Bad Moon On The Rise (19 page)

“
Debbie Little?” My
neighbor thought that was funny. As her laughter brought more
catcalls our way, she settled down into a simmering giggle. “Like
the Little Debbie snack cakes? Get it? I like the banana roll-ups
myself.”

“
That’s funny,” I
muttered. “I figured you for an oatmeal pie kind of
girl.”

“
How could someone do that
to their own kid?” she asked. “Giving you a name like
that?”

“
My father had a sense of
humor,” I said, needing the contact.

“
I killed mine,” Peppa
announced abruptly.

Talk about your conservation stoppers.
I wasn’t sure what to say, so I kept quiet. It didn’t stop
Peppa.

“
I’m not the only one on
this row who killed their father,” she said. “There’s three of us.
And six others who killed their husbands. Plus a few who jumped the
gun and took care of their boyfriends. I’m sensing a trend, aren’t
you?”

Okay, I admit it. This time I laughed.
And this time no one told us to shut up. The block got very quiet
as women up and down the row stopped whatever they were doing to
listen in.

“
What are you in for?”
Peppa asked, inevitably.

“
I don’t want to talk
about it,” I said. I don’t know why, but I didn’t want to lie
anymore that day, not to these women shut away from everything
behind bars. I’d lied about my name, that was enough for
now.

“
Fair enough.” Her voice
dropped. “I didn’t get a good look at you. Sure you don’t want to
stand a little closer so I can take a better look?”

“
I don’t think so,” I
answered as cheerfully as I could.

“
Oh, come on. There’s not
a lot to do around here,” Peppa complained.

“
I’m going to spend my
time reading books and improving my mind,” I said solemnly. Oops,
there was that mouth the female guard named Alldread had warned me
about: my own. And she was right. It got me into
trouble.

“
Yo,” a voice shouted from
across the row. “Shut the fuck up, college girl. No one cares what
you’re going to do.”

“
You don’t have to be in
college to read books,” I pointed out. “Just ask Dr. Seuss. Or
better yet, answer me this: Would you, could you in a cell? Would
you, could you down in hell?” I couldn’t help it. This place was
already chipping away at my sense of self and I had to get some
back quick.

Peppa’s hand was waving wildly in a
sort of “no, no, no” universal gesture, but it was too late. My
mouth had gotten me into trouble in record time.

“
What did you say to me?”
the belligerent voice challenged from the shadows. “Shut your hole
or I’ll do it for you.”

I was going to say something else
witty, but Peppa was in danger of busting her wrist trying to
signal me to be quiet, so I mumbled “What’s with her?” to Peppa
instead.

“
Girl’s got permanent
PMS,” Peppa told me. “Got processed in two years ago for shooting a
cop and she’s been in a bad mood ever since.”

“
Who is she?” I
whispered.

“
Doesn’t matter,” Peppa
said in a burst of wisdom. “We call her Martha Ray on account of
she has got one damn big mouth.”

“
People in here know who
Martha Rae is?” I asked.

“
What you talking about?”
Peppa asked. “A Martha Ray is just someone with too big of a mouth
for her own good.”

Fine. So I was a little rusty with my
prison lingo. I’d steer clear of anyone nicknamed for a semi-famous
name from here on out, just in case.

“
Who are these people?” I
asked, suddenly curious as to who my block mates might be. Shep had
arranged for me to be housed in the general population and I
wondered how hardcore they might be. “Have I heard of any of them?”
I couldn’t believe I was asking this, but apparently not even
incarceration can quench the thirst for celebrity
brownnosing.

“
Turn to the right,” Peppa
instructed. “Now look down. Do you know who you’re looking
at?”

“
I’m not looking at
anyone. I’m staring at my feet and wishing I had some toenail
polish.”

“
I meant your roommate.
She’s famous.”

I stared at the woman curled up in the
bottom bunk. She looked like she was trying to melt away from the
world. I was dubious.

