It couldn’t have been the next day. You don’t just show up at White Pine Penitentiary. The Pine, you learn to call it. You don’t just show up there. You have to be on a list. There are rules.
So one day not long after Tess made her dramatic entrance, not stage right, not stage left, but there as the curtain opened, as the lights came up on a short-haired girl riding the hood of a Toyota truck, we went to see my mother.
Offstage, the wind whipped at the ocean and the waves crashed. Concussive sounds in the night. Unlit cigarette between her fingers.
Not too long after that we find this young woman in black combat boots, scuffed and unlaced. Torn jeans over long johns, waffled, color of cream, old-fashioned, five bucks at Army Navy. Tight Fruit of the Loom wifebeater. White, new, the term hers, not mine. And don’t argue. She’ll roll her eyes.
“Fuck those women,” she’ll say. Or did once. “Feminists in language only. I’m a fucking feminist.” She laughs. “See? No bra.”
Over which a wool shirt. The Pendleton classic. Red and black checked. Insulated. Satin lining. And the watch cap. Let’s say black today. Sometimes navy. Sometimes white. This is the uniform now. A little tougher than in Cannon Beach. But it’s not that tough. If you’re following the chronology, keeping an eye on the years, you’ll know she’s in style. All of us dressing like half-assed lumberjacks back then.
God, do I see her. Unbuttoning the Pendleton, her nipples through the thin white fabric. Doc Martens on the dash the day we started out. The two of us driving up away from the beach, turning onto the ridge road. To our left, to the west, the town of White Pine, and the ocean. To our right, the prison of White Pine, and the vast valley and all its farmland beyond. Tess has turned to me and is beginning to speak. She’s raised her hand to the back of my neck and is running her fingers through my hair.
“How is it, Joe? Is it better?”
I’m watching the valley, waiting for that moment when the road breaks slightly to the east and the spaceship comes into view.
“Is what better?” I ask not knowing what she means this time. Not pretending. Not delaying.
“The bird,” she says.
“Ah,” I say.
“Is it?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Why?”
“Because it’s the beginning. Because it doesn’t come in the beginning. It only comes in the middle. And now you’re here and no way it would dare now.”
“If only,” she says. “But those are lies.”
“I’m glad you’re here,” I say, which is evidence of just how defunct language is.
She stops moving her fingers and instead cups the back of my head with a new firmness.
“What do you mean it’s the beginning? What do you mean it only comes in the middle?”
“There,” I say. “There.” I point down into the valley. The prison slides out below us as if set in a slowly opening drawer.
I pull the truck off the road. It’s about the same place where I stopped with my father. About the same place he comes to look over her as she sleeps. Or whatever she does in her eternally illuminated cell.
We have brought her earplugs. Balls of wax in a plastic box.
Tess will give them to her. Her first offering.
Tess doesn’t run into the onion field to vomit. We lean against the grille.
“She’s in there,” I say, pointing for no reason.
“I hate it.”
I nod.
“We should help her escape,” she says.
I wrap my arm around her shoulder. We wait a while before climbing back into the truck and slipping into the valley, to the prison parking lot. The doors closing and our four feet moving across the asphalt.
Those two in love. Joey March young and afraid. His blood full of adrenaline. His heart full of dread. And Tess? What was her heart full of? Love? Perhaps. Fear? Maybe. But above all, fire and rage. No question about that. She is half a step ahead pulling Joey March’s wrist slightly on the offbeat.
They are walking in the sunlight across the shining wet asphalt until they have become VISITORS, until they are swallowed by the double doors.
We stand in line. Wait our turn. Sign our names. We are scanned and frisked. We are ushered by a stocky woman with her long hair drawn up beneath her cap. Long hair I know is there because I’ve seen her drinking at Lester’s. Seen her with the heel of a boot on the bench of a wooden booth. Seen her bent over a pool table, eye on the break, hair back in a loose ponytail. This woman in her civilian life.
I’ve seen her both ways.
All of us broken in half. Half at least. Most of us in quarters, or sixteenths, or thirty-seconds, or sixty-fourths. The woman at work, the woman at play, the woman in love, the woman at war, the woman at home, the woman alone and all combinations in between.
We’re following her down the long cinder-block corridor, along the green linoleum. We can’t hear our own footsteps. Or I can’t now. Just the sound of those guard boots leading us along. Her broad back like a swimmer’s. Back and boots showing us the visit room, with the benches and tables riveted to the floor, and the fluorescent lights and the vending machines. Cans of Dr. Pepper, bags of Combos, Funyons, Snickers, always Snickers. The boots gone, the door closes. And there we are, the two of us. Waiting.
Others, sure. Other visitors. Other prisoners. But they are vague color. They are general noise, general motion. The clarity, the clarity is in Tess. Hands on the table. Narrow eyes fixed on the PRISONERS door. The texture of the table. The rotten-fruit candy chemical smell. Bleach. Humming lights and human noise. Visitors and prisoners coughing and sniffling and throat-clearing. Shifting their weight on the creaking benches. Murmuring interspersed with sobbing, a raised voice quieted by the death look of a guard built like a squat furnace. One of Seymour Strout’s colleagues.
And above it all, above the smell and sound, above even the hope and dread and rot exists something else, some other thing.
And it is this thing that holds the true authority.
And it is this thing that kills.
Tess in contrast. Her very existence, a kind of protest against it all. Her intelligence. Her warmth. Her smell. Her skin. Her rage. Her youth. All of it at war with the prison. Do you see the way this woman, just by her very presence in a place, challenges it and its terrorizing government? Is a menace to that sinister thing impossible to describe.