The Prison Transfer - part 2 (caption) (Patreon)

Odum gives us ten and doesn't say ten what.

Salas has been calling the arm fine since the fence. She says it again, dropping hard onto a deadfall with the arm pressed to her stomach, and Odum doesn't answer, which is its own kind of answer.

We're in second growth off the top of a drainage, sun coming in low and sideways through the trunks. Ferns to the knee. My legs are shaking, and they've been at it for the last mile, and I only caught it when I stopped. The shake lives higher up than it should, up in the hips, like the leg starts somewhere it didn't used to.

Two hours of this. Maybe less. We came out the maintenance side and went north into the trees and haven't stopped moving since, and everything I know about my own body is wrong in a way that's been getting more expensive every hundred yards.

Start with the tits. Nobody warned me and nobody was going to. They're not heavy standing still. They're heavy every time a boot hits the ground, and there's nothing holding them, and I've been running downhill for two hours with two weights strapped to the front of me, swinging on their own schedule, half a beat behind everything I do. The shirt cotton finds the nipples and stays on them, a fine-grained rub that started as nothing and won't quit being something now. They hurt. A deep ache up underneath, into the ribs, the kind of ache you get from a body shot that landed clean. I've had my share of those. This is worse because it doesn't fade out, it just comes back every step, and I have another however-many miles of steps in front of me.

There was a rack of stuff on the laundry cart and I grabbed whatever my hands came down on. Work pants, a shirt, boots that are close, a half-size off in a direction I haven't worked out. I saw the other thing in the pile and I know what it's for and I looked at it for a second and a half and left it, because I had maybe forty seconds and no idea how the fucking thing works. Forty seconds. I have thought about that decision every step since.

The pants rub. Between my thighs, high up, where there's more of me than there used to be and it touches itself when I walk. The seam found the spot inside the first hundred yards and has been working it since. Two hours of that and the skin is raw, and I can feel it going from raw to something worse.

I've walked this treeline twice a year since the rebuild. Dog handler on my hip, checking sight lines. This drainage runs down and north and lets out into the exact flat where I stage the dog truck, and Odum has us parked three hundred yards above it, and the line she picked coming out of the lot is the line I'd have drawn for her myself. That's what you get for writing procedure down. You write it for the smart ones too.

None of it is mine to say. I had that figured inside the first mile. Teague doesn't volunteer geography. Teague doesn't volunteer anything, near as I can tell, and the only reason I know that much is nobody's looked at me sideways yet for keeping my mouth shut.

"Teague."

Odum says it twice before I turn around, and the second one comes louder.

That's the second time today. The first was at the fence and I told myself it was noise. This wasn't noise. She said my name, except it isn't my name, and there's a piece of me that still runs on a name getting said and me turning my head, and it doesn't fire for this one. Nineteen years of hearing Ross across a yard and turning before I'd decided to. Two hours of Teague and nothing.

"Water at the bottom of this if we cut east," Odum says. "You know it or not."

Teague would know. Teague did nine years in a facility three miles from that creek and never once laid eyes on it, and I've stood in it in waders hauling a body out of it in 2019.

"Maybe," I say.

The voice still stops me. Every time. It comes out high and light with nothing behind it, no drag down in the chest where I'm used to feeling my own words come from.

Odum's already turned away, so maybe covers it. She goes over to Salas and crouches in front of her and starts peeling the sleeve up off the arm, and Salas swears at her, and Odum keeps at it.

The forearm is a mess. Something took a strip out of it going over or through, and it's been two hours open to the air, and Odum tears the tail off her own shirt to wrap it. She's not gentle and she's not rough. She's quick about it. She gets it wrapped and knotted and then she doesn't let go. She lays her hand flat on the back of Salas's neck and keeps it there, and Salas puts her forehead to Odum's collarbone, and neither of them says a word for about four seconds.

Six years I've been reading Odum's file. It isn't in the file.

Fanning's off by a stump with a boot off, digging at something in her sock, and she isn't watching them and she isn't not watching them. Her jaw does something small and she puts it away fast and goes back to the boot like the boot's the whole of her attention.

And something down in me turns over, hard.

I'm getting wet.

