Authors: Scott Snyder
None of the younger inmates seemed to want anything to do with them. At first, I assumed the giant age difference was the reason. It took me a while to learn that they stayed away from the old ladies because they were frightened.
As it turned out, the three old women were transfers from another Florida penitentiary—a real prison, with guard towers and searchlights, bars and razor wire. They were all violent offenders too, killers who’d spent thirty, forty, even fifty years in maximum-security prisons. They’d simply been transferred over to the camp because by now it was assumed that they were too old to do harm anymore. And because at their age they needed certain amenities that were difficult to provide in real jail.
“It’s not like there are any thugs in there,” Joyce had said. “No real criminals.”
But these women were murderers. All three of them had killed in cold blood. Two of them had murdered their husbands. One had done it for money, the other for no good reason at all. And the last lady, the oldest of the three, turned out to be a serial murderer. Her name was Rose Deach, and as a young woman in the 1940s she had killed over thirty people. If the war hadn’t been going on she likely would have made national headlines, because her crimes were particularly heinous.
Rose had started out working in the nursery of the Volusia county hospital, up the coast, not far from Daytona. She’d been a physician’s assistant, a pretty young girl who watched over newborns until they were ready to go home. Some babies she apparently took good care of. She checked their temperatures, their breathing; she fed them, did whatever she was supposed to do to keep them healthy. Other babies, though, Rose killed by clamping her hands over their faces in the middle of the night.
For three and a half years Rose moved from hospital to hospital, caring for some, killing others. When she was finally caught, she didn’t seem to understand what she’d done wrong. She’d only killed the bad babies, she said. She claimed she could tell which ones were going to grow up to be good people, and which ones were bad seeds.
“I don’t understand it myself, but it’s so,” she was quoted as saying from jail in June of 1944.
“I press my hand to a child’s chest and right off I can feel what kind of character they’ve got. Right in my palm. I can tell whether they’re going to add goodness to the world, or subtract from it. And so,” she said, “the bad ones I go ahead and press out of the world. Who needs them here? Right?”
In the 1940s Rose Deach was a scary story that parents and nannies around Florida told misbehaving children, a fairy-tale villain. Kids used her name to frighten each other.
Rose Deach knows you’re a bad boy. She’s coming to get you. She’s sneaking inside your closet right now, closing the door behind her with those bony hands. She’s waiting for you to fall asleep….
I watch as Rose and the other two murderesses emerge from the barracks. I watch them make their way to the picnic table, so skinny, all three of them, shrunken, tiny women, their skin pale and crinkly as tracing paper. The orange jumpsuits hang on them—Rose is so small, she has to wear hers cuffed at the ends of the pants legs to keep from tripping. And as they near the exercise path, I see all the other women part and let them pass.
Who can blame the younger ones, though? I’m frightened myself. It makes me angry to think that Joyce didn’t tell us about the murderesses. Laura doesn’t seem to understand. To her the murderesses are just three little old women hobbling around. They’re harmless. But for me, there’s something deeply scary about them. They remind me of a certain kind of car that shows up at the wrecking yard once, maybe twice a year. A kind of car that all of us are very careful around.
Like at most wrecking yards, the majority of the vehicles we acquire we get at insurance auctions. We buy them ourselves, junkers that we purchase for parts. An old Honda or Ford, for example, might have the back smashed to garbage but the front still full of usable machinery—a transmission, a fan belt, a dirty radiator. We’re scavengers, for the most part. We buy dead cars and gut them for pieces, catalog them, then stack them on the bone piles, wait for the aluminum prices to go up before selling the scrap in tonnage.
A few times a week people will bring cars to us. A guy looking to get rid of his dead grandmother’s clunker. A kid going off to school who doesn’t need the old station wagon anymore. But once in a while, someone will come to the yard with a different kind of car altogether. They’ll come by with the kind of car that they shouldn’t be bringing to a place like ours—nice, new cars with purring engines and smooth, shiny bodies.
Again, this happens three times a year at most. A guy will drive up in an expensive car, maybe a brand-new Cadillac SUV, and when he gets out, he tells us to just take it away from him. Sometimes he’ll want us to buy the car for some ludicrously low price: a thousand dollars, a hundred, maybe even less.
