It didn’t last.
By next morning, Eloda was back to her stony-face self, and I was once again mad that she didn’t like the diary. But my mad lasted only until I saw what was lying at my place at the breakfast counter. It was a key.
My father, as usual, was already off to work. But no matter—I didn’t have to ask what the key was for. I knew instantly. It was for the gate to the women’s exercise yard.
I had won!
Yard time began at ten in the morning. I looked down from the kitchen window. By ten-fifteen Helen and Tessa were playing netless badminton. (I had returned the racket and bird to them as promised.) Deena was sunning on her shower towel. Boo Boo was holding court, laughing, smoking.
I went down. I acted all casual, as if I were just coming for my usual other-side-of-the-fence visit. “Greetings, female people,” I said. I held up the key. I grinned. The yard was suddenly all silence and eyes. I inserted the key in the padlock. Opened the gate. Stepped in.
Pandemonium.
“MISS CAMMIE!”
I was mobbed. Everyone came running but Deena, who removed her eye cups. An unidentified voice flew from the crowd: “Little Warden!”
In truth there were two mobbings. First I was mobbed by Boo Boo. Or maybe “swallowed” is the word. I found myself engulfed in her massive arms and struggling to breathe in the pillowy depths of her bosom. I might have died there had not hands pulled me away for the second mobbing. Thirty-some women—fingers pecking at me like chickens, as if they couldn’t believe I was real, as if they’d never touched a person before.
I managed to look up. Atop the far wall Jim Carilla was out of the guardhouse with his rifle, staring. I waved. “It’s okay, Jim!”
And then the squeals turned to questions. Everyone wanted to know about the new celebrity inmate.
“Does he look like a killer?”
“Did he look at you?”
“Does he smell bad?”
When one of the women said, “They gonna fry that boy,” the hubbub came to a sudden stop. Eyes shifted to the great wall separating the women’s yard from the men’s.
Our inmates—inmates everywhere, I suppose—practiced the art of forgetting where they were. Those with long sentences in particular kept no calendars in their cells to remind them of the endless jail time remaining. They tried to not look ahead, as those afraid of heights are told not to look down. Another way to forget was to busy oneself with reminders of life on the outside: cigarettes, reading, radio (“The Shadow knows!”), candy. Simple things like daydreaming and sleep were vital in this regard.
But there were intrusions that made forgetting impossible. The clack of the guard’s beanbopper as he made the count at lights-out. Sitting down on a toilet with no door or walls for privacy. And the grimmest reality check of all: knowing there was among them an inmate headed for death row. It was not the crime he’d committed, but the likelihood that Marvin Edward Baker had a date with the electric chair at Rockview that was the source of the women’s fearful fascination with their new jail mate. I understood the fascination. I myself could never climb the Tower of Death and not stare at—not touch—the hangman’s noose.
The questions and the commotion went on for a while, but in the end thirty women were no match for Boo Boo. “Okay—enough!” she declared, her red-nailed fingers flapping. “Let the little girl be!” Suddenly I was slung over her shoulder.
Jim’s voice barked from the high wall: “Hey!”
I craned up, waved, called: “It’s okay, Jim! I’m okay!”
And she hauled me away.