“All they teach is GED prep here. Which is the education level of our guards.”
“Yeah.” He laughed quickly, covertly. “But since it’s the only thing offered, I structure it around reading. We read and talk about books. Try it out. I’d love to have you join us.” He told me how to sign up.
Sammy was right that having a job would keep me from falling apart. It did. It kept my mind off things. Instead, I concentrated, like everyone else, on what there was to be exploited.
Conan was crafting dildos in woodshop. He began working on them as soon as our shop supervisor commenced his marathon reading sessions at his desk. Every day the supervisor brought a novel to work, settled in, and read compulsively. The book covers featured lurid images with raised-letter titles, like Killed Twice. They were all water-damaged paperbacks you would find in a free box. The supervisor read at them for seven hours straight, day after day, while Conan used sanders and chamfering tools to taper his creations. He and Teardrop had a rivalry going over who could craft the better dildo. They both also had contacts at central kitchen for illicit sale of cucumbers. The unit kitchens get their cucumbers prequartered, to prevent nonintended and illegal use of provisions, i.e., as dildos. Prisoners who worked in central kitchen sold cucumbers uncut out the back door.
The Norse made wooden swastikas and pentagrams. My own innovation was the lunch meat. At meal breaks, I began toasting my bologna slice with the branding iron we used for all our products. It said CALPIA, California Prison Industry Authority, and I was in charge of it. I branded my lunch meat on both sides with the iron, and then my sandwich bread as well. The iron toasted the bread and the meat perfectly. I toasted other people’s sandwiches in exchange for baggies of instant coffee. I learned to hide the coffee for strip-out, after work. This was how it was going to be. Hustling for every little thing.
On Saturdays they let us go to the library. All they had for us to check out were Bibles. King James or International Version was the complete range of reading choices. Sammy and I went weekly to research who I could send letters to, about Jackson. Exiting one afternoon, I ran into Hauser again. I would be starting his class soon.
There isn’t anything to read here, I told him.
“I know. That’s why I ordered you some books. They haven’t arrived yet? I had to get them from Amazon, since we can’t give you books directly.”
I pictured Sammy’s hands, reeling in the line, cultivating a victim. Slowly, she’d said, you’ve got to do it slowly.
“I haven’t got them yet,” I told him, but things took a while. They had to sort the mail for three thousand women.
I continued to call Johnson’s lawyer because he was the only person I could contact, since he had Global Tel Link. He mostly avoided answering, but once, he picked up. He had news, he said. He was retiring, after thirty years as a public defender, and I would no longer be able to reach him at that office.
The way things were closing in on me: it was hard to accept that this was real life. No one but me cared about the fate of Jackson. I didn’t know where he was. I had no way to talk to him. I was trapped in a prison in the Central Valley, under the baked expanse of sunny sky, gazing into the warble above the razor wire, counting how long it took the perimeter truck to circle our big enclosure. Picturing tough and beautiful Angel Marie Janicki getting herself through the fence.
I kept going over a scene, from when Jackson was five. It was autumn, and my mother came with us to Tilden Park, in the East Bay. There were trees above us that had turned a color I might have dyed my hair, a bright, rich magenta. There were trees with gold and scarlet leaves. You don’t see a lot of that in California. My mother and Jackson and I sat and watched the wind shake these bright-painted trees. Jackson was enchanted.
“All that beauty and for nothing,” my mother said. “They’ll fall off tomorrow.”
“But after they fall off,” Jackson said, “the tree will grow new leaves, Grandma, and then those will turn colors, like these ones.” It would keep happening over and over, Jackson said, through all the years. The leaves falling off meant new ones were coming. My mother looked at him like she wondered what planet he was from.
He was born an optimist, and he didn’t get it from her, or from me. When Jackson was three, he asked me how the Earth formed. “How did it get here?” I said no one knew for sure but maybe there was an explosion and they called it the Big Bang. “But where did they put everyone while the explosion was happening?” In his mind there were always people. People taking care of other people.
The lawyer had given me the phone number of child welfare, which he said might tell me the name of Jackson’s case manager, but I could only contact people with a Global Tel Link account. I wrote letters and tried not to go insane. I sent one to Eva’s old address, and one to her at her father’s address, but I had little faith that either would reach her. I called Jimmy Darling, but the call did not go through, since he didn’t have Global Tel Link. I told myself if I ever got out, I’d blow up Global Tel Link.
I got a package. Like one of the lucky women who have family, outside help, I, Hall, got called to receiving and release to pick up my package. Hauser had gotten me three books: My Ántonia, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and To Kill a Mockingbird.
“That’s what he got you?” Sammy said, stifling a laugh. “Even I read those already.” I felt sad and a little protective of the teacher for not knowing better. I planned on keeping them, even if I didn’t especially want to read them. They were a link to the outside world. But a woman in my unit offered me shampoo and conditioner in exchange for all three. The state gives us indigents only a gritty powdered soap for body and hair. Being able to properly wash and condition my hair made me feel happy, at least for an evening, in a way I had not experienced since before I was arrested, three years earlier.
I had been in Hauser’s class for a couple of weeks when he stopped me after and asked if I’d enjoyed the books.
“I enjoyed reading them,” I said, “when I was fourteen years old.”
I didn’t plan on saying that. It certainly wasn’t tactical for reeling in a Keath.
“God. I’m sorry. That’s embarrassing.”
“It’s okay. You just don’t know me.”
He asked me what I wanted to read and I said I didn’t know. I said I had a lot on my mind and it was hard to concentrate.
He got me more books. One, called Pick-Up, was about two drunks in San Francisco in the 1950s. I started reading it and could not stop. When I finished it, I read it again. Scenes came into view for me, even though the character in the book doesn’t name many locations except Civic Center, and Powell and Market, where the cable car turns around, which fascinated Jackson as it did all toddlers. I would take him down there to watch the street musicians. Some of them were friends of Jimmy Darling’s. Jimmy knew all sorts of people in a way I didn’t, and the night would go differently if by chance he and I ran into someone and they invited us to a concert or a party or a screening of a film.
When I was a kid there was a large Woolworth’s at Powell and Market, with a wig department in the center of the store. Eva and I would go in and pretend we were wig shopping. The old ladies who worked there helped us pin our hair up in special nets and fitted us with grand and curly hairdos. We laughed and played around in the mirrors, sneaked makeup and hair products into our purses, and took pictures in the photo booth that was inside the store. Sometimes we went to Zim’s on Van Ness afterward, ordered a lot of food and left without paying. It was something different from dining and dashing at the more familiar Zim’s on Taraval. We felt sophisticated downtown. Sometimes we went into the museum, up Van Ness, to hide after booking from Zim’s. There was a painting inside that Eva liked. It was called The Girl with Green Eyes. Among the kids we knew, you weren’t supposed to be into going to museums, but Eva was into whatever she was into, this painted girl with a long neck that looked like it was squeezed into a napkin ring. She stared at us, and we stared back.