by James Boice
—Oh shit! his cellmates taunt. —You guilty! You guilty! Bwa ha ha ha!
Lee sits up, feeling grateful that, one way or the other, at least the wait is over. Hurricane does not look him in the eye as he steps out into the hall. Normally the man cannot stop talking, he taunts and humiliates like he’s on an automatic setting. But now he is very grim, sucking his teeth. —Come here, he says. Lee stands still. —Take a step toward me. When Lee still does not move, Hurricane reaches out to Lee’s collar and pulls him close, saying, —Come here, inmate. Then Hurricane shoves him back against the wall, Lee’s head cracking against it, and pats him down, more so punching Lee’s body. —Lower your drawers, says Hurricane, breathing heavily, sweat appearing on his big, wrinkled forehead. When Lee hesitates Hurricane yanks them down himself.
Lee’s cellmates are all looking on, as are the prisoners in every cell up and down the hall. —Bwa ha ha ha! He guilty, he guilty! He going away! He going to death row!
Hurricane pulls the waistband of Lee’s underwear out away from the rest of his body and looks inside, reaches in, grips Lee’s testicles and squeezes. Lee cries out and tries to squirm away, but two other COs pin him against the wall with their hands. —Fifteen years old, Hurricane says into his ear. —My son fifteen. Hurricane squeezes harder. —You think you beat it, but it ain’t over. Someone’s gonna wanna put a bullet in your head and it might even be me. You might be getting out of here now but you ain’t never leaving, you understand me? You gonna be locked up and you always gonna be locked up. Always.
—Bwa ha ha ha ha!
Hurricane lets go and tells Lee to pull up his damned drawers. When Lee has pulled them up, Hurricane twists Lee’s arms behind his back and cuffs him and forces him down the hall. Icy pain is shooting all through his body from the bottom of his belly. He realizes what Hurricane said.
—Wait, did you just say—
—Shut the fuck up.
He goes with them down the hall. Inside somewhere deep he knows is profound relief and confused elation—they say, You are getting out, soon you will see him, soon, soon—but he does not dare trust them, he does not dare believe them yet. The COs shove him along through the TV area, where they wait for the next gate to open. Joseph is there with other prisoners watching Judge Judy. One of them goes, —Yo, where they taking Pills?
All the others turn to look except Joseph, who mutters, —Where you think? All he did was kill a black kid. He said he’s sorry, won’t do it again, they say the kid probably deserved it anyway. And now he going home.
The others are staring at Lee, believing what Joseph’s saying. Resignation and rage, heartbreak and hatred—a storm behind each face. The way they look at him is worse than anything they could do to him.
One of them says, —What about me? I want to go home too. When do I get to go home?
Another says, —When you get rich.
Joseph says, —You want to get rich like he rich, you got to sell people dog meat.
—Dog meat? Like, dog food?
—Nuh-uh, I mean dogs for food. That’s what he did.
They have been talking about it in the media. The television comedian John Oliver discovered who the ancestor was who originally made the Fisher family fortune and has been having great fun ridiculing Lee for it. Back during the Civil War, Lee’s great-great-great-great-grandfather was a newly arrived, impoverished, unskilled German immigrant who fought for the North in the Second Battle of Bull Run, where he was wounded and had his leg amputated. While recovering in the hospital in Washington, he heard how the South was being decimated by the North’s blockades; there were no imports, so food was very scarce. They were starving down there. Confederate soldiers retreating from battle were so desperate for food, they were eating horses, boots. Stories of cannibalism were not uncommon. Once he was able to hobble out of the hospital, he bribed and lied his way down to Mexico, where he knew from earlier travels the streets were filled with all these wild, nasty little dogs spreading disease and generally getting in everyone’s way. The Mexicans did not know what to do with them or how to get rid of them, but he did. He contracted his dog removal services to the local officials there, then exported the vermin out and up into the States, building and protecting a formidable supply line, and he followed the remainder of the Civil War in a team of wagons stuffed with his livestock, setting up shop outside the battlefields on the Confederate side. When the rebels came crawling their way out of hell, starving, gaunt, desperate, he was there to feed them at whatever price he felt like demanding. And he became rich for it. Then after the war, he used that money to buy southern land and lease cotton plantations and became richer. The man was born an illiterate, simple laborer in the German countryside and died an American in Manhattan in the mansion he built up the street from Andrew Carnegie’s.
