anyone like that? She glowed.” He smiled and closed his eyes. “She was one of those people. You just liked her. And she was the only one who cared about me.”
“You feel guilty?”
“I was driving. I can’t remember now, but I know what I was like then. Looking at her and not the road? I can’t remember, and I don’t want to anymore. Anyway, I can imagine what it was like for him. If she was my family? And then to lose her like that? I was Stan Hicks I would have done the same.” His eyes clouded over. “Worse.”
“You got hit by a drunk driver, Ray. You can’t think she’d have wanted you to go to jail.”
“No, she’d have hated that.”
“How did you make it? With broken arms?”
“Harlan Maximuck.” Nelson shook his head, not getting it. Ray said, “Harlan had a younger brother died in prison in Maine.” He conjured Harlan then, tall and lopsided, walking with a hitched step, a staccato lope from where a statie had tagged him with shotgun pellets in the thighs when he and an even crazier friend had robbed a pawnshop and killed two people. Broad across the chest and wild brown hair that he’d stab at with oddly delicate hands, trying to keep it out of his eyes.
“So he, what? Adopted you?”
Ray pursed his lips. “Guys like you? Like anyone I guess hasn’t been sent up. You see Harlan as a scumbag. As, I don’t know. Evil, I guess.”
“And you think, what? He was misunderstood?”
“No. No.” Ray looked at the books on the shelves and tried to stretch for the words. “He kept me alive. He didn’t have to. He didn’t take anything off me. Except what he took off everybody.” Ray smiled at a memory. “He’d be talking to you and, like, going through your pockets. Looking for cigarettes, what ever. I even saw him start to do it to a CO once.” Nelson picked up the bottle again and offered it to Ray, who waved him off. “But he was crazy. I mean he was crazy. I saw him, well… One time this guy flicked cigarette ash in his oatmeal? Harlan shanked him with a fucking pork chop bone.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. So it’s not like I don’t know who he is. Would he rat me out if that was in his best interest? Yes. Would he fuck me over in a deal? Yes, if by some tragic fucking wheel of fortune miscalculation he ever gets out again.” Ray leaned in. “But he also did this.
He’s also this.” Made a circle in the air to include himself, the body saved. “Guys like Harlan? And Manny? Me, too? We’re more and we’re less than you think. Worse and better. And the thing is, all you people are, too.”
“So what does a cop do about that?”
Ray smiled wide. “Lock us up. What the hell else can you do? But maybe know, too. You lock up the good and the bad and sometimes both in the same person.”
Nelson squinted, not entirely convinced. “Maybe.”
“You think a person is defined by the worst thing he ever did? The most desperate, the most terrible day in his life?” He got a glimpse of himself in the farm house in Ottsville, the smoke hanging in the air, the milk and blood pooled on the floor and his head on fire.
“That’s how the law sees it.”
“What about Stan Hicks? He probably locked up a lot of guys who broke the law, bad guys who hurt people. You’re willing to send him away, too?”
“It’s the law, Ray. Without the law, what do we have?”
Ray lifted his shoulders. “I don’t know. Just a lot of fucked- up people trying to get through a day.”
ADRIENNE GRAY STAGGEREd home at two o’clock on a Saturday morning, and Ray was sitting on her steps in a bright cone of light. She started when she saw him and stepped back, holding her keys out. Her eyes were wide but red and bleary.
“Adrienne.”
“Is that you, Ray?”
“Yes, it’s me.” She put a hand on her heart.
“Jesus Christ. You scared the crap out of me.”
“Sorry.” He thumped the cold stair next to him. “Come sit and talk to me.”
She lifted her shoulders, patted her arms. “It’s cold out, hon. Can’t we talk tomorrow? I’ll come by the store.”
“No. Come here.” She made a gesture of giving up with her spread arms and slowly navigated the step and parked herself on the step below him, holding her arms in her thin coat. Ray took off his parka and put it over her shoulders, and she smiled at him and pulled the sleeves together.
They had started talking, Ray finding her coming out of Kelly’s or Chambers and walking her home. Trying to pull her into the store instead of letting her go back up the hill to the bars. Bringing her books she didn’t read.
“Adrienne.”
“What can I do for you, hon? You lonely?”
“No. Adrienne, you need help.”
She stood up slowly and turned to look down at him. “And you’re going to help me?”
“I’ll do what I can.” He lifted a shoulder, not sure how this should go.
In the cold light he saw her face close up, a subtle shift in her muscles, the way a closed hand becomes a fist. “Who the fuck are you?”
“Nobody. But you need a friend.”
“I got all the fucking friends I need. The bars are full of them.” She shucked the coat and threw it down at his feet.
“I don’t think those are your friends, Adrienne.”
“What the hell do you know about it? What the hell do you want from me anyway?”
He jammed up, not ready for her to be so amped up, ready to fight. “Don’t you want to get right? Get clean?”
“So I can be what, like you? Your life’s a picnic and I’m invited?”
“No, man. I don’t know.”
“You don’t know is right.” She stalked up the steps, her small, hard shins banging his bad leg. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. You don’t know me.”
“Adrienne.”
She took a couple of steps back down toward him, and he retreated, almost losing the rail.
“I lost my father. One day he’s a lawyer and he’s got money and respect and he takes care of me and the next day he’s dead, and his name gets dragged through the mud, and now he’s a shit-bag who stole money, and how do I even know what’s true? Everyone knows but me. Everyone knows he’s a shitbag. And me? I’m the shitbag’s daughter. You going to make that go away? Are you?”
“No.”
“And how do you even know my name? Where did you come from?”
“I’m nobody. I just thought…”
“Yeah, you just thought.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Go home, Ray.”
“Adrienne. Goddammit.” “Go home.”
TWO O’CLOCK IN the morning and Ray’s cell rang at the apartment on Mary Street. He looked at the number and didn’t recognize it.
He whispered, “Hello?” Michelle sat up, widening her eyes to clear the sleep, her hair rucked to one side from sleeping on it. He kissed her and winked while he listened. Then his face changed and he started nodding.
HE HADN’T BEEN inside Manny’s in almost a year. It was a narrow apartment fronting 611, quiet now at three in the morning. He looked right and left moving through the dark parking lot, the careful habits of his old life slow to desert him.
Sherry met him at the door, small and pale under unwashed black hair, speed- rapping about how she couldn’t get him up and he was just so lazy and she thought about an ambulance but who was paying for that? He put her in a chair in front of the tele vi -sion, noticing the scattered potato chip wrappers, the empty beer cans on
