by Jodi Picoult
“Fuck!” Crash yelled. “I just got soaked!”
“Man, that looks like blood,” Pogie said, horrified. “I’m not washing up in that.”
“It’s in the toilets, too,” Texas added.
We all knew our pipes were connected. The bad news about this was that you literally could not get away from the shit brought down by the others around you. On the bright side, you could actually flush a note down the length of the pod; it would briefly appear in the next cell’s bowl before heading through the sewage system. I turned and looked into my toilet. The water was as dark as rubies.
“Holy crap,” Crash said. “It ain’t blood. It’s wine.” He started to crow like a madman. “Taste it, ladies. Drinks are on the house.”
I waited. I did not drink the tap water in here. As it was, I had a feeling that my AIDS medications, which came on a punch card, might be some government experiment done on expendable inmates . . . I wasn’t about to imbibe from a water treatment system run by the same administration. But then I heard Joey start laughing, and Calloway slurping from the faucet, and Texas and Pogie singing drinking songs. In fact, the entire mood of the tier changed so radically that CO Whitaker’s voice boomed over the intercom, confused by the visions on the monitors. “What’s going on in there?” he asked. “Is there a water main leak?”
“You could say that,” Crash replied. “Or you could say we got us a powerful thirst.”
“Come on in, CO,” Pogie added. “We’ll buy the next round.”
Everyone seemed to find this hilarious, but then, they’d all downed nearly a half gallon of whatever this fluid was by now. I dipped my finger into the dark stream that was still running strong from my sink. It could have been iron or manganese, but it was true—this water smelled like sugar, and dried sticky. I bent my head to the tap and drank tentatively from the flow.
Adam and I had been closet sommeliers, taking trips to the California vineyards. To that end, for my birthday that last year, Adam had gotten me a 2001 Dominus Estate cabernet sauvignon. We were going to drink it on New Year’s Eve. Weeks later, when I came in and found them, twisted together like jungle vines, that bottle was there, too—tipped off the nightstand and staining the bedroom carpet, like blood that had already been spilled.
If you’ve been in prison as long as I have, you’ve experienced a good many innovative highs. I’ve drunk hooch distilled from fruit juice and bread and Jolly Rancher candies; I’ve huffed spray deodorant; I’ve smoked dried banana peels rolled up in a page of the Bible. But this was like none of those. This was honest-to-God wine.
I laughed. But before long I began to sob, tears running down my face for what I had lost, for what was now literally coursing through my fingers. You can only miss something you remember having, and it had been so long since creature comforts had been part of my ordinary life. I filled a plastic mug with wine and drank it down; I did this over and over again until it became easier to forget the fact that all extraordinary things must come to an end—a lesson I could have lectured on, given my history.
By now, the COs realized that there had been some snafu with the plumbing. Two of them came onto the tier, fuming, and paused in front of my cell. “You,” Whitaker commanded. “Cuffs.”
I went through the rigmarole of having my wrists bound through the open trap so that when Whitaker had my door buzzed open I could be secured by Smythe while he investigated. I watched over my shoulder as Whitaker touched a pinky to the stream of wine and held it up to his tongue. “Lucius,” he said, “what is this?”
“At first I thought it was a cabernet, Officer,” I said. “But now I’m leaning toward a cheap merlot.”
“The water comes from the town reservoir,” Smythe said. “Inmates can’t mess with that.”
“Maybe it’s a miracle,” Crash sang. “You know all about miracles, don’t you, Officer Bible-thumper?”
My cell door was closed and my hands freed. Whitaker stood on the catwalk in front of our cells. “Who did this?” he asked, but nobody was listening. “Who’s responsible?”
“Who cares?” Crash replied.
“So help me, if one of you doesn’t fess up, I’ll have maintenance turn off your water for the next week,” Whitaker threatened.
Crash laughed. “The ACLU needs a poster child, Whit.”
