Cruel and Unusual Punishment

Continued from January 18 posting

In our last episode Ma stumbled onto a fool-proof method for keeping her mooching relatives at bay while she is in prison for her sixth DUI. With the help of a cynical prison counselor named Dulles Sharpe she has a plan.

After a week of intense research with applied coaching by Sharpe, Ma was ready to conduct her radical charade. One morning , as she left the prison laundry (shades of James Cagney and Cool Hand Luke in black and white footage here) she bumped into a fellow inmate but instead of acknowledging the accident she flew into a trade about human slavery and losing one’s chains. She was tobacco road eloquent after all the intellectual cramming, and held the attention of a small crowd of prisoners who, granted, had little else to do but listen to her rant, until the guards broke it up.

Ma was escorted back to her cell yelling, “It’s time to end the injustice! It’s time for the redistribution of wealth. It’s time for violent revolution!”

This upset the prison authorities that she repeatedly labeled as racist pigs.

“We cannot tolerate this subversive jargon,” said the warden from his desk. “We will not permit this nihilist from poisoning the minds of our cherished convicts!”

The next day Ma repeated the performance outside in the prison exercise yard. Quoting Marx and Engels she worked the crowd expertly, un-harnessing long-held talent that might have made her a competitive candidate for elected office, a successful preacher or a rousing union organizer. Prisoners and employees listened to her and remarked that she was quite well-read, for an idiot. In moments the guards snapped back to reality, broke it up and hauled Ma to the warden’s office for observation and the application of a little axle grease logic.

The answer, by quorum, seemed clear enough. It was decided that Ma be surgically removed from the general prison population.

It was one thing to have fights in the mess hall or to find the beginning scratches of a escape hole in the floor of a cell. It was another to observe extortion, theft, rape and intimidation – a daily occurrence, but now we had a prisoner who threatened to politicize the entire incarcerated population. One bad apple in a barrel of kinda rehab apples. Maybe she was even one of those communists! It sure sounded like it.

She had been so docile, so stupid but easy to deal with when she first arrived.

Sharpe kept his distance, allowing Ma to explode into tirades about inequality, worker’s utopias and wars perpetrated by the rich. He stayed away when the warden had her transferred out of the general population. They met at the usual times for official counseling but he only tutored her on her next moves. Ma would gain political prisoner status or he would eat his first retirement check.

Meanwhile word of this development had reached Ma’s family who were still scattered around a locked doublewide on the property downtown. Several of her relatives left when they got wind that there might be a bonafide commie in the family. One right-wing cousin lost went ballistic  when the rumors of Ma’s links to Joseph Stalin and Che Guevara emerged. They may be low lifes but communism was another whole ball of wax.

Her Uncle Earl and Aunt Polly moved on to annoy an even more distant relative who had apparently come into some money over in Utah. They were slowly distancing themselves from this subversive. Her plan was working.

Most of the other refugees living around Ma’s trailer were beginning to look at other geo-political options. They were concerned about being ostracized although none of them knew them meaning of such a menacing word…illiterate authors of their own destruction.

Still most of the uninvited entourage remained, but they were far less likely to visit Ma in jail now that she was classified a terrorist or even worse…a socialist!

Ma had won round one. Enjoying her easy success in running off the mooch patrol she decided to continue with the disruption, and revved up the burlesque indoctrination of her fellow inmates. Ma had seen enough of this old county jail. She would be spending the rest of her sentence in a federal facility with clean sheets and a view. She had put the object in motion, now she had only to continue the act.

The word quickly got around a shocked Stringtown that Ma was nothing less than a card-carrying Bolshevik, even though the majority of the inhabitants thought Bolshevik was the name of a cherry-flavored vodka that you could buy over in Pinkyville.

A few days after another rousing exercise yard speech two federal agents came to visit Ma in her new digs, separate from the other prisoners.

“You are a disease,” started one of the agents, “A disloyal American. We will forcibly remove you from this institution and squash your attempts to poison the minds of our patriotic American prisoners.

“You will be transferred to Pine Ridge Federal Prison in the next few days. If you choose to continue this political activism there you will be separated from the prison population once again and kept in solitary confinement. You will be inaccessible to your friends, family and society for a very long time. Our advice to you is to shut up and mind your own business. Pine Ridge has a zero tolerance policy when it comes to commies.”

She had won. They all left. In a few days her yard was back to normal. Now that Ma was “inaccessible” there was nothing to take from her. In a touching soliloquy she tried to give her only worldly possession, the trailer, to Sharpe but he had no place to put it or so he said. So she donated it to science…

Just nights after Ma was moved to the federal prison, by heavenly design or hellish coincidence, a large bolt of lightning cracked in the sky lighting up the entire San Juan Range all the way from Ames to Almont. A second bolt provided a direct hit on her dilapidated trailer that night. Of course the place had no lightning rod. Of course she didn’t have insurance. When the fire department arrived they found a black, burned out skeleton with the front door standing wide open.

     Nobody had been home at the time of the incident.