“Prison Guard Blues” by Katelyn Pike

1. Sleeper 

Daddy says death comes in three chemicals for the murderers on Cell Block 16: one to make him sleepy, one to make him still, and one to stop his heart. The middle one’s important, says Daddy, not to be overlooked. That way, even if the anesthesia doesn’t work and the son-of-a-bitch’s awake, he still can’t move, can’t even lift an eyelid. The paralytic, that’s what it’s called. Daddy calls his taser his paralytic, but he won’t let me hold it, just keeps it on his belt all the time. Sometimes he forgets to take his belt off when he comes up to tell me his bedtime stories. Werewolf stories, boogeyman stories, things-that-go-bump-in-the-night stories, Daddy has ’em all, except all of his are real life, and all of his are out there, less than a mile beyond those woods, where the barbed wire starts the pen. Mama doesn’t like when Daddy brings his stories home. She says they’re foul, and he oughtta leave ‘em on the mat whenever he wipes his boots and takes his belt off like she says that he’s supposta. But I think it’s not so much that she ain’t ever liked his stories—I don’t think she likes him much. She always says that one day Daddy’ll walk in those gates, and they won’t let him back out. So every night I listen for the sound of his footsteps on the gravel drive, the jangle of his keys, the long, low, warning whistle whenever he stops outside my door.

“Who’s the most dangerous man on the cell block, Daddy?” I ask him, sitting up. 

“I am; you know that. But after that, reckon it’s Swiss Mallard. I told you about him, din’t I?”

“Yessir. He killt those three girls outside a Norman.”

“And you know why they call him Swiss Mallard, now?”

“For the holes he left in them ladies’ heads.”

Daddy nods. “He’d pluck out their eyes ’fore they died, like he din’t want ’em watchin’. But he’ll get his, don’t you worry. And your ol’ man’ll be there to watch that.”

Daddy always watches when the governor orders executions. One, two, three needles. He says the second needle’s like watchin’ a man die four minutes before the doctor can legally pronounce him dead. What does he call it, rigger mordis, when the body goes stiff like a board, like a corpse, but inside, inside that moment before the third chemical kills him, his heart’s still beating, beating for its life. And all the while, that blood brings the poison closer because it just can’t help itself. The slow stillness, the sludge of lethal injection on its way to the man’s chest. 

Whenever Darry and me play lethal injection, I always gotta play the prisoner because I’m the only one who can stay still enough. Don’t tell Darry this, but sometimes when I’m on my back, eyes squeezed shut, and Darry’s jabbing me in the arm to make sure I’m good and not movin’, I get the secret fear that one day I’ll get so still I won’t be able to get unstuck. When I was littler, sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night like that, my eyes open but my body unable to move, and I’d have to lay there and listen to the blood flow through me all loud: my pulse, the dull roar in my ears. I’d wonder what’s in my blood, what this heaviness on my chest is as the night stretches something hungry. Strange shadows darted across the swirling panels of the floor, and voices howled outside the door and down the hall, and I felt that potassium chloride travelin’ up my limbs to where my heart lay paralyzed. A man dies before he’s dead, reckon he can see what death looks like, can feel it in his limbs as it crawls up, and when I saw it, it looked like a night terror, a tall shadow close at the door.

So out of all our games, I like lethal injection the least. Jailbreak’s much better. Behind the woods where we play, the fence runs with barbed wire. Some places, certain days, it even hums electric, but Darry and I can just tell when it’s on, and we’ll drag sticks over the chain links whenever the guards try and chase us off. Then, when they get close enough, Darry and I fall down and fake-convulse until we’re shrieking and rolling with real laughter. 

“You wanna be in here, fellas, you keep at it!” shout the guards, and even though they call me fella, I don’t steam or get scared. Daddy says the border guards aren’t nothin’ to be scared of, so we never pay no mind, just laugh our way back into the woods and out the other side, where the trees come up against Route 67, and the sign says Do not pick up hitchhikers. Me and Darry, still playin’ prison break, we like to try and hitch sometimes, see if any outsiders’ll pick us up, chasing bumper stickers through the gravel dust, then loping off to wreak havoc again in our woods. 