Peppa felt it. “Seriously,” she
explained. “That’s Risa Foster.”

“
No shit.” The words
escaped before I could stop them.

“
Yup,” Peppa confirmed.
“It’s her. They moved her up from Raleigh on account of all the bad
ass lifers kept challenging her so they could grab a headline and
she’s not the type to fight back.”

Not the type to fight back? That
sounded a little off to me. Risa Foster was one of North Carolina’s
most notorious murderers, male and female alike. Five years ago,
she’d taken a shotgun, packed a knapsack with plenty of extra
rounds and systematically killed every male in her family, seven of
them in all, ranging in age from eighty-four down to twenty-two.
She drove to four different houses and discharged her shotgun a
total of fifteen different times to get the job done, her old man
apparently calling for bonus rounds while her younger brother had
his crotch blown off after he was dead. When she was done, she laid
the shotguns out across the lawn of the last house, pulled up a
lawn chair, sat down and waited for the cops to come and haul her
away.

She never said a word about why she
did it. And neither did any of the other women in her family, up to
and including her grandmother all the way down to Risa’s
three-year-old daughter, who was often photographed in the weeks
that followed staring at her mother with a solemn look, thumb
tucked firmly in her mouth. Risa Foster remained as silent as the
other females in her family, and now she was paying the price—she’d
opted out of a jury trial and the judge who heard her case sent her
away for over nine hundred years, with no chance of parole. That
she was not on death row was a testament to the fact that the judge
had been a woman, and to whatever that judge had heard in a
closed-door session the final day of the trial. It was this
never-released secret testimony that had caused her to opt out of a
lethal injection for Risa Foster.

I sat, staring at my roommate’s
immobile back, her body as still as in death, and I wondered which
punishment would have been kinder.

“
I think she’s asleep,” I
said to Peppa. “I’m going to take a nap myself so as not to disturb
her.”

“
She’s not asleep,” Peppa
said. “She just never talks.”

I’d give her some peace and quiet
anyway. I climbed up to the top bunk and stared at a ceiling the
color of washed out celery. I wondered what the hell I had gotten
myself into.

So far as I could tell, and it was a
long, long night with little sleep, my roommate only moved once
during those lonely hours. She got up deep in the night and took
down a photograph that was pinned to the wall and got back in bed
with it. I didn’t dare look, but I was pretty sure she was curled
up in the shadows of her lower bunk, staring at it through the
night.

Me? I had nothing to stare at but the
ceiling and nothing to contemplate but my own sorry fate. And the
more I stared at the ceiling above me, the closer it seemed to
inch, like one of those scary torture rooms in the horror movies of
my childhood, ingeniously-designed chambers where the walls and
ceiling would slowly close in on a person until they were crushed
to death.

That’s where I was for many long
hours, trapped in a death chamber, my chest growing heavier and
heavier with the irrational fear I’d somehow forget how to breathe,
an obsessive terror exceeded only by the thought that my cellmate
might rise up in the night and kill me, having stayed silent out of
rage, not grief. That’s the trouble with quiet people. You never
know what the hell they are thinking—and that worried
me.

Thus I alternated between
claustrophobia and mortal fear my first night back in prison, at
least until I discovered the one thing that could take my mind off
my predicament: sex.

Yes, the irony of it was not lost on
me. Here I was, locked in a building with almost four hundred other
women, unable to touch a man, not even with the ability to get up
and see one, thinking of nothing but Shep’s lean body in the
firelight and the way his shoulders had looked when he brought me a
glass of water early, early in the morning, the light of the sky
barely visible above the strip of horizon outside his window, or
the length of his fingers wrapped around my hand and the feel of
his mouth against mine. Like some pornographic movie, our hours
together played over and over in my mind, the only memory I had
with the power to take me away from the grim reality of my present
state. I could smell him, almost feel his skin, hear his voice,
imagine his warmth. And as I relived our time together, I realized
how much I would have to hold onto that memory in order to survive.
I slowed down then, going over every move we made again and again,
trying to recall our night through the haze of shared whisky and
pure mindless joy, equipping myself for the long nights
ahead.

