Hurry, Maggie said to herself as she rushed down the prison steps in the evenings, and then she said it again as she took the bus to the shopping plaza to buy something for dinner, after which she waited impatiently in the parking lot for Lyle or he waited impatiently for her. Mornings, it was the same thing in reverse. She would arrive at the prison breathless, her head spinning with competing admonitions: Move a little faster! Haste makes waste! Nobody cares if you’re late or not! She shivered to think that defeat was lurking and might be inevitable. But late for what? And why defeat?
The prison was set on a rise, dwarfing the people who flocked every day from the employee parking lot up the long flight of granite steps and through a gauntlet of metal detectors and guards charged with keeping the prisoners in and contraband out. Every time Maggie stepped through the gate into the chilly welcome center, she winced as if she were guilty of something, as if the metal detector could see the image of the top-secret document that was squirreled away in her brain or as if the escaped one-eyed men with hooks for arms her father had invented to scare his children into obedience were watching her from wherever they were hiding. It was easy to imagine her father waiting in the shadows too, to shout at her for something she had done or not done—a shoe unlaced, a toy left carelessly on the stair instead of put away in a closet, for crying or not crying when he smacked her, or the only jam to be found in the cupboard was strawberry when didn’t he always like peach—or to chase the four of them into their rooms, bolting the doors from the outside as if order in the house, as in the world, depended upon incarceration.
And where was her mother while all of this was going on? By the age of thirty-nine, Mary Sterling had taken to the shadows too, her body shrunken inside her paisley dress. She sent the children for the shopping and rarely ventured out. Maggie had looked helplessly on as her mother was buffeted before the winds of her father’s rages. That will never happen to me, she promised herself, and it hadn’t. Lyle always asked her what she thought before voicing his own opinion, and even though her father was long gone by the time Lyle had come along, Lyle seemed to understand that paternal absence was a kind of presence, so he tiptoed around it and helped with the dishes and remembered not to slam the door.
Every morning, Maggie took off her bracelets and put her purse on a conveyor belt so it could be x-rayed and searched. Every morning, she smiled at the guards and wondered if they too shouted at their wives. The head of the morning detail was a narrow man with furrowed skin and furtive eyes whose name was Louis, but in the evenings, the burly Hugo was in charge. Hugo exuded an air of tense restraint, as if he was holding his manliness in check or training for some test of stamina and determination. He seemed to find the intimacy implied in searching Maggie’s purse or running a scanner over her body amusing, and their thirty-second interactions began to feel like aggressive physical encounters. Hugo would say, “We have to stop meeting like this,” in a way that could be interpreted as a joke or as something more serious disguised as a joke. Or he would scrutinize Maggie’s face or dress with a savage gleam in his eyes until she blushed and fumbled for just the right lighthearted comment that would acknowledge his superiority in terms of size and strength, while also reminding him that she had a family and that she wasn’t available now and never would be.
But something about her interactions with Hugo suited Maggie. The layers to their little conversations fit with a growing sense that she was leading a double life, and she wondered if Hugo also thought of himself as two people: as the determined warrior he was at work and as the virile masher she imagined him to be when he went out on the weekends with his friends. Occasionally she allowed herself to respond to him in a way that hinted at the dual roles both of them were playing. “I see you’re wearing your Schwarzenegger smile today,” she might say, or “Prison guard by day, lady-killer by night.” And then Hugo would smirk at her and reply, “I haven’t killed anybody yet.”
This wasn’t the kind of banter Maggie was used to, and she was shocked at her own boldness. But something about it meshed with an inner readiness, as if she had spent the last sixteen years not only mothering and keeping house, but also training for a clandestine project she didn’t yet understand.
“She’s too old for you,” Louis would say to Hugo if he was working a double shift, and Hugo’s face would become a cartoon of regret. Or Hugo would say, “Good morning, Momma,” and Maggie would reply, “So now they’re giving badges and guns to children—what is the world coming to?”
But most of the time Hugo and the other guards only leered silently as they pawed through her things, and then Maggie would give her best imitation of a sultry smile and call them heartbreakers before gathering up her belongings and hurrying along the corridor to another set of locked gates and a walkway that led past the prison yard to the office block where she worked and thinking only about practicalities and the logistics of her day.
Dolly could smell whiskey on the doctor’s breath when he flicked his fingernail at the lab results for an underweight baby and thrust the folder back at her, saying, “Don’t you damn women know enough not to drink?”
Dolly knew he didn’t mean her. She knew she was only a convenient ear when the doctor complained about inadequate insurance reimbursements or working conditions at the big city hospital where he spent most of his time or when he told her about a vacation he was planning or about a task force he had been asked to chair. He had been divorced twice from the same woman. He had a daughter in San Francisco and a son in New York. Over the years Dolly had learned many things this way, while the doctor would have been astonished to find out that she came from a family of seven children, all born at home, that her boyfriend was a soldier in Iraq, that many of her clients paid her late or not at all, and that there was an entire consciousness ticking behind her eyes.
But the doctor also worked many cases for free, which was what convinced Dolly that underneath the gruff exterior a heart of gold was beating, trapped there like a caged bird and just waiting for something to free it. Each time she caught his eye over a swollen belly or a wriggling newborn, she thought she saw a window slide open, and sometimes she swore she could see right through the window to where the bird was flapping its wings against the bars and singing. But then he would cow a pair of anxiously waiting newlyweds into silence by barking, “While you’ve been sitting here reading magazines, I’ve been saving lives!” and she would go back to thinking he didn’t have a heart at all.
Dolly liked the feeling of lives in her hands too, but for her, it wasn’t the power she liked, but the mystery of new life springing from the very atoms of the earth, animated by love and the merest puff of grace. She could imagine vast potentials in the tiny curls of the fingers with their even tinier nails. “You can be anything you want to be,” she would whisper to the babies. Even though she knew that half of them would succumb to drugs, abuse, or lives of crime, she had to believe that each little life she brought into the world would be one of the lucky ones, that each word she whispered into its ear would make a difference, that each happy thought would help it beat the odds.
Mostly she only listened as the doctor talked, breathing out “Mm-hmm” or “Oh, my!” when a response seemed called for. Or she just hummed a song inside her head if the doctor waved his hand for silence. So she wasn’t quite sure what to think when he sought her out one afternoon and said, “What would you say if I told you they had altered a scientific report? What would you say if I told you the data had been fudged?”
