Now and Again (9 page)

“I'll show you what a nice guy I am and give you ten more minutes,” Mr. Quick announced to Will and the three other students who had only slouched more deeply in their chairs and clutched their pens and pencils more tightly when the dismissal bell sounded.

The classroom window looked out onto the courtyard, where a line of cars snaked and waited for the students to emerge. In the distance, a stand of budding apple trees stretched their branches to the sun, and beyond the apple trees, the gentle slope to the ball field where Will's team gathered every afternoon. If he stayed to finish the quiz, he would be late for practice and jeopardize his starting position, but if he didn't stay, he'd get a failing grade.

Will scribbled the word “corruption,” which he knew was a euphemism for sex only because Mr. Quick had pointed it out to the class. He wrote quickly, finishing with a statement about how it was fear that was destructive, not corruption or ghosts. Then he hurried to the locker room and changed into his practice uniform before sprinting down the hill to the ball field.

“Hustle up,” called the coach, and after that, Will could breathe a little easier.

Because he'd been late, Will had to run extra laps, so it was after six when he walked up the hill to the courtyard. Most afternoons he could catch a ride with a teammate, but at that late hour the turnaround was deserted, leaving him to walk the two miles home. We should have cell phones, Will thought, but he knew it was hard enough to make ends meet without wasting money on things they didn't need.

It wasn't until he was passing the Car Mart that he wished he'd put down “Yes” for the first part of the answer. Even if ghosts didn't exist, the idea of them did, and besides, the word “ghosts” could refer to inner demons as well as outer ones. There were a lot of unexplained things in the world, so maybe the story was about how things were what you thought they were and what they
really
were didn't come into it much.

Was it
really
wrong to think about sex multiple times a day? Was it
really
wrong to imagine Tula with no clothes on even though he liked her just as much when she was wrapped up from head to toe in tights and sweaters? Was it wrong to steal food if you were starving? Some people were forced into lives of crime by the way the world was—the way it
really
was. And then he decided that this whole line of inquiry was his mother talking—she had gotten inside his head somehow and was controlling it the way she had wanted to control Will and Lyle until she decided to go out and control the world.

When Mr. Quick passed back the quizzes the next day, he said that the most interesting answers came from the people who had answered “Both.”

“But that wasn't an option!” Will blurted out. He started to raise his hand, but Mr. Quick was in speech mode, beaming down at the high-achieving front row, who were looking primly at their papers and trying not to gloat. Will could feel the pride radiating off of them, and when Mr. Quick said, “thinking outside the box,” Will could feel the bars of the box closing in on him, penning him in with the hicks and the stoners and the mainstreamed autistic girl who sat every day in the back of the classroom gently banging her head against the wall.

“The ghosts were both real and not real,” said Mr. Quick. “The genius of the story lies in its ambiguity and its open interpretation. Literature is meant to engage the reader, not present some unassailable truth.” And so on until Will thought his head was going to explode.

“It's only a grade,” said Mr. Quick when Will shuffled up to him after class and burst out, “But both wasn't one of the options!”

Mr. Quick was different from the other teachers. He talked about critical thinking, and there wasn't always a particular answer he was looking for, which was why Will thought going to English class was kind of like standing on tiptoe in a rocky boat.

“Did you learn anything?” asked Mr. Quick. “Was your mind expanded?”

“I guess so,” said Will, for he had thought about the questions all the way home.

“Isn't learning the point?” Mr. Quick chuckled in a friendly manner, as if learning was not only the point, but also a lot of fun.

“I guess it is,” said Will. One of the things he was learning was that the choice wasn't always between right and wrong. Another was that the all-important grading rubric was the thing that separated the college-bound from those whose only options were the munitions plant or the chicken farm or a life of petty crime.

M
aggie told herself that working at the prison was better than working at the munitions plant, but by the second week, her illusions were in shreds. When she walked past the exercise yard, the prisoners whispered things at her—sexual things or half-formed words she imagined to be sexual in nature, words mixed with kissing sibilations and falsetto imitations and doglike yelps. Even if the words weren't explicit, she knew the thoughts lurking unsaid beneath the shiny skin of the shaved skulls were.

Maggie didn't like the inappropriate yammerings to go unanswered, but how could a woman answer a man without inviting more unwanted attention? And how could any person respond across the great divide that separated the free from the imprisoned, the explicit from the unexpressed? Any sentence she devised or uttered would have whole power structures encased in the grammar, which hinted at dense philosophies she knew nothing about, not to mention the entire history of race relations, for it only took one glance at the exercise yard to see that a disproportionate number of the inmates were dark.

Maggie held her head high and walked as if she didn't notice the hulking presences, but was it right to pretend they didn't exist? She tried not to swing her hips but also not to walk too tightly, which would have been an admission that they had already succeeded in drying up some of her essence.

“Don't let it get to you,” said Lex Lexington, who was the director of corrections and whom everyone called DC.

His first assistant, a voluptuous woman named Valerie Vines, added, “You have to have a pretty thick skin around here.”

“It doesn't bother me,” insisted Maggie, but whenever she passed the yard in the succeeding weeks, she felt as if she were walking past a long row of x-ray consciousnesses that beamed out through the chain-link fence and lit her up for all to see—not only her private parts, but the things she believed in—and not only for all to see, but for Maggie herself to be made aware of—of fears and prejudices and attitudes she didn't know she had.

One day, one of the men pressed his face against the links and whispered, “Miss, Miss. I'm innocent.”