I didn’t think even that would be
enough—and it scared me.

I should have been exhausted when the
lights finally came on with a cruel wash of institutional glare
early in the morning. But I wasn’t. I felt strong again with the
daylight. I had officially survived one night. I could do this, I
told myself. I had Shep in my head and the memory of his hands on
my body. And I only needed to get through a few more
days.

I rose at once, washing my face and
brushing my teeth hurriedly in my tiny sink, determined to stay out
of my cellmate’s way. She did not move a muscle, not even when a
guard came to get me, telling me I had a choice: I could clean
tables in the kitchen, and wash dishes later, or I could work in
the laundry scrubbing other people’s underwear.

I chose the kitchen, where the stains
would be more recognizable. As the guard—another tall man in
outstanding physical condition with a military-style haircut—walked
me over to the kitchen area, I tried to sneak a peek at Peppa, my
unseen neighbor of the night before. Her cell was already
empty.

In fact, many of the cells were empty,
the doors unlocked and left open. There was a fair amount of
freedom on this wing, I realized, as I noticed prisoners making
their way to and from their jobs, occasionally smiling at each
other and, just as often, bristling and stopping to block someone
else’s path until a guard intervened and moved people along. For a
woman’s prison, there was a lot of testosterone floating
around.

Not all the women had the freedom to
walk the compound unescorted. Some had their hands chained, a few
even their feet, and stepped glumly between guards as they headed
toward the dining room. I took one look at their faces, where
hatred for the world was etched as permanently as if in granite,
and decided I didn’t want to know why they were chained.

It took ten minutes for the guard to
walk me to the kitchen area. It was a good opportunity for me to
get the lay of the land. The prison was busy with activity despite
the earliness of the morning and I immediately noticed a difference
in the way the guards treated some of the women. It didn’t seem to
be based on looks at all—which made me doubt the sex-for-favors
theory—but some other factor I couldn’t pinpoint. I watched more
closely until I thought I had it: the prisoners in for short
stretches were receiving better treatment.

Reaching the kitchen just before the
breakfast rush confirmed my theory. I was introduced to a large
black woman whose face was so flat she looked like she’d been hit
with a frying pan, which was not outside the realm of possibility,
I suppose. Her name was Pam and the kitchen was her castle. I
wasn’t even Cinderella. She ordered me to wipe down the tables
before the crowd arrived. They didn’t need wiping down, she was
just showing me who was boss, but I grabbed a rag and went to work.
It gave me a chance to watch the way the guards handled the traffic
right outside the dining room doors, waving some women away without
letting them go inside, while beckoning others to grab a tray and
go on in.

There was a method to their madness. I
was sure of it. The lifers were treated indifferently, almost as if
they were invisible. And it was not hard to spot them. Not only did
they wear the forest green shirts of lifers – versus blue shirts
for those with hope – their whole demeanor seemed different. They
had settled in and given up the charade of caring about the outside
world. They seemed almost content, ambling along, stepping against
the wall when told, letting others pass. There was a stillness
about them, as if they welcomed knowing this confined world was all
they would ever know again. The other prisoners, the short-termers,
were less settled. They jostled and daydreamed and gossiped and
postured and joked. But, most of all, they feared. You could smell
it on them: Please get me through this, God, and I’ll never do
anything to land me in here again. Just get me through this
first.

These were the women who received
special attention from the guards. It took me about twenty minutes
to be absolutely sure about it. And I saw it then only because I
was looking for it. The guards would cock a head, or extend a
baton, or stop another prisoner from walking up in order to move a
short-termer ahead instead. It was all done very subtly, without
fanfare, but done nonetheless, inevitably sending a short-termer to
the front of the breakfast line before the coffee was
gone.