At night, he slept hard from his busy days. John wasn’t the type of kid to do things halfway. He was scrawny for his age, his chest almost concave, but he made up for it with sheer willpower. If there was any kind of game in the street, he was there, and despite his size, he was never picked last for any team. Stickball, baseball, dodgeball—he loved moving. Football was hardly a natural fit for his small frame, but he did all the leagues as soon as he was old enough to qualify. By junior high, he’d grown taller but his body was closer in proportion to a rubber band than a jock’s athletic build. Still, the football coach had been impressed with his drive and John’s first week of junior high found him on the field sweating his ass off, every muscle in his body screaming with joy at the prospect of playing with the big dogs.
In high school, he found out that you weren’t allowed to play football when your grades sucked. He was more upset than he thought he’d be when he got dropped from the team. In a sudden burst of anger, he had thrown his helmet at the wall, punching a large hole into the Sheetrock. He had started walking around the neighborhood after school because he knew if he went home, his mother would ask him why he wasn’t at practice. He had trashed the note the coach sent home and paid for the damaged wall with money from his illicit drug sales. He figured his parents would know soon enough what had happened when report cards were in and he wanted to enjoy his freedom as much as he could before Richard came down on him like the wrath of God.
Even after the rest of his life started falling apart, John still liked to walk. That first time he was suspended from school for the pot in his locker, he spent most of the day strolling around the neighborhood. After the cassette tape theft, his father grounded him for six months and except for his mother’s kind heart (“Be back in an hour and don’t tell your father”) John probably would have atrophied in his room. Sometimes, he thought that was just what his dad wanted. Let the bad son fade away on his own; out of sight, out of mind. Dr. Richard still had Joyce, after all. He had one good child left.
John liked being outdoors, seeing the trees sway in the breeze, watching the leaves sail to the ground. He never got high on his jaunts. He didn’t want to spoil things. Besides, the allure of coke was quickly fading. The visit to the emergency room, waking up feeling like his head was on fire, blood streaming out of his nose as he puked up the charcoal they had forced into his stomach, had been somewhat of an eye-opener. He had decided then and there to stick to pot. Nothing was worth dying for. Woody would give him shit for it, but John wasn’t going to kill himself because he couldn’t stand up to his cousin.
The night of the overdose, John’s father had come to the hospital, shirt hastily thrown on, buttons done up wrong. The nurse had left John alone with his dad, thinking they’d have a bonding moment or something.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Richard had demanded. He was beyond angry. His voice was strained like it was going through a sieve and John’s ears, already buzzing from being sick, could barely comprehend what he was saying.
Richard liked his quotes. He kept some of them taped to the wall of his study, and sometimes when he’d pull John in to talk to him about his son’s latest fuck up, he’d just point to one of the sayings. “Stupidity is a learned behavior” was one of his favorites, but that night at the hospital, John knew that the days of his father pointing to faded pieces of paper in the hopes of giving him guidance were over.
“You are not my son,” Richard said. “If it weren’t for your mother, I would toss your useless ass onto the street so fast your head would spin.” He slapped John on the side of the head as some kind of illustration. It wasn’t a hard hit, but it was the first time since John was six or seven that his father had raised a hand to him, and he had never, ever hit him anywhere but his bottom.
“Dad—” John tried.
“Don’t ever call me that again,” Richard commanded. “I work here. I have colleagues—I have friends—here. Do you know how embarrassing it is to get a phone call in the middle of the night telling you your worthless son is in the ER?” His face was red, and he was leaning over the bed, inches from John’s face. His breath smelled of mint, and it occurred to John that his father had taken the time to brush his teeth before coming to the hospital.
“Do you know who does this shit?” his father had asked, pushing away from the bed. “Worthless junkies, that’s who.” He paced along the length of the small room, hands clenching and unclenching. He turned around and gave a single nod of his head like he had decided something and there was no going back.
