Triptych

He tucked his hands into his pockets as he walked down Woody’s tree-lined street, trying to convey the image that he was just a normal guy going for a stroll, even though having his hands in his pockets made him uncomfortable; they didn’t allow pockets in prison.

The woman John guessed was the grandmother took the kid to school Monday mornings. She did some shopping after, sometimes had coffee with her friends. She stayed out of the house for at least an hour and that was all John needed.

He took the same route behind the houses, head up, whistling like he didn’t have a care in the world. He trudged through the backyards, keeping a careful eye on the houses, figuring that in a working-class neighborhood like this most people were either at work or too busy to look out their back windows.

The chain-link fence was still broken. John hopped over it, heading straight for the back door as he slipped on a pair of latex gloves he had stolen from the guys in the detail shop. Woody didn’t have a dog, but there was a dog door cut into the bottom panel of the back door. John was too big to fit through, but he reached his arm in, feeling blindly for the lock. His fingers grazed the knob and he twisted the catch.

He stood back up, looking around to make sure he wasn’t being watched, then opened the door. John tensed as he waited for an alarm to go off. He wasn’t an experienced burglar, but he assumed Woody was too arrogant to spend money on an alarm system.

He was a cop, for Chrissakes.

John bypassed the kitchen and went straight to the family room. He went to the desk in the corner, ignoring the big-screen TV, the digital equipment lying around the house that screamed out that Woody made a good living, that he could afford to buy an expensive pair of shoes or a nice meal whenever he wanted. Hell, he could afford a lot of things, couldn’t he? Two identities, to begin with. What else was he up to?

Woody was too smart to leave anything incriminating in the obvious places. His checkbook with the joint account he shared with his wife was right out in the open, their bills stacked neatly in an in-tray. They owed a lot, but they made what to John seemed like a fortune. Thousands of dollars a month in and out, a brand-new car for the wife, expensive school for the kid. It was almost too much to grasp.

In the garage, there was every tool you could imagine, though from what John had observed, Woody spent most of his time holding down the couch. There was a kid who came sometimes to mow the yard, so why Woody needed an enormous riding lawn mower with a freaking cup holder was a mystery. What angered John the most was the pool table in the middle of the garage. The thought of Woody out here with his kid, maybe some neighbors or the guys from work, drinking beers and playing pool made John more livid than anything else he had found.

John went through the drawers of the workbench, careful not to move anything out of place. He found a stack of porn mags under the tray in the toolbox, all the headlines promising “barely legal action” and “cum shots galore.” He flipped through the pages one by one, looking for clues, trying not to stare at the young girls-children, some of them-spread out for the world to see. Maybe something inside of John had been turned off in prison, but all he could think about when he saw their soulless gazes was Joyce, and how insecure and vulnerable she had been at that age. He put the magazines back under the tray, wishing he hadn’t seen them.

Woody’s bedroom was next, a huge master suite with a king-sized bed where the fucker probably made love to his wife every night. The bathroom was enormous, bigger than John’s room back at the hovel. Even the kid’s room was large, a racecar for a bed, toys spilling out of the chest under the window. John felt odd being in the kid’s room. The little bed would be changed for a big one soon. The kid would start growing up, wanting his privacy more. He’d go to school, meet a girl, take her to the prom. It was just too depressing to be in there, so John backed into the hall again.

He returned to the master bedroom, certain he had missed something. He tried to think like his parole officer, Ms. Lam, looking for contraband. He checked under the mattress, felt the pillows for hard lumps. He went through the shoes in the closet and the shirts in the drawer.

Shirts. All designer labels. Soft cottons, some silk. Woody’s underwear was Calvin Klein, his pajamas Nautica.

“Christ,” John whispered, so caught up in hating Woody that he couldn’t breathe. “Think,” he said, like that would make it happen. “Think.”

Two bottles of men’s cologne were on the dresser. John wasn’t interested in the brands, but what had been placed in front of them. A large folding knife. Woody had carried this same knife when they were teenagers. He said it was because he dealt with some badass motherfuckers in his drug dealings, and John had believed him, imagining tense standoffs and risky drug deals as his cousin brandished the sharp, serrated blade.

Woody carried a knife. How had he forgotten that?

“Who are you?”

John spun around, shocked to see the next-door neighbor standing in the doorway to the bedroom. She was wearing a silky white nightgown with a robe. The outfit hung from her child’s body like a wet sack on a pitchfork. Her voice was a little girl’s, high-pitched, almost squeaky.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded, but he could tell she was scared.

“I might ask you the same thing,” he said, palming the knife, trying to call up the authoritative tone adults used when they spoke to kids.

“This isn’t your house.”

“It’s not yours, either,” John pointed out. “You live next door.”

“How do you know that?”

“Woody told me.”

She glanced down at his hands, the latex gloves, the knife. “Who’s Woody?”

The question tripped him up, and she must have sensed his hesitation, because she bolted down the hall.

“Hey!” John called, chasing after her through the living room, the kitchen. “Hold up,” he yelled, but she had already flown through the open door and into the yard.

She chanced a look over her shoulder as she made for the fence. He remembered that he still had Woody’s knife in his hand, realized how that must look to her, and stopped. She hesitated again, but her body was still moving. Moving forward.

He watched her fall in slow motion, her bare foot catching on the broken fence, her head slamming into the ground. John waited. She didn’t get up. He waited some more. She still did not move.

Slowly, he stepped into the backyard, the grass soft under his feet. He remembered how it had felt when he got out of Coastal to walk on grass for the first time in twenty years. His feet were used to solid concrete or red Georgia clay packed hard as brick from thousands of men pacing it every day. The grass in the cemetery had felt so soft, like he was stepping on clouds as he followed his mother’s coffin toward her grave.

Twenty years and he had forgotten what grass felt like. Twenty years of loneliness, of isolation. Twenty years of Emily suffering the bimonthly degradation of visiting her son. Twenty years of Joyce being eaten up inside by the knowledge of what kind of monster her brother was.

Twenty years of “Woody living on the outside, getting a good job, marrying, having a kid, making a life.

John stepped carefully over the fence. He realized he still had Woody’s folding knife in his hand, and he put it on the ground beside him as he knelt by the girl. He had learned how to check a pulse at the prison hospital. She didn’t have one. Even without that evidence, he could see from the way her skull was broken that she had probably died the minute her head had slammed against a large rock on the other side of the fence. Her blood was smeared across the quartz, pieces of long blonde hair sticking into the wet.