Part 2 (1/2)

”You're not taking me to the Keeper's office?”

Did I need to spell it out for him? ”I'm sure he'll find you later if he wants to.”

”I see.” He tried to smile, but the expression fluttered away in a tremble of post-adrenaline letdown. ”I wonder, where do you think they will be taking him?”

”You mean Elgin? To the infirmary, I'd think.” A good chance to the morgue.

”And my other student, Jon Crowley?”

”If he's injured, he'll go there, too. If he's not, he'll end up in the dissociation unit for fighting.” It was already distasteful to me, this kind of concern, and I wanted to pry myself away from the good deed.

”I see,” Brother Mike said, and he thanked me.

We parted at the juncture between Keeper's Hall and the education wing, each of us for our own separate worlds.

5.

I did not know much about Brother Mike's world then, but I understood my own well enough, the daily pressure to be wary and cynical and to keep expectations low. That's my excuse for not doing more sooner. I could not stop thinking about my conversation with Josh, and his warning that Crowley was in danger because of the comic book, but while I wanted to approach him, to pull him off to the side and ask, Is this what you meant? I did not find the time. The default att.i.tude among COs in inmate-related circ.u.mstances was to be dismissive of the reasons and the backstories, to shrug off the entanglements. What right did inmates have to ordinary human fears? You did not need to trouble yourself about where the violence came from, what politics, rage, or soap opera plots drove their impulses and sullen schemes. You job was to focus on the situation at hand.

I was still contemplating those limitations the next morning when I sat in the internal evidence room behind shatterproof Plexiglas and waited for inmate Cooper Lewis to relieve his bowels. I had been informed that Lewis had inserted something bodily while in the VnC for a family visit, and it was my job to find out what.

He lay on a rubber mattress in a larger than normal cell, a fair-complexioned man with a blazing red goatee. He had his arms behind his head, and he whistled as he stared up at the ceiling as though he were on some gra.s.sy field somewhere, alone and un.o.bserved, watching oddly shaped clouds coasting by. He'd covered himself with a single white sheet that went from his waist to his ankles. The sheet was a mandated provision that mystified me. Though too small and thin to encourage sleep, it gave Lewis cover for anything he needed to do in secret below. I'd seen them do just about everything in my time, including excrete whatever foreign substance they'd suitcased and either re-ingest it or re-suitcase it in a wriggling, writhing wrestling match between object and a.n.u.s. For whatever legal reason-and I would love to know the precedent for that particular decision in the storied history of search and seizure law-a corrections officer was not permitted to rush a cell when it became apparent that an inmate had discharged a foreign object. Instead, protocol was to wait until the inmate got up from the bed and willingly and voluntarily discharged said object by taking a c.r.a.p in a gla.s.s toilet bowl. That almost never occurred in any timely fas.h.i.+on, but involved a shrewd cat and mouse game between the inmate, who had nothing better to do with his time, and the CO, who needed to wait and wait and wait until the bowel movement arrived.

At least-and here I suspected a truly sick mind at work-someone had mysteriously lodged a pleather recliner in the viewing portion of the room. Sitting in it, waiting for hours on end, it was impossible not to kick back so your feet were raised while you stared blankly at the inmate behind the gla.s.s wall with the foreign object up his a.s.s. The parallels with watching television were far too obvious to overlook.

In the end, you waited until the inmate's boredom exceeded your own and they traipsed the divide between the slab of concrete and the gla.s.s toilet bowl and sat sideways to you and expelled. Then you inserted your hands into thick fireman's gloves that protruded into the gla.s.s toilet bowl basin and pretended you were a nuclear scientist handling radioactive material. Even though the heavy fabric made it impossible to come into direct physical contact with the waste, I always doubled up with my own latex rubber gloves when doing the awful deed.

People, even friends, sometimes ask me about my job with twitters of interest. They want to hear the sordid details, the glamour of it all. Except they don't want reality. They don't want to know what it's like to be a woman in such an environment. They don't want to hear about Cooper Lewis in the internal evidence room, or the other things I see or smell, or the things I do when I absolutely have no choice. They don't want me to go past the line of too much information and into the realm of the hard-core. That's why we call civilians weak sisters.

There we were, Cooper Lewis and I, playing our mind games-he ignoring me, me pretending that his existence actually mattered-when I noticed the mark from the cover of Crowley's comic book scratched into the Plexiglas.

The inside surface of the Plexiglas was a web of faint graffiti. I don't know why any CO would sit still and ignore an act of defacement while an inmate expressed his frustrations with some sharpened object, but plenty obviously had. There were drawings of lewd s.e.xual acts and drawings of crude bodily functions. There were meaningless circles, random swoops, and lines of inappropriate poetry. I'd been blind to them before, the way you are blind to the white noise of an electronic appliance. But now the pumpkin with its triangle eyes and mouth glared at me from the upper right quadrant of the Plexiglas wall.

I unfolded myself from the recliner and stepped up to look more closely. Lewis glanced toward me warily, as if I were a feral cat getting too close. There were no explanations to be gained, however, from the inspection. It was just a childish rendition scratched into the surface, but the sight of it teased my memory again. I'd seen that mark before. I just couldn't place where.

