selected it for the penitentiary because it has the only reliable water source for fifty miles in any direction. The water is sufficient in quantity and quality to irrigate a year-round garden. The produce raised here feeds the inmates, as well as providing them rehabilitative work and healthful exercise. El Serrucho Oxidado is a women’s facility. The system sent Vanna Dee here after her conviction.
Vanna Dee was a quiet, sullen, prisoner. She performed the daily routines demanded of her by the prison staff without complaint. When she got special privileges for good behavior, she took them as things to endure rather than things to enjoy. One or two of the guards speculated Vanna was either dull-witted, or had been lobotomized. Her synapses were burnt out, and her evil nature banked like the coals of an overnight fireplace. Three years she remained in this spiritually vegetative state.
Vanna had several cellmates in her first three years. She was so uncommunicative that each of them requested transfer to some other cell. Her sullen silences bore heavily on the ordinary run of felonious females in the prison. Only one inmate, Jenny Tall, was willing to endure Vanna’s black hole personality.
Jenny was a lifer. She had been committed to El Serrucho Oxidado in her early middle years for killing her three husbands. The men had discovered Jenny had married each of them, without bothering to divorce any of the others. Moreover, they discovered she had impoverished each of them by emptying their bank accounts and selling off such other assets of theirs as she could. The determined to “teach the bitch a lesson.” One night they captured her, beat her, and raped her, repeatedly.
Jenny was outraged, but the police in her area were inclined to overlook a little well-deserved wife punishment (the community was not an enlightened one). When Jenny understood she’d have no justice from the system, she made her own justice. One night she waylaid her husbands, one by one, bound them, emasculated them, and left them to bleed to death. When the police accused her, she freely admitted her crimes.
A jury of local men voted for the death penalty, but the judge, a newly appointed bleeding heart liberal from north state, commuted the sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole. And so Jenny came to El Serrucho Oxidado. The beating she received from her husbands had left its mark on her face and body. Her eyes appeared to be looking in two different directions at the same time. Her nose, always a prominent feature of her physiognomy, also seemed bound to go in two contrary directions. Age had sharpened her chin and stolen her teeth. Her left shoulder rode high, and her right shoulder sank. Some damage to her pelvic structure left her with a crab-like shuffle in place of a walk. She added to this twisted presentation of humanity by wearing strange bits of feather, dried broccoli, withered carrots, twigs, and other detritus in her tangled gray locks.
Jenny fancied herself a witch. She claimed tribal ancestry, although the tribe’s name changed according to her whim. Now she was Chemehuevi, yesterday she had been Pomo and Modoc, and Thursday last she claimed kinship with the Hunkpapa Sioux. No one, not even Jenny herself, knew absolutely how true her claims were. In the prison, no one cared; everyone presumed others had some lie to tell about her past.
Many women found Jenny repulsive to look at. Vanna didn’t, or, at least, didn’t demonstrate any disgust at Jenny’s appearance. Jenny showed no distress at Vanna’s withdrawal from the world. The warden congratulated herself on a wise assignment of cellmates, and went on to other prison administration matters. It was in October, the beginning of Vanna’s third year in prison, that Jenny came to be with her. Jenny was physically unable to work in the garden. Vanna was very capable, as long as some one closely supervised her work. Vanna spent a long, warm, October day planting broccoli and cauliflower plants in the winter garden. Others harvested the last of the vine-ripened tomatoes.
Jenny sat in the warm sun, watching the gardeners. She kept watch over the water bucket, doling out dippers full of water to the thirsty gardeners. A hawk rode the updrafts over El Serrucho Oxidado. Jenny let her spirit enter the hawk, just to see the world from his god’s eye view. Instead, she got a vision of the Dark One, he who has no name among the People. He etched in Jenny’s mind that she must perform healing rituals for the first person she saw when her trance ended. A terrified Jenny agreed she’d do her best. The Dark One faded, and the hawk swooped on a ground squirrel. Jenny’s spirit returned to her broken flesh. She opened her eyes. Vanna stood before her, saying, “Water, woman, water.”
Jenny dipped the dipper in her pail, and offered the water to Vanna. Jenny’s hand trembled so much she spilled part of the water. Vanna didn’t seem to notice. She drank what remained in the dipper and handed the empty vessel back to Jenny. She plodded back to planting broccoli and cauliflower plants.
