THE GIRLS ON THE BUS

Miami Herald, The (FL)
Author: LINDA SHIPMAN

I pulled my best blue suit out of the closet along with a matching print blouse. It took two tries to get the makeup right; my hair fought back and won. Across the room Kieran slouched in a chair, sucking on a cigaret.

"How do I look, Kieran?"

"Lovely, my dear," he lied. "But . . . you're only taking me to jail." My eyes welled with tears. How do you dress for jail?

The girls on the bus know how to dress for jail. They've been doing it for years. They will do it forever, perhaps. As they stand, near midnight, on the shoulder of a highway in North Dade, they wear jeans and T-shirts and sneakers, their hair in curlers and kerchief. They carry pillows, and dry cleaners' bags filled with fancier duds, and overnight cases packed with perfume and makeup. They wait for the bus in silence.

I was one of them. Twice a month we rode that cursed coach together, these women and I, eight hours there and eight hours back, to visit our men in the prisons of North Florida. They are crime victims we seldom hear about, women imprisoned by their own love. They became my friends.

I saw a ghastly sacrifice of human life.

It's been nearly a year since my last trip to see Kieran, long enough to begin to forget The Bus and its tragic lesson. I don't want to forget. So I joined my friends one last time, with a notebook, to remember.

The five of us are in the back, spread out as always, one to a double seat: close enough for conversation, isolated enough for solitude when needed. Diane, across from me, is the prettiest: brunette, slender and graceful, with captivating gray-green eyes. Flo, two seats ahead, is the oldest--66, she says. Patty, well, she's the heaviest. Also the brightest, I've come to believe. As always, she's hogging the back bench. The youngest, Donna, is sprawled all over the seat in front of me. Says she's 18 but looks 15 under all that makeup.

There are other regulars on the bus, maybe two dozen more, but I've never gotten to know them. The women arrange themselves into tight little groups: a black group here, a Spanish group there. Diane, Donna, Patty, Flo and me, we always kept pretty much to ourselves in the back, just as we do today.

The five of us exchange news since we've seen each other last: Diane's daughter made it through her junior year of high school; Flo's got a new job--not much money but it keeps her busy; Patty's got another raise; Donna prattles on about school, her new boyfriend, her job in a hospital, and other trivialities I only half hear.

Small talk, that's OK here on the bus. Prying is not. I learned about that on my first trip the time I met Diane.

"Hi." A big smile. "My name is Linda."

"Diane. Hi."

"I'm going to see my fiance. He's in for forgery. Who are you going to see?"

"My husband."

Icy silence. I should have shut up. "What's he in for?"

"Murder." Diane averted her eyes.

I mumbled something I hoped sounded comforting, something about parole, getting out.

"He's on Death Row." Oh.

Diane has been coming to see Tommy for three years. She is 35, a licensed practical nurse. As we chat, she fumbles through her purse and comes up with the $30 we each pay to the driver, a blade-thin black man named Howard Coachman, who inquired after Diane's daughter and welcomes me back with a warm smile. As we roll out onto the highway, the women are squirming in their seats, trying to get comfortable. It is almost impossible. When this bus was new, it must have been one beautiful machine, with its upholstered reclining seats and an interior done in muted greens and corals. That was 23 years and a million-plus miles ago, however. Tonight, the old bus shudders frightfully after failing to negotiate a pothole, and Diane and I exchange nervous glances. We always half-expect this crate to rend itself in two at any moment.

When I was riding this bus to see Kieran, Diane never had much to say about Tommy. I learned the story later, in Diane's living rom in Miami Beach, where she lives alone with her daughter. The furniture is sparse and inexpensive. On one wall is a large framed painting of Jesus. Across from it, a photo of a young sandy-haired man, rough but kindly looking. It is Tommy. She has known him almost all her life. They met as children in the early 1950s, in Atlantic City, N.J.

Diane:

"The first time I ever saw him he was 9 and I was 7. He came darting down the steps of the apartment building he was living in--I can still see it in my mind, isn't that crazy?--and I was on my steps next door. He shot me in the eye with a water pistol. Would you believe that was our first meeting? I ran into the house crying.

"Next thing I remember, we were in the sixth grade together, in the elementary school. He was the class clown, that's what he was, the class agitator. He sat right across from me in the classroom. In these old classrooms, they didn't have air conditioning; they just had a blower that blew air. Tommy used to try to do things to make the class laugh. He found a way to roll up a piece of paper, and make little balls out of them, and throw them into the blower and they would come popping out of the top."

