Vanishing Acts

  I look down at my feet and pick up a Jolly Rancher wrapper, and begin to flatten it between my palms. "Don't cap it tight," I say.

  When he turns around, I shrug. "Moonshine. That's what you're making, isn't it?" Bread, oranges, hard candy--it wouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the chemical reaction Concise is aiming for.

  "Do your own time, not mine," Concise scowls, and he busies himself under the bunk again.

  Taking my towel with me, I head toward the bathroom. The shower stalls are empty at this time of day; Emeril is about to come on the Food Network and it is the one program that all races agree upon. I turn the corner and find Elephant Mike standing against the bathroom wall with his pants down around his knees, his eyes rolled toward the ceiling.

  I recognize the boy kneeling in front of him, too. He calls himself Clutch and is barely old enough to grow a beard. No doubt, like me, he received Sticks's and Elephant Mike's warning, and was offered their protection, for a price. The currency of which I've interrupted.

  A flush works its way up from my neck. "Sorry," I manage, and I leave the bathroom as fast as possible.

  On the television, Emeril throws garlic into a sizzling pan. "Bam!" he yells. I sit in the back of the dayroom and pretend to watch the TV, although I do not see a thing.

  If you pay Sheriff Jack thirty dollars up front, you are allowed the privilege of using the canteen. Funds for these luxury items are deducted from your account. A dollar-fifty, for example, will buy you either a bottle of shampoo or a twenty-ounce soda. You can buy soap that is like lye and rubs your skin raw. You can buy antihistamine and poker cards and a Spanish-English dictionary. You can buy Moon Pies and Paydays and Pop-Tarts and trail mix. Tuna, toothbrushes, a thesaurus.

  Sometimes I read the canteen order form, and think about who purchases what. I want to know who asks for Vicks VapoRub, if it reminds him of his childhood. I wonder who would order an eraser, rather than learn from his mistakes. Or, even worse, a mirror.

  They sell artificial tears, too, but it's hard to conceive of an inmate who doesn't have enough of his own.

  I share a toilet with a drug dealer. I have done business with a thrice-convicted rapist: three packages of cookies in return for a deck of cards. I have settled down to watch Thursday night TV beside a man who killed his wife and cut her into pieces with a Ginsu knife, stuffed the body parts into a truck tool box, and left it in the desert.

  Just last year, I gave Sophie the stranger talk: don't take candy from someone unfamiliar; don't ever get into anyone's car except ours; don't talk to people you do not know. Sophie, who was born in a small New Hampshire town where folks knew her by name when she walked down the street, couldn't understand the warnings. "How do you know who's a bad man?" she asked. "Can you tell just by looking?"

  What I should have told her at the time was: Yes, but you have to be watching at just the right moment. Because the same man who robs a general store at knifepoint might, at a traffic light, turn and smile. The guy who raped a thirteen-year-old girl might be singing hymns beside you at church. The father who kidnapped his daughter might be living right next door.

  Bad is not an absolute, but a relative term. Ask the robber who used the cash he stole to feed his infant; the rapist who was sexually abused as a child; the kidnapper who truly believed he was saving a life. And just because you break the law doesn't mean you have intentionally crossed the line into evil. Sometimes the line creeps up on you, and before you know it, you're standing on the other side.

  Off to the right, I hear someone taking a leak. It is underscored by the scrip-scrip sound of a weapon being honed on the cement floor--a toothbrush or a wheelchair spoke being sharpened into a shank. There's weeping, too, coming from Clutch, in the cell beside ours. He has cried every night since he's been here, into his pillow, pretending no one can hear. Even more amazing, the rest of us pretend that we don't.

  "Concise," I whisper quietly.

  "Yo," he says.

  I realize that I don't really have a question to ask him. I just wanted to see if he is still awake, like me.

  You come to visit me almost every day. We sit one pane of glass apart from each other, reworking the clay of our relationship. You would think that the conversations at a jail visit are grave and furious, packed with the emotion that comes when you don't see someone for twenty-three hours a day, but in fact what we talk about are the details. I soak up the descriptions of Sophie, making breakfast for herself by putting the entire box of oatmeal into the microwave. I picture the trailer where you are living, the inside as pink as a mouth. I listen to an account of Greta having her first run-in with a common snake. You hold up pictures that Sophie's drawn, so I can see the stick-figure family and my crayoned place in it.

