Authors: Mary Karr
To which Clyde replies, See that river? I’d hit it. And the boy wades off thigh high in his long jeans as some cop with a bullhorn starts shouting ghastly mechanical orders about lying down or keeping your goddamn hands raised up.
You raise your hands and wait for somebody to notice.
No actual blows fall, but the racket creates an ambience of roughness. That you’re all handled somewhat like barn animals astonishes you. You keep wanting to say, It’s me, Mary Karr. Winner of the Van Buren Elementary Spelling Bee in fifth grade.
Maybe you even do say it as your hands are tugged behind and latched into metal. Then you’re wedged in the caged backseat of a patrol car, your purse flung into your lap, with three other girls—including Cathy, who’s loudly pissed. She screams, Fucking pigs. Then she kicks the back seat and says, What are we being hauled in for, you fat-assed slab of bacon.
When she sulls up finally, slouching down in a pout, you try to shoulder her reassuringly. To this she whispers, Don’t give them your right name.
But my name’s on my license, you say. In my purse right here. With a picture.
They won’t know that’s you, she says. Not necessarily. Then Cathy straightens herself, lets her heavy, black-lashed eyelids fall like some oracle closing up shop, retreating to the netherworld. Her body sways next to you as the car seesaws down rutted roads.
Hoping to create an atmosphere of goodwill, to make up whatever ground Cathy lost for you in her rant, you address the driver’s shaved neck in what you hope are mellifluous tones, sentences autocratically constructed. You talk with the anxious cheer of a job applicant about your steadfast character. You tack fifty points onto your SAT score, and lie you’re in the Honor Society. You claim to have been first in your junior high class, when it was really sixth grade and you were a notch
down. You brag about belonging to the drill team, whose members still believe you procured an illegal abortion.
You look back and see that every car in this slow procession has its headlights on.
Like a funeral, you say to the shaved neck, using a coffee-klatsch kind of voice. Light-hearted. But when the driver turns around at a light—this is his first acknowledgment of your more or less nonstop patter—he reveals mirrored aviator shades and a lipless mouth that says simply, almost softly, Shut the fuck up.
Which you do, though his rebuke wounds you. You stare out the side window like some frisky dog who’s gotten a swat on the nose with a newspaper. Such self pity is required to steer your awareness from the deep terror the possibility of jail sparks. Dark’s come on, and the first stars seem to press down like shards of some far-off, shattered thing. The pines along the road loom through the tears you hope nobody notices, for you hate being such a pussy.
Finally, the funereal parade arrives at the Kountze County Jail, which is what William Faulkner might have called a fur piece.
For some reason, you expected a crowd for this arrival, flashbulbs or TV cameras. But only one unmarked Chevy with a siren stuck on top sits slantwise in the lot. Handcuffs force you to wiggle sideways out of the vehicle, a cop grabbing up your purse. Then you shuffle cowlike through a glass door held open by a skinny deputy saying, Well, hello there, ladies.
A movie will come out soon about some rednecks butt-raping some city guy they find out in the woods with his pals. The whole time they’ve got him down on the ground, he’s screaming, and some lunatic on his back keeps hollering out, Squeal like a pig. As if sodomy is the funniest damn thing on the planet. Once you see it, you locate the bowel-deep fear of being left alone in this backwater with brusque and malign-seeming men.
Your gang lines the walls around this large, nondescript room, where three central processing tables remind you of nothing so much as kindergarten snack time. (There’d been one for graham crackers, another
for milk, and a third where you selected a towel to unroll on the wood floor for nap time.)
At the first table, a man inks your fingertips, pinching each one to roll it in the correct rectangle on the white arrest card. Your own hand feels limp and foreign as he handles it, an object picked up on the roadside.
At the next, a guy at a typewriter studies your driver’s license then pecks a few keys. When you ask with all earnestness what you’re being charged with, the words seem to echo as if down a canyon. The guy behind the typewriter says, We’ll think a something. Then he says, Hey, Ray, what all are they being charged with?
Ray’s patting down the guys lined up around the wall, an indignity the girls have thus far been spared. He looks up from the well muscled bare back and blue-jeaned ass of Bert Stowe. He says, Well, disturbing the peace, for one thing. Indecent exposure for two.
