“Did you ever see the green flash,” she asked him after class, “down at Ocean Beach?”
He had not, he told her. She explained that it was an optical effect at sunset, when rays from the top of the sinking sun turned green. She had never seen it either, she said.
“Are you sure it isn’t a story cooked up by the Irish drunks who live out there?”
She laughed. They were standing outside the school trailer. It was a June evening when the sun sets late. The light was gold from valley haze and low, slanting into her eyes, filling the irises.
Looking at someone who is looking at you was a drug as strong as any other.
“Move it, Hall!” an officer yelled. It was time for evening count. “Move your ass, now! I said go!”
He researched the green flash of a setting sun. It existed. There were websites with lengthy explanations of the physics of light. He did not type the three words of her name. Instead, he kept on with the others. Betty LaFrance, who asked the guards to reserve a parking space for her hairdresser. Betty, whose letter he’d sent, and when Gordon asked how her boyfriend was, she said, “I had him strangled.” He was sure she was lying but when she said it the hairs on his arms stood up. He found her page on a prison pen pal site.
“Single and ready to mingle, an old-fashioned gal who likes champagne, yachts, gambling, fast cars, VERY expensive thrills. Can you afford me? Write to find out.”
There was a list of standard questions Betty LaFrance was obliged to answer on the site, for its users.
Do you mind relocating? (No).
Are you serving a life sentence? (No).
But at the bottom, under On death row? she’d had to check (Yes).
Of Candy Peña, Gordon learned that her mother had worked concessions at Disneyland in Anaheim. Candy Peña had worked at a McDonald’s. Her manager testified for the defense that she had never given him any problems. The mother of Candy’s murder victim, the little girl, that mother had cheered in the courtroom when the death penalty verdict was announced. “YEAH!” she’d yelled.
And then Gordon found another quote, later, from the victim’s mother, who said she felt for Candy Peña’s mother, knowing herself what it was like to lose a child.
London: at first he found nothing. They called London Conan, or Bobby. He typed in “Bobby London,” and found a Yelp page for a restaurant in Los Angeles. The top three reviews of it all started the same way: Fuck you, Bobby London!
He remembered that the first name was Roberta. Bingo. “Woman who masqueraded as man convicted and sentenced to men’s prison for armed burglary.” Another headline: “State Goofs.” London was not masquerading but one of the most natural people Gordon had ever met. London was London.
It seemed London had already served for the burglary, had gotten two strikes for it, and was on a third, for fraud. London was doing life for having written a bad check.
This gallery of people.
Every name he could think of, to avoid typing Romy Leslie Hall.
Geronima Campos, who had painted Gordon’s portrait: Geronima had apparently dropped her husband’s torso off a bridge somewhere in the Inland Empire. They found it and later the head, which had a bullet in it from a gun registered to Geronima. Geronima had no alibi. Her husband’s blood was in her bathtub, in her car, and on the clothes she’d worn the day of his disappearance.
Geronima was involved with a peer counseling group and taught human rights law to any prisoner who wanted to learn it. Geronima was a prison elder. She had associate degrees by mail order and a flawless disciplinary record. Geronima had gone up for parole eight times and been denied every time, despite her file of service and support from people on the outside who organized to help her. There was an internet campaign page, to advocate for Geronima’s next parole. Those who signed the petition included their reason for doing so.
Geronima has done her time.
She is no longer a threat to society.
Free Geronima.
She is a survivor of spousal abuse.
Geronima is an indigenous elder lesbian who is being unjustly held at Stanville Correctional Facility.
Being a lesbian is not illegal.
She is needed in her community.
She has served her time.
She is not a threat.
Free Geronima.
She had indeed served her time. She had done the time the court had given her. And Gordon knew Geronima. She was an old woman who liked to paint. Everything was true. It was time for Geronima to go home. She had served the sentence they gave her.
Every time Geronima went before the parole board, which Gordon pictured as a series of Phyllis Schlaflys all in a row, frowning, with stiff hair, in industrial pantyhose and little rippling American flag pins like Republican candidates wore for political debates, she told the board she was innocent. Her supporters said she’d done her time and was no longer a threat. She faced the parole board and said, I’m innocent. It made no sense. But Gordon understood why she said it.
Whatever space Geronima would have needed to find a way to face what she had done was not provided in prison. Prison was a place where you had to be strong to get through each day. If you thought about some awful act you’d committed, every day, in graphic detail, enough to prove to a parole board that you had insight, the proverbial insight they wanted, needed, to let you go home, you might lose your mind. To stay sane, that was the thing. To stay sane you formed a version of yourself you could believe in.
And if she did show insight, tell them what was on her mind the day she killed her husband, why and how she did it and what she felt after, excitement, guilt, denial, fear, revulsion, if she showed the board how honest and precise she could be in her knowledge of her crime and why she committed it, if she spoke openly about the impact it had on her victim and on others, on society, if she trotted out the whole horror of it, she would, at the same time, freshly reactivate for the parole board all the reasons why they had wanted to lock her up. You could not convince them. There was no way to win.
Just let her go home. Free Geronima.
But the contradiction, that Geronima faced the parole board and said, “I’m innocent,” while her advocates outside said, “She’s done her time. She is no longer a threat”: that bothered Gordon.
Still. Geronima, and Sanchez, and Candy, all of them were people who suffered and along the way of their suffering they made others suffer, and Gordon could not see that making them suffer lifelong would accrue to justice. It added new harm to old, and no dead person ever came back to life that he had heard about.
Alex had been calling, e-mailing, but Gordon had nothing to say to him because all he thought about was women in prison and it wasn’t fun conversation. He was in some kind of exile.
He felt hopeless as he sat in Baressi’s and envied the others at the bar, men in construction and farming, who made it seem as if the Central Valley was not about prison, and for them it wasn’t.