by Jodi Picoult
“Man, we just flowin’ . . .” Blue Loc replies.
Elephant Mike knocks the ball out of Clutch’s hands. “Go wash up. You ain’t touching me with those hands until you scrub off the spook that’s all over you.”
The ball bounces toward Concise, but I intercept it. I toss it quickly at Clutch, who automatically catches it and goes for the three-point shot. When it swishes through the net, he grins, the first time I have seen the kid smile in three days.
“It’s a game,” I say. “Let him rotate in.”
Blue Loc comes forward. “You talkin’ to me?”
Concise turns to him. “Yo, lay offa da pipe, cuzz. Jus’ let’s go.”
The play resumes, harder and faster. The detention officer goes back to his spot along the wall. When Elephant Mike walks away, Clutch looks at me. “Why did you stick up for me?”
I shrug. “Because you didn’t do it yourself.”
* * *
Garnering respect is the same across races: Never break weak. Back the play of your brothers. Never let a woman in on the real deal. Stand strong in the face of adversity. Get one over on the system at every opportunity.
Have heart.
Keep your word, because it’s the only thing you’ve got in here.
* * *
Concise is testing his hooch. As far as I can tell, he has several different bottles in various stages of fermentation; I suppose this way he can be sure of a steady income. “Do you ever think about what’s going on outside?” I ask.
He looks over his shoulder. “I know what’s goin’ on outside. Bunch of fools watching ESPN and gettin’ in each other’s business.”
“I mean outside outside. In the real world.”
Concise sits down, his arms balanced on his knees. “This is the real world, cuzz. Why you think we keep comin’ back to it?”
Before I can answer, Clutch appears in the entry to our cell. He is holding a bottle of shampoo and quivering from head to toe. “What’s wrong?” I ask.
He looks like he is going to throw up. “I can’t,” he blurts out, and suddenly I see Elephant Mike standing behind him.
Mike grabs the bottle from Clutch and squeezes, so that human feces sprays all over me. “You want to be a nigger so bad, rub this into your skin.”
It is in my hair, my mouth, my eyes. I gasp, trying to breathe around the awful smell of it, wiping it off me and then holding out my hands, covered with shit. Concise jumps Elephant Mike, as the detention officers rush into the cell. They pull Concise off Mike and throw him down into the mess on the floor. “Stupid move, Concise,” the officer yells. “You’re one D away from being reclassified into close custody.”
Another detention officer grabs my arm and steers me out of the cell. “You need to be decontaminated,” she says. “I’ll bring you stripes.” I turn around and see, over my shoulder, the first guard shove his knee into Concise’s back to handcuff him.
They think Concise did this to me, I realize—a black guy trying to make his white cellie so unhappy that he’d beg to be transferred out. They assume that Elephant Mike, the same race as me, is there because he’s come to my rescue.
“Wait,” I say, as the guard pulls me away. “Mike did it!”
Concise, hauled to his feet, swings a heavy head toward me. His eyes are slitted; his jaw clenched.
“Ask Clutch,” I call out, and as I am shoved toward the shower, I see the boy’s head turn at the sound of his name.
* * *
These are the words we use to refer to one another: Forty Ounce, Baby G, Buddha, C Bone. Half Dead, Deuce, Trigga, Tastee Freak. Preacher, Snowman, Floater, Alley Cat, Huero, Demon, Little Man, Tavo, Thumper. Bow Wow, Pinhead, Boo Boo, Ichabod. Chicago Bob, Pit Bull, Slim Jim, Die Hard.
In jail, everyone reinvents himself. You would never call a guy by any name except the one he gives you. Otherwise, you might remind him of the person he used to be.
* * *
Afterward, there is a pall cast over the pod. At lights out there is hardly any conversation. Concise lies on the top bunk. “Mike’s on the loaf for a week,” he says.
The loaf is a punishment, a severe form of disciplinary segregation. In addition to being separated and locked down and stripped of privileges, inmates are fed a brick of cuisine that has everything mashed into it—all food groups and a drink. It is the penalty for assaulting staff, for having a shank found on you, for throwing blood or bodily fluids.
