Inside These Walls (9 page)
* * *
The lockdown wears on through the next day, with our meals delivered by cart and pushed through the slot into our cells. The night before, Sergeant Schmidt came by my cell during night count and told me Janny’s arm was broken and they took her to the hospital to have it set and put in a cast, but I haven’t heard any more news since then. My heart aches to think of how disoriented she must be, shuffling from one place to the next without any awareness of the space around her, fearful of the unfamiliar voices. I never spoke to her before the fight that blinded her, but she was skittish and anxious long before she lost her sight. Others may not realize this, because years in prison had hardened her by the time she was attacked, but I know it is her nature because she shot her husband to death while he was sleeping. She wasn’t angry, she told me; she was just
done
. Tired of the way he behaved when he was awake. They arrested her outside the Greyhound station, with a child on each side of her and a cardboard sign balanced on the baby stroller in the middle, begging for bus fare to Mexico City.
To pass the time I read the ski lodge romance, I work on
Intérieur,
and I dance to a melody in my head, moving to a Cyndi Lauper song I’ve been thinking about since the day they took my cassettes away. It’s called
Time After Time,
and it was one of the songs on my mix tape from Ricky. I hadn’t listened to it in a very long time, because it was far too evocative; at the time they put me in here the song was at the height of its popularity and seemed to blare from every radio every hour of the day. Back then—when I felt so confused and so bereft, insanely hopeful that one morning a C.O. would unlock my cage and explain there had been a mistake, that none of this had ever happened—it drove me half-mad to hear it all the time, as if all my secret feelings were being projected outward to the entire prison. After a while, people in the world grew tired of it, it fell off the music charts and I rarely heard it anymore. The effect, when I did, was much like opening the drawer in which my father, while living, had kept his undershirts. Long after he had died, but before Garrison Brand, I went looking for a comb and in my haphazard search pulled his drawer open. Suddenly the ghost of my father seemed conjured before me, and I sank to my knees from the shock of it, breathing in the intense and living smell of this man who didn’t exist any longer. I didn’t like that feeling, because even before I went to prison I liked things to be clear and orderly. It made me a good Catholic, because in Catholicism everything runs in neat, up-and-down lines.
But two years later, when word came to me that Ricky had hung himself, I wanted that feeling. I dusted off the tape and listened to the song over and over again for several days. But then the music pulled me in two directions. I was drawn toward Ricky, remembering what he had been like at his best, and toward the potent memory of those first months in prison, when I faced the reckoning for loving him at his worst.
As I dance, I wish desperately that I had a pair of pointe shoes. Now and then, holding on to the bars or my bunk, I hesitantly try to rise onto my big toes; I believe I could do it, if only I had the right shoes. But for now I tie the loose legs of my blue pants tight against my ankles with string, and in the center of my cell I practice
adagios
, which are very difficult to do correctly. The guards walk past and cast long glances through my bars, probably wondering if I’ve lost my mind, but I’m suffering from nothing except a poignant song.
“Mattingly.”
I’m jarred back to reality and I come to the bars, where Officer Parker is standing with his thumbs in his belt. “They’re going to keep Hernandez in the clinic for a couple of days,” he says.
“Why? Is something wrong besides a broken arm?”
“I can’t tell you that. Privacy laws.”
I press my forehead against the cold steel bars in frustration. “Can you have her dictate a note to me? Or could I visit her? At least let me send down some of her things. Her special toothpaste and her rosary—”
“Sure, I’ll give ’em to her.”
Hastily, I gather up Janny’s favorite items and stuff them into her quilted bag, which she can identify by touch without any trouble. I reach for the romance novel, then realize nobody there will read it to her. The thought makes me feel a little desolate, and not only for Janny’s sake. It’s truly lonesome without her here. For eight years she has been beside me, and her absence calls to mind the sick feeling from my first long months of incarceration, when they kept me in administrative and then medical segregation because of my pregnancy. Without someone whose needs I can focus on, in the vacuum of human interaction, all I can think about is how terrible it is to be lonely.
