The Big Bang (14 page)

Ahead, there was a guard on the stairwell over the corridor. It may have been the night lighting, but the guard's face looking down at them was strange: all planes and lines, black shadows and dead white. It might've been a charcoal drawing. Of the many scary things she'd seen since coming to prison, that guard's still face and his silence as they passed might have been the most frightening.

Four years earlier, prison became very real to Taneisha when the large blond guard told her to “Bend over, spread 'em, and cough.” Since she was naked in a cell with this armed woman who looked as heartless as a stone, Taneisha did as she was told, her face hot with shame. The blond woman held a plastic bottle.

“Hold out your hand,” she said, bored. Taneisha extended her hand, which the guard promptly filled with cool gooey gel from the plastic bottle.

“Rub it in your hair and then your pubes,” she was ordered. Even as scared as she was, Taneisha noticed the arrangement of the order. Head first, then her pubic area. If she'd come in drunk or high, had fouled herself, and the order had been reversed, she would have taken part in a further humiliation. “It's delousing gel,” the guard offered, watching her.

“Cooties?” Taneisha asked, that term from her childhood springing to her lips as she massaged the gel into her scalp.

The guard nodded. “Those little beggars would spread through the whole prison. Everybody would be scratching.”

Taneisha turned her head away from the guard and quickly scrubbed the gel through her pubic area. When she was finished, the guard held out a paper towel. “Wipe it away from around your eyes.”

After wiping the suds from where the gel had trickled down her forehead and over her cheekbones, Taneisha stood quietly, waiting for the next order. A few minutes passed. The guard checked her watch, then motioned to the open shower stall in the back of the room. “You've got five minutes to shower.”

The prisoner stepped out of the shower in two minutes, looking for a towel. The guard grunted. “You might want to take those extra three minutes. Rinse your hair real good, otherwise that cootie-goo will really make you itch.” For a moment, a little demon of defiance climbed up into her brain, the same imp that had risen in her ever since the first time her father had taken a bicycle inner tube to her. He'd beaten her until his arm was tired, and he asked, “You had enough, smart girl?” Welts rising like mole tunnels on her back and legs, the ten-year-old girl looked up at him, and that defiant demon had lifted himself into her mouth and said, “No.”

Now the imp was whispering,
She ain't the boss of you. You get out of that shower right now
. So, Taneisha stepped forward, leaving the shower behind.

The guard shrugged, handed her a pile of folded clothes. A towel that was so threadbare it was almost transparent was on the top of the pile. After toweling herself off, Taneisha dressed in the issue undergarments and prison blues. Neither the prison top nor the pants fit. The last year or so of her “lifestyle” had run her thin as a rail.

The guard led her to another room, an office. In comparison to the previously dim and slightly damp exam room, this one was bright and dry. A woman sat behind the desk in a nurse's uniform. The guard told Taneisha to sit down in the chair in front of the desk.

The nurse held a clipboard. She read off questions in a flat voice. “Are you depressed?”

Depressed? “No.” Angry, sure.

“Are you hearing voices?”

“No.”

The questions went on. Her last period, how regular she was, bowel movements, followed by the same question about regularity, family medical history, and on and on.

Her breathing came shallowly and with surprise. Taneisha realized she was afraid. It was the boredom in the nurse's voice that scared her. The nurse could have been counting cans of peas, instead of doing a psychiatric intake evaluation of a new inmate.
She don't give much of a damn one way or the other
, Taneisha told herself.

When the interview was over, the blond guard said, “Stand up and face the wall, put your hands flat on the wall.”

“What for?”

“You'll go to Seg—Segregation for three days while we get you processed. Warden holds orientation first thing tomorrow.”

Taneisha sat where she was. “Why do I have to face the wall?”

Another guard appeared at the door. The blond spoke patiently. “We have to put shackles on you going back and forth to Seg. It's for everyone's protection.”

The other guard was glaring at Taneisha. The first guard was a big Bohunk gal. Probably carried cows around for exercise at home. Taneisha could've run her into the dirt, but in this office, there was nowhere to run.

