Cornish took me back to my cell and told me to be very careful where I walked at night. Everyone on my wing seemed to know about the attack. In fact, they seemed to have been warned away from the showers when I came up from my workout.
“You’re in trouble now,” Solina said, gloating. “Rohde’s fucking one of the Iscariots. He got those two to jump you out of revenge for Angie. And he put money on them.”
When we stood at attention for our predinner head count, Rohde handed me a ticket. He had written me up for instigating a fight that injured two other inmates. My hearing would come in a month, after the captain had reviewed the charge. Great. Now Captain Ruzich would realize I was one of his inmates. As I studied the ticket I got my one gleam of hope: Rohde had put my name down as Washki. Maybe the fact that none of the CO’s could pronounce my last name, let alone spell it, would save my butt.
Miss Ruby stopped me after dinner and told me she was disappointed in me, that she didn’t think fighting was the right way to solve my problems inside. “The women tell me you’re old enough to be a mother to most of them. This isn’t the way to look after the young ones or set them an example.”
I pulled down my T–shirt to show her the oozing wound in my neck. “Should I have turned the other cheek until I was cut to ribbons?” I demanded. She gave a snort that was half a gasp but wouldn’t stay to discuss the point.
After that I began to wonder if the attack in the shower would make it impossible for me to learn anything about Nicola. I even began to wonder if Baladine knew I was here, if he’d e–mailed the warden from France and told him to stage the attack. Only the realization during the next few days that none of the CO’s treated me any better or worse than the rest of the inmates made me decide that was a paranoid fantasy.
The fight in the shower grew as it was told around the prison. I had moves like you saw in the kung fu movies. I had given the two Iscariots subtle blows that stunned them and then pulled a knife to finish them off when the guards intervened. Some of the women wanted to attach themselves to me as a protector, but others, especially the real gangbangers, thought they wanted to fight me. I managed to talk my way out of several confrontations, but it added to my tension to have to be on my guard during recreation time or in the dining room. Any time I saw signs that anger was about to spill over into combat, I’d leave the area and return to my cell.
Fights were always breaking out, over things that might seem trivial to you if you’d never had this experience, the experience of being crammed behind bars with a thousand other people, without privacy, at the mercy of whatever whims the guards might feel that day. Someone stole someone else’s body lotion, or pushed in front of her in line, or spoke disrespectfully of a relative, and fists and handmade weapons flashed out in an instant.
People also fought over clothes. You got a replacement bundle only every five years in prison, so a torn shirt or lost button mattered terribly. Women paired off as lovers and had lovers’ quarrels. Various street gangs besides the Iscariots marked territory and tried to control such things as the flow of drugs.
After my fight in the shower room, my roommate became more nervous around me than ever. At least fear made her cut down on her smoking and made her halfheartedly clean out our sink every few days, but I learned she had begged for a transfer, terrified that I would jump her in the night.
Her attitude changed dramatically on my second Thursday, when I returned from my workout to find her bunched up in bed howling with misery.
“Caseworker is trying something with my children,” she screamed when I asked what was wrong. “Moving them to foster care, saying I’m unfit; even if I get out of here I can’t keep them. I love those children. No one can say they ever went to school without socks and shoes. And that caseworker, did she ever come watch me cooking dinner for them? They eat a hot meal every night of the week.”
“You don’t have a mother or sister who could take them in?”
“They’re worse off than me. My mother, she’s been high since the year I start first grade, and my sister, she’s got eight children, she don’t know where they’re at from one end of the week to the next. My aunt down in Alabama, she’d take them if I send them, but the caseworker won’t listen to me about my aunt. And who will give me money for my children’s bus fare if the caseworker’s against me?”
I leaned against the wall—of course we didn’t have a chair. “You could write again, showing that you have a proper home for them to go to and pledging your willingness to go into rehab as part of a plea bargain.”