The rain was hammering down, so anyone who passed by would be concentrating on driving, and Kevin had taken care to park back behind the trees where the pickup wouldn’t be visible from the road. Rain made people uninterested in anything except getting home safely; it also made the ground soft for digging. He stepped out of the truck and was soaked almost immediately by the near-freezing rain, making him gasp for air. Before he even reached into the back for the shovel, the water was dripping off his eyelashes, making it hard to see. He laughed.
Ducking back through the trees, he felt a sudden rush of freedom. Despite everything, he knew when he got home to his empty house, nobody would be there to ask him where he had been. Nobody would demand that he explain why he was soaked to the skin. Linda was a good person, most likely a better person than he would ever be, but Jesus H. Christ could she ask a lot of questions. Every day with her had been like a visit to the parole board. Where? Why? With whom? Now, tell me again?
He slammed the shovel into the soft earth, pleased to see that the ground where the cash had been buried didn’t look disturbed. There had been so much rain and snow in the past few weeks that not even a professional tracker would be able to see that someone had dug a hole here. Which was good, because it was deer hunting season, so most of the people likely to walk past the spot would actually be professional trackers. He was careful not to throw the dirt, laying each shovelful gently beside the hole. After about ten or twelve loads of dirt, he felt the sharp edge of the shovel drive into the trash bag. Damn, he thought, we really didn’t bury it very deep. What if animals had burrowed into it? What if a mudslide… He shrugged. Sometimes you just had to leave things to chance. He threw the shovel down and sat on a rotting log as he pulled open the bag.
Money. The first handful of cash he extracted was a wrapped brick of twenties, and as he looked at it in his lap, he was shocked to feel his eyes welling with tears. It was so unexpected that he put his head in his hands and let the money fall to the forest floor. More tears came, mixing with the freezing rain running out of his hair and down his cheeks. Within seconds, he was sobbing, so mystified by the emotion that he made no effort to stop it.
After a few moments, he became aware that even under the canopy of the trees, rainwater was dripping into the open bag of money, and he leaned over and twisted the top shut. The action allowed him to regain his breath and he looked down at the cash he had dropped on the ground. He was glad that looking at it again didn’t induce another burst of emotion. He picked it up and put it in his pocket. He figured it was about three thousand dollars. He grabbed two more bricks of similar size, tied the bag closed again, and carefully replaced the dirt, making sure to scatter sticks and brush around the tamped earth. Within moments, the driving rain had made the dig marks invisible.
When he got back in the truck, he tossed the money on the seat of the pickup and stared at it. What had that been about? He hadn’t cried since he was a teenager, and a young teenager at that. What was the last thing that had made him cry? He thought back. Frustration, probably. Ever-present frustration.
Then he looked at the money on the seat, so soaked that water was dripping off it and pooling by the vinyl backrest. It was his. That was what had made him cry. He had earned it. Sure, he had stolen it, but he had done it successfully. After dropping out of college, getting kicked off the football team, failing as a husband and a father, and screwing up as a marijuana grower, he had finally, as the prison counselor had advised him, set a goal and achieved it. This dripping money on his passenger seat represented the first damned thing in his whole life that he had done right.
He was turning into a decent businessman too. The dog-walking thing was really taking off.
It was time to reward himself, Kevin decided. He hopped out of the truck, grabbed the shovel, and went back for ten thousand more. He would buy a new truck. A guy who did things right didn’t drive around in a twenty-year-old pickup truck. His life was turning around and he wasn’t going to hide it.
“MY LAWYER IS a con,” Doug said into the telephone, looking through the glass at Linda. “He served five years for attempted murder, so he knows all the COs. He’s totally hooking me up.”
“That’s nice,” said Linda. Since she had arrived for her visit, she had appeared strained, as if fighting off sobs, which was making Doug uneasy. Before Linda, Doug had just had a fifteen-minute conversation with his lawyer, who had, through code, basically implied he could get the guards to bring him pills, weed, or anything he wanted. Rather than a Harvard lawyer, Doug now understood, an inmate needed a lawyer who knew the guards.
His lawyer had studied law while he had been in prison and supposedly turned his life around. (Though not enough to refrain from suggesting that he arrange drug deals for his clients.) Pennsylvania didn’t require lawyers to go to school, a little known fact that inspired Doug to follow in his lawyer’s footsteps. His first week in prison, he had resolved to become a lawyer, then noticed that, in a building where everyone was going to trial, the law books were always checked out. The only remaining skills book he could find was on cooking. He couldn’t escape it. Maybe he would just break down and become a chef. Or a dog walker for Kevin.
Doug had the feeling that Linda really wanted to nag him, but she had figured that if you were talking to someone in an orange jumpsuit, nagging clearly wasn’t necessary. She looked so, well, sad, that it was making him feel bad. Did he look that pathetic? “When I get out, Kevin said I can walk dogs for him,” Doug said, trying to add some cheer to the mood.
“When will that be?”
“My hearing’s on Thursday. My lawyer thinks eighteen months. It was going to be five years but he said if we agree not to talk to anyone about the guard shooting the other guard, then the armored car company wouldn’t push for a stiffer sentence. Man, it’s weird. It’s like that’s all they care about. Not embarrassing themselves. That, and the money. They said I could get out next week if I told them where the money was.”
