“The real world” some prisoners call it ironically. Some say, as our soldiers did in Vietnam, “back in the world.” Extracted from it, prisoners have a unique perspective on “the world.”
In Paul St. John’s 1994 story “Behind the Mirror’s Face” (Reading and Writing), the narrator asserts that prison marks most inmate writing, and for the worse. “A con may write fiction, but everybody will know where it comes from. His fiction wears the stink of prison for a belt. Her fiction is pregnant with loss disguised as possibility. His outlaws always get the better of a wicked status quo. Her heroines grope through a jungle of shame for their stolen womanhood, and perhaps a piece of heaven.” Certainly a portion of PEN contest entries support this charge. Every year men send pieces about the perfect crime, the foiled execution, the superhero’s ultimately satisfying revenge; and the “stink of prison” is inescapable in the uncen-sored wet dreams and virulent misogynist fantasies (sometimes merged} sent to the contest. Some of the writing by women is freighted with longing; some return relentlessly to scenes of loss and betrayal.
With a passion born of desperation, St. John’s narrator cries, “Take this goddamned place out of your art is what I am trying to tell you all.” The best writing about “the world” is neither stuck in the groove of crime-guilt-loss-revenge nor wheeling free in the fantasy of might-have-been. Not imprisoned, it yet bears the mark of the journey the prisoner has taken. Writers who have come to terms with who and where they are effect a triumph over those conditions. They use insight gained in “that goddamned place” to engage and illuminate the so-called real world outside — neither in an exculpatory nor an accusatory way, but by naming the human bonds that link us all. Thus, in “Prisons of Our World,” Allison Blake’s bid in prison gives her piercing insight into the social and psychological captivity her “free” neighbors cannot see. Robert Moriarty’s “Pilots in the War on Drugs” draws us into the romantic cockpit of perilous entrepreneur-ship and goes on to show how everything in our disingenuous war on drugs has driven pilots first to the air and, if they survive, to prison, scapegoats for a problem he can see, but the general public can’t or won’t.
The world seen through the prism of incarceration is cleansed of illusions and often startlingly unconventional. The hiphop poem by J. L. Wise Jr., “No Brownstones, Just Alleyways 5c Corner Pockets Full,” renders the cauldron of a St. Louis ghetto summer night, where lurking disaster coexists with resilient vitality. In “Americans,” Jon Schillaci celebrates our polyglot, postmodern society for its very confusions. In “For Sam Manzie,” his empathy becomes an ethical challenge to media-dulled citizens; it is the poet’s searing response to a Newsweek article about boy-killer Sam Manzie, who had himself been seduced over the Internet. “Diner at Midnight,” an Edward Hopper-like sketch by David Taber, limns a moment of failed empathy. In a retake of the diner scene in “The Film,” the protagonist willfully wipes out feeling for both waitress and himself, as he fashions himself, in a sinisterly all-American way, the hero in a typical thriller. And the late Henry Johnson, a saxophone player, offers a thrilling riff on a real murder (of jazz musician Lee Morgan by his ex-wife in Slug’s Saloon), set in a glamorized “5-Spot Cafe.”
The stink of prison is converted into a gift of pure imaginative transcendence in a sequential pair of stories by J. C. Amberchele. He traces a victim’s ongoing quest to understand and master what has happened to her. A sensitive and idiosyncratic loner, Melody hardens, after her brush with murder, into Mel, a woman driven to recover her life by reinventing it. The very creation of this remarkable figure is a gesture toward redemption, extending imaginatively as it does to the other side of crime. Mel’s preoccupation with her would-be murderer, speechless as a result of childhood trauma, makes her in some way his double, seeking a way to master, by encountering again, their shared horrific past.
Mrs. Hennessy is getting a manicure
No matter her husband loves her no more
Been vain and spoiled so long
Can’t leave these comforts now
Love is the only sacrifice it seems
Now she finds it in her dreams.
Sarah was to be a great artist
Her talents were noticed years ago
The street life smothered her dream
Now she lives in the could-have-been
Wonders each night if it should-have-been
Too afraid to think of the would-have-been.
Harry reaches for the bottle
Can’t get through the night without it
Colorful pictures dangle before him
Floating in unison with the sounds in his head
Can’t turn the music off now
It starts and stops without him.
Little Mary is hiding in the cellar
Doesn’t want her daddy to find her
Still hurting from last night’s beating
Can’t figure yet why it happened
Plans to run away as soon as she’s grown
Like Big Sister who works for Big Eddie.
We stand alone in the prison of our space.
1995, Bedford Hills Correctional Facility
Bedford Hills, New York
The brutal midday Caribbean sun beats down on the two men sweltering in their cockpit that long ago turned into an oven. Sweat drips down the captain’s chin as he patiently waits for the ground crew to finish loading his cargo. His eyes scan all quadrants of the sky, looking for unfriendly visitors. The rear cargo door slams shut with a dull thunk. The chief of his loading crew moves out to the left wing and smiles a shy grin as he passes a thumbs-up, a slight salute to the captain.
The pilot gently, smoothly pushes the throttles forward to their stops while firmly holding the brakes. His eyes make a quick pass over the engine gauges in a final check. His partner, occupying the right seat, makes a hurried, nervous sign of the cross. Glancing at him out of the corner of his eyes, the pilot cannot prevent a slight look of disdain from crossing his features.
Takeoff is always the critical point in these flights. Off to the side of the runway lie the crumpled remains of the planes that almost made it. This runway would never qualify for any I;AA safety awards. The pilot doesn’t even want to think about what happened to the crews of the mangled pieces of aluminum. He releases the brakes abruptly. Slowly, almost too slowly, the airplane starts its takeoff roll. Time seems to stretch to eternity. Rumbling and bouncing slightly, the aircraft accelerates down the narrow dirt strip hacked from a long-forgotten jungle. Infinity passes as the far end of the runway grows more distinct.
No flight manual covers takeoff in 100-degrees Fahrenheit heat with an overburdened aircraft powered by long-past-prime twin engines. The airspeed indicator limps clockwise a knot or so at a time. Flying speed may just be a few knots past eternity. Mentally the pilot prays the load is far enough forward in the cabm to still be within the aircraft flight envelope. He will know for sure in a few seconds.
As the end of the runway passes beneath the nose of the plane, he smoothly eases the yoke back. Fie rolls a smidgen of elevator trim then quickly pops the landing gear handle upward. It isn’t worth his time to snatch a quick peek at the airspeed indicator. Hither he has flying speed or not. A slight increase in drag from the gear doors open ing causes the aircraft to settle slightly.
The aircraft climbs upward a few inches at a time. As it bounces through slight turbulence, the stall warning horn bleeps its sound of terror. Flying a plane under these conditions is a lot like making love to a lady gorilla. The pilot eases his aluminum chariot into a gentle turn to the north. He sets the cowl flaps to the trail position and gently pulls the props back to climb power. Just to be safe, he turns the transponder switch to the left one more time and rechecks that the circuit breaker has been pulled. It wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense to get caught because the transponder somehow was left on.
Another planeload of drugs is on its way into the United States.
When the plane finally reaches cruising altitude cool enough to ride in comfort but low enough to evade radar, he sets the power to the maximum endurance setting. A few thousand feet below, the haze layer ever present over the ocean marks the boundary between turbulence and smooth air. The pilot turns to his still nervous assistant. “Reach in the back and see if any of the soda is still cold.” As his partner turns to the rear of the plane to complete his assignment, the pilot muses to himself. Wonder if that bozo realized how dumb it is to distract a pilot during a takeoff like that? Now and again he scans the engine gauges. The left engine runs pretty hot but at this weight it isn’t the critical engine any longer. Each engine is critical. If one quits or sputters, his aluminum butterfly will turn rapidly into a submarine. The pilot comforts himself with the thought of paper bags filled with cash. The hard work, the dangerous work has all been left behind at the jungle strip.
WANTED; PILOT — Low time okay, we train. Smoker okay; drinker okay; no medical required. We supply aircraft, fuel, some expenses. Should be able to navigate, land on remote strips. No fringe benefits; possible government supplied food, lodging, retirement. Some risk. Pay $50,000~$500,000 per trip.
