AT TWO O’CLOCK in the morning Ray sat upright in bed, his heart racing. He wiped at his eyes and found them wet. He put a palm on his chest, tried by force of will to slow his breathing, fumbled for the TV remote. He clicked through the channels, found an old movie about a man and a woman, carnival sharpshooters who end up robbing banks in cowboy outfits. He didn’t recognize anyone in it, but it was good enough to keep him occupied. He liked how they were with each other, high in love the way you could sometime be, but he didn’t get the cowboy outfits. Of course they were doomed, that was the movies, but he couldn’t think of a lot of bank robber stories that ended up with they live happily ever after. Not a lot of any kind of stories. He wanted a drink but couldn’t see getting up to get it, and he knew it wouldn’t help him sleep or stop the nightmares. He wanted a cigarette, too, and thought how it was great you could tell yourself you were becoming a better person by staying in bed and doing nothing.
He tried to remember the dream that woke him up. There was something about a house floating on a lake and somehow the house turned upside down. Someone he loved was in the house and he was screaming, or trying to scream. The place was familiar, like some place he knew or had seen, but not the same. That’s how it was in his dreams. The places were put together from bits and pieces of real life but reassembled in a crazy way that made him uneasy.
He couldn’t think who would have been in the house. All he could bring back from the dream was that feeling of being helpless and desperate, but there was no one he’d feel that way about in his waking life. It made him jealous of his dream self, this other him with this other, richer life of strong connection and the kind of love that made you frantic.
After the movie ended (they killed each other, but it was the only way out), another movie came on, something with Danny Kaye. He muted the sound and drifted off.
He was standing up on the bleachers, after gym and Mr. Hughes blowing that fucking whistle to make them all deaf. Him and Pete Quirk and Pete’s little brother Davey, who everyone said was re tarded, but not to his face because he went six- two in ninth grade. They were high, drinking Mr. Pibb, which sucked but was the soda they had at the Indian’s store, the only place they could get to and then back before fourth period, and now they were standing up on the bleachers and watching the girls come out of the locker room in their black and white leotards. Pete said, what the fuck lame school has black and white colors, and Davey snorted his Mr. Pibb out of his nose, and they all laughed even more at that. Davey and Pete jumped off the bleachers and walked out, enjoying the loud, echoing bang of their feet hitting the boards and the girls all watching them go, butRay slouched back on the bleachers and watched one of the girls pull herself up onto the balance beam into a handstand. She was small, dark, her eyes clear and focused, and she held herself straight, her back like the blade of a knife under the green lights of the gym. Ray moved down crablike over the bleachers until he was just a few feet away from the beam as the girl rolled over to stand upright, the muscles in her legs standing out, taut as wires, her hands frosted with chalk. Her body turned in flat circles, described fluent arcs that in Ray’s eyes, half- closed by dope, seemed smeared against the bright blue of the mats.
She launched herself off the beam, and he held his breath when she came down, pulled into himself in a sympathetic motion when her feet hit the mat. She held her hands up over her head then but looked down at her own feet while her friends clapped and one of them, the tall red- haired girl he knew was Claudia, whistled and smiled and called out to her. Go, Marletta. Ray smiled, full of expansive good humor fueled by Pete Quirks hash, and he wished she’d look up and see him so he could say it, too. Go, Marletta. But when she did look up, finally, her smile wide and her feline eyes flicking over his and then away, he couldn’t get anything out. His dry lips worked, clicking, but she was gone that fast, head down, dark hair hiding her profile, and he sat a long time and looked at the small white handprints she’d left on the beam, and he repeated her name to himself, the way her friend had said it. Marletta.
The next day Ray drove up 611, through Doylestown and up into the country, following a map Manny had drawn on the back of an unpaid electric bill. The rain had slowed. He passed an ice cream stand with a woman smoking a cigarette under the shelter of the awning, talking animatedly into a cell phone, and it made him unaccountably lonely. He glanced at his own cell phone as if he expected it to ring. Someone calling just to say hello. It brought back that feeling he had had in Theresa’s kitchen, that weight in his stomach, emptiness and a feeling of tears forming just behind his eyes. He put on the radio and found the college station from Princeton, drifting in and out with the effort of carrying all the way from Jersey. It was something he had never heard; a guitar drifting and echoing in a way that made him think of someone alone in an immense and empty space in the middle of the night.