  For you, too, it is all about the specifics of a world you can barely remember being a part of. Sometimes I tell you incidents that stand out in your childhood; sometimes you have precise questions. One afternoon you ask me about your real birthday. "It's June 5," I say. "The silver lining is that you're almost a whole year younger than you think."

  "I can't remember my birthdays," you muse. "I thought all kids remembered their birthdays."

  "You had parties. Pretty standard stuff: movies, bowling, goody bags."

  "What about when I lived here?"

  "Well," I hedge. "You were little. We didn't make a big deal about it."

  You frown, concentrating. "I can picture a cake. It's on a tablecloth I don't remember us having in New Hampshire." You look up at me, triumphant with recollection. "It fell on the floor, and I cried because we didn't get to eat it."

  That is the version that I fed to you, when it happened. "We had some of your nursery school friends over for your birthday," I say carefully. "Your mother had been drinking. She was singing and dancing and making a scene, and I told her to stop it. 'It's a party,' she said. 'That's what people do at parties.' I told her to go lie down, that I would take care of everything. She picked up the cake and threw it on the floor, and said that if she was leaving, then the party was over."

  You look at me, stricken; and immediately I'm sorry I brought this up.

  "She didn't know what she was doing back then," I say. "She--"

  "How can you defend her?" you interrupt. "If Eric had ever ... if he'd ..." You fall silent, a puzzle coming together. Along with your chin and dimples, did I give you the tendency to fall for someone dysfunctional? Would this gene be passed along to Sophie, too?

  "I don't want to talk about this anymore," you whisper.

  "Okay," I say. "Okay."

  I watch you sitting on the stool, bowed by the weight of what you're starting to remember, crushed by the episodes you don't. In this new place we've found, sometimes there aren't words, because the truth can be even more difficult than the lies. I lift my palm to the glass, pretending that it would be that easy to touch you. You lift yours, too, spread your fingers--a starfish. I picture the thousands of streets we have crossed, hand-in-hand. Of the high-fives we've exchanged after high school track meets and breathless father-daughter three-legged races. Sometimes I think my whole life has been about holding on to you.

  A poem circulating around D-block:

  A boy was born with skin pure white,

  He loved to fuck and he loved to fight.

  He was raised in the right way,

  Stood up for his race day after day.

  When he grew up and became a man,

  He got sentenced to do life in the pen.

  During his sentencing he stood straight and tall,

  He told the judge, "I'll do it all!"

  So when he went down to hit the yard

  Others tried him, and they tried him hard.

  He never once lost a fight to another race,

  When he walked by them, they gave him his space.

  The off-brands didn't like this a bit,

  So they all got together and put out a hit.

  The following day five of them tried,

  Wh
en the fighting was over, all five had died.

  All the woods got together and decorated the yard

  With bodies of off-brands and more than one guard.

  The Warden tried to stop them, but peed down his leg,

  All the fellas laughed and made the punk beg.

  The Governor called in the National Guard,

  The assholes came in to shoot woods on the yard.

  They walked up to this man and saw how he was lying,

  It was apparent to all that he wasn't done dying.

  The strangest thing was, he was full of bullet holes

  But not a drop of blood present from his head to his toes.

  He looked up then and started to laugh,

  He laughed at the soldiers and the prison staff.

  "Why can't you see that I am a saint?

  White's made by God, all others ain't.

  The reason you don't see any blood on my hide

  Is my heart pumps nothing but PURE WHITE PRIDE!"

  On the rec yard, we sort by color; two or three men per group. The blacks play basketball; the whites stand at the far wall; the Mexicans huddle diagonally across from them. The yard isn't really a yard, more an enclosed paved square. The ceiling on top protects inmates from the fierce heat during the summer; the Swiss-cheese holes in the far wall let the fresh air and the sun stream in. Someone has hung an enormous flag from the ceiling of the jail; it blocks part of the light.