She stood slowly, reminding herself that these people hadn't done anything to hurt her yet. They were just doing a job and they didn't want any grief about it. As she felt the shackles snap around her ankles again, she had to bite her lip to keep from weeping. She would not cry in front of these crackers, she swore. Instead, she bit down on the inside of her cheek and walked quietly behind the Bohunk guard, across the commons area and into Segregation.

It was a squat building, set off from the rest of the place by its single-story construction. The walls were painted the color of fresh-baked bread crust. The guard halted outside another locked door—perhaps in a prison there were no other kind. Moving from Admissions to Segregation, she quickly began to pick up one of the givens of prison life: walk, wait in line or behind a line, paperwork, shuffle forward on command, and wait some more, before the walking started over.

She waited while the door was unlocked and both she and the guard were scrutinized. She walked forward. She waited while the door was locked behind her. She walked to another set of bars. She waited while paperwork was exchanged, reviewed. Finally, a barred door slid aside, and she was officially in Seg.

A short but thick-set black guard with frown lines around her mouth took responsibility for Taneisha in Seg. She read over the paperwork and nodded at the Bohunk. “I've got her.”

The Bohunk tipped her head at Taneisha. “I'll be seeing you, Porter,” she said, using Taneisha's hated family name. “You didn't give me any static. Let's keep it that way, and you can do good time here.”

Taneisha wasn't sure how to react. Was she supposed to do some kind of house-negro routine, say, “Yes, boss?” like she'd seen in those old movies? She kept her head down, and muttered, “Sure.”

The Frowning Guard didn't reply, just watched the Bohunk step clear of the door, and called out, “Closing!” There must have been another guard nearby, because the barred door clattered in a track and closed with a dull bang.

The Frowning Guard took Taneisha's file and slid it into a slot in the wall. “I'm Ms. Darcy,” she said firmly. “You're going to be in cell fourteen.”

Taneisha kept her head down. Somehow, it seemed too bright in here. Too real. She didn't want to look at it, the hallway that was painted some kind of green, or the patched dents in the wall. The smell was hard, too. Real strong disinfectant, and under that, the odors of human sweat and waste.

Ms. Darcy took up a position to Taneisha's right and about half a step behind. Ms. Darcy always oriented herself to new prisoners this way, Taneisha later learned, because most people are right-handed. If somebody got ambitious and began to get rowdy, the position wouldn't allow them to generate a lot of force with manacled arms. More than one of those dents in the hall that Taneisha didn't want to look at had been engineered by Ms. Darcy by grabbing the arm of a suddenly combative prisoner and pivoting, adding her own very dense bulk to their momentum and slamming the felon face-first into the wall. Prisoners tended to be more surprised than hurt by the experience and it usually kept them quiet enough to make it to their Seg cell without recourse to more unpleasant means of persuasion.

There were doors in the hall. Solid doors, with horizontal slots and heavily re-enforced windows at shoulder height. Segregation was used for two things: in-processing of new inmates and medical isolation of depressed prisoners. In other words, suicide watch rooms. Doors made of bars offered too many options for self-injury.

The guard was talking as they walked, more like a firm teacher than a jailor. “Good time is fast time,” she said as Taneisha plodded along, shackles clinking. “You want to get out of the system as fast as possible.”

“How do I do that?” Taneisha asked. The words leapt out of her throat in a kind of spasm.

“You follow the rules. You keep away from men and you keep away from the girls.” Taneisha almost snorted. She'd heard there was a men's prison on the grounds. “I don't want anything to do with men,” she said firmly. “And I don't like girls.”

“Keep walking,” Ms. Darcy told her. “You remember what I said. Don't get involved in the games or the scams. Don't be anybody's trick.”

“What's a trick?” In spite of herself, Taneisha was interested. This was going to be her life, for a while at least. And that perverse mouthy imp inside her was nowhere to be felt, at least for now. Maybe it was because Ms. Darcy was also black. She seemed less like a representative of a mysterious Caucasian force, the way the Bohunk felt, and more like a stern teacher…one of those who had real love under their rhino-armored hides.

They stopped beside an empty cell. “Face the wall,” Ms. Darcy said flatly. This time, not even a thought of backtalk from Taneisha. “A trick is somebody who lets herself get conned by the scammers inside.” Ms. Darcy unlocked the shackles and stepped back. The cell door opened. “Go inside.”

