Dark and Bloody Ground (8 page)

If Sherry had not known Hodge for a prisoner, she would have thought he ran the place. She watched him bending and lifting, never breaking a sweat. When he turned toward the stairs with his load, he was only fifteen or twenty feet from her window. She admired his forearms and saw the muscles in his back working under his denim shirt. The bright early-fall light made his hair shine brownish-blondish and look so soft when it fell forward that she wanted to feel it on her face and smell it.

He was different from the other prisoners. Except when he shouted orders, he spoke to no one, and no one to him. Sherry had not been close enough to him to look into his eyes, but she saw that they were a pale blue, baby blue she guessed, and she thought that she detected in them a pent-up anger that she understood. He had a soft-looking Fu Manchu mustache that she liked. His only flaw that she could see was that his chin was maybe a little weak and gave him a baby face—not that she minded; it made him seem sweet. But she thought he might look even better and stronger with a beard. Sherry was crazy about beards.

Sometimes his eyes looked sad, then they would go cold. She bet that he could be ruthless when somebody crossed him, yet he looked as if he needed love and could accept tenderness, the poor guy, who must have known precious little love in his sad life.

She learned that Hodge had been at Brushy for five years and was serving the ninth of a twenty-year sentence for armed robbery. Nine years! He was only twenty-nine, seven months younger than herself; they had been born in the same year. He had had no life to speak of. If there was something in him that made him mean sometimes—there must have been, or he would not have received such a stiff sentence— it wasn’t God-given. He must have been hurt. She could sense his goodness and bet that she could bring it out if she got the chance.

The authorities helped to set Hodge apart, permitting him greater freedom than most of the other prisoners. He slept in what was called the White Building, at the front of the prison complex with only a wire fence between it and the road, set up like a dormitory with beds in rows and no barred cells. He had discovered a talent for cooking while in jail and lately had been appointed chief cook for the staffs commissary. Sherry found herself going back for seconds of his chili and cornbread.

None of the other prisoners bothered Hodge or challenged his status. Everyone said that he was strong enough to snap a neck with one hand. He had built himself up and kept in shape by lifting weights.

The social strata at Brushy were clearly defined. Authorities and prisoners alike made a distinction between two kinds of prisoners: convicts and just plain inmates. An inmate was someone who was merely doing time and had neither allegiance to nor power over his fellow prisoners; nor was he trusted by them. Convicts, by contrast, were tightly knit, organized within their own society and its hierarchies, arranged informally but like the military into ranks. The more physical strength, aggressiveness, and cunning you had, and the more cigarettes, marijuana, and other dope you controlled, the higher up you were in the convict pecking order. Those at the highest level even had “green money” (actual currency) hidden in one place or another. Once you understood it, Sherry decided, the organization of life within the prison was a mirror of life on the outside, minus hypocrisy.

The convict-inmate split did not cut across racial lines. At Brushy the ratio of whites to blacks was a fairly steady sixty-forty. Both groups divided into convict-inmate segments; blacks and whites, as on college and university campuses, mixed hardly at all, eating and socializing separately, but on the basis of spontaneous mutual aversion, rather than distinct and formal gangs. (Tennessee prison populations, to this day, have never organized themselves into the gangs—Aryan Brotherhood, Mexican Mafia, Black Guerillas—that dominate West and, to a lesser extent, East Coast prison life. Random drug testing and the segregation of violent and sexually aggressive prisoners have, since the mid-eighties, altered prison hierarchies somewhat. Prison officials continue to observe the convict-inmate division, but it is less of a factor than before. As in the outside world, loyalties have come to count for less than individual interests. Violence toward certain kinds of offenders, particularly “baby rapers” or child molesters, continues, but with far less frequency. The prevailing prison ethos is a fashionable moral relativism.) The threat of racial conflict was constant. A few months before Sherry began working there, three white prisoners smuggled a gun inside, climbed up an air shaft, and shot two blacks dead in their cell. From what authorities could determine, the motive was purely racial.

