One Life. David Lida

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СКАЧАТЬ necessary. Pamela will sometimes jabber in fragments of sentences. The words may be Spanish, but when Pamela talks she makes as little sense as the gringas and the negras yammering in English. She is thirty-five and flabby with lank brown hair. Her mouth is always open, her wide gums exposed, teeth as big as a horse’s. Every day someone comes with a cart and gives her medicine.

      Esperanza’s first cellmate had been an unsmiling woman with a close-cropped natural and a dull gray finish to her skin, who read the Bible all day and never directed a word to her. Then she was gone, replaced with a güera with freckles, pimples, broken teeth, and greasy red hair, uncombed and creeping toward her shoulders. She was in her mid-twenties, about the same age as Esperanza, and because of her lax bathing habits had a sour odor. She spent most of the day directing invective toward Esperanza, words that became easy to ignore because she didn’t understand them, and because the redhead never looked her in the eye when she said them.

      The bowl of the seatless steel toilet is two feet from the cot where Esperanza sleeps. At first she panicked at the idea of using it in front of her cellmates. Even in Puroaire, with a dilapidated bathroom, she and the others in her family took care of their necessities privately. But to pull down her pants and squat before strange and hostile neighbors? She peed only when she couldn’t hold it in any longer. Because of the starchy diet absent in fiber, a week went by before the institutional victuals caught up with her and she had no choice but to defecate. It was a thunderous, fluid, suppurating cascade of bile; it felt as if she was evacuating her internal organs and she couldn’t stop herself from groaning. She caught her Bible-reading roommate gaping at her and glared back. When the other woman turned her head, Esperanza felt in a curious way triumphant.

      “Maybe they’ll give us that thing with the peaches tonight,” Pamela says. She refers to a dessert in which a canned fruit encased in solidified syrup is perched atop a hard starchy chunk. The powers that be thought they were doing the few Spanish-speaking inmates a favor by pairing them up in cells. That is how Pamela entered Esperanza’s life. Pamela, who growls gutturally and laughs when nothing remotely funny has been spoken. Pamela, who grinds her teeth and snores while sleeping. Pamela, who grunts as she begins to rub herself. Esperanza discreetly turns toward the wall. “You can look at me,” Pamela says.

      The noise never stops. Atop a cement bunk and an inch-thick foam mattress, Esperanza is constantly disturbed out of a fitful sleep by the bark of shouting arguments, the buzz of a radio, or the blast of a TV infomercial, a solo droning rap or the harmony of several voices in song. In Puroaire she was sometimes awakened by the arguments when her father came home drunk. That happened periodically but predictably; here she doesn’t know from one night to the next what will wake her or prevent her from sleeping at all. Still, she has become more or less accustomed to the interruptions, to the fluorescent lights in the hall that are kept on through the night, to slumber in fits and starts. She wonders whether she is capable of getting used to anything.

      She hears the sucking sound of Woodruff’s tongue on her teeth. Sometimes the officer stops outside the cell and talks for a few minutes. Esperanza doesn’t understand why; the words are almost entirely a mystery both to her and to Pamela.

      “Where you at, Falanza?” the guard asks, peering into her cell. Esperanza nods. Woodruff has never learned how to pronounce her name so she more or less makes up a handle each time she addresses her. Esperanza can’t say her jailer’s name either. “How they treating you? Ain’t no one been up in your shit lately?” She speaks playfully, but there is little comfort in the singsong tone; she holds her stick in a vertical position as if to warn Esperanza not to even think of defying her. “You getting to like partying here at the Ponderosa? They worst places in the world. Don’t make no nevermind if you like it or not, ’cause you going to be on the inside a long time.” She extends the word long in a breathy drawl.

      Pamela doesn’t like the guard. She gets up from her cot, begins to walk around the cell and mumble. In Spanish, she tells Woodruff that she is a fat idiot, and that she cannot cause Pamela any harm because she is protected by San Charbel. Soon the officer will be burning in hell where the devil will make her dance like Juana la cubana. Woodruff ignores her.

      “I can’t figure you out, girl,” says the jailer to Esperanza. “Most of these motherfuckers up here is simple as shit, but you like a mystery.”

      The jailer fixes her gaze on Esperanza, who looks toward the floor.

      “I seen all kind of freak-ass bitches up in here. Cutthroat hoes steal the yellow out of an egg or the white out of your teeth. Wack-ass bitches who give up all the pussy they got for five dollars worth of crank. Pimpstresses dumb enough to do two dimes for riding in a car with the soldier that pulls the triggers.” Pamela stands next to the bars making faces at Woodruff, sticking her tongue out and barking like a dog. The guard barely glances at her. “And plenty that ain’t right in the head, like you friend over there.”

      Between Pamela’s bark and Woodruff’s drawl, Esperanza is on the verge of a panic attack. What wouldn’t she do to be back in Puroaire? How happily she would divide a tortilla in four just to see her mother’s vanquished eyes once more, to taste a spoonful of homemade beans, to look over the valley and the trees and the sun in the spring. Was life hard there? Backbreaking hard, so hard it turned humans into ghosts by the time they were forty. But she had no idea what hard was until she came to los States.

      “I get all that shit, but what I can’t understand is a bitch like you that kill you own childrens.” Woodruff shakes her head. Her eyes penetrate and her tone gets higher. “You must be out of your motherfucking conk, girl. How could you do that to you own baby?”

      Since she arrived in the United States, Esperanza has worked with Mexicans, eaten with Mexicans, made love with Mexicans, and lived on the outskirts of a town in a neighborhood where nearly everyone was Mexican. Her whole life here has been in Spanish; the closest she got to speaking a foreign language was figuring out the slang of the Hondurans. Yet in her months in jail, through osmosis, she has learned enough English to understand the sum and substance of Woodruff’s speech. It’s true: Esperanza has been charged with killing an eleven-month-old baby, a blameless infant named Yesenia who spent nine months in her own belly before living a miserable and thankfully brief near-year until her death. The memory of holding the baby in her arms when she still gurgled with life fills Esperanza with a horror so complete that she freezes.

      The guard begins to laugh. “Baby, you know she crazy and she don’t mean nothing by it, but you best watch out for your friend. She up in your drawers right now.” She walks away, chuckling and banging the bars with her stick.

      Pamela has indeed grabbed a pair of Esperanza’s panties from the shelf and has them in her mouth. She pulls them with her hands, tears them to shreds with her teeth.

      The Ponderosa may be a ghastly place, but no horror can compete with the death of Yesenia. Esperanza realizes that she isn’t afraid that prison will kill her. She wishes prison would kill her. She wants to die. There is even a little comfort in the knowledge that, if the state has its way, she will be put to death. And still more in the assurance that, whatever Louisiana has in store for her, God will give her what she deserves.

       WHERE THE DEVIL LOST HIS PONCHO

      The house was squat and square, of cinder block and cement. One of these days they might get around to painting the facade. It was one story tall with rebar popping out of the roof. In towns like Ojeras, rebar represents hope: hope that one of these days there will be money to build a second story.

      The woman behind the door was a foot shorter than me, her face crosshatched with wrinkles. Her gray hair was pulled back in a bun, the top button of a flimsy black sweater fastened across her chest. Although СКАЧАТЬ