by Deeanne Gist
They sit at a small wooden table with only one chair; he fetches a stool for himself. The cushion on the stool is faded with age and covered in yellow cat hair. He salts and peppers his eggs. Like a lot of men who live alone, he wolfs down his food, barely pausing to look up. “Eat.”
She eats. The food is good, especially the eggs. “I put ketchup in them,” he explains. “And a little bit of that garlic powder.”
He waits until his plate is clear and scraped, and he looks a little longingly at her half-eaten plate. She smiles. “I had brothers growing up,” she says, and once again feels the pang of the chameleon’s truth as she pushes the plate to him.
He grins and begins stacking the eggs and bacon on her uneaten toast. “Makes a good sammitch. But you’re waiting for me to talk.”
“Only if you want.”
He stretches his back. “If only the cops had someone like you. People like me would be dead in the water. You just sittin’ there smilin’.”
“No need to be hard.”
“Sure. But I bet you can be.”
Their eyes meet.
“I knew him. That man you must be working for. York. He was a boy back then.” He pauses and studies a crust of bread. “That’s who you’re working for, right? You said death row and Sawmill Falls.”
“Yes.”
He wipes his plate with the crust. “Big news when he got caught.”
“Were you still in Sawmill Falls?”
“Naw.” He wipes the plate with his finger. “Left a long time before.”
“Before?”
His eyes raise to her, slow and brown. “Yes, ma’am. Look. It wasn’t easy.”
“I know.” She waits and drinks her coffee. “You knew Shirley, I bet.”
He gets up abruptly and takes their plates. I screwed that up, she thinks. She watches him wash the plates—too hurriedly, with tepid water—and stack them on a bent brown dish drainer. She looks at his back in a brown shirt, the heavy jeans, and the worn boots. His arms are corded with muscle, though the slope of his shoulders tells her that he is a peaceful man. She remembers his record and thinks it is funny, how sometimes the men with the longest rap sheets are the safest. She worries more about the men too smart to get caught. He dries his hand with a faded dish towel. “Got to calve some more wood,” he says.
“I never heard that phrase before.”
“Grandpa used to say it. He was on them ships up in Alaska that went whaling. Came home and wouldn’t stop talking about it. Used to say everything like it was whaling times.” He chuckles. “We’d come up here to visit him and my grandma, and that’s all the old fart would talk about. You’d think he hadn’t married and had kids or nothing else but those damn whaling ships.” He hangs his towel, his eyes faraway. “Want to go see my babies?”
“Sure,” she says, and though she doesn’t know exactly where he is going, she gets up and follows him out the back door. The old pasture is littered with broken-down wheelbarrows. She feels peaceful walking behind him, like a woods daughter behind her father. She developed a finely tuned sense of fear as a child—she knows when there is any danger. Her body tells her there is no danger in this man, at least now, so she can traipse after him through the sunny meadow and into the shady woods.
The sweet smell gets stronger as they zigzag down circuitous paths and scramble over logs set across dry creek beds. He lifts branches for her to pass under and, more than once, a string across the path—a poor man’s booby trap, to see if others are spying.
“My grandpa left this land to me. When I left Sawmill, I came here. It took a lot of healing, I guess. I got into that hippie shit for a while, then some other stuff I won’t mention. Mostly finding the bottom of the bottle. Looking for answers.”
A spiderweb hits her in the face. She nonchalantly claws at her face and sees a huge orb spider hanging inches from her hand. Without a moment’s hesitation, she claps both hands together and kills the spider, then wipes her messy hands on some ivy on a tree.
He grins with admiration. “Ain’t afraid of bugs, is you.”
“Grew up with too many.”
“Human or fly?”
They come to an open clearing where the smell is intense. Dozens of huge pot plants stand at attention, reeking with the perfume of their potency. He breaks off a bud and rubs it between his fingers. “Pretty babies.”
She waits. The smell is so strong, so female; she wonders if she can get high just from breathing.
