Down and Out and Female

There has to be a jail where ladies go

When they are poor, without nice things, and with their hair down.

When their beauty is taken from them, when their hearts are broken

There is a jail where they must go.

Thomas Merton never met this lady named Janice, but he knew her. Janice is in jail, and her face explains his poem. It's slightly puffy, her face, from a short lifetime's ration of sad country songs, roadhouse beer and beauty banished by both. You've seen it. Broad-browed and narrow-chinned. Lips precisely two thirds down, pouted there like swollen scars. Blackberry eyes. Orange-dyed hair raw against complexion pale as cotton. And, yes, without nice things.

Janice wears a green prison smock and a thigh-high cast on her right leg. She looks as good as any lady can who's waiting for her luck, though luck for Janice is only a judge's choice of two or five years for bad checks. "I took a fall," she moans. That wasn't, of course, how she broke her leg. She did that going over 12 feet of chain link and barbed wire here at the city jail.

Janice ran from its Lysol inhalations, the poured-concrete dormitory's sleeping shelves, the heads in curlers, the unshielded toilets, the incessant fluorescent light and, most of all, from the waiting with nothing to do, the waiting now four months to be sentenced to more waiting in another jail.

"I broke my leg going back for my girlfriend. She cut herself bad on the barbed wire, but they didn't even take her to the hospital. And I got six more months. They're not people." Janice looks down at her cast. Among the salutations blue-inked by the jail sorority is, scrawled in Bic Banana red, "Good luck, kid."

Certainly Janice will need it, she and lots of other women entangled with the law and its agents. They are a minority on the make, a runaway problem, and through their liberated beings courses the searing seminal truth that as never before they are prey to the state's legal penalties and accompanying indignities. In jail and out, in big towns and small, whether black or white, women today must writhe in the tension of society's fundamental dichotomy--justice and injustice. Janice's predicament is simplest, really, the most understandable. On society's behalf, judges and juries and cops and probation officers have defined her. She is a convicted criminal, hair down and defenseless, as common as a high school sweetheart seen ten years too late. She's one of the ladies who suffer equally with men before the bar of justice. One who is incarcerated and so leaves more men and children alone outside, because even shoplifters and addicts and accessories taking falls bear children. One who has many jailed sisters, black child who saunters closer to us, her stud heel-and-toe protecting softness the way a shell surrounds a clam.

"Tell the man it ain't so much the time, it's the heat," she says. "But shit, dudes don't know." She signs the cast with a Tina Turner flourish. "Love," she writes, and I ask what dudes don't know. The question attracts more girls.

"Well, like, it's bad in here," Janice says. "Worse than for men. This is no hotel. There's nothing to do. So you break a rule, one little thing the matron doesn't dig, and you're into isolation for three or four days."

"Who's gonna fix supper for my kids?" the sauntering black girl asks at large. Her skin dances in the green smock. "I mean," her mouth makes an O, "who is?"

A doughy blonde in curlers doesn't care. "It's worse outside, honey. I was drunk in public view, see? Four cops picked me up. I got ninety days, but you know what? When I get out, I'm gonna get drunk again, but I'm gonna stay inside to get felt up." She sighs and reflects, "You know, cops got hands like guns."

This brings the group to a babble. They crowd around, each with something to say, something to do at last, all these women, shaved and powdered, with no place to go. "They don't trust men and they don't trust women," one breathes at me. "Whatta they think, we gonna screw there next to the barbed wire?"

I know the prison superintendent doesn't think that. He's a kindly man. He favors connubial visits and high school classes, unlimited phone calls, lawyer visits, an adequate work-release program, better food--all the things this clamor demands. But there isn't the money for the programs, for the staff, he's told me. Hell, yes, he wants it better inside, because he knows it's tough enough for them outside. That's what a big black woman is saying, eyes crackling above scarred cheeks.

"Goddamn, my windows and doors come in at the same time, wham! The cops, you dig, guns and all, and my kids all there. Just 'cause I drove the car. Man, they wanted me to clear up three-hundred burglaries, can you dig ... ?"

Cacophony builds as a dozen voices spit sour stories from a hundred histories.

"They bust me, one cop cusses me, frisks me nasty, so I kick him. Then he slaps me so hard it hurts. Lying bitch, he calls me....

"And they want to make deals, they get you as a felon, see, and after that it's all hassle. You waffle and zap! It's your ass for resisting arrest or some such shit. Or you make a deal, but a deal with fuzz can cross you right out, just right out...."

"Right, and they want favors then, big-time favors, or they run you in. 'Course, when you're in, they want to, like, watch you shower...."

"Across the river in that jail, they turned the trusties loose in the women's section, can you believe? Who listens if you holler rape or no thanks or something...?"

"Well, now, we don't need men, do we, sweetie, in here? No, not much...."

In this confusion I feel their vexing judicial problem. It hums in their outrage, in the oscillation between their crime and their treatment. Guilt is one thing, they're saying, and the process of the law another. They're in a jail for ladies and so de facto guilty, maybe de facto poor and brokenhearted and unlovely. But not unhuman. And so they bitch--surely that's the word--about "hard-on" judges who, perhaps captives of some Edenic dream, punish female offenders as they would any dangerous mutant strain. They revile arresting officers who call them whore and cunt but never ma'am and confirm their warden's lament that women parolees often get no job because employers believe the female the sneakier of the species, never again to be trusted once the aura of her gentleness dissipates in a jail's ranker odor. Janice speaks quietly into the cyclone:

"They watched me and got me five days before my parole was up. Five days. For $233 in checks. I thought there was money in the bank. Really, I did. Wow, I get depressed a lot."

