Part 25 (1/2)
In the Big House The next four weeks were the hardest of my life. I hunkered down and tried to learn the ropes at Coolis-how to avoid being beaten up by my sisters in chains, how to b.u.t.ter up the CO's without having to have s.e.x with them, how to keep myself busy enough that the pervasive helplessness and boredom wouldn't drag me so far down I couldn't function.
I wanted to talk to Miss Ruby, to thank her for her help on Sunday, but mostly to find out what she could tell me about Nicola, and about getting work in the clothes shop. I let everyone I talked to know that I'd like to meet her, but except for a couple of times in the dining hall, where the CO's kept us firmly in place at the table, I didn't see her after that first day.
Freeman's visit did bring a material change in my physical comfort. True to his word, he sent his intern out with money for my account, along with my clothes allotment. The intern had a stack of legal doc.u.ments for me to read and sign. In the middle of them was a letter from Lotty. She begged me to post bail in lines of such loving concern I was hard put to stick to my resolve about staying, but in a postscript she added, I helped Freeman's secretary pack your clothes and mended various tears.
”She especially wanted you to know about a hole in the waistband to your shorts,” the intern said primly.
Lotty was no seamstress. When I got back to my cell, I surrept.i.tiously picked apart an inch of the waistband seam. Tightly folded bills almost matched the khaki of the fabric. I pulled out a twenty before st.i.tching the seam shut again-it was the safest place to store money, and was.h.i.+ng wouldn't hurt it any.
With my prison trust account set up, I was not only able to buy a toothbrush and soap at the commissary but also some cleanser to scrub out the sinktoilet unit in my cell. The cash I would keep for bribes, once I knew to whom and how to administer them.
Except for being able to buy overpriced, poorquality shampoo and soap, my first trip to the commissary was a disappointment. The women around me had talked about what they planned to do on their expeditions as if their weekly thirtyminute trip was an outing to Water Tower Place. I suppose the women found the trips exciting because they made a break in the routine. They were also our main contact with the outside world, which we could experience through magazines like Cosmo or Essence. Soap Opera Digest was also popular.
Besides magazines and toiletries, you could buy canned or packaged food, cigarettes, and artifacts made by inmates throughout the Illinois prison system.
A large number of male inmates seemed to like to embroider. We could get handkerchiefs, place mats, head scarves, even blouses with intricate designs of birds and flowers, brought in from Joliet and points south.
Also available were Mad Virgin Ts.h.i.+rts and jackets-the average age of the prison population was, after all, Lacey's target audience, and many of the inmates were fans. Curious, I inspected the labels. They read Made with Pride in the USA , so I didn't think Nicola Aguinaldo had bought the s.h.i.+rt she died in here. The commissary also stocked spinoffs from other Global favorites, including Captain Doberman and the s.p.a.ce Berets, which women liked to buy for their children.
On my first outing I bought cheap lined writing paper-the only paper the commissary carried-and a couple of ballpoint pens. When I asked the clerk if they had plain paper or rollerball pens, she snorted and told me to go to Marshall Field's if I didn't like the selection here.
When I got back to my cell, my roommate, Solina, apathetically watched me scrub the basin. She had been at Coolis only a week longer than me, and the fact that the sink was filthy when she got here meant it wasn't her job to clean it up.
”We'll take turns,” I said, my voice bright with menace. ”I'm getting it spickandspan, and that means tomorrow, when it's your turn, it will be easy for you to clean up.”
She started to say she didn't have to obey orders from me, then remembered my prowess against Angie and said she'd think about it.
”We can control so few things in here,” I said. ”Keeping the place clean means at a minimum we can control the smell.”
”Okay, okay, I already got the point.” She stomped out of our cell down the hall to watch television on a small set belonging to an inmate who'd been awaiting her trial date for eleven months.
I had to laugh to myself, picturing the friends who've complained about my slovenly housekeeping over the years-they'd be astounded to find me laying down the law on hygiene to my roommate.
Besides making it possible for me to bathe, Freeman had also delivered my message to Morrell. On Thursday near the end of my first week, I got summoned to see him in the visitors' room.
My arrest had stunned him. He hadn't even known about it until he saw a paragraph in the Tribune on Sunday-Mr. Contreras, never fond of communicating with the men in my life, had been too rattled to call Morrell. Like Freeman, Morrell talked to me persuasively about all the reasons to leave Coolis, but unlike Freeman, he could see a point to my staying.
”Are you learning anything helpful?”
I grimaced. ”Not about Nicola, so far. About the way people without power turn on each other because they feel too helpless to see who's really to blame for their daytoday misery-I'm learning way too much about that.”
I leaned forward to talk more privately, but an alert CO made me back away the requisite arm's length-if we touched, Morrell might pa.s.s drugs to me. After five minutes of glaring scrutiny the CO decided I wasn't trying anything too heinous and turned her attention to another inmate. Only a handful of women got visitors on weekdays; it was hard to speak privately.
