the whale from a water park in Jacksonville, speeding, and they lost control of the truck. When the cab jackknifed, the whale’s aqua hammock broke and the animal came crashing out into the road, tumbling over itself, its bones cracking, before it finally rolled to a stop. The whale lay there wheezing, insects crawling over its skin, for a full hour before the rescue team came. Every now and then it would shriek through its blowhole.
I remember that picture and think: See, asshole? See? That’s what happens when you act too fast. When you don’t go step by step by step.
iii.
THE HOUSE IS COMING ALONG. IT’S AMAZING TO WATCH THE place change, week by week. Just nine months after moving in, we’ve finished most of the major work; we scraped the rot out of the second-floor walls, replaced the floor in the basement. Marco and Jesus and Jesus’s brothers came by and helped for a fee.
As expected, there are things about the house that will take years to fix: the slight, undulating warp in the upstairs floors, the sag in the attic ceiling. But our goal was to make it livable by the end of the first year, and here we are.
The only thing bothering me is that the prison has turned out to be something other than what Joyce said it was. I’ve learned that there’s more to the place than she originally let on.
From almost the moment we moved in, I made a hobby of studying the prison and its residents—looking up all the women, getting to know who they were, what their lives had been like before they ended up incarcerated. Almost every one of them had an interesting story: the chef had tried to burn down her own restaurant for the insurance money; the owner of the baseball team had been caught trying to smuggle drugs into the country on her private plane.
I enjoyed getting to know them, one by one: finding out about them on my computer at work, looking up their stories, then coming home and getting to watch them in person, through the keyhole of my telescope.
But there was one group of women, a tiny subset, that I didn’t become aware of—didn’t even see—until long after Laura and I were already settled in. After those first months of spying, I started to notice, every now and then, and only in glimpses, a different kind of resident wandering the grounds: I became aware of a small handful of women who were much older than the rest, actual elderly people, white-haired and wrinkled. There were only three of them on the grounds, I learned after watching the prison more closely. During the summer these women must have been indoors, where it was air-conditioned. But as autumn closed in and the weather grew cooler, they began to come out into the yard, lingering for just a few minutes at a time, smoking a cigarette by the vegetable garden, playing a quick hand of cards at the picnic tables, before heading back inside.
None of the younger inmates seemed to want anything to do with them. At first, I assumed the giant age difference was the reason. It took me a while to learn that they stayed away from the old ladies because they were frightened.
As it turned out, the three old women were transfers from another Florida penitentiary—a real prison, with guard towers and searchlights, bars and razor wire. They were all violent offenders too, killers who’d spent thirty, forty, even fifty years in maximum-security prisons. They’d simply been transferred over to the camp because by now it was assumed that they were too old to do harm anymore. And because at their age they needed certain amenities that were difficult to provide in real jail.
“It’s not like there are any thugs in there,” Joyce had said. “No real criminals.”
But these women were murderers. All three of them had killed in cold blood. Two of them had murdered their husbands. One had done it for money, the other for no good reason at all. And the last lady, the oldest of the three, turned out to be a serial murderer. Her name was Rose Deach, and as a young woman in the 1940s she had killed over thirty people. If the war hadn’t been going on she likely would have made national headlines, because her crimes were particularly heinous.
Rose had started out working in the nursery of the Volusia county hospital, up the coast, not far from Daytona. She’d been a physician’s assistant, a pretty young girl who watched over newborns until they were ready to go home. Some babies she apparently took good care of. She checked their temperatures, their breathing; she fed them, did whatever she was supposed to do to keep them healthy. Other babies, though, Rose killed by clamping her hands over their faces in the middle of the night.
For three and a half years Rose moved from hospital to hospital, caring for some, killing others. When she was finally caught, she didn’t seem to understand what she’d done wrong. She’d only killed the bad babies, she said. She claimed she could tell which ones were going to grow up to be good people, and which ones were bad seeds.
“I don’t understand it myself, but it’s so,” she was quoted as saying from jail in June of 1944.
“I press my hand to a child’s chest and right off I can feel what kind of character they’ve got. Right in my palm. I can tell whether they’re going to add goodness to the world, or subtract from it. And so,” she said, “the bad ones I go ahead and press out of the world. Who needs them here? Right?”
In the 1940s Rose Deach was a scary story that parents and nannies around Florida told misbehaving children, a fairy-tale villain. Kids used her name to frighten each other.
I watch as Rose and the other two murderesses emerge from the barracks. I watch them make their way to the picnic table, so skinny, all three of them, shrunken, tiny women, their skin pale and crinkly as tracing paper. The orange jumpsuits hang on them—Rose is so small, she has to wear hers cuffed at the ends of the pants legs to keep from tripping. And as they near the exercise path, I see all the other women part and let them pass.
Who can blame the younger ones, though? I’m frightened myself. It makes me angry to think that Joyce didn’t tell us about the murderesses. Laura doesn’t seem to understand. To her the murderesses are just three little old women hobbling around. They’re harmless. But for me, there’s something deeply scary about them. They remind me of a certain kind of car that shows up at the wrecking yard once, maybe twice a year. A kind of car that all of us are very careful around.
Like at most wrecking yards, the majority of the vehicles we acquire we get at insurance auctions. We buy them ourselves, junkers that we purchase for parts. An old Honda or Ford, for example, might have the back smashed to garbage but the front still full of usable machinery—a transmission, a fan belt, a dirty radiator. We’re scavengers, for the most part. We buy dead cars and gut them for pieces, catalog them, then stack them on the bone piles, wait for the aluminum prices to go up before selling the scrap in tonnage.
A few times a week people will bring cars to us. A guy looking to get rid of his dead grandmother’s clunker. A kid going off to school who doesn’t need the old station wagon anymore. But once in a while, someone will come to the yard with a different kind of car altogether. They’ll come by with the kind of car that they shouldn’t be bringing to a place like ours—nice, new cars with purring engines and smooth, shiny bodies.
Again, this happens three times a year at most. A guy will drive up in an expensive car, maybe a brand-new Cadillac SUV, and when he gets out, he tells us to just take it away from him. Sometimes he’ll want us to buy the car for some ludicrously low price: a thousand dollars, a hundred, maybe even less.
“Just give me a dollar and you can have it. Please, get it away from me,” he’ll say, already walking away from the car. Like it’s cursed.
Usually when they come by like this, when they’re frantic just to get rid of a car, they want a guarantee that we’ll destroy it. They don’t care if we gut it for parts, but they don’t want the car driving the streets anymore. They don’t want to have to see it ever again. One time a woman came by with a ’68 Mustang in perfect shape, jet black with a silver racing stripe down the center, and paid a hundred dollars to watch us flatten it in the crusher. Another time, two years ago, I came out of the office to find an empty 1972 Cadillac Eldorado idling in front of the gate. It had a glazed, butter cream exterior, red leather trim. The car was worth at least nine thousand dollars, just sitting there by the curb with the engine purring. A note taped to the windshield read,
Marco and Jesus call cars like that Voodoos. They like to try to guess what happened between the cars and the people who brought them in.
“I’ll bet it’s his lady’s car. Probably dumped him in it.”
