Sheldon Lord - A Girl Called Honey

At five, she began to tremble and stretch and rub her cheeks with hard fingers, and the watching women licked dry lips. At five-fifteen, she fell, rolled, struggled up and lunged into the bars. She hung there, quivering, and at five-twenty-five, she started to scream.

With the first scream, three of the women had darted forward. The first one to reach her jabbed into the pocket of Honey Bane’s prison dress and pulled out the crumpled remains of her cigarettes, then ducked away form the angry, envious clutching of the other two. And Honour Mercy screamed for the second time, neither knowing nor caring that her cigarettes had been stolen. It wasn’t cigarettes she wanted.

Now it was seven o’clock, and she was still screaming, though her voice was getting hoarse. One or two guards had tried to stop her, telling her the doc would come at seven, but she neither heard nor understood. One or two of the other women, unnerved by the screaming, had tried to stop her, to pull her away from the bars, but she had clung and shrieked and they had given up.

And now it was eight o’clock, and the metal door down at the end of the long gray metal hall clanged open. Two guards came through, followed by an annoyed young man in a business suit. They came down the hall, their shoes ringing on the black metal floor, and the annoyed young man waited while the guards unlocked the detention tank door. The three of them came in, and the guards efficiently peeled Honey Bane from the bars and held her rigid, still screaming, her back against the wall.

The annoyed young man put down his black bag and slapped Honey Bane twice across the face, forehand, backhand. “Stop that,” he said, and his voice was emotionless and cold. “I’m going to give you something now.”

The silence itself was like a scream, coming so abruptly. Honey Bane blinked rapidly, her eyes tearing, trying to focus on the annoyed young man. “Give — give — give me—”

“Got to get you ready for the judge,” said one of the guards. He grinned, holding her arm with one hand, rolling the gray sleeve up with the other. “Can’t have you all shook up in front of the judge,” he said.

Honey Bane fought the two realities, the hot hurtful hating reality within, the cold cruel killing reality without, and slowly she forced her attention away from the reality within and saw and heard and smelled and felt the reality without.

She looked upon the real world. In the background, a mob scene from the Inferno, women in shapeless gray, milling and staring, scratching their sores, grimacing their lips. In the foreground, the annoyed young man, down on one knee and crouched over his now open black bag, preparing a hypodermic.

A hypodermic. The needle glinted in the light from the unshaded bulbs high up against the metal ceiling. The needle glinted and gleamed, drawing her eyes, drawing her attention, drawing her soul.

Her mouth opened, working. “You’ll — give — me — something?”

“Sure thing,” said the guard. “Got to make you pretty for the judge,” he cackled, showing yellowed teeth.

The world was coming back, stronger and stronger. To either side there was a man, holding her. Men in uniform, guards, and the annoyed young man was rising up with the golden gleaming needle, and the one guard had rolled up her right sleeve.

With sudden violence, she shook her head, pulling away, her mouth distorted wide. One thing she knew in all the world, one thing and one thing only, and she screamed it at them. “Not the arm!”

“Hold her still,” said the annoyed young man. He was petulant, unjustifiably detained, left standing there with the cotton swab in one hand and the golden gleaming needle in the other.

“Not the arm!” shrieked Honey Bane. “The leg, the leg, not the arm!”

The two guards held her, crowded her close against the wall, and the annoyed young man came forward, the cotton swab moving with practiced indifference on her upper arm. “Where you’re going,” he told her coldly, “it won’t make any difference.” And the golden gleaming needle jabbed in.

When they let her go, she slumped back, sliding down the wall, her legs crumpled beneath her, her knees sticking up and out, the gray shapeless skirt falling away to her hips. The prison dress was all she was wearing.

The two guards looked at her, grinning, but the annoyed young man curled his lip and pointedly looked the other way. The guards unlocked the tank door, and they and the annoyed young man stepped through to the hall. The door was relocked, and three men walked back down the echoing hall and through the door at the far end.

Now that there was silence, more of the women got into conversations, and some of them lay down on the floor to try to get a little sleep before appearing in court. A few of them, new and curious and uncertain, watched Honey Bane with wondering eyes.

But she didn’t notice the looks or hear the conversations or know that her skirt was piled high about her hips. The outside reality had faded away once again, and the reality within had taken over. Slowly, quiveringly, painfully, far down within the crumpled huddled body that was and wasn’t Honey Bane, she was beginning to live again. Slowly, she was being reborn, she was returning from the dead. High hot color began to glow in her face. Her hands, which had been trembling and shaking so badly just a few moments before, grew still and languid. Her whole body relaxed, as tension drained away, leaving her limp and unmoving. Her eyes were distant and high-seeing, gleaming with a pale life of their own.

She stood, with slow and languid movements, and waited unmoving, her arms hanging still at her sides, her eyes almost blank-looking, staring far off at the reality within.

She had returned from the dead. On the island of Haiti, they would have called her undead, the zombie. On Manhattan Island, where the magic phrases were different, they called her junkie, the snowbird.

It took a while for the first high keening to wear off, and for Honey Bane to gradually circle down from that high-flying cloud and descend close enough to make out the details of the reality without. Finally, though, she did come down, and saw and realized where she was.

And this time, she realized, they’d picked her up just before she was due for a needle. And she was carrying the stuff on her when she’d been grabbed. So now they had her on a user rap.

That was bad — very bad. A simple charge of soliciting wasn’t anything to worry about all by itself — she’d been through that she didn’t know how many times, and she’d never gotten more than a suspended sentence out of it for disorderly behavior — but a user rap was something else again. It would mean six months at Lexington, taking the cure. It would mean getting dragged in by the cops every time there was a general narcotics pick-up. It would mean having cops banging on the door all the time, breaking in and looking for more of the stuff.

That’s the way it had been with Marie. Twice she’d been grabbed and convicted on user raps. The first time, she got the six-month taper-off cure at Lexington. The second time, she got the cold-turkey cure at a state hospital out on Long Island.

The third time they hadn’t wasted time with a user charge. She’d taken a fall for possession, and was now in the woman’s prison upstate, on a seven-to-ten. And Marie wasn’t the type to get time off for good behavior. Whatever years she had left when she could make a dime hustling, she’d be spending behind bars. By the time she got out, she’d be through. Too old to make it on Whore Row; too beat up to make it anywhere else. And she’d be back on the big H in forty-eight hours, with no way to raise the cash to feed the monkey on her back.

That was no way to go. Honey Bane was now starting down the same three steps Marie had taken, and she knew she couldn’t afford to go down more than just the first step. She’d have to make sure she fell no farther.