She brings the group down. In the buzzing light, the women mill and murmur, looking each minute at the high horizontal windows. Three wander off, their minds now on Lincoln Continentals and Cadillacs, which kind they'll have when they get out. "I'm gonna start at 1965 and work up," one says, and, resigned again, all the green smocks drift away to buff nails or write lawyers, to read Harlequin romances or wash in the concrete-doughnut trough watered by a sprinkler. Pterodactyls could bathe in it. An elderly woman, face blank as an unlived life, sits in the hair-drying chair. It seems it could be electrified another way for all she cares. Janice picks at her cast.

"When I get out, I'm gonna kill my brother," she says. "He set me up."

"Think about that." A woman scowls at Janice. Needle scars marble her arms like choice beef. "Try not to." Sigh "But then, in twenty years you'll probably still be doin' what you're doin'. Rehabilitation, sheet.... You know this therapy? Well, I been a junkie twenty years. Now they're gonna make a new me. They get you to tear at yourself. I got so screwed up mentally I almost got hit by a bus comin' from the probation officer's. Why can't they just fix the drug thing and leave the rest of me alone?"

She asks Prometheus' question, knowing that for her there is no answer, at least not here. Nothing is fixed in here. It's time to go. They watch me leave as though seeing a Greyhound go, as if all things happen with the inevitability of timetables. But someone plucks a sleeve. She's baby-faced, with blue-black hair, skin by Titian. Accused of car theft in Oregon, but really out for a joy ride, she says. She's 18.

"You should know, the cops, some of them--"

The junkie interrupts. "If you're a hooker, they want a blow job; if you're not, just a fuck. It ain't easy, being a woman."

Little Titian blushes and nods, then asks softly, "What sign are you?"

"Sagittarius."

This cheers her. The matron says they always ask that of visitors. I wonder if they've got a horoscopic guest book, if they keep it to check their luck against the outside world's. The matron doesn't know. She looks like Randolph Scott in a blonde nylon wig. Above her desk is a Playgirl centerfold of Fred "The Hammer" Williamson holding a white kitten over his genitals. She says the girls like it. Then I'm outside with their problem.

• • •

Sociologists know what's happening, just as do most jailers and police and social-welfare agents. Some will tell you it's nothing new, that the female has always been the more dangerous human. What about Lucrezia Borgia, Catherine of Russia, Lizzie Borden, Bonnie Parker (continued on page 112)Down and out and Female(continued from page 106) and all the rest? Even Janice's lenient warden counted some crimes as, well, peculiarly feminine. The superintendent retired from the Army with residual humanity intact, but one girl he'd supervised had confounded him. Twenty-three years old, she'd beguiled her husband and brother into raping and mutilating a woman she believed was fooling around with that same husband. She got 44 years, he said, shaking his head. A model prisoner, too.

He should not be surprised. According to the FBI, crime by females is up 86 percent since 1960, with a 239 percent rise for girls under 18. Narcotics arrests have increased tenfold (45 times for girls under 18), while robbery, manslaughter and trafficking in stolen goods also show Amazonian leaps. Alarmed authorities affirm it's as though the Furies were loosed on the land. Women, they say, are now too much like men. Yet, even given that, is the response just? Are society's institutions playing fair in this new game of cops and chicks? Must reports multiply, in eerie echo of fertility itself, of indignities inflicted by the body politic on the body female?

• • •

Ron Robinette is a modern policeman--college educated, community minded, hip. He works the dangerous watch from four P.M. until midnight in a tough Kansas City precinct, half black, half white, where "the streets belong to the punks and hookers." Ron has a simple answer. "Now they don't act like women when you arrest them. When I was a rookie, I still had shreds of chivalry. Then a woman came at me with a meat cleaver and all of a sudden I realized this wasn't TV; that she was really and truly trying to kill me with that damned thing, that she was after my own most personal and precious ass. All of that I saw while she was charging. Hell, I hit her like I would a man. That ended my Galahad phase. Now I'd split a chick's skull as soon as a man's."

The police chief of a small Kansas town knows what Ron means. He says more women prowl his streets, that they're more aggressive. More teenagers are soliciting, panning the expense-account gold of his turf. And shoplifting, possessing and pushing dope. The chief thinks this is a hell of a thing to happen in the heart of America, as natives hereabouts call it.

"I'll tell you what's wrong," he says. "There're no homes anymore. No discipline or respect shown anywhere to anything by anyone. The girls hustle in the high school halls. They panhandle. They leave drunken Mommy and tranquilized Daddy in the split-level and get their kicks participating in the sick aggressiveness around. And it's not just that there're more female offenders. Crime against women is up alarmingly. Rapes, robberies, aggravated assault--hundreds every year. You know, some guy breaks in, ties the girl up, rapes her, beats her, robs her, maybe kills her. Sometimes his girlfriend stands around watching, like Manson. It's sick and getting sicker."