Trade-A-Plane never printed this ad. It never showed up in the Miami Herald. But it’s correct. Openings exist. The ad is perhaps a little misleading. The real truth about drug smuggling is a lot like picking at an artichoke. You have to pull off a lot of cover to get to the heart.
Neither Forbes nor Fortune magazine publish any special editions about the size and extent of the illegal drug industry in the U.S. They should. If they did, the figures would show the business of selling illegal drugs to be far and away the biggest and most profitable business in the country. No one knows the total number of players, but if you estimate the employment figures for occupations we track on the “ami” side we can gauge employment totals. We have eight hundred thousand lawyers, eight hundred thousand police, six hundred thousand jailers and fifty thousand employed in the judicial system. If almost half the people imprisoned in this country were charged only with drug crimes, easily a million Americans draw legal employment strictly because of the prohibition laws. Lots more Americans sell drugs. Total employment: in the millions. The drug trade generates somewhere between $100 billion and $300 billion per year in gross revenues. Somewhere between the total sales of AT8cT, IBM, McDonnell Douglas, and the total sales of the entire auto industry.
This massive flow of illegal drugs into the U.S. continues for only one reason. It’s big business with big profits. The government refuses to admit it, but spending $50 billion a year on the “war on drugs” only makes the situation worse. Illegal drugs remain a problem primarily because someone defined them as illegal. The prohibition of drugs creates a 99 percent profit margin, encouraging people of all ages and occupations to enlist.
Wars may be hell for the victims, but they do create jobs. No one — not the dopers, certainly not the government — wants the public to recognize what really goes on behind the screen of smoke. Figures divulged by Charles B. Rangel (D), Chairman of the House Select Committee on Narcotics and Drug Abuse, suggest that in 1985, some eighteen thousand flights carrying illegal drugs entered the United States. That’s about one flight every thirty minutes of every hour, every day, every week, every month of the year. Once every twenty hours, a planeload was captured — a humiliating 3 percent of the total flights. How can a “war on drugs” be so ineffective? As Congressman Rangel said, “It is so easy to smuggle drugs into our country by air that it would take an absolute idiot to get caught.” A brief history of the drug trade may help put the picture in perspective.
Marijuana forms, and always has formed, the foundation upon which the house of drug smuggling was built. To a certain extent, the polarization of the body public caused by the seemingly endless slaughter in Vietnam played a part in the expansion of the drug trade. Young people, tired of cynical government claims of victory after bloody victory, listened to prophets like Dr. Timothy Leary. They “tuned in, turned on, and dropped out” at a record rate. If the pow-ers-that-be lied about Vietnam, was it not also possible that the government lied about the demon weed, marijuana? They tried it, liked it, and purchased record amounts.
Tractor-trailerloads by the hundreds and thousands passed from Mexico into the southern border areas of the U.S. through the late 1960s. Customs inspectors equipped with bulging wallets and very dark tinted sunglasses somehow missed most of these loads. As demand increased, a few World War II and Korean War vintage DC-4s, DC-6s, Convairs, and Martins made clandestine trips into long-abandoned Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona landing fields.
In 1970, the retail price for an ounce of grass ran about five dollars— “a nickel bag.” A plane of Iocoweed might be worth $100,000 wholesale; hardly worth risking the value of an airplane. The still minimum value of the illicit cargo demanded low-cost ground transportation. Then the federal government stepped into the act, increasing not only the profit but also the demand for drugs.
Up until 1970, drug crimes actually fell under violation of tax laws, the Harrison Tax Act of 1914 and the Marijuana Tax Act of 1938. During the campaign for governor of New York in 1966, Nelson Rockefeller began using the term “war on drugs” to great political benefit. Never one to miss a political trick, Richard Nixon pressed Congress for sweeping new drug laws initiating the concept of mandatory sentencing for what had been in the past relatively minor violations of tax laws. By 1971, Nixon had slammed the door on the trailerloads of grass. The massive flow of reefer into the border states stopped — for about three and a half seconds.
In economics as in politics, nature abhors a vacuum. As long as demand exists, supply must follow. The price of grass shot up to fifteen dollars an ounce. When first turned back at U.S. border stations, the Mexican truck drivers shrugged a sigh of resignation and headed for the nearest airport. The fledgling bands of more-or-less amateur smugglers entered what would prove to be a golden age of aviation lasting years. What had been a tiny trickle of cargo planes across the border turned into a flood. As the price of grass went up, so did the price of planes. A DC-3 cost $50,000 in 1970 and $150,000 in 1985. You could track the price of either grass or airplanes just by knowing the price of the other.
From 1971 well into the middle 1980s, much of the Mexican crop crossed the border via airmail. The sophistication of the dopers increased as the efforts of the state and federal authorities increased. Larger profits allowed new investment in the latest transportation and communication equipment. As the price of illicit drugs continued to climb, the size of an aircraft necessary to fly a profitable load decreased as well. By 1985, a $30,000 Cessna 206 could easily carry a cargo of grass worth $400,000 wholesale and an ancient DC-3, costing $150,000, could deliver a $10 million load,
Meanwhile, the increase in price of grass had attracted new growers in all the Caribbean basin countries, and the center of gravity of the drug trade had shifted gradually eastward several hundred miles. The history of drug smuggling efforts in the Caribbean closely followed the Mexican model. Rather than tractor-trailers, at first fishing trawlers, then full-size oceangoing freighters carried marijuana north from the reefer-producing countries around the Caribbean basin. By 1985, the increased Coast Guard patrolling of the few natural ocean smuggling routes put a halt to the freighterloads of Colombian weed. A few trawlers tried to pick up the slack, but suffered unacceptably high losses. As the price escalated, cargo aircraft carried an ever increasing share of the contraband haul. The cost of an aircraft could be recovered perhaps tenfold with one successful trip. Decaying, well-worn, used and abused large cargo planes flew load after load of pot until every airstrip in the Caribbean was dotted with a fleet of worn DC-3s and other cargo planes. As their presence began to draw unwanted attention, a fleet of smaller, less conspicuous Cessnas and Navajos equipped with high-performance engines and long-range tanks started to converge on every airfield in South Florida and the Bahamas.
As the drug runners became increasingly slick, well-heeled, and experienced, the nature of the business started to change. Reacting to the natural laws of supply and demand, drug traffickers and smugglers realized that aircraft capable of carrying a load of grass worth perhaps $100,000 wholesale, could carry a load of coke worth $20 million wholesale. The traffickers started carrying trickles of cocaine from Colombia and heroin from Mexico to the primary drug markets of Miami, Houston, Los Angeles, and New York. The smugglers sort of figured that they might as well be hung for sheep as for lamb. Because of its increased availability, the much more dangerous cocaine and heroin continued to drop in price, thus increasing demand. So we traded a minor marijuana problem for a major hard drug problem,
During the 1970s and well into the early 1980s, a few well-financed, well-organized groups controlled most of the flow of drugs into the United States. On a clockwork basis, the DEA or Customs would make a highly publicized bust of a “major drug-smuggling ring.” Much to their dismay, they found that every time they smashed one “drug-smuggling ring,” ten more sprang up from the remains of the group. Maintaining an accurate account of the number of “major drug-smuggling rings” busted would require IBM’s biggest and latest mainframe.
It is 1988. Dozens of flights leave Jamaica or Haiti or Belize or Cuba each day carrying planeloads of reefer. Many airdrop their loads to waiting fast boats off the coast of Florida. A few continue to make a low-level entry into the U.S. to land in Florida, Georgia, or South Carolina. The retail price of grass is up to $150 an ounce. Flocks of Cessna Turbo and Piper Senecas with up to three thousand miles in range carry paste from Bolivia and Peru to Colombia for processing into cocaine powder. Increased government intervention has only resulted in importation of far more of the truly dangerous drugs, in greater use of violence, and in runaway crime associated with drugs.
Few drug pilots make it to retirement. The chances of getting caught are slim. The chances of getting killed, whether in an accident, or by fellow drug gang members, are high indeed. Most drug dealers value pilots a little less than a good plane and little more, just a wee bit more, than a quart of lukewarm spit. Drug traffickers, those organizing smuggling attempts, are similar to every other sort of businessman. They seek minimum risk, minimum cost, and maximum profit. Pilots are viewed as rubbers — to be used and then discarded. Drug pilots are the first to be killed, the first to land in jail, the first to be snitched upon, and the very last to be paid.
