Triptych2

  "What are you doing here?" she asked, looking pleased, he thought, then nervous.

  "The girls told me you were here," he explained. He could see a line of young men snaking around the building. "Busy light?"

  "Nah." She waved it off. "Stupid fuckers want to see the movie first. I guess I'll come back later."

  "How long's the movie?"

  "Jesus, I don't know." She started walking back toward the liquor store and he followed her. She turned around, demanding, "What are you doing?"

  "I thought I'd walk you back."

  "Lookit," she said. "This ain't no Pretty Woman." She added, "And you sure as shit ain't Richard Gere."

  John had no idea what she was talking about. The only Richard Gere movie they'd watched in prison was Sommersby, and that was only because it had a kid in it.

  She clarified, "We're not going to fall in love and get married and have babies, okay?"

  John hadn't thought about it, but maybe that had been his plan.

  He told her, "I just wanted to let you know that I'm not going to see you anymore."

  "You've only seen me once, you stupid fuck."

  "I know," he said. When she started to walk away again, he followed her. "Please stop," he said. "Listen to me."

  She crossed her arms over her chest. "All right. Go."

  "I've just..." God, now that she was listening, he didn't know what to say. "I've been thinking about you," he said. "Not in a sexual way." His face must have shown otherwise because she rolled her eyes. "Okay, maybe sex," he admitted.

  "Unless you're here to pay me for your happy junior-jerk, I gotta get back to my drag."

  "It's not like that," he said. "Please."

  She started walking again and John got in front of her, walking backward because he knew she wouldn't stop.

  "I'm mixed up in something," he said.

  "Color me shocked."

  "I was in prison."

  "Am I supposed to be surprised?"

  "Please," John said. He stopped walking and she did, too. "I don't want to be mixed up in this, but I am. I have to do something about it. I don't want to go back to prison."

  "Somebody blackmailing you?"

  He thought about it. "Maybe," he said. "I don't know."

  "Go to the cops."

  He knew she wasn't being serious. "I just wanted to see you again, to let you know that I couldn't see you anymore. After this, I mean." He paused, trying to make sense. "I don't want you mixed up in it, is what I'm saying. This guy, he's bad. He's really bad, and I don't want you to get hurt."

  "You're scaring me here," she said, her bored tone belying the statement. "Who's trying to hurt me?"

  "Nobody," John said. "He doesn't even know you exist." He rubbed his face with his hands, letting out something like a groan. "This doesn't mean anything to you," he said. "I'm sorry I bothered you with this. I just wanted to see you one last time."

  "Why?"

  "Because of what you told me about your first kiss. I just..." He tried a smile. "I was a real loser in school. Girls didn't really want to have anything to do with me."

  "I got a news flash, junior. They still don't." Her words were sharp but her tone told him she was teasing.

  He said, "I went to jail real early. I was up for twenty years."

  "Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?"

  He shook his head. He had stopped expecting people to feel sorry for him a long time ago. "I want to thank you for telling me that story about Stewie and all. I've been thinking about it a lot, and it's a really nice story."

  She chewed her bottom lip, her eyes searching his. "All right. You told me."

  "And I..." His voice trailed off. He'd rehearsed this a hundred times at work, but now nothing was coming to him.

  "You what?" she prompted. "You wanna fuck me?"

  "Yeah." He couldn't lie. "Yeah, I really do."

  "Well, shit, you could've saved me some fucking time just saying that to begin with." She started back up the road, saying, "It's ten for the room, thirty for a half-and-half. No Greek, no hitting or I'll rip your fucking cock off."

  She was about ten feet away before she realized he wasn't following her. "What the fuck is wrong with you?"

  "Thank you," he repeated. Then, "Good-bye."

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Look at me," his mother had said, leaning over the table in the visitors' room. It was her first time seeing him since he'd gotten to Coastal, and neither one of them said anything about Zebra, the hospital, the fact that John was having to sit on an inflatable cushion just to talk to her.

  "You will not waste away in here," she told him. "You will do something with your life."

  He sat there crying, big tears rolling down his cheeks, his chest shaking as he tried to keep in the sobs.

  "You aren't a boy anymore, John. You are a strong man. You will survive this. You will get out of here eventually."

  Emily still had hope for the appeals. She believed in the justice system, didn't think the founding fathers had designed this sort of treatment for a sixteen-year-old boy.

  "I got you these," she said, indicating the textbooks she'd brought in with her. Math and science, his two favorite subjects back when he actually enjoyed school.

  She told him, "You can still get your GED."

  John stared blankly. He was wearing a diaper to catch the pus coming out of his ass and his mother was worried about him graduating from high school.

  She said, "You'll need it to get into college when you get out."

  Education. Emily had always insisted that education was the only thing that truly enriched your life. As far back as he could remember, his mother had always had a book she was reading, some article she'd clipped from the paper or a magazine that she found interesting and wanted to remember.

