V.I. Warshawski: Hard Time Part 27

We got paid by the piece: nine cents for Tshirts, which were the easiest to a.s.semble, fifteen cents for shorts, thirtythree for the heavy denim jackets.

Some of the women were so fast they could make nine or ten jackets an hour. One of my neighbors was turning out thirtytwo Tshirts an hour.

When I started, one of the women was detailed to show me how to a.s.semble a shirt. She put one together at lightning speed, unwilling to slow down her own production to show a newcomer the ropes. I had followed her moves as best I could. By the end of the second day, I had worked out how to do eighteen an hour, but of those only ten or so met the qualitycontrol standards; the ruined ones got deducted from my pay. And if Wenzel was angry at a woman-as he was with me-he would deliberately destroy a garment and then deduct the cost from her pay. One thing about prison labor: there is no shop steward or Labor Department to take a grievance to. If the foreman is p.i.s.sed off at you and wants to spit at you or slap you or destroy your output, there's not a lot you can do about it.

In a twist of irony, we sewed little tags into the shirts that read Made with Pride in the USA. So I had learned one thing-that the shirts in the commissary were made in the prison, although the ones we sewed were all plain white. Maybe they were shipped to one of the men's prisons for the Mad Virgin or Captain Doberman to be embroidered onto them.

In an adjacent room, women operated heavy shears to cut out the pieces to the garments we were sewing. A pair of runners went between the cutting room and the sewing room, bringing us the raw materials for construction.

We got two tenminute breaks in our sixhour shift, with half an hour in the dining hall, but most of the women except the smokers preferred to work through their breaks. As Miss Ruby had said, the crew here were all foreign, primarily Hispanic but with a handful of Cambodian and Vietnamese women.

Also as Miss Ruby had said, most of the women in the clothes shop were housed together. They arrived in a group in the morning, were escorted to the dining hall or commissary in a group, and were taken off together to a separate floor at night. I hadn't been moved over to their quarters, but I was closely monitored now by the CO's. So closely that I decided I had better speak only Italian, or my fractured Spanish, from now on, even in my cell.

My withdrawal from English made Solina and the crowd begging for letters at first tearful, and then furious. In revenge, Solina started smoking heavily in the cell, as if hoping to provoke me into yelling at her in English instead of Italian. She fell asleep each night with a cigarette burning on the floor beside her, when I would climb down to make sure it was out-I didn't want to go through everything I was enduring only to suffocate in a cigarette fire.

It seemed absurd to think that I could fool the CO's into thinking I wasn't really an English speaker, but I hoped to keep the pretense in place long enough to learn something about Nicola's end. CO Polsen was the likeliest to get me into trouble. When he was on duty in the afternoon, responsible for taking me over for recreation after my work shift ended, he showered me with foul language. When he did that, I treated him as if he were part of the ambient air, but if he tried touching me I would shout loudly-still in Italian-and keep shouting until I could move away from him to a public s.p.a.ce. It wasn't a great defense, but it was the only one I could think of. I hoped I learned something useful soon, because I didn't know how much time I'd have before either the women or Polsen decided to take me apart.

In the shop I trailed around with the smokers during our brief breaks, trying to ask them about Nicola or about the clothes-where did they go when we finished them? Illinois law said that anything manufactured in the prisons had to be for prison consumption, but I'd never seen any of these plain shirts or jackets for sale in our commissary. And our-or at least my coworkers'-output was enormous.

It was the size of the production, and the fact that no English speakers were working in the shop, that kept me going, despite my hackedup hands and the fury that the foreman Erik Wenzel kept unleashing on me.

The other thing that kept me going was a room down the hall where our goods were sent when they were done. Every hour Wenzel and CO Hartigan, the subordinate who'd taken my money from Miss Ruby to give me my a.s.signment, collected our output, inspected it, wrote on a card how much was usable, and stacked the finished goods on a giant trolley. One of the Cambodian women pushed the trolley down the hall to the next room.

My second morning, during the smoking break, I sauntered after her. When the door opened to admit the trolley, I saw a kaleidoscope of lights, machines, and people. Before I could look more closely I was flung hard to the ground. I rolled over, ready to kick my a.s.sailant. I actually had my legs scissored, pulling in to strike, before I remembered myself. Wenzel stood over me, his face red with fury, and ordered me back to the workroom in a mix of English and Spanish. His Spanish wasn't any better than mine, but it included an array of crude words for female anatomy that startled me. He wrote me a ticket, my third since coming to Coolis. My tickets could get me put in segregation at any moment, since they were all for offenses that could be construed as physical a.s.saults.

