Lady Jail Read online

  ‘Stop being so scared. It’s not so bad in here. It’s not like any of these killer-broads made it a habit. For them, it was a one-off. One and done. And Flo don’t have no acid supply.’

  Abigail felt better after talking to Temple. Her status had been pointed out to her, and she needed that. ‘Flo scares me, though. Even with no acid.’

  ‘You and me both,’ Temple admitted. ‘I stay real kind to Flo. Do that yourself. Don’t never cross her. While you’re at it, don’t cross me neither.’

  ‘I don’t plan to cross anybody,’ Abigail said.

  ‘More than I can say for myself,’ Temple said, and laughed at her own joke, as though it wasn’t a joke. ‘But. Good plan. Good plan. And look, I know what you’re worried about. Don’t be. Not going to happen. I’m not making out with no chickenshit fraud-artist, no matter how cute you are. You’re pretty damn cute, too. You know that, right? I know all about you slick white chicks. You wake up in the morning, somebody’s goddamn life savings went missing.’

  ‘Yeah, like you have life savings to worry about.’

  ‘I know, what? Anyway, if I did, you’d be the last to find out. So fool, we’re cool?’

  Abigail nodded. Then she said, ‘You’re wrong about one thing.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘No man. I worked alone.’

  ‘No shit,’ Temple said, in wonderment.

  iv

  After that fine discussion, Abigail got along with the other women more easily. One by one, in different ways, she connected. She and Doi talked first about their affection for the color blue. The day that Abi’s clothes had been cleared she was a trifle disappointed with a friend’s selections for her prison wardrobe. Then an understanding dawned. Her friend loved pale blues and robin’s egg blue. Abi appreciated blue herself, many of her clothes expressed that inclination, but in selecting what to send her, her friend fixated on her own preferred palette and ignored the variety of colors Abi typically chose.

  Still, at least they were real clothes – skirts, dresses, blouses, pants – not convict jumpsuits. The first time she’d pulled on a jumpsuit she thought she’d shrivel up inside it like an old cob of discarded corn, chewed on by raccoons and ants.

  Abigail iced an Elizabeth cake while she and Doi talked. Courtney requested the cake, but she couldn’t crack an egg and frequently burned toast. The girl insisted on crispy bacon for herself but ended up with blackened leather. She’d not be allowed near batter. So Doi baked the cake and sat in the kitchen while Abigail beat the icing then lathered it on.

  ‘The two of us, we’re alike,’ Doi decided.

  ‘How so?’ Abigail didn’t mean to challenge her, she just couldn’t see any similarity.

  Doi had prepared a list. ‘We’re traditional women. We know our way around a kitchen. We’re happy to have nice clothes. And we like the color blue.’

  Doi’s preference for darker blues went all the way to navy. Within the blue spectrum, they were opposites. Abigail let that go. She accepted that blue was still blue no matter the pigment.

  She wholly objected, though, to the remark about being a traditional woman, whatever that was supposed to mean, and the bit about kitchens. She didn’t abhor kitchens, but she wasn’t into them. Rebellion against traditional family values had probably started her on a downhill slide into crime. She let that go, too. Like Doi, she was happy to have nice clothes, although she wouldn’t classify Doi’s as nice. More on the frumpy side, even matronly. Total lack of style. The older woman wore a slip some days, which Abi couldn’t fathom. Her mother had worn slips and she never understood why. But in the 1990s? Who knew they still existed? Knowing that she had taken a hatchet to her daughter for staying out late, she doubted very much that Doi would approve of her delicates, beginning with how delicate they were. In any case, she wasn’t going to let her catch a glimpse. Who needed the grief?

  ‘I can ice a cake. Bake it, too. But I’m no cook.’

  ‘See? That’s what I mean. You’re modest.’

  Abigail was introduced to crime and criminals stripping in a highway bar, so she wasn’t all that modest. She guessed what Doi really meant was that she was shy, a trait that had dogged her throughout her days. People mistook her shyness for passivity; and, apparently, the quietude of her nature for a love of kitchens.

