"You're not taking me to the Keeper's office?"

Did I need to spell it out for him? "I'm sure he'll find you later if he wants to."

"I see." He tried to smile, but the expression fluttered away in a tremble of post-adrenaline letdown. "I wonder, where do you think they will be taking him?"

"You mean Elgin? To the infirmary, I'd think." A good chance to the morgue.

"And my other student, Jon Crowley?"

"If he's injured, he'll go there, too. If he's not, he'll end up in the dissociation unit for fighting." It was already distasteful to me, this kind of concern, and I wanted to pry myself away from the good deed.

"I see," Brother Mike said, and he thanked me.

We parted at the juncture between Keeper's Hall and the education wing, each of us for our own separate worlds.

5.

I did not know much about Brother Mike's world then, but I understood my own well enough, the daily pressure to be wary and cynical and to keep expectations low. That's my excuse for not doing more sooner. I could not stop thinking about my conversation with Josh, and his warning that Crowley was in danger because of the comic book, but while I wanted to approach him, to pull him off to the side and ask, Is this what you meant? I did not find the time. The default att.i.tude among COs in inmate-related circ.u.mstances was to be dismissive of the reasons and the backstories, to shrug off the entanglements. What right did inmates have to ordinary human fears? You did not need to trouble yourself about where the violence came from, what politics, rage, or soap opera plots drove their impulses and sullen schemes. You job was to focus on the situation at hand.

I was still contemplating those limitations the next morning when I sat in the internal evidence room behind shatterproof Plexiglas and waited for inmate Cooper Lewis to relieve his bowels. I had been informed that Lewis had inserted something bodily while in the VnC for a family visit, and it was my job to find out what.

He lay on a rubber mattress in a larger than normal cell, a fair-complexioned man with a blazing red goatee. He had his arms behind his head, and he whistled as he stared up at the ceiling as though he were on some gra.s.sy field somewhere, alone and un.o.bserved, watching oddly shaped clouds coasting by. He'd covered himself with a single white sheet that went from his waist to his ankles. The sheet was a mandated provision that mystified me. Though too small and thin to encourage sleep, it gave Lewis cover for anything he needed to do in secret below. I'd seen them do just about everything in my time, including excrete whatever foreign substance they'd suitcased and either re-ingest it or re-suitcase it in a wriggling, writhing wrestling match between object and a.n.u.s. For whatever legal reason-and I would love to know the precedent for that particular decision in the storied history of search and seizure law-a corrections officer was not permitted to rush a cell when it became apparent that an inmate had discharged a foreign object. Instead, protocol was to wait until the inmate got up from the bed and willingly and voluntarily discharged said object by taking a c.r.a.p in a gla.s.s toilet bowl. That almost never occurred in any timely fashion, but involved a shrewd cat and mouse game between the inmate, who had nothing better to do with his time, and the CO, who needed to wait and wait and wait until the bowel movement arrived.

At least-and here I suspected a truly sick mind at work-someone had mysteriously lodged a pleather recliner in the viewing portion of the room. Sitting in it, waiting for hours on end, it was impossible not to kick back so your feet were raised while you stared blankly at the inmate behind the gla.s.s wall with the foreign object up his a.s.s. The parallels with watching television were far too obvious to overlook.

In the end, you waited until the inmate's boredom exceeded your own and they traipsed the divide between the slab of concrete and the gla.s.s toilet bowl and sat sideways to you and expelled. Then you inserted your hands into thick fireman's gloves that protruded into the gla.s.s toilet bowl basin and pretended you were a nuclear scientist handling radioactive material. Even though the heavy fabric made it impossible to come into direct physical contact with the waste, I always doubled up with my own latex rubber gloves when doing the awful deed.

People, even friends, sometimes ask me about my job with twitters of interest. They want to hear the sordid details, the glamour of it all. Except they don't want reality. They don't want to know what it's like to be a woman in such an environment. They don't want to hear about Cooper Lewis in the internal evidence room, or the other things I see or smell, or the things I do when I absolutely have no choice. They don't want me to go past the line of too much information and into the realm of the hard-core. That's why we call civilians weak sisters.