Lee is processed out of Rikers Island. He insists they give him back the underwear and FUBU T-shirt he had on when they brought him in so he can get out of this jumpsuit, but the COs in processing must be confused as usual, because they hold up for him what they say are the clothes he was wearing, but it’s just another, identical jumpsuit. —This what they got for you, they say, consulting some document. Hurricane loves it. Ha ha ha. Fucking with him. They are fucking with him. Sticking it to him one last time while they still can. One last shot at Lee Fisher. What choice does he have? He removes one jumpsuit, puts on another. And this is what he is wearing now, going home again.
A black Town Car is waiting for him outside the gate. Protestors are there. The car takes Lee to Washington Heights. Lawyers and officials facilitate the handoff. The woman seems nice enough, but then again of course she would. The first thing Lee notices is how much his son has grown. It has only been a week but he seems to be half a foot longer and ten pounds heavier. It feels very good to hold him again. Lee immediately searches the baby for bruises or scratches or any other signs of abuse.
—What’s this, he says, —what’s wrong with his eye?
The woman says, —His eye? Nothing.
He has her look more closely. —See? It’s all red and infected. He shows it to the lawyers and officials.
The woman says, —It looks clean and white to me.
—Healthy eye, the lawyers and officials agree.
—Unbelievable, he says, —how could you let this happen?
—I let nothing happen, the woman says.
The lawyers and officials say if he has concerns he’ll have to take the baby to a doctor for an official examination, and the woman keeps saying she let nothing happen, but Lee waves her off and signs what forms he needs to sign and takes his son to the Town Car, straps him in his seat.
—Hospital emergency room, he mutters to the driver.
The ride seems to take hours. Lee peers into his son’s eye, everything inside him cold and sludgy. He will lose it. His beautiful eye, gone. At the hospital the doctor also says nothing is wrong with the eye, but Lee demands antibiotics anyway, and the doctor gives him a prescription, albeit for very mild ones, that Lee fills right away. He gives them to his son in the car, brushing back his hair from his forehead as they begin to heal him.
There are protestors outside his building—bullhorns, drums. Shirtless, skinny young men wander around yelling, unwashed young women wave signs and upside-down American flags. People have scarves over their faces, they wear Repeal the Second Amendment shirts, they hold banners with Clayton’s face on them and chant, —Not one more! Not one more! Cops are there in riot gear, they are already making arrests: two cops drag a kid down the street. Gun rights activists scream in the faces of the repealists, cops break up fights. Reporters chase it all around; in fact most of the protestors themselves hold cameras.
But it is not spectacle or theater, at least not anymore. Lee remembers Occupy Wall Street—this is not Occupy Wall Street. Whimsy is not present here. Neither is hope. There is only desperation, fear. And whatever it began as, it is spinning out of control. And Lee sees why: there in the midst of it all like a gener
al is Jenny Sanders, a bullhorn in her hand and a mob of media hovering tightly to her wake. Lee’s windows are tinted, the protestors cannot see it is him inside, but they slap on his car anyway, yelling, and one jumps on the hood and slides off. Jenny Sanders is staring through the window, right at him. Can she see? Does she know it’s him?
The driver is scared, asks what he should do. Lee doesn’t know, tells him to just keep driving past the building. Then, by impulse, he tells the driver to take them out of New York, get them out of the city. They take the Holland Tunnel and emerge in New Jersey, and Lee still does not know where to go, so he has the driver find a car rental place and the driver leaves them there and they get a car, the biggest they have, a Suburban. He drives west until the concrete chips away into grass and the smog-gray sky dissipates into blue and the hordes of desperate, fearful people—all those prisoners of Manhattan—fade away and it is quiet and you can hear birds again and there is space and room for once to think and breathe.
