Stinky walks into the room where the men play cards. They play dominoes and talk. They play chess and sell handmade Christmas cards. They smoke in the corner by the window.
It smells like straight-up donkey ass in here, he says. Stinky thinks everything stinks. He says he’s got extrasensitive smelling and he doesn’t smell nothin’ good.
Stinky in the dayroom: Is that thunder in fucking October? The trees are changing. I think that one’s dead though. These planes fly low because they’re keeping an eye on me. When I leave, you watch—you won’t see no more planes around here.
Stinky sits down across from me, lays a deck of cards on the table. He got some new T-shirts and what he really likes about them is that the tags have been removed, so it’s impossible to put them on backward. He was married—still is, technically—to a prostitute he calls Scared Sarah, who took her medication one night with a Wild Turkey chaser, and then the story gets fuzzy. The only indisputable fact is that she disappeared. Scared Sarah had a bad heart. Her teeth fell out because all the enamel was gone.
Nash is out of cigarettes, and his coffee’s gone. He’s at the next table and may have the flu.
I would like to be able to see movies again.
I hate the loudness here.
I sleep a lot.
I wonder if the four guys playing their vampire role-playing game know that it isn’t real. I don’t think it’s something they consider.
I’ve gotten used to instant coffee. It’s all right.
Most of my friends have killed someone. Most of my friends were notorious once. A couple of them you can see on A&E’s Cold Case Files. Stinky’s case shows half a dozen times a year. A guy behind me thinks my writing looks like Arabic. He locks in 92. I know because I take in laundry, then hand it out. I know where everyone locks. Almost. There are 240 men in this unit.
Is your name Sam? says Stinky. No? Good. I’ll hang around killers but not pedophiles.
People here talk way too much. No one cares what they have to say and I really think some people stay here or keep coming back because they like to talk and people on the outside are tired of listening to them. I heard Leonard Cohen once say he spent five years in a monastery and he compared the experience to being a rough stone in a small cloth bag with other rough stones. The friction between the stones buffs them all to a flat shine. These guys, though, they don’t think of prison that way. They think they’re here by accident.
The hardest thing to get used to is the play fighting, learning the difference between real violence and two guys acting like kids. For the first couple of years, you turn around at every loud noise.
What’s the name of that card game you’re playing? Casino, says Stinky. I mean solitary. You mean solitaire? And then he shuffles the deck, lays the cards in thirteen piles of four. He asks me what I think the odds are there are four of a kind in one pile. About a million to one, I say. Then he turns over four aces in the first pile and all the rest in sequential order.
I should have been a card shark, he says. Hey, maybe if we showed that trick to the judge, he’d let us go.
Yeah, maybe.
I think the correct term is cardsharp, but I’ve always thought card shark was the better description. I would rather be a shark than sharp, though I keep that to myself.
All the old grifters had names for the tricks they used: the Lefty Lucy, the Turn and Run, the Disappearing Deck, the Bloody Valentine, the Bootless Jack. And though Stinky knows a lot of card tricks, he has no names for any of them.
Here are the facts of his case as reported to me by Stinky himself and Bill Kurtis of Cold Case Files:
Scared Sarah Brown née Novak and Stinky are married in 1978. She wears white and he pays fifty dollars for a nice, tall wedding cake, which she picks up and throws at him during the reception in the basement of the American Legion Post 714. The wedding gala is attended by a who’s who of Kalamazoo County’s dealers, pimps, and thieves. The marriage is rocky, and in a couple of years, it’s completely on the rocks. There is a well-documented history of domestic incidents with the two of them alternating roles as the aggressor. She passes out nightly with a couple of Valium (she disliked the newer generation of benzodiazepines) and a half pint of Wild Turkey. He takes out a term life policy on her for $100,000, and a month later, she disappears. There is no body—no trace of a body found. Ever. Even to this day. The case goes cold with no insurance being paid because there’s no proof Scared Sarah is dead and not in Cancún living on the beach. Six years later, some nutcase barfly named Monica “Deadeye” Silver says on the stand that Stinky told her all about how he smothered Scared Sarah, ran her through a meat grinder he used for venison, then fed her ground remains to a pen of thirty hogs north of town. Stinky says he has never even seen Monica. Her statement comes two weeks before the coroner was to pronounce Scared Sarah presumed dead, the insurance money paid to Stinky.
A brief legal primer: corpus delecti literally means “body of a crime.” Generally, in a homicide case, there must be proof that someone died and that the deceased came to their end via foul play. Generally, it takes more than a recovered memory from a crazy woman to convict someone. But Michigan is funny that way.
Generally, it takes proof—unless $100,000 is involved, Stinky says. He thinks Scared Sarah most likely died en route south with a guy she probably barely knew. One day Stinky thinks she’s in a ditch somewhere between Michigan and Mexico. Another day he thinks she’s going to show up alive. Maybe here.
Also, I miss good music. I miss alternative music you can’t hear on VH1.
Someone on B-Wing took thirty of something. Thirty what? It don’t matter, he took thirty of them. You take thirty of anything and that’s a wrap. It’s that time of the year. People get depressed. They think enough’s enough.
When I get back to court, Stinky says, for my opening statement I’m gonna show the judge a razzle-dazzle card trick that’s going to blow his mind.
You’ve got to come up with a catchy name for it, Stinky. You can’t just say to him, Okay, Judge, here’s my card trick.
He looks out the window. Snow is possible today, or tomorrow.
A name, huh?
Someone stands up: I’ll tell you one thing; I’ll tell you this—all that medication they got me waking up for at five-thirty? They can stick it straight up their ass!
The one part of Stinky’s story I always get hung up on is this: why get rid of her body if you’re trying to collect insurance money? And this too: he still seems stunned that she threw a beautiful fifty-dollar cake at him. It was over thirty years ago.
Judge Peckerneck, for my opening statement, Stinky says he’ll say, I’d like to call your attention to this deck of cards for a little something I call Aces-in-the-Middle-Razzle-this-whole-thing-stinks-like-a-monkey-took-a-shit-in-an-old-boat-Dazzle.
Another thing I miss: when I would mow my yard, my dog followed close behind me, and when I would stop, he’d run into the back of my legs. There was something very comforting about that.
It’s laundry day. I’m going to take a shower. On the way to lunch Stinky told me good things were going to happen to me today because he prayed for me and my kids for a long time last night. I’m going to take a shower then wait. I’m going to drink strong coffee and wait for good things to happen.