Two days later my shift ended at 10:30 p.m., and at 10:55 I pried open the Land Rover door, the metal screeching in complaint about the cold. The men had been docile, juiced out, end-of-day solemn, but I was still bone tired and heavy-limbed afterward. The lack of sunlight, I told myself, the way the days started dark and darkened early. The truck started—every day I expected it not to—and I dropped the glove compartment and fished for my cell phone while I waited. When I clipped up the cover, I saw the message light flash.
A woman’s voice. A number to call back. I keyed the number into the pad. Three rings. A man’s voice answered. I didn’t know what to say.
“You called this number?”
A shuffle, and a light laugh. A TV turned down. I pictured a motel room for some reason.
“Where are you?” the voice asked.
“Driving back,” I answered. He’d either know or he wouldn’t. We were speaking the code of familiar conversation. Intimate strangers.
“There’s a BP off thirty-six with an all-night truck stop kind of diner. Get a booth, and someone will be there in thirty or forty.”
I heard a woman in the background: “Yes, you. I’m not fucking moving. What? Shut up.” A lover’s bitching.
Another sound. It could have been goodbye. Or maybe they’d forgotten about me and closed the phone. I shut my own and pulled back onto the road. My breath was tight, and my hands were doing a little dance.
A booth next to the long window. My parka shrugged off my shoulders. My fingers wrapped around the porcelain mug of decaf coffee. I should have been in bed, reading a book or watching Jon Stewart from between the sheets. What the fuck was I doing here? A surprising number of cars stopped in to fill up. I thought highway gas stations this close to the city were for emergencies only. But there was another population, from another planet entirely, coursing along the dark lanes. I was riding in the grooves of some other life.
I saw a large green Chevrolet pull up alongside the windows, some hunched-over winter hat wearer inside peering out, and wondered if that was my rendezvous. But the car disappeared around the corner of the building, and another ten minutes went by. I looked at my watch and wondered if I should order something, just to stay put. Then a young
woman in a jean jacket with scruffy wool trim and a winter hat with a pom-pom and chin strings slid in before me. The girl smiled and shrugged off her jacket, showing a brightly colored tattoo on her bicep. Her fingernails were lacquered blue with little stars, some of them chipped down to nothing. I sat up, feeling fifteen years older and infinitely less wise.
The girl asked for two coffees and a water. I already had coffee, I started to say. Then I realized the second coffee wasn’t for me.
“I have to pee,” she said, and she was gone.
I waited. I needed to go to the restroom, too, but had been too afraid to leave the table for the last half hour.
The door chime clanked, and another customer walked in. A man in a plaid coat. Tall, six and a half feet easy, and long strides. I knew his walk, a cellblock roll. He looked around the room at the three other occupied tables and, without looking down at me, slid into the booth, pushing the girl’s coat to the wall.
“She’s in the bathroom,” I volunteered, feeling stupid for saying anything.
The man had blond eyebrows over a sharp forehead ridge. He sipped his coffee, then tore open four packs of Equal and let it collect on the surface like an industrial powder spill, dipping it down with the corner of the packs of paper. Small green squares tattooed on each of his knuckles—prison marks.
“Nasty toilet,” the girl said. She slid in tight to the man.
The man leaned forward, fixing a bootlace or pulling up a sock below the table.
“The stuff’s out back. The guy in the library will take it from you tomorrow night between eight and key-up. Don’t keep nobody waiting.”
The library? He must mean the library in Ditmarsh, but I didn’t have time to parse that confusion. “Out back?”
“Go outside in the parking lot,” the girl said, “and around the back. Behind the Dumpster is a clear space except for this tree stump. Kick it over. It’s all hollow. Inside is the stuff. Take it out. Put the stump back.”
I waited. “You’re kidding me.”
“Not bad, huh,” the man said, smiling for the first time, proud of himself. “Saw it on the History Channel.”
I found the stump in the hazy diner light and kicked it over, then felt around underneath. A Baggie. In the truck, I looked more closely. At least five hundred pills. I pulled out of the parking lot, my bathroom need painful, but I was too scared to go back inside where the girl and the tall man were both eating western omelets. At home, I opened the bag and looked more closely. A collection of red, yellow, and green pebbles, some round, some numbered, some oblong and time-capsuled. Way more pills than I’d expected.
The girl had told me, stick the condom in your vagina, tied tight with the string hanging out. Nobody will pull on that string but you. It was kindly advice. They knew I was a firsttimer. They expected to see me again. For the relationship to grow.