“What happened?” I ask.
Concise rolls over. “Clutch backed you up. I figure he’s countin’ down the seven days along with Mike. Because on Day Eight you can bet he be gettin’ hammered.”
In this society, telling the truth is not rewarded, but lying to the right people is.
“The DO said that you could get reclassified,” I say after a minute.
Concise sighs. “Yeah, well, whatever. They caught me cookin’ up some stuff a couple times when they tossed my cell.”
To be moved into close custody is a bigger deal than he is letting on. Cellmates are housed alone and in lockdown for twenty-three hours a day, and worst of all, if you get convicted, the prison usually upholds whatever classification you had in jail.
“First thing in the mornin’, you outta here,” Concise says. “Clutch got an extra bunk in his cell, now. I don’t need this grief.”
A few minutes later, Concise begins to snore. I close my eyes and try to listen to the sounds in the jail. It takes me a while to realize what’s missing: For the first night since he’s been here, Clutch isn’t crying himself to sleep.
* * *
“Stripes!” Every morning we get a laundry call, the DO in charge swapping our towels and shorts or sheets or stripes for fresh replacements. As I walk down to the pod slider to make the exchange, I glance into Clutch’s cell and see him still asleep, curled on his side in bed with the blanket pulled up to his face. “Clutch,” I hear over the intercom. “Clutch, rise and shine.”
When he doesn’t come out, the officer goes to his cell. “Clutch,” I hear the DO say, and then she calls for medical assistance.
There is a lockdown while the paramedics come. They cannot perform CPR; it is impossible to dislodge the sock that Clutch has stuck so far down his throat. He is pronounced dead by one of the jail shrinks.
They carry Clutch’s body past our cell on a stretcher. “What was his name?” I ask the EMTs, but they don’t answer. “What was his real name?” I yell. “Doesn’t anyone know his real name?”
“Yo,” Concise says. “Sissinit, cuzz.”
But I don’t want to calm down. I cannot stand the fact that, under different circumstances, that might have been me. Is Fate getting what you deserve, or deserving what you get?
Concise glances at me. “He better off like that, believe me.”
“It’s my fault.” I turn to him, tears in my eyes. “I told the DOs to talk to him.”
“If it wasn’t you, it would have been someone else. Sometime else.”
I shake my head. “How old was he? Seventeen, eighteen?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why not? Why didn’t anyone ask him where he came from, or what he wanted to be when he grew up, or—”
“Because we all know how the story end. Wit’ a sock down your throat or a bullet in your gut or a knife in your back.” Concise stares at me. “Some stories, they the ones no one want to hear.”
I sink down on the bunk, because I know it is true.
“You wanna know what happened to Clutch?” Concise says bitterly. “Once upon a time a baby boy was born in New York City. He didn’t know his daddy, who was locked up in the pen. His mama was a crack whore who moved him and his two sisters to Phoenix when he was twelve, and then OD’d two months later. His sisters shacked up with their boyfriends’ parents, and he hit the streets. The Park South Crips became his family. They fed him, clothed him, and one day when he was sixteen they let him in on the action when they sweet-talked a girl into having some fun, and they all took turns with her.
Come to find out later she thirteen, and a retard.”
“That’s how Clutch wound up here?”
“No,” Concise answers. “It’s how I did. Clutch’s story, it’s the same, the names are jus’ different. Everyone in here got a story like that, except bling blings like you.”
“I’m not rich,” I say quietly.
“Yeah, well, you ain’t from the streets neither. What you do to get in here?”
“I kidnapped my daughter when she was four years old, told her her mother was dead, and changed our identities.”
Concise shrugs. “That ain’t no crime, man.”
“The county attorney doesn’t agree.”
“You didn’t kill your daughter, did you?”
“God, no,” I say, horrified.
“You didn’t hurt nobody. Jury’ll let you go.”
“Well,” I say, “maybe that’s not the greatest thing.”
“You don’t want out?”
