The Dope Thief (29 page)

August

It was a long drive into the hills, out past Valley Forge and through quiet towns where no one stirred on the street, and when they finally got out of the van everyone stretched and squinted, pulling at themselves in the heat like athletes before a long run. They started across a long stretch of grass, and small insects opened white wings and vaulted ahead of them.

It took a while to get them all in, Ray and Michelle taking turns holding the baby while Andy and Stevie signed the visitation forms and passing each other the mealy, lopsided bread that Andy had made herself the day before and an unwieldy bowl of peppery chicken salad. Theresa’s offering, though she herself was down with a cold and propped up in bed with a stack of romances, some DVDs of a cop show she liked, and a carton of cigarettes, which she claimed were necessary to keep her throat clear.

They put everything out on a long table in the visiting room, shyly watching the other families. They were black and white and other colors and nationalities that Ray couldn’t guess, clustered in knots, heads together, voices quiet except for the occasional murmuring cry from a baby or screech from two kids roughhous-ing in front of the vending machines.

Lynch was buzzed into the visiting room in his blue DOC jumpsuit, his arms out for his son, and they clustered around him and touched his shoulders, which were getting broad. Andy fingered his thin growth of beard while Lynch held his head up, his teeth showing and his bright eyes flicking back and forth between Andy and the baby, who observed everything with a wry and satisfied look. He reached for his father’s bright lapel and worked it in the minute and impossible fingers Ray could never stop looking at.

Michelle, hovering, organized plates of food and went into the diaper bag for a bottle. Ray caught Stevie checking out her ass and gave him yard eyes that had mellowed sufficiently to make the boy lift one shoulder and smile. The room was hot and close with bodies, but through the long windows they could see bright grass divided by rolling coils of wire and beyond that the Pennsylvania hills. They sat to eat, Lynch holding the baby across his lap and watching his son work his mouth and blink his eyes.

Ray knelt near him and kept his voice low. “How you making it?”

Lynch never took his eyes off the baby but nodded. “I read a lot, write letters. Stay in my house, out of the shit on the tiers. It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not, it’s fucked every minute, but it’s twenty- four months. Not even. We can do twenty- four months.” He balled some of the loose material of the jumpsuit and put his lips inches from the boy’s pale ear. “Listen to me. Never think any of this shit is okay. Never think it’s what you got coming.”

Lynch shrugged, and Ray put a hand on his arm. “No, man. Twenty- four months and out, no fucking around in here, no ganging up, none of that slopbucket meth. Seven hundred and thirty days and you’re home with your boy and Andy and this is all behind you.”

“Yeah, it’s less time than middle school, huh?” Ray nodded, lifted one brown hand and touched Lynch at his temple, and was almost overcome. He cleared his throat and rubbed at his reddened eyes, trying to think of the light sentence as lucky for nearly killing Andy’s father, who had lived through the bullet in his back but who would never leave a wheelchair.

WHILE STEVIE AND
Lynch walked around the visiting room and talked about TV shows and movies, DVDs that Stevie was putting aside for his friend to watch when he was out, Michelle sat by Ray and massaged his tense shoulders, swiveling her head to watch for the guards.

She put her head down into the back of his neck and whispered into his hair. “Fuck, I hate this.”

“You and me both.” They watched Stevie lift his T-shirt, show Lynch a new tattoo: barbed wire encircling his arm. Lynch rolled his eyes and slapped his friend lightly on the forehead.

Michelle said, “I keep expecting a couple of guards to cut me out of the herd and take me back to my cell.” She shivered, and Ray covered her hand with his and then lifted it to his lips. “How’s he doing, Ray?”

“He’ll be okay. If he was fucking up, we’d know it.” He looked to the gate, saw the COs checking clipboards and counting heads. He watched through the smeared glass as the shadows of clouds moved over the low hills and the towers and gauzy rolls of wire, painting them with a dark wash like ink dissolved in water.

Michelle slid onto the bench beside him and pressed against his hip, and they watched Andy feed the baby, the mother making small sympathetic movements of her lips as she held the minute spoon to the boy’s puckered mouth. While they watched, Michelle took Ray’s hand and pressed it against her, low on her stomach inside her jeans, and he felt the heat in her belly and the palms of her hands.

She said, “Do you want that, Ray? Do you want that for us?”

“I don’t know.”

He watched a man in a blue jumpsuit serving tuna salad to his family from a foil pan, his brow thick with scar tissue. A heavy woman with blond hair like a suspended wave watched him, her eyes wary, and when the plastic spoon snapped in his hands she winced and grabbed involuntarily at the frail, pink- eyed girl in her lap.

