Sing Her Down, page 1
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For Louisa Hall—fierce, wise, and loyal beyond measure
And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.
—Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
But that was just a story, something that people will tell themselves, something to pass the time it takes for the violence inside a man to wear him away, or to be consumed itself, depending on who is the candle and who is the light.
—Denis Johnson, Angels
PROLOGUE
KACE
Let me tell you a story.
I know everybody’s story. Been collecting them for years— a goddamn library of voices filed away in my head. Sometimes there’s not much to tell.
But you’ll want to hear this one.
It’s about two women, two women in a world of women, cut off from a world of men until they weren’t.
You won’t believe what women can do.
These women—their mistake was in thinking they burned with their own unique rage. Something deeper, darker than what the rest of us feel.
Let me tell you—inside we all rage the same. It’s how we let it out that differs.
* * *
This story ends seven hours west of here but a few miles short of the ocean. Like the women in it, ran but didn’t make it all the way. Ran from this desert but failed to find the water. That’s some raw luck to fall before you catch the ocean breeze. Gotta suspect that shit can wash away some sin. Couldn’t hurt to try.
But maybe they didn’t want to make it that far. Maybe that wasn’t part of their plan. Part of their story.
To each, you know.
Now, I don’t know what-all happened between here and there. I only know what I’ve been told.
What I’ve been told about is a mural.
You probably think that’s some bullshit, that I’m wasting your time talking about something spray-painted on a wall in a city I’ve never even been to. But I’m telling you—I’ve heard it’s a real something.
I’m gonna see it one day. Fly this coop and check it with my own eyes.
So, this mural’s painted behind a gas station at the corner of Olympic and Western in Los Angeles. Until recently those street names meant nothing to me. But they’re coming into focus.
As far as I know, it’s just another intersection of bad and worse—trouble running in either direction.
And far as I can tell, it’s where this story ends.
Thing is—this mural isn’t just any mural. People say it’s alive. People say it jumps and moves. People’re always saying crazy shit. People always thinking I’m saying crazy shit. After all, I got the voices in my head and I’m not going to lie about that.
You know what I thought when I first heard about this living mural, this paint job that moves? I thought motherfuckers been so cooped up, so safer-at-home, flattening-the-curve that they’ve gone out of their minds.
Motherfuckers been breathing through these fucking masks so long they’ve oxygen-deprived themselves.
A living mural, my ass.
But then I realized it makes sense.
All these voices in my head—the victims dropped by the women in here, they live on in me. So why the fuck couldn’t that mural be alive? Why couldn’t that story keep telling itself?
Over time, I’ve seen a lot more that’s made a lot less sense.
* * *
My girl Cassie finally sent me a photo. Been asking her for a month now—wasting stamps and phone time getting through to her.
Told her, Next time you’re in Los Angeles, you got to get me a picture of this thing, this mural.
The fuck you want a photo of a wall for? she asked me.
The least you could do for someone stuck inside like me, I told her. The least you could fucking do. Just take a goddamn fucking picture.
So she did it. Got her ass over to that intersection and snapped a photo on her phone. Like I said, the least she could fucking do.
Took ages for these assholes to print that shit out and show it to me.
By then I’d already reached Cassie on the phone to ask where the fuck my photo was.
Bitch, she says to me, you won’t fucking believe it. I thought you were crazier than crazy sending me to chase down a painting middle of a fucking pandemic. But that goddamned mural moves. My photo doesn’t capture shit. But I swear one of those women keeps walking toward the other.
The next day they handed me the printout. Blurry as fuck, but still.
* * *
I only know Los Angeles from movies, but in the mural it looks like a ghost town. Fucking dead. Empty. “Hollow” is the word I’ll use. Even blurry, you can just tell.
How the hell art can capture what isn’t there instead of what is, I don’t have a clue.
And let me tell you, you can almost hear that emptiness. A sound of blowing trash and echo. A sound of nothing.
Plus there’s all these masks and crap swirling up the street like tumbleweed. My granddad used to watch that John Wayne and Henry Fonda shit, so I know what I know.
As I said, a ghost town. That’s what the artist painted.
Listen, I don’t know how this shit works, but even in the bad copy the photo seems to move.
At first I thought it was the light in my cell.
Then the shifting light in my scratched window.
But it’s the goddamned photo. I’m sure.
I’m sure, I’m sure. I might be a killer. I might hear voices. But that doesn’t mean I’m crazy.
* * *
There are two people in the mural, two women. Dios and Florida. You’re going to hear all about them.
That intersection is the end of their run.