I try to find the right way to explain to this man how I can never go back to the way things were. How, after a while, you believe the fiction you’ve told yourself so well that you cannot remember the fact upon which it was based. It has been nearly thirty years since Charles Matthews existed; I have no idea who he is anymore. “I am afraid,” I admit, “that it might be even harder than this.”
Concise looks at me for a long moment. “When I got out the first time, I went to breakfast to celebrate. Found me a little diner and sat down and watched the waitress movin’ in her short dress. She come to take my order, and I say I want eggs. ‘How you want them cooked?’ she ask and I just stare at her like she speakin’ Martian. For five years, there weren’t no choice—if we had eggs, they be scrambled, period. I knew I didn’t want them like that, but I didn’t remember how else they could be. I’d lost all the words, just like that.”
Language, of course, vanishes like anything else in disuse. How much time before I cannot remember mercy? Before forgiveness is gone? How long will I have to be in here before I forget how possibility sits on the bridge of the tongue?
I am no less bound to circumstance than Concise, or Blue Loc, or Elephant Mike, or even Clutch. I would not have run with my child if I hadn’t married Elise. I would not have married Elise if I’d been in a different bar that first night. I would not have been in that bar if my car hadn’t broken down in Tempe, and I needed a phone to call for a tow. I would not have been in Tempe if I weren’t taking a graduate course in pharmacology; padding my chances to get a better job with a bigger paycheck so that one day I could provide for a family I could not even yet envision.
Maybe Fate isn’t the pond you swim in but the fisherman floating on top of it, letting you run the line wild until you are weary enough to be reeled back in.
When I look up, Concise is staring at me. “I’ll be damned,” he says softly. “You one of us.”
* * *
Inker, the resident tattoo artist, melts down chess pieces for the monochrome green pigment he uses in his craft. His client already has sleeves—a run of tattoos covering his arms, from wrist to shoulder. It says White Pride down each of his triceps, and on his back is a Celtic knot. You can tell a lot about inmates by reading their skin. The swastikas and the twin lightning bolts tell you their racial affiliation. The spider webs and Constantine wire tell you they’ve been in prison. The clock faces have hands placed to show you how many years they did time.
I wonder where Inker plans on putting this new one. He will scrape the skin with a sharpened shank and rub the ink into it, to scar. He’ll do it all in record time, between the detention officer’s walk-throughs, meant to keep things like this from going on.
Behind the cover of a card game, Inker bends down over the bared left shoulder blade of his customer and begins to dig, blood welling up in the shape of a heart. “Five-oh,” one of the card players says, a warning that an officer’s coming. Inker slips his shank under his stripes, hides the tiny packet of ink in the ham of his hand.
But the guard that passes by doesn’t even glance at Inker. He moves to the upper level, down the block of cells. I rise, running after him.
By the time I reach my cell, the detention officer has balled the bedding into a heap and tossed the mattresses off the bunks. He overturns my little cache of soap, toothbrush, postcards, pencils. Then he reaches under the bunk for Concise’s cardboard box.
Concise isn’t here; he’s left the pod to attend church services. It is not that he’s particularly religious, but going to church allows him the freedom to sell his bootleg alcohol to inmates he would not otherwise see. Of course, after having the cell tossed, he won’t have any merchandise. And once he is moved to close custody, he won’t have the means to make it at all anymore.
The detention officer opens up a tube of toothpaste, puts a taste on his finger and lifts it to his tongue. Then he reaches for the shampoo bottle full of hooch and unscrews the cap.
“It’s mine,” I blurt out.
I would like to tell you that I’m being selfless when I say this, but it would be another lie. What I’m thinking is that Concise and I have a fragile trust; to start from scratch with a new roommate could be a disaster. What I’m thinking is that I have little to lose, and Concise has everything. What I’m thinking is that there might be a karmic balance to the acts one undertakes in life, that maybe keeping one person’s existence as is can erase the time you changed someone else’s.