He holds the tightly furled bud in his open palm. “I never got the whole thing, you know.”
“With Shirley.”
“With the whole town. It was like—something happened to us. Something wrong. And it was in me, too.”
The smell is overpowering, but there is also the sky above, and the calm woods around, and she can see even in the fabric of his shirt that he does not want to hurt her. Like most of the people she sees, he has been waiting his whole life for someone to listen. “You said you left.”
He nods. “I left because—I felt bad. I wanted to help Shirley. I moved in with her for a time, don’t know if you heard that. Didn’t just take from her like most of the men. But the other men, they had gotten used to it. They didn’t want to back off.”
“And York?”
“Oh. Oh boy. He was ’bout nine at that time, I suppose. He had these eyes—I can’t explain. I tried to help.”
“What did you do?”
“I brought stuff—food, mostly. I’d make them supper, feed that little boy. York’s legs would hurt him something fierce, and I got this lotion to rub on them. But none of it . . . oh well.”
She waits. The smell is dizzying, and Troy is framed in his pot plants.
“None of it worked,” the lady says.
“No, ma’am. None of it worked. They kept coming even though they knew I was there—that she had a man now. They didn’t care. They’d come when I was at work, and I’d get home and she’d be sitting on her bed, her legs all wet and that smile on her face. You got to see, ma’am, she was daft, okay? She was daft, and the men all knew it. They all took advantage of her, and oh my Lord, it was like something bad in all of us. I did it, too. I admit it, okay? But I—I cared about her. I wanted to help. She had some nice parts, ma’am. Did you know she had a pretty voice? She could sing like an angel.” He is breathing heavily.
“York.”
“That poor boy. Sometimes I’d get home and she would be just sitting on the bed, no pants, wearing nothing but an old blouse with flowers on it, with those wet naked legs. And York would be crouching in the corner. There wasn’t no place, you see, that he couldn’t see. There were times I thought the best thing I could have done was poke that boy’s eyes out with a stick.” He is still holding the green bud.
“They didn’t just come for her, did they, Troy?”
His eyes are on her, beseeching. “No, ma’am. They didn’t just come for her.”
“I thought you were one of the men who hurt her. But you wanted to help.”
“I didn’t help her, ma’am. I tried and then ran like a chicken. I left that little boy. I left him and his mom to all those men. And later, when I heard what he did . . . I was a coward, ma’am.”
“You promised York you would stay, didn’t you?”
His face looks old, no longer handsome. “How did you know that?”
“A rabbit told me.”
“Hey, crazy.” Striker has been at his door for hours, whispering to me. “I know you can hear me, crazy man. I know you can talk.”
I hide under the blanket on my cot. I climb against the bed wall and turn my face to the reassuring stone. I wish I had a book to hold, but I gave back Crazy Weather days ago. I read it three times first.
“Got something for you, crazy ass.” Striker hoots like a monkey. His giggle is low and sharply melodic. A crumpled ball of stiff white paper lands in the hall in front of our cells.
I peek at the piece of crumpled paper from under my blanket. It looks like a page f
rom a book. I am too far away to see if it has writing.
“See? Crazy ass. Here you go.” Another ball of crumpled paper lands in the hall. “Want more? Crazy ass, it’s what you get.”
A distinct reek fills the row. It is the smell of shit, ripe and pungent. I smell it often enough, from my cell and others. The toilets don’t flush well down here, and the air barely circulates. But this smell is in front of me.
“I like your book, crazy ass.”
Cold water fills me—cold water that turns to icy panic in my veins. I can barely hear someone on the other side of me say, “Aw, come on, knock it off, Striker.” It is York, of all people, telling Striker to stop.
“You like the Eskimos, don’t you? Crazy.”
The sodden ball lands neatly in front of my cell. I can see the brown smears now, see the tiny print defaced with his shit.
“I heard you can talk, crazy ass. I heard you talked. You talked when you did him. Tell me about it, crazy ass. You’re not fucking mute, you lying crazy ass. You can talk. Tell me.”
