Читать книгу The Pink House - Trish MacEnulty - Страница 16

From the Journal of Nicole Parks

In my dream I was having dinner with my mom in a Paris restaurant. I’d never been to Paris before, but for some reason I was there in my dream at this little café on the rue something or other, eating plate after plate of delicious pastries all dripping with cinnamon and chocolate and vanilla icing. And I was saying to my mom, “Oh, you don’t know how much I’ve missed this sweetness.”

Something woke me up out of this nice dream. Someone in the dorm was moaning. The longing I felt just moments earlier turned into raw fear. Who was making that god-awful sound? It sounded like a ghost, like the dorm itself was haunted. A chill clenched the back of my neck and a shiver traveled down my body from my scalp to my toes. I finally raised my head out of the bed and that’s when I thought I’d faint from sheer terror. Someone was floating over in the corner of the room. I grabbed that ugly green wool blanket and pulled it up to my chin. Quiet as I could be, I kept watching it and slowly I started to realize it wasn’t a ghost. It was Viola Carpenter sitting up in her bunk. It looked like she was fighting someone.

Finally, she fell back on her bunk and the moaning ceased. It took me a long time to fall back asleep after that. Viola’s moaning was just one more reminder that there were lives here I couldn’t even begin to imagine.

After that I couldn’t help but keep an eye on Viola. I noticed that she forever seemed to be losing things—her glasses, her coffee cup, everything but her Bible that she toted everywhere with her. She was quiet and ladylike, but not exactly approachable. I was surprised she had signed up for the drama class. She didn’t seem the type but she had come to class and participated willingly so maybe she was and I just couldn’t see it.

One Sunday morning I got dressed up for church. I put on my make up extra careful—we’re allowed to have make up if we buy it from the canteen where the mascara is almost seven dollars, so you don’t let it out of your sight ever—and my one good pair of black shoes. I wore a painted silk scarf around my neck that I’d made in a crafts class and they had let us keep. I took special care with my hair, combing it in a flip down on my neck. It’s funny what a woman can do to make herself beautiful with nothing. Daffy was just as bad as me. We liked to dress for church and the two of us were in the bathroom primping when Viola came in, and I felt a burst of inspiration.

There was a row of sinks along one wall and a couple mirrors across the room on the opposite wall. I watched her bend over the sink, brushing her teeth nice and thorough like when out of my mouth came an invitation.

“Viola, why’d you come sit with me and Daffy in church today?” I asked.

Daffy’s jaw dropped. Viola spit into the sink and looked up into the mirror. I could see her face in the reflection and she could see me. She still had a little spot of toothpaste on her bottom lip.

“Thank you,” she said in some sort of island accent and wiped the toothpaste away with a wet washcloth. Daffy’s mouth had closed but her eyes were wide and looking at me like I had lost my mind. Viola was a bit older than we were and she just wasn’t part of our clique, but I wanted to find out about her. It’s an urge some people have that makes you want to know, need to know about other people.

So Viola, Daffy and I signed out of the dorm and walked to chapel on that brilliantly sunny Sunday morning. Lucille didn’t come, claiming she had a toothache, but she was just being lazy and sleeping in, Sunday being the only day you could do that.

Now prison churches never have a problem with attendance like some free-world churches do, and I believe I have never been so close to God as when I was locked up. For one thing you just don’t have the same distractions, and you are not under any illusion that you have the slightest bit of control over anything in your life. So when we sang, “And He walks with me and He talks with me and He tells me I am his own,” I could really believe it.

We had a beautiful chapel at our prison: pews made of a glossy light-colored pine and a high A-shaped ceiling, paneled in wood. The floor was carpeted in bright red and the stage area had a simple podium and a place for flowers. This was one of the reasons I loved to go to church because for a few hours every week I didn’t feel like I was in prison. Just like when we had the classes with Lolly. It was a form of escape.