As the COs stormed off the tier, we were all laughing. Things that weren’t humorous became funny; I didn’t even mind listening to Crash. At some point, the wine trickled and dried up, but by then, Pogie had already passed out cold, Texas and Joey were singing “Danny Boy” in harmony, and I was fading fast. In fact, the last thing I remember is Shay asking Calloway what he was going to name his bird, and Calloway’s answer: Batman the Robin. And Calloway challenging Shay to a chugging contest, but Shay saying he would sit that one out. That actually, he didn’t drink.
* * *
For two days after the water on I-tier had turned into wine, a steady stream of plumbers, scientists, and prison administrators visited our cells. Apparently, we were the only unit within the prison where this had happened, and the only reason anyone in power even believed it was because when our cells were tossed, the COs confiscated the shampoo bottles and milk containers and even plastic bags that we had all innovatively used to store some extra wine before it had run dry; and because swabs taken in the pipes revealed a matching substance. Although nobody would officially give us the results of the lab testing, rumor had it that the liquid in question was definitely not tap water.
Our exercise and shower privileges were revoked for a week, as if this had been our fault in the first place, and forty-three hours passed before I was allowed a visit from the prison nurse, Alma, who smelled of lemons and linen; and who had a massive coiled tower of braided hair that, I imagined, required architectural intervention in order for her to sleep. Normally, she came twice a day to bring me a card full of pills as bright and big as dragonflies. She also spread cream on inmates’ fungal foot infections, checked teeth that had been rotted out by crystal meth, and did anything else that didn’t require a visit to the infirmary. I admit to faking illness several times so that Alma would take my temperature or blood pressure. Sometimes, she was the only person who touched me for weeks.
“So,” she said, as she was let into my cell by CO Smythe. “I hear things have been pretty exciting on I-tier. You gonna tell me what happened?”
“Would if I could,” I said, and then glanced at the officer accompanying her. “Or maybe I wouldn’t.”
“I can only think of one person who ever turned water into wine,” she said, “and my pastor will tell you it didn’t happen in the state prison this Monday.”
“Maybe your pastor can suggest that next time, Jesus try a nice full-bodied Syrah.”
Alma laughed and stuck a thermometer into my mouth. Over her back, I stared at CO Smythe. His eyes were red, and instead of watching me to make sure I didn’t do anything stupid, like take Alma hostage, he was staring at the wall behind my head, lost in thought.
The thermometer beeped. “You’re still running a fever.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” I replied. I felt blood pool under my tongue, courtesy of the sores that were part and parcel of this horrific disease.
“You taking those meds?”
I shrugged. “You see me put them in my mouth every day, don’t you?”
Alma knew there were as many different ways for a prisoner to kill himself as there were prisoners. “Don’t you check out on me, Jupiter,” she said, rubbing something viscous on the red spot on my forehead that had led to this nickname. “Who else would tell me what I miss on General Hospital?”
“That’s a pretty paltry reason to stick around.”
“I’ve heard worse.” Alma turned to CO Smythe. “I’m all set here.”
She left, and the control booth slid the door home again, the sound of metallic teeth gnashing shut. “Shay,” I called out. “You awake?”
“I am now.”
&n
bsp; “Might want to cover your ears,” I offered.
Before Shay could ask me why, Calloway let out the same explosive run of curses he always did when Alma tried to get within five feet of him. “Get the fuck out, nigger,” he yelled. “Swear to God, I’ll fuck you up if you put your hand on me—”
CO Smythe pinned him against the side of his cell. “For Christ’s sake, Reece,” he said. “Do we have to go through this every single day for a goddamn Band-Aid?”
“We do if that black bitch is the one putting it on.”
Calloway had been convicted of burning a synagogue to the ground seven years ago. He sustained head injuries and needed massive skin grafts on his arms, but he considered the mission a success because the terrified rabbi had fled town. The grafts still needed checking; he’d had three surgeries alone in the past year.
“You know what,” Alma said, “I don’t really care if his arms rot off.”