I had my clothes on, you say. This is a small point of pride by now. But surely you should get credit for it. Maybe there’s some Wasn’t Naked list you can get on. Your eyes plead toward the typewriter dude. Again, you long to stand up and lean over the table, explain to him, conspiratorially, It’s me, Mary Karr. Daughter of Pete and Charlie. Sister of the large-breasted Lecia, who’s a student of physics. As if this would win you an apology or outright release.
Across the room, the guy with the mug-shot camera says, Resisting arrest would make charge number three.
I didn’t resist anything, you say.
The typer guy hits the space bar. You wonder is your voice audible, for no one seems to respond.
Now from a back hallway, cops enter hauling cardboard boxes with God knows what, suitcases and knapsacks, beaded purses. They even brought in somebody’s Coleman camping stove. You wonder wonder wonder what contents will come to light here. A misty sweat breaks out between your shoulder blades, condenses into a few definite beads that roll down. Latches are clicked open. Receptacles pawed through. Then some oratorio-belting choir inside you starts chanting with enormous force: Don’tfinddrugsthere! Don’tfinddrugsthere!
Yet still you assume there’s honor among these thieves. So anybody actually holding dope will invariable step forward if some appears, to keep the rest from being charged unfairly.
Hours seem to have unraveled while the guy at the typewriter stares at the white card. Suddenly he comes to life long enough to read out your street address, saying, This right?
You say, Yessir.
Then with a sweep of his hand, he reaches under the table to produce your purse with all the flourish of a magician. He upends it—pens and whatnot rolling. You’re embarrassed at the white tube of Maybelline mascara, the small compact of Cover Girl blush—for good hippie girls eschew such vanities, and you feel instantly like a cheater and hope Clyde doesn’t see, or Bert Stowe. When your spiral notebook of poems spills out, you restrain the impulse to lunge across the table and snatch it to your chest. He sets the notebook aside, not even thumbing it. Instead he holds aloft your container of birth control pills. There’s a quick grip at your core.
Hey Baxter, we got you a live one here, he says to camera-guy.
Little young for my taste, Booger, I’m gonna pass.
Across the room someone chimes in, Old enough to bleed, old enough to butcher.
For your mug shot, Baxter hands you a stiff card with numbers on it to hold under your chin. He says, Smile, you’re on Candid Camera! Profile. Full front. Just like on TV.
Then you’re blinking stars. Your eyes clear just when a Smokey-the-Bear guy draws from a cardboard box across the room a satchel. It’s woven with Inca geometries and may as well have an I-Carry-Illicit-Narcotics label on it. From it, he draws a huge freezer bag of uncleaned pot, jagged with stems and tarry clots and dry handfuls of blossom. Maybe half a pound, you eyeball it to be.
Well well well, he says, Looky here. He holds it high, Smokey does, asking with all earnestness, Whose is this?
Come on, you think. Get on with it. Before the rest of us get in trouble.
The sheriff says, Y’all done hit the jackpot now. Number next charge would be possession of an illegal substance.
A nearby cop whistles through his teeth.
A third says, Looks like intent to distribute, Jake.
By now anxiety has driven you back into prattling, like in the car. Mostly, you ask for your phone call. I get a phone call, you say. When’s my phone call? Don’t I get a phone call, sir?
Baxter leads you into the line of girls—between the goodwife and Cathy, who scratches her head then studies whatever lodges under her nails. Oh this is perfect, you say aloud.
For you’re thinking about how you fit between these two. What’s the feminist dichotomy for roles we get forced into? Madonna and whore? You say that aloud, Madonna and whore.
What? Cathy says. The goodwife says, Come again?
You look down at your grubby feet in coral-colored flip flops and fake deafness. When they move you down the hall, caged bare bulbs at intervals along the ceiling cast grids of shadows over you. You’re thinking, It’s not fair. It’s not fair.
The room they lock you all in is a stone dungeon lacking only wall chains and iron maiden. The cold concrete floor holds at its center a drain big around as a coffee can, nothing one could tunnel through. A hard bench lines the walls. Lidless toilet in one corner. The door swings shut. Blam. A slot in it slides open. The disembodied voice says, We’ll be watching you ladies.
Cathy says, Watch my flaming white ass, oinker.
The voice shoots back, We just might.
You picture that enormous plastic baggie of pot held high under the trembling neon like some chalice at mass, and you know in your bone marrow it’s sufficient to indict the lot of you.