Florida is striding north up Western. Up ahead, plastered on a hillside, the Hollywood sign watches the scene unfold.
Dios stands in her path, blocking it. She’s got her hands on her hips. Her coal-black hair is plaited and slicked. I’ve been on the receiving end of that look. She means business. She means don’t fuck with me or fuck with me and find out.
Look close and you can see the wind lift a stray hair. Promise.
Dios’s eyes are snakelike, unblinking. That’s something that doesn’t move no matter how long I look at the picture. That stare is fixed. Stone-cold stone.
It’s Florida who is on the move, coming up the street, straight down the middle. No cars. No people. Just these two women. Like the city has made way for them and what is about to happen.
You see Florida in profile. Her face looks off, like she’s wearing Halloween makeup. Her hair is pulled back. But you can tell that it’s still bleach-frizzled.
Now, I’ve known Florida for coming up on three years. Lived with her for nearly twelve months. And I’ve never seen the look on her face that’s captured on that wall.
Part of me wants to think the painter fucked up.
And this other part—well, that part guesses this side of Florida has been there all along.
It’s surprising how long it takes for us to know ourselves. Often takes until it’s too late.
Me, I’m not really a murderer, although I killed someone. Still, people—so many people—tell me that’s exactly what I am. That and nothing else.
Florida—well, I’m not exactly sure who she is. But the woman in the mural sure seems to know.
In the painting, she’s still wearing her state-issued boots.
You can almost hear them strike the asphalt.
She takes one step.
Another.
She’s got something in her hand, but the mural doesn’t show it.
All I see is the coming standoff. The endless approach. The last gasp. The final moments of Dios and Florida.
PART I
DIOS
See your tree, Florida. See it bowing and bending under the smothered sky. Wind-whipped and swaying. See it through the scratched glass—the work of blades and nails and night after night of desperation. Rain hammered and storm tortured.
You got the white-girl blues again, Florida. I know. I can tell through these walls. I can feel from my own cell next door. I can vibe you vibrating with your hurt—a deep chord that shakes the cinder block like the bass on a car radio.
You’re heavy into that I don’t belong here shit.
But this is exactly where you belong.
Rich girls like you, Florida—blinder than the rest by far.
Yours is not one of those hard-pity tales that make the privileged feel as if they’ve moonlit in a rough world. Yours isn’t the story that makes women like your mother shed phony tears— if only for a moment—at the injustices in the world.
You don’t need a good look to know that that particular song has been sung in here too ma
Who will tell our stories, Florida?
Who will listen to the song of a cold heart?
Who will sing, “Pero nunca se fijaron / En tan humilde señora”?
See your tree bowing down until it nearly breaks. Marking time and passing the seasons, budding and blooming and shedding. See your tree for two years and five months, twenty-two days and a handful of hours. Your sentence ticking away until completion.
And tonight, in the throes of the storm, in the arms of the kind of violence that fills your dreams, see your tree battling the wind, rain, and sand that rip through this flat desert state. Like Daphne, rooted strong against the assault of her unwanted lover.
* * *
“You still watching? You still watching, Florida? You still…” I can hear Kace’s rambling from here. “Because Marta says it’s no good to watch. Marta says that’s how the devil gets in. Marta says he’s watching you from the tree. Marta says you’re inviting him in. You want the devil, Florida? You want him?”
“Enough about Marta,” you tell her.
I can hear the heavy thud as Kace pounds the bunk with her fist, punching you through the springs and flimsy mattress. You recoil to the wall. I feel the bang.
Now listen.
Listen to Kace hearing voices. Listen to her talking back and talking for them. For part of the night or, worse, the whole night. Listen until you know those voices too, like they’re your friends. A crazed chorus wailing at the walls of a fallen city. A whole bunch of mad Furies.
So listen to them and her and miss them when they’re not around and she’s deadly quiet, scary in her silence. Listen to them because you think it’s better than listening to me.
I fear women with nonlinear anger, you told me, back when we lived together. Before you moved out and your old cellie Tina moved in.
You think anger moves from point A to point B like a formula? I asked. You think there’s always derivation. “Derivation” shut you right up.
You had imagined you were the educated one in here.
Kace is anything but linear. So let her talk all night if she needs. I’m just next door and it drives me crazy.
But that was the transfer that was available, so you took it. Anything to create space between us, you thought. Anything to rip you from me—from the you you saw in me.
You should have paid more attention to the old stories. Fate is fated.
Nothing you can fucking do about that.
We will meet at the crossroads.