There we were, Cooper Lewis and I, playing our mind games-he ignoring me, me pretending that his existence actually mattered-when I noticed the mark from the cover of Crowley's comic book scratched into the Plexiglas.

The inside surface of the Plexiglas was a web of faint graffiti. I don't know why any CO would sit still and ignore an act of defacement while an inmate expressed his frustrations with some sharpened object, but plenty obviously had. There were drawings of lewd s.e.xual acts and drawings of crude bodily functions. There were meaningless circles, random swoops, and lines of inappropriate poetry. I'd been blind to them before, the way you are blind to the white noise of an electronic appliance. But now the pumpkin with its triangle eyes and mouth glared at me from the upper right quadrant of the Plexiglas wall.

I unfolded myself from the recliner and stepped up to look more closely. Lewis glanced toward me warily, as if I were a feral cat getting too close. There were no explanations to be gained, however, from the inspection. It was just a childish rendition scratched into the surface, but the sight of it teased my memory again. I'd seen that mark before. I just couldn't place where.

I was still standing there, lost in my investigative reverie, when the door opened and in walked senior CO Ray MacKay.

To be caught by a fellow CO in any pose but the most routine or confrontational was potentially embarra.s.sing. And in this case I felt as if I'd been discovered in the bathtub with the shower nozzle. But MacKay did not seem to care. He stood next to me, as if at a barbeque, and asked what was cooking.

I snorted. "You got me," I answered, and retreated with rescued dignity to my recliner throne. MacKay followed and pulled up a foldout chair to sit next to me.

At least we'd ruined Lewis's good mood. Lewis scowled, as an inmate might at the sight of any CO, and went back to his whistling, but it was a more tense and hostile tune. It was easy to imagine that Lewis and MacKay had encountered each other in unfavorable circ.u.mstances before. MacKay was like that. He regarded rules as insignificant impediments. He knew every blind nook left in the inst.i.tution and would steer an inmate into such a s.p.a.ce for a brief talking-to without a moment's hesitation. He regularly and unapologetically f.u.c.ked the pooch when others were scrambling to get tasks done. And yet, of all the old boys who might have earned my disdain, I dearly loved the man. He was the dirty uncle I'd never had, the tenderhearted thug of my dreams.

As they say in the movies, he also made me laugh. Impatient, he barked through the gla.s.s. "Jesus, Cooper, you baking a cake in there?"

Lewis responded with all the wit he could summon, a m.u.f.fled suggestion that MacKay go f.u.c.k himself.

"Why me?" I asked MacKay. It was a rhetorical question, and I received a rhetorical answer.

"Because all s.h.i.t follows gravity and flows downhill."

It could have been a workplace motto.

MacKay did not look like the type you could have a sensitive and intelligent conversation with, but I had found him to be surprisingly open-minded and quick. In appearance, he resembled an Irish cop from a vintage photograph: the speckled buzz cut and square head, one ear gone nubby and cauliflowered, as if banged hard with a pipe, a heavy fold of flesh at the back of his neck. Inside, he was sensitive, thoughtful, and quick to be offended, just another feminist with a quick temper.

"You sure he's packing?" I asked. The word packing never so physically accurate.

MacKay just leaned forward in the chair and stared at the gla.s.s.

"Got it on tape. He was in a private visiting room with his grandmother and his little girl. There's even a G.o.dd.a.m.n sign on the wall says cameras may be watching, but you don't read too good, do you, s.h.i.t for brains?" he called out. "We seen it all. The whole sordid details."

I was quietly disgusted. The little girl in the room. A grandmother. I could tell you it doesn't get much lower, except it does, frequently, and always in surprising ways. "That's a new kind of sick," I noted, "getting your own grandmother to bring in your junk."

But MacKay turned to me. "Sweetheart, we're not talking about drugs. He upped one of those mobile phones. Didn't they tell you?" And when he saw they hadn't, he laughed. "The boys must have wanted to see the look on your face. Stupid b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. You might have had a heart attack."

I remained utterly baffled until the understanding dawned. "He suitcased a cell phone?"

MacKay nodded. "Looked like a Samsung."

