Sing Her Down, page 4
Seventy-two hours.
Florida unclenches her fists. She breathes deep. She puts out the flames before they consume her. As she’s storming for the exit, she hears Dios’s voice at full volume.
“Let me ask you something, Florida. Who is the fire and who is the match?”
Florida doesn’t stop.
“Florida, answer. Who is the fire…”
Before Dios can finish the question, Florida is gone.
* * *
Forty-eight hours. Time moves at an inconsistent pace. Some hours race away in flights of distracted fantasy and others seem stuck on repeat, as if time itself wanted to imprint a harsh and indelible reminder of the last thirty months—a final slow-drip salvo. The paperwork is a new distraction, the first tangible promise of freedom tempered by a list of rules and restrictions that will persist outside these walls. Then a slide into the overly familiar stagnancy—each measured breath moving nowhere, counting the uptick as the thermometer climbs in brutal increments.
Florida feels eyes on her everywhere—looks passed back and forth when she enters or leaves a room, when she searches for shade in the yard. A glance game of keep-away, the rest of the population trading messages around her, letting one another know and letting her know that they know she got lucky.
The yard is full despite the heat and the sickness. Florida finds a slice of shadow along the fence. The glance game is strong out here, some covert messaging that Florida wants nothing to do with. Too many women, too much time spent on grudges and gripes, a shifting landscape of allegiances and a minefield of rules.
This is just a moment. This is just a place. These are just things, benches, jumpsuits, grudges. Outside there will be the comfortable freedom of her old life. The possibility of escape and escape within escape—of coming and going as she pleases. Of going fast or slow. Of changing lanes. Of swerving and cutting corners. Of pressing her luck just a little. Just drive.
There’s a stretch of road on the 105 as it passes the airport where the freeway slopes down, slowing into a traffic light, before emptying into Dockweiler Beach. When no one was on the road, Florida would accelerate on the descent, letting the Jag pick up speed as it raced to the light. She’d test her limits, knowing that if the light wasn’t green, she might not be able to brake in time. The two times the light was red, she blasted through the intersection in a breathless terror that transformed to elation as she ran the following light too, only stopping at the coast when she ran out of road.
With her back to the fence, she can see the whole yard, women clustered in groups of two and four, standing silent as if the heat has robbed them of speech.
The sun is hellfire. The women trample their shadows. You could cook an egg on the picnic tables easy. Sear a steak too. Which makes it odd so many people are standing around, just baking in the full-force sun.
Florida wipes her forehead. She shades her eyes against the black spots that cloud her vision on the brightest days—the trails and contrails and nebulae that blind her even when she blinks.
The gate opens and Dios enters, her orange jumpsuit crisp and pressed, her black hair sleek and straightened, hanging loose like she’s ironed that too. Her fiery eyebrows freshly painted. She looks as if she’s emerged from a different ecosystem. She pauses and casts a quick glance around, getting the lay of the land. Normally there’s a shift in the room when Dios arrives, a collective registry of trouble on the come-up. But no one moves or recoils. The women in the yard simply look at her impassively, a herd of doe-eyed animals minding their own.
Dios checks the groups one by one, searching for her spot. Then she begins to cross the yard, a giantess on the move, heading for an unshaded, empty picnic table. You don’t even have to squint to see the heat rippling off the metal, rising in sheets and distorting the yard.
She’s singing one of her narcocorridos: “Cuando se enojan son fieras / Esas caritas hermosas.”
The silence in the yard is formidable, broken only by the dry dust scattering from Dios’s feet.
Dios is halfway to the picnic table when four women spring from their posts. They are on her before she has time to react. Florida watches a fist connect with Dios’s cheekbone, sees her skin crack, freeing a spray of blood. Another punch splits her lip. Her jaw is knocked from side to side with a fierce one-two. Her skin ripples, trying to catch up.
Dios shakes off the blows and takes a half step back. She spits blood and wipes her mouth. Her cheek is a red smear, her lip mottled purple and crimson. She spits again; this time a tooth hits the sand. Blood spatters onto her forehead. She looks wildly at the women who surround her, taking their measure, egging them on with the quick flick of her eyes and jerk of her chin. Dios licks the blood from her lips, grits her teeth, and balls her fists, pounding them once into her thighs. But she doesn’t raise her hands.
The women surrounding her pause, sharing a quick look. There’s a pin drop for Dios’s counter. When it doesn’t come, the women are on her again.
Dios’s loose hair makes an easy target. Florida watches one of the attackers grab a fistful of the slicked strands and yank hard. Dios’s neck jerks back. Her chin juts up. Her feet come off the ground, kicking up a cloud of dust.
She falls hard. Her head hits the dirt and bounces. Her hair is showered in dust. More dust rises as two of the women fall to their knees. The assailants surround her, landing kicks and punches, knocking Dios this way and that, indenting her flanks with their shoes, pounding her stomach.
Time slows. The beating continues in a suspended moment, when the rules of prison have been erased. The air around the women is thick with blood, sweat, and dust.
