The public defender’s office, or as Ryan’s clients call it, the “public pretender’s office,” is located on the second floor of the First National Bank Building, hidden behind a staircase, a speakeasy for indigent criminals who qualify with meager incomes and secret knocks. The fourth floor is haunted and empty, but others are populated by a mishmash of oddities—dental hygiene for the elderly, the carpenters’ union, Kirby vacuum cleaner sales, and an acupuncturist specializing in care for veterans. Longhaired Tom cleans the building, his mop of twisted yarn sloshing murk across the floors.
In character, Ryan was the lawyer with the salt stains on the cuffs of his pants and the frayed corduroy jacket, patting clients on their backs; “that guy with baby geese on his tie,” hand-selected by his children. It was difficult to determine if being a father was an advantage or a liability, as his instincts caused him to parent his clients, becoming the male figure so few of them knew intimately in their own lives. As he compared his clients’ shortcomings to ours, he failed to see big differences between a guy like Derek Green and himself. Instead, Green reminded Ryan that our pockets were also empty.
In fact, we almost wondered in seriousness if Ryan, with his cut-the-crap lecture to Green early on at the jail, made himself an unintentional coconspirator in the Walmart heist. After all, Sony home theater notwithstanding, Shaffer had filled her cart exclusively with trappings any parent might justify, in the name of Destiny on her first Christmas. We weren’t that different from Derek Green, even beyond the money struggles. Sometimes it seems like a miracle we didn’t end up in more trouble as kids. Together, we egged a crotchety school board member’s house; we trespassed on old abandoned houses; and we drank Malibu from the bottle, driving against traffic on one-way streets.
When Ryan was in eighth grade, he and his buddies would ride their bicycles one-handed, a cavalry, up over Highway 41, the sun puffed out like a dandelion gone to seed. Racing to Walmart, they would pitch their wheels against the superstore, and Ryan, designated thief, would venture inside alone. He was never antsy, ambling with what kids today call swagger. He walked straight to the aisle with the baseball cards and, without hesitation, pocketed dozens of Topps Stadium Club packs into his Nike zip-up. His paper route was not nearly enough to subsidize his pastime of acquiring and trading players. The guys tossed litter like paper airplanes across the parking lot as they waited for their own folk hero to emerge from Wally World and to reveal the faces of Major League Baseball from behind those cellophane seams.
At high-school parties, Ryan orchestrated our seating arrangements when we hunkered down to play poker in somebody’s kitchen. He’d study his hand, fresh from the cut-and-shuffle, and pass his best cards to me. Under the table, we’d make the exchange—his winning cards for my rejects. As I won, oftentimes the only girl at the table, he’d laugh knowingly. We were cheaters of the purest kind. Ryan and I disappeared into tree forts and farm fields, when we should have been socializing platonically. Eventually, in the later years, our friends stopped searching for us, our romance implied by our constant cahoots. We look back now on our petty but criminal wrongdoings with nostalgia rather than with shame or regret, as if shoplifting, cheating, vandalism, trespassing, and underage drinking were rites of passage, as they arguably still are for many kids who will become well-adjusted adults.
When Ryan and I graduated from high school together and finally moved away for higher education, we vowed never to return to this godforsaken town. Caravanning beyond the Oshkosh city limits, we felt triumphant and rebellious, like escaped convicts, having traversed the barbed-wire fence surrounding our former lives. While we were becoming enlightened in places like Madison, Ann Arbor, and Madrid, we were actually more like fugitives, wanted back in Oshkosh by some godlike warden who governed our lives. When we left Oshkosh in 1996, we were our parents’ children, but when we returned, permanently, in 2008, we had become the inverse of our former identities—we were now our children’s parents.
When officers began questioning Green and Shaffer, in a parking lot on the frontage road hillside after their Walmart heist, their mouths formed contrails on the air, long vaporous chains of words. If the policemen were cold, Destiny was colder. I’d like to think Shaffer ripped the tags off one of the pilfered stocking caps, gifting it two weeks early over the bald crown of her baby’s head. When one of the officers asked about the cart, Green responded with “permission from the manager.” When he asked why the merchandise was not in bags, Shaffer said they “just didn’t bother with that.”
“Can I see a receipt for your purchases?” the officer asked.
Green and Shaffer patted down their pockets and scrounged in their wallets as Shaffer offered her best spontaneous explanation, vastly underestimating the sixty-three items in her cart and the value of products such as the Gerber crib set for $79.88 and the George baby blanket for $13.38. She told the officer she checked out in aisle 18 and paid exactly $500.00 in cash, receiving no change. Strangely, Shaffer had packed empty Walmart shopping bags for the caper, intending to masquerade as a paying customer, but for panic or apathy, she never used them. They remained wadded up in a corner of the cart.
“I’ve got it here,” Green said, finally. He handed the policeman a receipt for orange juice, a jolt of vitamin C he had purchased earlier in the week
