A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [75]
So I knew that the port city had always been a factory town, a durable goods place, inhabited primarily by hardworking Scandinavians, Germans, and Eastern Europeans. It’s a modest town, a little run down, a city where people don’t seem to feel any need to put on airs. There’s a high school named after William Horlick, the guy who invented powdered milk. They have a good library, a zoo, a couple of fine hospitals, a Frank Lloyd Wright creation called the Golden Rondell that looks like an unidentified flying object. They have Johnson Wax, fresh Kringle, and Lake Michigan. I think it’s supposed to be a secret, as if it’s a mint, that the Western Publishing Company makes baseball cards. If I know it’s so, everybody else probably does too. Along a stretch of Spring Street in Racine, before the time of Christ, the Woodland Indians had garden plots for their corn. Alice and I had taken a walk there, a few years before. It was a pilgrimage for me, I guess. She could tell the seedy houses and the litter were getting me down. “I’m sorry, Howard,” she had said. “There might be a molecule of air, or something, left from that long ago.” She kept breathing in, picking up glass and pieces of dirt, in an effort to make me feel better.
When you round the bend on Highway 20 you see before you a five-block stretch of municipal and county buildings, the phone company, several churches, and law offices, one after the next. Five square blocks devoted to God and the law, all connected by Ma Bell. The few Victorian houses wedged between the churches have been given new paint, brass fixtures, hanging plants, understated signs: Akgulian, Akgulian & Larson. Keep driving east and you’ll come to the courthouse. It’s there before you expect it, a monolithic gray slab with inscriptions on the front about justice. Alice said later in the year that it was inevitable, the building, surprising and inevitable, with no charm or grace, just like a Porta Potti in the middle of the forest preserve. That is the sense you have when you come upon it.
The Law Enforcement Center went up across the street from the courthouse about ten years ago. Nobody realized that 146 beds would soon prove inadequate. Now there are close to 500 inmates in the jail at any time. It’s a simple brick square, built for utility, with narrow gold windows that shine in the daylight. That first time I visited I got out of the car and stood staring at the place. An older woman stopped in front of me. She spoke as if we’d been in the middle of a conversation. “You know,” she said, “Racine has the highest crime rate in all of Wisconsin.”
“What?” I said. “Is that right?”
“There ain’t no room in there.” She pointed up at the jail. “They’re going to have to start pushing the criminals into the lake. If you ask me, that’s the place for them anyhow.”
“A lot of them haven’t had trials yet,” I said.
She smirked and came closer. “Well, you know they done it.”
I walked on, into the small entry teeming with people who were either trying to make their way out or waiting to sign in. If we were visiting we were to remove our watches, our jewelry, our pens, our keys, and deposit them in the lockers. At the appointed time we were pushed through a series of doors into the visiting area, the long corridor with carrels, the Plexiglas windows, the telephones. Those places are well-known to all of us who have sat drugged before the Monday night movie. Dan would say that they are therefore a part of our national landscape, as significant and noteworthy as attractions like the Grand Canyon. He maintained, and he’s undoubtedly right, that courts of law are interesting to