We all wrote some good things. “That’s great!” Mrs. Bevins said to Karate once. “You get better every week.”
“No lie? So, Teach, am I as good as CD?”
“Writing isn’t a contest. All you do is your own work better and better.”
“But CD’s your favorite.”
“I don’t have a pet. I have four sons. I have a different feeling for each one. It’s the same with you guys.”
“But you don’t be telling us to go to school, get a scholarship. You’re always getting on him to change his life.”
“She does that with all of us,” I said, “except Dixie. She’s subtle though. Who knows, I might sober up. Anyway, CD is the best. We all know that. First day I got here I saw him down in the yard. You know what I thought? I thought he looked like a god.”
“I don’t know about god,” Dixie said. “But he has star quality. Right, Mrs. Bevins?”
“Give me a break,” CD said.
Mrs. Bevins smiled. “Okay. I’ll cop. I think every teacher sees this sometimes. It’s not simply intelligence or talent. It’s a nobility of spirit. A quality which could make him great at whatever he wanted to do.”
We were quiet then. I think we all agreed with her. But we felt sorry for her. We knew what it was he wanted to do, was going to do.
We got back to work then, choosing pieces for our magazine. She was going to have it typeset and then the jail printshop would print it.
She and Dixie were laughing. They both loved to gossip. Now they were rating some of the deputies. “He’s the kind leaves his socks on,” Dixie said. “Right. And flosses before.”
“We need more prose. Let’s try this assignment for next week, see what you come up with.” She handed out a list of titles from Raymond Chandler’s notebook. We all had to choose one. I took We All Liked Al. Casey liked Too Late for Smiling. CD liked Here It Is Saturday. “In fact,” he said, “I think we should call our magazine that.”
“We can’t,” Kim said. “We promised Willie we were going to use his title, Through a Cat’s Eye.”
“Okay, so what I want is two or three pages leading up to a dead body. Don’t show us the actual body. Don’t tell us there’s going to be a body. End the story with us knowing there is going to be a dead body. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“Time to go, gentlemen,” the guard said, opening the door. “Come here, Vee.” She blasted him with perfume before sending him back up. The homosexual tier was pretty miserable. Half of it was old senile winos, the rest were gays.
I wrote a great story. It came out in the magazine and I still read it over and over. It was about Al, my best friend. He’s dead now. Only she said I didn’t do the assignment right because I told about me and the landlady finding Al’s body.
Kim and Casey wrote the same horrible story. Kim’s was about her old man beating her, Casey’s about a sadistic john. You knew that they would end up murdering the guys. Dixie wrote a fine story about a woman in solitary. She has an asthma attack really bad but no one can hear her. The terror and pitch-black darkness. Then there is an earthquake. The end.
You can’t imagine what it is like to be in prison during an earthquake.
CD wrote about his brother. Most of CD’s stories had been about him when they were little. The years they were lost to each other in different foster homes. How they found each other by chance, in Reno. This story took place in the Sunnyvale district. He read it in a quiet voice. None of us moved. It was about the afternoon and evening leading up to the Chink’s death. The details about the meeting of two gangs. It ended with Uzi fire and CD turning the corner.
The hairs were standing up on my arm. Mrs. Bevins was pale. Nobody had told her CD’s brother was dead. There wasn’t a word about his brother in the story. That’s how good it was. The story was so shimmering and taut there could only be one end to it. The room was silent until finally Shabazz said, “Amen.” The guard opened the door. “Time to go, gentlemen.” The other guards waited for the women while we filed out.
CD was set to get out of jail two days after the last day of class. The magazines would be out the last day and there was going to be a big party. An art exhibit and music by the prisoners. Casey, CD, and Shabazz were going to read. Everybody would get copies of Through a Cat’s Eye.
We had been excited about the magazine but none of us had known how it would feel. To see our work in print. “Where is CD?” she asked. We didn’t know. She gave each of us twenty copies. We read our pieces out loud, applauding one another. Then we just sat there, reading our own work over and over to ourselves.
The class was short because of the party. A mess of deputies came in and opened the doors between our room and the art class. We helped set up tables for the food. Stacks of our magazines looked beautiful. Green on the purple paper tablecloth. Guys from horticulture brought in big bouquets of flowers. Student paintings were on the walls, sculptures on stands. One band was setting up.
First one band played, then came our reading and then the other band. The reading went fine and the music was great. Kitchen dudes brought in food and soft drinks and everybody got in line. There were dozens of guards but they all seemed to be having a good time too. Even Bingham was there. Everybody was there except CD.
She was talking with Bingham. He is so cool. I saw him nod and call a guard over. I knew Bingham had said to let her go up on the tier.
She wasn’t gone long, even after all the stairs and six locked steel gates. She sat down, looking sick. I took her a can of Pepsi.
“Did you talk with him?”
She shook her head. “He was lying under a blanket, wouldn’t answer me. I slid the magazines through the bars. It’s horrible up there, Chaz. His window is broken, rain coming through it. The stink. The cells are so small and dark.”
“Hey, it’s heaven up there now. Nobody’s there. Imagine those cells with six dudes in them.”
“Five minutes, gentlemen!”
Dixie and Kim and Casey hugged her good-bye. None of us guys said good-bye. I couldn’t even look at her. I heard her say, “Take care, Chaz.”
I just realized that I’m doing that last assignment again. And I’m still doing it wrong, mentioning the body, telling you that they killed CD the day he got out of County.
B.F. and Me
I liked him right away, just talking to him on the phone. Raspy, easygoing voice with a smile and sex in it, you know what I mean. How is it that we read people by their voices anyway? The phone company information lady is officious and patronizing and she isn’t even a real person. And the guy at the cable company who says our business means a lot to them and they want to please us, you can hear the sneer in his tone.
I used to be a switchboard operator in a hospital, spent all day talking to different doctors that I never saw. We all had favorites and ones that we couldn’t stand. None of us had ever seen Dr. Wright but his voice was so smooth and cool we were in love with him. If we had to page him we’d each put a dollar down on the board, would race to answer calls and be the one to get his, win the money and say, “Hell-oh there, Dr. Wright. ICU is paging you, sir.” Never did see Dr. Wright in real life but when I got a job working in Emergency I got to know all the other doctors I had talked to on the phone. I soon learned that they were just as we imagined them. The best physicians were the ones who were prompt to answer, clear and polite, the worst were those who used to yell at us and say things like “Do they hire the handicapped at the switchboard?” They were the ones who let the ER see their patients, who had the Medicaid patients sent to County. Amazing how the ones with sexy voices were just as sexy in real life. But no, I can’t describe how people get the quality into their voice of just waking up or of wanting to go to bed. Check out Tom Hanks’s voice. Forget it. Okay, now Harvey Keitel’s. And if you don’t think Harvey is sexy just close your eyes.