I ask the chief about how female suspects are treated. He says there hasn't been a girl assaulted in his squad cars for years. "We take special precautions with female prisoners. If the cop has to ride alone with her, he calls in his location and mileage. That's checked when he comes in. All police departments do this." But what if the policeman lied? "We'd break his ass. The girl would talk. Look, we get enough complaints about harassment from the teenager busted for speed or acid, especially if she's middleclass. They've got rights, see. They come with the country-club membership." But we both know any safeguard fails now and again.

Robinette sees it a bit more concretely. In his precinct, 20 percent of the crimes are executed by women. "Crime's always been one of the puberty rites for chicks in black districts. Now it's popular all over." Ron has nine years in the cars, watching the street, quivering in occupational paranoia. "What it is, we've got an ecological sink. Vietnam, TV, movies, it's all getting to women. Face it, as a nation we respect and fear the violent person. Put that with women getting to be men, you know, liberated libidos and all, and you see women have found a new outlet in crime. No helpless tears and hair pulling now. Oh, when we bust 'em, they may put a few moves on us, shake an ass or two, and they're smarter than men, they cool it faster, but don't turn your back. Hatpins today got five-inch blades."

Again, FBI statistics agree. The percentage of armed women according to the most recent FBI statistics is up 12 points, that of violent crime up nine, and cops use one to combat the other. A cop who prefers anonymity says, "Sure, if we got a known offender, we lay it on her hard to get what we need to bust the biggies. It's gotta be a little tough with women, because they still have this thing about protecting the men, or any men they know. They offer themselves. I don't know why. Herd instinct, maybe, taking care of the buck." And what is the average cop's reaction to such feminine overtures? "Once we had two girls said they'd go two-on-one for a cop who busted them. He turned them down. Hell, they'd turn a trick to beat the heat. I would, too, wouldn't you?"

Considering carefully, yes. That's the game, after all. Women with records especially fall prey to sexual blackmail. In Memphis, such practices seem like postpuberty rites for police. Recently, hard by the Beale Street wonderland where Faulkner's tender young men went to soiled doves for their initiation, two patrolmen were dismissed for extorting sex. A newsman says, "They apparently had something on these two girls, took them to an isolated spot, well, you know.... Hell, it's common enough. A few solicit favors from hookers. One got fired for leaving his post directing traffic to escort a passing lady to a nearby hotel."

Again, the swirling tides and shifting shoals of justice. I wondered, talking to the jailed women and the men who put them there, how it must be for the unjailed, for the female who is free--however poor, or young, or hooked or hooking, or how deeply engraved she is somewhere on a police blotter, like tears on a medieval Madonna.

• • •

Linda Hendrickson's [some of the names in this article have been changed] face is haunted, though its heart shape is sweet and she keeps the knife-split side away from you. She would be pretty were the ghosts not in her eyes, if her tongue did not constantly lick her lips and betray her speed habit. Linda's from Minnesota. She's never been in jail, at least not for long. She beat a car-stealing rap, and while she's been hauled in for shoplifting, associating with felons, being at the scene of drug raids and has gone through assorted station-house interrogations, she's on probation now. She works at a public mental-health facility, apparently near the medicine cabinet.

"I'll go on with it until I get bored, and then, I don't know. This job, I'm ten minutes late, it's an offense. I want something, some job that's not eight to five. But I won't find it, so I'll work. What else is there? That or boosting."

Linda's an experienced shoplifter. At her peak, she could do $400 or $500 a day to support herself, her friends and their pastimes. They once passed bad checks using a stolen check protector to add authenticity to the bad paper.

"All this stuff. I did it for the thrill. I mean for kicks, not the clothes. Lerner's just doesn't offer that much."

She laughs and drinks a little Scotch. "Really," she whispers about nothing, and we listen to the jukebox and the traffic hushed by a winter storm. I can't quite reconcile her appearance with her biography. Linda's 22, the oldest of four kids. Even now there's a halo of lakes and wind-reddened cheeks about her, something spirited and fine, something fading. She talks of her childhood. The eyes calm for a moment. It was normal, she says. The rest of her family still is, (continued on page 184)Down and out and Female(continued from page 112) but she got bored in high school. Started drinking and running around, then doing drugs.

"I've done about every kind of dope. That's mostly how I get in trouble now. See, first my girlfriend and I took this rented car and wrecked it. That got things really going. Then I started living with a bunch of real criminals, the biggest in town, and all the cops know it, so they hassle me, too. All these guys I'm with shoot dope. All of them. Did you know that?"

My vision of figure skates, pigtails flying in pirouettes and long childhood evenings with hot chocolate and marshmallows blurs away. I ask Linda how the cops treat her.

"Well, the young ones are all right. The old ones, detectives especially, they give you a hard time. Call you names, put their hands all over you. I'm pretty lucky. You know, they bust in, officers with a Federal warrant and all that shit, and I just start to look very pitiful and lost and about to cry. Before they got to know me, that always worked. They'd haul every dude out, and my girlfriend Vicki--she's got a bad mouth--well, they pull her arms way up and hurt her with the handcuffs. But they wouldn't touch me. Oh, sometimes a cop would hint around for a little, but that always happens."

The speed picks her up. She rattles on, tells me about cops' coming into her apartment without warrants and looking around, even under the bed.