“Just give me a dollar and you can have it. Please, get it away from me,” he’ll say, already walking away from the car. Like it’s cursed.
Usually when they come by like this, when they’re frantic just to get rid of a car, they want a guarantee that we’ll destroy it. They don’t care if we gut it for parts, but they don’t want the car driving the streets anymore. They don’t want to have to see it ever again. One time a woman came by with a ’68 Mustang in perfect shape, jet black with a silver racing stripe down the center, and paid a hundred dollars to watch us flatten it in the crusher. Another time, two years ago, I came out of the office to find an empty 1972 Cadillac Eldorado idling in front of the gate. It had a glazed, butter cream exterior, red leather trim. The car was worth at least nine thousand dollars, just sitting there by the curb with the engine purring. A note taped to the windshield read,
Wreck it.
Marco and Jesus call cars like that Voodoos. They like to try to guess what happened between the cars and the people who brought them in.
“I’ll bet it’s his lady’s car. Probably dumped him in it.”
“He was sadder than all that, man. It must have belonged to someone who died. A brother or a sister. Someone he loved. Maybe they offed themselves in it. You saw his face.”
Sometimes we dare each other to drive a Voodoo, or to take one home. A 1970 Cutlass SS will come in, triple black, and before we load it into the crusher, I’ll tease Marco, who drives a broken-down Chevy truck, about what a nice ride it’d be to bring home to his wife.
“Go on,” I’ll say. “Take it. You deserve it. I won’t tell.”
He’ll laugh and shake his head. “No, no. You’d look better in this one. A Cutlass is your style.”
“I insist,” I’ll say.
“So do I,” he’ll say, even as I push the button that starts the crusher.
That’s what Rose and the other two remind me of—Voodoos. Cars you know can’t really be that dangerous, but you avoid all the same. I look through the telescope at Rose—small, bony Rose, hobbling across the grass, stooped, the other old women at her side—and I am fascinated.
“Jacob, how long have you been up here?” Laura asked.
This was just the other day. I was watching the women get ready to take a sculpture class. There were seven of them sitting around a picnic table with a big bowl of water in the center. In front of each woman sat a gray, brain-like lump on a paper plate.
“Not so long,” I said. I swung the telescope to the left a little, to see which one of the women was going to pose for the others, and I spied the money manager already standing on the far picnic table, getting nude. She was not one of my favorites. Young and attractive, she had long blond hair and a slender, graceful body, but even so, there was something slightly repugnant about her. Maybe it was the hint of snobbishness in her face, the upturned nose, the small, darting eyes always assessing people. She’d stolen millions of dollars from her clients, investing their money in risky stocks without telling them. She would reside at the camp for seven more years.
I watched as she stepped out of her jumpsuit, then peeled off her panties. Her body gleamed, so pale in the sun. She was a little small, a bit bowlegged, but her breasts were full, the nipples bright pink. The hair between her legs was trimmed in a perfect diamond.
The telescope went black. I looked up to see Laura’s hand clamped over the lens.
“What’s the deal?” I said.
“Nothing. I just wanted to talk to you for a minute, that’s all.”
“The women are taking a sculpture class. The three killers, too.”
“Jacob, are you sure you’re all right?” Laura said.
“Of course,” I said. “What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know. You’re just a little distant lately. And you haven’t been sleeping.”
The night before, I’d had a dream about being chased by a man on fire. He was driving behind me on the highway, flames streaming from his eyes and nose and open mouth.
Laura ran a hand through my hair. “And you’ve just been spending a lot of time in here. You’ve been spending a lot of time inside your head.”
“I’m spying on the prison. I’m relaxing.”
She put her hands up. “Okay. Sorry. I was just checking in. Want to eat soon?”
I turned back to the telescope. “Just two more minutes. Roger, Kitty Kat?”
“Sure,” she said, waiting there. “Roger.” Then she headed downstairs.
