Vanishing Acts

  I sink down on the bunk, because I know it is true.

  "You wanna know what happened to Clutch?" Concise says bitterly. "Once upon a time a baby boy was born in New York City. He didn't know his daddy, who was locked up in the pen. His mama was a crack whore who moved him and his two sisters to Phoenix when he was twelve, and then OD'd two months later. His sisters shacked up with their boyfriends' parents, and he hit the streets. The Park South Crips became his family. They fed him, clothed him, and one day when he was sixteen they let him in on the action when they sweet-talked a girl into having some fun, and they all took turns with her. Come to find out later she thirteen, and a retard."

  "That's how Clutch wound up here?"

  "No," Concise answers. "It's how I did. Clutch's story, it's the same, the names are jus' different. Everyone in here got a story like that, except bling blings like you."

  "I'm not rich," I say quietly.

  "Yeah, well, you ain't from the streets neither. What you do to get in here?"

  "I kidnapped my daughter when she was four years old, told her her mother was dead, and changed our identities."

  Concise shrugs. "That ain't no crime, man."

  "The county attorney doesn't agree."

  "You didn't kill your daughter, did you?"

  "God, no," I say, horrified. "You didn't hurt nobody. Jury'll let you go."

  "Well," I say, "maybe that's not the greatest thing."

  "You don't want out?"

  I try to find the right way to explain to this man how I can never go back to the way things were. How, after a while, you believe the fiction you've told yourself so well that you cannot remember the fact upon which it was based. It has been nearly thirty years since Charles Matthews existed; I have no idea who he is anymore. "I am afraid," I admit, "that it might be even harder than this."

  Concise looks at me for a long moment. "When I got out the first time, I went to breakfast to celebrate. Found me a little diner and sat down and watched the waitress movin' in her short dress. She come to take my order, and I say I want eggs. 'How you want them cooked?' she ask and I just stare at her like she speakin' Martian. For five years, there weren't no choice--if we had eggs, they be scrambled, period. I knew I didn't want them like that, but I didn't remember how else they could be. I'd lost all the words, just like that."

  Language, of course, vanishes like anything else in disuse. How much time before I cannot remember mercy? Before forgiveness is gone? How long will I have to be in here before I forget how possibility sits on the bridge of the tongue?

  I am no less bound to circumstance than Concise, or Blue Loc, or Elephant Mike, or even Clutch. I would not have run with my child if I hadn't married Elise. I would not have married Elise if I'd been in a different bar that first night. I would not have been in that bar if my car hadn't broken down in Tempe, and I needed a phone to call for a tow. I would not have been in Tempe if I weren't taking a graduate course in pharmacology; padding my chances to get a better job with a bigger paycheck so that one day I could provide for a family I could not even yet envision.

  Maybe Fate isn't the pond you swim in but the fisherman floating on top of it, letting you run the line wild until you are weary enough to be reeled back in.

  When I look up, Concise is staring at me. "I'll be damned," he says softly. "You one of us."

  Inker, the resident tattoo artist, melts down chess pieces for the monochrome green pigment he uses in his craft. His client already has sleeves--a run of tattoos covering his arms, from wrist to shoulder. It says White Pride down each of his triceps, and on his back is a Celtic knot. You can tell a lot about inmates by reading their skin. The swastikas and the twin lightning bolts tell you their racial affiliation. The spider webs and Constantine wire tell you they've been in prison. The clock faces have hands placed to show you how many years they did time.

  I wonder where Inker plans on putting this new one. He will scrape the skin with a sharpened shank and rub the ink into it, to scar. He'll do it all in record time, between the detention officer's walk-throughs, meant to keep things like this from going on.

  Behind the cover of a card game, Inker bends down over the bared left shoulder blade of his customer and begins to dig, blood welling up in the shape of a heart. "Five-oh," one of the card players says, a warning that an officer's coming. Inker slips his shank under his stripes, hides the tiny packet of ink in the ham of his hand.

  But the guard that passes by doesn't even glance at Inker. He moves to the upper level, down the block of cells. I rise, running after him.

  By the time I reach my cell, the detention officer has balled the bedding into a heap and tossed the mattresses off the bunks. He overturns my little cache of soap, toothbrush, postcards, pencils. Then he reaches under the bunk for Concise's cardboard box.

