The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly

by Stephanie Oakes

  I stretch out on the padded floor, my back turned to the doctor. I close my eyes and breathe. Above, the blinking fluorescents cut through my eyelids.

  “My father used to gamble,” I say, eyes still closed.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “At the greyhound track in Missoula. Outside, they had these big halogen lamps that moths flocked to. They threw themselves at it, killed themselves over it, because they were confused.”

  “They thought it was the sun,” he says.

  My head nods. “I think about those moths. They would fall down dead on the stands, and I’d pick them up and stare at their white bodies, their feathered antennas, their strange soft wings, and wish they’d thought a little bit before they did that. Before they gave it all up for a lie.

  “And I think about my parents. They followed the Prophet, but they weren’t the ones who got burned. It was us, the children. And the girls in here are mostly the same. Their parents abandoned them, gave them up for drugs. Abused them. And now look at us.”

  I hear his shoes creak on the padded floor as he stands from his stool. The fluorescent light goes dark, and I can tell he’s standing over me.

  His voice winds down from high above: “So how do you avoid becoming a moth?”

  “You tell me,” I say.

  “No.”

  I look up. His face is shadowed against the light. “What?”

  “That’s how you avoid becoming a moth,” he says. “Stop asking others what to believe. Figure it out for yourself.”

  Chapter 42

  When I’m released from solitary, I am so relieved to be back in gen pop that everything is suddenly beautiful: the dirty grouted tiles in the showers, the clinking sound of cell doors opening and closing, the girls with their angry scowls and snaggleteeth. I even manage a small smile when, at lunch, one of the lunch ladies sees me coming and places my customary soup in a stainless steel bowl on the end of the lunch counter.

  “That was crazy what happened with Krystal,” Rashida says, her mouth full of half-chewed corn dog. “You got that girl good. Oh man, that was a sight to behold.”

  “Yeah, it was—”

  “Why do you get soup when no one else does?” Rashida interrupts, her attention pinging away at blinding speed.

  Angel answers for me. “Minnow’s nutrition has been seen to by the government. She got a pamphlet from the Association for Americans with Disabilities that explained that jails can’t discriminate against inmates with chopped-off hands.”

  “That means that the lunch ladies make me a different powdered soup mix every day that I can suck through a straw,” I say.

  “Today looks like Neon Orange Surprise,” Angel observes.

  “Why’s it a surprise?” Rashida asks.

  “It tastes like split pea,” I answer. “Angel figures it was some kind of mistake with the dye at the soup factory. But it’s my favorite.”

  “I thought your favorite was Puce with Pumpkin?”

  “They never give me Puce with Pumpkin anymore.”

  “Are you guys, like, friends?” Rashida interrupts.

  “What’s that mean?” I ask.

  “Some people been talking, is all.”

  My cheeks start to turn pink, but Angel rolls her eyes, like she’s heard it all before. “Let people talk, Rashida,” she says. “I’d hate to deprive anyone of talk. Some of these girls might die if they couldn’t talk, and I don’t want another life sentence.”

  “You is so fucking weird, Angel,” Rashida says. “Don’t you care that they’re saying you two cross scissors at night?”

  “If I liked to cross scissors, I wouldn’t care if anybody knew.”

  Rashida shrugs, as though she’s lost interest. “So why’d you get thrown in here, Minnie? Some people say you killed your old man or something.”

  “I didn’t kill anybody,” I mutter. Some of the girls talk about their crimes like it’s something to hold over the rest of us. The handful of murderers usually don’t let anyone forget it, and the girls who committed light drug offenses always try to make it seem like there was fifty years’ worth of charges they didn’t get caught for.

  “I got high and crashed a car,” Rashida says. “The judge was really sure I did it, and I asked him how he knew so much when I didn’t even remember nothing, and then he was like ‘Don’t roll your eyes at me, young lady!’ but then I was like ‘That’s just what my eyes do,’ and he was all ‘You don’t speak to a judge with a raised voice,’ and I said ‘That’s just the way my voice is!’ and he got really pissed and threw me out. And I was like ‘Seriously? You’re not my dad!’”

  I nod.

  “What about you, Angel?” Rashida asks. “I know you killed someone, but I never heard the details.”

  Angel’s chewing on her bottom lip, dipping her spoon in and out of her pot of tapioca pudding, as though she hasn’t been listening.

  “So, what did you do?” Rashida asks again.

  Angel clamps her hand on her forehead. “Do you ever shut the fuck up, Rashida? Maybe I killed you. You’re obviously a ghost come back to haunt me.”

  Rashida laughs and chews the last part of her corn dog from the wooden stick while Angel mumbles something and props up her book in front of her. To get Rashida to stop talking, Angel fills the rest of the meal with the details of the book she’s reading, something about how if you could drive your car straight up, you’d arrive in space in an hour, but there are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body, which would take you longer than a month to drive, which to Angel means something.

  The electric tone sounds, signaling lunch is over, and we stand as a unit, each walking slowly in single file to place our dirty dishes on a conveyor belt that feeds back into the kitchen.

  Officer Prosser watches us as we exit, arms crossed over the cushion of her chest.