The drug lords never advertise the whole truth about smuggling. For the one drug deal that succeeds out of three or four attempts, the pilot gets very well paid indeed. Sometimes. After all, anyone going to all the trouble to set up a drug deal has already broken numerous laws. Why not steal too? Who else is easier to steal from than the pilot? Who is he going to complain to?
Every smuggling strip in the Caribbean has a refuse pile nearby built from the remains of planes that “almost” made it. Every flight is flown overweight, often out of center-of-gravity limits, always right on the edge of the flying envelope, and most with submarginal equipment.
I flew in Vietnam from 1968 to 1970. I remember an area just south of the DMZ called Helicopter Valley. From a vantage point a few thousand feet in the air, you could look in any direction and see the wreckage of dozens of crashed helicopters. The thought of the hundreds of young men killed in battle over a few pockmarked hills no one really wanted anyway still leads to depression. And the ultimate crime in any pilot’s mind is breaking an airplane for no reason at all.
Colombia is worse. Jamaica is worse. Bimini Island, some forty-five miles off the coast of Florida, keeps a bulldozer permanently stationed next to the runway just to clear the wrecks of drug flights. The authorities in Bimini created a mountain of the wreckage, which serves as a constant reminder of mortality. It’s like walking into someone’s home and seeing a casket used as a dinner table.
The winding down of the war in Southeast Asia marked the transition period of drug usage for Americans. As the war shifted from a battle to keep the Viet Cong from invading Hawaii to a holding action, boted and scared American troops began to consume hard drugs as never before. The stage was set for increased drug use, a crime level never seen before in American history, and corruption in government reaching every level. Just as with every prohibition.
The two wars share more similarities than differences. Few take the time to understand how we became entrenched in either. No one even discusses how we might get out of the “war on drugs.” With both we have a history of atrocities, abuse of government power, and needless waste which goes hand in hand with all warfare. With Vietnam we destroyed the cream of one generation, with the “war on drugs” we seem destined to totally destroy generation after generation; leaving the bills for our great-grandchildren to pay.
At the start of any war it seems glorious. Maybe the good guys do wear white hats, just like on TV. Eventually, in the mud and gore of the battlefield, all uniforms tend to look alike. Nobody ever won any war. All that ever happens is that one side loses more than the other. Like all wars, this war is fought mainly by our young people: our most precious resource. Perhaps it’s time to declare a victory and go home. For our kids’ sake.
1989, Dade Work Camp
Florida City, Florida
I.
Hot bothered nights …
street corner hype &
neon signs winking to def jams’
rhythms jumping
the juke joint;
Mad Dog
T-bird
& greasy fatburger’s stench
reeks from sweaty pores
of nickel dime poolhall hustlers
busting nine-balls &
OOPS
upside the heads of
bluesed out screwballs;
where fanged flies on a mission
ignore the
ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK
signs
like kamikaze daredevils
free-basing poppies &
practicing the serious art
of hara-kiri;
a 15-story highwire act featuring
odiferous mongrels howling unmolestedly
off key
in schooiless breezeways up 14th St.
sporting flat-top fades on second grade
boys rolling dice
drunks
cursing like Popeye the Sailorman
& breaking down gats & Macs
as a skillful trade;
where cornrow-weaved
cornbread and swine fed
bow-bellied hoochies
double-dutch into labor.
Salvation dies too many deaths
in this palefaceless metro
where first-of-the-month checks
arrive a little & too late again
straight shooters
“jingle it, baby .. .”
& face-cracking Wet Willies*
flood Afrika’s blood.
II.
The buck stops here
headlining Monday’s toilet paper
after rendezvous in pissy gangways
between swingblade strawberries*
doing their best James Cagney
impersonations &
oversexed
overweight
outraged corporate America
(The Brave?)
ganked
stunted
jacked and permanently dissed
screaming for mercy
911
(it’s a joke in our town!) frigid wives
ł “Face-cracking Wet Willies” are More cigarettes laced with PCP, which — if “good” — cause a grimace.
ł A “strawberry” is a woman who will do anything for a hit of crack, including selling her body. (JLW Jr.)
& the AIDS hotline;
where storefront philanderers
preach 666 Hail Marys
in atonement for satisfying sins
with an idea when the indoctrination
began
but none of where hell or this alleyway
end
determined to discover brownstones
still
in corner pockets full.
Hot bothered nights …
but unstrange bedfellows.
1994, Potosi Correctional Center
Mineral Point, Missouri
Mr. Srinivasan
instructs us to call him “Babu”
because no one can say
his name —
perverted letters mate
unnaturally, heretic
bloodlines (sex in high school
was like sports: we did our
best and hoped someone
important saw). This country
Absorbs into its blondness
darkness and we began
in darkness —
I wonder how a Hindu
falls in love in Texas.
I wonder where Ann Nguyen went
(who threw her books into my
hands and knew English
enough to say, “You are my
boyfriend,” no matter what
I thought) —
who kissed engulhngly yet was
so tiny her ring sat only
a crown on my fingertip —
I thought I was the most
powerful chain-link boy
in school.
Mr. Srinivasan
was born in Rusk (a tiny
Texas town which still
dreams of the Republic)
and speaks only English.
His drawl is John Wayne or
Ross Perot and once in
Texas cows were sacred;
once in high school a girl
from Vietnam was more
beautiful than America.
1998, Ramsey I Unit, TDCJ-ID
Rosharon, Texas
Who, at fifteen, raped and killed a boy
Rattled in daysleepd reams the taste of space
Filled with www.com and photographs
Of himself caressed by strangers.
The lady says (the lady with the hat
That says, “I am a lady,1’) Sam Manzie
Should be chained or photocopied,
Paper clipped to hell Still I think
Of your fingers and think someone
Should hold your hand
(should hold you down:
Did you think he would rise after the weekend
And harrow hel) to retrieve you?) but they
Reappear. They rise and sign autographs, give cred
To James Cameron’s Hollywood for their
Annual resurrection
(was there something beautiful
Inside a teenage softskincandywrapper,
Art in smashed pumpkins?) or maybe he was
Much too boylike.you for you? An instant
Eternal brief while (you felt) what about
How I or you trembled (what about
How you or I felt (rell me how we felt
And I know what the world lost. Not one child.
Two. Everyone is dead, and everything
Is lost, and everywhere is hell, and I
Blame wherethehellwaslanyway lor the lady
Who says (yet has never deatbtrembled) we should
Rather kill you than allow someone to hold
Your vacant palm, your curl-fingered hand.
1998, Ramsey I Unit, JDCI ID
Rosharon, Texas
Buildings rise around the waitress
that are of concrete and metal shadow, dark
beyond the silver black of night.
There is a moon.
Lunar mountains
shine on the jukebox
that hangs over my left elbow.
The moon begs a song through newspaper print
after a murder of the previous
night. I insert no spare quarter.
I cannot decide whether I am
like Hamlet; or the city is a parasite.
I note my own insignificance, drag on a cigarette.
The waitress bends over a Spanish omelette,
white American cheese, toast. The plate
clatters like death. I drink coffee
I shake ketchup onto eggs
though I notice the absurdity of my elbow
pumping tomato paste Eucharist.
I know the waitress: curled blond hair,
blue eyes of a Wonder Bread billboard
faded image of an industrial era.
When we were fourteen we kissed in an antiseptic high school corridor.
Anna had an abortion last week.
I exhibit no sign
of how deeply
someone has reached into her soul:
I fear what
I may see, what I may feel.
1997, Massachusetts Correctional Facility-Norfolk
Norfolk, Massachusetts
The highway lures me out of my house
at night, when lead-white faces mock
a black moon.
I get into an Oldsmobile.
Red lights blink,
I push in a tape
and follow the words of a song,
Nothing is real,
I look at my watch.
10:30 P.M. E.S.T.
I slant in my seat
an imitation of a cinema actor,
There is a gun under my front seat.
• • •
I pull into a diner
in the middle of Connecticut.
I order eggs and bacon.
I drink coffee.
The waitress is a cheap actress.
