BACKSTORY: I grew up in Huntsville, Texas, where there are eight state prisons in and around town—incarceration and country music are two cultural facts of everyday life. Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” rightly illuminates the predominant metaphors in my life as a teenager: the ever-present prison system, iconic music, a dying railroad, and testing of personal freedoms.
MEG’S HAIR WOULDN’T BEHAVE IN THE WIND. It was long and messy and strawberry except for the under duff that rested against her neck. The underneath always grew in darker and straighter than the top. In the visitors parking lot she shook it out of her face and threw her head around like she was in a shampoo commercial. She made a ponytail, tied it in a knot on the back of her head, and tucked it under an Astros cap. The air felt vacant and it made her want to empty her head. She didn’t want to take anything personal Inside. She watched a freight train 500 yards off. It slugged along carrying away food-crops the prison grew; beans, greens, and sauerkraut stirred with shovels by inmates in rain pants and no shirts.
She walked toward the entrance of “The Walls,” officially called the Huntsville Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. The state had just changed it from the Texas Department of Corrections. At some point it became obvious there wasn’t much correcting going on. She looked back down the highway. Driscoll, her home, seemed a lot farther than forty miles away.
The ’85 Bronco behind her was a gift she’d received that morning. It was used, but was shiny and clean in the driveway where her parents unveiled it and sang to her. Her sister, Maryanne, had climbed into the passenger side and swished her butt on the seat, forming it to her. “This is awesome!” She turned up her collar. “You’re going to have to take me everywhere.”
Meg’s dad had arranged for her to leave school around third period. It took her all of what would have been fourth to remove her makeup, change into the oversized sweat suit he told her to wear, and drive to Huntsville. She was acutely aware she’d never before had occasion to make herself look like a boy.
The short shrubbery up the sidewalk didn’t budge in the breeze, its waxy leaves stiff as cow chips. Before she reached the door she bent down to pluck a leaf to see if it was real.
Her Uncle Dan had a badge made for her specifically for this visit. It was only in case of an emergency, stamped “OFFICIAL” across the top with her junior class picture on it. Her dad had said if they needed to get her out, she’d have to prove who she was. She clipped it on her pullover so her picture faced her heart. It felt like a passport, like she was going across the border. Leaving town was all she hoped for. It felt good, but not nearly as good as it would feel to be on that train, even though it carried mealy turnips and blinky milk. She was going to meet a legend and she was scared.
The correctional officer at the gate looked at her closely after he flipped up her badge. She relaxed her face and gave him her best girl smile so he could see it really was her in the picture. Her sister called that particular smile her “cruise face,” referring to the insincere grin she wore in most family vacation photos. They’d never actually been on a cruise, though. The first officer called over another officer to escort her. “Keep your head down and let the guard walk between you and the inmates. Don’t respond if they talk to you.” His name badge was turned backwards, too.
The prison system was notoriously short of guards. Meg looked down at his holster, wondering if he had graduated high school. It held a billy club and a radio. She knew they didn’t have guns. Growing up forty miles from the state pen and having an uncle who’d been a warden for ten years made it very easy to learn a lot about the prison system. Plus, she’d been to visit twice on field trips. Most local schools had a few places they visited repeatedly. In Driscoll the drill was: second grade, Ice Creamery in Brenham; fourth grade, NASA Space Center, Houston; sixth grade, Prison. Eighth, tenth, and twelfth grades were repeats in the same order. Just a month before on her senior trip she’d seen her father in the hallway. Lately, he spent a good portion of his workweek there consulting with the prison construction team. Or so he said.
Meg had been preparing all week to meet the other reason her father was here. It put a grim shadow over things. His mistress worked for her uncle. It made her hands cold. There was an upside though, and she couldn’t forget that. A private meeting with David Crosby wouldn’t have been possible if Meg hadn’t discovered the affair.
Meg had seen inmates all her life. Summer mornings when she was in junior high, there was always one tending the yard at her uncle’s place. Until the eighties, wardens had houseboys who cooked and cleaned for them, but the state stopped using them after the Menedez hostage crisis when the assistant warden’s kitchen man smuggled a revolver Inside in a rotten ham. The ordeal left two librarians and a chaplain dead.
