Shane Jones - Crystal Eaters

Today is a privilege day. This occurs about once a month. Administrators have inmates use the basketball court, run a track outside, or allow a one-hour session in the gym with light weights. There’s a rumor about a swimming pool, but Pants has never been taken because the follow-up rumor is that someone drowned in the swimming pool, the body quickly disposed of, wrapped in painter’s plastic and tossed into the afternoon garbage truck.

Two steel doors painted white open. He’s pushed inside, the guard kind of shrugging when Pants gives him a look back. The doors close with a clang followed by a second clang that is the lock. The floor is shoe-scuffed parquet. A layer of shellac seals dents and gives glare. The single basketball hoop is a transparent charcoal-dusted backboard with red rim, no net, which is attached to a cement wall. Glued on all four walls are six-foot-high sections of cushioned matting in gray, red, and blue. The ball sits under the hoop and Pants jogs slowly, his white shorts riding up, and grabs it.

His first shot is a fourteen-foot jumper with no arc that arrows through the no-net. He runs to the ball that bounces off the padded wall. Sneakers squeak with each sharp but careful turn. Pants, on the baseline, drives in for a lay-up while a guard with a head like a hamburger looks in from a window above. He takes more shots, lost in thoughts of childhood because his only future thought has been breaking out and seeing his family again and he can’t think about it anymore, when it will happen or not. He’s been putting together his childhood memory by memory. One shot comes close, bounces high off the back of the rim and nearly hits one of many spinning fans. The guard looking in shakes his head and blows on his lips.

When Pants McDonovan was a child he didn’t use toilet paper. He’d pull his underpants up, and using three fingers, wiggle them into the fabric, into his ass, and once there, curl-pick his fingers until assumed clean. In his bedroom, he’d take the underwear off and roll the soiled pair into a tube he hid in a dresser drawer. This continued until Mom noticed his lack of underwear in the laundry. She walked into his bedroom late one night with an armful of clean laundry and opened the bottom dresser drawer and found fourteen perfectly aligned rolls of dirty underwear. When she picked one roll up she noticed another beneath. The smell was so strong she thought Pants would wake, so she hurried from the room and into the bathroom where she unfolded the underwear revealing a wide splotch of dried shit in the shape of a hammered butterfly. She turned the sink on, let them soak in hot water, and tried not to feel that she had done something irreversibly wrong as a mother. She would confront him in the morning. She wouldn’t sleep that night.

He said he didn’t know why he did what he did, but boy it felt good, toilet paper was rough and sometimes didn’t flush because the water pressure was so weak in their house. Their plumbing is city plumbing a hundred years ago. This is something the city knows and makes fun of. Men in city bars like to talk about how dirty the villagers are. It’s another reason why the city should continue building. Just look at them, men in city bars say. They don’t shower. They lie in rocks and mud and make babies in the mud. They don’t worship a god. Mom said none of that mattered because what he did was wrong and it had to stop.

Dad couldn’t look him in the eyes. He let Mom deal out the punishment. Grounded for a week. No play time in the mine with Remy. Also, forced to wash all his underwear to an insane brand new clean. The task taught him how to do laundry better than all, something he was strangely proud of but didn’t tell anyone else about until the prison. But the punishment didn’t work because Pants continued the habit and found new places to hide his dirty underwear: between his mattress and bedspring, between the window and screen with the blinds drawn, in a shoebox kept in the closet, behind the YCL generator in the basement, and finally, and best, behind his dresser.

He skipped school once a week to make the trip — a somewhat long walk from one side of the village to the other — to get the same kind of underwear his Mom bought with a matching design consisting of a red elastic band and bubble-words written across the crotch and backside that said WINNER. CHAMPION. VICTORY. They were different because they came from the city, traded for crystals curious city-folk displayed in their homes or taken from Mob of Mary’s who always had a steady supply. He used these pairs not to wear, but to throw into the dirty laundry after he purposefully dropped them on the ground, dragging them through dirt and weeds.

But the room took on the bottom-drawer smell. The bright yellow paint above the dresser turned to the shade of straw. At first Mom blamed the moon, an unusual lighting effect caused the paint to look that way, but the smell couldn’t be ignored and her denial wasn’t strong enough. She wanted to believe that her words, her punishment, had been received and she was not only a good mother but an effective one who was developing her son to be a greater person than her and Dad. Again, she went into his room, this time when he was at school. She opened each drawer before pulling the dresser from the wall where a heap of underwear spilled to the sides, the paint behind the dresser peeled off in curling sheets, half a dozen brittle hooks fingering the air.

“I mean, how ridiculous . No more spending time with those boys. I’m telling your father. I don’t know what to do with you.”

What was said between parents: slightly worse than a spanking. Something to be remembered. He sensed the beating coming from Dad’s truck heading home from the mine. He had never seen Mom so angry and had overhead the word belt . Even her cough was angry. He feared bruises. What he did to protect himself was take the rolled up dirty underwear on the floor and stuff it down the inside of his pants, covering his legs front and back. He put the underwear under his shirt and fattened his belly. He positioned underwear on his shoulders and became a little anxious monster waiting for Dad’s anger to liquefy out and onto his body.

He lay on the bed with his chest rising and falling in the silence of the bedroom.

Mom greeted Dad in the driveway. Pants startled when Dad slammed the truck’s door. Then he heard their voices through the window before they decided to go for a walk. Pants got up, kind of penguin-shuffled with the shit-underwear covering him and watched from the window until they came back up the road. He thought maybe nothing would happen. He thought maybe a big body wouldn’t hurt his small body. A walk meant things were okay. Walks relaxed. You talked and felt better after a walk.

Again, they stood in the gravel driveway talking closely, the wind sweeping dirt from the road into brown wings against the sky above them. When Mom looked up at his window he fell backward and onto the bed and began hyperventilating. He couldn’t control his air. The bed squeaked and he tried to calm himself down by saying it would be okay. Would it be okay?

Remy woke from her nap and shouted Wake me up!

His body felt miniature because the bed felt like it was the size of the room.

His breathing hurt.

Mom lifted Remy from the crib and she stopped crying.

Footsteps in the hallway.

A drawer being opened then closed.

Someone in the bathroom.

A body near the door.

Footsteps.

Then no footsteps.

When the door opened a hole opened in his heart.

Dad lunged in. The belt extended from his fist and hung against his thigh. His work shirt was stained with long drips of YCL and he smelled like mold. Pants sat up in bed, swung his legs over the edge, fell to his knees on the carpet scattered with underwater, and apologized. Mom said from the doorway maybe he would learn something this way because she had tried everything else. Her father had done the same to her, and so did Dad’s, and it worked, look at them, adjusted people. She didn’t necessarily believe what she thought, but her family history was stronger than her head. The important thing was a punishment that he would remember.