immy Highfield lies on his stomach and thinks about Susan. Life in prison deprives him of many simple pleasures. He misses drinking milk, for example, with his morning coffee or eating scrambled eggs—runny and with plenty of ketchup—any time he gets the urge. He wonders if Susan is doing it with someone else. Sure she is. She and her oral fixation. She practically couldn't wait to get her mouth around his cock on their first date. The lights in the theater had barely dimmed when she leaned over, unzipped him, and got to work. Other people have popcorn and soda with their movies, not Susan, though. She swallowed, licked him like a mother cat, and sat back up. For the rest of the movie, they barely touched, which was fine with Jimmy who felt a little drained and in no cuddling mood.
He rolls over. It is still dark outside. No telling what time it is. He doesn't have one of those glow-in-the-dark watches.
Go directly to jail. Except of course that in Jimmy's case the road had not been so direct. He first had to fuck up his probation. Not five months into seven years of supervised probation, he got pulled over by the Monroe City Police Department. It was his bad luck that his tail light was busted and that he reeked of alcohol and that he smarted off to a cop who had no sense of humor at all. The dope in his glove compartment didn't help matters much either. Well, actually, all this was his mother's fault, in a way. And so for the second time in a year they dragged his hippie ass in front of a judge who didn't like long-haired country boys and who was running for the Louisiana State Supreme Court on a platform of Traditional Christian Values: Prayer and respect and individual responsibility and all that jazz. The original sentence was re-instated with a flick of the gavel. Jimmy's mother had sat through the entire proceedings with amazing calm, especially considering that a month earlier she had experienced a psychotic episode, caused by the gallbladder pills she had been taking. It happened in the produce section at the Super Walmart, while she examined the lettuce.
"I have met God," she stated. "I am the Virgin Mary," she added.
Jimmy's dad called him that night from Glenwood Medical Center and said that tests were being run and for him not to worry. Jimmy figured that having the Virgin Mary for a mother deserved drink or two, but when he tried to explain that to the cop, it didn't make much of an impression.
Now, his mother sat quietly, listened to the gavel's sound waves die down, and with all the composure of the retired school teacher she was, she stood and told the judge that he had just sentenced John the Baptist to hard labor. Jimmy's court-appointed attorney smiled apologetically. Jimmy hoped he'd choke on that shit-eating grin of his. Six months later he did, unbeknownst to Jimmy, though, choke on a cherry pit. But by then, Jimmy had other things to worry about. For now, the judge called order in the court room and then motioned the bailiff to remove both Jimmy and his mother from his sight.
At eight that night, Jimmy and a few other prisoners were transported to Hunt Correctional Facility. Nobody paid attention to the falling star that arched directly over I-20. It fell a long time.
They arrived in St. Gabriel late. Jimmy was tired and he couldn't see the exterior of the building too clearly, but it looked like a giant square slab of brick.
Jimmy turns over on his stomach again. His shoulder hurts badly. At night, it always gets worse. Then he can concentrate on feeling the pain. There, in the absence of light and noise, the only thing alive is the pain. It is quiet during the night, much more quiet than he had imagined a prison to be. It was different in the movies he had seen. There is always some clanging or shuffling about for a few minutes after lights out at eleven, but then the whole building hushes and settles down into its own darkness and sleeps until wake-up call at 5:30. Jimmy often lies awake like this, thinking, listening, to nothing in particular, maybe the sound of his heart, beating, not beating, beating, inside his body, some unseen miracle pushing against his flesh. You must revise your life. He can't remember where he read those words. Each word punctuates the spaces between each heartbeat. But where to begin? How far back do you go? Yesterday? Last year? The moment of birth? Before your parents were born? How far back is far enough? Sometimes Jimmy envisions himself as a receding speck of dust, getting smaller and smaller. He wonders how small he can get.
After a week without a phone call or a letter, the guard told Jimmy that he had a visitor. Susan looked good. Her hair was a touch darker than he remembered, or perhaps it was the light tile in the visitor's hall which made it seem darker.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi," she said.
"Whatcha doin'?" he asked.
"Nothing much. You?" she asked.
"Nothing. How's stuff?"