That day the preacher was talking about how God is looking for the fruits of the Spirit not the nuts. Of course some of those nasty-minded women took it the wrong way and were giggling. Okay, I will admit that often as not I used to sit and daydream about Antwan during that preacher’s boring-ass sermons (Jesus, forgive me). And I always went back in my head to this one scene: Late at night Antwan and me walking along the beach, me wearing a sarong and him with his shirt off and pair of rolled up white trousers. I had a big old banana daiquiri in my hand, and he was carrying a bottle of Red Stripe and a blanket. Finally we found a deserted spot and neither of us could keep our hands off each other any longer. Well, I don’t have to go into the details. Just picture the most ecstatic moonlight sex possible. When we came in unison, the whole earth trembled and probably caused a tidal wave out on some remote island in the Atlantic that no longer exists thanks to our moment of passion.

Viola was still there, next to me on a pew in the chapel. I could tell during the service that she was steady praying. I mean she was praying fierce, hands clenched together and head bowed, lips moving. Daffy glanced at me, and I had to hit her to keep from laughing at that wide-eyed expression of hers.

After church Viola sort of latched on to us. She came with us to the cafeteria, and so Daffy and I didn’t sit with our usual cronies, which I was glad about because there was this one stud who had the worst kind of crush on me. She wasn’t the only one after a piece of me, but she was damn sure the most persistent. Now I’m open-minded and all, but I just didn’t have all that much time left, and I wasn’t about to squander my chance at going to work release in the fall because some wanna-be-a-man type of girl thinks she’s in love with me. If I were to get tangled up in something like that it would be just for kicks, and kicks aren’t worth it—not when you can see freedom waving its hands at you, wanting you to come out and play in the free world.

So the three of us sat at a table down at the end of the hall. My curiosity was getting the best of me. I finally broached the subject and asked, “Viola, is something bothering you? I noticed you were having trouble sleeping the other night.”

Viola took a dainty bite of the canned spaghetti we were having for lunch that day and put down her fork before turning to me and saying, “I am being haunted.”

Daffy, with a mouth full of food, nearly spit it all over the table. She swallowed and said, “Oh my god.”

“By who?” I asked.

“By my dead husband, Raymond Carpenter.”

I was plenty creeped out by this. I have always sort of believed in ghosts since I was a child and my Granny Hazel swore up and down she ran one out of her house when she lived down near Lake Okeechobee. She said the ghost was a woman who was a victim of the 1928 hurricane that broke the dikes and took all the water out of the lake and dumped it on top of the people, killing more than 2,000 people. She knew she had a ghost because she’d find wet foot prints on the floor and wet spots on her furniture and water would overflow the sinks for no reason at all. When I asked her how she got rid of it, she said she did her own exorcism with a cross and a Bible and a stick of burning sage.

“What do he do?” Daffy asked.

“Does he do?” I corrected.

“Shut up, Miss College,” Daffy said.

“He touches me and I get real cold,” Viola said. “He whispers to me at night and won’t let me sleep. He takes my things and hides them.”

“Is he here right now?” I asked quietly.

Viola paused as if listening for something. All I could hear was the noise of six hundred woman all running their mouths at the same damn time. Viola shook her head.

“How did Raymond die?” Daffy asked.

Viola took another bite. She looked so prim and proper, even had a paper napkin in her lap. She sighed and said, “I shot him to death.”

Daffy and I sat back like a couple of Siamese twins.

“Why?” I asked.

Viola’s shoulders sort of slumped forward, and she looked like she was bearing a fifty pound weight on her back.

“Have you ever loved someone so much that he was your whole life, he was your reason for breathing, for eating and for waking up in the morning? Have you ever loved a man so much that if he asked you to, you would lay down on a set of railroad tracks, not getting up even when you could feel the tracks shaking and the whistle blowing?”

“Hell, no,” Daffy said, dropping her little tin cup of kool-aid on the tray.

But I unfortunately knew what she meant. And now I understood what drew me to her.

