Judy Fox went first to be fingerprinted. She rolled her fingers and thumb in black ink, the sheriff asking her for the right and left hand and nodding at me to follow. I inked the digits of my right hand and explained that my left hand was paralyzed and he told me to give him two right hand prints. We were both anti-war demonstrators, arrested twice. This was July, and the summer the harbors and mangrove swamps were mined when we pressed our thumbs into the sheriff’s blotter, and I admired their loops and arches as they spread in ink like swirls on undergrounds rivers. A white sheet had been unfurled behind us for our mugshots to be taken. Both of us smiling. The war was the backdrop of our childhood and adolescence, always there but not there, the rice patties and wild orchid forests, the napalm and B-52s, blooming and exploding in our cornfields and school lunches.
*
A female deputy patted me down and then asked me to remove my clothes, to bend over and spread my cheeks. I reeked of patchouli. A druggy smell. Unashamed of my nakedness, not at age 18 and slender, I hoped she wouldn’t notice my paralyzed left arm. I tried to hide it even from her. “Your limb is limp. What happened to you?” I almost laughed. I never heard it phrased like that and never would again. Limp meaning flaccid, wilted, a noodle. My arm was rigid, a soldier fated to salute for half a century, angular. “I was shot on Thanksgiving Day at a party. A guy drank too much and started showing off with his father’s shotgun,” I said, flatly, already tired of telling the story and yet the shooting happened only seven months ago. What would telling the story feel like when a year or longer had passed? She told me to get dressed, and I knotted my red halter, holding one strap in my teeth and the other in my right hand and slipped into my jeans which hung on my pelvic bones. My uniform for nine days. Once in custody my bag was opened and its contents spilled into plastic tubs. The bruised eyebrow pencil and lipstick, the clumpy mascara, the musk oil, lemon drops, Starburst fruit chews, Bic lighter, Virginia Slims, a prescription bottle of Darvon, Tylenol, a fat wallet stuffed with miscellaneous and two dollars. The Darvon the sheriff would keep and bring to me as prescribed. No tweezers, no fingernail clippers, nothing sharp, no jewelry, no cash or coin.We climbed narrow stairs between cornmeal-colored walls. Like prisoners everywhere, we each carried a blanket, a sheet, and a pillow. The stone locked a lavish coolness into the jail.
*
The sheriff invited us into one of the bedrooms in his stone house. A tall man with wide shoulders and handsome in a strong-jawed way. The cell door opened, two bunks, one on each side and chained to the wall, a sink, and a silver toilet on a raised platform. Home for the next nine days. “Three meals a day,” he said, locking us inside. “Every two days you’ll get a shower. Dinner my wife makes, and she’s a pretty good cook. You can ask the rapist and stick-up guy across the way, and the assault and battery fella down the hall, if that isn’t so.” He grinned, and a dimple showed in one of his cheeks. “Okay, girls, enjoy your stay. Judy, if you need anything let me know.” I could see his dark eyes travel over Judy not in a leering way but in an admiring way. I too appreciated her unruly beauty, her thick kinky red-brown hair, her husky voice the ear drank in.
“He’s nice,” Judy said, unfolding her sheet and blanket.
I stretched out on my bunk. “He is nice.”
*
A huge oak shaded the window where bars shone in the sun like the luminescent blue Celsius radiation the poor in a Brazilian slum had rubbed themselves with for its lethal beauty. Nine days in the stone building impenetrable as a granite cliff. Staring into the emerald leaves of the massive tree the bars only made the outside lusher, more desirable. Judy Fox would be my cellmate. Her body resembled the sleek animal she was named for. I idealized her. If I said I was secretly pleased at the prospect of spending nine days locked in a cell with her, I would be telling the truth.
*
Proud of our arrests, Judy mounted the raised platform and sat on the toilet as if a ruby-jeweled throne. Her red hair like rope unraveling over the shoulders of her ribbed purple top. She talked while she peed about wanting to adopt bi-racial children, the ones left behind in Saigon, she wanted to elope with a silka deer. In front of her lay a future. She made friends with the stickup artist and rapist in the cell across the hall. The men loved her, especially her sultry voice, the stickup boy rolling lemon drops across the hall into our cell. In the slow afternoons when light slanted in, we read aloud passages from Harold Robbins’ purple sex prose and laughed. Long horn cattle drives and a Latin gaucho lover, jungle birds. Panties going moist every 4 pages. The sheriff had brought us books other prisoners had left behind. The sheriff too wanted to be near Judy, to listen to her voice. Nights he would carry a footstool upstairs and set it outside our cell or squatting down, he and Judy discussed the politics of protest. I snuggled up with a penlight reading Fire in the Lake, Francis Fitzgerald’s Pulitzer prize winning history of Vietnam and the American intervention.
