Neighbors

David Griffith

                    I could say “Elves” to him
        But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
        He said it for himself.
                  —Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”

They were finishing the prison outside Cooperedge, taking applications, and Ernie, whose hope ran far out ahead of his reason, claimed our chances of landing guard jobs were good because of the security training we’d received at Adam’s Landing. I didn’t really want a prison job, but I rode along to apply because it was out of the usual run of things. Where they were building the prison was pretty country, probably much like Adam’s Landing before its fairways suffocated the pocosin. Twenty minutes into the trip, row-crop pines gave way to low stretches of light green broom sedge and bulrush crossed by narrow irrigation canals and creeks skirting nursery pools where coots inspired carnival ducks and cormorants dried their wings. It was April. Lazy tundra swans lingered, having wintered over in the rye. We crossed a bridge and startled two black youths illegally dipnetting herring from a half-submerged ferry landing on Widow Greene’s Creek. They slipped into marsh grass and emerged again in the mirrors, tiny as elves, their herring wriggling in plastic grain bags.
    As we neared the prison, the water wandered less and less. Lengths of canals were closed to fishing and navigation. Quarried granite and steel stakes painted the local high school’s colors, bright yellow and red, held hoses that disciplined the streams, draining wetlands and raising the land seven feet above the reach of high tide. The builders sunk pylons eighty feet into a sediment of oyster shell and baleen.
    On the ride out Ernie told me that the Cooperedge elders treated the prison engineers like royalty, spreading open titles and deeds and offering them survey maps still wet with virgin ink. Nobody owned the pocosin. Rumors circulated that carpetbaggers expropriated it from Confederate fathers and then abandoned it in the twenties after its peat caught fire and smoldered for a decade. “How do you know all this?” I asked.
    “Small town. Nobody farts without somebody two blocks away asking
who called choir practice.” Ernie was my age, thirty-two, but looked older, thicker and shorter, with a froth of curly brown hair falling to mid-scalp and an unfortunately round face with prominent teeth. He had difficulty disciplining his emotions, and his laugh could become maniacal, his frown threatening. It crippled first impressions of him.
    He wore his security uniform to the interview, though we had the day off, disappointed that I had on jeans, a T-shirt, and a yellow windbreaker that a sailor passing through Adam’s Landing Marina left in his haste to intercept the spring exodus to Cape Cod. Ernie said I’d have better luck in the uniform. Maybe he was right. At the gate to the employment trailer, the guard asked Ernie, “Who’s the tourist?”
    “Just another damned Yankee come back to reclaim the swamp.”
    “Maybe he’d like to see the same tar pit we showed the last one.” He stepped back and waved us through.
    Beyond the employment trailer stood the shell of prison, alive with construction workers and cranes. Eight tall buildings riddled with rows and rows of square windows, not yet barred, encircled an oyster shell courtyard. Cottonmouths haunted the moats, eastern diamondbacks the pocosin. North of the main compound, two hundred yards away, a special crew of engineers, masons, and electricians erected a physical plant whose bowels would one day electrify razor wire and, if need be, toast men whole. A chapel and clinic, two surveyor’s flags south, awaited appropriation.
    The prison would put Cooperedge on the map. It was the town’s bridge to the rest of society and life as seen on television. After the hiring they would pave over all but a buffer of pocosin, erect guard towers, and expand the employment trailer into a garage to service the most sinister fleet of buses in the state. By now anybody in Cooperedge could envision convicts clearing brush from irrigation ditches and filling potholes that nutria used for dens. They were adding six thousand inmates to a town of eight thousand, creating a hundred and sixteen new jobs, importing stone and steel enough to repair Sodom, and rerouting nearly as much water as the Army Corps of Engineers harnessed to light cities that trafficked in dreams. Even the original skeptics—naysayers who whined about recidivism and anxiety among housewives, elitists who warned of the riffraff of halfway houses, Southern culture preservationists who submitted briefs against taking federal inmates—now even these citizens were silent, or silenced, convinced by endless editorials, towed under by public opinion, charmed by strategic donations to the Lions and Kiwanis, or censored by county commissioners whose lawns grew quietly around surplus construction materials.