The doctor’s eyes were wide and searching, but what Dolly saw in them now was more a mine shaft than a window.
“What report?” she asked him. “Does it have to do with the damaged babies?”
Before the doctor could answer, the second-to-last patient of the day came into the waiting room, drenched from a pelting rain and calling out behind her, “Okay, Frankie. Come back for me in half an hour.”
The woman had suffered a miscarriage and seemed both teary and relieved. After assuring the doctor she was fine, she started sobbing. “It’s just that Frankie came back from the war without his feet. Some days it’s all I can do to take care of him. What would I do with a baby? And Frankie has trouble sleeping, so then I have trouble sleeping too. Can you give him something to help with that?”
“This is a women’s clinic,” said the doctor, but then he relented and took out his prescription pad.
“These pills are for you,” he said. “It’s against the law to share them.”
“Oh,” said the woman.
“However, I doubt anyone would find out if you did.”
“And he stopped going to physical therapy. He says there isn’t any point.”
“I can’t solve everything,” said the doctor, tearing the leaf off the pad and giving it to the woman. “He needs to see his own physician.
“I can’t solve everything,” he said again when Dolly put her hand on his arm and said, “You’re a good man.” Of course the doctor had hopes and dreams! Of course he had a beating heart!
“Tell me, then. What would a good man do if he knew what I know? Would he make that knowledge public even if it ended his career, or would he close his eyes and continue to help his patients the best he can?”
Dolly was certain the doctor was talking about the report on munitions safety he had mentioned several weeks before. She took a deep breath and asked, “Was it the report on birth defects and munitions safety that was altered?”
The doctor looked startled, as if he hadn’t meant to speak his thoughts aloud. “Oh, that,” he said. “Whatever caused the birth defects, it wasn’t the munitions. The revised report was absolutely clear on that.”
“The revised report,” said Dolly carefully. “What did the original say?”
But the window was closed now, closed and shuttered. And then the doctor was glancing at his watch and asking about the last patient—wherever had she gotten to? Did she think he had all night? While they waited for her to arrive, he talked pompously about the heroic things he had done, the influential people he knew, the exotic places he had traveled to, the new car he was going to buy. “So I really don’t have time to wait,” he said.
“Doctor,” whispered Dolly. “Do you have copies of both reports?”
“Do I have copies?” asked the doctor absently. His eyes had lost focus, and Dolly couldn’t tell if he had been drinking again or if he was merely lost in thought.
“Yes, of the two reports.”
The storm was turning the orange clay of the parking lot into an orange pond. The owner of the building had dumped a load of pea gravel in a corner of the lot, but no one had ever come to spread it, so it sat like a miniature mountain near the rusting trash receptacle. Dolly liked to imagine the improvements she would make if she were the owner of the facility: curtains at the windows instead of broken mini blinds, pots of geraniums at the entrance, a fresh coat of paint on the flaking stucco, and in the waiting room, a basket of magazines and comfortable upholstery rather than metal folding chairs like the one the second-to-last patient was sitting on while she waited for someone to pick her up.
“Do you have a ride?” asked Dolly.
“Yes,” said the woman. “We got the truck fitted out with hand controls. Frankie’s still getting used to them, so he says I’m not to worry if he’s a little late.”
“I guess she’s not coming,” Dolly said when fifteen minutes had passed and the last patient had failed to arrive.
The doctor put on his coat. “Who would have thought?” he muttered. “Who in tarnation would have thought?”
“What’s done in the dark always comes to the light,” said Dolly.
“Unless it doesn’t,” said the doctor.
“What about if we give it a teensy push?”
“No, no. I can’t afford to ruffle feathers,” said the doctor. “That would be disastrous.”
“But I can,” said Dolly. “What if I were the one…”
But the doctor was pulling a rain hat over his ears and she couldn’t tell if he was listening or not.
After he left, Dolly made her way through the rooms locking cabinets and making sure the bathroom was presentable. She had just finished, all except the lights, when a rusty pickup pulled into the parking lot and honked, the beams of its headlamps illuminating the heavy raindrops and the gravel pile. The woman who had had the miscarriage jumped up and ran out the door, slamming it behind her and holding a paper grocery sack over her head to protect her from the rain. Just when she reached the passenger-side door, the truck lurched forward, causing her to fall to her knees in a puddle.
Dolly opened the door and called out, “Are you all right?”
“It’s not Frankie’s fault!” the woman called back as she scrambled to her feet. “It’s the hand controls! They can be a little bit tricky at first!” The gears ground and caught. Then the truck shuddered backward until it was clear of the puddle, and she opened the door and climbed inside.
The A students sat up front, their faces smug with knowledge. After school, they streamed out the doors to the waiting minivans, the waxed and buffed high-riders, the sleek four-doors and rusted rattletraps, taking their secrets with them while Will was left with the mystery: “Were the ghosts in The Turn of the Screw real or not? Explain.”
He had a 50 percent chance of getting the first part of the question right, but how could he explain what he did not know? And how did it make sense to ask if something in a made-up story was real, especially when that something couldn’t be real in reality. At first he thought it was a trick question, and after hesitating, he had written “No,” comforted that the letters, scratched out in soft pencil, were easily erased—something he quickly did. “Yes,” he then wrote. But “yes” was an answer he couldn’t explain, while “no” had years of experience to back it up, not to mention Sunday school instruction if he chose to get into that, a tactic that went over well with most of his teachers, but somehow not with Mr. Quick. Besides, the Y looked shaky, about to topple over on its stick, so he erased “Yes” and replaced it with the more solidly grounded “No,” which he made as bold and as black as graphite and his wavering conviction could make it.
“I’ll show you what a nice guy I am and give you ten more minutes,” Mr. Quick announced to Will and the three other students who had only slouched more deeply in their chairs and clutched their pens and pencils more tightly when the dismissal bell sounded.
The classroom window looked out onto the courtyard, where a line of cars snaked and waited for the students to emerge. In the distance, a stand of budding apple trees stretched their branches to the sun, and beyond the apple trees, the gentle slope to the ball field where Will’s team gathered every afternoon. If he stayed to finish the quiz, he would be late for practice and jeopardize his starting position, but if he didn’t stay, he’d get a failing grade.