I put the Baggie into my underwear drawer, where I kept
my jewelry, and put on sweatpants. I brushed my teeth, thinking, do you brush your teeth at the end of such a day? I lay on the bed and flipped channels, too tired to read. Hours later I was still awake because my heart wouldn’t slow down. I had this urge to call Brother Mike or even Ray MacKay and talk to someone who understood how ambiguous the world could be. In the end, I soothed myself the chemical way, with two sleeping pills downed with water. I slept like the dead.
He had a dream about his father. They were at a restaurant filled with men, and they shared a kiss. The other men were gay, but Josh was able to explain quickly with only the mildest embarrassment that it was different for him, he and his father were father and son. It was only natural, in other words, and the feeling between them had been tender, intimate, welcomed. Everyone understood.
When he woke up, he spent most of the morning baffled and upset by what had happened in his dream, the textured rasp of his father’s grizzled chin. His approving smile. Then, around ten o’clock, as he mopped the area around the nurses’ room, Josh came to a hard-fought conclusion. He’d wanted love from his dad. The dream had been about the desire for
love, not any kind of homosexual urge. He was surrounded by men, fearful of them, dependent on them, younger. What’s more, he hadn’t kissed a girl in a year and a half, ever since he and Stephanie broke up. He could list pages and pages of things denied to him now, but kissing a girl was near the top, except it wasn’t even about sex, it was about affection and love. He longed for that kind of touch, and he longed for understanding from his father. All those feelings had gotten churned together in his dreams.
Roy came to his cell just after lunch but remained standing in the door.
“It’s deal time,” he announced. “No more beating around the bush.”
Josh waited for the word.
“I want you to draw for me,” Roy continued. “Crowley did. We made a lot of money. I was his middleman. You probably don’t know how valuable a middleman can be. You can do some smooth time that way. You won’t have to worry about trouble. Your middleman got your back.”
It occurred to Josh that Roy didn’t do a very good job watching Crowley’s back. But that wasn’t why Josh said no.
“I don’t want to draw for you. I don’t want to draw for anyone.”
There were times when he never wanted to draw again. Talent might have been a gift from God, as Brother Mike insisted, but Josh feared it was another kind of gift, a worm-hole into the rotten part of his brain, a path for viruses.
He figured Roy would throw out a snide joke and come back later, try him again and again. He wasn’t prepared for
the hurt that showed in Roy’s expression. The jaw slackened ever so slightly. The old man was genuinely stunned.
“I can’t believe it,” Roy said. “All the support I’ve given you. The things I’ve done to keep you safe. I saved you from Elgin. I saved you from Cooper Lewis. I’ve gone through your files for six fucking days like Perry Mason. And that’s what I get in return?”
Roy spun on his peg leg and left.
Josh was still thinking about Roy’s reaction an hour or so later, when he was startled by a voice above his head.
“You have a visitor.”
A jack stood in the door. There was nothing to do but comply. He rose up, baffled, and slipped his feet into the sneakers without laces.
His mother was in Florida. She’d gone after the new year and was staying for a month. Had she come back early? If so, what was wrong? The jack told him he could escort himself to the VnC, and Josh went out hesitantly, used to the handholding. It was a cold afternoon. A group of hard cons were outside, some doing circles around the snow-covered field, others in the smoking ring.
There were three areas to meet with visitors. An old-fashioned row of desks behind Plexiglas was saved for cons who had zero physical contact; then there were private rooms for lawyer and family visits, and a large common area, filled with scattered tables, some round, some rectangular, and fold-up chairs. He stood at the entrance and looked nervously
for his mother. The two largest tables were taken up by families, children slumped or slouched, husbands and wives trying to steal some time. At a small table an old man with white hair was playing cards with an inmate who must have been his middle-aged son. At the back of the room, a couple sat side by side, as close as they could get without the woman sitting on the man’s lap. Josh took in the noises, hushed voices, long pauses, sniffs, and laughs, the rustle of potato chip bags.
He couldn’t see his mother, and he wondered if she was in one of the family rooms waiting for him. The anxiety was building, a lightness in his hands. He knew something was wrong. He saw a young woman waving to someone and looked beyond her. The jack at the desk hadn’t even looked up from his newspaper. Josh strode toward him, then was bumped and knocked off stride, a hand on his chest. The girl who’d been waving stood in his way. He tried to get around her, but her hand pressed harder on his chest. She smiled up at him, told him it was great to see him, and gave him a hug around the waist. It was only when he smelled the oily perfume in her hair that he woke up to the fact she was there to be with him, not someone behind him, and he was there to meet her. Not his mother. Her. This girl he’d never seen before in his life.
