“It’s only a grade,” said Mr. Quick when Will shuffled up to him after class and burst out, “But both wasn’t one of the options!”
Mr. Quick was different from the other teachers. He talked about critical thinking, and there wasn’t always a particular answer he was looking for, which was why Will thought going to English class was kind of like standing on tiptoe in a rocky boat.
“Did you learn anything?” asked Mr. Quick. “Was your mind expanded?”
“I guess so,” said Will, for he had thought about the questions all the way home.
“Isn’t learning the point?” Mr. Quick chuckled in a friendly manner, as if learning was not only the point, but also a lot of fun.
“I guess it is,” said Will. One of the things he was learning was that the choice wasn’t always between right and wrong. Another was that the all-important grading rubric was the thing that separated the college-bound from those whose only options were the munitions plant or the chicken farm or a life of petty crime.
3.4 Maggie
Maggie told herself that working at the prison was better than working at the munitions plant, but by the second week, her illusions were in shreds. When she walked past the exercise yard, the prisoners whispered things at her—sexual things or half-formed words she imagined to be sexual in nature, words mixed with kissing sibilations and falsetto imitations and doglike yelps. Even if the words weren’t explicit, she knew the thoughts lurking unsaid beneath the shiny skin of the shaved skulls were.
Maggie didn’t like the inappropriate yammerings to go unanswered, but how could a woman answer a man without inviting more unwanted attention? And how could any person respond across the great divide that separated the free from the imprisoned, the explicit from the unexpressed? Any sentence she devised or uttered would have whole power structures encased in the grammar, which hinted at dense philosophies she knew nothing about, not to mention the entire history of race relations, for it only took one glance at the exercise yard to see that a disproportionate number of the inmates were dark.
Maggie held her head high and walked as if she didn’t notice the hulking presences, but was it right to pretend they didn’t exist? She tried not to swing her hips but also not to walk too tightly, which would have been an admission that they had already succeeded in drying up some of her essence.
“Don’t let it get to you,” said Lex Lexington, who was the director of corrections and whom everyone called DC.
His first assistant, a voluptuous woman named Valerie Vines, added, “You have to have a pretty thick skin around here.”
“It doesn’t bother me,” insisted Maggie, but whenever she passed the yard in the succeeding weeks, she felt as if she were walking past a long row of x-ray consciousnesses that beamed out through the chain-link fence and lit her up for all to see—not only her private parts, but the things she believed in—and not only for all to see, but for Maggie herself to be made aware of—of fears and prejudices and attitudes she didn’t know she had.
One day, one of the men pressed his face against the links and whispered, “Miss, Miss. I’m innocent.”
Maggie kept her eyes high, as if she were thinking elevated thoughts. Above the dull expanse of metal fencing, rolls of concertina wire gleamed in the sharp light, and high in the sky, a plane was writing a puffy contrail across the sky. But something in the man’s voice caught at her attention, and instead of hurrying past, she stopped and turned to face him. The prisoner was small, with a lean frame and girlish muscles. Maggie looked at the creased skin at the corners of his eyes, the flecks of dandruff in his short hair, and the speck of gold in his iris and instantly believed him.
While she pondered what to say, another man came up and leered at her. “I’m innocent too, Momma.”
And then another came, and then another, until a crowd of men jostled for position at the fence, all of them innocent, all of them clawing at one another or at the wire mesh, all of them shoving at the small man and shouting out about fabricated evidence and false prosecutions. Maggie tried to imagine what their lives were like, but she couldn’t do it. She could only stare at them, her eyes wide and her mouth open, while the concertina wire coiled above them, singing in the rising wind and glittering with the hot, high notes of the sun.
