Mrs. Eliot turned her into 4 cell just before she hit the wall. Patsy immediately sprawled onto my bunk. I felt a snarl coming up and clamped down, surprised. Mrs. Eliot lifted her quickly saying “I believe that bunk is occupied my dear. Here’s a nice one that hasn’t been taken. Now you make yourself at home and ask Kathy for anything you need. She’ll bring you a nice clean uniform and you can change into that so she can hang up your lovely street clothes so they’ll be fresh when you go. All right? The girls will help you with whatever you don’t understand. Goodnight dear.” She patted Patsy on the shoulder and went off smiling reassuringly at us.
Patsy still hadn’t moved. We stared at her and she stared at the floor. Kathy broke the spell by barging in with her hands on her hips, a uniform slung over one shoulder and a pair of Goodwill saddle shoes with the strings tied together over the other. “Aaah get out of here you sheep!” The other girls broke up and wandered away grumbling. I stayed sitting on my bunk where no one could chase me away.
Kathy flung the stuff on Patsy’s bunk. “Climb into that and give me your duds. Snap it up.” Patsy looked up at her and I could see her whole scalp move back away from her face maybe a quarter of an inch—the eyes were wide and the mouth started to open. I started talking fast, telling her that her clothes were nice and she’d got a nice bunk and what was she in for. I didn’t sell magazines. It’s a real skill to distract someone from a danger they can sense instinctively.
For a while Patsy talked and I asked questions. We became what you might call friends. She had an incredibly whiny voice. It was annoying, always brimming with something painful. It seemed like she was always on the verge of something but never quite into it, tears, a rage, a sulk. She couldn’t say “Pass the butter” without putting into that voice a plea not to be hated.
In my memory her face and Marie-Sophie’s have run together but the impact was the same with both of them. Formless, boneless, gushy skinned, pale eyes tinged pink and never quite steady, always jerking. She could never look you in the eye.
This is what she told me: A year and a half ago her hair had been long and yellow. She had been in town waiting for the bus home. A man drove up and offered her a ride. She knew him slightly. They went to the same church, so she accepted. He drove her out onto a country road and raped her. She said it was a custom car with no door or window handles on the inside, just pushbuttons on the driver’s side. She had struggled and would have jumped out but she couldn’t open the door. When he was through with her he let her out on the road and she walked home. Her parents took her to the police and she told them who it was and what had happened. They brought him in but he just laughed and said she had been willing, that she wanted it and liked it and was over twenty-one and since when was that a crime? There were no witnesses. It was her word against his. The police let him go and told her to go home and not make so much trouble for her admirers or she’d never get married. She went home and cut her hair short and shoe-blacked what was left of it. She put on every girdle she could find and hadn’t taken them off since. She did have shoe-black on her hair. You could smell it, and when she slept it made her pillow black and greasy. She wore seven girdles even when she slept.
She took to reading the Bible and decided she had a right to take revenge on the guy if the police wouldn’t do it for her. She started carrying a pistol in her purse. A year after the rape she went to a concert. She saw him there with another girl. He looked at her and then said something laughing to his date, Patsy didn’t know what. Patsy took out her pistol and shot him in the belly.
So she was here. I think she was out on bail for a while because she told me about her stepmother locking her in the bedroom and not letting her out at all so she had to pee in a jar. I never heard of bail for attempted murder. She said the guy didn’t die.
We talked a lot after that first night. I was as greedy for talk as she was. I couldn’t bring myself to say much to anybody else but her. I guess it was because she was weaker in the head than me.
We’d have big theological discussions. She’d quote Old Testament Eye-for-an-eye stuff to prove she had a right to kill the guy and I’d spout New Testament Revenge-is-mine and Thou-shalt-nots to prove she didn’t. I knew quite a bit of stuff because I was a renowned agnostic in high school and people were always trying to save me. I’d go to their picnics and wienie roasts and soak it all up. Besides that I used debate techniques. Whenever I ran out of real quotes I’d make some up. She never knew the difference. She was always reading her Bible but she only read the parts that were on her side. I outargued her every time. Any debate coach would say so, but she was never convinced.
I don’t know why I bothered arguing. I really agreed with her and wished the bastard had died.
It was to convince Patsy that I started copying the Bible on the wall. I did it over her bunk with this same pencil. I started on the New Testament because she already reeked of the Old. I’d work at it all day, arguing with her all the time and underlining parts I wanted her to pay special attention to. It was the only way she’d let me look at her Bible and it was the only thing around to read. I still don’t know how she got by with bringing it in. When they took her away they took the Bible too.
I got up to the seventh book of Acts before the mess. The last thing I wrote was: “…Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and come into the land which I shall shew thee.”
It was just before Christmas when Patsy came in and there was a commotion going on all the time in the tank. Rose was making cards to send to her friends. She fancies herself an artist and tells big stories about how she had her own studio to work in when she was in the state house. All she had to work with was a ball-point and some cheap writing paper so I shouldn’t have judged her so hard but I always considered myself pretty good at sketching and her stuff didn’t compare to mine. I guess it was that professional jealousy that started the scene. She decided she was going to send a card to the Sheriff. The whole tank was supposed to sign it.
