Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin

An ass-kicking like none He ever got before.

I ain’t gonna whine either before or after I do it. Well, I guess there’d be no whining after anyway. If you think of the world without people it’s about the most perfect thing there ever is. It’s all balanced and shit. But then come the people, and they fuck it up. It’s like you got Aretha Franklin in your bedroom and she’s just giving it her all, she’s singing just for you, she’s on fire, this is a special request for Tillie H., and then all of a sudden out pops Barry Manilow from behind the curtains.

At the end of the world they’re gonna have cockroaches and Barry Manilow records, that’s what Jazzlyn said. She cracked me up too, my Jazz.

It weren’t my fault. Peaches from C-49 came at me with a piece of lead pipe. She ended up in the infirmary with fifteen stitches across her back. People think I’m easy ’cause I’m cute.

If you don’t want it to rain, don’t fuck with the clouds over Tillie H. I just hit her one good whack. It weren’t my fault. I didn’t want to juice her up, that was all. I’m not into that. Simple fact is she needed an ass-kicking.

The boss matron was up in my face. She said I was gonna have to go upstate. She said: “We’re shipping you upstate for the last few months of your sentence.” I was like: “What the fuck?” She said: “You heard me, Henderson, no cursing in this office.” I said: “I’ll take it all off for you, boss, every stitch.” She shouted: “How dare you! Don’t insult me! That’s disgusting.” I said: “Please don’t send me upstate. I want to see my babies.” She said nothing and I got nervous and said something not too polite again. She said, “Get the hell out of here.”

I went around the side of her desk. I was just going to open my jumpsuit to pleasure her, but she hit the panic button. In came the screws. I didn’t mean to do what I done, I didn’t mean to get her in the face, I just lashed out with my foot. I knocked her front tooth out. I guess it don’t matter. I’m going upstate now for sure. I’m on the pony express.

The boss matron didn’t even beat the shit out of me. She lay there on the floor a moment and I swear she almost smiled, and then she said: “I’ve got something real nice for you, Henderson.” They put me in cuffs and they arraigned me, all formal and everything. They put me in the van and booked me and brought me to Queens court.

I pleaded guilty to assault and they gave me eighteen months more. That’s near two years all together with time served. The defense lawyer told me it was a good deal, I coulda gotten three, four, five years, even seven. He said, “Honey, take it.” I hate lawyers. He was the sort who walks around with a stick so far up his ass you could’ve waved a flag under his nose. Said he pleaded with the judge and all. He said to the judge: “It’s just one tragedy after another, Your Honor.”

I told him the only tragedy is that I don’t see my babies nowhere. How come my babies weren’t in the courtroom? That’s what I wanted to know. I shouted it out. “How come they ain’t here?”

I was hoping somebody would be there, that Lara girl or somebody, but there was nobody at all.

The judge, he was black this time, he must’ve gone to Harvard or something. I thought he woulda understood, but niggers can be worse on niggers sometimes. I said to him, “Your Honor, can you get me my babies?

I just wanna see them once.” He shrugged and said the babies were in a good place. He never once looked me in the face. He said: “Describe to me exactly what happened.” And I said: “What happened is that I had a baby and then she had some babies of her own.” And he said, “No, no, no — with the assault.” And I said, “Oh, who the fuck cares a flying fuck about the fucking assault, god fucking damn it fuck me fuck you and fuck your wife.” Then my lawyer shut me up. The judge looked down over his glasses at me and sighed. He said something about Booker T. Washington, but I wasn’t listening too good. Finally, he said there was a specific request from a warden to put me in a penitentiary upstate. He said the word penitentiary like he was lording it over me. I said to him: “And fuck your parrot too, asshole.”

He snapped his gavel on the bench and that was that.

I tried to scratch their eyes out. They had to put me in restraint and bring me to the hospital wing. Then on the bus upstate they had to restrain me again. Even worse, they didn’t tell me they was going to move me from New York. I kept shouting out for the babies. Upstate woulda been okay, but Connecticut? I’m no country girl. They had a shrink meet me and then they gave me a yellow jumpsuit. You’d need a shrink for sure if you wanted to wear a yellow jumpsuit.

I was brought into an office and I told the shrink that I was real happy to be in suburban Connecticut. Real real happy. I said if she gave me a knife I’d show her just how happy. I’d trace it out on my wrist.

“Lock her up,” she said.

They give me pills. Orange ones. They watch them go down. Sometimes I can fake it and tuck one of them in the hole in the back of my teeth. Someday I’m going to take them all together like one great big delicious orange, and then I’ll reach up to the jolly pipe and say sayonara.

I don’t even know my cell mate’s name. She’s fat and wears green socks. I told her I’m gonna hang myself and all about the jolly pipe and she said, “Oh.” Then a few minutes later she said, “When?”

I guess that white woman, Lara, worked things out, or someone did, somehow, somewhere. I went down to the waiting room. The babies! The babies! The babies!

They were sitting there on the knee of a big black woman, long white gloves on her and a fancy red handbag, looking for all the world that she just woke up from the Lord’s bed.

Down I ran straight to the glass wall and stuck my hands in the bottom opening.

“Babies!” I said. “Little Jazzlyn! Janice!”

They didn’t know me. They were sitting on that woman’s lap, sucking their thumbs and looking over her shoulder. Like to broke my heart. They kept snuggling into her bosom, smiling. I kept saying, “Come to Grandma, come to Grandma, let me touch your hands.” That’s all you can do through the bottom of the glass — they got a few inches and you can touch someone’s hands. It’s cruel. I just wanted to hug on them. Still they wouldn’t budge — maybe it was the prison duds, I don’t know. The woman had a southern accent, but I knew her face from the projects, I seen her before. I always thought she was a square, used to stand in the elevator and turn away. She said she was rightly conflicted whether she should bring the babies in or not, but she heard I really wanted to see them and they were living in Poughkeepsie now with a nice house and a nice fence, and it wasn’t too far away. She’d been fostering them awhile now, she got them through the Bureau of Child Welfare, they had to spend a few days in a Seaman’s home or something like that, but now they were being well looked after, she told me, don’t you worry.

“Come to Grandma,” I said again.

Little Jazzlyn turned her face into the woman’s shoulder. Janice was sucking on her thumb. I noticed their necks were scrubbed clean. Their fingernails too were all perfect and round.

“Sorry,” she said, “I guess they’re just feeling shy.”

“They look good,” I said.

“They’re eating healthy.”

“Don’t feed them too much shit,” I said.

She looked at me a second from under her eyebrows, but she was cool, she was. She wasn’t about to say nothing about me cursing. I liked her for that. She wasn’t a stuck-up, she wasn’t making judgments.

We were silent awhile and then she said that the girls have got a nice room in a little house on a quiet street, much quieter than the projects, she painted the baseboards for them, they got wallpaper with umbrellas on it.