Vanishing Acts (20 page)

We walk down a hallway that opens into a large, two-tiered room. Each side of the square holds an enclosed pod–barred cells on top, a common area on bottom. What it resembles–what a jail always resembles–is a human zoo. The animals are busy doing their own thing–sleeping, eating, socializing. Some of them notice me, some of them choose not to. It's really the only power they have left. Sheriff Jack walks up into the control tower while I wait at the bottom of the stairs. A pair of black inmates start rapping, putting on a show for me. I'm the O.G. Mr. Wop

On the trigga nonstop

Bust a cap on a cop

And watch his punk ass drop.

A 187 that's what it was

Greetin' all homies with the word of Cuzz

I was dressed in blue

Since the age of two

Down for my 'hood

'Cause it's the thing to do.

To their right, an old man with white hair cascading past his shoulders is making elaborate hand motions to catch the attention of one of the detention officers. Behind the glass, his frail arm movements look like a modern dance performance. Suddenly the sheriff is standing next to me again. 'The good news is, your client isn't in there."

“Where is he?”

Sheriff Jack smiles. “Well, that's the bad news, boy. Disciplinary segregation.” Disciplinary segregation is on level three, house two, in pods A and D. Andrew knows I am coming before he sees me; prisoners can sniff out lawyers at a distance, and my arrival has created a hum in the air. He stands with his back deliberately toward me as I am led to his cell. “I don't want to speak to him, Sergeant Doucette,” he tells the detention officer.

She looks at me, bored. “He doesn't want to speak to you.” I stare at Andrew's back. “Well, that's fine by me. Because God knows I don't feel like hearing what the hell landed you in lockdown.”

He turns around and stares at me for a long moment. “Let him in.” Sheriff Jack has said nothing about me being let into a cell; I can see the detention officer thinking the same thing. If Andrew and I are going to have a traditional attorney/client visit, it is supposed to be upstairs in one of the conference rooms. Finally, she shrugs–if one lawyer gets strangled by his own client, the detention officers would probably consider it a good start. When she opens the barred slider, it grates, like fingernails on a blackboard. I step into the tiny space, and Doucette rams the door home behind me.

Immediately, I jump. Even knowing I can leave at anytime, it's uncomfortable; there is barely enough room for one man, much less two. Andrew sits down on the bunk, leaving me a small stool. “What are you doing in here?” I ask quietly.

“Self-preservation.”

“I'm just trying to save you, too.”

“Are you sure about that?” Andrew says.

Time is elastic, in jail. It can stretch to the length of a highway; it can beat like a pulse. It can expand, a sponge, thick enough to make the few inches between two people feel like a continent. “I shouldn't have gotten angry at you the other day,” I admit. “This case isn't about me.”

“I think we both know that's a lie,” Andrew says.

He is right, on all counts. I am an alcoholic, representing a man who ran away from one. I am the child of an alcoholic, who didn't get to escape. But I'm also a father who wonders what I'd do in the same situation. I'm a victim of my own mistakes, holding fast to a second chance.

I glance around the tiny Spartan room where Andrew has come for protection. We do all kinds of things to safeguard ourselves: lie to the people we love; split hairs to justify our actions; take punishment instead of waiting for it to be given to us. Andrew may be the one who's been charged, but we are both being tried. I hold his gaze. “Andrew,” I say soberly, “let's start over.” Andrew

In jail, a black inmate will call a white inmate peckerwood, cracker, honky, redneck. He'll call a Mexican a spic.

A white inmate will call a black inmate a nigger, a monkey, a spook, a toad. He'll call a Mexican a beaner.

A Mexican will call a black inmate miyate, which means big black bean; or yanta, tire; or terron, shark. He'll call a white inmate a gringo.

