Ed Gorman - Short Stories, Volume 1

“Well say hi to your mom.”

“Thanks Riley. I’ll be sure to.”

“She’s a hell of a nice lady.” Riley and his girl came over one night when Ma’d had about three beers and was in a really good mood. They got along really well. He had her laughing at his jokes all night. Riley knows a lot of jokes. A lot of them.

“I sure hope we make our goal today.”

“You just relax Tom and forget about the store. OK?”

“I’ll try.”

“Don’t try Tom. Do it.” He laughs, being my uncle again. “That’s an order.”

In the kitchen, done with packing her paper bag, Ma says, “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Said what?” I say.

“About you being like your sister.”

“Aw Ma. I didn’t take that seriously.”

“We couldn’t have afforded to stay in this house if you hadn’t been promoted to assistant manager. Not many boys would turn over their whole paychecks to their mas.” She doesn’t mention her sister who is married to a banker who is what bankers aren’t supposed to be, generous. I help but he helps a lot.

She starts crying.

I take her to me, hold her. Ma needs to cry a lot. Like she fills up with tears and will drown if she can’t get rid of them. When I hold her I always think of the pictures of her as a young woman, of all the terrible things that have cost her her beauty.

When she’s settled down some I say, “I’ll go talk to Sis.”

But just as I say that I hear the old boards of the house creak and there in the doorway, dressed in a white blouse and a blue skirt and blue hose and the blue flats I bought her for her last birthday, is Sis.

Ma sees her, too, and starts crying all over again. “Oh God hon thanks so much for changing your mind.”

Then Ma puts her arms out wide and she goes over to Sis and throws her arms around her and gets her locked inside this big hug.

I can see Sis’s blue eyes staring at me over Ma’s shoulder.

In the soft fog of the April morning I see watercolor brown cows on the curve of the green hills and red barns faint in the rain. I used to want to be a farmer till I took a two-week job summer of junior year where I cleaned out dairy barns and it took me weeks to get the odor of wet hay and cowshit and hot pissy milk from my nostrils and then I didn’t want to be a farmer ever again.

“You all right hon?” Ma asks Sis.

But Sis doesn’t answer. Just stares out the window at the watercolor brown cows.

“Ungrateful little brat,” Ma says under her breath.

If Sis hears this she doesn’t let on. She just stares out the window.

“Hon slow down,” Ma says to me. “This road’s got a lot of curves in it.”

And so it does.

Twenty-three curves — I’ve counted them many times — and you’re on top of a hill looking down into a valley where the prison lies.

Curious, I once went to the library and read up on the prison. According to the historical society it’s the oldest prison still standing in the Midwest, built of limestone dragged by prisoners from a nearby quarry. In 1948 the west wing had a fire that killed eighteen blacks (they were segregated in those days) and in 1957 there was a riot that got a guard castrated with a busted pop bottle and two inmates shot dead in the back by other guards who were never brought to trial.

From the two-lane asphalt road that winds into the prison you see the steep limestone walls and the towers where uniformed guards toting riot guns look down at you as you sweep west to park in the visitors’ parking lot.

As we walk through the rain to the prison, hurrying as the fat drops splatter on our heads, Ma says, “I forgot. Don’t say anything about your cousin Bessie.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Stuff about cancer always makes your dad depressed. You know it runs in his family a lot.”

She glances over her shoulder at Sis shambling along. Sis had not worn a coat. The rain doesn’t seem to bother her. She is staring out at something still as if her face was nothing more than a mask which hides her real self. “You hear me?” Ma asks Sis.

If Sis hears she doesn’t say anything.

“How’re you doing this morning Jimmy?” Ma asks the fat guard who lets us into the waiting room.

His stomach wriggles beneath his threadbare uniform shirt like something troubled struggling to be born.

He grunts something none of us can understand. He obviously doesn’t believe in being nice to Ma no matter how nice Ma is to him. Would break prison decorum apparently, the sonofabitch. But if you think he is cold to us — and most people in the prison are — you should see how they are to the families of queers or with men who did things to children.

The cold is in my bones already. Except for July and August prison is always cold to me. The bars are cold. The walls are cold. When you go into the bathroom and run the water your fingers tingle. The prisoners are always sneezing and coughing. Ma always brings Dad lots of Contac and Listerine even though I told her about this article that said Listerine isn’t anything except a mouthwash.

In the waiting room — which is nothing more than the yellow-painted room with battered old wooden chairs — a turnkey named Stan comes in and leads you right up to the visiting room, the only problem being that separating you from the visiting room is a set of bars. Stan turns the key that raises these bars and then you get inside and he lowers the bars behind you. For a minute or so you’re locked in between two walls and two sets of bars. You get a sense of what it’s like to be in a cell. The first couple times this happened I got scared. My chest started heaving and I couldn’t catch my breath, sort of like the nightmares I have sometimes.

Stan then raises the second set of bars and you’re one room away from the visiting room or VR as the prisoners call it. In prison you always lower the first set of bars before you raise the next one. That way nobody escapes.

In this second room, not much bigger than a closet with a stand-up clumsy metal detector near the door leading to the VR, Stan asks Ma and Sis for their purses and me for my wallet. He asks if any of us have got any open packs of cigarettes and if so to hand them over. Prisoners and visitors alike can carry only full packs of cigarettes into the VR. Open packs are easy to hide stuff in.

You pass through the metal detector and straight into the VR room.

The first thing you notice is how all of the furniture is in color-coded sets — loungers and vinyl molded chairs makes up a set — orange green blue or red. Like that. This is so Mona the guard in here can tell you where to sit just by saying a color such as “Blue” which means you go sit in the blue seat. Mona makes Stan look like a really friendly guy. She’s fat with hair cut man short and a voice man deep. She wears her holster and gun with real obvious pleasure. One time Ma didn’t understand what color she said and Mona’s hand dropped to her service revolver like she was going to whip it out or something. Mona doesn’t like to repeat herself. Mona is the one the black prisoner knocked unconscious a year ago. The black guy is married to this white girl which right away you can imagine Mona not liking at all so she’s looking for any excuse to hassle him so the black guy one time gets down on his hands and knees to play with his little baby and Mona comes over and says you can only play with the kids in the Toy Room (TR) and he says can’t you make an exception and Mona sly-like bumps him hard on the shoulder and he just flashes the way prisoners sometimes do and jumps up from the floor and not caring that she’s a woman or not just drops her with a right hand and the way the story is told now anyway by prisoners and their families, everybody in VR instead of rushing to help her break out into applause just like it’s a movie or something. Standing ovation. The black guy was in the hole for six months but was quoted afterward as saying it was worth it.