  There is one guard for thirty men; he can't see everything. For this reason, the rec yard is one of the prime places for a deal to go down. Cigarettes are bought surreptitiously--both real stuff and makeshift: lettuce leaves or potato peels rolled up in pages of the Bible. The inmates who have a drug trade going make their pitches out here, too. Drugs are the only reason the colors have to interact; looking for speed is called "chasing the dragon." As I am watching, a white called Chromedome makes a sale to a Mexican. He takes a Sharpie marker out of his pocket and removes the tip of it, so that the buyer can inspect the goods. I'm close enough to smell the pungent vinegar scent of the black tar heroin he's got hidden inside.

  Clutch, the kid, straggles at the edges of the whites like an unraveling thread. He is pale and skinny, with crooked buck teeth and freckles. His eyes are locked on the basketball game. From time to time his feet move in an imaginary play.

  One of the blacks dives for a loose ball, but misses. It rolls against the wall by the DO's foot, and passes by in front of me. Clutch bends down and palms the basketball, spins it on one finger. He dribbles twice, the ball rising up to meet his hand magnetically.

  "Fool, give us the ball," says Blue Loc, one of the dominant blacks in the pod. Concise stands with his hands on his hips, sweating hard.

  Clutch glances around, but he doesn't relinquish the ball. When Elephant Mike walks to the perimeter of the game, Blue Loc says, "Tell your sister he betta act right foe he git smacked right."

  Mike stands toe-to-toe with Blue Loc. "Since when do you tell me what to do?"

  The detention officer approaches. "Break it up," he says.

  "Man, we just flowin' ..." Blue Loc replies.

  Elephant Mike knocks the ball out of Clutch's hands. "Go wash up. You ain't touching me with those hands until you scrub off the spook that's all over you."

  The ball bounces toward Concise, but I intercept it. I toss it quickly at Clutch, who automatically catches it and goes for the three-point shot. When it swishes through the net, he grins, the first time I have seen the kid smile in three days.

  "It's a game," I say. "Let him rotate in."

  Blue Loc comes forward. "You talkin' to me?"

  Concise turns to him. "Yo, lay offa da pipe, cuzz. Jus' let's go."

  The play resumes, harder and faster. The detention officer goes back to his spot along the wall. When Elephant Mike walks away, Clutch looks at me. "Why did you stick up for me?"

  I shrug. "Because you didn't do it yourself."

  Garnering respect is the same across races: Never break weak. Back the play of your brothers. Never let a woman in on the real deal. Stand strong in the face of adversity. Get one over on the system at every opportunity.

  Have heart.

  Keep your word, because it's the only thing you've got in here.

  Concise is testing his hooch. As far as I can tell, he has several different bottles in various stages of fermentation; I suppose this way he can be sure of a steady income. "Do you ever think about what's going on outside?" I ask.

  He looks over his shoulder. "I know what's goin' on outside. Bunch of fools watching ESPN and gettin' in each other's business."

  "I mean outside outside. In the real world."

  Concise sits down, his arms balanced on his knees. "This is the real world, cuzz. Why you think we keep comin' back to it?"

  Before I can answer, Clutch appears in the entry to our cell. He is holding a bottle of shampoo and quivering from head to toe. "What's wrong?" I ask.

  He looks like he is going to throw up. "I can't," he blurts out, and suddenly I see Elephant Mike standing behind him.

  Mike grabs the bottle from Clutch and squeezes, so that human feces sprays all over me. "You want to be a nigger so bad, rub this into your skin."

  It is in my hair, my mouth, my eyes. I gasp, trying to breathe around the awful smell of it, wiping it off me and then holding out my hands, covered with shit. Concise jumps Elephant Mike, as the detention officers rush into the cell. They pull Concise off Mike and throw him down into the mess on the floor. "Stupid move, Concise," the officer yells. "You're one D away from being reclassified into close custody."

  Another detention officer grabs my arm and steers me out of the cell. "You need to be decontaminated," she says. "I'll bring you stripes." I turn around and see, over my shoulder, the first guard shove his knee into Concise's back to handcuff him.

