Sleeping Beauties: A Novel Read online

  “Little League Shake,” Jared said, and held out his hands. “You still know it?”

  Clint did: bump fists, pop and lock thumbs, twist hands, smooth down the palms, then clap them together twice overhead. Though it had been a long time, it went perfectly, and they both laughed. It put a shine on the morning.

  Jared was out and gone before Clint remembered that he was supposed to tell his son to take out the trash.

  Another part of getting older: you forgot what you wanted to remember, and remembered what you wanted to forget. He could be the old wag that said that. He should get a pillow stitched with it.

  6

  Having been on Good Report for sixty days, Jeanette Sorley had common room privileges three mornings a week, between eight and nine in the morning. In reality that meant between eight and eight fifty-five, because her six-hour shift in the carpentry shed began at nine. There she would spend her time inhaling varnish through a thin cotton mask and turning out chair legs. For this she made three dollars an hour. The money went into an account that would be paid to her by check when she got out (inmates called their work accounts Free Parking, like in Monopoly). The chairs themselves were sold in the prison store across Route 17. Some went for sixty dollars, most for eighty, and the prison sold a lot of them. Jeanette didn’t know where that money went, and didn’t care. Having common room privileges, though, she did care about. There was a big TV, boardgames, and magazines. There was also a snack machine and a soda machine that only worked on quarters, and inmates did not have quarters, quarters were considered contraband—Catch-22!—but at least you could window-shop. (Plus, the common room became, at appointed times of the week, the visitors’ room, and veteran visitors, like Jeanette’s son, Bobby, knew to bring lots of quarters.)

  This morning she was sitting beside Angel Fitzroy, watching the morning report on WTRF, Channel 7 out of Wheeling. The news was the usual stew: a drive-by shooting, a transformer fire, a woman arrested for assaulting another woman at the Monster Truck Jam, the state legislature having an argle-bargle over a new men’s prison that had been built on a mountaintop removal site and appeared to have structural problems. On the national front, the Kinsman Brightleaf siege continued. On the other side of the globe, thousands were thought dead in a North Korean earthquake, and doctors in Australia were reporting an outbreak of sleeping sickness that seemed to affect only women.

  “That’d be meth,” Angel Fitzroy said. She was nibbling a Twix she had found in the snack machine’s dispenser tray. Making it last.

  “Which? The sleeping women, the chick at the Monster Truck Jam, or the reality show–type guy?”

  “Could be all, but I was thinking of the chick at the Jam. I was at one of those once, and damn near everbody oncept the kiddies was coked up or smoked up. You want some of this?” She cupped the remains of the Twix in her hand (in case Officer Lampley was currently monitoring one of the common room cameras), and offered it to Jeanette. “It ain’t so stale as some of them in there.”

  “I’ll pass,” Jeanette said.

  “Sometimes I see something makes me wish I was dead,” Angel said matter-of-factly. “Or wish everbody else was. Lookit that.” She pointed to a new poster between the snack machine and the soft drink dispenser. It showed a sand dune with footprints leading away, seemingly into infinity. Below the photo was this message: THE CHALLENGE IS GETTING THERE.

  “The guy got there, but where did he go? Where is that place?” Angel wanted to know.

  “Iraq?” Jeanette asked. “He’s probably at the next oasis.”

  “Nope, he’s dead of heatstroke. Just a-layin out there just where you can’t see, eyes all buggin out and skin black as a tophat.” She didn’t smile. Angel was a tweaker, and serious country: bark-chewing, baptized-in-a-moonshine-still country. Assault was what they got her for, but Jeanette guessed Angel could have hit most of the categories on a criminal scorecard. Her face was all bones and angles—it looked hard enough to break up pavement. She had spent a goodly amount of time in C Wing during her stay at Dooling. In C Wing you only got out two hours a day. It was bad-girl country, was C Wing.

  “I don’t think you turn black even if you die of heatstroke in Iraq,” Jeanette said. It could be a mistake to disagree (even humorously) with Angel, who had what Dr. Norcross liked to call “anger issues,” but this morning Jeanette felt like living dangerously.

  “My point is, that’s a crock of shit,” Angel said. “The challenge is just livin through fuckin today, as you probly well know.”

