Bad Moon On The Rise (20 page)

“
What are you looking at,
Little Debbie?” a familiar voice said behind me as I was retrieving
a tray that an enormous white woman with a bad mullet had left on
the table in violation of rules.

“
You must be Peppa.” I
took a look at my would-be suitor and talkative neighbor of the
night before. She was a big woman, nearly six feet tall, with dark
brown skin, lots of tiny braids swinging on either side of a round
face with high cheekbones that hinted at more than a drop of
Cherokee blood. Her face was so sprinkled with acne scars she
looked as if she had been seasoned and I knew without asking where
her name, Peppa, had come from.

“
That’s me. They call me
Peppa because I’m hot stuff.” She wore a white apron stained with
ketchup and was trying to untie it. Sweat covered her face and
arms. Free from the constraints of her apron she twirled it
expertly over her head and launched it into a hamper of dirty
linens near the kitchen door.  Man, she was almost as muscled
as Mike Tyson. I had found a friend.

“
You’re a little pale for
my taste,” Peppa said, grabbing my arms and holding them out like
she was trying to find the biggest drumstick on the chicken. “But
you got some meat on your bones and I do like me a dirty white girl
with bleached hair and black roots.”

Uh oh. Maybe I’d found too good of a
friend. “You the cook?” I asked her, just to change the
subject.

“
One of them,” she said.
“I’ll get you back there with us soon as I can.” She nodded toward
the dining room filled with long rows of steel tables now jammed
with several hundred noisy, clamoring, arguing, laughing,
shrieking, just-this-side-of-being-out-of-control women. “It’s
safer in the kitchen.”

I looked out over the crowd and
started to say I could take care of myself, but who the fuck would
I be kidding? “Thanks,” I mumbled instead.

“
Who were you looking
for?” Peppa asked. “You been standing there with your mouth open
staring at those women for ten minutes. Keep it up and you’ll be
down in the laundry before you know it. Or out cold on the
floor.”

“
Sorry,” I said, starting
to shine a stainless steel counter with my rag. “I thought I had a
friend in here. Tonya Blackburn. I was hoping to see
her.”

“
Yeah,” Peppa agreed,
smiling broadly. “A friendly face sure don’t hurt in here. 
But you won’t see Tonya in this crowd. She was one of the lucky
ones. She left and she didn’t come back.”

I doubted Peppa would still consider
her lucky if she knew why Tonya was never coming back.

“
Tonya wrote to a couple
of them,” Peppa explained as she nodded toward a table of chatting
women who seemed happier than the other short-termers—which meant,
in prison body language, that they felt safer. They weren’t worried
about someone else coming up from behind and braining them. They
were protected and I thought I knew who was doing the
protecting—the guards.

“
What did she write to
them?” I asked. “Do you know?”

“
Said she was back in
school and doing real good. I remember because I didn’t believe a
word of it. Everybody always writes and says how good they are
doing. Everybody always ends up back here anyway.”

 “
Those were Tonya’s
friends?” I asked a little dubiously. The group of women seemed to
have nothing in common. Some were white, others were black, one was
Asian. A few were skinny, most were slightly plump from all the
starchy prison food, and their hair color ran the gamut from white
to screaming red. They were sitting at a prime table well out of
the way of the food line, but near the big steel containers of ice
tea and lukewarm coffee—they didn’t serve the coffee hot for
obvious reasons.  “Nice table. Is it reserved for prom
queens?”

Peppa laughed and reached for a coffee
cup. “The guards? They have their favorites and then they have
their favorites. You’re looking at them.”

I tried to figure out what they might
have in common. “Favorites for what?” I asked. “Sex?”

Peppa shook her head. “I know women
have offered, but I don’t know anyone who’s been taken up on that
offer yet. At least not anyone I believe.” She looked over at a
pair of guards leaning against one wall. They were scanning the
crowd, their hands resting lightly a few inches away from their
guns. “Do they look like they fool around to you? I mean, look at
those two. They‘re acting like a plastic knife fight’s about to
break out. They act that way every meal, too. Can’t relax for a
second. They are not the type to relax enough to unzip their pants,
trust me. Uptight bad asses, one and all. You ask me, they’re too
busy swinging their dicks at each other to let us get near
them.”

