Ugly Girls: A Novel (3 page)

Every shift began the same: Sign in at one door, show your badge, ask after the man’s family, pretend to listen. Say
Morning
if it was Phil. Next door, same thing, only open up your lunch pail and let the man paw through it.
How’s Sharon? And the kids? Good, good. Yep, cheese and mustard today, all out of cold cuts.
Next door, hold out your arms for a pat down, ignore this man as he ain’t really the chatty type. Store your lunch pail and wallet and cell phone and keys and pen, if you were dumb enough to bring one in, in your locker. Badge up, gun up, nightstick loose in your hand. Walk through the final door. You’re in.

He had about five minutes before the next shift began, so Jim joined Clapp, the other walker, where he stood just inside the final set of doors. They couldn’t go early; everything had to be timed just so, no cutting corners or schedule changes, or else why bother? From here they could see all the way to the other side; this part of the prison wasn’t nothing but one long rectangle with forty rooms on each side—twenty on top and twenty on bottom. Metal staircases on both walls, metal because it was sturdy and because, Jim had come to believe, nothing in this place could be quiet or peaceful. Footsteps rang off the stairs day in and day out, and the metal amplified all the other noise, too.

The yard was a sorry place where the men could get some quiet, the yard like a clay baseball diamond pocked with weeds and cigarette butts. When it rained, the yard became a swamp; when it was hot the dirt felt like it had been cooked in the oven. The infirmary was off the cafeteria, and the hole was underneath the cafeteria, in the basement of the basement, or so the warden called it. When he first started, Jim wondered if the men in the hole could smell things cooking in the cafeteria above. He’d soon found out that all you could smell down there was what the men brought with them: sweat, breath, fear. Working the hole was just as much a punishment as having to live down there. You patrolled it in mostly dark; you listened to the men crying or yelling or, worse, not making any sound at all.

Jim nodded at Clapp. He was a scrawny man, jumpy. Myra would say he looked rode hard and put up wet. He loved inmate gossip, and it seemed like every time Jim worked with the man he had a story.

“Hey,” Clapp said. He was fiddling with a button on his cuff, couldn’t quite get it to go through the eyehole. He stopped suddenly, put his hands on his hips, and Jim knew he was in for another story. “You hear Carver pulled a balloon of coke out an inmate’s anus?” He peered at Jim, like Jim was the warden and could do something about it.

“You don’t say,” Jim said.

“Mm-hmm. Says he heard some talk so he did a strip search. Said it was bright green. The balloon was, I mean.”

Jim waited. More and more, these kinds of exchanges felt like torture. He just wanted them to be over so he could get started on his shift, one second closer to it ending.

“Well, what do you have to say about that?” Clapp asked.

“I guess I’m not all that surprised,” Jim said. Every day it was something. Stories abounded. O’Toole ate a prisoner’s dinner every night for a month, right there in front of him, because the prisoner called his wife a whore.

“Right out the man’s
asshole
,” Clapp said, smacking his hands together, as if to wake Jim up. Now Jim wondered if the meaningful part to Clapp wasn’t the smuggling of cocaine, but the fact that Carver had fiddled with another man’s area.

“Good for Carver,” Jim said. “I hope he wore gloves.”

“Haw,” Clapp howled, and some of the inmates in their cells mimicked him. Clapp wheeled, yelled, “Shut the FUCK UP.” He put a hand to his ribs, shook his head. Six months ago Clapp had slipped on a tooth and fell down the stairs, right onto his nightstick. Broke two ribs.
Whose tooth?
Jim had asked when O’Toole told him the story.
Does it matter?
came the answer. Clapp went back to fiddling with his button, nodded at Jim, and walked toward the metal staircase on the right. They’d switch sides halfway through, take their breaks separately. This was all the human interaction there’d be, aside from whatever the inmates had in store.

O’Toole was known as a hardass. Clapp had a hair trigger. Jim wasn’t sure what the other guards, or the inmates for that matter, said about him. Maybe, Jim Tipton once broke up a fight by throwing a hot pot of gravy onto the prisoners. Or, Tipton brought in his guitar and sang on Easter. Or, Tipton’s wife used to call the front desk drunk and ask to talk to Jim, which wasn’t possible during a shift, or asked when was Jim coming home.