Taneisha stepped into the dim room. Ms. Darcy looked her over. “Lights on at 5 am. First count at 6 in the morning. Your orientation is at 8.”

Taneisha nodded without replying. “Please look at me,” Ms. Darcy said. “I want to be sure you hear what I'm saying.”

She lifted her head, looked the older woman full in the eyes. “Maybe you made a mistake,” Ms. Darcy said. “Maybe you made a lot of mistakes and they got you here. Your life isn't over, girl. You don't have to make your whole life a mistake. Maybe God put you here to keep you alive.”

Surprise spread across the young woman's face like ink dropping into water. “I've got five years in here. What kind of life is that?”

Ms. Darcy reached out and took Taneisha by the wrist, as gently as if she were lifting a butterfly. Her thumb and forefinger encircled the girl's skinny wrist with a lot of daylight to spare. “What you were doing was killing you.” She let the girl's arm drop, and stepped back into the middle of corridor. “I'll see you tomorrow night.” She spoke into a small walkie-talkie. “Closing fourteen.”

Taneisha stood there as the door closed. She listened to the quiet squeak of Ms. Darcy's shoes as the guard slowly walked back to her post. When she could no longer hear the woman's shoes, the girl turned her face to the wall and wept. She was just twenty years old.

Taneisha first met Warden Gutierrez when she was in the Hole. “Protective Segregation” was the official term for the small, soundproofed rooms, but they were universally known as the Hole.

She was officially in for contraband. A search of her cell had turned up makeup, including a tube of eyeliner. Forbidden. The brush could be a weapon. Taneisha couldn't argue that, she'd almost poked her own eyes out when she was a girl learning to make herself up. But once you were in prison, you had so little…little things took on a magnified importance. Clothes. Food. Makeup.

That bit of psychological reality didn't make a difference. The guards had shackled her in chains for the infraction and dragged her down here.

It wasn't really the makeup that put her in the Hole. One of the guards, Owens, had become interested in her. He'd started to find reasons to stop by her cell, to talk to her in the tiny library where she worked, making $5.45 a month. After two years in prison, she'd gotten her health back, and now she looked like the healthy young woman she had been. Some part of her was flattered by the attention; it was nice to remember she had her charms and that she wasn't simply another drab in prison garb. Owens, who was a tall, good-looking athletic white guy of about thirty, slowly began to slip innuendo into his talk with her, finally moving from suggestion to blunt proposition. When she realized what she was hearing, sweat prickled between her shoulder blades, and she hurriedly excused herself, saying she had to sort some recently donated books.

She avoided him after that, claiming work or illness or other duties. Anything to keep from being alone with him. One night, after lights out, he stood by her cell door as she lay in her bunk, barely breathing. He didn't say anything. She felt as if were a test of some kind, as if he were willing her to swing her feet over the side of her bunk and crawl over to him. She forced herself to be still, remembering what Ms. Darcy had said to her. “
Stay away from men
.”

And she had. She had followed the rules, or, most of them, anyway. Any opportunity to improve herself, she took. One prisoner, a former dancer, started an aerobics class, an hour a day in the afternoon. Taneisha went for the music, at first, but then this dancer, named Vivian (“the Vixen” was her professional name, she'd admitted), had also began offering informal seminars on how to eat healthy in spite of the poor, starch-heavy prison food. Taneisha found herself regularly doing aerobics, discovering long-forgotten muscles while recovering equally long-lost muscle tone. Soon thereafter, she was engaging in food barter…swapping prepackaged desserts (there was a brisk market in Twinkies) for vending machine tuna fish and wheat crackers.

Somehow, she managed to work her way into the library, a deeply coveted position. The librarian could move about the prison with a relative degree of freedom. For years entrepreneurs with guts and guile had used the library position to create mercantile empires, trading and transporting contraband as they trundled books from cell to cell. Taneisha suspected her dark fairy godmother, Ms. Darcy, had a hand in her unexpected elevation to the position, although the formidable guard had never made mention of it. The only thing she'd said, one late night escorting Taneisha back from the library, was, “Lot of college books in there. A smart girl might do a little reading.”