  Concise isn't here; he's left the pod to attend church services. It is not that he's particularly religious, but going to church allows him the freedom to sell his bootleg alcohol to inmates he would not otherwise see. Of course, after having the cell tossed, he won't have any merchandise. And once he is moved to close custody, he won't have the means to make it at all anymore.

  The detention officer opens up a tube of toothpaste, puts a taste on his finger and lifts it to his tongue. Then he reaches for the shampoo bottle full of hooch and unscrews the cap.

  "It's mine," I blurt out.

  I would like to tell you that I'm being selfless when I say this, but it would be another lie. What I'm thinking is that Concise and I have a fragile trust; to start from scratch with a new roommate could be a disaster. What I'm thinking is that I have little to lose, and Concise has everything. What I'm thinking is that there might be a karmic balance to the acts one undertakes in life, that maybe keeping one person's existence as is can erase the time you changed someone else's.

  *

  Being in disciplinary segregation is like being a ghost, something at which I've actually had a fair amount of practice. The officers get right into your face, yet don't seem to really see you. For one hour each day, you are allowed into the dayroom by yourself, to shower and to haunt a greater space. You go for hours without using your voice. You live in the past, because the present stretches out so far it hurts to glimpse it.

  Since there are an odd number of prisoners in the pod, I am in a cell by myself. At first, I consider this a blessing, then I begin to have my doubts. There is no one to talk to, to have to step around. Anything to break up my routine becomes a gift. So when I am told that my attorney has arrived for a visit, there's nothing I'd like more than to be taken down to the visiting room, if only for a diversion. But there is also nothing I'd like less. I know why you asked Eric to be my lawyer, but at the time, you didn't know the whole story ... and neither did Eric. It is clear, from our last meeting, that Eric can't easily separate my story from his own. Would he have agreed to represent me if he'd known that he'd have to walk through the memories of his drinking all over again?

  "Please tell my attorney," I say, "that I'd rather not."

  A half hour later, the inmates begin to stir. A few of them start hollering, others begin to pace like hamsters in a cage. I look back over my shoulder to see what's causing the stir, and find Sergeant Doucette leading Eric toward my cell.

  I turn my back. "I don't want to speak to him."

  "He doesn't want to speak to you," she tells Eric.

  Eric inhales sharply. "Well, that's fine by me. Because God knows I don't feel like hearing what the hell landed you in lockdown."

  At that moment I remember when I first realized that Eric was going to be the one to take care of you after I let go. You were fourteen, and had just had four teeth pulled by the dentist; your whole face was numb with novocaine. Eric came to our house after school to visit, and I let him take you the chocolate milkshake you'd asked for. When the liquid dribbled down your chin, Eric wiped it with a napkin. Before he let go, though, he let his fingertips caress the side of your face, as if he was finding his way acro
ss a relief map. He did this even though, or maybe because, the dentist's shot kept you from feeling it.

  "Let him in," I tell the officer.

  He is uncomfortable, holding on to the bars like a swimmer afraid to leave the side of the pool. "What are you doing in here?" he asks.

  "Self-preservation."

  "I'm just trying to save you, too."

  "Are you sure about that?" I say.

  He looks away. "This case isn't about me."

  When he asks me to start over, I have to think twice. It would be so easy to say no; to receive a court-appointed attorney and be convicted. I've given up my life before; I could do it again.

  But there is another part of me that needs to see Eric succeed. He's my granddaughter's father, and you love him. I can still remember you sobbing against my shoulder after you drove him to rehab. If Eric loses this legal battle, will he start drinking and make you cry again? If he wins, will it make me believe what I couldn't when I looked into Elise's face: that someone who is given a second chance might actually make something worthwhile of it?

  I rub my palms on the knees of my pants. "I don't know what you want to hear, and what you don't."

  Eric takes a deep breath. "Tell me how you met Elise."

  I close my eyes and I am a too-serious, overachieving grad student again. All my life I've gotten good grades; all my life I've done what my parents have asked ... until now. It is their great shame that instead of becoming a doctor, I have chosen pharmacology; never mind the fact that I cannot stand the sight of blood.