"O.K. You?"
"Cool."
"They shaved your goat-tee."
"Yeah, I think my hair is next."
"You're looking good."
The clock on the wall got unbearably loud, as if the tiled walls expanded the sound. Susan looked into her lap.
"I am pregnant."
"You sure?"
"Yeah, it turned blue."
"Fuck, fuck, fuck." Jimmy hit his head against the table. He wanted to empty his mind of every last thought in there.
"I'm moving back in with Bobby. It may be his anyway." Jimmy knew that he should have felt rage, or anger, or something, but there was nothing there. He remembered a rattlesnake round-up his father had taken him to see when they lived in San Antonio. Hundreds of hissing and rattling snakes lay coiled up in their cages, and one by one was fished out and taken to the middle of the arena where the snake handlers grabbed their heads and squeezed the venom into a bucket. Later, the poison could be used to make antidotes for snake bites. The snakes had looked pitiful, their mouths wide open but soundless, and yellow juice running out of their fangs. Then the snakes were killed and the meat sold. It hung limply from silver hooks.
"That's justice, real justice," Cecil, Jimmy's, father said. "None of that pussy shit." Cecil divided the world into pussies and real men. He worried that Jimmy was a pussy because he never served his country, but then again, these days the United States fought pussy wars anyway.
Jimmy looked at Susan and could not think of anything else to say.
"I guess, I'll look you up when I get out."
"Yeah, why don't you do that."
And when she left, Jimmy wondered if he could have said something or done something that would have made a difference.
After Susan's visit, it rained for over a week. Jimmy figured that the two events were somehow related. He hated the sound of rain. It meant that work call would be canceled and that they had to sit around all day. No T.V. before three on weekdays, but it stays on all the time on weekends, and they watch everything from the early morning television evangelists to football and the made for T.V. movie at night. They sit in community hall, on yellow sofas and chairs and get up during commercials to look out of the windows which have little steel wires criss-crossing through them. Nobody talks much.
Jimmy was glad when it stopped raining and the normal routine kicked in again. He and three others were put on kitchen duty and had to pull the stems of bags and bags of greens. They sat behind the kitchen area in the sun. Sweat dripped into the buckets with the greens.
"I hope they cook these real good," Jimmy said to the man on his right, for lack of anything better to say. He figured that talking would pass the time. The fat guy on his left shook his head.
"Don't talk to him. He doesn't like to be disturbed."
The fat guy reached over the bucket and held out a sweaty palm.
"I'm Jerome."
Shaking Jerome's hand was like shaking Jell-O. Jimmy couldn't feel any bones in there. He wanted to keep the conversation going though.
"So, where're you from?"
"I don't know; everywhere, I guess."
"What kind of answer is that, 'everywhere I guess'?"
"It means that it depends, like, how you define 'home.'"
"Home is where the heart is." Jimmy had always liked that saying. He wasn't sure about his heart, though. There were so many empty spaces.
"Well, shit. If you want to play that game, then I have no idea where home is." Jerome looked at his thumbs, which had turned the color of greens, and seemed to wait for Jimmy to say something.
"I am trying to get transferred closer to home."
Jerome laughed. He had a good laugh, and Jimmy liked the way he talked, with that light Cajun rhythm. It was a voice full of Zydeco and Jambalaya, and Jerome's belly shook when he laughed, and he sat there like a Cajun Buddha. Voice was important to Jimmy. Like a blind man, he listens to places and distances connected to words, and maybe the roots, because he doesn't have them himself, only a restless moving around—state to state, country to country, airforce base to airforce base—until his father took early retirement, and by then it was too late for Jimmy's voice to root itself in one region.
"Closer to the heart, hm?"
And then, "Good luck. The warden likes to keep his flock."
"I'm trying to get a medical transfer."
"You're sick? The guys've been talking. You've been losing weight."
"Lousy food. But I got this pain in my shoulder and the doctors at Charity can't fucking find anything."
"Do you think they're trying to?" Jerome, as Jimmy finds out over the next several months, was born in Sulphur, Louisiana, and worked in every bar and nightclub in New Orleans, doing odd jobs—everything from bouncer to shrimp peeling. He won't say why and how long he has been in prison.
