“I don’t think they do that here,” said Maggie, not because she knew anything about it, but because the woman seemed as if she was about to cry. On an impulse, Maggie grabbed her arm, which caused the woman to fall against her, almost knocking her over.
“Don’t be so sure,” she said, recovering her balance. “It’s a shockingly common practice.”
“I’d have heard about it,” said Maggie.
“Don’t be so sure about that either. They count on people closing their eyes to things.”
The woman glanced up the hall and then down it as if she were checking for eavesdroppers before she took a tiny copy of the Constitution out of her pocket and said, “Take a look at this.” She pointed to a chunk of text and said, “See? Right there. It’s perfectly legal for people who have been convicted of a crime to be enslaved.”
“That can’t be right,” said Maggie.
“As I said, they count on people closing their eyes to things.”
Maggie doubted it was true that slavery was legal. If it was, wouldn’t there have been an outcry on Geraldo and Oprah, and wouldn’t people be marching in the street singing “Let My People Go”? She found the woman’s air of superiority irritating, but as soon as she thought the word “smug,” the woman’s face collapsed in doughy misery and tears welled in the corners of her eyes.
“What do you do for the ACLU?” asked Maggie in an attempt to change the subject.
“I’m not part of the ACLU—not really. A colleague invited me, so I came along. Oh, I give them a little money now and then, but I’m a prisoner advocate for a different group, a group called PATH, which stands for Patrick Henry. You studied him in school, I imagine: Give me liberty or give me death! Why doesn’t anyone believe that anymore? In any case, that’s what we’re committed to. Our mission is to free the wrongly incarcerated case by case, although sometimes I think we’re going about it the wrong way. And now I might have crossed the line, and I’m trying to figure out how to uncross it. It’s all terribly upsetting.”
“What line?” Maggie pictured the yellow lines that striped the floor of the prison, marking the various places where the prisoners had to stand for services or inspections.
“The moral line,” said the woman coyly, as if she knew exactly which word would staple Maggie’s wandering attention to her face.
“I don’t understand. What did you do?” Maggie tried not to sound too eager, but a fragile hope expanded in her chest that there were other people like her out there, people who cared about something other than sex and makeup and what to cook for dinner, people who were used to righting wrongs and could tell her how it was done. People she could turn to for help with Tomás. “Freeing people is something I’m interested in too,” she whispered, just in case the prison was riddled with listening devices. Even though Maggie was watching carefully to gauge the woman’s reaction, she wasn’t prepared for the joy that spread across her face.
“Then you know.” The woman was beaming quietly now, and Maggie could see that she had once been beautiful. “Then you know what it’s like.”
“I’m not sure,” said Maggie. “At first I couldn’t understand why the people here weren’t rushing about trying to fix all the things that are wrong, and then I thought, How can I expect other people to do something I’m not willing to do myself?”
“Be the change,” said the woman.
“I’m not very experienced, so maybe you could give me some advice.”
“I…Well…First, I should probably fill you in on exactly what my group does.”
A metallic sound rang from somewhere ahead of them. They had reached an anteroom past which Maggie had no access, so she turned to the woman and said they would have to wait for the guard to call ahead.
“It’s just as well, just as well,” she said. “I couldn’t bear to see anyone in solitary confinement.”
“I don’t think they do that here,” Maggie said again, and again the woman responded, “Don’t be too sure.” This time, though, there was nothing smug about the expression on her face, which was filled instead with hope and yearning. She reached out and grasped Maggie’s sleeves, pulling her a little closer as if she too was worried that the walls had ears. “My George was in solitary confinement for four years,” she said. “It’s why I took him on.”
While they waited for the guard, the woman told Maggie that the members of her group adopted specific nonviolent prisoners and tried to help them. “We publicize their cases and bring injustices to light. We find attorneys who will donate their services, and then we run various errands in order to keep the cases from falling through the cracks.”
“How noble!” said Maggie. It was the kind of thing she was hoping to do, and she could see she had gotten off track by merely befriending Tomás and teaching him math.
“Noble? More like exhausting! But you start off filled with idealism, anyway. Then, at some point, you become aware of the line. Oh, you pretend not to see it. You act all prim and dance around it like a schoolgirl, stepping very carefully whenever it’s in sight. But after a while, you want to be close to it.”
The woman opened the swimming pools of her eyes wide, as though she were noticing something unexpected or trying not to cry.
“And eventually you just step over it. But you don’t cross it in a blaze of righteous glory, which is how you thought it would be. You cross it, really, on a dare. Or you cross it because you want a bigger and bigger dose of whatever it was that made you step up to it in the first place. You cross it because you are now an addict. Because, frankly, it is exhilarating and because it’s a lot more fun than housework or your day job.”
The moment ended, and the woman’s eyes snapped shut. When she opened them again, the hope had vanished, and everything about her sagged with defeat.
“I don’t understand,” said Maggie.
“Of course you don’t. How could you?”
“But what did you do when you crossed the line?”
