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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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Reformatory
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Beloit was where bad girls went, but I wasn’t really a bad girl. I did a bad thing, and I knew that, but I was going to bring back my brother’s car; I mean, I wanted to get away, and I didn’t want to go back, but where was I going to go? The prosecutor gave me a chance to serve my time at a “trade school,” and I thought, hey, maybe that could work. Only the “trade school” was Beloit, a reformatory, mostly a fancy, old-fashioned name for a juvenile jail.
I don’t know if I’d have made it, if I hadn’t met Heather. She’d been in Beloit for sixteen months by then, and she took me under her wing. She had a couple of, acquaintances, I guess you could call them, but I think I was her first real friend there. Heather was stronger than me. Her parents used to take turns kicking the shit out of her, until she got so numb that the kicking only made her laugh, laughing through the blood, spitting up bits of her cheeks, and sometimes chipped off pieces of teeth. And Heather was pretty, prettier than me, but whenever she’d smile, she looked like a Jack O’Lantern, and it scared most people, or made them make that face, that, “Oh, the poor dear, can I get you a saucer of milk” face, like she was a lost puppy looking for affection. That was worse than the kicking, she said; she’d rather they just kick her instead. Heather introduced me to the other acquaintances I mentioned, Diane and Kathy, and we all became friends. I got the impression it was mostly because Heather had been friends with them before I got there, and I think we mostly spent time with them so people wouldn’t think we were lesbians. But they were okay. There was an old Romani woman with us at Beloit. Heather called her “the old gypsy bag.” She liked to say, “Here comes that old leathery gypsy bag hauling her old leathery gypsy bag.” And we’d giggle. I think she was there because she wasn’t quite crazy enough for the sanitarium in Wichita, and wasn’t criminal enough (and was too old and frail) for the women’s prison. She came and went, and sometimes I wondered if she maybe just volunteered at Beloit. But that night we were playing cards late at night in the refectory, just go fish, because the superintendent (she hated it when we called her the warden because she hated the idea that she was in charge of a jail) got mad when we played poker. The old woman sat down, and we played several games before Diane was dealing, and asked if the old gypsy wanted to be dealt in. She didn’t say anything, but Diane was a helpful kind of person and gave her cards anyway. She didn’t touch them, didn’t say a word, just kept looking, not quite at any of us, just looking. And then it was Heather’s turn to deal, and she was tired of go fish, and war, and all the other viceless games we played, and said, “Five card stud,” and Kathy turned a little red at the word “stud.” Heather dealt the old gypsy in, and this time she picked up the cards. She still didn’t say anything, but she played, took cards. We weren’t anteing, but every time someone raised her a nickel, she’d fold, even when Kathy was bluffing- and Kathy was an awful bluffer- she’d fold. It wasn’t until that last hand, when it was Heather and Kathy and the gypsy, and Heather raised and Kathy folded. Heather didn’t like winning just because other people were scared- she wanted confrontation- so as the old gypsy began to lower her hand to fold again, Heather stopped her. “Wait.” She put two more nickels in the middle of the table; “I’ll spot you. I want to see what you’ve got.” Heather laid down her cards, a pair of red queens and some numbers. “Just your hand,” Diane had said earlier when Heather had played those same cards, and she’d looked at me with something between jealousy and sadness. I don’t know if Diane was lonely or in love, but I guess it only bothered me in moments when she looked at me like I was where she wanted to be- and I wasn’t sure that where she wanted to be was where I actually was. This time Diane didn’t say anything; she was busy staring across the table at the old. The gypsy started to lower her hand, but before any of us but Kathy could see their faces, she whispered, “One of you will die tonight.” Her cards were all black, from the left the eight and ace of clubs, then the ace, eight and jack of spades. A shiver ran down my spine as the cards flitted onto the table. The old gypsy stood up, and I can’t explain it, even now, but I wanted to talk to her, ask something- anything. “Wait,” I said, but she simply walked out the door. A stillness had entered the