"He was doing this to get my attention and I was looking, but I pretended I wasn't. This teacher we had, her name was Miss McHale, she was a real old-timer. I remember her saying, "Thomas, Diane is not paying any attention to you, so you can just cut that out."

"I was watching every move he was making, you know. Later, in eighth grade, he'd wink at me or something, and that was my big thrill for the day." Tommy left the neighborhood for three years, lived with his mother in New York, then returned to Atlantic City unannounced.

"There was this corner hangout where all the kids played the juke box and drank sodas and everything. There he was standing there again. We just started talking to each other. He had this big ring on his finger and he handed it to me and said, 'You want to go steady with me?' I said, 'yeah, why not.'"

Diane was excited by his sense of adventure. Tommy was 17 then, tough and cocky. A real punk, not much different from many of the of the boys in the poor Italian neighborhood. It wasn't long before a joy-riding arrest landed him in jail for four months. That was the first time Diane visited Tommy through a wire mesh screen.

Tommy was a mere prankster no more. He had developed a certain hardness, a swaggering contempt for the weak. When he was arrested and convicted of burglary Diane stopped seeing him altogether, and during his five-year prison term she married a schoolmate, gave birth to her daughter, and got divorced. Tommy hadn't forgotten her. He sent her letters from prison and remembered her birthday, Dec. 10, with a card he mailed to Diane's mother. And when he was released in 1967, at 25, he arranged a reunion through mutual friends.

It was as thought Tommy had never been gone. He hadn't lost his boyish, lanky good looks; if anything, he was leaner, more muscular. It seemed improbable, but gruff and sullen Tommy, never a marksman with words, now spoke with sensitivity.

He and Diane dated and in time became lovers.

Diane knew he man was a renegade, even a misfit. She tolerated his drinking, his occasional rages, the coarse company he kept. She was no innocent herself; uncomfortable with moralists, distrustful toward authority. Tommy treated her gently, lovingly. Perhaps he had threatened other people with violence. But these were empty threats, she was sure of that. The boy brandishing a water pistol.

In 1969 Tommy was convicted of armed robbery. He swore to Diane that he had been framed and she believed him. Diane was terrified at the sentencing. The lawyers told her Tommy faced 18 years.

Diane continues:

"At that time I had a special thing that I believed: that when it rained it made bad luck, and when the sun shone it made good luck. The morning of the sentencing I got up and it was pouring. So we got in the courtroom and the lawyer went through his speech about preparing myself, and not to get hysterical. Then the judge comes in. He was an elderly man with these great big blue eyes--I'll never forget those eyes--and he had Tommy stand up. The judge said something about this being against his better judgment and 'I hope I'm not going to live to regret this.' He then began to read the charges, one by one. He'd read the first one and he'd say 'I sentence you to two years,' and he'd change it to two years' probation. He's going down the list, and he's doing the same thing with each charge. And when I turned to look out the window, the sun was just gleaming through.

"Tommy walked out of there that day. I remember going up to the judge and trying to thank him. When he got down from the bench he was hurrying off and I pulled on his robe and I said, 'I don't know how to thank you for this.' He just turned to me and said, 'Don't thank me.'

"I felt like he was saying don't thank me, but thank the Lord."

It never occurred to Diane that the judge might have meant something else entirely.

Diane and Tommy married, lived together for six years, "loving each other to death," she says. Tommy solemnly promised he would be a father to Diane's daughter. Husband, wife and child moved to Florida. Tommy bought two Dobermans, named them "Hitler" and Barabbas." He adopted the nickname "Tommy Dillinger," got a job as a boat repairman, scouted around for other opportunities.

From news reports in The Miami Herald, July 1 and 2, 1978:

A murderer who said "dead men tell no tales" before beating and stabbing an 86-year-old Miami Beach millionaire to death was sentenced Saturday to die in the electric chair.

A pen had been placed into the victim's ear and kicked into his skull.

"This is the most heinous, vile, outrageous crime I've ever known," Assistant State Attorney Lance Stelzer told the Dade County Circuit Court jury in his remarks at the end of the four-day trial.

The jurors deliberated less than an hour before returning with their 11-1 vote for the death penalty.

Diane's been visiting Tommy at Florida State Prison ever since. His death sentence is on appeal, and she swears he is innocent. Since the trial she has embraced religion fervently. Tonight, like every night on the bus, Diane is clutching a paperback Bible in her lap. She is wearing the same blue and white vented T-shirt she often brings on these trips. On the front of it is written "The Optimist's Club."