Above Ottsville he followed a forking exit onto smaller roads lined with farms being cut up into developments. Patches of trees, their branches moving in the rain. He slowed, found a rusted mailbox and a gravel drive leading off over a low hill, and kept moving around a slow curve. There was a turnoff into the field, and he pulled off and stopped.
He grabbed his bag and got out, stretching as if he had come a long way, though he had only been in the car about forty- five minutes. The quiet, the unfamiliar greenness of things, made him feel he had made a long trip to a strange place. In the distance there were long fence lines and horse barns. A country of people whose lives he couldn’t imagine. Getting up early, to do what? Feed the fucking horses. Tinker with farm equipment, maybe. The engine ticked, and water dripped from the trees. He looked up and down the empty road and then walked off into the field, up the hill along a line of trees.
He kept to the left of a screen of maples, moving quietly and staying aware of his position, ears straining. He began to sweat immediately, his legs getting wet from the high grass. There was nothing to see except the trees and the fields on either side of him. He looked at his watch and back down the way he had come to where his car was just barely visible now and began to hear a dog bark somewhere.
Near the crest of the hill he stopped and swung the knapsack off his back and kneeled down to rummage in it. He lifted the pistol out and quietly racked the slide, putting a round in the chamber and then putting it back in the bag. He took out a pair of binoculars and picked up the bag, moving slowly up the hill. Finally on his right a farm house came into view, partially obscured by pines. A dog was tied up outside to a stake in the ground, barking itself hoarse at nothing. There was a Ford pickup collapsing in on itself by the side of the drive and a kids’ swing set with just the chains hanging, the swings long gone, the chains pinging off the rusted poles. There was a black barn with the doors rotting in.
Ray squatted by a tree and put the glasses to his eyes. The lenses fogged up, and he wiped them with the tail of his T-shirt. The wind picked up, and rainwater ran out of the leaves over his head, soaking his back. A man with a black T-shirt, a leather vest, and a ponytail came out of the house with a beer can in his hand. He threw the can at the dog and lit a cigarette. The dog sat and watched the man expectantly, his ears back. There was a blue van in the driveway and a motorcycle next to the rotting porch. One of the windows upstairs was broken, and a curtain hung through where the glass was gone. After a minute a woman with wild hair and thick hips came out wearing a green T-shirt and shorts and carrying two bottles of water. The guy with the ponytail took one and dumped it over his head and into his eyes, and the woman smoothed back his hair with her hands.
Ray ran the glasses over the house, the van, the yard. He could hear thunder far away, and the rain began to pick up again. He went into his bag and came out with a thin plastic parka and put it on and then settled onto a tree stump and picked up the glasses again. He smelled the faint, acrid odor of charcoal burning. The rain on the parka made popping noises close to his ears. He let his mind drift, thinking about de cades ago when the house was new and someone brought a young girl here to show her where she was going to live. Someone thinking this was the place they would get old and die and maybe being okay with that. Christ, but he was getting strange in his old age.
After a while he walked back down the hill and along the road, back past the driveway and along a fence that bordered the other edge of the property. The ground was more exposed, open to view from the neighbors, and he walked just to the crest of the hill. He sat down in the wet grass and made sketches of the layout: the house, the barn, the dog, the tree line. This side of the hill had a view of a valley dotted with houses, stands of trees. Six or seven cows stood together on a hillside a hundred yards away. Horse -flies found him and began to bite him through his jeans. He retreated down the hill, swatting at his legs.
LATER, RAY DROVE back down through the hills into Doyle stown and parked on a side street. It was a Sunday afternoon, the day quiet and the air thick with humidity. He put a baseball cap over his wet hair and walked the main drag, stopping at a book-store to get a paper. He stood near the door, feeling his wet clothes cool and holding his paper. There was a circular rack with ten- dollar DVDs near the register, and he stood and pushed it around. One of the faces looked familiar, and he picked up the case, finding it to be the movie he’d watched the night before. Gun Crazy.
