by Greg Barth
“Ain’t seen him in a while. I doubt he’s much surprised. That girl was always trouble. She sure was something though.”
“I got up to see Magnus and Roman a couple weeks back. We was kicking around the idea of throwing a party for him. Kind of cheer him up. Relive some old times. You know?”
“We sure did have some good old times, didn’t we?”
“Shit, some of us still do. The whole thing’s still running, you know?”
“Life goes on, I guess,” Judd said. “Seems a lot of it is going by without me these days.”
“Hell man, everybody falls on hard times now and again. Happens to the best of us.”
“Sometimes, though, I feel like my luck’s just run out. Health too. Feet feeling numb each night. Afraid I’m getting the diabetes.”
“Sorry to hear that, Judd.”
“You know if there’s any benefits in that?”
“What? Diabetes?”
“Yeah.”
“I have no idea, man. Government writes checks for just about anything anymore. While I’ve got you, would you like to throw in with us on this party for the old man? Everybody wants to. We just need to fund it. Magnus would probably give us a discount on the girls, since it’s us.”
“Man, I would so love to be in on it. How much you need from me?”
Bostic did the math and quoted him the cost.
“I ain’t got it now, you understand? But I’m good for it. I’ll have it. I’ll figure it out. Got some scrap in the truck there to sell.”
“It’d be good to have you, Judd. I’ll let you know when we get everything set up.”
“That’d be real nice. You tell my brother I said hi if you see him.”
“I will.”
“Don’t suppose you could loan me a twenty, could you? I’m outta kerosene and need about five gallons to get by.”
“Sure, man.” Bostic fished for his wallet.
“If you could make it forty, I could get a 12-pack too.”
Deputy Bostic handed him the bills, then turned to walk back to his cruiser. He paused and looked back. “Hey, Judd. Just one more thing. Hope you don’t take this personal, but… try to get a bath before the party. You know, on the same day before the party. That would be a nice touch.”
“How the hell can I not take something like that personal?”
“I don’t know, man. Had to be said though. Good seeing you.”
Deputy Bostic got back in the cruiser. The rear tires kicked up gravel as he pulled out.
His words stung, but Judd brushed them off.
A party? Now that would be damned nice. He got back in his truck and thought about where he could get his hands on some cash. He’d have to weasel it out of Wanda. Maybe get her to get a loan from that sister of hers…
I’m going to die someday. Might as well try to live a little.
E IGHT
Selena
IN A LOT of ways prison life was good for me. Would I rather have been spending late nights hanging out with friends, blowing my earnings from dancing at the Lollipop Lounge and getting stoned? Sure. But that was all ancient history. Compared to the more recent days of running and fighting, prison was a vacation.
The facility was non-smoking. I had developed a strong, lifelong addiction to cigarettes. It seemed absurd to me that the least fun addiction I had was the hardest one to kick. But it’s much easier to do when you have no choice and no access to cigarettes. I quit cold turkey from day one. I could get them through the black market, but it was a hassle. If I was going to shop there, it wouldn’t be for nicotine.
I was required to attend AA meetings and complete an alcoholic’s recovery program. At first I longed for intoxicants, but as the days passed, I grew comfortable with sobriety. In a way sobriety was easier inside than outside. Everything was so structured. You knew what time you were going to get up, how meticulously you were going to make your bed, how long you would be in line for a toilet, how long you would be permitted to shower. Breakfast and lunch happened like clockwork, and I always saved my lunch dessert for last. I knew what time I would show up for work, what the paint fumes would smell like, and I knew that the workday would end at exactly three o’clock. I had to be inside my cell at four, standing beside my bed until the count was completed and confirmed. Two corrections officers would come through each cell. Every inmate was counted twice. You had to stand at your bunk, front and center, and not speak. This happened exactly the same way every single day. After four o’clock count, I was able to do whatever I wanted as long as it was somewhere behind the miles of razor wire encircling the penitentiary. I could go to the library, talk on the phone, exercise, walk in the rec yard, play cards, or watch TV. Mostly I read.
