A Place to Stand

Baca learns that the FBI was able to identify him by the wallet they found in Lonnie’s purse. Baca is picked up in New Mexico and then extradited to Yuma County Jail. Soon Lonnie writes him a letter explaining that she has fallen in love with their mutual friend Carey.

Baca calls his sister Martina to attempt to borrow fifty dollars for a lawyer who specializes in drug cases. She refuses the loan, citing bills and household expenses, but Baca believes his sister has fallen under their mother’s influence in Albuquerque. He accepts a public defender, who advises Baca to take a plea deal. Without fully understanding his options, Baca agrees.

Baca explains that he had simply been present at the farewell party when Carey’s roommate, Rick, sold some heroin. At the Albuquerque police station, however, Baca is interrogated and beaten. Then he is loaded into an unmarked car, driven outside the city, and beaten again. Law enforcement officers are particularly tough on Baca because an officer had been wounded in the raid at Carey and Rick’s home.

Baca continues to fight extradition to Arizona. After eighty-nine days, extradition is granted when marshals present a sworn statement from Rick claiming Baca is “a big heroin dealer” who had sold the drugs to Rick (95). The judge agrees to send Baca back to Arizona. Baca is furious that Rick has lied in his testimony: “The truth was I’d only met him a few times when I had gone to pick up Carey, and I had never given him so much as a seed of marijuana”(95).

The next day, Baca is transported to the Yuma County Jail. At first, he is kept in a cell twenty-four hours a day, but he is given more freedom when a guard he knows makes him a trustee. Baca mourns for the life he had with Lonnie, but at night he dreams of Theresa, his first love.

Baca begins to flirt with a clerk named Tara, but his feelings for her change when he sees her laugh at another prisoner. She is a college student, so Baca takes one of her textbooks as revenge. Though he has difficulty reading the book, he continues to try. The stolen book contains poetry by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

When Baca’s guilty plea is entered in the Arizona court, he is not surprised to receive five years without parole in the maximum-security Florence State Prison. As he enters the prison gates, Baca thinks about his future, noting that it “was time to change” (108). 

Once Baca arrives at the state prison, it is not long before he comes into conflict with another inmate. The man, called Macaron, asks to borrow Baca’s harmonica, but it is burned inside when Macaron returns the instrument. Macaron has cooked heroin in Baca’s harmonica, and Baca frets about how to respond to the insult. Baca doesn’t want a fight, or the trouble it would bring, but he knows he cannot allow himself to be viewed as weak. When Macaron awakens from his heroin-induced sleep, he hands Baca two packs of Camels and the insult is cured. Later, Macaron invites Baca to sit at his table, a sign of acceptance.

Macaron learns that a prisoner named Wedo, whom Baca knows only because they were transported together to the prion, is a target of some other prisoners. Baca is inclined to tell Wedo, but Macaron warns him not to. Wedo attacks two prisoners with a metal shank. After the fight is halted, one of Macaron’s associates tells Baca to stay away from their table, thinking he has warned Wedo. Macaron smooths things over, however, by explaining that Baca is not a friend of Wedo.

Baca and Macaron, now in neighboring cells, work together in the kitchen. After Baca has been in prison a few months, a guard begins to smile and stare at Baca. Macaron advises, “Take him down, you don’t wanna get turned out” (118). Macaron convinces Baca that he must fight the guard and passes him a shank to use in the attack.

The next day, Baca sees the guard in the welding shack. He runs across the yard and attacks the man with a piece of angle iron. The guard drops the pipe he is holding and turns directly into the grinding wheel. The blade cuts the man’s face and eye, and Baca continues to strike him until guards in riot gear stop the fight. Baca is taken to an isolated, five-by-nine cell. When he is released to general population, an additional six months is added to his sentence.

One day, as he is working in the kitchen, Baca’s old friend Carey approaches him. He does not want to talk about his relationship with Lonnie, as Baca expects. Instead, he says that Galvan has put a contract on a Rick. He asks Baca to warn Rick.

Out of loyalty to Carey, Baca passes the information on to Rick. He discovers his mistake when a prison mafia member admonishes him for tipping off a snitch. Soon, the gangsters begin to threaten Baca for the money they are losing on the failed hit. When two men attack Baca in the kitchen, he grabs a butcher knife and guts one of his assailants. The other attacker runs away. Baca goes back to his cell, where he tells Macaron what has occurred. When guards in riot gear arrive at Baca’s cell, he defies their orders to step out. The guards enter his cell and take him away.