Рейчел Кушнер - The Mars Room

Betty and Doc had been arrested in Las Vegas. Sammy knew the stories but any new audience for Betty was worth a repeat. She told us through the vent about the Nevada jail where she was held before they extradited her back to California. She said the girls there—the gals there—all worked. Every female in the Las Vegas county jail had to count playing cards, put them in proper order to make decks for the casinos. They made her do it, she said, and her fingers got terribly chapped.

We were buzzing by then from the hooch.

“Did she ever show you that photo, of her with the money?” I wanted to see it.

She had not, but Sammy said Betty had a whole file on herself down there, all the articles that had appeared in the newspapers, her trial transcript, everything. Her case was a big deal, big news, Sammy said. Betty hiring multiple hit men, the cop implicated in a lot of other cases, major scandal with the LAPD. Sammy shouted down to Betty and asked if we could look at the photo. All I wanted in my drunken state, my full set of hopes and wishes, was to see this picture of the person whose voice I heard through the vent, a woman covered in money. But really I wanted to see anything besides the concrete walls of our tiny cell.

Betty refused to send the photo through the toilet. She was afraid it would get damaged. You can wrap things tightly enough in plastic that no water seeps in. We send ice cream sandwiches from canteen through the toilets, wrapped in Kotex as insulation, then plastic wrap. She was playing hard to get. Sammy asked McKinnley, the sergeant working ad seg that night, if he’d pass a book from Betty for her to read. Everyone called him Big Daddy. “I got to finish it, Big Daddy,” Sammy said. “I read every chapter but the final one, last time I was back here.” If he said yes, Betty could slip the photo into the pages.

“I can’t do any passing, Fernandez. You get caught with property that ain’t yours, they’re gonna add time. You know that. I don’t like to see my little girls suffer back here. Just follow the rules, Fernandez, and you’ll be mainlined soon.”

“Big Daddy,” Sammy said, “I wish you’d been my father. My whole life could have gone different.”

“Now, Fernandez,” Sergeant McKinnley said, “I’m sure your own father did the best job he could.”

We heard his boots moving down the hall.

“I never knew my father!” Sammy called after him, through the food flap. “My mother didn’t know him, either! She’s not even sure who he was!”

Betty heard us laughing and that was what did it. She was no longer the center of attention and agreed to flush up the photo.

After we got the thirty layers of plastic wrap unpeeled, Sammy unfolded a newspaper article that featured the incriminating image. I had pictured a classic nude with a bikini of hundred-dollar bills, the long tan legs insured for millions.

The image was of a woman lying on a bed stony as a corpse, with an enormous landslide of money crushing her, only her head emerging from the pile. She looked as if a gravel truck had backed up to the bed and slid its multi-ton load over her, entombing her in money.

We didn’t either of us say a word. Sammy folded up the image, rewrapped it, and sent it down the pipes.

Our once weekly yard time was not a real yard, just the ad seg yard. A small concrete area wrapped in razor wire. But we got to see Conan out there, on his own adjacent razor-wire concrete patch. Conan did push-ups and talked to me about cars. It had started when Conan asked where I was from.

“Frisco, huh,” he said, “where they were doing that extended-axle thing back in the nineties. Pokers. Man, you guys have something to answer to.”

To say “Frisco” is as goofy and wrong as an extended axle, but Conan was right. It was as if one morning I’d woken to discover that every neighbor on my block had extended their axles, so that the wheels of the cars stuck out on both sides. Now it was a distant memory, something unfashionable. That was before I’d moved from the avenues downtown, when the city was invaded and I could no longer afford anything but a place in the Tenderloin. Extended axles were no less important than any other memory we made the subject of our talk: life as we had known it.

Conan and I reminisced about big rims, floater rims, spinners. Neon undercar kits. Holley carbs and Hemis. Popular trucks and SUVs. The Chevrolet Intruder. The Dodge Rendition.

The Intruder, Conan and I agreed, looked like something that was designed to be inserted in something else.

“There’s a new Nissan coming out called The Cube,” Conan said. “You can only get it in Japan. But who wants a square car? The Cube. Now there’s an aerodynamic concept. Nissan makes these trucks you can hacksaw the catalytic converter off in three minutes. I can’t walk past one without stealing the muffler. I should sue the manufacturer for forcing criminal behavior on me.”

We laughed about the Smart car. Those looked to me like the cap on a furniture leg. A blunt vertical thing that scooted around.

“What did you drive?” Conan asked me.

“Sixty-three Impala,” I said.

“Dang.”

“Hell yeah,” Sammy said. “That’s my girl.”

But the moment I said it, the fun cracked to pieces. I had no car anymore.

“You know what I hate is when people put open headers on an Escalade,” Conan said, as I tried to steer my thoughts back, to listen, to not care about anything. “Fuck Escalades. Something about them is plastic, cheap. I’d take an El Dorado, though. The seventies is the end of good American cars. We used to make trucks in this country. Now we make truck nuts .”

“Those ugly things dangling over the road at eighty miles an hour? I didn’t know they were called that.”

The idea that men would want to display an artificial scrotum—the most fragile part of a man’s body—on the back of their trucks, I said it made no sense and Conan agreed.

“Where is the pride in towing those from a bumper? If I was a dude, I’d tow a big-ass trailer with a Harley on it,” Conan said. “Or I’d just ride a Harley.”

“I heard you bragging to McKinnley that you do ride a Harley,” I said.

“That’s what I mean. If I was a dude I’d be like I am right now. ’Cept not locked up.”

Sammy told us she’d owned a Trans Am at age fifteen. Her dealer and boyfriend Smokey had given it to her.

“I know a Smokey,” Conan said.

I did, too. Not personally. The Smokey I knew of was Smokey Yunick, the NASCAR builder. Smokey Yunick was someone Jimmy Darling and I had bonded over. Smokey Yunick cheated in all of his NASCAR innovations but everyone else did, too. Also, when he was a young stock car racer, he raced with one arm out the window, resting on the sill. Smokey Yunick had swagger. But Smokey Yunick was dead. I was in prison. Jimmy was wherever. With some other woman, no doubt, and whoever the other woman was reminded me of what I was not. Was no longer.

Conan said, “It ain’t Smokey from Bell Gardens you’re talking about, is it?”

It was, Sammy said.

“Smokey was your boyfriend ? I’m from Bell Gardens, and the Smokey I know is a she.”

“I didn’t know that when I met him,” Sammy said. “This fine-ass guy wearing, what are they called, those little white shells around his neck, shows up and we’re partying—he’s got a bottle of PCP—and the next thing I know I’m in a motel in Whittier, and it’s two days later.”

“Puka shells,” Sergeant McKinnley said over the PA. He was in the program office, behind one-way glass, listening to our conversation with long-range microphones.

“I wake up with no memory of how I got there. I’m covered in hickeys, and this person Smokey is sleeping next to me. We’re both, like, we don’t have our clothes on. I peek under the sheet and he was the same as me down there. I was shocked. We were together for two years after that.”