A chorus of complaints is rising from cells down the row. It is not my book they are complaining about, it is the reek of fresh shit. I can barely hear them through my red rage. I begin to pull out my hair, tears smarting in my eyes. I remember what happened before I fell for the second time, and I am glad there are bars between Striker and me. Then I am not so glad, because I could easily kill him right now. I would strangle him and bash his ugly head against the stone floor until his skull broke and the brains and blood leaked from his ears and I would tear out his eyes with my long horny nails and I would use those sharp claws to tear open—
Another crumpled ball smeared with shit. It is the cover page of The White Dawn. “Let’s hear you talk now, crazy ass.”
It is too late. I am bolting across my cell, my hands up the smooth metal bars, ricocheting back soundlessly to bounce off the walls, tearing, ripping, banging against anything I can. There is a delighted hoot next door. I smash my arms against the toilet rim, rip holes in my cheeks, and spread the blood. Striker keeps hooting, laughing, and tossing the shit balls as he hears me smash around my cell. He knows I can make no sound, raging in my cell, and he rips and tears, and the entire row begins shouting, and yet no guards ever come until my favorite book lines the row in an ankle drift of shit-stormed paper. I tear my graying hair until it is lying in torn clumps on the floor, each clump a seaweed strand headed with little white follicles. My walls are smeared with my blood, which looks weak and watery even to me, and I ricochet off the walls again and again as I hear him laugh.
The warden comes two days later. I’ve been sitting with the blanket over my head. The trays have fallen willy-nilly on the floor, spilling untouched food.
“I heard what happened.” The warden stands outside my cell. “Striker’s an asshole.”
They carried Striker off to the hole. It didn’t have anything to do with me. The guards don’t like shit. It has germs. When I first came here, one inmate shit-bombing another wasn’t such a big deal, but now, with all the hepatitis and AIDS and staph infections, the guards get mad when someone shit-bombs another.
I keep my thin arms over my face under my blanket. I can feel the scabs starting to twitch where I tore out my hair. Now I know what it means when they say someone feels adrift, without moorings, when the most precious thing in life is gone.
The warden sighs. “People can be assholes sometimes.”
There is nothing left.
“I bought something for you,” the warden says.
The warden drops a small book with a white jacket through the slot. It is so new, I can smell the ink. The book falls as one stiff entity to the dirty stone floor. No pages flap, because the book has never been opened. The spine is unbroken.
I have never seen a brand-new book. I peer under the blanket through what remains of my raggedy hair.
The book has landed so the title is visible on the floor. The White Dawn it says.
I cannot help myself. I scramble off my bunk to rescue it. It cannot lie on the befouled floor. I grab it with long yellow nails. I hold it tight to my chest, feeling the stiff gloss of the cover under my fingertips. The smell of new paper and ink is like heaven.
My heart is beating, and now I know why they say beating like a drum. It is the drumming sound of blood running to all corners, flooding my body with the magic of the words inside. I scramble back on my cot and cover my head once again with the blanket, the book pressed against my thundering heart.
I want to tell the warden thank you, but of course I can’t talk.
“How are you, Mom?”
This is what the lady always says when she visits her mom, and every time she says the word, it breaks her heart into pieces that she has to pick up in her hands and shove back in her chest.
Her mom has dried crumbs on her lips and a vacant look in her eyes until she realizes it is her daughter. The lady takes her mom’s hand. It is cold, and she rubs it. Her mother wakes up to the world and starts complaining. This is what the aides say about her mom, too. She is a Grade A complainer.
Today her mom wants to complain about another resident at her disability home. She believes that the resident stole the perfume the lady gave her for Christmas, even though the aides have told her a million times that no one stole your perfume, you used it all up. But her mother is like that. She perseverates, is the medical term, which is fancy talk for saying getting stuck in a hell of an annoying way.