"Good grief," I muttered. The things a human being could shove up the a.s.s. I felt awestruck, affirmed in my belief that there were no bounds to ingenuity when it met the curve of need.

"Yeah, Cooper didn't believe it either. He was downright skeptical when Grandma made the suggestion. He said, 'Granny, that's never going to fit up my a.s.s,' and she said, 'It'll fit up no problem. You think I brung it here without trying first?'"

I could only blink in wonder. "She shoved it up her own a.s.s before she got him to shove it up his a.s.s?"

"As G.o.d is my witness. It must have taken him five minutes working it back there. We were cheering him on. He kept saying, 'No, Granny, it ain't going to go,' and she told him to keep pushing, and then the expression on old Cooper's face changed considerably, and he said his goodbyes and got out of there fast. We nabbed him as soon as he pa.s.sed the control zone. And now look at him. Whistling like he's got nothing on his mind."

"And you couldn't resist coming in to watch."

MacKay nodded. "Yeah. I figure once in my life I got to see someone s.h.i.t a phone."

A minute pa.s.sed.

"If we knew the number, we could give it a ring," I suggested.

"Honest, Judge. We were just trying to answer the phone."

We laughed, pleased with ourselves, and waited some more.

I'm not sure why-an urge to think about something other than Cooper Lewis and his cell phone, I suppose-but I broke the silence and asked MacKay what he was up to these days, outside of work.

Right away I regretted it. I didn't know much about Mac-Kay's private life, whether to suspect a Mrs. MacKay and a houseful of grandkids or, what was more likely, a shabby one-bedroom apartment with a divorce agreement buried in a stack of bills on the kitchen counter; and he didn't know much about me, though he sometimes teased me about boyfriends and wild weekends. It was a taboo conversation, especially in front of inmates. They sucked up information like parasites and found ingenious ways to use it against you. But MacKay didn't seem to mind, and Cooper Lewis gave no indication he could hear through the thick gla.s.s.

"You mean when I'm not waiting for someone to take a c.r.a.p?" he asked.

It was probably the best answer I could expect.

"I've been bird-watching lots," he said.

I couldn't have been more surprised if inmate Cooper Lewis had s.h.i.t a microwave. Bird-watching. Sometimes life hits you like that, the little astonishments that lead to major recalibrations.

"You're kidding?" I said. "I wouldn't have guessed."

MacKay looked at me as though I were making fun. "Yeah, bird-watching. You asked, so I told you. I'm treasurer of the Mourning Warbler Society."

A bit sour because of my surprise, but what did he expect? I'd pictured him in a camouflage jacket waiting for deer, or liquored up in an ice-fishing hut, or doubling down in some Indian casino. Not bird-watching.

The mood was wrong, and I wished I could rescue it.

"I'm reading To Kill a Mockingbird right now," I said. It wasn't about bird-watching, but there was a bird quality to it, one I figured a man of Ray MacKay's sensibilities could appreciate.

But MacKay looked at me in horror until I asked what was wrong.

"What the h.e.l.l kind of a book is that?" he demanded.

Then I realized the t.i.tle might alarm a bird lover in complete ignorance of it. So I began an embarra.s.sed and awkward attempt to explain that To Kill a Mockingbird wasn't actually about killing mockingbirds. In fact, one of the best lines in the book even stated that to kill a mockingbird was a sin.

But MacKay said, "I'm just f.u.c.king with you, Kali. I like Gregory Peck, too."

I called him a b.a.s.t.a.r.d, and sat back, relieved yet embarra.s.sed. I often felt superior to the men I worked with, and it was at a moment like this that I realized some of them knew it.

More minutes went by. Lewis had stopped listening and was starting to squirm on the slab, bringing his knees up to his chest. Nature taking its course, if ever there had been a more unnatural course taken.

"You don't have to sit this one out with me, Ray," I said as kindly as I could, trying not to sound patronizing again. "I'm all right. I know it's my job."

But MacKay said, "You kidding me? Wouldn't miss this for the world. Why don't you go powder your nose or beat up an inmate."

"You got this one?" I asked.

