Playing With Matches (23 page)

Wesley, it appears, has an aching heart. “That may be.”

Closest to me is Raoul. He’s dark—South American, maybe, with a nose that covers half his face. Although he’s three feet from the back wall, he keeps glancing over his shoulder. “One in the middle stole a piece of bread.” His voice is high-pitched. “He broke a rule. He breaks them all the damn time, always getting a case, called up before the man. Really, it’s a wonder he lasted this long.”

Everybody laughs.

Wesley shakes his head, runs an enormous hand over his eyes.

There’s also this little white guy, Frank. He has big teeth and an oft-broken nose. “Fuck that. Damn crow ain’t acceptable here.”

“Here being Mississippi.”

He thinks that over. “In the South. Wherever.”

Is he talking racial?
I don’t think so. Gangs form in prisons. They’ve all seen this played out—join or die.

Wesley says, “Bird had shit for brains. Didn’t call the man ‘boss.’ ”

This time they almost fall out of their chairs laughing.

The guard bangs into the room, his jaw tight and his chest barreled out.

“Hold on!” I say, and I step up and press my palm to his shirt buttons, the first I’ve felt the gray twill of those uniforms. I think about how I used to fear them, and of the night I spied on Bitsy in the field. That guard’s pants were around his knees and his backside was shining. “Sir. You’re disrupting my class. If I need you, I’ll call.”

There’s dead silence in the room, but he goes, the guard goes, and I tell my students, “Okay. I want to begin to know who you are. I want you to write about an hour or a day, in your life, that shows where you came from.”

Frank of the big teeth: “We all come from our mamas.”

“Well, I jus’ come from yours,” Wesley says, and Raoul laughs in a high whinny-snicker that makes me want to laugh too.

Raoul says, “I tell you right now, Miz Ryder, we come from ba-a-a-d times. You got a weak heart? The stomach trouble? ’Cause it ain’t pretty. I kilt a guy with a butcher knife.”

“Goddamn liar,” says the fourth man. He’s been silent until now. His name, improbably, is Willie G. Willy. “You want everybody to think you’re bad, man. You ain’t shit. I heard you got busted stealing a roll of carpet off a truck.”

“Matched my living room,” Raoul said, sulking.

The fifth man, whom they call Horse, has said nothing.

“He my cellie,” Willie says, introducing Horse. “He’s writing a vampire romance.”

I can see Raoul and Wesley want to hoot and whistle, but I put a finger to my lips and nod toward the door. They keep it down.
“Glad to have you in my class, Horse,” I say. “I look forward to reading your work. I’m—I’m glad to have all of you.”

“We gonna meet again?” Raoul has taken a prissy-ass attitude. “Or you gonna ride off into the sunset like most teachers do?”

“Other teachers come here?”

“Oh, hell,” says Raoul. “We learnt to sew. I made an apron.”

Wesley grins. “One come to help us get our GED. She didn’t last two days.”

Willie G. says, “Her two eyes went in different directions. Black Monday, my man, you run her off.”

Black Monday is apparently a nickname for Wesley. Willie G. is privy to it. I guess he’s earned the right.

“I’m here for a while,” I tell them.

“Okay, then,” Raoul says.

Frank picks up his pencil. “You want somethin’ like—that time we got a riot going? Nightsticks, teargas, shanks poppin’ out. Some guys used fingernails, went for the throat.” He looks over at Raoul. “Fought like goddamn girls.”

“I didn’t fight like no girl,” Raoul whines. “This Aryan dude broke off a piece of chain in the yard, that’s what. Gutted two ol’ boys like fish, lined the rest of us up against the wall. Things turned sour quick.”

Willie G. says, “My brother got ripped up pretty bad that night. They didn’t know we were brothers ’cause we got different last names. We went on awhile. Then one night he sent word down, he had all he could stand, workin’ in that laundry wit’
‘Fold the towels, keep the edges sharp, stand up straight, take a dump.’
 ”

Incredible stories, and they hurt, and I love them. I hold up a hand, and Wesley and Raoul take up pencils.

Beyond the window, in the far, far distance, I hear a train whistle
by, and I am spellbound and saddened. I was born a quarter-mile from here.