"Man, I could use me some crawfish right now," Jerome said to Jimmy one afternoon while they were on work duty. The work was mind-numbingly dull: pulling weeds along a stretch of road close to the prison. Hardly a car drove past; it was too hot and the asphalt had turned sticky, and neither the guards nor the prisoners hurried the work along because the weeds would still be there tomorrow or the next day and the day after that; nobody was going anywhere or had anything better to do, and shooting the breeze was better than no breeze at all.
"Crawfish and beer," Jerome said. "Crawfish as big as my fist. We'd go crawfishing, you know, in ditches like these. If you're not careful, you fall in. Bust your ass, too. Waist-high weeds; you didn't know what was in there. Ever seen a crawfish net before?"
Jimmy shook his head, and he envied Jerome for his memories. Jerome is filled to the brim with action-adventure, and he has tales of the swamps (that part of earth that can't decide whether it wants to be wet or dry) as tall and as wide as the Mississippi Delta.
"Getting the crawfish is half the fun. The nets are like little pyramids baited with chicken necks. When the crawfish eat the bait, they get trapped. Their claws and stuff gets hung up in there. Then we'd sack 'em in onion bags and hang the bag up in trees, and one time, they got lose and there was crawfish all over the yard. They were big crawfish, big as a hung man's dick, not these little piss-ant crawfish they rip you off with in restaurants."
Jerome laughed. He had stopped pulling weeds and lit a cigarette.
"Want one?" "No, thanks." Jimmy thinks that every cigarette he doesn't smoke is like a little prayer to God to let this pain be something minor. He sends these thoughts to God: See? See? I am not smoking. This is my sacrifice. What else do you want me to do? I don't have a first-born.
"Christ, what did you do with all the crawfish?"
"We ate them, man; we ate them. We put them in salt water first, to purge them, and then in boiling water. When they come up red, they're ready."
Jimmy felt sorry for the crawfish. They had to shit out everything that was in them, and then they'd be boiled alive and eaten.
Early light comes through the window. It gets light early in the summer, and with the rising sun, some of Jimmy's pain eases. He tries to guess how long until wake up call. And then, he thinks of Susan some more. Maybe she and Bobby have broken up again. That's what had happened when Susan had agreed to go out with Jimmy the first time. Bobby was like her center of gravity she told Jimmy. And no matter what, who and where, she would always love Bobby. But in the meanwhile, she wouldn't mind seeing more of Jimmy. And that was alright with him, except that it made him nervous to think of Bobby as an unseen but tangible third whenever Jimmy and Susan were together. Susan did wonders for Jimmy's self-confidence with women until he found out that she had a general proclivity for sucking dick and had not merely singled him out for special treatment. His ego deflated to its usual size again after he overheard Wyatt Elvgren say that she'd given him head one time for almost two hours straight on a boatdeck overlooking the bayou. But Jimmy really doesn't care about Wyatt or Bobby or the other un-named possible ones. He cares about Susan, her long dark hair that braids easily, her small fingers that can hold a glass with more grace than anyone else he ever knew, her voice that is always on the verge of a giggle. He cares about her body, the way it feels under his, her legs locked so tightly around his midsection his ribs hurt. He cares about the way she sits on the toilet, eating a burrito and commenting, This is life, man. Eating and shitting. Why not carry the damn toilet around with us?
The building stirs to life. A slow ascent into wakefulness begins. It won't be long until wake-up call. Jimmy tries to sit up and move his arm. A sharp pain shoots through his spinal cord into his brain. He can hardly use his left arm anymore, and it's getting harder and harder for him to grasp anything with his left hand. Why none of the doctors have found a cause for the pain is beyond him. He has not yet found the courage to verbalize the worst of his fear, which keeps hammering away in his brain, insisting louder and louder every day that something is wrong, very wrong.
