The Mars Room(43)

I was happy to learn I was in Conan’s room and unhappy to learn it was also Laura Lipp’s room.

She approached as I was fitting a sheet to my mattress.

“Hi there, I’m Laura Lipp and I’m from Apple Valley.”

I kept making my bed.

“That’s in the Mojave Desert. It’s drier than any bone and there are no apples. Applebee’s, though.”

Laura Lipp didn’t remember our eight-hour bus ride together. I didn’t question it, wasn’t going to insist on familiarity.

I was putting my few possessions, the photos of Jackson, into my small locker, when another roommate came in. “Nuh uh!” she yelled, looking at me. “No hillbilly bitches in this room. Get the fuck out.” Her name was Teardrop. She was huge and would have destroyed me if I had to fight her, but Conan intervened on my behalf.

“She’s cool. I cosign her.” They went out to the hall to talk.

“Except I think the Applebee’s closed,” Laura went on like nothing had happened. “We’ve had a lot of changes. None of them for the better.”

I pulled a Fernandez and told her to shut the hell up.

“The town’s got history though,” she said, carefully moving away, out of fist-swinging range, just in case. “It was a fine place and it’s gone downhill. We used to be cowboy country. All the country and western people came because of Roy Rogers. He had a museum with a big display of all his fishing lures. He owned the Apple Valley Inn. My father took us there for Sunday dinners. It was a carefree time. There weren’t problems like now. You know what people were worried about? Static cling. That was the big fear on TV and in people’s hearts. Static cling.”

Conan and Teardrop returned. “Don’t leave nothing outside your locker!” Teardrop yelled at me, but in a slightly nicer tone, like she was resigned to letting me stay. “And nobody runs the fucking water, no tap and no flushing, until I get up in the morning.”

Button Sanchez, who had the baby in receiving, was also in our room. The other three roommates were what Sammy would call nondescrips. Women with short sentences, minding their own business and staying out of trouble.

How I was hillbilly and Laura wasn’t, I didn’t understand, until I figured out that Laura was paying Teardrop extorted rent money to stay in our room. As a baby killer, nobody wanted her, so it was possibly her only choice.

At dinner I saw Sammy in line at the chow hall and tried to talk to her. She looked at me and shook her head. A cop shined a light on me. “BUS YOUR TRAY,” his voice boomed over a microphone. They give you ten minutes to eat their shitty food and you have to do it in silence. Mostly it’s people who don’t have money who go to chow. Teardrop only ever ate in our room, from her personal supply of canteen food, ramen bowls that she added water to and heated with a stinger.

That evening I put my name on the sign-up sheet and waited in line for the phones in the common area. People were shouting into the phones because others were shouting next to them. The signs on the cinder-block walls were the same as in receiving, that cursive plea: Ladies, no whining Ladies, report to staff if you are experiencing signs of norovirus. Same dirty pink paint on the doors and railings, a color that was probably meant to relax us institutionalized knuckleheads. The line for the phones went fast because the people being called didn’t pick up. I dialed my mother. My mother had an account with Global Tel Link, the company that monopolized jail and prison calls. You can’t get through to a number that has no Global Tel Link account. I knew she was dead. Still, I had to try. I didn’t get through. The public defenders all have Global Tel Link, so I called Johnson’s lawyer but he didn’t answer.

For the next several days I signed up for phone calls and waited in line and dialed the lawyer. After my eighth try I finally reached him. I begged him to help me get information about Jackson.

He said he would try, and to give him a week at least. When I finally got through to him again, he said he’d been attempting to figure out who Jackson’s case manager was, but had been unable. This work, he said, was really for a dependency court lawyer.

Would the state provide one, I asked him, trying to control my tone, not sound angry and desperate.

“Oh, no,” he said, and in the gap where I might have pressed him, as if he were obliged to help me, he lunged into that silence before I could and said he was extraordinarily busy with his assigned caseload, and I was not on it, and that he had to get off the phone.



* * *



As soon as I was eligible, I tried to get a prison job. That was Sammy’s advice. Sammy wasn’t in my unit but she was on C yard, which meant we could hang out in our free time. “White girls get all the best jobs,” she said. “You can clerk, sit in air-conditioning and type letters, while us black and brown women pull used tampons from the septic tank screen for eight cents an hour. Take advantage.”

It was true that the clerks were all white. I tried to clerk, too, but you had to have a clean disciplinary record, and you had to be liked by the cops.

Sammy, Conan, and I all got assigned to the woodshop, which was hiring at twenty-two cents an hour: good money. Conan bragged that with his wages he was going to invest in a tattoo rig, start a side business and do some art on himself. We were sitting in the common area, waiting for the Friday night movie to begin. They were delayed because the film that was scheduled had profanity. They had to swap it for Driving Miss Daisy, which they’d shown us the Friday before.