Michelle waited, and he finally said, “I just don’t.” He made a movement with his free hand that took in the room. “Trust that things will be okay. That they’ll be good.”

“They won’t, always.” She smiled. Lifted one hand and touched the baby’s white hair. “But we’ll do the best we can, and we’ll have a good life.”

“Do I deserve that?”

She pressed against him, and Ray could feel pain in his arm from where he’d had his tattoo burned, the laser turning the heavy black letters into an oblique scar so that he’d shaken his head, laughed at himself for wasting the money. He’d marked himself; he’d always be marked.

He said, “Who am I now?” but there was a change in the room, a collective sighing and pauses in conversation, and it was time to go, and Michelle hadn’t heard what he’d said.

They packed up, Andy clinging for a long moment to Lynch, their eyes closed, swaying in the heat as if at one of the high school dances they’d all missed, though it was Stevie who teared up and had to go stand in front of a vending machine and pretend to pick out orange soda, working quarters in his red fist.

Ray walked Lynch back to the door and handed him two car tons of cigarettes. Hugged him hard, feeling the knot of scar tissue at his side through the jumpsuit, then stood while the boy went through the gate to stand patiently with his arms out to be wanded by a short woman with wide hips who laughed at some-thing the boy said.

While Ray was watching, an older man came down the hall from the tiers in the brown jumpsuit of a lifer, his shoulders riding in a lopsided wave and one long hand pushing at a mass of graying hair. When the man got to Lynch the younger man turned, smiled, and said something lost to Ray behind the glass. He patted the older man’s mountainous shoulder and pointed through at Ray, shaking his head, mouthed a word that might have been “bad- ass.” When the door nearest him was buzzed open, Ray could hear the distant shouting and banging of the tiers.

Ray lifted a hand and waved at Harlan and Lynch as they turned to go back. Harlan went into Lynch’s pockets while they walked, pulled a cigarette out, and stuck it behind his ear. He turned and nodded at Ray, made a scooting motion to send him on his way.

Ray knew he couldn’t fix everything, couldn’t stop every bad thing just by his love for Michelle or these broken kids. He’d failed with Adrienne Gray, and he’d let Manny slide away into the dark. The rest of the money had all gone to legal bills for Lynch and medical bills for Andy and rehab for Sherry, and he saw they’d always struggle to stay ahead. But there were good, clear days, too, and sometimes he came home tired and slept without dreams.

Ray knew Lynch would come out with tattoos and scars, but Michelle had said it would be a map only of where he had been, not where he was headed. Ray hoped it was true, though he sometimes saw her staring into the middle distance and knew she saw her mother’s untended grave in the flat Ohio earth, a boy she had loved in high school walking down a tree- lined street with his children.

Ray turned to the rest of his pickup family, clutching bags and blankets as they clustered by the door, and looked out into the daylight with the hooded and set- upon eyes of refugees. In the parking lot he had to keep himself from running, and Michelle laced her fingers through his and kissed his cheek.

In Phoenixville they stopped at a Dairy Queen, and he bought sodas for the kids and soft serve for the baby. The clouds had piled up overhead into a hard ceiling threaded with black and softening the light to a muted blue. He stood at the eroded curb and watched them all, Stevie draped over the seats and flipping through the CDs, Andy furiously texting one of her girlfriends from work, Michelle cradling the baby and smiling at him with her crooked smile.

They looked okay, and he let himself believe they would be. They looked hungry and tired. They looked like any family by the side of the road, and he had the thought that if they locked him up again this would be the image he’d remember. At night on his bunk, when the lights would go out, this moment, these few quiet seconds, would be the thing he’d hold on to to keep himself sane.

There was a low, drumming rumble behind him, and he turned as a motorcycle appeared on the street and drifted to a stop at the light. The noise grew louder, bouncing and echoing off the buildings around him, and then there were a dozen more bikes strung out along the road. Ray stood silent, watching them come. Men in leather jackets, some wearing chromed helmets, most with noth-ing on their heads but bandannas or long hair in matted plaits.

At the back of the line, a young guy with black hair and a goatee turned and looked at Ray, his face shadowed and unreadable. Ray felt naked, exposed, blinking away the sweat from his eyes. His heart worked faster, but he stood up straight, put his chin out. Thought to himself,
take what comes.
The bike coasted; the man leaned forward, reached a hand behind him. Touched a small form there. A boy, pressed against his back, wearing goggles and an oversized helmet the blue of a robin’s egg. White- blond hair framing a heart- shaped face. The boy held a hand up and gave Ray a quick, shy wave. Then the light changed, and they were gone.