The lady listens to her mom talk and talk and talk and feels the old dull ache inside her. This is her mother—the one who gave birth to her, pushed her from her canal. Breast-fed her, she was told, until she was almost two. Loved her, in her own way. Fed her when reminded, cuddled her when she cried. Forgot her at the park. Never knew how to take her to a doctor. Misunderstood thermometer readings. Called the ambulance for colds but let broken bones go untreated. Couldn’t set an alarm clock so her daughter never got to school on time. Never bought a toothbrush or read her a book or cooked a recipe. But would hug and kiss her and loved her beyond all measure. All the usual stuff of growing up with a mom with an IQ of 69, the lady thinks.
“Is everything okay, Mom?”
She has been her mom’s caretaker since she was five. That was when she realized that her mom was one of them—a retard. The ones everyone made fun of. Even nice normal people on television make fun of retards. Short bus, ’tard, retard, she has heard them all.
She loved her mom anyhow. She wanted to protect her mom from the people who would make fun. So she learned how to cook and clean. She took care of her mother, and her mother’s boyfriends took care of her: a circle of sickness and despair.
She was never one of them—never one of the normal people who teased and jeered and made fun of her mom in the store, following behind them and mocking her waddle-walk or the way she talked. She didn’t want to be one of her mother’s friends, either—the crazies and the slow learners and the strange men who you thought cared even as they shamed you. She could remember their names as easily as she recalled the names of the men she knew on the row. Danny, David, Alfonso. Robert and Joe.
Her mother seemed to wear an invisible beacon when the lady was a child. Even a trip on the bus could be a hazard—invariably, some creep would want to sit next to the retarded woman and her pretty daughter. How many times she had hopelessly tugged her mom’s dirty sleeve only to be shushed—you be quiet!—her mom thinking the nice man wanted to talk to her, when it was really the tiny dark-haired girl sitting next to her whom he met with his gloaming eyes.
She realized early on that if she told anyone what her mother let happen to her, they would take her away from her mom. She was thirteen when she told a school counselor, because she was afraid of getting pregnant. It was a day that haunts her still for the scalding sense of having failed her mother. When the police arrived at the school nurse’s office to interview her, she looked in their sober faces and realized she was never going home again. She was sent to a f
oster home for sexually abused girls. Her only consolation was she was able to find her mother again, years later, and get her in this nice disability home.
“You okay, Mom?”
This is her mom, this woman with thinning hair and a squat body. This is her mom, with breath like ripe apples and breasts that lie unhammocked on her chest. A woman who let men come and go through her door for years, to molest her baby. Not out of evil but for a reason that’s harder to accept: She didn’t know better.
“I brought something for you,” the lady gently says to her mom.
She pulls two Barbie dolls from her bag. Her mom always loved dolls. Her earliest memories as a toddler were playing Barbies with her mom. They would play for hours in the sun-splashed living room on the old ripped couch, under the shifting patterns of the torn tablecloth curtains. Finally, she would get hungry and go into their dank kitchen and climb on the counters to find something to eat.
Someone should have taken care of you, too, Mom.
She delights to see her mom’s hazel eyes light up at the sight of the flaxen-haired plastic dolls. The two sit at the visiting room table and begin to play. An aide passes by, and a soft light comes into her eyes.
“Who are we today?” the lady asks her mother. She has an image of the priest sitting with them at the table. It is a surprising image but not a bad one. She thinks he would be kind.
“Princesses.” Her mother giggles.
“Yes. Princesses,” the lady says.
I sit in my cell and remember the psychiatrist I saw back when I was a kid, when they sent me to the mental hospital. I was maybe twelve at the time; I’m not sure, exactly. Time had stopped passing. I was safe. No one tried to make me talk.
The psychiatrist was young. He had blue eyes that were sunburned around the corners, and his hair was sun-bleached. He looked like a surfer. On his desk was a dried Play-Doh sculpture decorated with finger-paints. I thought maybe someday I could put a sculpture on his desk. He would brag about me to his friends. He would say my name and smile.
