Big Bertha

I divide my life into two parts: before Hiland Mountain and after. The time between I don’t dwell on much. Why should I? It was as bleak as Eagle River’s sky in November, a granite dome strung with nimbus clouds that blocked all light and yielded only biting rain and hail. Through the steel bars, the land around the facility was covered with a thin layer of frost and ice, where off in a distant and unattainable horizon a few dots hinted at Anchorage city life. Beyond the importance of complete rehabilitation (I have to say this, in case my probation officer is monitoring my correspondence), there are only a few things I learned at Hiland Mountain Correctional Facility for Women that served me well on the outside. The most important was taught by an unlikely guru and mentor, one Big Bertha of the television series, “The Depths of Depravity of Modern-Day Serial Killers” fame.

Of course, I didn’t know her when she was involved in that cause célèbre. This was much later, years after the FBI knocked on the thin plywood door of the RV, parked illegally outside of a Philips Station on the 199 outside of Adak. I was wrapped around D on the bunk, hands underneath their thin Live at the Hollywood Bowl T-shirt grasping for any kind of warmth, as the cut-out cardboard on our broken window leaked precipitation and snowflakes peppered the chipped linoleum across the floor. Delilah was on their feet in seconds and shrieking, “destroy the hard driver,” but it was too late for that. They had our number, or I actually gave them mine.

I took the fall for Delilah, that’s the truth. They were the ones with the false accounts, the ones that made the calls to unsuspecting victims of their scams. I could hack, but I wasn’t the expert. Delilah was the mastermind, but when the authorities arrived, I told them it was me all along.  Delilah could never survive in a men’s prison, and that’s where they were headed, Alaska not being a liberal state, especially with Lord Voldemort in the White House spewing nonsense from his infant-sized mouth.

Unlike some of the other trans before their transition, the slight ones with curled-up, full lips, sexy staggers, and doe eyes, Delilah was a ham hock named Danny as a child and my best friend in Glendale. We were both bullied at the same grade school by the Dylans and the Taylors, boy band locks sweeping over their blemish-free foreheads, who followed us home to an empty apartment where we spent our afternoons while D’s mom worked the day shift at Denny’s downtown. The boys made fun of Danny’s favourite sweatshirt, a tiger with the face on the front, ass on the back, a plastic decal that crackled with each step the then-boy took. “Not a Fan of Fat Dan, Fat Dan is not a Man,” they would taunt, before putting their four hands out on the tiger’s tail and pushing Danny down on the grass outside of Walmart. That was before they got wise, got on Keto and estrogen. Now they are as slim as I am with long flowing black tendrils that I would put my fingers through and pull just to see the curls bounce back in place, like tiny Slinkys suspended in air.

I told my public defender not to do too much defending, and since I pleaded guilty, it was off to jail, but not the minimum-security facility I was promised. No sir, it was Hiland or bust, and bust I might have done if I thought about it much, but when I crossed through the high gates in the van, snipers balanced on high beams ready to maim or kill, I had only three wishes: to serve my time, to return to D, and to go back to the desert sun.

“Keep you’ head down, and don’t talk to anyone,” my lawyer had said when he shook my hand at the arraignment. “Ten years and you’ll be out. You’re still a young woman. Be careful who you associate with in there. It can come back to haunt you.”

Hiland sat on the outskirts of the city, a block of maximum-security concrete and barbed wire, with its ground level devoted to the intake area, the common and the chow rooms, a small library, sick bay and so on. Then there were levels upon levels of cages for inmates, with everything smelling like Lysol and too many bodies forced into close quarters. They put me on the highest tier, among the thugs and degenerates and one of the first prisoners I met was Bertha, my neighbour two cells down. A six-foot Inupiat giant with some Filipino mixed in, she stared at me with bug eyes as I was led through the walkway in chains. “Cookies,” she hissed and then spat on the floor, Grizzle chew juice pooling near my feet. I later learned Bertha was the head of the gang of all gangs at Hiland, the Ravenclaws, taken from the Harry Potter books that a young Bertie had read in foster care. She was in for manslaughter, a “misunderstanding,” it was rumoured, and her crew of other murderers and drug traffickers ruled the clink and had their pick of girlfriends. They also had special privileges at the commissary and could buy all sorts of goods from Raisinets, to electric razors and tampons, whereas the rest of us had to make do with Cup-a-Soup, hairy legs and a limited supply of Kotex.