* * *
Being in disciplinary segregation is like being a ghost, something at which I’ve actually had a fair amount of practice. The officers get right into your face, yet don’t seem to really see you. For one hour each day, you are allowed into the dayroom by yourself, to shower and to haunt a greater space. You go for hours without using your voice. You live in the past, because the present stretches out so far it hurts to glimpse it.
Since there are an odd number of prisoners in the pod, I am in a cell by myself. At first, I consider this a blessing, then I begin to have my doubts. There is no one to talk to, to have to step around. Anything to break up my routine becomes a gift. So when I am told that my attorney has arrived for a visit, there’s nothing I’d like more than to be taken down to the visiting room, if only for a diversion. But there is also nothing I’d like less. I know why you asked Eric to be my lawyer, but at the time, you didn’t know the whole story . . . and neither did Eric. It is clear, from our last meeting, that Eric can’t easily separate my story from his own. Would he have agreed to represent me if he’d known that he’d have to walk through the memories of his drinking all over again?
“Please tell my attorney,” I say, “that I’d rather not.”
A half hour later, the inmates begin to stir. A few of them start hollering, others begin to pace like hamsters in a cage. I look back over my shoulder to see what’s causing the stir, and find Sergeant Doucette leading Eric toward my cell.
I turn my back. “I don’t want to speak to him.”
“He doesn’t want to speak to you,” she tells Eric.
Eric inhales sharply. “Well, that’s fine by me. Because God knows I don’t feel like hearing what the hell landed you in lockdown.”
At that moment I remember when I first realized that Eric was going to be the one to take care of you after I let go. You were fourteen, and had just had four teeth pulled by the dentist; your whole face was numb with novocaine. Eric came to our house after school to visit, and I let him take you the chocolate milkshake you’d asked for. When the liquid dribbled down your chin, Eric wiped it with a napkin. Before he let go, though, he let his fingertips caress the side of your face, as if he was finding his way across a relief map. He did this even though, or maybe because, the dentist’s shot kept you from feeling it.
“Let him in,” I tell the officer.
He is uncomfortable, holding on to the bars like a swimmer afraid to leave the side of the pool. “What are you doing in here?” he asks.
“Self-preservation.”
“I’m just t
rying to save you, too.”
“Are you sure about that?” I say.
He looks away. “This case isn’t about me.”
When he asks me to start over, I have to think twice. It would be so easy to say no; to receive a court-appointed attorney and be convicted. I’ve given up my life before; I could do it again.
But there is another part of me that needs to see Eric succeed. He’s my granddaughter’s father, and you love him. I can still remember you sobbing against my shoulder after you drove him to rehab. If Eric loses this legal battle, will he start drinking and make you cry again? If he wins, will it make me believe what I couldn’t when I looked into Elise’s face: that someone who is given a second chance might actually make something worthwhile of it?
I rub my palms on the knees of my pants. “I don’t know what you want to hear, and what you don’t.”
Eric takes a deep breath. “Tell me how you met Elise.”
I close my eyes and I am a too-serious, overachieving grad student again. All my life I’ve gotten good grades; all my life I’ve done what my parents have asked . . . until now. It is their great shame that instead of becoming a doctor, I have chosen pharmacology; never mind the fact that I cannot stand the sight of blood.
I stand on the side of the road, kicking at the tires of my car as steam rolls out from the seam of the hood and spills onto the ground. I am going to miss my final in pharmacokinetics because of this.
Six miles later, dusty and sweaty, after figuring every sorry permutation of my ruined grad school grade point average and tanked career, I approach a mirage. It is a roadside bar; twenty monstrous Harleys are parked in front of it. I walk inside in time to hear the screaming. Two burly men have a stunning, black-haired girl pinned up against the wall; a third holds a fan of darts in his hand. The girl closes her eyes and yells as the first dart goes whizzing toward her shoulder. A second dart strikes inches from her ear. The biker has just lifted his hand to throw the third dart when I launch myself at him.
I have about as much effect as a mosquito; he bats me away and sends the third dart spinning to land between her knees, nailing her skirt to the wall.
