and wet clay he got when he played in the backyard with his friends. She wanted to listen to him tell her about his day, the baseball game he had played, the new friend he had made. She wanted her son. She
But he was already gone.
CHAPTER NINE
John hadn’t slept well, which was nothing new for him. In prison, nighttime was always the worst. You heard screams, mostly. Crying. Other things he didn’t like to think about. John had been fifteen when he was arrested, sixteen when he was incarcerated. By the age of thirty-five, he had lived in prison more years than he had slept in his parents’ home.
As noisy as prison was, you got used to it. Being on the outside was what was hard. Car horns, fire engines, radios blasting from all over. The sun was brighter, the smells more intense. Flowers could bring tears to his eyes and food was almost inedible. There was too much flavor in everything, too many choices for him to feel comfortable going into a restaurant and ordering a meal.
Before John was locked up, you didn’t see people jogging in the streets, headphones tucked into their ears, tight spandex shorts clinging to their bodies. Cell phones were in bags like big purses that you carried over your shoulder and only really wealthy people could afford to have them. Rap didn’t exist in the mainstream and listening to Motley Crue and Poison meant you were cool. CD players were something out
He didn’t know what to do with this new world. Nothing made sense to him. None of the familiar things were there. His first day out, he had gone into a closet in his mother’s home, shut the door and cried like a baby.
“Shelley?” Art yelled. “You gonna work or not?”
John waved his hand at the supervisor, pushing his mouth into a smile. “Sorry, boss.”
He walked over to a green Suburban and started wiping water off the side panel. That was another thing that had shocked him. Cars had gotten so huge. In prison, there had been one television that got two channels, and the older inmates got to decide what was playing. The antenna had been ripped off and used to pluck out somebody’s eyeball well before John showed up, and the reception sucked. Even when the snow cleared and you could halfway see the picture, there was no sense of scale with the cars on screen. Then you wondered if what you were seeing was real or something just made for a particular show. Maybe the series was really about an alternative world where women wore skirts up to their cooches and men weren’t beneath sporting tight leather pants and saying things like, “My father never understood me.”
The guys always got a laugh out of that, shouting “pussy” and “faggot” at the set so that it drowned out the actor’s next line.
John didn’t watch much TV.
“Yo, yo,” Ray-Ray said, bending down to sponge silicone onto the Suburban’s tires. John looked up to see a police cruiser pulling into the drive of the car wash. Ray-Ray always said things twice, hence the name, and he always alerted John when a cop was around. John returned the favor. The two men had never really talked, let alone exchanged their life stories, but both knew on sight what the other was: an ex-con.
John started cleaning the glass over the driver’s door, taking his time so he could watch the cop in the reflection. He heard the man’s police radio first, that constant static of the dispatchers speaking their private code. The officer glanced around, pegging John and Ray-Ray in about two seconds flat, before he hitched up his belt and went inside to pay for the wash. Not that they would charge him, but it was always good to pretend.
The owner of the Suburban was close by, talking on her cell phone, and John closed his eyes as he cleaned the window, listening to her voice, savoring the tones like a precious piece of music. Inside, he had forgotten what it was like to hear a woman’s voice, listen to the sort of complaints that only women could have. Bad haircuts. Rude store clerks.
Chipped nails. Men wanted to talk about
Every two weeks, John’s mother had made the drive from Decatur down to Garden City to see him, but as glad as John was to see her, that wasn’t the kind of woman’s voice he wanted to hear. Emily was always positive, happy to see her son, even if he could tell by looking in her eyes that she was tired from the long drive, or sad to see that he’d gotten another tattoo, that his hair was in a ponytail. Aunt Lydia came, but that was because she was his lawyer. Joyce came twice a year with their mother, once at Christmas, once on his birthday. She hated being there. You could smell it on her. Joyce wanted to be out of that place almost more than John did, and whenever she talked to him, he was reminded of the way the black gangbangers and Aryans talked to each other.
His father came to see him twice in all the time he was locked up, but John didn’t like to think about that.
“Excuse me?” The woman with the cell phone was beside him. He could smell her perfume. Her upper lip was a little bow tie, gloss making her mouth look wet.
“Hello?” she said, half-laughing.
“Sorry,” John managed, shocked that she’d gotten this close to him without him even noticing. In prison, he would be dead right now.
“I said ‘thank you,” “ she told him. She held a dollar in her hand and he took it, feeling cheap and dirty at the same time.
John made a show of putting the bill in the communal tip box, knowing every eye in the place was watching him. He did the same thing when a customer handed somebody else a tip. No one trusted anybody around here and for good reason. You didn’t need a college degree to figure out why a bunch of middle-aged guys were working for minimum wage plus tips at the Gorilla Car Wash.
Art came out of the office, yelling, “First shift, lunch,” as he walked over to the cop standing by the vending machine. Shit, John hadn’t noticed that, either. The cop had come outside, had been watching him, and he hadn’t seen it happen.
John tucked his head down as he went into the back, clocking out and grabbing his lunch off the shelf. He had a soda in the refrigerator, but there was no way he was going back out there until the cop was gone and Art was back behind his desk counting his money.
Chico, one of the other workers, was sitting on the cement wall under the shade of a big magnolia tree that grew in the strip of grass in back of the car wash. John liked to sit there under the tree, enjoyed the solitude and the shade, but Chico had beaten him to it today. This sort of thing wouldn’t have happened in the joint. Taking a man’s space was like fucking his sister up the ass. Nothing happened in that place that didn’t have some kind of price attached to it.
“How’s it going?” John said, nodding at Chico as he walked past him to the carport that served as a detail shop. The detail guys went out for lunch. They made enough money to afford the luxury.
John sat on the ground under the canopy. He took off his ball cap and wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. November used to mean winter, but now it meant you were lucky if the jacket you put on in the morning didn’t have you sweating by noon.
Christ, even the weather had changed without him.
He glanced around before pulling a piece of paper out of his back pocket. The credit report. Part of him had wanted to shove it back in the trash bag last night, just let it go. So some motherfucker was pretending to be him. What did that mean to John Shelley? Obviously, the poser wasn’t running some fraud. Why would he pay off the credit cards every month for six years? John had heard about all kinds of scams in prison, and though he hadn’t really had access to any computers, he knew that the Internet was the best way to run an identity fraud. This, though. This was nothing like that. You took the money and ran. You didn’t stick around and pay your monthly bills