As if he were playing a part in a movie, he allowed his hand to be held and followed her to a table by the bricked-in window next to the magazine rack. They sat across from each other like an eager young couple. She clenched his fingers in hers. Then she used his name.
“So what’s it like, Josh? Am I the first girl you’ve touched in a while?”
She had big, dark glittering eyes, dark hair parted dead center, and naturally tan skin. She was short, five feet and an inch at most. She wore an unzipped winter parka, all paisley on the inside lining and a mane of gray fur around the hood. She had a frilly low-cut purple blouse on under that. She clenched his hands even tighter and squirmed in her seat.
“I heard a lot about you,” she said, “from Billy.”
His heart was in his throat, and his belly was all warm. Fenton? He wondered if she knew what he’d done to his girlfriend. If she was okay with that, because some people just were.
She smiled up at him and took off her jacket.
“What’s your name?” he asked. He worried the question would break the spell and change everything. But she was just as cheerful.
“Deanna. Call me D.”
“Have you been here before?”
She grinned as though it were the most thrilling and insightful question she’d ever been asked, but the answer never came.
“Want to play cards?”
He muttered sure, and she pulled her hands away and walked over to the bookshelf where the games were stacked. She knew exactly where to go. He saw the dragon tattoo on the top of her ass when she crouched down, the jeans riding low. She had gleaming white sneakers with the laces loose. He saw the jack at the desk eyeing her over his newspaper. Then D was dealing the cards.
They played hearts for twenty minutes. She told him the rules. They laughed when he lost and then laughed when he started to win. He felt her sneaker toe against his shin and kept his own leg stiff, the pressure from her foot sometimes intentional, sometimes drifting away. Then her foot was resting on his. They talked about her sister and her car troubles and the mall near her house. Then she asked him for a hot chocolate.
The vending machines were in the hall past the jack’s desk, on the way to the restrooms. You needed a key for the restrooms. He was embarrassed. His mother always paid for everything. He told D he didn’t have any money for the machines. She fished into her front jeans pocket and pulled out a crumpled dollar bill. Every hot beverage cost fifty cents. She knew it. He scooped up the bill and walked through the maze of tables past the jack’s desk and into the hall. He fed the dollar into the machine. It whirred but didn’t take. He took it out, rubbed it up against the edge of the metal, and fed it through again. Then she was beside him, the restroom key in her hand.
He turned to her. Part of him wanted to ask her whether he was ordering her the right choice. Her smile was gone, replaced by a dreamy seriousness. She reached up to touch his cheek, her thumb along the line of his jaw, then ran her hand up to his ear and cupped the back of his head. She pulled his face down and gave him a wet peck on his lips, a hot breath of tongue. She stroked his chin, her eyes fixed on his, then reached into her mouth and pulled out a wad of gum. He expected more kisses, and she leaned into him, but her hand
was down the front of his drawstring pants. He felt her hand touch his cock, as hard and vertical as it had ever been, and reach down for his balls and then pull him in closer. He felt her finger between his legs, pushing up, forcing in, a piercing pain in the center of his being. The finger stayed there, pushed up a little higher, the pain thickening then easing off, her hand snaking out and away, gripping his balls, stroking once along his cock, and she leaned into his chest and slipped past him, disappearing into the bathroom.
He leaned against the vending machine, weak, tears in his eyes. He looked around and saw no one. In the haze, he remembered what he was meant to do, and he pressed the button, waited for the first hot chocolate to fill, pulled it out, and pressed the button again. Like a good boy, he brought both hot chocolates to the table. It should have been funny—a golf ball up his ass—but his heart was pounding.
He sipped his drink while he waited. He was halfway done, and figured she was never coming back, when she appeared before him. She was quieter. Her smile was sweet but less full of the energy that had passed between them before. He picked up the deck and started shuffling.
“It’s time for me to go,” she said after they’d played another hand. “Billy likes you. He wants you to know there’s a lot of good things waiting for you. I’d like to see you again, maybe a room next time.”
“I’d like that, too,” he said, all chalky-mouthed.
“Tomorrow night at the library,” she told him, “you can bring Billy his little package.”
