Lighthouse Island

by Paulette Jiles

INK: FORTY DIMES

  LABOR: NINETY-TWO DIMES

  TOTAL: 132 W.C. DMS

  A team of men slogged up a mountain pass and from time to time the straggling line was obscured by blizzards. Feral humans with green gummy-looking teeth charged at them from the forests but the Imperial Rebels soldiered on.

  I thought they all got killed, said Nadia. She had learned to speak in the accepted flat voice, bare of interrogatives, emotionless. Watching the television made her feel better but soon her eyes would develop a glittering field of sparks and then pain. She looked down at her hands. The crowded room full of women stared resolutely at the TV, which was what they were supposed to do. It made the guards happy. They yelled at a very young girl for dancing and the old gypsy women playing some kind of game with bits of pilot biscuits.

  That was the guys that went AWOL, said Charity. This is Captain Kenaty’s unit. They are trying to get to the AWOL guys and get their cell phones. But they don’t know the AWOL guys got killed by the savage hippies. They put the captain back in because the young men were rioting over it. Listen, the guard that comes for you is named Terminal Verna. The one that takes you away for death row.

  A gypsy woman sitting near them said, Big tall woman. When they send her for you it’s all over. They give you your stuff and say, Here’s Terminal Verna, come to take you away. She laughed silently with her lips shut. It’s blotto for you. But maybe you get to be on TV. You get to be a star for about ten seconds.

  Charity rested her chin on her fists. Terminal Verna needs her throat slit, she said. The Facilitator needs his throat slit.

  Nadia clapped her hand over Charity’s mouth and whispered, You’re going to get killed, you’re going to end up in the dryers.

  Nadia sat on her cot with its unraveling gray blanket and the dirty sheets and tried to help women fill out applications. The guards sat at the wide entrance to the Q ward watching My News, My Day. The jail authorities had just thrown any kind of application in a pile on the table: applications for clothing allowances, for Buddy car repairs, for lightbulbs and pet ownership and divorce and vacation time and study programs and small appliances. The women simply wanted to be heard by some official somewhere. They wanted their name in a file so they did not disappear altogether.

  Okay, so you have to give your reasons here, Nadia said. The noise of the television and the hundred or so women in the ward was so loud she had to raise her voice. The air stank.

  You write it, said a small blond woman. She was crocheting a cat out of blanket threads. You can write it; you know how to say it right. The young woman’s voice was light and childlike.

  Well, what kind of toaster do you want?

  Oh, one for bread.

  All toasters are for bread. You’ll have to apply for a yeast bread allowance.

  Oh, well, let’s do lightbulbs, then.

  Nadia turned the application over and crossed out toaster and wrote in lightbulbs with her pencil stub and said, Why are you in here?

  The small blond woman said, I helped my boyfriend with his pirate radio station. They tracked us down somehow. I don’t know how they do it. She smoothed out her crocheted cat and regarded it and then began on the tail, looping the blanket threads on a fork tine. And you? What about you, Sendra?

  I messed up at my job, said Nadia. I worked at a special memorizing section. She wrote down, “Request for three 25-watt lightbulbs for reasons of deficient eyesight.” I didn’t recycle my trash. Threw it all out the window. I was drinking wine at the time.

  Memorizing?

  I had to memorize poetry.

  What’s going on here, what’s going on here? shouted the fat guard that everybody called the Lard Queen. The guard bulled her way into the listening crowd, grabbed the application from Nadia’s hand, and tore it up. The Lard Queen had grown bored with her news, her day.

  Often Nadia was so thirsty she briefly considered drinking the water in the toilet tanks. Briefly. They were to be sent to a work farm somewhere but here they were already, slaving like Orcs in the Mines of Moriah. Nadia asked Charity, Am I talking in my sleep? I am dreaming so intensely. I dream about this man that I met and I am laughing with him, there’s an ocean and then other things.

  No, said Charity. If you do I’ll whack you on the arm.

  What if you’re asleep.

