Джойс Оутс - Prison Noir

Suddenly, a woman started screaming. Everyone stopped.

“No, God!” she cried. “Please, someone help! My boy! It’s my son!”

The woman sat on the ground cradling the kid in her arms, desperately shaking him.

“Let me see,” the coyote said, checking the boy’s limbs for marks. He found two huge red bumps on his neck. “He must’ve been sleeping on a snake pit.” He lifted the kid’s eyelids, revealing only white.

The mother just kept shaking her son. But it was no use; his body was already stiff.

“There’s nothing we can do,” the coyote told her. “I’m sorry, but he’s gone.”

Celso was flabbergasted. Why couldn’t the damn kid have been more careful? The woman should’ve been keeping a better eye on her little bastard.

The coyote tried to pull her away from the boy’s body, but she wouldn’t let him. She just screamed louder.

“We can’t stay,” he said. “And you can’t take him with you. It’s too far.” He paused for a solemn moment, then turned back to the crowd. “Let’s go.”

A few followed him. Still, others lingered, including Celso.

“Come on,” Eleonel urged, pulling his cousin’s arm. “We have to go. We can’t help her.”

The woman kept weeping.

“Maybe La Migra will find her,” Eleonel said. “You want to stay and find out?”

Celso could only hope that was true because, one by one, they all left her there. Together, they kept walking until the woman’s cries became just an echo in the wind.

Celso slipped and fell on the ice.

Flores doubled over laughing. “Easy, brother, you don’t want to end up in Duane Waters.”

Celso stood up and dusted the rock salt off his jacket. “Where?”

Flores nodded toward the big building that peeked out from behind the perimeter wall. “The prison hospital,” he said. “Didn’t you see the graveyard when they drove you in through the gates?”

Celso remembered.

“That’s where you’ll end up if you let those doctors work on you. That’s where they bury all the lifers — all the guys who outlived anybody who’d care to come pick up their bodies. Them, and mojados like us.” He pointed to the water tower, which stood higher than everything else. “That’s why everybody’s so fucked up around here. We’re all drinking the dried-up corpses of forgotten criminals.” He took a long sip from his plastic coffee mug.

They came to a stop at the weight pit, where a dozen or so inmates were curling rusted iron dumbbells and lifting warped steel bars. Flores dusted the snow off a preacher bench and sat down.

“Let me see it,” he said, handing Celso his coffee mug in exchange for the paperwork.

The mug brought warmth to his hands again. He hadn’t thought to wear gloves. Or a hat. It was a new sensation for him, being numb. It hurt like hell.

“Why do you want to read my casework?”

Flores looked at him. “To make sure I wasn’t walking the track with some fucking baby-raping child molester.”

Nearby, someone cried out in pain. An inmate dressed only in thermal underwear was deadlifting several hundred pounds off the ground. Two other inmates cheered him on as he lifted the bar higher, grunting, yelling. Nobody but Celso seemed to find this peculiar. Flores hadn’t taken his eyes off the packet of paper.

“What does RGC mean?” Celso asked him.

“Reception and Guidance Center.”

“You mean this isn’t prison?”

“No. Well, yeah — this is prison. But you won’t stay here. This is quarantine. They keep you here until a bed opens up at another joint. That, and to run psych tests and shit.”

He must’ve been referring to the long afternoon Celso spent answering True or False to a bizarre tape recording of a few hundred seemingly random statements — from the telling ( If people make me angry, I can be dangerous ), to the ambiguous ( I can usually talk my way out of trouble ), to the downright obscure ( I enjoy repairing doorknobs ). When he was done, the proctor had handed him a blank piece of paper and told him to draw a picture of a man on one side and a woman on the other. The inmate beside him didn’t seem to take the assignment seriously: he drew obscene stick figures, with a giant dick and balls on one and huge tits above a hairy triangle on the other. Celso drew a confused young man on one side; on the reverse, he drew Marichuy.

“Where’s this place at?” Flores asked, indicating where the paperwork noted his previous employment.

Celso pointed to the left of his open palm. “Near Grand Rapids.”

“What did you do there?”

“I killed turkeys,” he said. “But I got fired.”

Flores didn’t bother to ask why. He just kept reading.

The report summarized Celso’s life up to his crime. It told of his long ride from Arizona to Michigan. It mentioned his termination from the poultry-processing plant (his employer stated he fired Celso upon learning of his illegal-resident status). It told how he found a new job selling drugs for convicted armed robber Octavio “Spooky” Ramirez; how he started on a trial supply of marijuana, until he was promoted to cocaine, and finally heroin; how, one day, Ramirez and an unnamed man picked him up to accompany them on a prospective bulk drug purchase, set up by the unnamed man; how, unbeknownst to him or Ramirez, this man was an undercover DEA officer; how, upon seeing convicted drug possessor Alfred Burke — accompanied by his girlfriend, convicted check forger Lacey Hopkins — Ramirez stopped the vehicle (against the undercover agent’s adamant protests) to follow Burke to his residence, because, he said, “That junkie owes me money”; how the party forced entry into Burke’s residence, and Celso restrained Hopkins while Ramirez repeatedly struck Burke with his fists; how Ramirez, visibly agitated, produced a Glock 9mm pistol and placed it inside Burke’s mouth; how there remains a dispute as to whether the trigger was pulled deliberately or accidentally, but upon witnessing the shot, the undercover agent drew his own weapon and demanded, in a clear and loud voice, that Ramirez put down his gun; how, according to the agent’s testimony, Ramirez turned to fire on him, but was promptly shot twice in the upper torso by the agent; how Celso was then placed under arrest for home invasion, conspiracy to purchase and distribute a controlled substance, and later, felony murder for the deaths of Ramirez and Burke; and how his court-appointed attorney later pled down the substance and home invasion charges.

In the weight pit, a group of inmates had gathered. They weren’t working out and they weren’t talking. They were just waiting.

“That still doesn’t make sense,” Flores said, flipping through the packet.

The group was staring at a lone inmate doing bench presses, completely oblivious to anyone else.

“Oh, here it is,” Flores said, stopping at the final page. “You must’ve just misunderstood.”

One of the inmates grabbed a small dumbbell. He tested the weight in his hand. Not satisfied, he switched it for a heavier one.

“It doesn’t say you get out when you’re twenty-two, vato ,” Flores said.

The inmate with the dumbbell walked toward the man on the bench, the rest followed. They circled around the man.

“Look,” Flores said, referring to the paper. “It says, Twenty-two-year sentence minimum .”

The entire weight pit went silent when they heard the crunch.

Back home, death was an event. It was a small town; when somebody died, if you weren’t grieving them, you were comforting someone who was.

Up here, death was routine. Maybe, because there was so much of it, people were numb to it. Even at Celso’s sentencing, he had to wait in line. He had spent the week leading up to it rehearsing his speech, but when the moment finally came, and he stood in the crowded courtroom, it just felt like he was wasting everybody’s time. The way the judge got irritated and slumped back in her chair when the attorney mentioned he would need to translate; the way the stenographer paused from typing to take a sip of water; the way the other convicts scoffed at Celso (who was struggling to remember the right words) and kept looking at the clock like they had somewhere else to be; the way the prosecutor yawned and picked the lint off his tie — it all seemed so banal.