Out of Orange (32 page)

I decided then to take advantage of my old boss’s short-handed situation to make my time at camp a little better. Mr. Wonka wasn’t really worried about not having tutors; they could be trained. There were a few women working in the lab already who had gotten to be pretty effective tutors in the Microsoft Office products and had done well with the Total Training CDs for Adobe products. What he didn’t have was someone he could trust and who had already been proven trustworthy to the warden to do the warden’s pet projects. The camp really didn’t have a computer lab to speak of. It had a small room no bigger than a walk-in closet with a few clunky old computers that barely functioned and a set of self-paced instruction books. I wasn’t sure exactly what was at stake with the project that he had wanted me to work on, which I could not work on, because I had been transferred to the camp where there were no computers or programs up to the task. But six months after my arrival at the camp, he had a whole lab built with sixteen new workstations and new software, there were new classes for the women, and I had a new work assignment. I was also able to complete the project I had had to abandon when transferred from the FCI to the camp.

Things were a little more laid back at the camp. Not all the guards were maniacs like Ms. Presley, we had no razor wire, and there were no murderers, assassins, or terrorists. Fights were more of a seasonal event than a daily occurrence, but they still happened, and over stupid things like what television shows to watch, petty theft, cigarettes, and cutting in line for the microwave, phones, or showers.

The camp was made up of mostly recovering drug addicts, women related to the drug world by marriage or blood, and participants, like myself, in drug trafficking. The rest were white-collar criminals—people who had fudged bank papers, evaded taxes, and committed crimes that required a degree. My bunkies were people like Carol, the ex-mayor of a prestigious town in Connecticut;
Lang, a diplomat from the U.S. embassy in South Korea; and Lisa, a deposed billionaire cosmetics queen. One of the tennis court royalty (a group of women who looked like they belonged in a country club and played tennis really well) from the FCI had been moved over to the camp too. The dark-haired goddess Elaine was at camp with me. Her claim to fame was that she was Heidi Fleiss’s ex-prison-lover. Elaine’s crime was drug related; she was a first-time drug offender who’d had the misfortune of being arrested at the height of the drug war hype. She was wrapping up a twenty-year sentence she had done more than sixteen years of. I had started to consider myself lucky for getting only ninety-four months. Drug sentences were so arbitrary. Some women got almost no time for doing much worse, others got more time for doing less. Elaine’s sentence made me feel very blessed.

Elaine and I spent a lot of time together, complaining about the decrepit state of our new home, searching for cigarettes to buy, and smoking them. Cigarettes were only forty dollars a pack in the camp; they were easier to get into the camp. Elaine was a hot shit with a brilliant, dry wit and was entertaining as hell. She had long brown hair and brown eyes, and she carried herself like she might really believe she was royalty. Being her friend was like a promotion to the clique of “cool” girls.

We tried to play tennis, and tried, and tried. The so-called tennis court fit the style and ambiance of the place perfectly. Instead of the well-lit, country club grade courts we had enjoyed inside the FCI, the camp called a crumpling bit of asphalt and a sagging net their tennis courts, more like the courts in public parks. Even in the rare event I could hit the balls to Elaine, as soon as they hit the ground, it was anyone’s guess where they would bounce. The rackets were questionably shaped, like they had been used as bats, and there was nothing but a sticky residue where the grips kept getting stolen. The balls looked as though a dog had donated them to Goodwill after they’d lost their chewiness. There was no fence around the court, so ball chasing took up most of our time. The ground sloped and the cracks made puckers in the smooth surface everywhere. Injury-
free face-planting was a necessary skill neither of us had acquired, so we gave up on tennis before it got ugly.

Time slowed to a crawl at the camp in spite of my new job. I spent most of my time working in the computer lab in C2 or in the law library writing; I decided it was high time I finished a novel I had started writing in the FCI. If I was not in either of these two places, I was sitting on the C4 porch with Patches. We had been inseparable ever since the day we’d met. I guess you could say Patches was my new girlfriend.

She followed me everywhere, just like a dog might. When I walked the track, she walked with me, round and round, looking up at me occasionally with a quizzical little expression that said,
What the hell are we doing?
When I worked out, she would sit on the bench and watch, looking at me like I was crazy. When I was finally moved from the C4 zoo into a room in C1, Patches followed me. She moved from the C4 porch to the backside of C1, sleeping directly under my window or on the fire-escape stairs.