"I gotta laugh. I tell 'em they've got no right and to take a flying leap, but they don't care and, hell, there's a hypo right under the floor tiles. They never find it, so they look at my arms. I say, 'I give blood.' It cracks them up."

She laughs loudly. The people in our bar turn around. Twenty-two, I repeat, and wonder if I were a cop and a good man, trying to do a hard job, how I'd react to someone like Linda. She's saying she never screwed any cops.

"I never had to, but I know chicks who have. You know how it is, your old man's in jail or coming up for trial, and this fuzz is the arresting officer, so what do you do when he comes around and asks? It's funny, most of them say, 'You give me head and I'll fix things.' They're all oral freaks. But I'll give them this: Most of the time, they pay off."

Here it is, I think, the other side of things. But is it? What's right about these situations Linda describes, even if she is wrong? Our talk subsides. We drink. Linda fidgets, asks the time, inspects her nails. She's got to meet her current boyfriend in a little while at the Taco Bell. Just like a high school date. Linda confesses that she's trying to be a little straighter, that she's got it figured out that her recent past has not done her much good. But it's hard.

"It's like I said before. Everything's so boring. But I'd like to go to college. I've got about two years' worth. And I don't like the constant heat. I'm trying. Why is it they never bother any old people, just kids? We don't have the clout, I guess. I was in a car once with this guy, a criminal, sure, and we got picked up for nothing. He got booked just to harass him. I couldn't testify for him, because I'd been charged one time with a felony. Shit, they can cuss us and throw us in jail any time."

The hard planes on her babyish face soften and I see why young cops wouldn't put the cuffs on her. For an instant, in the artificial twilight of a saloon, she is again as fresh as a virgin ski slope. The ghosts retreat, the scar detracts but does not disfigure. Then Linda stirs to ask for some money for talking with me. I give it to her and she smiles.

"I wouldn't take it except I'm destitute." She says, "Hey, did you know when you picked me up I'd just done some speed? I was higher than a kite. Could you tell?"

I don't say, so she leaves, plowing through city-dirtied snow toward the Taco Bell. I'm left to ponder just what it is I've learned, knowing that it's both the same and different things. Onward, then.

• • •

Girard, Kansas, looks like a nice town. The sign announces it's populated by 2783 friendly folks, and coming in past the tumescent grain elevators like those William Holden greeted swinging off his Picnic freight, you can believe it. The streets make precise squares, geometrical grids bracketing the weatherboard bungalows, the Supersweet Feeds store, the used-car and implement lots, the First Christian Church's poster proclaiming that they're calling the continent to Christ. Upstart trees struggle like mutant wheat to break a horizon flat and straight as a fence line. It's comforting, this symmetry.

You feel that here people have little enough to do so that were you struck down by a cholesterol coronary, they'd stop to help. They'd have a sense of rightness and leftness, blackness and whiteness, town and country, wheat and weed. The feeling insists like a fever coming on in the courthouse, a Roosevelt-Federal-Lego edifice brooding over cafes, law offices, appliance stores and an orderly purveyor identified by a Coca-Cola sign as the Police Brothers Grocery. There in the cool of Carthage marble, fecund publication racks offer 4-H craft pamphlets, two years in a Swiss cottage courtesy of the Army, advice on taxes and licenses and John Deere calendars. Especially striking is a display of plants crushed under cellophane and labeled in a heavy Palmer hand. It's headlined "Public Enemies of our Agriculture: Learn to know These Bad Weeds." Marijuana is not included, which is odd, since that bad weed grows wild though weak here-abouts and is partly responsible for my being in Girard.

Three of them there were, three runaway girls from Pittsburg, a college town nearby. Not especially "nice" girls by the Baptist standards sown thick on these plains. Why, they'd learned the evils of 3.2 percent beer, mild Kansas "field" grass and sexual intercourse before their 17th birthdays. A slow track by Linda's measure, perhaps, but enough to shock, then alienate their parents, who mostly are respectable middle-class folk, terribly busy, to be sure, and with troubles of their own. The girls would run off from them, often to exotic Arkansas. Eventually, the police gathered them together in Girard's Crawford County Jail, about two geo units from the courthouse. Two had been returned from Arkansas after a foray marked by pauses to find companions, consequent stops at the local Stop-a-Nite motel and a little grass drowned in beer. The other was a simple delinquent. All of them went into the same cell to await the law's disposition.

"The jail's a hellhole," the county attorney tells me. We're in his office across from the courthouse, next to the Long-branch Saloon, which specializes in Stewart Infra-Red sandwiches and that belly-wash beer. Vernon Grassi is a pleasant man, a local product. Worried about the state of the nation, he says, because Governmental crookedness sets a bad example. "It's hard to tell a little girl not to shoplift a comb now, isn't it?" he sighs. He wears a short-sleeved shirt under a sports coat, the usual tie, Cheracol-colored trousers and white shoes. He also wears a Mickey Mouse watch. A Playboy Calendar sits alongside his funny trophy, which is the rear portion of a horse with his name engraved on it above The Biggest.

