Bad Moon On The Rise (22 page)

“
Stop it.” He kicked me
under the table.

“
Ouch,” I complained.
“What did you do that for?”

“
You’re freaking me out,”
he said. “Stop with the tears. And if you’re like this next time I
come, I’m pulling the plug on this operation. You can’t see it, but
I sure as hell can. Whatever is happening to you in here, it’s not
good. I want the old Casey back.”

“
I’m fine,” I insisted,
wiping my eyes with the back of my hand as I stared at the
photographs. “Thank you for this.”

“
Don’t mention it,” he
said with a magnanimous wave of his hand, as if he always drove
hours each way to help out a friend.

I slipped the photographs inside my
shirt, where I could feel them against my heart. Two things hit me
as the female guard, Alldread, escorted me back to the dining hall.
One, I was a mess and could not take many more days inside. Two, I
might have been wrong when I insisted to Bobby that whatever was
going on, it had nothing to do with sex between the guards and the
inmates. I say this because, just as we rounded one of the corners
near the kitchen, a red-haired inmate hurried out of a bathroom,
her head down and face grim, followed closely by a red-faced guard
tucking his shirt into his pants. Very subtle, buddy. Twirling the
condom over your head like a lasso would have been less obvious.
Assuming he’d used one, of course. I took a closer look: he was as
meticulously clean and as relentlessly in shape as all of the other
guards I’d seen so far. Close-cropped hair, not an ounce of extra
fat—and something on his forearm I’d seen on a couple of other
guards. I stepped back against the wall to let another group of
inmates pass and was able to get a few feet closer to him. It was a
plain black tattoo, about two inches wide. I recognized the shape:
it was the silhouette of a ploughshare linked to a sword, both
depicted above an anvil. Weird. Or Biblical. Or
both.  

“
Keep moving,” the guard
escorting me hissed in my ear. She guided me around the male guard.
From the rigid set of her jaw, I guessed she’d seen the male guards
and inmates come tumbling out of the bathrooms before—and she did
not approve.

I knew better than to say anything. “I
know the way now,” I mumbled as we drew closer to the dining
room.

“
Rules,” she said.
“Sometimes we randomly escort prisoners. Helps us know what they’re
up to.”

“
What?” I asked, not
believing her. Then I shut the hell up. It wasn’t the rules, I
realized. The guard was helping me out, just in case Martha Ray,
a.k.a., Petunia, was lurking nearby, hoping to throw her weight and
bad mullet around a little bit more that day.

“
Thanks,” I mumbled as we
neared the kitchen door.

She shrugged and walked off without a
word. I was on my own again.

I kept my head down. I scrubbed and
fetched and kept my mouth shut while the dinner hour swirled about
me, the sound level as excruciating as ever. I was willing to bet
that a monkey house during a hurricane was quieter than that damn
dining room. The chattering was immense. It came in waves, pounding
against my head, which had started to throb. Everywhere I looked,
the dining room was crammed full of noisy or angry or shouting
women, hollering at friends three tables over, arguing with their
table mates, shrieking with laughter a little too loudly, betraying
their closeness to desperation. The noise seemed to build in a
crescendo, break and cascade into my brain, then begin to build
again. Every movement made in the dining hall emerged in
hyper-relief, as if I was moving in slow motion. If I hadn’t known
better, I’d swear I had been drugged. But I knew better: it wasn’t
drugs. It was me. No matter how hard I tried, deep inside, I was
starting to panic. I should never have tried this. I had been
behind bars long enough. It would only get worse. I needed to get
out of there fast.

I wasn’t the only one suffering from
the noise. I spotted my silent roommate, Risa Foster, as always
eating alone at the head of a table, ignoring the chattering women
sitting a few seats down on each side. I had no idea who she was,
really. We’d spent three nights together, locked in a cell, and
she’d never said so much as “boo!” to me. Which was just as well.
I’d have crapped my drawers if she had. Seven dead men and a lawn
full of rifles proved nothing if not that she was a woman of
action.

The other women at her table had grown
careless and were sitting much closer than usual. Worse, they were
taking turns screaming witless jokes in response to pointless
stories before collapsing in forced giggles that sounded like
nothing so much as witches being boiled in their own cauldron. I
saw Risa grow rigid, paralyzed by their shrill voices. They were
encroaching on the space she kept around her. Her hand inched
toward her fork.

I could foresee it all: Risa grabbing
the fork, Risa standing up abruptly and lunging forward, Risa
bringing the fork down at just the right angle to drive the plastic
tines right through a hand, puncturing the flesh and pinning the
hand right to the table top, the guards springing into action a
heartbeat too late, Risa being hauled off to solitary, her lonely
life made even lonelier.

I had to stop it. I rushed up the row
between the crowded tables, reaching my cellmate just as she lifted
the fork to strike. I pinned her hand to the table as I nearly
enfolded her in my body and hissed into her ear. “Don’t do it.
They’re not worth it. There’s a guard less than a foot behind
you.”

She froze, shocked that I had dared
touch her and even more shocked that I had dared to interfere. But
she did not move and after a moment of silence, I felt her fingers
release the fork she held.

“
Look, they’re leaving,” I
pointed out as the two women pushed back from the table, the metal
legs of their chairs scraping angrily against the floor. “Just take
a deep breath and wait it out. They’re not worth weeks in
solitary.”

Those stupid bitches took forever to
take their trays and get the hell away from what surely would have
been agony for at least one of them. I don’t think my cellmate so
much as breathed during that time.

“
Why did you try to do
that?” I asked. We were breathing in unison, as synchronized as
lovers curled up in a bed might be.

“
They made me mad,” she
said, but her posture softened.