Will scribbled the word “corruption,” which he knew was a euphemism for sex only because Mr. Quick had pointed it out to the class. He wrote quickly, finishing with a statement about how it was fear that was destructive, not corruption or ghosts. Then he hurried to the locker room and changed into his practice uniform before sprinting down the hill to the ball field.
“Hustle up,” called the coach, and after that, Will could breathe a little easier.
Because he’d been late, Will had to run extra laps, so it was after six when he walked up the hill to the courtyard. Most afternoons he could catch a ride with a teammate, but at that late hour the turnaround was deserted, leaving him to walk the two miles home. We should have cell phones, Will thought, but he knew it was hard enough to make ends meet without wasting money on things they didn’t need.
It wasn’t until he was passing the Car Mart that he wished he’d put down “Yes” for the first part of the answer. Even if ghosts didn’t exist, the idea of them did, and besides, the word “ghosts” could refer to inner demons as well as outer ones. There were a lot of unexplained things in the world, so maybe the story was about how things were what you thought they were and what they really were didn’t come into it much.
Was it really wrong to think about sex multiple times a day? Was it really wrong to imagine Tula with no clothes on even though he liked her just as much when she was wrapped up from head to toe in tights and sweaters? Was it wrong to steal food if you were starving? Some people were forced into lives of crime by the way the world was—the way it really was. And then he decided that this whole line of inquiry was his mother talking—she had gotten inside his head somehow and was controlling it the way she had wanted to control Will and Lyle until she decided to go out and control the world.
When Mr. Quick passed back the quizzes the next day, he said that the most interesting answers came from the people who had answered “Both.”
“But that wasn’t an option!” Will blurted out. He started to raise his hand, but Mr. Quick was in speech mode, beaming down at the high-achieving front row, who were looking primly at their papers and trying not to gloat. Will could feel the pride radiating off of them, and when Mr. Quick said, “thinking outside the box,” Will could feel the bars of the box closing in on him, penning him in with the hicks and the stoners and the mainstreamed autistic girl who sat every day in the back of the classroom gently banging her head against the wall.
“The ghosts were both real and not real,” said Mr. Quick. “The genius of the story lies in its ambiguity and its open interpretation. Literature is meant to engage the reader, not present some unassailable truth.” And so on until Will thought his head was going to explode.
“It’s only a grade,” said Mr. Quick when Will shuffled up to him after class and burst out, “But both wasn’t one of the options!”
Mr. Quick was different from the other teachers. He talked about critical thinking, and there wasn’t always a particular answer he was looking for, which was why Will thought going to English class was kind of like standing on tiptoe in a rocky boat.
“Did you learn anything?” asked Mr. Quick. “Was your mind expanded?”
“I guess so,” said Will, for he had thought about the questions all the way home.
“Isn’t learning the point?” Mr. Quick chuckled in a friendly manner, as if learning was not only the point, but also a lot of fun.
“I guess it is,” said Will. One of the things he was learning was that the choice wasn’t always between right and wrong. Another was that the all-important grading rubric was the thing that separated the college-bound from those whose only options were the munitions plant or the chicken farm or a life of petty crime.
Maggie told herself that working at the prison was better than working at the munitions plant, but by the second week, her illusions were in shreds. When she walked past the exercise yard, the prisoners whispered things at her—sexual things or half-formed words she imagined to be sexual in nature, words mixed with kissing sibilations and falsetto imitations and doglike yelps. Even if the words weren’t explicit, she knew the thoughts lurking unsaid beneath the shiny skin of the shaved skulls were.
Maggie didn’t like the inappropriate yammerings to go unanswered, but how could a woman answer a man without inviting more unwanted attention? And how could any person respond across the great divide that separated the free from the imprisoned, the explicit from the unexpressed? Any sentence she devised or uttered would have whole power structures encased in the grammar, which hinted at dense philosophies she knew nothing about, not to mention the entire history of race relations, for it only took one glance at the exercise yard to see that a disproportionate number of the inmates were dark.
Maggie held her head high and walked as if she didn’t notice the hulking presences, but was it right to pretend they didn’t exist? She tried not to swing her hips but also not to walk too tightly, which would have been an admission that they had already succeeded in drying up some of her essence.
“Don’t let it get to you,” said Lex Lexington, who was the director of corrections and whom everyone called DC.
His first assistant, a voluptuous woman named Valerie Vines, added, “You have to have a pretty thick skin around here.”
“It doesn’t bother me,” insisted Maggie, but whenever she passed the yard in the succeeding weeks, she felt as if she were walking past a long row of x-ray consciousnesses that beamed out through the chain-link fence and lit her up for all to see—not only her private parts, but the things she believed in—and not only for all to see, but for Maggie herself to be made aware of—of fears and prejudices and attitudes she didn’t know she had.
One day, one of the men pressed his face against the links and whispered, “Miss, Miss. I’m innocent.”
Maggie kept her eyes high, as if she were thinking elevated thoughts. Above the dull expanse of metal fencing, rolls of concertina wire gleamed in the sharp light, and high in the sky, a plane was writing a puffy contrail across the sky. But something in the man’s voice caught at her attention, and instead of hurrying past, she stopped and turned to face him. The prisoner was small, with a lean frame and girlish muscles. Maggie looked at the creased skin at the corners of his eyes, the flecks of dandruff in his short hair, and the speck of gold in his iris and instantly believed him.
While she pondered what to say, another man came up and leered at her. “I’m innocent too, Momma.”
And then another came, and then another, until a crowd of men jostled for position at the fence, all of them innocent, all of them clawing at one another or at the wire mesh, all of them shoving at the small man and shouting out about fabricated evidence and false prosecutions. Maggie tried to imagine what their lives were like, but she couldn’t do it. She could only stare at them, her eyes wide and her mouth open, while the concertina wire coiled above them, singing in the rising wind and glittering with the hot, high notes of the sun.
Luckily for Maggie, footsteps were approaching along the walkway that led to the office block. Cheerful voices rose in good-natured argument, breaking the spell and causing the prisoners to stop talking and to back away from the fence. A moment later, the grizzled Louis and the virile Hugo came around the corner and slapped their batons against the chain links, scattering the men like frightened pigeons and replacing the horror of the clawing clot of humanity with the horror of how easily they were cowed by uniformed authority. Maggie found herself suddenly and unexpectedly allied with the prisoners against the guards and glad to be exactly where she was to witness—well, to witness what, she couldn’t say. Tiffany was right that the inmates were needy, and now it seemed to Maggie that an unseen force had been guiding her and had purposely dropped her down just outside the chain-link fence so that she could finally do a little good.