Jim clanged up the steps. Men pretended to busy themselves, watching him from the sides of their eyes. Walk from one end to the other, turn, walk back toward the other end. Go down the stairs, walk that end to end, too. He knew whatever floor he wasn’t on, the men in their cells were up to something. Making dice out of soap, sharpening toothbrushes, coughing or howling in one cell so the guard would be distracted from what was happening in another cell, whispering plans so low it was a miracle anyone heard. Even if they were just lying there thinking, they were up to something.

“Hey,” he heard a man say. “Hey, Tipton?”

It was a newer prisoner, only been inside eight months or so, a child-toucher named Herman. Some guards made it a point to ignore any names, to refer to the prisoners only by their numbers, but Jim wasn’t like that.

Jim walked over to his cell. Herman had one blind eye that tended to roll around, making it hard to take him serious. Child-touchers had it rough in prison. Jim expected him to ask for more protection, or to see the warden, or even just to shoot the shit a little, make himself feel human for a while. “Speak,” Jim told him.

“Oh, hey, Tipton.” He aimed his good eye at Jim. “You got a daughter?”

Jim knew that prisoners were the most bored human beings on earth. Aside from forming gangs and working out and smuggling drugs and carving paraphernalia out of soap and having sex with each other and themselves, they loved to find ways to fuck with a person. It’s about control, triumph. This was something Jim understood. A man wearing a jumpsuit and shuffling around in plastic shoes and getting bent over if he ain’t watching close needs to find a way to stay a man. It was a truth that rang clear as a bell across the countryside.

Still, Jim stabbed his nightstick through the little slot in the door, right into Herman’s good eye. The prisoner lurched back, fell to the floor with his hands cupped over his face, sobbing like he was a boy after his first punch.

“Don’t you fucking ask me that again,” Jim said. He’d make sure the man saw a doctor, it’s what separated him from some of the other guards, and he didn’t often hit the prisoners. It’s just that from time to time that bell rung true for him, too.

WHEN SHE WAS YOUNGER,
about Perry’s age, drinking with her friends made the nights feel plump with possibility. The way the streetlights could blur, the way music was never loud enough, the highway going east forever in one way and west forever in another. Even sitting in someone’s garage waiting around for something to happen—there was always the guarantee that something would happen. What could the future hold? It didn’t matter, as long as there was that feeling.

Myra felt that way now. Her body warm and relaxed, the pleasant yellow light of the living room, the whole world outside the trailer for her to join or ignore. A new friend two cushions over, the sting in her hands and knees just a dull throb. What could be wrong with trying to preserve that feeling?

“You should put up some twinkle lights,” Pete said.

“You think?” Myra was tickled. Such a young-person thing to say, and he was saying it to her like nothing. “Where, up around the television?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Or lining your windows. White ones, though, not them multicolored ones. Those are tacky.”

“You’re right.” Myra held her beer to her knee. It’d be swollen but the beer was cold enough to help that a little. If Jim didn’t want her to drink, why didn’t he pour it out, get rid of it, yell at her some? Jim just wanted her to be happy, that’s why. The thought made her feel safe. Loved. Maybe she’d do a little something for him. Make him a pot roast. A sandwich, at least.

Pete took a swig from his bottle. Myra loved that sound, that clean sound of the beer coming down the neck. He held his fist to his mouth, belched. But a quiet belch. Polite.

“You know,” he said, “I’ve seen you before.”

“Oh?” Myra didn’t like this. When had he seen her? When she was dressed for work? That’d be okay. Or when she was passing by her windows in her robe, red-eyed, hair all messed up, hungover? That would not be okay.

“Yep. I seen you and your daughter one day. Coming home from somewhere. You both looked pissed off.” At this he laughed a little, into his fist again.

“Yeah, that’s us all right,” Myra said. She took a drink, held the bottle to her other knee. “She’s a handful. You remember being a teenager?”

“Course I do. Wasn’t
that
long ago for me.”

He finished off his beer, his throat moving with each pull. Myra had said something wrong, had passed him an oar in the “Ain’t we old?” boat.

“No, no, that ain’t what I meant,” she said. “I know you’re still a young man. I just meant there’s a difference between your teenage years and your adulthood.”

“I get you,” he said.