I ignore her.
She may be thinking of her tip
or she may not care.
It doesn’t matter.
She is air.
I eat.
I put on a lead-white face.
Do you want anything else?
No.
My life is a cinema cliche.
* * *
I finish my second cup of coffee
and I am on the verge
of philosophical observation.
Highway lights pass.
It is 1:00 A.M.
Police follow me.
I am an owl.
Without doubt I am analytical.
I possess an introspective
bent.
I grimace through a lead-white face.
The lights of New York City
flash onto my windshield.
I am in a film
There is a gun under my front seat.
This is the part
where the criminal hero …
1997, Massachusetts Correctional Facility-Norfolk
Norfolk, Massachusetts
for Lee Morgan
Your latest lover sits at my table,
and I snap open my purse
as her lips smudge
the rim of her champagne glass red.
Your gun fills my palm
like something sexual
while all the nights I spent alone
beat black-wings inside my chest.
You raise your trumpet,
the stage lights shimmer like stars
while I watch you from the shadows
in the 5-Spot Cafe, damp hands
balled into trembling fists.
I schemed for days, imagining ways
to win you back, like the time
I met you at our apartment door
naked but for the red rose
in my hair. Once you even cried
on my shoulder, and I glowed inside
until the phone rang and you
rushed out the door, lies falling
from your lips like fruit.
I close my purse.
Halfway through your new arrangement
I sashay past tables with candles
in tinted red glasses, the slip of satin
like a cool hand against my back.
My anger like steam
knocking against pipes as I brush the shoulder
of a man leaning back in his seat,
eyes closed like a lover
waiting to be kissed.
I beg his pardon, step gingerly
past your lover nearer the stage.
Our eyes meet, and for a moment
I almost lose it, remembering you
hard and strong in my arms, black hair
slicked back like a silk cap
tight against your skull. But when
you turn away it’s like steam
filling this room so full, the lights
dim, and each riff burns like the iron
you held near my face the night we fought
about a motel room receipt
I found balled up in your pants pocket.
Tonight I ride with you to the last measure,
where the music is pure, where applause
retards to a heartbeat, and
your lover calls out, “play it sweet
for me baby,” and I bring the crowd
to their feet — with a single,
well-aimed shot
I compose my own arrangement
all over the white brick wall.
1989, Sing Sing Correctional Facility
Ossining, New York
Mel is standing on the curb in front of her father’s house, digging in her knapsack lor the key and wondering how she could have misplaced it, or why she has misplaced it, wondering if maybe she has misplaced it on purpose. She is aware of the dream and thinking: I’ll be a sibyl, a seeress, I’ll see halos and auras, III predict the future …
It is noon and the cab has just dropped her off and she’s had a headache since this morning when she led Omaha.
“Til find the keys,” she says out loud, surprising herself with her sarcasm … and immediately remembers an inside pocket on her windbreaker.
The house has been empty for a year. It is brick and stone, three stories under a red tile roof. 1 here are turrets at the front corners, three-quarter round with bay windows on all floors, medieval strue tures that to Mel have always seemed an architectural afterthought. Out: front on the lawn is the stocky red pimpcr her father planted before she was born, and at the curb, towering over the street, the roots so effortlessly heaving the pavement aside, is the ancient sycamore that has been around longer than the houses on the block. The hedge separating the yard from the neighbor’s is frantic with growth, hut the lawn has been mowed — the real estate company has seen to that — although the first thing Mel noticed from the taxi was that no one had taken down the blue window awnings this past winter, and now they look faded and sad. Sad windows and sad gray walls, the welcome mat missing from the front steps, ivy gone wild and snagging the rain gutters, the chimney fascia spilling its rust down the wall overlooking the driveway, I fer lather’s castle, his crumbling fortress in the middle of die block.
On the porch, knapsack harassing her shoulder, Mel fingers the key from her jacket and aims it at the lock, noticing as she does that her hand is trembling.
She is here to meet the woman from i he real estate company. There is a buyer lor the house, and a good offer. Paul, Mel’s brother in Omaha — where Mel has spent the last year recovering — has come to Denver twice this month to arrange the sale, and actually Met didn’t have to return. But the deal didn’t include the furniture, room after crowded room of turn-of-century tables and chairs, antique wall hangings and rugs, thousands of knickknacks — and ostensibly Mel has come for this: to sell or store the furniture, or as she told Paul before she left, to check her room one final time, to see if there is anything she wants to keep.
Mel closes the door behind her but then swings it open again because the air in the hallway is stale. She eases her knapsack to the floor and looks down the length of the narrow room. To Mel the hall has always been the unfriendliest room in the house, a dim passageway of hardwood floors and empty walls, so unlike the other rooms. There are heavy sliding doors, closed now, to the parlor on the left and the dining room on the right, and farther along there are single doors to the den and to the closets under the stairwell. Toward the rear of the house is an entryway to the kitchen, and next to it, another door — the service stairs, a metal spiral in a narrow shaft from basement to roof.
Which was how he got to them, so quietly, she and her father light sleepers but never hearing the familiar creak of the staircase in the hall, the groan of the wooden banister , . .
… She awoke with the barrel of the gun pushed between her lips, icy metal against her teeth, the reading lamp turned above her and shining in her eyes. He wore a ski mask, a ratty blue parka that rustled as he moved. All she could think was that she was naked beneath the covers. He drew the gun from her mouth and pointed it at her head and with the other hand shoved a note in her face — so as not to reveal his voice? she wondered, squinting, trying hard to focus on the words. The safe, it said. Where was the safe, and what was the combination?
But there was no safe. She hesitated, and then couldn’t speak. He motioned for her to sit up. She did, spilling the covers to her lap. Curiously, she wasn’t afraid. She felt her heart race, felt her skin turn cold; her eyes stung in the brightness of the bulb and what puzzled her was that she knew this man would probably kill her — and yet she wasn’t afraid, as if in her mind there wasn’t room or even time enough for fear.
He took her arm and pulled her from the bed, spun her around, and jammed the gun in her hair — her wild hair, springy curls out past her shoulders — and pushed her to her father’s room down the hall …
Mel opens the sliding doors to the dining room. Nothing has changed. The walls are cluttered with eighteenth-century engravings and elaborately framed mirrors. The Queen Anne dining set, the china case, look recently polished; the crystal glassware and figural silver are displayed exactly as they have always been.
She walks through and into the kitchen. The refrigerator door is open; the light is off. She closes the door and lifts the phone off the wall and holds it to her ear, knowing there will be no dial tone. Except for her bedroom, this was her favorite part of the house, here at the oak table in the breakfast nook where she’d read or do her homework, the afternoon sunlight angling through the bay windows. By the time she was twelve, she was mostly alone here. Her father could no longer afford the maid, and by then her brother had left home permanently. And so after school she would bring her books to the table by the window, and then with cookies or maybe a cake in the oven she would dream up salads or fix casseroles that too often her father wouldn’t show up to eat, but even so, the idea of something ready on the stove or warm in the oven was a comfort to her.
Mel hangs up the phone and, returning to the hallway, hears a car pull up out front — and knows it is Beth, the real estate lady who is selling the house. This wasn’t Mel’s idea. It was Paul who had called Beth from the airport. But then in a way it was Mel’s idea because it was she who had insisted on coming back, and selling or storing the furniture was the handy excuse, something Paul would understand. Paul who had ignored her all her life and who now acted as though he needed her, as though he needed to protect her.
Mel walks to the front door. Beth steps out of her shiny car and looks up at the giant tree spreading high above her, and somehow at that instant Mel realizes that the new owners, whoever they are, will cut it down, will decide it is too old and too big for the neighborhood.
“Such a lovely tree,” Beth calls from the curb. She wears a white suit with low heels to match, a floppy spring hat that Mei thinks is silly. Approaching the porch she says, “I hope it survives. You know, this Dutch elm disease is rampant here.”
“It’s a sycamore,” Mel says, and Beth shrugs and flips a hand in the air as if to say: Sycamore, elm, what’s the difference?
