Lindsay Hunter: Ugly Girls

JIM GOT TO WORK feeling like he’d been wrung out. Before he left, Myra had seemed fidgety. Never a good sign. And Perry’s TV was still on, which meant she was still awake, hadn’t turned it off and rolled over to sleep. She’d be out the window quiet as a cat not an hour after he left, he knew.

He wanted to leave the house with his family tucked in and safe, doors and windows locked snug, leaving a warm presence that never cooled. Wanted to return to a home filled with the yellow light of morning, have his coffee, crawl in next to his wife, fall to sleep without a care.

That hadn’t happened in a long while. Instead, he knew he’d come home to Myra’s bottle still in her hand, the foamy bits dried to a film at the bottom, Perry’s door closed, her bed empty. The trailer dank and dark, the sky overcast, no yellow light. The neighbor playing her polka music loud enough for her to hear despite her broken hearing aid.

And before that, a long shift at the prison, which always left him feeling like he hadn’t showered in days, like behind every piece of good news there was a shiv-sharp piece of bad news.

Jim had a walker’s shift that night. Already, seated comfortably in his truck, he could feel his bones ache like he was driving home after a shift, not driving toward one. Kadoom, kadoom , he’d have to walk the lengths of the cell block over and over, the hard rubber soles in his shoes never giving, not ever; he’d asked to be allowed to wear black tennis shoes instead but had been denied. And in a way he felt reassured by that. In prison, order was key. Allow one crack — moving to less formal, more giving shoes — and the whole thing would fold in on itself.

He pulled up to the small guard shack. The new guard leaned out, a young black man named Davie. He smiled and Jim saw he was missing the top right incisor. A child’s smile, and a child’s innocence in his eyes, too. Hadn’t seen shit yet. Jim handed over his own ID, attempted a smile in return, though he was sure it looked like he was simply brandishing his teeth.

Or was it Davis? This was new — these blips in his mind where he wasn’t sure what was what. The stresses of a teenaged stepdaughter, of a wife giving in to the urges she’d been able to convince herself didn’t exist for a time. Not much room to store things like the gate man’s name. Did it even matter? Would he fold in on himself because he couldn’t remember Davie or Davis? The brim of the man’s hat was stiff, unworn. Jim waved, drove through.

Every shift began the same: Sign in at one door, show your badge, ask after the man’s family, pretend to listen. Say Morning if it was Phil. Next door, same thing, only open up your lunch pail and let the man paw through it. How’s Sharon? And the kids? Good, good. Yep, cheese and mustard today, all out of cold cuts. Next door, hold out your arms for a pat down, ignore this man as he ain’t really the chatty type. Store your lunch pail and wallet and cell phone and keys and pen, if you were dumb enough to bring one in, in your locker. Badge up, gun up, nightstick loose in your hand. Walk through the final door. You’re in.

He had about five minutes before the next shift began, so Jim joined Clapp, the other walker, where he stood just inside the final set of doors. They couldn’t go early; everything had to be timed just so, no cutting corners or schedule changes, or else why bother? From here they could see all the way to the other side; this part of the prison wasn’t nothing but one long rectangle with forty rooms on each side — twenty on top and twenty on bottom. Metal staircases on both walls, metal because it was sturdy and because, Jim had come to believe, nothing in this place could be quiet or peaceful. Footsteps rang off the stairs day in and day out, and the metal amplified all the other noise, too.

The yard was a sorry place where the men could get some quiet, the yard like a clay baseball diamond pocked with weeds and cigarette butts. When it rained, the yard became a swamp; when it was hot the dirt felt like it had been cooked in the oven. The infirmary was off the cafeteria, and the hole was underneath the cafeteria, in the basement of the basement, or so the warden called it. When he first started, Jim wondered if the men in the hole could smell things cooking in the cafeteria above. He’d soon found out that all you could smell down there was what the men brought with them: sweat, breath, fear. Working the hole was just as much a punishment as having to live down there. You patrolled it in mostly dark; you listened to the men crying or yelling or, worse, not making any sound at all.

Jim nodded at Clapp. He was a scrawny man, jumpy. Myra would say he looked rode hard and put up wet. He loved inmate gossip, and it seemed like every time Jim worked with the man he had a story.

“Hey,” Clapp said. He was fiddling with a button on his cuff, couldn’t quite get it to go through the eyehole. He stopped suddenly, put his hands on his hips, and Jim knew he was in for another story. “You hear Carver pulled a balloon of coke out an inmate’s anus?” He peered at Jim, like Jim was the warden and could do something about it.

“You don’t say,” Jim said.

“Mm-hmm. Says he heard some talk so he did a strip search. Said it was bright green. The balloon was, I mean.”

Jim waited. More and more, these kinds of exchanges felt like torture. He just wanted them to be over so he could get started on his shift, one second closer to it ending.

“Well, what do you have to say about that?” Clapp asked.

“I guess I’m not all that surprised,” Jim said. Every day it was something. Stories abounded. O’Toole ate a prisoner’s dinner every night for a month, right there in front of him, because the prisoner called his wife a whore.

“Right out the man’s asshole ,” Clapp said, smacking his hands together, as if to wake Jim up. Now Jim wondered if the meaningful part to Clapp wasn’t the smuggling of cocaine, but the fact that Carver had fiddled with another man’s area.

“Good for Carver,” Jim said. “I hope he wore gloves.”

“Haw,” Clapp howled, and some of the inmates in their cells mimicked him. Clapp wheeled, yelled, “Shut the FUCK UP.” He put a hand to his ribs, shook his head. Six months ago Clapp had slipped on a tooth and fell down the stairs, right onto his nightstick. Broke two ribs. Whose tooth? Jim had asked when O’Toole told him the story. Does it matter? came the answer. Clapp went back to fiddling with his button, nodded at Jim, and walked toward the metal staircase on the right. They’d switch sides halfway through, take their breaks separately. This was all the human interaction there’d be, aside from whatever the inmates had in store.

O’Toole was known as a hardass. Clapp had a hair trigger. Jim wasn’t sure what the other guards, or the inmates for that matter, said about him. Maybe, Jim Tipton once broke up a fight by throwing a hot pot of gravy onto the prisoners. Or, Tipton brought in his guitar and sang on Easter. Or, Tipton’s wife used to call the front desk drunk and ask to talk to Jim, which wasn’t possible during a shift, or asked when was Jim coming home.

Jim clanged up the steps. Men pretended to busy themselves, watching him from the sides of their eyes. Walk from one end to the other, turn, walk back toward the other end. Go down the stairs, walk that end to end, too. He knew whatever floor he wasn’t on, the men in their cells were up to something. Making dice out of soap, sharpening toothbrushes, coughing or howling in one cell so the guard would be distracted from what was happening in another cell, whispering plans so low it was a miracle anyone heard. Even if they were just lying there thinking, they were up to something.