I went on watching the women sculpt for a few more minutes, enjoying the last of the sun, the warm breeze coming through the window. Most of the sculptures were hopeless, deformed and mangled, but a couple were quite good. It was a thrill to observe the better sculptors, to watch them slowly draw human figures up from the clay, tease out arms and legs. The eye surgeon was working on a bust that looked more and more like the money manager with every pass of her hands. I was impressed by how carefully she molded the facial features—smoothing out the money manager’s brow, pinching up the bump in her nose.
Rose was sitting at the far end of one of the tables. I watched as she molded her flattened clay into a square gray slab, all the while thinking about what those hands of hers had done. As soon as she finished shaping the corners, she began plucking out the slab’s edges, picking the clay apart with her spidery fingers. She worked quickly, snatching at bits of clay, now and then shooting a glance up at the naked money manager, studying her.
Soon enough Rose peeled her sculpture off the table and stood it up. It was a twisted shape, almost like a gnarled, barren tree, or a system of veins squiggling off from a single artery. Nothing human to the shape at all. Still, there was something about those squirmy, desperate tentacles that reminded me very much of the money manager standing on the table. Maybe it was the way the sculpture seemed to speak of greed, a kind of veiny, slurping greed. I don’t know. But Rose Deach got it right. She saw right through to the money manager’s ugly heart.
iv.
T
HE DAYS SLIP BY. THEY SLIDE INTO ONE ANOTHER AND DISSOLVE.
The wrecking yard is only a few miles from the aquarium, so most afternoons I’m able to visit Laura at work for lunch. Sometimes we eat in her office, other times we eat outside, in the aquarium’s amphitheater, where the shows happen. Jed, the trainer, rides across a pool on a chariot of dolphins. Baby sea lions tumble through the air like footballs.
I worry that one day soon I’ll break Laura’s heart. And not by accident either. I’m afraid I’ll do it violently, bust her heart wide open.
I’ve done it before. I’ve dated a woman, fallen in love, and then turned on her. I don’t know why.
It always happens the same way. I’m going along fine with someone. One month goes by, two, six. I’m attached. I care now. I think about her all the time. I look forward to seeing her. She starts leaving things at my house: a hair clip, earrings; she starts bringing things over: a toothbrush, an extra pair of glasses to leave on the nightstand, old sneakers to go biking in.
And wham: I start waking up sweaty in the middle of the night with a strange crackling in my chest; waking up angry, even furious, my fists clenched, aching. And from there it all starts to slide. I feel it happening and don’t know how to stop it. The fear and resentment, the rage; I feel them all blooming in me so fast, like something from a fairy tale, a vine sprouting overnight, its black leaves slapping open.
But that’s too pretty a way to describe what happens to me. The change is much uglier than that.
Does this ever happen to you? You’re going about your day with the person you love, your girlfriend, your boyfriend, your spouse; maybe you’re in the car together, on your way to the home improvement store to pick up supplies: paper towels, glass cleaner, lightbulbs, dusting rags, a plunger. You’re waiting at a traffic light together. Your person is talking to you, saying something about a musician they like, or a commercial they saw, and you’re listening to them, watching them talk, and all of a sudden the strangest sensation comes over you. This feeling of total disorientation, almost like you’re seeing your life through a new set of eyes, like you’re watching yourself from afar. And what you see is so unfamiliar to you, so wrong. This is you? This is your car? These are your hands on the wheel?
And who the fuck is this person sitting next to you, talking to you? Who are they? Of course you know they’re the person you love—
you know that
—but right now, at this moment, they’re unrecognizable, a total stranger. Some kind of mistake has been made; you shouldn’t be here with them. But they’re keeping you here, keeping you from your real life, which is happening somewhere else, with someone more attractive, someone wilder; not in this car, not here, in this line of people waiting for a traffic light, listening to the tick, tick, tick of your own turning signal. And so you hate this person all of a sudden. You want to smash them. Because their face is a trap. Their face is a cage.
But then someone behind you hits their horn and breaks the spell.
“It’s green,” says your person, who’s beautiful to you now. Just as they were seconds before.
“Hey,” they say. “You can go.”
I understand that moments like this are common enough; that they happen to most people at one time or another. But what if the moment didn’t end for you? What if you couldn’t find your way out?