American rust (30 page)

7. Poe

T
he new cell didn't have a window and they never turned out the lights but at least it was his alone. He knew it was late morning sometime; they had brought him breakfast, that had been a few hours ago though he wasn't sure even of that. It didn't matter, though. They would all be after him now, everyone in the prison, black gangs and white, a coalition of the willing, he had gone back on his word and taken another man down to boot, he had taken men from both sides. He wondered how he had done that, a basic rule, choose your enemies. He had chosen everyone. He wondered if he had killed Tucker. It didn't seem to matter much, it was the least of his worries, it was not a game of sums. No matter what you did in life, there was still your own death at the end of it. There was no question they would kill him, they would take their first chance.

He felt a shiver go through him and the sweat was coming fast now, he was drenched and cold where a second ago he had been warm. He was up on his feet and pacing around the cell, he was testing the walls with his hands, the bars, it was no use, the natural laws, he was going to scream, there were things inside that needed to escape. Only he would not. He would be a man. He would lie on the bed and calm his mind. He did. He was wet everywhere and his scalp was tingling, it felt like a heart attack, he would die there in his bed. After a few minutes the wave passed and there was a feeling of weakness and being emptied of everything.

And yet there was a way out. It was right in front of him, staring him in the face. He could tell the truth and change everything, his lawyer would want the same thing as all of them. That was the purpose of the lawyer. To get him out of here. To save his actual life.

Except it was not saving as much as trading. Isaac and Lee. But his life. Versus a promise he had made. Versus what he knew, there were good ones and bad ones and Isaac was one of the rare good ones. Him, Poe, from the natural standpoint he was where he was supposed to be, he belonged here and Isaac didn't. Maybe not this exact place, maybe this was not exactly where he belonged, but he admitted it, he was not surprised, not really. He had nearly made a vacation here last year, and his mother and Harris had gotten him out of it. It was not some unfair twist of fate, he had not been born a refugee, it was his own choices, he could be a man about it. He could accept the consequences.

And yet—if a lawyer asked what happened, it would be difficult to withhold a description of the events, it would not be human thoughts but another part of him. If someone asked him, he would tell. He would have no choice. But if they didn't ask him he wouldn't tell. It was a fair chance, it gave equal weights to both sides. Except he knew they would ask him. It was an obvious question: who killed the man in the machine shop? Christ it seemed so long ago, ancient times, part of the past. But it was the reason he was here. They would ask it and he would tell them. It was the truth, was all it was. It was nothing more than the truth.

He was up and pacing again, three steps to the back wall and turn and come back. Before lunch, they had said, that was when the lawyer was coming it had been some time now since breakfast. Yes, he thought, that is who you are. If there is any bad luck you will find it only it was not just luck, there had been many ways to avoid it, he hadn't taken any of them. It was hopeless, a lost cause. He had slept through life, let the currents take him. He had let the currents take him faster and faster and he had not noticed. He was at the end now, the big drop. It was not only college there had been other choices as well, choices that had revealed him to others, choices that half the town would have jumped at but he, Poe, had chosen another way. It was Orn Seidel calling him right after graduation, there was an opening at a company that did the plastic seals for landfills. Traveling all over the country. At new landfills they would lay down the plastic liners in preparation for garbage to be dumped there, to prevent leakage into nearby streams and such. At the old landfills they would seal them up, it was like a giant ziplock, a heavy layer of plastic overtop the garbage and then they blew them up with air to test them, just before they dumped the soil on top you could run across the acres of plastic, bouncing, it was like running on the moon, Orn said, it was fourteen dollars an hour to start. But it was not really running on the moon. It was working with other people's trash. Technicians, they called themselves, but it was not really that. It was laying plastic overtop of trash heaps, it was hanging around city dumps. Your country is supposed to do better than that for you, he thought.

And from Mike DeLuca's uncle, Poe's last big chance, strike three is what it was, dismantling work, taking apart mills and old factories, they had taken down old steelmills all over the country, locally and nationally. But another traveling job, Poe had applied and gotten the interview but there was so much traveling, it was living out of a suitcase the entire year, and the man giving the interview must have seen something in Poe's face. The work was all in the Midwest now, taking down the auto plants in Michigan and Indiana. And one day even that work would end, and there would be no record, nothing left standing, to show that anything had ever been built in America. It was going to cause big problems, he didn't know how but he felt it. You could not have a country, not this big, that didn't make things for itself. There would be ramifications eventually.

