Pay the Piper

by Joan Williams

  “Unreal,” Rick said.

  Her sense of disappointment changed when around the corner a mule appeared pulling a garbage wagon driven by an old black man in a gray-and-white striped prison suit, and who wore a pillbox hat of the same material, as in old movies. Rapture filled her heart.

  A middle-aged man in tan perforated shoes came from the administration building and introduced himself as Buddy, Hal’s friend. In doffing his hat and calling her “ma’am,” he placed himself in a different society from her own. While they walked inside, Laurel made polite conversation, asking if he had always been a friend of the MacDonalds’. “Oh, no, ma’am. I was goggled-eyed like everybody else when they come down from Delton and built that big plantation home. In the middle of the Depression, too, when the rest of us was wearing clothes made of meal sacks and scratching ground to eat. I reckon Mister Mac would have more money today than Croesus if it wasn’t for his doctor bills.”

  “He’s sick?”

  “No’m, his missus. Most men couldn’t have what he’s still got, though, and support her habit.”

  “Habit?” Laurel said.

  “Of being sick. I didn’t have truck with planters in my line of work. Mister Mac came to Rotary, though, and talked to you nice as any man.”

  She liked the word planter as she had liked the words cotton farmer. Images from Gone with the Wind readily came to mind.

  Buddy showed her to a yellow plastic couch. “I can’t get Hal out yet. And we have to see the superintendent first.” What did he mean, get him out? The words had a terrible sound and made her want to rush to save Hal from where he was, a female knight to the rescue. “Mister Mac,” Buddy was saying, “is a gentleman of the old school. Not many of them left. I believe Hal’s trouble has been, he’s always been in his daddy’s shadow. Then got in with the wrong crowd, got to drinking, married the wrong woman, and you know the rest.

  “Hal’s stood up to this place better than most men that come up like he has could have done,” Buddy continued. “When he gets out, I believe Hal’s going to be his own man. And not his daddy’s son any longer.”

  She nodded in a satisfied and even proprietary way. But why wasn’t Hal already his own man at his age? Despite obstacles in his way, William had not let himself be overshadowed. Again, she imagined Hal as kindly and too sensitive for his own good, a man without the heart to usurp his father’s position. “I think on the outside Hal will stick with AA, too,” Buddy said.

  “But he’s not a real alcoholic.”

  “Oh, yes, ma’am.”

  Laurel felt superior. He was not the kind of alcoholic she meant: not a stomp-down, out-and-out drunk. Obviously Buddy was not of Hal’s social set, so what did he know of his life before prison?

  Along corridors; the building inside was ordinary too. Odd to Laurel that she was walking with Buddy while Hal was elsewhere, and they were waiting to meet. Secretaries looked up from small offices. In William’s giant building, there were so many cubicles on the floors she was reminded of a hornet’s nest. When William recently quit his job on the travel magazine and took the new one, she was surprised when one of his Boston cousins said, “We’d wondered how long William was going to do something so childish.” She had loved William’s job and the trips it took them on, only not his office hours. She had tried seeing things through his family’s eyes and failed. Had something William sensed from his family led him to change jobs? Did he hear, when his mother broadly proclaimed what an interesting life they led, some false note, possibly read in her eyes words she once asked Laurel: “Is he going to be an Events-Empire hack?” Laurel had brooded over those words as if criticized herself, and in some ways she had been, for without intention Mrs. Perry pointed up the vast difference in the way they saw things.

  Remembering the superintendent was enlightened about prison reform, she was glad to meet him. Mr. Grady shook hands warmly too, saying he was glad to have her look around. “We have nothing to hide.” She could tell he wanted to help her with an article because of Hal; Mr. Grady seemed anxious to help Hal out, if only to break up prison routine for him. “All the way down here from New York,” he said. But Laurel let the remark go; another one she grew tired of all summer. Even her Delton peers seemed to think Connecticut was only part of that larger city; they never realized she lived in a more rural environment than they did.

