The Road Narrows As You Go (57 page)

The envelope containing the name of the winner of the Reuben Award was in her hands now. Spotlight on the infamous
Replicant Fitness
instructor. Manila opened the seal without fanfare.

The winner is, who else? My good friend and all-time favourite—Bill Watterson for
Calvin and Hobbes
, Manila said, and when he came up the three stairs, she handed him his trophy, kissed him on the mouth, and stood beside him while he delivered a speech that we don't remember any of except that it sounded more like a manifesto against consumerism than a list of thank yous.

Wendy sat and clenched her jaw behind a smile through his whole speech like a plaster clown it only takes one tiny tap to shatter.

Then she said she needed a minute in the ladies' room before we left the hotel ballroom. Light-headed, splash of water. Forty minutes later we followed her in to ask if she was okay. Not drunk, she said. Too lucid. Impaired by perfect sight. She groaned, What was I
thinking
?

She threw her torn-up acceptance speech in the toilet and flushed it away.

Our ride to the ABC party in the hills was in a rental car driven by an intern, and he wanted to get going, it was getting late (three in the morning), but now that Wendy had calmed down, Frank was missing.

I'll go find him, Wendy told us. I could use a walk to clear my head. She carried her heels in her hands and strolled barefoot through the banquet hall and the reception area, but all was empty.

The National Cartoonists Society Awards that year were held in the Beverly Hills Hotel, a sprawling and modern renovation, luxuries updated a year ago with all new fixtures, pool after pool, and views of the diamondblue ocean and the golden beaches. The halls on the main floor had a whole mall's worth of shops that catered to well-financed whims. He was shopping in none of them.

She took a flight of carpeted stairs that spiralled up to the third floor, also reserved for banquet halls and conference rooms. She pulled open the door of a small waiting room, where three enormous windows were open, letting in air from the ocean, and the sound of the ocean, looking out onto the perfectly black night sky and the white sands of the beach. It was beautiful.

Oh, sorry, I didn't see you— … There on a loveseat Wendy caught sight of a couple of men in suits, kissing and groping. She turned to leave. But then she realized one of the men was a woman, it was Manila in her sexy tux. And the man on top of her, with his hands in her hair and on her breast and …, that was Frank Fleecen.

Wendy was already running.

She came running into the lobby. No tears in her eyes. We only wondered where Frank was. There we were, her four devoted assistants, waiting for her so we could go to yet another party in her honour—at four in the morning. Amid the last of the cartoonists to leave the Reubens party— Bushmiller, Johnston, Larson—three men wearing slate trenchcoats stood inconspicuously near the exit.

Wendy studied one of the men in a trenchcoat. Chris Quiltain, she said. What is it
this
time? Think you can get me when I'm down?

Then Frank ran into the lobby, in time to see her being led out the glass doors, and he called out: Wendy—

Frank Fleecen, you're under arrest, said one of the men in a slate trenchcoat and gently eased both Frank's hands behind his back and cuffed him.

Came in from NYC this morning to see this, Chris said from the front seat of the police cruiser taking Wendy to the nearest station. Had to watch, had to make sure it happened right.

Chris Quiltain, you devil, Wendy said. I wondered when you might show up with something kinky. I've never been to jail. What's it like?

Next day's papers ran front-page stories about Wendy's arrest as part of a sweeping round of indictments in New York District Attorney Rudy Giuliani's war on white-collar crime. She was described as
caught up
in Frank Fleecen's larger racket, and the charges laid against her alleged that she siphoned at least thirty thousand dollars
a month
of Frank's illegal profits through at least a dozen bank accounts at Solus First National and from there moved the money into numbered accounts in offshore banks. She was delivered to a women's corrections facility.

The indictments took out main players within the offices of Hexen Diamond Mistral and Frank's connections in the savings and loans. Police with handcuffs interrupted Doug Chimney on the phone in his office at Solus First National making an illegal sell; for the past three years he had allowed Frank Fleecen's bagman to deposit nine thousand dollars in cash every day into Wendy's accounts without her knowledge. The bagman, a flunky Hexen junk bond salesman with two alimonies and health problems, flipped on his boss for a deal to avoid time. These arrests followed that of Quinn Kravis, who agreed to cooperate with the DA for
a reduced sentence. Kravis confessed to multiple counts of insider trading and accepting a bribe, and claimed Frank was not just part of an insider trading scheme but the ringleader who paid him and others to take up big positions, park stock, greenmail companies, and in return, receive tip-offs about deals ahead of public disclosure.

