Afterburn (11 page)

"You just figured this out?"

"I was passing the room yesterday and saw the diapers inside. You can tell by looking."

"Oh," said Miss Metzger, recovering herself. "I'm sure we would have realized the problem."

MAYBE,
Christina thought a minute later, but of course not. She walked briskly toward the prison hospital. She didn't have much time; she was due inside the hospital in fifteen minutes for more maintenance work that didn't need to be done. Good thing she liked sweeping, always had, for it calmed her. Outside the dispensary stood a long line of women waiting to be handed their daily dose of AZT, or methadone, or Prozac, or whatever else kept them alive. In the SHU they brought your medicine to you, if they remembered. The whole point was to
punish
. In the box you got a cot and a hot and no more—the rooms in the SHU were cement cells, zoo cages. Not much of a penalogical advancement from, say, eighteenth-century London, modern toiletry the only great difference. Twenty-three hours a day inside, one out. No television, no cooking for oneself, no books, no visits, no music, no work. Just time. Just time and picking at your fingernails and masturbating and listening to the soft rush of the plumbing system and cooking imaginary meals and telling yourself that your life was not over yet and wishing you had been nicer to your father and masturbating again and picking your teeth with a fingernail and doing a thousand sit-ups and hearing the girl in the next cell banging her head on her steel door. Soft T could deliver you into this vacuum. All he needed to do was scribble on his fucking clipboard a couple of times in a week and you were gone. He'd told Mazy that she had to blow him once a month, the first time being a minute from now behind the hospital. Soft T had a thing for big women, and Mazy, softly expanded by grief and exhaustion to more than three hundred pounds, excited all of Soft T's spittled sadism. The more immense his victim, the larger his conquest. He did not see Mazy's maternal gravity and private generosities, the loveliness hidden by the half dozen scars melted into her face decades prior by a drunken father holding an electric clothes iron. As for Mazy, the prospect of bending her bulk to the ground to service Soft T's quivering viciousness terrified her, and she'd confessed to Christina she'd never been able to do that to a man; the act made her sick. Something had happened with an uncle when she was a girl, and she'd never been able to forget it. What if she tried to do it to Soft T and started to weep? He'd become furious, maybe he'd hit her, maybe he'd put her in the SHU
anyway
. Watching Mazy, seeing the old, never-forgotten frenzy come into her eyes, Christina had decided. She'd take the chance. At first she'd considered a weapon—you could get a shank if you really needed one—but then she'd realized that Soft T would quickly overpower her, perhaps even beat her for her trouble, and then, having attacked a guard, she'd end up in the SHU for at least a year, unable to help Mazy or herself, for that matter. There had to be a better way, she'd concluded to herself, a trickier way, and in fact, there was.

SOFT T WAS WAITING
in the hidden, shadowed space behind the hospital, his hands on his fat waist, the armpits of his uniform dark crescents of sweat. He looked up at Christina. "Where's Mazy?"

"She had a scheduling conflict."

"She ain't coming?"

"Nope."

He blinked, disbelief preceding anger. "She sent you to tell me that?"

"No."

"What're you doing? I'll report you being down here."

"I'm taking Mazy's place. I do you, you keep off her."

Soft T's heavy face stared into hers until he understood. "All right, girl, but you better be
good
."

"You wouldn't know what good is."

"You can say any shit you want." He laughed. "But you still got to do it."

The ground was littered with broken glass, cigarette butts, and trash. Some of the guards brought rubbers along, some didn't. Soft T never demanded actual vaginal sex from any of the women.

He rubbed his belly, and when he lifted his shirt, she noticed the soft, toffee-colored flesh around his hips. "All right now, come to Daddy," he said, his open hands at his waist.

"You can unzip yourself, you fucker."

"No, you can do that, too."

She knelt down on the old piece of plywood that had been thrown over the ground, her knees hard against it, and unzipped Soft T's pants. No one could see them. I'm doing this for you, Mazy, she thought, I can take the SHU.