  “Hal’s done a real good job on the paper,” Mr. Grady said. “He’s the first editor we’ve ever had in this country prison who could read and write.”

  They laughed and parted company. She waited on the couch while Buddy went to get Hal out, whatever those darksome words meant.

  Sandy-haired, he appeared around a corner like a scared rabbit. His hazel eyes sought her here, there. When he saw her, their eyes met briefly, and his own lost a look of confusion, even fear, and he seemed merely shy. Anyone locked up for a year was at a disadvantage; Laurel felt for once she must be in control of a social situation. She stood up, put out her hand, and looked the man straight in the eye as William taught their son. “Hal,” she said.

  “Hey.”

  Her knees felt weak. She heard that old Southern expression so seldom. It made her feel at home, but that was ridiculous in this place. Still, the place was bucolic enough to make it more like her home place in the hills than a prison. When Hal spoke that one word, it was with a kind of chuckle in his voice. It deepened over the word and made her feel shivery. She had never heard a voice like it. He was not so tall as she might have wished; but after she had once broken off with a boy because she did not like the socks he wore, she had taught herself not to make superficial judgments. “Buddy’ll be here in a minute. We’re supposed to wait at his car.”

  Hal opened the door and stood back, one arm upflung against the doorframe as he waited for her to pass. She went by. Laurel always had the same feeling in such moments—even with a man who was a stranger, in a restaurant or a store, anywhere—a momentary recognition of his maleness and her femaleness. Of necessity, she had to brush by his sleeve lightly. She was surprised he wore a white Oxford-cloth button-down shirt, a familiar look from her courting days to the present; it seemed odd a prisoner had one on. She had the sense, then, when he held open the door, that she was small and helpless, an impression Southern females grew up to rely on. Admittedly, it was one she cherished. But a friend had said she had that awareness of sex even passing beneath the arm of her stepson. Laurel had been glad to find herself similar to other people, something she worried about.

  The white shirt and white jeans Hal wore were dazzling in the sunlight; blue stripes down the sides of his pants snaked and swam. He was dressed like the boy at the entrance, and yet there was a difference she could not pinpoint.

  The day was so hot mica in the steps might melt. Leaves lagged on the trees, as still as moss. Hal cupped her elbow as they went down steps. Apparently, good breeding outweighed printed warnings on his prison stationery about contact between prisoners and visitors of the opposite sex. She would like to have told him, also, she could walk by herself. As they stopped in the skeletal shade of a mimosa, Laurel recalled his writing her that a certain mimosa was his favorite tree here. “Laurel, not many women would want to visit this prison. I’ve worried about your reactions.”

  “Why wouldn’t they want to come? I’ll like everything.” But that seemed an inappropriate statement for where they were, and she made a mess of trying to explain what she did mean.

  “My brother-in-law, Pete Rogers, came down one time. He said he was never coming back. He couldn’t take the place or seeing me in it.” Hal gave his intimate-sounding little chuckle. “Pete spent the day calling where I live my dorm, instead of my cage.”

  “I know Pete!” Laurel cried that out a little too gladly. She wanted Hal to understand their whole pasts were not dissimilar. She knew people he knew, though she had come to know them later in life. “I dated him one weekend when I was a junior at a college in Washington and he was at Annapolis. In those days, I had
to wear a hat and gloves to leave the campus and had to stay on the college floor at the Biltmore, where no boys could come up. Did you used to meet under the clock there?”

  “Sure.”

  “After that, I went to Bard College. Quite a change.”

  “Went where?”

  “Never mind.” Laurel felt a renegade again that she had chosen a college no one in Delton had heard of, and wouldn’t have gone to if they had heard of it. “Does Pete know I’m here?”

  “I didn’t tell anyone except Pris. And asked her not to mention it. I hope you won’t either. There’s talk about me up in Delton, I hear. People are saying I live in a special house here and have no contact with other prisoners.”