Two rows ahead of me, Donna, the kid, is fidgeting in her seat, trying her best to eavesdrop on the conversations around her. She is plump but attractive, with lovely auburn hair.

Donna is as effusive as Diane is reticent. She lives in Fort Lauderdale with her mother, and, at least to hear her tell it, pretty much runs the household. She has just wangled a job as a hospital technician by lying about her age, and probably about her high school grades, which were abysmal. She seems to go through a boyfriend a week, frets about the size of her chest (which is considerably larger than mine), favors indigo eye shadow, rose blush-on, wine-colored lipstick. She is pigheaded and selfish and maddeningly self-possessed, but I like this kid a lot. She's got more grit than most of us.

Donna rides the bus every two weeks to visit her father at Florida State Prison. Her mother, a junior executive for an insurance firm, never comes along. She's too ill to make the trip, Donna says defensively.

Donna was only 11, a Catholic school sixth-grader, on Feb. 23, 1975, when the family lawyer telephoned her mother with the news at their home in Hollywood.

"When Mother started screaming, I thought he was dead," Donna once told me. Then: "I actually got happy: it was just arrested."

Police said her father, an unemployed laborer, bludgeoned a Miami businessman to death in return for the promise of a job from the businessman's competitor. Police said he wrapped the body in a carpet and dumped it at sea. He was sentenced to death though no body was ever recovered. Donna's grandmother died of a heart attack when she was told of the sentence, which was commuted to life imprisonment just this year.

Donna is emphatic about many things, and one of them is her father's innocence. He was framed, she says. He wouldn't hurt anyone.

Tonight, I want to hear more about Donna's father. I lurch up the aisle (you can't walk on this bus, you lurch) and slide in next to Donna. You don't have to prod this kid very hard to get her to start talking:

"When he first went away I missed the Saturdays most. We always did something fun, the three of us, on Saturdays. The carnival, a beach, what have you." A tear creeps out of the corner of one eye, and she hastily wipes it away. "Then for two weeks each August the three of us would go to someplace special. One year we went to Disney World; another year we went to the beach in New Jersey."

An only child, Donna is just 15 years younger than her mother. Her father had always been the dominant parent and continues to be.

"I think he's wonderful, I don't know any other way to talk about him. He can make his personality any way he wants to be--it can change--he can be caring, tender, tough or rude. He's always watching out for me. I cling to him. I can tell him anything and I can't do that with my mother."

Donna and her father exchange letters almost every day. Hers are filled with news of school and family, his full of advice and admonitions and, of late, good-natured questions about her romances. He draws cartoons of smiling faces when hee's happy, frowning faces when he is displeased, such as when no letter arrives one day. And he ends each letter the same way: "Daddy loves Donna. XXXXXXXX."

"Once when I was 15 I took a fellow I was dating up to see my father," Donna tells me. "My dad said he didn't like this guy. He wants me to be with a doctor or lawyer. The boy worked in a body shop and my dad used to be a mechanic. He wants me in limos, not 1969 Dodges. So I told the fellow goodby."

As my watch ticks into the single digit hours, things get quieter on the bus. Outside, the trees whip by, each silhouetted for an instant by the moonlight. Inside, the overhead reading lamps have blinked off. The only illumination is an occasional glow from a cigaret, and a red incandescent sign in front of me, near the rear door, warm and comforting. I push the button to recline my seat and the plastic armrest comes away in my hand. The seat snaps upright, rudely slapping my shoulder blades. And the red light glows genially on. "Emergency Exit," it says.

At Fort Drum, we pull off at the turnpike rest stop for coffee and bathrooms. Diane and I stumble, groggy-eyed and sleepy into the cafeteria line, Flo in front of us. Short, dumpy and rawboned, Flo walks with an exaggerated limp, courtesy of an ankle injury aggravated by 20 years of waitressing. Something is bothering Flo tonight, but none of us pries. In this case, there is no need to. It tumbles out all at once, loud enough to startle Diane and me awake. When Flo is agitated, she is all arms and fingers.

"You know what happened to me? Last time I made this trip I came home and my dog Brownie was gone. Gone I checked the fence--there wasn't no holes, so I called the county animal control. You know what that man told me? He said the Haitians probably took my dog. Now who would take a 12-year-old dog? He said the Haitians probably took Brownie and ate her. Now isn't that something," she says paying for her coffee and turning to us.

"Do you think the Haitians ate my dog?"

There doesn't seem to be very much to say.

