After church, I decided to look around the medical building again. I knew the body had been hidden in the closet there. I knew that Johnson, Jacobson, and Thomas all spent a great deal of time there and were all involved in this thing. Whatever this thing was.
“Hey, Chaplain,” Nurse Anderson greeted me loudly as I approached the medical building. She was standing outside smoking. She was a large attractive woman with bleached blond hair, green eyes the color of lime Jell-O, and bright red lips.
“Good afternoon,” I said. “How are you today?”
“Just fine, thank you. How are you?” she said. Smoke came out of her mouth as she talked. The moment the last word came out of her mouth, she brought the cigarette back to her mouth. In contrast to the dainty Capris that Sandy Strickland smoked, Anderson smoked full-sized Winstons. She held the pack, along with a lighter and a cup of coffee in a paper cup with large red lipstick stains on it, in her left hand.
“Fine, thanks. Is there anyone in the infirmary today?”
“Yes, we have two convicts today,” she said. She waved the Winston with her hand as she talked. Her gray uniform matched the buildings around her, and its wrinkles matched those around her mouth as she sucked on the cigarette.
Behind us a steady stream of inmates, returning from the chapel, library, or dining hall, made their way back to the dorms. A couple of them remarked on my message as they went by. Many of them spoke or waved to Nurse Anderson. She was warm and friendly, brightening up their day with her sweet smile.
“Don’t you mean inmates?” I said with a smile.
“No, these are definitely convicts,” she said. She spoke more loudly than was necessary, and regardless of where I stood, she moved toward me and invaded my space.
“Good for them,” I said.
“Good for us,” she said and laughed. When she laughed, her large breasts bounced up and down with the buoyancy of a cork in the Apalachicola River.
“This is a pretty popular place, isn’t it?” I asked.
“You have no idea,” she said with a wink. “A lot of these men just need some feminine TLC, if you know what I mean.”
I hoped I didn’t. “So, you all are consistently busy?”
“It’s always busy,” she said after a long drag, “but at night, for some reason, things really get crazy.”
“ATTENTION ON THE COMPOUND,” a loud voice said over the PA system. The words echoed off the buildings. “RECALL. INMATES RETURN TO YOUR DORM. RECALL. INMATES RETURN TO YOUR DORM.” The stream of inmates behind us became a river of blue. Many of the inmates carried paperback books in one hand, a few had their Bibles, nearly all were talking and laughing.
“Aren’t you usually on the night shift?” I asked.
“Yes, but we’re all working overtime to prepare for the ACA inspection,” she said. “I work midnights, but Sandy, she runs the show. She’s one of the most competent nurses I’ve ever seen, both medically and administratively. She’s the best. She really does care.”
“I saw her in action when the inmate was killed in the sally port. She was very impressive. Cool as a cucumber under extreme pressure.”
“I’ve heard the same about you,” she said with a small nod in my direction and a quick wink.
“Thank you. That was an awful thing that happened, wasn’t it?”
She took a big gulp of her coffee. “Wasn’t it though? I just can’t believe it happened. He was here the night before it happened. I talked with him for a pretty good while. We weren’t that busy. I just can’t believe it. It’s really freaked me out,” she said.
“I can imagine,” I said. “Death is always difficult, but when it’s so brutal and so bizarre, it’s even worse.”
She took her last puff, a long, slow drag that caused her cheeks to grow hollow-well, hollower. Her face said that it was as satisfying as she thought it would be. She ground the butt down into the sand of the ashtray.
I always thought that smoking, unlike alcohol, involved much more than just an addiction to a drug. It was oral, busy, and nervous. Smokers enjoyed the lighting, the extinguishing, and especially the fondling of the cigarette.
“Who was in the infirmary that night?” I asked.
She thought for a minute. “Let me see,” she said, “seems like it was only Thomas, Jacobson, and Johnson. I think that’s right. We usually have more than that, so it sort of stands out, you know? Especially after what happened.”
“Anthony Thomas?” I asked.
“Yes, I believe so. I mean, I know he was in there. He’s always down here.” She leaned in and whispered, “He’s in love with Sandy.” She leaned back and continued in her normal tone, which for her was loud. “I don’t think there was anyone else that night. Come on, let’s go back there and take a look at the log, then I can tell you for sure.”
“Sure,” I said.
She set her coffee cup down on the counter of the nurses’ station and began flipping through the pages of the log book. Her movements were awkward and overstated like her speech. “Just Johnson and Jacobson according to this,” she said, looking at the log, “but I know Thomas was here. I remember. Oh well, somebody forgot to write it down.”
“Somebody forgot to write it down?” I asked, my voice revealing my skepticism.
“I know. That shouldn’t have happened, and it usually doesn’t,” she said, then thought about what she had said and added, “At least I don’t think it does. But, I know he was here. I saw him with my own two baby blues.”
“Blues?” I asked.
“Oh,” she said loudly, “I have colored contacts on.” She rolled her eyes.
“So Johnson, Jacobson, and Thomas were the only ones here last Monday night, right?”
“Right. I’m sure of it.”
“Who took the trash out that morning?” I asked.
She gave me a large shrug. “That’s the sixty-four-thousanddollar question, isn’t it?” She leaned in closer to me and whispered, “I can tell you who it wasn’t. It wasn’t Jones. He was cleaning up a urine sample for me. I saw the bags when I went and got him, and when we went back, they were gone. Oh, and it wasn’t me. I was with Jones the whole time.”
“Did you see him go into the caustic storage room at anytime that morning?” I asked.
“When we saw that the trash had disappeared, he tried to look into the caustic closet, but it was locked. He said it was unlocked just an hour before, but I tried it, too, and it was locked.”
I went by the infirmary and prayed with the two inmates, who were really not inmates at all, but convicts, before I left medical. When I walked back out into the late afternoon sun, I saw spots. I considered going to confinement, but a voice inside my head said for me to go home instead. It was the voice of God.
Chapter 27
Loneliness eats away at you from within and without simultaneously. Within, it’s the dull ache of emptiness and the sharp pains of hunger-hunger for another. Without, it’s the dull hum of silence when noise stops and the sharp pains of a body needing to hold and to be held. The only thing wrong with going home was that I would be alone. Actually, there were other things wrong with going to my current home: like the fact that it was not a home at all, but a trailer. And the fact that it was not just a trailer, but a butt-ugly trailer with several inches of crud on it, alone, like me, in the middle of a prairie of poverty around a lonely, dried-up palm tree. However, the worst thing about going home was being alone.
When I got home, there was a powder-blue ’66 Ford Mustang parked in my driveway. I was wrong; it was