When the guard comes around to check inmate presence, Jimmy is not dressed. He tells the guard that he is too sick to answer work call and that he wants to see the doctor. The guard fills out a medical exam request form and warns Jimmy that if he keeps abusing the system, he'd be written up. The doctor arrives at 10:30 a.m., asculates Jimmy's lungs (clear, bilaterally), weighs him (down to 120 pounds from 123 two weeks earlier; total weight loss 25 pounds), writes the usual prescription for Percodan. Final diagnosis: chronic back pain of unknown etiology. He leaves at 10:45 a.m. Jimmy asks him to talk to the warden about a medical transfer closer to home. The reply, "sure, son," comes as the guard locks the door. Jimmy thinks that the doctor sounded a lot like his father. The doctor and Cecil share a similar voice, but the rest of both men couldn't be more different. Cecil is tall and square, and the doctor looks shrivelled up. For the rest of the day, Jimmy is relieved from duty. Out of boredom and the need to communicate, Jimmy writes a letter to his parents:
I talked to the doctor that does sick call rounds. He said nothing would be done for me as long as I'm in Hunt. I guess the best thing to do is to see if Betts can try to get me out on a Medical Transfer. I'm worried about being put in population. The first thing other inmates will think is I have AIDS. They all think they know what the symptoms are. I don't have it, but that won't stop them from jumping on me to get me transferred. I was in a better state of mind before talking to the doctor this morning; now it seems that I have nothing to hope for. I thought a doctor was a doctor no matter what.
Love,
your son.
He looks over what he has written so far and thinks it sounds pretty desperate, and so he adds that he misses everyone at home, which is almost true. His parents came to visit once so far. He hardly recognized his mother at first. She had shaved off her eyebrows.
"Now, I won't have to pluck anymore. Those little stubbles get pesky after a while. I am sure you men understand." Jimmy said he does, but those brow-less eyes made him nervous; they are so naked.
"Maybe I'll do my head next," his mother contemplated. "It would make things so much smoother." Cecil didn't say anything; Jimmy couldn't shake the feeling that his Dad was actually proud of him for being in prison. My son is in prison he tells his friends. It has a certain bravado to it, a manly ring. After he seals the envelope, it occurs to Jimmy that he should have asked how Beal is doing and if he has ever gotten the Camaro out of the ditch. Beal is his younger brother, the one who will one day finish college and become an occupational therapist. But right now, Beal likes to race his car. And the one day in probably ten years when Monroe experienced an icestorm, Beal picked to test the car's spin capacity. He managed almost three complete rotations on a road sheeted with ice before sliding off the shoulder into a ditch, nose first. The angle of impact, combined with the speed, crumpled the hood into half its original size, and when the tow truck arrived, the car was pronounced a total loss. Beal didn't have a scratch on him.
"In that case," Beal had said, "don't worry about towing the car. Leave it here." Of course, the "here" was a residential area, and the people living there didn't think that the ditched Camaro added scenic improvement. About the time that City officials called Beal, or rather Cecil, since the car was registered in his name, about removing the vehicle, Jimmy ate his first prison meal. That was six months ago. He saw the doctor on three different occasions and had twice been to Charity for tests. The diagnosis: Chronic back pain of unknown etiology.
Monday morning, Jimmy finds out that instead of being put in population, he will be transferred to Wade Correctional Facility in Homer, Louisiana. Someone pulled the right strings, finally. He will be a two-hours drive from his parents' home; he will be able to see his kid brother. A happy feeling spreads through his stomach. The panicked voices quiet down.
Jerome tells him that Wade is called Baby Angola.
"That's were they send the troublemakers. They even got the ones that Angola can't handle."
Jimmy doesn't want to hear this; his margin of hope is slim enough without Jerome squashing it even further.
"Personally, I always thought that if God exists, he wouldn't make Catch-22's," Jerome mumbles. "Damned if you stay; damned if you go."
Now Jimmy begins to wonder about God, too. But that's a big concept, and God keeps escaping through Jimmy's widely cast nets. His eyes keep returning to the bible his mother sent him. A few lines make sense, are beginning to break through. Wilt thou be made whole?