Flo rides the bus to see her son, Bill at Raiford State Prison. He's completed one year of a life sentence for the 1975 murder of a Biscayne College basketball coach and his house guest. Bill, now 34, was convicted with an accomplice of having shot the two men in the back of the head while they lay on the floor. The execution-style killing had been masterminded by a third man, who was angered by the victims' attentions to his girlfriend. Bill spent four years in a psychiatric hospital before he was judged fit to stand trial.

"That boy, he never was a lick of trouble before he got involved with those bad men," Flo told me later. "He lived at home after his marriage broke up. When this happened my husband and I would lay awake in bed at night and talk . . . said we'd see it through together." Her chin trembled. "My husband didn't get to see our boy before he died."

Flo has only one other relative in Miami, a sister who will only visit now after dark. "She's afraid someone might recognize her," Flo says. "My sister doesn't want anyone to know she knows me."

Flo goes to church regularly, but she has not found peace.

"God doesn't know me," she says. "If he did, I wouldn't have to take this trip."

As always, Patty has managed to be the first one back on the bus after the rest stop. I suspect it is so she can reclaim her back bench. I don't begrudge her that--she probably would not fit comfortably anywhere else.

How do I describe Patty? You tend to underestimate her the first time you meet her. She is not one of those fat people who carry their weight gracefully, and today she looks even less attractive than usual in a pair of too-tight jeans and a T-shirt. Her voice seems to carry through the bus even when she speaks in what she thinks is a whisper.

But there is a pretty face hidden under all that flesh and you can't help noticing her hands--beautiful, expressive, artist's hands that are always impeccably manicured. They seem to belong on a different body. Patty is also perceptive and articulate, and at only 25 she's got the best-paying, most challenging job of any of us--second in charge of a department in a large company. She lives with her parents.

Unlike the rest of us, Patty never knew her man outside of prison. She met him three years ago when she gave a friend of hers a ride to visit a relative in the Broward County Jail. "Visits" there are conversations in a small cubicle, by telephone through a 6 by 6 inch plexiglass screen. When Patty's friend had had her say, Patty said hi. Back then, Gary was awaiting trial for armed robbery.

This is Patty's story:

"We talked a little bit, I asked him how old he was, things like that," she recalls of that first encounter. After that Gary would call her frequently from jail, and Patty encouraged his attentions. She was lonely. She grew up as The Kid With Rich parents. She always had a car, always found herself ferrying other kids around. Later, the men she knew also used her, she believed, sexually and emotionally.

"At that point in my life I wanted someone. A lot. Somebody I could talk to. It seemed to be easier to talk to someone over the telephone than face to face. He asked if he could write to me and would I write him back. I didn't see any harm in it, so I said 'sure.'"

Gary is ruggedly handsome. Patty describes him as a "rough, good old lumberjack type--a guy out in the wilderness that could make it on his own. Sometimes I compare him to Clint Eastwood."

About a month after their first conversation, Gary called to ask Patty to marry him. "At that point I thought it was a kind of a ridiculous statement, and I couldn't believe what he was saying, since he hadn't gone on trial yet or anything." She put him off.

"It's weird, thought, because I found that my dreams at night were of this man. That face would be there. And as our letters were crossing in the mail, we seemed to be talking about the same things, expressing the same emotions and feelings to one another. And we got close, very close.

"I would wait for his telephone calls. It wasn't as if I didn't have other people to go out with.

"He was everything I couldn't find in another man."

Patty was cautious. She talked to some of Gary's friends and became convinced that his participation in the crime was tied to a heavy involvement with drugs. Having once been a drug abuser herself, she sympathized. She talked to Gary's lawyer, and was told he might get a light sentence. Patty decided to go to his trial.

"They'd bring him out handcuffed, with his hands behind his back, his legs shackled. He'd have to take tiny little steps. I'd sit in the front row, and he's be maybe 4 feet away from me at the table in front, but he wasn't allowed to turn around and talk to me. We couldn't touch at all, that was the hardest thing.

From The Miami Herald, Oct. 18, 1979:

Moments after a jury found Gary Eaton guilty Wednesday of robbing a Beef and Beer sandwich shop with a sawed-off shotgun, the judge sentenced him to 99 years in jail.

Eaton, 26, laughed.

Patty continued seeing him in prison, and their relationship deepened. She's never told her colleagues at work about her prison love affair, but she did confide in her parents.

