'She had a scheduling conflict.'
'She ain't coming?'
'Nope.'
He blinked, disbelief preceding anger. 'She sent you to tell me that?'
'No.'
'What're you doing? I'll report you being down here.'
'I'm taking Mazy's place. I do you, you keep off her.'
Soft T's heavy face stared into hers until he understood. 'All right, girl, but you better be good.'
'You wouldn't know what good is.'
'You can say any shit you want.' He laughed. 'But you still got to do it.'
The ground was littered with broken glass, cigarette butts, and trash. Some of the guards brought rubbers along, some didn't. Soft T never demanded actual vaginal sex from any of the women.
He rubbed his belly, and when he lifted his shirt, she noticed the soft, toffee-colored flesh around his hips. 'All right now, come to Daddy,' he said, his open hands at his waist.
'You can unzip yourself, you fucker.'
'No, you can do that, too.'
She knelt down on the old piece of plywood that had been thrown over the ground, her knees hard against it, and unzipped Soft T's pants. No one could see them. I'm doing this for you, Mazy, she thought, I can take the SHU.
She pulled out Soft T's penis, which was short and thick and smelled of cologne, and leaned close to him. He needed a little working and she did this brusquely. He stiffened. She moved her head back and forth. Her mouth was numb, she felt nothing. To imagine that she'd once enjoyed this sometimes-well, that was a long time ago.
'That's good,' he rasped. 'You like it.'
She shook her head, mouth full.
'You're lying. You like it.'
She pulled her head back. 'Dream your sick dreams.'
He pushed her head down, laughed. 'Dang, girl, you good.'
She kept at it, two hands at once, fast.
'Tight, make it tight.' His breathing quickened, his legs started to shake. 'All right,' he moaned. 'All right. Okay.'
She pulled him out as he came. White ribbons of semen stuck to her face and lips.
'That's right,' said Soft T, slapping his penis against her cheek, 'go on and make a mess of yourself.' He laughed and zipped up. Then he reached out and squeezed her cheek. 'You a hot bitch, you know that?' He looked hard into her face. 'Next time I want a smile.'
As Soft T disappeared around the corner of the building on his way back to his shift, Christina removed the small urine cup from her pocket. Using the cup's firm lip to scrape against her cheek, she collected the semen on her face, not all of it, but certainly a few teaspoons. She pressed the top of the cup together, matching the two edges perfectly, and then withdrew a tape dispenser from her other pocket. She taped the top of the cup shut, then wiped her tongue and teeth against the left sleeve of her shirt, her lips and cheeks against the right. Last, she spat-hard as she could.
Some of the other women knew what she had planned and watched from afar as she stalked toward the administration building. Dolores, a Dominican girl raking grass clippings, cried, 'You get it?'
Christina nodded.
'You go, girl,' she called.
Christina walked into the administration building. 'I want to talk to the Dep,' she told the guard, a man known as Rings because he sported at least five on each hand.
'Why?'
'Something important.'
'He busy.'
'I heard something about one of the girls having some strong stuff inside.'
Rings looked at her with suspicion, having listened to all manner of requests, lies, and outrageous assertions over the years. But, Christina knew, he had to let her through. Heroin was coming out of Mexico these days, cheap and strong. The snortable stuff sometimes got inside. If one of the women died, then it was his ass on the end of a string. The deputy warden, a tight bantam of a man with a salt-and-pepper crew cut, was known to be smart, tough, and completely unfair. He also wanted to be a warden at one of the state's men's prisons, an inherently political position, and so he had to appear to have a record of running as clean an operation as possible. Female inmates dying of heroin overdoses were not in the plan.
'You tell me what it is,' said Rings.
'No.' Christina shook her head. 'You gotta give me the Dep.'
The guard picked up his keys and clipboard, unlocked the barred door, disappeared behind it, and locked it again. In a minute he was back, a look of surprise on his face. 'All right.'
She proceeded through the bars and down the cement-block hallway to the deputy warden's office, feeling the air conditioning touch her face. The deputy warden stood at his desk, a little man in a bad suit, and waved his hand in front of his chair. 'Miss Welles, you-'
'I got something to talk about, but not what I told Rings.'
The deputy warden lifted his hand to interrupt.
'No, wait, wait, Dep, let me talk,' she said. 'Soft T has been terrorizing the women.'
'Mr. Thomas?'
'Mr. Thomas. He's using the clipboard to get sexual favors for himself.'
The deputy warden sat down. 'That's a very serious charge.'
'I know it's a very serious charge.' She could guess what he was thinking, because the wiring inside the prison was plain to anyone who had been there a few months: The prison generally let the guards get away with as much as they could, but a guard who was proven to have forced sex onto a female prisoner subjected the prison to the sensationalistic and synergizing effects of news reports, watchdog agency press conferences, civil lawsuits, and TV-movie deals. And then he had to be removed, which, the union correctly pointed out, deprived the man of his livelihood, guards being generally unqualified to do much else-the job required subservience to a military chain of command, tolerance for extreme boredom, a masked but present desire to abuse weaker human beings, and last but by no means least, the ability to attack and, if necessary, beat a woman.
The deputy warden saw that Christina was resolute. 'Go on,' he said.
'He's forcing women to give him blow jobs.'
'You?'
She held his gaze. 'Me.'
'When?'
'About five minutes ago.'
He nodded noncommittally and whisked his hands across his desk, as if sweeping away grains of irritation. The gesture carried an entire mindset-two decades of professional tedium, a thousand forgotten memos, a hundred remembered alimony payments, beer cans in an otherwise empty refrigerator, dead flies on the windowsill. 'You know my problem, Miss Welles, it's his word against yours.'
She waited until he seemed sure that she had no response. And then longer, creating enough silence to break his certainty.
'I've got proof.'
The deputy warden folded his arms. He'd heard everything in his time. Christina slipped her hand into her pocket. 'Here. Don't take my word for it.' She put the little paper cup on the warden's desk. 'That's his-his ejaculate. You have that tested, get the DNA or whatever they do, and then test him, Dep. He just shot that all over my face five minutes ago. You go ask him how I got that, okay? I didn't steal it from him, you know what I mean?'
The deputy warden picked up the little paper cup. He tore the tape off, looked inside, and nodded. Then he raised his eyes to Christina. 'That's it, then,' he said.