John tried again. “Dad—”
“You are not my son,” Richard repeated as the door closed behind him.
“He’ll get over it,” his mother said, but John knew otherwise. He had never seen that look in his father’s eyes. Disappointment, yes. Hatred…that was something new.
John was thinking about that look as he walked around the neighborhood the day after his father’s confrontation in the emergency room.
“Just an hour,” his mother had said, but she hadn’t added, “Don’t tell your father,” because they both knew that his father didn’t care. As if the hospital scene weren’t enough, Richard had come into John’s room that morning and told him point-blank that he would feed and clothe him until he was eighteen, and then he wanted John out of his house, out of his life. He rubbed his hands together, then held them palm out to illustrate. “I wash my hands of you.”
The breeze picked up and John pulled his jacket around him. Despite nearly dying the night before, he wanted a bump of coke, something to take the edge off. He wasn’t going to do it, though. Not for his dad or his mom, but because he was scared. John didn’t want to die, and he knew the coke would kill him sooner rather than later. He’d only snorted it a handful of times anyway, right? It shouldn’t be hard to quit. Still, no matter how much pot he smoked, the craving ached inside his body like he’d swallowed a razor. God damn Woody and his stupid parties.
“Hey.”
John looked up, startled out of his thoughts. Mary Alice Finney was sitting on one of the swings in the playground.
His hatred of her sparked like a flash fire. “What are you doing here?”
She said, “I didn’t know you owned the playground.”
“Shouldn’t you be in school?”
“I skipped.”
“Yeah, right,” he said, snorting a laugh that made him taste blood in the back of his throat. “Shit,” he said, putting his hand to his nose. Blood was coming out like a faucet had been turned on.
Mary Alice was beside him. She had a tissue in her hand—why did girls always have these things?—and she pressed it under his nose.
“Sit down,” she told him, leading him over to the jungle gym. He slumped on the bottom bar, his bony butt feeling the cold through his jeans. “Tilt your head forward.”
He had his eyes closed, but he could feel her hands on him: one on the back of his neck, one holding the tissue to his nose. You were supposed to lean back when your nose bled, but he didn’t care as long as she was touching him.
She sighed. “John. Why are you doing this to yourself?”
He opened his eyes, watched blood drip onto the sand between his feet. “Did you really skip school?”
“I was supposed to have a doctor’s appointment, but my mom forgot to pick me up.”
John tried to turn his head, but she wouldn’t let him. Mothers didn’t miss doctors’ appointments. It just didn’t happen.
“Yeah,” she said, like she could read his mind. “My parents are getting divorced.”
John straightened up quickly, seeing stars for a moment.
She was embarrassed. She clutched her hands together, the bloody tissue between them. “My dad’s been seeing this woman at his office.” He could see the tight smile on her face. Perfect Mary Alice’s parents were splitting up.
She said, “Her name is Mindy. Dad wants me to meet her. He thinks we’ll be great friends.”
John could hear Pa
ul Finney saying this. The guy was a lawyer and he had the arrogance of most lawyers where he figured anything that came out of his mouth was the God’s honest truth.
John stubbed his toe into the sand. “I’m sorry, Mary Alice.”
She was crying, and he could see her watching her tears hit the sand just like he had watched his blood a few moments before.
He hated her, right? Only, he wanted to put his arm around her, tell her it was going to be okay.
He had to think of something to say, something to help her feel better. He blurted out, “You wanna go to a party?”
“A party?” she asked, her nose wrinkling at the thought. “What, with all your stoner friends?”
“No,” he said, though she was right. “My cousin Woody is having a party Saturday. His mom’s out of town.”
“Where’s his dad?”
“I don’t know,” John admitted. He’d never really thought about it, but Woody’s mom was away so much that the guy practically lived alone. “You could drop by.”
“I’m supposed to go to the mall with Susan and Faye.”
“Come after.”
“I don’t really belong with those people,” she said. “Besides, I figured you were grounded after what happened.”