  I stand on the side of the road, kicking at the tires of my car as steam rolls out from the seam of the hood and spills onto the ground. I am going to miss my final in pharmacokinetics because of this.

  Six miles later, dusty and sweaty, after figuring every sorry permutation of my ruined grad school grade point average and tanked career, I approach a mirage. It is a roadside bar; twenty monstrous Harleys are parked in front of it. I walk inside in time to hear the screaming. Two burly men have a stunning, black-haired girl pinned up against the wall; a third holds a fan of darts in his hand. The girl closes her eyes and yells as the first dart goes whizzing toward her shoulder. A second dart strikes inches from her ear. The biker has just lifted his hand to throw the third dart when I launch myself at him.

  I have about as much effect as a mosquito; he bats me away and sends the third dart spinning to land between her knees, nailing her skirt to the wall.

  The girl opens her eyes, grins, and glances down between her legs. "No wonder you can't get a date, T-Bone, if that's the closest you can get."

  The other bikers all start laughing, and one of them extricates the girl from the darts. She walks toward me, and holds out her hand to help me to my feet. "I'm sorry. I thought they were hurting you," I say.

  "Them?" She glances over her shoulder, at the bikers who have gone back to their arm-wrestling and their drinks. "They're pussycats. Come on, then. Heroes drink on the house." She ducks beneath the counter and pulls the tap, filling up a long glass of beer for me; I realize that she is the bartender.

  She asks me what I'm doing here, and I tell her about my car. I say that I am missing my final. "Ever wonder why it's called that?" she says. "It's not like everything stops when you're done with it."

  I don't tell Eric how I found myself watching a shaft of sunlight play Elise's skin like the bow of a violin; how she could talk to one biker about basketball stats and make change for another and smile for me at the same time. I don't tell him how she made fun of me for nursing my beer, and then shared it with me. I don't tell him how she locked up early; how I drew the patterns of molecules for her on cocktail napkins, then between the stars, and finally on the flat of her bare back.

  I don't tell Eric that until I met Elise, I had never stayed awake till dawn just to watch the sky burn a hole through the night, that I took my first go-kart ride on a track beside her. I don't tell him that she led me through graveyards to lay down flowers for people she had never known. I don't tell him how she would decorate the inside of my car with rose petals for me to find when I came out of class. That she would call me up to ask me what color I would be, if I were a color, because she was so completely purple and she wanted to know if we'd match. That she was like no one I'd ever met, that when I moved inside the kaleidoscope heart of her, I saw how dreary my life had been.

  I don't tell Eric this, because it's all I have left of that girl. "What happened?" he asks.

  "She drove me home from the bar," I say simply. "A month later I found out she was pregnant." She'd used words like should and too soon and career and abortion. I had looked right at her and asked her if she wanted to get married instead.

  "What made you get divorced?"

  There were a whole string of things, if I want to be honest about it. And yes, there was a trigger. But I should have known that someone who was such a child herself would not feel comfortable taking care of one. I should have been more supportive after our son was stillborn, instead of clutching Beth like a shield to ward off the grief. But most of all, I should have admitted to myself far earlier that the things I loved about Elise, the impulsiveness and the craziness and the spur-of-the-moment outlook, were not really part of her personality, but a product of the alcohol. That when she didn't drink, she was so insecure that nothing I said or did was enough to convince her that I loved her.

  Eric nods; he has been there himself--on both ends of the equation. You cannot depend on an alcoholic, so you learn to live for the moments when they are present. You tell yourself you'll leave, but then they do something wonderful that reels you back: host a picnic on the living room floor in January; find the face of Jesus in a pancake; celebrate the cat's birthday by inviting all the other neighborhood cats for tuna. You use all the good times to paint over the bad, and pretend you can no longer see the grain of the wood that she's made of. You watch her wade through sobriety and secretly wish she would drink, because that is when she turns into the person you love; and then you cannot figure out who you hate more: yourself for thinking this, or her for reading your mind.

  Eric stares at me, putting together everything I've said so far. "You loved her. You still love her."

  "I never stopped," I admit.

  "Then you didn't take Delia because you hated Elise," Eric says slowly.

