The Big Bang (15 page)

A prison volunteer, an aging nun everyone called “Sister” who in another lifetime had been a sixties firebrand, heard about this comment. Sister reviewed the prison's meager stock of non-fiction, then typed up a recommended reading list and lugged in the first twenty books on the list herself. As she explained when she gave the list to Taneisha, “'Neisha, you have to walk before you can run. I put down the easy books first. That's not an insult. I want to be sure you have the basics, the fundamentals, before you tackle the harder work.” Taneisha, who always wanted to run, shrugged and started reading.

It was slow, it was painful, and it was frustrating. There was a lot in the texts that the writers took for granted, something Sister called “cultural capital.” But Taneisha persevered. She realized she'd worked really hard to get here, and it was time to work hard to get out.

And now, all of that was jeopardized by this silent figure standing outside her cell door. Good
Lord
, didn't the man have any kind of life that he had to get his jollies bothering prisoners? Taneisha knew if she had a choice she wouldn't be hanging around a prison cell looking for a good time. But she also knew that if she turned him away, she could lose more than her self-respect. Her fists knotted in the blankets. Damn it, she'd earned everything she had. She'd earned her status as a prisoner by a series of incredibly stupid decisions, and she was now earning her own self-respect by working hard and playing by the rules. She wouldn't throw her self-respect away because she was afraid of a man.

Owens stood at her cell door for another half an hour, and then he walked away.

The searches had started after that.

Taneisha was working out, running in place, keeping her knees pumping high, when the slot in the door opened. Even if she was in the Hole, she wasn't going to lose a step on her own progress. The Hole had crummy ventilation and any exercise brought on a heavy sweat. To keep her few garments from being gummy with perspiration, she was only wearing her bra and panties. She stepped to one side, into the shadows.

She'd lost track of the time. In the Hole, you did twenty-three hours in solitary, with one hour for a shower and a walk around a treeless, grassless yard. She wasn't sure if it was night or day, or whether it was a weekday or weekend.

A familiar voice said, “You have a visitor.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Taneisha answered Ms. Darcy. “Just one minute, please.” The imp, that smart-mouthed demon…well, she'd kicked him to the curb a year ago. Sister had got her to writing about her life and breaking the events down into columns. One of the columns had been about what had happened, another about what people had done to her. The third column had been what she had done to contribute to what had happened. Taneisha had fought and raged against this: didn't Sister know what those people did to her? The nun's wrinkled face was kind, understanding, and patient as a mountain. After a while, Taneisha could see how much abuse she'd volunteered for. How much of it was instigated by that mouthy imp. What had he ever done for her? Not a hell of a lot, it would seem. The nun had even performed an exorcism on her. Taneisha took it as a joke, but Sister seemed deadly serious. Whatever it was, something had worked to still the reckless and self-justifying voice, and she was now able to think about what she was going to say before she spoke.

She wiped the sweat off quickly with her single towel and climbed into her clothes. She stood back by the wall, in full sight of the slot in the door and called out, “I'm ready, Ms. Darcy.”

The door opened and Taneisha blinked in the bright light from the corridor. Two figures stood there, Ms. Darcy and someone she didn't know. For a moment, the silhouettes looked comical, one shorter and round, the other taller and thin. Who were those guys from the old movies? Abbott and Costello. The thinner silhouette stepped forward…and Taneisha remembered that she never liked the thin guy in the movies. He was mean to the chubby guy.

Ms. Darcy reached along the outside wall and the light in the isolation cell brightened. Now Taneisha could see the skinny guy. He was an older man, maybe in his late fifties. She was terrible with ages, and, besides, all old white men looked alike to her: old and white. He was smiling, at least. It felt like a real smile. She couldn't say what made it seem like a real smile. His expression seemed to lack malice or trickery, or any motive other than to be friendly.

“How do you do, Ms. Porter,” the old white man said, extending his hand. “I'm Eli Gutierrez.”