I’d like to say that I followed in the footsteps of many of the notable prisoners of the past—such as Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo—and bettered myself in prison by pursuing an education. Truth is, I read romance novels and murder mysteries, consumed them by the dozens. I learned every trope, knew every trick. Hell, I could write them if I wanted, but I just loved reading them. I loved walking through the rec yard during the evening hours reading a paperback. The great thing about a flat, empty rec yard was that I could keep my eyes on the page, walk at the same time, and not worry about tripping and killing myself. As the days grew longer coming out of winter, I could read even longer in the fresh air.
I usually took dinner outside the mess hall. I had enough in my account that I could get snacks from the commissary. While breakfast and lunch services were okay, dinner was hit and miss, mostly miss.
External gangs ran the prison. I have no idea how they do it, but it’s a fact. I didn’t have any particular bias or affiliation, but these things tend to run along racial boundaries. The Aryans took me into their fold readily. They interpreted my tattoo as a membership card, and I didn’t bother to correct them. You have to fit in somewhere. You don’t want to be the odd one out in prison.
All the inmates had jobs. I worked as a painter, and they paid me fifteen cents an hour. It was a mindless task but it gave some purpose to the long days.
During the late evenings, I spent time in the room with Carla. We talked. We read to each other. We braided each other’s hair. We gave each other massages. You’d think we were dorm-mates. It was all innocent, but we became best of friends.
It’s strange to say that prison was a good change for me. There is a school of thought out there that says if you take a person that’s made some “mistakes” and put them in a world of criminals and a culture of crime, then you only develop a more effective criminal. And I guess that makes a certain amount of sense. So why was it any different for me? Why should I be the only person with a shot at rehabilitation while in prison? I think it was because I had been around those people my whole life—the bad influences and criminal types, I mean—hell, I was one myself. Prison didn’t put me among worse company. Prison put me among the kind of people I was used to; only inside they didn’t have the same weapons to hurt me with or the same freedom to do so that they did on the outside. And I didn’t have the same freedom to hurt myself either. You could still do it all, of course, if you wanted to bad enough. But you wouldn’t get away with it for long.
There’s also a perception that all women hate each other. As a woman, I can tell you that isn’t true. But when two women do hate each other, or are even jealous of one another, each will do everything within their power to destroy the other. So prison wasn’t always peaceful, but—for me at least—it was a crazy vacation from the outside world.
Inside the fishbowl we were all predators, swimming and circling each other, keeping an eye on every other fish. Everything inside the fishbowl was seen and watched. It didn’t mean you let your guard down, it just meant you didn’t act out like you would if you were in the ocean.
I took comfort in this. For a time.
I had money on a phone card I never used. I loaned it out to Carla. I had money that appeared mysteriously in my co
mmissary account. I assumed it came from Pete Malucci. Why, I don’t know. Just kindness I suppose. I can’t imagine he was buying my silence. I didn’t know enough to be silent about.
I only had one regular visitor, and that was Jack. My crazy mountain man drug dealer. He always flirted with me, which was flattering. But deep down we both knew this was never going to work for us. He was a dear, though, a true friend; and god bless him for coming. It made for a nice surprise when I actually had a visit, which I never expected. We were sometimes allowed the brief hug before and after a visit. Not all the CO’s were dicks.
He kept me up to date on the painful mental recovery of a dear friend of mine, Todd. The man who saved my life. One of the growing number of men whose lives I’d destroyed in return.
The assignment from Pete came unexpectedly. It was early evening. Work was over, and we had completed the four o’clock count. I was walking alone in the rec yard. I had a novel in hand, but I wasn’t reading. I had a paint-covered finger tucked inside marking my place within the coarse pages.