  “Who do you think put it up? Dr. Norcross?”

  Angel snorted. “Norcross has got more sense. No, that’s Warden Coates. Jaaaanice. Honey’s big on motivation. Seen the one in her office?”

  Jeanette had—an oldie, but not a goodie. It showed a kitten hanging from a tree branch. Hang in there, baby, indeed. Most of the kitties in this place had already fallen off their branches. Some were out of their trees.

  The TV news was now showing the mug shot of an escaped convict. “Oh man,” Angel said. “He put the lie to black is beautiful, don’t he?”

  Jeanette did not comment. The fact was, she still liked guys with mean eyes. She was working on it with Dr. Norcross, but for the time being she was stuck with this attraction to fellows who looked like they might at any moment decide to take a wire whisk to your bare back while you were in the shower.

  “McDavid’s in one of Norcross’s babysitting cells in A Wing,” Angel said.

  “Where did you hear that?” Kitty McDavid was one of Jeanette’s favorite people—smart and feisty. Rumor was that Kitty had rolled with a heavy crowd on the outside, but there was no real meanness in her, except for the kind that was self-directed. She had been a deeply dedicated cutter at some point in the past; the scars were on her breasts, sides, upper thighs. And she was prone to periods of depression, although whatever meds Norcross had her on seemed to have been helping with that.

  “You want all the news, you got to get in here early. I heard it from her.” Angel pointed at Maura Dunbarton, an elderly trustee who was in for life. Maura was now placing magazines from her wheelie cart on the tables, doing it with infinite care and precision. Her white hair stood out around her head in a filmy corona. Her legs were clad in heavy support hose the color of cotton candy.

  “Maura!” Jeanette called—but low. Shouting in the common room was strictly verboten, except by kids on visiting days and inmates on the monthly Party Nites. “Walk this way, girlfriend!”

  Maura rolled her cart slowly toward them. “Got a Seventeen,” she said. “Either of you interested?”

  “I wasn’t interested when I was seventeen,” Jeanette said. “What’s up with Kitty?”

  “Screaming half the night,” Maura said. “Surprised you didn’t hear her. They pulled her out of her cell, gave her a needle, and put her in A. Sleeping now.”

  “Screaming what?” Angel asked. “Or just screaming?”

  “Screaming that the Black Queen is coming,” Maura said. “Says she’ll be here today.”

  “Aretha coming to put on a show?” Angel asked. “She’s the only black queen I know.”

  Maura paid no attention. She was gazing at the blue-eyed blonde on the cover of the magazine. “Sure neither of you wants this Seventeen? There’s some nice party dresses.”

  Angel said, “I don’t wear no dress like that unless I have my tiara,” and laughed.

  “Has Dr. Norcross seen Kitty?” Jeanette asked.

  “Not in yet,” Maura said. “I had a party dress once. Real pretty blue, poofy. My husband burned a hole in it with the iron. It was an accident. He was trying to help. No one ever taught him how to iron, though. Most men never learn. And he won’t now, that’s for sure.”

  Neither of them replied. What Maura Dunbarton did to her husband and two children was well known. It happened thirty years ago, but some crimes are unforgettable.

  7

  Three or four years earlier—or maybe five or six; the aughts had sort of s
printed away on her and the landmarks were hazy—in a parking lot behind a Kmart in North Carolina a man told Tiffany Jones she was headed for trouble. Vaporous as the last decade and a half had been, this moment had stayed with her. Seagulls were screeching and picking at the trash around the Kmart loading dock. Drizzle streaked the window glass of the Jeep she was sitting in, which belonged to the guy who said she was headed for trouble. The guy was mall fuzz. She had just given him a blowjob.

  What happened was he caught her shoplifting deodorant. The quid pro quo they’d agreed on had been fairly straightforward and unsurprising; she gave him oral sex, he let her go. He was a beefy son of a bitch. It had been quite an operation, getting access to his dick while negotiating his gut and thighs and the steering wheel of his car. But Tiffany had done a lot of things and this was so minor by comparison it wouldn’t even have made the long list, except for what he said.

