by David Cole
“What’s your color?” he said when I swiveled his rearview mirror around so I could see myself with the beret, adjust its fit. I liked that. Most men would have a cow if you even touched their mirrors while they were driving, but his only physical reaction was to snuggle against the left door, steer with his left hand while he looked me over at seventy miles an hour.
“Color?”
“Your hair. What coloring, what brand of coloring do you use?”
“That’s not flattering, you know. That I’m old enough to cover the gray.”
“I do. So, what do you use?”
“L’Oréal.”
“Hey. Use it myself.”
He stretched a fist to me, we knocked fists. And again, I had to check him out, I’d been doing this ever since we’d met, but not obvious, keeping up my part-angry, part-frustrated, part-I-don’t-care image. Unlike most older men who fixate on total black coloring, Brittle’s hair was somewhere between black and brown, not even noticeably colored.
He slid over to the I-10 right lane, turned on his blinker for the Cotton Lane exit. We headed north on Cotton Lane, my heart thumping. I’d been here before, been here just last year, the start of one of the worst days in my life, the day Meg Arizana was kidnapped down at Nogales. Tried not to show my anxiety at being here as he turned left at McDowell Road and then right on Citrus Road for approximately half a mile.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, pulling into a parking lot instead of the main prison complex entrance.
“I’ve been here once.”
“A friend in there?”
“No.” Licking my lips, tugging at the beret. “I’ve never been inside.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“Let’s just get this over with.”
This time, I paid more attention, saw a bunch of gray buildings, looking like blockhouses, spread out within the confines of the entire Perryville grounds. I knew that “complex” actually meant specific buildings in a prison.
“Explain to me what I’m going to see,” I said, alerted by the remembered anxiety of my last visit.
“Arizona Department of Corrections. Each complex is run by a warden and each unit within the complex is run by a deputy warden. Each complex warden is assisted by a complex deputy warden, each unit DW is assisted by an associate deputy warden, an ADW.”
“Forget the alphabet soup.”
“I don’t know many details about Perryville regarding units. I never worked here. All I know, it’s a woman’s prison, there’s a Criminal Investigation Unit here. My impression is of a fairly large complex of single-story gray buildings with this large parking lot out front, facing the flat, one-storied admin building. Here.”
He got out, moved to the front of the car before realizing I was still inside. He laid his briefcase on the hood and waited. His cell phone rang, he flipped it out and open. A Samsung a310—I notice these things, it helps when I’m anxious or frustrated, I focus in on technology, my safety valve, my emotional throttle-down escape.
One Mississippi, two Mississippi…ten deep breaths, and I got out of the car, eyes on the pavement and then up, defiant, ready to deal with it.
“She’s supposed to be at the camp,” I heard him say. “Shit! I authorized one of my men to pick her up. To hold her as a material witness.”
An Anna’s hummingbird buzzed past my ear, flirting with the red ocotillo flowers. A male, its gorget and crown a brilliant iridescent red, the helmet absolutely glowing when you saw it head-on, but turning dark as it flew the other way.
“See if you can find that guy, that…Sean, the guy who supposedly told her about the bones. Okay, bodies. Whatever. Call me when you leave the camp.”
“Problems?” I said.
“No.”
If I’d have known right then that Theresa Prejean had been assassinated on a Tucson street, on a corner only six blocks from where I used to live, if I’d have known, I’d have…what? I thought, What the hell would I have done anyway?
He folded the cell, tucked it away, and gestured toward the entrance. He followed me inside to the front desk, showed his ID, and we were escorted through a barred-door sally port into a long hallway and then a windowless visitors’ room. Twenty feet wide, over fifty feet long, chairs set on either side of tables, aligned perfectly in a row stretching the length of the room.
“You can leave us,” he told the correctional officer.
“Can’t do that, sir.”
Brittles slapped his coat pockets, found another ID card with a green border around a bright yellow background. Shielding it from me, maybe just an accident, but I couldn’t make out what it said. The CO’s eyes widened, he was young and seemed a bit awed.
“Yes, sir!”
He snapped a salute and left.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Just who I said I am. Okay. I’m going to leave you here. You’ll talk to the prisoner alone.”
“No way.”
“That was part of her condition. I’ll be right outside. Slap the door or holler, I’ll come in.”
Alone in the antiseptic room. Orange plastic chairs, tables bolted to the floor, the chairs burned with cigarettes and full of dings where they must have been hurled at the wall. The chairs looked as heavy as the tables, I wondered why everything wasn’t bolted down.
A CO escorted a black woman in an orange jumpsuit into the room. She wiped down all the tabletops, mopped half the floor, never once looking at me once she caught me staring. She started on the second half of the floor, but the CO checked his wristwatch and told her it was time for her lunch break. They left.
I fiddled, I breathed, I unbuttoned and rebuttoned the top of the tight shirt, and started as a door banged open at the opposite end of the room. Another CO ushered a woman in, took off her handcuffs, exited, shutting the door behind him.
The woman didn’t move. Staring at me. Dark, curly hair, shoulder-length but not stylish at all, looked like she’d cut it hurriedly, not anything important, just had to be cut, keep it out of her eyes, probably. She wore institutional blue jeans, no belt, an orange tee shirt, sneakers without laces. She didn’t move.
