The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly Read online

  When I look behind me at the watchers gathered on the polished wooden benches, I see Philip resting his fingers inside the opening of his jacket, over the place where I kicked enough times to burst organs. His front teeth bow outward where his mouth was wired shut.

  He stares down at me when he passes to take the stand, and I gaze straight into his green eyes. In the fluorescent light of the courtroom, they look unremarkable. Celery-colored and plain. There is nothing there but a boy. A human boy.

  Tears pool in my eyes, and after a moment, I start crying loudly, doubled over, my nose almost touching the thickly waxed table. Juanita glances around the courtroom. “That won’t help you, Minnow,” she whispers. “This judge doesn’t have any sympathy for crying.”

  I shake my head because everything has become very clear now. How wrong I was, wrong about myself, wrong about everything because there, in front of me, stands the hard evidence of my wrongness, limping in glossy shoes and bruised bones and regular eyes that shouldn’t have made me lose my mind.

  Chapter 6

  After weeks of court dates and interviews and the incessant droning silences that intersperse moments of terror, the judge says it’s time for the jury to deliberate. Juanita marches me to a small room to await the ruling.

  I sit on a leather-upholstered chair. Juanita gives one of her cheerless smiles. I know she doesn’t want to tell me everything will be okay because that would be a lie.

  After ten minutes, she takes a phone call, and I’m alone.

  My eyes scan the room, and everything becomes suddenly important. A ceiling fan thick with dust. A small, glass-topped vending machine where color-wrapped foods are lined up, trapped. A little pot of brown-edged violets. I can smell the varnish they used on the floor, the powdery cleaner in a can beside the sink, but I can’t smell the violets.

  My head jerks when the door opens and a man strolls in. He’s a policeman; I can tell, I’ve been around enough of them now, though he looks different from the others: glasses, herringbone suit, and in his eyes a kind of softness, like he’s winking with both eyes open.

  He nods at me and shuffles in his leather shoes to the vending machine. He surveys the contents for several long moments as though this is the most important decision he’s made in years. Slowly, he inserts three coins, turns a knob, and pulls out a yellow-wrapped rectangle. As he tears the wrapper open, I glimpse multicolored candies lined up in a row, toothlike. He unwraps one, chews it, and leans against the machine like he’s totally alone in the room.

  I should look away, but I don’t. Every stranger is still a thrill, having gone so many years never knowing anyone but the same hundred wind-burned souls. I read every part of this man, the mechanical motion of his jaw, the gold wedding ring, the fan of lines across his forehead, like I imagine people read books. At least he’s a distraction from the idea of the jury in some room nearby discussing how evil I am.

  He turns toward me. “Want a Starburst?” He holds a pink-wrapped square between his thumb and forefinger.

  I do want it, but I shrug, holding up my stumps. “Can’t unwrap it, can I?”

  And then he does something strange. He smiles. The kind of smile that pushes every feature upward by an inch. “Don’t be so sure,” he says, placing the candy on the coffee table in front of me. “You might be more capable than you think.”

  He puts the remaining candies in his pocket and walks toward the door. “See you later,” he says, like a promise.

  I glare at the square of pink on the brown table. I know there’s no way I can unwrap it. I’d need fingernails, a thumb.

  I swallow the saliva that’s filled my mouth and lean forward. I pick up the candy in my teeth. I run my bottom teeth over the wrapper until it lifts away, and my tongue nudges the other edges. The wrapper falls to the tabletop, and I press the candy to the roof of my mouth. Instantly, my jaw aches and my eyes prickle. I haven’t tasted anything so vibrant since I was five. It is wonderful.

  There’s still a sliver of candy on my tongue when Juanita leads me back to the courtroom. I see the man with the candy sitting in the back, chewing. The judge reads the verdict. Guilty. Six years with the possibility of parole on my eighteenth birthday. The judge informs me that, unless I maintain a spotless record in juvenile detention and receive a character recommendation from a staff member, my chances of earning parole are slim.

  I take another ride in a cop car. This time to the Missoula County Juvenile Detention Center.

  Chapter 7

  How do you handcuff a handless girl?

  The answer is remarkable. There is a man. His name is Early. He’s the first person to introduce himself after I arrive at the white cinder-block building that houses every underage female criminal for five hundred miles. He enters the blank-walled processing room with a measuring tape and a mouth full of crooked smiling teeth.

  Early’s job, he tells me, is to make all the custom restraints for the Missoula County Correctional Department. You wouldn’t think a man could possibly make a full-time job out of this; after all, how many handless people could possibly be imprisoned at one time? Early says he makes ends meet in all manner of ways—making fox traps for hunters, altering the stretchers where they do lethal injections for obese prisoners. He tells me that he even tinkered together a silver necklace for the warden’s daughter’s sweet sixteen.

  He’s a strange-looking man, like I imagine an old gnome might look, a hooked nose and black brooms of hair coming out of his ears and a circular hole in his left front tooth. Early chatters at me the entire time, and I don’t ask how the hole got there, but I wonder.

  He unsheathes the orange measuring tape and hooks it around my elbow. I flinch.