"We're not prudes," he adds, "but, shoot...." It's by way of answering my question about the Great Crawford County Jail Sex Scandal. He smiles deprecatingly. Yes, it was bad, that deputy and the juveniles, but consider the circumstances. "It's a hellhole," he repeats. "Now we've just opened new juvenile-detention facilities in Pittsburg. Got counselors, color TV, games, Celotex ceilings, soft lights, even posters with 'Love Your Neighbor' and all that crap on them."

But these girls were put in the hellhole, and there they languished for seven or eight weeks while they waited for the law to do what it would with them. Seeing the jail conjures how the judicial mills must have ground these adolescent spirits. Imagine something in Bolivia circa Butch and Sundance and you won't be far wrong. The county erected the thing in 1915. It's blocky, three-story stone, with iron bars thick as saplings and with plywood panels over the cell-block windows to keep drafts out and suicides in. Views of a warehouse and a chamber-of-commerce building that looks like furs should be traded in it. I saw it in company with its hostess, a Welcome Wagon jailer who is the sheriff's wife. Mrs. Joe Fry is tightly curled, white-uniformed and uncertain about displaying the jail. In her corneas, agate eyes roll about looking for a winner. She shows the second-floor cell where the girls were kept before the scandal.

The steel door has a little barred window behind a sliding panel. The outside windows are boarded. Three girls would have maybe six square feet each, including what Mrs. Fry calls the rest room. That's a cubicle with a stool, green-dripping corroded pipes, the odor of excrement wrapped in disinfectant. Mrs. Fry agrees they need the new facilities and thanks God they don't keep juveniles here anymore. She points to the tank across from the girls' where the three boys, partners in the scandal, were jailed. No electric lights, because the kids would tear them out. A shower. The same deadgrass paint. Everywhere the messages scratched through to the steel.

I Love Ronnie He Loves Me.

God Help Us.

A Beer Would Kill Me.

LSD Freak, Queen of the Year.

I am a Bad Little Bitch.

On the Pauley Jail Sliding Door Company door is etched Peace and Love. But nowhere is there a TV, psychiatric help, anything pretty or peaceful or loving. There's only the radio the prisoners have upstairs, the gloom, the stink, the fantasies in the notes the juveniles passed, pulled from cell to cell on a heartstring. The sheriff's wife says, as we go downstairs, "If I was in jail, I wouldn't put my name on the wall. Everyone'd know."

The fantasies won out, of course. No one knows for certain when or how it started, but after so many weeks, the girls took off their clothes and wouldn't dress until they were let out for a while. At least that's one account. Sheriff Fry doesn't mention that. He's a commonsensical man, trying to enforce laws in a county too big for his five-man force. The starched blue uniform shirt, tiny stars on the collar, pushes his plainsman face into a frown. He didn't like being the dumping ground for juveniles. The girls came in, then the boys, not on the same offenses, but they knew one another, all these bad kids know one another. Himself, he likes most kids, though he and Mrs. Fry have none.

"Hell," he says, "they were caged like animals. Now we got counselors come and take them out, but these kids were just here. They'd raise Cain at night, break glass. The girls'd shout dirty words at people on the street and the neighbors complained, but I couldn't do anything. Couldn't touch 'em. Just tell 'em to be quiet."

That explains the boarded windows but not how the sex began. Why was his deputy involved? The sheriff's thinning hair seems to recede with the thought. He won't say exactly.

"He seemed like a good boy to me, until this happened."

And what happened was that for some time, and when this deputy was on duty as radio dispatcher, the three girls were let out and the three boys were let out. They played the mating game and the deputy was on hand. The sheriff and the prosecutor agree this jailer was probably too softhearted, at least at first. He was married, 23 or so and the son of a Baptist minister in Pittsburg. Whether for that reason or another, he'd always wanted a career in law enforcement. The sheriff gave him his chance, working nights as a dispatcher after he finished at a local factory.

"I don't know how it started," the sheriff says. "It went on awhile, lettin' them together, at least two weeks. I found out when one of the girls finally got placed in a foster home and just couldn't keep it in anymore. I called Vern Grassi and said I'd handle it. I went over to the jail about three in the morning. Tom, that's the deputy, was just comin' down the stairs. He saw me and he said, 'What the hell is going on?' And I said, 'That's what I want to know.' I fired him then and there. Phoned the prosecutor and judge and had him back there at nine in the morning. He admitted it all. The rest was up to them."

The rest turned out to be a six-month sentence for contributing to the delinquency of minors. The deputy served two months in his own jail, then had a psychiatric examination and treatment. Now he's back at the factory ("Better job 'n ever," says Fry) and driving a bus on Sundays to his father's church.

The prosecutor, like the sheriff, selects his memories, prefacing them with his likeness to the Blue Knight. He tsk-tsks in equating Girard with Tahiti, a utopia until big-city sins are imported. "Like in the Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage," Grassi says. It's startling to hear Diderot in Girard, perhaps because the Frenchman was a supreme rationalist. But the attorney leaves that to answer a question about whether Tom the minister's son had to do with the teenage Jezebels.

"Oh, yes, a little. Look, this has almost ruined him."

A little?

"You gotta understand these girls. You can see what they wrote on the walls and in those notes. Suckin' this dick and how long that one was. One time they just took off their clothes. Said they needed exercise. Well, they'd really been dying to get with these boys. They were in love with them all, you know?"

But the deputy? And the rumors of coercion?

