I wanted Lotty to know how important she’d always been to me, since my student days at the University of Chicago when I’d been not only young but rawly unsophisticated. She took me under her wing and taught me basic social skills I’d missed growing up in a rough neighborhood with a dying mother. Somehow over the years she’d moved from being a kind of fulfillment of my mother to a more equal friend, but she’d never lost her importance for me.
If I am foolhardy, daring without judgment, I wrote, it isn’t because I don’t love you, Lotty. I hate to bring you grief, and if I am seriously injured you will grieve. I don’t have an answer to the conundrum. Not the old masculine swagger that I couldn’t love you as much as I do if I didn’t love honor more. Something more restless drives me, a kind of terror that if I don’t take care of things myself I will be left with a terrible helplessness. More than anyone I’ve ever known, you’ve kept that helplessness at bay. Thank you for your years of love.
In the morning I quickly put it in an envelope without reading it over. On my way to breakfast I handed it over to CO Cornish for the outbound mail.
The condemned woman’s last meal: cornflakes, powdered orange juice, watery coffee, a piece of soggy toast. At nine, CO Cornish brought me to the gate of the prison’s work wing. There we were counted again and marched down the hall to our assignments. One group was escorted to the room of phone banks, where Miss Ruby and other well–spoken inmates took hotel reservations for families crossing America on their summer vacations. The rest of us were taken farther down the hall to the sewing room. We stood at attention while we were counted for a third time, this time by Wenzel and Hartigan, and then sent to our machines.
Before I could start on the pile of pieces I had left over from yesterday, Hartigan grabbed my arm. “You!” he spat at me in English. For one heart–stopping minute I thought maybe Baladine had already tracked me down and given orders to treat me in some unspeakable way.
Apparently it was only my ineptitude as a seamstress that made Hartigan grab me. In a graphic mix of Spanish and English he explained I was being demoted to a cutter. The pay there was a flat dollar–thirty an hour, did I understand?
“Comprendo,” I said through lips thick with anger.
For the next three hours, with one ten–minute break, I stood in the cutting room, pinning stencils to thick stacks of cotton, then holding the stacks in position as automatic shears sliced through them. It was backbreaking work, made harder by Hartigan’s periodic eruption into the room to yell, “Vamos, mas rapido!”
All last night as I had lain sleepless on my bunk and in the morning as I moved the heavy plastic stencils onto the fabric, I kept rehearsing in my mind what I wanted to do. My chance came at lunchtime. We were allowed to put aside the stencils and turn off the shears just as the Cambodian woman gathered up the previous hour’s sewing output onto the trolley. While everyone else moved into formation for lunch, I followed the trolley down the hall in the other direction. As people chattered and milled around stretching their sore arms, neither Wenzel nor Hartigan noticed I was going the wrong way.
The Cambodian woman rang a buzzer in the door. When it opened I followed her inside. In the confused medley of light and noise that greeted me, I couldn’t make anything out at first: giant machines, women in Corrections Department smocks, the ratcheting of conveyor belts. It was a major production plant. I moved to a conveyor belt carrying T–shirts.
Lacey Dowell’s face stared up at me. Her red hair was artlessly tangled, her lips half–parted in a mischievous smile. The smile was repeated half a dozen times as shirts passed in front of me on the belt. Hot lights overhead made me start to sweat; I realized they were there to dry wet ink—two women operating a giant press on my right were stamping decals onto shirts the Cambodian woman was unloading from the trolley. At a second belt facing me, another pair were stamping Space Beret insignia onto denim jackets.
At the far end of the belts other women pulled the garments off, folded them, and fed them to someone operating a commercial iron. Another pair laid ironed clothes in boxes. I watched in frozen fascination, until a shout behind me galvanized me. I began snapping the stem of my wrist camera, taking pictures as fast as I could, of Lacey’s face, of the belt, of women pressing decals onto shirts and jackets.
A man grabbed my arm, yelling, “What the hell are you doing in here? Where did you come from?”
I darted away, trying to snap a picture of the machines themselves, of the workers, of anything where I could get a clear view. The man who’d yelled out at me began to chase me. I ducked under a conveyor belt and skittered on my hands and knees toward the entrance. The women feeding shirts to the iron stopped working and huddled against a wall. Clothes began to pile up and then fall to the floor.