I woke one night to find her in my bunk. It was a warm night and the fire-escape door had been propped open to let the breeze through the hallway. She had come up the back stairs, found my room, my bed, and gotten in. I was on the upper bunk, so that was an impressive route for a cat to navigate. Carol, the former mayor, started grooming Patches regularly and even going so far as to brush her teeth daily. Carol was typical of the white-collar campers. She had been convicted in a scam to convert apartments to condominiums using forged documents of some kind to expedite the process.

For an outdoor cat, Patches was becoming quite domesticated and spoiled. She was a smart little shit too. She knew she was not supposed to be inside the housing unit. When the guards came around to count us at night, she would either crawl under my blanket or jump down and hide behind the curtain in our window. This astounded me.

Patches had an old blue cat carrier she had apparently been delivered in nine years earlier, or so the myth went. We moved it over to
C1 when she decided she wanted to live in our building. Everyone who liked her regularly scouted for new bed linens to make her little mobile home comfy. Patches had fewer places for shelter behind and under C1 than she did back at C4, but she insisted on staying near me. When the weather got bad—cold or rainy—I felt awful, since I was the reason she had moved and didn’t have as many places to seek shelter. I got garbage bags and carefully wrapped her carrier, so that the rain and wind could not get in, but there was no danger of her suffocating.

I had acquired a treasure at one point, a pack of Camel Wides. My plan was to go see my counselor, Ms. Hosen; I had paperwork I had to fill out with her and didn’t want to walk into her office after smoking. I didn’t want to make myself a target for locker tossing, which is exactly what would happen if Ms. Hosen smelled cigarette smoke on me. Instead, I would go to smoke after that was done, and I hid my treasure in Patches’s blue carrier. I would find a better hiding place later, after I finished my visit to the counselor’s office.

As I sat, filling out the paperwork with Ms. Hosen, I saw the two other counselors walking behind the buildings. This probably meant surprise inspections were under way. When I heard women running down the halls to their rooms in C2, then the counselors yelling “Inspection!” my suspicions were confirmed.

Failing an inspection for being messy or possessing contraband like chicken wings could cost an inmate her room. She would get put back into the C4 zoo and once again be placed on the first-come, first-served list for a real room. They did these inspections once a week. My room was always spotless, and I didn’t have any worthwhile contraband, so I wasn’t worried about losing my bed and getting popped back into C4 to live. But when they came back out of C2 and headed to C1, they paused at Patches’s carrier and my heart stopped. I saw one counselor, the lady I didn’t like from the FCI, hold up a pack of Camels, and the guy she was with, the nice counselor, grabbed Patches’s home and carried it back toward where I was with my counselor, in C3.

I heard the counselor I disliked, Ms. Bright, hoot and holler, all
excited by her big bust. I could hear the noisy wooden stairs, hanging off the back of C3, creak and rumble as they made their way up to the second floor and in through the back door. Then the two counselors piled back into the office with Patches’s home and bedding still in their possession.

“Jesus, this cat’s got half of Laundry here.” Laundry Services is where we were issued our one sheet, one blanket, and one pillow slip allotment.

Mr. Dansler, the other counselor, looked over at me and blushed. He hadn’t realized that I was the inmate sitting in the office with Ms. Hosen. He and Ms. Bright knew Patches was my buddy.

“One of your friends just screwed your little cat, Wolters,” Ms. Bright commented, as though every woman in the camp was my friend. She took the pack of Camels and taped them to the air-conditioning unit behind her desk, but only after opening the pack’s lid up and pulling one cigarette slightly out of the pack. That way when she started her interrogations, which I figured she would be getting started with soon, whoever was seated where I was would be looking right at the delicious pack of cigarettes on display.

“You’re punishing Patches? I can tell you for certain she does not smoke! She doesn’t sell cigarettes either or she’d be as fat as her house. Christ! How much tuna that pack of cigarettes would buy.” I said this, not sure I understood how far Ms. Bright was willing to go with whatever she had up her evil sleeves, but I wanted to remind her that Patches was a cat being sheltered, not an inmate allegedly being punished. Since my arrival in Dublin, there had been rumors of the cats, all the cats, being removed from both facilities and put to sleep. It was a rumor perpetuated by a couple of officers who hated the cats. But I had a dear friend in San Francisco, Carol Mooreland, ready to come collect Patches if those rumors actually ever turned out to be true or if I thought another inmate posed a serious threat to her.