But most importantly, the guards allowed Bertie an hour a week of screen time in the antiquated prison library where she could beef up on her craft: the art of magic. With only one guard supervising her searches to ensure she did not order weapons or download porn, Bertha spent hours on the website Houdini Hoodonit, which provided tutorials for budding illusionists. She wrote cryptic emails to the founder Jay Makeable, a celebrated magician in his own right, begging for instructions on how to use prison props as the basic tools of the trade – ribbons, knives, coins, and rabbits – were not readily available to the condemned. From Makeable and her own ingenuity, the leader of the Ravenclaws learned to fashion pull thread out of underwear for a type of invisible string that could make toothbrushes skip and dance across the steel tables in the common room. She would weave handmade chips of glue and toilet paper in between her sausage fingers before they vanished into thin air.

Bertha perfected her act Thursday afternoons in the common area, a sterile white room where everything, including the metal table and chairs, was pinned to the ground. Cheers from her audience in a sea of tangerine prison garb would drown out the slow hum of Wheel of Fortune from the two hanging flat-screen TVs, while the guards who stood on the margins held their hands to guns balanced at their hips as if the weapons might leap out of their holsters and disappear as well.

At first the gangs left me alone, both the Ravens and the lesser known, but more appropriately named Ballbreakers who were in for lesser crimes such as armed robbery and extortion. Not to be self-deprecating, but I am on the tall side, rail thin. I am well aware my face somewhat resembles an orangutan’s buttocks, with puffy cheeks, pinball-round eyes, and a rather large nose that has been broken so many times it lies flat against my face, almost an afterthought rather than a prominent feature. The only one who ever found me remotely attractive was my lady D., and I was always as eager as a chipmunk to please her.

Five months into my sentence, a Ballbreaker named Stella cornered me in the shower and pinched my small nipples, which I found unpleasant, but not intolerable. Before she could get to third base, one of Bertha’s right-hand girls, Sally Jean, fully dressed in her neck-to-ankle jumpsuit, pulled the wet, nude body off me. “She’s one of us,” I heard SJ say. From the minute I stepped out of the shower, shaking so hard the droplets of water jumped off my skin and pebbled on the hard cement floor, I knew the Ravens had staked their claim.

The Magician sent one of her emissary’s that evening, not SJ as she was in confinement for stabbing a guard with a nail file after lunch, but Vinnie, short, stocky, with mangled ears that looked like someone had hacked off two pieces of cauliflower and stuck them onto the sides of her head, and pink eye that never healed, bloodshot like a never-ending sunset. She was a Wood just like me, another name for the white trash inside, the outcasts. She tapped my shoulder in the dining hall while I was trying to balance my plastic tray with the pieces of cardboard they call food here, all different shades of beige, a meatloaf so dry that dust from it set off the prison's fire alarm system. “Cookies,” she whispered in my ear, and I could smell her hot breath and its stale mixture of tobacco and copper at my neck.

“Bertie would like a word with you, tomorrow, in the yard.” I looked across the room and saw the Magician spread across the low bench, shuffling a deck of cards with one hand and shovelling peas and meat into her mouth with the other.

“I don’t want no trouble,” I said to Vinnie, turning my eyes back to the jostling slop on my plate.

“No trouble. Just be there,” and with that she cut the line as was her prerogative as a Raven, the other suits making way for her as if she was Moses parting the Orange Sea.