She pulled out Soft T's penis, which was short and thick and smelled of cologne, and leaned close to him. He needed a little working and she did this brusquely. He stiffened. She moved her head back and forth. Her mouth was numb, she felt nothing. To imagine that she'd once enjoyed this sometimes—well, that was a long time ago.

"That's good," he rasped. "You like it."

She shook her head, mouth full.

"You're lying. You like it."

She pulled her head back. "Dream your sick dreams."

He pushed her head down, laughed. "Dang, girl, you good."

She kept at it, two hands at once, fast.

"Tight, make it
tight
." His breathing quickened, his legs started to shake. "All right," he moaned. "All right. Okay."

She pulled him out as he came. White ribbons of semen stuck to her face and lips.

"That's right," said Soft T, slapping his penis against her cheek, "go on and make a mess of yourself." He laughed and zipped up. Then he reached out and squeezed her cheek. "You a hot bitch, you know that?" He looked hard into her face. "Next time I want a smile."

As Soft T disappeared around the corner of the building on his way back to his shift, Christina removed the small urine cup from her pocket. Using the cup's firm lip to scrape against her cheek, she collected the semen on her face, not all of it, but certainly a few teaspoons. She pressed the top of the cup together, matching the two edges perfectly, and then withdrew a tape dispenser from her other pocket. She taped the top of the cup shut, then wiped her tongue and teeth against the left sleeve of her shirt, her lips and cheeks against the right. Last, she spat—hard as she could.

SOME OF THE OTHER WOMEN
knew what she had planned and watched from afar as she stalked toward the administration building. Dolores, a Dominican girl raking grass clippings, cried, "You get it?"

Christina nodded.

"You go, girl," she called.

Christina walked into the administration building. "I want to talk to the Dep," she told the guard, a man known as Rings because he sported at least five on each hand.

"Why?"

"Something important."

"He busy."

"I heard something about one of the girls having some strong stuff inside."

Rings looked at her with suspicion, having listened to all manner of requests, lies, and outrageous assertions over the years. But, Christina knew, he had to let her through. Heroin was coming out of Mexico these days, cheap and strong. The snortable stuff sometimes got inside. If one of the women died, then it was his ass on the end of a string. The deputy warden, a tight bantam of a man with a salt-and-pepper crew cut, was known to be smart, tough, and completely unfair. He also wanted to be a warden at one of the state's men's prisons, an inherently political position, and so he had to appear to have a record of running as clean an operation as possible. Female inmates dying of heroin overdoses were not in the plan.

"You tell
me
what it is," said Rings.

"No." Christina shook her head. "You gotta give me the Dep."

The guard picked up his keys and clipboard, unlocked the barred door, disappeared behind it, and locked it again. In a minute he was back, a look of surprise on his face. "All right."

She proceeded through the bars and down the cement-block hallway to the deputy warden's office, feeling the air conditioning touch her face. The deputy warden stood at his desk, a little man in a bad suit, and waved his hand in front of his chair. "Miss Welles, you—"

"I got something to talk about, but not what I told Rings."

The deputy warden lifted his hand to interrupt.

"No, wait, wait, Dep, let me talk," she said. "Soft T has been terrorizing the women."

"Mr. Thomas?"

"Mr. Thomas. He's using the clipboard to get sexual favors for himself."

The deputy warden sat down. "That's a very serious charge."

"I
know
it's a very serious charge." She could guess what he was thinking, because the wiring inside the prison was plain to anyone who had been there a few months: The prison generally let the guards get away with as much as they could, but a guard who was
proven
to have forced sex onto a female prisoner subjected the prison to the sensationalistic and synergizing effects of news reports, watchdog agency press conferences, civil lawsuits, and TV-movie deals. And then he had to be removed, which, the union correctly pointed out, deprived the man of his livelihood, guards being generally unqualified to do much else—the job required subservience to a military chain of command, tolerance for extreme boredom, a masked but present desire to abuse weaker human beings, and last but by no means least, the ability to attack and, if necessary, beat a woman.

The deputy warden saw that Christina was resolute. "Go on," he said.

"He's forcing women to give him blow jobs."

"You?"

She held his gaze. "Me."

"When?"