The walkway to her uncle’s office was dry and white and concrete. The ceiling was easily fifty feet high, the left wall climbing forty feet of sheer cinderblocks. The top ten feet were enclosed with the glass used in high schools in the fifties; some green panes, some white panes, some transparent, all old and yellowed. The high band of natural light made Meg feel she was looking up from the bottom of a well.
The right wall housed inmates in four stories of cells that looked over where she walked. Each was empty. She didn’t pass anyone on the way in. A staircase at the end of the corridor led up to a metal door with mini-blinds and a Lexan window thicker than praying hands. It was the only thing on the wall. There, the hallway made a sharp turn to the right and led to what smelled like the showers. Soapy steam clouded that direction. That meant naked men. The cement stairs were steep and beaten, and there was no rail. As she walked up them she pressed her left shoulder and leg against the wall and tried not to look down. The thrill vanished. There was something off about a place that didn’t have a rail on a thirty-foot staircase surrounded by bald concrete. She wondered if all the men from those empty cells had to shower at the same time.
The guard, ragged in the ordinary ways of rural Texas, spoke again. “Mr. Meri should be up in a minute. When we get to his office have a seat. I’ll lock you in.”
They approached a secretary. This was her. She sat typing something from a yellow pad. The guard led Meg past her desk. Her nameplate said “Eve.” Here she was. She was redheaded, too, but from a bottle. She was young and smiley. Meg pushed the tip of her tongue to the roof of her mouth to keep from screaming. Eve triggered the lock from a button under her desk and said hello. Meg actually bit down on her tongue, but it didn’t work. The restraint she mustered only turned her face slightly before she let out a soft “Eat shit,” which she tried to cover with throat-clearing. Had her father told Eve that Meg knew? Meg exhaled in a way she thought could collapse her lungs. Then she remembered she hadn’t come here to screw with this woman. She had a real reason and she wouldn’t let anything get in the way.
The officer left Meg in her uncle’s office. She took off the cap, let down her hair, and pulled out a tube of lip gloss and a compact from her pocket. The applicator was like a tiny sword. She pouted her lips and pressed the furry tip full of clear, thick goo to her mouth. She rarely wore it on days like today, windy ones, because her hair would stick to her mouth and spread gloss all over her face. Meg held up the mirror for a long time, smacking and touching her hair. Maryanne didn’t know about Eve. Meg couldn’t stop picturing her sister. She knew she wasn’t beautiful like Maryanne, but her hair was so overwhelming it sometimes fooled people into thinking so, and she hoped it would fool David Crosby, too. Maybe just seeing someone who lived his own life would show her a way to make it through the last few months living at home.
She put the mirror away. There weren’t any pictures of her cousins. Her dad said there wouldn’t be because Dan didn’t want “nobody looking at his babies.” The room was humid and smoky, all of it the color of vegetable stew with creamy brown paneling halfway up the cinderblock walls. There were three chairs; a steamed-carrot-orange desk chair and two heavy looking cooked-celery-green vinyl armchairs.
Her father’s Martin guitar was in the corner just like he said it would be. She unbuckled the case and pulled it out, immediately fretting a G, strumming it with the fat part of her thumb. She’d only started playing in the last few years. Her dad had played when she and Maryanne were little and was taking it up again, playing weekends with a bluegrass band in Huntsville. Unbuckling that particular case had come to feel like opening a tear in space that she could step through. The fullness of sounds from an expensive guitar rang like promise. Regardless of his requests, Meg and her dad never played together outside of the living room. Their uses of the Martin were completely different.
She turned it over in her hands, started with C, then moved to F, and finished with B, which she was sure stood for bitch because it was so hard to play. She worked at fretting it, then strummed and sang, “Biiiiiitch,” in perfect tune. “Eveisa Biiiiiitch.”
The dusty yellow blinds swung left then right when the door opened and her uncle appeared in the doorway. His tag was turned backwards, too. “Ah, mi Rosaquita! You’re here.” She never understood why he insisted on calling her Rosa. He said it was the color of her hair and that Meg didn’t translate well. She didn’t hate the nickname, it was his Spanish that bugged her. Her hair wasn’t pink. And he was always trying to speak with an accent, as if it made him one of the boys in La Raza on the Inside. He used the same tone with the hands at her grandfather’s ranch. Her uncle had tried to talk her dad and grandfather into joining his Spanish lessons, but only Meg took it up, and it wasn’t so she could talk to Dan.
