Maggie tried to do nice things for the men she came across in the course of her duties. Some of them were longtime inmates who had earned positions of trust, and she would see them working in the gardens or re-shelving books in the prison library. In addition to joining the education initiative, one day a week she gave up her lunch hour to visit men whose families had stopped coming to see them. She would sit on a folding chair and listen to them describe a fishing hole under a cypress tree, a cabin in the woods, a favorite recipe for smoking deer. One day she baked a cake for a prisoner’s seventy-fifth birthday and held his hand as he talked longingly of a flaxen-haired wife and children who must by now be half a century old.
Valerie called her aside to say, “You can’t befriend the prisoners. You think you’re being kind, but you’re not. Listening is bad enough, but if you act like you believe them, they’ll start hounding you with all kinds of sob stories. It’s best if you can think of them as not quite human. Really, it’s the only way for any of us to survive, and by us, I mean all of us — them included.”
The education initiative consisted of a group of volunteers who worked in the prison school, where Maggie was assigned to help the prisoners on good behavior learn basic computation skills.
“They won’t forget me, will they?” asked an earnest young man who chugged his finger dutifully under the columns of figures and word problems Maggie wrote out for him to solve. The class was half over when she realized it was the young man from the exercise yard. His name was Tomás, and he had served three years of his thirty-year sentence for killing a gas station attendant with a knife.
“Of course not, Tomás. Who could forget you!”
“My family, that’s who. They live in Arizona, but I was transferred here.”
“I assume there was a good reason for that,” said Maggie.
“What is it? What’s the reason?”
“I don’t know anything about it,” said Maggie. “But people usually have a reason for doing things. Just like there’s a reason you’re in prison in the first place.”
“But I didn’t do anything,” said Tomás. “You believe that, don’t you?”
“I honestly don’t think about it. Besides, it doesn’t matter what I believe.”
“Why not? Why doesn’t it matter?”
“Because I don’t know the facts of the case and because I’m not in a position of authority.”
“If it doesn’t matter to you that I’m innocent, why would it matter to anyone? Why wouldn’t it be okay to lock up anybody for any reason, just because you wanted to?”
“But I don’t want to,” said Maggie. “Why would you think I’d want a thing like that?”
“Because…” Tomás peered at Maggie as if she was supposed to guess, but she had no idea what he was thinking.
“I would never want that,” she said. “Now, here’s one I’ll bet you can’t solve.” She wrote out a problem involving complex fractions.
“Yes, you can write in the book!” she cried when Tomás’s pencil hovered indecisively. “You see? It has your name on it — right there! Every time you come, this very same book will be yours!”
Maggie hurried across the room to erase the whiteboard, to file the attendance form, to turn on one bank of overhead lights and turn off another. One of the other inmates called out, “Over here, Miss. I have a question too!”
The men scraped their pencils against the paper. A man with a scarred face blew his nose against his arm and then wiped it on the seat of his pants. Maggie straightened the stack of notebooks belonging to the Tuesday class before glancing back to where Tomás was sitting, toiling away over his workbook, writing as neatly as he could. “Good job!” she exclaimed when she circled back to check his answers. “Four out of five correct!”
She was glad when the class was over, but the idea of innocence stayed with her. The next day she asked Valerie, “Does it ever occur to you that some of the inmates are innocent?”
“It occurs to everyone, darling. I was wondering when you were going to ask.”
“What do you do about it?”
“I said it occurs to everyone. I didn’t say they were innocent. In most cases, they’re guilty of more than what came out at their trials.”
“But most of them didn’t have trials,” said Maggie, who had started to research the criminal justice system and been shocked by what she had found. “Did you know—” she started to say, but Valerie cut her off.
“I know, I know. And if you kiss them, they turn into princes.”
“Maybe someone should kiss them then.”
“They’re guilty,” said Valerie. “Hand on heart. I wouldn’t lie.”
“But isn’t believing you without question the same thing as believing the inmates without question? Or believing…well, believing anything without looking into it for yourself?”
“That’s a little too close to the deep end for me,” said Valerie. “My motto is to keep it simple. Besides, the police don’t go around arresting people willy-nilly. Someone would have to be awful unlucky to end up here if he was innocent.”
“Yes,” said Maggie. “Someone would.”
Maggie thought of luck as a giant primordial atom that had fractured the day God made the world, unleashing particles of good and bad luck into the atmosphere where they could rain down at random, and now it occurred to her that she was sitting at a desk on the outside of the bars rather than wasting away inside of them not because she was inherently more virtuous than other people, but because she was luckier.
“Do you know why they arrested me?” asked Tomás when Maggie saw him in class the next Wednesday.
“Why no, I don’t,” replied Maggie.
“Because I ran from the police.”
“What were you running for?”
“To get away from them.”
“But why? If you hadn’t done anything, why didn’t you just say so?”
“Because…” Again Tomás peered at Maggie as if she could read his mind.
“And why did you plead guilty if you were innocent?”
“I had to plead guilty. If I didn’t, I might have gotten life.”
3.5 Lyle
It was Lyle’s belief that bombs prevented bloodshed, and now that Will was backing him up, he felt more sure of it than ever. “I know that sounds like a contradiction,” he said to a co-worker named Jimmy Sweets, “but if you think about it…” His voice trailed off, not because the explanation was hard to find, but because it was obvious. If anyone would know what he was talking about, it was Jimmy, who had been a fighter pilot in Vietnam.
“We pretty much proved that in nineteen forty-five,” said Jimmy. He rolled up his sleeve to reveal a long scar. “Christmas in Hanoi,” he said.
When some metal filings flew off a carelessly operated lathe and embedded themselves in Lyle’s left biceps, he thought of it as a war wound. “I have shrapnel in my arm,” he would say after a beer or two at the Merry Maid, which is where some of the men hung out in the evenings and where Lyle had started to go with Jimmy whenever Maggie worked late or when he wanted to get away from the creeping suspicion that he and Maggie were growing apart and that the new arrangement had left him without a necessary piece of equipment, like a leg.