Beth is a retired housewife, in her late forties, Mel decides. Her nose is too long and her mouth too wide but other than that she is attractive in a motherly way. Paul has been in touch with her since last fall, ever since he and Mel agreed to sell the house. Paul, at twenty-nine, is ten years older than Mel; he is a dentist in Omaha where he lives in a boxy suburban neighborhood and cares for his two young sons, a result of a recent divorce. For the past eleven months, ever since she left the hospital, Mei has been recovering at Paul’s, taking care of the boys when she was able. Paul has made trips to Denver about the house, but Mel couldn’t return, not until she was ready. And then one night when he was away she dreamed a crazy dream, a dream similar to the recurring nightmare but different because this time she knew she was dreaming; like a spectator at a film, she saw herself return to her father’s house, watched as she moved from room to room reliving the horror of that night — and abruptly the dream shifted to a distant future in which she had arrived at an unknown faraway place, and there in her mind had grown numb and therefore comfortable and as a bonus had acquired these strange mental powers — she could read people’s auras, she could see their lives unfolding, minute by minute — a future in which she existed in the same spatial dimensions as everyone else and yet in a time slightly ahead, so that even her own days were predictable … a future also in which the nightmare of the past had ended, had vanished as, in a sense, she herself had vanished.
… The man snapped the overhead light on, and her father sat up as they entered the room. He sat up blinking, and there wasn’t much else he could do, not with the gun at her head, naked as she was and with the man gripping her neck from behind. The man pulled her father out of bed, motioned for them to lie on the floor, face down. He grabbed a blanket and tossed it over her, a thing that surprised her, but then he knelt above her and yanked the blanket down and forced her hands behind her back where he taped her wrists, moved to her ankles and taped them also, then started on her father. And her father kept asking, Why? and Who was he? and What did he want? over and over, with the tape tearing, screeching in Melody’s ear. But the answer when it came was only the note, this time held low to her father’s eyes. Where was the safe? What was the combination?
But there was no safe. Her father told him: There never was a safe, not in this house. On the dresser — take the wallet, the watch — take the TV, anything. Just don’t hurt them.
And Melody kept thinking: He won’t hurt us, he only wants money, he’ll take the wallet and leave …
He began with the paintings on the wall, tore them off one by one and threw them to the floor, then moved to the closet, ripped the clothes out and pulled all the boxes off the shelves. No safe. He stopped, chest heaving, and Melody could feel his anger, could almost see the air around him boil with rage. He stood above them for a moment, then suddenly grabbed her father by the hair and pressed the gun to his forehead … and Melody waited, wanting desperately to be afraid, wanting fear to release her, to feel it as a poison in her blood, pumping into her mind, pumping everywhere at once …
There was a life insurance policy, a few dollars in a checking account, a trust fund for her college tuition. Paul sold the car and gave her half the money, but she gave it back as monthly rent — even after the hospital bill, her half of the insurance policy and the money from the house would be more than enough.
As for the trust fund, her father had never mentioned it. But that was like him, not to tell her. Losing his wife when Mel was born, silent and brooding, a tall man with sunken eyes and permanently hunched shoulders, he rarely told her anything: There were entire days when he didn’t speak to her, so that she grew up trying too hard, hoping to replace not only his loss but her own. There were financial problems. Eventually he sold the printing company that had been his grandfather’s and his father’s and took a job in the press room at the Denver Post. And Mel had finished high school and had attended her graduation ceremony alone, had spent a year after that working odd jobs and hanging around the library downtown — and he hadn’t said a thing about a trust fund.
“You know what I like about this place?” Beth says. “It’s so quiet.” She pats the wall next to the front door. “It’s so solid.”
Mel considers smiling but isn’t sure it won’t come out as a frown. Although Beth is right: The house is quiet. Mel’s paternal grandparents lived and died here before she was born; they were, as her mother and her mother’s parents were, more of the silent family she never knew. Growing up, Mel embraced the silence, took it for her own, but Paul came up angry, hating this house and leaving as soon as he could. Now Mel isn’t sure what to think — this was never a happy place, never a place for a child, really, but it is all she knows. And now she must forget it — she must walk through it, room by room, erasing it from her mind.
She slides open the doors to the parlor. The furniture is untouched — the sofa and loveseat by the fireplace, the octagonal table in the turret bay, the Estey pump organ against the wall. There are too many tables: coffee tables and end tables and corner tables, all busy with knickknacks that have never meant a thing to her but to which she now feels an unwelcome attachment, knowing they are hers to dispose of.
“Try the sofa by the fireplace,” she says to Beth. She is aware of having acquired a short fuse: since the hospital she has found it difficult to listen to her brother complain about his divorce, and today in the taxi on the way from the airport she snapped at the driver when he tried his small talk. Mel doesn’t wish to be rude to Beth, but neither does she feel a need to explain — it is simply that she must do this alone. “I’ll be back,” she says.
She climbs the stairs to the second floor, crosses the balcony, and enters her bedroom. The room is sunny; the drapes have been drawn from the window overlooking the backyard, probably by her brother on his recent visit. Here, there is a thin layer of dust over everything: the massive headboard on the bed, the heavy walnut dresser with the teardrop pulls, the books piled on her desk and floor — it was never a girl’s room, never frilly, although when she was six her father relented and exchanged the antique wallpaper for Pooh characters: Owl and Eeyore and Christopher Robin, Pooh and Piglet following in circles the multiplying tracks of a Woozle — the wallpaper that seems faded and brittle now, about to peel from the walls.
She stops at the window. The lawn in the backyard is patchy, blemished with debris brought by the winter wind, and the dogwood tree, bursting with hundreds of clusters of brilliant white flowers, seems delirious, abandoned to nature. Beyond the fence there is the wide expanse of the neighbor’s lawn, and across the street, the country club where as a child she would spend her weekends — alone on winter Sundays she would test the frozen creek, hike the empty golf course that became her private estate; the trees she would climb were make-believe houses where she’d perch in her heavy coat like a silent bird, watching frosted cars glide by on a nearby avenue. She was a tomboy; she was more a boy than a girl; she thought of herself as odd and graceless and at fault, and with her brother so much older and her father hardly home even when he was, there was no one to tell her different.
Mel turns and leaves the bedroom but stops just outside the door. She is suddenly lightheaded, dizzy. She is fine, she tells herself—she has come this far; she can go on. She takes a breath and steadies herself with a hand against the wall, walks to her brother’s room and looks in, then continues around the stairwell toward her father’s room. This is why she has returned — she has forced herself to this room because she believes in the dream; she has rehearsed this a hundred times in her mind; she is convinced she can walk in and walk out and in that fleeting turn bring it all back — everything: the senselessness of it, the horror, the fear that would never come. And then walk out and forget it, forget this room altogether … or perhaps remember it as it had always been so perfectly ordinary — his robe hanging on the back of the closet door, the collection of antique paperweights on the roll-top desk, the wisteria lamp in the corner with the tilted shade, the humid oversweet odor of pipe tobacco and cologne permeating everything — the Oriental rug faded where the afternoon sun burns through the tall windows … but there on the rug is another faded area, a large oval where someone has scrubbed, where a stain has been lifted by hard work and whatever chemicals …
… He walked out. He tucked the gun in his pocket and looked around the room as though deciding what to do or what to take, glared at them as if to say, You think I came for your wallet, old man? You think I came for the fucking TV?
And walked out. She heard him in her brother’s room, knocking pictures off the wall, toppling the dresser. Then in her room, hangers springing from the closet, drawers yanked open and clattering to the floor. He ran downstairs, and she heard him in the parlor, furniture crashing, glass breaking. She tried twisting her arms to loosen the tape, tried slipping a hand out but couldn’t. Her father lay next to her — if she could inch down, get to his wrists, she could chew the tape and free his hands. She rolled to her side, told her father what she was doing, expecting, hoping he would say Yes, hurry … but all he could say was Why? — Why was this happening to them?
Melody in her bathrobe, tugging her father through the snow in the backyard, over the fence and into the darkness of the neighbor’s yard — she saw this in her mind: tiptoeing to her room for her bathrobe, the two of them hurrying down the service stairs to the rear door and out into the night. .. but the man returned before she could finish with the tape at her father’s wrists; he walked in as she was lifting her head, a long strand in her mouth.