She didn’t, that much was true. But she did care about being called a nigger. Every time Calloway hurled that word at her, she’d stiffen. And after she visited Calloway, she moved a little more slowly down the pod.
I knew exactly how she felt. When you’re different, sometimes you don’t see the millions of people who accept you for what you are. All you notice is the one person who doesn’t.
“I got hep C because of you,” Calloway said, although he’d probably gotten it from the blade of the barber’s razor, like the other inmates who’d contracted it in prison. “You and your filthy nigger hands.”
Calloway was being particularly awful today, even for Calloway. At first I thought he was cranky like the rest of us, because our meager privileges had been taken away. But then it hit me—Calloway couldn’t let Alma into his house, because she might find the bird. And if she found the bird, CO Smythe would confiscate it.
“What do you want to do?” Smythe asked Alma.
She sighed. “I’m not going to fight him.”
“That’s right,” Calloway crowed. “You know who’s boss. Rahowa!”
At his call, short for Racial Holy War, inmates from all over the Secure Housing Unit began to holler. In a state as white as New Hampshire, the Aryan Brotherhood ran the prison population. They controlled drug deals done behind bars; they tattooed one another with shamrocks and lightning bolts and swastikas. To be jumped into the gang, you had to kill someone sanctioned by the Brotherhood—a black man, a Jew, a homosexual, or anyone else whose existence was considered an affront to your own.
The sound became deafening. Alma walked past my cell, Smythe following. As they passed Shay, he called out to the officer, “Look inside.”
“I know what’s inside Reece,” Smythe said. “Two hundred and twenty pounds of crap.”
As Alma and the CO left, Calloway was still yelling his head off. “For God’s sake,” I hissed at Shay. “If they find Calloway’s stupid bird they’ll toss all our cells again! You want to lose the shower for two weeks?”
“That’s not what I meant,” Shay said.
I didn’t answer. Instead I lay down on my bunk and stuffed more wadded-up toilet paper into my ears. And still, I could hear Calloway singing his white-pride anthems. Still, I could hear Shay when he told me a second time that he hadn’t been talking about the bird.
* * *
That night when I woke up with the sweats, my heart drilling through the spongy base of my throat, Shay was talking to himself again. “They pull up the sheet,” he said.
“Shay?”
I took a piece of metal I’d sawed off from the lip of the counter in the cell—it had taken months, carved with a string of elastic from my underwear and a dab of toothpaste with baking soda, my own diamond band saw. Ingeniously, the triangular result doubled as both a mirror and a shank. I slipped my hand beneath my door, angling the mirror so I could see into Shay’s cell.
He was lying on his bunk with his eyes closed and his arms crossed over his heart. His breathing had gone so shallow that his chest barely rose and fell. I could have sworn I smelled the worms in freshly turned soil. I heard the ping of stones as they struck a grave digger’s shovel.
Shay was practicing.
I had done that myself. Maybe not quite in the same way, but I’d pictured my funeral. Who would come. Who would be well dressed, and who would be wearing something outrageously hideous. Who would cry. Who wouldn’t.
God bless those COs; they’d moved Shay Bourne right next door to someone else serving a death sentence.
* * *
Two weeks after Shay arrived on I-tier, six officers came to his cell early one morning and told him to strip. “Bend over,” I heard Whitaker say. “Spread ’em. Lift ’em. Cough.”
“Where are we going?”
“Infirmary. Routine checkup.”
I knew the drill: they would shake out his clothes to make sure there was no contraband hidden, then tell him to get dressed again. They’d march him out of I-tier and into the great beyond of the Secure Housing Unit.
An hour later, I woke up to the sound of Shay’s cell door being opened again as he returned to his cell. “I’ll pray for your soul,” CO Whitaker said soberly before leaving the tier.
“So,” I said, my voice too light and false to fool even myself. “Are you the picture of health?”
“They didn’t take me to the infirmary. We went to the warden’s office.”
I sat on my bunk, looking up at the vent through which Shay’s voice carried. “He finally agreed to meet with—”
“You know why they lie?” Shay interrupted. “Because they’re afraid you’ll go ballistic if they tell you the truth.”