But prison guard is even better than jailbreak, the best of all our games. Either me or Darry’ll be the murderer, confined behind a fallen tree, and the other one’ll be the guard, set on keeping him behind the line. We rush at each other and whack each other on the arm with our sticks and come home purple-welted. Mama warns me if I don’t stop playin’ prison guard and start actin’ more like a young lady, she’ll whoop me somethin’ worse, but I know she don’t mean it really, ‘cause she and daddy play prison guard all the time. 

On nights Daddy gets home late, too late for bedtime stories, the keys jangle up the yard, and Mama’ll lock her bedroom door. Daddy’ll beat his fists against it until it rattles and almost bends. He’ll kick and hit and holler.

“You unlock this door! You unlock this door right now or else I’ma kill you, Jeanie!” 

He’ll pace the hallway. He’ll throw a rocks glass against the door, then go and fetch another with two fingers of bourbon sloshing in it. When I wake up in the mornin’, though, I never find the door bust open. I find him in a chair he pulled up in front of her door, sleepin’ like the dead, keys still dangling from his hand. Mama herself only opens the door after she’s sure that he’s all the way asleep. Then, with her lips pressed tightly together, she sweeps up the broken glass, takes his bourbon and his belt, and meets me in the kitchen so we can have his breakfast ready.

II. Paralytic

Some towns are college towns. Some towns are tourist towns, mill towns, factory towns. Our town, it’s a prison town, and as Mama says, it’s Us and Them ’round here. Us, she means the proper townsfolk, the families of the guards, the cooks, the clerks, the bus drivers, then all the ones who gotta feed us and fill our cars with gas. Us is even the warden in his big house, up on the north hill by where the woods turn to national forest, his picture window lit up like a searchlight. And Them…

Well. When we pass the trailer park on the edge of town, Mama says most of the people there are what she calls the conjugals: the mothers and wives and babies of the men locked up in the cells. Whenever we’re passin’, Mama will hiss behind’er hand to me, “Girls like that oughtta be ashamed of themselves. No backbone, no backbone at all.” 

Reckon there’s nobody who stands as straight as Mama, though. Daddy calls her a witch sometimes, but to me, behind the wheel of our old Ford, she looks more like the witch’s broom. She sits ramrod straight, her spine 90 degrees, and she’s wiry in the arms, all bristle.

“Aw, come on, Mama, let me sit in front.” 

“Not likely. You’ll go flyin’ through the windshield. Or else that airbag’s gon’ kill ya.”

“What, at twenty miles’n hour?”

See, our old Ford can’t go no faster. Folks can always see us coming in a great big clouda dust, sort of like you can always tell there’s roadkill because of the buzzards circling round. So I sit back, sulky, confined to the backseat again. Mama turns up talk radio over my grumbling til’ we’re in sight of the grocery store.

Parking lot, she twists around.

“Stay home next time if you gon’ act like this.”

But Mama never buys nothing good unless I’m there to bug her. I fold my hands and fake contrition.

“Sorry, Mama.”

“Mmm,” she says. “Right. ‘Twenty miles’n hour’? Brat. Why don’t you get the cart, then? See how you like drivin’.”

Truth is, I like pushing the cart just fine. While Mama marches toward the produce section, I stand up on the back and sail down the narrow aisles, taking my time catching up to her. The grocery store smells like cardboard and the inside of old freezers, and the cereals are all generic brands, but at least the front left wheel’s a screecher, much to my delight. I shriek past the Wonder Breads, the condiments, the toiletries. I imagine orange sparks flyin’ out behind the wheels.

I glide over to a bin of plums and reach out a greedy hand. I’ve always liked peaches, but the plums are Daddy’s favorite. My hand hovers over cherry red skins, holds over a deep bruise purple. He taught me to go by color. You know the fruit is sweetest when it looks like it’s ’bout to bleed.

