Flesh and Blood (16 page)

The judge, more as a personal favor to David Clyde Rish than anything else, had graciously granted me visitation privileges, though stressed how easily they could be revoked if I abused them in any way.

I waited, but she didn’t say anything.

“It’s so hard to see you this way,” I said.

I had failed. I had not solved the mystery. I had not saved the day. I had not been able to keep her out of this place.

She didn’t say anything, but continued to look in my general direction.

“Do you know who I am?” I asked.

“Do you?” she managed.

An involuntary burst of something resembling laughter shot out of my mouth.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t do more for you,” I said. “But I haven’t stopped trying. We’re going to try other legal measures and we’re trying to get you assigned to a different doctor.”

She slowly reached over and patted my hand with the tips of her small, cold fingers.

“Does that mean not to do anything?” I asked.

She didn’t respond.

“I’ve been trying to figure out what all this means,” I said.

I had had all the obvious thoughts—that the Second Coming, whatever it was, was a personal appearance of Christ to each of us at some point in our lives, maybe many. It was one of the first things she had said to me—“I come back all the time. In the sick, the hungry, the imprisoned.” Or maybe it was meant to remind us that the Christ nature, the potential to be our best selves, to be like him, like God, is in all of us, in all things. Maybe enlightenment or the Buddha nature or myriad other named and unnamed things in hundreds of traditions the world over were ways of expressing the same thing.

“But I can’t,” I added. “I can’t come up with anything that satisfies. I just don’t understand.”

Perhaps this was just one of those true mysteries of life, not a vague unknown, but a specific unknowable, insoluble, unsolvable. No amount of investigating or deducting could help. It was beyond the limits of logic, beyond reason, beyond my understanding.

We were silent a few moments, continuing to look at each other. Eventually, the black orderly in white appeared at the door to let me know it was the end of our time together.

I stood and hugged her.

“I’ll keep coming to see you as often as they’ll let me,” I whispered in her ear. “And it’s not because I’m expecting anything or wanting you to be anything. I just want to be with you.”

“When you’ve done it for the least of these … ,” she said, then trailed off.

I pulled back from her, searching her eyes for some of the earlier light and life, but it wasn’t there.

“What’d you say?”

She didn’t respond, and eventually I started walking across the room toward the waiting orderly.

“I said …”

I turned.

“… you’re not depressed anymore, are you?”

I smiled. “No, I’m not,” I said. “Confused, shaken, humbled, questioning my sanity, but not depressed.” “That’s something,” she said. “And sometimes, something is all there is.”

I nodded and continued walking.

When I reached the door, I turned again and waved.

She lifted her small hand, but didn’t really wave. “Keep your eyes open, John,” she said. “You’ll be seeing me again.”

“Something’s wrong with Keli,” I said.

“How can you tell?” Merrill asked. “She look just the same to me.”

He was right. It wasn’t obvious, but I could tell something was wrong from the moment I saw her across the large parking lot. There was nothing overt, but it was there. It was as if she were walking around with the knowledge that the red dot of a high-powered scope was on the back of her head.

“I’m observant,” I said.

We were in the staff parking lot of Potter Correctional Institution. Merrill had given me a ride to work this morning, when my truck wouldn’t start. It was early, the February air still damp, the ground still wet with dew.

“You something,” he said with a smile. “And it may even start with an O.”

“Optimistic?”

He laughed, his bright white teeth contrasting his dark skin. “Obsessive,” he said. “Try that on, see how it fit. How long it been since you had a puzzle to worry your mind with?”

I smiled. “A little while.”

“Aha,” he said, as if a detective hearing an important admission.

I laughed.

Situated on a cleared plot of nearly a hundred acres and surrounded on all sides by planted pine forests, PCI included a main unit, an annex, training facilities, an obstacle course, a firing range, a warehouse, gardens, and an on-site staff housing trailer park—nearly all of which were visible from where we stood.

Merrill wasn’t the only one who didn’t seem to notice Keli’s odd behavior, but in addition to being an amateur noticer, I knew Keli well enough to know when something was wrong.

Keli Linton and I had gone to high school together. A kind, quiet girl with the insecurities that come with having an abusive alcoholic father, a larger than culturally-approved body, and the embarrassment of living in poverty. We had been friends. Many mornings in the school cafeteria, at a table that smelled of a dirty dish rag, I copied her homework while she told me the details of her life.

After graduation, we lost touch. She went into the military, got married, had a baby girl, got divorced, got out of the military, and eventually moved back to Pottersville.

In a small panhandle town like Pottersville, there’s not a lot of jobs that enable a single mom who doesn’t receive regular child support to provide for her family—especially if she only has a high school diploma. The obvious choice, particularly for a woman who’s done time in the armed forces, is the growing field of corrections.

When Keli became a correctional officer at PCI, where I served as chaplain, she came into my life again. Working days put her at the prison during the administrative shift when I was there, which meant we saw a good bit of each other.

Getting out of her car, Anna joined us as we all headed in the general direction of the front gate.

“What ‘O’ word he remind you of?” Merrill asked her.