Dios is a rag doll, letting each punch and kick land. She doesn’t raise her hands to fight back or defend herself. She doesn’t shrink from the blows. If her attackers are dismayed by the ease of their target, they don’t relent.
One of the women kicks Dios’s cheek, making her face flip so she’s facing Florida. Her lips are two swollen leeches. One of her eyebrows is smeared with blood and dirt. Her left eye is a rotten plum, oozing and purple. But—and Florida can’t exactly swear to this—there’s a look in the other eye, the one that has so far escaped the beatdown—of satisfaction. And then someone punches that eye shut.
When the whistle sounds from the guard tower, it’s as if it has broken through from another story. The yard is all noise—women cheering from the sidelines, guards bellowing, the cough and sputter of one of the women still pounding Dios, a choking cough from Dios herself. Her shirt is torn. A breast hangs loose.
Three COs race toward the fight. Florida is so surprised by their appearance that she forgets to wonder why they haven’t come earlier.
Before the officers reach them, the women retreat from Dios, as if they are cool with what comes next. They don’t bother to fight their fate, falling into line as they are led off to their punishment. A couple of women on the sidelines applaud as they go.
Florida recognizes two of the officers, but the third is new. A fresh recruit with a long face, a buzz cut you could balance a book on, a wispy moustache, and blue-tinted glasses. He’s paunchy and his movements seem already labored although he’s fresh on the scene. It’s clear he’s new to the job by the way he’s staring at Dios’s bloody face, as if he didn’t know women did such things to one another. Then his eyes trail down to her exposed breast. He squats and makes a show of covering her. But the whole yard can see his hands take their time with Dios’s breast, fondling it like he’s checking a bruised fruit before sloppily and slowly shoving it back in her shirt with a final tweak.
Dios spits. The rookie rises and pushes his glasses up on his nose. He takes his walkie-talkie from his belt. “Medic,” he says into the static.
Dios’s head lolls back. A strange quiet hangs in the yard, the aftermath of violence, the lull after a car crash. The only sound is the buzzing of the electric fence.
The flies come quick. They circle Dios’s face like a halo. Florida takes a step from the fence to survey the damage.
It looks as if her face has been turned inside out. But she’s in there, all right. Her lips are moving.
Florida steps closer. Dios is singing, her voice hoarse and choked.
When they become angry they are beasts,
Those beautiful faces.
She takes a rattled breath that whistles through her missing tooth. She swallows and fixes her less-battered eye on Florida.
* * *
One more dinner. That’s it. Her last meal inside. Then she can use her teeth again instead of slurping the baby-soft food. Use a real knife too.
“They take you early,” Kace is telling her. “It’s a final power play, waking you up like it’s your fault you gotta go. Last girl I celled with who got out, they took her before dawn. Shook her ass out of bed because they still could. Got me up too for good measure. They’ll show you who’s in charge up until the gate closes at your back. Their house, their rules.”
“Until it’s not my house anymore,” Florida says.
“So enjoy this last chow.”
There are still twenty minutes until feeding time. Florida sits on Kace’s bunk, while Kace is up top, staring through the small, scratched window. “That’s messed up how badly you wanted this view of nothing. You can’t see shit.” She flattens her nose against the thick, murky plastic.
“It’s yours now.”
“At least you had the tree.” Kace bangs her head on the window. “Fuck me, that I missed that show yesterday,” she says.
Kace is looking toward the yard, her forehead smashed against the glass, as if she’s trying to see what she missed the day before. “They got her good, right? Painted her face all types of colors?”
“Made her spit a tooth,” Florida says.
“A tooth,” Kace says, savoring it. “A tooth. That’s where the infection gets in.”
“Molar,” Florida says, although she has no idea.
Kace shakes her head slow. “Must have been something to watch Dios get beat down. I would have loved that. I would have loved to see her limp and lame after all these years of boasting how hard she is. All these years of trying to convince us she’s a killer when all she did to land herself in here was fuck with a rich white kid with deep pockets.” Kace’s eyes rove wild across the cell. “Anyway, must have been some fight. Some fucking fight.”
“It wasn’t fair, though.”
“What’s not fair about that fight?”
Florida lies back, staring at the bottom of her own bunk, breathing in Kace’s old-clothes smell. “You can’t take a person down when she can’t fight back. They knew.”
“Now that would have been some shit. Being ad-segged when your release rolled around. Bet they’d leave your ass in there. Might even forget your ass in there.”
“You see? Not fair,” Florida says.
Kace turns around and itches the cobra that climbs her neck to her scalp. “Who are you to judge fair?”
* * *
Florida is confused by her desire to take a last look at everything, as if she needs to burn this place any deeper into her brain. But you can’t help taking notice of each last—the walk down the line to dinner, a final tray, the ultimate slop of the food hitting your plate, the final check for a safe seat.
Soon there will be more—a final count, a last lights-out, a last sleep.
Kace stayed back, eating food from the commissary in the cell. So Florida takes her last meal alone.
The room is less than half-full. Mel-Mel is hunched over a table, the bandage on her cheek flapping as she chews. A few old-timers cluster in the back by the door, which is propped open, claiming the spot for a sliver of increased ventilation.