I got up, but she still didn’t move, so I started walking the length of the room. She looked somehow familiar, but I knew I’d never seen her before. As I got within ten feet I saw deep frown lines burrow into her forehead, just for a moment; she was steeling herself, getting ready for me. Five feet away, I stopped abruptly in shock. She smiled, a cynical hook at the right corner of her lips which flattened against perfectly white teeth.
I dug into my purse, found the old picture my ex-husband Jonathan had given me two years before. A twenty-one-year-old woman, laughing, happy.
“Yeah,” she said, voice brittle with tension.
“Is it…are you…?”
I hadn’t seen her in twenty years. Shock waves. I had to reach for a tabletop, steady myself, my legs weak, felt like one of my old panic anxiety attacks, it was brutal, I tell you.
I couldn’t stand and wobbled into a chair, mouth wide open, stunned.
“Hello, Mom,” she said sarcastically, all the tension released in those words as though she’d been waiting to say that for years and years.
It was my daughter from my brief marriage to Jonathan Begay.
Spider.
9
“Spider,” I said, lips dry, tongue in knots, my whole head in knots.
“Dominguez.”
She cut me off, her lips barely a pencil line, they were clenched so tight, the word emerging like a hiss, lingering on the last ahhh syllable, teeth apart, for a moment I thought her tongue would dart out. Like a stinger. Like a snake.
“Help me here, Spider,” I said.
She fingered the ID badge clipped to her orange tee. Waited for me to read it.
DOMINGUEZ, ABBE CONSUELO
ADC 49-353424-F
Finally, not knowing what else to do, I took out the photo that Jonathan gave me two years before. I traced my finger over
the smiling woman, trying to discover some link, some blood, some connection between my memories of her at two years old, when Jonathan took her from me and disappeared.
Trying to make a connection between the smiling photo and the enraged face in front of me. I just kept staring at her, a tiny smile flickering on my lips, fading, more a twitch than a smile. I had so much invested in discovering this moment, meeting her for the first time in twenty years, I’d built this mythic meeting scene, I don’t know what I’d built, but the daughter I’d imagined was nothing like the woman across the table.
Her concentration broke. Blinking, suddenly looking down, nothing else changing in her body, still sitting like she had a pole up her ass, years of anger at me, at somebody, and here I was as a release for the anger. And then she took a deep breath, hunched her shoulders, let the breath out with a slow sigh, and rolled her head side to side, muscle tension probably cramping her neck.
It was something to build on.
“Dominguez. Where did you get that name?”
“Run one of your hacker searches. You’d find out.”
Rude.
A whole different attitude. For the first time, I wondered if she really knew what to do with me, with her mother, facing her mother, two adults, two strangers.
“I’ve searched for your real name for years.”
“I have no real name,” she snorted. “Like you, I have lots of identities.”
“Spider Begay.” She shrugged. “I filed the birth certificate. In Flagstaff.”
She shrugged again.
“So Spider Begay disappeared two years after that birth certificate?”
“You disappeared. That’s what he said. What Daddy said. When I met him in Mexico. Do you know where he is now?”
“No.”
She nodded toward the steel door at the far end of the room.
“Where is he?” she asked.
“Who?”
“Mister Law.”
“Nathan Brittles?”
“Oh, c’mon, mom. You don’t believe that’s his real name, do you?”
“He has a lot of ID. But I really don’t care about him right now.”
She saw I was curious.
“Check out John Wayne,” she said cryptically.
“I saw the movie. What do we do here? Why are we here?”
“He coming in? Or what?
“Tell me, Spider.”
“Dominguez!”
“Abbie, then.”
“It’s not aaaaa-beeee.” Flat A sound, long E sound, said derisively. “Ah. Bay. Ahbay. Don’t you, like, know any Mexican?”
I swore. A border phrase, a slang phrase, the rudest I could think of. That shocked her. No telling if it was because of the insult, or because it was said by her mother. Another attitude. Negotiation with anger.
“Let’s get to it,” she said flatly. “Call him in.”
“This is between us,” I said, standing up. “You want him in here, you deal with him and I’ll just go home.”
After a minute of standoff defiance, I headed toward the door. I’d only gone a few steps when she surged out of her chair, slamming it against chairs behind her, grabbed a plastic ashtray from another table, and hurled it like a Frisbee, like a discus, like a deer slug out of a twelve-gauge, sailing it three inches from my head. I ducked, but she wasn’t aiming it at me. Flew all the way down the room in a flat trajectory, cracking against the door and dissolving in shards. The bolt shot back with a loud click, a CO appeared with her hand on a baton.
“Get John Wayne,” Spider yelled.
The CO cocked her head at me.
“Brittles,” I said.
“Wait one.”
She closed the door, the bolt shot home. Neither Spider nor I moved. Two minutes later the CO came in again.
“On the phone.”
“Get him off the fucking phone, get him in here!” Spider screamed.
“Your call,” the CO said to me, arms out wide, palms up, a shrug.
“We’ll wait.”