  "No," I sigh. "I took Dee so that she wouldn't."

  Broadway Gangsters, West Side City Crips, Duppa Villa, Wedgewood Chicanos, 40 Ounce Posse. Wetback Power Second Avenue, Eastside Phoeniquera, Hispanics Causing Panic, Hoover 59. Brown Pride, Vista King Trojans, Grape Street 103, Dope Man Association. Sex Jerks, Rollin' Sixties, Mini Park, Park South. Pico Nuevo, Dog Town, Golden Gate, Mountain Top Criminal. Chocolate City, Clavalito Park, Insane Born Gangster, Vista Bloods, Casa Trece. There are three hundred street gangs in the Phoenix area; these are just a few represented at Madison Street Jail.

  Crips dominate the Phoenix area; Bloods rule Tucson. Crips wear blue and call Bloods "slobs" as a sign of disrespect; they don't write the letters CK in succession, because that stands for "crip killer," and will spell a word blacc or slicc instead. A Blood wears red and calls Crips "crabs"; he will cross out all c's in his writing to show disrespect.

  Members of two different Crip gangs who meet on the street will try to kill each other. In prison, they join in solidarity against the Bloods.

  There is only one way to get a Crip and a Blood to stop fighting: Put them in front of an Aryan Brotherhood member and they will suddenly be on the same side.

  Long before I get out of Disc Seg, there are rumors. About Sticks, returning to the maximum security pod and talking of retribution. About Blue Loc, who has become my staunch supporter. Watching me take the blame for something one of the blacks did has, apparently, set me squarely in their esteem.

  When I am moved back down to maximum security, Concise is lying on his bunk, reading. "Wuzz crackalackin'?" he says, a homeboy greeting that could mean anything. He doesn't really speak
until the detention officer leaves. "They treat you all right up on three?"

  I start to make up my bed with sheets and a blanket. "Yeah. I got the cell with the Jacuzzi and the wine cellar."

  "Damn, they always give that one to the white boys," he jokes. "Andrew," he says, the first time he has ever used my name. "What you did ..."

  I fold up my towel. "It was nothing."

  He stands up, reaches out slowly, and clasps my hand. "You took the fall for me. That was somethin'."

  Embarrassed, I break away. "Well, it's over and done with."

  "No it ain't," Concise says. "Sticks is gonna beat a lesson into you in the rec yard. He been plannin' it for days now."

  I try not to let on how much this terrifies me. If Sticks nearly beat me to death as an afterthought on the first night I was in jail, what might he do with preparation?

  "Can I ask you somethin'?" Concise says. "Why'd you do it?"

  Because looking out for yourself sometimes isn't about you at all. Because contrary to what inmates seem to think, situations are never black or white. But I just shake my head, unsure of how to put this into words.

  Concise leans down and pulls out a box beneath the lower bunk; it is filled with an arsenal of makeshift weapons. "Yeah," he says. "I hear you."

  The morning of the fight, Concise shaves my head. All the inmates involved do, because it makes it harder for the DOs to sort out the participants afterward. The disposable razor leaves patches of hair, so I look like I have been attacked by a cat. I glance at Concise's smooth, dark skin. "Well," I say. "I'm going out on a limb, here, but I think the guards might be able to tell me apart from the rest of the Crips."

  There will be thirty men in the rec yard at once: ten Mexicans, nine blacks, and ten whites, and me. For the past week, a steady stream of smuggling has enabled Concise to build up a weapon supply. We have stayed up late to fashion them: clubs, rolled out of National Geographics and secured with the tape the kitchen uses to mark a special dietary meal; saps, a sock filled with two bars of soap or, in one case, a padlock nipped from an ankle chain, which can be swung at an enemy. We have broken out the single-edge razor blades we are given every morning, reset them in the pliant plastic of a melted toothbrush. We have fashioned shanks from the stainless-steel frames around the mirrors in our cell, from pieces of chain-link fence, from the metal stays in knee braces, even from a toilet-bowl brush, all filed to a deadly point along the cement floor at night. The handles are wrapped with strips ripped from bedsheets and towels, tied tight with the white cotton string from laundry bundles: You can grip the weapon more firmly, and you are less likely to be cut as your hand slips up the blade.