Late in the evening they dim the lights. I sigh and put away my dancing socks, smoothing down the edges of moleskin that are peeling from the knit fabric. Before I crawl into bed, I pour the water from the Gatorade bottle into the sink above my toilet and peel the saturated wood pulp from the pencils. With all of the graphite safely stowed—we probably won’t have another contraband check for a while, and the grab was arbitrary in the first place—I say my last prayer of the day and pull the blanket up almost to my eyes.
I can’t stop thinking about him.
For years I forced myself not to think. When all arousing thoughts are terrible, forbidden for their awfulness or else for the yearning they bring, it’s better to make the mind a sheet of white paper, an empty screen, and the act of releasing tension as perfunctory any other bodily function. If the guards catch you, it’s thirty days in solitary.
Be careful
.
But to remember Ricky is to remember all things about Ricky. The dogbeat kid behind the register at the Circle K, the young man clowning on the beach, the impish boy with one of my kittens in his arms, the bare-skinned lover and, yes, the raging, dirty wanted man with nothing left to lose. Clear as any other memory is the sight of him pacing the kitchen with the phone pressed to his ear, his damp floppy bangs grasped in his hand, grit caught in the sweat that shone on his arms. The weight of his body amplified itself in his heavy footsteps, and his voice was a hoarse and ragged edge of what it had once been.
I’ll talk to Clinton Brand,
he half-shouted, over and over.
You want to talk to me, send him in. Send him right here. Clinton Brand
.
I scroll back. Picture the one before. The second-to-last Ricky.
Sometimes, when he had worked the graveyard shift at the Circle K, I would come to the house after work and find him fast asleep on his mattress on the floor. I’d slip beneath the covers and find him already nude, because he had known I was coming. After hours asleep, the space under the covers was as heated as an animal’s den. I would run my hands all over his buttery skin, drinking in the scent of him: warm and alive and
male,
a body that my own body wanted to pull close, hold tightly. Not cologne or shampoo or soap—I loved the smell that ran beneath all those things. The one that completed a circuit in my brain, made a tingle of electricity dance down my spine.
Soon enough he would awaken and turn to me. Unbutton my blouse, run a warm, clay-roughened hand down my belly. Roll onto his back and relax into my touch along the sparse hair of his chest and simple flat plane of his stomach, and then the part of him I’d first feared, then loved. When I wrapped my hand around him he purred deep in his throat like one of our cats.
It’s what I miss hopelessly. How perfect the fit of his body into mine. The way he moved as we both grappled for what was just out of reach, his arousal built to feed and vanquish mine, and mine his. We could make each other desperate for what we alone had created, and then destroy it together.
There is no substitute, not inside nor outside these walls, for a lover who wants you.
I roll onto my stomach and keep it as quiet as I can.
* * *
In the morning the regular wakeup call sounds, and we all rise and head back to work. I return to the drawing of
Guernica
with intense focus, and Shirley even bestows a compliment for the speed and quality of my work. The hours seem to vanish behind me, and before I know it I’m back in the yard, squinting in the sunlight for the first time in days.
I walk the edge of the fence, clicking my tongue, looking for Clementine. The other inmates, gang members sitting at the picnic tables, watch me the way patrons of a café watch a homeless person mumbling down the sidewalk. The other inmates here have never been fond of my indifference to making friends. Even on the outside it was always difficult for me, and in here it’s all the more perilous. People snitch about petty violations, they get transferred to other prisons, they get released. An alliance that was very valuable can become a liability if the other person is unceremoniously taken away. There’s a rule that we can’t receive mail or visits from anyone who was released in the past year, so friendships, even the most carefully cultivated ones, die. But it’s just as well. If I were spontaneously pardoned for my crimes, I’d walk away from all this and never look back. Except for Janny, whom I would never abandon, I wouldn’t maintain my loyalty to friends on the inside or cling to my identity as a former inmate. I’d shed it like a dirty snakeskin and try never to think of it again.
Clementine is nowhere to be found. Dejected, I walk back to the other side of the yard, then pace back and forth near the C.O.s for a while to work the days of laziness out of my muscles. It’s a very hot day, and I suppose the cat must have been smart enough to find shelter. Sweat trickles down my temples and catches in the wispy bits of my hair flying out from my ponytail.
