The Laws of our Fathers (75 page)

    'To me? What would I do?'

    'Hey, dude, way I remember this one, Michael set you up big-time. Only logical to think you'd want to trash him, if you ever got a bead on where he was.'

    'I never held him to blame. You know that. I'd actually like to see him.'

    'Proust,' says Hobie.

    'Right,' says Seth. His imagination, anchored in the past, already is crawling toward some usable image of Michael. Seth has been to towns like Marston. Several years ago, he did a few columns on a girl up in Podunk, Minnesota, who wanted to play the tuba in the all-boys marching band. He spent a week out there. Everybody has strange hair: girls with dos like woodpecker's combs, guys whose fathers ragged the hippies now with greasy locks dripping to their shoulders. All of them get drunk on Friday nights and tear down the county roads, picking off the rural-delivery post boxes with their bumpers. Their parents, farmers mostly, are utterly confused by the viral spread of urban life. Their kids take drugs and hang out at the malls down on the interstate, wear their seed caps backwards, and call each other 'motherfucker.' What the hell? the adults always seemed to be asking.

    And here, where people once thought they were the real America, Michael Frain has remained. Seth envisions him on the

    main street peering discontentedly into the window of his store. An unlit neon sign, too small for the frontage it decorates, mentions a popular brand, Sony or G. E. Behind it, the shop is gloomily, grimly out of business. Some disused something, two cardboard boxes, and a few stray kinks of wire are piled meaninglessly on a ledge blanketed with acrid dust, which has gathered at places into hairy wisps. The fixtures and display shelves have been removed. The man himself remains angular, still slender, though his gut has taken on some slope. He wears a washed-out plaid shirt, with the tails hanging outside his twill trousers. He looks a bit wasted, gawky, with a knobby weight at the elbows and the knees. He still has some hair, ragged but not quite as wild, not quite as bright of course. And he would take considerable pain in stepping down into the street. To walk, Michael wheels his upper body to the left and stiffy hurls the opposite leg, an elaborate, painful-looking motion which he has thoughtlessly mastered. Down the way, the unpainted clapboard church and corrugated Farm Bureau building stand beside a new brick restaurant, prefab construction from the looks of it, insubstantial as a cereal box. As he moves along, Michael's eyes, still glossy and uncertain, would flash this way and avoid Seth, as they avoid all strangers, with no hint of recognition. That's him. Seth gathers himself around the picture.

    'And did you find him?'

    'Which one?'

    'Either. Nile?'

    'Nope. Course not.'

    'How about Michael?'

    'Nope. That's how come I ended up talking to everybody in town. Man's just gone. Nobody could find him that day. Or since.' 'They're together?'

    'Doing their fugitive thing. My guess. Michael's had practice slipping his name, his past. I figure he's showing Nile how.'

    In the silence of the basement, the voice of one of the wrestlers, at the same pitch as an engine exhaust, rumbles across the room from the TV. 'I'll crush the Mighty Welder's butt,' he declares to an interviewer.

    'And you're not going to tell me the rest. How we get to this point?'

    'Can't, man.'

    'Who can?' Seth asks. 'Who will?'

    Hobie lays his heavy hand on Seth's knee. He smells of paint, his eyes are bleary. He looks at Seth, as they look at each other, with what's been imbued over a lifetime.

    'You'll figure,' he says.

    

    

    
Nile

    

    Weak, Nile always thought when he entered the jail. The damn guards were so weak, just in a total snooze. Their whole deal was papers and forms. 'Captain wants them forms to be right.' Here they were, with all these bad actors and tough customers, killers and heartless slobs two hundred feet away, and the realest thing to these tools was whether every visitor put down a sign-in time and the inmate's pen number. Probation was the same way. Jesus. Nile sighed and thought about the girl.

    Nile was in love. He was always in love, but this was different. It was always different, because he didn't love the girls other men did. He didn't think Julia Roberts was so beautiful. In high school, he wasn't like every guy who thought about boning the whole pom squad. He liked sweet girls, gentle girls, girls who had something special - girls who maybe some way reminded him of himself. Right now he was really in love. Better than ever. He was like the dude in the song who loved being in love. He loved Lovinia.

