Jewelweed

by David Rhodes

  “You sure?”

  “Not now, Jones.”

  Dexter Worthington Jones stayed quiet after that. He was a decent fellow, Blake thought, but he liked talking too much.

  Still, Jones was one of the better guys, and Blake didn’t want to offend him.

  Contrary to the popular notion of prison, including Blake’s before he found himself inside one, it was filled not only with meth-soaked gangbangers, though some of those could be found in here too. Prison society was about as diverse as any other, though the etiquette was more strictly enforced. Keeping on good terms with men who wanted to be locked up with you about as much as they wanted to be dragged behind a car required an almost-Victorian attention to power structures, personalities, and social nuances. Even in a prison like this one, where inmates couldn’t usually see the person they were talking to, social pressures were enormous. Falling out with someone in a neighboring cell could poison a whole week for everyone. Not a place you wanted to be unpopular in. Speaking to other inmates was sensitive business. That said, outside the community of fellow inmates, Blake knew his chances of remaining whole shrank to almost nothing. All he could expect was whatever ragged shred of humanity could be stitched between cells. And if he didn’t or couldn’t participate, he was finished. The human garbage pit would have completed its work on him and he’d be done, bled out, fried.

  The decent ones were priceless—the cognizant ones, the guys whose minds hadn’t rotted. Never forget that, he reminded himself. Hold to them, because just beyond the companionship they offered waited a thriving emptiness with no hope at all. There, prison shoveled you like compost inside oblivion’s garden.

  Blake crossed over to the iron slots in his door and whispered, “Hey, Jones, you okay? Jones?”

  “I’m okay, Blake. You okay?”

  “I’m okay. Thanks for asking.”

  “Good night, man.”

  “Good night.”

  Feeling better, Blake did fifty more push-ups and about as many sit-ups, then returned to lying on his bunk. The two guys with televisions at the end of the range turned them off and one of them flushed his toilet. From the other direction came the indistinct jabbering of guards in the center hold, talking while they drank coffee. Down another corridor a crank yelled several times, fell quiet, and yelled again. Cranks were head cases who never should have been put in prison in the first place—and never would have been if the government had another place to put them. Prison was for the unneeded human labor that didn’t stay inside the lines. Some of them yelled all the time, usually biblical stuff mixed with obscene sexual and racial profanities, evincing that the language of both the saved and of the lost was sourced from the same material.

  Thankfully, most cranks were kept on Range C. Being locked up with them would undo even the best-trained minds. Blake had seen it happen to several guys. It took about three weeks. They started by yelling back at them to shut up. After this failed they simply yelled all the time, like barking dogs answering each other.

  Blake felt secretly grateful for the range he’d recently been assigned to, filled with Level Two inmates, who in the opinion of the guards demonstrated better attitudes and behavior than those on Level One. Levels Four and Five were the highest, of course, and supposedly entailed privileges like computers. But descriptions of Level Three remained vague, and no one seemed to know anyone who had ever been on Level Four or Five. And needless to say, asking a guard about it could get you bounced down to Level One.

  My father would be proud of me, Blake thought, if he knew. He didn’t, though, because about a year before, Blake had told him never to visit again. Still, it made Blake feel good to think of his father being proud of him, even if it wasn’t true.

  He wondered what Nate might be doing. His ancient Kenworth might be broken down somewhere in Montana, with him sitting beside it along the road. Or he might be at home, eating chicken and biscuits.

  Blake smiled at the latter thought. No one loved good food more than his father, and he spared no effort in obtaining it. Blake’s memories eagerly crowded together—accompanying his father to remote farms, knocking on doors, asking, “Excuse me, but I heard you have some red peppers for sale, grown without pesticides. . . . Is it true you have air-cured beef? . . . My son and I would certainly appreciate your letting us know when these muskmelons are ripe. . . . Did you say corn-fed, walk-around-the-yard chickens without antibiotics? Brown eggs? No, we don’t give a flying grommet whether you’re inspected or not. . . . Yes, we would be very interested in goat cheese if you had any to spare. Do you know of anyone who raises shallots or mills their own wheat? . . . Sorry for the intrusion, but I recently had a cup of cider made from windfall and cherries; is there any chance that cider came from around here? . . . Someone told me you smoke carp. Is that true? . . . Say, are those freshly woven garlic braids?”

