They were twenty feet or so up the A Wing corridor. Sitting slumped on a bench next to the Kwell dispenser was Claudia Stephenson, known to all the inmates (and the officers, although they did not use the nickname while in gen-pop) as Claudia the Dynamite Body-a. The bod in question wasn’t quite as dynamite as it had been ten months ago, however. Since her intake, starches and gallons of prison gravy had packed on thirty or forty pounds. Her hands were resting on her brown uniform pants. The top that went with them lay crumpled at her feet, revealing an XL sports bra. Claudia’s boobs, Jeanette thought, were still pretty amazing.
Angel ladled coffee into a Styrofoam cup, splashing some on the floor in her amped-up enthusiasm. She held the cup out to Claudia. “Drink it up, Ms. Dynamite! Made strong to last long! Power by the hour, my sister!”
Claudia shook her head and kept staring at the tile floor.
“Claudia?” Jeanette asked. “What’s wrong?”
Some of the inmates were jealous of Claudia, but Jeanette liked her, and felt sorry for her. Claudia had embezzled a great deal of money from the Presbyterian church where she had been director of services in order to underwrite the ferocious drug habits of her husband and oldest son. And those two were both currently on the street, free as birds. I got a rhyme for you, Angel, Jeanette thought. Men play, women pay.
“Nothing’s wrong, I’m just getting up my nerve.” Claudia didn’t take her eyes from the floor.
“To do what?” Jeanette asked.
“To ask her to let me sleep normal, like her.”
Angel winked at Jeanette, let her tongue loll from the corner of her mouth, and made a couple of circles around one ear with her finger. “Who you talking about, Ms. Dynamite?”
“The new one,” Claudia said. “I think she’s the devil, Angel.”
This delighted Angel. “Devil-Angel! Angel-Devil!” She made scales in the air, lifted them up and down. “That’s the story of my life, Ms. Dynamite.”
Claudia droned on: “She must be some kind of wicked, if she’s the only one who can sleep like before.”
“I’m not getting you,” Jeanette said.
Claudia raised her head at last. There were purple scoops under her eyes. “She’s sleeping, but not in one of those cocoons. Go see for yourself. Ask how she’s doing it. Tell her if she wants my soul, she can have it. I just want to see Myron again. He’s my baby, and needs his mama.”
Angel dumped the cup of coffee she’d offered Claudia back into the urn, then turned to Jeanette. “We are goin to see about this.” She didn’t wait for Jeanette to agree.
When Jeanette arrived with the coffee wagon, Angel was gripping the bars and staring in. The woman Jeanette had glimpsed while Peters assaulted her now lay loose-limbed on her bunk, eyes closed, breathing evenly. Her dark hair spread out in a glorious fan. Her face was even more beautiful close up, and it was unblemished. Not only was she clear of the webbing, the bruises Jeanette had seen were gone. How was that possible?
Maybe she really is the devil, Jeanette thought. Or an angel, come to save us. Only that didn’t seem likely. Angels didn’t fly in this place. Other than Angel Fitzroy, that was, and she was more of a bat.
“Wake up!” Angel shouted.
“Angel?” She put a tentative hand on Angel’s shoulder. “Maybe you shouldn’t—”
Angel shrugged Jeanette’s hand off and tried to roll the cell door, but this one was locked. Angel grabbed the lid of the coffee urn and began to whang it against the bars, creating an ungodly racket that made Jeanette slap her hands over her ears.
“Wake up, bee-yatch! Wake up and smell the motherfucking coffee!”
The woman on the bunk opened her eyes, which were almond-shaped and as dark as her hair. She swung her legs down to the floor—long and lovely they were, even in her baggy intake coverall—and yawned. She stretched her arms, thrusting forward a pair of breasts that put Claudia’s to shame.
“Company!” she cried.
Her bare feet hardly seemed to touch the floor as she ran across to the bars and reached through them, grasping one of Angel’s hands and one of Jeanette’s. Angel instinctively pulled away. Jeanette was too stunned. It felt like some mild electricity was passing from the new woman’s hand and into her own.
“Angel! I’m so glad you’re here! I can talk to the rats, but they’re limited conversationalists. Not a criticism, just a reality. Each individual creature on its merits. My understanding is that Henry Kissinger is a fascinating discussion partner, yet consider all the blood that man has on his hands! Force me to choose, I’ll take a rat, thank you, and you can print that in the newspaper, just be sure you spell my name right.”
“What in the hail are you talking about?” Angel asked.
“Oh, nothing really. Sorry to blabber. I was just visiting the world on the other side of the world. Scrambles my brains a little to go back and forth. And here’s Jeanette Sorley! How’s Bobby, Jeanette?”
“How do you know our names?” Angel asked. “And how come you can sleep without growin that shit all over you?”
“I’m Evie. I came from the Tree. This is an interesting place, isn’t it? So lively! So much to do and see!”
“Bobby’s doing fine,” Jeanette said. Feeling as if she were in a dream… and perhaps she was. “I’d like to see him again before I fall aslee—”
Angel yanked Jeanette back so hard she almost fell. “Shut up, Jeanie. This ain’t about your boy.” She reached into the soft cell and grabbed Evie by the admirably filled front of her coverall. “How’re you stayin awake? Tell me or I’ll put a hurtin on you like you never had. I’ll make your cunt and your asshole swap places.”
Evie gave a jolly laugh. “That would be a medical marvel, wouldn’t it? Why, I’d have to learn how to go to the bathroom all over again.”
Angel flushed. “You want to play with me? You want to? You think just because you’re in that cell, I cain’t get at you?”
Evie looked down at the hands on her. Just looked. But Angel screamed and staggered back. Her fingers were turning red.
“Burned me! Bitch burned me somehow!”
Evie turned to Jeanette. She was smiling, but Jeanette thought there was sadness as well as good humor in those dark eyes. “The problem is more complex than it first might appear—I see that. I do. There are feminists who like to believe that all the world’s problems go back to men. To the innate aggressiveness of men. They have a point, a woman never started a war—although, trust me, some were definitely about them—but there are some bad, bad chickadees out there. I can’t deny it.”
“What is this shit you’re spouting?”
She looked back to Angel.
“Dr. Norcross has his suspicions about you, Angel. About the landlord you killed in Charleston, for one thing.”
“I didn’t kill nobody!” But the color had drained from Angel’s face, and she took a step backward, bumping the coffee wagon. Her reddened hands were pressed to her chest.
Evie redirected to Jeanette, speaking in low tones of confidence. “She’s killed five men. Five.” And now she turned again to Angel. “It was a kind of hobby for awhile there, wasn’t it, Angel? You out hitchhiking to nowhere in particular, with a knife in your purse and a little .32 in the side pocket of that rawhide jacket you always used to wear. But that’s not all, is it?”
“Shut up! Shut up!”
Back to Jeanette those amazing eyes went. Her voice was quiet but warm. It was the voice of a woman in a television ad, the one that told her friend that she also used to have problems with grass stains on her children’s pants, only this new detergent had changed everything.