A Good Dude (17 page)

“I
have to
take a shower,” Candace confided. “I just had a baby the day before yesterday.”

Neci looked upset for a moment, but it washed over quickly. “Yeah?”

Candace nodded.

Neci shrugged. “It’s like I said, people can see you in there. They won’t really look. Ain’t nobody supposed to look at you, but they can see if they want to.”

That was weird, but Candace didn’t have another option.

“Where do I get a towel?” she asked.

“They shoulda gave you one when you checked in.”

“I didn’t get one.”

“You can get one from the guards,” Neci said, pointing to a station at the front of the room. “It’s somebody there all the time. Or you can use one of mine. I got an extra one.”

Candace was leery of any
gifts
from this woman, no matter how insignificant.

“I’ll get one from the guards. I need to have my own.” Neci shrugged. “Good thing you didn’t come here pregnant.”

“Why?”

“Cause if you got into it with somebody, you’d be worrying about your stomach.”

“I’m not going to fight anyone,” Candace assured. “Sometimes you don’t got no choice.”

“They would fight me while I was pregnant?”

Neci chuckled. “They got a saying here for situations like that:
Yo face ain’t pregnant
!”

Candace didn’t think that could be true.

“You had a baby right before you came to jail?” Neci asked. But that was a conversation Candace wasn’t going to have in the middle of the unit. Neci had to wait until they were locked down for the night to pry that information from her.

* * *

Next to the initial intake, taking a shower proved to be the second most embarrassing thing jail had to offer. But Candace did it that night, and every other night she was locked away in the facility. Afterwards she watched a little TV before finally selecting a novel from their scantily stocked cart. Of the twenty-two books available, eight were different copies of the Bible. Most of the rest were tawdry romance novels. Candace lucked out with a Jackie Collins mystery.

She was already on her cot when the guards instructed everyone to return to their cells for the night. Neci came in but didn’t get right into bed. She brushed her teeth, washed a pair of socks and underwear, and hung them on the bunk to dry. Candace was glad she was already settled, because the cell wasn’t big enough for both of them to move around down there.

The lights went off at ten-thirty, but
lights out
was only a relative term. The fluorescent bulbs in their cell only went to half power, and the main area where they ate their meals was still well lit. With Candace on the top bunk, she took the brunt of this unnatural illumination, but there was a bright side to everything: She could read anytime she wanted, all the way till breakfast if the nights found her sleepless.

Neci finally lay down at eleven p.m. Two minutes later she wanted to talk.

“You still ‘wake, cellie?”

“Yeah.”

“Was you still gonna tell me about your baby?”

“Might as well. I don’t think I’m going to sleep.” Candace told her the whole sordid story, from Rilla to

Leila. When she was done talking, Neci had a million ques
-
tions. Candace only had trouble answering one of them. “How can you sit in here without going crazy? I’d be on them phones every minute trying to get out.”

“I didn’t do it,” Candace said. “They’re going to let me out.”

“But what if they don’t?” Neci asked. “They done put cases on niggas with less evidence than that. Plus you said they found the dope.”

“But I didn’t do what they said I did.”

“But they got the dope.”

“
Based on a lie
,” Candace said. “They’re not going to be able to bring an informant to court. And if they got that search warrant based on a lie, then the warrant’s no good.”

“You been watching too much TV,” Neci said.

“Maybe so, but I think they wanted to arrest a drug dealer. Once they find out that’s not me, they’ll let me go. I really believe that.”

“You still need to let your people know where you are. You over here all by yourself. You need a lawyer.”

“They’re going to let me go.”

“But what if they don’t?”

“I feel it,” Candace said. “It’s just something I know, Neci. I’m going through all of this for a reason. I think it’s ‘cause I wanted to give up my baby. I’m being punished for that. And for running away.”

“What if you’re still here in a month?”

“If I’m still here in a month, I’ll call my parents,” Candace said.

“For real?”

“For real.”

“So why you ain’t crying? You not scared? You don’t miss your baby?”

“I am scared,” Candace said. “And I do miss my baby. She’s all I think about.”

“This is your first time getting locked up,” Neci said. “Everybody cries.”

“I can’t,” Candace said honestly. She shook her head and chuckled at the light fixture no more than two feet from her nose. “If you knew how much I’ve been crying in the last nine months . . . . I’m through with that. I’m out of tears. Plus I feel like if I start crying again, I’ll snap. I’ll be stuck like that, depressed, crying for the rest of my life. They’ll have to put me in a padded room.”