I’m twisting a plastic bag tight to hold Daddy’s plums when I hear a cart grind to a halt beside me. There’s a baby in the cart’s basket, gurgling, flailing its socked feet. The mother shushes it. I can see just one side of her face while she considers the peaches. Even so, I know who she is. She’s one of Them. Maybe the worst of Them, even. Darry’s mama calls her the slut-whore from the trailer park. My mama’s too scandalized by her to speak much of her at all, other than that she reckons any woman willing to become Mrs. Swiss Mallard is a disgrace, an affront to God, and probably a sign that the apocalypse is nigh.

I fake like I don’t recognize her, like I don’t even know she’s there. I stand real still, as if I’m still thinking about the peaches. All the while, I’m waiting for her to turn her head, the way I seen deer do at the first sign of trouble when Daddy and I go huntin’ in the wintertime. I want to see Mrs. Mallard’s face. I ain’t ever been this close to her before.

Some evenings, Darry and I ride our bikes to the trailer park even though both our mamas would threaten to tan us if they knew where we were strayin’. All we’ve wanted these last two years is to get a good look at Mrs. Mallard, but her curtains are always shut. Once or twice, I’ve tossed my bike in the bushes and waited for her behind some tin double-wide, but she never comes out. Nobody visits, of course, so I figured she wouldn’t come to the door if I knocked. She even does all her shopping real early in the morning, right when the stores first open, because people’ll shout at her in the street if she shows her face when Main Street’s busy. All I knew of her, I’d gleaned from a distance: her trim, angular figure hunched over on itself, her brown hair, her old clothes. 

I knew Swiss’s face from newspapers: weak-jawed and snaggle-toothed and bug-eyed, his reddish hair buzzed close in the Cell Block Special. I tried to imagine the sort of person who might marry a man like that. I figured there could be only two possibilities. One, the woman was both incredibly stupid and incredibly beautiful, and her looks and lack of awareness moved Swiss Mallard to spare her life until the time age at last robbed her of those graces. Or two, she had not been spared his wrath at all, and she had a missing eye like all the rest. This was the option I had been most hoping for, little as beauty interested me. I’d practiced describing her to Darry on occasion in the same fashion as Daddy described the inmates to me. Accordin’ to my telling, she leaked eye socket gunk and ripped stringy patches of graying hair out of her scalp. And the baby had been born without no eyes at all, just indents of skin where the sockets should be and a wet and screamin’ mouth that I saw now, in the grocery aisle, smacked real quiet in close-to-sleep.

Standing there in the produce section, I can still only see this woman in profile—the missing eye must be on the other side—but I’m already a little outraged by how the baby’s just a baby and the woman so far unremarkable. Even Mama looks more interestin’ lookin’ than the right side of this lady’s face, and there’s no tellin’ Darry that. Swiss Mallard’s wife, her brittle hair, her slouch, her all-over color brown, it’s like she’s made completely outta dust. She’s the haze that hangs over dirt roads in the summertime, a little trembly, barely there. I have half a mind to worry I might accidentally walk right through the film of her if I’m not careful, and later I’ll have to spit out the grit of her left over in my mouth. That left eye better be an empty socket, I think, or else I’ll have nothin’ to tell Darry. Darry, Darry, you won’t believe it, I looked right into her brain, and it’s just like everybody thought it must look, rotten, gray, and hollow. 

But too soon, she’s twisty-tying her peaches and starting to turn her back to me. My chance, my one opportunity, is shuffling her shopping cart away. 

“Hey,” I blurt out. “Lady!”

She startles, and I watch her shoulders tense up. This a woman often screamed at by strangers, I remember. When she turns around at last, facing me full on, her mouth’s twisted in distaste…but not by any scar tissue. There’s no eye patch. No gruesome burns or bashin’s. No bald spots on her scalp. She’s plain-faced, dull-eyed. To my dismay, she’s boring. 