It was a good novel. A handsome loner who had a bad history with women was sailing from his family’s home on an extended solo trip in the Atlantic. He finds that the sister of his ex-girlfriend is passed out drunk in the ship cabin. The kind of thing I usually enjoyed reading, but I couldn’t get into it that night.
It was a cold evening. I had my coat on and zipped up tight, my collar turned up to protect my neck from the brisk wind. My breath came in puffs of white steam. My nose and cheeks felt cold, and my nose was running a little to protect the inside from the dry air.
I heard footsteps approaching and turned.
An inmate was walking behind me. There was no one else nearby and her direction was clear. She was trying to catch up to me.
It was Janson.
She was a short, pretty Caucasian woman. A former soccer mom, she was now pulling fifteen months for some stupid drug thing. Federal prisons in the US are overcrowded due to mandatory minimum sentences from the whole war on drugs. Somebody somewhere must be making a fucking fortune off this thing.
“Hey, Carson,” she said. “Hold up, okay?”
I stopped and waited for her to catch up.
“Janson,” I said.
She caught her breath. “Jeez it’s like freaking cold out here, huh? What are you doing out like this?”
“It’s quiet.” I looked around. “I’m not used to quiet. I’m not used to sober.”
“You like it?”
“Well, I wouldn’t turn down a drink or anything, but yeah. It’s starting to grow on me.”
“Cool.” She looked around. “Let’s walk a little, alright?”
“Okay.” We walked side by side.
“Look, I’ve got a message for you.”
“Oh? From who?”
“You know who.”
“Really. I have no idea.”
“Your sugar daddy. Q-tip on the outside?”
Q-tip could only mean Pete Malucci. He was the only guy I knew that had white hair like a cotton swab. And he could get any kind of message to me on the inside. “Oh? Ask him why he doesn’t write.”
“There’s something he wants you to do for him. In here.”
“Like what? He wants me to paint a wall or something? Because I’m getting pretty good at that.”
She looked up at me. Her cheeks and the tip of her nose were turning red in the cold evening air. “It’s Chav,” she said.
“What about Chav?”
“You know.”
“What? He wants me to paint Chav? ’Cause I don’t know that she’d be okay with that. Is she putting too much salt in the potatoes? ’Cause you can’t taste it.”
“Q-tip’s got a short-timer in here that’s close to him. Chav’s putting a hard hustle on her. Not to mention, Chav’s got gang connections. A gang that has different ideas about things. Q-tip thinks that Chav’s being hard on his cherry because of this, uh... professional tension.”
I sighed. “I don’t need this. Alright? Not now.”
“Fuck you don’t need it,” Janson said. “You haven’t heard it all.”
“There’s more?”
“Yeah. You do it one week from tonight, right after count. Put Chav away for a while, or forever, you know? Get it done, then make your way to the laundry. Things will go real good for you.”
“What do you mean?”
“You do this, and you’ve proved your loyalty. Q-tip’s going to do you a big favor.”
I felt tension in my gut. The stress felt something akin to hope mixed with fear. If she meant what I thought she meant, then I could get out. Pete would make a way.
The memories that came flooding back during my conversations with Carla had me thinking. Looking back on it from the perspective of a grown woman made things look worse than they had when I was in the midst of it. I was stronger now in a lot of ways too, stronger even than when I’d visited my father during the previous year. I’d killed men since.
If I could get out, I could find out if those things were still going on. Carla seemed to think things had only gotten worse. I wasn’t sure. Certainly those men would have lost some testosterone over the years. If they were still up to their old tricks, I could get out and end this thing with my father, my uncle, and Magnus. I could make it stop.
If I could get there, I knew how to stop them.
But I was in prison. I couldn’t allow myself to feel hope.
And there were problems with what Janson had said. Something didn’t pass the sniff test. I couldn’t imagine Pete asking me to do something like this. I’d killed Faranacci, but that was something he permitted. He didn’t ask me to do it.
I stopped walking and glared at her. “Are you fucking setting me up?”