  "Are you listening to me, Jonathan?"

  He couldn't even nod.

  "You'll get your GED, and then you'll go to college, okay?" She took his hand in hers. His wrists were still bruised where the men had held him down. One of the guards stepped forward, but didn't break them apart.

  "You will not give up in here," she told John, her grip tight, as if she could force some of her strength into him, take the pain away and carry it herself. She had always said that she would rather suffer herself than see her children hurt, and John saw for the first time that it was true. If Emily could, she would trade places with him right now. And he would let her.

  "Do you understand me, Jonathan? You will not give up in here."

  He hadn't spoken to anyone in four and a half weeks. The taste of his own shit and other men's come was still stuck to the back of his throat like molasses. He was scared to open his mouth, scared his mother would smell it on him and know what he had done.

  "Tell me, John," she had said. "Tell me you will do this for me."

  His lips were stuck together, chapped, bleeding. He kept his teeth clamped tight, stared at his hands. "Yes."

  Two weeks later, she asked him if he had been studying. He lied to her, said he had. John was celled up with Ben by then, not sleeping at night because he was terrified the older man was biding his time, playing out some game as he waited for the right moment to make his move.

  "Sweetheart," Ben had finally said. "You flatter yourself if you think you're my type."

  In retrospect, John was his type: young, dark hair, slim build, straight. Ben had never crossed that line, though, and there were only two times that John had seen him truly angry. The most recent was when the planes had been crashed into the Pentagon and World Trade towers. For days after, Ben had been too livid to speak. The first time he showed his anger was years before, when he had caught John with drugs.

  "You will not do this, boy," Ben had ordered, his hand gripped so tightly around John's wrist that the bones felt ready to break. "You hear me?"

  John looked into his eyes, knew that the last man who had seen Ben Carver this angry had ended up floating naked and facedown in a shallow pond outside an abandone
d church.

  "I will turn them loose on you, son. Like a pack of jackals. Do you understand me?"

  The protective custody wing had ten cells with two men each. Six of them were pedophiles. Two liked girls, four were stalkers of young boys. At night, John could hear them jerking off, whispering his name as they moaned their release.

  "Yes, sir," John had answered. "I promise."

  The rest of the offenders in the wing were like Ben. They preyed on adults on the outside, so John felt fairly safe around them. But sex was sex, and on the inside, you took fresh ass where you could get it. He had found out later from Ben that all of them had at separate times offered various trades for a go at the new boy. Prison etiquette dictated that as cellmates, Ben had first dibs. As time wore on and Ben didn't take his due, some of the guys got twitchy; but every last one of them, from the baby-rapers to the child-killers, was afraid of Ben. They thought he was a sick bastard.

  Those first few years in lockup, John blocked off every day in his calendar with a big X, counting down until he was released. Aunt Lydia was working on his case, trying to find every angle she could exploit to get him out. Appeal after appeal was rejected. Then, Aunt Lydia came one day with Emily and they both told him that the Georgia Supreme Court had refused to hear his case. Lydia had been his champion, the only other person aside from his mother who had insisted he fight it out in court and not take the plea the state offered.

  Her expression said it all. It was the end of the line. There were no other options.

  The state plea had been fifteen years no parole. Lydia had told him not to take it, that she would fight for his innocence with every bone in her body. Now he was looking at twenty-two to life.

  Aunt Lydia shook with sobs. John ended up being the one to comfort her, trying to soothe her with his words, absolve her from the guilt she felt for not saving him.

  "It's okay," he told Lydia. "You did your best. Thank you for doing your best."

  When John got back to his cell, he started reading his latest issue of Popular Mechanics. He didn't cry. What was the use? Show his emotions so some murdering child rapist in the next cell could get off on his pain? No. John had toughened up by then. Ben had shown him the ropes, how to make it in prison without getting knifed or beaten to death. He kept to himself, never looked anyone in the eye and seldom spoke to anyone but Ben.

  What John found out in prison was that he was smart. He didn't come to the realization out of vanity. It was more like an epitaph, a sort of eulogy to the person he could have been. He understood complex formulas, mathematical equations. He liked to study. Sometimes, he could almost feel his brain growing inside of his head, and when he solved a problem, figured out a particularly difficult diagram, he felt like he'd won a marathon.

  And then the depression would set in. His father had been right. His teachers were right. His pastor was right. He should have applied himself. He should have—could have—put his brain to work and done something with his life. Now, what did he have? Who cared if you were the smartest convicted murderer in prison?

  Some nights, John would lie awake in bed thinking about his father, how disgusted Richard had been that one time he'd visited his son. John was learning other things about life while he was incarcerated. As bad as Richard was, he had never hurt John the way some of his fellow inmates had been hurt. His father may have been thoughtless, but he wasn't cruel. He had never tortured him. He had never beaten him so badly that a lung collapsed. He had never put a gun to his son's head and told him to choose between letting some old bastard suck him off so daddy could have a bag of dope or getting a bullet in his brain.