A woman stood at the register holding her glasses up to the light, and then she breathed on them and wiped them with the tail of her shirt. She put them on and took them off again while Ray watched her. She swore under her breath, then noticed him standing there.
“Sorry about that.” Her smile was crooked, and she looked down. “We’re not supposed to, you know, swear in front of the customers.” He smiled back and shrugged to show he didn’t mind.
She pointed at his hand. “Ring that up?” she said, and he handed her the box, his mind blank. He felt his face coloring.
“This is a good one.”
“I watched it last night. On TV. You know, not the DVD. Or why would I be getting it now?” Jesus Christ. “I never saw them before, the couple in it, but I liked it.”
“John Dall, he never really did anything else that was, you know, famous. The girl, Peggy Cummins, she was in Night of the Demon.”
“A horror thing?” He was conscious of the way he talked, the words forming in his mouth. Of not cursing, trying to seem okay. She had a small mole near her mouth, and her smell was sweet and faint, like an apple smelled when you held it to your face.
“Oh, yeah, a great one, with Dana Andrews. Directed by Tourneur. Great stuff, very…” She waggled her fingers and widened her eyes in mock terror. “You don’t get nightmares, do you?”
Ray thought she must be in her midtwenties, maybe thirty? Younger than him, he thought, but he was no good at ages. She came around from behind the register and went to another display and flipped through some more cases. She bit her lip and pulled her glasses off her face to use like a magnifying glass. Her hair was dark, and she wore it in a braid, something that always caught his eye. He thought of her in a room somewhere braiding her hair in front of a mirror. Putting on makeup, those little pencils and liners a whole branch of knowledge he knew nothing about. Not that she wore much makeup.
“Shit. Sorry. These things aren’t worth a goddamn. Sorry. Doesn’t look like we have it.” She was tall, maybe taller than him, with a slim build under loose clothes. A gauzy skirt, one of those sweaters that looks like it has thread pulls all over it. Dark colors, like he wore. Browns and blacks and dark blues. Did that mean something?
He wanted to keep talking, had nothing to say. He nodded.
“Thanks for looking. I’ll keep an eye out.” He spent a long time looking through his pockets for the right change. “Night of the Demons.”
“Demon, right.” She smiled at him. There were lines by her eyes that made her seem like someone who would be nice to people. Ray looked down. He held up his bag, smiled, and waved on his way to the door, and she watched him go.
He sat in the car a while. The sun wanted to come out, he thought, but then fat drops started hitting the windshield and the roof, loud as pistol shots. It began to hail. Chunks of ice pounded the car, making a muffled roar that was somehow pleasant. He liked being inside and watching it come down. People ran by: two young girls, holding hands; a fat man with a bent umbrella. He opened his paper, closed it again. He was drawn to those women who wore long clothes and dark colors. He thought it meant something, dressing like that. It seemed to him they were protecting themselves against some possible danger, and he thought it wise to be onto the world, to know things could go wrong.
He wondered if he asked her out, how long it would take for her to get on his nerves, or how long until she got bored with him. Isn’t that what happened? She seemed a lot smarter than he was. There were people he met who seemed to have a whole language he didn’t know. He wasn’t stupid, but what he knew was what he had taught himself. He haunted the bookswaps, buying paper bags full of Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey. Books about World War II, black holes. He had opened a book of short stories by a woman named Amy Hempel and couldn’t stop reading it. Bought it for ninety cents and went to the library in Warrington to get more. Something in it made him wish he’d finished school, could somehow get to know smart women who knew there was a terrible joke inside of everything that happened to you.
He could only see clearly the end of the arc of wanting someone. He could feel gears turning inside him when he saw certain women, fell in love two or three times a week with women in shops or at bars or just stopped alongside him at intersections, but it was like he skipped too much in his head and got caught up in how the end played out. The screaming and cocked fists and broken glass. He had a vision of his mother carrying him into the bathroom and locking the door, holding him in the bathtub while his father screamed like a gutshot animal and smashed things in the kitchen.
