Джойс Оутс - Prison Noir

Most of the guys in the group seemed way more gone than I was. Most of them were on varying dosages of lithium, I was not. My therapist tried several times to get me to take something, but I saw the other zombies. Being around them didn’t stop me from wanting to die — instead, it just made me feel more alienated. But even if I didn’t particularly like all of them, I related to them more than I wanted to. I couldn’t be shocked by the extents they might go to — after all, I had the scars to show I could go to some wicked places myself. In their faces I saw an East Indian man I’d met in the county jail who tried to off himself by bashing his head against a steel sink. He could only do it for so long before the noise gave him away, or his neck got too tired and injured to keep going. I mostly remember the rage and fear in his purple and turquoise eyes as he jerked and flung in his cuffs.

Coming into the room it was hard to gauge individual moods. We were swept into personal tirades of whoever’s mania was strongest that day. No matter what kind of topic the therapist presented.

“Lately I’ve been crying a lot. Is that strange? I mean, sometimes I’ll be watching TV and a commercial will come on and I’ll start crying, and I don’t know why,” a new guy told us.

An alarm went off just as we were released from the meeting, so we got stuck against the wall while guards ran full speed down the hall, handcuffs jangling, rubber-soled boots thudding, before they tackled the two guys in the main rotunda. The cloud of pepper spray misted, numbing my lips. Our eyes burned and our noses ran.

Summer

It got hot, really hot, where the heavy blue sky pressed down on me. Serial Killer, Mississippi, and I had been out in the nuclear sun replacing mulch in every last one of the mulch beds. The heat put extra rot to discarded milk and eggs in the dumpsters, and the crows stalked leftovers in the bins waiting to be picked up by the pig farmers. It was the third morning in a row I’d found a pigeon in the grass with its head missing and its belly ripped open. They often stayed cooped up, hiding from that hawk. It was so hot, the asphalt melted the soles of our boots. Serial Killer had a stream of sweat dripping down his seventy-year-old nose that looked like a melting icicle at the tip.

Flowers wilted while weeds kept growing. There wasn’t any air-conditioning in the cellblocks, so the whole prison was miserable; everyone slept in sweat-soaked sheets. Even the shadows were deadly, swallowed up by the heat and made into mirages. Most of the conversations I had were with people coming out of those shadows. They said something, then fell back into them. Guys would sit on the floor in their cells and make statements like: “The world really is gonna end.” It would have been fine with me, but I knew we wouldn’t be that lucky.

The hotter it would get, the greater the delirium. Guys walked the tiers and their lips moved, but they weren’t speaking to anyone we could see. They had stories, names of individual souls that visited them on their tiers and in their dreams. People swore the spirit of a kid who killed himself ten years before was living in one of the showers. I used to believe them, but now I don’t believe anything. The dreams I have are usually either Mississippi choking me with his enormous hands, or Serial Killer shoveling dirt over my head.

End-of-the-world hysteria was going full tilt. It wasn’t just the group — the whole joint had gone apocalypse crazy. After setting off the metal detector and being asked to back through, a guy just stared the guard down—“It’s the end of the world, what?” It was everywhere, it was included in greetings and leave-takings. It became comical, except to the people who were coming to rely on the cataclysmic ending to their suffering, like most of the guys in the group. I was kind of hoping for it too — but I knew it would end up just another disappointment.

There were more fires. Guys in the block across the hall set a bundle of towels and T-shirts aflame in their cells. On their way out in cuffs, one of them said: “Fuck it. It’s the end of the world.”

When it wasn’t too hot, I still went to the yard to play basketball with Slick, until a chubby Mexican guy crossed the court without a shirt on and sat down to take a shit in the old bathroom shed right next to it. Me and Slick walked the track, with the big smokestack in the background that changed positions like an illusion. We passed by the push-up squads, and watched a pair of eagles gliding over the river. An itty-bitty woman walked the gangplanks in sunglasses carrying an assault rifle that looked heavier than her. We talked about all that had changed. It meant something different to him, he was going home. The old horseshoe tournaments, the time Old Green Eyes with the cane beat up the young nappy-headed kid on the bleachers — Slick remembered things I did not. I resolved it was because he made them up.

Rudy walked the track by himself, going the opposite way. I gave him a nod as he passed; he nodded too and put his head back down.

“What’s up with dude’s arms?” Slick asked me.

“He’s fine,” I told him.

Then he asked me again about my wrists. “What am I supposed to tell our people in the world, Clyde?”

“We still have people in the world? I never expected this would be my life and I don’t consider this living.”

He told me, “Shit, I knew I was coming. Since the fifth grade people been telling me I was coming here. My dad done broke out some of them windows. I used to come here in the ’80s when they had banquets right here in the yard, family and all that.”

Those days were definitely gone. I told him he could break as many windows as he wanted when he got out.

At the end of the yard period, when the bats started coming out of the old powerhouse chimney, Slick pointed toward the basketball courts: “Ain’t that your boy?” A line of guards were running across the yard at somebody butt-ass naked who was yelling something. It was Landon, jogging in circles. It took them ten minutes to tire him out enough to catch him. “What happened to that dude?” Slick asked me.

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. This ain’t no way to live.”

That night they hit us with another memo, telling us that due to the costs incurred by all of the fires, there would be no holiday meal for the Fourth of July this year. With it came division — division and blame thrown at each other. Our side hated the youngsters for setting the fires; the youngsters hated us for being passive. Even the weirdos and the punks started throwing garbage around and slamming phones. The old walls were sweating under the heat. Guys were starting fights with each other just to go to the AC in segregation. Until the AC broke and they were stuck in the death chambers. People sat on their steel toilets and flushed them over and over to stay cool. Guys were trying to corral others to do something, but nobody had a clear “what.”

My friend Melanie started coming around more. She used to visit once a year, now it was every couple of months. She said it wasn’t because of the marks on my arms, but I sensed it was. We shared Sonny, who had died a couple years before I got locked up. Sonny and Melanie were the kind of people who made the world better; I was not. I thought that if they could take Sonny away, and leave me, then there was something irreparable about the world. Melanie was the only person I still spoke to outside the walls. My mom told me she was tired of explaining to people that her son was in prison. Now she tells people she doesn’t have a son. She’s still my emergency contact, but she never even reached out to me after my incident.

The problem with Mel was I wanted to look at her shape, but she wanted to bring me to Jesus. A guy came in the visiting room one time with a book. “What’s that he has in his hand?” she asked.