Taneisha did what she did now whenever she didn't know what to do: she froze for a moment, thinking. Ms. Darcy helped her out. “This is our new Warden,” she said, bringing a plastic chair in from the corridor. She spoke into her walkie-talkie. “Closing Seg Seven.” The door rolled shut behind the guard as she settled into the chair.

The new Warden. Taneisha wondered what had happened to the other one. She reached out, took the old man's offered hand. “Hi,” she said carefully, hiding her surprise. He might look old, but his hand was solid. No soft old-person flesh loose and floppy around the bones. She felt a lot of power there. She might have been shaking hands with a mechanic.

The Warden gestured at the bunk. “Do you mind if we sit down?” Taneisha nodded. The Warden waited. She realized he was waiting for her to sit down. It was a kind of courtesy she'd run into only a few times in her life. She lowered herself to the bunk and he sat on the opposite end, well away from her.

He cleared his throat. “I've asked Ms. Darcy here as an official witness. I feel that her word can be trusted. Do you agree?”

She was starting to feel a little trapped. “Yes. I mean, I trust her.”

“Good,” the Warden replied. “Why are you here?”

“I had some contraband in my cell,” she said carefully.

“Is that the only reason?”

She nodded. Ms. Darcy may have sniffed, or Taneisha may just have imagined it.

The Warden looked at her and clasped his hands across his stomach. “I've spent the last three weeks reading the file of every prisoner here. I've walked through the prison a lot. I've watched how the prisoners respond to the guards.”

“They aren't all like Ms. Darcy,” Taneisha added.

“They are not,” the Warden agreed. “Now, I want to ask you again. Why are you in here?”

“Officer Owens wanted to…wanted me to be his girlfriend. His punch. Whatever you want to call it. I didn't want to.”

The Warden continued to look at her intently. “You realize not all of the guards are like that.”

“Enough of them are.”

The Warden's lips got tight and his eyes narrowed. “Not in
my
prison.” He stood, paced. The Warden turned to her. “Would you be willing to make a formal complaint?”

Now he was getting into crazy talk. Taneisha had heard about what had happened to one girl who'd charged a guard with sexual harassment. One night, three male prisoners had found her alone (and you had to wonder how that was arranged) and raped her. They'd even told the girl it was retaliation for filing a complaint. But…if the Warden was behind her, maybe something could happen. They might be in jail, her and these women, but they weren't just disposable trash. Taneisha cut her eyes over to Ms. Darcy, who merely nodded solemnly.

“Yes, sir,” she heard herself saying. “I'll file a complaint.”

The Warden gave her a funny smile then. He was proud of her. Like she was his daughter, and she'd passed a difficult test. It warmed her in a way she hadn't felt in a long time. “Good. You're going to have some company for a while.”

The Warden started the next day. With Ms. Darcy on the night shift, and the big Bohunk guard, Lindestrom, keeping watch for the day shift, the Hole was deemed the safest place to gather testimony. A court stenographer and a prosecuting attorney, both women, were brought in, dressed in prison issue. They were each assigned their own cell in the Hole, and the interviews began. Taneisha turned out to have an excellent memory for names and details she'd overhead or been told. Working from the list she provided, under the cover of real or imagined infractions, six other women prisoners were brought to the Hole to be interviewed.

This was where it could have all gone very bad. If any of the women retained any allegiance to their “boyfriend” guards, word would be out. If rumors started to fly about the investigation, then Taneisha had better hope Sister had been praying hard enough for her. Accidents can happen very easily in prison.

There were no accidents. Ms. Darcy spirited away the lawyer and stenographer late one evening. The evidence was presented to a special grand jury, and one morning a squad of eight sheriff's deputies appeared outside the prison. Taneisha and the other women watched it that night on TV in Ms. Darcy's office. The deputies, white, black, Hispanic, all had a similar look about them: thick neck and shoulders, hair cut high and tight, well-tailored uniforms, shined shoes, sparkling belt buckles, and grim expressions on every face.

“Jeez, who are these guys?” one woman wondered out loud.

“They're Devil Dogs,” Ms. Darcy said. She had a wicked look of pleasure on her face. “Former Marines, girl! Warden picked them special. That's my Henry,” she said, pointing to one of the black deputies as his fierce image crossed the television screen.

