Interlude 4 Gwen, Under Attack #7
“I hope that’s a promise you break, Gwen,” Arthur said, but she pushed the thought back, didn’t want this sweet, hope-affirming, fake Arthur-ghost in her brain, this Arthur-ghost who always said just what she needed to hear, whether she deserved to hear it or not.
“Come on already,” Donna said. “Tell us who we’re going to kill.”
“We have five good options this year,” Colin began.
“Fuck all that. Just tell us who you chose. It’s your year to choose, and even if it wasn’t, you always get your pick.”
Colin smiled bravely—Gwen knew he loved the day they decided, knew he loved it more than Christmas, prepared for it all year.
He hated any suggestion they might cut things short. He lifted the decanter. “Anyone want another splash before we start?”
Shaking the decanter. “No?”
7.
She had a shift in the ambulance from five to eleven: an OD, a stroke, a fall down the stairs, a woman who had been punched
by her husband and who said she fell into a kitchen table.
“You should get a new table,” Gwen told her. “One that won’t kick you in the side once you’re on the floor.”
When she got back to the little house in Gogan where she had lived her entire life, it was beginning to snow and she still
had fifty pages of reading to do, Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane for Advanced Topics in Religious Movements.
She read at her desk in her bedroom under the eaves, book on her left, a steno pad on the right for taking notes.
The old pipes clanked and the iron heater steamed.
She thought maybe some fresh air would liven her up, so she turned to the window over the bed.
It was old and swollen, the brown paint around the frame chipped with age, and she struggled to push it up, reaching across the mattress without leverage.
It moved one quarter inch, and then another, the window squeaking and bumping in the frame as it rose.
“Come on, you hoor,” Gwen said.
“Let me help with that, love,” King Sorrow said, and his claw came in out of the darkness, reaching under the window to pull
it up half a foot with a shrill squall. His yellow talons gouged lines in the wood.
Gwen toppled back, missed her chair, sat on the floor.
His claw slid out from under the window and away into the darkness.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“See, it’s about this year’s selection,” King Sorrow said.
“It’s not up to me. Talk to Colin. It’s his pick.”
“That’s the thing. I did talk to him,” King Sorrow said. “And he picked you.”
8.
The buzzer sounded—a grinding, mechanical sound—and the door opened. The old woman shuffled through as if she were wearing
leg shackles, in little sliding steps. She kept her eyes averted and her head down, and Officer Augusta Plemons couldn’t help
but feel sorry for her. A lot of them were like this, after a long stretch like hers, nearly thirty years: frightened of what
was waiting for them on the outside. All those years of being told what to do and when to do it, of hot meals made and delivered
on a schedule, of free medical care, of not worrying about the bills. It was a lot to leave behind.
“Those clothes look like they fit all right,” Plemons said to the poor dear, a small, scrawny woman with a disordered spray of hair the color of steel wool. Sometimes her lips moved, as if she were reciting something to herself. “Do you like them?”
“Nn,” said the old woman, nodding. She wore a pair of new Wranglers, clean white Keds, and a faded mustard-colored blouse,
courtesy of Uncle Sam, who did most of his shopping for ex-convicts at Walmart.
Plemons was on one side of a white Formica counter, with this scrawny old felon’s paperwork and her going-away package. She
showed the old woman where to sign, turning pages on a clipboard for her and waiting while she scrawled her name.
“Now there’s two hundred dollars here for you, darling,” Plemons said, pushing the envelope containing her gate money across
the counter. “And here’s a check, this is for everything that was in your commissary account, plus your earnings for the work
you done while incarcerated. That’s forty-six hundred dollars!”
“Nn,” the old woman said, nodding again.
“There’s an Uber outside, that’s paid for—”
The old woman’s eyes darted toward Plemons with querulous alarm.
“It’s like a taxi, kinda. You pay for the rides through an app. On your phone. This one is going to take you into Morgantown,
to the Quality Inn. Do you have some family, going to come down and get you, take you back north?”
“Nn,” the old woman said. This nn had a different quality than the others, seemed negative in nature. Plemons wondered if she had suffered a stroke at some
point.
“Are you going north, though? Back to where you come from?”
The old woman looked again—and this time Augusta Plemons felt a little shiver of surprise. She had been working in the prison
system for most of the new century and had dealt with plenty of hardcases—sweary, insolent bitches all marked up in scars
and ugly tattoos—but she had never been stared at with a pair of eyes quite so dead, quite so empty.
“Count on it,” the old woman said.
Plemons swallowed and swiftly looked away, down at the paperwork.
“What you going to do on your first night out? Anything fun? The place we got you checked into, it’s just a short walk from the Sizzler.
They’ve got a steak and shrimp combo for twelve dollars, might be the best thing you’ve eaten since you got locked up. ”
“Doubt it,” the old woman said, and fixed her eyes on the cross around Plemons’s neck. “I was in a cellblock with this teenager
some years back and ate plenty of her nineteen-year-old pussy. Too bad she was a Baptist. She got feeling bad about all the
sinning we were doing and hanged herself. I guess that’s one way to defeat the temptations of the body.”
Plemons tucked her cross back into her blouse, feeling a hectic flush rise into her cheeks. “You do have someplace to go,
though? Somewhere you’re aimed at?”
The old woman issued a grunting little laugh. “You could say that. I got some people I mean to drop in on. Some folks who
were close to my eldest. The girl who burned to death while I was locked up in here.”
“Ah. I hope catching up with your daughter’s friends will bring you some comfort.”
“I’m sure it will.” She took the bills out of the envelope and folded them up and put them in her back pocket. She took the
check and folded it and put it with the rest of the money.
“Do you know what you’re going to do with all that cash money?” Plemons asked. “I know it looks like a lot, but it will go
faster than you might expect. You want to be careful too. There are a lot of people out there will try to take advantage of
a lady your age, to get whatever they can from you. You want to invest it wisely.”
“It’s not so much money,” the old woman said. “But it’s enough for a car and a gun, and once I’ve got those, making more ought
to be no problem a’tall.” She grinned then. “Just teasin’.” And she winked.
Bill Hanscom, who worked prisoner processing and release with Plemons, stepped in from the parking lot and held the door open to the day. The afternoon behind him was so bright it was blinding.
“The Uber is here,” Hanscom said.
“You take care of yourself and be safe,” Plemons said, what she told all the convicts before they left, although her voice
came out thin, and uncertain. “You don’t ever want to come back here, Mrs. Nighswander.”
“Nope,” Daphne Nighswander said. “After thirty years inside, I can say I’ve learned my lesson: never let them take you alive.”
And she turned and went out, pushing open the iron door and slipping around Hanscom, to be swallowed by the bright, blazing
inferno of the day.
Augusta Plemons was unsettled and distracted for the rest of her shift, pouring coffee until it overflowed her mug because
she had gone off into her thoughts and forgotten what she was doing. Nighswander’s empty eyes and saw-toothed grin were bad
enough. Her talk about getting a car and a gun weren’t much better. But what rattled Plemons most was the way the old woman
had stood there for a time, eyes downcast, lips moving as she spoke to herself without making a sound.
It had seemed to Plemons then that Daphne Nighswander had been reciting a list of names.