And then the pastor of the First Baptist Church said, “The point of the star goes down, not up.”
“So?” the town said.
“A downward star points to Satan,” the pastor said. “This is a pentagram.”
No one had ever heard of a “pentagram,” but within hours it was on everyone’s lips. Phrases like “devil worship” and “satanic cult” flew from house to house. A madman was out there. Was he a thousand miles away by now? Or living next door?
So when the old man called “They got him!” Ned knew—and I knew—exactly what he meant.
But my juices didn’t start to boil until I was rolling away from Ned’s, licking mustard from my mouth. That’s when I heard the sirens. I knew the difference between police, ambulance, and fire-truck sirens. This was police. A lot of them. Front doors were opening. Kids were running.
I flew to the end of the boulevard, pedaled furiously up the Elm Street hill, veered right on Cherry. I was so excited I didn’t realize I had fired right through The Corner. People screaming. Sirens screaming. When I saw the mob on Airy Street, I detoured to Marshall, then flew to the back of the prison and down the high-walled alley to the front.
That whole block of Airy Street was packed with people. I could see only the police cars’ red flashers, inching through the crowd. The sirens’ scream pinched itself into pulsing balls of warning: Make way!
I ditched my bike. I’d worry about it later. I hoisted myself up the side wall of the jail’s tiny front yard, which was packed. I fought my way through the crowd to the main walkway. Unlike everywhere else, the walkway was perfectly clear of people, from the sidewalk to the massive, ironclad front door. And in front of the door, magnificent in the navy-blue uniform he used only for special occasions, stood my father.
He wore the billed, cop-like hat with the silver badge that said WARDEN. My mother had given him the badge for his birthday. She’d had it made special at Keystone Jewelers.
He hadn’t even been warden at the time—he was captain of the guard and was taking courses in criminology— but she knew he would make it. Two years after she died, he did.
His face was all business. He stood at attention. He gave no hint that he was aware of the tumult around him. Suddenly I felt proud—proud that it was my father standing there. The warden. The monster’s master. My dad. And then his eyes moved, a tiny movement I doubt anyone else noticed. They landed on me, and one of them—the left eye—winked. Winked at me! For an instant I found myself both surprised and grateful that he even knew me.
And then the squad car was at the curb. The mob was wild and loud as the back door was opening and then…sudden…dead…silence. The silence of a classroom when the principal walks in.
He was dressed in gray pants with the cuffs rolled up. An olive-green T-shirt. Cigarette pocket. White socks. Black shoes. Policemen helped him onto the sidewalk—he was shackled, wrists and ankles—but even after they stepped back to give him room, he remained hunched over, as if by standing up he would have to face the fact that he had arrived at his destiny. A voice from the mob cried out: “Killer!”
Still bent over, he took a step. Then another. The car door swung shut behind him.
Step by step he began to unbend. His face came into view. I stared, fascinated: the face of a murderer. A homicidal maniac. Within the hour I would learn his name: Marvin Edward Baker. He worked for a company that installed windows. That surprised me. I must have thought that “murderer” was a full-time job, like milkman or teacher.
His face was pasty and bristled with black whiskers. In fact, whatever skin was visible was pale, as if he had been living in a hole or under a rock…or in a prison. His hair was stringy and long and so obviously packed with oil that I imagined a glassful could have been squeezed out of it.
His eyes were last to come up. They were pale, gray, blinking in a daylight that seemed foreign to him. They glanced about briefly, then settled straight ahead. I found them disappointing, empty. They were aimed in the direction of my father but seemed to have no focus on him or anything else. The only sounds were the footfalls of himself and his uniformed escorts—and the sound of ankle shackles, which was not unlike the rattle of milk bottles.
As he shuffled past me, I think I half expected him to glance my way, as my father had, to single me out. He did not. But his sheer presence, the nearness—I could have reached out and touched him—chilled the skin on my shoulders. I happened to look up. I saw a face—Eloda’s—in the window of my bedroom.
As Marvin Edward Baker approached my father, the crowd began to spill over the perp walk. They stopped in their tracks, however, as I chose that moment to vomit up my morning’s angry binge of junk onto half a dozen shoe tops and pant legs.