Several days’ worth of mail awaits me when I return to my cell. There is a letter from Emory Pugh, my copy of the
Magnificat
and a package. I set the other items aside and pull apart the cardboard tabs with the excitement of a child on Christmas morning. I can’t remember the last time I got a package, and this one bears Annemarie’s name in the upper left corner. Inside, a folded note sticks up alongside a pink notepad printed with cupcakes, a set of drawing pencils, a jar of coffee and a little bag of cat treats. There is also a bar of German chocolate and a postcard of a beach scene. With shaking hands I unfold the note, and read.
Hello,
It was lovely to see you the other day. I found out I can send a package but the rules are just—wow. No stickers, no stamps, books have to come straight from the vendor, etc. I hope this stuff gets through. You might not like chocolate or coffee, but personally I can’t imagine being stuck anywhere without them. I sent the beach postcard because you said you hadn’t seen the beach in a long time. A postcard is kind of a lame substitute, but it beats that mural on the visiting room wall, at any rate. Hope to have a chance to visit again soon.
Fondly,
Annemarie
I unpack each of the items and line them up on my little desk. She remembered everything I told her. About Clementine and my drawing and how I love the sea. It’s the sort of package I would have put together for my own mother, had my mother lived a terrible life.
The pink notepad has a message scribbled on the back. I bring it toward my face and look above my glasses to read it.
This is one of the items I designed. Couldn’t send stickers or a poster, but wanted to show you. -A
. Rounded little cupcakes dance along the border, festooned with sprinkles in between. It’s hard to tell how much creativity she was allowed in the design, but her handwriting is angular and stylized, consistent among the letters as if it’s a font she’s created. Her father’s was like that, too— not the same in its lines and loops, but holding a similar confident swagger, as if he knew it was beautiful and that it reflected on him. I wondered if she already knew Ricky had been an artist, and if it made her all the more suspicious that she was his.
But I have an answer for that. Maybe, if I phrase what I say just right, she will come to the conclusion on her own and not need for me to lie at all. If we’re both lucky she will hear what she hopes to hear, because I am certain she hopes not to hear Ricky’s name. I saw it in the wince in her expression when she first asked me. And I don’t want to see it again.
An entire day passes before I even remember the letter from Emory Pugh. A photo falls out of the envelope when I turn it sideways— an image of him standing in a white-paneled kitchen with his arm around the shoulders of a petite teenage girl, his mustache and goatee neatly trimmed, hair slicked back. He looks very serious, although the girl offers a tentative smile.
Dear Clara,
I’m hurt that I sent you the pictures you asked for and you still haven’t wrote back to me. I thought it was funny you asked for pictures of Ricky but I sent them anyway. Now I wonder if you’re still hung up on him.
I’m sending a photo of me and my daughter so you will have one of me as well as him to remind you who loves you now. Not saying anything bad against Ricky though he was convicted of murder but the fact is that he is no longer with us and I am right here and save all my love for you. You are very special in my life and I hope you don’t forget about me just because of distance separates us. In AA they say EXPECT MIRACLES and it’s true you never know.
With love & also hoping,
Emory Pugh
I sit down right away and scribble off a letter in return. Emory Pugh, for all his guileless assurance that we belong together, is a good human being, and I don’t want to hurt his feelings.
Once the letter is written I turn my thoughts back to Annemarie. From the shelf above my books I take down a long rectangle of pink crochet, doubled over and sewn together on two sides. This is my completed project. Long thin braids of yarn trail from two corners. I make a fist and fit my creation around it, as if my hand is a newborn’s round little head. The strings of the bonnet fall evenly on each side of my wrist. It’s just about right.
I run a cupful of water into my coffee machine, put in a filter, and sprinkle on a little of the coffee Annemarie sent. Once it’s prepared, I press the crocheted hat down into the mug and leave it there for a few minutes. Then I take it out and rinse it a bit with some cold water, squeeze it over the sink, and lay it out on the shelf to dry.