Cathy says, They’ll take us one at a time. Whatever you do, don’t tell them anything.
But I don’t know anything, you say.
That’s right, Cathy says. That’s just the look to give. Real blink-blink wide-eyed.
But I don’t, you say.
Since Cathy’s the only one who has, in her words, been in the joint, she somehow commandeers the room to prepare you for the atrocities that come with your certain prison sentences.
Well first off, you better learn to eat pussy, Cathy says. You can ew and goo all you want. One of those dykes ham-handles the scruff of your skinny neck, you’ll think better of it. Believe me. It’s way easier than getting a big old dick in your mouth.
Nobody says anything for so long that you feel obliged not to leave this statement hung out there. It stretches the edges of reason to think of women doling out a rape. Finally you say, Couldn’t you just talk to them? I mean. They’re women, right?
Only technically, Cathy says. Then as if she’s read your mind meandering, she says, Don’t read this all weird. I’m not suggesting we eat each other out in here or anything.
At this the goodwife’s eyebrows jag upward. A hush comes back, heavy. Unliftable. Goodwife says, I gotta mellow over here a minute.
While everybody is stretching out on benches just wide enough for their torsos, Cathy leaps up and starts pounding on the door hollering, I need a blanket, fuckwads. Get your doughnut-eating asses down here with some blankets.
The slot slides open, but no eyes appear. The voice says, Why sure, honey, and maybe you’d like some cookies and milk and a little tuck in.
The slot has two six-inch bars welded over it, and it’s to these that Cathy flies—but she continues to hang there like a gorilla, rattling the metal with her whole weight. The sliding door snaps shut. She holds the bars and eventually hops up so her soles slap flat on the door.
You crook one arm over your eyes to block out the sight, for you can no longer bear to ponder Cathy. But from nowhere an image fills your head like floodlight: Cathy at seven, at twelve, at fifteen. For the first time, it strikes you that Cathy wasn’t born this way. Maybe she entered custodial care with as much humanity as any girl here.
Look what happened to Hogan. When he got paroled briefly this year, you and Doonie took him to Burger King where he bummed both
a smoke from a guy and his lit cigarette for fire. Once Hogan’s was lit, he thumped ash on the guy’s head and dropped his lit cigarette on the ground. It happened so fast and offhandedly, you questioned the fact of it, wondering if they knew each other or some nasty exchange had gone down out of ear reach. When in the car you asked what that was about. Hogan said only, I hate all this bullshit, man. Two days later, he was arrested for breaking and entering.
And even though Meredith’s brother sounded like he got some protection in prison from his barbershop job, which gave him access to razors, he’d already written home about seeing a man’s throat cut ear to ear. He’d already learned to say he saw nothing. Could jail transform you like that?
Not to worry. Your mother will show up and call a lawyer and get you out. Or else your daddy will march in and kick some redneck butt. But so many secrets are kept from him, you know he’ll never catch wind of this. He’ll also strive not to hear about it.
For a minute jail seems an okay alternative. Malcolm X started his mission locked up. Think about the yogic meditations you could master. Or the reading you’d do.
But Meredith’s brother writes that his prison’s library holds only grade-school grammar books and detective crap and motor-head mags. (How long’s he been in? A year? Eighteen months?) She and her mother both top out their town-library cards for books to haul up on the bus. Any weekend one can go, they scrape together money for a Motel 6 and the bus fare. Sometimes your pal Stacy even drives them. (But while you’re willing to ride along, you’ve not once borrowed your mother’s car for such forays, though you regularly ferry carloads of whooping hippie strangers stoned out of their gourds on beach runs or to concerts in Houston.)
Maybe prison could mutate you into Cathy. You can suddenly picture your body hung from that door like a simian.
The night gets long, longer, longest.
Before this arrest, you believed neither brutality nor tedium in any measure could break you, for citizens of your region receive black belts
in bearing up under both. There’s some contrary regional pride in withstanding it all. Some kids leave elite prep schools like St. Paul’s or Choate with entry into certain colleges, mastery of certain protocols. In the same way, one leaves Leechfield with raw tales on which to dine out, a sense of having escaped, and the capacity for both pathos and pissed-off that would make for either an excellent nun or a fearless infantry soldier.