بخش 02 - فصل 03

3

After not even one hundred hours as a free man (well, semi-free), Morris came back to the old apartment building where he now lived to find his PO sitting on the stoop and smoking a cigarette. The graffiti-decorated cement-and-breezeblock pile, called Bugshit Manor by the people who lived there, was a state-subsidized fish tank stocked with recovering druggies, alcoholics, and parolees like himself. Morris had seen his PO just that noon, and been sent on his way after a few routine questions and a Seeya next week. This was not next week, this was not even the next day, but here he was.

Ellis McFarland was a large black gentleman with a vast sloping gut and a shining bald head. Tonight he was dressed in an acre of bluejeans and a Harley-Davidson tee-shirt, size XXL. Beside him was a battered old knapsack. ‘Yo, Morrie,’ he said, and patted the cement next to one humongous haunch. ‘Take a pew.’

‘Hello, Mr McFarland.’

Morris sat, heart beating so hard it was painful. Please just a Doubtful Behavior, he thought, even though he couldn’t think what he’d done that was doubtful. Please don’t send me back, not when I’m so close.

‘Where you been, homie? You finish work at four. It’s now after six.’

‘I … I stopped and had a sandwich. I got it at the Happy Cup. I couldn’t believe the Cup was still there, but it is.’ Babbling. Not able to stop himself, even though he knew babbling was what people did when they were high on something.

‘Took you two hours to eat a sandwich? Fucker must have been three feet long.’

‘No, it was just regular. Ham and cheese. I ate it on one of the benches in Government Square, and fed some of the crusts to the pigeons. I used to do that with a friend of mine, back in the day. And I just … you know, lost track of the time.’

All perfectly true, but how lame it sounded!

‘Enjoying the air,’ McFarland suggested. ‘Digging the freedom. That about the size of it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, you know what? I think we ought to go upstairs and then I think you ought to drop a urine. Make sure you haven’t been digging the wrong kind of freedom.’ He patted the knapsack. ‘Got my little kit right here. If the pee don’t turn blue, I’ll get out of your hair and let you get on with your evening. You don’t have any objection to that plan, do you?’

‘No.’ Morris was almost giddy with relief.

‘And I’ll watch while you make wee-wee in the little plastic cup. Any objection to that?’

‘No.’ Morris had spent over thirty-five years pissing in front of other people. He was used to it. ‘No, that’s fine, Mr McFarland.’

McFarland flipped his cigarette into the gutter, grabbed his knapsack, and stood up. ‘In that case, I believe we’ll forgo the test.’

Morris gaped.

McFarland smiled. ‘You’re okay, Morrie. For now, at least. So what do you say?’

For a moment Morris couldn’t think what he should say. Then it came to him. ‘Thank you, Mr McFarland.’

McFarland ruffled the hair of his charge, a man twenty years older than himself, and said, ‘Good boy. Seeya next week.’

Later, in his room, Morris replayed that indulgent, patronizing good boy over and over, looking at the few cheap furnishings and the few books he was allowed to bring with him out of purgatory, listening to the animal-house yells and gawps and thumps of his fellow housemates. He wondered if McFarland had any idea how much Morris hated him, and supposed McFarland did.

Good boy. I’ll be sixty soon, but I’m Ellis McFarland’s good boy.

He lay on his bed for awhile, then got up and paced, thinking of the rest of the advice Duck had given him: If you get the idea to do something that might get you marked up on Doubtful Behavior, wait until after your PO makes a surprise visit. Then you prob’ly be all right.

Morris came to a decision and yanked his jeans jacket on. He rode down to the lobby in the piss-smelling elevator, walked two blocks to the nearest bus stop, and waited for one with NORTHFIELD in the destination window. His heart was beating double-time again, and he couldn’t help imagining Mr McFarland somewhere near. McFarland thinking, Ah, now that I’ve lulled him, I’ll double back. See what that bad boy’s really up to. Unlikely, of course; McFarland was probably home by now, eating dinner with his wife and three kids as humongous as he was. Still, Morris couldn’t help imagining it.

And if he should double back and ask where I went? I’d tell him I wanted to look at my old house, that’s all. No taverns or titty bars in that neighborhood, just a couple of convenience stores, a few hundred houses built after the Korean War, and a bunch of streets named after trees. Nothing but over-the-hill suburbia in that part of Northfield. Plus one block-sized patch of overgrown land caught in an endless, Dickensian lawsuit.

