Tucked behind the matches was a sliver of paper rolled tight, a dusting of hash inside. A gift. A peace offering. A gesture of friendship. “Thanks,” he said into the silence, but heard nothing. He sat back on the bed wondering what to do. Could you light up in a drum? Smoking was against the rules. You had to be in a specific area of the yard, no more than twenty men maximum at one time, and he’d seen fights break out when someone got sick of waiting and dragged a tardy inhaler out of the circle to beat him senseless. He still smelled of puke, his clothes were in a pile on the floor, and he was sniffling with a cold, aching with the usual hard-on, and brutalized by grief and loneliness. A little toke of hash was the right medicine. Two hits and it was gone, a spark in his fingertips, and the world was spinning in a tighter groove.
Still unable to sleep, he got out his notebook and started to draw, a flashlight crooked on his shoulder. He’d discovered
in the library a book he’d owned as a child,
D’Aulaire’s Book of Trolls
. The story reminded him of his life inside, and he drew some of the inmates and COs that way now. There were trolls everywhere. Gnarled and gruff, unwashed and violent, huge and ugly. Some had twelve heads. Some had long noses, broken teeth, and tails. Some carried their heads under their arms. Some shared an eye. They had no souls. They ate humans in their stew and counted their treasure in caves. They came out only at night and burst into fragments at the mere sight of the sun.
After the delivery detail, routine resumed, and I was grateful for the discipline of the uniform. An inmate’s way of seeing the world could seep into your brain like a virus if you let it. For a few days afterward I wondered if I should tell Wallace about Josh and Crowley and the comic book. But I didn’t trust Wallace, and I didn’t care to open my decision-making process to his scrutiny. It was his fault I’d been put into such an ambiguous situation. The consequences could fall to someone else. Crowley’s friendship with Josh was a troubling aspect. It was difficult to imagine Crowley wasting any time with such a fresh and unlikely fish, but it was not unusual for
an established con to use a newbie as a courier or errand runner or service provider. The reasons and the what-fors were never easy to follow, and there was nothing I could do about it anyway.
To be honest, I thought more about the mixed emotions I still had around Josh. I was bothered by the murky reasons he was allowed the pass and by the heavy shock he’d experienced not knowing his father was sick. I could still see him crumpled over and crippled by the revelation. I was not usually curious about an inmate, but a week later, one evening when I was home doing an online training class on inmate rights and three glasses of merlot to the wind, I broke away from the Q&A and googled Josh to find out what I could about him.
The Internet had distorted the value of information in prison. The code inside was not to talk about the particulars that led to your bit. This secrecy gave rise to rumors and innuendo that served as a kind of floating currency, measuring the ups and downs of an individual’s status and reputation. As natural liars and unaccountable shiftless fucks, most inmates are inclined to bluff about their beef, accentuating the positive, downplaying the unsavory. If you’re a skinner—a rapist—for instance, and nobody knows it, you put the hate on suspected skinners just to cover yourself from unwelcome speculation. If you’re weak or disliked, you get labeled and tagged and sometimes bagged, based on whatever story gets spread, unless you throw down and take a stand. But now, if those inside wanted to learn more about a new neighbor, one sentenced in the last five to ten years, all they had to do was get a friend outside to do a search and dish the details during a
visit. We dealt with the consequences of such trade all the time.
It didn’t take long to draw my own picture of Josh from the news articles that popped up. He was in for first-degree manslaughter and had been sentenced to twenty-five years. It seemed a heavy bit, given the verdict and his age and the things that some hard men do to earn sentences half as long, but I’d also seen fourteen-year-olds walk in facing the fifty-year stretch. Sometimes the young perps get the harder hand so the courts can show the world, behold, here is justice, and this time we’re not fucking around. The victim’s name was Stephanie Patchet, a girlfriend, or ex-girlfriend in some accounts, shot by Riff with his father’s handgun one evening after an argument in her family living room. I got sober scanning the pieces. An accident. A struggle. A slipped gun. An early version called it a tragedy, a later article described it as a malicious, well-planned homicide masquerading as juvenile distress. The verdict turned because of the notebook found in Josh’s car, which was filled with drawings that proved, in explicit and occasionally pornographic detail, his murderous intentions. No examples were provided, but I saw her photo, the eager aliveness of a smiling face framed in mousy blond hair, the kind of shot always chosen by journalists when they want to canonize a victim.