Maggie tried to do nice things for the men she came across in the course of her duties. Some of them were longtime inmates who had earned positions of trust, and she would see them working in the gardens or re-shelving books in the prison library. In addition to joining the education initiative, one day a week she gave up her lunch hour to visit men whose families had stopped coming to see them. She would sit on a folding chair and listen to them describe a fishing hole under a cypress tree, a cabin in the woods, a favorite recipe for smoking deer. One day she baked a cake for a prisoner’s seventy-fifth birthday and held his hand as he talked longingly of a flaxen-haired wife and children who must by now be half a century old.
Valerie called her aside to say, “You can’t befriend the prisoners. You think you’re being kind, but you’re not. Listening is bad enough, but if you act like you believe them, they’ll start hounding you with all kinds of sob stories. It’s best if you can think of them as not quite human. Really, it’s the only way for any of us to survive, and by us, I mean all of us—them included.”
The education initiative consisted of a group of volunteers who worked in the prison school, where Maggie was assigned to help the prisoners on good behavior learn basic computation skills.
“They won’t forget me, will they?” asked an earnest young man who chugged his finger dutifully under the columns of figures and word problems Maggie wrote out for him to solve. The class was half over when she realized it was the young man from the exercise yard. His name was Tomás, and he had served three years of his thirty-year sentence for killing a gas station attendant with a knife.
“Of course not, Tomás. Who could forget you!”
“My family, that’s who. They live in Arizona, but I was transferred here.”
“I assume there was a good reason for that,” said Maggie.
“What is it? What’s the reason?”
“I don’t know anything about it,” said Maggie. “But people usually have a reason for doing things. Just like there’s a reason you’re in prison in the first place.”
“But I didn’t do anything,” said Tomás. “You believe that, don’t you?”
“I honestly don’t think about it. Besides, it doesn’t matter what I believe.”
“Why not? Why doesn’t it matter?”
“Because I don’t know the facts of the case and because I’m not in a position of authority.”
“If it doesn’t matter to you that I’m innocent, why would it matter to anyone? Why wouldn’t it be okay to lock up anybody for any reason, just because you wanted to?”
“But I don’t want to,” said Maggie. “Why would you think I’d want a thing like that?”
“Because…” Tomás peered at Maggie as if she was supposed to guess, but she had no idea what he was thinking.
“I would never want that,” she said. “Now, here’s one I’ll bet you can’t solve.” She wrote out a problem involving complex fractions.
“Yes, you can write in the book!” she cried when Tomás’s pencil hovered indecisively. “You see? It has your name on it—right there! Every time you come, this very same book will be yours!”
Maggie hurried across the room to erase the whiteboard, to file the attendance form, to turn on one bank of overhead lights and turn off another. One of the other inmates called out, “Over here, Miss. I have a question too!”
The men scraped their pencils against the paper. A man with a scarred face blew his nose against his arm and then wiped it on the seat of his pants. Maggie straightened the stack of notebooks belonging to the Tuesday class before glancing back to where Tomás was sitting, toiling away over his workbook, writing as neatly as he could. “Good job!” she exclaimed when she circled back to check his answers. “Four out of five correct!”
She was glad when the class was over, but the idea of innocence stayed with her. The next day she asked Valerie, “Does it ever occur to you that some of the inmates are innocent?”
“It occurs to everyone, darling. I was wondering when you were going to ask.”
“What do you do about it?”
“I said it occurs to everyone. I didn’t say they were innocent. In most cases, they’re guilty of more than what came out at their trials.”
“But most of them didn’t have trials,” said Maggie, who had started to research the criminal justice system and been shocked by what she had found. “Did you know—” she started to say, but Valerie cut her off.
“I know, I know. And if you kiss them, they turn into princes.”
“Maybe someone should kiss them then.”
“They’re guilty,” said Valerie. “Hand on heart. I wouldn’t lie.”
“But isn’t believing you without question the same thing as believing the inmates without question? Or believing…well, believing anything without looking into it for yourself?”
“That’s a little too close to the deep end for me,” said Valerie. “My motto is to keep it simple. Besides, the police don’t go around arresting people willy-nilly. Someone would have to be awful unlucky to end up here if he was innocent.”
“Yes,” said Maggie. “Someone would.”
Maggie thought of luck as a giant primordial atom that had fractured the day God made the world, unleashing particles of good and bad luck into the atmosphere where they could rain down at random, and now it occurred to her that she was sitting at a desk on the outside of the bars rather than wasting away inside of them not because she was inherently more virtuous than other people, but because she was luckier.
“Do you know why they arrested me?” asked Tomás when Maggie saw him in class the next Wednesday.
“Why no, I don’t,” replied Maggie.
“Because I ran from the police.”
“What were you running for?”
“To get away from them.”
“But why? If you hadn’t done anything, why didn’t you just say so?”
“Because…” Again Tomás peered at Maggie as if she could read his mind.
“And why did you plead guilty if you were innocent?”
“I had to plead guilty. If I didn’t, I might have gotten life.”
It was Lyle’s belief that bombs prevented bloodshed, and now that Will was backing him up, he felt more sure of it than ever. “I know that sounds like a contradiction,” he said to a co-worker named Jimmy Sweets, “but if you think about it…” His voice trailed off, not because the explanation was hard to find, but because it was obvious. If anyone would know what he was talking about, it was Jimmy, who had been a fighter pilot in Vietnam.
“We pretty much proved that in nineteen forty-five,” said Jimmy. He rolled up his sleeve to reveal a long scar. “Christmas in Hanoi,” he said.
When some metal filings flew off a carelessly operated lathe and embedded themselves in Lyle’s left biceps, he thought of it as a war wound. “I have shrapnel in my arm,” he would say after a beer or two at the Merry Maid, which is where some of the men hung out in the evenings and where Lyle had started to go with Jimmy whenever Maggie worked late or when he wanted to get away from the creeping suspicion that he and Maggie were growing apart and that the new arrangement had left him without a necessary piece of equipment, like a leg.
