Hard Habit to Break (20 page)

Lightning terrified me. I glanced uneasily at the officer on duty, hoping she’d let the tomatoes go to mush and order us back inside. She didn’t. She just yawned, leaning against a tree, staring glassily into space. Obviously, distant lightning wasn’t high on her list of concerns.

“Did you know that lightning can strike as far as ten miles away?” I said to Tina, who was picking on the opposite side of my row.

“So what?” Tina scoffed. “Your chances of getting hit by lightning are less than winning the Powerball.”

“You’ve got it backward.” The heat was making me cranky. It was Tina’s fault I was on this gulag detail in the first place. “The odds against winning the Powerball are greater than your chances of being struck by lightning.” “I ain’t never won the lottery and I ain’t never got hit by lightning neither, so that proves my point.”

Tina’s logic made my brain hurt. I opened my mouth to explain her faulty reasoning, which would probably have resulted in Tina’s giving me a mashed tomato facial, but at that moment a siren began to wail. I nearly jumped out of my sweat-streaked skin. Dropping my tomatoes, I clapped my hands over my ears.

“Is that the escape siren?” I asked.

“No, you goober. That’s the tornado siren.”

Tornado?
My stomach did a roller-coaster dip. Tornadoes scared me even worse than lightning. What were you supposed to do? In grade school we’d had to practice tornado drills, crouching under our desks with our arms over our heads and our butts in the air. By the time the drill ended, our classroom smelled like a cauliflower factory.

The guard-snapped out of her heat-induced stupor, blew a whistle, and bellowed, “All right, everybody, form up in a line. We’re returning to the main unit. Inside, you will proceed to your designated—”

A galloping wind drowned out her voice, bowled over the tomato plants, and hurled leaves through the air like green rain. The storm blitzed in faster than anyone could have expected. Thunder shook the ground and a zag of lightning split the sky. The mercury vapor lamps that lit the grounds exploded, plunging us into murky gloom.

Disoriented, I grabbed onto Tina and we bumbled around, tripping over vines, squishing tomato guts underfoot, trying to catch our breaths against the scouring gale. The air sizzled with electricity and my hair stood on end. The wind worked itself into a tantrum and slammed us along, Tina’s long braid whipping against my face until she was whirled one way and I was hurled another. I smacked up against the wall of the greenhouse and stepped in a load of peat moss from an overturned wheelbarrow.

Lightning flashed again, turning the world muddy purple. The purple goop spat hail. Split pea hail at first, that sounded like the first faint pops of microwave popcorn, then fist-sized hail that smashed the greenhouse panes and sent shards of glass geysering into the air. A 747 revved for takeoff inside my skull. My ears popped, my hair tried to yank itself out by the follicles, and what felt like a dozen Dustbusters sucked at my clothes. Tree branches and gutter spouts hurtled through the air, outlined by strobes of lightning. Something enormous somersaulted toward me, growing bigger and bigger, blotting out the sky. I stared in disbelief. It was a house! An enormous house was about to smack down and squash me like the Wicked Witch of the East. When the rescue workers came around searching for bodies, they’d discover my feet sticking out from beneath the foundation.

“She really needed a pedicure,” they would say.

I was five years old when I watched
The Wizard of Oz
for the first time. My parents were out and my older brothers, who were supposed to be babysitting me, had abandoned me. Alone in the house, I poured myself a glass of Kool-Aid, dribbled my way to the TV, and popped a tape into the VCR. I couldn’t read yet, but the video cover showed a girl in a blue dress, a scarecrow, a lion, and a shiny metal man. I plopped down on the sofa, my legs so short they stuck straight out over the edge of the cushions, and watched, entranced, as a girl named Dorothy balanced along a fence, singing a song about a rainbow.

Then Almira Gulch appeared. Eyes like Raisinettes, chin like an ax blade, mouth like a rat trap. By the time she was pedaling her bike through the twister, cackling insanely and transforming into the Wicked Witch of the East, I was petrified, sobbing, and soaked.

My mother came home, switched off the movie, changed my underpants, and put me to bed. I wasn’t allowed to watch
The Wizard of Oz
again until I was nine years old, presumably old enough to separate fantasy from reality, but even then I had to squeeze my eyes shut when the winged monkeys flew out of the witch’s castle.