"We got it on a tape. He said the girls started it. We'd ask if he got undressed, too. He'd say, 'Sort of,' and we'd ask again and he'd say, well, he had his pants down. We'd ask if he ever screwed these girls and he'd say, 'Kind of,' and we'd ask, and he'd say he just laid his penis up against them, stuff like that. Only thing seems for sure is that at first he just let the boys and girls out to fuck together. He'd tell them to be quiet and he'd go downstairs and listen to his radio. I don't think he ever watched. He claimed it only happened once."

Of course, they'd tried the deputy in the confidentiality of the juvenile court, though he was an adult. "It's perfectly legal under Kansas law," Grassi boasts.

So legal that nothing would have outed had not the one girl told the tale, thus activating the local media, several weeks after the events. Proceedings for the remaining two girls were suddenly held. One went home, the other to a reformatory, where she was found to be pregnant. "Sheer coincidence," opined the prosecutor. All hearings, the sentencing of the deputy, the disposition of the girls' cases took place in the secrecy of a juvenile court.

"The sheriff, all of them, they protected themselves," says the deputy's father. The minister is a stocky man, turned out this Sunday morning in plaid sports coat and trousers the black of his eyeglasses. He'd just preached repentance and salvation so effectively a number of women wept, and this formidable righteousness he's interposed between me and Tom. Doesn't fear the truth, he vows, but he won't let people ruin his son. He'll sue, because "There's decent people here won't stand for lies." His son stands to one side. He's shorter than his father, slight, with a struggling mustache curved down over his lip like a new moon. He wears sports clothes, too, mostly mustard tones, and as he collects riders for his bus, his eyes jerk uneasily from me to his father to the door. Soon he will leave the Pittsburg Fundamental Baptist Temple, this long, green concrete-block church, and board his blue-and-white bus with a Bible Believing, Bible Preaching Church lettered on it, to begin delivering the congregation to their homes, at least those who did not arrive in their own pickup trucks from places like Chicopee. Outside, children wait and play boisterously on the heart-shaped paving stones leading from the Sunday-school annex. When the service had finished, they'd rushed for the doors, desperate for relief from talk of sin, and I wondered if Tom did not, ever, want similar release, some soul-fluttering existential leap. According to his father, he did not.

"Tom was a victim of his own honesty. He admitted he'd done wrong to let those kids out together, though he says it was customary to let the teenagers together into that big room to play games. Checkers and things. That night he was working on a wreck on the radio and left them. Came back to find one couple goin' at it. They threatened Tom. Told him it would all blow over."

I inform the reverend that this disagrees with other versions. He looks pained, then sincere. He's just told me they're protecting themselves.

"After it happened, Tom wouldn't say a word, just that he was guilty. The sheriff told him to, he wouldn't. He still won't. Well, actually, he was afraid of the other deputies, because all this had been going on for years. We collected affidavits from several girls saying they'd been used in that jail. Tom only worked part time there for a short while. He couldn't very well have let it all happen, could he? He swears it only happened this once. He didn't have any part in it. None. Even Mr. Grassi said on the radio it wasn't anything too big and it only happened once. 'Course, the radio and newspaper wanted to make it look real big and sensational, like Tom had enjoyed watchin' them, got a queer satisfaction out of that sort of activity."

The preacher shakes his head. His pale face blazes red during the speech, the red of a congenital ideolog. I remind him that another minister in town publicly attacked Tom from his pulpit and had told me that the whole community should be ashamed, especially Grassi, who'd think differently if his daughters had been in that jail. Tom's father shakes his head again. Everyone's entitled to his beliefs. He goes on to say how Tom had come to him when it happened and said he was in trouble, and how they had prayed together until they were sure the Lord would set it aright, and then he'd resigned his church, but the deacons wouldn't let him, so they moved to the counterattack, gathering evidence for Tom.

"Everyone supported Tom," he proclaims. "We decided not to fight to spare his wife." Obviously not a man for debating the issue. It's as clear to him as Scripture. As the other minister had said, "Knowing his theology, the anguish was bitter." More important, the facts escape finality. But whatever did or did not happen, the girls in jail suffered, at the least indignity, at the most sexual extortion. Leaving Pittsburg, I pass through Girard. There's an appropriate image. A tousle-headed kid is relaxing on the courthouse lawn, or so it seems until he moves and I see he's legless to the hips, that he's arm-swinging himself along on his leather-insulated rump until he achieves the courthouse stairs and pulls open the door to enter, this crippled kid knee-high to the doors of justice.

• • •

What happens to women in the country and in Janice's city happens daily in different regions of America. The reports bear an archetypal, franchised similarity, blinking neon emanations into the night. Males, whether cops or pimps or kindly institutional administrators, habitually degrade and sometimes abuse females. In the darkest contemplation of that, I think it is almost as though the male, so long enthralled by the mystery of generation, of continuity resident in women, has in the age of technology, with its test-tube embryology and cybernetics, gone fatally empirical, and now seeks without woman to recreate himself by destroying his awe at the creature who births him. I can think that, realizing that while the female's ancient triple role of lover and mother and burier-mourner may stay with us buried in man's cortex like last night's drunk, perhaps this nascent sadism is the beginning of the species' end as a two-sexed creation and that the old patterns will remain forever interred. Why else, excepting the orneriness encysted in authority, have we this pattern of abuse and debasement, if not because we have somewhere in our mental wings the vision of reproduction machines immune to innate feelings?