  “Gotta be a bummer for you, huh?” A sympathetic grimace spread across his sweaty face as he wiggled around in his seat, trying to yank up his bright red plastic jogging pants that were probably the only thing he could get in his pig size. “You know you are headed for trouble when you find yourself in a situation like this here where you have to cooperate with somebody like me.”

  Until this point Tiffany had assumed that abusers—people like her cousin Truman—must live in denial. If not, how could they go on? How could you hurt or degrade a person when you were fully cognizant of what you were doing? Well, it turned out you could—and men like the pig of a security guard did. It had been a real shock, this realization that abruptly explained so much of her entire shitty life. Tiffany was not sure she had ever gotten over it.

  Three or four moths rattled around inside the bubble of the light fixture set above the counter. The bulb was burned out. It didn’t matter; there was plenty of morning light in the trailer. The moths binged and fluttered, their little shadows bickering. How did they get in there? And by the way, how did she get here? For awhile, after some rough times in her late teens, Tiffany had managed to build a life. She had been waiting tables at a bistro in 2006, and making good tips. She had a two-room apartment in Charlottesville and grew ferns on the balcony. Doing pretty good for a high school drop out. On the weekends she had liked to rent a big bay horse named Moline who had a sweet disposition and an easy canter, and go riding at Shenandoah. Now she was in a trailer in East Shitballs, Appalachia, and she was no longer just headed for trouble; she was there. At least the trouble was wrapped in cotton, though. It didn’t sting the way you expected trouble to sting, which was maybe the worst thing about it, because you were so far inside, trapped all the way back in the last row of yourself, where you couldn’t even—

  Tiffany heard a thump and all at once she was on the floor. Her hip throbbed where it had banged against the edge of the counter.

  Cigarette dangling off his lip, Truman stared down at her.

  “Earth to crack whore.” He was in his cowboy boots and boxer shorts and nothing else. The flesh of his torso was as tight as plastic wrap over his ribs. “Earth to crack whore,” Truman repeated and clapped his hands in front of her face like she was a bad dog. “Can’t you hear? Someone’s knocking on the door.”

  Tru was such an asshole that, in the part of Tiffany where she was still alive—the part where she occasionally felt the urge to brush her hair or call that Elaine woman from the Planned Parenthood clinic who wanted her to agree to sign up on a list for a lockdown detox—she sometimes regarded him with scientific amazement. Tru was an asshole standard. Tiffany would ask herself, “Is so-and-so a bigger asshole than Truman?” Few could compare—in fact, so far, officially, there was only Donald Trump and cannibals. Truman’s record of malfeasance was lengthy. As a boy he had stuck his finger up his butt and jammed it into the nostrils of smaller kids. Later, he had stolen from his mother, pawned her jewelry and her antiques. He had turned Tiffany on to meth that afternoon he’d swung by to see her at the nice apartment in Charlottesville. His idea of a prank was to poke you in the bare flesh of your shoulder with a lit cigarette while you were sleeping. Truman was a rapist, but had never done time for it. Some assholes just struck lucky. His face was patterned with an uneven growth of red-gold beard, and his eyes were enormous with pupil, but the sneering, unapologetic boy he’d always been was there in the jut of his jaw.

  “Crack whore, come in.”

  “What?” Tiffany managed to ask.

  “I told you to answer the door! Jesus Christ!” Truman feinted a punch and she covered her head with her hands. She blinked tears.

  “Fuck you,” she said half-heartedly. She hoped Dr. Flickinger didn’t hear. He was in the bathroom. Tiffany liked the doctor. The doc was a trip. He always called her Madame and threw a wink to let her know he wasn’t making fun.

  “You are a toothless deaf crack whore,” Truman announced, overlooking the fact that he was himself in need of cosmetic dental surgery.

  Truman’s friend came out of the trailer’s bedroom, sat down at the foldout table, and said, “Crack whore phone home.” He giggled at his joke and did an elbow jig. Tiffany couldn’t remember his name, but she hoped his mother was super proud of her son who had the South Park poop tattooed on his Adam’s apple.

  A knock at the door. This time Tiffany did register it, a firm double-rap.

  “Never mind! Wouldn’t want to trouble you, Tiff. Just sit right there on your dumb ass.” Truman yanked open the door.