When the women were out of stabbing
distance, I released her and walked away, knowing better than to
wait for any sort of thanks. I could only hope she didn’t bring the
fork to bed with her later. I had no desire to end up being a
surrogate shish-ka-bob.

“
What was that all about?”
Peppa asked me, having witnessed the odd interlude. There was
nothing Peppa did not see, I realized. Like the Great Oz, she knew
all and saw all.

“
You don’t want to know,”
I told her. And I meant it.

You’d think that would be enough
excitement for one night, but, having saved some worthless inmate
from a stabbing, a cynical Universe rewarded me poorly. It happened
right after dinner, when Peppa asked me to bring her a carton of
canned peaches from the storage room. She was whipping up some
peach cobbler, and if I played my cards right, I’d get to be the
taste tester.

It was the best news I’d had all day.
I hurried off to a concrete storage room filled with wire shelves
stacked high with cartons of industrial-sized canned fruits and
vegetables. The room was dark. When I finally found the light
switch, it only turned on one row of lights, creating a thinly-lit
strip of visibility that mostly made the shadows on either side
seem even more menacing. As I walked down the aisle, peering at
labels, I heard a scratching sound in the darkness on the other
side of the wire shelves. I stopped and held my breath. Nothing.
The room seemed eerily silent after all the noise of the dining
hall. I started down the row and I heard it again. A scraping of
feet across concrete. I stopped. The sound stopped. I waited,
breathing deeply, trying to get my panic under control. The air in
the room was stagnant, dry and hot, filled with dust and cardboard
particles that swirled in the florescent light. I felt it coming
on, a massive sneeze, the dust motes inching further and further up
my nose. I could not hold it in any longer and bent over, hands on
my knees, sneezing so hard it propelled me forward just as a stack
of cartons piled high on a shelf above me crashed down. They missed
my skull by inches, glancing off the back of my shoulders, sending
me flying to the ground as sixty pounds of metal cans and
sharp-edged cardboard boxes tumbled to the floor behind me, the
sound as loud as an explosion

Footsteps echoed down the aisle hidden
by the shelf in front of me. A door slammed as I lay in the
darkness, afraid to move, my fingers searching the concrete floor
for wet spots, my mind imagining my brains splashed across the
floor, a five-pound can of creamed corn embedded in my skull. I had
missed being flattened by inches and I’d have a hell of a bruise on
my shoulders as proof.

A door opened at the far end of my
aisle. Noise filled the room as people and voices grew closer.
Figures bent over me as fingers fluttered through my hair and then
gently ran over my face. “Talk to me, Little Debbie,” Peppa said
softly. “Tell me you are not lying there dead.”

“
I’m not lying there
dead,” I repeated obediently. “Though not for lack of someone
trying.”

I was lifted to my feet. Peppa used
her rag to dust me off and to probe for injuries. “What happened?”
she asked as the other women with her inched away. With me still
mobile, they smelled more trouble coming and they wanted no part of
it.

“
Someone tried to kill
me,” I whispered back. “That’s what happened. Probably Martha
Ray.”

“
Girl, you do work fast,”
Peppa admitted, shaking her head. “I was in here three months
before someone tried to kill me."

That night, the true darkness came. I
lay in bed, the ceiling hovering what seemed like inches above me,
and knew I had to get out the next day. I could hear my cellmate
breathing evenly beneath me. She had once again fallen asleep in
her lower bunk, the photo of her little girl in her hands, without
a word to me. Risa Foster had crawled into a place so far inside
her head that nothing could touch her, not the lack of freedom, not
the walls, not even another human being. I envied her the ability,
but I knew it came only because she had no hope and no expectation
of ever getting out.

Me? I had to get out now. I should
never have tried to go back inside.

I took out the Xeroxed photos of my
family Bobby had given me and tried to remember what it was like to
stand in the middle of a fifty-acre soybean field with nothing but
skies above and rows of green stretching over the horizon, a
verdant land so vast you could run for days and never hit
concrete.

But I couldn’t feel it. I could see
it. I could wish for it, but the way it had felt eluded
me.

Deep in the night, I gave up trying to
sleep and wandered over to the bars that separated my cell from the
block hall. I had noticed that night was the only time they
bothered to keep the doors locked, an attempt to keep the women
from finding private places for their private
encounters.

It was deeply quiet. I stood at the
bars of my window, drinking in the stillness. The air had shifted
almost imperceptibly inside the prison and I knew that outside its
stone walls, the temperature and barometer were falling. Snow, I
thought, smelling the bite of it on the air. The mountains could be
like that, I knew, one day bathed in sunshine, the next shrouded by
snow clouds.

I froze, unmoving, as the outline of a
guard unfolded from the shadows outside my cell. He looked like all
the others, although his hair was a little thinner than most. He
was lean and muscled, his face unreadable as he drew closer to the
bars of my cage and peered in at me. A familiar tattoo peeked out
from beneath one of his shirt cuffs: the tip of a ploughshare and
sword.

“
Can’t sleep?” he asked,
his voice a soft drawl.

“
No,” I said. “I
can’t.”

He stared at my blue shirt. “At least
you won’t be in here for long.”

“
I hope not.”

“
You’ve been in before?”
he asked. It was barely a question.

“
Once. A long time
ago.”

“
And you’re ready to get
out again?” he guessed. “I can see it in your eyes.”

“
It’s worse, having been
in before. I know what it’s going to feel like when the days start
to turn into weeks.”

He stared at me quietly, as if sizing
up the nature of my soul. He had odd eyes. Even in the murky
lighting of the night hallway, I could see that they were a light
greenish-gold, flecked with deeper spots of brown. They
disconcerted me, but I forced myself to stare back at him. I would
not be cowed.

“
You seem like a smart
woman,” he whispered.

That whisper scared me.

“
Not smart enough,” I
said. “I’m in here, aren’t I?”