feeding the nutria
Icy rain bullets fell on my head as I circled the prison yard, breathing fresh air for the first time in nearly eight months. It was late January, and I'd been stuffed in airless county-jail boxes since the previous May. I'd turned pale as chalk, and my back was a strawberry field of zits. The clean air and cold rain felt like a baptism.
As I rounded the track's corner, it seemed odd to behold a family of thirty-pound rats huddled on the field. They were a few feet from the track's edge and within striking distance of my feet. The other convicts seemed unperturbed by the giant rodents. I walked back to my dormitory, scratching my head and thinking that maybe I'd finally gone insane.
Another con later explained that the creatures were called Nutria, who often emerged from nearby wetlands and crawled under the prison fences looking for inmates to feed them. Nutria are common only in swampy Gulf Coast states and parts of the Pacific Northwest. I was familiar with "Nutraloaf," a nauseating mash fed to disobedient convicts, but I'd never heard of "Nutria" before. Sounded like a vitamin-enriched shower gel rather than an oversized ratlike beastie.
Big D. was a white convict in his mid-thirties who'd beaten his mother to death with a baseball bat in his mid-teens. Rumor had it that when he first got to the pen, he was a skinny seedling who suffered some serious punking-out. But over the years, the weight pile had transformed him into one giant round muscle. His body was the shape of the Kool-Aid Man. He was able to snap your neck between his hammy fingers. But every day, Big D. was out there on the field with apple or orange sections, feeding the Nutria.
I figured Big D. would never parole, but a year ago, I heard his scratchy voice behind me at a local convenience store. I turned around and saw him grinning, a murderer who was suddenly a free man. His parole was so strict that if he so much as entered a bar, he'd be back in prison for the rest of his life. He said we should hang out sometime and gave me a business card that had the number of the Salvation Army where he was staying.
He tried calling once, but I never called him back. He scared me. Big D. was one of the very, very few convicts I encountered who I believed should never be released. Most of the other guys were just fuckups and screwballs, dangerous only to themselves. But there was simply a piece missing from Big D.'s head. I didn't want to mistakenly step on his foot and get strangled to death.
I never saw him again. I've concluded that he's probably back in prison.
Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe after killing his mom and spending twenty years buried alive, he figured out how to keep part of his heart alive. After all, he did go out and feed the Nutria every day.