"They felt I should have nothing to do with him, that I should just turn my feelings off and forget about him completely. But by that point, I was so involved with the man, I couldn't. I couldn't do it. I tried, I really did try. I went out with one guy that was pretty well off. He couldn't get to me. He couldn't get to me. The whole time I'd be with somebody else I'd be wanting to be with Gary."

"I was very insecure . . . at first. I would tell him, you are a very handsome person, you could have girls if you wanted them. He'd tell me about how his grandmother told him about people, especially overweight people, that there's nothing wrong with the person, it's just that they have to wear bigger clothes. He said that . . . I'm a very beautiful person and he was sure that once we were together out there on the streets that I'd slim right down." Patty laughs self-consciously.

"I've managed to keep myself--how shall I say it--a virgin since I met Gary. And I like that. My girlfriends can at times understand it . . . when they hear things that I tell them, a lot of them I let hear some of his letters and stuff like that . . . they wish they could talk to their husbands 24 hours a day the way me and Gary talk to each other."

Tonight, as on every visit, Patty is bringing a $20 bill to leave in Gary's prison account. Every week she mails him $15 more. By prison standards, that is a hell of a lot of cash. Gary has become one of Florida State Prison's richer inmates.

Behind me Patty is dozing. I look around, and most of the women are also asleep. I try to join them, but can't.

These girls on the bus, in one way, have it easy. They know their men are innocent or have found excuses for their crimes. All victims of circumstance, these guys.

I knew Kieran was guilty. I put him in jail.

We met in New Port Richey on Independence Day, 1976, while covering the city's Bicentennial Parade for competing newspapers, his a daily, mine a weekly. After filing our stories Kieran and I repaired to the Shrimper's Paradise, a tumbledown little bar that serves up generous tankards of beer. We spent several hours getting acquainted. And plastered.

You couldn't call Kieran handsome--he was too bony, too dissipated. But he had a strong chin, a quick Irish wit and an relentless cynicism that I found appealing. He was a tragicomedian. Loved the Chicago Cubs, agonized over their daily ineptitudes. His son's name, he informed me by the by, was Dylan. All this I learned, and more.

Kieran's marriage was on the rocks. I was single and lonely. And we were both two-fisted alcoholics. Instant, electric rapport.

Within two weeks he had moved into my house trailer in New Port Richey and we did the domestic shtick up right. Kieran cooked, I did the laundry. We went grocery shopping once a week, in tandem. It had to be that way--six cases of Pabst is too much for one person to lug out to the car.

One Saturday, I noticed an interrupted sequence of blank checks in my checkbook. Kieran scolded me for poor record keeping.

Then the bank statement came in the mail. I stared wide-eyed at the checks, uncomprehendingly at first, at check after check made out to him or to a grocery store, with my signature forged at the bottom of each. Nine checks in all, maybe $150 worth. I knew immediately what had happened. Kieran had needed drinking money.

Oddly, what bothered me most was that the forgeries were nearly perfect. The son of a bitch must have practiced for hours, hunched over a table with blank paper and my canceled checks. He probably thought I was too disorganized to notice.

In a rage, I rushed to his office at the Clearwater Sun. There were hysterical tears from Kieran, so drunk in the middle of the day that he weaved as he tried to embrace me and beg for forgiveness. My next stop was the sheriff's office.

I was angry and humiliated. But I was also trying to help. For the first time I had recognized the extent of Kieran's drinking problem (not my own, of course. I was a "social drinker"; Kieran was a lush). He needed to be shocked.

At my suggestion, the sheriff's department agreed to hold onto the checks and take no action if Kieran would enroll in an alcohol-treatment program. He agreed. But he didn't stay in the program, or on the wagon, more than a month. Warrants were issued for his arrest. He pleaded no contest and was sentenced to four years' probation, conditioned on his staying sober.

And I was shattered. I had never intended to do this to Kieran, never expected to intrude so horribly on anyone's life. I knew I couldn't live in the same city as Kieran, so I moved to Lakeland. But apparently I couldn't live in the same city with myself, either. I lost my job, went on unemployment, and spent two months drinking ceaselessly, alone in the ramshackle apartment I shared with a rat. Couldn't afford both beer and telephone, so I had no phone.

In time I drank my way into the Polk County alcohol detoxification center and later to Alcoholics Anonymous. The last drink I ever had, or ever hope to have, was on September 15, 1977.

Almost two years later, I met Kieran by accident at an AA Club in Tampa. He was sober and had been so for nearly 12 weeks. During the next four weeks we were together every possible moment. Sometimes we would babble at each other about nothing at all, for the sheer fun of not slurring our words. We'd sneak kisses like teenagers, for the new experience of not stinking like stale beer. You'd have to be a recovering alcoholic to understand this. We were in heaven.