"About five minutes ago."

He nodded noncommittally and whisked his hands across his desk, as if sweeping away grains of irritation. The gesture carried an entire mindset—two decades of professional tedium, a thousand forgotten memos, a hundred remembered alimony payments, beer cans in an otherwise empty refrigerator, dead flies on the windowsill. "You know my problem, Miss Welles, it's his word against yours."

She waited until he seemed sure that she had no response. And then longer, creating enough silence to break his certainty.

"I've got proof."

The deputy warden folded his arms. He'd heard everything in his time. Christina slipped her hand into her pocket. "Here. Don't take
my
word for it." She put the little paper cup on the warden's desk. "That's his—his
ejaculate
. You have that tested, get the DNA or whatever they do, and then test him, Dep. He just shot that all over my face five minutes ago. You go ask him how I got that, okay? I didn't
steal
it from him, you know what I mean?"

The deputy warden picked up the little paper cup. He tore the tape off, looked inside, and nodded. Then he raised his eyes to Christina. "That's it, then," he said.

She didn't understand his tone. "What? You're not going to do anything?"

"I
am
going to do something, as a matter of fact." The deputy-warden pushed the cup to one side on his desk. "But when and in what manner is not your business. However"—he glanced at a couple of papers on his desk—"we have something else much more important to talk about."

She couldn't believe it. He wasn't going to do anything about Soft T. "What?" she spat, thinking bitterly of what she had just put herself through. "What do
we
have to talk about that is more important than what I just told you, Dep?"

"This." He was holding a piece of paper. "You're due to appear in court tomorrow, Miss Welles."

"Court?"

"State Supreme Court."

"I don't get it."

"Your lawyer never contacted you, I see."

"Nobody told me anything," she breathed, afraid now. "They can't be adding on to my sentence, they aren't—"

"No, no," the deputy warden interrupted, his voice both disgusted and amused. He handed the heavy stationery to Christina. The letter was from the Manhattan District Attorney's Office:

You are hereby directed to produce Christina Welles, inmate number 95G1139-112D, in State Supreme Court, New York County, Part 47, for a 440.10 motion request. It is anticipated by this office that the motion to vacate the inmate's conviction and sentence will be signed by the Court
.

We have been unable to contact the inmate's family members. Please advise the inmate of her anticipated change in status and prepare her for her imminent release.

She looked up at the deputy warden. He nodded silently, his mouth shut. The air conditioner in the window battered out a hum. She glanced back at the letter. Signed by her own prosecutor, whom she'd last seen at the sentencing hearing, where she'd received her seven years, no thanks due to her attorney, Mrs. Bertoli, a meat-faced hack lawyer who worked out of a castle of hack lawyers on lower Broadway. Why had the prosecutor written the letter? She barely remembered him, a faceless man in his late twenties who wanted to know everything about her life before she'd been arrested, wanted to understand how a young woman like her had become a felon—unlike Mrs. Bertoli, who was just putting in the time for a fee, the fee Rick had so magnanimously agreed to pay using money Christina had earned for him. But Christina had not been cooperative with the prosecutor, and he had marched through the charges relentlessly. She had accepted her conviction, breathed it in like a mountain, seen it as the logical result of a life out of control. Too many wrong choices in a row, and you ended up in the bad place.

"I'm getting out?" she said now, trying to keep her voice even.

"Yes," the deputy warden replied, face tight.

She blinked. "Wait, this never happens."

"Never, usually."

"I can't believe it."

The deputy warden's eyes were cold. "I can."

THAT NIGHT
she stood under the cell's single lightbulb and packed her things in a black plastic trash bag. Not much. A few books, her music tapes. Five pairs of panties, two pairs of pants, three T-shirts, one ugly dress, and a pair of sneakers. A mail-order bra. Her hairbrush, her toothbrush, dental floss, Tampax, a small bottle of aspirin. She didn't own any makeup. Among her papers were photos of her mother and dead father and an out-of-date address book. Everyone from her former life had moved on or died or married or otherwise departed. She hadn't kept up with people. She'd wanted to forget them and for them to forget her.