  • • •

  Some days, I stare out the bars of my cell and wonder at how I managed to exchange one prison for another. But I would take this cell with the constant hoots of girls and the bleary fluorescent lighting and the juddering steps of guards on the skyway at all hours over the maidenhood room any day.

  I don’t know how long they kept me in the maidenhood room after I lost my hands, a week, maybe more. I slept every moment that I could, but there were always a few wakeful hours when I would stew in the certainty that I would be married to the Prophet before the winter thawed. He would stand above me on a wooden chair, and I would stand below with my head bowed, barefoot in snow. And he would kiss me in front of everyone, his graying beard like brambles against my face.

  The only way to distract myself from the thought of my wedding was to close my eyes, listen hard, and paint a picture of what transpired downstairs. In the bedrooms, someone was sweeping, and a toddler was running on small, heavy feet. Wives clinked dishes in soapy water while they talked.

  “What did Miss Holy-Holy-Holy have to say for herself?” I heard Donna Jo ask.

  “Just a lot of noise,” Vivienne replied. “Putting on.”

  “She did lose her hands,” said Mabel weakly. “There was a lot of blood.”

  “She was clearly in need of a little bloodletting!” Vivienne said. “What with the way she spat in the Prophet’s face.”

  “She didn’t.”

  “Oh, Mabel, not literally, but she did how it counts, with her smart mouth.”

  “I think she should be grateful,” someone said in a small, sweet voice. “She’s been given a second chance at righteousness.” The pink-walled room of my diaphragm went pinched and strange shaped at the sound of that voice.

  “That’s true, Constance,” Donna Jo said. “We can hope she takes this as a new chance for an obedient life. Many haven’t been so lucky.”

  “Mmm,” the wives said in muffled agreement.

  My perfect little sister. I hope
d she was just playing along. She was good at acting obedient, but then so were we all. At least until obedience became impossible.

  I believed the Prophet when he said he would marry Constance if something were to happen to me. I had to think of a way to get us both out.

  The thump of boots on the wooden floor below told me my family was on their way to the Prophet Hall. The front door slammed shut, and it was quiet for the first time that day. I lay back and tried to sleep again, tried to ignore the pain that niggled at the tourniquets and radiated up my arms.

  The lock slid back on the other side of my door. My mother stood in the doorway. In her eyes, something burned with the kind of frantic fire that might sputter out at any moment.

  She approached, whispering for me to stand and put my arms out. Delicately, she edged a knitted maroon glove over each stump then slid my arms into my navy button-fronted jacket. She helped me place each foot into a pair of leather boots, tying the laces in loose knots. When she was done, she stood and looked at the door.

  “Constance—” I started to say, but my mother put a finger in front of her lips again.

  “Go,” she whispered. “You save yourself.”

  She shut her eyes tight for a moment, then turned around and walked out.

  The door swayed behind her after she left.

  For a moment, I could only stare at the open door. A part of me saw it as a violation and wanted to close it, knowing all of the rules it broke. The wind fought through the chinks in the wall and the door began to creak shut again, the gap of darkness that meant freedom growing smaller and smaller. Fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast, I pushed my body through the doorway.

  Downstairs, the muslin walls wafted in the momentary draft from my mother’s exit. It was impossible to tell if someone lurked behind a wall. I slid quietly over the floor toward the kitchen. It still smelled of dinner, a pot on the table skinned with the yellow remains of onion soup, and my stomach walloped with hunger. But stronger than the smell was the breeze coming from the open front door. I stood at the opening, not bothering with food. Not bothering with feeling sorry to leave the home of my childhood. Pushing the image of Constance back, too.

  Blood started dripping through the stitches around my stumps soon after I entered the woods, a slow dribble that fell to the undergrowth with audible plops. If anyone was following me closely, they’d easily make out my path, crimson coin shapes glinting with moonlight, leading straight to Jude’s house.

  Chapter 43

  All the women I ever knew had palms like toughened cowhide, inches of built-up callus gloving each hand, fingers rough as a cat’s tongue that, when they grabbed my wrist in admonishment, could leave behind raw patches long after they let go.

  Those were hands of trowel digging and washboard scraping, but they also were the hands that cupped a baby between them, that slipped slices of boiled potato into a toddler’s mouth, that wiped faces clean and patted cheeks in something like love. Their version of love, at least, steel-eyed and always looking for something to improve.

  I asked the doctor today where my mother is. He looked up at me like he wasn’t sure what to say, but he decided on the truth. She’s living in a women’s home. She’s taking medication and learning how to balance a checkbook and type on a computer, copying articles out of magazines to get her fingers used to making words again.

  “You could visit her, you know,” the doctor says. “When you get out.”

  I shake my head because the idea is still too untested, a fragile thin-skinned thing that needs to strengthen before I touch it. “Where are the rest of them?”

  “Group homes,” he says. “Government housing.”

  I’m picturing their hands again, only now they’re flicking light switches, wrapping around jars of peanut butter, tearing the cardboard top from a package of processed macaroni and cheese. Those hands weren’t made for a life outside of the wilderness. They don’t make sense here. Now, I wonder if they wish they could take those hands off and put them away, get back the hands they had before.

