The Enchanted (19 page)

At least the female guard has the solace of knowing that her body will not go to the oven. They lift it on a real stretcher and take her out to find her family. They empty her locker and take the knitting needles and balls of yarn, and the battered purse that has seen better days, and the wallet stuffed with coupons and pictures of her kids.

Then she vanishes the same way we all do, so I suppose it is not much different.

I
hear the soft clop of the lady as she walks past my cell, and I can feel the hot storms that rage inside her. The
closer she comes to the priest, the more her insides rebel. She wants this and cannot have it: the peace of being known.

She is afraid if she shares her soul with him, he will reject it. Then she will be lost forever. Then she will be like the men she works with—alone.

I wish I could go to my cell door and call to her. “Lady,” I would tell her, “it will be okay. Go to the priest and ask him. Ask him, Will you know me? See what he says.”

I can't say anything to the lady. Even if I could talk, I don't know how to have those conversations. I heard one only once, during that visit with my grandparents. I remember the warm pajamas after the bath and the rich feeling of the cocoa in my belly. I remember curling up in their guest bed under a thick scratchy wool blanket and listening to them talking softly in the room next to me. The talking sounds that came through that wall were not hurting sounds or sad sounds. They were peaceful sounds. That night I got up and touched the walls and put my head on them and listened. Is that what love sounds like? The sound of peace in their voices?

I know that when I read books about love, they are telling the truth. The truth of it winds around my heart and tightens in pain. I try and see it through my eyes, raised to my stone ceiling, and I wonder, What is it like to feel love? What is it like to be known?

The lady is like me in many ways. Serpents crawl inside her. She is deathly afraid that others will see them. She is afraid, and yet she wants the priest to see inside
her and accept the monsters that wrap around the secret, pure part of her—the part she managed to save, miraculously, that so many of us have lost. She knows the monsters are there and yet wants to be seen.

Her courage frightens and amazes me. It makes me hopeful for her. It makes me crave happiness for her. Is that what you call love? Is that what you call hope?

T
he night silk skies, they fail to exist. The dark road is like a ribbon under your car. Gone. The wife waiting for you, even the tiny dimple at the corner of her mouth. Gone. The stars outside—oh, to see them with her once more—and the faint smell of barbecue for the birthday you missed again because you were working late again. Gone.

The warden stands in his backyard. What soon will not be his backyard anymore. He smells the overpowering smell of fir and cedar and the river from afar, of the smoldering ashes of the barbecue of his neighbors—the lazy assholes don't wait for the fire to burn down, they just keep soaking it with fluid, so the burgers must taste like lighter fluid—and the damp loam of the beds his wife once turned over for the fall onions that she grew not so many years ago, and the distant hills, and the faint remembrance of shampoo wafting from the open bathroom window where she once showered.

He knew this grief was coming, and here it is, no different or better or anything. He doesn't want to lie
to himself. He doesn't want to tell himself that his wife wanted to leave. He doesn't want to pretend she lived in pain and regret and longed for a place of peace. All of that is bullshit. She didn't want to die. He didn't want her to die. Fuck heaven, he thinks—bring her back.

Bring her back.

T
he lady visits the home she grew up in. She doesn't know why she came, but here she is, standing out front.

She could never bring anyone here. The yard is pitted with dog turds, and the ancient white siding is stained green-black with mold. The sole window out front is spotted, as if someone inside were spitting on it. Not much has changed, she sees. Probably the same landlord, fleecing the poor of their welfare checks. The limp curtain twitches, and she sees a face—a child's face. It is small and scared but could be her own, back in time.

She decides to move before an angry parent comes out, wondering why there is a lady in a suit standing on the sidewalk, staring at their home. They might assume she is a social worker, come to wreak havoc on their lives.

She walks around the corner, seeing into the backyard. The same laurel hedges are there, capped with the same sliver of sky. She remembers how she used to think that if she prayed hard enough, her dream worlds would come true. She and her mom would wake up one day on the magical island and eat the dripping fruit. Or the best one of all: Her mom would turn around one day with
her eyes wide awake, and she would be all there, and she would rush to her and say, Oh, baby.