Luckily for Maggie, footsteps were approaching along the walkway that led to the office block. Cheerful voices rose in good-natured argument, breaking the spell and causing the prisoners to stop talking and to back away from the fence. A moment later, the grizzled Louis and the virile Hugo came around the corner and slapped their batons against the chain links, scattering the men like frightened pigeons and replacing the horror of the clawing clot of humanity with the horror of how easily they were cowed by uniformed authority. Maggie found herself suddenly and unexpectedly allied with the prisoners against the guards and glad to be exactly where she was to witness—well, to witness what, she couldn’t say. Tiffany was right that the inmates were needy, and now it seemed to Maggie that an unseen force had been guiding her and had purposely dropped her down just outside the chain-link fence so that she could finally do a little good.
Maggie tried to do nice things for the men she came across in the course of her duties. Some of them were longtime inmates who had earned positions of trust, and she would see them working in the gardens or re-shelving books in the prison library. In addition to joining the education initiative, one day a week she gave up her lunch hour to visit men whose families had stopped coming to see them. She would sit on a folding chair and listen to them describe a fishing hole under a cypress tree, a cabin in the woods, a favorite recipe for smoking deer. One day she baked a cake for a prisoner’s seventy-fifth birthday and held his hand as he talked longingly of a flaxen-haired wife and children who must by now be half a century old.
Valerie called her aside to say, “You can’t befriend the prisoners. You think you’re being kind, but you’re not. Listening is bad enough, but if you act like you believe them, they’ll start hounding you with all kinds of sob stories. It’s best if you can think of them as not quite human. Really, it’s the only way for any of us to survive, and by us, I mean all of us—them included.”
The education initiative consisted of a group of volunteers who worked in the prison school, where Maggie was assigned to help the prisoners on good behavior learn basic computation skills.
“They won’t forget me, will they?” asked an earnest young man who chugged his finger dutifully under the columns of figures and word problems Maggie wrote out for him to solve. The class was half over when she realized it was the young man from the exercise yard. His name was Tomás, and he had served three years of his thirty-year sentence for killing a gas station attendant with a knife.
“Of course not, Tomás. Who could forget you!”
“My family, that’s who. They live in Arizona, but I was transferred here.”
“I assume there was a good reason for that,” said Maggie.
“What is it? What’s the reason?”
“I don’t know anything about it,” said Maggie. “But people usually have a reason for doing things. Just like there’s a reason you’re in prison in the first place.”
“But I didn’t do anything,” said Tomás. “You believe that, don’t you?”
“I honestly don’t think about it. Besides, it doesn’t matter what I believe.”
“Why not? Why doesn’t it matter?”
“Because I don’t know the facts of the case and because I’m not in a position of authority.”
“If it doesn’t matter to you that I’m innocent, why would it matter to anyone? Why wouldn’t it be okay to lock up anybody for any reason, just because you wanted to?”
“But I don’t want to,” said Maggie. “Why would you think I’d want a thing like that?”
“Because…” Tomás peered at Maggie as if she was supposed to guess, but she had no idea what he was thinking.
“I would never want that,” she said. “Now, here�
��s one I’ll bet you can’t solve.” She wrote out a problem involving complex fractions.
“Yes, you can write in the book!” she cried when Tomás’s pencil hovered indecisively. “You see? It has your name on it—right there! Every time you come, this very same book will be yours!”
Maggie hurried across the room to erase the whiteboard, to file the attendance form, to turn on one bank of overhead lights and turn off another. One of the other inmates called out, “Over here, Miss. I have a question too!”
The men scraped their pencils against the paper. A man with a scarred face blew his nose against his arm and then wiped it on the seat of his pants. Maggie straightened the stack of notebooks belonging to the Tuesday class before glancing back to where Tomás was sitting, toiling away over his workbook, writing as neatly as he could. “Good job!” she exclaimed when she circled back to check his answers. “Four out of five correct!”
She was glad when the class was over, but the idea of innocence stayed with her. The next day she asked Valerie, “Does it ever occur to you that some of the inmates are innocent?”
“It occurs to everyone, darling. I was wondering when you were going to ask.”
“What do you do about it?”