The yard was what we called the 3000 square feet of asphalt where we were let out each day to hang off the fence or, if the guards were inclined to do their job, walk in circles, counterclockwise for exercise. In Alaska, there were no basketball hoops or muscle benches like you see in prison movies for the main reason of everything being ass-wipe cold, with only two months when the wind or snow did not cut you in half in minutes. Although Anchorage was temperate compared to Fairbanks or worse the northern Prospect Creek, the wet Knik wind coming from the inlet tore through our standard-issue, unlined parkas. We were not allowed scarves since that day one of the Ballbusters used one to strangle a Ravenclaw. Gloves were just pulled down sweatshirt sleeves or pockets. The glacial air was like nothing I had ever experienced before coming so far up the globe. We took breaths in sharp rents from chapped lips, faces buried in our coats’ flimsy turned up collars, and sometimes the snot would freeze to our philtrum and have to thaw for hours. That is to say, no one wanted to be in the yard for long in the late autumn. I found Bertie huddled around some of the other girls under an awning, the guards watching from the window where they warmed their paws in front of a space heater.

“Ah there you are,” she said, after I shuffled over to her, my feet feeling like I had shoved two ice trays in my thin socks and rubber-soled clogs.

“I don’t want no trouble.” I repeated my mantra from the day before, and I saw her eyes crinkle as frost started to paint her eyelashes and nose tip with white ash.

“Well, trouble is an interesting word. You see we know all about you and why you’re here. We also know about Delilah. We have people on the outside. People who can get to her.” She pulled a Polaroid photo from her pocket – I didn’t even know they still made instant cameras in 2017 – and there was my lady sitting on the bed, clad in just fishnet stockings and a teddy, looking sassy and satisfied as always.

“It’s easy,” Bertha continued. “We need you to hack the prison computer systems to get me a B&B.” That was slang for spring her. I put both of my arms around my ribs to warm and steady myself, rocked back and forth, toes to heels to bring life back into my feet and calm my heart. The gale was picking up, and sleet carried the yard’s sooty excrement, cigs butts, used Kleenex, even a rubber or two from the COs getting frisky with some of the inmates. I glanced in their direction, hoping one of the guards would sense trouble, but they both had their backs to the yard, now twisting and turning in front of the radiator to warm their buttocks, pigs on a roasting spike with choices.

“It has to be next Thursday. The day of the big show. So much commotion, the guards will be caught off guard,” and the big barrel of a woman laughed at her own wit before malingering over to the window and pounding her fists against the plate glass to get the COs to open the doors. In shop, we had worked for weeks on posters for “The Big Show,” an annual talent contest promoted by Alaska Corrections if not the governor, who last year campaigned on ending the event as it “coddled murderers and rapists.” The warden chose who would participate, not solely based on talent, but also on good behavior, time served, and the probability of the act getting out of control.

They even bused in some of the talent from the men’s prison, but only the docile, those who could belt out Amazing Grace or something else innocuous. Last year, though, a prisoner named Ralph, round bald head and egg-shaped paunch, burped his way through “Wouldn’t it be Lovely,” from My Fair Lady. Needless to say, Bertie and her tricks headlined the event, and I heard last year Warden Stiff had even brought his ten-year-old grandson to see her.

The girls were starting to file back into the hall, pushing and shoving for the warmer climate of our catwalk which led to the stairway and then our cells, two to a bunk, one metal sink and hole in the corner for a commode. I stood where I was, still thinking about D. If anyone could get to them, it would be an associate of the Magician’s. Vinnie slinked up to me and poked me in the ribs.

“How does she think I could possibly do such a thing?” I whispered.

“Dunno, but you’d better or else,” and she slashed a frostbitten finger across her neck. “Bertie will slip you into the library on Tuesday, and you do that thing you do online.” Simple, so it seems.