“What? No. What do you mean?”
“Because if you’re fucking setting me up, Janson, I’ll fucking kill you.”
“God, girl. Stop it, alright? Here’s what you do. After counts one week from today, you go to the toilet down by the dorms. Go to the last toilet near the showers. Something will be lying against the stainless steel on the floor. That’s for you. Then you know where to find Chav. Get it done, then get to the laundry.”
“I’ll never make it. I’ll get caught.”
“Carson, you’ve got to trust a little bit here, alright? You’re not doing this alone.”
“What happens when I get to the laundry?”
“Do I got to spell it out for you? You get in the bag. You’re small. You go on the bottom. Just stay all limp when they inspect at the sally port gate. Then you’re home free.”
I sniffed in the cold air. I nodded. “I’ll think about it.”
“The fuck you’ll think about it. You’ll fucking do it, okay?”
“I said I’ll think about it.”
“You know who this guy is and what he’s offering you?”
“Look, he can’t ask me to do this. He can’t pressure me. He can’t expect me to do something like this. If he’s who you say he is, he could get a hundred people to do this for him.”
“A hundred? Are you fucking kidding me? You don’t know who he is, you don’t even know who you are. You think he’d trust a job like this to just anybody? You really think there’s a hundred women running around in here like you? A hundred that could take down Chav? Honey, this man has one option. One. You are that fucking option.”
“I... I just want to read and stay sober and paint and talk to Carla and...”
“He’s offering you a big favor. You think he can do this kind of thing for just anybody? This cherry is that important to him.”
“I should call him.”
“You do that, the whole deal’s off.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
“You better not fucking think about it too fucking long, Carson. He can make life better for you outside. Or he can make life bad for you inside. You pick.”
Janson walked away.
I stood there looking up at the sky.
“Fuck,” I said.
N INE
Uncle Judd
GABBY ANSWERED THE DOOR.
Judd stood on the warped porch boards under the crumbling overhang, holding the screen door open.
Gabby blocked the doorway.
Judd tried to see around her, but it was dark inside the house and he couldn’t tell if anyone else was home.
“Your mom here?” he said.
“Hi, Judd. No, she’s not here. She’s gone down to Charlotte and won’t be back for a week.”
“You mind if I come in?”
“Oh, she… she said for me not to—”
“Just for a minute,” Judd said. He pushed his way closer and Gabby moved back. He stepped inside.
“Uh… Okay. Maybe for just a minute would be okay. But… just don’t…”
Judd walked into the living room, the worn brown carpet soft under his boots. He reached for a pack of cigarettes on the coffee table. “You mind if I get a cigarette?”
“Well, no, I mean, those are all I—”
“Thank you,” he said. He shook one out of the pack and lit it with Gabby’s lighter next to an overfilled ashtray.
“What… what brings you by today?” she said.
“I’m going to grab a beer too, Hon. You don’t mind? You got beer don’t you?”
“Uh, there’s only a few.”
Judd walked into the kitchen. Gabby followed him from a distance. The kitchen was tidy, the sink clean, floor recently waxed, the trash empty and all dishes put away. He opened the refrigerator door and reviewed the contents. Milk, butter, eggs, some sodas. He opened the crisper drawer and found a few cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon. He pulled one free from the plastic ring and popped the top open. He took in a mouthful of the suds and gulped down a couple of swallows.
Judd closed the refrigerator door. He leaned up against the counter and took a deep draw from his cigarette. “So how you been?” he said, and blew out his smoke.
“Oh, you know. I’ve been fine,” she said.
Judd took her in from head to toe. The girl had grown up nice. He liked the curve of her hips, the swell of her breasts. She was wearing a long t-shirt and shorts. Her legs were bare. His eyes lingered long on her chest. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and there was just the hint of the shape of her nipples under the thin cotton fabric. With Wanda not being home, he couldn’t get money the way he’d planned, but Judd considered the other opportunities available to him.