It knocked me back to see that Josh was nothing more and nothing less than a girlfriend killer, and that his drawings had earned him the hard time. Given his milquetoast persona and the relative stability of his family life (minus those communication problems regarding his father’s health), it was not surprising
that his crime was unrelated to any of the thicker pursuits surrounding drugs or gangs, yet the revelation truly pissed me off. Wallace had sent me, without warning, on a secret road trip accompanying a lying, emotionally manipulative, murderous coward who’d killed a woman. I hate domestics. I hate passion murders. Why did thwarted love so often turn physically harsh? I was sick of young men and their fevered imaginations and the irreparable harm they caused through clumsy assertions of control.
Or did I just want the freedom to hate from a distance? The job usually allowed for that. Contempt was part of the gear you wore. The rote duty dulled your personal take on the world, and that suited me just fine. If Josh was an in-between inmate, then I was an in-between person. Thirty-nine years old, pretty in a conventional way, though one eye was slightly lower than the other and I wore my bang across it. I had combat experience in Iraq, but that was paper fake. I did yoga twice a week, liked bourbon, and knew how to rap the vulnerable point of an elbow with a baton. I had an ex-husband, but the marriage had left no dent on my life. I was all holding pattern and no hold. It took the rest of the bottle of wine to contemplate the details in full.
Such was my queasy and slightly disoriented state of mind the next morning when the violence began.
They had me working the tower. The task was to look down onto the yard and also to scan the slate rooftops with their fringes of barbed wire and even the absurd glass dome. I was there to catch odd breaks in the traffic flow, to spot what could not be spotted on the ground, to call warning if a fellow
CO was under duress, to scatter perimeter shots if a clustered knot of violence ever unraveled and spread—in short, to simply be the watchful eye of a pissed-off and ever-vigilant God. Most COs counted it a lucky day to be assigned such duty—all that power with the luxury of being safe and bored, too—but the isolation up top emptied me out. I watched the inmates and COs and the civilians—or weak sisters—and thought, that’s me down there, that’s how small I am; and I got down on myself for thinking that way.
The office at the top of the tower was cramped with gray furniture and blue metal. Even with the chill I preferred the open air. Standing on the platform six stories above the yard kept me alert, or as alert as was possible overseeing such heavy routine. On a clear day you could see beyond the walls to the forest and the valley and the choked, twisted river, and beyond that to the crisp brown farmlands and the jut of the city. But on that day visibility was almost nonexistent. The sky was low-ceilinged. Time had thickened up, and every sound was muffled, as though the yard were contained within a lidded pot. Then the first snowflake appeared, and Ditmarsh became a fairy-tale castle.
It was easy to be distracted, and I let it happen. A million more snowflakes followed the first one, materializing out of the milky emptiness rather than falling from the sky, dancing in front of me, stirring whatever thin poetry I had inside. The snow landed heavy, piling up fast. The beauty was surprisingly insistent. I forgot about caution, movement, and status notifications for the moment and took it all in. The towers could have been turrets. The dip in the yard a grassed-over
moat. The dome a crystal palace. What did that make me? Hardly a princess—too much uniform in my life for that—but still.
My reverie lasted long enough for me to be utterly startled when the siren blasted to mark midday. The buildings remained unaffected by the signal for two or three puffs of breath; then the doors burst open and the men hit the yard like schoolboys at recess. The change in weather slowed them up. Arms got outstretched, hands and mouths opened to receive the flakes. The exaggerated innocence made their brutality seem as random and regrettable as a car accident. You could get lulled like that sometimes. You could start to look on them like acquaintances.
I blinked to see through the blur. The men were not walking their usual defined routes at their usual regulated pace. No one else seemed to mind, but the disruption of flow across the yard bothered me because the situation was abnormal and called out for vigilance. Twelve minutes later, only two minutes longer than normal, the movement had trickled off and I willed myself to relax. A group of inmates entered the yard from the education center in the old wing, a class or counseling session having spit its dutiful attendants out late. I tracked them with less caution because their numbers were small. It was almost amusing when the scooping up began and the snowballs launched among them like a flurry of arrows from opposing ramparts. I picked up my binoculars for a closer look and was surprised to see Josh standing among the group. Despite the childish nature of the play, he looked more uncomfortable than the others, hands shoved into his pockets.
Then I saw Crowley in the larger scrum, chased by another man with a handful of snow. The horizontal cast, the strange slow-motion way he walked, twisting his body as if on a swivel. His pursuer moved awkwardly, too, and I recognized Roy Duckett, the one-legged kitchen chef called Wobbles. Funny to see the two of them together, as if competing in the Para Olympics. A snowball hit Crowley in the back, and he turned and waited for Wobbles to reach him. When they grappled, Wobbles slipped and fell hard on his back and lay there as if stunned, and Crowley fell on top of him and began to face wash him. I thought it was a bit rough, edging toward brutal, but two COs had gathered and seemed to feel there was no reason to intervene. Then a third inmate took the opportunity to launch himself into the tangle. I didn’t like it, and I willed the COs to break it up. Even so, I was completely startled when the third inmate’s arm began pumping up and down with the sped-up vigor of someone using a sharpened killing implement.