The woman’s face softened, and her lips quivered into a smile. “I fell in love with George,” she said. “But now I’m about worn out, which is why I came here today. The ACLU people—they’re very structured and focused. And disciplined! They all respect the line. That’s what I came for—to get advice on that.” The woman’s mouth settled into a tight barrier between her running nose and quivering chin, and she seemed to be waiting, as Maggie was, to hear what words would come out of it next. “No, that’s not entirely true,” she said. “I came to pass George on to someone else.”
She held up a quilted bag with the name GEORGE appliquéd onto the side in contrasting fabric. “Of course the work can be very rewarding if you get your prisoner out of jail, which is why it’s so frustrating to be representing George. There seems to be a vendetta against him. If you read the file, you’d see for yourself. Not to mention that George is very…well, dashing. It’s been an honor to advocate for him, but nothing I did made one bit of difference. So I came here to find a replacement, and then I’m going home—if I still have a home to go to.”
At first Maggie felt cheated—why couldn’t Tomás be dashing? Why couldn’t she be passionate and strong? But then a rush of excitement and possibility surged through her. If befriending Tomás was murky and ambiguous, representing George would be a completely good and noble thing. There was a vendetta against him! He was handsome and nonviolent! He had been kept in solitary confinement for four long years! “I’ll represent George,” she blurted out.
Relief flooded the woman’s eyes. “I want to assure you that the advocacy program is completely rewarding,” she said.
While they were talking, they had circled back toward the director’s office. When they reached the conference room, the woman thrust the quilted bag into Maggie’s hands and said, “The appellate attorney’s name and contact information is in the first folder. He’s part of a network of attorneys who take these cases on.”
Maggie asked if he might represent Tomás too.
“Th
at depends on where Tomás’s case was adjudicated. Anyway, you’ll find a lot of information here—telephone numbers and email addresses and official documentation, as well as copious handwritten notes—everything indexed and color-coded.”
When they reached the conference room, the woman snatched up her jacket and hurried back along the corridor and down the stairs, not even bothering to call the elevator. Maggie was left with the quilted bag sitting in her lap like a bloated and limbless child and the sinking feeling that even if she took on George’s case, she couldn’t abandon Tomás. And then, from the heaviness of the burden emerged a sense of sureness and direction. If she really wanted to help Tomás, she would stop buying him little presents. She would stop trying to make prison tolerable. Instead, she would start trying to free him.
When Valerie and DC left for the day, Maggie picked up the telephone and dialed the number for George’s lawyer. “Send me the fellow’s paperwork,” said the lawyer. “I can’t promise anything, but I’d be happy to take a look.”
Maggie said she would, but first she had to get the file out of the prison, which, given the tight security, might prove problematic. If she couldn’t handle Hugo, she told herself, she didn’t deserve to be George’s advocate. She didn’t deserve to be anyone’s. Besides, the blouse incident had given her an idea, and one soft summer evening, she was able to smuggle the file out of the prison by unbuttoning an extra button on her blouse. She laughed at the way Hugo, with his handsome face and muscle-bound physique, had fallen so easily into her trap.
5.4 Tula
The health-care clinic where Tula worked was twenty miles away. To get there, she either had to borrow her mother’s car or ride the bus, which took a lot longer. Because Will had baseball practice every afternoon, it wasn’t until school was out for the summer that she was able to arrange a day that was convenient for both of them. Tula was so preoccupied with the logistics of the trip that it was only when they were in the car that she thought about what the clinic was set up to do. How was she going to explain to Will that most of the clinic’s patients came in for gynecological services and prenatal care?
The car rattled whenever it reached cruising speed, making it noisy and hard to talk. After a few attempts at conversation, Tula pushed the button to turn on the radio, but the sound was mostly static, with only a few bars of music coming through. Will opened the window and let his hand lift off like the wing of an airplane. When a pebble flew up from the wheels of the truck they were following and made a tiny star pattern in the corner of the windshield glass, Will said, “Now they’re attacking,” as if Tula would know what he meant by it. And she did know. At least she almost did, for it seemed as if the car was traveling right along the frontier that divided the land of safety from the land of peril.
“They,” she said.
“You know, aliens, or terrorists. What would you do if they did attack us?”
“We couldn’t outrun them in this old rattletrap, so I guess we’d have to fight them off.”
“Never fear,” said Will. He pulled a scouting knife from the pocket of his jacket and waved it around like a sword.
They laughed, and then they didn’t talk again until they were pulling into the unpaved lot of the clinic. Before getting out of the car, Tula said with more confidence than she felt, “This is a women’s clinic, Will. I forgot to tell you that. So they’ll probably have you manning the phone.”
“What’s a women’s clinic?” asked Will.
“It’s a clinic dedicated to women’s health.”
“Okay,” said Will. “They don’t treat men?”
“No, they don’t. But sometimes husbands or boyfriends come with the women. And the doctor is usually a man.”
“What do they treat the women for?”
“You know,” said Tula. “It’s women having babies and stuff.”