I know what that word means for a woman. I've read it in a hundred reports and never once had to feel it happen to me, and it's happening to me right now, standing in the ferns, watching another woman rest her forehead on a third woman's collarbone. There's a slow full ache low in my belly and a warmth spreading out from somewhere behind my hips, and lower down, between my legs, where there was cold ten minutes ago, there's a heaviness now and a wet heat and I can feel it start to gather, and I don't know how to stop it because I've never had to know. In my old body this shows up in one place and I've spent nineteen years pretending it isn't there. This one doesn't have a place I can pretend about. It's everywhere at once, low and wide, no off switch, and it's happening because I'm watching two women hold each other in the woods, and I have never once in my life gotten hard from that.

I look at the ground. It doesn't help. None of it came in through my eyes.

"Nobody goes off alone," Odum says, to all of us, not lifting her head.

Which is a problem, because I've had to piss since the fence.

Fanning gets the boot back on before anyone tells her to and comes with me. She doesn't offer and I don't ask. Odum doesn't send her. She's already moving.

We go down maybe forty feet, out of the sight line, and the walk down is worse than the walk in because it's steep and my weight sits in the wrong place, lower and wider, and every step puts the ache back into the front of me. My stride's gone too; I keep reaching for a leg length I don't own anymore. I get my arm across my chest and hold it there, and that's its own education, the give of them against my forearm, warm and heavier than they look. It helps. It helps enough that I understand something about every woman I've ever watched sprint for a bus.

Fanning stops, works her pants open, pushes them to her knees along with everything under them, and squats.

Straight down. No hunting for it, no hand out for balance, no checking the ground first. Down, and she's pissing, and she's talking the whole time.

"She's going to run us down to that creek and then up the far side of it, and the far side is bald for a quarter mile. I said it at the fence."

She's got her heels flat and her ass maybe eight inches off the leaf litter and her knees wide, wider than I'd have guessed, and the stream comes off her in one hard steady line down between her boots and hits the leaves, and I can hear it, a hiss and then a patter.

"Bald for a quarter mile. In daylight." She shifts her weight a little. "I don't care what she says about the trees."

Then it stops, and she stands up, and she pulls everything up in one motion and buttons it, and she's still talking.

There was no step in the middle. She didn't wipe. Nothing there at all, and I stood four feet off waiting for something I couldn't have named until it didn't happen.

She backs up the slope two paces and turns around and waits, thumbs hooked in her belt, still going about the creek.

My turn.

I get the pants and the underwear down to my knees and the cold gets everywhere at once, air on skin that has never been out in air, and it finds the raw parts first and lights them up. I go down the way she went down and I go down wrong. I drop, and my weight hangs back off my heels and I have to catch a sapling to keep from going over onto my ass. My other arm flies out sideways. I'm squatting in the ferns hanging off a tree like a drunk.

Nothing down there is where I thought it was. I never had to think about it before and I'd have guessed, if somebody made me guess, that it all sat further back and further under. It doesn't. It's forward. It's closer together than I thought, the whole works packed into a space about as wide as my old hand, and the cold is going over all of it at once, telling me the layout in an order I didn't ask for.

Then I start and it goes wrong on the first beat.

It comes off me at an angle I didn't send and it doesn't arc, it just goes, straight down and forward, and it's on my boot before I understand it's happening. Warm, and then cold where the air takes it. I can't feel it leaving the way I've felt it leave every time since I was a kid. There's no part of me out front where the information lands. It's all happening back inside, secondhand. I shift my weight up onto the balls of my feet and that fixes maybe half of it. There's no aiming this. There's nothing to aim with. Two hours ago I could have written my name in the dirt from four feet up and now I'm hanging off a tree pissing on my own boot.

I stay down when it runs dry, because I'm waiting for the end of it.

There's supposed to be an end to it. There has been an end to it since I was twelve. Two shakes, no thought, done. I send for it. There's nothing on the other end to send to. The stream just dies on its own, dribbles, and there's no closing anything, no last thing, and it's over and I'm still wet.

And it stays wet. It doesn't dry off and go away. It's sitting on skin with nowhere to run, cooling and going tacky, and I'm about to pull my pants up over it and walk fifteen miles in it.