“I said it occurs to everyone. I didn’t say they were innocent. In most cases, they’re guilty of more than what came out at their trials.”
“But most of them didn’t have trials,” said Maggie, who had started to research the criminal justice system and been shocked by what she had found. “Did you know—” she started to say, but Valerie cut her off.
“I know, I know. And if you kiss them, they turn into princes.”
“Maybe someone should kiss them then.”
“They’re guilty,” said Valerie. “Hand on heart. I wouldn’t lie.”
“But isn’t believing you without question the same thing as believing the inmates without question? Or believing…well, believing anything without looking into it for yourself?”
“That’s a little too close to the deep end for me,” said Valerie. “My motto is to keep it simple. Besides, the police don’t go around arresting people willy-nilly. Someone would have to be awful unlucky to end up here if he was innocent.”
“Yes,” said Maggie. “Someone would.”
Maggie thought of luck as a giant primordial atom that had fractured the day God made the world, unleashing particles of good and bad luck into the atmosphere where they could rain down at random, and now it occurred to her that she was sitting at a desk on the outside of the bars rather than wasting away inside of them not because she was inherently more virtuous than other people, but because she was luckier.
“Do you know why they arrested me?” asked Tomás when Maggie saw him in class the next Wednesday.
“Why no, I don’t,” replied Maggie.
“Because I ran from the police.”
“What were you running for?”
“To get away from them.”
“But why? If you hadn’t done anything, why didn’t you just say so?”
“Because…” Again Tomás peered at Maggie as if she could read his mind.
“And why did you plead guilty if you were innocent?”
“I had to plead guilty. If I didn’t, I might have gotten life.”
3.5 Lyle
It was Lyle’s belief that bombs prevented bloodshed, and now that Will was backing him up, he felt more sure of it than ever. “I know that sounds like a contradiction,” he said to a co-worker named Jimmy Sweets, “but if you think about it…” His voice trailed off, not because the explanation was hard to find, but because it was obvious. If anyone would know what he was talking about, it was Jimmy, who had been a fighter pilot in Vietnam.
“We pretty much proved that in nineteen forty-five,” said Jimmy. He rolled up his sleeve to reveal a long scar. “Christmas in Hanoi,” he said.
When some metal filings flew off a carelessly operated lathe and embedded themselves in Lyle’s left biceps, he thought of it as a war wound. “I have shrapnel in my arm,” he would say after a beer or two at the Merry Maid, which is where some of the men hung out in the evenings and where Lyle had started to go with Jimmy whenever Maggie worked late or when he wanted to get away from the creeping suspicion that he and Maggie were growing apart and that the new arrangement had left him without a necessary piece of equipment, like a leg.
Jimmy and Lyle thought alike about a lot of things. “What would happen if they turned around to reload their guns, and presto! the ammo was gone,” said Jimmy. “Just frigging gone. That’s what we do. We replenish the ammo pile.”
A Merry Maid regular named Lily De Luca pushed her prom queen hair back over her shoulder to expose the fullness of her pink sweater and said, “Heck, people can convince themselves of all kinds of things.”
Lily worked as a bookkeeper at McKnight’s Chicken Farm, and despite the tight pink sweater and her breathy renditions of “Desperado,” she thought of herself as one of the guys.
“We’re not convincing ourselves, Lily,” said Jimmy.
“Become convinced, then,” said Lily. “People can become convinced.”
“We didn’t become convinced. You make it sound as if we sit around waiting for opinions to fly in and out of our heads. We always thought this way, didn’t we Lyle?”
“Yeah,” said Lily. “You were born knowing—a real know-it-all.”
“We looked at the facts and assessed them. Or is that a concept that’s too advanced for people who work with chickens all day?”
“Notice that it’s the hens that are useful,” said Lily. “Do you know what happens to the cocks?”
“I know what happens to one of them,” said Jimmy, but Lily ignored him.
“At egg farms, anyway, the roosters are suffocated or ground up live because they’re not useful. Not a use for them in the world.”
