“What?” I said. “Is that right?”
“There ain’t no room in there.” She pointed up at the jail. “They’re going to have to start pushing the criminals into the lake. If you ask me, that’s the place for them anyhow.”
“A lot of them haven’t had trials yet,” I said.
She smirked and came closer. “Well, you know they done it.”
I walked on, into the small entry teeming with people who were either trying to make their way out or waiting to sign in. If we were visiting we were to remove our watches, our jewelry, our pens, our keys, and deposit them in the lockers. At the appointed time we were pushed through a series of doors into the visiting area, the long corridor with carrels, the Plexiglas windows, the telephones. Those places are well-known to all of us who have sat drugged before the Monday night movie. Dan would say that they are therefore a part of our national landscape, as significant and noteworthy as attractions like the Grand Canyon. He maintained, and he’s undoubtedly right, that courts of law are interesting to the public because they are the last vestige of power and mystery in our crumbling civilization.
I sat down on a round stool in cubicle three, as I’d been told. I waited. It was probably power and mystery that made my nerves play, all of them, ringing in my ears like a brass band. The glass was smeared with hand prints, the palm marks of the children who have tried to melt themselves through the wall into their mother’s or father’s laps. She was going to come through the door on the other side. Perhaps she’d be too sick to speak. The man sitting in the next cubicle smelled of garlic and had such greasy skin and hair he sparkled. We avoided eye contact, staring straight ahead. We were ashamed, as if we were waiting for a peep show.
I remembered the time Alice and I went swimming the day we moved to Prairie Junction. We’d gone and had tuna sandwiches and pie at Del’s. When it got dark we went for a swim in our own pond, on our own farm. I had thought it would be fun to strip and swim together. I wanted to celebrate the occasion. After a few strokes she swam under until she was in the middle of the pond. She stayed there treading water. Her head was thrown back and she was barely moving. She acted as if she was alone. I climbed up onto the dock and dried off. I waited for her to come out of her trance. Finally she did the breaststroke in my direction. In the
shallows she walked through the water dabbing at the surface. She was obviously having some private joke or thought. She never said what it was.
I sat waiting for her in the visiting area at the jail and I wondered if she would again be as far away as a person can go while they are still with you. She was going to be beyond reach. There would be nothing I could do to help her. It was like death, to be beyond reach. But of course it wasn’t death, this visit from someone as untouchable as a ghost. Her group came through in single file. She was third in line, wearing the orange shirt and pants that looked like they were made of burlap. The man next to me began shouting at his daughter for getting herself into trouble again. Alice was standing very straight, looking ahead like a soldier. The receiver was slippery in my hands. When she turned into the cubicle I said, “Visit means both to bless and afflict.”
Howard
. I could see her lips moving as she reached for the phone, and then I heard her. “Howard. Two things. I know Nellie is in Yugoslavia. Would you please keep this to yourself? I don’t want you running to her this time, do you hear me?”
“She’s in Rumania,” I said.
“I know, I know. I couldn’t ever face her, or you, for that matter, if she had to pinch and save or pawn her jewels, sell her house, just to bail me out. I don’t know how to say it any more clearly. I couldn’t stand it. This is my deal and I’m not going to have her throwing her precious last dollars at it.”
The phone fell out of my hand. When I got it back to my ear she was saying, “I know it sounds ungrateful, but I don’t mean it to. It’s only that I couldn’t stand it. Number two, don’t do anything foolish like sell off parcels. You have to swear that you won’t do something rash like try to get zoning changes and sell off the old orchard. I know I’ve complained about the farm over the years, but I didn’t mean it, not really. I love that place. I’ve been having nightmares about your going to great lengths to get money so I can get out of here. I had this dream that you were like a kid with a lemonade stand out in the front yard, only you were selling off whole cows. I know you, Howard. I know you! I just don’t want you to do something we’ll both regret later.”
I had not seriously considered selling any part of the farm, I suppose because Rafferty had told me it was our greatest asset. It also was not something a person could dump onto the market expecting to make a quick fortune. “I want to have you out.” I had to yell to hear myself. The father was on one side of me, fuming and swearing. On the other side there was a teenage boy whose jeans were slashed up and down his legs. He was so excited he had to stand to talk.
