Red Mist (4 page)

Typically in interview rooms if there is a hidden camera it will be mounted diagonally across from the subject, which in this
instance would be the inmate and not me.
There is no camera in here, I’m fairly certain, and I sit down and scan for hidden
audio surveillance
microphones, fixing my attention on the ceiling directly over the table, noticing the metal fire sprinkler and next to it
a tiny hole surrounded by a white mounting ring.
My conversation with Kathleen Lawler will be recorded.
It will be listened
to by Tara Grimm and possibly others.

S
ince Kathleen Lawler was moved into protective custody, she has been locked up twenty-three hours a day inside a cell the
size of a toolshed with a view through metal mesh of grass and steel fencing.
She can no longer see the concrete picnic tables,
benches, or flower beds she’s described in e-mails to me.
She rarely catches a glimpse of another inmate or a rescued dog.

The one hour she is allowed out for recreation she walks in “boring perfect squares” inside a small caged area while a corrections
officer watches from a chair parked next to a bright yellow ten-gallon cooler.
If Kathleen wants a drink of water, a small
paper cup is pushed through chain link.
She’s forgotten the human touch, the brush of fingers against hers or what it’s like
to be hugged, she says, with a dramatic flair, as if she’s been in Bravo Pod most of her life
instead of only two weeks.
Being in PC, or protective custody, is the same thing as death row, she says, about the new situation
she finds herself in.

She no longer has access to e-mail, she explains, or to other inmates unless they yell cell to cell or stealthily carom folded
notes called “kites” under the doors, a feat that requires rather remarkable ingenuity and dexterity.
She’s allowed to write
a limited number of letters each day but can’t afford stamps and is very grateful when “busy people like you bother to think
about people like me and pay a little attention,” she makes a point of saying.
When she isn’t reading or writing she watches
a thirteen-inch TV built of transparent plastic with tamper-resistant screws.
It has no internal speakers and the signal is
weak, the reception very poor in her new confines, the worst ever, and she conjectures it’s because of “all the electromagnetic
interference in Bravo Pod.”

“Spying,” she claims.
“All these male guards and a chance to see me with my clothes off.
Locked up in here all by myself,
and who’s going to witness what really goes on?
I need to move back to where I was.”

Allowed only three showers per week, she worries about her hygiene.
She worries about when she will be allowed to get her
hair and nails done again by inmates who aren’t the most skilled stylists, and she irritably indicates her overprocessed short
dyed blond hair.
She complains bitterly about the toll incarceration has taken on her, about what it’s done to her looks,
“because that’s the way they degrade you in here, that’s the way they get you good.”
The polished-steel mirror over the steel
sink in her cell is a constant reminder of her real punishment for the laws she’s broken, she says to
me, as if it is the laws themselves that are her victims, not human beings she has violated or killed.

“I keep trying to make myself feel better by thinking,
Well, Kathleen, it’s not a real glass mirror,
” she muses from the other side of the white Formica table.
“Everything that reflects anything in this place must cause distortion,
don’t you think?
The same way something is distorting the TV signal.
So maybe when I look at myself, what I’m seeing is distorted.
Maybe I don’t really look like this.”

She waits for me to affirm that her beauty really isn’t lost, that her steel mirror is guilty of fraudulent reflections.
Instead
I comment that what she describes sounds terribly difficult and if I found myself in a similar situation I’m sure I’d share
many of her same concerns.
I would miss feeling fresh air on my face and seeing sunsets and the ocean.
I would miss hot baths
and skilled hairstylists, and I sympathize with her about the food especially, because food is more than sustenance to me
and I feel comfortable talking about it freely.
Food is a ritual, a reward, a way of soothing my nerves and brightening my
mood after all I see.

In fact, as Kathleen Lawler continues to talk and complain and blame others for her punishing life, I think about dinner and
look forward to it.
I won’t eat in my hotel room.
That would be the last thing I feel like doing after being trapped in a
dirty stinking cargo van and now inside a prison with an invisible code word stamped on my hand.
When I check into my hotel
in Savannah’s historic district, I will wander along River Street and find something Cajun or Greek.
Better yet, Italian.

Yes, Italian.
I will drink several glasses of a full-bodied red wine—a Brunello di Montalcino would be nice, or a Barbaresco—and
I will
read the news or e-mails on my iPad so no one tries to talk to me.
So no one tries to pick me up, the way people often do
when I travel alone and eat and drink alone and do so many things alone.
I will sit at a table by a window and text Benton
and drink wine and tell him that he was right about something being very wrong.
I’ve been set up or manipulated, and I’m not
welcome here, and the gloves are off, I’ll let him know.
I intend to grab the truth with my bare hands.

“Well, imagine not really knowing what you look like anymore,” says the shackled woman sitting across from me, and her physical
appearance is her biggest heartbreak, not the death of Jack Fielding or the boy she ran over when she was drunk.

“There was tremendous opportunity for me.
I missed a very real chance to be somebody,” she says.
“An actress, a model, a famous
poet.
I have a damn good singing voice.
Maybe I could have composed my own lyrics and been a Kelly Clarkson.
Of course, they
didn’t have
American Idol
when I was coming along, and Katy Perry is a closer fit, more what I used to look like if she was blond.
I suppose I could
still be a famous poet.
But success and acclaim are much more reachable if you’re beautiful, and I was.
Back in the old days,
I’d stop traffic.
People would gawk.
The way I looked back then, I could have what I wanted.”