Jimmy and Lyle thought alike about a lot of things. “What would happen if they turned around to reload their guns, and presto! the ammo was gone,” said Jimmy. “Just frigging gone. That’s what we do. We replenish the ammo pile.”
A Merry Maid regular named Lily De Luca pushed her prom queen hair back over her shoulder to expose the fullness of her pink sweater and said, “Heck, people can convince themselves of all kinds of things.”
Lily worked as a bookkeeper at McKnight’s Chicken Farm, and despite the tight pink sweater and her breathy renditions of “Desperado,” she thought of herself as one of the guys.
“We’re not convincing ourselves, Lily,” said Jimmy.
“Become convinced, then,” said Lily. “People can become convinced.”
“We didn’t become convinced. You make it sound as if we sit around waiting for opinions to fly in and out of our heads. We always thought this way, didn’t we Lyle?”
“Yeah,” said Lily. “You were born knowing—a real know-it-all.”
“We looked at the facts and assessed them. Or is that a concept that’s too advanced for people who work with chickens all day?”
“Notice that it’s the hens that are useful,” said Lily. “Do you know what happens to the cocks?”
“I know what happens to one of them,” said Jimmy, but Lily ignored him.
“At egg farms, anyway, the roosters are suffocated or ground up live because they’re not useful. Not a use for them in the world.”
The two went on in that fashion for a while, but Lyle was happy just to sit and soak up the atmosphere: the polished bar, the crazed mirror in which he could see his new aviator glasses pushed up on top of his head, the television screen showing a mild-mannered weapons inspector getting drowned out by the talk show host, the smell of old beer, Lily’s gravelly voice, and the row of regulars with drooping, bloodshot eyes. It was a new world for Lyle, who had gone straight from camping out at the Sterlings’ dinner table to being married to Maggie. He had never been in the thick of it before, and suddenly, here he was, going mano a mano with people in a bar. Maybe he wasn’t missing a leg after all, or maybe it was growing back.
“Just after our fifth anniversary, my ex decided,” said Lily. “Does ‘decided’ work for you, Lieutenant Sweets?”
“Okay, okay,” said the bartender, butting in. “This isn’t the grammar society. What did he decide?”
“That it was a good thing to have an affair. It took the edge off, is what he thought—or at least that’s what he allowed himself to think. People don’t like to think they’re doing a bad thing—Bertie was no different from anyone else in that regard, and I guess we aren’t either.”
“Dang, Lily,” said Jimmy. “You didn’t hear a thing I said.”
“I heard you all right,” said Lily. “I guess people think what they think and come up with the reasons why after the fact.”
“That’s not what we do, is it Lyle? We’re critical thinkers. Rational man—notice how they don’t say woman, Lily? Notice how they don’t say chickens? We’re warriors in pursuit of truth.”
“We’re almost like troops ourselves,” said Lyle, flexing his muscle against the bandage just so he could feel the pain of the place where the filings went in. He was surprised to find his ideas were so fully developed and easy to express. Then he realized it wasn’t the ideas that were new, but the words, and definitely the attitude. He probably wouldn’t have said anything if Maggie had been there to finish his sentences for him—to drown him out, if he was to be honest about what she did. It was almost as if he was finally arguing with her, as if his words had developed in reaction to the words she would have said, words he could picture flying out of her mouth, slippery and persuasive, but which he didn’t agree with at all. He glared at Lily and said, “Did you ever consider that he had an affair because you were smothering him, Lily? And Jimmy’s right, we didn’t have to convince ourselves.”
“Gosh, Lyle, it’s just my opinion, that’s all. Can’t a girl have an opinion around here?”
Lyle felt kind of proud that Lily was fidgeting in her seat and looking at him as if he was a bully or something, as if he was some kind of untrained alpha dog.
When Lily left to go home, Lyle went after her, settling the aviator glasses on the bridge of his nose even though night had fallen and the dark lenses made it harder to see. He had nothing in mind but to prolong the sense of competence and belonging that had enveloped him in the bar and possibly to apologize for treating her roughly, but as he walked into the fragrant springtime air and followed Lily into a side street, the feeling turned into something new and disquieting. She walked with her head down and didn’t turn around even though Lyle’s shoes made clacking sounds on the pavement. Doesn’t she know I’m here? he wondered. A dog barked at their passing, but still she didn’t seem to notice him. She must be hard of hearing—or she was purposely ignoring him, leaving the decision to follow her entirely in his hands. Something is beginning, thought Lyle. It was like watching the first part of a movie as he settled into his seat, taking off his jacket or unwrapping his candy bar and listening half-interested/half-annoyed to the whispered conversations coming from the people around him who were still settling in too, until suddenly he was swept up in the on-screen action and hurtling with the hero toward the point of resolution or disaster.
Lily turned left on Maple and left again on Pine, where a row of two-story dwellings had been turned into apartments. Only when she was standing on the porch of a downstairs unit did she turn and say, “You might as well come in,” in a low, come-hither voice. Lyle had stopped behind a row of crape myrtle trees, still trying to decide if he was going to declare himself or walk away. Just as he was about to step forward, a tall shape detached itself from a rocker and followed Lily into the house.
Now Lyle was just as eager to remain hidden as he had been to be seen a moment earlier. He kept to the shadows as he went back up Pine to Maple, walking on the grassy verge to muffle his footsteps. To be honest, he was relieved that it wasn’t up to him after all, and he drove home newly aware of a great web of networked futures and how he could live just one of them and how that one would only be revealed slowly and how he could quickly get tangled up in an alien future merely by stepping out from behind a crape myrtle tree at exactly the wrong time.
The file room was accessed through a maze of stairs and corridors that tunneled through the hill on which the prison was set. Its only natural light came from two windows that were set too high up to see out of except by wheeling one of the access ladders to the window and climbing up the steep steps. Every time she entered the room, Maggie felt an urge to climb up and look out, but the ladders were never in the right position and some of them were missing rungs or wheels, so she never did.
On hot days, she liked to linger in the cool, dark room that smelled of concrete and dust. A central dehumidifying system worked day and night to keep the room dry, and when she closed her eyes she could turn the white-noise sound of it into the roar of a rushing river just by imagining it. Sometimes she paged at random through the files, and with the men reduced to paper abstractions, she could feel sorry for them in a way that was hard to do when she was confronted with the hissing reality of the convicts in the yard: fostered since the age of seven; history of mental illness; abused by alcoholic father; resorted to crime after dropping out of school; after being orphaned; after losing job.