  “That’s so unfair,” she said. “How do—”

  “I think because some guys from Delton who’re my friends can come to see me pretty much when they want to. They got interested in a pre-release center Mr. Grady wants to build, and they and their wives are helping to raise money. Politicians won’t allocate funds for it because they think this prison is for two things, punishment and profit. People know these guys have dropped in when they want to and have gotten the wrong idea. That’s the only reason I can think of for the rumors.”

  Surely, he must realize a lot of people might like to say unkind things about him; that was not a topic for conversation. “You sure are tan,” Laurel said.

  “I take a lot of sunbaths out behind my cage.”

  “I agree with Pete about that name. But I don’t understand his not being able to face it here.”

  “Pete will be the first to tell you he’ll only see a movie where Betty Grable’s the poor show girl who ends up with a millionaire.”

  “Oh, those Depression era movies we grew up on. They gave me false notions.” Romantic ones about men and women, Laurel added to herself. “Was it Eliot who said people can’t stand too much reality?”

  “Eliot?”

  “Not some Eliot in Delton.” She assumed herself teasing. “T.S.?” she ventured. “I only like realistic movies and books. I don’t understand wanting to escape, do you?”

  “I never have thought anything about it. I’ve been using an aluminum reflector Pris brought down. Have you tried one of those?”

  “No.” Laurel did not reveal she no longer sunbathed, wishing to avoid further sunspots, wrinkles, and freckles. Reality seemed a dead subject; she would like to have pursued it. In the silence, she was aware of the uncomfortable heat. Unexpectedly, a dried mimosa pod drifted down to her hair, and Hal removed it. “Thanks,” she said softly.

  “It’s a different day from when we did grow up,” he said. “Movies. Everything. The first time I heard my father mention sex, he was driving me to Delton to take a train for prep school. He said there were girls in the world who were not nice and to watch out for them. That poor man stuttered so bad and turned so red trying to say that much, I had to feel sorry for him. Mama, of course, never told me anything.”

  She said, “We were made to be secretive. So many rules, you had to break them.”

  “One of those buildings over there is my cage. They’re like army barracks and no more uncomfortable. The main trouble is noise. A TV at the top of the room goes constantly. My cage mates’ favorite program is Lawrence Welk.”

  “My husband and I almost never look at TV. I watch with my son, though. Our favorite—” Why was she telling Hal about her and Rick’s special time? Forced to explain, she ended, “Do you like Judy Garland?”

  “I don’t know enough about the girl’s singing to comment.”

  In this part of the world you were a girl till you died of old age. She had looked at the barracks when he nodded toward it. “They don’t care if you just take sunbaths?”

  “Why should they care? I’ve got plenty of time.”

  “Oh. Sorry,” she said, and looked at her feet in the dust.

  Buddy took up more than his fair share of space on the front seat. Laurel in the middle tucked her elbows to herself while he drove them along roads in interstices between fields. Going around curves, she swayed and favored Hal’s direction. Buddy was still a stranger. His car was air-conditioned but had little time to cool as they stopped so many places, which she visited with Buddy. Hal, as a prisoner, was forced to wait in the car. They were all sweating, and when she swayed against Hal, damp hairs on their arms brushed together. He smelled of mingled sweet scents. William used no men’s toilet articles except shaving cream. She did not recall that William sweated, but then people from Boston perspired. In hers and Hal’s summer dating days, there was a sense of intimacy to sweating all over one another while necking or dancing, slimily and slickly, like eels.

  “Pete coming to the dove hunt this year?” Buddy said.

  “He won’t come here anymore. Daddy’s coming instead and bringing Jiggs.” As Hal put an arm to the back of the seat, Laurel felt nestled and held herself stiffly. Hal explained Mr. Grady had invited him on a dove hunt last fall. He had let him ask his friends from Delton who were interested in the pre-release center. “Pete went by Matagorda and brought my Lab. That dog was so glad to see me he almost had a fit.”

  She smiled over the picture of dog and master reuniting, though inmates on dove hunts was not exactly her concept of prison. She was glad he saw the irony too. Hal laughed. “Grady even let Pete bring my own gun.”