MacKay nodded. "Yeah, I'm serious."

"Well, that's a deal as far as I'm concerned."

Except I didn't move. I was paralyzed by suspicion and doubt. I couldn't help but wonder why MacKay wanted me out of the room. Most of the COs had something going on. The inmates wore you down that way, their pa.s.sive and sometimes not so pa.s.sive forms of resistance requiring a little give-and-take, a mutual back-scratching to pa.s.s a shift without incident. You started out doing something small for them in order to get a favor in return-a quickened response time at lockdown, a heads-up when something was going down-but then the favors kept getting traded, and you stopped knowing the difference, and you became colleagues in a way, and sometimes you even worked for them. MacKay despised inmates, but that didn't mean he didn't despise himself a little bit, too. So I took the opportunity to stall by asking MacKay about the other thing on my mind.

"You ever hear of an inmate referred to as the Beggar?"

I said it low, still conscious of Lewis. MacKay didn't flinch or redirect his gaze, but it was one of those moments when you realize a bell has been rung.

"Sure I know him," he answered. "He was here for ten years, wasn't he?"

Him? I knew of no Beggar. I had never heard the name before, and I wondered vaguely if it was a forgotten term in the ever-evolving and endlessly variant jailhouse jargon. I was not expecting such a routine answer. Another reminder: what I didn't know about corrections could fill a Chicago phone book.

"Are you kidding me? Who is he?"

MacKay leaned back, eyes on Lewis, and gave a reasonable shrug. "Name we had for a son of a b.i.t.c.h called Earl Hammond."

He stopped, and I figured that was it, but MacKay was just winding up, some pent-up bitterness working its way to the surface like slow lava.

"This was mid-eighties. He was in a gang, naturally. No big deal. Then he stabbed a fifteen-year veteran CO named Tony Bucker about fifty times. We buried Hammond same day we buried Bucker, put him in the City, cleared the other a.s.sholes out, and let him rot by himself in total f.u.c.king isolation for the next three years. Let's just say Hammond became a favorite object of frustration from that point forward. If you had a bad day, got a cup of urine splashed on you, got your a.s.s chewed out by a keeper, no worries, you just headed downtown into the City and whooped some cop-killer a.s.s for a while. We'd say he was begging for it. 'How was Hammond?' 'Begging for it!' Then some weak f.u.c.king sister took up his cause, and they transferred him in the middle of the night so none of us would make a fuss. But that was almost twenty years ago, so I have to ask, where in the h.e.l.l did you hear mention of him?"

I was embarra.s.sed to admit it.

"In a comic book."

MacKay looked at me as if I had confessed my love for Cooper Lewis.

"Something an inmate drew," I said. I saw it more clearly now. A piece of propaganda. The Four Stages of Cruelty. An account of the injustices incurred for the mere killing of a CO.

"Which f.u.c.king s.h.i.tbird did that?"

And that's when I felt my first misgiving. Did I really know how someone like MacKay might react? I saw no way out.

"Jon Crowley."

MacKay nodded. "Mister Shank Fight in the Yard, huh? Well, it figures." And he went back to watching Cooper Lewis.

I let a moment go by, until the insistence of doubt nudged me on.

"Why does it figure?"

MacKay looked at me without understanding.

"Why does it figure the guy who made the comic book about Hammond would get shanked in the yard?"

"Jesus, Kali, how should I f.u.c.king know?"

His incredulity put me in my place. I'd heard MacKay's comment as acknowledgment of some logical connection when it was just the usual indifference.

Minutes later he was still amped up and p.i.s.sed off.

"I'm sick of waiting for this f.u.c.ker." But I felt like the anger was aimed in multiple directions at once-at Lewis, at Ditmarsh, at me.

"I'll wait," I said, ever the peacekeeper among violent men.

"No, you get going. I'm going to expedite this a little. There's more than one way to take a s.h.i.t."

Pushing me around, taking advantage of our friendship to handle some personal business. Part of me felt sad for him. I had the awareness that it happens to all of us in time. We get permanently angry.

I couldn't stop myself. "Why does Lewis have a phone up his a.s.s, Ray?"