    'Nile, my man, my man,' said the lieutenant. He said that each week. Nile timed it so this sphincter-brain named Eddie was on the desk, because he barely searched him. 'It rainin out there?'

    'A little,' Nile said. 'Kind of misting.'

    'Shit. That damn pizza boy get slow. Any doggone excuse. Step into my office. Kind of mistin,' said Eddie, as he extended a slightly arthritic finger to the examination room. 'Shit, you know, it been mistin all damn month. That pollution and all's what done it. You think I'm kiddin? I'm not kidding. Mistin. Shit, I'll be havin this damn cough all year.' He ran his arms along the outside of Nile's torso, inside each leg until he reached the thigh. 'Okay, you done. Which one you want?'

    'Henry Downs. Sly Bolt.'

    'Mr Sly Bolt. Yessir, we gonna tell another gangbanger this week how he got to be a good boy when we let him out. You make sure he listen up.' Eddie laughed and stamped Nile's hand. He said he'd call to have them bring Bolt down.

    Nile walked on. At the gatehouse, he stuck his hand under the ultraviolet and the guards inside discharged the lock, admitting him. Nile could feel it there behind him. It reminded him of Bug; every step, every twitch, brought her to mind. She was always with him, like magic. He saw some skinny girl on the street and he remembered her. He saw stocking caps or grey twills; he felt the package in his can. It was like a town where all the roads ran to one place. Lovinia.

    Girls always got Nile like that. He was always waking up and trying to remember first thing who he was in love with. His heart was always flying along, airborne with secret love. He was crazy all the time about someone who didn't even know it. There was Emme Perez, a receptionist at Main Probation who had two little babies from two different men. He'd loved her secretly for a long time, with her thin little legs and her kind of attitude. There was Marjorie in his father's campaign office, who had a limp from something she'd had as a kid. There was another black girl named Namba Gates he met at college who seemed to like him, too. Nile thought she was waiting for him to ask her out, and he almost did it, until he realized he couldn't bear to. When he was a freshman in high school, there was a girl in geometry, Nancy Franz, chubby really, but kind of sweet on him, she used to bump him in the hallways and stuff, steal his books; it was fifteen years later and he still thought of her sometimes. There were so many.

    Bug was the best. She was so sweet. That was just the word for her was sweet. And shy. She got so she could barely stand to let those huge eyes of hers get near yours, that had to be why they called her Bug, those eyes. It drove Nile crazy when she did that, like she wasn't even fifteen but seven.

    'Do you suppose you'd say you were my girl?' he asked this morning, when they were doing the package.

    'Not to none of them, I wouldn't. No how.'

    'Would you say it to me?'

    And she got that look. She batted him on the arm. 'You psychin,' she said.

    'No, I'm not. I think you 're my girl, man. That's what I think.'

    'Well, you gone think what you think, then. Ain you? Ain gone matter none what I say.' And she skirted away from him, the way she did usually. Not in person. But like her spirit. It was like a ghost. Something you couldn't catch. A part of her was shy. Or hidden. Or something. He didn't have the words. He was inside Department
2
now and he sighed aloud thinking of her.

    'What's got you down, men?' asked Runculez, the guard at the desk.

    'I'm not down,' said Nile. 'I'm up. I'm happy.' He lifted his arms to show he was free. Then he smiled stupidly. 'Henry Downs,' he said, and the guard shouted. 'Downs!' Two tiers up you could hear them shouting 'Downs!'

    'You got the Henry Downs,' said Runculez. They both laughed so that it actually seemed funny.

    'Interview room,' said Nile.

    'Got some lawyers in there, men. How bout the cafeteria? We don' start in with lunch till e-leben.'

    'Got to have an interview room, man. Bureau regs. Got to read the rules of the road in a one-on-one interview room.' Ordell had told him to say that. And he told Core that was strictly crazy. Who'd believe that? Who'd believe there was a rule so dumb? 'Shit,' said Ordell in reply. 'Where you been?'

    The Mexican guard shook his head, but he was smiling. They all liked Nile. He was easy. Runculez spoke to another uniform a few feet away.

    'Go tell that PD down there we got to hab that room, men. Tell her go by the cafeteria.'

    The PD came out with her briefcase in a minute. The guard went to explain, but she was cool. She was done anyway.