A spatter of rain in my face woke me. Disoriented, I jerked upright, swiping water out of my eyes. Memory returned in jumbled fragments: lightning, wind, hail, a flying house. Had I actually been in the middle of a
tornado
?

The eerie purple clouds had vanished as the storm roared off east. The air smelled like Christmas trees and the sky had turned that soft, heavenly blue that precedes dark. Bricks, boards, mangled metal, and glass from the shattered greenhouse lay strewn about, sparkling beneath a layer of rapidly melting hail. And there, just a few feet away, was the thing that had struck me. Not a
house
falling out of the sky, Mazie, you hysterical tornado-phobe—just an old roof the tornado had snatched off a garage or shed. It was lodged against the prison’s perimeter fence, half in and half out of the grounds, as though it’d tried to escape but had been snagged at the last moment.

I took stock of my parts. No broken bones, merely a hard, painful knot about the size of a jawbreaker on my crown. Just a bump, I told myself.
Walk it off
, my horrible brothers would have sneered.

Heaving myself to my feet, I eyed the fallen roof. My heart started beating the way it had the first time I’d seen Taylor Lautner take off his shirt in the
Twilight
movie. I felt woozy. I felt short of breath. I felt terrified that I might be contemplating something stupid.

Shouts came from somewhere close by, puncturing my last-person-on-earth fantasy. Peering out through the jungle of tangled limbs, I glimpsed figures on the grounds. The emergency generators kicked in at that moment. Lights blazed, motors hummed, and current surged through the fence wire in a whispery buzz. I figured I had about thirty seconds before someone spotted me. The whole point of making inmates wear orange jumpsuits on work details is to make them as visible as construction barrels.

Don’t even think about it
, I warned myself.

I have never been an impulsive person. You don’t want to be in line behind me at Baskin Robbins because I dither forever trying to choose between Peanut Butter Passion and Mississippi Mud. When I see a sweater I love in a store, I decide to wait until it goes on sale and when I go back my size is gone.

But four years in prison changed that. In prison you don’t have time to weigh the pros and cons of a situation. In prison you listen to your gut. And my gut was telling me
go for it
! My gut didn’t care that if a single hair came in contact with that fence, twenty thousand volts of electricity were going to surge through my body. My gut didn’t care that I had no clue what I would do if I actually escaped from prison. My gut had become a shoot-first-ask-questions-later type of organ.

Taking a running start, I leaped for the outthrust corner of the roof, snagged a rain-slick shingle, slung a knee up, and shimmied to the peak. I seat-of-my-pantsed down the other side and halted at the far edge. From here to the ground was a two-story drop. Heights are high on my list of phobias, with a scariness rating just below lightning, tornadoes, and those cardboard cylinders of biscuit dough that make a loud pop when you press a spoon against the seam and even though you’re expecting the noise it still makes you jump.

Heights made me sick to my stomach. Just watching someone in a movie climbing out on a ledge gives me sweaty palms. I cursed the gut feeling that had led me into this predicament. But here’s where growing up as a Wisconsin farm girl comes in handy: deep inside my otherwise chickenshit soul there lurks a tiny flicker of derring-doness dating from the time when being allowed to hang with my brothers was the most important thing in my life, a time when I constantly tried to prove that possession of testicles was not the single standard for bravery. So I took all dares. Rode the bucking heifer. Climbed to the highest beam in the barn and jumped. Set off the string of firecrackers under the milk bucket.

Unfortunately, a residue of that brainless bravado must still have lingered deep inside my lily-livered soul. Without giving myself more time to think about it, I squeezed my eyes shut, launched myself into space, and jumped.

I landed with a bone-jarring thump on the perimeter road.
I was outside!
For the first time in four years I was not, technically, in prison. Digging out the gravel imbedded in my palms and using my tongue to take roll call of my teeth, I scanned the terrain. Beyond the road was no-man’s-land, a flat stretch of ground with all vegetation slashed away, as wide and exposed as an interstate highway. Expecting to hear a bullhorn-amplified voice ordering me to halt any second, I slithered commando style across the open stretch until I reached the woods opposite. Then I scrambled to my feet and ran.