  I’ll wake up.

  Listen.

  What.

  I think that’s rain on the windows.

  Charity lifted her head. Is it possible?

  There had to be a way to get out of here, by lying or adopting some disguise or murdering a guard or hiding in the garbage. And then going on as she had begun, to the north. She bent her head and tried to see it in her mind and not the brilliant and professional images of sitcoms and Sector Secrets.

  Does the sea remember the walker upon it?

  Supper and the water ration arrived in a noisy trundling as the barrels were rolled down the hall to their ward and other wards on the Q ward. The water seemed more vital than food. Everyone grabbed their metal cups and shoved into line and some women staggered; their blood pressure was low from dehydration. Nadia learned that standing up quickly made you faint. She stood up slowly. Charity held out her cup as if it were a chalice, trembling.

  One night when the guard at the door had fallen asleep and was lightly snoring the small blond woman whispered, Recite. You said you memorized all these poems.

  What.

  Anything. Anything you memorized.

  And out of the unresting crowd of women with their arms or sheets thrown over their faces voices spoke up: Yes, yes, recite, give us a poem.

  Nadia rustled around in the files of her memory. It was a moment of strange elation and she realized it was because she and the women in the ward were together for themselves, just this short time. The guards were not the focus of their attention. She put her hands over her eyes and whispered,

  The souls of those I love are on high stars.

  How good that there’s no-one left to lose

  and one can weep. All created in order

  to sing songs, this air of Tsarskoye Selo’s.

  The river bank’s silver willow

  touches the bright September stream.

  Rising from the past, my shadow

  is running in silence to meet me.

  So many lyres hung on branches here,

  but it seems there’s room for mine too.

  And this shower, sun-drenched, rare,

  brings me consolation and good news.

  And all around them women sat up in their beds and listened. The woman who had strangled her twins and the woman who had made false invoices, the one who had lost her ID, the girl who spoke on pirate radio, the gypsy women who were not gypsies, all tortured with one another’s endless proximity but now each one listening for herself alone to the words, things rising from their pasts like silent running shadows. What was a harp, what was a tree. Consolation. Good news. Then it began to rain lightly, as if the world had just remembered how. It tapped at the painted windows as if it wanted in.

  Chapter 26

  The sons of bitches and the bitches got to jam themselves into everything we do. They listen to everything we say.

  Charity stopped muttering long enough to eat half of her black bean and corn patty. The kitchen was blasted with the theme music from the new program called Things You Cannot Say. The atmosphere was heavy with steam and food odors, as if the air had weight and mass, as if it had color and the color was of some sour, tarnished metal. They were sitting on upturned buckets eating their midday meal, on work assignment in the big kitchens.

  Nadia had stolen one kitchen worker’s pair of coveralls and she could steal a second pair given the opportunity. She was not going to wait any longer for some kind of message from James. He would not understand how she was slowly going insane here. The heroines
of the escape novels she had read were always as beautiful as clothing models in essential occupations, with significant villains after them, the center of high-level conspiracies. She was a nobody and she was determined to remain a nobody. That way she might stay alive.

  What happened? Nadia said. Why were you arrested?

  A donkey. I had a donkey. Charity ate quickly. They had fifteen minutes. She wiped her tiny mouth and said, He was about two hundred pounds underweight; I was going to fat him up but they got me for animal abuse. I was going to fat him up on cake batter. I knew where to get old expired sacks of cake batter powder. I knew how to forge his license and all the permissions stuff.

  A donkey. Nadia laughed, as if she were laughing at a yelling woman on Things You Cannot Say. The woman was in a shouting fury at a street vendor. Nadia’s tunic collar was sticking to her neck and her feet ached from the straw slippers and she had come to hate the sound of them, slop, slop, slop, gray uniform lives and gray slopping noises like walking rinds. The semolina was like gluey sand. I can’t believe it. A real donkey.