39

Freedom or riches? Jeans or khakis? These questions troubled Wendy's cellmate, Essa Mole Deattur.

She told Wendy to be glad for her view of the water tower. Not everyone had such a grand view. Most other cells got a clear sheet of uninterrupted hot blue sky, a purgatory you hoped to see a cloud in, a jetliner, any animate thing to obstruct that changeless picture of the atmosphere out of the eight-by-ten picture window. An eight-by-ten picture of everything and nothing. Or you had a view of fence. But the water tower's dimensions, its circumference, the cone of its rooftop, the concrete substance of it, the oblique angles, its shadows always changing—the water tower reminded Wendy of her life, of the purpose of drawing, to see the same thing forever differently. Days when the birds all took off at once from underneath its domed roof—she thought the little birdies must live there, nests must be under there, all of them a family, flying in formation like a powder. The tower took her away from this sanitized dungeon with nothing but the Home Shopping Network and back to someplace normal, full of choices. At a certain longitude, the water tower blocked out the sun and even
cooled her cell. A temporary breeze amid the prison stifle. Time she spent meditating on the water tower passed at the pace of a soap opera, too quickly for nothing to have happened in the space of an hour.

Apart from the water tower, which constantly changed with the light, everything else in prison happened slower than dentistry.

She sat on the top bunk, or sometimes lay on her stomach, and looked at the water tower through the Plexiglas window, and she thought about her life and answered the questions posed by her cellmate. Both women were innocent, awaiting trial. Wendy's cellmate was arrested for shoplifting over ten thousand in Gap merchandise.

Night owl or morning person? Steal or starve?
Dallas
or
Dynasty
?

Another perk of being a nonviolent cartoonist she did not fully appreciate in the early days of her integration with the general population was that unlike most of the others imprisoned in the California Institution for Women outside the city of Chino, Wendy had only one cellmate, Essa. Some cells even had a fifth roommate sleeping on a foam mattress laid out over the remaining floor space. Essa Mole Deattur was more fidgety and unused to confinement than Wendy, and she'd been here much longer. She was maybe fifty pounds overweight and acted like it was all muscle. She had the laugh of a Disney villainess. Every morning, Wendy had to braid her hair or never hear the end of it. Ford or Dodge? Wendy's prison cell had a high ceiling, a window view, and a pregnant woman for a bunkmate.

She ought to be more creatively energized given the privacy, solitude, and being dislocated from bad habits. When she couldn't fall asleep she dreamed of Hick, of Jonjay, of Frank, of Biz Aziz. She dreamed of Twyla Noon and Sue Fleecen and The Farm and Aluminum Uvula. When her eyes wouldn't shut, she dreamed of herself elsewhere. She ought to channel her thoughts into drawings, she ought to draw if she wasn't going to sleep. In a blink, night to morning, and a buzzer to let her know it was time to get ready for breakfast.

Wasn't that what this was supposed to be all about, rehabilitate herself
and become a productive member of society again? But she couldn't organize her thoughts. The atmosphere was not intuitive, it wasn't.

Hot tea or ice tea? Revenge or let bygones be bygones?

Definitely
Dallas
, said Wendy.

Yesterday my cellmate was Siobhan, she was sentenced to life but got out due to governor's clemency, Essa told Wendy. Got a terminal lung cancer from an asbestos factory she was at since a teenager. Said her it was her nerves what made her stalk her ex-husband and leave death threats on his message machine. Now she's got a couple months to live on a respirator. I hope your nerves are okay.

Wendy chewed her bottom teeth and said her nerves were pretty much shot at the moment.

There's others like you in here, Satanists, said Essa.

I'm not a—

There's the Manson family girls.

There is?

And there's a lady here from Martinsville for ritual abuse of baby children, like, molestation or something. Says she's innocent.

I'm not a Satanist, Wendy explained to her cellmate.

That's what she says, too. She's innocent.

I
am
innocent, said Wendy.

Yeah, said Essa. Me, too.