I was still standing there, lost in my investigative reverie, when the door opened and in walked senior CO Ray MacKay.

To be caught by a fellow CO in any pose but the most routine or confrontational was potentially embarra.s.sing. And in this case I felt as if I'd been discovered in the bathtub with the shower nozzle. But MacKay did not seem to care. He stood next to me, as if at a barbeque, and asked what was cooking.

I snorted. ”You got me,” I answered, and retreated with rescued dignity to my recliner throne. MacKay followed and pulled up a foldout chair to sit next to me.

At least we'd ruined Lewis's good mood. Lewis scowled, as an inmate might at the sight of any CO, and went back to his whistling, but it was a more tense and hostile tune. It was easy to imagine that Lewis and MacKay had encountered each other in unfavorable circ.u.mstances before. MacKay was like that. He regarded rules as insignificant impediments. He knew every blind nook left in the inst.i.tution and would steer an inmate into such a s.p.a.ce for a brief talking-to without a moment's hesitation. He regularly and unapologetically f.u.c.ked the pooch when others were scrambling to get tasks done. And yet, of all the old boys who might have earned my disdain, I dearly loved the man. He was the dirty uncle I'd never had, the tenderhearted thug of my dreams.

As they say in the movies, he also made me laugh. Impatient, he barked through the gla.s.s. ”Jesus, Cooper, you baking a cake in there?”

Lewis responded with all the wit he could summon, a m.u.f.fled suggestion that MacKay go f.u.c.k himself.

”Why me?” I asked MacKay. It was a rhetorical question, and I received a rhetorical answer.

”Because all s.h.i.+t follows gravity and flows downhill.”

It could have been a workplace motto.

MacKay did not look like the type you could have a sensitive and intelligent conversation with, but I had found him to be surprisingly open-minded and quick. In appearance, he resembled an Irish cop from a vintage photograph: the speckled buzz cut and square head, one ear gone nubby and cauliflowered, as if banged hard with a pipe, a heavy fold of flesh at the back of his neck. Inside, he was sensitive, thoughtful, and quick to be offended, just another feminist with a quick temper.

”You sure he's packing?” I asked. The word packing never so physically accurate.

MacKay just leaned forward in the chair and stared at the gla.s.s.

”Got it on tape. He was in a private visiting room with his grandmother and his little girl. There's even a G.o.dd.a.m.n sign on the wall says cameras may be watching, but you don't read too good, do you, s.h.i.+t for brains?” he called out. ”We seen it all. The whole sordid details.”

I was quietly disgusted. The little girl in the room. A grandmother. I could tell you it doesn't get much lower, except it does, frequently, and always in surprising ways. ”That's a new kind of sick,” I noted, ”getting your own grandmother to bring in your junk.”

But MacKay turned to me. ”Sweetheart, we're not talking about drugs. He upped one of those mobile phones. Didn't they tell you?” And when he saw they hadn't, he laughed. ”The boys must have wanted to see the look on your face. Stupid b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. You might have had a heart attack.”

I remained utterly baffled until the understanding dawned. ”He suitcased a cell phone?”

MacKay nodded. ”Looked like a Samsung.”

”Good grief,” I muttered. The things a human being could shove up the a.s.s. I felt awestruck, affirmed in my belief that there were no bounds to ingenuity when it met the curve of need.

”Yeah, Cooper didn't believe it either. He was downright skeptical when Grandma made the suggestion. He said, 'Granny, that's never going to fit up my a.s.s,' and she said, 'It'll fit up no problem. You think I brung it here without trying first?'”

I could only blink in wonder. ”She shoved it up her own a.s.s before she got him to shove it up his a.s.s?”

”As G.o.d is my witness. It must have taken him five minutes working it back there. We were cheering him on. He kept saying, 'No, Granny, it ain't going to go,' and she told him to keep pus.h.i.+ng, and then the expression on old Cooper's face changed considerably, and he said his goodbyes and got out of there fast. We nabbed him as soon as he pa.s.sed the control zone. And now look at him. Whistling like he's got nothing on his mind.”

”And you couldn't resist coming in to watch.”

MacKay nodded. ”Yeah. I figure once in my life I got to see someone s.h.i.+t a phone.”

A minute pa.s.sed.

”If we knew the number, we could give it a ring,” I suggested.

”Honest, Judge. We were just trying to answer the phone.”

We laughed, pleased with ourselves, and waited some more.

I'm not sure why-an urge to think about something other than Cooper Lewis and his cell phone, I suppose-but I broke the silence and asked MacKay what he was up to these days, outside of work.

Right away I regretted it. I didn't know much about Mac-Kay's private life, whether to suspect a Mrs. MacKay and a houseful of grandkids or, what was more likely, a shabby one-bedroom apartment with a divorce agreement buried in a stack of bills on the kitchen counter; and he didn't know much about me, though he sometimes teased me about boyfriends and wild weekends. It was a taboo conversation, especially in front of inmates. They sucked up information like parasites and found ingenious ways to use it against you. But MacKay didn't seem to mind, and Cooper Lewis gave no indication he could hear through the thick gla.s.s.

”You mean when I'm not waiting for someone to take a c.r.a.p?” he asked.

It was probably the best answer I could expect.