The Mars Room(26)

He heard it again, the woman’s shriek, farther away now.

He called out. “Is anyone there? Are you okay?”

He stood in the cold and waited. He heard only wind.

He walked up the hill and got back into bed. Tried to sleep and could not.





10


Out walking in the bitter cold I spotted a porcupine in a tree and shot it. At first it seemed to be dead, but then I noticed that it was still breathing. Because of the thick hair and quills, I couldn’t see where the brain area of its head was. I put my gun against what I guessed should be about right and fired. It was difficult to butcher because the skin didn’t pull away from the flesh cleanly and I had to watch out for quills. It had many tapeworms inside its abdomen, so after cleaning it I washed my hands and my knife thoroughly in a strong solution of Lysol. Naturally I will cook the meat very well.

This morning I went wading in the snow for a couple of hours. When I got back I boiled the rest of my porcupine (heart, liver, kidneys, a few lumps of fat, and a large clot of blood taken from the chest). I ate the kidneys and part of the liver, which were delicious. I also ate part of the blood clot, which tasted good enough but had a dry texture that I didn’t care for.



* * *



After first thaw, dynamite blast began booming all over the hills. Occasionally audible at my cabin. Exxon conducting seismic exploration for oil. Couple of helicopters flying over the hills, lowering a thing with dynamite on cables, make blast on ground. Instruments measure vibrations. In late spring I went and camped out, hoping to shoot up a helicopter in the area east of Crater Mountain. This proved harder than I thought, because a helicopter is always in motion. Only once had half a chance. Two quick shots, as copter crossed a space between trees. Both missed. When I got back to camp, I cried, partly from frustration at failing. But mostly from grief about what is happening to this countryside. It is so beautiful. But if they find oil, disaster.





11


“Okay, flush!” Sammy Fernandez was teaching me how to pass things through the toilet. You run a line on the riser, to send things up or down. Burritos. Twinkies. Cigarettes. Pruno in a shampoo bottle.

Sammy and I were sharing a cell in administrative segregation for the next ninety days, the punishment we both got for refusing officers’ commands. We were in a six-by-eleven-foot room with a toilet and two concrete beds with plastic mattresses. We talked to each other, and took turns standing at the little window in our door to watch the hallway, otherwise known as Main Street, where, if you were lucky, you could see some other person on ad seg being hustled to the showers in handcuffs with two cops behind her, which is ad seg protocol. We were confined twenty-four hours a day, except for the two times a week that we each got taken down the hall for a shower, and once a week when we were given an hour of yard time in an outdoor cage.

Death row was underneath us, in the same building. The cops call them “grade A.” They say it about fifty times a day and probably the prison administration thought it was bad for staff morale to say “death row” over and over.

On our plumbing riser, one floor down, was an old friend of Sammy’s, Betty LaFrance. Betty LaFrance, like the other women on death row, had access to canteen and contraband. We had access to Betty, through the toilet and the air vent, and thank goodness, because Betty did not speak to just anyone, much less transmit burritos or bunk-distilled liquor. She and Sammy had been in county jail together years earlier, when Betty was fighting her case.

“Is that my Chicana child? Sammy?” she’d shouted to us through the air vent on the first night. Betty had her black babies and her Chicana children and Sammy was her favorite.

Betty had been a leg model for Hanes Her Way pantyhose. “Her legs are insured for millions. Her foot has that curve under it like a Barbie doll, but it’s real.” Sammy said Betty had stiletto heels in her cell on death row. She paid a cop hundreds to smuggle them in, just so she could put them on now and again and admire her own legs.

Hundreds. Millions. You can’t believe anything people say. But what they say is all you have.

Leg model or not, Betty’s pruno, like all pruno, looked and smelled like vomit. The garbagy smell of pruno is so distinct that when people are brewing, they disperse baby powder in the air of their cell to mask the scent.

“That’s the best hooch at Stanville but you got to double-decant it, honey,” Betty shouted to us up the air vent. “Don’t forget to decant. It’s got to breathe.”

She made it the usual way, with juice boxes poured into a plastic bag and mixed with ketchup packets, as sugar. A sock stuffed with bread, the yeast, was placed in the bag for several days of fermentation.

Betty sent up a wineglass next, the plastic kind with a screw-on base.

“Where the hell did she get this glass?”

“The regular way,” Sammy said. “The vault or canoe.”

Women smuggled heroin, tobacco, and cell phones from visiting inside their vaginas and rectums. Betty was smuggling plastic stemware.

Sammy and I passed the pruno back and forth, and she told me Betty had arranged her husband’s murder to get his life insurance. You don’t talk about people’s crimes. But Betty was different. Death row was different. They were the big celebrities of Stanville, and celebrity gossip has a role.

The hit man who killed her husband was her lover, but while she was waiting for the money to come through, Betty worried he was turning on her, so she had her hit man killed by a dirty cop she met at a bar in Simi Valley. She was going to have the second hit man—the dirty cop who’d killed the first hit man—knocked off when they caught her. She was afraid he’d squeal, or threaten to, and blackmail her. They were in Las Vegas, partying on her life insurance money. She asked a security guard at the El Cortez casino if he would murder the cop for a payoff.