So, the whole school knew about his trip to the emergency room. John had figured he’d get at least a couple of days before the story leaked out. “No,” he said, thinking of his father, the way he had looked at him this morning. It was the same way he had looked at dead Uncle Barry lying in his coffin, thin lips twisted in distaste. Glutton. Womanizer. Used car salesman.
Mary Alice asked, “Where does your cousin live?”
John told her the address, just three streets over. “Come on,” he said. “Say you’ll go.”
She wrinkled her nose again, but this time she was teasing. “Okay,” she said, then to give herself an out, “I’ll think about it.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
OCTOBER 11, 2005
John was lying in bed at the flophouse, half asleep, when a knock came at his door. He rolled over and looked at his clock, squinting his eyes to read the tiny numbers. Six-thirty. He had another hour to sleep before he had to get up.
“Knock-knock,” a woman said, and he laid back in bed with a grunt. “Rise and shine, choirboy,” Martha Lam sang. The first thing he had found out about his parole officer was that she loved surprise inspections.
“Just a minute,” he called back, sitting up in bed, rubbing his eyes.
“Not a minute, cowboy,” Ms. Lam insisted, her voice polite but firm. “Open up this door, now, you hear?”
He did as he was told—quickly—because he knew if she got it into her head she could throw him back inside before the day was out.
She stood at the door with one hand on the jamb, a cheerful smile on her face like she was happy to see him. She was dressed up as usual: pressed black shirt, gold lamé vest and tight black leather pants. Between her hoochie-mama shoes and the Glock she wore strapped to her side, she could be the poster girl for a fetish magazine.
She glanced down at the tent in his boxers, then gestured down the hallway to the bathroom. “Go on and salute your little general. I’ll just poke around on my own.”
John put his hands over his crotch, feeling fifteen. “I just have to go to the bathroom,” he explained.
She gave him that cheerful smile again, her southern drawl making her words sound polite. “Fill me up one’a them cups from the cooler in the hall, why don’t you?”
He made his way to the communal bathroom as quickly as possible, peeing as fast as he could, spilling enough into the specimen cup for the random drug screening, then hurried back to his room. Ms. Lam would be going through his stuff now, and even though John knew there was nothing for her to find, he felt guilty, terrified she’d toss him back in prison. Guys back in the joint talked about parole officers, how they planted stuff on you if they didn’t like you, how they were especially hard on sex offenders, looking for any excuse to send you back inside.
She was holding a framed photo of his mother when he got back.
“That was taken last year,” he said, feeling a lump in his throat. Emily was standing in the visitor’s hall at the prison. John had his arm around his mother, the dirty white cinderblock wall behind them serving as a backdrop. It had been his birthday. Joyce had taken the photo because his mother had insisted.
“Nice,” Ms. Lam said. John always called her Ms. Lam, never Martha, because she scared him and he wanted to show her that he was capable of respect.
She opened up the back of the frame and checked it for—what? He didn’t know, but he felt himself sweating until she put the photo back down on the cardboard box that served as a bedside table.
Next, she went through the paperback books he had borrowed from the library, thumbing through the pages, commenting on the titles. “Tess of the d’Urbervilles?” she asked, pausing on the last book.
He shrugged. “I’ve never read it before.” He had been arrested the day after Ms. Rebuck, his English teacher, had announced in class that Tess would be their next major paper.
“Hm,” she said, giving the book a second, more careful inspection.
She finally replaced the book and put her hands on her hips, surveying the room. John didn’t have a chest of drawers so his clothes were folded and stacked in neat piles on top of the red cooler where he stored his food. He could tell she had already gone through the clothes because the shirt on top was folded differently, and he assumed she’d checked out the bananas, bread and jar of peanut butter in the cooler. There was one window in the room, but he had taped construction paper over it to block out the early morning sun. Ms. Lam had peeled back the edges to make sure there was no contraband hidden behind it. A bare lightbulb overhead illuminated the room and he noticed she had turned on the floor lamp beside the bed. The shade was askew. She had checked that as well.