  “Do many prisoners go on dove hunts?” she asked.

  “I’m the only one. The only one with friends who have money, I guess.”

  “Mr. Grady cares a lot about your position here, Hal,” Buddy said.

  “He knows I won’t run even with a gun in my hands. I’m a prisoner he can trust.” Hal looked out into a cornfield where dark, elephant-eared leaves formed shady funnels. “Why do they keep trying, the poor bastards?”

  Laurel liked prison lingo: to run would mean to escape. “But no one is guarding.”

  “You don’t think so?” Hal bent forward, pointing to a tripod of white wooden legs. In observing them, she had thought they led up to watchtowers for fires. Now, looking up, she met the eyes of a guard holding a rifle who stood on a widow’s walk outside a tower. He seemed that moment to peer directly into her soul. “There are invisible gun lines,” Hal said. “Every prisoner knows where they are; he’d better, by God. Step beyond a line, and those guards have the right to shoot without warning.”

  She thought about the danger in which he must live. She had been naïve to think country peacefulness was what this prison was about. He’d have a lot of inside information he could give her. Inside info, Laurel thought. She got out to visit First Offenders camp with Buddy. Seeing a lot of tow-headed, redneck kids with pale eyes, she thought it rather nice to be back in country where there were mostly people like herself, of Scots-Irish descent. Hal said he had not been put into First Offenders because of the age difference; those boys’ music alone would have driven him nuts. A record had been playing loudly. A record made by the prison’s own colored band, Buddy had said. A black man was singing, “I’m settin’ here on a prison farm. I ain’t done no harm. Umm-umm. Settin’ here for the rest of my life. All I done was kilt my wife.” Umm-umm, Laurel went on singing to herself. Hal talked about First Offenders as the camp where there was the most homosexuality. “When I first came here,” he said, “an old con named Purvis told me I was lucky not to be in there. I might have been corn-holed. That was my introduction to prison. He scared the bejesus out of me.” Laurel envisioned her article printed in The New York Times magazine section, stunning people because of a woman’s sure knowledge of the vicious inner life of a Southern prison. In accepting a Pulitzer Prize for journalism did you have to make a speech?

  There were more than twenty thousand acres to the prison. Was Buddy going to show them all? After viewing Maximum Security from a distance, visiting the one women’s camp, the firehouse, the dairy, and the hospital, she wearied. Finding she was hungry, she knew something of a loss of freedom when she could not satisfy a whim. Buddy stopped various plac
es on AA business. She and Hal were left alone, but always within Buddy’s eyesight. Prison was as bitchy as any small town, he said. When she tried to answer how she’d ended up in the North, she could understand Hal’s thinking her moving away strange when his family had owned the same land for three generations and farmed it long before his parents moved to it and built their house. He talked about his life and frequently mentioned Pete. There were humorous anecdotes of their hunting dove, deer, wild turkey, and duck. She knew Pete’s sisters would be the same as relatives to Hal, and the people they married, and so on till there was a whole tribe of people feeling kinship one way or another. Poor Rick, his first summer down here, traveled the hills on his bike enumerating houses where he had blood kin, claiming his grandmother’s aunt’s daughter the way he would a first cousin, having none, the way he had neither an aunt nor an uncle. “People are better off growing where they are planted,” her mother often said. “Here we are up here all by ourselves.” Mrs. Wynn spoke about the East as if she and Laurel stood alone atop Mount Everest. “And not a soul in the world to come to my funeral.”

  “I’ll come,” Laurel always told her cheerily. Privately, she shared some of her mother’s misgivings and fears. Who in Soundport could she count on to fill pews in a church where even the minister would not know who she was? She wondered if only Southerners were so obsessed with burying. When they stopped for Buddy to visit what he called a “colored camp,” a black man stepped from the shade of a chinaberry tree and walked to the car to shake Hal’s hand. “How you doing today, Mister Little Hal?”