The Mars Room(63)

“They said they can’t guarantee my safety. Even if they put me in a snitch prison I might not be safe.”

She was petitioning to get reclassified as a female and sent to a women’s prison. There was another inmate in the state system who had done this, her lawyer told her. It was Serenity’s dream.

“I hope your dream comes true for you,” Doc called to her through the wall.

Soon, Doc himself was going to snitch prison, but he did not tell Serenity this, or really anything personal. What was there to say? I was a crooked cop who murdered people? His eggs might have been scrambled, he might be weak and softer than before, but he wasn’t stupid.



* * *



Over those months in the skilled nursing facility, when he wasn’t yelling back and forth with Serenity, he listened to the country music that was more or less playing all the time. There was a finger on a button in his brain pressing play. He heard Grandpa Jones. Booger Beasley. The Possum Hunters. The Fruit Jar Drinkers. The Tarpaper Sharecroppers. Stringbean and his String Band. Stringbean was a singer who wore pants belted at the thigh, way down low, attached to his shirt so the whole ensemble would stay up. It was funny, back then. In the 1960s. At least his foster father, Vic, thought it was funny and wanted Doc to laugh alongside. Or Vic wanted Doc to go fetch him an ashtray. Stringbean was tall but his pants were tiny, because belted down low, at his thighs, and much shorter than a tall man’s actual legs. Stringbean was not making fun of the way young black males had their pants so low down. It was way before all of that. If you told Stringbean that his pants were gangster style, and also prison style, belted at the thigh, well, you just wouldn’t. There would be no way to explain it. The comedy show on the Grand Ole Opry was for white people. Country music was for white people, even when it was sung by Charley Pride. Stringbean’s low-slung pants were a freakish, accidental echo. Hillbilly bands sang jingles for hillbilly flour, which was a brand. Hillbilly. Little Texas Daisy Rhodes sang the ad with the Golden West Cowboys. She had bad skin and dark eyes and a grainy lurid appeal. Not pretty, but pretty sexy.

Hank Williams was malnourished and his spine was crooked. Minnie Pearl had been cleaning rooms as a maid when Judge Hay gave her the big break, at the old-maid age of twenty-eight. Hank Snow had been a cabin boy. Marty Robbins was raised in a tent, caught wild horses for a living. Porter Wagoner had a third-grade education. Dolly Parton had a dozen siblings and no indoor plumbing. Country music was a homey affair. And not the homey of people who wore low pants like Stringbean, but not as a joke, not the homey they meant, which was another word for brother or friend.

Texas Ruby Owens burned up in a trailer fire. A trailer fire was a hazard for many sorts of people, Doc’s people. But also the types of people Doc arrested. Doc had shown up on the scene of a trailer fire in Westlake in the early 1980s. It was a slovenly place vandalized by its own inhabitants, Mexicans who mixed their beer with clam and tomato juice, lit superstition candles, and passed out. Forgot about the candles and one fell over. “Par-tee shack,” Doc had said after the firemen had doused the flames and the trailer was just a charred shell, hissing and steaming. Doc had thought it was funny these people had burned themselves homeless. Fuck, I was such an asshole.

He told Serenity he had been a bad person. He’d hooked up with another bad person, and they killed a guy together. He told the whole story to Serenity, of Betty and her husband, and her husband’s hit man. Serenity said if the dude was a hit man, maybe they’d done a good thing. Maybe Doc wasn’t all bad. Serenity was a flirt, she sugarcoated, probably part of why he liked her so much.

“I killed a kid for no reason,” he said, switching to the worst fact, the scene outside the pawn shop on Beverly. “Blew his brains out.”

“I killed someone, too,” Serenity said, to Doc’s surprise and irritation. This was his big confessional moment and it turned out they were both assholes. And suddenly Doc wanted to have a pissing contest, insist he was worse. But then he remembered Serenity was a lady and not to compete. He tried to focus on what she was saying.

“My cousin Shawn had this stupid idea to steal some shit from a house,” she said. “No one was supposed to be there. They were just some people with jobs and they were supposed to be at work, but they were home. Shawn went off the plan and tied them up but the man got loose and escaped. All we had was the woman and she was screaming her head off. Shawn ordered me to shoot her. I did what he said. I’d give anything to bring that lady back.”



* * *



Serenity got her reclassification. The state considered her female. After that everything went fast. They had to whisk her out of the prison, because they suddenly had a woman deep in the nursing ward of a men’s facility.

Doc felt all her excitement and nerves through the wall. He congratulated her and wished her luck.

“I’m scared,” she told him. “What if the women don’t accept me?”

Doc told her what Judge Hay had said to Minnie Pearl when she was just starting out, green as the hills of Tennessee, and nervous to go on out there on the big-time stage at the Grand Ole Opry, in front of so many people.

“You got to just go out there and love ’em, honey,” Judge Hay had said to Minnie Pearl, and Doc repeated to Serenity.

“Just go out there and love them, and they’ll love you right back.”