room, and with it a chill, like someone had left a window open. None of us felt much like poker anymore, and we shuffled off, afraid to look each other in the eye, afraid to be scared in front of one another. Heather and I shared a room, just like Kathy and Diane shared one on the opposite end of the hall. I was lying awake in the darkness, clutching my blanket to my chest, for the first time feeling like I’d been safer at home than here. “Can’t sleep?” Heather asked, and I jumped, causing the spring mattress supports to squeal on me. “Don’t let it worry you. The old gypsy bag’s just crazy.” I guess that was enough. Heather was tougher than I was, smarter. If she said it was okay, well, it didn’t make me not scared, but just not-scared enough that I drifted off. And I woke to a chill like in the refectory, and the sound of the wind, gusting hard into our room, and I sat bolt upright, because the wind never blew through our room. That was because the windows were sealed from the outside with wire. But those horrible green curtains were flapping in a dark wind, and I heard something else, too: tap, tap tapping. “Heather?” I asked, knowing there would be no answer. “Heather,” I said again, no longer a question as I reached out for where her leg should have been in her bed. “Heather.” I was up, and tore her blanket off her empty bed, and nearly slipped on something wet on the floor, and even before I regained my balance I knew it was blood. I steadied myself against her bedpost, trying to convince myself that it was just that time of the month, that it was just a little menstrual blood and Heather was probably in the bathroom cleaning herself off- only our cycles had been aligned for the last six months, and my period wasn’t for another ten days. I followed the trail of blood out into the hall. It was dragged, not intermittent drips like you’d expect from a normal wound or an accident, but blood smeared across the floor, like someone had taken a mop to it but only made one pass before giving it up for lost. There was a single, flickering fluorescent light near the end of the hall, by the bathroom, but the blood disappeared down an earlier corridor to the right. My heart trembled in my ears, not the thundering of wildebeests, but a timid, plaintive gurgle, like it wasn’t sure it could handle the pressure and might stop working at all. I didn’t know what to do- and I stood at the t in that hallway for a full minute, staring down the dark corridor without moving. I don’t know if I ever would have moved, but I heard Heather, muffled, screaming. My bare feet slapped loud against the tiled floor, and I slid as the trail of blood curved into my path, and my fingers scraped as I caught the doorway the trail went through. Splinters shot up under my fingernails out of the old, unvarnished wood, but I stopped myself from crying out. Heather was lying in a bed in one of the empty rooms. A man was sitting on a circle stool, holding one hand over her mouth. I couldn’t see the other. “Need my other hand, or it’ll hurt more. Don’t scream.” A swollen eye and a gashed lip told me it wasn’t the first time he’d said that- and that she’d screamed anyway. His other hand moved from her mouth, and down, to where his bulky body hid it from me. I stepped inside the room, circling like a stalking cat, until I froze. There was a cut in her side, slashed clumsily; there was a pair of grisly garden shears lying on the bed beside her knee. His right hand was already inside the cavity, and he wormed the other in beside it. Heather grimaced and shook in pain, but didn’t scream, until suddenly he ripped his left fist out of the hole, holding something, and threw it in my direction. In the near-dark of the room it looked like a fleshy flower not quite in bloom, and I forced myself to look away before my eyes adjusted more. He slapped her with his bloody hand, “No screamin. One more to do.” His free hand moved down her leg, and she shuddered and so did I, until his hand left her knee and found the shears. He squeezed them in his hand, watched as they opened and closed, watched as the sticky blood left red slug trails between the blades. Then he moved the shears back towards the hole. I slunk across the room, towards a small nightstand, and picked it up. It was heavier than I’d thought, and I had trouble holding it over my head, and was afraid I might drop it as I walked to him. He must have heard my feet over the sound of her whimpering, and turned his head. I brought the nightstand down on his temple, with barely enough force to knock him off the stool. I might have been in trouble, then, but I’d lost control of the nightstand, and I dropped it, and it landed on the side of his head, smashing it into the tile floor. And then