Chris did not comment. A silence settled between them.
“Your mother said you called her last week.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m saying, she was pleasantly surprised. Normally you don’t call us at home.”
“They only give me ten minutes a week on the phone. Before, I was using that time to call my friends.”
“Why’d you change up?”
“My friends stopped taking my calls.”
“Jason, too?”
“I haven’t spoke to Country in a long time.”
“What about your girlfriend?”
Chris shrugged and shook his head. But Flynn could see that he was wounded.
“You’ll make new friends,” said Flynn.
“I got friends in here.”
“That’s good, Chris. But I’m saying, when you get out, it’ll be a new start. New friends, everything.”
Chris looked away.
Flynn breathed out slowly and said, “Mom told me you’re doing well in school.”
“I’m gonna graduate. A real high school degree, not some GED.”
“Excellent. With a degree in hand you could test into a community college.”
“That’s not gonna happen.”
“What, then? What will you do?”
“Work, I guess. I don’t know.”
Flynn used one hand to crack the knuckles of the other.
“Don’t get frustrated, Dad.”
“I just don’t want you to make that kind of crucial decision without thinking about it.”
“I don’t want to go to college. You didn’t go, and you turned out all right.”
“ Don’t… don’t compare yourself to me. Back in my day, with only a high school degree, you could still make something of yourself. But now there are two distinct societies, Chris, plainly separated. The educated and the uneducated. You don’t just go to college to learn. You go to mingle and forge a permanent network with people who all move up the chain together. Don’t go to college and there’s going to be a ceiling on your earnings. The pool will be limited on who you date and marry. Not only will you probably live in a lower-income neighborhood, but so will your children, and their peers will be lower income, too. Don’t you see how it works? There are people who strive to make it to the upper level of society and then there are the other people who stay down below.”
“It was you who was always cracking on the lawyers and doctors in our neighborhood. Saying how they came from privilege and money, and how they had a leg up. Being all sarcastic about how they never got their hands dirty or broke a sweat. Like how you sweated every day.”
“Chris-”
“You don’t want me to be like you?”
“You’re not listening to me.”
“I guess I’m just one of those other people. The ones who stay down below.”
“God damn it, Chris.”
“Anyway. All this talk about the future? It doesn’t mean nothin to me. I mean, I’m in here. This is what I got to deal with now.” Chris swept his arm around the room as if he were showing his father something grand. He pushed his chair back and stood away from the table. “Thanks for coming by. Tell Mom I was askin about her, hear?”
Flynn put his hand on his son’s forearm and held him a bit too hard. He knew that he should tell Chris he loved him and that now was the time. He tried to say the words but he could not.
“Sir?” said the guard on duty. “There’s no physical contact allowed.”
Chris pulled his arm free. He stared at his father for a moment, then made a chin motion to the guard, who let him out the door of the visitation room. Flynn watched his son walk back into jail.
The boys were sitting around in the common room on a cold night in early spring, cracking on one another, talking random shit, and killing time until lights-out. None of them were anxious to go to their cells, where a few would study, fewer would read books for pleasure, many others would masturbate, and most would simply go to sleep as their bodies wound down and the shield they felt they had to carry fell away. Though cell time was the one truly quiet, introspective time of their day, it was also the loneliest, and the most difficult to face.
Ali Carter and Chris Flynn were seated on the couch, and Ben Braswell was in the fake-leather chair with the rivets in the arms. Luther Moore and Lonnie Wilson were playing Ping-Pong. Lattimer, the old graybeard guard they called Shawshank, was in a hard-back chair too small for him. The boys liked him well enough for what he was, but they would not defer to him and give up a seat more suited to his age, size, and authority.
They could hear Lawrence Newhouse in the media room, arguing with a boy, trying to get time on the computer, an old, slow machine with a blinking cursor that sat next to a dot matrix printer. Lawrence’s tone was becoming more threatening by the sentence, but Lattimer was not moving from his chair.
“You better get in there, Shawshank,” said Luther. “Lawrence sound like he ready to blow.”
“Scott’s in there,” said Lattimer. Scott Stewart, a fellow guard, was built like a Minotaur. “He can handle it.”
“Scott’s swole,” said Ben.
“They need to get Bughouse out this unit,” said Ali. “Put him in Unit Twelve.”
“He ain’t that kind of bad,” said Lattimer. “Lawrence just be talkin, mostly.”
“Either get him out or put me somewhere else,” said Ali. “ ’Cause I cannot stand to be around that fool anymore.”
“Won’t be long till you’re gone anyway, young man,” said Lattimer, trying to make eye contact with Ali. “Stay focused on those books and walk that straight line. You keep doing what you been doing, you’ll be all right.”
“They can put me somewhere else,” said Lonnie Wilson, laying down his paddle, signaling to Luther that their game of table tennis was done. Both of them came to join the group but remained standing, as no one was about to move over and make room for them to sit.
“Where you want to go?” said Ben.
“Unit Six,” said Lonnie, running a hand across the crotch of his khakis. “What you think?”
Lattimer rolled his eyes. Unit 6 was the girls’ building, out in the woods somewhere, out of sight from the boys’ camp. It was on Pine Ridge acreage, surrounded by its own razor wire-topped fence. The conversation was about to go where it usually went this time of night.
“Boy,” said Lonnie, “I would punish the shit out them girls in Unit Six. I would be like a bull in one of them Chinese shops.”
“Don’t be runnin your fingers through their hair, though,” said Luther.
“I know it,” said Lonnie.
“They put razor blades in their braids!” said Luther.
“You don’t know nothin, Luther,” said Ali.
“I know enough not to touch their braids.”
“It’s a lot of gray girls they got out there, too,” said Lonnie.
“White Boy would like it out in Unit Six,” said Luther, and Chris felt warmth in his face.
“Them pale skins are runaways and hos, mostly,” said Lonnie. “But I got love for all the girls. I don’t care what they did to get locked up or what color their skin is. Shoot, I’ll even get with a Mexican. They pink to me, too.”
“What about, like, Asia girls?” said Luther.
“ ’Specially them. I’m all about equal opportunity.”
“If they got to squat to pee, you gonna take the opportunity,” said Luther, and he and Lonnie Wilson smiled and dapped each other up.
“Do they let those girls have dogs out there, Shawshank?” said Ben.