He did not hit her. He simply pulled her by the hair, back to where she’d been. And then leaned over them, his breath quick and labored now, nearly a wheeze, and held the note where they both could read it, held it with a young and shaky hand, tapping it with the barrel of the gun. And her father said, “Dammit, there is no safe. Can’t you hear? There is no safe.” And the man shot him. In a clap of thunder she saw her father bounce once and then leak his life onto the rug through a ragged opening in his head. And the last thing she felt was the gun in her hair, and a roar, not a sound but a pressure, a rushing as of wind in a tunnel, going away …
* * *
It is too much for hen With no warning she begins to retch. She hurries out the door and down the hall to the bathroom, reaches the toilet but can’t throw up. She waits but nothing happens. She considers pushing a finger down her throat but can’t do that either. This is how it has been since the hospital, this sense of choking, of something there but not there, something not in her throat but hidden in the damage at the base of her skull, poised as if to ambush her. And it will not come, it will not leave her.
She moves to the sink, and realizes — standing now at the mirror, seeing a face that is not her present face but a face from the future — that the dream was a sham, a hoax, that she was a fool to think she could walk in and walk out and rid herself of the past. She could almost laugh. She ts both the joke and the joker, the dreamer and the dream itself. Oh, but the fear will come — she knows this now, she can see it in her eyes ~~ it will leak from her slowly, drop by drop, year after year, as tears, blood from a wound that will never heal.
She splashes water on her face, hoping to shrink the endlessness of it all. She must grow her hair back, she thinks, her wild hair that saved her — so that he thought he’d shot her in the center of the head when in fact the bullet had only grazed her; she had turned to her father at that instant, turned her crown of curls out past her shoulders and halfway down her back — and he’d shot her hair instead.
Hair chat is gone now, barely long enough 10 cover the crease in her skull. She had been a month in the hospital, and then the long, slow recovery at her brother’s in Omaha. The police had arrested the man that same night, in another house a block away ~~ a drug addict, or a mental patient, she never did get it straight. She had come to in a haze ot pain, the left side of her face sinking in a pool of blood ~— hers and her father’s, the sickening, fruity smell of it in her throat ~— and had pushed herself across the floor, then back with the telephone cord in her mouth until the old metal phone toppled from the desk. And later, out of the hospital and at her brother’s house, the nightmares began: a man in a ski mask stalking her, catching her, the gun tangled in her hair™ every night she’d wake up screaming, and her brother at first croubled, even frightened, and then later impatient, condescending, would tell her it was okay, everything was okay now, the man was in prison. As if that were enough,
Mel leaves the bathroom, She feels heavy; the gray light in the upstairs hall seems to press against her; the air settles in her lungs like ash. She forces herself past the bedrooms and down the stairs, and when she enters the living room Beth gets off the couch. The front door is still open, and now a chill is added to the gloomy silence of the house.
“There’s nothing I want here,” Mel says, and Beth blinks, looks around at the furniture and then touches the arm of the couch.
“This is very old.”
“Yes, it’s stuffed with horsehair,” Mel says, impatient now. “And that’s marble on the tables, and the chairs are antiques. So is the rug.”
“Worth a fortune,” Beth says, almost dreamily.
“Then maybe you should sell it for a fortune —”
Mel is about to add: And buy yourself a new hat … and can think of a dozen other phrases too cruel to be witty … but she is aware of an almost visible warmth from Beth, a concern that has nothing to do with the house.
Beth hesitates, and clears her throat. “Honey, all your books, all your clothes in your room. You don’t want any of it?”
Suddenly Mel wants out. Out of the house, out of the city. She’s had this idea about hitchhiking to Alaska, working construction or crewing a fishing boat, something hard and out of doors. Something far away.
“Are there papers to sign?”
Beth smiles. “Your brother took care of that. We’re set to close in a month.”
Mel lifts her knapsack by the strap, slings it over her shoulder. “Then can you give me a ride? To the freeway downtown?”
“Honey, of course.” Beth stares toward her but stops abruptly when Mel turns. From behind Mel she says, “But why don’t we have lunch at Andre’s first? Or there’s this cute little place on the downtown mall.”
Mel can’t answer. The idea of lunch is so absurd she feels like crying. She steps outside onto the porch. The sun winks through the upper branches of the sycamore in a way that is familiar. When she was small, five or six, she carried a serving dish from the dining room and filled it with dirt from around the rhododendrons in the front yard. Her father spanked her, struck her for the first time. And then on the porch he picked her up, and in a rare show of affection, and with the sun over his shoulder winking rainbows through her tears, he kissed her cheek and told her he was sorry.
Mel hands Beth the key and Beth locks the front door. The fragmented light has a hypnotic effect, and as they walk to the car Mel sees too clearly what will happen to the old sycamore — she sees them cutting it, limb by limb, grinding the branches in one of those infernal machines, the sawdust swirling high into the summer sky.
Beth opens the car door for Mel and says, “Can’t I take you to a friend’s place? Or a hotel? Listen, hon, I don’t have to return to the office. You could come out to Cherry Hills. The last of my daughters is in college and my husband and I are all alone with too many empty rooms. It’s such a lovely house, with a magnificent yard, with dogwood and cherry trees, and, oh, the flower garden, it’s the perfect time of year .,. you can stay, you know, we’d love to have you. It would be a nice place to relax.”
“No thanks,” Mel says, dropping herself on the front seat of Beth’s car and shifting her knapsack to her lap, hugging it to her chest as a girl would hug a doll. Because she doesn’t feel like relaxing. What she feels like is running. Running and running until she runs out of herself. What she feels like is disappearing, though she knows it wouldn’t help. What she really feels like is killing someone.
1992, Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility
Canon City, Colorado
It is late winter … sun high in a pale blue sky, the air sharp with the scent of pine from the foothills to the west. Mel has been driving for three hours, from her home on the western slope to this city on the edge of the plains where the mountains have become wrinkled fingers stretching eastward, dry escarpments hugging the river, and where the highway no longer meanders with the lay of the valley but abruptly widens to become a busy thoroughfare into town — immediately to the left is the prison: high stone walls and tin-roofed guard towers, chain-link fences topped with concertina wire, a parking lot out front.
She locks the car door. It is Saturday, visiting day, nearly noon, and there are plenty of vehicles in the lot. She is here to meet a man she does not know, a prisoner now for thirteen years. She does not know this man and yet she has carried the memory of his hooded face, his youthful and powerful hands, since the night he shot her father, shot her also, left her for dead. And she has carried the memory all these years, like the still tender scar at the base of her skull.
Mel fancies herself a vagabond, and rightfully so. She is also a writer, but of this she must frequently remind herself, even though she has had numerous articles and even a book published, with another on the way. It is that travel has been her release and writing her anchor, and with her fears, somehow she has equated entrapment with success, freedom with travel. Although now, for the first time in thirteen years, she has settled into one place in one town for more than a month, and for the first time ever she is living with a man, someone she met while hitchhiking in Mexico — his name is Hank and he is as carefree as she is not; he is a wanderer also but not out of need; he is currently a ski instructor and a bartender at a resort near where they live, and he is in love with her. And this is why she is here — now that she has a home she is aware of a connection to this prison, to the man who possesses in his crime the greater part of her.
There is a solitary tower out front, a gate through a high fence and a walkway leading to a sixties-modern building fronting the stone wall. Mel enters the building via glass doors and stops at a desk where a uniformed officer hands her a form to read — visiting rules — and another to fill out: Name, Address, Driver’s license number, Name and number of inmate, Relation to inmate. She does this quickly and hands it along with her driver’s license to the officer. She knows the inmate’s name — Alex Pitts — but because she does not know his penitentiary number the officer must find it on a list. As to “Relation,” she has written: Friend.