”There's a place called the Unblinking Eye where you can get a particular kind of watchcamera,” I said in a prisonyard mumble as soon as the CO turned her attention away. ”If you buy one for me and bring it on a Sat.u.r.day or Sunday when there's a mob here, we ought to be able to make a switch.”
”Vic, I don't like it.”
I smiled provocatively. ”I don't think they'll do anything to you if they find you with it-except bar you from visiting me.”
He gave an exasperated sigh. ”I'm not worried about that but about you, you fool.”
”Thanks, Morrell. But if I ever manage to get into the clothes shop, I may see something that I should doc.u.ment. And frankly, there's plenty else to record here between the inmates and the guards.”
Morrell gave me another quizzical look and said he'd see what he could do. He switched the talk to neutral matters-my neighbor, who was so distraught at the idea of me behind bars that he wouldn't make the trip to see me. He gave me news of Lotty, of the dogs, of all the people whose welfare I cared about and couldn't attend to. He stayed an hour. I felt a wrenching desolation when he left. I went down to the rec room, where I shot baskets for an hour, until I was wet with sweat and too tired to feel sorry for myself.
When I went back upstairs to shower, the CO at the entrance, a man named Rohde, seemed to react oddly. He looked at me, then got on the phone. I had to wait five minutes before he let me in, and then it was only when two other CO's joined him. I wondered if they had somehow monitored my conversation with Morrell and were going to put me on report, but Rohde watched me go past the guard station without saying anything. Still, he seemed to have an air of suppressed excitement about him, and he was joined behind the doublegla.s.s walls by the other two men. The video cameras were trained on the shower rooms as well as all other common areas, but I had already figured out which shower head cut the camera angle so that it could only catch me if I stood directly under it. If he'd called his buddies for a peep show, I figured I knew how to avoid providing it.
I was jumped almost before I got into the shower room. Two women, one from the front, one from the rear. Rohde's manner had put me on guard, otherwise they might have destroyed me. I dropped my supplies and towel and kicked, all in one motion. I was lucky; my foot caught the woman in front square on the patella, and she grunted and backed away.
The one behind me had my left shoulder in a steel grip. She was pulling me toward her. I gasped-she had something sharp that sliced across my right shoulder. I hooked my feet around her ankles and used her own force to catapult her forward. The wet floor made it hard to get a purchase and I slipped and fell with her. I chopped across her right wrist before she could recover and forced her to let go of her weapon.
The one I'd kicked was closing in on me. I rolled over on the moldy floor and got up into a crouch. She flung herself at me before I could kick the weapon away. She had her hands around my neck. I held on to her shoulders for leverage and swung both knees into her stomach. She squawked in pain and let go of me.
The woman with the weapon was behind me again. I was winded; I'd already been working out for an hour and didn't know how much longer I could keep fighting.
When she lunged at me I ducked. It was the wet floor that did the rest. She lost her footing, scrabbled to gain it, and careened so hard against the concrete wall that she stunned herself. Her partner saw her fall and suddenly shouted for help.
The guards appeared so fast I knew they must have been on their way as soon as the woman knocked herself out.
”She jumped me! She jumped Celia, too, and knocked her out!”
Rohde grabbed me and held my arms behind me. Polsen, the CO who'd joined him at the video monitor, stood nearby but didn't touch my a.s.sailant.
”Nonsense,” I panted. ”Celia is lying there with something in her hand that gave me this cut on my neck. And as for you, whoever you are, if you were waiting to take a shower, where the h.e.l.l is your towel or your soap? As you two CO's know, because you were watching all this on your monitor.”
”You stole them from me.”
”Those are my things on the floor there. Where are yours?” I demanded.
At that point CO Cornish appeared. He was the fairestminded of the CO's on our wing.
”You fighting again?” he asked me.
”The woman on the floor there cut me with something when I came into the shower room,” I got my story in quickly. ”She still has the razor or whatever she used in her right hand.”
The woman was beginning to stir. Before Rohde or Polsen could move, Cornish bent over and pulled a strip of metal from her.
”She belongs on the prison wing. As does the other one. I'm putting all three of you on report. Warshawski, if I catch you in one more fight you're going into segregation. And you two, off you go to your own quarters. How did you get in here, anyway?”
Rohde was forced to let me go. He and Polsen escorted my a.s.sailants off the floor. Cornish looked at my neck and told me to go to the infirmary for a teta.n.u.s shot. It was the closest he was going to come to acknowledging that I'd been jumped, but it eased the injustice of the whole situation slightly.
”I'd like to wash off first,” I said.
Cornish waited in the hall while I picked up my shampoo and towel from the filthy floor. I took off my s.h.i.+rt and bra and washed off under the shower most remote from the video monitor. Cornish took me in an elevator down to the bas.e.m.e.nt, which I'd never seen, and waited while I got my shot. The woman on duty put some antibiotic ointment on the wound in my neck. It hadn't gone deep enough to require st.i.tches, which was fortunate, since she didn't have the equipment to put me back together.
Cornish took me back to my cell and told me to be very careful where I walked at night. Everyone on my wing seemed to know about the attack. In fact, they seemed to have been warned away from the showers when I came up from my workout.