  11:46 p.m. Blake decided he should pray before falling asleep, rolled out of his bunk, and knelt on the concrete.

  This posture always felt a little undignified to Blake, especially under the omnipresent eye of the security camera. It was the position the guards made you get into before putting on the shackles—one of the reasons most inmates refused the once-a-day court-mandated optional exercise period in an outdoor cage. Yet almost everyone who claimed to have made some contact with God insisted upon it, Muslims especially.

  Blake had at first complained (to himself) that a particular posture had nothing to do with how genuine his prayers were, and refused to kneel. If the legitimacy of prayers depended upon the physical arrangement of the body from which they were released, then the delivery system was more important than what it delivered, the law more valuable than the spirit. No, he wasn’t going to do it. If God couldn’t recognize true humility from the inside, then God wasn’t God.

  But eventually Blake noticed that his arguments against kneeling always seemed to come from an especially unreliable corner of his mind, where a well-known choir of dissidents greeted most things with scoffing contempt. A company of old boys, they automatically condemned anything new. And this more than anything else convinced him to discredit their voices. Who knew? A certain posture might play some role in praying. Perhaps it would help. Who could say? He’d try anything and needed whatever help he could get, however he could get it. And after he became accustomed to kneeling he was quick to ridicule any attempts to pray in another manner. The unreliable choir of dissidents took up the kneeling practice, as committed to protecting one habit as another.

  The other problem Blake faced concerned the nature of the god he prayed to. All day long he’d been mostly agreeing with Spinoza, who did not believe the deity was a prayer-listener or prayer-grantor. Moment by moment, Spinoza’s god created the universe and everything in it by revealing himself through all emerging phenomena. He couldn’t listen in on his creation any more than the law of gravity could fall through space.

  And though Blake mostly agreed with Spinoza, his need for a god of a different nature—a listening, sympathetic, humanlike god—temporarily vetoed this particular teaching. Born out of desperation, Blake’s god was greater than reason, greater than Spinoza, greater than Blake. He could be both a listening god and a god who couldn’t listen. There were no limits to his ability to manifest himself in whatever form his creatures needed him in.

  Blake first began praying for his father. This was fairly effortless. He could easily imagine ways to improve his father’s circumstances, including a better son, a better truck, and a girlfriend. Unsure of the appropriateness of the latter request, however, he decided not to allow that particular imagined good fortune to enter into his communication with the divine, and kept his well-wishing more generalized. He simply thought of his father with a distant fondness, and fervently desired the best for him.

  Next, he prayed for Reverend Winifred Helm. Whatever events the Creator envisioned in his ongoing manifestation of unfolding glory, Winifred Helm deserved to be at the very center of them. Blake was sure of that.
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br />   These two were easy. His father and Winifred Helm already had one foot in heaven as far as Blake was concerned. They were perhaps the last virtuous ones—those whose luminous presence on the earth kept the rest of humanity from cosmic condemnation and eradication. Praying for them felt as natural as praying for peace.

  Then Danielle Workhouse walked into his mind, and Blake’s prayers for her—like those for his mother, whom he hadn’t seen since he was four and could hardly remember—were far more complicated. He loved Danielle Workhouse in an especially soul-devouring way, and because of this he could not honestly pray for her without including himself inside the prayer as a stowaway to her dark ecstatic presence. And it was impossible to imagine God approving of anything that included Blake and Danielle. The two of them together almost ensured the absence of everything a person should pray for. According to Spinoza, God manifested them both, of course, yet it seemed impossible to believe they were divinely intended to be anywhere near each other.

