Stephen King: Sleeping Beauties

“I’ll pass,” Jeanette said.

“Sometimes I see something makes me wish I was dead,” Angel said matter-of-factly. “Or wish everbody else was. Lookit that.” She pointed to a new poster between the snack machine and the soft drink dispenser. It showed a sand dune with footprints leading away, seemingly into infinity. Below the photo was this message: THE CHALLENGE IS GETTING THERE.

“The guy got there, but where did he go? Where is that place?” Angel wanted to know.

“Iraq?” Jeanette asked. “He’s probably at the next oasis.”

“Nope, he’s dead of heatstroke. Just a-layin out there just where you can’t see, eyes all buggin out and skin black as a tophat.” She didn’t smile. Angel was a tweaker, and serious country: bark-chewing, baptized-in-a-moonshine-still country. Assault was what they got her for, but Jeanette guessed Angel could have hit most of the categories on a criminal scorecard. Her face was all bones and angles—it looked hard enough to break up pavement. She had spent a goodly amount of time in C Wing during her stay at Dooling. In C Wing you only got out two hours a day. It was bad-girl country, was C Wing.

“I don’t think you turn black even if you die of heatstroke in Iraq,” Jeanette said. It could be a mistake to disagree (even humorously) with Angel, who had what Dr. Norcross liked to call “anger issues,” but this morning Jeanette felt like living dangerously.

“My point is, that’s a crock of shit,” Angel said. “The challenge is just livin through fuckin today, as you probly well know.”

“Who do you think put it up? Dr. Norcross?”

Angel snorted. “Norcross has got more sense. No, that’s Warden Coates. Jaaaanice . Honey’s big on motivation. Seen the one in her office?”

Jeanette had—an oldie, but not a goodie. It showed a kitten hanging from a tree branch. Hang in there, baby, indeed. Most of the kitties in this place had already fallen off their branches. Some were out of their trees.

The TV news was now showing the mug shot of an escaped convict. “Oh man,” Angel said. “He put the lie to black is beautiful, don’t he?”

Jeanette did not comment. The fact was, she still liked guys with mean eyes. She was working on it with Dr. Norcross, but for the time being she was stuck with this attraction to fellows who looked like they might at any moment decide to take a wire whisk to your bare back while you were in the shower.

“McDavid’s in one of Norcross’s babysitting cells in A Wing,” Angel said.

“Where did you hear that?” Kitty McDavid was one of Jeanette’s favorite people—smart and feisty. Rumor was that Kitty had rolled with a heavy crowd on the outside, but there was no real meanness in her, except for the kind that was self-directed. She had been a deeply dedicated cutter at some point in the past; the scars were on her breasts, sides, upper thighs. And she was prone to periods of depression, although whatever meds Norcross had her on seemed to have been helping with that.

“You want all the news, you got to get in here early. I heard it from her.” Angel pointed at Maura Dunbarton, an elderly trustee who was in for life. Maura was now placing magazines from her wheelie cart on the tables, doing it with infinite care and precision. Her white hair stood out around her head in a filmy corona. Her legs were clad in heavy support hose the color of cotton candy.

“Maura!” Jeanette called—but low. Shouting in the common room was strictly verboten , except by kids on visiting days and inmates on the monthly Party Nites. “Walk this way, girlfriend!”

Maura rolled her cart slowly toward them. “Got a Seventeen ,” she said. “Either of you interested?”

“I wasn’t interested when I was seventeen,” Jeanette said. “What’s up with Kitty?”

“Screaming half the night,” Maura said. “Surprised you didn’t hear her. They pulled her out of her cell, gave her a needle, and put her in A. Sleeping now.”

“Screaming what?” Angel asked. “Or just screaming?”

“Screaming that the Black Queen is coming,” Maura said. “Says she’ll be here today.”

“Aretha coming to put on a show?” Angel asked. “She’s the only black queen I know.”

Maura paid no attention. She was gazing at the blue-eyed blonde on the cover of the magazine. “Sure neither of you wants this Seventeen ? There’s some nice party dresses.”

Angel said, “I don’t wear no dress like that unless I have my tiara,” and laughed.

“Has Dr. Norcross seen Kitty?” Jeanette asked.

“Not in yet,” Maura said. “I had a party dress once. Real pretty blue, poofy. My husband burned a hole in it with the iron. It was an accident. He was trying to help. No one ever taught him how to iron, though. Most men never learn. And he won’t now, that’s for sure.”

Neither of them replied. What Maura Dunbarton did to her husband and two children was well known. It happened thirty years ago, but some crimes are unforgettable.

Three or four years earlier—or maybe five or six; the aughts had sort of sprinted away on her and the landmarks were hazy—in a parking lot behind a Kmart in North Carolina a man told Tiffany Jones she was headed for trouble. Vaporous as the last decade and a half had been, this moment had stayed with her. Seagulls were screeching and picking at the trash around the Kmart loading dock. Drizzle streaked the window glass of the Jeep she was sitting in, which belonged to the guy who said she was headed for trouble. The guy was mall fuzz. She had just given him a blowjob.

What happened was he caught her shoplifting deodorant. The quid pro quo they’d agreed on had been fairly straightforward and unsurprising; she gave him oral sex, he let her go. He was a beefy son of a bitch. It had been quite an operation, getting access to his dick while negotiating his gut and thighs and the steering wheel of his car. But Tiffany had done a lot of things and this was so minor by comparison it wouldn’t even have made the long list, except for what he said.

“Gotta be a bummer for you, huh?” A sympathetic grimace spread across his sweaty face as he wiggled around in his seat, trying to yank up his bright red plastic jogging pants that were probably the only thing he could get in his pig size. “You know you are headed for trouble when you find yourself in a situation like this here where you have to cooperate with somebody like me.”

Until this point Tiffany had assumed that abusers—people like her cousin Truman—must live in denial. If not, how could they go on? How could you hurt or degrade a person when you were fully cognizant of what you were doing? Well, it turned out you could—and men like the pig of a security guard did. It had been a real shock, this realization that abruptly explained so much of her entire shitty life. Tiffany was not sure she had ever gotten over it.

Three or four moths rattled around inside the bubble of the light fixture set above the counter. The bulb was burned out. It didn’t matter; there was plenty of morning light in the trailer. The moths binged and fluttered, their little shadows bickering. How did they get in there? And by the way, how did she get here ? For awhile, after some rough times in her late teens, Tiffany had managed to build a life. She had been waiting tables at a bistro in 2006, and making good tips. She had a two-room apartment in Charlottesville and grew ferns on the balcony. Doing pretty good for a high school drop out. On the weekends she had liked to rent a big bay horse named Moline who had a sweet disposition and an easy canter, and go riding at Shenandoah. Now she was in a trailer in East Shitballs, Appalachia, and she was no longer just headed for trouble; she was there. At least the trouble was wrapped in cotton, though. It didn’t sting the way you expected trouble to sting, which was maybe the worst thing about it, because you were so far inside, trapped all the way back in the last row of yourself, where you couldn’t even—