But such meanderings do not alter what is. Sadism may only be eccentric, not suicidal. As eccentric, say, as police in Skokie, Illinois, who arrested a 17-year-old girl from the nearby posh community of Evanston and took her to their police station, where she was forced to strip so a matron could examine her for concealed narcotics. This girl was lucky. She had access to lawyers who filed a damage suit on her behalf, alleging assault in the violation of the protection against unreasonable search and seizure, inasmuch as her suspicious activities consisted of visiting a shopping center to buy a Christmas gift and since she'd been charged with no crime.

On the Mexican border, similar strip searches are de rigueur, as anyone violating the norm for appearance quickly learns. Usually you are summoned from your car and roughly patted, then rudely questioned while they disassemble your car and luggage. If you're female and kinkyish, you may be escorted to the bright, government-beige Customs shed, where you're told to strip in preparation for a "body-cavity search," as bureaucratese delicately puts it. Though such spelunking may violate the Fourth Amendment, the border cops have a "noknock" in. They're justified if there's "clear indication" of contraband such as--male or female beware--"a greasy substance on the buttocks" or, presumably, thighs. A woman fond of Mexico may find herself frequently fingered by the long arm of the law. In the Rio Grande Valley region, the A.C.L.U. knew of one woman stripped and searched four times in a year. Naturally, if you're busted, be ready for pressure.

"They'll be all over you for information," an A.C.L.U. lawyer in Brownsville said. "Push, push, push and heat all the time. What the hell can the girls do?" What, indeed? Which makes me wonder how early it starts, this institutional pressure on women. What effects can it engender?

• • •

This one's name is Rusty. She has known the cops and she has known the administrators of justice and she has known the agents of social welfare. She sits now in the parlor of a Thirties bungalow, the rock-and-siding sort once accompanied by La Salles and recordings of Russ Columbo. The house squats in what social scientists call a changing urban neighborhood. Its yard is littered with broken playthings, bright plastics scattered like Bakon Bits in salad, rusting metals like wreckage in the Sinai. The room is wall-to-wall mess, children's garments lumped here and there as though a clothesline had abruptly given way. Four kids leap from a staircase to the mess, pausing in mid-flight at the trapeze of Rusty's knees--exquisite children, Eurasian, delicate as Hokusai's waves. She once habitually beat them, near to death, until she committed herself for treatment. She knows why.

"I punished myself through them, because of the way I grew up, what happened to me. I beat them black and blue until Kim, that's my little girl, looked up while I was wiping blood off her lips and said, 'I love you, Mommy.' When I heard that, my heart fell out. I knew then I was crazy. I've worked hard to cure myself."

Rusty is 23, carrottopped, frail and pale as only the never-enough syndrome can make you. She's intense and smart. A small-town girl whose house now is filled with fresh-apple-pie smells, pastry for her Oriental husband, a laborer. She says she doesn't mind the litter so long as she can love her children, that before, when she tried to be orderly, it maddened her. She speaks through teeth testifying to four-sibling, rural poverty--jagged yellow stalactites--and she is hard of hearing from malnutrition or abuse. She doesn't know which. Abuse wasn't in short supply. The worst, the institutional, began when she was 13. Her mother told her to bathe her little brother, and she did, but the child got soap in his mouth. He screamed. Rusty was giving him water to clear the soap. She was holding his chin when Mom entered. She was drunk, Rusty says.

"She hit me with something and knocked me out. When I woke up, everyone was gone. I got scared and ran away. The police caught me. They laughed at me and touched me and spit on me and called me names. They took me to court and my mother told everyone maybe I'd killed my brother, that I'd been trying to murder him. She and the judge committed me to the state mental hospital. The highway patrol took me there in a squad car. On the way, they told me I was born loony."

Rusty hugs herself, her arms crossed as in a strait jacket. "Soon as I arrived, the other inmates, the girls, took me and stripped me. They held me and shoved a sponge down my throat so I couldn't scream. Then they beat me with coat hangers straightened out. The cops and matrons just laughed. six months and I never knew whether my brother was alive. I suffered guilt. Oh, God, I'd reach out for love. Once I hugged a new nurse and she got frightened. She hollered and they took me and strapped me down to a bed for four days. Never changed me or kept me clean. I just lay there in my filth in a little room with a chain-link door. When the smell got really bad, the other girls would come and spit at me through the door for the stink I was making. Then the flies would come. I watched them circle, heard them buzz. I waited to feel them sit on me and I couldn't move to shoo them and I'd think I was going crazy. I'd yell, but no one came. Then I'd tell myself, 'They're never gonna let you out.' But they would let me up after four or five days. Oh, it happened every time anything happened. Once I accidentally burned a girl with a Zippo and they tied me down again."

She lights a cigarette and her hand doesn't shake. The smallest, fairest of her children climbs onto her lap. Rusty's freckled hand, a white shadow, strokes the child. "Oh, God, I love them," she says. She stares away, invoking the personal God she believes helped her when she was lowest, crazy with beating her kids, with marriage, with life crushing her like a diver down too deep. She shows me poems she wrote to allay the demons and a piece of autobiography about growing up without a father, with a mother who beat and cursed her, about rats and roaches and filth and she and her brothers and sisters wetting the straw beds in fear and hate. No country-club memberships here. Only the intervention of God, who came into Rusty's heart as the ability to love, she says. Before was the hospital and other things. She's forgotten some and she thanks the same God for that. "They finally let me out. My mother brought my brother to show me that he wasn't dead. She told me, 'That's what you get, girl,' when I cried in relief."

