Chapter 5: Welcome to Holshue

5. Welcome to Holshue

It was very dark outside when the van picked us up from the county jail in the pre-dawn darkness, a cold fog hitting our face. A round-bellied dark man in the brown state corrections shirt who smelled of cigarettes and cheap after-shave held the side-door for us. His hair was greasy and the cologne was probably hiding the fact that he hadn’t bathed in several days. He sleepy, bored and barely looked at us as we climbed into the back, although I could feel his shifty dark eyes stroke across our ass right before we turned to sit down on the bench seat at the back of the van. Around our wrists were handcuffs that were tied via a long chain to the manacles that kept our ankles from separating by anything more than about ten inches, much more barbarous than the ankle bracelet we had worn for the month of house arrest. It was all we could do to walk, let alone run, but neither of us had any desire to run. We were resigned to accepting that this would now be our life, a prisoner unfit for society.

The large Ford passenger van was built to hold at least a half-dozen miscreants, but in the pre-dawn of this morning it was only us and the suitcase Allison’s mom had packed. We took a seat on the cracked vinyl at the very back, as far from the cage that separated us from the ugly driver as we could get. We would have been able to shout conversation up to him, but there was nothing to say to anybody, no excuse for who we were or what we had done.

We were still wearing the thin papery orange jail jumpsuit and no bra, too emotionally numb to feel the cold, or to care if the surly man even noticed us. He didn’t. Allison’s mom had said that we would get to wear regular clothes at Holshue House, that it would be more like being away at camp than like a prison, but this morning, this ride, still clearly said incarceration. Someone else would now control our life.

The darkness gradually weakened to the gray of a cloudy dawn. I remembered the sound of the whip-poor-will that night beside the river, and wondered when I might again be able to hear birds, or smell the fishy green of a river. This day there was only the loud roar of the engine, a belabored, insipid V-8, so unlike the Formula’s, and the white noise of the tires on pavement. Occasional bits of the country music radio slipped through the roar from the front seat, where the driver was just as happy to be not talking to anyone as we were.

We had been driving along a river when I first saw it, the place that was to be my new home, Holshue House. I wondered if the river was the same one as the one which had nearly consumed us on the night of the crash, or if it was a different river. All rivers flowed to the sea. They were all connected, and in that sense they were all the same. Did it even matter that they had names?

Holshue House was a three-story brick antebellum mansion with massive white pillars across the front, dominating the long drive. It sat in the middle of several acres of lawn, a lawn that was scraggly grass and weeds, but was still kept mowed. Everything was surrounded by a high chain-link fence with a foot of barbed wire angled in at the top. Scarlet O’Hara would not have been happy, with the fence or the general shabbiness that had over-taken a once beautiful southern home. //*?*R

At the chain-link gate my driver rolled his window down the rest of the way and pushed a button on the intercom that stood by the dive. He said something unintelligible and the gates swung open. I noticed a wire strung high above the gate and then some white glass insulators on the barbed wire on either side of the gate. The fence was electrified. There were no guard towers or machine guns – it was after all considered “minimum security,” but definitely still a prison.

 At the bottom of the steps the roar of the van finally quit, and there was that clicking of the engine cooling. The sound made me think again of the Formula down by the river on that night. The driver looked even greasier in the daylight, and I could see that he hadn’t bothered to shave for a couple of days. I used my peripheral vision as he walked around to the back to the van to retrieve my suitcase and then opened the door for me to get out. Still shackled, still in the orange jumpsuit, I walked up the stone steps ahead of him. I knew he was watching my ass, which definitely did not have its sexy sway as I slowly climbed the steps, having to put two feet on each step because of the ankle restraints. He might have tried to look down the top hoping to see my braless boobs, but I was too numb to give a shit. We had killed a star high school athlete and dishonored my closest friend – I deserved no better treatment than this.

Inside the big white doors was a foyer which had once been elegant and white with a marble floor and portraits on the wall, but had now aged to yellows and browns. Two of the six closed doors along the foyer had been replaced with modern steel brown ones, and the only furniture was a desk to one side and a folding table across the middle, both heavily scratched and scarred. Instead of power, the oil-painted portraits of old white men and elegant ladies now looked on with sadness from beneath a layer of gray dust, resigned to the fact that the South would not rise again, at least not here.

A short round lady in brown pants and a blue uniform polo came out of one of the steel doors, with a manila folder in one hand. She looked at the shackles on my ankles, pointed and shook her head. The guard squatted down and removed them and the cuffs on my wrists. We were told to call her Ms. Slanick.

My suitcase was placed on the brown folding table in the foyer, and opened. As the guard watched, Ms. Slanick pawed through every piece of underwear Allison’s mother had packed, looking for contraband. The little smile playing across the greasy man’s face as he watched led me to wonder if he was envisioning us in each pair of panties, each lacey bra, as she fingered the fabric meticulously. Once we had passed the inspection, including Ms. Slanick’s pat-down of my person, the guard retreated to his van and the woman led us up the seldom-used sweeping front stairs and through another steel door to my assigned room. The walls of the hallway were shiny green, with scratches of white plaster showing through at the level where they had been battered by carts. It was now very clear that I was in an institution.