Kathleen Lawler is unnaturally pale from years of being shielded from the sun, her body soft and shapeless, not overweight
but broken down and doughy from a life that has been chronically inactive and unavoidably sedentary.
Her breasts sag, and
her upper thighs spread widely in the plastic chair, her former attention-getting figure as formless now as the white prison
uniform she and other inmates wear in segregation.
It’s as if she’s no longer physically human, as if
she’s evolved backward, returned to a primitive stage of existence like a platyhelminthes, a flatworm, she says sardonically
with a thickly elastic Georgia drawl that makes me think of taffy.

“I know you’re probably sitting here looking at me and wondering what I’m talking about,” she says, as I recall pictures I’ve
seen, including mug shots from her arrest in 1978 after she and Jack were caught having sex.

“But when I met him at that ranch outside of Atlanta?”
she says.
“Well, I was something.
I don’t mind saying it, because it’s
true.
Long corn-silk hair, big-busted, with an ass like a Georgia peach and legs that wouldn’t quit, and huge golden-brown
eyes, what Jack used to call my tiger eyes.
It’s funny how some things get passed on, like you’ve been programmed in the womb
or maybe at conception and there’s no escaping.
The roulette wheel spins and stops and your number comes up and that’s what
you are no matter how hard you try or even if you don’t try at all.
You are what you are, you are what you’re not, and other
events and other people just enhance the angel or devil, the winner or the loser in you.
It’s all about the spinning of the
wheel, whether it’s hitting the winning home run in the World Series or being raped.
Decided for you, and forget undoing it.
You’re a scientist.
I’m not telling you anything you don’t know about genetics.
I’m sure you agree you can’t change nature.”

“What people experience also has significant impact,” I reply.

“You can see it with the dogs,” Kathleen continues, not interested
in my opinions unless she tells me what they are.
“You get a greyhound that was mistreated, and it’s going to react to certain
things a certain way and have its sensitivities.
But it’s either a good dog or a bad dog.
It was either a winner on the track
or wasn’t.
It’s either
trainable or not.
I can bring out what’s already there, encourage it, shape it.
But I can’t transform the dog into something
it wasn’t born to be.”

She finishes telling me that she and Jack were two peas in the same pod and she did to him exactly what was done to her, and
she didn’t recognize it at the time, couldn’t possibly have the insight, even though she was a social worker, a therapist.
She was molested by the local Methodist minister when she was ten, she claims.

“He took me out for ice cream, but that’s not what I ended up licking,” she puts it crudely.
“I was crazy in love.
He made
me feel so excited and special, except in retrospect I don’t think
special
is what I really was feeling.”
She goes into graphic detail about her erotic relationship with him.
“Shame, fear.
I went
into hiding.
I can see that now.
I didn’t associate with other kids my age, spent huge amounts of time by myself.”

Her unrestrained hands are tense in her lap, only her ankles shackled, and the chains clink and scrape against concrete whenever
she restlessly shifts her feet.

“Hindsight is twenty-twenty, as they say,” she continues, “and what was really going on was I couldn’t tell anyone the truth
about my life, about the lying, the sneaking around to motels and pay phones and all sorts of things a little girl shouldn’t
know about.
I stopped being a little girl.
He took that from me.
It went on until I was twelve and he got a job with a big
church in Arkansas.
I didn’t realize when I got involved with Jack, I basically did the same thing to him because I was encouraged
and shaped in a certain way to do it, and he was encouraged and shaped in a certain way to accept it, to want it, and oh,
yes, he sure did.
But I see it now.
What they call
insight.
It’s taken me a lifetime to figure out we don’t go to hell, we build it on a foundation already laid for us.
We build
hell like a shopping mall.”

So far she has avoided telling me the minister’s name.
All she’s said is he was married with seven children, and he had to
have his God-given needs met and considered Kathleen his spiritual daughter, his handmaiden, his soul mate.
It was right and
good that they were joined in a sacred bond, and he would have married her and been open about his devotion but divorce was
a sin, Kathleen explains to me in a flat, dead voice.
He couldn’t abandon his children.
That was against God’s teachings.

“Fucking bullshit,” she says hatefully.

Her tiger-eyed stare is unwavering, her once lovely face peanut-shaped and haggard now, with a spiderweb of fine lines around
a mouth that once was pouty and voluptuous.
She is missing several teeth.

“Of course, it was unadulterated bullshit, and he probably moved on to some other little girl after I started shaving my parts
and hiding from him when it was my period.
Being beautiful and talented and smart didn’t land me anywhere good, that’s for
damn sure,” she emphasizes, as if it is imperative I understand that the ruin sitting across from me isn’t who she is, much
less who she was.

I am supposed to imagine Kathleen Lawler as young and beautiful, wise and free, and well intentioned when she began her sexual
relationship with twelve-year-old Jack Fielding at a ranch for troubled youths.
But what I see before me is the wreckage caused
by one violation that caused another and another, and if her story is true about the minister, then he damaged her the same
way she damaged
Jack, and the destruction still hasn’t ended and probably never will.
It is the way all things begin and continue.
One act,
one deception.
A chronic lie that escalates to critical mass, and lives are disabled, disfigured, and defiled, and hell is
built, lights on and welcoming and like that motel Kathleen described in the poem she sent.

“I’ve always wondered if my life would have turned out different if certain other things hadn’t happened,” she ponders depressively,
resentfully.
“But maybe I’d be sitting right here anyway.
Maybe God decided while my mama was pregnant with me,
This one’s going to lose everything.
Some have to, may as well be her.
I’m sure you understand what I mean.
You see it enough in the morgue.”

“I’m not a fatalist,” I answer.