  Years passed, and John saw that he had adapted. He could take prison. His days were long and drawn out before him, but he had learned the patience, had built the capacity, to do hard time. The possibility for parole came up for him his tenth year in, and then again every two years after. He was a week away from his sixth parole board hearing and a year and a half away from completing his twenty-two-year sentence when Richard visited his son for the second and last time in prison.

  John had been expecting Emily in the visitors' room, and he'd been staring at the metal detector, waiting to see her come through, when Richard had blocked his view.

  "Dad?"

  Richard's lip curled in distaste at the word.

  John had barely recognized him. Richard's hair was a shock of white, still thick and full, a sharp contrast to his well-tanned face. As always, his body was fit. Richard saw obesity as a sign of laziness and he was a health nut long before it became a national obsession.

  Emily had divorced Richard a year after John's conviction, but the two had stopped living together under the same roof the day John was arrested. Richard did not go to the trial, did not pay a dime for his son's defense, refused to testify on his behalf.

  "You've finally done it," Richard said, not sitting at the table but looming over John, his disapproval and disgust raining down like a summer shower. "Your mother has end-stage breast cancer. You've finally killed her, too."

  A week later, John sat in front of the parole board, looking them each in the eye in turn, telling them how he had finally come to realize that he had no one to blame for his incarceration but himself. He had hated Mary Alice Finney. He was jealous of her popularity, of her friends, her status. He had been a drug addict, but that was not an excuse. The coke had only lowered his inhibitions, his ability to judge between right and wrong. He had followed her home the night of the party. He had broken into her bedroom and brutally raped her. When he started to come down from the coke, he realized what he had done and murdered her in cold blood, mutilating her body to make it seem as if a psychotic stranger had killed her.

  His record was remarkably clean. John had been a model inmate with only two infractions on his record, both over a decade old. He had attended every class the prison offered: Victim Impact, Family Violence, Corrective Thinking, Depression Group, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Life Issues, Communication Skills, Anger Management, Focus Group and Worry Control. He had finished his GED, completed a bachelor's degree and was in the middle of completing a postsecondary degree when an amendment to the 1994 Crime Bill banned federal education grants to prisoners. John volunteered at the prison hospital where he taught CPR and basic hygiene to the other inmates. He had attended on-the-job training sessions in horticulture and food preparation. A letter penned by John and attached to his file stated that his mother was sick, and he just wanted to go home and be there for her the way she had been there for him all these years.

  The official notice granting him parole came on July 22, 2005.

  Emily had died two days earlier.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  JANUARY 6, 2006

  Cousin Woody. The cool one, the popular one. He had a weight machine in the garage and he spent most of his days working out and smoking dope. His chest was ripped, six-pack abs separated by a trail of hair leading down to his privates. Girls climbed all over him like kudzu up a pine. He drove a silver Mustang hatchback, brand-new. He got the kids at the local school to sell some of his stash for him so he always had money burning a hole in his pocket. His widowed mother was on the fast-track at her law firm, always working late nights, always leaving her son alone. Mr. "Come Upstairs," Mr. "You "Wanna Toke?" Mr. "Just Snort It Up Your Nose." Cool Cousin Woody.

  John had been following Woody for almost two months now, parking the Fairlane at the Inman Park MARTA station because gas was too expensive to use the car for anything but business. That's how John thought about it: business. He was the CEO of Keep John Out of Prison. The fucking chief financial officer, the vice president, the secretary, all rolled up into one.

  From the beginning, Woody had made it easy for John to keep tabs on him. He had always been a creature of habit, and his adult life had proven no different. John could set his watch by the guy. He went to work every day, came straight home after, kissed the wife if she was home, tucked in the kid, then planted himself in front
of the television for the rest of the evening. He did this every evening the first week, and John was beginning to think he was wasting his time when Sunday rolled around. The kid wasn't there—the wife hadn't brought him back from church and John assumed he had been left with a family member. The wife left around six, dressed for work, leaving her husband all alone in the house.

  "Woody waited about thirty minutes after she was gone, then he got into his car and drove away. Weeks passed with him doing this, then a month, then another. Every Sunday night, Woody was in that car like clockwork.

  With time, John had gotten good at keeping his distance, making sure Woody couldn't see the Fairlane trolling along behind his car. Not that Woody seemed to be looking anywhere except toward the row of women who lined the streets of downtown Atlanta. He'd stop, wave one over, then drive her into an alley or park on an empty street. John would see the woman's head go down for a few minutes, then it'd bob back up for good and she'd get out and Woody would move on down the road, have himself back in front of the TV an hour later.