  They think Concise did this to me, I realize--a black guy trying to make his white cellie so unhappy that he'd beg to be transferred out. They assume that Elephant Mike, the same race as me, is there because he's come to my rescue.

  "Wait," I say, as the guard pulls me away. "Mike did it!"

  Concise, hauled to his feet, swings a heavy head toward me. His eyes are slitted; his jaw clenched.

  "Ask Clutch," I call out, and as I am shoved toward the shower, I see the boy's head turn at the sound of his name.

  These are the words we use to refer to one another: Forty Ounce, Baby G, Buddha, C Bone. Half Dead, Deuce, Trigga, Tastee Freak. Preacher, Snowman, Floater, Alley Cat, Huero, Demon, Little Man, Tavo, Thumper. Bow Wow, Pinhead, Boo Boo, Ichabod. Chicago Bob, Pit Bull, Slim Jim, Die Hard.

  In jail, everyone reinvents himself. You would never call a guy by any name except the one he gives you. Otherwise, you might remind him of the person he used to be.

  Afterward, there is a pall cast over the pod. At lights out there is hardly any conversation. Concise lies on the top bunk. "Mike's on the loaf for a week," he says.

  The loaf is a punishment, a severe form of disciplinary segregation. In addition to being separated and locked down and stripped of privileges, inmates are fed a brick of cuisine that has everything mashed into it--all food groups and a drink. It is the penalty for assaulting staff, for having a shank found on you, for throwing blood or bodily fluids.

  "What happened?" I ask.

  Concise rolls over. "Clutch backed you up. I figure he's countin' down the seven days along with Mike. Because on Day Eight you can bet he be gettin' hammered."

  In this society, telling the truth is not rewarded, but lying to the right people is.

  "The DO said that you could get reclassified," I say after a minute.

  Concise sighs. "Yeah, well, whatever. They caught me cookin' up some stuff a couple times when they tossed my cell."

  To be moved into close custody is a bigger deal than he is letting on. Cellmates are housed alone and in lockdown for twenty-three hours a day, and worst of all, if you get convicted, the prison usually upholds whatever
classification you had in jail.

  "First thing in the mornin', you outta here," Concise says. "Clutch got an extra bunk in his cell, now. I don't need this grief."

  A few minutes later, Concise begins to snore. I close my eyes and try to listen to the sounds in the jail. It takes me a while to realize what's missing: For the first night since he's been here, Clutch isn't crying himself to sleep.

  *

  "Stripes!" Every morning we get a laundry call, the DO in charge swapping our towels and shorts or sheets or stripes for fresh replacements. As I walk down to the pod slider to make the exchange, I glance into Clutch's cell and see him still asleep, curled on his side in bed with the blanket pulled up to his face. "Clutch," I hear over the intercom. "Clutch, rise and shine."

  When he doesn't come out, the officer goes to his cell. "Clutch," I hear the DO say, and then she calls for medical assistance.

  There is a lockdown while the paramedics come. They cannot perform CPR; it is impossible to dislodge the sock that Clutch has stuck so far down his throat. He is pronounced dead by one of the jail shrinks.

  They carry Clutch's body past our cell on a stretcher. "What was his name?" I ask the EMTs, but they don't answer. "What was his real name?" I yell. "Doesn't anyone know his real name?"

  "Yo," Concise says. "Sissinit, cuzz."

  But I don't want to calm down. I cannot stand the fact that, under different circumstances, that might have been me. Is Fate getting what you deserve, or deserving what you get?

  Concise glances at me. "He better off like that, believe me."

  "It's my fault." I turn to him, tears in my eyes. "I told the DOs to talk to him."

  "If it wasn't you, it would have been someone else. Sometime else."

  I shake my head. "How old was he? Seventeen, eighteen?"

  "I don't know."

  "Why not? Why didn't anyone ask him where he came from, or what he wanted to be when he grew up, or--"

  "Because we all know how the story end. Wit' a sock down your throat or a bullet in your gut or a knife in your back." Concise stares at me. "Some stories, they the ones no one want to hear."