My glimpse into the room had been so fleeting, I couldn't make sense of what I'd seen. How secret could it be if the Cambodian women were allowed into it? Yet my coworkers were so fearful of talking about it that it must be very secret indeed. The only women who worked back there had been given life sentences-that was all I could glean. No one ever talked to them-they were housed in a separate part of the prison.

When I persisted in trying to ask about the room the next morning, the smokers backed away from me in a cl.u.s.ter, as if I were a wolf going after a flock of pigeons. CO Hartigan was a heavy smoker himself; the women eyed him nervously when I talked to them.

"Tu preguntas demasiado," one of the women finally whispered to me when Hartigan had gone into the cutting room to deal with a machine that had stopped working.

"No sigas pregontando por Nicola.Do not keep asking about Nicola. She learned that her baby was dead, and she wanted to go to Chicago to bury the child. Of course no one would let her leave, but she was mad with grief and began pounding on Wenzel with her tiny hands. He and Hartigan shot her with those guns of theirs that fire electricity, and then they laughed and made sport with her.

Now, ask nothing more. For us she never existed, and the guards will punish you severely if they know you are inquiring about her. And they will punish me if they think I remember her."

Her hoa.r.s.e Spanish was hard for me to follow, but before I could ask her to repeat anything she flinched and tried to duck back into the workroom. CO Hartigan grabbed her arm and then one of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, which he twisted until she gasped in pain.

"You're not talking out of turn, are you?" he asked the woman. "Remember: we know where your little boys are. Sabemos donde son tuos nios. "

Her eyes were streaming and she spoke pantingly. "Only tell woman, she no have money, no get my cigarette. She lazy, not working, why I think she pay back someday?"

I knew her quick wits were protecting herself, not me, and the look she gave me was one of loathing. Hartigan let her go and slapped me for good measure: I was a lazy c.u.n.t, he said, and they weren't going to give me a free ride forever.

Once again I controlled myself in the nick of time. Rage and helplessness were so bottled and boiling inside me, I knew I had to leave Coolis soon; even if the guards didn't harm me I was destroying myself. If I didn't learn something soon that I could use against Baladine, I would forfeit my only chance to understand what was going on in the clothes operation. I had a pretty clear picture at least of why Nicola had gone to the hospital, even if I didn't know how she'd died in Chicago, but it wasn't anything I could use to get her killers arrested.

I didn't want to think about what might have lain behind the woman's phrase that the guards "made sport" with Nicola. I only knew I had to move fast before either my language fraud or my inept.i.tude with the sewing machine landed me in trouble. How fast I'd have to move was made clear to me on my return to the jail wing that afternoon, when I got a summons to see a visitor.

Morrell stood up on my entrance, an oldfashioned courtesy so remote from the mores of Coolis that I blinked back tears. It was a Thursday; as always midweek, the visitors' room was almost empty.

Morrell squeezed my fingers, a fleeting pressure that the CO in the room overlooked. "You need to leave as soon as possible, Vic."

I agreed, thinking of the abuse I was enduring, and started to detail some of the language and actions of the CO's and the work shift managers.

Morrell cut me short. "That's appalling, Vic, but that isn't what I mean. Things have come unraveled on the outside. Since Baladine left Chicago shortly after your arrest, he apparently didn't know what had happened to you. He's coming back from Europe tomorrow. He knows-or will know when he lands-that you're here.

And while you're in Coolis he has the power to have you treated more harshly than you want to imagine."

I shivered involuntarily. "How do you know this?"

He gave a glint of a smile. "I'm a journalist, I have press credentials. I've started being very attentive to Alex Fisher at Global, told her I'm working on a book about the security business."

To my chagrin I felt a stab of elemental jealousy. In the midst of my potpourri of misery and fear, I was picturing the contrast between Alex, with her clear, smooth skin and Rodeo Drive wardrobe, and my own bedraggled condition. Like seducing Murray wasn't good enough for her, she had to take Morrell, too. I muttered something farouche about her being able to make sure he got a good movie deal for his book.

"In that case I'd better get a contract before she reads it. She thinks highly of you, by the way, and says it's a pity your stubbornness gets in the way of your success. I've told her you were out of town, vacationing until your trial, and I don't think she's doublechecked that news. And since she's extremely busy, she's been happy to palm me off on her poor overworked a.s.sistant. Who's not sophisticated enough to keep news to herself. Like the urgent email Baladine sent Alex yesterday demanding to know your whereabouts after making bail. It will take them this long"-he snapped his fingers-"to learn you're in here. Have you found out what you wanted to know?"