  “It’s okay,” he says in the quiet way you talk to skittish animals. “No one’s gonna hurt you. No need to be afraid.”

  I want to tell him that I have more reasons to be afraid than he could even count. I keep my teeth pressed together in silence.

  • • •

  Juvie is just a shaky, tin-walled place, a repurposed alternative high school the county purchased for juvenile delinquents. All the windows in the big gymnasium were bricked up years ago and scaffolded into three stories of light metal cells.

  I can hear the girls—voices, movement, metal clanging on metal—the minute I enter the cell house. It smells of bodies in here, just like the Community.

  A guard named Benny leads me to a white-tiled room. She snips the zip-tied restraints around my elbows and I shake out my arms. Benny is big and her skin is a lovely shade of brown, almost exactly like Jude’s, and I trust her, even when she tells me this strange room is for undressing.

  “We’ll make two piles,” she says. “A keep pile and a trash pile. Things like jewelry and keepsakes usually go in the keep pile.”

  In the corner, there is a black camera that watches Benny yank the belt efficiently through the loops of my skirt, unbutton the pearls of my blouse until I’m standing in only Jude’s shirt. It’s fraying badly, hardly even a shirt anymore.

  “Trash?” she asks.

  I shake my head. “Keep.”

  She raises an eyebrow but puts it in the pile with the rest of my clothes.

  With a flap she shakes out a stiff orange jumpsuit. She helps me into it, slips the buttons into the holes, and straightens the shoulders. She finds me a pair of Velcro shoes and watches while I fumblingly fit my feet inside.

  Benny picks at the knot on the ribbon that ties the tail of my braid, and my hair slowly unwinds. “You ought to get a haircut,” she says. “Could be a liability here.”

  “We hardly ever cut our hair in the Community,” I say.

  “Doesn’t look like you’re in the Community anymore.”

  We walk out of the room, down a hallway that ends in a heavy door, thick with coats of white paint.

  “This is the last free ground you’ll walk on for
quite a while,” Benny says. “Are you ready for it in there?”

  I shrug.

  “Ours is the only mixed-offender facility in the state,” she says. “All the girls are under eighteen, but some were tried as juveniles and some as adults, like you. When you turn eighteen, you’ll be paroled or transferred to an adult facility. Do you understand what that means?”

  I shake my head.

  “There’re girls here who’ve killed, who would kill again. Just . . .” she glances at my stumps. “Watch yourself. I don’t want to be scraping you offa any floors, you hear?”

  • • •

  Benny leads me down a grated pathway on the third floor. Hazy ovals of faces press against the bars of cells as I walk past, the occasional hoot or shout from an inmate following me down the skyway.

  “You’ll be in what we call Angeltown,” Benny says.

  “What’s that?”

  Benny stops and walkie-talkies to another guard. The cell door before us buzzes loudly and swings open.

  Benny looks down at me. “If I were you, I’d try to get on her good side.”

  With a flat hand, she pushes me into the cell. The door swings shut behind me and the whole complex of interwoven metal shakes. I look over my shoulder. Benny’s gone.

  On the top bunk reclines a girl in the same violent orange as me. She ignores me, reading a book perched on her lap, something with a view of the stars on the cover.

  “What’s your name?” I ask.

  She looks at me with sharp, pale blue eyes. “Angel.”

  Angeltown, I think. I know about angels. Sometimes they speak to Kevinians, whisper in our ears and make terrible things happen. They are hairless and androgynous and the height of small buildings.

  I wrap my arms around my middle, lean against the concrete wall, and slide to the ground across from her. She picks at the edges of her book with fingernails stained yellow.

  “So, let me guess,” she says, casting her eyes over the bunk. “Petty theft?”

  I glance at her face. “What?”

  “Stealing. Food probably, by the look of you. You got all your teeth, so I doubt it’s drugs.”

  I shake my head. “Aggravated assault.”

  She lets out a small chuckle. “Right,” she says.

  “You don’t think I could?” I ask.

  “You don’t look it. My leg weighs more than you.”

  “Anyone can hurt someone.”

  “What about your hands or whatever?” she says, her eyes avoiding the empty spaces below my wrists. Where the bandages and sutures were removed, my stumps look purple and thin.

  “What about ’em?” I asked.

  “Alls I’m saying is, you don’t look like a murderer. Sheesh, take it as a compliment.”

  My father once told me that all you needed to hurt someone is a single word, said just wrong enough. Anybody is capable of enormous harm, anyone with a mouth or a hand to write with.

  “So who was the guy?” Angel asks. “The one you beat up.”

  “How do you know it was a guy?”

  “You got that look, like you been messed around by men.”

  I swallow hard. I want to tell her it was me who messed up Philip Lancaster, but that would require saying his name. “I don’t want to talk about him.”

  She shrugs and turns toward her book again.

  “What’d you do?” I ask.

  “Same as you, I expect. Tried to kill a guy. Except, unlike you, I succeeded.”

  “Really?”

  Though her face is relaxed, it forms a natural scowl, a cord of muscle tight over her eyebrows, and though her cheeks and nose are dotted with freckles, she doesn’t look dainty or young or delicate. On her scalp, bands of pale skin are visible between tight cornrows of dirty blond hair.

