Рейчел Кушнер - The Mars Room

Sammy had been back in ad seg the night that Candy Peña received her execution papers. Candy had to choose which method she preferred, and sign the form. Sammy listened to Candy Peña cry as she read the paper that offered her gas or injection. “We turned out our lights to protest,” Sammy said, “and everyone on ad seg refused their dinner tray. It creates a lot of paperwork for the staff. They have to fill out forms for every person who refuses her tray and turns out her security light. Candy was screaming over and over. Everyone on ad seg and death row was crying. Even the guards were crying. There was one handicapped lady who accepted her dinner tray, but I think she just didn’t understand what was going on. Candy chose lethal injection.”

Candy Peña had knifed a little girl. She was out of her mind on meth and PCP when it happened. She prayed daily, hourly, minute by minute, at the altar she’d made in her death row cell, to honor the little girl. She cried and signed the papers and Sammy was a human if sometimes a bully and she felt for Candy. You go to ad seg and you don’t stop having feelings. You hear a woman cry and it’s real. It’s not a courtroom, where they ask all the pertinent and wrong questions, the niggling repeated demands for details, to sort contradiction and establish intent. The quiet of the cell is where the real question lingers in the mind of a woman. The one true question, impossible to answer. The why did you. The how. Not the practical how, the other one. How could you have done such a thing. How could you.

Sammy’s crime was that she’d wet the bed. She told me all about it. I know I said you don’t give out personal data in prison, but Sammy told me everything.

“When I was four we lived in a trailer and there was no electricity because my mother was an addict and had to spend whatever money she could get on dope. At night, I would pee in the bed to warm it up. I got a rash on my legs. A neighbor saw my legs and called CPS.”

Child Protective Services took Sammy away. She was in and out of group homes and wound up in Youth Authority, where she learned to fight. “You get a lot of skills there you’ll need for prison.” By twelve she was out of YA, back with her mom and turning tricks to support her mother’s habit. The men liked young company. Her first sugar daddy was a bail bondsman named Maldonado. She eventually got strung out herself, was arrested, took a narcotics number, a never-never number she called it, and had been in and out of prison ever since, on sales and trafficking charges. Her mother was long dead. Many people she’d been in YA with were here at Stanville. Her network was extensive. It was a lifetime of prison connections.

Sammy had paroled six months earlier. Her time out of prison had been brief. She was eager to mainline in order to reclaim her possessions. She had a television, a personal fan, a stinger to heat water. Her friend Reebok had her eye mask. “It’s got little piggies on it,” she said, “and I want it back.” She’d given things away but on the condition that if she returned she’d be able to repossess. She knew her leaves from prison were just that, not departures but vacations.

But she had not expected to be back quite so soon. Sammy had been released to a new husband, a guy she met through the mail. It all started with a letter he wrote, but not to Sammy. He’d written the letter to another woman inside Stanville, and that woman treated the letter as currency, something to sell to another prisoner who wanted a pen pal. People were always looking for pen pals. Someone would surely pay to start an exchange with this guy. The letter had been read by so many women when it got to Sammy that its pages were tearing on the crease lines where it had been folded and refolded. The letter and its writer, Keath Something—I never caught the last name—had potential, and so the woman who had received his letter kept raising the price. When the letter got to Sammy, bidding for it had risen to over fifty dollars. The high bidder would get the envelope with Keath’s return address. Sammy told me that as soon as she started to read it she knew the letter was worth more than fifty dollars, a lot more.

“His writing was like a third grader’s,” she said with a grave tone, as if to suggest that such a thing denoted immense value.

“Even his own name was misspelled,” she said. “K-e-a-t-h? Who the fuck spells it that way?”

Keath had victim written all over him and his misspelled name.

The woman selling the letter had used a photo of a high school beauty queen on her prison pen pal page. People put up photos they found or traded, someone’s daughter, someone’s cousin, someone. Not themselves. It was crucial to have runners—people who sent you money inside. One way to get runners was to find men to write to you. Keath had written to what he thought was this high school beauty queen, but was merely a woman who had used that photo. She was an elderly prisoner who’d suffered throat cancer and had a mechanical larynx. She held a battery-operated box to her neck to negotiate a price with Sammy, who offered her CD player as payment. The woman handed over the envelope with Keath’s address.

Sammy wrote to Keath and introduced herself, said she’d felt an instant connection when she’d read his letter. A courtship began. She was paroling in a few months and needed not your typical runner, but someone to go home to. An apartment, financial stability, and proof of gainful employment, or the parole board would never let her free. Sammy had an old boyfriend named Rodney who might set her up at his place in Compton, but Rodney hit her, she told me, and she was done with that. Keath started to seem like the answer.

Keath said he had been in the air force and flew planes and had a good military pension. When he came to the prison for the first time, he proposed to Sammy. He was a big, lumbering, and doughy white boy with a wandering eye. She said yes but could not bring herself to let him kiss her in the visiting room. Like the rest of us, she’d done all kinds of sex work, but she couldn’t let this innocent dope plant one on her cheek. She told him she’d lost her privileges and could not hug or kiss. Keath believed it. “Oh, golly, I don’t want to get you in trouble,” he said, “why don’t we just shake hands.” She paroled. They married at a county courthouse not far from Stanville, in Hanford, a dusty farming town where Keath’s father sold tractor equipment. His family had fixed up an apartment for them and made everything in it blue, because Sammy had said it was her favorite color. Blue curtains, blue couch, blue microwavable bowls. She didn’t have a favorite color. She was just saying things to Keath that she thought he wanted to hear. She’d said blue because it was what she was wearing that day in the visiting room, like every other prisoner in the visiting room.

There she was, a Mexican girl from Estrada Courts in East LA, living in a small town in the Central Valley with a corny white husband who, it turned out, had never flown planes, never been in the air force, and instead spent all day watching car racing on TV. He said he was going to Daytona, talked incessantly about Daytona. Once a month he filled out his SSI forms with his left hand, so the government would think he was slow, even slower than he already was. His big doughy small-town family didn’t know anything about Sammy, and didn’t ask where it was Keath had met her. He took her to a picnic down the I-5. It was a gathering for people who liked to pretend they were fighting the Civil War. There were log cabins where women in old-timey clothes were making biscuits. Keath wanted Sammy to join the other women. Sammy had never made anything but prison spreads. She could whip up a prison cheesecake from Sprite and nondairy creamers, or tamales from canteen Doritos that were soaked in water and hand-pulped to masa. She stood awkwardly, wishing she had worn long sleeves to hide her prison tattoos. “I love your tan,” one of the white women told Sammy as she rolled out her white biscuit dough. The men were firing cannons. One blew into a bugle. Keath was a pretend captain in the pretend army and won a real sword that day. He had to get rid of it, Sammy explained while they were on the long drive back to Hanford. She was a level four on parole: no firearms, and no knives over ten inches long, or she would go right back to prison. “Aw, durnit.” Keath blew air and flapped his lips like a child. Like a Keath Something who lives in a dream. Gets himself a sureña from Stanville, takes her to a picnic where white people admire her tan.