If Ms. Bright assumed that the cigarettes were mine, why not just come out and say it? If she didn’t think they were mine, were they seriously going to take away Patches’s shelter on a cold day when it
was about to rain? But threatening to torture my sweet little kitty in their power games was exactly what the counselors had proposed as the plan. I just needed to make sure they understood that—maybe if I made them say it out loud again, they would really hear what they were saying. If they didn’t think those were my cigarettes, what the hell did they think I could do.

“No! We are not punishing the cat.” She said this as though it was crazy to think she would do such a thing. “She’ll get her house back the instant the owner of these cigarettes mans up.” That was her favorite phrase. “Man up” is an odd phrase for a women’s camp, but I knew what she meant. Someone had to step up and confess to being the owner of the cigarettes before Patches would get her house back.

“Patches will go under the building to sleep. She will be fine.” Mr. Dansler slapped his bony knees and sat up. “Don’t worry about your cat.” They didn’t think the Camels were mine; what he’d said made no sense if they did. But that was worse—at least if they thought they were my cigarettes, this was all a ploy to get me to ’fess up.

“But you took her house?” I was responding to Ms. Bright’s claim they were not punishing my cat, not Mr. Dansler’s claim she would be fine. It was only sprinkling outside, but the sky was gray; sprinkles could change to a downpour in a heartbeat. Mr. Dansler shrugged his shoulders and Ms. Bright picked up the phone and dialed up the numbers that would put her on the intercom for the camp.

“Oh well!” Ms. Bright’s response to my observation was condescending, curt, and rude. I felt around in my pocket and my fingers touched the cigarette I had planned on taking over to C4 to smoke. She put the phone to her ear and practically yelled into it, as if she was talking to someone hard of hearing. She always did that and I knew that instead of being able to hear what she was saying in the camp, all anyone would hear was “Wah-wah-wah cat-wah wah-wah Camels wah, come see me,” broadcast intolerably loud, all over the camp.

“Give me that.” Mr. Dansler stood up, leaned across her desk, and
took the phone receiver from her, held his hand over the mouthpiece, and remarked, “Fifteen years and you still don’t know how to use this?” He’d said this as if he was joking, but of course, he and Ms. Hosen knew he was serious.

“Fuck you, Bob,” Ms. Bright snapped back at him and laughed. She was always so cheerful when she was being cruel or engaged in a hunt. I could totally see these guys out at night together, the three counselors. They probably drank like fish. A couple of them lived in the staff housing up the hill. The girls from landscaping always reported on interesting developments in the staff housing area, where they mowed and watered the lawns or raked leaves depending on the season.

Ms. Hosen put a paper in front of me to sign and we were done with what I had actually come there to do. I pulled my hand out of my pocket and left the office. Ms. Bright’s lovely crooning flooded the camp for another hour. I couldn’t now smoke the cigarette burning a hole in my pocket. Everyone would know I was the idiot who had cost Patches her home. Besides that, with Ms. Bright on her rampage, nobody would dare smoke in the C4 bathroom until she went home for the day. Instead, I searched for something to make into a temporary home for Patches, until I could figure out what to do. From outside, I heard everyone complaining about Ms. Bright’s intercom noise every time she repeated the unintelligible terms for giving the cat her house back.

Then someone inside C1, who apparently understood what she was saying, said they knew how to shut the counselor up. “I’m killing that fucking cat. Bright can have the fucking rodent’s house.” Then someone else laughed, arguing that Cleary would go batshit crazy.

I put the box down that I had found and picked Patches up, giving her a quick hug and kiss. “You stay away from these fuckers, Patchy-poo.” I walked back over to the counselors’ office, walked in, and sat down across from Ms. Bright. Ms. Hosen and Mr. Dansler looked at me like I had lost my mind. We didn’t just walk right into the counselors’ office and sit down. We were supposed to knock and wait in
the hallway until you were beckoned. I pointed at her trophy, the package of cigarettes taped to the air-conditioner. “They are mine.”