“You think you’re going to get your baby back?”

“I know I will.”

“Then what are you going to do? Go home?”

“Maybe. I kinda want to see if I can do it myself.”

“You crazy,” Neci said.

“Just wore down,” Candace corrected. “If you’d been

“I guess,” Neci said, then asked, “What about your boyfriend? He’s here, too, right? In this same jail?”

Candace wondered how far away Rilla was physically. “He’s here,” she said, “but I don’t think about him. I’m not thinking about him. I’m never going to feel the same way about him.”

“Even if both of y’all get out?”

“I’ll never get back with him,” Candace clarified. There was a break in the conversation, so she asked, “So why would they arrest you for
cashing checks
?”

Neci laughed. She explained how she not only cashed checks, but she wrote the checks herself with a fictitious bank, fictitious account number, and fictitious signee.

“You can do anything with a computer,” Neci said.

“I’ll say,” Candace said.

* * *

Neci did not come out of the closet that night or even bring up the possibility of gay women on their unit. Candace certainly didn’t bring it up herself.

* * *

An hour before breakfast Candace was awakened from a horrible dream. She sat up in her bunk not sure where she was for a second. It was odd waking up at night with so many lights on,
if it was still night
. There was no way of telling time in there. Candace was sweating, and her heart raced. The dream slipped from her consciousness quickly, and she was glad she couldn’t remember it. She knew it was something bad, and her baby was involved in some way.

The noise that woke her up was still going on, even more loudly now.

“Get off—”

“Shut up!”

Whap!

“Sto—”

Whap! Whap!

“Bitch!”

“Ooh, they fighting!” Neci said. She hopped out of bed and rushed to the bars. She strained her neck in all directions. “Damn, I can’t see them.” Neci usually wore long shorts and a wifebeater to sleep. From behind, she looked like a full-grown man standing at the door.

“Who’s fighting?” Candace asked.

“I think it’s some Mexicans,” Neci said. “I can’t see them though. They’re right next to us. Somebody getting they ass whooped.”

The ruckus went on for a few minutes more before three guards charged the unit.

“Get off her!
Get off
!”

One of them had a radio. “I need cell four opened!”

Another had pepper spray on the ready. “Get off her or I’m spraying the whole cell! Get off her! Both of you lay flat on the floor!”

Candace was out of bed now, and she saw that all of the women on her unit were awake. Two pairs of eyes stared out of each cell. They might sleep through a meal, but no one missed the fights.

The guards got the door open and charged the cell like linebackers. They pulled out a wild-haired black girl and a bloodied Hispanic woman. Both women looked slightly deranged to Candace, but the Latin girl was worse for wear. Not only was she crying and bleeding, but she couldn’t even tell the guards what happened; neither of them spoke Spanish.

“She was messing with
me
!” the black girl insisted, but everyone knew she was the aggressor. One of the guards wrenched her arm behind her back and led her off the unit with a tight grip on her hair. The Hispanic lady was led away, too, but without all the roughness.

“See, that’s why you should stay in a cell with your own people,” Neci said, but Candace didn’t think that was right.

* * *

The days Candace spent in jail crept by one lowly minute at a time. She eventually got into a routine she could live with, but the time never flew by like she thought it would. There were a lot of things to complain about: the smells, the cold, the food, and the company, but Candace found that sheer boredom was the worst incarceration had to offer.

You could watch TV for a while, play with homemade cards and dominoes, and read every book on the cart, but sooner or later you were going to be locked in your cell. You got locked down for eight hours at night. After breakfast you were locked down another five hours until lunch.

With all of the time spent in your cell, you had no choice but to develop an emotionally intimate bond with your cell mate. Candace and Neci talked about everything imaginable. By the time Candace got out, she knew about every one of her friend’s stays in jail, arrests, and traffic stops. Sometimes Neci would get animated in the retelling of her stories. She would stand up and act it out, and Candace would rest her head on the heels of her hands and watch from her bunk.

Neci was fun to be around. Sometimes in the wee hours of the morning, she would have to put the brakes on herself.

“. . . Man, that was wild. But I better quit talking. I know my cellie don’t get no sleep.”

“I’m all right,” Candace would say. “I get most of my sleep after breakfast.”

* * *

The
freedom
they got after lunch and dinner was the best part of the day. You could associate with everyone then, a much-needed change after so much time with your cell mate’s smells. There were two women on the unit who only spoke Spanish. The powers that be had them in separate cells, and they sought each other like sisters during mealtimes.