“So, le adonde?” She turned her head to the side and tapped her feet together.
“He’s coming, relax.” He looked at her as he walked across the room to his chair. “Why is your hair down? Didn’t your dad tell you to put it up?” He sat and leaned forward. “Are you wearing makeup?” His lead hands spread out on the desk and he breathed hard through his nose. His ears moved when he breathed like that. She hadn’t spent much time alone with him and she felt mildly weird about it, like being blood kin meant she was supposed to be friends with a stranger when really the only thing they had in common was the Spanish.
“I put on a little lip stuff when I got in here. I don’t want to scare him.” She laughed and reminded herself how she’d gotten here. It was about straddling power and politeness.
“Meg. He’s an inmate. You need to get that through your head.” He waited for her to nod. “He’s here for doing SMACK,” he said loudly. “Shit’ll kill you dead. He’s not cool and you shouldn’t worry about looking any way. You’ll wipe that off your face and we’ll march out if you can’t get a grip on that. Got it?”
She wanted to ask him if he really thought it was a good idea telling her how to behave, but because she was in such a strange place and she didn’t want to jeopardize the meeting, the sod was yanked from under her. “It’s not like he’s violent, he was a dope head.” She decided to test his tenderness. She imaged poking the end of her lip gloss sword into his chest to see how hard she could press him.
He clenched his teeth but still managed to enunciate clearly. “Got it?”
Meg wasn’t used to losing control like this. Since she’d hinted to her dad that she knew Eve’s kid, she had learned to negotiate a variety of situations. The problem was she hated how it made her feel to watch the strongest man in her life squirm. But more, she hated that he’d cheated on the weakest woman she knew. She looked down at the strings on the guitar and plucked the low E, punctuating her vowels. “I got it, I got it.”
“Now, put your hair in a ponytail.” He breathed hard and leaned back in his chair. His girls wore ponytails. He knew what they were called. “He’s going to be playing your dad’s guitar. Here’s a rubber band.” He tossed it across the desk.
She rolled her eyes away from him. “I know.” She took a rubber band off her wrist, put up her hair, and left his where it lay. It was easier to look between his eyes than at them. “I think I want him to autograph it, maybe.” She hesitated about telling him anything straight. It felt like her guitar. It could’ve been hers if she’d asked right, but she didn’t, wouldn’t ask her dad for his guitar. Somewhere, in the already grown-up part of her, she figured he needed it as bad as she did.
Before he responded there was a knock. It was the same officer who had escorted her in, and just as the door opened she noticed a substantial space between his front teeth, and she wondered if he could slide a nickel in there. She lost the thought when she saw he wasn’t alone. Behind him, a thin, beardless, short-haired David Crosby, with shackled feet, walked shyly into the room. A man who looked nothing like the clips she’d seen on cable TV. Her father said he looked different, but Meg hardly recognized him at all. She curled back in her seat when he made himself a full step closer. Her face was blank and timid and she couldn’t think of what to say, which she certainly hadn’t expected. Her uncle filled the void, crossed the room, and pointed to one of the celery-green vinyl chairs. “Please.” They did not shake hands.
“This is my niece, Rosa. Today is her eighteenth birthday and she’d like to hear you play.”
Meg’s eyes widened but she didn’t say anything. She didn’t want him to think this was her idea, dragging him in here. It was, of course, but she didn’t want him to know it. The decision was showing itself to be a questionable one anyway. He’d been taken away from something. She was intruding on his routine. She wished she could tell him she recognized that. She thought for a second. If they’d been outside, he’d never talk to her, which she guessed was fine. She understood she wasn’t famous and didn’t deserve this kind of attention. She hadn’t thought of their meeting as an inconvenience to anyone before now, but suddenly she wanted no part of it, and it was too late to leave. The same train tracks that moved field crops carried passenger cars to Dallas every other day. She wasn’t going anywhere now but it made her sick that she didn’t know the departure schedule.
“Hi Rosa.” He said it with a Z, like a country man saying, rows and rows of cotton, Roza.