  ‘We’re genteel women. That’s the proper word for us two, don’t you think? Sure it is. We don’t belong in here. That’s all I’m saying.’

  That was it, then. The crux. Doi didn’t feel that a disciplinary outburst inflicted upon her daughter, that admittedly got out of hand in a hurry, warranted incarceration. A reprimand should have been enough. An apology should have ended it, and after that she could have cared for her daughter during the girl’s convalescence. She’d make it up to her over time somehow. Doi was thinking that Abi also did not belong in a penitentiary. She was too bright, too pretty, too classy, too well-dressed, too sophisticated and too capable in a kitchen to be stuck behind walls topped with barbed wire. That was supposed to be their connection, then, their bond. Here, visitors were greeted by sniffer dogs who took a whiff of anuses and vaginas to detect whatever might be stuffed inside and that was simply too undignified to contemplate. Not that she had visitors. Family and friends had abandoned her. She was still waiting for the day when her daughter might show up. Abigail, though, carried herself like a proper lady, unlike the others, so that Doi built her up in her head as being traditional and sophisticated, as a worthy prospect for friendship.

  Abigail got that part and understood that every attribute Doi saw in her was connected to how and even why she’d been such an outstanding – some might say, upstanding – fraud artist. Uncanny, how well she fooled people. She hardly had to try. Deceit came so naturally to her that she even deceived herself.

  v

  The second of the two older women befriended her next, although Malka painted similarities, and the concept of women’s work, differently. ‘We both know how to cook,’ she assessed.

  ‘I’m just average.’

  Malka wore a broad smile.

  ‘What?’ Abigail asked.

  ‘I mean, we cooks the books. We both know how.’

  That would be the basis of their association. If nothing else, they were colleagues in deception. Abi would distance herself from Malka because she was into slow-poisoning anyone who annoyed her and she could not imagine doing that, whereas Malka seemed fine with it. Unlike Doi, though, Malka owned up to her crime and was at peace with her choice and the consequences.

  They were peeling spuds and carrots and washing mushrooms together. A beef stew demanded the participation of the entire house-unit. They were supervised, of course, and if they wanted to use a knife or a fork, they had to shout it out. Shout again when they were done.

  ‘You’re not in for cooking the books,’ Abi said, in a tone that did not confront Malka or contradict her. Merely a comment.

  ‘Course not. I was a politician. What crooks never go to jail? Almost never, anyhow.’

  ‘Politicians?’ Abi asked, to see if that was the expected reply.

  It was. ‘If I didn’t kill my husband, I wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘If Doi didn’t hack up her daughter she wouldn’t be here. If Courtney didn’t off her best friend. If Rozlynn didn’t murder her dad …’

  ‘You know what I’m saying.’

  ‘I guess so,’ Abi said, but wasn’t sure.

  ‘We’re the sophisticated ones, you and me. We work with our God Almighty brains. We cooks the books. The rest of them in here? Pfft.’

  Abi was catching on to the lay of the land. Everyone was elevating themselves by virtue of her company. She wasn’t sure how she was going to play this, or if there was anything to be played. At dinner, she cottoned on to another aspect of Malka’s offer of friendship. Malka had detected Doi moving closer to her. The two older women considered themselves a pair thanks to their ages. They both settled down together for chats that left others out. If Abiga
il, shy, smart, and mature, was going to be admitted to their clique of two, making it a clique of three, Malka wanted to solidify the relationship first. Abi suspected that Malka might be annoyed that someone else held Doi’s confidence, so slithered in on that connection, asserting her presence and, slyly, her authority.

  Abi accepted the desire to include her, while doing very little to endear herself to either one.

  vi

  She did take the initiative to befriend one woman: Rozlynn. A girl who killed her father on her eighteenth birthday had a story to tell, although that’s not the story she was after. Abi wondered about the girl’s life in Manitoba, way north in the wilderness on a reservation. She dreamed about a solitude that deep; free in the depth of a forest with nothing to know except the earth and the sky. And maybe the snow and a cold north wind.