I had a few days to kill and no resources. It was not as if I could turn to my cellmate, a deaf mute named Miranda, who spent the first few years doing time in the psych ward. Everyone left Miranda alone as she was Bertie’s best girl, someone the Magician said wouldn’t talk back to her. I knew from Day One not to trust her. Word on the floor was that Bertha had learned some sign language and could communicate with Randi, a five-foot-one, blue-eyed, blond nymph of a thing, who if situations in her difficult life had been different, could have been homecoming queen in her small town of Elmirah on the coast. She got out of daily walks as Bertie convinced the guards she was too fragile to exercise in a meat locker. The girl jumped me when I returned from the yard, her toothpick arms around my neck, body limp as a wrung-out dish towel, hanging off my chest apelike. “Ha hoo,” came from her cherry lips, the only sound she would utter. I pried her white palms away from my body and she slid to the floor moaning. “You’re not going with Bertie and keep the noise down before the COs get any wiser.” I needed to think, to put two and two together — to really scheme like Delilah.

Tuesday afternoon was the Magician’s time to troll the web for her act, and true to her word, she brought me with her to the prison library. There were shelves of dusty books never checked out, except for the few law journals that everyone browsed through in the hope of giving their public defenders grounds for appeal. Up against the wall stood a row of 1986 Hewlett Packard Pavilions and inmates would snake out the door on Thursdays and Saturdays, the days each of us had fifteen minutes to send emails to husbands and boyfriends, or in my case to D. Truthfully, I preferred old-fashion letters. Once they had given me a book of famous love letters throughout history and my favorites were those from Zelda to F. Scott Fitzgerald where she wrote about velvet nights and holding love like a parasol to balance her. D was a better writer than I was and would sometimes drench their yellow legal pad scribbles in dime store perfume that never made it through our censors.

You would think the COs would restrict a hacker’s access to a computer the same way they would a pedophile to a daycare center, but the librarian and guard in charge that day just sat in his chair by the door, banging his billy club against his fist and whispering that Bertie would “owe him.” He was an old dude, well past retirement age, forced to work to make ends meet, bent over and bitter. His eyesight was bad, no way he could see what I was up to on the terminal, so I took my chances. I was soon deep in the prison’s XJail system, where inmates’ records coiled for pages and pages telling tales of often bad luck and hard choices. I launched the malware and bridgehead, let the worm slither through the closed circuit until it found what it was looking for, and soon a virus was rapidly replicating, infecting codes instead of human cells.  I would come back when there was less surveillance from the warden’s lackeys in the control room to finish the job. Bertie glanced at me sideways a few times, and I quickly gave her the thumbs up and grinned like a maniac on heroin.

The day of the Big Show it was raining and shrill. The water washed away the coated blanket of white outside and left turned-up earth in its place. The men from Stanton prison never made it on time, as their bus, the warden told us, had been hampered in the mud, a security situation that called for additional troops to secure the area, and God’s own truth, I thought Bertie had even bewitched the weather. The heavy pellets against the roof did not subdue the excitement of our ladies, sitting in rows of plastic chairs across the cafeteria, whooping and howling so much that the warden threatened the hole to anyone misbehaving.

The stage was a few long cafeteria tables pushed together, a bit wobbly and only accessible by one chair, and once on the platform most contestants teetered this way and that like surfers on a high wave, which caused the audience to burst into applause if the act remained standing for longer than a yawn. The first to take the tables was a convict from Manitoba who played the ukulele and harmonica with puckered lips and bare folded toes, sounding like a clucking chicken with a head cold. Since the men were AWOL, one act led to another disappointment, until the warden took the mike from the floor and introduced the Magician.