T
he attorneys have been calling the lady, and for the first time she doesn't call them right back. She can hear the panic in their messages. The time has passed and the hour is here. If they are going to file with the court, they have to do it now. They ask if she has found anything, if there is any hope at all.

The lady feels silenced. No, not silenced. Quiet. Listening. She sees the path Auntie Beth hobbles along to her porch. She sees the skies over Sawmill Falls. She sees York, real flesh and blood in the Dugdemona cage. Flesh and blood as real as the warden's. As the priest's. As hers.

She wishes she could talk to someone. She imagines talking to the priest.

She has danced with death these years, pulling some bodies from the flames, walking away, and letting others perish.

For the first time, she truly feels it. She feels the pull of life the way the lakes pull their streams into them, mixing the fresh with the cold. Like her mother must have felt with the stirrings in her belly that were knitting joyously into new flesh: her. She wishes she could feel that someday—the creation of new life inside her body. A new being, a water baby born of the blue forests.

She also feels the pull of death. Although she doesn't know about them, she senses the flibber-gibbets waiting
near the oven. She feels their implacable gray skins and the coolness and despair of their desire. Will she feed York into their oven? Will she let them steal his last kindling warmth?

W
eeks have passed for the white-haired boy, and life is no different or the same.

Summer is here in force, the sky a bright hammered dome over the yard, but the boy doesn't know it. He doesn't feel the dust under his feet or the warm sun on his skin. It doesn't matter to him if it is hot or cold. He gets letters from home, and they are like missives from a foreign land. His mother writes that his sister won the fifth-grade talent show and that she makes his favorite rolls for breakfast every Sunday, the orange kind with icing. She says his grandpa Frank is feeling much better, and their crazy neighbors got drunk on the Fourth and lit the lawn on fire with their stupid illegal fireworks. His dad adds postscripts that he intends to be funny but are not funny, like,
Don't turn into a career criminal, son.
The boy reads the letters and wonders if he ever lived in that world and whether he can go back. He knows the answer: He can never go back.

His days, at least, are predictable. He goes to mess three times a day. He works in the clothing factory, where he gets paid forty cents an hour. He doesn't complain about the work or the slave wages; the time spent at the clothing machines, slicing the blue denim, acts as a salve. It is
the only time his brain is asleep. He beds in his cell with the snoring, guttering old man. And twice a week, sometimes more, a big beef will come to him—in the yard, in the mess, in the halls, anywhere they want, it seems—and tell him when or where. Or does it soon after, up in a stairwell or behind a door. The big beefs seem to walk with impunity, anywhere and everywhere, under the smiling sardonic eyes of that intelligence officer Conroy.

He tells himself he will not think about it when it happens. He will blank it out. That never works. He is wide awake and screaming inside through the whole thing. Always. He wonders who made up the lie that people can blank out such things.

Today he sits at lunch mess with the other broken men. He sits next to a thin reedlike man with sandy hair. The man might have been good-looking once, but now his face is lopsided, as if he were badly beaten and had his jaw reset. The man could be nineteen or he could be thirty. The boy realizes he doesn't know the man's name, though they have been sitting next to each other for weeks.

The man begins talking in a low, broken voice, as if he swallowed splinters. He tells the boy he worked as a landscaper. “Till I got sent here for drugs,” he says in his whispery, broken voice.

The boy looks at his tray. He thinks it is rice—if rice has round black spots in it, like bugs. There is a pile of damp, rotten shredded iceberg lettuce that smells like fish. The boy thinks of the meals his mother used to
make—lasagna and garlic bread, bowls of buttered peas, brownies with homemade white icing, and tumblers of icy cold milk to wash it all down. He remembers coming home from school and filling a mixing bowl with cereal and milk and eating it all. He pushes down those painful memories with force.

“How long have you been here?” the white-haired boy asks the man, tentatively spooning a little of the rice into his mouth. One of the black spots cracks unpleasantly under his teeth, spurting a vile taste in his mouth. His hunger lately is a raging, shaking force, and yet he cannot make himself eat this food.

