“It’s ‘cause I had my dirt!”
We pass the remaining miles listening to a Sonny Rollins tape Kwako has brought, foggy sax twisting around mushrooming drumbeats. As we approach Huntsville, I notice blueberry fields on either side of the road and remember passing through here as a girl, in Mama’s car, traveling from Houston to Dallas. I recall black men in ghostly white suits picking the berries and realize now they must have been prisoners working for the state. In high school, one of the persistent rumors was that Creole women, just out of jail, hung around “nigger” cemeteries near Huntsville. They’d “do” a boy for a six-pack of beer.
On the town’s outskirts, sleek new housing crowds bulldozed fields; the unfinished homes are only about ten feet apart — a developer’s strategy to reduce the taxable land. Corporate campuses, white and bland. Condos. Hotels assembling ski lodges, made of hill-country limestone. Billboards say, DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS. In the town itself, new additions have been tacked to older homes, a sign of prosperous times in the prison industry. Satellite dishes, swimming pools. College boys swerve past us in freshly waxed sports cars; farmers rattle along in flatbeds.
All I know about the Texas prison system, from reports in the mayor’s office, is that the state once fed inmates a powdered meat substitute called Vita Pro, whose nutritional value was nil — and there was some question about where the unused meat was going and who profited from its sale. In the early eighties, the prison director was forced from office under suspicion of corruption. But this town is thriving; building cranes, skeletal girders soak up the sun beneath buzzing black police helicopters.
Downtown, in front of tobacco shops and clothing stores, men linger in shadows, wearing blue, short-sleeved shirts, khaki pants, wraparound shades. They light each other’s cigarettes, mill about uncertainly, clutching plastic bags, manila folders. Ex-cons, I figure, out on parole, sniffing the outside air, testing to see whether it’s poison to them now. Tattoos smear their arms.
Near the vaguely Italian courthouse, narrow cafés serve Diet Cokes and Fritos, All You Can Eat Noon Specials, to men in cheap ties — middle-management types. We spy them through the windows. I spot only a few women on the street, mostly in front of a lumberyard converted into a county museum and on the steps of a Baptist church so large it appears to be swollen.
I have twenty minutes to make my appointment. With Barbara’s help, I choose the nicest-looking café in the main square and drop her off with Kwako. “I won’t be long,” I say. “Are you sure you’ll be all right?”
“We’re fine, honey.” She slips the dirt inside her purse. “Kwako’ll read the paper, and I’ll do a crossword or two. Take all the time you need.”
“It’s good to have a break.” Kwako pauses on the sidewalk, stretching his arms. He seems frail here, out of context. But the café looks reassuring, full of dark faces.
Once I’ve seen them comfortably seated, I check my scribbled directions and make my way to a thin, tarry road surrounded by chain-link fences trimmed with barbed-wire. Every fifty feet or so, cinder-block guard towers shade my car. The guards grip cell phones. They look bored. I drive slowly, carefully. A sign in English and Spanish informs me that my presence here means I’ve automatically consented to a possible search. I come to a large sally port, but then I see a small VISITORS sign shunting me off to the left. I turn and immediately I’m stopped by a uniformed man with a cell phone. “He’p you, ma’am?” I give him my name. He asks me to wait in my “vehicle.” Puny trees ring a pale brick admin building just up ahead; it looks like the tidy home of a college president. After ten minutes or so, the man returns — I didn’t see where he went — and directs me past the building to a nearly full parking lot. I lock the car and head toward a chain-link gate manned by two other sullen uniforms. They buzz me in and point me toward a boxy structure. Inside, on a warped corkboard nailed to the gray stone wall, handwritten notices announce TDC rules, the Employee of the Month, car and house rentals. A battered water fountain gurgles in the corner. A carrot-haired man smacking gum asks for picture ID, hands me a clipboard, orders me to sign in. In the “Reason for Visit” column I write “Dallas Mayor’s Off.” He squints at my words. “All righty. Follow me. Oh — you can’t take that purse. We’ll hold it for you here.” I hand it over; he stuffs it in a cabinet with other purses, paper sacks, even two or three Happy Birthday balloons, then leads me through a narrow doorway to an outside path lined with artificial flowers and tall Cyclone fences festooned with concertina wire. From somewhere in the distance a loudspeaker shouts, “Clear on outta the rec room now. All you sweet little bitches get back to your shitters.” The officer glances at me, reddening, as though I wasn’t supposed to hear that. We come to a squat building, red brick, with barred and meshed windows. He opens the door with a key, steps aside. As I slip past him I smell the spearmint gum he’s chewing, a pondlike cologne. The room is dim. Green plaster walls, flaking. A dusty, old-papers smell. A soft drink machine rattles behind a scarred oak table. R.C., Orange Crush. Through yet another doorway we come to a long wooden counter rigged with a Plexiglas divider, about a foot high. Chairs on either side. Three other women are sitting on my side of the counter, speaking in low tones to men opposite them, fellows in orange jumpsuits with blocky black numbers stenciled on their breast pockets. Guards — I overhear one of the inmates call them COs — lurk in each corner of the room, leering openly at the women. I take a seat and cross my arms. The room hums faintly — from what, I can’t telclass="underline" an air-conditioning unit (though it’s hot in here), a generator under the floor.
“Jesus, baby,” says one of the inmates, “my lawyer thought DNA was an additive in food coloring.”
Soon, a CO leads a tall, shaved-headed, middle-aged man to a wobbly chair directly across the counter from me. He’s carrying a thick leather book, Black’s Law Dictionary, hugging it to his chest like a Bible. From time to time his mouth twitches as though he’s working an invisible toothpick. His eyes are yellow, his ears flat and fleshy like the leaves of a large, overwatered houseplant. Skin the color of an avocado’s woody heart. “So,” he says to me, a bass rasp. “Miss High Society come to see the ghost. Who are you, High Society? Can you help me?”
“Thank you for seeing me, first off.” My voice trembles.
“Who are you? What you want with me?”
“My uncle, a man named Bitter, maybe you knew him as Ledbetter, did some carpentry work for you once. He said — ”
He slams his hand on the book. “They rejected my last appeal. You know that, right? That why you here?”
“No …”
“Giving me the needle next month. So what I need to know, Miss High Toes, is can you help me? You got any pull with the Big Juice? Tell me again. What’s your lookout?”
“Well I’m — ”
“Kind of a bull dagger, ain’t you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Traipse in here, cleaner than the Board of Health … I’m some sort of freak show for you?”
“I think you knew my daddy.”
“Hell, I probably fucked your daddy. When was he in?”
“He wasn’t. He was — ”
“They told me you work for a mayor or something.”
“That’s right.”
“So can you raise me? You must have some pull.”
“No. I’m afraid not.”
He leans closer to the Plexiglas. “See, the thing is, I should’ve only did a nickel. But Mr. Charley, he won’t listen to me no more.”
I lean back and sigh. “Did you kill your wife?” I blurt, wondering if I can wrench a single straight answer out of this guy.