Джойс Оутс - Prison Noir

“A Bible.”

“People can bring Bibles in here?”

“ You can’t,” I told her.

She asked me why not. I told her that if she brought a Bible, I would walk out on her. There was enough Jesus in here already. Every book cart was stacked with Bibles and tracts. I thought we were good until I brought up all of the end-of-the-world stuff and she quoted a verse from Revelation. She squinted at me, crinkling the little scar on her right brow from when her dad hit her with his belt buckle when she was young. I guess she had scars all over her body that she just didn’t talk about.

Those of us on higher tiers woke up dizzy and light-headed. We came back from work one day and a water main had broken, so we were stuck without plumbing in the middle of Minnesota’s hottest summer. Guys fought over the last of the ice in the machine, most of it ended up on the floor. People fought until tears came to their eyes. Most didn’t know why they fought. It didn’t matter to the administration, they locked us down anyway. It only took a couple of hours before the whole place smelled like shit and piss.

In the cell I usually felt safe, insulated, but in the heat I lost breath. My fan wheezed heavy air at me, its motor had run for days in a row and simply swirled heat. With no water I was thirsty, and dizzy from the smell of baking urine. I lay on the floor, hoping it would be cooler, but it had absorbed too much of the heat. At first guys started to yell in the most base kind of logic, every woman was a whore or a cunt, every man was a bitch or a fag. It only lasted a few minutes until they were exhausted and overheated. Twenty minutes into the lockdown everything was still and silent. Even the old man’s voice, riled up and quoting scripture, faded to a murmur. I panicked. I swore I had heatstroke. I wanted to holler something. I wanted to yell to send a wheelchair to take me to the air-conditioned infirmary, but several people had already beaten me to the idea; when I opened my mouth no sound came out.

I woke up on the floor bone-dry with a puddle of drool and sweat around me, two guards pounding at my bars. “Clyde! Clyde — you all right?”

I wasn’t sure.

A fat one, sweating heavily and holding a bottle of water, said to me: “What’s the matter, you take too many pills, Clyde? You’re not trying to kill yourself again, are you, Clyde?”

Wounded, I just shook my head, and for some reason, probably shame, I couldn’t tell them. They left, and once I realized where I was, I was stuck to panic again. I spent the night shivering, and throwing up a radioactive green substance I didn’t know was in my body. Without plumbing, guys threw bags of piss and milk cartons of shit out of their cells onto the flag. One guy set a bag of shit and shredded paper on fire and threw it out onto the tiers. Then, sometime in the early morning, toilets started flushing. By midafternoon they let us out. It was a zoo. I could see then how quickly a block could transform, people’s natures could change.

The heat broke for a couple days, making a lot of guys believe it was over. The sickness had run its course and moved on, they said. But those of us who had been here long enough knew the sickness was always there, dormant, picking its times to infect us.

Soon it got hot again.

We went back to work, spraying Japanese beetles and trimming weeds until I got sand in my teeth. I came back to the shop for water one afternoon and caught an angle of something moving in an unlit cubby. I was aware right away of the gas, strong but mildly sweet. I took a glance and saw Serial Killer bent at his knees, with one of the lawn mowers tilted to its side, the gas cap off, draining into a small bottle he held in his hand. He didn’t notice me, so I played it off and left. But he must’ve heard my footsteps because he straightened up and came back out with the mower. “I accidentally filled it with fifty-fifty. God, what a stupid old man.” I didn’t need an explanation. He did weird things every day. Maybe he was huffing it — guys did a lot of crazy shit to get high.

Me and Mississippi were resting in a shadow after watering flowers. He was telling me that back home they had pecan trees which hung low enough for them to reach up and pick.

“You ate them right off the tree? Damn, you is country.”

“Say, what’s the old man doing?” He pointed his huge finger at a group of shrubs the sparrows used for nests and the wasps made hives in. Serial Killer was underneath one, slumped over on his side, motionless.

“I don’t know. You going over there to check on him?” I asked.

“Hey, man said leave him if we found him like that. I ain’t fonna have him all mad at me for saving him. Let the police find him.”

The old man had made the point clear many times. We watched the stooped old body lay there for a while, then finally wheeled our hose carts back to the shop again and left them under the shadows of the powerhouse. I was envious that time might release him without a noose or lots of blood. Thirty-five years just to go away in a pine box to the cemetery out back.

When we got back inside the shop, we sat down without a mention of it between us. We just anticipated someone would find him and commotion would begin. Instead, though, the door opened and there stood a ghost. A ghost of that ornery old man with a set of hand trimmers and mulch stuck to his clothes, babbling away about something or other.

“We thought you finally kicked it.”

“Unfortunately not,” he answered, wiping the sweat from his nose.

“You fall asleep?” Mississippi asked.

“Maybe I did.”

Landon wasn’t at the next group. Apparently he was strapped to the board back in segregation for blasting off on nurses when they came to bring him his dope. A couple of the guys were so proud to tell us their doomsday preparations. They had stockpiled bottled water and noodles. Rudy was in the corner with a hand holding up his face, shaking — part tremor, part disgust at the discussion. If the rest of the joint had end-of-the-world hysteria, this group was the nerve center for it.

We were all injured, the whole joint shared it. It seemed like every day we heard the damn dog barking and boots running into the unit for something. Every day guys were hauled out for something petty. People who hadn’t been in trouble for years were getting jammed up. The whole water-main thing really broke me. Staff claimed they were just regaining control, while most of us never believed we had any control in the first place. I just wanted it to be over. Throughout most of our lives, we had gotten used to being told we were like animals in a zoo or a jungle. We got used to being the kind of animals that every day thought about devouring these people, that would devour each other if we starved enough, or even ourselves if it got bad enough. It felt like that’s where we were headed. I knew it would only get worse, because we were being told everything was our fault. Before too long they would have us eating out of troughs.

I lost all my faith in organized resistance after they took the cigarettes in ’98. I didn’t even smoke, but I’d stood with all the sour faces until they rang a bell and shouted warnings over the PA. I’d looked around and the mass that was originally gathered had thinned down to only a few of us thinking we could change something. I got stuck for a year in the hole, withering away, sleeping, and doing push-ups. The cigarettes were gone, and the joint was back to normal.

I knew my body didn’t want to go through the same rigor of the blade, or look at the same ghost in the mirror I had the last time. Talking to Rudy had scared me from the noose, but I could sit around forever waiting on something to happen that never would. This was what this place was: a dream crusher, straps and a board.