Triptych

Everett started going through the rules, listing things they could and could not do. While he was talking, another guard walked behind the prisoners with a flashlight, making each man bend over and hold themselves open for inspection. Another man put on a pair of gloves and stuck his fingers into their mouths to check for contraband or weapons. A third took out a hose and washed them all down, then sprayed powder on them to delouse their bodies.

They were each given a pair of white pants and a white T-shirt. John was given an extra small shirt but his pants were large enough to fit an elephant. He had to hold them up around his waist as he walked, carrying his pillow and his sheets in one hand, the meager toiletries they had been given precariously balanced on the top.

He moved as if he were in a fog, staring straight ahead, trying not to be sick.

“Shelley,” Everett said. His baton was resting on the outside of an open cell door. “In here.”

John walked into the cell. It reeked of urine and shit from the stainless steel toilet in the corner. The sink mounted to the wall had been white at some point in its life, but rust and grime had made it dirty gray. There was a desk on the left, two bunk beds stacked on the right. You could touch the opposite walls just by standing in the middle of the cell and holding both your arms out. A guy who looked to be about twenty-five lay on the top bunk and he turned to look at John, smiling.

“You’re the bottom,” he said.

There were more wolf whistles, but Everett was already moving on, assigning the next cell to the next prisoner.

“Zebra,” the guy said, and John guessed that was his name.

“John.”

“How old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

Zebra smiled. His teeth were black and white, striped like a zebra. “You like it?” he said, pointing to his teeth. “We can do yours that way, too. You want?”

John shook his head. “My mom would kill me.”

Zebra laughed; a shocking sound in the concrete building. “Go on and make your bed, Joh

“Not really,” John said. Not since he was a baby, anyway.

“You’ll be all right in here, Joh

Zebra gave a private chuckle. “I’ll take care of you, boy.”

And he did.

After lights-out, every night like clockwork Zebra was down on the bottom bunk, pressing John’s face into the pillow, raping him so hard that the next day blood came out when he sat on the toilet. Crying did not stop him. Screaming only made him ram harder. By the end of the first week, John could barely stand.

Zebra was a predator. Everybody in the prison from the warden to the guards to the guys who came in to take off the trash knew that. He kept John to himself for that first week, then he started trading him out to the other men for cigarettes and contraband. Three weeks later, John was in the prison hospital, his asshole shredded, his eyes swollen shut from crying.

This was the first of two visits Richard Shelley made to visit his son in prison.

He was led back to the hospital by the guard named Everett, whom John hadn’t seen since his first day in lockup.

“Here he is,” Everett told Richard, stepping back against the wall to give the man some space. “You got ten minutes.”

Richard stood at the foot of John’s bed. He just stared, for a long time not saying anything.

John stared back, feeling relieved and ashamed at the same time. He wanted to reach out to his dad, to tell him he loved him and that he was sorry for all he had done and that Richard was right, John was worthless. He didn’t deserve anything his dad could offer but he wanted it, he needed it so bad that his heart felt like it was on fire.

Richard spoke with some effort. “Are you in pain?”

John could only nod.

“Good,” his father said, sounding as if some justice had been done. “Now you know how Mary Alice felt.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

John didn’t want to think about his first night in prison, but it kept coming back to him like a waking nightmare. Someone walked behind him at work and he would flinch. A loud noise from the street sent his heart into his throat. He would bend over to get the sponge out of the bucket, put some shine on the wheels of a truck or a sedan, and it would flood into his brain.

After Zebra had passed him around, John had spent a full month in the hospital wing at Coastal, learning how to shit again. When he got out, he found that he’d been transferred into the protective ward with all the serious sex offenders. Maybe they had thought Ben Carver would have a field day with John, finish the work that Zebra had started, but the older man had taken one look at the scrawny sixteen-year-old boy and said with great disappointment, “A brunette! I asked for a blonde!”

John didn’t know who was responsible for transferring him into protective custody, but even if he did, John wouldn’t know how to thank him. Sometimes he thought it was Everett, the guard, but then sometimes he would be lying in his bunk at night and let his mind play out this fantasy story where it was his dad who had rescued him. Richard stormed into the warden’s office. Richard wrote an angry letter to his state senator. Richard demanded fair treatment for his son.

John laughed at his foolish boyhood dreams as he slid his card into the time clock, waiting for the loud chu-chunk as he signed himself out of the car wash for the day. The weather had been good for several weeks, and holiday shoppers had been out getting their cars washed. John hadn’t had time to go to Ben’s mother’s house and pick up the car until yesterday afternoon. He had been working on his learner’s permit when Mary Alice had died, but that was a long time ago and he had sweated like a whore in church at the prospect of getting behind the wheel. If he got caught in the car, Martha Lam would throw his ass back in jail. Of course, if he didn’t use the car, he might end up back there anyway.

Over the telephone, Ben’s elderly mother had been open and friendly, “pleased to talk to a friend of Ben’s.” When asked, she assured him that the insurance was paid on the car. Mrs. Carver had further explained to John that her Mr. Propson was taking her to a church social over in Warm Springs on Sunday, but could he please remember to return the car with a full tank of gas. John had agreed to everything, but she had kept him on the phone for another fifteen minutes to tell him about her sciatica. Both sets of John’s grandparents had died while he was in prison, none of them ever bothering to visit. He had listened intently to her woes, making the right noises at the right times until the pedophile from across the hallway had glared at him and demanded to use the phone.

John had found the dark blue Ford Fairlane parked in the carport as promised. The key was tucked into the visor along with the title and insurance card. What mattered to John most at that moment was that it cranked on the first try. He put the car in gear and rolled into the street, his foot stuttering between the gas and the brake as he practiced up and down the one-lane road ru

He could do it, he kept saying, teeth gritted as he drove down 1-20 back toward Atlanta. All he needed to do was make sure he looked like he knew what he was doing. Not too slow, not too fast, confidence high, arm out the window. That’s all the cops ever looked for: somebody who looked guilty. Their little cop radar went up and they could feel indecision coming off you like a pulse.