She said, “Lift up your mattress, please,” then, as if they were old pals, she explained, “I just had my nails done.”
John took two steps into the tiny room and was at the mattress. He picked it up and leaned it against the wall so she could see the dirty box spring underneath. They both saw the back of his mattress at the same time. The bloodstains and some kind of gray circle of grime in the middle made her frown in disgust.
“That, too,” she said, pointing to the box spring resting flat on the floor.
He picked this up, and they both jumped back like a pair of frightened little girls when a cockroach scuttled across the dank brown carpet.
“Bleh,” she said. “No luck finding another room?”
He shook his head, dropping the box spring and mattress back into place. He had been fortunate to find this one. As in prison, even flophouses had standards and a lot of them wouldn’t take sex offenders, especially if the victims had been young. John was stuck in a house with six other men who were all registered with the state. One of them had a record for going after an eight-year-old girl. Another liked to rape old women.
“Well.” Ms. Lam smiled, cheerful again. “I guess the Pedo Arms will do for the time being.” She indicated the cardboard box by his bed. “Open this, please.”
“There’s nothing—” He gave up, knowing there was no use. He took the stack of books off the box and put them on the bed, then placed the photo of his mother on top of them, not wanting the frame to touch the dirty sheets.
He opened the box, showing her it was empty.
She went down her checklist. “Not hiding any Viagra in here, are you?” John shook his head. “Illegal drugs? Porn? Weapons of any kind?”
“No, ma’am,” he assured her.
“Still working at the Gorilla?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Anything changes, you’ll tell me about it first, right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well.” She had her hands tucked into her hips again. “All righty, then. Clean bill for today.”
?
??Thank you,” he said.
She wagged a manicured finger at him. “I’m watching you, John. Don’t you forget that.”
“No, Ms. Lam. I won’t.”
She looked at him a moment longer, then shook her head as if she couldn’t understand a thing about him. “You stay out of trouble and we won’t have any problems, okay?”
“Okay,” he agreed. Stupidly, he added, “Thank you.”
“I’ll see you around,” she said, heading for the door. “Keep your nose clean.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he agreed. He closed the door behind her, leaving his palm flat against the wood, resting his head on the back of his hand and just trying to breathe.
“Knock-knock,” he heard above him. Ms. Lam was in charge of the old-lady rapist, too. John didn’t know the guy’s name because every time he saw him in the hall, it took all of John’s willpower not to deck him.
He turned back to his room, blocking out Ms. Lam’s voice as she made her cheery rounds upstairs. John hated people going through his shit. The most important thing he had learned in prison was that you never touched another man’s property unless you were willing to die for it.
He picked up his T-shirt, one of the six that he owned, and refolded it. He had a pair of chinos, two pairs of jeans, three pairs of socks and eight pairs of boxers because for some reason his mother had always brought him underwear in prison.
John used his foot to upright one of his sneakers. Ms. Lam had searched them, too. The tongues were pulled out, the inserts crooked. Thirty dollars for a pair of shoes, John thought. He couldn’t believe how expensive clothes and shoes had gotten while he was inside.
Upstairs, he heard Ms. Lam say, “Uh-oh!” John froze, knowing she had found something. He heard the rapist mutter a response, then Ms. Lam’s voice loud and clear: “Tell it to the judge.”
There wasn’t much of a scuffle. She had a Glock, after all, and it wasn’t like there was anywhere to run in the dilapidated house they all called home. John couldn’t resist sticking his head out the door when he heard them making their way down the stairs. Ms. Lam had one hand on the rapist’s shoulder, one on the cuffs that were locking his hands behind his back. The guy was still in his underwear, no shirt, no socks, no shoes. They’d have a real nice time with him in the holding cell, as Ms. Lam well knew.