THAT NIGHT HE lifted the lid on the toilet tank and pulled out a plastic ziplock bag with a foil package in it. He went into the kitchen and made a pipe out of a straw and aluminum foil and dumped a tiny hit of brownish, clotted heroin into the bowl. He sat on his old couch and fired it up and waited. His apartment was tiny, white walls and three rooms over a garage owned by an ancient Ukrainian widow who only left her house for funerals and bingo.
He had put on an album he liked, the sound track to the Bruce Willis movie where he finds out he’s a superhero. The music was quiet but built to a point. Ray liked to think it suggested powerful things happening that were invisible to the eye. He put the pipe down and poured himself a Jameson. He became aware of a pound ing in his blood, a repeating signal that spread warmth and light through his head and down along his arms. He lay back on the couch and let his eyes almost close, so the lamplight filtered or ange through his lashes. Currents moved in his blood, and he thought of chemicals being conveyed through his system to his brain, like people in another time passing buckets full of water hand to hand to throw into a house on fire. He sipped at the shot, and the burning in his throat was like something being cleaned out of him. The woman from the store came into his head wear-ing blue and black, and he closed his eyes, trying to conjure the sensation of her fingers touching his forehead. Light, in the way some women’s hands were light on your skin. He touched his own dry lips and felt his heart beating in the pulses in his fingers. His head moved with the low drumming of his heart, small lateral movements as if there were water under him. He drifted, drifted, waiting for the fire to go out.
“Hey, counter lady.”
“Hey, you.”
“How much is this hat?”
“You want that hat?”
“I don’t know. Yeah.”
“That is a ridiculous hat.”
“It’s cool.”
“Take that off, it’s making me laugh.”
“I make you laugh?”
“Yes, you’re laughable.”
“Well, I like to make you laugh.”
“I know you.”
“Yeah. I know you, too.”
“You’re in Mrs. Haddad’s fourth period En glish.”
“I was. Fatass Haddad.”
“You used to make us all laugh in there.”
“Not Fatass.”
“No. You’re Ray.”
“ Yeah.”
“You know my name?”
“ Yeah, I know your name.”
“You’re a liar. You don’t remember me.”
“I remember you. You’re Carole Quirk’s friend.”
“But you don’t know my name.”
“Carole’s friend.”
“I knew it. You don’t know. Hey, what happened to you?”
“Ah, nothing. I got kicked out.”
“I know that, everyone knows that. What for?”
“Ah, I boosted some stuff.”
“ Yeah?”
“ Yeah, it was stupid. I don’t know.”
“Claudia Shaeffer said your dad…”
“ Yeah.”
“Is that true? Is he in jail?”
“ Yeah, he’s an asshole.”
“Why is he in jail?”
“For being an asshole.”
“They don’t put you in jail for that. Half the world would be in jail if they did that.”
“You don’t say that.”
“What?”
“Asshole.”
“So?”
“I don’t know. I just knew that about you. You don’t say…”
“Swears.”
“No.”
“Well, it doesn’t make me a bad person.”
“No.”
“I wasn’t raised like that.”
“You’re from, like, the South, right?”
“ Kentucky.”
“Yeah. Isn’t your dad like a cop or something?”
“A state trooper.”
“Oh, man.”
“You don’t like policemen.”
“No, I don’t know. My old man sure hates them. One thing.”
“I guess he would.’
“One thing, they always call you by your whole name. Raymond.”
“Yeah, that’s my dad.”
“Raymond, is this any way to get ahead in life? And shit like that.”
“Well, it’s not.”
“But you’re laughing.”
“I can’t help it, you make me laugh.”
“Good, I like to make you laugh.”
“You going to pay for that candy bar?”
“No, I’m going to put it back.”
“You already ate like half of it.”
“Well, then it should be half price.”
“Oh, you think you’re super bad, huh?”
“I would be if I had this hat.”
“You’d be super retarded. Anyway, Mr. Rufe just put in a camera over in the corner, so he can see when you juveniles steal from him.” “You think I care?”