I stand there, speechless, while she waits for me to finish whatever insult she expects. The lump in my throat’s like I swallowed an eye, though, and I realize I never asked Daddy what Swiss did with them. The eyes, I mean, not the three women. 

She asks, “You say somethin’?”

“No, I—” 

I falter, only to realize I’ve accidentally left off on the worst possible homophone. At a loss, furious at myself, for all those years of fascination, I hold up my crummy, crumpled dollar.

“Did you drop this?”

At last, she softens.  “No,” she says, “not mine.”

Her eyes flicker to something over my shoulder, and her jaw sets again. I hear familiar footsteps; a hand yanks at my arm. Mama wrenches the shopping cart out of my grasp and strong-arms me away.

“Let’s go, Ty.”

My bag of plums thuds to the tile, but neither of us picks them up.

“What’d she say to you?” Mama hisses in my ear once we’re far enough away, secluded behind a shelf of pasta sauces. She snatches my scrunched-up dollar outta my hand. “What, that woman’s gonna give our family charity?”

“I just found that,” I say. 

“Oh, so you found a dollar, but not your common sense? You know who that woman is?”

“She didn’t say nothin’ to me, Mama, honest.”

“So what, you were makin’ conversation? Get over there and grab a box of Pastaroni. I wanna get outta here today.”

I rip my arm out of her grip and fume as she orders me around the aisles. All these years of wonderin’ about Mrs. Mallard, and for what? That? A full, plain face and half of the world’s most uncomfortable conversation? Why didn’t Swiss ever scoop her eyes out, then, if she was nothin’ special? Why, ’cause she was always lookin’ down? I can’t comprehend any of it and now, thanks to Mama, I’m never gonna get to ask. Why’d she have his baby if she knew at the time he’d be goin’ underneath the needle? Did she know? Or did she find out later, when it was too late to leave, too late to go back? And if that’s true, why didn’t she leave then, when they locked Swiss Mallard up? Why she’d follow him here? Was it ’cause she really loved him? Or ’cause she wants to watch him die? 

Mama prods me through the checkout line and out the door, smacking me on top my head when I glance back for one last look at Mrs. Mallard. I slam myself into the backseat of the Ford, arms crossed, while Mama hurls the grocery bags into the trunk and curses me for an ungrateful punk. Wonderbread’s smushed under clunking cans of green beans and her signature tight-fisted fury. Daddy’s pack of Camel blue-shorts spills out of one bag and slides underneath my seat. I put it in my pocket for Darry and me to sneak later, the next time that we play prison guard. When Daddy rifles through the bags lookin’ for ‘em later, Mama will have to tell him she forgot. 

The shopping cart screeches and yowls as Mama scrapes it back to the front of the store. Locked in the car, I watch her go in the rearview, only for my eyes to stray as the automatic doors gust open. Open-mouthed, I stare at Swiss Mallard’s wife buckling her baby into their tan Chevy. I keep watching even as Mama cranks the Ford’s engine and we belch and jerk away. Only after the store’s gone in a cloud of dust behind us do I notice the words printed at the bottom of our side mirror, a warning for one of us, or both of us, though I may never know quite which: Objects in mirror may be closer than they appear.  

III. Executioner 

The day of Swiss Mallard’s execution, I wake up in the dark hours of early morning to the smell of bacon frying. Rubbing my eyes, I stumble down the hall and find Daddy in the kitchen, barefoot and unshaven but in a cheerful mood given how late he blew in last night. He tells me to grab a plate and a paper towel to line it and soak up the hot oil. I eat at the table, too sleepy to do much but munch and listen. Daddy eats standing up, his back against the counter. He’s talking at the same time, talking slow in that storyteller voice, and I watch his bare arm stray too close to the spitting pan on the stovetop as he tells me about Swiss Mallard. 