The next morning, after they count us, I check my project and find it’s dried nicely. The coffee has muted the bright bubblegum color with a sepia tinge. I wrap it in a triple layer of Kleenex and tie it with an extra piece of yarn I’ve salvaged, set it on my shelf until she calls for me again, and then begin another letter.
Dear Ms. Shepard,
I apologize for the delay in answering your questions. Obviously I have the time to respond, but I have gone nearly twenty-five years thinking about all of this as little as possible, and I find it overwhelming to remember too much at once. It can easily take over my mind, and it becomes deeply depressing when I consider that my entire lifetime—the only one I will ever have—is defined so entirely by those few days when I was twenty-three years old. This leads to unproductive thinking, such as considering that I would be better off had I never met Ricky— but then I believe if I had never met Ricky I would probably be even more miserable free and out in the world than I am confined. I’m not sure how to reconcile that.
I might as well skip ahead to the month in which everything unraveled. Up until that point, there was nothing in my relationship with Ricky that would be worthy of including in a book. I worked for a dentist in San Jose, and after Ricky was fired from Spectrum he asked to get his old job back at the Circle K, which the franchise owner, Mr. Choi, was kind enough to allow. Ricky was irritated, however, because Mr. Choi had started him out at his original minimum-wage salary from when he’d begun working there at age 17 rather than the somewhat higher wage he was earning at the time he left. Ricky accepted that only because of the risk that prospective employers would call Jeff Owen, the owner of Spectrum Supply, and learn of his suspicions of Ricky’s theft. It seemed better to work for Mr. Choi again for a while and move up from there.
At some point during those in-between years, Ricky moved out of his parents’ house and into the ramshackle cottage that would become known as the Cathouse. Although it has been called a
squatter’s den,
he was, in fact, paying rent on the place. He shared it with his best friend, Chris Brooks, whose girlfriend Liz also lived there off and on, as their volatile relationship worked through its trials. You surely recognize these names as the other participants in the crime, along with Forrest, who stopped by the house once or twice a week. Chris worked as a flagger on a road construction crew, and he and Ricky both supplemented their income by doing odd jobs, including a little landscaping for Father George at Our Lady of Mercy, the church in which we had been raised. On weekends at the changing of the seasons you could often find Chris and Ricky hauling mulch and planting flowers, spraying the good Father’s precious rosebushes for aphids and other such work.
The house was not far from the dentist’s office, and so I took to using the place as my base camp for feeding strays and coaxing them into carriers so I could take them in for neutering. Over time we had quite a few cats hanging around— I’m not sure how many, but admittedly more than the neighbors would like. Long before the crisis they already referred to it as the Cathouse, and even amongst ourselves we sometimes called it that.
Sometime in July that year, Chris and Ricky got into a car accident on Stockton Avenue. They were on their way home from a bar in Ricky’s car, with Chris behind the wheel because he was the more sober of the two. Chris went through a red light and hit a woman in a Cadillac, and while the injuries were all minor, there was quite a bit of damage to the woman’s expensive car and Ricky had no insurance. She began sending threatening letters to him through her lawyer demanding that he pay the costs for her repairs and emergency room expenses. I found this almost as asinine as Ricky did, because Chris had really been the one responsible, and it must have been costing this woman at least as much to pay the lawyer as it would to just cover the repairs herself. She was an older woman, and I think she believed she was teaching a young person to take responsibility for his actions. She couldn’t have known where that would lead, but it’s difficult not to resent her role in it, even so. Ricky never cared the least bit about money. Truthfully, it was one of his flaws. I can’t imagine he would ever have committed the actions that followed had it not been for her threats of legal action.
