Vanishing Acts Read online

The door to the tank opens again and a female DO screams a series of names: "DEJESUS! ROBINET! VALENTE! HOPKINS!" We file to the door, the lucky ones. Individually we are brought up to a counter to sign a release form cataloging all the possessions that used to be ours. I am asked to press a thumbprint onto the back of two colored cards. There is an empty space beside it; I realize that I will do the same on the day I leave. After three months or eight months or ten years in this system turn me into a different person, they will be sure they are releasing the right man.

  A young girl whose hair smells like autumn is the one in charge of fingerprinting us. It is done on a machine and sent automatically to the FBI and the State of Arizona's main databank. There, it will magically connect to any other times you've been in trouble with the law.

  Sophie's school recently had a Child Safety Day. They took pictures of the kids and mounted them on Safety Passports. They had the local police set up to roll the fingerprints of each boy and girl. This was all so that they would have a protocol in place if the child was ever abducted.

  I helped out that day. I sat next to an officer of the Wexton PD and we made jokes about how the mothers were coming out in droves to the gymnasium at the elementary school not because they were concerned with safety, but because they had cabin fever after three days of steady snow. Child after child, I held those impossibly tiny fingers between my own, small and fleshy as peas, and rolled them across the ink pad. "Jeez," the officer had said, when I got good at it. "Why haven't we hired you?"

  Now, as I am standing in the Madison Street Jail rolling my own fingers across a blank screen, the technician seems surprised that I know how to do it myself. "A pro," she says, and I glance up at her. I wonder if she knows that the same treatment is given to the kidnappers as the kidnapped.

  From Tank Six I can see the boy in the suicide chair. A young kid with hair that covers his face, he whispers rap lyrics to himself and curls his hands into fists to pull at the restraints every now and then.

  The Mexican boy who advised me not to use the phone is here, too, now. He lifts up his hands when the door opens and the DO tosses a haul of plastic bags into the air, catching two of them before they land on the floor. "Ladmo," he says, sitting back down.

  "Andrew Hopkins."

  This breaks up several of the men in the cell. "It isn't my name," the boy says. "It's the lunch."

  I take the cellophane sack from his hand and look through the contents: six slices of white bread. Two pieces of cheese. Two rounds of questionable bologna. An orange. A cookie. A juice container. Just like what you and I pack Sophie for snack at school.

  "Why does the lunch have a name?" I ask.

  He shrugs. "Used to be a TV program for kids, the Wallace and Ladmo Show. They gave out goodie packs called Ladmo Bags. Guess Sheriff Jack thought it was funny."

  Across the cell, a big man shakes his head. "Ain't funny to make us pay a dollar a day for this shit."

  The Mexican sticks a long thumbnail in his orange and begins to peel it, one continuous stripe. "That's something else Sheriff Jack thinks is funny," he says. "Once you're inside, you got to pay for your food."

  "Hey." A Native American man who has been asleep in the corner rubs his eyes and crawls forward to snatch a Ladmo. "What kind of animal has an asshole in the middle of its back?"

  "Sheriff Jack's horse," grumbles the big man. "If you're gonna tell a joke, at least tell one we haven't all heard a thousand times."

  The Native American's eyes harden. "Ain't my fault you pop in and out of here like some skinny dick in your mama."

  The big man stands up, his lunch tumbling to the floor. Ten square feet is a small space, but it shrinks even further when fear sucks out all the spare air. I press myself up against the wall as the big man grabs the Native American by the neck and hurls him forward in one smooth move, so that his head smashes through the plate glass.

  By the time the DOs arrive, the Native American is lying in a crumpled heap on the bottom of the cell, with blood trickling down his collar, and the big man is eating his lunch. "Well, shoot," the officer says. "That was one of the stronger windows."

  When the big man gets thrown across the hallway into one of the isolation cells, the boy in the suicide chair doesn't even react. The Native American is hauled off for medical attention. The Mexican leans down and grabs the two abandoned lunch sacks. "The orange is mine," he says.

  We are told to shower, but no one does, and I am not about to stand out any more than I already do. Instead I follow the others as they strip down, each man putting his clothing into a plastic bag. In return, we are given orange flip-flops, black-and-white convict-striped shirts and pants, hot pink boxers, a hot pink thermal tee, and hot pink socks. Another of Sheriff Jack's policies, I am told; the pink keeps inmates from stealing the underwear when they're released. It is not until one of the other men turns his back that I see the writing: SHERIFF'S INMATE. UNSENTENCED.

  It feels like pajamas. Loose and unstructured, an elastic around my waist. As if, at any given moment, I just might wake up.

  We are the ones who have been remanded into the custody of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, the ones who have not been released on bail. There is a courtroom right in the curve of the Horseshoe, one that meets several times a day.

  When it was my turn, I told the initial appearance judge that I wanted to wait for my lawyer. "That's nice, Mr. Hopkins," he said. "I'd like to wait for my pension, too, but we can't always get what we want."

  My hearing took less than thirty seconds.

  T-3 is the cell where we wait to be given our placement in the jail system. The man beside me has taken off his sandals and sits in a lotus position, chanting. Now that we're dressed alike, we are all reduced to the same bottom line. There is nothing to differentiate the guy who shoplifted an electric razor from the one who slashed a gang member's throat with a straight edge. We cannot tell one another apart, and this is both a blessing and a curse.

  Freedom smells of spores and ragweed and dust and heat and suntan oil and car exhaust. Of hot, buttered daffodils and worms hiding under the soil. Of everything that's outside, when you are in here.

  Two detention officers escort me upstairs to the second floor of the Madison Street Jail, the maximum security pod. The elevator opens up into a central control area. I am strip-searched again, and then given a toothbrush the size of my pinky finger, toothpaste, toilet paper, golf pencils, erasers, a comb, and soap. I'm handed a towel, blanket, mattress, and sheet.

  The house consists of four pods--cages, each with fifteen cells inside. A central guard booth looms in the middle of the space, communicating by intercom. In each cage, a handful of men sit downstairs at tables, playing cards or eating or watching TV.

  After my paperwork is transferred, the officer on the floor opens the door to the cage. "You're in the middle cell up there," she says. Immediately I can feel everyone's attention settling on me like a rash.

  "Fresh meat," says one man, with a barbed-wire tattoo on his neck.

  "Fish," says another, and he purses his lips.

  I walk past them, pretending I'm deaf. In my cell, I put my supplies on the top bunk. I can almost stretch out my arms and touch both walls.

  I lie down on the mattress, which is wafer-thin and stained. Now that I'm alone, all the fear that's been building up inside me during the intake process--all the panic I've been pushing out of my mind and covering with utter silence--presses down on my chest so hard I cannot breathe. My heart is thundering: I am sixty years old and in jail. I am the easiest target.

  When I took you, I knew this was always a possibility. But risk always looks different when you are beating the system than when you've been beaten.

  A man walks into the cell. Tall and beefy, he has devil horns tattooed on his head and is carrying a Bible. "Who the fuck are you?" he asks. "I'm off at church and they stick someone in my cell? Fuck that." He shoves the Bible under the mattress on the bottom bunk, then comes onto the landing and yells fo