He got off the bus on Garner Street, near the library where he had spent so many hours as a kid. The libe had been his safe haven, because big kids who might want to beat you up avoided it like Superman avoids kryptonite. He walked nine blocks to Sycamore, then actually did idle past his old house. It still looked pretty rundown, all the houses in this part of town did, but the lawn had been mowed and the paint looked fairly new. He looked at the garage where he had stowed the Biscayne thirty-six years ago, away from Mrs Muller’s prying eyes. He remembered lining the secondhand trunk with plastic so the notebooks wouldn’t get damp. A very good idea, considering how long they’d had to stay in there.

Lights were on inside Number 23; the people who lived here – their name was Saubers, according to computer research he’d done in the prison library – were home. He looked at the upstairs window on the right, the one overlooking the driveway, and wondered who was in his old room. A kid, most likely, and in degenerate times like these, one probably a lot more interested in playing games on his phone than reading books.

Morris moved on, turning the corner onto Elm Street, then walking up to Birch. When he got to the Birch Street Rec (closed for two years now due to budget cuts, a thing he also knew from his computer research), he glanced around, saw the sidewalks were deserted on both sides, and hurried up the Rec’s brick flank. Once behind it, he broke into a shambling jog, crossing the outside basketball courts – rundown but still used, by the look – and the weedy, overgrown baseball field.

The moon was out, almost full and bright enough to cast his shadow beside him. Ahead of him now was an untidy tangle of bushes and runty trees, their branches entwined and fighting for space. Where was the path? He thought he was in the right location, but he wasn’t seeing it. He began to course back and forth where the baseball field’s right field had been, like a dog trying to catch an elusive scent. His heart was up to full speed again, his mouth dry and coppery. Revisiting the old neighborhood was one thing, but being here, behind the abandoned Rec, was another. This was Doubtful Behavior for sure.

He was about to give up when he saw a potato chip bag fluttering from a bush. He swept the bush aside and bingo, there was the path, although it was just a ghost of its former self. Morris supposed that made sense. Some kids probably still used it, but the number would have dropped after the Rec closed. That was a good thing. Although, he reminded himself, for most of the years he’d been in Waynesville, the Rec would have been open. Plenty of foot traffic passing near his buried trunk.

He made his way up the path, moving slowly, stopping completely each time the moon dove behind a cloud and moving on again when it came back out. After five minutes, he heard the soft chuckle of the stream. So that was still there, too.

Morris stepped out on the bank. The stream was open to the sky, and with the moon now directly overhead, the water shone like black silk. He had no problem picking out the tree on the other bank, the one he had buried the trunk under. The tree had both grown and tilted toward the stream. He could see a couple of gnarled roots poking out below it and then diving back into the earth, but otherwise it all looked the same.

Morris crossed the stream in the old way, going from stone to stone and hardly getting his shoes wet. He looked around once – he knew he was alone, if there had been anyone else in the area he would have heard them, but the old Prison Peek was second nature – and then knelt beneath the tree. He could hear his breath rasping harshly in his throat as he tore at weeds with one hand and held onto a root for balance with the other.

He cleared a small circular patch and then began digging, tossing aside pebbles and small stones. He was in almost halfway to the elbow when his fingertips touched something hard and smooth. He rested his burning forehead against a gnarled elbow of protruding root and closed his eyes.

Still here.

His trunk was still here.

Thank you, God.

It was enough, at least for the time being. The best he could manage, and ah God, such a relief. He scooped the dirt back into the hole and scattered it with last fall’s dead leaves from the bank of the stream. Soon the weeds would be back – weeds grew fast, especially in warm weather – and that would complete the job.

Once upon a freer time, he would have continued up the path to Sycamore Street, because the bus stop was closer when you went that way, but not now, because the backyard where the path came out belonged to the Saubers family. If any of them saw him there and called 911, he’d likely be back in Waynesville tomorrow, probably with another five years tacked onto his original sentence, just for good luck.

He doubled back to Birch Street instead, confirmed the sidewalks were still empty, and walked to the bus stop on Garner Street. His legs were tired and the hand he’d been digging with was scraped and sore, but he felt a hundred pounds lighter. Still there! He had been sure it would be, but confirmation was so sweet.

Back at Bugshit Manor, he washed the dirt from his hands, undressed, and lay down. The place was noisier than ever, but not as noisy as D Wing at Waynesville, especially on nights like tonight, with the moon big in the sky. Morris drifted toward sleep almost at once.

Now that the trunk was confirmed, he had to be careful: that was his final thought.

More careful than ever.