“
Really?” I asked. I had
to admit they looked all business, all the time. Definitely not on
the prowl.

“
Who knows with men?”
Peppa said, rolling her eyes. “And who really cares? Back to the
salt mines for me. But don’t bus no more tables for the girls, L.D.
They’re baiting you, hoping you’ll take something off their trays
so they can come back and say they wanted it and pick a
fight.”

“
I’m never gonna get the
hang of this,” I admitted.

Peppa patted me on the shoulder. “I’ll
look after you.” She eyed me with the astuteness of a used car
salesmen. “You got some muscle behind that meat, don’t you? You and
me need to go a few rounds.”

“
They have boxing in
here?” I asked timidly.

She started laughing like I had said
something truly funny. “Oh, that’s a good one, Little Debbie.
That’s a real good one. I like some sass in my women.”

I smiled weakly as Peppa walked
away—but then I saw her shoot a glare at another woman who had
started to move toward me and let me tell you, however friendly
Peppa had been to me, it was a look that stopped the other woman
dead in her tracks.

I decided to be glad Peppa was my
friend.

“
Hey, L.D.,” Peppa
whispered unexpectedly in my left ear. I jumped a good two feet.
She had returned to my side with the stealth of a ghost. “You get a
good look at your roommate yet?”

I shook my head.

“
That’s her.” Peppa
pointed to a table near the front door. A woman sat alone at the
head of it, the seats cleared on either side of her. “Don’t look
much like a mass murderer, does she?”

Curious, I moved a little closer,
polishing table tops, steering clear of dirty trays, trying to get
a look at the woman I pretty much slept on top of. I could not
believe what I saw. To say she didn’t look like a mass murderer was
the understatement of the century. The notorious Risa Foster looked
like a younger version of Mrs. Santa Claus. Her jolly round face
crinkled around kindly eyes and her rosy cheeks bobbed up and down
as she ate. Her dark hair was peppered with gray, and cut short so
that it feathered around her face and stuck up a bit on the top in
a jaunty rooster-like comb. A milkmaid would have envied the creamy
pinkness of her skin and the adorable freckles sprinkled across her
nose.

Uh oh. She caught me looking. She
stared at me, fork halfway to her mouth. I froze, not knowing what
to do, before finally giving her a half-assed grin while I sort of
wiggled my fingers.

Clearly, I was rusty on my bad ass
moves. I’d have been less obvious with “Please don’t kill me!”
tattooed on my forehead.

But Risa Foster pretended not to have
seen me and just kept eating, her jolly face and kindly eyes
shining brightly beneath the harsh florescent lights.

I worked my ass off all morning long,
and for the next few mornings as well, washing dishes, unpacking
huge cans of soggy peaches and flaccid green beans, sweeping
linoleum floors and scrubbing steel counters. Half the work I did
was unnecessary, but the women who ruled over the kitchen wanted me
to know they were in charge and I wanted them to know I wasn’t
going to argue. I consoled myself with the fact that the calories I
was burning might make up for the anti-Atkins diet I was facing. I
swear, breakfast was always grits with toast and fried potatoes
while lunch usually turned out to be anemic spaghetti with a side
of mashed potatoes. Now that’s good nutrition for you.

Lunches and dinners were as chaotic on
the surface as the breakfasts, yet also as carefully choreographed
as a dance, with the same groups of women forming, the same
challenges being made, the same demands for power and acquiescence
and solitude. My cellmate, Risa Foster, dined alone and, always,
the two chairs on either side of her remained empty. Whatever her
secret was, no one bothered her and she had no problem whatsoever
being granted plenty of personal space.