“Wish we could still electrocute the bastard,” he tells me. “If anybody deserves it, it’s him. Was thinkin’ we could tell everyone he tried to run for it, then throw ’im on the fence. What d’you think?” 

“I don’t know. Who’s all gon’ be watchin’, Daddy?”
“The injections? Supposed to be those girls over in Norman have family comin’ out.”

“What about his wife?”

“What about her?” Daddy pinches the last strip of bacon between two fat-greased fingers. “You’n Darry stay away from the yard today, understand me? I’ll tell you all the details when I get back home.”

“Sounds good.”
“You wash these up for me, now. I can’t be late.”

“Sure, Daddy.”

He pats me on the head and leaves the room. At the sink, I wait and listen for the telltale jangle of his keys, then the twist-lock on the front door. Only when I hear the truck engine roar to life and the tires trundle down the gravel drive do I turn the faucet on. Water runs hot as Mama joins me in the kitchen. Her mouth’s made of coat-hanger wires, thin and taut, and she’s wearing long sleeves in the summertime, but I know better than to say.

She’s particular about how Daddy’s cast-iron skillet gets cleaned, always has been. First thing she does comin’ into the kitchen is peer over my shoulder with squinted, puffy eyes to make sure I’ve wiped it out with a paper towel rather than scrub it with a Brillo pad. She nods in approval as she raises it up to the light.

“Pretty good,” she says. Something like a smile casts its shadow across her face. “I’ma need your help today, Ty.”

“Aw, Mama, no. Darry and me were gonna—”

“—ride your bikes on over to the penitentiary? Oh, no. Better you stick close to me today, where I can keep’n eye on you. Now, go’n git dressed. I mean it. I need groceries, and you’re gonna help me carry ‘em since you were so kind about it last time. Hey,” she snaps. “What’re you still doing here? Get goin’. I ain’t askin’ twice, or you’ll see what else this skillet’s good for.”

Mama’s never hit me, not hard anyway, but I ain’t ever been tempted to test her. I skitter back to my bedroom and hurry into a pair of blue jeans with my toothbrush rattling dry around my mouth.  

“Ty!”

“I’m comin’!” I shout back. I shove the toothbrush back into its plastic cup and run for the front door. The car’s already coughing exhaust by the time I get my hand on the door. This morning, like most mornings, I try to sit up front, mostly to annoy Mama. To my surprise, she doesn’t say anything as I buckle in. As we pass our mailbox and turn onto the road, I cast a suspicious glance at her out the corner of my eye.

“We ain’t going to the doctor, are we?”

She switches the radio from news chatter about the crimes of Swiss Mallard to an old country station. “No.”

“The dentist?”

“I told you, we need groceries. You ever listen to a word I say?”

“I don’t know how else I’d answer that question ’less I was listenin’ to it.”

“Smart mouth,” she says, but again, she’s wearing that tiny smile at the corner of her mouth, like it don’t fit quite rightly. “Get my cigarettes outta the glovebox, wouldya?” 

I can no more believe she’s made this request than I can believe she’s letting me sit up front. Daddy hates Mama smelling like cigarettes; I only ever see her smoking her menthols when Daddy picks up second shifts. Slowly, I pop open the glovebox, shift a bundle of napkins aside, and pass her a cigarette from the tattered pack stashed in the back corner. She removes a lighter from her pocket and rolls the driver’s window down a crack.

I clear my throat, curious how far I can push these indulgences.

“Mama, I’ve been thinkin’.”

She lights up. “This another one of your bright theories?” 

“I just wanna know, that’s all. He didn’t take her eye, but he was gonna eventually, right?”

“Well,” says Mama as she takes another drag, “he can’t get after her, now. How old’re you, last time this town had an execution? Seven, I think? Eight? You remember much of that?”

“No, Mama.”

“This town, it was a circus. And that night your daddy and all them guards got so blind drunk they could barely get up the next mornin’.” She inhales again, sucking down that cigarette so fast I’m surprised it doesn’t turn to ashes at once between her fingers. “I been waitin’ on this day, Ty. No, ma’am, he won’t get after us now.”