And then it was over. Until he finally conquered his drinking three months before, Kieran had been blithely violating the terms of his probation by getting drunk in public. His exasperated probation officer decided enough was enough. It took four months for the paperwork to go through, a time period Kieran used to straighten out for real. No matter. The case went to court.

Five years.

I think I'm the only one still awake. Outside, the half moon is playing hide and seek with the clouds. On the next trip, the moon will be gone altogether; the ride will be in darkness. That's how the girls on the bus plot their "progress." By the phases of the moon.

Wildwood, Fla., 4:30 a.m. The Union 76 trucker's stop, a big, busy, bright plastic piazza at the junction of the Florida Turnpike on Interstate 75. A peculiar ritual is about to be performed.

The women begin to stir as the bus rolls to a stop in the middle of a cluster of 18-wheelers, and we slowly file out. The others are carrying the drycleaner's bags and overnight cases they've brought. This is my fist trip without baggage; I feel curiously out of place, a voyeur. On the way in to breakfast, Flo hitch-steps over to me. She has been told I am now there as a writer, and asks me not to put her full name in the paper. "But you can put my dog's name in. That's Brownie. B-R-O-W-N-I-E-, Brownie."

The women wolf breakfast so as to allow as much time as possible in the john. Diane and Patty and I go in together. The door, which opens in, whaps a couple of people on the behinds. The place is full of women, all in various stages of undress, all jockeying for the few square feet of mirror space.

In another setting, at a less preposterous time of day, with a more homogeneous group of women, you might mistake this for a bathroom in a college sorority. There is at least, a similar sense of conviviality. "I forgot my soap," one woman announces. Six bars are offered at once. Me, I always forgot something. Usually my eyebrow pencil. No sweat. Every shade from light brown to smoky gray would be proffered.

Somewhere behind me, Donna has redone her makeup. It's now, well, even more so. And she is wiggling into something soft and slinky. I must have been gaping.

"I once wore jeans and a T-shirt up here and my dad got mad at me," she explains. "He wants me to look pretty."

Stepping back on the bus, I am assailed by a lusty stench, a witches' brew of every scent from Halston to Dior to Tabu to Chanel to Blue Grass (The fumes intermingle. More than once Kieran would later tactfully inquire, "Uh, what's that perfume you're wearing?")

They are ready. Just a bunch of girls going to see their fellas.

Starke, Fla., Florida State Prison, a grim, green eyesore in the peaceful North Florida countryside. For an instant the women fall silent. I stare at the high double fence topped with giant coils of razor wire. I stare at the gun turrets.

Diane, Donna and Patty depart here, along with a dozen other women, and the bus moves on.

Patty. There's something I haven't mentioned yet about Patty. Gary isn't doing just the 99 years for the stickup. He's now serving 287 years. While awaiting trial he participated in a botched jailbreak in which a guard was shotgunned to death. The would-be escapees had planned to go straight to the airport and hijack a plane to Europe.

At least that's what the jury said when it returned the murder conviction. Patty, she says that's not true, that there never was any lot to escape, at least none involving Gary, because Gary had never told her about it. He would have tried to take her with him, wouldn't he?

Raiford is next, just down the road, another alien blot on the landscape. Exit Flo.

I was always the last one out, 20 miles away at Lake Butler. Today, I stay on the bus with the driver, collecting my thoughts.

Every time I walked into Lake Butler to see Kieran, I rehearsed a warning that Diane laid on me on my first trip. Never so much as mention another man's name, not even a casual acquaintance, not even a relative. Not during your visit, not in a letter.

"They have nothing to do but build up trifles in their minds," she said.

The notion seemed absurd, but Diane was right. The first time I dropped the name of a male coworker in a letter, Kieran fired off a petulant response, demanding to know why all of a sudden I mentioned the guy's name "three times in quick succession." The word "three" was underlined. I did not make the mistake again.

Quite a place, Lake Butler. Once when I checked in at the reception desk, I asked the guard, a florid-faced Cracker, why his people never carried weapons in the prison. It seemed illogical. Here is what he told me: "One of those m'fucs would grab the gun and shoot us daid, that's wah."

"M'fuc" is guard talk for "inmate."