“Look it,” she said. “They have to give me a trial in three months. They can’t keep me in here longer than ninety days. Well, okay, they could if Rafferty needs more time and makes a motion to delay. Still, three months, four months—I’m telling you I’m all right.”
“Alice,” I said slowly, “Rafferty said we shouldn’t discuss the case over the phone. We have to be careful. But can you help me understand? Suzannah Brooks is praying for us, no one will speak to me—”
“We don’t have time to explain. It’s happening. I’ve seen Rafferty. He’s so strange he makes me laugh, with that voice of his, thick with adenoidal drippings. He should probably have them removed, don’t you think so? Aside from his goatee and the way he’s always rubbing it, he’s smart, he’s decent—”
“I saw him too.” And again I said, “I can’t understand this.” But we were talking at the same time. We might as well have been on different continents, satellites beaming our voices back and forth over the long distance.
“You have to realize,” she was saying, “that Mrs. Mackessy has had it in for me for a long time. I’ve been thinking these few days how Prairie Junction, Prairie Center, whatever the hell our town is called, has been changing so fast, all the houses going up, the racetrack, the strip along the highway. It’s gone through so much change we don’t even know what it’s called anymore—”
“We shouldn’t be talking about—”
“Those Hmong people have moved in down by the mill. Hmong people in Prairie Center! The old-timers probably think they’re done for. Sometimes people get so confused by how fast everything’s moving they have to throw somebody out, to make them feel better. It could have been anyone, really. The neighborhood associations in the new subdivisions
have had so many disputes about how high the fences should be, what kind of annuals you can plant, the Christmas decorations they’ll allow. This ought to unify them.”
“Jesus, Alice,” I said under my breath. I didn’t know how she could see it in such an impersonal way. I had thought she was going to be frail and withdrawn. I had thought I might have to coax her to speak.
“Don’t look at me as if I’m cracked, Howard. I’m not saying I deserve this. I was feeling pretty sorry for myself last night and I thought that I should pray, that I should ask Christ or God, whoever, to save me from prison. And then I realized that there’s no point in believing now, just to be saved. That’s a fair-weather friend. If I had believed before I was in trouble that would be one thing, but to believe now—”
I was trying to understand what she was saying. And I had to keep her in line so she didn’t mention anything in a way that could be misconstrued. Also I needed to pinpoint what was different about her. As she jabbered on about whether it would be right to go to the daily Bible class, I realized that I hadn’t talked with her since before Lizzy drowned. She hadn’t spoken in weeks. She was chattering the way she often used to before Lizzy died. She was the one who usually held up more than her end of the conversation. She had the same lulling and companionable effect of the radio in the barn, something I tuned in and out of. She was coming close to the glass, peering at me. “Are you okay, Howard? You look sort of awful.”
We had so little time and I didn’t yet know how this had happened to her. That was what I had set out to learn, above and beyond seeing that she was in one piece. “Alice,” I said, “there have been some calls. I need to figure—”
“What? What are people saying?”
“We shouldn’t be discussing it here—”
“That’s ridiculous! I have a right to know what people are saying so I can defend myself. I have a feeling each story is going to be more and more outrageous. Tell me! Tell me what’s being said.”
“One woman, a stranger, said that you told her daughter—”
“What?”
“That you could g-get it on with a tampon.”
She shut her eyes and wrinkled her nose, as if she was trying to think back to a smell. After a minute she threw up her right arm. Her eyes, her mouth, both of them popped wide open. She stared at me before she began her explanation. “How do we live in this world, Howard?” She waited a beat, perhaps expecting an answer. “How do we do it? You try to be a decent person, try to rise above the savage and ugly things, but not so far above that everything seems distasteful. Maybe it’s just not possible. Most of the kids at school are good and sweet, but the ones who aren’t, the minority, ruin it for everybody. Last fall, last year, I walked into the girl’s bathroom because I heard hooting. I told you this. Josie Marone was standing at the sink, Josie Marone, a very smart, very developed sixth-grade girl, the one who wore the off-the-shoulder prom dress for the chorus concert. It turned out—I’m sure I told you about this. I must have. It turned out the girl in the stall was having her first period and Josie was trying to talk her through using a tampon. I told Josie a tampon wasn’t appropriate under the circumstances and I bought a sanitary pad from the dispenser. The poor girl was mortified. As I was leaving, Josie said to me, ‘So, when you use a tampon, do you get it on?’ Sixth grade. What do I say to that? She was sniggering, thinking she was going to get a rise out of me. ‘Josie,’ I said, ‘sexuality is about intimacy, about closeness, about giving and receiving,’ you know, that line. Sometimes I just don’t want to live in this world. Maybe the sex in advertising and the movies is triggering children’s neurons and they’re going through puberty earlier than ever before. Couldn’t that happen? We should go to Ireland, to some poor country where there’s no birth control, no plastic toys, where people drink a lot of beer and grow vegetables.”