She pulled her shoulders back and put the guitar on the ground, leaning the neck against the desk. “Hi.” She waved. “My name’s really Meg.” She was intimately aware of her surroundings. She put out her right hand the way she thought women properly shook hands in old movies, like they were waiting for someone to kiss them. Her other hand wound a fistful of hair around her palm. Something in him was alive in there. It captivated and terrified her.
Mr. Crosby looked at her uncle for permission to approach her, and Dan said nothing of it when he shook her hand firmly then went back to his seat. “May I?” He nodded at the Martin.
“Yeah, yes.” She reached down, handling it more gently than she ever did, and gave it to him across the span of about six feet. They both leaned into it so that they were hardly standing perpendicular to the ground anymore, like alpine ski jumpers. She tried to remind herself he was a normal person.
He sat down with the instrument and for a moment he just looked at it, looked at it like he’d picked an apple from an oak tree. He let the air leave his lungs the way people do when they are ready to let themselves cry; that last little bit of air no one ever really exhales unless they’re trying to let go of something, or in some cases trying to get a hold of it again.
“Don’t you play in here?” she asked. He was in the prison band. She knew that. And he played with a $700 Ovation kept by the chaplaincy. He could have had his own guitar, but didn’t.
“I do. Warden lets the band stick around even though there aren’t any more music classes.” The prison school system had recently nixed music from its curriculum. According to locals, the prisons like their musicians pretty well. In the thirties a female vocal group of inmates traveled the state performing for dances. And recently in Huntsville they were talking of painting a mural of Huddie Ledbetter in the downtown square. Her mind raced through the lyrics of “Midnight Special” and she thought it should shine its light on David Crosby. The song said if the night train’s headlamp shone through the bars onto someone, they’d be set free. She didn’t know if the train ran here at night.
Mr. Crosby pulled the pick from the end of the neck, then rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. His fingers were almost maroon, like they’d been bruised for fifty years, and then Meg thought it was possible they had been bruised that long from smashing them into the strings of so many guitars. Her stomach dropped. Or he’d been made to shell peas. Purple hulls made fingers that color. Or pecans. Inmates regularly gathered them from the grounds outside the walls of The Walls. Shelling was punishment.
Eve was looking in through the blinds. Meg felt hot, she stared hard at her uncle until she got his attention then nodded to the door. He stood up, made a pitiful face at Eve, and twisted the blinds shut. Meg didn’t feel bad about it at all.
Mr. Crosby flat picked, slow, inaudible notes at first, notes it looked like he could hear only through the camber of his belly on the back of the guitar and the pads of his fingers that silently punched along the strings. The notes grew louder and closer together until he seemed satisfied. He looked up like he’d returned from traveling, his face wet and red and glowing. “Warden Meri said you like this one.” He went into it loud and fast and without a hitch. She knew the tune in four counts. “Aye, ye, ye, ye, ye, Canten y no llores, porque cantando. . . .”
Mr. Crosby smiled as big as he sang. It made his eyebrows lift and his hairline tilt back. The thing hiding in him was coming to the surface.
Meg let go of her hair and rolled her eyes at her uncle again like she might find a reason under her lids that he was such a jackass.
Mr. Crosby stopped in the middle of the second verse, laughing. “That’s all I know.”
Meg clapped for him. Her uncle clapped too, loudly. “That was great,” she said, careful of her voice, thinking about the open window behind her that looked out over the recreation yard. Anyone out there could surely hear the music. What did they think about this? Maybe it happened all the time. Meg focused her mind beyond the yard to the train. There were people going up and down, north and south, moving slowly, but freely as they pleased. The men in the yard had things hiding in them like Mr. Crosby had with his music. But she didn’t believe all they hid was good.
He gave a little bow from his seat with the guitar in his lap, leaning forward and stretching his arm to the side, pick between his first finger and thumb. “What next?”
There was a knock at the door and her uncle moved quickly across the room to open it. It was the same skinny officer with the large space between his teeth. She thought maybe it could only hold a dime.
“Sir, Mr. Meri? You hear your radio?”
Her uncle looked at him through lowered lids, he was obviously mad the guard had interrupted.
“Yes, I turned it down.” His hands crossed over his stomach.
“Well, sir, there’s a situation.”
He didn’t seem overly concerned. “A fight?”