*
We were both running from our mothers, as the lemon drops rolled across the floor, as we drank from plastic cups our mangrove swamps of coffee, as we cleaned our trays like we did in grade school. We each had our own war.
*
We talked through the night, the ember of our cigarettes glowing. We would make the world change. We spoke about our mothers, and she had written essays on the Midwestern mother. A generation of women before feminism, who saw other women as rivals, including their daughters, especially their daughters. The buckboard wagon of criticism mother, the Teeth Mother who devoured her children, angry and strong pioneer women marooned in the 20th century, Kali Maa, mother goddess, the naked hag. The Cult of the Great Mother, the oldest religion of all, Cybele, raised by panthers and lions, her love too intense for her mortal prince who went mad and castrated himself. Our mothers’ love was too much for their daughters. We spoke of grandmothers and wondered if they had been Teeth Mothers once, worn down by the water of work, softened. Judy remembered being a shy girl and wishing the grandmotherly neighbor who babysat her had been her mother. She told Judy that tiny maidens lived in the castles of sugar and flour and rode through the baking powder clouds on the backs of grasshoppers. The kindly woman taught her the secrets of dough and pie lattices. I loved my grandmother, her kindness, her kolaches, apricots and cherries and poppy seed.
*
When Judy showered downstairs, that’s when I mounted the throne to poop. Girls don’t do that dirty business openly, not easily. I was lying in my bunk when the sheriff suddenly appeared telling me I had a visitor, and then he opened the bars and led me past the accused rapist’s cell, down the stone stairs through the hallway into the jail’s visitor’s area. It was just a few tables and chairs. Lips painted white, I was thrilled I had a visitor to witness me in my anti-war glory. Eighteen, patchouli-drenched, copper bangles on each arm, I had metamorphosed into someone. Did I have enough eyeliner and mascara on? I saw my mother rise, leave her purse on the table, her arms that smelled of brown sack and celery at her sides, eyes staring wide. I was smoking a cigarette. She grabbed for it, knocking the cigarette onto the floor and stepping on it. “This is what I sacrificed for, scrimped and saved.” Her mouth a sharp thing, mine even sharper. “In jail. A daughter of mine in jail.” Who was that with the bare stomach in hip huggers? Jeans dragging, I pranced to her, batting my ghoulish lashes. “You look like a haggard whore,” she whispered. Fifty-eight she smoothed her injured dress. This was my last chance.
*
She had been at the Bible Conference in Storm Lake, 75 miles south and decided to drive up to Marshall to see me. Her blue eyes looked watery when she flipped her clip-on sunglasses up. I should have said sorry, I should have wept, but instead my lips felt numb. I hit my thigh with the flat of my hand, my eyes burned, but no tears came. It was as if we had left the other face down in a half tub of water drowned, we pointed the finger at each other, neither admitted to having done anything wrong. Eighteen with a scarred face, I had rebelled against the strictness, and a fellow long-hair had shot me, and now which road was left open, not left or right, but somewhere, a crooked road.
*
She didn’t understand. Age 18 the year of scalded skin and dogs with two heads, the year I walked into the kingdom of protest. The Mining of the Harbors March has melted away into a blur of bodies, bull horns, and speeches, endless speeches. We marched and marched while the speeches rained over our heads, burning phrases so full of fire and atrocity and outrage they became a mantra, a free fire zone of plunder and pillage. I could feel the My Lai Massacre, the gang rapes of tiny Vietnamese girls some only 12-years-old, and pure as lotus blossoms, I felt the terror the girl knew when the last sunburnt and deranged soldier thrust himself into her. I thought of my own entrance into death, losing my eyesight, the blackness of the brain shutting down the nonessentials. The loudspeakers called out the murder of Fred Hampton, Chairman of the Black Panthers, the FBI persecution of the Panthers, and then the singing started up again of “Ain’t Gonna Study War No More.” The song sung over and over I’m gonna lay down my sword and shield, down by the riverside to study war no more. We students couldn’t sing, only knew the chorus of anything. I felt divorced from everyone, here on my red planet with the scorched sky, keeping my left arm close, seeing if anyone saw, a vigilance without end that blocked out the larger world. Age 18 struggles to become one of them, the antiwar, the edgy, the smart, the ones with élan. Age 18 hides herself and sees no others out in the world who resemble her. What will it be? A lizard’s life? A peacock’s? A thrush’s or the slough’s muck? The drowning of wild orchids? Age 18 speaks with the tongue of troubled flowers.
© Stephanie Dickinson
[This piece was selected by Rachel Wild. Read Stephanie’s interview]