I shook my head. "I've learned some things, but not enough. It seems reasonably clear that Nicola died of injuries she got here, although I don't think I can ever prove that. There's some reign of terror that goes on with the women in the clothes shop where she worked-the foreman today threatened the children of a woman who was talking to me. Whether that's random-there's a lot of vile abuse that goes on here, most of it s.e.xual a.s.sault-or whether there's something specific they don't want the women talking about, I don't know. It's mighty peculiar that the only women who work back there can't speak English."

Morrell tapped the table impatiently. "Vic, do I have your permission to go to Freeman and tell him to bail you out as fast as possible? He might be able to appear for you in a Chicago court tomorrow instead of waiting through the weekend."

I rubbed my face, overwhelmed with a desire to lay my head down on the table and cry my heart out. Everything I'd been doing seemed so futile, ever since the night I'd stopped to help Nicola Aguinaldo. My career was in shambles, I was demoralized from my weeks in Coolis, I didn't know any more than I had a month ago about why BB Baladine was gunning for me.

"Yeah, tell Freeman to bail me out. I don't have much time left in here before everything comes unglued for me in here, anyway. Everyone on the jail side knows I speak English, that I was even writing legal letters for some of the women. It won't be long until that word gets over to the creep who runs the clothes shop, and then I'll-well, the bestcase scenario is I'll be a.s.signed back to the kitchen."

"Vic, I don't know whether you're heartbreakingly gallant or only out of your mind, but you're worth a dozen of Alex Fisher, with her stock options thrown in besides. Don't do anything too foolish before Freeman can post bail." His lips brushed the back of my hand and he was gone.

CO Polsen wasn't on duty; the woman guard patted me down in a perfunctory way and sent me to my cell to be counted before dinner. I brushed the back of my hand against my cheek. I had one last chance to learn something tangible at Coolis. I don't know if it was gallantry or insanity that was driving me, but the only plan that came to me made me so cold that I lay shivering under my blanket while Solina and her friends marched in formation to the dining hall.

41.

Photo Op In the middle of the night, when I couldn't sleep, I wrote a letter to Lotty. A light in the corridor came through the grated window at the top of our door, projecting a small grid of light on the wall behind our toilet, enough for me to make out the shape of my words on the page without being able to read them.

I wanted Lotty to know how important she'd always been to me, since my student days at the University of Chicago when I'd been not only young but rawly unsophisticated. She took me under her wing and taught me basic social skills I'd missed growing up in a rough neighborhood with a dying mother. Somehow over the years she'd moved from being a kind of fulfillment of my mother to a more equal friend, but she'd never lost her importance for me.

If I am foolhardy, daring without judgment, I wrote, it isn't because I don't love you, Lotty. I hate to bring you grief, and if I am seriously injured you will grieve. I don't have an answer to the conundrum. Not the old masculine swagger that I couldn't love you as much as I do if I didn't love honor more. Something more restless drives me, a kind of terror that if I don't take care of things myself I will be left with a terrible helplessness. More than anyone I've ever known, you've kept that helplessness at bay. Thank you for your years of love.

In the morning I quickly put it in an envelope without reading it over. On my way to breakfast I handed it over to CO Cornish for the outbound mail.

The condemned woman's last meal: cornflakes, powdered orange juice, watery coffee, a piece of soggy toast. At nine, CO Cornish brought me to the gate of the prison's work wing. There we were counted again and marched down the hall to our a.s.signments. One group was escorted to the room of phone banks, where Miss Ruby and other wellspoken inmates took hotel reservations for families crossing America on their summer vacations. The rest of us were taken farther down the hall to the sewing room. We stood at attention while we were counted for a third time, this time by Wenzel and Hartigan, and then sent to our machines.

Before I could start on the pile of pieces I had left over from yesterday, Hartigan grabbed my arm. "You!" he spat at me in English. For one heartstopping minute I thought maybe Baladine had already tracked me down and given orders to treat me in some unspeakable way.

Apparently it was only my inept.i.tude as a seamstress that made Hartigan grab me.

In a graphic mix of Spanish and English he explained I was being demoted to a cutter. The pay there was a flat dollarthirty an hour, did I understand?

"Comprendo," I said through lips thick with anger.

For the next three hours, with one tenminute break, I stood in the cutting room, pinning stencils to thick stacks of cotton, then holding the stacks in position as automatic shears sliced through them. It was backbreaking work, made harder by Hartigan's periodic eruption into the room to yell, "Vamos, mas rapido!"