  Danielle. Her name bullied around in his mind, knocking over everything else and shoving it beyond his awareness. He asked her to leave, but she stayed. The more he insisted, the stronger she became. She wanted his full attention. She wanted him to remember how her body smelled in the morning, with baked steaminess from the night’s rest.

  Soon, Blake found himself still on his knees, but not praying at all. She’d banished his reverential mood. Feeling like a failure, he got off the floor and sat on the bunk. Then, needing a new view, he walked over two steps and sat on the floor with his back against the steel door, staring at eye level with the flusher mounted above the toilet on the other side of the cell.

  Women presented enormous difficulties for Blake, especially in here, where there were none. The distress he suffered through them had a history long before Danielle Workhouse came to embody everything he most wanted and feared from them. He could remember envying other children who lived with their mothers. He’d watched them longingly, wanted to be close to them, marveled at their shapes, the way they moved, the clothes they wore, the sound of their voices, their hair, the way their arms poked out of their sleeves and their feet slid into shoes. Everything about them seemed in contrast to the spartan world he and his father lived in. The smell of perfume filled him with a wonder too delicate to explore. What kind of creatures would wear that scent?

  What was going on with females, anyway? What made them different? Could their difference be unmade? How did one go about talking to them? Everything about them seemed terrifyingly attractive yet alien. He couldn’t imagine any appropriate way of approaching them, and when he saw others performing this utterly impossible feat, he couldn’t imagine himself imitating them.

  On one particular occasion in his adolescence, he had succeeded in making eye contact with someone he felt deeply attracted to, and immediately burst into tears. Needing to protect himself from further occasions that could provoke this shameful vulnerability, he energetically applied himself to excelling in activities designed by males for avoiding this vulnerability altogether: sports, roughhousing, and risk-taking.

  After high school Blake began working in the foundry. He bought an old pickup and several motorcycles to race on weekends. He moved out of his father’s house and into a room in Red Plain. Several years went by, and while he was living there he met, or rather saw, Danielle Workhouse. She rented a tiny apartment above a secondhand store, and six days a week walked to and from the cement plant on the edge of town.

  The way she walked drew his attention. It was almost as if one leg might be slightly shorter than the other. The tiny imperfection caused her hips to swivel a little farther around on one side, though not enough to unbalance her stride. The visual result was a subtle clicking into place, a repeated cocking motion. Most people would not have noticed, but Blake had always been interested in how people moved forward. Each step entailed a conscious act of falling into the future, and even though the act had become habituated to where there was little conscious effort involved, it still revealed something essential, an infantile attitude toward the unknown. No one moved forward in the same way, even in the same family. Danielle Workhouse was determined to get where she was going—an adventure looking for a suitable place to unfurl. There were no extra movements, no swinging arms; there was no looking to either side, changing speeds, or adjusting clothes—just a straight-ahead-leaning, brisk, and thrusting movement.

  She walked from her thighs.

  She also looked as if she might cut her own hair. The sides of her black curly mane appeared better thought-out, more even than the back, and Blake didn’t think there were styles in which the back was supposed to be crooked. It looked a little like his own hair, which he cut himself.

  She seemed to have three outfits: a blue skirt with a white top, a brown dress, and black slacks with a ruffled orange blouse. And she appeared to have just two pairs of shoes, brown and black. She wore a thigh-length gray sweater with widely-spaced buttons up the front in even the coldest weather.

  At exactly seven o’clock each morning, she stepped out of her building, locked the door leading up the narrow staircase, and walked the ten blocks to the cement plant. Her return times apparently depended on how busy they were at the plant. Some nights she didn’t get home until Blake had left for the night shift in the foundry.