As for Mike DeLuca's uncle, he'd spent twenty years working in steelmills and then twenty years taking them apart, scrapping them, it was like his revenge against the steelmills, against getting laid off, but it was not really revenge, it was not a job anyone would want, the lies he had to tell when he visited the small towns and some waitress asked him
so what're you in town for?

It was not all bad. He had lived a good life, the leader of the pack, a local hero, it was more than most. Slept with fourteen girls, it was more than most. Maybe one of them had a baby he didn't know about, life after death. Except it did not have to go that way. He could tell the simple truth. Truth and nothing but. He had not killed the man Otto, they would let him go and these men, Clovis and these men who would kill him here, he would never see them again.

It was the old saying, the truth will set you free. He could breathe outside and sit and feel the river air on him as he fished in the shade and ate egg sandwiches, jump a rabbit with a .22. Christ a .22 what he could do in here with that, a .22, the weakest of calibers, he could run the entire place. He could leave here, lie under the covers warm with Lee with her legs holding them up like a tent, smell of her smooth skin the slight rough patch between her legs. It was countless the pleasures of life there were millions, you could spend your entire life listing them, they were different for every person the feel of oak bark, light in a room, watching a big buck and deciding not to shoot it. It was a privilege you could lose at any time, he had taken it for granted, but he would change his life. He would make his life mean something. You could not go with the current and expect it to turn out fine, he had not known it before but he knew it now, he would change everything.

He lay down on the cold cement floor. He put his head under the bunk and lay there with his face in darkness. He could not tell the truth because it was not really the truth. Lee would not forgive him. She would see him for what he was. She would never think of him again, she would hate him more than she had ever hated anyone, it did not take a genius to figure that out. She already knew the story. It had been a mistake telling her. But he could not go back now, there was no way around it, she would not forgive him it was her brother, she would not be able to turn a blind eye to it.

He thought about that and felt even sicker, he was sweating again. No he could not allow that. He had closed the door on himself when he told her. But he could not lie anyway. He would not have done it anyway, ratted out his best friend, it was not in him to do that, he could think it but not do it. It was like look but don't touch.

Except he would just see. It was life. It was comparing ideas to actual life, it was not a valid comparison, it was words versus blood. He would see. When the lawyer came he would sign the papers and that would be all. He would not offer but if they asked him he would tell. He would have no choice. But if they didn't ask he wouldn't tell. Except they would ask. It would be the first question, most likely.

He could not talk to the lawyer. He would stay angry, he would think about getting Clovis or even Black Larry, he would take them down with him. He would go down a legend it was as simple as that, you could change your destiny that quickly. He heard a noise coming from somewhere. He was still lying under his rack. He looked out and saw a guard rapping on the bars.

“Cuff up,” he said. “Your lawyer's here.” He opened the slot in the door for Poe to stick his hands through.

Poe shook his head. He got to his feet and stood over the toilet and tried to urinate but he was too nervous, nothing would come out.

“Get the fuck over here and cuff up,” said the guard. He was a short fat man with thinning hair and a jovial face, a plump fat face, he could not help but look happy.

“I ain't goin anywhere,” said Poe.

“Stop being a fuckin hard- ass. Get the fuck out of that cell before I call the fuckin SORT team on your ass.”

“Fuckin call em. They can drag me out but I ain't going.”

“You are one stupid- ass motherfucker, aren't you?”

“Open that door and you'll see how stupid I am.”

The fat man stared at him with an amused expression. “Alright then,” he finally said. He rapped on the cell and began to walk away.

“Hey,” Poe said.

“Change your mind already?”

“What happened to that boy? My cellmate.”

“They took him to the hospital in Pittsburgh.”

“He comin back?”

“If he does I don't think he'll be much trouble to you or anyone else.”

“I don't give a shit about him.”

“No one else does, either. If they hadn't gotten him out of the infirmary so quick, there's about fifty guys who would have sat on his chest.”

“Is that gonna help me?”

“You aren't getting any new charges pressed, I can guarantee you that. Now get your ass over here and cuff up and see your lawyer.”

“No,” said Poe.