Taycheedah is located in the middle of the Kettle Moraine, the range of wooded hills that snakes across the length of eastern Wisconsin, tucking calendar-cute farms among its rolling ridges and hardwood forests. In fall, when the sugar maples are blaze orange and the scarlet maples are—well,
scarlet
—the Kettle Moraine makes the New England woods look like end-of-season clearance sale colors. But that great color explosion was weeks in the future. Right now the trees were still in their green, full-leafed, convict-covering phase. I would hide in the woods, I decided. I’d gather roots and berries, I’d hunt game with a bow made of saplings. I’d live in a pine bough lean-to. Swiss Family-of-one-Maguire.

I imagined myself aiming a homemade spear at a bunny. I pictured the bunny chuckling merrily as my spear thwunked into a nearby tree and splintered into twigs. I envisioned myself showering beneath a freezing waterfall, using moss for tampons, shaving my armpits with clamshells, and attempting to skin roadkill with a chunk of sharp stone. I’d have the sky, the stars, and the great outdoors. But no toilet paper, clean underwear, or M&Ms. And if I wanted to get right down to it, I didn’t actually know how to make a fire to char my squashed squirrels. In Girl Scouts they’d tried to teach us to produce fire by rubbing two sticks together, but all I’d ever produced were blisters.

Okay, so not the woods. So where instead?

Where was the best place to hide a marble?

Inside a bag of marbles
.

I had to find a place where a solo woman wouldn’t stick out like a nun at a strip club. I needed to put as much distance as I could between me and the prison before the man-eating dogs glommed on to my trail.

Keeping to the cover of the woods, I began moving parallel to Taycheedah’s access road. This was a lot harder than it sounds. These weren’t nice woods. These were evil woods like the one in Snow White where she’s escaping her evil stepmother. Low-lying branches slapped me in the face, thorns shredded my arms, mosquitoes dive-bombed me. I climbed barbed wire fences set in the middle of the woods by some inconsiderate idiot. I crashed through the brush with all the stealth of a tank battalion. I cursed a lot. As the hours wore on, I became convinced that the prison authorities had set up night vision cameras in the woods and were watching my bumbling escape on screens in the control center, laughing so hard they drooled on their starched white shirts. They were purposely not swooping in and grabbing me because of my entertainment value.

A thicket of thorny brush forced me to steer away from the access road. When I finally angled back to where the road ought to have been, I discovered that it had treacherously disappeared, leaving a bog in its place. I plunged into swamp water up to my knees. Mud sucked off my right shoe and I had to grope through oozing slime before I finally retrieved it, trying not to think about the
things
that might be paddling around in that gunk, itching to crawl up under my pants legs and insinuate themselves into personal parts of my body.

By the time I climbed out of the swamp I was completely lost. For all I knew, I’d walked in a circle and would find myself back at the prison. It was now pitch-dark and raining like God’s power showerhead. Shivering from cold and shaking with muscle fatigue, I collapsed onto a mossy log and started bawling. Mouth wide open, snot drizzling from both nostrils, not caring if the hidden cameras were watching or not. What had I been thinking? Why had I even
wanted
to escape?

I used to lie awake nights fantasizing about breaking out of Taycheedah, inspired by the great escape movies—
Cool Hand Luke, The Shawshank Redemption, The Fugitive
. But I knew they were fantasies; in real life most escapees are caught within a few hours. The same thing would happen to me. I was going to be caught and punished. Tossed into solitary, sentenced to a hundred years
plus
my life sentence. When I died, they’d lock my rotting carcass in a cell to make sure the sentence was carried out.

Sirens warbled in the distance. The woods distorted the sound so I couldn’t tell which direction they were coming from. Emergency vehicles out for storm victims or police cars sent to chase me? At this point I didn’t care.

All right. Here was my plan: I would sit here and wait until the bloodhounds found me. I would plead for mercy. I’d say I’d suffered a bout of tornado-induced insanity.

Plead insanity
, advised my lawyer, Sterling Habenmacher.
Your husband was going to divorce you; you were going to lose him to another woman; you were going to be kicked out of your own home. So you went a little PMS and offed your hubby. Happens all the time. Plead temporary insanity and we’ll get you off with twenty-five years
.