Essa Mole Deattur said she was a native of Baton Rouge who moved to California with a man who later got shot in the spine and died after messing with the wrong convenience store clerk in Carmel City trying to steal a bottle of rum, a stack of VHS movies, and a box of Tampax for Essa, who watched him twist, explode in blood, and fall. She was behind the wheel of the getaway and took off in squeals with the moon rising in her rearview mirror like a dead eye.

Essa was marking the beginning of her third trimester of a prison pregnancy.

Docs say I'm having a little girl, she said, caressing the cantaloupe-sized sphere stretching out her belly as she lay on the bottom bunk with extra pillows for lumbar support. The shock of her lover's shotgun death cured her of a life of crime, and when Essa settled into an apartment and took a minimum-wage job at the flagship Gap warehouse on the Hunters Point drydock, she promised herself she'd never look back. She was looking at eleven months for grand theft. Halfway through the remand hearing she realized her court-appointed lawyer was partially deaf. The judge was sold on high-tech video surveillance footage from the drydock that the prosecutor showed of a pregnant woman guiding two broad-shouldered men in black jackets to load half a dozen boxes of Gap khakis out of a delivery truck and into a Dodge minivan.

Wendy said she was innocent, too—at risk of serving up to three years on charges of perjury and insider trading or something. The police told her they'd caught her helping Frank launder money but she didn't know a thing about it. She still could not understand her own crime.

Cashews or almonds? Coffee Crisp or Crispy Crunch? Sade or Annie Lennox? Oil of Olay or Noxzema? Which do you like more,
Nancy
or
Cathy
?

Nancy
, said Wendy. We used to play these kinds of games at my place.

I'm a
Cathy
person, said her cellmate. I used to tape her strips up all over my office walls at the warehouse. She's a Lucille Ball type of embarrassment to herself. She's late for everything. She's gaining weight and losing her hair. Mom nags. Work piles up. Men ditch her. That's life.

I met the creator of
Cathy
. Like, three days ago. Fuck. It feels like months.

Ruthvah or Old Spice?

Old Spice, said Wendy.

Interesting. Bra or burn? Burgers or hotdogs? Kmart or Zellers?

*

Six thousand six hundred and twenty women resided at the California women's corrections institution outside Chino, east of Los Angeles, in a gated, guarded complex built to room half that population. A thousand beds were saved for women like Wendy and Essa awaiting trial without bail. Across ten separate cellblocks, five thousand three hundred and seventy mothers were locked up, and two dozen pregnancies intermingled with the rest. Hundreds of women serving less than a month for nonviolent or drug-related crimes slept on day cots and army bunks in the recreational room, called the red light district. More than one young woman could not stop cutting herself and they kept rotating these waifs in and out of solitary confinement on suicide watch. Essa said there was a woman on death row here since Eisenhower. None of the inmates had seen the femme fatale's face since the sensational newspaper clippings but the guards said she'd kept her looks.

There was one guard for every three hundred women. Her guard's name was Rick and his booth in the centre of her cellblock's panopticon was scattered with empty fast food bags and candy wrappers and the greasy remnants of reread pro wrestling magazines, and Rick was the only guard who tuned the television to something other than the Home Shopping Network.

The buzzer for dinner sounded uncomfortably like the buzzer for No Manors amplified a hundred times. She lingered beside Rick's desk and watched the evening news. Footage of Frank leaving the courthouse and crawling into the backseat of a private car, flanked by lawyers, besieged by journalists and cameramen, appeared in a frame to the side of Dan Rather's head as he ran down the list of indictments against Frank, who was going to jail for years for racketeering and securities fraud.

Frank Fleecen was the image of American wealth in the eighties, Dan Rather said. Through risky hypothecations he turned a quiet investment banking firm into a seemingly unstoppable behemoth. Now it turns out his deals may have benefited him and his inner circle more than his clients.

His genius, said Dan Rather, goes unquestioned among his acolytes but his critics say it was his greed, not his generosity, that helped extend America's line of credit. Thanks to years of Reaganomics, Fleecen has exploited the deregulated bond market to turn his chosen princes into captains of industry—ousting families from their own businesses in the process. Like a modern-day swashbuckler, chasing down companies in a series of hostile takeovers that have replaced seasoned managers and nepotism with trailblazers and inexperienced hotshots …