Lucia Berlin: A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

Willie left a couple of weeks after I got there. We were sorry to see him go. Two of the women got in a fight so there was only Dixie, Kim, and Casey left, and six guys. Seven when Vee de la Rangee took Willie’s place. Puny, pimply ugly transvestite with blond permanent, black roots. He wore a plastic bread fastener for a nose ring, about twenty along each ear. Daron and Dwight looked like they might kill him. He said he had written some poems. “Read us one.”

It was a lush violent fantasy about the drag-heroin world. After he read no one said anything. Finally CD said, “That’s some powerful shit. Let’s hear some more.” Like CD gave everybody permission to accept this guy. Vee took off from there and by the next class he was at home. You could see how much it meant to him, to be heard. Hell, I felt that way too. Once I even had the nerve to write about when my dog died. I didn’t even care if they laughed, but nobody laughed.

Kim didn’t write that much. A lot of remorse poems about the child that got taken away from her. Dixie wrote sardonic things to the theme of “Vice Is So Nice.” Casey was fantastic. She wrote about heroin addiction. Really got to me. Most of the guys in here sold crack but either didn’t use it that much or were too young to know what years and years of voluntarily returning to hell can do to you. Mrs. Bevins knew. She didn’t talk that much about it, but enough to make it seem pretty cool that she had stopped.

We all wrote some good things. “That’s great!” Mrs. Bevins said to Karate once. “You get better every week.”

“No lie? So, Teach, am I as good as CD?”

“Writing isn’t a contest. All you do is your own work better and better.”

“But CD’s your favorite.”

“I don’t have a pet. I have four sons. I have a different feeling for each one. It’s the same with you guys.”

“But you don’t be telling us to go to school, get a scholarship. You’re always getting on him to change his life.”

“She does that with all of us,” I said, “except Dixie. She’s subtle though. Who knows, I might sober up. Anyway, CD is the best. We all know that. First day I got here I saw him down in the yard. You know what I thought? I thought he looked like a god.”

“I don’t know about god,” Dixie said. “But he has star quality. Right, Mrs. Bevins?”

“Give me a break,” CD said.

Mrs. Bevins smiled. “Okay. I’ll cop. I think every teacher sees this sometimes. It’s not simply intelligence or talent. It’s a nobility of spirit. A quality which could make him great at whatever he wanted to do.”

We were quiet then. I think we all agreed with her. But we felt sorry for her. We knew what it was he wanted to do, was going to do.

We got back to work then, choosing pieces for our magazine. She was going to have it typeset and then the jail printshop would print it.

She and Dixie were laughing. They both loved to gossip. Now they were rating some of the deputies. “He’s the kind leaves his socks on,” Dixie said. “Right. And flosses before.”

“We need more prose. Let’s try this assignment for next week, see what you come up with.” She handed out a list of titles from Raymond Chandler’s notebook. We all had to choose one. I took We All Liked Al . Casey liked Too Late for Smiling. CD liked Here It Is Saturday . “In fact,” he said, “I think we should call our magazine that.”

“We can’t,” Kim said. “We promised Willie we were going to use his title, Through a Cat’s Eye .”

“Okay, so what I want is two or three pages leading up to a dead body. Don’t show us the actual body. Don’t tell us there’s going to be a body. End the story with us knowing there is going to be a dead body. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Time to go, gentlemen,” the guard said, opening the door. “Come here, Vee.” She blasted him with perfume before sending him back up. The homosexual tier was pretty miserable. Half of it was old senile winos, the rest were gays.

I wrote a great story. It came out in the magazine and I still read it over and over. It was about Al, my best friend. He’s dead now. Only she said I didn’t do the assignment right because I told about me and the landlady finding Al’s body.

Kim and Casey wrote the same horrible story. Kim’s was about her old man beating her, Casey’s about a sadistic john. You knew that they would end up murdering the guys. Dixie wrote a fine story about a woman in solitary. She has an asthma attack really bad but no one can hear her. The terror and pitch-black darkness. Then there is an earthquake. The end.

You can’t imagine what it is like to be in prison during an earthquake.

CD wrote about his brother. Most of CD’s stories had been about him when they were little. The years they were lost to each other in different foster homes. How they found each other by chance, in Reno. This story took place in the Sunnyvale district. He read it in a quiet voice. None of us moved. It was about the afternoon and evening leading up to the Chink’s death. The details about the meeting of two gangs. It ended with Uzi fire and CD turning the corner.

The hairs were standing up on my arm. Mrs. Bevins was pale. Nobody had told her CD’s brother was dead. There wasn’t a word about his brother in the story. That’s how good it was. The story was so shimmering and taut there could only be one end to it. The room was silent until finally Shabazz said, “Amen.” The guard opened the door. “Time to go, gentlemen.” The other guards waited for the women while we filed out.

CD was set to get out of jail two days after the last day of class. The magazines would be out the last day and there was going to be a big party. An art exhibit and music by the prisoners. Casey, CD, and Shabazz were going to read. Everybody would get copies of Through a Cat’s Eye.

We had been excited about the magazine but none of us had known how it would feel. To see our work in print. “Where is CD?” she asked. We didn’t know. She gave each of us twenty copies. We read our pieces out loud, applauding one another. Then we just sat there, reading our own work over and over to ourselves.

The class was short because of the party. A mess of deputies came in and opened the doors between our room and the art class. We helped set up tables for the food. Stacks of our magazines looked beautiful. Green on the purple paper tablecloth. Guys from horticulture brought in big bouquets of flowers. Student paintings were on the walls, sculptures on stands. One band was setting up.

First one band played, then came our reading and then the other band. The reading went fine and the music was great. Kitchen dudes brought in food and soft drinks and everybody got in line. There were dozens of guards but they all seemed to be having a good time too. Even Bingham was there. Everybody was there except CD.

She was talking with Bingham. He is so cool. I saw him nod and call a guard over. I knew Bingham had said to let her go up on the tier.

She wasn’t gone long, even after all the stairs and six locked steel gates. She sat down, looking sick. I took her a can of Pepsi.

“Did you talk with him?”

She shook her head. “He was lying under a blanket, wouldn’t answer me. I slid the magazines through the bars. It’s horrible up there, Chaz. His window is broken, rain coming through it. The stink. The cells are so small and dark.”

“Hey, it’s heaven up there now. Nobody’s there. Imagine those cells with six dudes in them.”

“Five minutes, gentlemen!”

Dixie and Kim and Casey hugged her good-bye. None of us guys said good-bye. I couldn’t even look at her. I heard her say, “Take care, Chaz.”

I just realized that I’m doing that last assignment again. And I’m still doing it wrong, mentioning the body, telling you that they killed CD the day he got out of County.