    Inside the employment trailer a dozen men lined the wall filling out applications while two men sat at a long table at one end, interviewing. The interrogators wore uniforms with Cooperedge Prison patches. Among the applicants sat James, a man I moonlighted for from time to time. He managed catering service and hired me for small banquets and meeting room luncheons a quick, easy thirty bucks and free meal interspersed among security shifts a Adam’s Landing. “Don’t tell me you want to be a guard,” I said.
    “I’m getting the kitchen concession,” he said. “I’ll be feeding more people than Jesus.”
    We took clipboards and forms from the rack and squeezed in beside James, fingering stubby pencils. James and Ernie nodded at each other. I said “If you already have the job, why are you here applying?”
    “It’s in the institutional culture,” he said in his pedantic way, “to make everybody go through the motions.”
    I knew James well enough to suspect he was exaggerating. He liked people to think he was somebody he wasn’t, his importance reaching the property line of some Rockefeller or other. Ernie, who knew only that James appeared confident and handsome, said, “Listen, you think if the guard thing fall; through, you might hire us in the kitchen?”
    “What would you want with a kitchen job?” I asked, irritating James.
    “The job doesn’t matter,” Ernie said. “It’s working for the state. In one of these state jobs you’re set for life. You got your medical, vacation, pension. Before you know it you’re drawing retirement and fishing from first light ’til dusk.” James and I looked at each other. Evidently Ernie, who seemed to know so much about the prison, didn’t know that it was private. “How old are you?” I said.
    “Thirty-two. Why?”
    “You just skipped over thirty years in this prison.” That didn’t sink in. All he said was, “What’s this word?”
    “Polygraph?”
    “What kind of test is that?”
    “One even you can pass,” I said. “It’s a urine test.”
    “Don’t listen to him,” James said. “They’re asking if you’ll take a lie detector test.”
    “Me? Why not? I got nothing to hide.” He turned back to his application, hunching over it as though plodding through a citizenship exam, his tongue snaking over his upper lip. After completing the employment history grid, he took a deep breath, puffing his big round cheeks with its release, and said, “So what do you say? Do we get those kitchen jobs or not?”
    James drew a cigarette out with his lips, but one of the interrogators said, “No smoking in here,” and he flipped it up and down with his tongue between his teeth before guiding it back into the pack. “You know your way around a steam table?” he asked Ernie.
    “Are you kidding? I was born on a steam table.”
    I wondered if Ernie’s lies and James’s exaggerations might complement one another, creating a version of truth you could trade for a folk song across a border.     “What makes you think you won’t get the guard job?” I said.
    “Look at the competition,” he whispered. “There’s guys here played football.” He rolled his eyes wildly to indicate two muscular black men he may or may not have known. They sat quietly with completed forms. Later, they answered with sentences so clipped you could have baked their words into drainage tiles and organized all the water for miles.
    But another applicant sat down wearing headphones. “Could you remove those, please?” the interrogator said.
    “It’s okay, man,” he said, swaying. “I can hear you.”

Afterward we stood on fresh gravel. It was early afternoon. I had fourteen bucks from selling a set of rusty files someone left on a ledge in the garage of the house where I rented an attic apartment. From Cecil, a black security guard at Adam’s Landing, I knew about a shot house right here in Cooperedge, where the three of us could catch a buzz for about what I got for the files. I proposed this, and James sniffed and spit, shrugging. Ernie confirmed: “As long as you’re buying. You are, aren’t you? Buying?”
    The neighborhood of the shot house strung out along the edge of a pocosin on Cooperedge’s west end. It flooded periodically and hosted a stubborn strain of tuberculosis that prevented gentrification. Converted tenant shacks stood on stilts and mobile homes on ruined tires. Two rows of shotgun houses, for decades a labor camp, had been abandoned after the mechanization of cotton. The neighborhood’s heart was the Stones’ shot house, where customers sat around a rare banyan tree that rode with Lucas Stone on a crew bus all the way from Florida after a trek into the citrus groves. It was a symbol of might, Cecil told me, its girth and height reminiscent of the petrified trees of Olduvai. He protected it from occasional freezing weather with surplus highway department smudge pots. Soot streaked its twisted trunk and medusan vines. I’d been to the Stones’ only once, with Cecil, on a slow, pretty day when Regina Stone told stories about the migrant camps, and Lucas smiled mischievously at parts about tripping up crew chiefs.