“But you’re not going to?” Linda’s voice rose in surprise. “Doug, you could be free.”
Doug leaned forward and lowered his voice as he spoke into the phone. “I’m freer in here with money than out there without any. Besides, eighteen months for sixty grand? I figured it out. That’s like three times what even a manager makes at Chicken Buckets.”
Linda laughed, despite herself. Doug liked her smile. He felt the urge to say something romantic like, I miss you, but squelched it. To squelch it further, he asked about Kevin.
“He’s fine. He’s walking dogs. Business is good, I hear. Last I saw him, he had a new truck.”
“He was supposed to wait six months before…” Doug said, then he realized that Linda might not need to know their prerobbery plan and quickly changed the subject. “You guys not getting back together?”
Linda shook her head. The buzzer went off, which Doug had learned was the signal his visit was over. Linda knew what the buzzer meant and looked around the metal- and cinder-block room as if relieved. The atmosphere in there was not inviting. Few people could tolerate more than their fifteen minutes.
“It’s not so bad in here,” Doug said cheerfully, hoping to get another smile. He got a sad one as she said goodbye. She waved as she left slowly, still looking at him, and Doug was afraid she was going to cry.
But it isn’t so bad in here, Doug thought. He wasn’t lying for her sake. He had a CO who could get him better drugs than he’d had on the outside, and he didn’t have to feel stressed about not getting on with his life. You
There was no pressure. That was the beautiful thing. No one expected you to make anything of yourself. A good day in jail was when you didn’t get into a fight. You actually got credit for that. How cool would life be on the outside if, every week that you didn’t get into a fight, a government official came by and complimented you, then gave you a reward? All you had to do was be nice and everyone was happy with you.
With no pressure and with his drug and alcohol counselor frequently praising him for being good-natured, Doug felt he could finally get his life back on track. He didn’t know how yet, but it would come to him. The chopper pilot thing seemed like a stretch, even to the eternally optimistic counselor, but Doug was still thinking about writing a children’s book. He was sure that he could write about a lobster who could stay off drugs and not stab anyone. Prison was the perfect writing environment. Hadn’t there been a famous novelist who wrote from prison? Charles Dickens or Oscar Wilde, one of those English guys? Doug definitely remembered his English teacher in high school mentioning something about that.
Doug went back to his cell and the automatic lock closed behind him. His roommate, Mikey, who was in for “terroristic threats,” was snoring away on his cot. One of the guys in the mess hall had told Doug, in a conspiratorial whisper, that terroristic threats had nothing to do with terrorism. It was most likely a sentence for stalking a girl. It was hard for Doug to imagine Mikey doing illegal things, because he seemed like such a quiet, sleepy guy. Severely overweight and soft-spoken, Mikey liked playing chess and humming to himself. It had been Mikey who had first clued Doug in to the secret of prison-it wasn’t so bad.
Sure, there were no girls, and the black guys listened to shitty rap music all the time, but it was only for eighteen months. He could just hang out, relax, meet people. If there were some women and some Allman Brothers, Doug figured jail would be a pretty cool place.
Maybe after he got out, he’d take his sixty grand and go live somewhere like jail. And get a job as a sous-chef. Or a writer or something.
It was all cool.
POURING ROAD TAR was hot. The tar was hot; the metal machinery that heated it was hot; the tools were hot because they were always in contact with the tar or the machinery. Even the towels you had to have so you could touch the tools became hot a few hours into the shift. Mitch’s hands were covered in burn scars after only a week on the job. He was spending twenty dollars a week on skin lotion, and it wasn’t even summer yet.
Mitch had found a job working road construction in Cleveland. His plan had been to work for anyone who didn’t ask for ID and a Mexican woman at the day-labor service had told him about the road crew. She had mentioned it in passing, figuring that a white guy wouldn’t be interested, and had been surprised when Mitch enthusiastically copied down the number. He had been there a month before anyone even asked him his last name, and when they did, he lied. He got paid cash on Fridays.
As the only guy on the crew who was not Mexican, Mitch found himself learning Spanish fairly quickly. As the only guy who could read and write English, he found himself a foreman after two weeks. An illegal citizen in charge of illegal aliens. The bosses suspected something about him but he showed up on time and worked hard so they didn’t care.
Sweeping the tar smooth on an exit ramp on I-90, Mitch looked around at the brick warehouses on either side of him. The buildings were covered with decades of highway grime, most of the windows broken. Cleveland was dying but it still had some time before it reached the death spiral that had enveloped Wilton. Here there were the usual boarded-up businesses and homeless people and trash strewn streets, but there were echoes of life mixed in. There was a bar scene. There were art galleries. He didn’t go to them but they existed. It was comforting.
The tricky part had been finding a place to live. He didn’t want a roommate, because he had a duffel bag with sixty thousand dollars in it, but he had to find a place that wouldn’t do a background check. Despite his attempts to appear nonthreatening, everyone he talked to eventually asked for ID or mentioned a credit check. Mitch
