The Terror of Living (7 page)

    Several of the men had come from other prisons and they shared stories about what they'd seen. Smuggling anal rock. Tattoo guns made from fan motors. Violence. From the comfort of his bed it had all seemed very safe, almost like entertainment. But when the men showed him their scars, it became real again. "Five inches," one man said, pointing to the sliver above his abdomen. "Just between the lung and the small intestine." The mark was only a half inch in length, but five inches straight in.

    The kid placed his head in his hands and tried to breathe. He stared at the holding-cell floor, gray concrete with flecks of black. He toed one of the flecks and felt his shoe stick. Gum: he hadn't had a piece of that in years. Only eight hours before, he'd been in the mountains. He'd been somewhere that was the opposite of what he'd known. All he could hope for now was that they'd go easy on him. He had been to prison, but for manslaughter. To them, this lifestyle-everything that had led him to this point-would certainly seem to be an accident. One gigantic fluke. He could live with that. He'd lived with it already.

    He looked around the cell again. A man in the far corner was staring at him. The kid looked away. He rubbed his hands together and drew his shoulders up. The man walked over and sat down next to him. "How much do you weigh?" the man said.

    The kid looked at him, a shaved pink head, bald at the top where no hair grew, and a broad, punched-in nose that hung slightly askew. The kid looked away. "Nearly three bills. I can bench a quarter-pounder on a good day."

    "That's a lie."

    "I've been hearing that a lot lately," the kid said.

    "How'd you get in here?"

    "Cookie jars."

    "That's about right," the man said. "That's always about right."

    The kid felt the man move on the bench and he turned to look the man over. He was leaning away from him on the bench, judging the kid.

    "I'd say you were about a buck forty, maybe a little more."

    "Is this your thing?" the kid said. "You size up other men in your spare time?"

    "Among other things."

    "Why don't you take your skills back to the other side of the cell."

    "No reason to be rude, kid. You'd think you'd have learned already to respect your elders."

    "Fuck off."

    "I thought you'd have better manners for a kid from Monroe."

    "Where'd you hear that?" the kid said. He began to sit up and the man bent low and took his legs out from under him. The kid went down hard and the sound he heard was his jaw coming together against the floor. He tasted blood. The man was on top of him. The kid tried to turn over but felt his arm being pulled behind him. He started to yell out for the guard, but his face slammed into the concrete again. A tooth came loose. He could feel more blood.

    "I have other skills," the man said, "but they say they're not useful skills. I like to think differently." The kid heard a muffled pop and felt the pain coming from his arm. He tried to yell again, but the man bounced his head on the concrete. None of the other men moved. He was bleeding from the mouth and nose and he could feel the cement growing slippery and warm. He tried to turn over and look up at the man.

    "There you go, kid, there you go. Just a little cooperation." The man bent down and snapped the kid's neck on a quick swivel.

    NORA FIXED A BED FOR EDDIE ON THE COUCH AND went upstairs. She ran the shower for a while and stood in the bathroom with the steam collecting on the mirror. After a minute or two she tested the water, adjusted the knobs, and took off her shirt, then her pants. She wiped a hand across the mirror and looked at the reflection there, considering herself. Fifty years old, skin beginning to go with gravity, silver in her hair now. The steam filled the pocket in and she brushed her teeth. Afterward, she ran the tip of her tongue along her gums. She turned and stepped into the shower.

    Steam clouded the shower glass like breath on a windowpane. The water ran down her skin, the heat rose from the basin of the shower.

    When she'd first met Hunt, she hadn't been scared. She knew about what he did for a living, had heard he'd been to prison. He drank too much, she could see that. Everyone could. She took him home that first night and he woke up shivering the next morning. He woke up like that many mornings, shaking, his mouth dry, asking for another drink, and little by little she brought him back from that place. She could see he felt that he'd never measured up, that everything he touched somehow crumbled. He told her one morning that he'd never set out to be the man he was, it had just happened. One day he was just a kid, and then the next he was what she saw before her. He never set out to be an alcoholic, a murderer, an ex-convict. But he was all of those things, and even if he could get out from under them, he would still be that man. He could never change that.

    She nursed him, watched over him, and somewhere along the way he got clean. Other men had taken her to nice dinners at expensive restaurants, but Hunt had been different; bad or good, she knew him for who he was. He didn't need to impress her or feed her lies, he didn't need to sell her. For a month she cared for him, and as a thank-you he took her on a picnic to the state park, a basket between them, jams and deli meats, the smell of fresh bread in the truck as they drove.

    It rained that day, which was somehow more appropriate, the two of them parked near the grass, the spot they'd picked just a hundred yards away beneath a walnut tree. Rain falling from the sky, a carton of orange juice taken from the picnic basket and poured into plastic cups on the bench seat of the truck. Heavy rain striking the windshield. She had realized then that there was a little part of her that feared him, that wanted to understand that fear, why she felt the way she did. Rain pattering on the metal roof of the truck, their own breath on the windows like the steam of a shower on a mirror. It was what came foremost to her mind when she thought of their history together, this dangerous man, a man who'd murdered, who'd been to prison, turned gentle, turned into something else, someone only she could see.

    When she got out of the shower, Hunt was waiting for her on the bed. He still hadn't taken off his boots, and he sat there on the edge of the bed with his arms at his sides and his boots on the floor. "What time will you wake up?" she asked.