  Yeah, yeah. I got him way up north. I was traveling at night but there was some guys from that venomous natural substances program or natural poisonous pest program or council or task force or some shit like that, out looking for scorpions with blacklight flashlights and they nailed me. Bad paper. They said they had the power of arrest and detainment. Liars. Charity snarled over her black bean patty. Liars, liars.

  Are people different out there in the field systems? asked Nadia. I mean, more resourceful, more hopeful and, you know, just different?

  Shit, I don’t know. Why ask me. They are goddamned prisoners for God’s sakes, Sendra.

  Around them the kitchen workers slung pots and pans into the thirty-gallon sinks full of soapy water and sliced open packages of semolina and tapioca, bags of sugar, emptied them into bins. At the door a dehydrated old woman held out her cupped hand and asked for half a cup of water. Kitchen Head shouted Get out, Granny. Get your ass out of here.

  Nadia clasped her hands together to keep from walking up to Kitchen Head and smacking her. To speak like that to an elderly woman, look at her hands, a woman who had worked hard all her life and God knows why she was here. Nadia shut her hand around her fork and opened it again and shut it again and told herself to stop it.

  She leaned closer to Charity. Could you go through that again?

  Yah. Way north. A million miles north. There’s some open places up there. Past the Mon Debris Soybean Farms. There’s two-three donkeys up there. They took him away in a yellow bus. She bent her tangled head over her black bean patty.

  Took who.

  My donkey.

  Okay. Are you from the North? I mean, why were you coming south to this area?

  I was born up there on the Jolly Green Giant Essential Grains headquarters; my mother was a free worker. She said my dad was a guard. I just go around here and there. One place and another. I can’t stand being in one place all the time. I been arrested four times now. I got to find that donkey. His name is Homer.

  Did you ever hear of Lighthouse Island?

  Shit, yeah, it’s on TV.

  Well, is there e-waste up there? North of here?

  Sure, before the farms. From here north there’s a kind of snooty neighborhood then scrap, then the paper mill. I know where north is, you bet your ass. Charity tossed her black hair. I know where south is, too.

  Nadia saw Kitchen Head looking over at them and quickly smiled and gestured at the screen where a man on the street was shrieking at a bus conductor. There was no voice, just a sound track: Bridge Over Troubled Water. It was a very popular program since it showed ordinary people going into emotional states of rage, caught on camera, and the only other place you could see ordinary people instead of higher-up celebrities was on Sector Secrets where they were being arrested or dragged bloodily from bus wrecks. Nadia laughed in a false voice at a tiny enraged woman on the screen. Her Dutchboy haircut fell in hanks around her face; she saw herself in a shining steel pot. She looked like a fiercely intelligent floor mop.

  Did you escape, when you were in jail before?

  Charity stared hard at Nadia. No. But. She was silent again for a moment. I am ready to this time. The garbage chute, eh.

  Exactly. Nadia forked down a crisp edge of black bean patty. We can do it in kitchen worker coveralls. I already have one pair.

  If we’re caught they’ll kill us right there. We won’t even get a screen test. Charity laughed.

  I don’t care, said Nadia. I don’t care.

  That evening two guards came and took away the little pirate radio blond woman, the one Nadia had helped fill out applications. Her face was vacant and stunned, her blue eyes wide with fear. Good luck, the other women whispered. Good luck.

  The next day Charity managed to steal a second pair of kitchen worker’s coveralls from a locker and then used them to mop the floor as if they were a wad of mop rags. Afterward Charity took them to the shower with her under her own clothes and washed the filth away.

  It grew colder and from time to time they could hear light rain pinging at the painted windows. This would be a good time to try the garbage chute. It would not be festering with flies. Charity said, Wait, wait. I know when a good time is. Trust me.

  It was close to All Hallows Eve and soon Male Voice One and Female Voice One would begin to read all the sea stories—Joseph Conrad and Melville and The Golden Ocean, which read aloud so well, and The Voyage of the Liberdade—and they would play the ballad “the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which always made her cry. From time to time in the evening she found herself staring at the gray-painted windows in all the noise and smells while she beat her fists on her thighs in gentle repetitive thuds.