I, on the other hand, fought all day
long to keep a one-foot radius around me clear. It wasn’t overt,
and maybe sometimes I imagined it, but I was being tested again and
again. Women stepped too close to me, bumped into me, knocked me
against walls, forced me to step back and make room for them to
pass by. It seemed that the most precious commodity in this place,
at least from what I had seen so far, was personal space and they
were going to make me fight to keep mine.

I fought. I challenged no one on the
surface, I kept my head down, but I am proud to say that I did not
give an inch willingly. To show any sign of weakness would have
been like standing in the middle of the Amazon River and daring the
piranhas to eat you. I was not about to invite trouble and, well,
my big ass and ample bust had to be good for something. Turns out
both parts were good for swinging and bumping people away from the
rest of my body. Finally, it seemed as if I wasn’t being tested
nearly so often. Word had gotten out that this was not my first
visit to the coop and someone, I suspected Peppa, had started a
rumor that I had sawed my cheating husband into pieces with a steak
knife, fed most of him to his hunting dogs and flushed the rest
down the toilet. I know because some sad-faced Latina woman had
asked me, in broken English, if the hunting dogs had eaten all
trace of my ano husband’s bones or was it was necessary to bury the
big ones? Yikes. I hoped for her husband’s sake that she was not
getting out anytime soon.

“
You doing okay,” Peppa
said to me one afternoon after the lunch rush had subsided and I
had finished rinsing several hundred plates smeared with sauce that
looked like dried blood. We’d swapped bits of our lives in the
darkness over the past couple of nights and were close to becoming
friends.

“
I’m hanging in there,” I
answered.

“
I wasn’t asking you a
question,” she said impatiently. “I’m telling you that you’re doing
good. You’re holding your own and keeping your head down. How long
you got to be here?”

“
Couple months, I guess.
Until my trial. Can’t even begin to afford the bail.” It was a
believable lie.

Peppa nodded. “You’re going to make
it. I can always tell within a couple of hours who can hang and
who’s going down. You’re gonna be okay.”

I felt unaccountably relieved. But I
still didn’t want to be alone. Or, more truthfully, didn’t want to
be caught alone, not by the notorious big-mouthed Martha Ray, whom
I had not seen since she’d yelled at me to shut up in the darkness
my first night, nor by the amorous Peppa, for that matter, or my
enigmatic cellmate. So when my free time rolled around each
afternoon, I headed to the library and offered to shelve books. The
librarian, a skinny little old lady who could easily have been
jumped and trussed by any of the prisoners, looked at me
suspiciously at first, decided I was serious and waved me toward
several rolling carts of books waiting to be re-shelved. It was not
a bad-sized library, at least for a prison library. Many of the
hardback books looked fairly new. The titles weren’t going to win
any Nobel prizes, however. The stacks seemed heavy on crime
fiction, which I re-shelved in the How To section just to be a
smart ass. Then I hid two copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves under a
radiator in case Peppa wandered in. I didn’t want her to get any
ideas.

I found I liked it in the library. It
was quiet, unlike the rest of the prison. It smelled of dust and
books instead of slightly old vegetable soup and cheap lemon
disinfectant, and the women sitting at its tables, poring over
their books, looked like they were trying to escape the chaos
around them, not contribute to it. I could have stayed in there
forever.

Best of all, plenty of the
short-termers hung out there, no doubt for the same reasons I did,
so I was able to wander through the rows of shelves, eavesdropping
on inmate conversations. I heard all the usual disasters,
complaints, betrayals and disappointments that marked the lives of
women in general. In fact, the inmates clung to all the things
wrong on the outside of the prison with a desperation that made me
think that, rotten or not, having a bunch of losers waiting for you
when you got out was still way better than having no one at all.
But I learned little that would help me figure out what had
happened to Tonya Blackburn until the afternoon I noticed that two
of the women Peppa had said were in Tonya’s group of friends were
whispering together at a table near the hallway door. I grabbed a
couple of books and hid in the row behind them, listening. Not a
lot of it made sense.