Blame: A Novel by Michelle Huneven Read Free Book Online Page A

were led to a loading area. The sheriff’s bus took them the three blocks to the jail. There, she was asked to strip, then sprayed with some pressurized corrosive delouser, allowed a tepid shower, and issued the usual scratchy poly-steel gown. She rode an elevator half a dozen stories up to a cell occupied by a Korean-speaking bar girl with a nasty head cold. For two days she sat or lay on the upper concrete bunk, listened to her cellmate cough and spit, and searched for patterns in the bubbles of the poured concrete ceiling. Then the state prison’s bus arrived and took her east.
    •
    Surely, county jail had prepared her for prison. She expected no amenity, civility, or consideration from the guards. She expected grime and hopelessness, and how the refrigerated hours slowed to a standstill. She knew how to pull in deep. But who could go deep enough for the bus ride to prison, a two-hour coed excursion. From the moment of boarding, the male prisoners said everything imaginable to the women, about their faces and bodies, their wrinkled, stinking genitals and not-so-secret passion for rape. Patsy found the guards’ noninterference as shocking and hateful as anything the men said. No, more so.
    She was twenty-nine years old; her dissertation had been accepted six months earlier, almost to the day.
    They rode east for more than an hour; then the driver left the freeway and drove through the backside of a warehouse district, the factory yards full of rusted and leaking metal drums, heaps of pipes and rods, and unidentifiable pieces of steel. The bus bumped over train tracks, passed pockets of houses with tiny yards, people sitting on porches, dogs standing in the streets. They came to what looked like a vast, ugly elementary school in dark pink stucco. Flower beds spilled crabgrass, and what might have been lawns were expanses of packed dirt and low, trash-snagging weeds. A few dark, tenacious, struggling juniper bushes hugged the buildings; otherwise the yards were bare. The bus swung around the back, stopping for a long time by a high steel fence. On the bus, the men went from fractious to frenzied, ready to rampage the place and its female population, if that were only possible. A gate opened; the bus pulled in and idled in the sun on an asphalt field. After some minutes a guard in the back of the bus stood and herded the women off. They filedout, clutching small totes, trash bags, grocery sacks. Patsy had her gym bag. They moved slowly in their clanking shackles while the men whistled and catcalled and banged the windows with the flats of their hands.
    Once off the bus, the women funneled through solid steel doors into an entryway. Once they were all inside, a set of iron gates opened with much buzzing and creaking, and they were ushered into a longer passageway where three guards frisked them, patted them down, and took their bags. Gone were Patsy’s books and asthma inhalers. The next gate opened, they funneled through, and the gate shut behind them. The whine of the hinges, the clangs of closure were terrible, loud, unnecessarily theatrical.
    The guards told them to open their mouths and shake their heads. The waxed floors and empty hallways and wide stairs divided by steel pipe handrails resembled nothing so much as an abandoned school, one so battered and harshly lit, so completely devoid of any nicety, the effect could only be intentional. The women shuffled finally into a large, open room where more guards were stationed all around, their legs apart, their right hands poised over their guns. Along a counter on the far end, six women waited like bank tellers. Registration, somebody said. It takes hours.
    No talking, said a guard. That means no talking.
    Even though the new prisoners were silent, the noise of the place was intense, layered, insane: the banging and clanging of steel, the slamming of doors, the incessant pinging of vehicles in reverse, the voices of women nearby and far off, yelling and shrieking, their