When Ryan’s clients nicknamed themselves with monikers like Crash and Face, he shot back, in echo effect, with his own designators, such that I often knew them only by their crimes or physical attributes. There was The Troll, The Pathological Liar, The Wheelchair Pervert, and Pothead Betty Crocker. Nicknames were symbols of their hard living.
Meth Mouth and McNally might explain why Ryan got disproportionately angry about our kids’ toothbrushing habits and dental bills, especially after Francis required surgery for his putrid and rotting baby set. The longer Ryan worked in criminal defense, the more he pinpointed differences between us and his clients. They let their teeth rot; we would not anymore. Teeth grinding, cotton mouth, a general disregard for hygiene—these are just the visible symptoms of meth use. Never mind what it does to the brain.
But no matter how much McNally had begun to resemble the kind of scourge from whom parents avert their children’s eyes, Ryan continued taking him back like a wayward brother. Police were always taking McNally back too, even in other counties, where any pretext to pull over a dude with face tats was sure to prove justified. Was he traveling over the speed limit? A taillight burned out? Registration expired? Any excuse would work with a guy like McNally behind the wheel, and ditto for probable cause. McNally himself might as well have tattooed CONFIRM YOUR SUSPICION OF CONTRABAND on his forehead before hitting the highway between Oshkosh and Milwaukee, his girl, Shelby Drake, riding shotgun. One glimpse of McNally through the windshield led to a routine traffic stop, then a search of his car, the cop discovering, without much effort, 120 ephedrine pills crammed into an empty hard pack of cigarettes. Upon further searching, he also found a drug he believed to be meth, later confirmed at the state crime lab.
Drake, still married to a different convict, who was incarcerated for homicide by intoxicated use of a vehicle, must have felt eager to see McNally back behind bars too—a quick and easy way to dispose of a lover, I suppose. When police escorted Drake to the nearest station, she consented willingly to a two-hour interview with police, laying out details of McNally’s meth lab in the garage of her Oshkosh home, where she lived with her father and seven-year-old daughter. When police obtained the search warrant for Drake’s home, her ailing father answered the door and welcomed them onto the premises, where evidence of methamphetamine production proliferated beneath their fingertips—empty soda bottles with eyeholes punched out for tubing, empty Sudafed and cold-relief packages, fuel, fire starter, charred remains on burnt spoons, and the innards from batteries splashed against the backdrop of card tables like the intestines of fish.
In each photo taken as evidence, accoutrements of a young girl’s life made cameo appearances—a booster seat, a pin-striped umbrella stroller that matched one in our own garage, and a bright pink bike that was likely the fastest and only ticket out of the girl’s septic existence. Were homes evacuated, as they often were, upon discovery of meth labs, neighbors hoping for clean-up crews to finish their job before precursors required to manufacture meth erupted into a fireworks display of toxic waste, hopeful their own front porches and gardens wouldn’t also burst into flames? Eventually a letter from a federal agent would be delivered to Drake’s address, and it would read: “A clandestine drug laboratory was seized at this address.” Nobody was home to gather and read the mail, so what difference would it make for the obvious to be noted?
Lives were in turmoil. Shelby Drake sat sixty days in jail while her daughter was taken into child protective custody. It seemed everywhere McNally went, CPS followed along behind him, picking up children as if on a bus route, the sons and daughters of women who fell for McNally, his drugs, or both. As Mama McNally’s apprentice at the age of thirteen, learning to concoct meth in the bathroom of the Hells Angels clubhouse, how could he have predicted all the kids who’d fall in line behind him, a processional of his former selves? What had this little girl witnessed? Did she carry crystal meth in a medicine pouch around her neck, convinced, as my children would be, she’d found a magic rock?
They say each pound of meth makes six pounds of toxic waste. How many pounds did the special agents find at Drake’s house during detox, and how many months passed before this defunct home fell into foreclosure, its owners now in separate big houses in separate counties? Ryan visited McNally at the jail. He squinted and scrunched up his nose, trying to literally read McNally’s face through the glass. The digits 1488 were scrawled to match the arch of his eyebrow. Homage to white supremacy and Hitler, it was a common, if despicable, prison tattoo.
“Hey, bro,” McNally said.
“What’s with the face tattoo?” Ryan said.
“I know, I know,” McNally told him. “It’s stupid. I’m going to fix it. I promise.”
“What the fuck, dude?” Ryan shook his head slowly, trying to loosen fragments of disbelief stuck inside. “You’re not exactly making my job defending you any easier.”
What, exactly, was his sense of obligation to Rob McNally? Watching him fry his brain, year by year, was like watching a person’s body rot before it expired, yet Ryan had been summoned there by some sense of unspeakable loyalty they shared. After all, McNally was the first of his clients to make jailhouse referrals. A lot of Ryan’s early business came from