    "Eight at the latest. I need to pull the boat out and give it fuel."

    "That's the plan?" she said.

    "That's the plan."

    She walked around the bed and sat down opposite him. She didn't turn to look at him, but instead settled for feeling the way the bed gave with him sitting there. "You ever think things could have been different if we had kids?"

    "We have the horses, don't we?"

    "I'm asking a serious question, Phil"

    Hunt looked out the window, toward the tops of the birch trees. "I can't say anything about that."

    "Yes, you can," she said. "You just won't."

    "Nora-"

    "Don't start," she said. "We both know it was always me and it doesn't make a difference these days anyway. Even if I could, it would be too late now."

    Hunt didn't say anything. He moved to touch her back but then thought better of it and didn't. She'd thought-only that one time, sitting in the car outside their house with the engine on and the lights playing out along the gravel drive-of a life without him, thinking about what it would be like if she left, if she just left him behind. She thought about it now; she thought about it because she could see some need in him to protect her from the trouble he'd gotten himself into. She could see it, like some distant dust storm, gathering black and full along the horizon. She thought about how it would be, waking in a bed without him, sitting at a table, going day to day alone, knowing the whole while that he was out there doing the same.

    "Do you think it's true," Nora said, "what they say about having kids: it makes you selfless?"

    "I think it makes you something," Hunt said. "I don't know what, though."

    "Are you calling us selfish?"

    "No, but I think you're calling us something."

    "Maybe I am, and maybe we are."

    "I can't do anything about that," Hunt said. "It is and we are, and here we are right now with all of it behind us."

    "You think it was coming all this while."

    "I don't want to think of it like that. I just don't. It's been a gift to have a life like ours, and I wouldn't have changed it one bit."

    "I want you to promise."

    "What do you want me to promise?"

    "If it all goes wrong tomorrow, I want you to promise you won't keep going. You won't. You'll just turn around and come right back here. Do you understand?"

    "I don't go through with it, there is no tomorrow, there is no here.'

    Nora began to cry. Hunt stayed where he was, motionless, listening to his wife. "When I saw you this morning, I said, Maybe it's gone already, maybe it's been gone a long time already. I don't like feeling like that, Phil. I don't like it at all. I want you to promise me now."

    "I'm fifty-four years old. It's too late for promises."

    "That's not an answer," Nora said. "That's not any kind of answer. If you need to run, you will. Now, you promise me one way or another."

    THIS IS SO EXCITING," SHERI SAID. SHE WAS STANDING at the window looking down on the freeway and the crosscut of the city streets. They were on the twenty-second floor of the Sheraton. Below, she could see the yellow lights from a tow truck swing and touch the cement of a nearby overpass. "You think they'll make you an agent or something?"

    "I don't think so," Drake answered. He had risen from the bed and come over to the window to look out on the city. He wore a pair of his college basketball shorts and a thin white T. His short brown hair was beginning to go at an early age, and he reached up unconsciously to tousle it and bring it down across his brow. Sheri had her hand up on the window. She stood on her tiptoes looking down. "Come away from the window," Drake said. "You make me nervous."

    "What, this?" She leaned into the window and put her other hand on the glass.

    "Stop playing."

    "Don't you live dangerously? Isn't that how you got here?"

    "I'd rather be back home where I know what I'm doing."

    "Back home with your two hundred and forty-three citizens."

    He could see she was enjoying this. "Yes, back home where we belong."

    "Live it up. Treat it like a vacation."

    "It's not a vacation. It's more like protective services."

    "I don't see a guard on the door."

    "I'm your guard." He picked her up and threw her on the bed. She laughed and rolled off the other side and was back up with her hands held out in front of her, waiting for his next move.

    "A little wrestling?" she said, cocking her eyebrow at him.

    He threw a pillow at her.

    "Play fair," she said.

    He walked over and pulled her sweats to her knees.

    "Damn it, Bobby," she said, smiling. "I said fair, not perverted." She pulled her pants back up.

    "You asked for it."

    They lay down on the bed and ordered room service. After they had finished their meal, Drake went to stand at the window. The tow truck was still there, the lights going. Sheri called from the bed to ask him what he was looking at. "Just this accident down here."

    "How many cars?"

    "Looks to be about three."

    "That's a bad one."

    "It's certainly not a good one."

    "I feel bad for people like that."

    "People like what?"

    "People who get stranded. I hate passing them on the road."

    "Why don't you pick them up, then?"

    "I think I would if I saw them out there alone."

    "No, you wouldn't," he said.

    "Well, probably not, but I'd still feel bad for them."

    "I always think maybe they had it coming."

    "That's a terrible thing to say."

    Drake believed wayward souls were responsible for their own salvation. He didn't have any other way of thinking about it, nor did he want to. The scars ran deep, and he thought that if healing was going to come, it would come from within and grow outward. He didn't say any of this to his wife, though he'd been thinking about it. Finally, compromising with a simple statement of the facts, he said, "Bad drivers cause accidents," as if he'd been born to believe it.

    "Listen to you," she said. "Any number of things cause accidents."

    "Well, bad drivers cause most of them."

    "Not very compassionate, are you?"

    "It's how I rationalize it," Drake said. "If I went around saying all these people are good, I think it would break my heart. It would just tear it all to pieces."