Power in the Blood by Michael Lister

family members sneak it in and slip it to them while they visit or leave it in the bathroom and the orderly get it when he clean up. And, they is officers that will sell it to you. Not many left, but they always a few.”
    “Is it expensive? Hard to get?” I asked.
    “Cost whatever man’s got. Cookies, cards, smokes, or a hit on someone.”
    “No cash involved?”
    “Nosuh. Not enough of it to be able to bribe officers and it don’t do no good for inmates.”
    “Everything’s done on trade?”
    “Yesuh. Inmate say, ‘You do this for me or that for me and I give you my canteen.’ They pay—it just ain’t with money.”
    “What can you tell me about homosexuality on the compound?”
    “Well, they’s the punks, the pimps, the sisters, and then the inmates who use they services. The punks are the real fags. They like it. They was fags before they come in here. They have pimps who look after them and hire them out. The sisters are faggots who just go with each other. They don’t have no one to protect them and they don’t hire out. They just in love, I reckon,” he said, shaking his head and then growing silent.
    We were both silent for a moment. I looked at him. He was looking down, which is what he did most of the time. He was old, with solid gray hair, except for the bald spot. He seemed feeble. His brown lips protruded and his nose seemed to spread across his entire face. His eyelids twitched occasionally—probably wishing they had been closed more often throughout his painful life. His hands were very large and his fingers all came to sharp points at the ends.
    “You said that some inmates use the services of a punk, but are they not considered to be punks themselves?”
    “Nosuh. They straight on the outside. It’s just they can’t get none in here. In here they a big difference between pitching and catching.”
    We were silent again, and I mused about the moral difference between pitching and catching in the social order of Potter Correctional Institution. What a strange world I had entered.
    “The punks,” he began again, “wear women’s stuff.”
    “Like what?” I asked.
    “Panties, pantyhose, perfume. Shit . . . I mean stuff, like that.”
    “What?” I asked truly amazed. “Where in the world do inmates get women’s clothes and perfume?”
    “Get it from one of the female officers.”
    I gave him a look that said, No
way
.
    “Yesuh,” he said with a world-weary smile. Some of these womans who work out here are lonely. They do lot of stuff for inmates they likes. If they like one, nobody better mess with him.”
    “Do any of them actually have affairs with inmates?”
    “Some do, not many. Not really affairs, but they have sex. Get an inmate to come into the laundry room with ’em late at night when ’most everybody’s asleep. Some of the black officers get white inmates. They chance to have a white man. But this don’t happen a lot. Too hard in open dorms. But a lot of them let inmates gun them down.”
    “Gun them down?” I asked as if I had been born yesterday, and in this world I had.
    “They jack while they watch the officer in the control room of the dorm. Control room glass, and you can see everything in the bathroom. They got a squad that get together and gun down the female officers, especially the fat ones. Some of the officers encourage it, and some even expose themselves to the inmates. Some don’t even know it’s goin’ on.”
    “Who all knows about this?”
    “’Most everybody on the ’pound.”
    “Officers too?”
    “Some. Not too many. Everything that we do, somebody know about. Everything.”
    “So if an inmate does something, it’s because some officer or staff member allows him to do it.”
    “Yesuh.”
    “Most of the inmates trust you, don’t they?”
    “I got respect. Not the same thing. Inmates don’t trust no one. They life say they can’t trust no one, not even the chaplain.”
    “Really? So I have no hope of real acceptance and trust