Everybody was laughing and feeling Christmasy. The shoplifters were wishing they were out on the streets to take advantage of the crowds. Rose told how she used to use a plastic pregnancy to shoplift with. I was sitting on my bunk thinking and listening. Patsy was reading her Bible on her bunk. Then Joyce, one of the girls from 3 cell, came in to get the card to the Sheriff signed. She was hopping around sprightly and cheerful and said “Hurry up Turdhead” when she handed it to me. I remembered how she was in for bad checks like me only she’d written a lot of them for dresses and record players and had lots of money in the commissary fund for candy and cigarettes and stationery and junk and she was eighteen like me and already had a long record and her husband was rich and her ma screwed the judge that was going to try her so she was going to get off light.
Then I started thinking about the Sheriff. I’d seen him in the kitchen a couple of times and he was fat and ugly and went marching around feeling very happy with himself with a gun hanging on his fat ass and that chalked message on the menu board—I looked at all the names written in blue ball-point under that emaciated ball-point Santa Claus face and I didn’t want to sign. Right then nothing could have made me sign. I handed the card back to Joyce. She said “Sign it!” I don’t want to. She shrugged and turned to Patsy who was crouching in a corner of her bunk looking wild. “I don’t want to sign it either. How do I know you’re not going to use my signature to do something bad to me?” Joyce looked disgusted and stomped out. She told the girls in the bull pen that we wouldn’t sign. Rose came in and wanted to know whether we thought her Christmas card wasn’t good enough for us to sign. That was a good piece of it on my part but I didn’t feel like talking. I rolled over to the wall. Patsy started her thing again but Rose got furious and screamed “You know better!” at her. That was the last thing Patsy needed. She was already scared to death of everybody but me. She started bawling. Rose roared out.
I could hear them talking in the bull pen about how if we didn’t want to assoc
iate ourselves with the tank then we couldn’t have the tank’s privileges: no TV, no free laundry, no commissary, no going to the kitchen for meals and on and on like that. They were deliberately talking so we couldn’t help but hear them. Rose went on about how she just wanted to do something nice and the Sheriff had been awful good to us and this place was like a country club compared to some jails she’d been in.
I was lying with my face to the wall on the rough blanket of my bunk getting mad. With every word I heard I got madder. I couldn’t say just why, maybe because I’d been in 4 cell so long. I jumped up and went to the gate, I leaned out into the bull pen and yelled: If that’s the way you’re going to be about a goddamned Christmas card you can shove it up your ass! Jean was standing near me. She swung once with her right hand—hard. I felt the whole left side of my face go numb with the whack of her fist. My nose started bleeding. I stood staring at her with my blood running over my mouth and down the uniform. I turned around without saying any more and went in to my bunk. Patsy heard the whack and saw the blood. She sat rocking back and forth on her bunk moaning. Her eyes were rolling pale, she mumbled “Them Lesbians, them Lesbians!” I felt a little tired and very calm as though I had cried for a long time. Sister Blendina was playing solitaire. They never even asked her to sign.
The next day my nose was very swollen and kind of purple across the bridge and under my eyes. Patsy looked at me lying on my bunk when she woke. She turned away and started moaning into her pillow.
It wasn’t the first time I’d broken my nose and I wasn’t worried. When the gates rolled I dressed and lay back down. The other 4 cell girls looked as they passed me. They went out quickly without saying anything. After a while Kathy came in and looked at me. She kind of grinned and said “Fell down in the shower, eh?” I smiled at her. She went away. A few minutes later Jean came in and sat on the bunk beside me. That’s a great right you’ve got there, ever do any boxing? “Well kid, I’m sorry, I’ve got an awful temper and I know you hurt Rose’s feelings.” I thought of how she looked when she talked about Pudge. Jean, it wasn’t your fault, I deserved it and I would never tell on you. I wanted to reassure her. I wanted to be nice. She stiffened as though I’d barfed on her. Her face was horrible. “Bitch…Bitch…if you ever say that…never say you won’t squeal on me!” She went out and didn’t speak to me again.
Mrs. Eliot saw me at breakfast and clucked over me and said she’d been after the Sheriff for the longest time to put rubber matting in the showers but he just laughed at her.
Dorothy McInrick and I went down to the infirmary. She’s a nice little dumpling who’s always afraid someone won’t like her. She’ll make a little joke and we’ll all chuckle and then she’ll look around with huge eyes and say “Are you mad at me?” She even says that to me as though she really cares what I think of her. The others don’t give a damn what they say or do in front of me. I feel sorry for Dorothy. I heard Rose talking once about how she and Dorothy were upstate in the federal pen together a few years ago and Dorothy had been very pretty then with a doll face and a nice figure. It was the jails that made her the way she is now. She’d lost all her teeth and the state wouldn’t give her plates so she had to gum her food. There is never enough time to eat so she could never get it down properly. She had indigestion all the time. Dorothy’s mouth sank in over her gums and her belly and butt were very round. The eyes were always looking out over everything. She took good care of her hair. It was long and shining auburn and hung far down her back in corkscrew curls.