One afternoon I walked to the house after work and found Chris and Ricky sitting on the front porch steps. Ricky was smoking a cigarette, which was unusual for him, and when I kissed him I could taste that he had also been smoking marijuana, which was not so unusual. It bears mentioning at this point that I was really no fan of Ricky’s best friend even before the accident in question. Chris had been in the Navy for two years after high school and walked around with this jaded, cocky, pool-hall attitude, as if he’d seen the whole world and considered every human interaction to be a game of poker. He didn’t like black people, and he loved large breasts, and these two items comprised about fifty percent of his efforts at conversation. There was a sort of Batman-and-Robin dynamic to the friendship, and alongside him Ricky took on the role of the beatnik bohemian in a way I felt stifled him. Because of the death of his sister, he had come of age in a family where his grieving parents alternately lavished him with resources and desperate love, then shut themselves away in their mourning. This produced an insecure teenager with a lot of spending money, nearly endless freedom and no respect at all for authority, followed by an adult who was slowly struggling uphill against the obstacles that upbringing had thrown in his path.
Though I was initially attracted to Ricky because he had a free and easygoing spirit that I lacked, over his time with me—and I know this is difficult to believe, given his notoriety now—he had made great strides toward behaving like a responsible adult. He paid his own rent, had stopped mooching off his parents and had turned around some of his red-flag substance use—drinking during the day, the occasional line of cocaine with Chris— that had troubled me early on. In some ways I was very young inside my mind, too, so it was easy to forgive his slow crawl toward respectability. But because Ricky and I felt mutually protective of each other, I believed his friendship with Chris Brooks, which was intensely brotherly on a level approaching the romantic, rewarded him too much for his immaturity.
That afternoon I walked past Ricky and into the house, leaving him on the steps with Chris. Inside was the sort of dark, filthy pigsty one would expect out of two stoned bachelors. The glass bong was out in the living room—that was Ricky’s preferred method of smoking marijuana because he believed the water filtered out the impurities—and some of the cats were nesting in piles of laundry in the downstairs bathroom and at the foot of the stairs. The kitchen sink was sloshed with bong water. An open peanut butter jar, bags of potato chips, a loaf of Wonder Bread spilling from its package and the remainder of a chocolate cake with its frosting roses removed spoke of the feeding frenzy that had followed the boys’ smoking session. The entire place smelled of litter box, weed, and stale tobacco smoke, and the only thing that made it tolerable was the contact high I was achieving merely by standing in it.
Then I noticed a bit of order in the madness, in the form of several sheets of paper arranged on the dining table. This table had no chairs and was overflowing with giant tubs of protein shake powder, ashtrays, one of Liz’s tennis shoes and a general assortment of trash. Yet these papers were arranged neatly and afforded space of their own, so I walked over, tugged the chain for the light—it didn’t turn on, however—and peered down at them.
United States District Court, Northern District of California. Alice Myers, Plaintiff, v. Richard Rowan Jr, Defendant
. I stepped back outside.
Ricky had finished his cigarette and was sitting with his head in his hands. I rested my arm on his shoulder and played with his hair a little. “That stupid woman just won’t lay off, will she?” I said.
He replied in his Bob Marley voice. “Stupid woman don’t know what life is really worth,” he said. It was a twist on a line from a song.
“Dumb bitch,” Chris said.
You’re the one she ought to be suing
, I thought angrily. “It’ll work out,” I assured Ricky. “The court will see you don’t have any money. At worst they’ll garnish your paycheck for a while. And I’ll drive over and pay the electric bill this afternoon. We’ll get the lights back on, at least.”
He nodded, still cradling his head in his hands. “You deserve better than me,” he mumbled.
“This wasn’t your fault,” I said, and it took all the self-control I possessed not to turn to Chris and fire off,
It was yours
.
“It’s everything,” he said, “everything,” and even in my protectiveness toward his feelings, I couldn’t play dumb. We both knew what my mother thought of him, after all. She had been generous in her attitude toward him for a long time, but now thought Ricky was essentially a bum, and I was anxious for him to stop proving her right.
But after the summons, things only got worse. He went to Father George in the hope of getting extra work to cover the mounting bills, but he and Chris had just put in the fall garden the previous month and Father George claimed to have no additional work for him. This annoyed me as much as it did Ricky, because I felt the man should come up with something for him to do. Ricky was asking for honest work, and God knew—whether or not Ricky did—that Father George could have stood to pay a few pennies on his personal karmic debt by helping out a young man in need. But it was not to be, and twice Ricky came home from the rectory empty-handed.
