Рейчел Кушнер - The Mars Room

But after that, Keath never took her anywhere. He only left the house himself one evening a week, Sundays, when he worked as a volunteer security guard at the Red Cross. He made a big deal about it. Always took a briefcase with him, and said it held important documents that he needed to study for his next Daytona run. It wasn’t really a briefcase. It was the emptied container for a backgammon set. Once, Sammy opened it. It was filled with candy bars.

Sammy had no money, no car, was trapped with a meatheaded half-wit in an apartment next to a feedlot. Keath spent his days swiveling left and right in a chair, like he was on the racetrack that was inside his TV. He wore a shiny Daytona race shirt that said PENZOIL over the shoulder. Sammy started asking him for money. He reluctantly gave her a few ones. She would walk to the dollar store, buy a quart of malt liquor, drink it while talking to the farmworkers who lived in the shacks behind the parking lot. One night she came home drunk. Keath was swerving in his chair as race cars jerked around the track on TV. Sammy could not take it anymore. She picked up a heavy glass ashtray and beaned him with it, then ran from the apartment.

She was a fugitive with no place to go. At a railroad crossing she heard a siren in the distance. She hid behind a switching box, waiting for the sound to fade, and then followed the train tracks. She got to the freeway and stood on the southbound shoulder until she found a ride.

Sammy knew skid row, had survived there on and off between prison stints, and that was where she went. It was a place where a person could disappear if she was careful. She managed to elude arrest for several months, but eventually got picked up in a sweep. Keath pressed charges, but they never went through a divorce proceeding, and as far as Sammy knew, she was still married to this idiot country boy living right close by.

On our weekly hour in the paved outdoor cage, I spotted the GED teacher through the razor wire. He was on a path going into the ad seg housing block. I yelled a hello. He called back through the barbed coils. “Have you given any more thought to whether you want to work toward the GED?”

I said I had not.

“Let the administration know if you want to take the test. The questions were easy for you, and that’s a good indicator. Although I didn’t give you a reading assessment.”

I know how to read, I told him. And I graduated from high school.

He nodded. “I didn’t realize.”

“I could have gone to college. I got into UC Berkeley.” I wasn’t much of a liar before I got to prison. The instinct to lie to staff and guards is automatic. They fucked with us, we fucked with them.

“No kidding, really? That’s where I went to school.”

I gave him a story about how sad I was not to be able to enroll, because my father was ill and so I had to take care of him. “I really miss reading,” I said. “I love to read books.” Not a lie.

“I’d be happy to get you some reading material, if you’d like. And now that I know you’re at a higher level, it won’t be GED workbooks, I promise. What do you like to read?”

“ What do you like to read ,” Sammy said, imitating him, after he’d walked away. “That guy looks like a serious vic. Could be your own personal Keath.” Sammy made a motion like reeling in fishing line. “Do it slow, do it right, and you’re looking at Keath II.”

I pretended to be interested in reeling in the GED instructor, but only because I felt sorry for Sammy, who had to look at everyone as a possible victim, when victim meant savior.

The turkeys I’d seen from the prison bus the morning after Chain Night, their feathers wind-plucked and swirling in the car lanes, had not been headed for Stanville.

Thanksgiving Day marked one month in ad seg. We had our holiday meal shoved through the flap. I looked at my tray. On it sat a large and meaty drumstick. Unusually large. I had never seen a drumstick so large.

“Every year here it’s like this,” Sammy said.

“What do you mean?”

“Oversized Thanksgiving meat. People say it’s emu.”

Emus are big, ugly, aggressive birds that rise to six feet when they stretch upward. The neighbor next door to the ranch where Jimmy Darling stayed had emus. They sometimes got onto the property and wandered around. They were like people, violent and unpredictable, with brains the size of walnuts.

After the disgusting meal, McKinnley let us on the caged concrete square, a special privilege on account of the holiday. It was freezing. The sky was the bleak white of old kitchen appliances. Wind blew dust into our eyes as we sat on the ground, waiting to watch staff or guards walk by on the other side of the razor wire. Such was the excitement we lived for. A nurse ran past. Then, two more. Conan yelled, “Save a life!” The way he yelled it made their mission less of an emergency. Made it funny. Life didn’t matter much. It was something for Conan to yell while watching the breasts of the nurses bounce up and down.

I was hungry. I had not eaten my emu. Sammy hadn’t eaten hers, either.

“If I wasn’t stuck in ad seg I could have sold that drumstick,” Sammy said. “Black girls will add it to stuffing mix and canned corn. I saw a black chick smuggle a big bird leg from chow last year. Got a blistering burn on the inside of her thigh.”

“Why you got to be so racist?” Conan said. “Black girls this. Black girls that. Just because we run this prison.”

“We could have ran this place,” Sammy said, meaning Latinas, “if most of us weren’t high.”

“Good idea, though, to trade up for a spare drumstick, mix it with corn and stuffing,” Conan said. “Maybe squeeze in some nacho cheese, add pickled jalapeños. They weren’t fucking around with that piece of meat. It was serious. That was no Mortimer portion.”

Mortimer was supposedly a woman at Stanville who sued the prison. Because of her, they had to serve us exactly 1,400 calories a day, so that we could not sue them for our fatness like Mortimer did. The Mortimer portion is not enough food. But instead of blaming the prison, the staff tells us to blame Mortimer, who ruined things for the rest of us by filing a 602 inmate complaint that became a frivolous lawsuit. There were a lot of rules like that, with a prisoner’s name attached to them. To get medication, you stood in an Armstrong box. The Armstrong box is a red square painted on the floor around the pill counter. It’s for privacy. If you were not called to the window, if you were even just walking down the hall and your foot went over the red line of the box, you got a 115, thanks to a paranoid named Armstrong.

We hated the prisoners who ruined it for everybody else, but these people probably didn’t exist. Sammy told me where 602s actually went: into a paper shredder in the assistant litigator’s office. I doubted a prisoner could make history, get her name attached to a new rule, when it was impossible to even lodge a complaint in the first place.

People say holidays are depressing in prison. It’s true. It’s because you cannot help but think of the life you once had, or did not have. Holidays are an idea of how life should be.

My last free-world Thanksgiving I had squandered. I worked day shift at the Mars Room. Men don’t holiday from their addictions. Holidays are busy, because the men need to escape from their real lives into their really real lives with us, their fantasies.

No one forced me to spend Thanksgiving at the Mars Room. I didn’t need the money that badly, on that particular day. Why didn’t I do something with Jackson? I’d given him to my neighbor to watch. She and some friends made a meal. The kids had fun. I sat with Kurt Kennedy in a dark theater. At that point I’d eased myself into the hustle of having a regular. I was by instinct against it, but it had presented itself as a novel certainty. He would be there on my shift. He would choose me automatically. I would not scan the room and circle, waiting for someone who had decided on his lunch hour, in his dark fiefdom, the Mars Room, that I was the one he felt like paying, for company.