They write for twenty minutes. I ask them if anyone would like to read what they’ve written. No surprise, Willie G. has written about his brother. He calls him Joey. After the chain incident, Joey got himself transferred to a hoeing detail, and one day in the field when they were all watching freight cars go by, he jumped out on the track. He died for the next three thousand yards. Willie G. stood, watching, while his brother’s pieces were strung up and down the line.

I tell Willie G. that I’ve never heard a tribute written with so much love. I wait for them to hoot or make faces. But they don’t.

Big Wesley Mondale, who has almost no hair on top of his head, writes about his beard. It grows too fast and so thick that they make him shave twice a day. He says they oughta let him keep a razor in his cell, and not one of those pink girlie tricks, either. He pumps iron in the rec yard and does five hundred push-ups every day in his cell. Back home in Hattiesburg, he has a sister who’s eleven.

The same age as Luz.

He hasn’t seen her since she learned to walk.

While I listen to these stories, my ignorance weighs a thousand pounds.

I ask Horse if he’d like to read.

Horse is a study. He looks like a killer. He wears a wedding ring. I can tell that he bites and tears at his nails. His arms and face are barked with ravines and scars in the shape of scimitars. His long body curves over his desk, and his singleness—his aloneness—is so palpable, I could scoop up a handful. I wonder what kind of woman ever wanted him, or if one will again. He says, “Ain’t nobody wants to hear this stuff.”

“We do,” I say.

He tucks his long chin in. I note the knobs of his Uriah Heep fingers; long, thin feet that must require special-made shoes. He reminds me of a tree bent by centuries of wind.

Raoul says, helpfully, “Horse, here, ran a laundry and”—in his chair, Raoul makes a girly move with his hips—“
sexino
in Texas.”

Sexino?

“One-armed bandits, video porn, girls in the back,” Raoul explains. “He was just passin’ through, seein’ his mama, somebody asks for his license. Horse jumps outa his car and beats the dude up. But the dude’s dead now, and the judge says on account of Horse boxed in the army, he’s gettin’ life.”

“That’s the shits,” Wesley commiserates.

They read. They’ve written about convenience stores and cops and sex, grinding poverty and family, too much meth and not enough corn bread.
Songs of the South
, I think.

Although they could keep paper in their cells, they want me to have their stories. I collect the pencils. Horse hands in his work without reading it aloud. The guard marches them out. Beyond the door, Raoul picks up a grin and walks with a bounce.
A front
, I think,
a cover for who he really is
.

Clea Shine is in the jail—and this is what it’s like.
Good God
.

I’m supposed to leave quickly now, find my own way out, but, as I walk, I look over Horse’s story. It’s about three guards who beat a sex offender senseless. One of his eyeballs is wrenched out of its socket; his arm is broken; twelve tiny bones in his foot are crushed. He spends eight months in the infirmary.

On my way out, an old guy with a mop and bucket of water is swabbing the entryway. He moves closer than is smart and murmurs, “Miss, some of us ol’-timers, we wanna tell you—we knew your mama.”

“What?”
I must be falling down stairs. I am floating in space.

“Sometime Clarice here. Trustee slip her in.”

The foyer stretches ahead, distorting so that the door is unreachable. In this long, long space, I am exposed.

Wheezer comes up and puts a hand on my shoulder, takes an umbrella from the stand. We go out into rain that’s lightened to a fine mist.

God, God, something has stripped off my careful mosaic and uncovered Clea Shine.

I don’t know if Wheezer heard.

34

W
e stand under the prison’s overhang while I blink against the mist and try to clear my head. The air is fresh but oddly not cooler. After the real storm has come and gone, the humidity will be insufferable.

Wheezer says, “Listen. Thanks for doing this, Clea. It was a lot to lay on you, but I’m not above begging.”

“You’re welcome”—I look up at him—“Francis? I don’t know what to call you.”

There’s a roughness to him that neither shaving nor scrubbing nor being a chaplain can erase. He could dress in the finest clothes and scour his skin till there was nothing left, and he’d still be the boy I found under the house.

“Call me Wheezer,” he says, grinning. “You’re the only one who ever did—you and Finn. Hey, you’re making a difference here. We’d like you to come back tomorrow, if you can swing it—the warden, your students, me.”

“I was only with them half a day. How—”

“You could start around nine, be finished by noon. Maybe Friday too, if that suits you.”

