15
By the time Gordon Hauser was into his second year at Stanville, he would not have mistaken the shriek of an animal for the shriek of a woman. The cry he had heard on that early night in his cabin had been a mountain lion. Not a woman, and not in trouble.
When snow blanketed the ground his first winter, paw prints went up around his property, scooped divots that matched exactly in pattern and spread those in his field guide, according to which, the voice of the mountain lion had been variously described as sounding like the screaming, yelling, or moaning of a female human.
He never saw a mountain lion, only heard them. In the early morning, on his way down the mountain toward Stanville, he sometimes glimpsed gray foxes, their lustrous tails trailing after them, as he followed the curves of the winding road, passing huge drought-desiccated live oak, their jagged little leaves coated in dust, and banks of rust-red buckeye and smoke-green manzanita. The buckeye branches without leaves glinted bone-white in the sun. The grasses were the rich yellow of wet straw. He’d never seen such beautiful grasses.
On the straightaway toward the brown basin, the scenery changed to oil pipeline and derricks, whose axles wound and wound. After the derricks was a dusty orange grove, one farmhouse with two palm trees in front, where the road split. The two palms were a curious variety, thickly shaggy and luxurious like an Inuit’s snow boots.
On the valley floor, the temperature was twenty degrees hotter and the air heavy with the smell of fertilizer. There were no more oranges, no oil derricks, just power lines and almond groves in huge geometric parcels all the way to the prison.
Like all California prisons, Stanville flew three flags: state, nation, and POW MIA. The POW flag had always seemed pathetic to Gordon, since it was for those left behind in Vietnam, a war the U.S. had lost and badly. Any prisoners not returned were probably long dead, and either way, no one was going back for them, but prison guards at every state facility muscled up a flag in their honor. When people were captured now, it was different. A lot of them were private contractors, and they got beheaded live on the internet. President Bush went on TV and said he was building hospitals and schools for the Iraqi people. Most of the cars in staff parking at Stanville had the yellow ribbon on the bumper.
The prison was complicated to navigate. It all looked the same to Gordon, one- and two-story detached cinder-block buildings in a vast expanse of dirt and concrete surrounded by shrouds of razor wire. He went through three electronic sally ports to get to his classroom, which was in a windowless trailer near the vocational workshops and central kitchen. From the kitchen pumped a constant smell of rancid grease, overpowered only by the drift of solvents from the auto body shop, where a row of trucks—guards’ private vehicles—were lined up for super-discounted paint jobs by inmates.
Gordon had clearance to enter this part of the grounds, but the housing units and yards were off-limits to him, with the exception of one cell block on A yard, 504, where he could work with people from death row and administrative segregation.
Gordon had dreaded death row but found that it didn’t quite conform to his nightmares about it. He’d imagined iron bars, a medieval vision of misery. It was automated and modern, each tiny cell with a white-painted steel door and small glass window. There were twelve women, one to a cell, and a cramped alley with tables and sewing machines surrounded by meshed cage. A guard unlocked an entrance in the cage and led Gordon in to meet with students one-on-one, while others knitted or made hook rugs at nearby tables. Betty LaFrance, who was not Gordon’s student but always insisted on speaking to him, brought a radio from her cell and played elevator music as she crafted. The women made greeting cards by hand in emulation of a machine-printed corporate look: their best work resembled cards you could buy at Rite Aid, with blandly inspirational messages in a neutral script. The women were allowed to come and go from their cells, which smelled of Renuzit air freshener and were blanketed in homemade afghans, for privacy and probably to have some use for these afghans they churned on the oily axle of time.
They called him Deary and Pumpkin and Doll. Deary creeped him out. It was what the old pawnbroker Elsabeta calls Raskolnikov before he carries out his plan to murder her, or at least that was the English equivalent the translator had chosen. Deary.
Administrative segregation, on the floor above death row, had no common area, and there was no interaction among women except yelling. The women hollered from one cell to another, heckled guards, made noise to have something to do. Gordon waited in a small office as a student clink-jangled down the hall in her restraints and was put in a cage for the lesson with him. That was where he first met Romy Hall, who was in his class now. What he had noticed about her was that she looked him in the eye. Many of the women had this way of looking at his shoulder, or past him. Their eyes rolled every which direction to avoid his. Also she was attractive, despite the conditions. Wide-set greenish eyes. A mouth with a cupid’s bow, was that what it was called, an upper lip that swoop-de-swooped. A pretty mouth that said: trust this face. And the face said: this is not what it seems. She spelled well, read with good comprehension. He wasn’t looking for a good speller. He wasn’t looking for anything, among the women in Stanville.
He’d seen her again in what the guards called a dog run—the outdoor cages where women in ad seg were placed for exercise. The walkway to 504 routed past a series of them, and his instinct was to avoid staring at the women trapped in these barren little enclosures. Hall had called to him in a casual way like a woman asking a man for a light, or if he knows what time the train stops here.
He liked having her in class. She did the reading in earnest. A lot of his students thought Gordon was stupid, spoke in codes and laughed at him, but this seemed fair enough. They had state commitments he could hardly understand—LWOP, which was life without parole, or multiple life sentences. Even a single life sentence was difficult for him to get his head around.
He passed out photocopied sections of books, Julie of the Wolves, Laura Ingalls Wilder, but he didn’t tell the prisoners they were children’s books, and it didn’t matter if the women enjoyed them. He kept it simple, since many had only an elementary school education. They wrote in bubble letters like adolescent girls. Even London, who the others called Conan and looked like a man, wrote in bubble letters. London was clever, it was obvious. Never did the reading but made the others laugh, which was something.
“Is bosom plural?” London asked.
“Depends on whose, maybe,” someone said.
“The bosom of Jones. Sounds like an adventure film. Lieutenant Jones and the Bosom of Doom.”
Geronima Campos, an old Native American woman, painted in her sketchbook all through class time. Gordon wondered if maybe she could not read or write. One day after class he asked her what she painted. If she admits she cannot write, he decided, he could suggest she work with him independently.
Portraits, she told him. She opened her sketchbook to show him. Each page had an image and, under it, a name. She could write. But the images were not faces. They were wild streaks of color. “This is you,” she said, and showed him a scribble of black lines with a staining splotch of blue.
When his class discussed a chapter of The Red Pony by John Steinbeck, the women talked about the mountains in the book and the ones they could see from main yard. They seemed afraid of the mountains, which surprised Gordon. He figured they’d regard the mountains as freedom, the one thing they could glimpse of the natural world. “You got to fight bears up there,” Conan said. “At least in here it’s just cubs. Cubs and scrubs. And I know I can win.”