In jail, everyone comes with a label. It's up to you to peel it off. The maximum security pod is made up of fifteen cells–five white, five Hispanic, four black, and the one that holds Concise and me. Considering themselves at a disadvantage, the blacks begin a campaign to get me traded for someone with the right color skin. They stand at the entrance to the dayroom, waiting for an officer to come in on his habitual twenty-five-minute walk, to plead their case. I wander around the dayroom, not really fitting anywhere. The television is tuned to C-SPAN, one of the five channels we are allowed, and a reporter is discussing the good fortune of turkeys. “Presidentially pardoned turkeys have reason to give thanks today,” the woman says. “Animal welfare activists at PETA said on Monday that Frying Pan Park in Herndon, Virginia, has promised better treatment of Katie, the female pardoned by President Bush as part of last November's holiday tradition. The second turkey pardoned died last week, after living in substandard conditions.” Elephant Mike, the Aryan Brotherhood probate in control in Sticks's absence, turns up the volume. Enormous and muscular, with a shaved head and a spider tattooed onto the back of his scalp, he was one of the henchmen who came with Sticks to attack me in the bathroom. “Hey, what's the address for PETA?” he says.

“Maybe they can get us better conditions.”

The reporter beams at the camera. “Katie will be given a heated coop, more straw for bedding, extra vegetables and fruit, and some chickens in her pen for mental stimulation.”

Elephant Mike crosses his arms. “Look at that. For stimulation, they get chicks, and we get spies.”

A Mexican stands up and walks past Elephant Mike, kicks his chair. “Gringo,” he mutters. “Chenga su madre.”

As I walk past Elephant Mike, he grabs my shirt. “Sticks wanted me to give you a message.” I don't bother asking how Sticks, a whole floor away from us and in lockdown twenty-three hours out of the day, might be able to get word to Elephant Mike. There are ways to communicate in jail, from talking through the ventilation ducts in the bathrooms to slipping a note to someone at an AA meeting who will carry it elsewhere. “In here, you stick with your own kind.”

“I thought I made it pretty clear that you aren't my kind,” I reply.

“I'm telling you this for your own protection.”

Without responding, I start to walk away. I take two steps, and then find myself flattened against the wall. “At any minute, a fight might break out, and when that happens, you don't want to be beside a guy who may turn on you. All's I'm saying is, you're asking to get yourself in a wreck if you don't get it right, Grandpa.” A voice comes over the intercom. “Mike, what are you doing?” the detention officer asks.

“Dancing,” he says, letting go of me.

The officer sighs. “Stick to the waltz.”

Elephant Mike shoves me and walks off.

I clench my fists so that no one will realize my hands are shaking. If this were any ordinary Thursday, I would have gotten to my office by eight-thirty. I would have called over to Wexton Farms–the assisted living community–to see if there was anything I needed to know about–recently hospitalized people, delays in the transit shuttle, dietary restrictions. I would have checked with the kitchen to see what was on the menu for the day and welcomed the day's entertainment–a lecturer from Dartmouth or a watercolor artist, sharing his or her passion with the seniors. I would have procrastinated by looking up news stories on the Internet about you and Greta and your rescues; I would have dusted off the picture of Sophie sitting on the corner of my desk. I would spend the day with people who valued whatever time they had left, instead of people who bitterly counted it down.

I head up the stairs to the cell. Concise is huddled on the floor around a cardboard box where he keeps his canteen possessions. At the sound of my footsteps he shoves what looks like a piece of bread underneath the bottom bunk.

“I'm busy in here. Step.”

It smells like oranges in the cell. “What do you know about Elephant Mike?” Concise glances at me. “He think he's some tank boss but he's just doin' a mud check. You know, see if you stick up for yourself, or put grass under you.” He seems to remember that he is not supposed to be helping me, but rather doing his best to get me into another cell. “If the dawgs find you in here, you gonna be hemmed up.”

I look down at my feet and pick up a Jolly Rancher wrapper, and begin to flatten it between my palms. “Don't cap it tight,” I say.

When he turns around, I shrug. “Moonshine. That's what you're making, isn't it?” Bread, oranges, hard candy–it wouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the chemical reaction Concise is aiming for.

“Do your own time, not mine,” Concise scowls, and he busies himself under the bunk again.