All last night as I had lain sleepless on my bunk and in the morning as I moved the heavy plastic stencils onto the fabric, I kept rehearsing in my mind what I wanted to do. My chance came at lunchtime. We were allowed to put aside the stencils and turn off the shears just as the Cambodian woman gathered up the previous hour's sewing output onto the trolley. While everyone else moved into formation for lunch, I followed the trolley down the hall in the other direction. As people chattered and milled around stretching their sore arms, neither Wenzel nor Hartigan noticed I was going the wrong way.

The Cambodian woman rang a buzzer in the door. When it opened I followed her inside. In the confused medley of light and noise that greeted me, I couldn't make anything out at first: giant machines, women in Corrections Department smocks, the ratcheting of conveyor belts. It was a major production plant. I moved to a conveyor belt carrying Tshirts.

Lacey Dowell's face stared up at me. Her red hair was artlessly tangled, her lips halfparted in a mischievous smile. The smile was repeated half a dozen times as shirts pa.s.sed in front of me on the belt. Hot lights overhead made me start to sweat; I realized they were there to dry wet ink-two women operating a giant press on my right were stamping decals onto shirts the Cambodian woman was unloading from the trolley. At a second belt facing me, another pair were stamping s.p.a.ce Beret insignia onto denim jackets.

At the far end of the belts other women pulled the garments off, folded them, and fed them to someone operating a commercial iron. Another pair laid ironed clothes in boxes. I watched in frozen fascination, until a shout behind me galvanized me. I began snapping the stem of my wrist camera, taking pictures as fast as I could, of Lacey's face, of the belt, of women pressing decals onto shirts and jackets.

A man grabbed my arm, yelling, "What the h.e.l.l are you doing in here? Where did you come from?"

I darted away, trying to snap a picture of the machines themselves, of the workers, of anything where I could get a clear view. The man who'd yelled out at me began to chase me. I ducked under a conveyor belt and skittered on my hands and knees toward the entrance. The women feeding shirts to the iron stopped working and huddled against a wall. Clothes began to pile up and then fall to the floor.

My pursuer tripped on the Tshirts and bellowed for backup. CO Hartigan came through the door on the run. Jackets and shirts tumbled from belts and got tangled in the machinery. Sirens howled and the clanking machines ground to a halt.

I ducked under Hartigan's outstretched arm and pushed open the door, with some foolish hope of pretending I'd gotten turned around and ended up in the room by mistake. Wenzel was on the other side of the door. He seized my arms. I slid my legs around his ankles and with the fury that had been boiling in me for a month, took his feet out from under him. He fell backward, still holding me, but his grip loosened as he fell, and I pulled away, rolling on my side and coming up in a crouch.

Hartigan was facing me, pulling a gun. I twisted away, then suddenly lost control of my limbs. I was shot through the air as from a cannon and careened headfirst onto the pile of jackets. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't move. The skin on my chest stung. My legs were wet, and I smelled urine and burning cloth.

My arms and legs jerked spastically.

Hartigan stood over me, a smile of exultant sadism on his face, and lifted one large booted foot. I managed to wrench myself sideways just before he kicked me.

His boot sank savagely into my ribs, and then into my skull.

When I woke I was in a dark room. My head pounded violently. I tried to lift a hand to feel my head but I couldn't move my arms. My ribs ached and my stomach heaved. I shut my eyes and pa.s.sed out again.

I felt a hand on my arm and someone saying, Is she alive? I wanted to pull my arm away but I still couldn't move it. I was alive, someone else confirmed, but I wasn't going anywhere, they could take off the manacles.

"Someone like her will fool you, Hartigan," the first voice said. It belonged to CO Polsen. "Wenzel has a concussion from the blow she gave him. Leave her chained up, that way you'll be sure."

It was the fall, I wanted to say. I took his legs out from under him and he fell. But my jaw hurt and I couldn't speak. Later someone brought me water. I was so grateful tears spurted out the sides of my eyes.

My cousin BoomBoom had dared me to climb the crane, I tried to tell my mother.

And why had I done it, she demanded in Italian. Do you need to do everything that crazy boy does? What are you trying to prove, that you're a cat who has nine lives? My father told her to let me be, I had a concussion and two broken ribs and that was punishment enough. And my punishment, my mother shouted in English, if she's taken from me in one of these crazy exploits you and your brother laugh at, I will never survive it.

I thought it would be safe now to open my eyes, because my father would be smiling down at me, but when I opened them I was in a cell-not the one I shared with Solina-one with a single bed in it. I heard a sharp snap. The pounding pain had subsided to a muted throb and I could move my head. I saw the door, with a window in the top and an eye bulging as it peered at me. There was a second snap as a shutter slid across the window, leaving me once more in darkness.