“How's the Warden know them?” another, older, prisoner asked.

“He's been a lot more than a Warden,” Ms. Darcy said mysteriously.

Warden Gutierrez had planned this like a military campaign; it made sense he would call upon ex-servicemen. They learned later that other squads of equally grim deputies had descended upon three off-duty suspects at the same time the Devil Dogs were walking through the prison. No one had a chance to alert the other guards.

Each guard was read their rights and arrested. The prison rumor mill circulated a story that before he'd perp-walked the disgraced guards out the front gates to the waiting police cars, the Warden had had a private word or two with the offending officers. More than one of the former guards, even the hulking ones who'd spent half their shifts in the weight rooms working out, had walked from the Warden's office strangely subdued.

At the sight of their persecutors' faces on the evening news, the party atmosphere in the guard shack shriveled and disappeared. “They could still get us,” a skinny, nearly toothless young woman whispered. “They have friends.”

“They could get
you
,” the older woman said to Ms. Darcy.

“Warden won't allow that,” Ms. Darcy said, getting to her feet. “Almost lights out. Time to go back to your cells. You ladies were brave for what you did. It was the right thing to do. Always pick the right thing, girls, even if it's tough.”

Just before she closed her eyes that night in the Hole, Taneisha thought,
Ms. Darcy always tells us something simple, but so hard. Can't anything be simple and easy?
If she got an answer, she didn't remember it the next morning.

Warden Gutierrez held a short meeting with the entire prison the next day, announcing the arrests of the officers and introducing a hand-picked crew of new guards to supplement those who remained, those he trusted. After the cheering of the prisoners had subsided, he added, “The rules apply to everyone, equally. Guards will follow the rules and inmates will follow the rules.” There were groans and catcalls at that. The Warden turned to face the prisoners directly. “You men and women have a choice. You can continue to make the kinds of decisions that got you here, or, you can make new decisions about how you're going to live your life. Only you can put your mind in prison.” He dismissed them after that.

In spite of the women prisoner's fears, no one was “got” by anyone. Five of the six guards were convicted for violating the civil rights of the prisoners under their care, and one, Owens, was convicted of two sexual assaults. The Warden had wanted the hammer to come down on the disgraced officers, but witnesses for the worst offenses had not been available or breathing at the time. While some of the guards remaining at the prison were convinced an insurrection was imminent, Warden Gutierrez was as good as his word. The rules were applied equally to the inmates and the guards. The population of the Hole briefly increased as the usual con artists in the prison tried to take advantage of perceived weaknesses in the authority of the guards. These prisoners were summarily presented with some time in solitary, giving them the opportunity to meditate upon their sins. Once the corrections officers saw that the Warden was still ready to back them up on righteous calls, they, and everyone else, began to settle down.

Riding a certain wave of public outrage at the abuse of the women, Sister was able to pull in more rehabilitation volunteers, some from as far away as Phoenix. The state was still parsimonious with funds for additional programs, but as long as they were largely self-funded, the Warden, or Mr. G as he was becoming known, encouraged self-improvement of all kinds. Taneisha found herself completing her GED, and then she enrolled in two community college classes.

One day, working in the library, she remembered she had just two years left on her sentence. The mandatory drug sentencing laws of the state decreed she would serve five years and a day. While she chafed against the time spent locked up, she had finally come to accept that it wasn't bad luck or the stars, or the nefarious Man that had gotten her into prison. It was her.

Other girls had come from those same sewers where she grew up. Other girls had been neglected, barely teen-aged girls subjected to the attention of adult “uncles” when no one was around. Not all of those girls were in prison. Some of them got out, married decent men, went to school, and left the asphalt-covered, soul-killing 'hood behind. Some of them didn't hook up with a man (who was just an overgrown boy) with a habit. Her hookup was doing fifteen years, since he'd had the majority of the speed stashed in his car. She had only been carrying her personal supply. She was no longer in touch with him; he'd rolled over on her as soon as he was popped by the Arizona State Police.