I said nothing throughout the process, and no one bothered to ask any questions. They knew my sins, or maybe not. Perhaps they knew only that I was a criminal. Ms. Slanick told me to change out of the jumpsuit into regular clothes, that the jumpsuit would be returned to county jai. I opened the suitcase on the bed, pulled out a blue generic t-shirt, a pair of jeans and a bra that had been white once but become yellow with sweat stains. With Ms. Slanick still standing just inside the door I turned my back to her and stripped down to my underpants to get out of the thin orange jump suit. I wondered if I would have even that much privacy in the weeks, the months, the years ahead. With my jeans secured, I turned as I pulled the t-shirt over my head. Ms. Slanick’s eyes were diverted. As we handed her the jump suit, I wondered if the sleazy driver would sneak a sniff of our smell as he got into the van. I didn’t give a shit one way or the other, but still it seemed like something he might do. Would I have wanted him to like my smell or be repulsed by it? I didn’t know. I didn’t want to think about it.

 Before she left Ms. Slanick pointed to the rule book that sat on the little battered desk and told me to read it immediately. I didn’t. Instead I just flopped onto the bed and lay there for a while, eager to leave the memory of the jail and the noisy van behind.

The once large, high-ceilinged bedrooms had been sectioned off into smaller bedrooms for the residents. Ours was only eight by ten, but the ceiling was ten feet high, so it felt like we would be sleeping in an elevator shaft. We were given half of a wide sash window, the other half having gone to the girl on the other side of a partition that had been constructed through the room to make the once large room into two small ones. The sash was screwed shut on the outside with corner brackets, and a heavy metal screen of diamond-shaped openings had been screwed on the outside over the window. Holshue House was a nice place, but they would not tolerate escapes.

Through the window the grounds rolled away to the fences. A couple of out-buildings perched along the way, one of which looked like it went back to the days of the plantation, and the other a metal shed probably storing the lawn tractor.  Along the chain link fence I could see the sweet gum trees, but I could also see how their branches had been cut back from the fence, to deny us the privilege of being able to impale ourselves on the barbed wire of the fence if we should try that path of escape.

Then suddenly it washed over me how totally alone I was. “Are you there?” I whispered to the Allison inside me. She had been extremely quiet throughout the journey.

“Yes. I just have nothing to say,” came her quiet answer.

“Could you think some memories now? Something to think other than this and what we did six weeks ago.”

“Okay. But I’m not sure if I have any happy ones left.”

Her mind became a movie. It was a hot summer day. She was in a one-piece bathing suit, and James was there in a bathing suit as well. He must have been about five which would make Allison about eight. The sprinkler was running and there was a hose off to one side of it which they could direct at one another as they danced on the slippery green of the grass in suburban backyard. Soaking wet, their white sun gleamed in the sun, and they were laughing, each trying to get the other even wetter with the cold water.

James pulled down his swim trunks and started dancingf about nude, his penis stiff, but only about the size of Allison’s little finger. She noticed it, but didn’t think anything of it – she was pretty sure she had seen it many times before when he took baths. Giggling she slipped off her own suit and joined him in the dance, both of them shaking their butts. Suddenly James jumped at her and tackled her to the ground and that made them laugh even harder. She rolled so to get herself on top of him and began tickling him, so he started tickling her back. They were both shaking with laughter. Their hands went lower and lower in the tickling. She discovered his testicles were very ticklish and his fingers dancing along the outer lips of her still hairless vagina made her laugh harder than she ever remembered laughing. It was just children having fun – she had no idea what genitals were for other than peeing.

Then, out of nowhere, a hand snatched her up to her feet and there was a slap across her face. “You pervert!” It was her father, and he was really mild. “What are you doing? And to your own brother! You hussy. You slut. I can’t believe it.” And with that he began to smack her bare wet bottom hard, the water making the sound and the sting even more intense.

Allison shut the memory down at that point. “I was trying to remember why that word, ‘pervert’ had hurt so much that night in James room. I guess now we know.” She was crying. “I don’t think my Dad’s opinion of me ever improved. I don’t think that he ever felt sorry for hitting me, and really was just tickling. Just silly kids.”

I lay quiet, knowing that she didn’t really expect me to say anything about something with that much personal hurt.

Then she asked, “That night in James room, there was something there, up at the ceiling. It wanted to hurt him, but you stopped it. What was it?”

I bit at our lip, “I don’t know. I mean I kind of remember it, remember being afraid of it at some other place in my life, but I don’t remember. I can’t remember … I can’t know. I think I want to remember, but I just can’t. I guess all I really have anywhere is you.” I tried to hug her with my mind and she hugged back, I think.

Then we laid there on the bed, watching the daylight work its way into the window and onward into the afternoon. There was no point in trying to do anything else. Six years was going to be a very long time.