Taking my towel with me, I head toward the bathroom. The shower stalls are empty at this time of day; Emeril is about to come on the Food Network and it is the one program that all races agree upon. I turn the corner and find Elephant Mike standing against the bathroom wall with his pants down around his knees, his eyes rolled toward the ceiling.

I recognize the boy kneeling in front of him, too. He calls himself Clutch and is barely old enough to grow a beard. No doubt, like me, he received Sticks's and Elephant Mike's warning, and was offered their protection, for a price. The currency of which I've interrupted.

A flush works its way up from my neck. “Sorry,” I manage, and I leave the bathroom as fast as possible.

On the television, Emeril throws garlic into a sizzling pan. “Bam!” he yells. I sit in the back of the dayroom and pretend to watch the TV, although I do not see a thing. If you pay Sheriff Jack thirty dollars up front, you are allowed the privilege of using the canteen. Funds for these luxury items are deducted from your account. A dollar-fifty, for example, will buy you either a bottle of shampoo or a twenty-ounce soda. You can buy soap that is like lye and rubs your skin raw. You can buy antihistamine and poker cards and a Spanish-English dictionary. You can buy Moon Pies and Paydays and Pop-Tarts and trail mix. Tuna, toothbrushes, a thesaurus.

Sometimes I read the canteen order form, and think about who purchases what. I want to know who asks for Vicks VapoRub, if it reminds him of his childhood. I wonder who would order an eraser, rather than learn from his mistakes. Or, even worse, a mirror.

They sell artificial tears, too, but it's hard to conceive of an inmate who doesn't have enough of his own.

I share a toilet with a drug dealer. I have done business with a thrice-convicted rapist: three packages of cookies in return for a deck of cards. I have settled down to watch Thursday night TV beside a man who killed his wife and cut her into pieces with a Ginsu knife, stuffed the body parts into a truck tool box, and left it in the desert.

Just last year, I gave Sophie the stranger talk: don't take candy from someone unfamiliar; don't ever get into anyone's car except ours; don't talk to people you do not know. Sophie, who was born in a small New Hampshire town where folks knew her by name when she walked down the street, couldn't understand the warnings.

“How do you know who's a bad man?” she asked. “Can you tell just by looking?” What I should have told her at the time was: Yes, but you have to be watching at just the right moment. Because the same man who robs a general store at knifepoint might, at a traffic light, turn and smile. The guy who raped a thirteen-year-old girl might be singing hymns beside you at church. The father who kidnapped his daughter might be living right next door.

Bad is not an absolute, but a relative term. Ask the robber who used the cash he stole to feed his infant; the rapist who was sexually abused as a child; the kidnapper who truly believed he was saving a life. And just because you break the law doesn't mean you have intentionally crossed the line into evil. Sometimes the line creeps up on you, and before you know it, you're standing on the other side. Off to the right, I hear someone taking a leak. It is underscored by the scrip-scrip sound of a weapon being honed on the cement floor–a toothbrush or a wheelchair spoke being sharpened into a shank. There's weeping, too, coming from Clutch, in the cell beside ours. He has cried every night since he's been here, into his pillow, pretending no one can hear. Even more amazing, the rest of us pretend that we don't.

“Concise,” I whisper quietly.

“Yo,” he says.

I realize that I don't really have a question to ask him. I just wanted to see if he is still awake, like me.

You come to visit me almost every day. We sit one pane of glass apart from each other, reworking the clay of our relationship. You would think that the conversations at a jail visit are grave and furious, packed with the emotion that comes when you don't see someone for twenty-three hours a day, but in fact what we talk about are the details. I soak up the descriptions of Sophie, making breakfast for herself by putting the entire box of oatmeal into the microwave. I picture the trailer where you are living, the inside as pink as a mouth. I listen to an account of Greta having her first run-in with a common snake. You hold up pictures that Sophie's drawn, so I can see the stick-figure family and my crayoned place in it. For you, too, it is all about the specifics of a world you can barely remember being a part of. Sometimes I tell you incidents that stand out in your childhood; sometimes you have precise questions. One afternoon you ask me about your real birthday.