The visits here were always the same. It seems like yesterday:

A half-dozen steps off the bus and I am into the shake-down room, a dingy affair with an array of housecoats hanging on the wall. Without saying a word, a woman guard hooks her hand between my legs and runs it up each thigh to the crotch (I eventually got used to this and hardly ever flinched.) Then she lifts up the hem of my skirt about 6 inches, to check that I was wearing a slip.

"OK, I guess," she mumbles, and passes me through.

Dressing for jail is a science. You want to dress attractively for your man, but in nothing so revealing that it will discombobulate the jailers. If they judge your attire too risque, they make you wear those idiotic housecoats over your clothes. You look like the cleaning lady.

Accordingly, I wear slips, high-neck blouses, nothing sleeveless, nothing too sheer, nothing too tight.

The visiting rules are rigidly enforced. If a name isn't on the visiting list, no visit. If the visitor has forgotten her identification, no visit. Once, a woman behind me told me of the time her in- laws came from Canada, and her husband's mother had forgotten her driver's license. No visit.

I always remember my ID. I wait for my man.

Kieran arrives, number 829678. He's dressed in whites, like the Good Humor man, and there's not enough of him to fill the uniform. His name, stenciled on one breast pocket, is misspelled, but Kieran never has let on to the guards about that. It's his little joke. Kieran, after all, is still Kieran and I love him. Have I mentioned that he named his son Dylan?

Kieran and I, we obey the rules, which are:

One kiss at the beginning of each visit. One kiss at the end of each visit. No kissing in between. No physical contact other than handholding. No sitting face-to-face, just next to one another. (Don't ask me why, I'm just reciting the rules.)

As always, the visit ends too soon. At 3 p.m. sharp, Kieran and I negotiate our goodby kiss, and I am back on the bus.

That's how it always went. Then Howard would pick me up, and head on to Raiford, where Flo would always be first aboard.

And she is first aboard again today. She shields her face with a hand and slides into the seat behind me. I hear her sobbing quietly and pretend not to notice. Diane leads her Florida State Prison contingent aboard wordlessly, and sits down, red-eyed and ashen-faced.

It's always the same right after the visits. There is a predictable pattern to the return trips.

You seldom find out what has happened during the visits, at least not right away. There is almost no talking. Later, much later, Flo will tell me about how her boy Bill had been beaten up twice by other inmates since her last trip. So he had been placed in solitary, for his own protection.

Today we are joined by Kay, a genial woman in her 60s who divides her biweekly visits between her son in Florida State Prison and her son's common-law wife, at the Broward Correctional Institution. They were arrested as conspirators in the murder of a Florida State patrolman on the highway in 1976. Kay feels her son, Jesse, was a victim of sexual discrimination: Jesse is on Death Row. His woman, Sunny, is serving only a life sentence.

(You never really know what to say on this bus. Once, Kay pulled out a photo of Sunny, who is absolutely stunning. Diane and I made the appropriate compliments, but Key just stared at us and tucked the photo away. "They have a beautiful child," she said, absently.)

Today, Kay has an observation to make, from her visits to both a men's prison and women's prison: there are invariably more women who come to visit male inmates than there are men who go to see woman inmates. We all agree this says something about the comparative honor of men and women. Or about the stupidity of women, someone suggests. There is a good deal of weary laughter.

The laughter releases tension. A certain giddiness seems to take over. This, too, seems to happen on every trip.

Many of the women are changing back to their street clothes now, in the aisles and on the seats. The driver keeps his eyes riveted on the road. Diane comments on how the sun is hot, and Donna breaks into fits of giggles. I giggle at Donna's silliness. Kay says something to Patty, who brays with laughter.

And so it goes.

Some of the bus trips are tenser than others. There was the ride just a day or two after John Spenkelink was executed: I wasn't there but Diane was. Spenkelink had been on death row with Diane's Tommy.

Diane:

"We got to meet him. He was a very mellow person, the way I saw him. The woman that used to go and visit him had a lot of children, a pile of kids, and she used to bring those kids in their Sunday clothes, dress them all up. And those kids would just crawl all over him, sit on his lap, pull on his hair and everything. And he loved it. They'd be hanging on him like little monkeys, as if he was their father. It was amazing. He seemed family oriented, really gentle.

"I was shocked by the comments of my friends at work the day he was executed: 'I heard their eyeballs pop out.' 'Well, Spenkelink is oing to get fried today.' 'They ought to get rid of all of them.' These were people who didn't know . . . "

"I just couldn't keep my eyes off the clock because I knew what time the execution was. I could relate because my husband was there . . . Tommy's mother called from New Jersey and was hysterical.