Will rolled the window closed and unbuckled his seat belt while Tula gathered up her purse. “The doctor can be a little gruff, but you’ll like the midwife. Her name is Dolly.”
“What’s a midwife?” asked Will.
Dolly told Will he could straighten the magazines in the waiting room and then the contents of the supply cupboard. “I’d let you answer the phone, but some of our patients hang up if they get a man.” Then she passed out smocks and took Tula with her into the back. “I wish I could give your boyfriend something more interesting to do,” said Dolly while they waited for the doctor to arrive.
“He’s not my boyfriend. He wants to be a doctor, so I invited him to come along, but it wasn’t until we were on our way that I realized this probably isn’t the best place to bring him.” Tula laughed, releasing the tension that had built up during the drive. The two women were giggling over the awkwardness of the situation when the doctor walked in.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
“Will wants to be a doctor, so Tula brought him along. We were just hoping that the sight of all the pregnant ladies doesn’t scare him away.”
“You just leave your boyfriend to me,” said the doctor. “I’ll let him autoclave the instruments and show him how a fetal heart monitor works.”
“He’s not her boyfriend,” said Dolly with a wink, and Tula said, “Will’s in for a big surprise.”
When they unlocked the door at nine o’clock, two patients were waiting on the steps accompanied by their husbands, but a third said her boyfriend was a little freaked out and wanted to wait in the car. “He was in Iraq,” explained the woman. “He’s on crutches, so it’s a little hard for him to get around.”
“That sounds like a job for me,” said Will. “I’ll take him a cup of coffee and see what I can do.”
“Men,” said Dolly as the door rattled shut. “Always racing off to fix things. I guess you’re stuck with cleaning out the cupboard as well as answering the phones.”
Will was gone a long time and didn’t come back into the clinic with the empty coffee cup until the third patient was leaving. “What were you up to out there?” Tula wanted to know.
“Guy stuff,” said Will. “Nothing much.”
Toward the end of the day a new mother came in for a checkup. Her hair was unwashed and her husband had to help her fill out the form Tula gave her. “Get away from me!” the woman shouted when Dolly tried to take her blood pressure, so Dolly called in the doctor, who showed Will how to put on the cuff while Dolly and Tula backed out of the room. “It’s okay,” said Will. “I’m here now.”
“Well,” said Dolly. “Will you look at that?”
“What happened to her?” asked Tula.
“Her baby was born with severe deformities. It was horrible. Of course they blame me.”
“How could it be your fault?”
“It wasn’t! But I was there, so they link me to the experience.”
Tula told Dolly about Will’s mother and how she had quit her job at the munitions factory because of something about deformed frogs.
“Interesting,” said Dolly, but then she changed the subject to the coming-home party she was arranging for her boyfriend. “His name is Danny. Do you think I should go with a patriotic theme or just keep it simple? A barbecue would be fun, or what about a friendly baseball game?”
“I like the baseball idea,” said Tula. “Will’s a baseball player.”
“I’ll send you an invitation once I know when it’s going to be.” A few minutes passed, and then Dolly asked, “What’s her name?”
“Who?” asked Tula.
“Will’s mother. What’s Will’s mother’s name?”
“Maggie Rayburn. There was a lot of talk about her at one point—don’t tell me you heard about it all the way out here!”
“Interesting,” Dolly said again, and then she talked some more about the coming-home party until it was time for Tula to leave.
On the drive back to Red Bud, Will was even quieter than he had been that morning. “Thanks for coming,” said Tula.
“I should be thanking you,” said Will. “I learned
a few things.”
“You were really good with those soldiers. What did you talk about with the guy in the truck?”
“Oh, you know. We listened to music and talked about baseball.”
“I’m glad they were there, since there wasn’t much else for you to do. I guess I didn’t think things through when I invited you.”
“I never really thought about where babies come from before, about how one minute there’s nothing and the next there’s a new life. And then when you die, it all happens in reverse. Nothing to nothing.”
“They’re just talking about the body when they say that. The soul is something else.”
“I used to believe in the soul,” said Will, “but I don’t anymore.”
“I think that right at the last second our souls will fly up to heaven and wait for a new body to inhabit. It will be like being born all over again.”
“Huh,” said Will. “That’s just a fairy tale.”
No sooner had they turned onto the highway than the clouds turned livid. Lightning forked in the distance, and then, closer in, the sky seemed to ignite. Pretty soon it was raining so hard that Tula had to pull beneath an overpass to wait for the storm to blow over. “We’re lucky it’s not a tornado,” she said.
“Why?” asked Will. “That’s something I’ve always wanted to see.”
They sat for a while peering out at the rain, which seemed to be moving in a line across the fields, battering one strip of wheat before moving on to the next. When the windshield fogged up, Will swiped at it with his sleeve. “Did I ever tell you I was shot?” he asked.
“No!” exclaimed Tula. “You didn’t.”
“It was just a BB, but still. That soldier today had a big ol’ hole in his leg.” Will’s eyes were gleaming as he rattled on about the soldier, about how he knew everything there was to know about radar and military electronics.
Now and Again Page 14
