Джойс Оутс - Prison Noir

I carried on like that for several years, like a zombie or a dude on inmate autopilot. My wife divorced me when I was on H block. I guess she found a better deal. I started writing letters to a pretty girl named Jewel — a cousin of an old friend — a few months ago. And she wrote me back. She even came to visit me a few times. I’m sure I won’t meet her again, seeing as how I am about to go back to the hole. Seems like everything there is waste and death. I don’t think she could save me from all that anyway. My skin has become so pale, ain’t nobody able to tell I’m a Native. Somewhere along the line, my hair turned silver. And now I get to go back to the hole, seeing as how I’ve killed a man. Once my case gets through the courts, you’ll probably be able to find me on H block. By that time, I’ll be on the other side of it. Worse. Someday, they’ll be singing for me.

Minnesota Correctional Facility, Stillwater (Bayport, Minnesota)

Things were different after I came back from the hospital. It wasn’t just me, though; it felt like the whole joint was tilting. The night I got back, Little Bug lit a garbage can on fire. Everyone was yelling about a memo, what was being taken, what we should do about it. It was hard to process. I had already been here almost eighteen years and I thought I’d finally escaped all of what this place was.

A few years into my life sentence, an old-school crook told me that buildings are moody the way people are moody. “They have a history they can’t escape, until they crumble. Sometimes these walls are depressed, sometimes they’re happy and warm, and sometimes they’re wicked and spiteful.” I didn’t understand it then. But after so many years, I think I have it sort of figured out.

I came back to familiar faces that didn’t know me anymore. I was a different person with bandages on my wrists and a softened face that scared me enough to turn my mirror backward. I didn’t do it for attention. I really did want to die. I didn’t want to fail and come back to my life sentence and curious expressions from everyone else in the unit. Even Slick, who I went back to ninth grade with, took a few days to come holler at me. “That’s pretty nuts, Clyde.”

“Yeah, well, I’m no longer coming of age like when I got here. I am of age. Of the age to be able to decide if this is what I want for the rest of my life.”

He walked away after that.

The rest of the people who came to talk to me were not my friends. They were from the fringe — would-be predators who probably smelled something. It didn’t scare me or anything, the pure predator seems a dying breed. Now they are mostly watered-down hybrids of punks and snitches, mixed with the classic features of blood and lust. When I got my property, I could smell it. Blood has a certain scent, something visceral and distinct, especially your own because it has a story you know. It was all over everything, even the notebook I’m writing this in.

I don’t remember much past preparation. Standing over the sink. The razor. The first cut and the dig, the saw, the tangle of wires just under the skin, the mush of my wrist. The pink aura and the cool over my face. The other wrist, trying to gnaw just as deep, not deep enough. I remember the pain, fright that made me want to go back to before — so great as to want someone to come and undo this. My hands convulsed as though detached from me. The red mineral spouting from me might as well have been from the center of the earth. Smudges of red on my cheek — I looked at the mirror to see if it said I was ready. Instead I saw someone I would probably never see again, a face being erased, with a name and a story that didn’t matter anymore. It was a mess, the last mess I would ever make of myself. I chased images of my life. My mom and dad, the alleyways in Minneapolis, from shooting basketballs to bullets. A hug from my best friend Sonny with tubes connected everywhere in her body. But the images ran from me, the backs of their heads retreating. I wanted to know why, but I couldn’t get their attention.

The looks are what I remember — the pink hue wrapped around those wide, strangled, and brooding stares, uniform and collective along the walls. I didn’t recognize anybody, I only saw doom in those eyes, like they weren’t really people, just images. It wasn’t until afterward that my therapist told me people rarely succeed when they cut their wrists. The body goes into a protection mode to save its vital organs. It mostly just looks dramatic, and I got these bracelets of scar tissue to say I tried, to say I was a little nuts, to say I was on fire.

Spring

They were strange times at Stillwater, the walled-in fortress of buildings sitting on the Minnesota side of the St. Croix River. We never saw the water, though, except for chance glances from the top floor of one of the old twine factories. They say the whole joint is haunted by all the souls that have gotten trapped here after they died. For almost a hundred years it has been a depository for souls trapped under the wheel. From all of our unanswered echoes, sometimes it feels like we are already ghosts, or on our way to becoming. Every once in a while there are people here from the historical society, taking pictures of the old Georgian colonial-style buildings, whose limestone has been decaying for decades. They don’t visit to take pictures of us .

May came, but with a bite hiding under a deceptively blue sky. It wanted to be spring, but winter had been particularly stubborn this year. Another garbage can got lit on fire in one of the blocks. It annoyed most of us. Youngsters did it to amuse themselves. It wasn’t just garbage cans, it was their drawers, their sheets, T-shirts, bundles of paper. The alarms went off and we’d get escorted to the hallway, or the yard, while it only took thirty seconds to extinguish the flames. They would take a couple of guys to the hole, never older than twenty-one or twenty-two, and that would be it. The administration never made a big deal out of it; they said they were just childish acts and no real threat. The old-timers just thought it was stupid.

We got locked down during a visit from the commissioner, the governor, and some kind of federal prison auditor. The visit was coupled with another memo listing a series of new policies. It made a lot of guys tense up, believing the prison could never go back to the way it used to be. I usually liked lockdowns, but this one gave me food poisoning and a throb over my right eye for three days. I was getting my sense of smell back after the incident, and I was particularly stung by the stench of rotten milk and the sweat and ass of unwashed bodies. There was an old man underneath me who ranted to himself, shouting, “The end of the world is coming!” Guys yelled at him to shut the fuck up, but he couldn’t hear them over the voices in his own head.

I had to view the first really nice days of spring through a checkerboard of glass and fiberglass windows put in when the convicts broke nine hundred out in ’83. I worked on the yard crew and we were supposed to be planting. Instead, we were locked in our boxes collecting the stink from bags of garbage. Men who were kids when I came here, laughing and playing grown-up, dumped my drawers into garbage bags. I was over my book limit, so I had to make a choice between The Brothers Karamazov and The Count of Monte Cristo. It was like giving away members of my family.

My only relief was going back to work. We basically lived in a hallway that attached to everything: cellblocks, chapel, gym, yard, school, chow. When they built this place they called it a “telephone pole” prison, because it connected everything through that single corridor. It was supposed to be innovative a hundred years ago. Now it was just the hallway where I followed the parade of sleepwalking zombies in boots and blue shirts, blue coats and orange caps, on their way to the factories. I was revived by fresh, cool air. For most of the year we lived under indecisive clouds — unsure of rain, unsure whether to stay or leave. I had been without sun for so long, my grill was pasty white and nasty. I’m usually pale, though, except for a couple months in summer, but I wear raccoon eyes all year round. I used to tell people the dark circles are from the pain, now I don’t bother.