.’
‘Come on, Grandma, you like picnics.’
‘I hate picnics.’
‘I don’t know why. You sure as hell sound like a six year old. Wheel that thing over here.’
Becky’s wheelchair could go up and down steps. She could raise and lower the seat. She could even speak to it to tell it what she wanted it to do, but she did that only in private. She used its sophisticated electronics to manoeuvre herself to the table and allowed Helen to help her into a dining chair.
Becky didn’t really need the help. She didn’t need a wheelchair either, much less one so technologically advanced. But how else was an old woman to protest such a marriage? How dare Helen present her with a fait accompli? Becky had decided guilt was the only effective card to play, but it was a hard one for her. She hated dependence. She hated weakness and passivity. She feared them, was furious at the whole world for failing to provide a dignified alternative and furious with herself for being unable to wrangle one all on her own. Worse, Helen didn’t seem much concerned, which meant she suspected the ruse. That meant Becky had to redouble her efforts, hone her role. And that meant she had to use the wheelchair far more than she’d planned, and she could feel the damned thing actually making her weaker.
