Free Dark and Bloody Ground by Darcy O'Brien Page B

months before Sherry began working there, three white prisoners smuggled a gun inside, climbed up an air shaft, and shot two blacks dead in their cell. From what authorities could determine, the motive was purely racial.
    Sherry preferred the convicts to the inmates or the male guards. The guards resented her because she was a woman and were constantly hitting on her and making ugly remarks. The convicts were con artists, so they were polite, and she enjoyed the way they bullshitted her with rapid-fire chat and had her thinking that she was the grandest thing that ever put on shoes, with their “Yes, ma’ams” and“Thank you, ma’ams” and cornball endearments—"A gal like you could cause the world a heartache.” She could see how they studied her, that was what they did best, reading people; they were so street smart they could fool you upside down six ways a minute with sweet talk and flattery, and they were always manic-high on something. The next thing you knew, one of them had sliced somebody open with a homemade knife or split somebody’s skull with a meat cleaver. They were liars, first and foremost; all criminals were, that was the point and purpose of their existence; but once you were onto their game, and they knew it, they could be fun.
    “I’m gonna marry you when I get out,” one called Lefty would say. “We’ll head for California and you’ll be in the movies.”
    “You know why there are no left-handed people in the insane asylum?” Sherry would shoot back. “Because they drive everybody else crazy.”
    The ordinary inmates, Sherry thought, were nothing but slime and as boring as nine-to-five types anywhere, putting in time and always ready to snitch. The convicts were her allies in a system that ran on lies and accomodations, threats and power. She knew enough, for instance, to turn a blind eye to the wall-to-wall homosexuality, as to the drugs. What else was a locked-up man supposed to do? Like most people, most of them were sheep and went along with the sex because it was the accepted thing. A handful were brutally gay, punishing the sexual slaves they called punks; some took on girlish-looking boys as punks and pretended they were women. Others merely did what they could to fill the isolated hours with the human warmth available, which happened to be male. It was no different from becoming a cannibal if you were starving to death; it didn’t mean you would pass up ham and eggs if they were offered. A man who wasn’t a natural fruiter, Sherry was told and believed, would go back to women once he was free. She thought that people in prison understood human nature better than hypocrites on the outside. At Brushy you had to face reality. There was nothing else.
    It was the same with the dope: she ignored it unless it was blatant, and even then, she’d tell a guy to get smart rather than bust him. She had stopped selling to the guards once she became one; she did not trust her male fellow workers not to snitch on her just to get rid of a woman. They had other sources, and the wives and girlfriends of the prisoners smuggled in plenty of dope, usually inside a condom or a balloon hidden in pants or vaginas. The men swallowed it or insertedit into their rectums, in case they were cavity-searched. (Visitors were never cavity-searched unless strongly suspected.) It was a game that was more or less ignored. Marijuana or downers, after all, kept the men calm. They could get away with smoking pot in their cells in any number of ways, combining it with apple-scented pipe tobacco, smoking it with the water running in the basin so the fumes went down the drain, perfuming the air with spray deodorant or baby powder.
    Sherry’s growing infatuation with Benny Hodge helped her catch on fast. He was obviously a convict, a general who took orders from no one. She gathered that he controlled a lot of dope but was himself clean, being so health-conscious. Nor did he resort to men for sex. Apart from