Spider immediately went to the other door and pounded on it with her hands. The CO quickly shut and locked her door, the second door opened, a second CO appeared. Spider held out her wrists to be hooked up. Once the handcuffs were on, she left without a word.
Brittles arrived fifteen minutes later. There wasn’t anything I could do, alone in the visiting room. No other inmate received a visitor, whether by accident or planning to keep the room empty for me.
“Sorry.” Panting, slightly out of breath. “I was out in the parking lot. Cell phones don’t work so good in here. Listen. I’ve got other problems. Bad problems.”
He had the envelope, still sealed.
“I thought I was more important to you.”
“You’re important right now. How did it go?”
“Ever had kids?” I asked.
“Three. But I see them once in a while. Seeing your daughter in here, in a prison. Bad?”
“Horrible.”
I started to cry. Began sobbing. He offered me a clean purple handkerchief. After a few minutes, he put a hand on my shoulder, not a grip, not a pat, he just laid it there until I got things together enough to wipe my face dry, mascara streaking across the purple hankie.
“What did she say?” he asked, his voice gentle, with an underlying urgency.
I tried a smile, managed a laugh, more a wet giggle.
“She said…something like, ask you if you’re John Wayne.”
“Interesting.”
He actually began spinning the envelope. I slapped his hand. He looked down, unaware of what he’d been doing.
“You’re good,” he said. “You find a tell, you use it. Except the secret in poker is to never reveal that you know a tell.”
“What did she mean?” I said with emphasis.
“Who knows? Let’s get her in here.”
I watched him stride to the nearest door. Noticed his cowboy boots. Hand-tooled kangaroo uppers, intricate stitching, uppers dyed black, tops lined with an inch-wide strip dyed a soft orange. He pressed a button on the wall, and the door opened quickly. Spider held out her wrists again for the CO to unhook her, never looking at her wrists or the CO, staring at me. Unhooked, she came directly to our table, snagged another chair, sat down.
“Here’s the deal—” she said.
“Not quite yet,” Brittles said. “Take her back inside for five minutes.”
“What!”
She resisted, but the CO took orders only from Law.
Brittles began twirling the envelope, became conscious he was doing it, nodded to himself, slapped the envelope himself this time.
“So. You found one of my tells. She has a tell of her own. She left you waiting in the room, left you alone to stew. If she’d been really good at any of her attitudes, if she’d really played out any of those roles, she’d have demanded to be returned to her cell. Then, when we wanted her, they’d have to call up, release her, all those prison rituals with doors and keys, she’d have been at least ten or fifteen minutes. But she was waiting right on the other side of the door. This woman has an agenda. For now, her emotional need to press the agenda overrides her head.”
“What’s the agenda?”
“I have no idea. But. We’ve got an edge. Let’s push it. Usually these visitation rooms are filled with all kinds of vending machines. We need some food in here.”
Calling the CO, Brittles talked a moment and turned to me.
“Sandwiches. Tuna salad, chicken salad, or egg salad?”
“Tuna.”
“Coming up. Look. I’ve got to make another phone call.”
He left.
Alone in the room again. Nothing to do. So anxious I could hear the linoleum floor expanding as I pressed on it. Heard the walls breathing, my senses so acute for something to happen, if there was a lawn nearby I’d be able to hear individual blades of grass grow.
The envelope.
I ripped it open, pulled out a single sheet of paper. A s
preadsheet printout dated three days before. Names, Social Security numbers, addresses, gender, age, credit card numbers, all checking and savings account numbers and balances. Old-hat stuff to me, I could get anything like this, I could use it, transfer money, whatever I wanted. But I had ethics about it. Something told me that this list had nothing to do with ethics or morality, it was nothing more than a cookie jar waiting to be emptied.
Flannel-lined jeans, 34 waist, 33 long, 2 pairs. Orbit hiking boots, black, Gore-Tex in uppers, women’s European size 36. Every spreadsheet entry involved ordering either clothing or towels and sheets.
There was no 800 number listed, nothing to indicate the company.
Brittles came back with a green plastic tray, two shrink-wrapped sandwiches, two diet Cokes, heavy worry lines in his face, cell phone open on the tray.
“Can we get my daughter back in here now?”
“Eat first.”
“I don’t want to eat. I want to see my daughter.”
“Then wait while I eat. Let’s see if this time she figured out the game and went back to her cell. If not, we’ve got a bigger edge.”
“This is no game for me.”
“Law and not-Law is always a game. They’re always out to screw us, we’re always out to con them. Everybody looks for a tell, an edge, an advantage, leverage. When you’re inside here, or when you’re the person who’s gonna put somebody in here, you bank any leverages you get, whether you use them now or in five years.”
“I can’t wait.”
Moving to the door, I pressed the button. When the CO opened the door, I saw Spider sitting on a bench. She came back to the visitors’ room, went through the ritual with the handcuffs. She came to the table as though it hadn’t mattered, but I saw her smile to herself. She knew she’d made a mistake. Brittles caught my eye, shrugged. Edge. Leverage. I could care less.
10
“Okay,” Brittles said to Spider. “Your mother will find out how the information is being sent.”
