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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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Good Behavior
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“Shit,” Dagney said, her head slumping against the metal bars of her cell.
“First time in jail?” She’d sat through enough women in prison movies with an ex boyfriend to worry where that question was going- especially when she felt a hand on her shoulder. But when she turned she recognized the woman from Alameda, an immigrant in her thirties named Luiz. They both smiled. “That obvious?” “A bit.” “Any advice? Should I shiv the big one?” “You’re not in TV prison, and you aren’t a guy. Most of the women here are just like you and me, caught up in an immigration thing. The few that aren’t- well, they’re outnumbered enough they don’t usually try shit.” “Usually?” “Well, there’s the occasional girl who comes at it all hard, wearing her insecurities on her sleeve like that’ll keep the predators at bay, but really, we all just want to be left alone in here. Nobody gets far making waves.” “How long does it take?” “Processing can take days, but it’s usually a few weeks. Usually they put take a busload of us to the courthouse, and from there straight over the border. The flow’s pretty steady, but immigration cases take a backseat to criminal immigrants, you know, thefts, or anything more serious.” “So we’re just stuck here? For a few weeks?” “Pretty much. But at least I got something pretty to look at.” There was that troubling feeling again… until Dagney realized Luiz was looking out through the windows. They had a nice view of the mountains from their cell. “But, in a way, we’re lucky. It’s Wednesday; our block gets a phone call today. If we’d come in on Thursday we’d have had to wait another six days. They don’t give you long, and when the call’s complete, there’s a clicking sound and then you’re disconnected. No warning, which is a pain, but at least you can tell people you’re okay. Usually they give us our call just after meals.” The food wasn’t as bad as she might have guessed; it reminded her of high school, only without the little salad bar at the end. At first she didn’t feel like eating, but sitting in the lunch room silently made her depressed- the hungry kind of depressed. She plowed through some runny mashed potatoes and lettuce dripping with runnier ranch dressing (though she actually preferred the texture). After eating she got a phone call, and dialed Nelson without really thinking about it. “It’s Isabel, I got caught up in an INS dragnet.” “Yeah, the boss told me. I’ve been googling like a fiend since you left. It took me a while to put it all together, but I’ll give you the rundown. Derek’s farm, the chemicals he was using, came from a Cox Industries subsidiary, CoXem. Both Derek and Madsen process corn into Ethanol through another Cox subsidiary. That Appalachian coal mine is run by Masterson, but the Cox family own a majority share in that, as well as Cox Industries. I don’t think I have to tell you that Cox supplies pesticides to Alameda- or that the truck that made their most recent delivery was from Pine Bend. But that’s just another Cox subsidiary, albeit without the name. And I can’t confirm it, but it seems Coxtech does work for the Defense Department, in particular DARPA.” “The Cox family is headed up by two brothers… and Martin Fox is their cousin. Was, I guess. They made a rather sizeable donation to the reelection fund of that pretty little irritated Sheriff you met at Martin’s murder. Apparently, everything you’ve been working on has been related to them. And…” he hesitated, “they own the private prison where you’re being held.” Dagney’s entire body tensed, but she knew she couldn’t freeze up. “How’s the spud?” “Clara’s good.” There was a long pause. “We’re going to get you out. I promise.” “I know,” she said. Dagney spent the rest of the day curled up on her bed. “”It’s Rec time,” a guard said, getting annoyed. “You need to exercise.” “She isn’t feeling well,” Luiz interjected. “Should I take her to the infirmary?” The guard, Officer H. Dietz her nametag said, hesitated a moment. “Yeah. And see that she gets patched up. This is a one-time thing. This ain’t high school gym- there’s no cutting class.” Luiz walked her to the infirmary, following a red line painted on the floor. In the infirmary was the doctor, going over some paperwork. She was visibly annoyed, and when she heard the door open she slammed a clipboard down onto her desk and muttered, “Don’t know how they expect me to perform that many physicals without some goddamned help.” “What’s the trouble?” she asked, softly, smiling politely at Luiz. “Think it’s just nerves. It’s her first time.” “Popped her cherry, have we? Sit her down on the table her. You speak English?” Dagney nodded. “Cool. Because