“Whatever your reason,” the guard said. “You might think your good buddies back home would do the same for you, but I can promise you they wouldn't, and if you don't believe me you can look around inside that cell there and tell me if you see them anywhere. So cuff up. Least give yourself a chance.”

“Don't trouble yourself,” Poe said.

The guard gave him a final look. Then he disappeared from view, and Poe heard him shuffling back down the hall.

8. Lee

S
he'd spent most of the day driving around, finding places to read and then driving, past the houses of old friends, teachers, but it was all the same. The place held nothing for her. Maybe one day it would, but not now. She had a few nostalgic memories, but not many. Mostly they involved being with Isaac. Or maybe she was just telling herself that now.

She'd always known it wouldn't be easy for him, his awkwardness around people, around her high school friends. No one knew what to make of him. He didn't know what to make of himself. With the exception of his sister, he didn't know anyone like him. And people his age tended to mistake his generosity for condescension, presuming that Isaac held them to the same impossible standard to which he held himself. Eventually, she thought, he must have decided to stop trying.

She could feel herself getting angry, at herself mostly but also at her former classmates. Her sophomore year, everyone was sitting around Gretchen Mills's room and someone, it might have been Bunny Sachs, said, “You guys do realize this is the hardest thing we'll ever do. Getting in here is basically the hardest thing there is in the world and we've already done it.”

But of course they hadn't done anything. They'd all been born to the right parents, in the right neighborhoods, they went to the right schools, had all the right social instructions, had taken all the right tests. There was simply not a chance they would fail. They'd worked hard but always with the expectation they would get what they wanted—the world had never shown them anything different. Very few of them had earned their places. Everyone admitted how spoiled they were but underneath, there was always the presumption that they deserved it.

Of course, she hadn't said a word. She wished she had but she hadn't. It was easy now to look back and think these things, but at the time she'd wanted to fit in and go along with Bunny and think yes I deserve this happy life I'm living.

Isaac's friendship with Poe still baffled her. But of course her friendship with Poe must have baffled him as well. Maybe it was that people had always set them, Poe and Isaac, so far apart—Poe because of his talent for everything physical, Isaac because of his mind. The truth was they were both the best at what they did in that school. It was a special sort of small- town bitterness that must have thrived on seeing them both fail.

After Isaac's first visit to New Haven, she'd thought maybe he'd come back, a month during the summer, she would scrape together money for a full- time caretaker for her father, just for the month. By then she already had two credit cards—she would find a way to pay for it somehow.

But Isaac had not responded to her offers to come. He was already changing. No, she thought, he might just have cared about his father too much. Henry would have seen it as Isaac going on vacation in Connecticut, and Isaac cared too much about what Henry thought of him to risk it. You had it easy, she thought. You got let off the hook.

The truth was that Isaac was not as ready to leave as he claimed. He had had a longer time to think about their mother, whereas she was already being pulled into another orbit—she'd left for New Haven almost immediately. What kind of people Isaac and her father could have become in the intervening years, she had no idea. Anything could have happened. You got lucky, she thought. You were too selfish to even consider staying.

Isaac: you could give him two random numbers, tell him to multiply them in his head: 439 times 892. He could tell you the answer in a few seconds. He just saw the answer, he didn't even do the calculation. Divide them—it was the same. Once she'd sat with a calculator, testing him, certain he must have memorized certain combinations of numbers, certain there was some trick. But there was no trick. There's parts of me I don't understand, he said, and shrugged.

Her boyfriend from freshman year, Todd Hughes, the physics major, had loved Isaac, seen his brilliance, offered to help with the applications. Isaac had sat next to Todd for most of the weekend. But she'd gotten bored with Todd. Or maybe he had just come too soon, she had been too young. You should have stayed with him just for Isaac, she thought. You're the only one in this family who isn't making any sacrifices. Simon, who had met Isaac that same weekend, had formed no real impression of him, and Isaac had formed no impression of Simon.

There had been a time once, through most of high school, when it had seemed to her that if she closed her eyes and thought about it long enough, she could see exactly where Isaac was. Because you knew his routine, she thought. There was no magic in it. She continued to drive along the high road that followed the river.

Alright, she thought. She pulled over at the place by the river and turned off the car and looked out over the grass and the gorge rising steeply out of the water and the way the river bent quickly out of sight, unknowable. She put her head on the steering wheel and closed her eyes and thought about her brother.