  Once, when leaving the plant, she stepped out of the stone building and crossed the street between two cement mixers. Blake was on his way to work. He turned around in the gravel lot, drove back, and asked if she wanted a ride. He’d never been this close to her before. Without stopping, she glared at him through the pickup window, her eyes bright black inside a tightly stretched brown face, an angry yet slightly fearful expression. Scrubbed clean, no makeup, no jewelry, no frills. Her black hair had the color of a burned field, her lips straight across and full. She reminded him of a drawn bow.

  From this distance, Blake noticed that her shorter leg made more of a difference than he’d thought originally; each time her weight shifted and her hips made the small but perceptible cocking motion to the side, her body gave a little jerk, readying for another stride. As soon as he noticed this, he felt a corresponding lurch inside him and an ache opened up in his throat. Her sexuality seemed to be exercising inside him.

  He drove beside her for several blocks, but she never looked at him again. Finally he turned off at the gas station and took the back road to the foundry.

  Then one night she stood on the sidewalk in front of her building. An older man, maybe fifty, prevented her from going inside. When she turned away from him, he swung her around roughly to face him. She spit on the pavement and he shouted something and grabbed both her arms. She knocked his hands away and stepped farther down the sidewalk. When he lunged at her, she ducked to avoid him and shoved him to the side, where he stumbled into the street. Her movements seemed almost practiced. He came after her again and she easily outmaneuvered him again.

  By this time Blake was out of his pickup and could hear them.

  “You’re drunk,” she said, avoiding him now with mocking ease. “There’s no use you ever coming over here. Don’t do it again. Go home, idiot.”

  As Blake crossed the street he wondered what part he intended to play in this. When he reached the other side the older man saw him and shrank back, muttered something, and hurried away, heading toward the nearest tavern.

  “Are you all right?” asked Blake.

  Her black eyes glowed fiercely and she took a step away from him. “Beat it, fool. Nobody asked you to crawl over here. Get the hell away from me before I tie your dick in a knot.”

  She opened the door leading up to her apartment and slammed it closed behind her.

  Blake was unprepared for such a wide splattering of words, as if some well-established history of malevolence already existed between them. He was so unprepared for it that by the time he got back into his truck and drove away, he wasn’t sure exactly what had happened.

  That night at the foundry he bro
ke hot castings from molding frames and ground off the sharp ragged burrs. And as he worked he kept thinking about her.

  By the time he got off in the morning, he could hardly remember anything she’d said—only the vitriolic manner in which she spoke, as if a relationship somehow existed between them.

  She must like me a little, he thought. It was the only way to explain the connection he felt to her.

  11:56. Down the corridor, the electronic lock on the central hold snapped and the range door banged open, followed by a quick succession of echoes. Third night check. A guard stepped into the hallway, his movements announced by the dragging shuffle of his feet and the rattle of the keys hanging from his belt. Shuffle, rattle, shuffle, shuffle, rattle, shuffle, rattle.

  Blake climbed back onto his bunk, felt his stomach turn over as he recognized the slow, 250-pound amble. Bud Jenks didn’t usually work the night shift. Shuffle, rattle, shuffle.

  Maybe Bud Jenks hadn’t always been the way he was now, thought Blake, trying to talk himself into a better frame of mind. Maybe he was just an ordinary guy living in a small town and looking for a job, when he heard the Lockbridge prison needed more corrections officers. After his initial training, he got a uniform and for the first time noticed a curious mixture of hatred and fear in prisoners’ eyes when they looked at him. And he liked it.

  It might not have been the first taste of power that changed him. Perhaps it took several years. Blake wanted to think so. He was desperately trying to believe in something larger than himself, something at the foundation of the world that could not be held responsible for making Bud Jenks. Bud Jenks alone should be blamed for Bud Jenks.

  The shuffle stopped outside Blake’s cell, followed by a long reign of silence. Then a heavy boot kicked the bottom of the steel door and the cell exploded with sound. “Hey, Bookfucker, you asleep in there?”

  Blake said nothing.

  “You, Bookfucker, I’m talking to you. I asked if you were asleep.”