Mel did not plan this visit. She is not sure what will happen. She knows that Alex Pitts is here — her brother in Omaha has checked every year for thirteen years to make certain — but she does not know if he has a family now, a wife or a girlfriend who visits him. She knows only that he was young when he arrived — eighteen, a year younger than she — and that he was a drug addict, a homeless boy with a record for burglary since he was ten,
She signs a waiver to be strip-searched, which a female officer tells her is a formality and to which she will probably not have to submit. Mel wears no jewelry and has never carried a purse, so there is nothing but her wallet to place in a nearby locker. She is dressed according to the rules — no short skirt or dress (Mel has not worn a dress in twenty years, since she was twelve and her father had to beg her to attend an Easter party with him}, no tight or see-through blouses, no revealing sweaters —she wears what she usually wears: sweatshirt and jeans and sneakers, a jacket with pockets for her notebooks and pens, empty now. The guard pats her down and assists her through a metal detector, and suddenly she is on the other side of a steel door and into a barred sally port — inside the prison now — through another door and into a wide, rectangular room with cinder-block walls and a linoleum floor, square pillars supporting a cement ceiling, thirty or forty metal tables surrounded by folding chairs, a row of vending machines along one wall and an old wooden desk in the corner, another uniformed guard behind it.
There are other people in the room — families, women alone — but no inmates, although Mel is not sure what an inmate looks like, what sort of outfit he wears. She finds an empty table against the wall, eases herself onto the chair, and scans the room. It is curious — she has never seen the races so thoroughly mixed — whites and blacks and His panics not in groups but scattered here and there in the room and even mingling at a row of tables that have been pushed together — even the waiting areas of bus and train stations, all the airports she has been in, are not like this.
A woman with yellow, strawlike hair and dreadfully thin arms, sitting alone at the next table, smiles tentatively at Mel and lifts a hand, wiggles her fingers in a halfhearted wave. “I haven’t seen you before,” she says, her face the face of a sad clown, pouty red lips and chalky skin, dark circles like sinkholes around her languid brown eyes. “Did you bring quarters? You know, you can have quarters in here, for the machines.” She opens her other hand and reveals a roll of coins. “I couldn’t stand it here without a pop or a candy bar or something.”
Mel nods and shrugs and can’t think of anything to say. She has not brought quarters; nor does she drink pop or eat candy. Immediately the woman with straw hair is up and around her table and over to Mel’s, where she sits across from her. “You here to see your father?” she says,
“My father?”
“Well, it can’t be your husband or your brother, you’re too young. Haven’t you heard? This is Old Max. They moved the youngsters out to the new prisons and brought the old-timers here, all the cripples and sick people because this is where the hospital is. Isn’t that the perfect name … Old Max?” She lifts an eyebrow. “You really are new here. You wanna Coke or something?”
Mel is about to reply but the woman jumps up again. “Be back,” she sings, heading for the vending machines. Normally Mel would tell this woman who is probably younger than she is and who hasn’t the courtesy to wait for an answer — that she wants to be alone, that no, she is not here to visit her father and for that matter it is none of her business, and anyway a Coke is about the last thing she needs right now — but the woman, as disheveled as she is in her shabby pink blouse and threadbare jeans and that crazy broom of yellow hair, has about her a toast-colored light, a pulsing aura of youthful warmth that follows her like a mist.
It is this that Mel sees. The year of recovery after the crime she had had a dream — that in removing herself from the pain she would sense what others could not, she would see differently; she would come to know and to trust people by their light. And slowly, over the years, with practice, the dream came true. So that what began as a nightmare has become for her not only a shield but a treasured advantage, a glimpse into the future, a head start.
It is a willful act, this seeing — she must allow her eyes to drift out of focus; it is more a sensing, although the qualities of vision are there: color, shape, density, the aspects of movement. And it is a talent she dares not reveal — Hank is the only one who knows — for to tell someone, she is certain, is to bring the sort of attention she most wants to avoid,
The woman returns towing her blob of tawny light; she carries two cans of cola that appear as dark holes in her glowing hands. She sits and tells Mel her name is Angie and that, of course, she is here to visit her father … as she is every weekend, three years now, back and forth from Colorado Springs — God, the price of gas is killing her! and now this morning the car wouldn’t start and she had to take a bus, a bus mind you, and how will she get back? there are no buses until tonight and she’ll have to leave in an hour, probably have to hitchhike — “say, you wouldn’t be heading that way, would you? I could wait if you are!” , . . abruptly she tilts the can to her mouth and gulps soda, eying Mel. When she finishes, she wipes her mouth and smiles.
“Why is he here?” Mel says. “Your father.”
“Because I put him here.”
Mel waits in the silence that follows. She knows what is coming next, although the words do not form in her head.
“He molested me,” Angie says, “From the time I was five and until I was eighteen, when I got pregnant with his daughter. But when he touched my baby girl, I called the cops.”
Mel hasn’t liked canned soda since she can’t remember when, her teens, she supposes, but now she pulls the tab and lifts it to her mouth. The taste is familiar still, the icy bubbles a curious relief. “And you’ve forgiven bim?” she says.
“Never. I have three brothers who hate his guts — they even hate me for coming here. No, no, we’ll never forgive him. Who would?”
Mel feels that she has pried, for no good reason. Or perhaps there is a reason, but it is not obvious. Why is this girl sharing her wound? As though they were friends, compatriots.
Somewhere a metal door clangs, and there is the sound of heavy footsteps on the stairs, laughter, a shuffling as of cattle let out of a pen. And now they enter the visiting room, one at a time through a door in the corner next to the desk. The first is a tall black man with a matted gray beard, hurrying to a table of women with enormous smiles. Two more inmates enter — dark green slacks, green pullover shirts with the all too obvious number on the pocket — then more, a middle-aged man on crutches, another who must be in his seventies, stooped and frail but with a full head of bristly white hair, part of it braided into a rat’s tail at the back of his head. Then Angie stands as the next man enters — he, too, is bent forward, and carries a cane, a large man with bulging arms and a long, sagging face. He smiles at Angie and Angie places her Coke on the table and winks at Mel. “That’s my dad,” she says — proudly, Mel thinks. “That’s my dad.”
* * *
Fifteen, twenty men have entered the room, and Alex Pitts is not among them, Mel waits another ten minutes and then finally approaches the officer at the desk who in turn telephones a Control Center somewhere in the prison. “You know how it is, lady,” he says with his hand over the receiver, “some of these guys never get a visit, so they ain’t ready.”
Mel returns to her table next to the wall. She sits and wishes she had something to read, some way to calm the churning in her stomach. The tabletop has been etched with overlapping layers of graffiti, probably years of work. And with what? she wonders. What sharp instruments ? Some of it is tattoo flash — snakes and dragons and devils’ heads, skeletons and motorcycles — but most is another message: love, loved ones, hearts and arrows and who loves who; and dates: parole dates, release dates, who was here when.
Still, inmates are arriving. Two more enter the visiting room, and five minutes later, another two. A half hour has passed and Mel is beginning to think she should have handled this differently — she should have called the prison first, she should have written to Alex Pitts and told him she was coming. But she did not want him prepared for her, no more than she, thirteen years ago, was prepared for him. No, she tells herself, this meeting will be what it is — even if he does not show, for her it will be what it is.
The room is noisy. Half a dozen children have taken to the floor in a game of hide-and-seek, and the officer at the desk is frowning at them. Angie and her father are eating sandwiches purchased from the vending machines. Most of the inmates and visitors are smiling and talking and holding hands; except for the bars on the sally port and the heavy metal doors, it is a church social in a church basement. And out the corner of her eye Mel sees the guard point his pencil at her — as she turns, another inmate enters the room.
He is younger than she expects, her age, but so much younger than the others. He is tall and powerfully built, with a narrow waist and wide shoulders — a build she does not remember — thick, sinewy arms filling the short sleeves of his green pullover. He is staring at her perplexed, now glancing self-consciously at the others in the room, then back at her, wondering. She does not recognize this man — the wide brow, the long and slightly crooked nose, the angular jaw — certainly not from the night long ago when he wore a mask, but not even from the news photos or the mug shots she saw months later at her brother’s house, during the court proceedings. She had gone to the sentencing — a plea bargain to avoid the death penalty — in a wheelchair, still too weak to carry herself, but she had arrived late, nearly an hour after it was over and they had taken him back to his jail cell where she could not see him, could not look into his eyes and glimpse there the knowledge of his future, the suffering that would never be enough. Because it is the eyes she remembers — blue, with flecks of gray, the color of winter sky, but framed, made violent by the mask holes, huge and desperate.