    The interview room was a little cinder-block square with a folding table and those old-fashioned plastic bucket chairs. Graffitied gang signs on one of them had been scoured off with steel wool, leaving a spot where most of the color was gone from the plastic. A blast of overhead fluorescence interrupted the usual jailhouse gloom and leaked into the hall through a narrow plate-glass panel in the door meant to allow observation by patrolling guards.

    Bolt arrived in cuffs and leg irons, accompanied by two solemn correctional officers. Here in the jail, half the guards had something going with one gang or another and they'd kid around a lot, especially with a Top Rank Saint like Bolt, downtalk him or make jokes about the weather. But Bolt presented himself as above that. Hard case. In seg. There was a chain around his belt that attached the manacles and ankle irons. As the correctional officers closed the door, Bolt took a seat. Nile immediately wandered to the near corner, where he could not be seen from the viewing panel, and began speaking.

    'Now I gotta give you this pre-probationary briefing thing, Henry, okay? I want you to understand the rules of the road, once you get out of here. You've done eighteen months here, DOC, jail time. You have another year's probation. Okay?'

    Sly Bolt was a cousin of Hardcore's. He wore a beard and he was tremendous across the shoulders and belly. Somewhere, Nile had heard he had played good b-ball in school, but it was hard to believe looking at him now. He had the mass of a boulder and an ill-mannered glower.

    'Now, I know we've gone over this three times already, but you sign the form today. That's a contract, man, me and you. You keep this contract, you 're on the street. You break it, you 're not just back here, you 're at the Yard in a blink, okay? Are you listening, Henry?'

    As Nile spoke, he'd opened his belt. He stuck his hand under the elastic of his briefs and reached behind him and tore the line of tape off. He had shaved his ass. Bug had done it actually, one morning about three weeks ago. God, they both thought that was funny. Fun, he thought and reached back for the package. It was a rubber, tied off at the end, so it was about four inches long. Core made jokes about white guys. Nile just reached back to the crack in his butt and drew the condom out and held it close to himself as he approached Bolt and dropped it on the table.

    'Now I'm going through this one by one. Okay? No guns. I don't care what you call it. "Gat." ' 'Strap.'' ' 'T-9. "Any firearm, you 're back inside.'

    In a single motion, Bolt had the rubber in his lap, beneath the table, the chain that ran from his cuffs barely clinking on the table top. Nile kept talking. Once he had his trousers hitched, he stood with his back against the glass panel in the door. No leaving the state without court approval, he said. No felonies or misdemeanors. Bolt would go back in, even for DUI.

    'And no gang association,' Nile said. ‘I know they 're your homies. But you see them, you better go the other way. I catch you out there with those guys, then it's back inside. No way around it. If you're straight, I'm straight. You understand?'

    Beneath the table, Bolt pumped his hands around the condom like it was a bat handle, gradually thinning and extending it. Then he suddenly reared his head back, lifted his chained hands, and dropped the rubber straight down his throat. Gone. Like stories June told about college dudes eating goldfish. Bolt, rarely happy, smiled as Nile spoke.

    'You understand me, Henry?' Nile asked again. 'I don't want any b.s. about you didn 't hear this part or that part. This is serious shit I'm talking here.'

    'Mmm-hmm,' said Bolt, both hands on his stomach. His eyes were closed. He was concentrating to make sure he kept it down. If that balloon -that's what Ordell called the rubbers, the balloons - if that balloon broke in Bolt's gut, full of straight stuff, pure white, they couldn 't get him to emergency fast enough. He'd be dead. He wouldn't call for a doctor either. Bolt was Top Rank, bar none for his. He'd just smile. They all laughed about it. 'Fuck man, that'd be motherfuckin kickin, man. That'd be a rush. Whoo-ee.'

    Whooee, thought Nile. From inside his jumpsuit, Bolt took a wad of bills, loot he 'd collected in here for the dope. Nile couldn't believe there was cash in here, but anything small enough to pass between hands - pills, razor blades, currency - made its way inside if it was useful. On a chair, there was a blue plastic bag, the delivery sleeve from a local paper one of the guards must have been reading. Nile put the bills in there and just stuffed all of it down his trousers. No one searched him on the way out.