The two went on in that fashion for a while, but Lyle was happy just to sit and soak up the atmosphere: the polished bar, the crazed mirror in which he could see his new aviator glasses pushed up on top of his head, the television screen showing a mild-mannered weapons inspector getting drowned out by the talk show host, the smell of old beer, Lily’s gravelly voice, and the row of regulars with drooping, bloodshot eyes. It was a new world for Lyle, who had gone straight from camping out at the Sterlings’ dinner table to being married to Maggie. He had never been in the thick of it before, and suddenly, here he was, going mano a mano with people in a bar. Maybe he wasn’t missing a leg after all, or maybe it was growing back.
“Just after our fifth anniversary, my ex decided,” said Lily. “Does ‘decided’ work for you, Lieutenant Sweets?”
“Okay, okay,” said the bartender, butting in. “This isn’t the grammar society. What did he decide?”
“That it was a good thing to have an affair. It took the edge off, is what he thought—or at least that’s what he allowed himself to think. People don’t like to think they’re doing a bad thing—Bertie was no different from anyone else in that regard, and I guess we aren’t either.”
“Dang, Lily,” said Jimmy. “You didn’t hear a thing I said.”
“I heard you all right,” said Lily. “I guess people think what they think and come up with the reasons why after the fact.”
“That’s not what we do, is it Lyle? We’re critical thinkers. Rational man—notice how they don’t say woman, Lily? Notice how they don’t say chickens? We’re warriors in pursuit of truth.”
“We’re almost like troops ourselves,” said Lyle, flexing his muscle against the bandage just so he could feel the pain of the place where the filings went in. He was surprised to find his ideas were so fully developed and easy to express. Then he realized it wasn’t the ideas that were new, but the words, and definitely the attitude. He probably wouldn’t have said anything if Maggie had been there to finish his sentences for him—to drown him out, if he was to be honest about what she did. It was almost as if he was finally arguing with her, as if his wo
rds had developed in reaction to the words she would have said, words he could picture flying out of her mouth, slippery and persuasive, but which he didn’t agree with at all. He glared at Lily and said, “Did you ever consider that he had an affair because you were smothering him, Lily? And Jimmy’s right, we didn’t have to convince ourselves.”
“Gosh, Lyle, it’s just my opinion, that’s all. Can’t a girl have an opinion around here?”
Lyle felt kind of proud that Lily was fidgeting in her seat and looking at him as if he was a bully or something, as if he was some kind of untrained alpha dog.
When Lily left to go home, Lyle went after her, settling the aviator glasses on the bridge of his nose even though night had fallen and the dark lenses made it harder to see. He had nothing in mind but to prolong the sense of competence and belonging that had enveloped him in the bar and possibly to apologize for treating her roughly, but as he walked into the fragrant springtime air and followed Lily into a side street, the feeling turned into something new and disquieting. She walked with her head down and didn’t turn around even though Lyle’s shoes made clacking sounds on the pavement. Doesn’t she know I’m here? he wondered. A dog barked at their passing, but still she didn’t seem to notice him. She must be hard of hearing—or she was purposely ignoring him, leaving the decision to follow her entirely in his hands. Something is beginning, thought Lyle. It was like watching the first part of a movie as he settled into his seat, taking off his jacket or unwrapping his candy bar and listening half-interested/half-annoyed to the whispered conversations coming from the people around him who were still settling in too, until suddenly he was swept up in the on-screen action and hurtling with the hero toward the point of resolution or disaster.
Lily turned left on Maple and left again on Pine, where a row of two-story dwellings had been turned into apartments. Only when she was standing on the porch of a downstairs unit did she turn and say, “You might as well come in,” in a low, come-hither voice. Lyle had stopped behind a row of crape myrtle trees, still trying to decide if he was going to declare himself or walk away. Just as he was about to step forward, a tall shape detached itself from a rocker and followed Lily into the house.
Now and Again Page 8