* * *
Florida slides her tray onto the end of Mel-Mel’s table, not joining the gentle giant, but not ignoring her either. Mel-Mel is eating with her cellie, Tracy, a small, brittle woman with a manic patter that puts Kace’s chitchat to shame.
Tonight neither of them are speaking, just working through their meals as if they are simply one more thing to survive. Suddenly Mel-Mel’s head jerks up from her plate and her eyes lock on the door. Tracy swivels her spindly neck, displaying a lattice of veins and sinew. Florida follows their gaze and sees Dios making her way down to the chow line.
Her gait is stiff but balanced. She keeps a hand at her side, stabilizing whatever damage has been done to her ribs. Each step brings the hurt, but she is battling not to let it show. Her bruised eye has closed completely. Her lips are cartoonishly large. One cheek is swollen and shiny, with a deep gash sealed with Steri-Strips.
There’s a hitch in her movement as she takes a tray, a wave of pain that slows her. But Dios pushes through it. She lets the kitchen staff slop her up. She lifts her tray and, with a stiff, painful turn, begins to search for a seat.
Florida feels as if she’s watching a tightrope walker, both hoping that Dios makes it to a table without incident but also thrilling to the possibility of disaster.
The whole cafeteria is on pause as Dios shuffles toward an empty seat. It’s hard to read the expression on her distorted face—a grimace or a grin. But she’s walking proud. No doubt of that. She pauses before lowering her tray and then herself into a seat at a vacant table.
All eyes are on Dios as she lifts a forkful of food to her lips, working it between those purple sausages, and then chewing slowly, slowly around the pain.
Dios—always the center of attention. Even now when she’s been defeated.
Then, all at once, the women rise, everyone except Florida getting to their feet and filing out, turning their backs on their tormentor, leaving unfinished meals and trays behind, violating rules, risking punishment, all to send a message.
Florida finishes her food, her last meal already forgotten. Then she pushes back from the table, her gaze never leaving Dios’s.
Now who’s the victim? Florida wonders.
Because look at her. Look at her struggling to eat. Look at her lifting her fork gingerly like the very air around her is barbed. Look at her still pretending she’s above it all, that she knows you and everyone else in here better than they know themselves. Look at her pretending for no one. Because no one is left to care. Look at her wincing as she swallows, trying to make one lasting impression of her superiority. Look at her, because after tonight, you won’t have to look at her again.
Florida stands and heads for the exit, glancing over her shoulder at the solitary figure—a color wheel of purples, blacks, and blues.
“You never answered my question,” Dios says.
But it doesn’t matter. It’s too late.
The cafeteria door swings shut.
And that’s it.
Another in the list of lasts.
KACE
They might have walked out the door. But that’s only part of the story.
Let me rewind and tell you how this all began.
It started on the hottest day of 2019 in early October. When a cough was a fucking cough and not a death sentence and murder rap rolled into one.
It started with the sun so high and fierce the sky was a white blister—the reflection off any metal surface searing your eyeballs.
It started with women collapsing in the suffocating indoor heat.
Then women collapsing in the outdoor furnace.
Then the lights fading from yellow to brown.
The heat lightning tap-tap-tapping in the distance.
The never-ending buzz of the high wire fence in the yard got louder, then went erratic, like radio static. Louder and louder until it fizzled out.
It started with the yard going silent. When we all realized that, it was as if we’d taken off tight shoes. Really fucking quiet. Scary fucking quiet without that buzzing we’d all stopped noticing after one night in this place.
Then the airhorn and sirens overrode the brownout, driving us inside, everyone cursing as we moved from one heat to another, worse—the fucking huddled mass of our own bodies suffocating us.
We were almost back in our cells, the lights in the prison flickering, fighting the power grid, clinging to life.
We were almost locked away, many of us where we were supposed to be.
But before our doors locked into place, the brownout went black.
The prison went dark.
The only light came through our small, smudged, scratched windows. You could hardly call it light at all.
I glanced outside my window. The fence was on fire. Blue electric sparks shooting into the sky. The backup generators not coming on.
We sat on our bunks. We roamed the tiers where red emergency lighting shone a demonic glow. We could not be contained—our doors frozen where they were when the power died. The COs dressed in riot gear. They marched us back into our places. But they could not keep us there.
Next door, in Dios and Tina’s cell, Tina started to scream.
“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” I said, banging my fist against the wall.
Florida put her hand on my back. “Ssshh, Kacey-Kace.”
“Shut that bitch up,” I told her.
* * *
There were too many of us. Too few of them. Night fell. The heat rose. We cooked in our cells, the stink and sweat of us filling the air. The dark was thick, a thing you could comb your fingers through.
There was an hour of uneasy calm—of whispers and waiting—then the realization that the prison was ours crashed like a tidal wave.
It was blacker than black. A hundred voices at once. The absence of radio and TV. The storm of boot strikes on the tiers. The banging of metal. The rattling of bars and bed frames. It was one scream. And another.
It was Tina screaming and screaming. And me screaming back.