“Four years,” the man whispers. He shows a fearful broken-toothed smile and rubs his pants legs nervously with his hands. The boy feels like scooting a little farther away. “It was supposed to be just one year,” the man adds.

“One?” the boy asks softly, looking at his tray.

“Yeah.” The man spoons the vermin-filled rice into his broken-toothed mouth, closes his rubbery lips, holds his nose, and swallows hard. “I got an infraction.” The man's voice lowers even more, and he tilts his head down so that only he and the boy can hear, though none of the other men at their table listens.

“An infraction?” the boy whispers.

“That guard Conroy, he was behind it,” the man whispers, his brown eyes on the boy. “Planted my cell with dope. I got three years on top of the one I already had.”

“But—why?” A dawning horror awakens in the white-haired boy. It fills his work boots with terror and gives
cold air to the sagging of his pants behind his hollowing thighs.

The man gives a loony, broken smile and says in his husky voice, “I was a favorite—just like you.”

T
he white-haired boy wanders the yard. He wanders the cellblocks. Men take him without recourse or reason. They can see his soul has left and there is nothing to feel bad about anymore. When they are done, the men turn away in disgust, scars on their cheeks showing the battles they have fought—and lost—for the same reasons.

The boy wanders late at night, long past lockdown. The classrooms are in shadows, the windowless Cellblock H a dark hole that swallows screams. He wanders through the clothing factory and sees the machines standing shrouded in shadows. He wanders into the mess, the moonlight coming in through the tall cafeteria windows, highlighting the tables wiped with smears of gray rag juice. The trash cans are filled to overflowing with rank food and blood-smeared napkins from men with rotten teeth and untreated gum disease.

The boy wanders, and it occurs to him that we have a sun and a sky, a moon and a cloud, a ground and a grave. Before he came here, he thought death was an innocent thing. Now he can see that death is a choice.

When the guards catch him wandering late at night, they sigh and lead him to his cell, where the wheezing old man rises to let him in his bunk. The old man and
the guards exchange glances in the dark, the moonlight showing in the old man's rheumy eyes.

No one bothers to demerit the boy for wandering. Usually, this offense would mean a month in the hole and, if caught again, a longer trip to the metal coffins of Cellblock H. Since the female guard died, the guards have become even harsher with the wanderers. But they take pity on the boy. They can see though he is a lost boy, he is a useful boy. Boys like him keep the men peaceable. They keep the men from rioting. The men spend time arguing inside themselves about the boy, whether he represents them or not, whether they want him or not, whether this is a line they should cross. A boy like him keeps the men from thinking about the revolting food, about working for slave wages, about the unfairness of a man like Conroy. One useful boy is like a lightning rod that moves the prison away from storms.

When the boy is at work, he loses himself staring at the sharp blades of the mechanical shears that cut the cloth. Chop, chop, the blades fall, slicing the heavy blue denim as it passes down the line. Farther down the line, other men run the pieces through sewing machines, while still others stamp the cloth with a heavy blue ink badge, turning out the clothes that are currently fashionable with gangbangers and kids who dream of prison life like a romance.

The boy has heard how Risk and his crew make shanks out of these sharp blades and any other item they can use. He thinks about how such knives—hundreds of
them—are hidden all over the prison, taped under desks, buried inside mattresses, tucked in the endless rat holes in the old walls. For a price, anyone can rent a shank. Anyone but the boy, that is. If he tried to buy a knife, even to kill himself, word would get back to Risk.

But he was a handy boy in his dad's workshop. He looks at the glittering metal blades and thinks, I can make one.

The only question is, What will I do with it?

He wanders the prison, his eyes unseeing. He knows the cellblocks where Risk and his cronies roar with laughter at night, drunk on pruno. He knows the stairwells where the smell of old blood drifts from the stone like a cold afterthought. He knows the quiet hallways of the administration building where the guards and staff have offices. The building is locked at night, but the boy knows there are windows that cock open to the sultry summer nights, and sometimes he drifts under the shadows of those windows, along the dark walls where the guards in the towers cannot see.