my Spanish is balls, though in my defense there wasn’t much reason to learn it well in Pennsylvania.” “You have a history of anything? Infections, allergies, heart conditions, anything? In your family, too.” At first Dagney just shook her head, then remembered, “But my mom died of cancer.” “Okay. How are you feeling?” “Nauseas, mostly. “You eat the cafeteria food?” Dagney nodded. “That’ll do it.” The doctor smiled. “But we’ll do our due diligence.” Then she turned to Luiz. “If you want you can stay here, but if your friend speaks English it might make the guards less antsy if you went out to exercise- and everybody’s less anxious when the guards are relaxed.” Luiz looked nervously to Dagney. “She’ll be fine,” said the doctor. Reluctantly, Luiz left. “Bit of a mother hen, isn’t she? I take it you know each other.” “Uh… we worked at the same vineyard. I knew her a couple days.” “Oh,” the doctor said, blushing a little. “I didn’t mean, um-” “It’s okay that you did. Honest mistake.” “Open up,” the doctor put a small plastic thermometer strip under her tongue. “So why do you think you’re here?” “I’ve never been deported before. Or in jail. The whole thing is just…” “Overwhelming. Yeah. First few days can be like that. If you want you can spend the rest of the day in here. It’s quiet, exam bed isn’t too uncomfortable. I can give you something to quiet your stomach, help you relax.” There was a knock at the door, and Dietz poked her head inside. “Doctor, look, Miranda, warden asked me to bring the newbie up to her office.” “You can tell the warden to fuck herself with that fancy brass nameplate on her desk, because so long as she’s my patient she doesn’t tapdance to the beat of Hitlerette’s drum. Once I’ve cleared her, made sure she’s at least physically healthy, then maybe she can take a walk on up there. Otherwise, the warden’s got legs, and I’m fairly sure still has the use of them. At least, that’s my medical opinion.” Officer Dietz didn’t really know how to take that, and walked quickly out. “Woah,” Dagney said. “The Warden’s a bully. Simple as that. In a state-run facility she would never have progressed beyond lunch-lady, at least not without spending some serious knee-time. I’m sorry. Being terribly unprofessional. I swear, working in a jail turned my vocabulary back to high school- when I was obsessed with Tarantino movies. The ladies here are pretty well-behaved, but language-wise we’re in the midst of some vulgarity-Picassos.” “Can I ask what you’re in for? Or, can I guess? Most of the women here are on an immigration beef, and the fact that you look a little white to be Mexican, I figure that’s probably it. There are fair-skinned Mexicans, though they’re fewer and farther between. It’s like people forget about the Spanish that went there. That it?” Dagney nodded slowly. “Well, then you’ve got even less to worry about. At this point the state’s gotten pretty good about processing illegals through here. If you were here on an assault charge or something, then you’d be looking at a longer stay- but then again, I doubt you’d be so mousy if you were an assault and batterer. If you know Luiz, stick to her. She seems to know her ropes, and at the very least she’s going to have the backing of all the other Latinas in here. They keep things pretty calm.” “What about…” Dagney trailed off, but Miranda recognized the awkwardness. “We don’t get a lot of rape, here; it doesn’t have the same kind of meaning, woman to woman- though you should still keep a weather eye out, just in case. We do get a fair share of shit-tits, though. It does the same thing- pain, and the humiliation of being dominated. One girl kicks the hell out of the other, then defecates on her breasts. Ain’t pretty… but it ain’t as ugly as panda-tits, either.” “Panda…?” “Little girl like yourself gets stomped so many times in the breast that she ends up with all kinds of bruising, dark skin and white skin mottled together, it looks like a panda. But it’s a rarer thing. Only happens with somebody really making trouble, kinda like a specialized blanket party.” The door to the office crashed open and Dagney started. “Why the fuck haven’t I fired you yet?” The woman howled. Miranda smiled, tried to pretend to be civil. “You like the way my ass looks in my white lab coat.” The woman who Dagney knew must be the warden loosed a cruel smiled. “Do you mean hidden? No, your oversized J-Lo booty isn’t anywhere close to appealing, except maybe as an Ottoman, place to lay my sweaty feet at the end of a long hard day. But I’ll ask it this way: why the fuck was I forced to hoof it down to your crab’s anus of an office?” “Because your mother was a heifer, making you part cow.” “Not terrible; now leave the room, doctor.” “I’m monitoring my patient.” They stared at each other a moment, then the warden shrugged, as if the contention was