Three or four seconds later I scrambled inside the booth and came out with an AR-15 assault rifle. It was heavy but beautifully balanced and locked on, and I cradled it in my arms. A circle formed, but the COs did nothing to interrupt. Someone needed to take control, so I sounded the blare, hoping to clear the tight group and fire off a round, at least a skip shot to frighten them into stopping. At the sound, everyone in the yard looked up as though startled, then looked back to the scrum. Almost immediately Crowley managed to do something within the tangle, which evoked a howl of agony in his attacker, who scooted away on the seat of his pants, dragging
his lower body. The fight had turned, as they sometimes did. With COs on hand, it should have ended there, Crowley could have been pulled off or restrained, but still no one moved in. Instead, Crowley knelt on his attacker’s chest, his cast arm wedged into the guy’s neck and his good hand stabbing down as though knocking chips off a block of ice. I steadied the rifle and aimed for a spot on the snow next to Crowley, and everything resolved into a punctuation point.
I might have fired if not for the man who sprinted across the yard and tackled Crowley. Some civilian. Some weak sister. He appeared out of nowhere and did what no one in uniform had the inclination or the courage to do. Wrestling Crowley down, tying up his good arm from behind, he provided the COs with the excuse or the opportunity to rouse themselves, wade in with fucksticks, and pummel away.
Two COs dragged Crowley off, not gently. A half dozen more began the sorting-out process now that the event was over. I remained at the railing, staring down, watching the clumsy work going on, mesmerized by the falling snowflakes and the prediction of violence Josh had promised. What the hell had just happened? I’d interpreted the comic book as fantasy and little more, the melodrama of the story salty with the injured sentiments of some self-righteous con. It knocked me off balance to see Crowley attacked so soon after that conversation, as if I’d misheard everything. I thought about the possibilities and got nowhere. Then the hatch at my feet popped up and my replacement arrived a full fifteen minutes early. A short CO with a sleepy look on his face named Patrick Kim emerged from the staircase to join me on the tower. He muttered bitterly
about the fucking cold and asked me about the excitement. I gave him my abbreviated version and offered a philosophical observation: “Who knew the kids hid shanks in snowballs these days?”
“Winter sucks,” he said. “Go do your paperwork and get off my tower.”
After I reached ground level and made my way through the tunnel to Keeper’s Hall, however, I did not pour myself a coffee, find a desk, and get started, but drifted out into the yard to see the site of the happening firsthand.
The gathering had thinned of inmates and thickened with COs and weak sisters. I saw an assistant warden, a counselor, some medical staff. I did not see Josh; he must have been among the inmates led back to their cells. The sprinter who’d interrupted the fight was still there, a group of COs surrounding him, berating him hard. I knew him by sight as Brother Mike, an ex-missionary turned counselor who ran the art therapy program. I put it all together then. This was the class Josh had spoken about, the program they were all dying to get into.
Three orderlies and Keeper Wallace squatted before Crowley’s attacker. The man’s face was a mutilated mess, his barrel chest rising and falling in the suck for air. Through an overheard comment I learned that the plucked chicken was Lawrence Elgin, someone I knew to be of the Viking persuasion, which was a general categorization we had for gang-affiliated white supremacists. Looking for some way to make myself useful, I saw that Wobbles, the one-legged inmate Crowley had traded snowballs with, still sat on the ground
unattended, his good leg and his peg leg scissored out from his girth. His nose and ears trickled blood, and I wondered if that injury happened when Crowley face scrubbed him. As I walked over, a smile spread across his mouth. “Hey!” he called, and pointed to the red snow between his legs. “Looks like I got my period, doesn’t it?” It was the kind of shot I took all the time, as a woman inside a house for men, so I stopped short and decided to ignore him like everyone else.
There was nothing for me to do, no reason for me to be there, but still I lingered. I wandered around the site and noticed, in the center of the flattened snow, a toothbrush with flecks of gore and swirls of red around it. Kneeling, I poked it with a finger, delicately tipping it skyward. The bristle end was worn down from normal use, but the handle had been melted and twisted until sharpened to a deadly point. “Keeper Wallace,” I called. I wanted him to see this, to know the weapon had been found by me. The orderlies rolled Elgin’s heavy slackness onto a canvas stretcher and lifted him up. Wallace left them but, instead of walking my way, joined the circle around Brother Mike. The voices of the COs were heated, and although Wallace did not intercede directly, his presence toned things down for the moment.