Jenny pondered for many days how to effect a healing. When Vanna fell asleep at night, Jenny entered a trance state and began exploring Vanna’s aura, probing her mind, and seeking her spirit-ghost on the ethereal plane. Time and again Jenny ran into a wall of black, opaque, glass that walled the essential Vanna off from her consciousness. Jenny recited to herself in all the Native American languages she knew, the bits of lore she had collected over her lifetime. Nothing presented a cure for this walled-off kind of mind. Jenny grew desperate. In her universe, commands from the Dark One could not be ignored or dismissed.
She decided, in the end, to consult the Dark One itself. One night, while Vanna lay as one dead on the upper bunk, Jenny lit a small fire in the drain of her cell with matches she had smuggled from the kitchen. On this fire, started with shredded racing forms, and sustained with alder twigs, she put the sacred sage and dried branches of the unholy goat-nut. She began a prayer in Chemehuevi, repeated it in Pomo, and again in Ohlone. She fell back in a trance, bruising her head on the concrete cell floor. The Dark One gave her a vision, a worm with a corkscrew proboscis that burrowed into the hard black glass that was the barrier in Vanna’s mind.
In her trance, Jenny became the worm, and began burrowing into the obsidian barrier in Vanna’s psyche. Round and round the corkscrew proboscis turned, and the whole worm body Jenny imagined herself to be turned with it. The tunnel Jenny-the-worm made lengthened, until it was twice as long as the worm’s body. As she went forward, Jenny felt the heat build on her worm-body. Some hot dark energy seethed behind the barrier she was penetrating. The corkscrew tip broke through into the hot darkness. The pressure release blasted the worm-Jenny back into her body. Jenny’s brain collapsed, and she died.
On her bunk Vanna pondered her re-awakening as she savored her fury. She must escape this prison, and return to revenge herself on La Señora and the Village. She resolved to hide her recovery until she could escape. She felt Jenny’s spirit whirl up and away. In the netherworld, the Dark one chuckled.
Maw Hawganee’s Cornbread Corners Cookhouse
Vanna waited six months for an opportunity to escape El Serrucho Oxidado. When it came, escape was simple. Vanna walked away from the prison with a bucket of water to sustain her across the desert. Since Jenny Tall died, the guards had rotated the water distribution duty among various inmates. One February day the detail began planting potatoes. It fell to Vanna’s lot to dispense water from the bucket. The weather was cool, with an overcast sky, a rarity in the Páramo Purpúreo desert.
Vanna watched her cohorts begin the stoop labor of digging holes, plunking cut pieces of potatoes (every one had three eyes, to increase the odds of viable plants). Then she covered them with the cool, moist earth. She suddenly realized the three guards watching the six women were all turned away from her. She stood up, took up the heavy bucket, filled with water and protected with a wooden lid, and slowly walked up the side of the gray ridge and over its top. The prison had not fenced the field; no desert creatures had developed a taste for potatoes, and the inmates had all been told repeatedly that the desert had no water for fifty miles in any direction. The mostly city-bred inmates believed it to be un-crossable.
> It wasn’t, Vanna proved, over the next five days. The overcast stayed with her most of the time. She carefully rationed her water supply, and even had a few mouthfuls left when she came to Cornbread Corners and Maw Hawganee’s Cookhouse. She had bruised her feet on the rocks and sands of the Páramo Purpúreo desert. Prison issue shoes had cardboard soles and thin cloth uppers that did not wear well. The prison orange that covered her wiry frame was already faded when she had put it on. Now it was streaked with dirt. Her hair straggled around her ears. It had gone gray while she was in prison.
When Vanna found Cornbread Corners, very little of it was left. Sand-filled cinder-block squares and oblongs marked where several buildings had stood. A cluster of salt cedars indicated a water source, the first Vanna had seen. Several of the structures had date palm trees around them. Vanna could see a few dates hanging from one of the trees, but they were too high up for her to reach. The thought of the fruit woke her hunger pangs. On a slight rise, a stand of Joshua trees and cholla cactus made a forbidding desert postcard outlined against the sky. A graveled road that lay
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