Now what? He spends the night in a motel somewhere in Ohio, his son sleeping in the bed next to him and a chair jammed up under the doorknob. He turns on the news, is watching live coverage, when what happens to Jenny Sanders happens to Jenny Sanders. Involuntarily he cries out, —Holy shit! Clamps a hand over his mouth as the news anchors get hysterical. His son wakes up screaming and does not stop, and there is nothing Lee can do to calm him down, the bottle does not work, nor does shushing him or changing him, for hours the baby screams gutturally, agonizingly, and Lee can only look on. Late into the night the baby exhausts himself and falls asleep, and Lee drinks the motel room coffee and stays up, stunned and shocked, peeking through the blinds into the parking lot at the footsteps and whispers he keeps hearing out there.
In the morning he does not know what to do, so they keep moving, drive aimlessly south, and end up in South Carolina, where they go into a convention center in which there is a gun show. He has pulled into the parking lots of a few along the way, wrestling with getting out and going inside and getting one. But in South Carolina he goes in and they recognize him and want pictures with him. They are selling Lee Fisher action figures, they ask him to sign some. They’ve bought one of his paintings off eBay, it hangs on the wall of a booth. Confused, he stands there with them for pictures, but then he gets ahold of himself and declines to sign the action figures, declines to take one, and leaves without a gun, saying he’s no hero, he just did what he had to do.
He continues driving. He drives in silence out of Georgia, into Alabama, then Mississippi, then Tennessee, his just another car on the interstate, no radio, unable to stomach hearing them lie about him and make her out to be some kind of hero, preferring instead to listen to his son coo in the backseat, to his son’s breath as he sleeps.
They see signs for Graceland. He tells his son about Elvis Presley as he follows the signs and there it is, there is Graceland. He finds the parking lot, but the attendant recognizes him and wants to talk about what happened, and Lee changes his mind and backs out, he drives away, not watching the mansion recede in his rearview mirror.
In a Super 8 motel that night in Arkansas, his son speaks for the first time. He says, —Dada. The only person for Lee to tell is the housekeeper.
The next morning, a Sunday, he heads toward the address he has had for a long, long time but has never been to. Lee drives all day and through the night, crossing nearly the entire width of Kansas, passing Dodge City, telling his son about Wyatt Earp and the American West, all that holy lore. Late in the morning in Colorado, he arrives outside a high concrete fence on wooded property miles from anyone or anything. Lee wonders, Is the man even alive? Maybe he’ll find him in his recliner, long dead, forgotten by everyone who once loved him. He will be decayed, half eaten by rats. The TV will still be on and turned to the news, his mummified face peeled back in eternal disgust with the state of his country. Lee pulls up to the big gate and pushes the button on the intercom. No one answers. He pushes it again. It takes a long time, revving up Lee’s pulse as he keeps pressing the button, but eventually a voice answers that sounds tired, reedy but alive.
—It’s me, Lee says.
The voice says he knows it is, he can see him on camera, and the gates slowly open. Lee drives through them. Where the hell were you? is what he’ll say to him when he gets out of the car. He won’t take the kid out, he’ll leave him there. It will be a short conversation: Where were you? Where have you been? What do you have to say for yourself? He will be very tall, compared with the old man. He will dwarf him. His ordeal will have turned him into a hulk. His father’s life will have withered him away. He will grip the man’s neck, twist it like a washcloth. Where have you been? And his father will see what a man Lee has become, much more of one than he himself ever was. And he will weep, he will confess his wrongdoings and beg his son for forgiveness and hug his son, tell his son he loves him. Then Lee will turn away, get back in the car, and drive off, and he won’t introduce him to his baby and he will never see him again.