    Today Lucas sat with two forestry workers, and Regina stood beside them in her apron, in the shade, holding a long wooden spoon. Their eight-year-old son, Willie, arranged shot glasses on secondhand communion trays at a stand beside the house. The neighborhood smelled of corn bread. A stew of collards and okra seasoned with ham hocks simmered in an iron pot on a hibachi next to a stack of folding chairs. Regina leaned away from us until she saw that Ernie’s uniform was from Adam’s Landing, same as Cecil’s, then recognized me. She beamed, greeting us, passing us chairs. I gave her a dollar and a half for our shots. “Got some fine stew,” she said, lifting the lid. “Fifty cent a bowl.” Its aromatic steam drew another man to join us, along with Regina’s daughter Vera, who carried her infant son, and it took little time for the whiskey and stew to open a meandering channel through the gathering. I glanced over at Regina’s daughter, and we exchanged smiles. Ernie lifted his glass in front of his big teeth and said, “Here’s to hoping we all get jobs at the prison.”
Everybody drank to that. Why not? Lucas asked, “Is that gonna be a state or federal facility?”
    “Neither,” James said.
    “Generally your federal pens got more amenities than your state,” one of the sawyers said. “More TVs. More channels. More beds. Soap drip in the showers. And they don’t mind if you from out of state.”
    “The question is, what’s the best way to get sent to federal jail, though,” Lucas said, winking at the sawyers.
    Ernie disturbed their mischief by suggesting robbing the commissary at Camp Lejeune, but the sawyer who knew about prisons laughed and said, “Camp Lejeune? Them marines itchin’ to use all that equipment. They’d put a rocket up your exhaust pipe. There wouldn’t be enough left of you to season collards.”
    “Please,” I said, “I’m eating.”
    Lucas said, “Post office. Robbing a post office will get you in with the feds, for sure.”
    While the sawyers mused over this, James said, “It doesn’t make any difference. Cooperedge is private. They’ll take a burglar who never crossed a state line same as a guy that knocked over a post office.”
    “Private?” Vera said. “That don’t seem right. Anybody could, could pay, be negotiatin’ early parole.”
    “No,” James said. “They’d get in big trouble for that.”
    “What they gonna do,” she said, “throw them in they own private prison?”
    Even James laughed at this, but the sawyer couldn’t believe that the prison really was private, and Ernie, who wanted a job with the state, couldn’t seem to process this information. Like Vera, the sawyer didn’t like the idea of a prison run like a business, with money at the bottom of punishment and privilege. He said, “No, no. I can’t see it. Sooner or later somebody’d cut a deal and be rentin’ us out to dig sweet potatoes or work live-hang at the chicken plant.” He wasn’t meaning to be funny, but by now Regina had served us all third shots, and it took a good, long while for the laughter to die down.
    A bright green lizard scurried up one of the hanging vines of the banyan,
threatened us with push-ups, darkened against the soiled trunk, then disappeared into the depths of the tree. It might have been a sign. I sipped the fine moonshine, relishing its heat coloring my face. Cecil once told me that Lucas distilled it with water that chemicals from the golf links hadn’t yet contaminated, allowing it to age with the same base courtesy that everyone at Stone’s observed. James asked for another bowl of stew, tasted it professionally, and asked something about fish oil that only Regina understood. She answered, “Two days,” and he sighed, saying, “Amazing.”
    After twelve dollars in shots and stew, we were warm and pleasant. It was April, but it felt like June. The youths poaching herring could have climbed high up the canal banks to probe crayfish burrows without catching cold, but just after four o’clock they slipped into the neighborhood with their bags. We were obliged to leave. We might have been Fish & Game, especially Ernie, in his uniform and memorable grin, so full of hope of working for the state. With strangers like that to watch, they wouldn’t truck with the Stones.

We carried James back to his car at the prison, and he said, “You guys hungry? That stew stirred my appetite. Let’s get something at Central.”
    Central was the commercial kitchen where James squeezed banquets into wheeled carts, acres of stainless steel inside a network of service corridors and loading docks at the bottom of Dune Scape Resort’s hierarchy of private security guards and immigrant chambermaids. Like Adam’s Landing, Dune Scape roped off stretches of waterfront from the public, but they charged by the day instead of the lifetime, renting villas for six hundred a night and getting eight bucks for breakfast yogurt or pickled quail eggs in the honor bars. Recognizing James, the guards waved us through. We pounded across speed bumps and scattered imported black swans shining like negatives in the sunlight. Their flapping stirred up the fungicides of the golf links and angered iridescent flies up from man-made ponds.