Three days in a row. Wheezer was right about himself—he’ll
do what he needs to, stand up for his cause. Did I, at this end of my journey, emerge nearly as strong?

But I have not yet come to the end of my story.

“Wheezer,” I say, “why are you here? Why didn’t you run? You must have terrible memories of this place.”

He takes his time answering. “No better or worse than yours. I heard about the way your mom was, and all.”

Here is someone to talk to, not like Thomas, who ate and slept in our house but lived somewhere else. We seldom spoke. He’s never even asked me about the raised lines on my arms or my feet or my belly.

“Sometimes it all catches up with me,” I say. “Like a ball of yarn that wants to unravel, you know? Other times, they’re more feelings than thoughts, and I have to find the right words to express them.”

“You did pretty good in your book.”

“Fictionalized,” I tell him.

“Don’t underestimate yourself. You’re great with words. I read the reviews.”

“Wheezer. Your life here was far worse than mine.”

“Yours
was
bad, Clea. You didn’t deserve it. No kid does.”

“The Oatys kept you under their house, for God’s sake. I’ve thought about you and wondered what kind of kid—adult—does it take to survive that?”

The rain has stopped. We walk to the sally port and wait while we’re buzzed through. Wheezer makes little puffing noises with his lips. “Surviving is a basic thing. Getting by. Staying alive in whatever way we can. It doesn’t mean we make right choices or drive fine cars or have good jobs. It means we found a way not to die. I survived.”

“I know about that,” I say. I push my sleeve up, turn my arm
over, and show him a dozen short lines and scimitars. “Sometimes Luz touches them, but she never asks.”

“She will.”

“I know. And I guess—I’ll tell her the truth.”

“You’re that kind of mom.”

“So—”

“Those two Oatys were my uncles, the old geezer my grandpa.”

“My God.”

Wheezer lifts his shoulders, like a kid. “My mom was their sister. My dad and the two uncles ran a meth lab back in the woods, but my daddy wasn’t very good at it. Blew up stuff, killed himself and my mom too. After that the two Oatys brought me here. But the old man threw a ringtailed fit, said he was gonna die for sure with this skinny-assed kid around. So they—they put me under the house. I was there two, maybe three, weeks when you came along.”

My throat aches. “You were a strange sight, that’s for sure.”

“I guess so. I sure was glad to see you. But then you went away, and I thought you weren’t coming back. I thought maybe I dreamed you.”

“I went to get Finn,” I say. “And then Auntie. After that, everything got big and noisy.”

“Yes. I thank you for speaking up.”

“Just words,” I say. “What happened when Pilcher took you away? Where’d you go?”

“That was just the beginning. I ran off every chance I got. Nobody wanted this wormy little runt, sickly looking, no color in my skin. By the time I was twelve, I drank every damn thing I could get my hands on.”

I know about drunks. As part of the sisterhood, I can’t count the number I’ve plucked from the gutter. And bathed. And given
a meal. I don’t do it to be Christlike or out of any sense of charity. Unlike some of the sisters who can give of themselves till there’s nothing left, I think something different. These folks who live in the gutter, on the edge of life, are only people filled with hurt. When I first left here, I did that too. But the alcoholics. I know those broken blood vessels and anguished eyes. “It still deals you trouble.”

“Every day of my life,” he says, “like a patch of poison ivy. One minute I can work it through, and ten minutes later I’d kill for a drink. It’s just gonna be like that.”

I ache for him. “How long has it been?”

“This time? One hundred and eighty-two days. Hell, we hold AA meetings twice a day, right here at the Oasis of Love Bingo Hall and Prison Camp Center.”

“Not just for canasta and funerals anymore?”

“Well, those too,” he says, grinning. “Those righteous ladies hightail it outa there before we drunks show up.” He looks along the lane to where my mother’s house stood. “Luz said you work with an oblate.”

“An interdenominational order.”

“Good for you. How’d you get from here to God?”

It feels good to talk. “How did you?”

He barks out a laugh. “Struck by lightning. One night at a meeting, I was standin’ in the back with a cup of coffee in my hand, and—there it was. I guess somebody’d made the right kind of speech. I nearly fell over myself, confessing my sins. Folks picked me up and took me in.”

“Finally, the right kind of people.”

“Yup. Went on to a little podunk college, seminary.”

“Same here,” I tell him. I like looking this man in the eye. It feels clean.