The same eyes, only softer now, questioning. Mel stands. She must force herself to keep her hands apart, to keep from picking at herself like a bird. He looks back at the guard who has not moved, still with his elbows on the desk, hands folded, pencil dangling from his fingers, pointing at Mel. So he turns and walks up to her.
It was a foolish thing to say. She will think later, driving home, that it was dumb, silly. “I didn’t bring quarters,” she says, “I can’t buy you anything from the machines” — Mel who is quick but who rarely speaks before thinking, who is ahead of possibilities.
He does not talk. She knows this, she has known it all along, since before the sentencing when her brother discovered that the man who shot his father and his sister could not talk, had not talked since childhood.
And now she wishes she had her notebook with her, a pen, although she supposes these items are not allowed in the visiting room. He is questioning her with his eyes, saying Who are you? What do you want? But then he tenses and she knows he has just now figured it out, has recognized her. He blinks and clenches his jaw in a controlled expression of pain and surprise, saying God! And Why?
Mel sits. She reminds herself that she is not here for revenge — she cannot erase the memory, or the fear, but she is not here to vent an anger she long ago buried. She has come to resolve something, to untie a knot in her head, although she is not sure how, or even if she is right to try.
His face is tanned, clean-shaven, and there is a faint odor of soap about him. Unlike the other inmates he has no tattoos she can see, no scars. His hair is dark and straight, combed back. His wrinkles are sun wrinkles; he has the leathery skin of a man who has labored outdoors for years. And those eyes — blue, and too easily read, studying her.
“You’re Alex,” she says. “You shot me. You killed my father and then tried to kill me.”
He sits across from her, wary, on the edge of the chair. He does not seem to know what to do with his hands.
He had gotten in through a window in the basement, crept up the service stairs and into her bedroom, woke her by shoving a gun in her mouth. Then marched her to her father’s room and forced them both to lie on the floor, tied their hands and feet. The safe — Mel will never forget — the note held to her face, the childish scribble on paper torn from a school notebook — Where was the safe and what was the combination? But there was no safe, there was never a safe in the house, and her father told him, pleaded with this man who would not believe them, who ransacked the house, tore the paintings off the walls and toppled the dressers, emptied the closets and returned in a rage, wild-eyed and shaking — and shot them. Killed her father with a bullet to the head, there, next to her on the rug, murdered him. Then aimed the gun at her hair as she turned, the final instant, the endless hollow roar …
“.. . Wait,” Mel says. She stands and walks to the desk, asks the officer for a pencil and paper. The guard grunts and hands her his pencil and opens a drawer, finds a sheet from a notepad. She returns to the table where Alex Pitts sits with his shoulders hunched, arms on the table, perfectly still. “Here,” she says, placing the paper and pencil before him.
But he does not write. He looks at her with his winter blue eyes, the long lashes beneath the thick, sunbathed brows. His jaw is square, his chin strong, and yet his mouth is small and moist, nearly heart-shaped, which lends a boyish and oddly vulnerable look to his face. His eyes are worried.
“You’re in the labor gang, aren’t you?” Mel says. “Is that why they keep you here, to do the jobs the old prisoners can’t? Because they need you? You went to school, you took college courses and earned your degree, you’ve been here thirteen years and have only one report. That’s pretty good, isn’t it! …” She sits straight in her chair, feels an urge to clear her throat, but does not. “… Look, I know a lot about you from my brother. He calls here to check. You can understand that, can’t you?”
But Alex Pitts does not answer. His body is as rigid as hers was the night he shot her. He is even beginning to tremble, ever so slightly, a nervous hand on the table.
The police had caught him in another house, a block away. A house with a safe. Melody had come to in a drying pool of blood, inched her way to the telephone and managed with her teeth to pull the old metal phone off her father’s roll-top desk. The man with the ski mask — Alex Pitts — had fired the gun into her hair, her wild, curly hatr, just as she had turned — and had wounded her, the bullet taking a piece of her skull but leaving her alive. And all because, as the police would tell her brother weeks later, a crazy kid, a drug addict named Alex Pitts, had mistaken her father’s house for another. Had shot them because he was frightened and sick and maybe didn’t know any better.
She sighs. “I didn’t come here for this, to convict you again. But I have to tell you what it’s like for me. You changed my life. I can’t say you ruined it because that’s up to me, but you hurt me beyond measure. Do you see that?” Mel catches herself staring at him, tapping her knuckles on the table. “Right now I’m not sure why I’m here. I don’t know you. I don’t know if you feel bad about what you’ve done, but by the look in your eyes I’d say you do … after all, you could have left, you could have walked out of the visiting room the moment you realized who I was.”
Alex Pitts lowers his gaze. He exhales through his mouth. It is the first time Mel has noticed him breathe,
“Why did you shoot us? Were you frightened? Desperate? Did you care that little for life? Were we like dust to you, something you could brush off your sleeve? Am I still that to you?”
There it is again, a shiver, that nearly imperceptible trembling of the hand.
“I want to know why.” Mel picks up the pencil and holds it out to him, “You owe this to me. Tell me why you shot us. I don’t care if it’s not enough. I want to know what you were thinking. I want to know why I’m the way I am today.” She waits, holding the pencil. .. a second, five seconds … then finally withdraws it. “Don’t you realize?” she says. “What you did happens to me every day, and in a sense, what I do, what becomes of me, happens to you now. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?…
“. .. Or is this your power? Was that why? Was it my loss and your gain? You shot me, so you own me, the rest of my life?”
She leans forward on the table, close to him now, as if to reveal a secret.
“Then let me tell you what you bought. Thirteen years, and I’ve had no home and no friends, because possessions and relationships can be merciless, when they’re taken away. I have nightmares. I see things. Sometimes hooded faces with eyes like yours. I see all sorts of things, like auras and halos and even events before they happen. I’m afraid most of the time. I have this idea, as crazy as it sounds, that I’m worth shooting. That no matter what I do or who I become, I should be punished. So I compensate — sometimes I’m cruel, usually I’m blunt, unforgiving. Does any of that sound right to you? Is that what you wanted?”
But Alex Pitts does not respond. He sits there, looking at her, hardly breathing. He should leave, she thinks. Why doesn’t he leave? A chorus of “Happy Birthday” begins at a table in the center of the room. The old prisoner with white hair flamboyantly opens a bag of popcorn and dumps it on the table, and everyone cheers and claps. The sound echoes off the walls and ceiling, reverberates in the sterile air above her head. Mel feels herself dwindling, folding into herself, losing her sense of time and space.
But then across the room she sees Angie and her father rise, hug for a second, and slowly head for the door. Suddenly Mel wants out; she is tired of feeling trapped, she knows in her heart she was wrong: that the power was never his, was hers all along. She feels ridiculous — for trying, for talking to this man, for even coming here. She also has an urge to cry, something she has not done since before the crime.
She stands, steadies herself for a moment — she is lightheaded, sweating now — and walks to the desk, asks the guard where the bathrooms are. On her way she stops and tells Angie to wait — not to hitchhike, please don’t hitchhike, she’ll be glad to drive her home — and then finds the women’s room where at the sink she runs cold water on her wrists, cups her hands and splashes it on her cheeks, her neck. But this time she does not look at herself in the mirror, worried that she will see there the face from the past, unchanged, the face in the mirror at her father’s house all those years ago. Still Melody.
In the visiting room again she walks directly to the table to tell Alex Pitts she is leaving, but as she arrives he stands and hands her the sheet of paper, folded. He lingers a second, blinks as though he wishes to say something, then starts across the room. At the desk he hands the pencil to the guard, and as he turns for the door Mel sees his light — a symbol of blue, clear and close to the body, but wispy, flickering, as though starved for fuel, a pale blue flame in the wind — and then he is gone, through the door and into the interior of the prison, Mel looks at the guard, who shrugs as if to say, “You know how it is, lady,” and then she joins Angie who waits for her at the entrance to the sally port.
Outside, Mel and Angie are silent as they walk to the parking lot. The sky is cloudless, the sun high and unusually brilliant in the crisp air above the foothills to the west. It is a winter day, cold and fixed, and yet there is a hint of spring in this light, a fragile notion. At the car Mel fishes the keys from her pocket, but before she unlocks the door she unfolds the paper in her hand. “I’m sorry . ..” it begins.
1993 Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility
Canon City, Colorado