Maggie kept her eyes high, as if she were thinking elevated thoughts. Above the dull expanse of metal fencing, rolls of concertina wire gleamed in the sharp light, and high in the sky, a plane was writing a puffy contrail across the sky. But something in the man's voice caught at her attention, and instead of hurrying past, she stopped and turned to face him. The prisoner was small, with a lean frame and girlish muscles. Maggie looked at the creased skin at the corners of his eyes, the flecks of dandruff in his short hair, and the speck of gold in his iris and instantly believed him.

While she pondered what to say, another man came up and leered at her. “I'm innocent too, Momma.”

And then another came, and then another, until a crowd of men jostled for position at the fence, all of them innocent, all of them clawing at one another or at the wire mesh, all of them shoving at the small man and shouting out about fabricated evidence and false prosecutions. Maggie tried to imagine what their lives were like, but she couldn't do it. She could only stare at them, her eyes wide and her mouth open, while the concertina wire coiled above them, singing in the rising wind and glittering with the hot, high notes of the sun.

Luckily for Maggie, footsteps were approaching along the walkway that led to the office block. Cheerful voices rose in good-natured argument, breaking the spell and causing the prisoners to stop talking and to back away from the fence. A moment later, the grizzled Louis and the virile Hugo came around the corner and slapped their batons against the chain links, scattering the men like frightened pigeons and replacing the horror of the clawing clot of humanity with the horror of how easily they were cowed by uniformed authority. Maggie found herself suddenly and unexpectedly allied with the prisoners against the guards and glad to be exactly where she was to witness—well, to witness what, she couldn't say. Tiffany was right that the inmates were needy, and now it seemed to Maggie that an unseen force had been guiding her and had purposely dropped her down just outside the chain-link fence so that she could finally do a little good.

Maggie tried to do nice things for the men she came across in the course of her duties. Some of them were longtime inmates who had earned positions of trust, and she would see them working in the gardens or re-shelving books in the prison library. In addition to joining the education initiative, one day a week she gave up her lunch hour to visit men whose families had stopped coming to see them. She would sit on a folding chair and listen to them describe a fishing hole under a cypress tree, a cabin in the woods, a favorite recipe for smoking deer. One day she baked a cake for a prisoner's seventy-fifth birthday and held his hand as he talked longingly of a flaxen-haired wife and children who must by now be half a century old.

Valerie called her aside to say, “You can't befriend the prisoners. You think you're being kind, but you're not. Listening is bad enough, but if you act like you believe them, they'll start hounding you with all kinds of sob stories. It's best if you can think of them as not quite human. Really, it's the only way for any of us to survive, and by us, I mean all of us—them included.”

The education initiative consisted of a group of volunteers who worked in the prison school, where Maggie was assigned to help the prisoners on good behavior learn basic computation skills.

“They won't forget me, will they?” asked an earnest young man who chugged his finger dutifully under the columns of figures and word problems Maggie wrote out for him to solve. The class was half over when she realized it was the young man from the exercise yard. His name was Tomás, and he had served three years of his thirty-year sentence for killing a gas station attendant with a knife.

“Of course not, Tomás. Who could forget you!”

“My family, that's who. They live in Arizona, but I was transferred here.”

“I assume there was a good reason for that,” said Maggie.

“What is it? What's the reason?”

“I don't know anything about it,” said Maggie. “But people usually have a reason for doing things. Just like there's a reason you're in prison in the first place.”

“But I didn't do anything,” said Tomás. “You believe that, don't you?”

“I honestly don't think about it. Besides, it doesn't matter what I believe.”

“Why not? Why doesn't it matter?”

“Because I don't know the facts of the case and because I'm not in a position of authority.”

“If it doesn't matter to you that I'm innocent, why would it matter to anyone? Why wouldn't it be okay to lock up anybody for any reason, just because you wanted to?”

“But I don't want to,” said Maggie. “Why would you think I'd want a thing like that?”

“Because…” Tomás peered at Maggie as if she was supposed to guess, but she had no idea what he was thinking.

“I would never want that,” she said. “Now, here's one I'll bet you can't solve.” She wrote out a problem involving complex fractions.

“Yes, you can write in the book!” she cried when Tomás's pencil hovered indecisively. “You see? It has your name on it—right there! Every time you come, this very same book will be yours!”

Maggie hurried across the room to erase the whiteboard, to file the attendance form, to turn on one bank of overhead lights and turn off another. One of the other inmates called out, “Over here, Miss. I have a question too!”

The men scraped their pencils against the paper. A man with a scarred face blew his nose against his arm and then wiped it on the seat of his pants. Maggie straightened the stack of notebooks belonging to the Tuesday class before glancing back to where Tomás was sitting, toiling away over his workbook, writing as neatly as he could. “Good job!” she exclaimed when she circled back to check his answers. “Four out of five correct!”

She was glad when the class was over, but the idea of innocence stayed with her. The next day she asked Valerie, “Does it ever occur to you that some of the inmates are innocent?”

“It occurs to everyone, darling. I was wondering when you were going to ask.”

“What do you do about it?”

“I said it occurs to everyone. I didn't say they
were
innocent. In most cases, they're guilty of more than what came out at their trials.”

“But most of them didn't have trials,” said Maggie, who had started to research the criminal justice system and been shocked by what she had found. “Did you know—” she started to say, but Valerie cut her off.

“I know, I know. And if you kiss them, they turn into princes.”

“Maybe someone should kiss them then.”

“They're guilty,” said Valerie. “Hand on heart. I wouldn't lie.”

“But isn't believing you without question the same thing as believing the inmates without question? Or believing…well, believing anything without looking into it for yourself?”

“That's a little too close to the deep end for me,” said Valerie. “My motto is to keep it simple. Besides, the police don't go around arresting people willy-nilly. Someone would have to be awful unlucky to end up here if he was innocent.”

“Yes,” said Maggie. “Someone would.”