Sherry preferred the convicts to the inmates or the male guards. The guards resented her because she was a woman and were constantly hitting on her and making ugly remarks. The convicts were con artists, so they were polite, and she enjoyed the way they bullshitted her with rapid-fire chat and had her thinking that she was the grandest thing that ever put on shoes, with their “Yes, ma’ams” and
“Thank you, ma’ams” and cornball endearments—"A gal like you could cause the world a heartache.” She could see how they studied her, that was what they did best, reading people; they were so street smart they could fool you upside down six ways a minute with sweet talk and flattery, and they were always manic-high on something. The next thing you knew, one of them had sliced somebody open with a homemade knife or split somebody’s skull with a meat cleaver. They were liars, first and foremost; all criminals were, that was the point and purpose of their existence; but once you were onto their game, and they knew it, they could be fun.

“I’m gonna marry you when I get out,” one called Lefty would say. “We’ll head for California and you’ll be in the movies.”

“You know why there are no left-handed people in the insane asylum?” Sherry would shoot back. “Because they drive everybody else crazy.”

The ordinary inmates, Sherry thought, were nothing but slime and as boring as nine-to-five types anywhere, putting in time and always ready to snitch. The convicts were her allies in a system that ran on lies and accomodations, threats and power. She knew enough, for instance, to turn a blind eye to the wall-to-wall homosexuality, as to the drugs. What else was a locked-up man supposed to do? Like most people, most of them were sheep and went along with the sex because it was the accepted thing. A handful were brutally gay, punishing the sexual slaves they called punks; some took on girlish-looking boys as punks and pretended they were women. Others merely did what they could to fill the isolated hours with the human warmth available, which happened to be male. It was no different from becoming a cannibal if you were starving to death; it didn’t mean you would pass up ham and eggs if they were offered. A man who wasn’t a natural fruiter, Sherry was told and believed, would go back to women once he was free. She thought that people in prison understood human nature better than hypocrites on the outside. At Brushy you had to face reality. There was nothing else.

It was the same with the dope: she ignored it unless it was blatant, and even then, she’d tell a guy to get smart rather than bust him. She had stopped selling to the guards once she became one; she did not trust her male fellow workers not to snitch on her just to get rid of a woman. They had other sources, and the wives and girlfriends of the prisoners smuggled in plenty of dope, usually inside a condom or a balloon hidden in pants or vaginas. The men swallowed it or inserted
it into their rectums, in case they were cavity-searched. (Visitors were never cavity-searched unless strongly suspected.) It was a game that was more or less ignored. Marijuana or downers, after all, kept the men calm. They could get away with smoking pot in their cells in any number of ways, combining it with apple-scented pipe tobacco, smoking it with the water running in the basin so the fumes went down the drain, perfuming the air with spray deodorant or baby powder.

Sherry’s growing infatuation with Benny Hodge helped her catch on fast. He was obviously a convict, a general who took orders from no one. She gathered that he controlled a lot of dope but was himself clean, being so health-conscious. Nor did he resort to men for sex. Apart from visitors—the story was that Hodge had made his new wife pregnant when she sat on his lap at the prison picnic grounds—he was also involved with another woman who worked at the prison with a face like a bad stretch of road but a great figure.

This woman was always disappearing with Hodge. A prisoner was supposed to be accompanied by a prison employee whenever he left the cellblock, so Hot Pants, that was what Sherry called her, was always saying, “I’m taking Hodge down to bring this here stuff up,” and down they went together into the storeroom. She would come up looking mighty smug. What did she think people thought they had been doing, taking inventory?

Sherry was jealous. It didn’t seem right that a man like Hodge was doing the Texas two-step with a pruneface.

The exercise yard was at the rear of the main building. Beyond the yard lay the ball field, the wall, and the mountains. Sherry discovered that she could stand on the third floor at the end of a row of cells and look down into the yard to see Hodge lifting weights. He was there every afternoon, stripped to the waist, lifting.