never important to her. “Fine, but I’ll assume our usual arrangement applies.” She turned towards Dagney. “I got a tip you were coming. It turns out, about half of the INS arrests from Alameda went to another facility, which is where they thought you’d ended up. It wasn’t until this morning that they realized you weren’t where they thought you’d be. That’s when I got the fax, of a headshot. You were a little younger, a little prettier, and a lot less sickly looking, but it was definitely a match.” “INS ran your fingerprints when they brought you in, but of course they didn’t show up in the criminal database, but I had a friend at Justice run them against government employee records, and ding-ding-ding. We’re going to move you out of gen-pop and into solitary. I want to know why I have a federal agent hiding in my prison.” “She’s not going anywhere.” “Excuse me?” “She can’t leave.” “Doctor, this woman isn’t an illegal immigrant; because of that, she was never your patient. In fact, she was never here.” “I don’t think you understand. If you’d knocked on the door, I wouldn’t have let you in. The symptoms she’s described to me, accompanied by pain turning the head from side to side, are consistent with meningitis. Neither she, nor I, nor you, can leave this room. We have to be quarantined.” “Uh, but I, uh, haven’t been here long enough to be infected, right?” The warden stammered. “Every second I stay the chance of infection gets higher, right?” Miranda looked from the warden to Dagney. “Right, I guess.” “Then I’ll be quarantined in my office.” She left, slamming the door behind herself. Dagney grinned, but Miranda’s head sunk. “That was stupid. It doesn’t buy us anything. An outbreak would require notifying the CDC. It won’t take the warden too much time googling in her office to figure out that I was lying. But…” Dagney followed the doctor’s eyes, “I can let you use my phone. The phones down in the commons are all monitored, but this phone, and I insisted and had a PI test it to be sure, is protected by doctor-patient privileges. It’s clear.” Dagney didn’t wait an instant. “Anything to get out?” “Nine, then nine again, and wait for a dial tone.” She dialed Sharpe. “I may not have too long to talk.” “Dagney?” “The Warden’s made me. How close are you to getting me out of here?” “It’s a process, unfortunately. Right now we’re waiting on a handful of judges who don’t seem very motivated, at least one of whom doesn’t like that you were helping DoD operate domestically- how that fits into his judicial ethics is beyond me. If we had something concrete, something that could get someone, anyone, really, with a little more sway interested, we could light a fire.” “Fuck. I know. But I’m in prison. It’s not like I can just find new evidence about what the Coxes are up to.” “The Coxes? Glenn and Sean?” Miranda butted in. “The billionaire industrialists? I’ve got something…” she went to a filing cabinet. “The Cox Corrections Corporation lobbied for a change in the immigration law here in California, much the same was as they did in Arizona. They wanted to increase prison populations to make a profit, or a better profit, anyway, off the taxpayers. They went about it in a pretty sheisty way; at best they were skirting the laws on disclosure and conflicts, the way they were mingling with state legislators. The warden was one of the chief lobbyists, and she figured it made sense to keep her own records, to make sure everyone stayed ‘honest.’ A couple of months ago I snuck into her office to take a protest dump on her desk, found the files, and photocopied them for myself.” “Protest dump?” “The warden gave me a shitty annual review and said I didn’t deserve my scheduled cost of living increase because I hadn’t kept up with the increase in prisoners. And the longer I stayed here the more pissed off I got. I was going to crap on her desk, then resign in a month so it wouldn’t be obvious it had been me.” “Okay. But why do you want to give this to me?” “Ever since I started here, the warden’s been lording it over me that she was my boss. I’m a doctor- it’s not like this was the only place I could get a job. And worse, any time I’ve even made noises about looking for other work, she spins these wild stories about malpractice claims she’d make about my time here. Bitch talked about fucking with my medical license. I didn’t spend four years in med school, a year as an intern and two as a resident to be somebody’s prison bitch.” “You get all that?” “I got a friend in Justice, and a cousin in California Corrections that ought to be very interested in that information. I think you just got your golden ticket. Can the doctor keep you there while I make a few phone calls?” “Taken care of. I have meningitis- just not really. Right?” Dagney looked at Miranda. “No shit.” |
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