  “They wouldn’t stick a murderer in with another prisoner,” I reason.

  “Who said it was murder?”

  “Well, what was it then?”

  “Self-defense,” she says. “Only, they might not’ve believed me one hundred percent. My uncle was a real upstanding citizen, and I don’t exactly look all innocence and peaches and cream. In any case, these jails are so overcrowded, they’d put a murderer in with a shoplifter just to save money.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Everyone knows. It’s common knowledge on the outs. Half my class has ended up here, one time or another. Shoot, coming here’s practically a school reunion.” She squints at me. “What school do you go to?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Homeschooled?”

  “No. Just . . . not schooled. I was raised out in the national forest. Past Alberton. South of Cinderella Rock.” In the hospital, one of the nurses found me a map and I figured out where we’d been living.

  Angel looks at me sidelong. “Nobody lives out there. That’s, like, real wilderness. Grizzlies and shit.”

  “Grizzlies didn’t bother us. They stay away from noise.”

  “But the only people who live out that far are, like, religious freaks who hate the government and sell their daughters to creepy old men.”

  My eyes flick to the metal floor.

  “That was you? That cult?” Angel says, sitting up. “Dang, I saw that on the news. Heard you lived in holes and ran around naked.”

  “You heard that?”

  “Something like that. Did you really not have running water?”

  “Or electricity.”

  “Why?”

  “It was my parents’ decision, not mine. I was five when we moved to the Community.”

  “Why’d they do it?”

  “The Prophet,” I say vaguely, and find I can’t finish the sentence. It takes effort to push through the tangled memories of the past twelve years living in the forest, to when the Prophet arrived, holding prayer rallies in our run-down trailer, his big black-robed presence shoving meaning into every corner of our lives. He made us believe we were saints. That we were being lied to never crossed our minds.

  “Hey, I get it,” Angel says, softening. “Your dad probably spouted some bullshit about God, probably sold out his family to follow this guy. Seen it a million times.”

  “You have?” I ask.

  “Sure. My whole family’s religious. I’ve been around this stuff my entire life.”

  A pleasant, electronic tone pulses from the intercom. Angel jumps down. From the front of the block, I can hear the buzz of doors unlocking and feet traversing the skyway.

  “What’s going on?” I ask.

  “Dinner.”

  Our door is the last to buzz open, and for the first time, I see the whole population of criminals this place holds. Before us, spaced by five-foot gaps, are girls in orange jumpsuits walking two-by-two.

  The jail has opened up its metal body and shoved out these girls, these prisoners, this pilgrimage.

  Chapter 8

  In the morning, after the lights snap on and I lurch up from my bunk, after I stumble behind Angel to the cafeteria for a breakfast of mushy oatmeal in a blue plastic cup that I have to tilt into my mouth, after the other girls noisily gather their books and binders for school, I walk back to my cell alone. A guard stands down the hall monitoring my progress, but I risk a moment to tilt my head toward a small, wired window in the cinder-block wall. The glass is reflective and I only see my own face: my sunken eyes, my hair tumbling down my shoulders like a frayed brown shawl.

  I arrive back to find a man sitting in my cell. I can tell by the silence on every side of me that there isn’t another soul on this level but me and the man sitting on a low stool beside my bed, like he belongs there. One hand holds a pen racing across a yellow pad of paper in his lap.

  With a buzz, my door opens.

  The man stands up. Immediately, the taste of artificial fruit fills my mouth, and into my
head comes the memory of the trial day when I met him.

  “Morning,” he says, gesturing toward the bunk. “Take a seat.”

  I walk slowly forward and sit cross-legged on my mattress. He sits back down, sandwiched between the toilet and my bunk, with his knees pushed high from the lowness of the stool. I stare at the ink-covered notebook he holds on his knees. I can’t read a thing.

  “I know you,” I say.

  “Starburst,” he says.

  I nod.

  “That was a hell of a day,” he says. I grimace at the word, remembering all the Prophet taught us about Hell, the hollowed-out middle of the planet where bad people are tortured in darkness forever, hearing but not seeing the droves of others shrieking in every direction.

  “A hell of one,” I agree.

  “My name’s Doctor Wilson.” He holds out a plastic-coated ID card. His picture makes him look stuffy, necktie cinched high, his mouth an unsmiling line. In the corner, even with my level of illiteracy, I can distinguish three letters: FBI.

  I’m about to question why the FBI cares about what I did to Philip Lancaster when I recall that there’s another crime, a bigger one. Even with the Prophet lying in a frozen drawer in some state morgue or whatever it is that happened to him after the fire, he isn’t gone. Maybe he’ll never be. Maybe he’ll hover behind my ear forever, speaking his bile and clinking his chains until he’s succeeded in killing me like he wanted.

  I look from the card to the man’s face. His brow is folded in an accordion of wrinkles. I can’t tell how old he is. People look so different here than in the Community, where hard winters and blasting sun made the young look old and the old look dead. “You’re, what, a detective?”

  “Forensic psychologist.”

  I squint. “What’s that?”

  “Whatever I want it to be. Usually I talk to people.”