  She whispered to Charity, When?

  Next week. New guard is coming. Doesn’t know her way around.

  That night the guards smirked as the Trials and Tribulations program came on. There was the little blond woman in the dock, shrinking away from a shouting prosecutor and the camera, fighting for her life.

  Chapter 27

  Big shots having lunch with administration, said the head cook. All the good girls get to take it up and serve it. Hey? Fancy offices. Air-conditioned. Bad girls don’t get to go. Hey? She turned to Nadia. And what are you?

  I’m a good girl, said Nadia. And may God forgive me for groveling. She went back to scraping the oily crust from the inside of a twenty-gallon rice pot. A good girl, a good girl. Very unattractive. Poor camera quality.

  Nadia and Charity and two others shoved the lunch trolleys on the freight elevator and stood braced while they and the rattling dishes shot upward. They were dressed in new, pressed jail uniforms. They were strictly clean. Nadia counted the floors. Seven. In another day she and Charity would get out via the garbage chute and then, if they were caught appearing among the slop, start accusing whoever was standing around of poor safety practices and demand an investigation and then in the confusion get onto a food delivery truck. If they were caught the essential thing was to create as much confusion as possible.

  The guard whispered, Head guy from the top Demolition offices. Came on an airplane, imagine, an airplane. She flung open the doors to the administrator’s office. When Nadia and the others pushed the trolleys in she saw James.

  The two halves of her heart struck together like a bell. Her mouth opened. Then she suffered through a little cough. She flushed red. Her ears were burning. James turned in his wheelchair with an attitude of mild interest and looked into her eyes half of a second. His eyes were a rainy gray. It was the first time she had seen his face in daylight and he gave nothing away. Then he glanced at all the other women prisoners and returned to a diagram.

  Kitchen Head stepped forward and laid paper placemats of blue-and-beige stripes in front of James and then the administrator. The administrator regarded the women with a blank antis
eptic stare. Kitchen Head ignored the administrator’s assistant who clearly expected to be ignored and was regarded as a sort of wastebasket or perhaps a human in-out box. He sat against the wall, a meager sour man in a spindly chair. James took up his fountain pen and began to doodle on the placemat.

  I know, he said, but we’ve already designed the C-4 placements. We have designated five thousand drilled holes and twenty-one miles of detonating cord.

  There’s nothing wrong with this building, nothing, said the administrator. The assistant said indeed there is not with little minimal sentences of body language. A minute head toss.

  The women all stood silently behind the lunch trolley with their pressed jail clothes and clean nails while overhead fans beat the office air into waves like heartbeats. Nadia gripped a slotted serving spoon, poised over a mound of tapioca topped with maraschino cherries that looked like toy nipples. James had three thick folders laid out on the table. The jail administrator pushed them around as if they were giant playing cards.

  Nadia could not take her eyes from his face for long moments and then remembered and looked down at the slotted server. She saw the silver trembling with little lights.

  You’re using water like there is no tomorrow, said James. We have authorization from the highest level to consider plans for a more hydro-efficient unit somewhere else. I mean this building is ten stories high, you’re using huge amounts of electricity to pump, and it’s just one inefficient unit tacked onto another. As far as I can see the original building was a library, a hundred years ago, and now it’s surrounded by add-on after add-on serviced by very old leaking water pipes. James tapped his fingers restlessly over files. He took up his pen and doodled a stick figure roller-skating on the placemat.

  I saw you on television, said the administrator. You claim your brother, some kind of rain man, a storm expert, is saying these disastrous rains are coming. We’ve had three little rains and he’s talking floods! Should I be thinking about where the high ground is? Eh? Should I go and buy a rubber dinghy? Where’s the drainage maps for this area? Shouldn’t I be thinking about whether to save myself and my family and just leave all the prisoners to drown in their cells? Now where’s your water problem?