"During the next bus ride a few days after the execution the whole bus was in gloom. The tension inside the visiting room was thick; it just hung in the air. The guards wouldn't make eye contact with us. They didn't want to talk to us, like they felt sorry."

Across the aisle in front of me Donna has fallen asleep, smiling, curled up with her head cradled in her hands. She looks like what she is, a cute, slightly chubby adolescent with a lot of makeup on. I resist an urge to hug her.

Letter to Donna from her father, 8/1/79:

" . . . You come home when your mother says, not when you want to!! . . . I love you and I am yelling at you for your own good. I hope you realize that. If you don't I don't care. Just do what I've said."

Letter to Donna from her father, 7/1/80:

". . . Did you tell Joe how nice you feel about him or are you still shy? He seems like a nice boy and if you like him you should tell him so Give it a try, you can't lose anything."

Letter to Donna from her father, 11/9/80:

" . . . What did you and Brisco talk about? It was nice of him to get you those ringside seats. Did you give him your phone number? I hope not. I don't think I like that idea. Did he call you at home? Just don't get too chummy, okay?"

Letter to Donna from her father, 7/25/81:

". . . I eat one meal a day, lunch, and I hope you are doing the same. Some guys seen you in the park and said, 'your wife is beautiful.' I said, my wife, you mean my daughter? Please Donna, lose that weight on your cheeks, cut down on your snacks, and exercise. That's all that will do it. I thought you were going to write me this week. Not one word . . . I heard from Lucille and she's a pisser. She sent me a big poster of nude women for my cell . Ha ha ha. What a nut. Well little poops I'll close for now so you take care and be good. I love you soooo much and miss you. Can't wait to see you next week. And write soon."

Flo has a question for me.

"When Bill was in the sixth grade he was throwing spitballs, and the principal called and asked permission to whip him. 'You've got a good boy,' the principal said. Don't you think I did the right thing by letting the principal whip him, Linda?"

I tell her I am absolutely certain she did the right thing.

Diane has a favor to ask. She wants me to write about the troubles she's been having at the prison. The officials there won't let her into the prison chapel with Tommy. They say that would be too much of a security risk, that the Death Row inmates are too violent. She believes that is an injustice, says that it is depriving the two of them of a chance to lay their case before God.

"I believe in a power that is greater than any of these circumstances that I can see with my eyes. God can change anything. God is a big god, bigger than that electric chair."

There is something I haven't mentioned yet about Diane. It may help you understand her a little better.

She was arrested along with Tommy that day in 1979. Police said that after the murder, her husband had demanded that she go over to the old man's house to help wipe away fingerprints, and she had complied. It was Dec. 10, her birthday. Prosecutors charged her with burglary. They felt certain she hadn't known about the murder in advance, knew she was aghast when she saw the body. They thought that possibly she might testify against Tommy in return for leniency.

But she didn't. She waited until the end of his trial, when her evidence could no longer hurt him. Then she pleaded no contest and was placed on probation.

Just south of Fort Drum, the girls and I have one more conversation, one I initiate. I ask them whether they've gotten fed up with hearing "gunnadoos." I get empty stares.

Gunnadoos, I explain, are the promises you keep hearing from your man in prison. The promises I always got from Kieran, in his letters, during our meetings. He's gonna do the laundry once he's out. He's gonna marry me. He's gonna be careful with money. You know, gunnadoos. I didn't ask for them, didn't like them, certainly never believed them.

Diane and Patty, they say they don't know what I'm talking about. They hear the gunndooes, sure. But they swallow them.

We ride the rest of the way back to Miami pretty much in silence.

As I mentioned earlier, I'm no longer making the trip to see Kieran. He was released from prison earlier this year, and we promptly broke up. He is rebuilding his life, and I wish him well.

But I was right about the gunnadoos.

The girls on the bus, well they're still there. Diane, Donna, Flo and Kay, you can see them every second Friday night, heading north from Miami on Howard's bus.

Patty stopped going to see Gary about two months ago, shortly after my last ride. She says the bus trips became too oppressive, her prison visits too filled with tension. Says she's through with him for good, but I doubt that. Because she also says she loves him and would live with him in a minute if he got out of prison.

Oh yes, there is one more thing. I just found out that Kay's son Jesse, the one who's on Death Row, has been writing letters to Donna. That's a fact. And in one of his letters, he's proposed marriage. Donna is thinking it over, though not very seriously, she says. But she is writing to him. Three goddamned letters a week.