“You should. He’ll call my dad and my dad’ll put you in jail.”
“Like I’m scared.”
“You should be.”
“Maybe you should be scared of me.”
“Why?”
“I was in jail.”
“ Yeah, but I’m not scared.”
“Not even when I’m close up like this? In the middle of the night and you’re all alone at the counter?”
“Not even then. Anyway it’s like seven thirty at night. It’s not even dark.”
“What about now?”
“No.”
“I think you should come for a ride with me.”
“My shift is almost over.”
“That’s good, then come for a ride.”
“I have to go home.”
“Just for one ride?”
“You don’t even know my name.”
“I know it.”
“You don’t. Say it.”
“Marletta.”
“Say it again.”
“Marletta.”
“So you know my name.”
“I know about you.”
“What do you know?”
“I know you do gymnastics. I know you’re smart. I know you like Carole Quirk but not her other friend, Amy.”
“Everyone knows that.”
“No, I know. I see you. I know your mom is black and your dad is white and that’s why you moved up here.”
“Who told you that? You think that’s funny?”
“No.”
“You better watch what you say.”
“No, I know that’s why you’re so good- looking.”
“I’m not.”
“No, you are. I thought so the first time I ever saw you.”
“No. No one says that”
“They’re all dipshits.”
“You think I am? Good- looking?”
“You are.”
“Why did you do that?”
“Kiss you? I wanted to.”
“You shouldn’t.”
“I can’t help it. I’m a juvenile.”
“You’ll help it when my dad sees you.”
“He protects you, huh?”
“Something like that. He gets pissed. And then he calls me by my whole name.”
“What does he call you when he’s not pissed?”
“You’ll laugh.”
“I won’t. I swear.”
“Like the swear of a juvenile is worth anything.”
“What does he call you?” “Mars.” ‘Uh-huh.”
“You said you wouldn’t laugh.” “I’m not.”
“ Yeah, you kind ofare.”
“You’re laughing, too. Look at my arm and your arm.” “You’re so pale.”
“And you’re like, I don’t know. Honey or something.” “ Watch the hands, mister.” “ Your skin is soft, that’s all.”
“You shouldn’t be back here. Mr. Rufe would be super pissed.” “I’m just keeping you company.” “Are you coming to junior prom?” “No, probably not. When are you done?” “Soon. I have to go home.” “Nah, you don’t.” “You shouldn’t do that.” “Kiss you?” “No, you shouldn’t.” “I can’t help it.” “No?”
“No. I have to.” “You have to?”
“I see you and I just… have to.”
“Well, if you have to.”
“I do. Do you like it?”
“Yes. Say my name.”
“Marletta.”
“You like me?”
“I like you.”
“I like you, too. Ray.”
On Tuesday he drove south through Philly, down 95 past the airport and the Burn Center. At Providence Avenue he got off and made his way to SCI Chester, the front looking like a factory or a school or something, if you didn’t notice the coils of razor wire.
He filled out the forms using his own name, figuring if they didn’t want him there they could kick him out. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be there either, but the big bull with the gray flattop behind the Plexiglas just took his name and buzzed him through. He emptied his pockets and stood for a wand, and in about fifteen minutes he was sitting in the visiting room that stank of disinfectant and cigarettes, watching men in yellow jumpsuits trying to act casual with their wives and kids. He sat and watched the kids get tokens out of the change machines for sodas and candy, the same thing he had done the one time he had visited his father upstate all those years before.
He thought about riding the chain the first time, the way he did every time he saw coils of wire. When they sent him out to Camp Hill, his arms were busted, and he sat stiffly in the bus with his arms in the rigid casts while a guy with a lazy eye looked his way and moved his tongue over his lips in a pantomime of hunger.
He could remember little bits of the trial, but it was like he’d seen it on TV. The prosecutor looking pissed all the time and telling the judge how he had stolen a car from his drug buddy Perry March and racked it up with Marletta next to him, but the trial went by in a rush, like ten minutes of bullshit before they locked him up. None of what the guy said was right, but Marletta was dead and he didn’t care what came next.