Sherry wondered about the wisdom of leaving those weights where anyone could pick them up. A couple of years before, one prisoner had been heaving a barbell over his head when another ran up and smashed down on his face with a hundred-pound weight. The victim had required extensive plastic surgery. But no one came within thirty feet of Hodge when he exercised. If someone dared, Sherry imagined, they could feed the guy to the dogs, for all that would be left of him.

As often as she could, Sherry stole time to watch from her perch as Hodge lifted. She guessed that he must be pressing four hundred
pounds. It was the most gorgeous body she had ever seen, perfectly proportioned, with more muscles than you would have guessed from the way he looked with his shirt on; but his was an athlete’s body, not a muscle freak’s. She heard his grunts echoing off the concrete and dug her nails into her palms.

He lifted standing first, straining, grimacing, triumphant. Then he lay on his back on the bench with his crotch toward her, legs bent, sweat streaming. He was not too hairy, just some on his chest.

All around her there were men, five hundred of them, men in their cells jerking off and touching each other men swabbing floors, men in the kitchen working and in the dining room eating in shifts, always eating, men watching from the towers. And in the center was Benny Hodge.

It wasn’t easy at home at night in the marriage bed, thinking about Hodge in the yard or Hodge in the basement with that horny old bitch.

Sherry had been a tomboy. She had never thought of herself as pretty; an older sister was the beautiful one. But Sherry didn’t think she had to be a prom queen to be attractive to men. She wore no makeup; it was her way of saying take me as I am or leave me the hell alone. She believed that she had certain qualities, including more determination than the next ten women combined, that compensated for whatever knockout looks God had neglected to provide her. Another thing she knew about herself was that when someone told her that she could not have something, she found a way to get it. She had been that way as far back as she could remember, like a running back who found a way around when he couldn’t go straight through. And when someone had something else she wanted, especially when that something was a man, then watch out.

Not that she was always preying on other women’s men. She had had only two affairs since her marriage, both of them as a way of getting back when she believed her husband had been cheating on her. Both affairs had been with married men, but in her view this had been merely a practical choice. You had better not mess with a single man, because he might want you permanently and cause a big fuss and endanger your marriage. Sherry could have told Dear Abby a thing or two.

She held off until it was already a week into October. She had been watching Benny Hodge for more than three weeks; she could not resist the excitement any longer. She did not care what happened,
she had to get with him. They had locked eyes a few times. They still had not spoken to one another, but she was certain that he knew who she was and that he felt something, too—or was she imagining this? She had to find out. Sherry’s way of dealing with temptation was to try to keep calm, devise a plan, see how things played out, and deal with the consequences later. “You can’t change life,” was the way she put it, “but you can learn to live with it.”

CF Oscan Wilde

By ten in the morning, Sherry knew from studying Hodge’s routine, he would be starting to prepare lunch in the staff kitchen. There was a phone nearby which Hodge had the privilege of using and answering. Just after ten on a Tuesday, she rang that phone from another out of sight near the warden’s office.

“Hodge here,” he answered.

“This is Sherry Sheets. You know me?”

“Yeah, I know you.”

“Well, I think you’re pretty cute.”

“Is that right.”

“I do. I been watching you. I have went to a lot of trouble to watch you, and I’m going to miss you so much, it hurts.”

“What, you quitting? They fire you?”

She felt her knees shake, hearing his voice and knowing she could get caught.

“No,” she said, “I ain’t quitting and I ain’t fired and I ain’t no quitter, neither. I’ve got Wednesdays and Thursdays off and what that means is, I won’t be able to see you for two whole days. I don’t know if I can stand it. I mean, all I’ve got between then and now is my husband, and I don’t think he’ll do, know what I mean?”

“You a married woman? You shouldn’t be talking like that.”

“Well, you ain’t nobody to talk, Benny Hodge, Lord knows. You are married, too, and I know what you’ve been up to. You’re as bad as they come. You still haven’t told me what I’m supposed to do. What do you want me to do, Hodge? Aren’t you going to tell me? What’s a girl supposed to do with herself?”