I heard that noise again: tap, tap tapping. It was closer, now, and with it came a voice. “Charles? Charlie Coyner? Where are you, darling? We have more girls to work on.” It was a woman’s voice, cracked and cragged by age. I wanted to run, but I knew the voice was coming from the doorway. I turned. She was blind, and old, and frailer than a person capable of walking on her own ought to have been, but she still seemed to stare into me with her dead old eyes, and wrinkled her nose. “They’ve been bad girls- and bad girls shouldn’t be mommies.” I hit her. I punched her so hard her face collapsed into her skull, and she fell backwards, and I felt a, a sucking sensation as my hand pulled back out of the face hole, and she hit her head on the doorframe and it shattered like an old pumpkin. I looked to Heather, but she’d passed out, so I ran back down the hall, screaming for help. The superintendent caught me at the end of the hall, and after a few moments of sobbed explanation, she called the police. Over the next few months, I found out more about the man and the blind woman. Her name was Lindsay Rolens. She had been forcibly sterilized at Beloit, under the wardenship of Lula Coyner more than half a century ago. Coyner claimed Rolens and 61 others requested the sterilizations she performed, because of insanity, epilepsy, VD or illegitimacy; she was removed shortly thereafter. The man’s name really was Charles Coyner. He was Lula’s great grand-nephew, an autistic boy who tested from an early age as mentally retarded. He was stolen when he was four years old from a babysitter by Rolens. And Rolens raised him in her own fucked-up image, the way all parents do. Heather lived through that night. Kathy wondered if the gypsy really knew what she said, or if maybe she’d let Rolens and Coyner in in the first place- but it really didn’t matter: we never say the old gypsy woman again. Heather slashed her wrists the next spring. She still hadn’t gotten her period back, and it was driving her crazy, watching everything else become fertile again, the trees and flowers, the rabbits. She always said she was too screwed-up to have children, but I guess there was something about not being able to make that choice anymore that she couldn’t stand. I was the one who found her in the bathroom. The paramedics took her away, and she came back after a few weeks. She didn’t speak to me again until summer, and even when she did she wasn’t the same. Then it was almost fall, and I’d wake up most nights, feeling our window open, only when I got up to check it was fastened tight. When I mentioned it to the superintendent, she had the maintenance woman put in a heavy latch that would only open from the inside. But I knew something bad was coming. And it was on one of these nights that I couldn’t sleep, and when that shiver went through me I sat up. Heather was in her bed, staring, tears in her eyes; the superintendent had given her a night light, because she couldn’t sleep in the dark anymore. She said, “I’m going to die tonight.” I stayed up with her, and we talked, and she was her old self again, mostly, until she said, “It isn’t the tits or the ovaries that ever made me a girl, but what they did to me- I don’t feel like me. I’m so scared to die, but,” her voice dropped to a whisper, “I can’t not be me.” And finally it all made sense, and that worried me, because I didn’t want to lose my friend, but I also didn’t see any way to talk her down from it, either. So I sat in her bed and just held her head, until she got up and said, “Goodbye.” As soon as she was out of the door I pushed my face into her pillow. I refused to breathe, because I knew the moment I did I would cry, and if I started to cry I thought it would only be a moment before I screamed- and then the superintendent would come and stop Heather- and I knew she couldn’t be stopped, not really, it just meant she’d be in pain a little longer, until some night she managed to sneak out without waking me. So I held my face into her pillow, held breath until my lungs burned, until the darkness at the edges of my closed eyes started to twinkle. And then it all tumbled out of me, and I wheezed through coursing snot, unable to whimper (let alone yell), until I heard the padding of feet on the tile in our doorway. And I looked up and saw Heather. She’d been crying, but she smiled, and I realized how long it had been since I’d seen her teeth. I wanted to ask her what had happened, but then the nightlight caught her shirt, and the red stain beneath her pelvis. She wobbled on her feet, and I caught her in my arms and hugged her, and she squeezed me, too. “Are you okay?” I asked. “Do you feel-” “It’s a start,” she said. |
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