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"Thanks, mom," the younger woman said.
"The motherfucker shouldn't have put us in here with some strange man," the older woman said. Despite
her reference to him, she did not look at Randy or even gesture in his direction.
"Well, you should have kept your mouth shut," said the younger woman. "We don't know when the man
is coming back with food and water, like that guy said."
Randy didn't know whether to speak or not. If he stirred this difficult situation any, it could be an even longer
night-or three days till he dehydrated-than it already would be. He looked at the two women. The older woman had
her back turned to him, speaking to the younger one in the next cell. From here, he couldn't see the younger one
at all. The older one was what his mother would have called "chunky."
"Well, he should have kept his mouth shut then. I have a right to know what is going on. When they arrest
you, you're supposed to get a phone call."
"The phone lines are all busy," said the daughter. "We kept trying, remember?"
"Fuck."
They didn't speak for a moment after that. Randy considered saying something.
He didn't have to. The younger woman leaned past her mother and yelled to him, "Hey, what are you in for?"
"What am I in for?" It was the stereotypical prison-movie new-fish question, he knew, but it was also
a logical thing to ask. "I guess I'm here for robbery."
The mother turned around then and turned on him. "You guess you're in for robbery? What the fuck does that
mean?"
"I was taking money out of the cash register at Kroger," he said. "A security guard grabbed me."
"They ought to be grabbing the goddam zombies, not grabbing regular people," the woman said. She staggered
across her cell and grabbed the bars in front of Randy, who automatically took two steps back. She gave a half-smile
and looked him over. "Well, Robin Hood, what are we gonna do now?"
She was what his dad would have described as "rode hard and put up wet." Bleached hair showed dark roots,
but no evidence of having been combed since the last dye job. She was wearing jeans and a white tee shirt that
read HE LOOKED GOOD LAST NIGHT.
Randy tried to force a smile. "I don't know," he stuttered. Her sneering stare made him add, "About
what?"
"What you were asking him about," she said. "Water, food."
"I don't know," he repeated.
"Shit," she said as she turned on her heel and started back across the cell. "Some fucking help
you are." As she finished the last word, she dropped on one knee, the alcohol having overcome her. Randy grimaced.
If he had gone down on concrete on his knee like that, he couldn't imagine the pain. She seemed to be feeling no
pain from that or from anything else right now. She had managed to pivot enough to land face down on the cot. "I'm
gonna take a nap. That's what I'm gonna do." Her next breath was a snore.
Randy had hoped the younger woman would take up the conversation now, but she did not. Instead she just stood there,
looking at her mother. Randy wished the cell arrangement had been different. The jailor had probably done it on
purpose. The girl was not as pretty as she had been in his imagination a few seconds earlier. Stringy brown hair
framed a horsey-face. With prettier eyes, she could have been Julia Roberts. She was nicely shaped, he noticed.
She had bigger boobs than Julia Roberts. That was a good thing.
He shook his head, disgusted with himself for even thinking that. It was thinking like that-and the behavior that
was consistent with such thoughts-that had made his wife leave him and file for divorce. So. He was indeed a bastard,
as her petition in court had phrased more politely but just as specifically.
Then the girl looked up at him and smiled, exposing a sexy little overbite. That made him forget the self-imposed
guilt he was feeling a moment before. He was reminded of St. Augustine's prayer, "Lord, grant me chastity,
but not yet."
THREE
The smile hadn't been followed by any conversation. The girl had sat down on her cot without a word and gone back
to watching her mother's heavy drunken breathing.
Lying back on the small cot now, Randy tried to get comfortable just in case this was going to be his deathbed.
Somehow, a deathbed ought to be a pleasant place to pass away. No matter how he moved, Randy couldn't find comfort.
He wondered how old this cot was, whether it had indeed been the deathbed for previous inmates. Surely they threw
out mattresses if someone died on them. And then he realized that surely they would not do such a thing with taxpayers
being as adamant as they were these days about money being wasted. So not just one person had died in this bed,
he fantasized. This was the freaking deathestbed of all the beds in the world.
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