“They had us stand in a circle in the middle of the ring,” Kev says. “Only the well-behaved got to do this part. We got to wear special rodeo outfits, the white shirts with the blue triangles on the shoulders and everything, tassels, glitter, all of it. We held hands around four prisoners who held up flags, America’s, Louisiana’s state flag, a Confederate flag, and one other one I never figured out, Aryan Nation or something. And one of us sang the National Anthem over the speakers, then afterward, we bowed our heads and a minister came and said a prayer over the loudspeakers. Everyone had their eyes closed and their heads bowed, everyone in the stands.”
The described world overwhelms Ella, all of its texture and scent and color invading her through her own empathetic touch, funneling into that space between her ears. She can see it all. She can feel, smell, taste, hear it alclass="underline" four inmates, two of them with their silver hair in rattails, one of them with nappy hair and octogenarian eyes, one of them barely having finished being a child, their feet digging into the dirt, their legs bent slightly at the knees, hands open, fingers flexing, in a posture of readiness, attack, defense, toes light against the inner rims of the pink hula hoops at their feet. The gate clangs open and thundering toward them is the bull, eyes trained on the small coterie of collared prisoners, horns lowered, legs pumping, muscles rippling, dirt flecking its flanks, its hooves thudding against recently turned dirt and the compacted subsoil beneath. It flicks its head and one of the prisoners sails through the air, legs spread, a new gash torn through the side of his safety vest, his pain having pushed his face past contortion into an aspect of peace before he slams against the ground, body cracking in a way only he and the prisoners in the ring and Ella, who is there too, can hear. One of the others darts from the path of the bull while another manages to step aside with one foot, the other firmly planted, his whole bearing intent on winning, even as the bull’s skull crashes into another inmate. This one’s unable to breathe through newly broken ribs, grips the bull’s horns as tightly as can be managed, the bull throwing its head back and forth until the inmate’s grip slips. The bull rushes over him, crushing a leg and an arm before cruising toward that last prisoner. He sees he’s won the game of inmate pinball, runs for the edge of the ring and vaults to the top of the wall, just as the bull’s horns bong against the metal reinforcing the cushioned plastic.
Kev’s eyes are hot and glowing when Ella sees him again, across that table in the waiting room. He’s sweating, breathing heavily, smiling. Anguish pulls Ella’s heart into the floor. This is the other side of what solitary did to him. The agitation, the running straight into painful memories rather than barricading himself against them. Whatever destructive impulses propelled Kev that night of the attempted armed robbery now augmented by what twenty-three hours in a cell alone for six months will do to a man. Kev looks as though he is staring at the sun, intent on blindness.
Ella manages to make it onto the Rikers bus heading back into Queens before crying. Her heart shakes in her chest. Kev has never been to the Louisiana State Penitentiary.
She moves the blinds by the kitchen window and watches the police patrol the block. Up and down St. Nicholas, they amble. Stationed on one corner, an officer sits in his mini-tank and says something that the cop walking by laughs at. The guns on the small tank’s turret are angled toward the ground. Metal orbs float along the sidewalks above the streetlamps, close enough for people to see, not bothering to disguise themselves, but everyone has already gotten used to them. They’ve quieted the neighborhood. The park across the way holds only the rustling of empty burger wrappers and soda cups. Her hands are shaking against the window blinds, and she feels it coming. Small pulses matching her heartbeat that radiate out of her to rattle the cutlery and unsettle the grill on the stove. They’ll see her.
The smell of sulfur swallows her.
Her eyes burn and when she opens them again, above her, a gray sheet for sky, and before her, a sign showing she has arrived at Belmont Park in Elmont, New York, outside of the outside of the City, where there are houses and strip malls, where cars have space to breathe on the boulevards. On the jumbotrons in the main building, white college students in loafers, seersucker suits, and their dates in broad hats, watch the Kentucky Derby alongside bomber-jacketed South Asians.
Ella wanders to the clubhouse. Nobody turns her way. She’s Shielded.
The tents and the front terrace are spotted with families and bearded, potbellied middle-aged white men tipping back cans of Bud Light. The kids, baby-faced and gleefully, obnoxiously tipsy, must be from St. John’s, prancing as they do now like the horses about to race, while the girls, in their gowns and gaudy, wide-brimmed hats, pull beer coolers behind them like servants. Bow ties clinch necks, sleeves rolled up, sunglasses worn indoors.
In clusters, at various points in the clubhouse, like scattered molecules, close to the exit onto the track and below the grandstand, wait people who look like they’re from around here. Familiars. The thick two-hundred-page paper programs of the day’s races rolled up in their nicotine-stained fingers. Weathered jackets and sweats and jeans loose on them, some of them with shirts tucked into their pants, they all crane their necks in anxious penitence, some of them marking their programs absently, others clutching their betting slips. Weathered white faces, all of them. No fear of gun turrets or constant observation. This place doesn’t need to be watched. A burst of anger flames in her heart, a small one, swallowed up a moment later by pity. Wasting away, and if they saw Ella, they’d still think they were inherently better.
Everywhere has a patina of dirt and dark, even though the sun has finally beaten back the cloud cover outside. A few patrons light up cigarettes as they brush past her, still unaware of her presence. Ella shuffles to a booth, reaches over a counter, feet dangling off the ground, then comes back up with a beer.
A heavy-set man nearby in glasses and a goatee speaks urgently into a flip phone: “I’m tellin’ you; she can’t keep doing this. Every month she’s in jail. Every two weeks.” He drifts out of earshot.