Anna looked at me, her brilliant brown eyes big and playful. “Orgasmic?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I’m an orgasmic optimist.”

“I’ve got to hear the part of this conversation that took place before I walked up,” she said.

Merrill told her. As he talked, she looked across the parking lot at Keli.

I followed her gaze.

Keli’s posture and movements were that of another person. It was as if she were wearing clothes that were too small, so stilted and strained were her movements.

She had parked on the far side of the lot, in the front row of the section reserved for employees who were having their cars washed. There wasn’t anything very odd in that (though I had never seen her get her old banged up Honda washed before), except that she parked in the very last space on the end, passing several open spaces and nearly guaranteeing hers would be the last car washed.

“I’m with Merrill,” she said. “I don’t see it.”

“He obsessing ’cause he ain’t had a case lately,” Merrill said.

“Obsessing’s better than a seventh percent solution,” she said.

I smiled.

“I thought it was a fifth of something that was eighty proof,” Merrill said with a smile.

I laughed. “Too true, that,” I said.

We reached the front gate and the security check that awaited us in the visiting park of the security building at the same time Keli did. Instead of speaking in her normal, friendly, loud, try-a-littletoo-hard voice, she didn’t speak, and when
I
spoke, her reply was the barely audible grunt of a distracted person.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

She gave me a quick nod. “I’m fine.”

“Told you,” Merrill whispered to Anna.

Keli had said it in such a way as to discourage further discussion, but I didn’t let that stop me.

“You sure?” I asked. “You seem—”

“I’m fine.”

“How about Kayla?”

Kayla was the thirteen-year-old daughter she was raising by herself.

“She’s fine,” she said. “Everything’s fine.”

Because of the steady flow of contraband into the institution, we started each workday with a pat-down. Herded like cattle into the sally port, through the security building, and into the visiting park, we placed our belongings on long folding tables, behind which were correctional officers who went through them. We were then taken into the restrooms—the men into theirs, where male officers waited, the women into theirs, where female officers waited— took off our shoes, our bodies then traced with a metal detector wand and an officer’s hands.

You’d think all of this would prevent contraband from being introduced into the prison, but it didn’t even slow it down. Part of the problem was how inconsistently and casually the searches were performed. Three shifts a day entered and exited the institution. These types of security measures would only work if applied to every shift, every day. They weren’t, and most volunteers and contractors were never searched. The other problematic part of the equation was that the searches were performed by friends and coworkers, who already felt awkward and ambivalent about what they were doing.

After being searched, Keli hurried out of the visiting park without speaking to everyone she passed as she normally did.

Adjusting his uniform, Merrill walked up beside me. “No better way to start the day than gettin’ felt up by a cracker ass redneck motherfucker,” he said.

In another moment, Anna rejoined us and we began walking down the compound.

“How is she?” Anna asked.

“Fine,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”

“Told you,” Merrill said.

“Something’s wrong,” I said. “How about you two help me keep an eye on her?”

“Sho,” Merrill said. “Gots nothin’ else to do ’round here, boss.”

“If we do, won’t we be enabling your obsession?” Anna asked.

“Look at it as keeping me from drinking,” I said.

My morning went as it usually did, filled mostly with the crisis counseling of inmates, their families via phone, and a few staff members. I had even managed a little time to reflect on what Merrill and Anna had said about me obsessing, because I was bored. I knew there was truth in what they said, but I also knew that awareness and observation, being mindful and meditative, were the keys to enlightenment— in life as well as detection. And since I didn’t want to obsess about obsessing, I didn’t do it for long.

I had wanted to check on Keli, but it was nearly time for lunch and I had yet to have the opportunity.

As the last of the inmates were leaving the chapel to return to the compound for count, followed by chow, the phone on my desk rang. I picked it up.

“Good morning, Chaplain Jordan,” I said.

“What’re you doing for lunch?” Anna asked.

“I’m open to suggestions,” I said.

She laughed again. “How’s Rudy’s sound?”

“Not very good, but about our only option,” I said.

“Oh, I asked around a little about Keli,” she said.

“And?”

“Girl’s just as much a saint here as everywhere else,” she said. “Patient with the inmates, even kind.”

“I knew that.”

“Until today.”

“Told you.”

“So she’s having a bad day,” she said. “She’s probably on her period.”

“I realize I’m a guy,” I said, “but—”

“And a celibate,” she added.

“Not by choice,” I said, “and it’s a temporary condition.”

“Okay, okay,” she said. “Do you remember what you were saying or is your sexual frustration finally getting the best of you?”

“I know enough to know that she probably has a period about every twenty-eight days—and probably has since she was fourteen. Why is it just now turning her into Mrs. Hyde?”

“You know, if you put as much obsessive energy into dealing with your forced celibacy as you do little things like this, you might actually be able to renounce this vow you say you haven’t taken.”

“Is that what you really want?”

“Like I was saying, something is obviously very wrong with Keli, and you need to spend every waking moment trying to figure out what it is. How can I help?”

“Where is she posted right now?” I asked.

“She’s over outside grounds,” she said.

“Thanks.”

“So how about lunch?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll see if Keli can join us.”