I hang on to the sapling and let all of it sit for a second.

Fanning's six or eight feet uphill with her eyes on me the whole time.

And the heat is still there. It came up watching Odum lay her hand on Salas's neck and it did not leave. It's low and it's steady and it doesn't care what's happening to me right now. Being looked at is feeding it. I'm out in the open air from the waist down in front of a woman doing time, and every square inch of that is reporting in warm, and knowing it doesn't touch it.

My face doesn't move. Nineteen years of keeping a face on. First thing I've carried across that's worth a damn.

I reach for a double handful of ferns to clean myself off, and I've got them half up when I remember. She didn't. Down, up, done, no step in the middle, and she's been carrying this body a lot longer than I have. I look at what's in my hand. Dirt on the leaves, whatever's been crawling on them, and about two feet away is the answer to the question, already demonstrated, free of charge. I set the ferns down.

It's not nothing, leaving it. It sits there wet and I can feel every bit of where it's sitting, and I stand there a second with my pants still at my knees, working out whether I trust an example I watched for four seconds over a thing I've done my whole life. I don't trust it. I do it anyway.

From up the slope, Salas's voice. Not loud. It carries downhill anyway.

"You know what Ross did to me once? Wrote me up over a lightbulb. A fucking lightbulb. Shade cracked off the fixture in 4, that's a hazard ticket, he says. Two weeks cell restriction."

I remember the lightbulb. I remember signing it. It took forty seconds of a Tuesday and I never thought about her again.

"Two weeks," Odum says. "Over a bulb."

"Over a bulb."

I'm the only thing in these woods not reacting to my own name. It goes off somewhere in the middle of me and nothing outside moves, and nobody clocks it. Or nobody's clocked it yet.

Here's what I've got. The voice I can hold, more or less. The name I'm two for four on. Where we're going and what Teague would say about it, I can sit on by saying nothing, and saying nothing costs nothing.

It's the rest of it. It's the twenty things a body does that nobody ever decided to do. How this one gets its hair off its neck before it does anything else, and it wants it off, there's a weight back there I can feel at the roots, sweat sticking the ends to my skin every time the breeze quits. Which hand it favors. Whether it spits. Whether it squats with its heels down. Fanning has watched every one of those for six years from four feet away in a room the size of a bathroom, and I've had since this morning, and I've gotten every last one of them wrong in the past four minutes with her standing uphill watching me do it.

A squirrel gives us hell from a stump and quits.

I get the pants up. The button goes wrong. I send my hands the way forty-three years of buttoning goes and the waistband comes up twisted, and I have to undo it and do it again slow, looking down at it. Second try holds. The shirt rides up when I move and I have to take the hem and pull it back down, and I have watched women do that pull ten thousand times across a booking desk and never once wondered what they were pulling it down away from.

That's when I notice she's gone quiet.

The creek and the bald slope have been running under everything since we came down here, and it dropped out somewhere back around the ferns, and I heard the quiet before I worked out what was missing from it.

I turn around at my own speed. Nothing quick. Quick is what you do when you've been caught.

She's uphill in the low sun with her arms crossed, and her eyes finish a slow pass over me, boots first, the same sweep she ran in the treatment bay. I've run that sweep on other people more times than I could count. I've been inside it twice in one day now.

Her face isn't giving up anything either. But the sweep finishes and she doesn't look away after, not right off, and there's a beat where whatever she was checking for has come up clean and she keeps looking anyway. I know that beat. I've held it myself, on other women, for reasons that had nothing to do with checking for anything.

"You about set?"

Ordinary. Could be about the ferns. Could be about the fact that I just squatted like a man who's never squatted in his life, and I stand there with a wet boot and a burn climbing up inside me and no way to tell which, and I don't get to ask, because Teague doesn't ask.

"Yeah."

She nods at the slope. Then she stops, and looks at me a second longer than the nod called for.

"Teague. We're moving."

I turn before she finishes it this time. Small thing. I get my hair off my neck first, the way I should have done it from the start, and I go up the hill ahead of her with my arm across my chest, and I can feel her fall in behind me at the exact distance you walk behind somebody you're driving.