The guard looked at Meg and Mr. Crosby and then to her uncle, “A little more than that.”
Dan reached down to his belt where his radio was clipped and turned the dial. The room filled with crackling, official sounding voices. He turned it down.
Meg knew he didn’t want to leave them alone.
“Get an officer in here and we’ll talk outside.”
The officer leaned in close to Dan, but Meg could see what he said by watching his mouth. “There’s a shit fit’s moved out to the yard. We don’t have no one extra right now.” There was a pause. “They cut a teacher.”
There was luggage on those train tracks, luggage that belonged to old people and to children. There were Snoopy suitcases out there.
Her uncle prepared himself to step outside. He looked at Meg and then at Mr. Crosby. “I’m going to be right out there, but you so much as fart, and you’ll be in ad seg the rest of your stay.” There were people who cut hair and did nails on those tracks. He looked at Meg, her face all turned up, wide-eyed. “GOT IT?”
They replied simultaneously, “Got it.”
He pulled the officer to the lip of the staircase and shut the door halfway.
Meg could hear murmurings but couldn’t make out anything. Ad seg was administrative segregation, twenty-three hours a day in a cell. There, men only ate meal loaf, a mixture of all the food from the day baked in a bread pan.
Her uncle returned. He clenched his jaw and narrowed his eyes at Meg and she knew he was going to leave them. “You’ll wait in here till things settle.” He turned to Mr. Crosby. “You’re staying, too.” Then looked back at Meg, “I hate to do this to you, honey.”
She cringed at the sound of him calling her “honey.” Maybe this was just a set-up to scare her. Maybe Eve would come in, excuse Mr. Crosby, and have a talk with Meg about blackmail and extortion.
Her uncle took a zip tie from the officer’s belt and secured one of Mr. Crosby’s wrists to the arm of the chair. He leaned down and whispered to Mr. Crosby, looking at Meg again. Her eyes felt hard and dark. She imagined them like synthetic emeralds in costume jewelry. Before he was finished she was holding strands of her ponytail in front of her face, inspecting them for split ends, attempting to ignore him and the look on Mr. Crosby’s face. “He’s harmless, honey, every muscle he’s got’s eaten from drugs.” He moved around his office gathering a key card and a bullhorn. Meg heard the door lock after he shut it. She wondered what he was going to say into that bullhorn that would undo what was happening. She guessed he was a different person here. Or maybe he wasn’t.
She stood up and eased across the office to a window that overlooked the rec yard. She put her hand over her mouth. Two men lay on the ground like full sides of beef. Officers tried to separate the inmates around them. They weren’t dead, but it made her knees wobble. She remembered she’d heard gangs required a murder for initiation.
Mr. Crosby shook his head. “You ought to sit down.” He said it in a quiet voice, and she did.
She wondered how he made it around people like that everyday, but swept the thought from her mind before coming up with an answer.
“It’s probably not a big deal. Just taking precautions,” he said, waiting a few seconds before continuing. “He deals with this stuff a lot.” He stopped and looked at her from one side and then the other. “You’re not eighteen, are you?”
“Yes, I am.” Her face stretched out to refute him and she touched it with her hands. Did she look older? “Today is my birthday.”
“Is he really related to you?”
Her expression scrunched up her nose like she’d smelled stink. “Yes, unfortunately.” She knew where he was going.
“Doesn’t look like you come from the same bunch. Red hair, white skin. The Boss looks Mexican.”
This confusion was familiar and it relaxed her enough that she moved to her uncle’s chair. It’d been a long time since she’d met someone who didn’t know her family. “Nope, but he looks it. And all the Spanish would make you think so, but he’s as Irish as the rest of my mom’s family.” She picked up a glass paperweight from his desk, inlaid with the state seal. “I got the eyes from my mom. No one knows about the hair. We’re supposed to be black Irish. My sister is dark.” She looked at his arms, scarred from years of hard everything. “I can’t believe he tied you down. I mean I understand why, but. . . .” she caught herself and ducked her chin.
“Don’t be afraid.”
She could tell he was equally as uncomfortable. “Oh, I’m not.” She was half telling the truth. “There’s an inmate who sometimes cuts the grass at the ranch and I like him a lot.”
He nodded strangely and then focused on the guitar. “Do you play? You could show me what you got?”