“About what?”
“It’s all mind control. And we have no choice but to be obedient because what if this is the one time that really—”
“Shay,” I said, “did you talk to the warden or not?”
“He talked to me. He told me my last appeal was denied by the Supreme Court,” Shay said. “My execution date is May twenty-third.”
I knew that before he was moved to this tier, Shay had been on death row for eleven years; it wasn’t like he hadn’t seen this coming. And yet, that date was only two and a half months away.
“I guess they don’t want to come in and say hey, we’re taking you to get your death warrant read out loud. I mean, it’s easier to just pretend you’re going to the infirmary, so that I wouldn’t freak out. I bet they talked about how they’d come and get me. I bet they had a meeting.”
I wondered what I would prefer, if it were my death that was being announced like a future train departing from a platform. Would I want the truth from an officer? Or would I consider it a kindness to be spared knowing the inevitable, even for those four minutes of transit?
I knew what the answer was for me.
I wondered why, considering that I’d only known Shay Bourne for two weeks, there was a lump in my throat at the thought of his execution. “I’m really sorry.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”
“Po-lice,” Joey called out, and a moment later, CO Smythe walked in, followed by CO Whitaker. He helped Whitaker transport Crash to the shower cell—the investigation into our bacchanal tap water had yielded nothing conclusive, apparently, except some mold in the pipes, and we were now allowed personal hygiene hours again. But afterward, instead of leaving I-tier, Smythe doubled back down the catwalk to stand in front of Shay’s cell.
“Listen,” Smythe said. “Last week, you said something to me.”
“Did I?”
“You told me to look inside.” He hesitated. “My daughter’s been sick. Really sick. Yesterday, the doctors told my wife and me to say good-bye. It made me want to explode. So I grabbed this stuffed bear in her crib, one we’d brought from home to make going to the hospital easier for her—and I ripped it wide open. It was filled with peanut shells, and we never thought to look there.” Smythe shook his head. “My baby’s not dying; she was never even sick. She’s just allergic,” he said. “How did you know?”
<
br /> “I didn’t—”
“It doesn’t matter.” Smythe dug in his pocket for a small square of tinfoil, unwrapping it to reveal a thick brownie. “I brought this in from home. My wife, she makes them. She wanted you to have it.”
“John, you can’t give him contraband,” Whitaker said, glancing over his shoulder at the control booth.
“It’s not contraband. It’s just me . . . sharing a little bit of my lunch.”
My mouth started to water. Brownies were not on our canteen forms. The closest we came was chocolate cake, offered once a year as part of a Christmas package that also included a stocking full of candy and two oranges.
Smythe passed the brownie through the trap in the cell door. He met Shay’s gaze and nodded, then left the tier with CO Whitaker.
“Hey, Death Row,” Calloway said, “I’ll give you three cigarettes for half of that.”
“I’ll trade you a whole pack of coffee,” Joey countered.
“He ain’t going to waste it on you,” Calloway said. “I’ll give you coffee and four cigarettes.”
Texas and Pogie joined in. They would trade Shay a CD player. A Playboy magazine. A roll of tape.
“A teener,” Calloway announced. “Final offer.”
The Brotherhood made a killing on running the methamphetamine trade at the New Hampshire state prison; for Calloway to solicit his own personal stash, he must have truly wanted that chocolate.
As far as I knew, Shay hadn’t even had a cup of coffee since coming to I-tier. I had no idea if he smoked or got high. “No,” Shay said. “No to all of you.”
A few minutes passed.
“For God’s sake, I can still smell it,” Calloway said.
Let me tell you, I am not exaggerating when I say that we were forced to inhale that scent—that glorious scent—for hours. At three in the morning, when I woke up as per my usual insomnia, the scent of chocolate was so strong that the brownie might as well have been sitting in my cell instead of Shay’s. “Why don’t you just eat the damn thing,” I murmured.