She rubbed the back of her hand where they put the stamp
with invisible ink. After she pulled on her jacket, she gave him a deep, lingering hug until the jack told them to refrain from physical contact. The sweet smell of her made him drunk. He walked out the other way, past the jack at the desk. The two jacks at the checkthrough metal detector gave him a pat-down. One said, “I seen that hot little bitch before,” but Josh was already walking away. He was off balance and flushed as he crossed the yard. It was dark outside, the evening may as well have been midnight, and he felt free and alone and trembling with hope. When he reached the infirmary, he barely glanced at the jack and waited for the door to click open. Then he was down the hall. It was almost time for dinner. He could sit in his drum for ten minutes and compose himself, then grab chow.
When he got to his drum, everything inside his chest flew up into his throat. Roy was sitting on his cot, the photocopies of Josh’s drawings in his hand. Roy was amused, all pleasure in the smile spread across his face.
“Where do you think Crowley learned how to hide his work, Josh?” Roy asked him. “You should have invented a different spot.”
“That’s my property, Roy.” Breathing hard.
Roy didn’t give a shit.
“Now I see why they sent you here.”
The drawings in Roy’s hands, his fingers folded around the pages—Josh wanted to jump for them. Tear them away. But he did nothing, just waited.
“Here’s you fucking the shit out of her. Here’s you stabbing her with a knife. Here’s her sucking your knob while
you’ve got a gun to her head. My, what a big cock you have. I never thought I’d say this, Josh, but you’re disgusting.”
“That’s got nothing to do with reality.”
Roy laughed. “Ever do a Rorschach test, kid?”
Josh didn’t bother to answer.
“I done more than my share, and I don’t mind admitting, every single one of those ink splats look like pussy to me. Of course, you can’t admit that, because you know somehow you’re sick—about sex and everything else, too. So you end up telling the doctor you just see a plate of hot lasagna or an open-faced roast beef sandwich.” He paused, grinned at Josh. “You got a whole lot of lasagna on the brain, don’t you.” Head shaking in a mocking disapproval.
He rose up and thrust the pages into his pocket.
“In any event,” Roy said, “you’ve given me better leverage than being nice to you ever would, all the pleasure that was. I show these drawings to some of the more sensitive fellows out there, jack or con, and your life will be a living hell. I’m sure you understand. So, fresh start, new relationship. I’ve been happy enough to accommodate your surly bullshit so far because I like people in all their various moods and personalities. But there’s business to be taken care of, and time ticking by. I need an extra helping of cooperation from you going forward. You know what I mean? Tomorrow we’ll have a little talk about the work you did for Crowley and what you can start doing for me.”
Then he was gone, and the call for dinner rang out. Josh didn’t leave the drum, just lay there, his chest heaving. An hour went by. A cramp grew in his stomach, and he told himself
it was all in his mind, not a ball of coke exploding into his intestine. Did you just reach up inside there and pull it out? The mechanics were beyond him, and then the overwhelming urge came and he rushed to the toilet, sat his ass on the cold metal, and practically fainted with the pain as it passed through him. It had come to this, he thought. All the good feelings were gone. Hope was like an adrenaline shot. It gave you a jolt of heart-thumping life and left you beat to shit afterward. Then he was on his knees, his fingers in his own muck, searching for it, whatever it was, knowing that something large had squeezed out—retching, the water streaming in his mouth and from his eyes. He couldn’t let Fenton down. Every gift came with a price. Don’t make friends, Officer Williams told him. You don’t want any friends.
When he finally grabbed something, he thought it was too small, but he could find nothing else, and he washed it off in the sink. In his hand was a thin plastic case, an oblong ping-pong ball, a fake egg of some kind, and he an unlikely chicken. He could have cracked it, but he didn’t dare and had never desired anything less. He put it on the shelf behind his stack of letters and washed his hands again and again.
His mind kept racing, and he thought about the drawings, the shame of them. By the time they came along for lockup, he couldn’t stand it anymore. The doors slammed shut—bang, bang, bang, bang, down the line, one after another. He reached his own door just as the jack arrived to key him in, and he began screaming. The jack body-checked the door shut, slamming Josh’s fingers. Josh stuck his hand out the slot, and the fuckstick crushed his knuckles. He stuck his face into
the slot, and the fuckstick drove him back like a pool cue against the ridge of his eye socket, a black hole of pain, and he was lying on the ground unable to see, holding his face, blood in his hands. He stood up and stomped the world. He tore his shelves down, all the clothes and books and letters crashing low. He leaned into the desk and lifted, wrenching it from its bolts in the wall. He kicked the wall. He rammed the door with the chair until the chair disintegrated. He tore at his bunk. He howled and thrashed and scratched. And when they came at him, bursting in, surrounding him on all sides at once, pushing him down and taking the life out of his lungs, he gave them every last bit of fight he had.