The third wife, he remembers from when he met her at their wedding, was a small brown woman who barely spoke English and kept forgetting Lee’s name even though it’s the same name as his father’s. She was subservient and passive and saw him through the cancer scare, but eventually he found a way to drive her off just as he drove off the second wife. The second wife was pretty, and they had two kids together who were smart and successful and everything Lee had never been. Their kids graduated from the college Lee dropped out of, got MBAs, are now high-level executives at the family corporation, and for a while they got along with his father in ways Lee never did, but now he hears they do not, they have no relationship with him anymore, he has driven them off. He drove off the second wife too, the way he drove off Lee’s mother, and the way he drove off Lee himself. And now there is no wife. The man is all alone, Lee knows, and that’s all he knows.
He rounds a corner past the trees into a clearing where a sprawling, lovely home sits on a little hill. A small gray man stands on the front porch, gun holstered on hip. As Lee gets out of the car, the old man is already saying something but Lee cannot make it out. He walks right up to him. The old man wears shorts and his legs are chubby and the color of ash, and he has on a gray T-shirt with a college football logo and he has little bleary eyes behind thick glasses that warp them. He blinks and blinks. His nose is bigger. When Lee gets closer his father repeats himself and this time Lee can hear it: —You should’ve called first. Heroically, Lee stops himself from murdering the old man right there on his doorstep.
—Where the hell have you been? Lee says.
—Santa Fe, says his father.
—Santa Fe, Lee echoes bitterly.
—Met a gal on the Internet.
—Internet. Wonderful. Congratulations.
His father does not see how angry he is or just does not care. —Anybody follow you?
—No.
—You’re sure?
—Look, I just came to ask you one thing.
—Okay.
—You got anything to say for yourself?
His father thinks about it. —Like what?
—Like apologizing to your grandson. Lee points to the car. —He was in a shelter because of you, in the care of daggone crackheads.
Distress comes over the old man’s face. Then something else. —He’s here?
—Yeah, he’s here, he’s in the car.
—Well, were you planning to just let him bake to death in there?
Lee seethes, tells him to hold on, and goes and gets his son out. He carries him in the car seat back up to the porch. His father stares at him. He says to Lee, —I figured you had someone else to ask. You didn’t have anyone else?
—No.
—Why not?
Lee raises his voice. —What the hell do you mean? He starts to go further but he cannot. It is one of those things where when it is inside of you it makes perfect sense, but when you take it out and say it out loud it makes absolutely none: Because of you.
I had nobody else because of you. So instead he says, —Ain’t you curious about the gun? Ain’t you wondering where it is?
—Which gun’s that?
—The gun.
—Which gun, Lee. I don’t know what you’re talking about.
—The one you told me I have to keep safe. The one you said was always mine and that one day I’d pass on to my boy. You don’t remember?
It’s obvious he does not. Drunk himself stupid, Lee thinks.
—Well, they’re gonna destroy it, if you’re interested. If they haven’t done it already.
His father squints, trying to comprehend. —What do you want from me? A new gun?
—Jesus Christ, you really don’t remember? That old .38, probably a hundred years old?
—You’re talking about the .38 that pulls to the right?
—That’s the one.
—I have it downstairs.
—No, you gave it to me before I left home.
—Oh, he says, and looks away, confused.
—The special gun, Lee says. —The one we Fisher men have carried for generations. Your granddaddy and his granddaddy and—
—Your granddaddy was a New York City agoraphobe and closeted homosexual who had a knack for picking stocks. I never had the knack, that’s how I got in trouble. But he hardly left his office. Afraid of the world. Allergic to dust. He had less blood in him than a brand-new Ziploc bag. Carry a gun? Him? He probably never got more than ten feet of one in his life. Got his doctor to say he had bad eyes to keep him out of the war. They were all like that, until me.
This was the first Lee had heard of this. From what his father had always told him, all Fisher men were basically Teddy Roosevelt—well-off but rough, hardy.
—What? You made all the cowboy shit up? Pulled it from thin air?
His father regards him a little disdainfully. —Course not! Come on inside.
He turns and goes in and Lee follows with his son. He expects it to be foul in there—flies and empty bottles and old pizza boxes—but it is very clean and everything is new. On the walls he has pictures of his kids, including one of him and Lee, together, back on the mountain. They are working on the farm and look very happy. The fact that he has Lee’s picture makes Lee feel like he will cry.