It was like his life had run backward, the parts before Marletta died real and true and clear, and everything after just a long twilight, a half- life where none of his vague wishes or worst fears materialized and it was hard to come fully awake, to open his eyes and see things as they were. Harder still to sleep, with no one he trusted there to stand watch.
HE PICKED THROUGH different pictures in his head. His father, short but wide through the shoulders; jet black hair in short spikes, holding a can of beer at a ball game. His mother sitting at the kitchen table, her cigarette in the ashtray stained with her lipstick, looking as if it had been dipped in blood. Her blank, defeated look, her eyes fixed somewhere else. His father in handcuffs in the kitchen in the middle of the night, the cops looking embarrassed on his mother’s behalf, their eyes down.
Now his father shuffled into the visiting room in a bathrobe, and Ray wasn’t ready for the sight of him. His hair was sparse, gray and patchy, and his lips were sucked into his mouth like he was tasting something bitter. He leaned heavily on the long table as he sat, and Ray saw his hands shaking. His father smelled like cigarettes and sour sweat, the wave of it taking Ray back to his own time upstate.
“So,” said his father, in a petulant rasp Ray wouldn’t have recognized. “I thought you was dead.”
Ray opened a pack of cigarettes and shook one out, and his fa-ther picked it up with fingers gone orange at the tips.
“Gimme some credit, Bart. I’m violating my parole to be here.” He bared his teeth in a mirthless smile and lit his cigarette. He couldn’t look directly at his father’s face, like it was a too-bright light. “I’m not supposed to associate with criminals. Not even the ones that raised me.”
The old man nodded as if Ray had made a valid point. “Ever hear from your mother?”
“I thought I saw her once at the Pathmark in Warminster. Just wishful thinking. What’s with the robe, old man? Playing sick?”
Bart shrugged, looked him up and down, everywhere but in the eye. “Cancer. In the stomach. Drinking that shit they make in here, the raisin jack.”
Ray looked away, not ready for any of this, and his father looked down, talked to the tabletop.
“The guys put all kinds of shit in it, trying to make it taste like something.”
“Shit, Bart. What do they say?”
The old man shrugged. “Six months, a year. Over and out.”
“Did you talk to your lawyer? Maybe you can, you know…”
His father snorted, made a motion like throwing something over his shoulder. “Can what? Go where? It might as well be here as anywhere. Like you give a shit.”
Ray let that hang. He stubbed out his cigarette, lit another. His father grabbed the pack and tried to pinch one between his shaking fingers. Ray watched him for a minute, then took the pack and shook one out. Across the room, a man reached over to tousle the hair of a little girl, who slid away down the bench.
“What about Theresa? Does she know?”
Bart shrugged. “What do you think? She better off with me there, or here?”
Ray shook his head, things moving in this unaccountable direction. Why had he come? What did he need from the old man now?
“I keep remembering this thing,” he finally said. The old man looked at Ray, and he pulled his lighter out and fired up his cigarette for his father. “We’re in the old house on County Line, remember?”
His father nodded, looked at the tip of his cigarette.
“Anyway, I’m like seven or eight, I don’t know. It’s the middle of the night and I’m half asleep, but you got me down the kitchen in my pajamas. You been beating the old lady, showing her the errors of her ways. She’s crying, but what the hell. I don’t remember her doing nothing else. I’m out of it, and slow on the uptake anyway, like you used to point out. But after a while I get that I’m supposed to take a swing at her. You know, get in the habit. Learn how it’s done. Take a lesson.”
“Yeah, it was all me. I was the one ruined your life.”
“Did that happen, really? Like I remember it? Would you even admit it now, you old fuck?”
The old man’s breathing was shallow, his face red, the busted veins standing out on his cheeks. “She’d have ruined you.”
“Yeah, I was lucky you straightened me out. You straightened me out so good I live alone like a fucking animal in a cave. Scared if I even bring a woman home I’ll start beating the shit out of her.” His hands were shaking, and he stared at the table a long time.
He heard a rasping sound like laughter and looked up, but the old man was crying, his hand spread across his face and the tears squeezing out of the corners of his eyes.