  She knew better than to ask questions or to probe. Abi and Rozlynn were drawn together by their mutual quietude. With Abigail it was a practiced condition; with Rozlynn, it was her nature. The two could spend hours in each other’s company and not say a word and not consider the silence a strain. They even met one time to sit and read side-by-side and as she arranged her legs under her Rozlynn offered a slight smile. Abigail grinned back. That communication was huge, and when Temple came by and warned Roz about her, ‘You gotta watch out for these slick white chicks, Rozzy, they can rob you blind,’ Rozlynn smiled, ever so slightly, again.

  She spoke at length – for her. She rarely went beyond two or three words. She said, ‘I got nothing to worry me about.’

  That could be interpreted a lot of different ways.

  Temple wondered about it. ‘How do you mean that exactly?’

  She shrugged at first, then she said, ‘I got nothing worth stealing.’

  That was her strength, and perhaps Abigail alone understood that it did not refer only to material things. There was no piece of her anyone could extract.

  Cooking or baking together, sweeping up or mopping up, changing sheets and making beds, they could say nothing to each other, yet they were growing closer. The others noticed despite the absence of conversation between them.

  ‘Abi’s gone native.’

  ‘I bet she thinks Indians have a gold mine hidden away in the back woods. She wants to check it out. Steal the secret map.’

  They spoke intending Abigail to overhear them. She did, too. But she did not respond in kind. If Rozlynn could stay quiet amid the noise and clamor of a woman’s prison, then so could she.

  vii

  The teenagers, Jodi and Courtney, were encountered as a pair. They seemed inseparable, as if Siamese. Abigail considered it a defense mechanism and presumed that they felt safer paired-off than alone. Especially with tough ladies around, like Flo and Temple. The younger ones worried they might be prey and their best hope for survival was in numbers. They may have had a point. Generally, the two were agreeable and most of the time they were irrepressible. They loved to giggle and whisper and be silly laughing themselves sick. They imparted the impression that it was either that or weep, that deep down they were irrepressible because they were inconsolable. True for Courtney. She’d killed her best friend. She wrote daily to her mom, not sending a letter a day but adding on to one until she had enough pages to make the postage stamp worthwhile. That seemed her critical connection in life, and from what she shared with others she needed to know that her mom still loved her and didn’t think badly of her. She accepted that what she did had been wrong. She had known it was wrong even while plunging the knife, again and again, into the other girl’s chest. Her best friend. She just didn’t want her mom, or herself, to believe that her sentence was a permanent condemnation. She wanted her mom to believe that she was still human, a human, worth something, that someday she might still have a life. If she could convince her mom to believe it, she might believe it herself one day.

  Abi felt sorry for her. Like Temple said, she’d gone nuts for a few minutes and now had to live with that ballistic moment, and the punishment, forever.

  Jodi had also gone ballistic and while she tried to paint herself blasting away in a convenience store the same way Temple did, as ‘losing her shit’, and she portrayed her crazy minute as being similar to Courtney’s, Abi wasn’t buying it. Something about her. She was pretty but Abi thought of her as difficult and dark; complicated. It’s not as though she hadn’t come across the type before during her life of crime. Jodi, though, could be funny, and could not only make Courtney laugh, but the lot of them, including Abi, and including – not insignificantly – Flo. That was a good thing.

  The pair stood out like skid row neon. Courtney preferred bright yellow to be included in her tops and in the prints on her dresses. Jodi opted for a spectrum of reds, from the rusty and the maroon to barroom lights. Once or twice a week she wore a crimson bandana in her hair. A brunette to Courtney’s blonde, Jodi’s selection of colorings was generally more muted than her pal’s, yet they seemed to blink in the corner of any room, where invariably they huddled.

  They approached Abi, interested to learn what she knew.

  ‘Wait, what? You want me to teach you how to what?’

  ‘Rip people off,’ Jodi said. ‘Put it that way. The way you do.’

  ‘Tell us how you got caught,’ Courtney said, ‘so we won’t be.’

  ‘You’ll wind up back in Lady Jail,’ Abi cautioned. ‘You want that?’