One evening he and I were sitting beside each other in the plastic chairs of the Laundromat near his house, waiting for his laundry to dry and sketching in our respective sketchbooks. It was what we always did at the Laundromat, and since I was right-handed and he was a lefty, we could sit shoulder to shoulder in a cozy way and still draw without any trouble. Often I drew portraits of whoever was nearby; Ricky typically created stylized, graffiti-like designs, usually of a large-eyed, small child in the midst of a gritty street scene. Our perspectives on art were always quite different—almost opposites, really. I enjoyed drawing portraits of children’s faces, detailed flowers and the like; if my work had a unifying theme, it was to say,
See, in spite of everything, the world is filled with beauty
. Ricky’s, by contrast, seemed to focus on the strange or unnerving quality of any given thing and exploit it. I agreed with him that art need not be moral, but I never traipsed through the outlands of what that meant, whereas he did nothing else.
On this occasion he had sketched a beach scene, with palm trees framing the water and two children, a boy and a girl, building a sandcastle as a vendor walked by pushing a cart with a picture of two Popsicles on the side. It was an oddly idyllic drawing for Ricky, without any dark subtext that I could see, so I laughed in surprise when I glanced at it. “What’s this?” I asked.
He said, “It’s Cancun. What do you think?”
“Looks nice. We should take a weekend there.”
“Weekend, hell,” he said. “We could drive down there and live on the beach. Sell sand dollars to tourists by day, then make love under the stars.”
“Sounds brilliant,” I said. He had a jokey tone, and I was playing along.
“What do you say to next weekend?”
I laughed and said, “I’ll clear my schedule.”
Then he wrote
MARRY ME, KIRA
across the sky above the water. He erased
KIRA,
wrote
CLARA
instead, and drew a waving banner around it, then a small airplane, as if it were a message trailing behind a biplane. He nudged my shoulder, and I just pushed him back a little harder than he had pushed me. “You need a ring for that, buddy,” I said. I know that seems unromantic, but coming from Ricky this was not very meaningful. He toyed with asking me in these lighthearted ways, and other times he would go into monologues about how silly it was to put love under contract. I think eventually he would have meant it, but at the time I couldn’t take him seriously.
That weekend rolled around, and on Sunday I was about to leave for noon Mass when I received a call from Clinton’s wife, my sister-in-law, Susie. I told her I’d have to call her back. She sounded agitated but reluctantly agreed that it could wait until later that day. Ricky’s birthday was the next day—he was turning twenty-four—and we had a fun evening planned with Chris and Liz, so I knew I wouldn’t get around to returning her call until later, but I let it go.
That evening we all piled into Chris’s car—it was a ’79 Plymouth Horizon, which forced the backseat passengers to hunch over like potato bugs—and drove to Champion’s to play pool. Forrest met us there with some other friends from his band and Ricky had two or three beers, but it was just enough to put him in a fine mood. It had been weeks since I’d seen him so cheerful and relaxed, which caused me to feel more at ease, too, since he and I were so tied to each other that way. The bathroom at that place was a closet-like space at the end of the hallway, just one for the whole place. It was a dimly little, yellow-walled room. I wasn’t surprised when he followed me there, because he had been drinking and probably needed to relieve himself, but when I tried to come out and let him have a turn he pushed me back inside in a play-wrestling sort of way and locked the door behind us. Under normal circumstances I would have been less accommodating, but it was his birthday and he’d been in such a sour mood for weeks. I remember the room’s particular light, the shifting shadows and citronella glow, and the faint cloying floral of the air freshener. When he lifted me up and pulled my legs around his waist, I felt his affection and his strength, and those things always appealed to me. The whole time he had me against the wall other customers banged on the door and rattled at the knob and he kept laughing about it. When he finished he made more noise than usual, just for show, and I punched him on the shoulder and cursed at him for that, which made him laugh more.
Not long after that we parted ways with Forrest and got back in the Horizon. As soon as Chris climbed into the driver’s seat he pulled out his baggie of cocaine and began chopping a line with his credit card onto a cassette tape box. “That is much too small for that purpose,” Ricky observed in a jokingly prim tone. “That’s like coke for a tea party.”