* * *
You think you are unique in your appreciation for the finer things—contrails that cross-streak the sky at sunset, a scattershot of buds erupting on your tree, the soft swallow as the desert rain hits the dry earth.
I know how close you hold them because I listened to you go on and on about how this place was not your place. How you can’t breathe, can’t feel, can’t sense properly—as if your senses are keener. I know you think these people are not your people and your crimes not your crimes. I listened to you make everyone else’s excuses for what you did.
Except I know that your guilt runs deeper than the story crafted for you. A small detail no bigger than a matchbook. I know because Tina told me. And I know more than that.
You’re no victim, Florida.
There was the summer you spent in Israel that you paid for by smuggling diamonds into Luxembourg. And the year abroad in Amsterdam, where you fraudulently signed your name to mortgage papers that secured bad loans for grifters.
Then there was what brought you in here—accomplice to murder after the fact. Drove the getaway car from a fire that left two bodies burning in the desert. Like you didn’t know.
Inside, they call you Florida because of the color you dye your hair—jailhouse blond.
Florence isn’t a name for in here. So you keep ruining your hair with the cheap bleach.
* * *
It’s raining a hard desert rain, a monsoon so powerful you can almost feel it through the thick windows—a rhythm so fierce that it’s inside us. The storm surges like an advancing battalion, cleansing the air of the nightly noise of everyone up and down the block. A purge.
Kace is talking. Marta is talking back. The tree is swaying silent.
Lightning splinters the sky, cracking it like a rock kicked into a windshield, x-raying the yard and the fence.
* * *
Now, I can barely hear you two above the storm. I close my eyes and lie back on my bunk, thankful I don’t have to listen tonight.
* * *
In the morning the storm has left a low-slung sky. Because of the rain, we all slept well, able to forget one another for a second.
We wake to the regular sounds, to women hollering down the halls. Calling from bunk to bunk and cell to cell. The coughing too—we wake to that.
The window is dirt-streaked and spattered with water stains.
The yard is mud.
The tree is gone.
I’ll let you tell the rest.
FLORIDA
Last night’s storm raised hell. The electricity from the lightning lingers in the blocks and coils around the bars of each cell Florida passes, ramping up a tension that you can almost see vibrating down the line. More cells than normal remain occupied at mealtimes—more and more older women are hanging back from group activities, buying their meals in the canteen and eating on their bunks.
But even at reduced capacity, the cafeteria is charged with a current that reveals itself in spikes and ripples of activity, small explosions of noise, dropped trays and spilled drinks. As Florida fills her plate, she notices the room has grown strangely silent, the customary chatter receding to nothing. Only a cough breaks the calm.
At the sound the women flinch and scatter like they’ve heard a gunshot. Then it is still again—a sure sign of a quiet storm brewing.
Florida’s eyes shift, careful to land on no one and nothing. Head down. Business to herself. She slides into a seat next to Mel-Mel, a woman innocuous except for her size, and occupies herself with the nothing-doing of her breakfast.
“Unsex me now, bitch!”
Diana Diosmary Sandoval jumps back from her seat, arms wide, stomping her foot for the room’s attention. The guards lift their eyes at trouble on the boil, but no sooner has she assumed her stance than they look away.
What happens next will be swift and painful. Dios has barbed wire in her veins one second, mercury the next.
“I said, unsex me now, motherfucker.”
Florida is too close to this action. Dios’s eyes land on hers.
Then Dios smiles, mean and mirthless, a quick flash of her perfect teeth. If it weren’t for her regulation orange, it would seem as if Dios has wandered in from a different world—a place of cleanliness and order and the luxury to focus on the superficial details. Beneath her obsidian hair, her high forehead is a polished orb. Her eyebrows are painted arches. Her eyes are cold green stones. Her skin glows golden with an inner heat.
She steps toward Florida’s table, positioning herself just behind Mel-Mel. Florida flinches at the sight of the fork in her grip.
At least the mountain of Mel-Mel is between them—an undulation of soft peaks in bright orange, a physical manifestation of Mel-Mel’s personality, malleable and gullible, a pawn, never a player.
Florida knows some of the COs aren’t paying attention or are looking away on purpose in deference to a deal sealed in the kitchen or chapel with a handshake, a trade-off, a handoff, a dirty exchange. Some might even be looking on with perverse pleasure, eager for the fight, aching to seeing Diana Diosmary Sandoval in her element.
They can’t hide that they love it when the women throw down, especially when it’s a woman like Dios—someone who outclasses them on the outside but whose status in here forces her to bite her tongue at their rude talk. They permit her to fight, Florida thinks, because it reduces her to their animal level.