16
The apartment door was open. Eloda was waiting at the top of the stairs. Her eyes were wide with alarm.
“You all right?” she called down.
“Wonderful,” I growled, dragging myself up the endless steps.
She whipped off my baseball cap and flung it to the sofa. She took me into the kitchen. She gave me ginger ale. “Gargle. Spit,” she said. She reached into a drawer and produced a Life Saver. “Crush it in your teeth. Chew.” She wet a clean dishrag and wiped my face, hard. I yelped, “Ow!” She sat with me at the kitchen table. She felt my forehead. She felt the glands in my neck. “No fever,” she said. “No swelling.” She stared at me. “How you feeling?”
“I told you,” I said. “Hunky-dory.”
“Maybe all the excitement,” she said.
“Yeah, maybe,” I said. I was dying to tell her she was the reason I got sick, but with her staring at me like that, I just couldn’t.
“You want some Alka-Seltzer?” she said. “Settle your stomach?”
I told her no.
She wet the tip of her finger with her tongue and rubbed a spot on my cheek that she must have missed…and suddenly there was yelling on the stairs outside the apartment and the door flew open and Reggie was bursting in: “Is he gone? I missed him, didn’t I? I missed him! Oh farts, I missed him!”
And then she was sprinting past us into my father’s bedroom. There was a little square window in the back wall. It looked down onto Murderers’ Row. “I can’t see him! I can’t see him!”
She came back, flopped onto a chair. No lipstick. Bare feet. Huffing. Sweating. “…heard too late…ran all the way…” Then she was gushing at me. “What did he look like? Was he skinny? Did he say—” Suddenly, horror struck her face. She turned up the bottom of a foot, stared at it. “Eewww!” She hopped over to the sink, grabbed a dishrag, scrubbed vigorously at the foot. “Somebody barfed on the walk. I ran right into it.”
I said nothing.
“Well,” she said, tossing the dishrag away, “at least I heard something.”
I perked up. “What?”
She sat back down. “I heard somebody say that he said, ‘I ain’t never goin’ to Rockview.’ ” She popped back up. She was too worked up to sit. “What do you think that meant?”
Among kids in town, I was considered the expert on crime and prisons. “Sounds like he’s going to either escape or kill himself,” I said. “Or go down in a hail of gunfire.”
She was impressed. “Wow! So what’s Rockview?”
“State prison,” I told her.
“So? Is that so bad?” She waved her hand in a circle. “Worse than this?”
“In one way,” I said. “Rockview’s where the electric chair is.”
Reggie boggled. Her awestruck eyes stared down through the floor. The name came to her lips like a whispered prayer: “Marvin Edward Baker…the chair…” She turned to Eloda, whose hand, I just then realized, was resting on my shoulder. “He’s even more famous than I thought.”
Eloda usually made herself scarce when Reggie came to visit. This was her longest exposure to my melodramatic friend.
Reggie was pacing, holding her arms as if receiving the ovations of adoring audiences. Her dream was to become a star in musica
ls. First Broadway, then the movies. Her plan was to get on the TV teen dance show American Bandstand and be discovered by a talent scout.
“Can you dig it?” she said. “His name is on a thousand lips. This minute. Tomorrow it’ll be millions.”
“He’s a killer,” said Eloda, her boldness surprising me.
“A famous killer,” said Reggie.
“A child killer,” said Eloda.
Reggie turned to Eloda with a look of hurt, as if our housemaid was spoiling her fun. Then the hurt look gave way to something else: blinking, quizzical. “So…Eloda…why did he do it?”
Beneath her spoken words was a pointed undervoice: So…Eloda…you’re a criminal. You know how the criminal mind works. Why did he do it?
I felt Eloda’s fingers tighten on my shoulder. An awkward silence followed. Then her hand was gone and she was out of the room.
Reggie shrugged. “Big help she is.” She looked me over. As usual, she failed to find anything to her liking. She poked me between the eyes. “Next time, I’m bringing my pluckers. I will not have a friend with one eyebrow.” Then she, too, was gone, flying down the long stairway, screaming about feeling naked without mascara.