The file room held the essence of the men, but not the body odor or bad teeth. Not the hopes and dreams. Some of the despair was there, though, and some of the heartbreak, so when she located Tomás’s file in a dark recess of the room, she experienced a blast of tenderness. It was only when she opened it and saw the fuzzy mug shot and fingerprints that she remembered his fawning and guile.
It was silly to think anyone knew what she was doing, but as she read, she couldn’t help sensing eyes on her—on her neck, on her back side, peering up under her skirt from beneath the ladder she had climbed to access the file or down from the dingy egg crate fixtures, as if someone had put hidden cameras in the room or opened a folder containing intimate facts about her—facts and vital statistics, but also photographs and things she didn’t want anyone to know.
But the feeling of being watched didn’t stop her from poring over Tomás’s record with the idea that she might find something that would tell her whether he was guilty or not, which in turn might tell her what her attitude toward him should be. Only when she came upon a list of the things that had been in his pockets when he was arrested (a book of matches, a dollar coin, a picture of his girl) did she think, I don’t want to know anything about Tomás. I know quite enough already! Just as she was closing the folder to return it to its slot, a sheet of paper fell to the floor. It must have been tucked up between the pages, not affixed by the two-prong binding but stuck in casually, almost as an afterthought.
The page was dated two years after Tomás had been convicted, and a penciled note was scrawled across the upper right-hand corner: Witness recants. The rest of the page contained only a short paragraph purporting to be the words of John Gill, who now claimed that he had testified against Tomás in order to reduce his own sentence, that he had no knowledge of the crime Tomás was supposed to have committed, and that he had never met Tomás or even heard of him until he was being interrogated by detectives who offered to go easy on him if he could provide information that would help them get a conviction in the murder of the gas station attendant. Gill did his best to help them, but then he had found Jesus, and Jesus would want him to tell the truth.
The file also contained the notes from the arrest. Tomás had been apprehended miles away from the scene of the crime. When the police approached, he had started to run. Two officers had chased him down and arrested him. At the time, the only thing they had charged him with was resisting an arrest that, as far as Maggie could make out, shouldn’t have happened in the first place.
Maggie glanced up at the two high windows as if they would shed light on the mystery. Then she took the file upstairs, and when Valerie went to lunch, she copied it. But she didn’t know how to get it out of the prison past Hugo and the army of guards who were entitled to pat her down or feel her up, which, according to the other female employees, often amounted to the same thing. For two days, she kept the papers in her desk, but they weren’t safe there either. The duties of the secretaries were apt to change unexpectedly, and on any given day, one or the other of them might sit at someone else’s desk. Nothing in the prison was private. It made her miss the days at the munitions plant, where she had her own locker and where one of the desk drawers came with a tiny key. While she pondered how to remove her new evidence from the prison, she made a file for a fake prisoner, whom she named Max Gray, filled it with the copies she had made, and slipped it into the “G” section in the basement room. Hide in plain sight, she told herself.
Maggie left Tomás’s name out of it when she said to Valerie, “I learned about a prisoner who is only here because he ran from the police. Does that seem right to you or not?”
“Why was he running?” asked Valerie in her weary here-we-go-again tone.
“He had every reason to run!” cried Maggie. “Look what happened to him!”
“Good lord,” said Valerie. “It makes no sense to say he was running from a thing that hadn’t even happened yet!”
“But he knew it would happen.”
“Now he’s not only innocent, but he’s some kind of a genius. Good lord, Maggie. I’m beginning to see what Misty was talking about.”
Soon after Maggie started working at the prison, Valerie had said, “You have quite a reputation. Misty Mills told me all about you.” At the time, Maggie had made a self-deprecating gesture and said, “Whatever it was, I hope it was good.” But now competing thoughts about what Misty might have said about her wrestled in her brain. Too much time had passed for her to bring it up again and ask Valerie for specifics. Besides, Maggie didn’t want to let on that there was anything to tell, which could prompt Valerie to talk to Misty and Misty to put two and two together if Winslow had let on that he was missing a document.
Instead, she approached Misty at church the next Sunday. “What did you tell Valerie about me?” she asked.
“I told her to keep an eye on you.”
Again, there were multiple interpretations. Was it a friendly gesture, or was something a little more sinister being implied?
True was standing nearby and must have sensed her hesitation, for she came over with her plate of donuts and linked her arm through Maggie’s. “Everybody knows you have a good heart,” she said.
“No doubt I do,” said Maggie. “But what does having a good heart really mean? Having a good heart is meaningless if you don’t do good things.”
“You’re kind, for one thing, and you don’t do anything bad, do you?”
“Thank you, True, but everyone does bad things. I always thought the key was for the good to outweigh the bad, but now I wonder if that’s even possible. And just try putting those people with good hearts in a difficult situation and see what they do then. What if it’s the circumstances and not the people that are bad?”
“I don’t see how circumstances can be bad,” said True. “That’s like blaming a road for having potholes.”
“But people could fix the potholes,” said Maggie. “Instead of worrying so much about whether people are good or bad, maybe we should pay more attention to changing their circumstances.”
“I thought you were against changing circumstances,” said Misty. “Don’t go to war against a dictator. Don’t try to free an oppressed people. Don’t make an omelet because you might break a few eggs.”
“Maggie doesn’t believe in eggs,” said True with a giggle. “Not if it means upsetting the chickens.”
“I’m just saying that there are plenty of people to free right here—people who have done less wrong in their lives than I have,” said Maggie a little recklessly, given the documents hidden in her drawer.
“Just so you know, this is what I warned Valerie about,” said Misty. “This is a perfect example right here.”
Lyle started taking an interest in what other people had to say on various subjects, and without Maggie with him night and day, it was as if he had an open socket that was now free for other connections. Sometimes Jimmy sat in Maggie’s old chair in the lunchroom, and for the first time since high school, Lyle was reminded of the term “best friend.” He made ball-and-chain jokes with Jimmy, and just talking about how a wife tied you down made Lyle feel kind of liberated.
In early March, Lyle towed Jimmy’s car to the shop when it broke down. A few weeks later, Jimmy used his chain saw to clear a branch that had fallen on the shed during a winter ice storm, after which Jimmy asked Lyle and Will to go fishing with him up at the lake the next day.
