12

They moved us in increasing levels of severity: drunken and disorderly criminals that were only in for a night got moved first and then were out so quickly that they hardly had time to meet any others. Then it was the petty criminals, those who only had a few years in. The two wings got emptier and emptier and busier and busier. Once they got to the high-profile prisoners, those like me, the murderers, the rapists, the committers of treason, they started pulling them out one by one.

I was one of the last to go. One of the guards came unexpectedly into my cell, where I was reading my daily newspaper. He slammed open the door waving a club which he thought made him seem important and threw a medium sized sack with all his strength into my chest. I looked inside: my old clothes were there, the ones I’d been wearing when I first went to jail. It was hardly the kind of an outfit you would want to spend a significant amount of time in any jail wearing. For the very reasons my lawyers would have wanted me to dress so for my trial would I have not wanted to be caught dead mixed among the people I had been mixed among for the past several years wearing what I had in this bag.
I laid the bag down beside me and went back to my newspaper. I would keep on my standard prison jumpsuit, if it was all the same.

And yet apparently it wasn’t all the same. The guard rapped the metal frame of my cot with his club, narrowly missing my hand. “Put that on and load your bag up with your stuff,” he grunted in the low voice of a man who knew he was about to be discarded. “I’ll be back to get you in three minutes.” He seemed to assess my unmoving features. “You will change, or I will change you myself,” he threatened. “Three minutes.”

As much as I did not relish donning my old clothes, I relished even less having them forced upon me by a burly guard who was bitter over losing his position to a madness of criminal activity. I did not want to be his excuse for a last-ditch example of brutality. As quickly as I could against the constant chill of the wing I changed from my rough jumpsuit to the summery linen of my top and dress. I carefully knotted the scarf around my neck just in case I needed it later. I dropped my jumpsuit onto the floor and then went back to my newspaper.

I was in the middle of the arts section when the guard came back. He looked relieved when saw that I had changed, his salt and pepper eyebrows rising back to a normal level on his face, but they snapped back down again when he saw my empty bag. “I’nt you going to take all that?” He snatched my bag off the floor, maybe too tired to be violent, maybe too tired to fight me. Maybe he had spent too many weeks shuttling criminals from this old facility to the new one, knowing that the sooner he did it, the sooner he’d just be done, but the sooner he was done the sooner he’d be out of a job. But for whatever reason, instead of arguing about it, he just grabbed a random handful of my newspapers, the only thing I had in the room, shoved them in the bag, which he then shoved into my stomach hard enough to knock some of the breath out of me.

“Jes’ come on, lady.” He had a dulling on some of the consonants on the ends of his words. He grabbed me by the upper arm and half dragged me along. After two years in heavy boots my feet were light in thin flats. At the end of the hallway, nowhere near the door, they tightened a pair of handcuffs behind my back, and then fastened me to two separate guards. It appeared they weren’t taking any chances.

I had not considered escaping until that moment, but now that they seemed to be doing their best to stop me, I weighed my options. I had no doubt that my endeavor would be successful; rather, I was more concerned about what I would do after I escaped. I was, after all, a relatively well known face from the publicity of the trial. And while the average American citizen had probably forgotten what I looked like, I could only assume that, if I broke out again, they would put me back on the news. And the only exciting thing about breaking out of jail would be running from the police. And then who would buy my newspapers? How would I find things to read? I decided that staying in the jail was a better idea.

The prison yard was empty like nighttime. They bundled me, the two guards I was attached to and the three accompanying with guns, into the back of a white van which they proceeded to lock with undue caution. If I was ever in the mood to be entertained, this might have done it for me: here were five big men in uniforms, carrying guns, all looking serious and solemn and guarded while they were accompanying a twenty seven year old girl who was wearing the skirt of a kindergarten teacher and a shirt with no sleeves. It was so absurd that I might have tortured them, just a little, to see if it was fun, but I was too cold; we had all been moved across the month of December.

The ride to the new jails wasn’t long, but it was drab in a vehicle without windows. Instead, to pass the time, I stared stonily at the guard who had come to fetch me until he scowled, jerked on my leash like a misbehaving puppy, and growled, “Now listen here. You stop that.” I would crack him my iciest smile, the kind you never could use on kindergarteners, and turn my eyes away for a moment before starting the one sided contest again. His periods of tolerance grew shorter and shorter, those selfsame salt and pepper eyebrows knitting closer and closer together, his shoulders hunching under his regulation shirt.

Eventually the situation got so bad, the guard’s temper got so short, that one of the others, one carrying a gun with sandy blonde hair, let out an irritated sigh. “Let her be, Jim,” he muttered, sounding almost disgusted. If I had been planning an escape, he was the one I would have dominated. He had a weaker constitution than the rest, less eager to dominate, less bitter over his loss. He was just tired. “Didn’t you hear? She’s one of those goddamned crazy ones. Offed seventeen people in cold blood and then just confessed to it, cool as chatting. Just got right up there on the stand and told everybody she’d did it. Let the poor crazy ones alone. They can’t help it.”

It was twenty seven that I had killed, but that was besides the point. Yes, he definitely would have been my target. It was almost as diverting to plan an escape while knowing that I would never actually attempt it as it was to actually plot and execute a murder. I wondered if I could perhaps arrange it so they would move me from place to place more frequently, just for a change of pace.