“I don’t think I could. I play with my dad sometimes. You’ve played on TV.”
“Everybody starts someplace. Maybe I can give you some tips.”
She didn’t know how she felt starting here, but she picked up the guitar and sat down. She hid her eyes behind her hair then glanced at her fingers on the neck. “Here’s one of yours.” She played slow at first, like he had before and then louder and with more confidence and by the time she reached the chorus of “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” she was singing to where he could almost hear her. Her voice sounded distant under her breath. She liked that.
He smiled and clapped his free hand on the arm of the chair. “Fun.”
What did fun mean?
A loud noise came from the yard but Meg couldn’t bring herself to look.
He helped her change the subject. “Your uncle doesn’t seem crazy about you being here. How’d you talk him into it? Maybe you can tell me how to talk him into letting me go home.”
“My dad asked him to do it. He’s been doing a lot of cheap work for the state, running construction for them or something. I guess this is some kind of trade.” Everything about being here felt uncomfortable. She hated this now.
“Your dad must really trust your uncle.”
“Dad says it’s because he trusts me, but that’s not why.” She hesitated. Why not tell him. “He’s pretty sure I know he’s cheating on my mom,” she stopped again and had to force out the last bit, “with her.” She was careful not to call her a lady as she pointed towards Eve’s desk in the hallway.
Mr. Crosby leaned as far forward as his arm would allow for him to look. His brow wrinkled. “Shit, man.”
“Yeah, I give my dad a couple of sideways looks and he pees himself.” She waited. “I did ask to come here today.” She wanted him to know it now because she was sorry.
His gaze became transparent. “I’m glad you came.”
He was lying. Her dad had told her sometimes it was easier for inmates to disappear into their Inside life than keep a connection with the world outside. They often asked their families to stop visiting. Meg said, “I know this is weird and I’m sorry.”
“That’s not your fault.” He looked at his feet and cleared his throat. “How do you know? About your dad?” His eyes were wide and it reminded her of the way she must have looked when she found out about Eve.
“I don’t know for sure, but her kid is a grade younger than me. He’s in 4-H with a friend of mine. And it got from him to me that my dad’s been around a bunch. I don’t know if that just means here,” she pointed to the floor, “or at their house, or what.”
“That’s rough for a kid your age. But your friend might be wrong.”
She was glad he hadn’t said for a girl your age. “I doubt it.”
Meg looked out the window toward Eve. All she could make out was a shadow cast on the wall. A month ago a different friend asked about a strange woman eating with Meg’s dad at Casa Miguel. She rubbed her stomach where something had started to ache.
“Are you going to tell your mom?”
Meg whipped around. “Hell no, I’m not going to tell her. Hell no. It’d kill her.” She wished for a cigarette. “And then what would the Junior League do?” She picked up a pencil off the desk and poked the sharp tip through the knit weave of her sweat pants. She could feel it pricking into her leg. “No way.”
“Sounds like good song material.”
She eased the lead and laughed. “I don’t know how to write music.”
“You should try it.” He looked toward the window. “Haven’t heard anything out there for a minute. Maybe it’s over.”
And as though to confirm it, her uncle opened the door and both Meg and Mr. Crosby seemed taken back by it, scared even. Dan eyed Mr. Crosby. When he was satisfied he motioned for Meg to go sit in the other chair. “Everything is under control. Sorry about that, Meg.” He smiled then looked to Mr. Crosby. “Mandatory lock down. Officer Percy will take you back to your cell.” He nodded at the man in the doorway with the space between his teeth.
The guard walked into the room and bent over the chair with his butt facing Meg. He clipped the zip tie in one small cut then led Mr. Crosby up by the arm. “Come on, we’re going back.”
“I’m coming.” Mr. Crosby said it in a voice of compliance, but he shook his arm a little to loosen the grip.
Meg wondered where exactly they were going back to. She wondered if his cell was decorated the way she’d seen in movies. The cells had looked empty when she’d come in. She walked up behind them. “Do you have any of your band posters in. . .” she started to say your cell, but ended with, “. . . here? I could probably get you one.” This was a stupid idea but she didn’t care. She tried not to look back at her uncle’s face. If he wanted to object, he’d have to do it in words, in English words.