  “Have you given any thought to what you’ll do when you’re released?” Dr. Wilson asks.

  “Not really.”

  “Did you apply for the Bridge Program?”

  I shake my head. “No point. I wouldn’t get in, and anyway you only qualify if you’re eighteen or younger when released. I’m probably going to Billings, so . . .”

  “Sounds like you’re giving up.”

  “Maybe.”

  “And you’re just fine with that.”

  “What do you want me to say?” I ask. I let my head fall forward to prop it up against my hands, then stop. I’m still forgetting that they’re gone. It’s been how many months and I’m still forgetting. I stare down at the empty spaces.

  “They took my hands,” I say. “The police, I mean. They said they’d have them incinerated, do you believe that? Between the Prophet and the law, I’ll have nothing left by the end.”

  “What would it matter if your hands were incinerated?”

  “Because . . . because they were part of me. Do you know what it’s like to have a piece of your body taken away without your consent?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Then you don’t get to ask that question.” I shake my head. “I know it’s strange. And kinda gross. But I wish I had them back. They’re mine. There’d be a sense of, I don’t know, fairness.”

  He’s leans back on his stool, one arm crossing his chest. “Everybody’s lost something,” he says. “Most of us never get the chance to have it returned.”

  I know he’s right, but a small voice insists, they were mine. As much my property as anything ever has been. As long as they’re gone, I don’t see how I can ever stop being so angry at the world I feel like ripping it to ribbons.

  Chapter 44

  It’s two months until my birthday, two months until they decide if I go free. It’s gotten warm, the part of early summer when, if I were still in the Community, I’d be sun-pink at the cheeks and peeling from the bridge of my nose. Here, I stay inside. I’ve seen those chain-link pens in the yard reserved for exercising, but I don’t think I could ever let myself be locked in a cage. Besides the persistent hum of air conditioners, I’d hardly know it was summer at all.

  Today, they’re driving us up into the foothills to do community service, those of us who aren’t considered a flight risk. I had to convince Mrs. New to let me go.

  “I’ve had only good behavior for months,” I said.

  “You were in solitary for an altercation with Krystal Smith not two weeks ago.”

  “That was a . . . misunderstanding. I’ll be good. You don’t have to worry about me.”

  “Minnow, you know it’s more than that. You’re . . . understandably weakened. And you’ve taken no outdoor rec time all year. I don’t see why this matters to you.”

  “The place you’re going,” I say, “it’s not too far from the place I grew up, in the woods. I want to see how it feels, going back. I think—I think it might be important.”

  She purses her bright lips. “All right. God help me if anything happens. I’m putting it in the books as reward R & R, not as work detail. You’re not to do anything strenuous, do you understand?”

  In the morning, the broken-up voice of a guard announces over the intercom that we should congregate in the cafeteria for a debriefing before we depart. Rashida stares after me longingly when I leave reading class. The cafeteria tables have been folded into giant A shapes and wheeled to the edges of the room, the linoleum floor shiny where a long mop has just swept.

  Angel walks into the cafeteria a moment after me. Somehow, she’s been cleared to come, though probably through bribery more than good behavior. I see Tracy enter the room with a couple of other girls. She sees me and gives me a wary smile.

  “It’s called gleaning,” Mrs. New explai
ns from the front of the room. “Basically, you’re picking fruit from several acres of wild orchards. Normally private contractors would be hired for this manner of work, but budgets are tight and it remains the state’s responsibility to clear the fruit from this area of the Rattlesnake Valley.”

  “Isn’t this child labor?” Angel asks.

  “This totally voluntary excursion will last most of the day,” Mrs. New continues.

  Mrs. New explains that, in the next couple of months, black bears will trundle down from the mountains, attracted by the smell of ripening fruit trees. It’s a liability, given the number of homes in the area. The bears gorge themselves on fallen apples and plums, and sometimes swipe a Sheltie or Pomeranian on the side, because their guts are vacant. Because they feel like it. There’s always an element of fickleness in murder, isn’t there? That’s what I’ve learned in juvie, among these girls who’ve committed such monstrous crimes. You get the sense that, on that particular day, there was just nothing better to do. That, had something better been playing on TV or had the softball game been scheduled for Wednesday instead of Saturday, someone might not’ve had to die. Crime is never preventable because the mind will always grow bored.

  In addition to our everyday neon orange jumpsuits, they give us tan hiking boots and a thick leather belt. Angel helps tie my bootlaces and buckle the belt.

  “What’s this for?” I ask.

  “Chaining us to our seats. You never wanna be on a prison bus unless everybody’s nice and restrained.”

  Slowly, we march out of the prison into the blinding sunlight of the parking lot, and I stand on the pavement with my head craned back until the sun warms me all the way through to my bones. Slowly, the girls step onto the yellow bus. Officer Prosser escorts me last.

  “Don’t suppose there’s much point in chaining you up,” she says. “Not like you’ll do much damage with no hands and a pair of boots.”

  “A pair of boots is the reason I’m locked up,” I say.