She leaned back on her stool to check the wall clock. “Oh, not yet, not yet,” she moaned. “Our time is nearly up. Okay, okay, so Rafferty says it should be simple, that what I told him makes it relatively easy to sink his teeth in and fight the good fight. I’m supposed to have a hearing ten days from my preliminary arraignment, by law, but Rafferty’s delaying so he can study up. His first order of business is to try to get the bail reduced. The state is pushing him to get going and he’s trying to string them along. There’s this whole pecking order with the phone in our pod, and the second time I got to it you were out. And then someone jammed it and
they say they’re not going to fix it. I’m not sure I could handle talking to the girls anyway. I’m so far away from them—Are they okay? Where are they this afternoon?”
There was a beep, our warning signal.
“And another thing, tell them the truth, as much as you can. Tell them that once in a rare while people blame the wrong person for their own troubles. Tell them I hope I’ll be home in ninety days, that I’ll be out by September. And Howard,” she said. She came close to the glass again. She was like a dolphin brushing by in an aquarium. We looked at each other. She didn’t say anything more. I think we were both remembering the night before she was arrested. The last time we’d touched one another, and exchanged a few words, had been that night. I hadn’t understood what was going through her mind, why she had struggled and crashed up, making the floorboards shake, the dresser tip. The next morning I hadn’t known how we would mend the rift. It almost seemed for a moment, as we watched each other, that her imprisonment was the result of that night. The implications had been serious, terrible. The phones went dead. She was waving at me, backing away with a crooked smile on her face. Her hideous togs hung on her. They had been made for a tall, fat person. They were orange, like reflectors, something you can see in the night when you shine a light at it.
I stood in the entry of the jail for a while, thinking, I guess, that something might happen. That the older deputy who was sitting at his computer terminal behind the glass might get up, might ask me if I was Howard Goodwin. He might glance back at his screen and tell me that something had flashed across to indicate that I could take Alice home. I had gotten out of the habit, on the farm, of thinking of most of us as wretched. Everyone hanging around looked as if their lives were filled with nothing but hatred and stupidity and hard knocks. Of course. What did I expect? And still I stood staring like a foreigner at the sullen, pimply woman who looked all of twenty, baring her rocten teeth in frustration as she tried to pour the Dr. Pepper from a can into her baby’s bottle.
On the way home I pulled over by the Washington Park Golf Course to watch the men in pastels buzzing around in their carts. My father had been an avid golfer and I sometimes watch the game, I guess for him. There used to be three effigy mound groups in that park along the Root
River, from about
A.D
. 1000. One was in the shape of a panther that measured eighty feet in length. The mounded earth was landfilled years ago to make way for the golf course. It had been a disappointment to my father, that I hadn’t taken to golf. He hadn’t been able to believe that I’d played with a friend without keeping score, that we’d gone to the course because I liked to walk around outside.
When I turned into Miss Bowman’s drive the girls were sitting on the railroad ties at the foot of her crudely terraced garden. They weren’t fighting or talking or scratching in the dirt. Miss Bowman came out of her kitchen door. She watched us with her one good eye as I helped the girls into the car. “Thanks,” I called. “I really appreciate it.” She stood on her porch with her hands in her apron pockets. She was inert. I picked up a small sharp stone and I realized, just in time, that I was thinking of throwing it at her. I wanted to see if it would make her move or speak. A week before I would never have had the reflex to throw anything at anyone. “We’ll be by for eggs one of these days,” I said. “Thanks again.” I waved. “So long.” At the last minute I remembered that I was supposed to pay her. I got out of the car and ran up the stairs to the side entrance. She was stirring onions in a frying pan at the stove. When I opened the kitchen door she yapped and whipped around in alarm. “Here,” I said, setting the five dollars on the table. “Thanks so much.”