Myra pushed herself up, limped into the kitchen to get more beer. “Of course,” she said, “it’s important to maintain some stuff from your teenage years.” She spoke to him across the tiny bar in between the kitchen and the living room. He didn’t turn his head toward her. What was she doing, talking to this strange person about being a teenager? “That excitement,” she added, “you know what I mean?”

He grunted, grunted again when she handed him a fresh beer. Myra lowered herself back onto the couch. After a while he said, “I didn’t have the most fun teenage years.”

Myra waited for him to go on, but he just took a swig and sat there. “Well,” Myra said, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Nice of you to say.”

“Me, I had a great time in high school. Back then everybody hung out with everybody. There wasn’t no cliques. Football players wouldn’t just go for the cheerleaders, if you get me. And I wasn’t no cheerleader.”

The beer was making her chatty. She could feel her mouth getting away from her, wanted to stop, but it felt too good, saying these things. Remembering.

“One time I—”

“Your daughter ain’t no cheerleader, either, am I right?”

She had been about to tell him about the time she had drag raced from one stoplight to another, one of those spur-of-the-moment events she treasured. She had won, had kissed the boy she’d raced full on the mouth right there in front of his girlfriend, that’s how filled with triumph she’d been. He had tasted like eggs and she had come to know that most mouths tasted like eggs when they were caught off guard like that. She was overcome with the memory of that night, that moment, her heart pounding, her mouth still open like she was going to keep right on talking, but Pete’s question had caught up with her, frozen her.

“No, she doesn’t cheerlead,” Myra said. “How you know that?”

“Well, like I said, I seen you before. And I ain’t never seen her in no cheerleader’s uniform.”

Was he making small talk? Why interrupt her story like that? Was she being a glory days bore?

“Uh-huh,” Myra said. “Nope, she’s not the peppy type.”

“Me neither,” he said. “Or I mean, I wasn’t the peppy type, back when I was in school. Do y’all get along? Fight a lot?”

“We get along fine,” Myra said. “We fight sometimes, but that’s normal.”

Myra knew what was going on. She’d overplayed her hand, taken this young man for a confidant, this man closer to her daughter’s age than her own. Now he was making polite conversation, was about two questions away from saying,
Well, I better get going
.

“She seems like a real spitfire,” he said.

“You could say that,” Myra said. Took in two gulps of her beer. That’d be a burp, one she’d be hard-pressed to hold in, guaranteed.

“Where’s she at?” he asked.

“Oh,” Myra said, “I don’t know. Out for an evening stroll, is what she told me.”

“You don’t seem too worried about her. What if she ain’t out for a walk? What if she’s out doing wrong? Or tied up in some maniac’s closet?”

Already Myra was thinking of the bath she’d take, how she’d pour a beer into a glass and take it with her, light a candle, maybe even fall to sleep in the tub for a while. Who was this Pete, asking her about her parenting?

“That’s on her,” Myra said. “She knows right from wrong.”

They looked at each other. Myra saw how his cleft lip made it difficult to keep his lips shut all the way, how his eyes moved quick, taking everything in, green but for a big brown spot in the right one. Finally he looked away.

“Well,” he said. “I better get going.”

Myra almost shouted
Aha!
, she was so pleased with herself for calling it.

“Thanks for the beers.” He got up, smoothed down his jeans, straightened his shirt. Such pride, Myra thought, in his rags. It felt good to think it.

“Stop by anytime,” she told him, tipped her beer. She felt surprised to realize that she meant it.

At the door he turned and said, “You think about those twinkle lights.”

“I will,” Myra said, the screen door snapping to.

She listened to see if he remembered to take his gun. Only now did she realize she’d been aware of it out there the whole time, keeping her mind tuned to it like she would if it was a feral cat that could speak her name. Like it might grow legs and walk in, right up to her, and spit in her face.

THEY ROLLED THE RED MAZDA
out of the gravel driveway. The owner had left the keys balanced nice and sweet on the back left tire. A gift. Baby Girl listened to the same GBE song again and again, like she was trying to convince herself she was as bold as the hard thumping beats rattling the windows, like her tank was empty and she was filling it right back up. The bass was so loud it made the car feel like a vise, squeezing tighter with each beat. What Perry wouldn’t give for a song featuring an actual instrument.