“Don’t hate me no more. It was the drink, Ray, the drink. I wanted to be good, but I was weak. I couldn’t handle it. Working at that fucking quarry and breathing that shit all day and coming home to the water heater’s shot and the bills and you sick all the time. And her wanting me to be something I couldn’t. I couldn’t.” He put his hand across the table and touched Ray’s arm. The old man’s flesh was hot, and Ray wanted to pull away. “Do you think this is what I wanted? You think I didn’t want to be going home at night? I was weak. I was weak. You can’t be better than you are.”
“Yeah.” Ray lined up the cigarette packs in front of him and pulled back from the table. Nodding as if Bart had said something wise. “That’s what I was afraid of.”
RAY DROVE BACK up 95, his head on fire. He had felt driven to see his father again, to try to sort out what was him and what his old man and the way he’d been raised. He had come up to the edge of something standing in the store with that girl with the glasses, and he wanted to know would he always come up to that edge and look out and away at something he’d never really get to, never live out. Now Bart was going to die, and he didn’t know if that mattered, if it meant he’d be free or stuck forever.
He remembered guys upstate drinking raisin jack, only the guys he knew called it chalk. Older guys, mostly, who’d been in for a de cade and more or were back for their third or fourth jolts. He remembered a guy named Long John keeping a plastic bag full of rotting fruit and dinner rolls under his bunk. He’d had a drink of thin, milky liquid from a glass jar and thought it tasted like orange- scented gasoline. He didn’t get the point, with weed and meth around most of the time.
He’d hated every second of prison but saw guys at home there. Guys who’d get out with the couple of bucks they gave you, what the old cellies called shotgun money because that was all it was enough to buy. They’d blow the money in a couple of days, stick up a 7- Eleven or a gas station and be back inside. Get in bar fights still wearing the Kmart jackets they got when they were gated out. They’d talk like it was bad luck or people on the outside fucking with them that brought them back, but the truth was they couldn’t make it outside.
One day upstate they took him off the laundry and sent him and a big convict named Merce outside to bury two guys who’d died within a couple of hours of each other in the infirmary. One from AIDS and one from old age. Merce spent the whole time telling him about the beef that got him locked up, killing a friend in the dope business.
“I went out to get my scratch tickets, I come back, the motherfucker’s drinking my last can of soda. You believe that shit?”
“Uh- huh.” They were standing in a field in the snow, watching a trusty scratch a trough in the frozen ground with a green backhoe. Ray kept his hands in the pockets of his thin jacket, and Merce smoked a cigarette, stabbing at Ray with the red end to make his points. Ray’s arms ached where they had been broken.
“That wasn’t Coke or Sprite, neither. That was Guarana, what my baby drinks.”
“It was what?”
“Guarana. It’s from Brazil. You can’t get that shit at the Wawa. You got to go to a Brazilian store like all the way the fuck up in Norristown. I said, you did not just drink my last soda.”
“Huh.” The trusty was taking his time, smacking the ground over and over to break up the frozen clay. Ray felt the ground under him shudder every time the bucket on the backhoe hit the ground.
“He said you just go to the store. I said, bullshit you go to the store. I went to the closet, got my crossbow.”
Ray looked at him, eyebrows up.
“You heard me. My baby didn’t like guns in the house.”
“Good compromise.”
Merce gave him convict eyes, his head lowered, smoke from his Newport streaming from his nose. Then he gave a snort and started a deep laugh that shook his frame and started him coughing and made his eyes tear. “Yeah, I guess you got to laugh now.”
There was a grinding snap, and the backhoe stuck fast in the frozen ground. The engine died, and they heard the trusty swear. Ray watched a thin film of frost materialize on the plywood coffins. Thought about it forming on the dead men inside the boxes. Merce’s eyes fixed on the middle distance.
Ray said, “Lesson learned, huh?”
“Yeah.” Merce bent to the stacked coffins, throwing the cigarette away in an arc of smoke like a plane going down in a war movie. “If only my baby had bought more soda, I wouldn’t be in this fix.”