“They can’t,” said Maggie. “Will is taking the SAT next weekend, so he needs to study.”
“What am I going to learn in a week?” asked Will.
“That’s like saying it’s no use saving a penny,” said Maggie. “Every little bit helps.”
“Your mother’s right,” said Jimmy. “Love does much, but money does more.”
“My point was about education, not about money or love,” said Maggie.
“Anyway,” said Will. “I know all of the test-taking techniques. Mr. Quick has been drilling them into us for weeks.”
“Say, I’ve got an idea,” said Jimmy. “Will can bring his book in the car. I’ll quiz him on the way up.”
The next morning Jimmy tooted the horn when it was still dark. While Will settled into the back seat, Lyle stowed a cooler full of sandwiches and drinks in the trunk, along with the SAT review book. As they drove into the rising light, Jimmy switched on the radio looking for the top-of-the-hour news and weather. “They do the weather last,” he said.
Just over half of the thirty thousand additional troops being sent as part of the so-called surge have arrived in Iraq, yet political pressure at home calls for quick results and a firm pullout date, said the radio announcer.
“Firm pullout,” said Jimmy. “That’s the problem right there.” Then he called back to Will. “‘Oxymoron.’ There’s an SAT word for you.”
Poor construction has resulted in generators that don’t work, overflowing sewage systems, and unreliable distribution of food and fuel, said the radio announcer.
“We’re supposed to build their country for them?” asked Lyle.
“If you break it, you own it,” said Jimmy. “I guess that’s the thinking there.”
After the weather, Jimmy turned the radio off and said, “Okay, Will, now for the quiz like I promised your mom.”
“I might have put the review book in the trunk,” said Lyle. “If you pull over, I can get it out.” Outside the car window, the landscape heaved and buckled. Scrubby pine trees clung to the rocks and a stand of post oaks pushed out their soft new leaves.
“It’s not that kind of quiz,” said Jimmy.
“What kind of quiz is it?” asked Will.
“Multiple choice,” said Jimmy. “Here’s the first question. If you’re interested in a girl, do you (a) tell her how much you like her; (b) wait for her to make the first move; (c) invite her on a romantic date; or (d) ask out someone else?”
“Let’s see,” said Will. “I’m guessing A might scare her off, and I can eliminate D, so I’m guessing the answer is C.”
“B worked for me,” said Lyle, and Jimmy and Will laughed.
“Even if that’s what you did with Mom,” said Will, “it wouldn’t work with most girls. Most girls like to be pursued.”
“Correctamente,” said Jimmy. “And what if the girl doesn’t think she’s interested in you? In that case, you have to change her mind. So B is out, and telling her how much you like her not only scares her off, but it makes you look weak. Women like strong men. They like men who have options, not some sad sack who’s mooning after them like a sick dog. I suppose you could ask her out on a romantic date, but that isn’t as good as D.”
“No way,” said Will.
“You’ve got to establish yourself as a player. Then the women will come to you.”
“Jeezus, Jimmy. That’s not how it was with Maggie and me.”
“You have to keep them guessing. It crossed my mind that all that weirdness up at the plant is just because Maggie needs a little excitement in her life.”
“What weirdness?” asked Lyle. “All she did is quit her job.”
“But why did she quit it? That’s the buried question. People are curious if all that do-gooding talk was just a smoke screen for something else.”
“Who’s saying that?” asked Lyle. Then he added, “And what would it be a smoke screen for?”
“Forget I mentioned it. It’s just rumors, anyway. The point is that a romantic date is good too. The strategy has to fit the man. No percentage in acting like a player if you can’t pull it off.”
Lyle had never been a player, but now he wondered if he had let Maggie down in some way, if he should have worked harder to keep their romance alive. And then he wondered if she had let him down too, if they were missing a crucial part of life because of something she had done or failed to do. Nah, he told himself. It was Jimmy who was missing something. “There’s more to life than dating,” he told Jimmy. “You’d figure that out if you had a wife and kids.”
“I won’t try to tell you your business,” said Jimmy. “But Will here has a chance to learn from a master.”
“A divorced master.” Lyle laughed before turning in his seat to look at Will. “Consider the source, son. Always consider the source when people are giving you advice.”
“Love and war,” said Jimmy. “Or, rather, love is war. Specifically, it’s maneuver warfare. You have to feint and circle, and then you overwhelm. Women like a show of force—nothing over the line, that’s not what I’m advocating. I’m just saying, who likes a pussy? Frankly, about the only thing more fun than seduction is war.”
“And fishing,” said Lyle.
“That goes without saying,” said Jimmy.
Lyle hadn’t been fishing in a long time, and now he remembered what it was like to feel at one with the world around him instead of looking on from the bleachers while other people made the plays. As a young man, he’d had a vague notion that when he was called upon to provide for a wife and family, he’d do it by casting his line out into the world and reeling whatever he caught back in. That wasn’t the way things turned out to be, though, and he’d been silly to think it. Still, he liked the way his hands knew what to do without his brain having to tell them. He liked knotting on the shiny lure and flinging it toward a far-off shore and then feeling it tug against the water and trying to spot it beneath the murky surface of the lake as he jigged it in. He settled into a soothing rhythm: the buzz of the line stripping off the reel as he flung it forward, the musical plunk when the lure hit the water, the ratcheting purr of the reel, the smooth arc of his arm and flick of his wrist for the back cast, the cool spray of drops against his skin as the lure whizzed above his head, and finally, the shooting line and agreeable plink as it hit the surface of the lake. He liked watching the water smooth over it and imagining a whole mysterious world roiling beneath the surface, filled with creatures that would live and die without knowing a thing about Lyle’s world, just the way he wouldn’t know a thing about theirs.
By April, Maggie had changed her mind about the prison, not only because the idea of helping the prisoners filled an important requirement for her new life, but also because of the adrenaline rush she experienced when she found out shocking things—that Tomás might be innocent, that profit-driven private prisons relied on a steady stream of bodies for their cells, that “growth” was an industry buzzword, that she suspected her boss was cheating on his wife.
“Do you think DC is having an affair?” she said to Valerie one day when the director was out of the office.
“What makes you say that?” asked Valerie.
“He’s been so cheerful recently, and he’s lost a bit of weight.”