My father must have seen the big barf, but he did not mention it at dinnertime. Neither did he speak of the new prisoner.
It wasn’t until I lay down to sleep that the grandest moment of the day came back to me: Eloda wetting her finger and cleaning the spot on my cheek. Something sweet spilled inside me. I had been mothered!
17
It didn’t last.
By next morning, Eloda was back to her stony-face self, and I was once again mad that she didn’t like the diary. But my mad lasted only until I saw what was lying at my place at the breakfast counter. It was a key.
My father, as usual, was already off to work. But no matter—I didn’t have to ask what the key was for. I knew instantly. It was for the gate to the women’s exercise yard.
I had won!
Yard time began at ten in the morning. I looked down from the kitchen window. By ten-fifteen Helen and Tessa were playing netless badminton. (I had returned the racket and bird to them as promised.) Deena was sunning on her shower towel. Boo Boo was holding court, laughing, smoking.
I went down. I acted all casual, as if I were just coming for my usual other-side-of-the-fence visit. “Greetings, female people,” I said. I held up the key. I grinned. The yard was suddenly all silence and eyes. I inserted the key in the padlock. Opened the gate. Stepped in.
Pandemonium.
“MISS CAMMIE!”
I was mobbed. Everyone came running but Deena, who removed her eye cups. An unidentified voice flew from the crowd: “Little Warden!”
In truth there were two mobbings. First I was mobbed by Boo Boo. Or maybe “swallowed” is the word. I found myself engulfed in her massive arms and struggling to breathe in the pillowy depths of her bosom. I might have died there had not hands pulled me away for the second mobbing. Thirty-some women—fingers pecking at me like chickens, as if they couldn’t believe I was real, as if they’d never touched a person before.
I managed to look up. Atop the far wall Jim Carilla was out of the guardhouse with his rifle, staring. I waved. “It’s okay, Jim!”
And then the squeals turned to questions. Everyone wanted to know about the new celebrity inmate.
“Does he look like a killer?”
“Did he look at you?”
“Does he smell bad?”
When one of the women said, “They gonna fry that boy,” the hubbub came to a sudden stop. Eyes shifted to the great wall separating the women’s yard from the men’s.
Our inmates—inmates everywhere, I suppose—practiced the art of forgetting where they were. Those with long sentences in particular kept no calendars in their cells to remind them of the endless jail time remaining. They tried to not look ahead, as those afraid of heights are told not to look down. Another way to forget was to busy oneself with reminders of life on the outside: cigarettes, reading, radio (“The Shadow knows!”), candy. Simple things like daydreaming and sleep were vital in this regard.
But there were intrusions that made forgetting impossible. The clack of the guard’s beanbopper as he made the count at lights-out. Sitting down on a toilet with no door or walls for privacy. And the grimmest reality check of all: knowing there was among them an inmate headed for death row. It was not the crime he’d committed, but the likelihood that Marvin Edward Baker had a date with the electric chair at Rockview that was the source of the women’s fearful fascination with their new jail mate. I understood the fascination. I myself could never climb the Tower of Death and not stare at—not touch—the hangman’s noose.
The questions and the commotion went on for a while, but in the end thirty women were no match for Boo Boo. “Okay—enough!” she declared, her red-nailed fingers flapping. “Let the little girl be!” Suddenly I was slung over her shoulder.
Jim’s voice barked from the high wall: “Hey!”
I craned up, waved, called: “It’s okay, Jim! I’m okay!”
And she hauled me away.
18
Boo Boo deposited me onto the concrete bench in the Quiet Room. As usual, the place was empty. The only sound was the mini-waterfall pouring eternally from the tin wheelbarrow into the plant-ringed pool. Boo Boo kept squeezing my hands and shoulders as if making sure I was still in one piece. She smelled like strawberries. She fussed at my hair and clothes. I issued a feeble protest: “Boo Boo, I’m all right. They weren’t hurting me.”
Sudden anger flared in her eyes, as if I’d just put the thought in her head. “They better not,” she snarled.
I was getting more mothering from Boo Boo in one minute than I ever had from Eloda. In that moment, I wished Boo Boo was our housemaid.