  A woman was standing there in one of Truman’s checked shirts, a length of olive-toned leg visible beneath.

  “What’s this?” Truman asked her. “What you want?”

  The voice that answered him was faint. “Hello, man.”

  From his seat at the table Truman’s friend called out, “Are you the Avon Lady, or what?”

  “Listen, honey,” Truman said to her. “You’re welcome to come in—but I believe I’m going to need that shirt back.”

  That made Truman’s friend laugh. “This is amazing! I mean, this your birthday or what, Tru?”

  From the bathroom, Tiffany heard the flush of the toilet. Dr. Flickinger had finished his business.

  The woman at the door shot a hand out and grabbed Truman’s neck. He made a little wheezing noise; his cigarette popped from his mouth. He reached up and dug his fingers into the visitor’s wrist. Tiffany saw the flesh of the woman’s hand whiten under the pressure, but she didn’t let go.

  Red spots appeared on Truman’s cheekbones. Blood trickled from the gashes his fingernails were making in the woman’s wrist. She still didn’t let go. The wheezing noise narrowed to a whistle. Truman’s free hand found the grip of the Bowie knife tucked into his belt and pulled it loose.

  The woman stepped into the room, her other hand catching the forearm of Truman’s knife hand in mid-stab. She backed him up, slamming him against the opposite wall of the trailer. It happened so quickly that Tiffany was never able to capture the stranger’s face, only the screen of her tangled, shoulder-length hair, which was so dark it seemed to have a green tint.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said Truman’s friend, scrabbling for the pistol behind a roll of paper towels and rising up from his chair.

  On Truman’s cheeks the red spots had expanded into purple clouds. He was making a noise like sneakers squeaking on hardwood, his grimace slipping into a sad clown droop. His eyes rolled. Tiffany could see his heartbeat pulsing in the taut skin to the left of his breastbone. The woman’s strength was astonishing.

  “Whoa,” Truman’s friend said yet again, as the woman head-butted Truman. Tru’s nose broke with a firecracker snap.

  A thread of blood lashed across the ceiling, a few droplets splashing on the bubble of the light fixture. The moths were going crazy, battering themselves against the fixture, the sound like an ice cube being shaken around in a glass.

  When Tiffany’s eyes slipped back down, she saw the woman swinging Truman’s body toward the table. Truman’s friend stood and pointed his gun. The crash of a stone b
owling ball boomed through the trailer. An irregular-shaped puzzle piece appeared in Truman’s forehead. A ragged handkerchief fell across Truman’s eye, skin with a section of eyebrow attached, torn loose and hanging down. Blood overspread Truman’s sagging mouth and slid down his chin. The flap of skin with his eyebrow on it flopped against his cheek. Tiffany thought of the mop-like sponges at the carwash that swabbed the windshield.

  A second shot ripped a hole through Truman’s shoulder, blood misted over Tiffany’s face, and the woman barreled Truman’s corpse into Truman’s friend. The table collapsed under the weight of the three bodies. Tiffany couldn’t hear her own screaming.

  Time jumped.

  Tiffany found herself in the corner of the closet, a raincoat pulled up to her chin. A series of muffled, rhythmic thuds made the trailer sway back and forth on its foundation. Tiffany was cast back to a memory of the Charlottesville bistro’s kitchen all those years earlier, the chef using a mallet to pound veal. The thuds were like that, except much, much heavier. There was a pop of ripping metal and plastic, then the thuds ceased. The trailer stopped moving.

  A knock shook the closet door.

  “Are you okay?” It was the woman.

  “Go ’way!” Tiffany howled.

  “The one in the bathroom got out the window. I don’t think you have to worry about him.”

  “What did you do?” Tiffany sobbed. Truman’s blood was on her and she didn’t want to die.

  The woman didn’t answer right away. Not that she needed to. Tiffany had seen what she had done, or seen enough. And heard enough.

  “You should rest now,” said the woman. “Just rest.”

  A few seconds later Tiffany thought she heard, through the sound baffles left by the gunfire, the click of the exterior door shutting.

  She huddled under the raincoat and moaned Truman’s name.