    We turned between two fat pearls of golf tees onto a service road and curved around to the lot where they parked employee shuttles. Nobody lived inside Dune Scape’s perimeter. Everybody came from somewhere else, to work or to play, and whether they brought a week of clothes or a history of employment, at the end of each week or each shift they returned to their own homemade stews. This close to five o’clock, the kitchen and lounge staff from the lunch shift stood around with their bags of freezer burned meat and bruised fruit, waiting for the chambermaids to finish folding up their carts, their shuttle buses idling in monumental parking spaces. They lived deep inside the low country, an hour bus ride from this strip of resorts, in neighborhoods of halfway houses and domestic violence shelters on either side of the county government office complex that dispensed condoms and commodities. They could walk instead of march to freedom, if freedom meant free birth control and food, but to get to and from work, they rode a bus.
    James knew everybody: the Thai pan washers from the 48th Street hostel, the black chefs and assistants, Croatian busboys, waiters with advanced degrees in English literature, bartenders from Australia. He greeted them before leading us down a long hallway lined with insulated catering carts. They were designed to deliver food to clubs just around the corner as easily as to Attica or the Orient. The hallway opened up onto a room with thick cooler and freezer doors along the walls and long stainless steel tables with sinks standing between them. Three elderly white ladies tore up heads of lettuce and sliced cucumbers and hard-boiled eggs. James pulled one toward him with a smooth, gentle grasp. She recoiled from his whiskey breath, laughing, when he said, “Ruby! How’s my main squeeze? Duda gone?”
    I knew this Duda, the kitchen super, the same way I knew Ruby and the rest of the kitchen staff: through James’s complaints and comments about them when we worked the small, specialty banquets in Edenton and Elizabeth City, serving boiled ham, green beans, steamed potatoes, and cinnamon-pickled apples to librarians or county sheriffs. I’d been to Dune Scape before, but never this deeply inside, only reaching the loading dock, and this was my first time seeing these people whose names I’d heard James use in praise or in vain. They were and weren’t like I pictured them, which was sad, people I’d dreamed up shrinking into the margins of the people James greeted and teased.
    We threaded our way toward a cooler where they stored leftover banquet meals and then followed James through corridors and took a service elevator to the top, the twenty-fifth floor, carrying two covered dishes apiece. They were cold in my hands. The route James followed was off-limits to staff, but friendships with janitors freed him to pass through rooms like this one of overstuffed leather chairs and portraits of famous hotel proprietors, the center table as long as a limousine. Pioneers in the business of housing strangers side by side, the men in the portraits regarded our passage from thick oil paint and hospitality suites bordered by velvet and filigreed brass. I thought that this was where we would eat, but James kept moving, parting a curtain between two proprietors and opening a door that led to a stairway to the roof. Up there it was beautiful! A flight of tundra swans passed overhead, the last of them finally heading north. We could see the entire Dune Scape complex and the neighborhoods of Cooperedge and the late afternoon sunlight streaming through the unbarred windows of the prison. Its pitted shadow fell across the last of the pocosin to reach us.
    On a card table set up among half a dozen folding chairs, Dune Scape ashtrays overflowed with soda caps and butts. We pushed them aside and removed the covers from our dishes. Staring up from each plate were cold carrots and peas, a breaded chicken cutlet, mashed potatoes with coagulated yellow gravy and half a canned pear on a wilted lettuce leaf with a blob of mayonnaise browning around the edges. It was food they recycled into soups and salads or served on midnight buffets to diners too dazzled or drunk to complain, but to us it was heaven.
    I wanted to dig right in, but Ernie insisted we say grace. While his head was bowed, I spotted the two youths again, this time working a canal that connected Dune Scape’s golf ponds to the nursery pools and creeks beyond its walls. Four golfers paused to marvel at herring boiling under the fence, into the resort, leaping and skimming along the surface sideways every time the youths dipped their nets, shimmering with whatever light passed through the prison. They couldn’t know who prepared this miracle, couldn’t see the youths working slowly and methodically together, moving their nets back and forth and up and down, driving herring before them while Ernie spoke to God.

“Neighbors” appears in our Spring 2002 issue.