The Mars Room(66)

I had started helping Button with her homework for Hauser’s class. I took more pleasure in it than I would have guessed. It was a big-sister thing. Sammy was my big sister and I was Button’s, and Conan was something like the dad. We had a family. It was not that comforting, but it was something, even if Button was a pain in the ass. Always angry, and ready to fight. But when Teardrop ate Button’s pet rabbit, I saw a different side to Button.

Teardrop had boiled the rabbit in a pot with her stinger while the rest of us were programming. When we came back for afternoon count, the room was infused with the heavy smell of cooked meat.

“What kind of spread is that?” Conan asked.

Brunswick stew, Teardrop said.

Afterward, Conan kept saying, “Didn’t even have no seasoning, I mean nothing,” as if that was the infraction, eating Button’s pet rabbit unseasoned. “Anyway, a proper Brunswick stew is squirrel, not rabbit.”

Button crawled into her bunk with her rabbit’s little shirt that she had sewn. She stayed that way for a day.

“Are you sick?” a unit cop shouted at her.

Button, face in her pillow, did not answer.

“If you are not sick, and not going to your assigned program, I’m writing you up, Sanchez.”

The way Button clutched the little shirt reminded me of how Jackson held his stuffed ducky when he slept. He had been sleeping with the ducky since he was a baby. He would grip it tight, all night long. The last time I saw the ducky was the night I was arrested. Jackson, crying, police all around him. Holding his ducky and screeching, Mommy! Mommy!

“You can get another rabbit,” I told Button. “You’re good with them.”

Eventually she did, and trained it, put the same clothes on it, gave it the same name.

Only once had Button talked to me about her own baby. She told me what happened. From prison they took her to a hospital, where they stored her in a room with an armed guard. The guy even followed her to the bathroom, where she tried, in cuffs, a waist chain, and ankle shackles, to clean herself, wash the blood and afterbirth from the insides of her legs, put on the postpartum underwear and giant maxi-pad they tossed her way.

“They had somebody on me the whole motherfucking time.”

I pictured a cop standing over the newborn, already half criminalized, the cop watching it to be sure of no sudden movements.

Button had been badly torn up by the birth, and could barely walk from the stitches a doctor had given her. “A woodpecker,” she said, “with a do-rag that had American flags all over it. Not one flag, but many flags, all different sizes. All I could see was that pattern on his head as he sewed me up. These fucking flags. I said, How many stitches am I getting? He goes, Try not to think of it like that.”

A nurse gave Button a squeezy bottle with stuff to squirt on her stitches so she would heal right. Button was shackled to the bed, but the nice nurse held the baby girl up to her. Button had forty-eight hours to find someone to claim her. Button wasn’t sure she knew anyone who had a working car and could get to Stanville to take a baby. She watched the baby breathe, in its hospital crib. Stared at the baby’s perfect little face as she slept, the closed violet eyelids, the little mouth. In her exhaustion, Button slept, too. Woke up and her baby was gone. The guards said to get dressed. She put on her prison clothes. They said she could not take the squeezy bottle for her stitches. She was shoved in a van cage, where she bled all over the hard plastic seat and was in so much pain from her torn-up crotch that she had to sit on one buttock for the entire ride back to prison.



* * *



Jackson had asked me where his ducky came from. “Your dad gave it to you,” I said. He looked at his ducky with love and wonder. Kissed it.

His dad never gave him anything. That kid Ajax from the Mars Room had stolen it for me in an airport gift shop, on his way back from visiting his family in Wisconsin. I’ll give it to my son, I’d said. He looked confused, like he’d forgotten I even had one, but I kept Ajax at a distance and he and Jackson had never met.



* * *



I told Hauser I read Jesus’ Son, and asked him why he chose that book. I was paranoid he thought I was a no-good ex-junkie like the characters in the stories.

He said he gave it to me because it was excellent. That it was one of his favorite books.

There was one story where two guys strip copper wire out of a house, and the main guy sees the other guy’s wife floating in the sky and thinks he’s entered the other guy’s dream and it all made sense to me, I told Hauser. I said I knew people who did that, stole copper. Some of them were like the guys in the book, drug fiends looking for quick money, but there were others who did it like it was a profession.

Hauser kept getting me books, and after I read them, I passed them to Sammy, who read them, too. Sammy and I had both skipped seventh grade. We didn’t either of us turn out honors students, so it’s a strange coincidence. I’d gone to schools with Mexican girls, and we shared attitudes and a certain look: black chinos, Chinese shoes, the Maybelline eyeliner you heat with a lit match, and so I could reminisce with Sammy to pass time. On weekends I’d sometimes go to her housing unit and look at her photo collection. I’d get to see the visuals of all the stories she’d told me when we were locked up in ad seg together. Pictures of her when she was young, and of other people, friends of hers from over the years. Her at CIW, a women’s prison down south, which Sammy called CI Wonderful. “It was before mass incarceration,” she said, as if mass incarceration were some kind of natural disaster. Or a cataclysm, like 9/11, with a before and after. Before mass incarceration.