I kept dozing off into phantasmagoric dreams, where I was eight or nine or ten, with my mother as she made me practice scales until my arms hurt so much I begged her not to make me do music anymore, or with BoomBoom at a Fourth of July picnic where the fireworks made my head ache and tears run down my cheeks.

The fireworks smelled, too, like some kind of horrible uncleaned toilet.

The snapping shutter roused me periodically. I could move my arms now, but the pain in my ribs and gut was so great I didn't move them much. I was alternating between drenching sweats and chills so violent they caused a rattling at my feet. I thought my bones were clanking, but when I tried to sit up to look at my feet, the pain in my stomach stabbed me brutally. I cried out and lay back down.

Once when the shutter opened I had a flash of awareness: my legs were manacled together. It didn't matter-I was in too much pain to walk anywhere. I shut my eyes again.

Someone asked again if I was still alive. I knew the voice, but my mind floated off. She's not in good shape, a second man answered. She stinks, the first voice said. She'll be in back, Polsen, you won't smell her once you get her inside.

Wenzel can't drive; you'll have to come along. Put on some gloves and a mask.

Change her shirt; we don't want to get into the mess we had with the other one, having to come up with a clean shirt because this one's got burn marks on it.

CO Polsen. He was tearing off my shirt; he was going to treat me the way he had that other woman, and I was powerless to stop him. I would not cry I would not give him the satisfaction I would not cry when he touched the raw skin on my b.r.e.a.s.t.s. I was jerked upright, and the pain across my abdomen was so ferocious I blacked out. Then I was sick and my father was carrying me, but he was too rough, he was hurting me, my head and my stomach.

"No, Papa," I begged. "Put me down."

That made him laugh, and I cried for my mother but she couldn't hear me. When he finally put me down it was on something hard, not my bed."Mio letto," I sobbed."Voglio mio proprio letto." He slapped my face and shut the door on me, and I remembered it hurt his feelings when I spoke Italian, because he didn't speak it himself. "I want my own bed," I repeated in English, but it did me no good, he started shaking the room from side to side so that my sore ribs and stomach bounced against the hard floor.

I kept pa.s.sing out. I would come to when an extrafierce jolt flung me against the floor. At some point the jolting stopped and the door opened. I had another brief moment of clarity: I was in a panel truck, lying on packing cartons. A couple of men approached me. I couldn't protect myself as they seized me. They tossed me on the ground and slammed the van door shut. Polsen called me a stupid c.u.n.t and said this would teach me to mind my own business and then they left me on the ground and returned to the truck. The back door swung open as they drove off and several boxes bounced onto the road.

I saw now how Nicola Aguinaldo got out of prison and made it back to Chicago.

And died.

42.

Slow Mend I looked up and saw the machine that made decals ready to push into me. My arms were manacled to the bed and I couldn't lift them to guard my face. A man leaned over me. I didn't want CO Polsen to know I was scared, but I couldn't help crying out. The man called me "cookie" and seemed to be weeping. I shut my eyes and fell back asleep.

The next time I woke I realized the machine was the arm holding an IV drip. I wasn't wearing manacles but had lines running into both arms and an oxygen tube in my nose. A woman was feeling my left wrist. She had on a yellow sweater and smiled when she saw me watching her.

"You're all right, you know. You're with friends, so don't worry: you're not in prison and you're going to recover."

I looked at my wrist. It was empty. I didn't have my watch, my father's watch that he'd worn for twentyfive years.

I croaked something and she said, "Your watch didn't come over from the hospital with you. I'll ask Dr. Herschel about it."

This seemed so disastrous to me that I began to cry. The woman in the yellow sweater sat down next to me and wiped my eyes, since I was having trouble moving my arms. The fingers on my right hand were in splints, but both my arms were so sore it seemed like too much work to lift them to wipe my eyes.

"We'll do everything we can to get your watch back to you. Now that you're awake I want to see if you can drink something. You'll recover faster if you can start to eat on your own. As soon as you drink a bit of this, I'll call the hospital about your watch." She cranked the bed up, and I swallowed something sweet.

I croaked again.

"You're in the Grete Berman Inst.i.tute. Recovering from your injuries."

I knew I had heard of the Grete Berman Inst.i.tute, but I couldn't remember what it was. I went back to sleep, puzzling over it, but after that I began recovering, drinking more each time I woke, staying awake for longer intervals.

Sometimes the man who called me "cookie" was there, and I finally remembered it was Mr. Contreras. I tried to smile and say something so that he'd know I knew him and appreciated his being there; I could just manage to say "Peppy," which made him start to cry again.