And now Boo Boo was showing me a side I’d never seen. Her voice was soft, confidential. Her eyes kept flicking toward the yard, as if someone might discover her not being loud and jolly.
She paraded her fingers before my eyes. She smiled hugely. “Like my nails?”
Long, bold-red fingernails on Boo Boo seemed as out of place as lipstick on a hippo. It might have been comical or pointless, but the effect on me was somehow endearing. I nodded. “Cool.”
“You can touch.”
I touched one.
Her voice went whispery. “Cosmetics ain’t allowed. But your daddy lets me.” She leaned in. “Your daddy likes me.”
“I know,” I said. And for some reason I noticed for the first time that several strands of her wild hair were white.
It occurred to me that I had never asked Boo Boo my Big Question. “Do you know Eloda Pupko?” I said.
“Arnge hair. Hell on wheels outside, I heard,” she said. “Why?”
“Do you know why she’s in?”
Her answer came at once. “Firebug. Tried to set the town on fire.”
She saw the shock on my face, laughed. “Maybe. Maybe not. Don’t believe ever’thing you hear down here. But I’ll tell you right out what that girl’s crime is now.”
“What?” I said.
“Snootin’.”
“Snootin’? What’s that?”
“Snooty. She used to snoot away from the resta us. Spend alla her yard time in here, you b’lieve it.”
“Here? The Quiet Room? Eloda Pupko?”
She smacked the seat. “On this here bench.”
Maybe, I speculated, it was the Quiet Room that had made her silent and grumpy. Not exactly my father’s intention.
“Now,” Boo Boo went on, “she be up there”—she gestured toward the apartment—“snootin’ around with y’all. Like she live there. Come back down here to sleep, then right back up. No time for us common folk. The high life.” She reached down between her bosoms and pulled out a huge red bandanna. She dusted my face with it, made me laugh. “Y’all tell your daddy, fire that arnge hair and hire on Boo Boo. Boo Boo’ll do him some dustin’ like he ain’t never seen!”
&nb
sp; We laughed.
She poked me. “Pies? You like pies?”
“Love them,” I said. “Carl makes me a pie every week.”
She sneered. “Shoot, I’ll make you a pie ever’ day. Soon’s I get out. What’s your favorite kind?”
Some questions are impossible to answer. “All of them,” I said.
“Carl never made you sweet potato pie, did he? Marshmallow on top? Did he now?”
“No,” I conceded.
“That’s gonna be your favorite. Boo Boo’s sweet potato pie. Day after I get out…the day”—she poked me—“I’m walking right into ’ception with that pie in my hands….It’s still warm….” She took a deep breath that seemed to double her already enormous bulk. “Can you smell it?…Can you?”
“I think so,” I said. I wasn’t kidding.
“And the guard’ll say, he goes, ‘Mm-mm. ’Chu got there, Miss Boo Boo?’ He calls me Miss ’cause I’m out now. And I say, ‘Never mind, this’s Miss Cammie O’Reilly’s.’ ‘Oh, well then,’ he says, ‘you go right on up them stairs there.’ And that’s what I do. I go on up the stairs and—now listen—here’s the best part. When I get to the top of them stairs, I won’t have to knock on your door.” She grinned. She poked me. “You know why?”
I was barely breathing. “Why?”
“Because you know it’s coming, girl! You know Boo Boo’s sweet potato pie is coming, and so you’re already outside your door; you’re sitting on the top step waitin’ and waitin’ like you do for Santy Claus.” She was up now and pacing about the Quiet Room, waving her arms. “And I give you the pie and I start to go back down the stairs and you call me back and you say, ‘Boo Boo—wait! Come in. I can’t eat this pie all by myself.’ And that’s what we do. We go into the kitchen and we slice up the pie and we just sit there and eat and talk and laugh and talk and eat….” I could taste it. She was facing the waterfall. She reached out. The water splashed over her hand. She turned. Her face was serious. “Soon’s I get out.”
“How long, Boo Boo?” I said.
She gazed up through the glass ceiling. “Any day now,” she said. “My ’torney’s workin’ it. I’m s’prised I didn’t get a phone call already.”