On the morning of Jimmy's transfer, the sun rises into a humid, hot August day. The wet air is sluggish and by seven o'clock, the last breeze has hidden under the pecan and oak trees. Seventy prisoners stand in the courtyard waiting for their transfer papers to be filled out. One by one shuffles inside, picks up his belongings and gets on a school bus. Sweat, like a second set of clothes, clings to everyone, and movements are slow and deliberate. Any extra motion would be too much. Jimmy's bus fills up with twenty other prisoners, and although the windows are open, the air hangs perfectly still. Only when the bus pulls away from the prison and slices through the wetness, do Jimmy and the others begin to feel relief. Every stop is greeted by a silent groan. The bus rumbles north at a steady sixty miles per hour, and the thermometer holds at ninety-eight degrees. Nobody sleeps.
Wade is bigger than Hunt, and has more inmates. What Jimmy likes best about Wade is that a staff doctor examines him from head to toe. The doctor is old, over seventy, with patches of hair growing here and there on his scalp. He makes Jimmy take off his shirt and listens to his lungs. He looks at an old x-ray and shows Jimmy areas of lucency and infiltrates and tiny cavities. The words mean nothing to Jimmy. The doctor wants to run more tests, but there is something in his voice, something that Jimmy recognizes, something akin to defeat, something that speaks to the panicked voices inside himself. To calm them and himself, Jimmy writes to his parents.
I saw someone from Monroe today. He's been here for a couple of weeks. Has been at Hunt, too. Everyone is glad to get away from Hunt. I didn't realize how bad it was there until getting here. You can get outside a lot here and walk around, play basketball, horse-shoes. They have football, flag and tackle. The tackle plays some college teams from the area. They also have volleyball. When I get straightened out (my back), I'm gonna start exercising, maybe start lifting weights. There are some big guys here. They look like professional weight lifters. I need to try to stop smoking but it's real hard being locked up.
I found a four leaf clover yesterday. A guy here I talked to said he has found some with five, six, and seven leaves. But they are supposed to be bad luck.
They have a Vo-tech program here if you qualify. I should. They'll test me next week for my grade level and approval. I think I'll go and take classes in air conditioning and refrigeration. They also have welding, automotive mechanics. It's full time, so I won't have to work. That's good. Maybe I'll open my own business like Everett.
Have you heard anything from Bess on getting my sentence reduced?
Love,
your son.
Jimmy made up the conversation about the four leaf clover. He hasn't talked to other inmates at Wade. They avoid him. He is skinny and there are brown blotches on his skin. His left arm hangs useless from his shoulder. Even shallow breathing hurts. He fears running out of Percodan or having it stolen. He did find a four leaf clover, though. Most days he sits in the infirmary; sometimes he goes outside to sit in the sun. Even with temperatures approaching the century mark, he is cold. He doesn't sweat, and the sun feels good on his shoulder, and he worries about the coming of winter.
Cecil visits, alone, because Jimmy's mother won't leave the house anymore. Cars frighten her, Cecil explains. A few days later, Beal shows up with his new girlfriend, a very pretty and pale redhead.
"My first red," Beal says. "Red hot."
They talk about cars, and Jimmy enjoys listening to Beal use words like carburetor and big block engine and torque. These words have weight and performance; saying them is like spitting out a hot fire ball. The redhead sits patiently, smiling vaguely at Jimmy from time to time. Suddenly, he feels an incredible longing for Susan, as if his entire body is pulled on invisible strings toward wherever she is.
The old staff doctor convinces the warden that Jimmy needs a Bone Scan. At the hospital, a nurse injects 21mCi of Technetium MDP intravenously into Jimmy's system, and then wheels him into tubular looking thing that fits snugly over his entire body. It could pass for a futuristic coffin, except that it slides back and forth across Jimmy, whirring softly as it goes, and taking pictures of Jimmy's insides. Color pictures, pictures that show areas of increased tracer accumulation in left first, second, and third ribs. The doctors use an abbreviation for Jimmy's condition. Ca. Two letters that could spell cat, or car, or can. They tell him he has six months, maybe less.
He remembers a line from a poem he read in high school. A child asks her mother, When do you know you're dying? When you can't make a fist anymore, the mother answers, and the child lies awake opening and closing her fist. Jimmy's left hand can't make a fist anymore, and he begins to think of his heart as a fist, clenching and unclenching inside, unseen. With his good hand, he touches his chest, checking the rhythm.
© Claudia Grinnell