The Mars Room(46)

People clustered, catching up and hanging out, playing basketball or handball. Girls brought out guitars and strummed for small audiences (no gathering in groups larger than five). Some huddled and did drugs. Others had love affairs in the port-a-potties, or out in the open, with lookouts—pinners—watching for cops.

It was summer, and the hot wind rippled our loose clothing, which ranged from the palest blue, to navy, to the granite-speckle of denim—our fake jeans. The denim is not fake. The jeans part is. They are pants sewn crudely of denim, with an elastic waistband and a single lopsided, too-small pocket, and they are not jeans as I think of the term.

Sammy and I walked the track. We passed the 213 girls, who all waved to her. Main yard has area codes, just like the state.

Signs everywhere said NO RUNNING EXCEPT ON TRACK.

If you ran anywhere else they could shoot you.

“Who got her the wire cutters?”

“Who are you talking about?”

“Angel Marie Janicki.”

“Man, was she fine,” Sammy said. “She was the best-looking girl at Stanville.”

“Where did she get the wire cutters?”

“Free-world staff. Some guy. He was under the influence. I’m telling you, she was beautiful.”

Orders issued from the PA, clear and tight and loud.

“You by the bathrooms. I can see you smoking. Put that out right now.”

“Lozano, you’re out of bounds.”

A truck circled the perimeter of the prison, on a dirt road between the electrified fence and the outer, final fence.

“Copley, you left your dentures by the handball courts.” Audible laughter from the other guards near the microphone. “Copley, heh heh, come to the watch office to pick up your teeth.”

When it was hot, the guards mostly stayed in the air-conditioned watch office and observed us through binoculars. They did that when it was cold also. The yard is massive, and they are lazy.

“Which blind spot did she use?”

“Behind the gym. That’s why we have lockdowns now. There’s before Angel Marie Janicki and there’s after.”

“They can’t see the fence behind the gym?”

“Not from Tower One. But they don’t need to now. They have the electric fence.”

It took the perimeter truck at least ten minutes to circle the grounds. Maybe eleven.

How the guards know whose dentures: the inmate number is printed on the side, in the artificial gums.

We passed whale beach, just as the guards started breaking up their sunbathing party.

“Whale beach, no slingshots. Whale beach I said no slingshots. Everybody up and dressed.”

It’s not nice to say whale beach but that’s what it’s called, an area beyond the walking track where women grease up and fry. Slingshots are homemade undershirts. You were not supposed to bare flesh on main yard, but people did anyhow, slathered in cook oil or the fake butter they used in central kitchen, a brand called I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! or, as Conan called it, I Can’t Fucking Believe This Shit’s Not Butter.

No one runs on the track, since this was women’s prison and we were not training to kill. No one except Conan, who jogged past me and Sammy.

“I just slaughtered ten thousand gnats with my open mouth!”

He turned around, running backward, facing us.

“Try closing your mouth,” Sammy said. “You won’t have that problem.”

A female cop hurried past. “No sitting on the tables!” she yelled. It was also illegal to sit under them, which was the only way to get shade on the yard. Only regulation sitting was allowed.

Conan regarded the cop angrily marching past. He nodded approval.

“Boy, was she a different lay.”

At Stanville you can assume it’s a lie if the person volunteers it. It’s also a lie if the person says it in answer to a question. Conan’s tales were as tall as Tower One and Tower Two, where armed Fudds tracked us and ate pork rinds.

“She says to me, don’t just use your tongue, I want you to hum into me, like I’m a kazoo. That’s what she said. Like I’m a kazoo.”

The landscaping crew was working along the edges of the track with spray bottles of Roundup. Their job was to keep the yard one seamless expanse of dirt. “We keep it real tidy,” said Laura Lipp, who was now on yard crew. A top layer of bare dirt lifted and blew around, from valley gusts, as a new cop named Garcia came toward us.

All new staff are marks for prisoners and cops alike, but there was something particularly vulnerable about Garcia; he seemed lost out there on main yard, which is three yards, B, C, and D: three thousand women with six Fudds.

Fudd is short for Elmer Fudd. It was Conan who had started that.

“Hey, Fuddrucker,” he called to Garcia, who halted, and looked to be trying to decide whether to pretend he had not heard Conan, or to deal with Conan as a problem.

“But what is Fuddruckers?” Conan said to no one in particular, his usual audience.

“The joke is that it almost makes you say fuck, right? But then what is a ruddfucker? They make this stuff up and we all pretend these places exist, like, in history. Like Fuddruckers is some kind of grand family tradition.”

“My family has always gone there,” Laura Lipp said in a corrective tone, as she sprayed with her Roundup bottle.