The guard slowed, turned, and looked back at Dan. Meg guessed the officer was wondering what her uncle was going to do about her talking like that.
“Or some tapes?” She knew she was so far past the line of what was acceptable that she couldn’t have seen it if she’d turned back to look. She was thinking she’d spend her whole savings to bring him a guitar if it could reproduce the look on his face when he’d played. He’d known just who he was and just what he wanted. Meg never felt that.
Mr. Crosby didn’t look at her but he did turn his head to speak in her direction. “You just write some music.”
Her uncle’s breath seemed to burn the moisture off the back of her neck. He wasn’t going to let that go. He grabbed her arm and swung her around. “There will be absolutely no contact with him after this!”
It took some mental effort, but she put herself on that train, slow moving, too heavy to stop, impossible for someone else to jump on it. She imagined something valuable was in one of the cars, but she couldn’t see which one. She imagined all the cargo doors opened, save the one with the valuable thing. She’d have to get to her destination before she could find out what it was. Soon she’d be away in a place where his opinion didn’t mean a squirt of piss. She laughed.
“This is funny?” He turned to the guard. “Get that junkie OUT.”
She knew she was asking for trouble, but how bad could it be? Even if he told her parents how she’d behaved, they wouldn’t take her car away because no one else wanted to drive Maryanne to school everyday. They couldn’t slow her down. Twenty miles out of town, in any direction, was bare freedom.
She tried to move away from her uncle and slide in front of Mr. Crosby to shake his hand. She wanted to talk to him a little longer, wanted to hear how his voice filled out the hollow sounds of the office. One of her hands was outstretched for a handshake, but she couldn’t reach him.
The guard pushed Mr. Crosby out the door as he tried to turn around, holding out one of his big red hands as a gesture. The officer, lost in his own gap-toothed thoughts, must have believed he was grabbing for her. He pulled Mr. Crosby a full pace into the hallway by his collar and knocked his feet out from under him. Mr. Crosby’s short hair seemed to melt into the brown carpet and for a split second Meg thought it looked like they were all standing on a pool of long curly hair that had sprouted between the time he started to fall and the time he hit the floor. The officer clamped his knee down on Mr. Crosby’s chest like a cinderblock on a sack of flour.
Meg lunged for the officer but her uncle grabbed her solidly around the waist. She felt pain in her abdomen where he squeezed her. It didn’t hurt any more than cramps, but she wanted to drop to the ground and scream bloody murder that he’d hurt something female in her belly. But she knew screaming for help wouldn’t do anything. He was the only authority here. Either way, the officer would still drag Mr. Crosby out by his neck, and she’d never see him again. With that, she opted for another approach that wasn’t an approach at all, but an unbuckling. She turned around in the ring of her uncle’s grasp and hit him square in the face with her elbow and then her voice, an attack she pointed directly between his eyes. He didn’t let go. She fought like she would have if she’d reached the officer. She screamed obscenities, she screamed gibberish, she screamed things she didn’t even know she’d hated about him until that moment. And finally, with tears betraying her voice, she screamed things about her father and Eve.
Dan didn’t say a word, just half-dragged her, half-carried her over the top of the officer and Mr. Crosby out of the doorway. Eve stood up behind her desk looking like she didn’t know thin shit from wild honey. “Is she crazy?”
Meg narrowed her eyes and tried her hardest yet to shake herself free. Her hair caught in Dan’s mouth, his arm still around her waist. They were related. They did share DNA, and pressed together, she couldn’t forget it. She jerked forward over Eve’s desk, eye to eye, her own eyes red and bulging. Eve sat in horror. Meg wanted to spit in her face. “Crazy? You just keep fucking with my father.” Meg meant it from the darkest place she’d ever felt in her life. She could literally kill this woman. Right now, without doubt. Everything was wrong.
“That’s it.” Her uncle grabbed her tighter then pulled her down the stairs into the cold-cement, dry-white hallway with a concrete wall on one side and four stories of cells on the other. All were full and locked down this time. Their inhabitants screamed, too. They stuck their faces through the bars like rancid biscuits bursting from the can. They bit and licked their lips, some pulled out their dicks. A man hollered, “I want your pussy.”