Bertie had outdone herself with her costume, normally not permitted for the show, but the warden had cut her some slack as she was the only one with real talent. She hopped onto the stage with little trouble, dressed in a black cape and hat over a man’s tuxedo that must have come from Jay Makeable, and waving in the air a silver baton, which frankly could be considered a weapon. SJ and Vinnie, along with some of the Ravens, followed carrying her props, a folding table, a large box, a briefcase that must have one day been in the evidence room. At the end of the troupe was Randi, her glitter-speckled jumpsuit cut short at her soft upper thighs and armpits, buttoned down to her navel. At the sight of her, all the women were on their feet, stamping their rubber shoes, fingers in their mouths for catcalls, the guards on alert and pounding their clubs against the thin walls, the warden shouting, “settle down, settle down,” and then blowing his whistle.

With the commotion, it was easy to creep out, to get to the back of the room, slither down the hall to the library, the door unlocked because all of the inmates were accounted for in the chow room or some unlucky chicks deep in no man’s land of solitary. I was quick to my station, quick into the more secure part of XJail software where I could flick on and off the motion sensors and reign queen over the electrical grid. Waiting for my cue, I closed my eyes and pictured Bertie running through her routine, many of the tricks already previewed during Thursday sessions – dancing toothbrushes, cups and balls, linking and unlinking rings, a stuffed Teddy some kid left in the visiting room pulled out of a hat. Through the thin walls, I heard groans and cries from the audience as we expected, some shouts to “get on with it.” Then the sounds of the specially ordered trunk come to center stage, the one packed with mirrors the Ravens had cut out over the many months, just a crack here and there from the looking glasses over our sinks and toilets. The words of the Magician, her slow raspy voice teasing, showmanship-like, after a few suspenseful beats:

“Now you all know that I have been practicing the disappearing box trick, the famous one, where the magician loses his assistant in this here trunk, and then miraculously she reappears again. Randi is all set to jump in the box and isn’t she the prettiest thing (the feet pounding again, with someone shouting “Hell Yeah! I’d do her!)”

“But, I will do you one better,” the Magician howled to the heckler. “I will put myself in harms’ way.” Then there was a hushed silence, and buzzing, questioning voices, bursts of laughter as, I imagined, Bertie tried to fold her 200-pound girth into the small enclosure.

I knew how this trick worked with a lithe, flexible assistant able to move under the black creases into a secret chamber that the mirrors deflected. I didn’t know how Bertie achieved the feat. There was just a roar up the corridor, and then the shuffle of men’s angry, heavy boots, a chorus of whistles and gunshots and much later the sirens. This was my signal to open the doors, to flip the gates, and then close them as quickly as XJail would allow, enough time for Bertie to slip through their fingers, to meet her assistants in the unmarked car outside the laundry room, to escape unscathed. How the grey sedan was able to drive neatly through the front entrance, manned with army-trained COs high in a tower, remains to this day a mystery. Some say they were pulled off duty to attend to the men’s mishap, ensure none of the Stanton prisoners wandered away from the muck-entombed vehicle. Others say they were in the back of the room, drawn as we all were to the Illusionist’s spectacle. Of course, there was a manhunt for months across the state and even into Canada, but nothing came of it. Bertie, like her toilet paper chips, had vanished.

Two years later, I was paroled from Hiland for good behavior, no one the wiser. I returned home to Arizona and to an empty apartment. D had left me, they said, in a fit of boredom with the letter writing and lack of physical attention. I heard they took up with a man from the greater part of Texas, a grown-up version of Dylan or Taylor with a dimpled chin and brilliantine-treated hair above perfectly groomed eyebrows. The Illusionist was right, nothing is as it seems, and love is just a coin to be tossed, played with, and then discarded. After that I took up churchgoing. Of course, I also followed the antics of the now infamous Big Bertha, who, once on the outside, abandoned Jay Makeable and magic to commit some serious crimes, ending up on the FBI’s Most Wanted List, and eventually on Netflix. She targeted men known to abuse young girls and women, the pimps and the traffickers, drug pushers, fist pounders, deviants and deadbeats. Even so, these lost souls weigh heavily on my mind at night, and I am urged to confess my role, albeit removed, in their unfortunate demise.