The doctor set my nose with a white A-shaped bandage. The point on my forehead, a leg on each cheek and the crossbar over the bridge of my nose. I felt very symbolic about that and thought about Dogsbody. When he was done with my nose he just flipped the sheet the other way and gave me a vaginal. As I was getting dressed the nurse came in for a blood sample. She sank the needle into my arm almost without looking. I was embarrassed when the vein collapsed. She shook her head and went off carrying a little tube of my blood.
I heard Kathy tell the others about a young fag she knew who had been sent up for the first time. She said he was smart. When he got onto the block he yelled for the key-man. When the guy showed himself the flit jumped into his arms and said “Take care of me big daddy, I’m in for five years!”
—
After that Christmas card scene Patsy hung on to me all the time. She’d almost follow me into the shower except she would never take off her girdles so she never took showers. I saw them when she undressed at night. Seven of them, black, white, pink, sweat gray, seven girdles. You couldn’t tell what she was shaped like for the lumps. I made fun of her and asked if they weren’t hot and how’d we really know she was a girl and she smelled awful never bathing and just pulling them open a little to pee. I’d grown used to the thigh-links by that time though I dressed under the covers to keep people from seeing them.
—
It was arithmetic and he sat in front of me and his hair was as soft and fine as fur and his skin so golden smooth with the pale hairs all growing in one direction on his arms and his clean body so close and I leaned over to look at his funny drawings and felt it come up inside me so strong whirling to put my arms around him and hold him close to me—I could barely see and how hungry to touch him almost bent me over and all the people and what he would be doing while I was doing that and I fell back shaking in the seat and lay silent and sick on the desk until the bell rang.
—
I used Patsy. Her parents never came to see her but they left lots of money for her in the commissary. She didn’t smoke and probably would never have gotten anything but I made her order candy. I’d steal it from her and give it to the other girls so they’d like me. They still didn’t so I’d go back and eat it myself. I tried to get her to order stamps and paper so I could write letters but she wouldn’t. She probably believed the mails were sinful. She always ordered matches even though she didn’t smoke. She’d go around with a book of matches in her hand all the time and sometimes she’d watch one burn. I could never figure out what she did with so many of them. She was always ordering more matches but I seldom saw her using the ones she had. Then one day I looked under her bunk and there were thousands of burnt-out matches. There were whole books that had been fired all at once. I knew she must be lighting them at night while we were asleep. Still I didn’t think much of it till later.
The night it happened I was playing checkers with one of the new girls after the gates had closed. The lights were still on but most of the girls were asleep. Patsy had moved into the upper bunk across from my lower. She was lying under the covers with her eyes open playing with her matchbook. The new girl and I were carrying on the speculative dialogue of a checker game: “Now let’s see, if I move here you’ll jump me there and there and if I move there you’ll jump here.” We were talking quietly so as not to wake people. In the middle of one of my moves Patsy’s voice came whining “I hear you whispering. You can’t fool me.” We looked up. What are you talking about? “I hear you whispering about jumping up here and attacking me.” Don’t be stupid Patsy. We’re just talking about the checker game! We went back to it indignantly. I should have seen it in her eyes then but I was tired of noticing things about her. Some time had passed and we were absorbed in our game again when I remember hearing Patsy mutter that she was going to “Burn out all this evil.” I paid no more attention, she was always talking to herself. I admit I heard the matches striking but in a place where most people smoke constantly a lighted match is nothing odd. As it was, neither of us looked up again until we heard the flames hissing.
She had dropped her burning matches on the blankets of the bunk next to her and the bunk below her and onto her own bunk. The other bunks were smoking and small flames licked through the sheets around the girls sleeping there. On Patsy’s bunk the flames were coming through the sheets and her shoe-blacked hair was smoking. I yelled something, not a word but loud, and jumped at her. She was trying to light another match. I gra
bbed her arms and tried to pull her off the bunk but she was wild and strong. She kicked and scratched screaming “GOD! GOD! GOD!” I saw bodies rolling around me beating at the flames and heard yelling back and forth between the cells. Questions and the shouted answer “FIRE!” Then, ducking to avoid Patsy’s feet I saw Blendina lay a burning card upon a black queen. The flames were hungry around her and she reached for a black jack. I was mad then and I hit Patsy as hard as I could in the throat. I pulled her off the bunk and she lay on the floor choking with her hair smoking and her girdles browning at the edges. I saw the red of the smoldering elastic burning at her waist and I kicked her as I turned to slap at the flames that were eating her bedding. They were too much for us to handle and the metal bunks were too hot to touch. The girls flopped on the nonburning bunks and drummed at the walls with their feet. The drumming had already started in the other three cells and it moved through the whole floor like an earthquake. With the gates locked in these metal cells we could fry or suffocate unless someone came quickly. I knelt in front of Sister Blendina and slapped at the small fires that had started in her cards. She went on laying them down in their fastidious order even though the blanket was pouring out thick white smoke and their faces were black and curling. She looked at me as I took a burning card from her hand. Fire was falling into her hair from the bunk above. The walls were thundering around us from the kicking feet. She looked at me with her eyes and her face. Her ancient face and her newborn eyes unchanging. I bowed over the cards and cried.