She gagged and forced down vomit that rose each time her uncle’s arm gouged into her side. She tried to say stop, tried to tell him she couldn’t breathe, that he was really hurting her now, but there was no stopping him. They passed through the first gate and she gave up in order to simply swallow what was pooling in her mouth from her throat and the snot sliding down into her lips. He didn’t let go. She stumbled through the second gate and back out to the entrance, back to the gate guards and barbed wire and the walkway, and the tracks.
Her uncle and the guards put her on the other side of the fence. He turned loose of her. She made one last swipe for his face and missed, then slumped down fast to the sidewalk on her butt. They closed the gate. She kept her hand on her stomach, she curled her knees to her chest, tried to breathe, and not look at everyone watching her. Each exhale choked up mucus she spit out on the ground. She put her hands on the concrete and came to her knees like someone crawling out of a pool after almost drowning. Finally she stood. She swept loose chunks of hair from her face and straightened to look at him. She had to quit shaking. The back of her hand dried under each eye. He told her to go home and that he would check to make sure she was there in an hour. He said he wasn’t going to tell her parents about this.
She stood there, feeling heavy, wanting back in, wondering about David Crosby. What face he had to wear to go back. She made herself stop crying and then forced a little half grin. “Bueno, Le voy a decir a Mama lo sobre Eve y que lo sabices todo el tiempo.” She flashed her cruise face, “Buena Suerte.” He wouldn’t be able to translate it completely, but he’d pick up parts of it that would make him nervous.
No one on the other side of the fence moved, except one Hispanic guard who looked away and scratched behind his ear. She wasn’t telling her mother. She searched their faces; her uncle was gone. The rest stood there, easy, with their name badges clipped backwards so no one would see their real faces, the smiles that showed up in pictures with wives and children.
Meg walked to her Bronco, pulling off her tennis shoes on the way. She matter-of-factly stripped off the sweatpants and kicked them into the bushes next to her truck. Her blue panties showed from under the sweatshirt, her legs bare down to white socks. She peeled the socks off, opened the door, leaned over the driver’s seat, and grabbed her jeans and an undershirt off the passenger floorboard. With her back to the prison, she slid off her underwear, put her feet into the jeans, pulled them up and buttoned them. All was silent but the train. She tugged off the sweatshirt and bra and put the clean white T-shirt over her head.
The clothes ended up in a pile next to her tire, but not before she retrieved her lip gloss from the sweatpants’ pocket. She turned to climb into the truck, ignoring all the guards still standing a hundred feet away, their mouths set to catch flies. She saw now it was the Dallas train, and it took her breath. She slathered the gloss carefully over her mouth, much thicker than usual, and when she pulled out her ponytail holder, her hair fell down freely in the wind, and none of it stuck to her face. There were packages going up those tracks to loved ones in Dallas. There were people who’d left home on those tracks. She hung her head and prayed for the engineer to pull on the light.
AMANDA NOWLIN-O’BANION’s writing draws—not just on her imagination—but on her myriad experiences of life “off the beaten path.” From rural Texas to New York City to the sparkling Alaskan tundra, Amanda has worked as a sailing instructor, served as a jack-of-all-trades in Denali, and taught English inside a maximum security men’s prison. She has been pursued by bears, won first prize for her mayhaw jelly at the county fair, and survived to tell about it. Humorous, provocative, and genuine, Amanda’s essays, short stories, and other writings reveal the changing landscape of Americana, and the human struggles that come as a result. Her novel-in-progress, The Greenest Grass, from which “The Walls, Texas” is excerpted, explores one young woman’s struggle as she challenges traditional land inheritance patterns and the labor division of her family’s ranch. In 2000, Joyce Carol Oates named Amanda the “¡TEX! Emerging Writer” in fiction, and she was nominated for Best New American Voices 2006. Her work has appeared in the Dallas Morning News, Conversely, and will appear in the Summer 2006 issue of SHSR. Amanda has been an invited guest on National Public Radio affiliate KUHF’s program Front Row, and at The Blaffer Gallery Girls Night Out exhibit. She holds an MFA in creative writing from New York University, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston, where she teaches. Amanda lives in Huntsville, Texas, with her husband, Robert. Special thanks are extended to Robert O’Banion, Debbie and Bill Nowlin, and Ree and Daniel Belhumeur.