“Good lord!” said Valerie. “You seem to be just as eager to convict the innocent as you are to let the guilty go free. That seems to be a thing with you.”
Maggie had hoped she and Valerie could be friends the way she had been friends with True and Misty, but whenever she made overtures in that direction, Valerie would find an excuse to remind her who was the first assistant to the director and who was the second. “Let’s not forget who you work for,” she said.
“I work for the director.”
“On paper, perhaps, but he hired you to help me.”
Valerie sold makeup out of her car, and as a gesture of friendship, Maggie bought a pot of eye shadow even though she worried that the makeup had been tested on defenseless rabbits. While Valerie was dabbing pastes and powders from her sample kit onto Maggie’s face and showing her the results in a handheld mirror, she chattered about the great loves of her life and running off with her current husband to Las Vegas while she was still married to someone else.
“Oh, Johnny and I are all respectable and settled now,” she said. “But we sure had some fun first. Now, tell me about all of the terrible things you’ve done.”
Maggie couldn’t think of any that would interest Valerie. She had once been spanked for losing her house key, and another time she had burned a pan of lasagna and blamed it on her sister. By far the worst thing she had ever done was to strap baby Will into his car seat and forget all about him for an entire hour one autumn afternoon. The idea that if it had been a hot summer day he would have cooked still kept her up at night, but she knew this wasn’t the kind of thing Valerie was after. She had never had an illicit rendezvous in a forest or unbuttoned her blouse behind the bleachers or engaged in heavy petting in the back row of a movie theater or been groped by a stranger in a bar or on a bus. She had never had a doomed first love. Now she knew she never would, and the thought filled her with sorrow for the dark swaths of experience she would never know.
But when she skimmed the prisoners’ files for indications of suppressed evidence or incompetent legal representation, it was as if she had circled around and was approaching the forest from the other side. Whenever she found something particularly egregious, she copied the document and slipped it into Max Gray’s file, and then her nerves would tingle and her lungs would feel as if they might collapse for all the pressure put on them by her heart. What if she was discovered? What if Valerie or DC himself walked in and caught her in the act? On those days, she would breeze through her duties as if she had taken one of the little violet pills Valerie claimed to have taken in her youth.
It seemed as if her energy and confidence was catching, for even Tomás straightened his shoulders and started to speak up in class. He didn’t seem to notice when Maggie forgot to bring him something special, just a bag of candies for the entire group. Instead of whining and looking hurt, he only inquired if she and her family were well.
“Very well, thank you,” Maggie replied, pushing away from the table rather than leaning forward as she usually did.
One day, it was Tomás who leaned forward into the vacant space and asked, “Do you have a dog?” And then he asked, “Why not?”
“No good reason,” said Maggie. “We had a big ol’ cat once, but it ran off.”
“If you had a dog, what would you name it?”
Maggie told him she neither had a dog nor wanted one, so any name she came up with on the spur of the moment wouldn’t mean anything.
“Don’t you like dogs, then?”
“I like dogs as well as I like all God’s creatures.”
“So you like me,” said Tomás.
“Of course I do!” Maggie exclaimed, but she was beginning to wonder if she did.
“If I could change into a dog and go home with you, I would. I’d do it this second. I wouldn’t even think twice.”
“No you wouldn’t,” said Maggie cautiously. She was already aware that she had begun to think of Tomás as not quite human, but this was her first inkling that he thought of himself that way. “To be perfectly honest, I don’t really like dogs,” she said.
“Go ahead, tell me to sit,” said Tomás. “Go ahead and tell me to stay.”
He was like a dog with a bone, and he wouldn’t let it drop. “I’d do it. I’d do it for you,” he said a few minutes later, but she didn’t want him to do it. It was the last thing in the world she wanted. “Just give me any command you want,” he said, loudly enough for the whole class to hear.
“You’re not a dog, Tommy!” The instant the diminutive left her lips, she wished she could take it back. A look of triumph spread over Tomás’s features, and he rocked in his chair, leering stupidly at her. All Maggie could do was repeat, “You’re not a dog, and you shouldn’t say you are.”
“But I can be loyal. I can be loyal and true.”
She told him sharply to act like an adult.
“Okay, so then I won’t be loyal if that’s what you want.”
“It’s not about what I want!” cried Maggie in exasperation. It wasn’t Tomás, she knew, but the prison. Still, it was hard to be kind to him after that.
“Well, it’s certainly not about what I want. I want to go back to my girlfriend. I want to live in a little cabin in the mountains. A little cabin with pine floors and a fireplace and maybe a river outside the door. What I want is to be free.”
“Do you Tomás? Do you really?” Maggie was leaning forward now, and Tomás was leaning back. “Then why did you wind up in prison? Why were you wandering around on the streets that day? Why weren’t you in school or at a job?”
“A job,” said Tomás. “Do you really think jobs are so easy to find?”
“And why did you get kicked out of your foster home?”
Tomás had the hangdog expression again, his eyeballs settled in their sockets, his chin tucked, his brow slightly furrowed, and a quivering half-smile tugging at his lips as if he was trying not to cry. But then a light flickered and caught behind his eyes and he said, “How did you know that? How did you know about the foster home?”
Maggie couldn’t have known unless she had read his file or asked some questions about him; either way, it was evidence that she had shown more than the usual interest in him. She ignored the question—what was there to say? Instead of answering, she strode to the front of the room, snatched up the bag of candy, and then marched up and down the rows of desks, passing it to everyone, Tomás last. By the end of the hour, she had recaptured enough of her earlier high spirits to smile and say, “If you really wanted to be free, Tomás, you’d start taking responsibility for yourself. You’d buckle down and use these sessions to pass the high school equivalency test.”
“But how did you know?” asked Tomás again, sucking his yellow teeth as if they were lumps of sticky caramel.
“I only wanted—” But then Maggie stopped herself. Why admit to anything? Why awaken in Tomás something he couldn’t have? She wondered if she was turning callous, like Valerie and the other volunteers, all of whom wore friendly masks and unwavering robotic smiles. What was she supposed to say to someone who couldn’t be free for over two decades even if he got time off for good behavior?
But she was starting with the conclusion. If Tomás was telling the truth about his innocence, it would lead to a different conclusion altogether. “Why did you run from the police, Tomás? Why in God’s name did you run?”
But Tomás was celebrating his little victory over her by smiling and drawing hearts in the margin of his book.