Smoke curls inside the car, and our cloud of dust has formed in front, so it’s a miracle I even notice when our Ford bumps and ambles right on by the grocery store. 

“Mama,” I object. I point back in the direction of the parking lot even as it’s lost from view. “Mama, where we goin’?”

“Hmm?” Positively serene, Mama tosses her cigarette out the window, right at the shiny metal back of the road sign with the name of our town on the front. She steps on the gas; the speedometer cranks up to 25, 30. She looks over at me, still smiling crooked. I let my hand fall back to my lap. “What’d you say?”

“Nothing, Mama. Nothing.”

“Hmm.”  

We get another quarter of a mile, maybe farther, when the Ford starts to shudder and groan. Mama’s smile falters, flickers out. A light twitches to life on the dashboard, and steam joins the dust cloud beyond our windshield, bellowed out from under our hood. Mama curses and slaps the wheel as she mutters, over and over, “No, no, no.”

The car chokes and stalls up. As we slow, Mama slams a fist against the dashboard . The Ford coasts to a stop on the shoulder, a hundred yards short of the highway junction. Mama sits behind the wheel in silence for a moment, then shoves the door open.

“What—” I start, but the door slams shut again on my questions.

I watch out the grimy windshield, agape. Vexed, swearing, Mama wrestles the hood open. I scurry out of the car to join her before I can wake up from this dream. 

Mama’s standing still now, staring down at the engine. Her shoulders tense, her spine’s gone rigid. Thinking, she rakes back a few loose strands of her hair. Displaced dirt has settled on her eyelashes and coats the white of her long sleeves. After a minute, she grits her teeth and gives the front right tire a swift kick. The car bounces.

“Mama!” 

Then she bends in half, hands on her knees, and looks like she’ll be sick. I hurry over to steady her, hold her arm to keep her standing. “Mama, you all right?”

She doesn’t answer, just lets out a low moan, drawn out like a line of spit when someone’s about to vomit.

“Mama,” I hasten, “hey, Mama, it’s all right, you always said it was only a mattera time before the car—”
“It’s not that,” she croaks. “Not that.”

“Then what?”

“Ohhhh. Don’t you understand, Ty? Don’t you know what happens now? Everybody’s gonna see us. They’ll ask him where we was drivin’ to. He’ll see that we was gone.”

I back off from her. Sudden understanding has snapped me from her side like a branch from a tree in strong wind. I stand there, staring, stunned and betrayed by her, afraid of him, or else the other way around. I take another step back from her. I’m so close to the line that marks the road now that a tan Chevy has to swerve around me just to be safe as it speeds by us. Otherwise, the driver’s unconcerned with our predicament. Soon as it reaches the highway, the car takes a hard left toward the city. Soon enough, it’s vanished.

Once it’s gone, once it’s dust, Mama lets out a sharp, keen cry like she’s finally felt the pain I did when that snap of sudden understanding occurred between us. And then my mama, my proud mama, she bursts into wild tears on the side of the road. She cries there in the gutter, gripping the hood of our Ford with white knuckles, and all the while a line of cars whoosh by from the opposite direction, from the direction of the city, news vans and cop cars from the interstate, from the governor’s office, and not a single one of them slows down for us, if we’re still Us at all.

✶✶✶✶

Katelyn Pike is a writer and teacher from St. Louis, Missouri. Her work has appeared in Orca, Parhelion, and Coffin Bell, among other publications.

✶

nat raum is a disabled artist, writer, and genderless disaster from Baltimore, MD. They’re a current MFA candidate at the University of Baltimore and also hold a BFA in photography and book arts. nat is also the editor-in-chief of fifth wheel press and managing editor of Welter Journal. They are the author of preparatory school for the end of the world, you stupid slut, and specter dust, among others. Past publishers of their writing include Delicate Friend, perhappened, Corporeal Lit, and trampset.