The Mars Room(51)

They called him Deary and Pumpkin and Doll. Deary creeped him out. It was what the old pawnbroker Elsabeta calls Raskolnikov before he carries out his plan to murder her, or at least that was the English equivalent the translator had chosen. Deary.

Administrative segregation, on the floor above death row, had no common area, and there was no interaction among women except yelling. The women hollered from one cell to another, heckled guards, made noise to have something to do. Gordon waited in a small office as a student clink-jangled down the hall in her restraints and was put in a cage for the lesson with him. That was where he first met Romy Hall, who was in his class now. What he had noticed about her was that she looked him in the eye. Many of the women had this way of looking at his shoulder, or past him. Their eyes rolled every which direction to avoid his. Also she was attractive, despite the conditions. Wide-set greenish eyes. A mouth with a cupid’s bow, was that what it was called, an upper lip that swoop-de-swooped. A pretty mouth that said: trust this face. And the face said: this is not what it seems. She spelled well, read with good comprehension. He wasn’t looking for a good speller. He wasn’t looking for anything, among the women in Stanville.

He’d seen her again in what the guards called a dog run—the outdoor cages where women in ad seg were placed for exercise. The walkway to 504 routed past a series of them, and his instinct was to avoid staring at the women trapped in these barren little enclosures. Hall had called to him in a casual way like a woman asking a man for a light, or if he knows what time the train stops here.

He liked having her in class. She did the reading in earnest. A lot of his students thought Gordon was stupid, spoke in codes and laughed at him, but this seemed fair enough. They had state commitments he could hardly understand—LWOP, which was life without parole, or multiple life sentences. Even a single life sentence was difficult for him to get his head around.

He passed out photocopied sections of books, Julie of the Wolves, Laura Ingalls Wilder, but he didn’t tell the prisoners they were children’s books, and it didn’t matter if the women enjoyed them. He kept it simple, since many had only an elementary school education. They wrote in bubble letters like adolescent girls. Even London, who the others called Conan and looked like a man, wrote in bubble letters. London was clever, it was obvious. Never did the reading but made the others laugh, which was something.

“Is bosom plural?” London asked.

“Depends on whose, maybe,” someone said.

“The bosom of Jones. Sounds like an adventure film. Lieutenant Jones and the Bosom of Doom.”

Geronima Campos, an old Native American woman, painted in her sketchbook all through class time. Gordon wondered if maybe she could not read or write. One day after class he asked her what she painted. If she admits she cannot write, he decided, he could suggest she work with him independently.

Portraits, she told him. She opened her sketchbook to show him. Each page had an image and, under it, a name. She could write. But the images were not faces. They were wild streaks of color. “This is you,” she said, and showed him a scribble of black lines with a staining splotch of blue.

When his class discussed a chapter of The Red Pony by John Steinbeck, the women talked about the mountains in the book and the ones they could see from main yard. They seemed afraid of the mountains, which surprised Gordon. He figured they’d regard the mountains as freedom, the one thing they could glimpse of the natural world. “You got to fight bears up there,” Conan said. “At least in here it’s just cubs. Cubs and scrubs. And I know I can win.”

When they got to the third chapter, “The Promise,” about Nellie the pregnant mare, one woman raised her hand and said when she’d delivered, her belly was heart-shaped, “in two parts,” she said, “just like a horse, and even the doctor confirmed it, that horses have a heart-shaped womb.”

They read from the chapter out loud. At the mention of pigs, a student interjected that her cousin wrote her from lockup in Arizona that they had a gas chamber where they put a pig one Sunday a month, to test the machine.

Gordon tried to steer the discussion back to the book. What was the promise that Billy Buck made?

The girl whose cousin had written her about the pigs gassed on Sundays said that when the pig “went up the pipe,” a smell settled down over the yard. “Smelt like peach blossoms,” she said. “That’s what my cousin told me.”

Romy Hall raised her hand. She said Billy Buck promised the boy, Jody, a healthy foal. Earlier, Billy Buck had promised to look after the red pony and the pony had died. This new vow was Billy Buck’s chance to be a man of his word, by delivering the foal safely.

Did he keep it, Gordon asked.

She said that was the trick of the story. Technically yes, but in order to deliver the foal, he had to kill the mare. He killed the mare to save its breach foal. He smashed its skull with a hammer and that was a bullshit way to keep a promise. The mare could have had other foals that weren’t breach, but she had to die because some cowboy was hung up on himself as a man of his word.

“It’s okay to make a promise,” London said to Gordon, as if summarizing for the teacher how life actually worked, “but it’s not always a good idea to keep one.”



* * *



One evening, as class ended, Romy Hall hovered. Gordon started collecting papers from an awkward position, on the far side of his own desk, in order to create more distance between them.