“Yes,” I said. “I think I have.”

“He shamed me,” Viola said. “He gambled all the time. And he lost all the time. One night he gave me, his wife, to another man to pay off his debt. I did it. I thought I was saving his life.”

She breathed heavily and looked down at her hands.

“That other man treated me like a dog, girls. I . . . I can’t even tell you the things he and his thugs did to me.”

I felt a real sick feeling in my gut then because my imagination had no trouble conjuring up various scenarios.

“But I thought that Raymond would come back and get me,” she said, leaning forward, suddenly urgent. “I waited, and I waited. But he never came. He just went out and got himself another girl. My brother Junebug finally found me and got me away from that man. I was locked in this little room without a stitch of clothing. My brother had tricked them into letting him in to see me. When he came in, I just fell to the ground in relief and shame. I was so ashamed for my own brother to see me like that. Junebug is a big fellow, and he carries a big gun. A .44 magnum. He pulled out that gun and told those other men, he would kill them if they came near me. Then he made one of the men take off his shirt and give it to me. Then my brother took me out of there and got me home. He wanted to go back and kill them, but I begged him not to. I didn’t want him to wind up in a place like this.”

I breathed a sigh of relief myself and fell nearly in love with Junebug.

Viola continued, “It took me about three or four months to get my sanity back, and even then I still couldn’t hardly sleep at night. Finally, I woke up early one Saturday morning and I knew what I had to do. It was perfectly clear. I snuck into Junebug’s room and I took that .44 magnum out of his dresser drawer. I took a bus over to where Raymond’s new girlfriend lived in a little duplex down on the eastside of Jacksonville. I knocked on the door and her little boy answered. He was up by himself. He was just a kid, and he let me in. I leaned down and asked him where his mommy’s bedroom was and he pointed to the closed door. So I slowly and quietly opened it. Raymond was all sprawled out on the bed, snoring, buck naked with the sheets thrown off him. I lifted the gun and pointed it right between his legs.”

“Oh my God. I think I’m gonna lose my lunch,” Daffy said.

“I shot him there, then I shot him in the heart and then I shot him in the head. He was dead when I was done with him.”

Viola picked up her fork and took another bite.

Neither Daffy nor I could move a muscle. Finally, Daffy asked, “What did old girl do?”

“What do you think? She jumped out of the bed screaming and wet herself. I turned around and went outside. I walked down to the bus stop and waited for the bus, but the police got there first. I didn’t mind going to jail. But I thought . . . I thought I’d at least get my sanity back. Instead I’m being haunted by a dead man.”

**

Later that day Daffy said to me, “Child, that woman is insane.”

I shrugged. I was reserving judgment, as my daddy used to say until I had some more information. I got it by surprise the following Tuesday night.

I was in the bathroom, washing up for the night. I could hear water running in the showers, so I knew someone was in there. Just as I finished drying my face I heard this terrible screaming. I froze for a second and then ran to the shower to see what was wrong.

Viola had jumped out of the shower and she was trembling and shaking and crying holding the puny towel up to her front side.

“I’m burned,” she cried. “He burned me.” I looked and saw blistering welts on her shoulders and back. Steam was foaming out of the shower stall. I turned and ran for the C.O. who came charging back into the bathroom with me, ordering the crowd of busybodies out. While the C.O. looked at Viola’s burns, I tried to reach into the shower to turn off the water. I had to slide my arm around the scalding streams of water with a towel over my skin. I reached the faucet knobs and turned. The cold water was nearly full on but the hot water knob was just barely turned.

“What were you thinking, turning the water on that hot?” the C.O. scolded Viola.

“Excuse me, but that hot water was barely on,” I told her.

That changed her tune. I could see she was worrying about a lawsuit. She started treating Viola a little better, and ordered someone to get some ice. They sent Viola to the infirmary for the night but before she left, Viola looked me in the eyes and said, “See? He makes my life a living hell. Still.”