  ‘Maybe, but not for murder or assault with a weapon.’

  ‘I think if you’re not too greedy and you know what you’re doing, you can get away with fraud,’ Jodi maintained. ‘Don’t people get away with it all the time? Teach us.’

  ‘Think about it,’ Courtney tacked on. ‘We don’t got all that much to look forward to once we’re out.’

  Abi knew better than to teach them her tricks. She also knew better than to ostracize anyone, no matter how benign they might appear. You never knew who you might need in your corner someday. She laughed and strung them along.

  ‘We’ll see. I’ll think about it. Let’s face it. We got time by the truckload.’

  The girls giggled. They held hands. They figured they were on their way in the life at last. Courtney appeared nervous about that, though, while Jodi seemed thrilled.

  viii

  Flo looked like scrap iron. ‘I got tats on my tits,’ she told Abigail when she caught her gazing at her one afternoon. ‘Wanna see?’

  Abi learned her lesson quickly and turned her head away.

  After that, she looked down if Flo walked by. Not always easy. She usually had on a favorite orange sweatshirt that she matched with a clash of colors. The colors varied from day to day and from mood to mood. She walked with a gait that suggested she was wearing medieval armor. While Flo was flagrant in her expressions, they could be difficult to discern. One minute she was speaking in a high octave with a gentleness that disarmed her listener, emerging from that gruff demeanor, the next she turned ferocious at the slightest and often imagined provocation. Her pleasant high octave abruptly grew shrill.

  The corrections officers gave her an abundance of latitude until she went a step too far, then rounded her up and escorted her to solitary.

  Without making it look obvious, Abi endeavored to be friendly with Flo. Her ultimate goal was self-preservation which made any real connection difficult. She had something to gain; Flo did not. She set about to uncover how Florence might benefit from being on good terms with her. That took time before a perception, and with it a strategy, arose. Flo’s burden in prison and in life derived from loneliness. A great yawning cavity inside her that stretched from one horizon to the next and left her bereft of relationships. It instigated her spurts of violence, impregnated her periodic malevolent tone, imbued her snarky disposition, and defeated her. She pushed people off, hating that she was desperate for their company. She smacked people around because they weren’t her friends; she wanted to confirm to herself how much she was disliked by being unlikable. That helped fill a vacant void, as did her rage. A
bi’s plan, then, carefully thought out, hinged on ignoring the aberrant hostility that determined Flo’s interactions and instead be uniformly on her side. She’d be quiet about it, without fanfare and without reservation. What Temple said – ‘I stay real kind to Flo’ – would be her guiding principle, with a difference. Temple’s approach was defensive, and that only caused Flo to be more guarded. Abi’s plan was to undermine Flo’s antagonism with calm, her vitriol with concern, be simply there, undeterred and unwavering, to never be sullied or complaining, to nod in the face of consternation, to become as perfectly attuned to Flo as her own shadow, and like a shadow never impose her will or buttress her intentions.

  Fool her the same way she fooled the rest of the world.

  Others noticed.

  ‘If Flo says, “Wipe my butt,” will you give it a swipe?’ Temple wanted to know.

  ‘She won’t ask,’ Abigail replied.

  ‘She might. Anyway, I’m being whatchamacallit, metaphoric.’

  ‘Metaphorical,’ Abi corrected her, then immediately regretted doing so. Not that it mattered. That cat had long been out of the bag. She was not highly educated but had more schooling than the younger residents of Joliette, and during the time she was in school she’d been a good student. The others didn’t mind for they assumed it took a certain amount of learning to be a fancy-dancy crook, to get away with high-stakes fraud. Abi’s crimes had to be high-stakes because her prison term was lengthy.

  ‘Metafuckit,’ Temple said, not with any major scorn.

  Abigail never explained why she believed that Florence would never ask her to do anything vile. She would not explain that she had made strides. Flo had too much to lose to risk doing something mean to her one and only secret buddy in the world. Wisely, Abi kept knowledge of her newly emerging power, and what she might do with it, to herself.