Patting the children, reassuring herself in that gesture that she truly is all right, resurrected, Rusty tells about the hospital tunnels with old, toothless men in niches who reach out to pat, or masturbate at passing girls. She conjures the foster homes the judges assigned her to, the potato-peel soup these court-paid parents made her eat, their commands to "work or get your ass beat," how she felt like just a thing. "At one I slept in a garage with no heat. They were Holy Rollers. They treated their dog better than me. His name was Useless. And they had a thirteen-year-old son who'd go out for cigarettes every night and sneak into the garage and come to my bed. I'd scream and he'd run, but they always blamed me for it."

Rusty would run away and be caught. The police, she says, would tell her she was going to be a slut just like her mother. The juvenile officer would rough her up. They'd take her to the judge again. And then another home. And another. Police, judges, institutions until she was 18 and free to marry into the cumulative nightmare. Rusty sighs, but her voice is level. She's strong, resilient as piano wire, humming in dark winds from the past.

"Even before, when I was nine. God, how can I tell you? But it's true. My brother, an older one. Well ... he wanted to learn about sex. With me. I was so scared. My mother saw and the police came. I couldn't talk. They shook me and shouted at me that I'd tried to seduce him. I didn't know what the word meant. I was so humiliated. I cried and cried, but they just called me dirty names."

There are other stories, even about police harassment now, but Rusty's body closes itself like a slender book, unfinished but put aside. Her husband leaves for work. She tells him to button his coat and remember his pills. He has had a brain injury that will kill him if he doesn't take his medicine. She shows off her kids' new winter coats from Woolco. "It's all right, really. I have more than my mother ever did. Got a washer and drier, a TV, a loving husband, wonderful children. My home is my kingdom."

She surveys it and smiles. How can she? I wonder, and then she says, "The police, all that, you know, all they must understand is that they're naked behind their badges. They're human and you're human. We owe each other something."

• • •

All the others would agree. All the women suffering the law and its agents. Women beaten or blackmailed or abused or raped or imprisoned in foster homes, hospitals, jails, unwed-mother depositories--any of the society's dumping grounds. Yet even saying that, I must also say that most police are not sadists, any more than are most judges, caseworkers or hospital attendants. No, all that can be concluded is that women, as they move more into the ampler social abattoirs formerly reserved for men, must beware until such time as both branches of our endangered kind are protected as fully by and from the law as bighorn sheep. Perhaps I should add my romantic regret that time and events seem to have killed most of whatever tenderness we may have felt toward the once gentler sex, and that in too many instances cruelty prowls the corridors of power leering out of the robes of equality.

Even so, not all women distrust today's authorities. A few have learned to adore police. In Wichita, Kansas--henceforth, let no one accuse that state of dullness--six policemen were disciplined for various violations of the city's "law of passion"; to wit, either having on-duty sex with two teenage girls or knowing of it and not telling. These girls worked at a restaurant where the police went. Before long they were on the menu, they said, riding in the squad cars and collecting police-special bullets, real ones, as tokens of friendship with the officers, "certainly, though not in exchange for sexual favors." Each bullet bore an officer's initials, lovingly scratched in the lead. But all good things must be ended. The girls phoned the local newspaper with the story. The police chief promised action against a crime "that would never stop." One cop was fired, another suspended, three others reprimanded for giving away the city's bullets, the last demoted from sergeant to detective. The girls then checked into the hospital, the 17-year-old from an overdose of drugs ingested in a suicide attempt and the 16-year-old due to a nervous breakdown partially brought on by all the flap. The older girl is pregnant, she says. Not surprisingly, since among their belongings they had a collection of initialed bullets from police as far away as Salina, Kansas. They even had souvenirs from MPs at Fort Riley, all of which goes some distance toward proving that firearms are symbolic phalli.

Even cheerier, for people concerned about women and the law, is the revelation that there is abroad in the land, at long last, a whore with a heart of gold. Her name is Charlotte Tyler and she has an overpowering taste for cowboy clothes and policemen. In her spare time, Charlotte has sampled her wares to dozens of police in several states. She has ridden to roll calls in, yes, a city's community-relations bus, her metallic cowboy suit gleaming like Wonder Woman's. She has lain in cars with highway patrolmen and beat cops, and in the American spirit once said she wanted to screw her way to the very top of a police force.

Obviously, Charlotte likes police, and they like her. She says, "They're well trained, they know their work." They say she "really smiles on police officers," that "she has a great feeling of generosity toward cops." True, and so no one minded very much when it was discovered that Charlotte was an unauthorized distributor of the clap. No one accused her of biological warfare. After all, she was an old-fashioned woman you could understand. Especially could you fathom her after she was detained and the besmirched cops were treated and disciplined. No one could mistake the sort of lady whose dresser drawer, rummaged by amused investigators, was found stuffed with badges from far and wide. Even one of gold, to match her heart.