by Joan Barfoot
Okay, Roddy understood the moment. “No.” Larry crowded so close they were almost touching chests. “Back off, asshole,” Roddy felt he must add. He kept his eyes narrowed and his feet planted wide, tried to keep Sean Penn in his mind’s eye like a map.
The guy, Larry, nodded slowly. He looked like he was trying to think. When he opened his mouth, Roddy thought he could as easily have been going to say, “You’re dead meat,” instead of what he did say, which was “You better not be holding out on me.” The point was, he backed off. He sidestepped away again, back to his pacing. This was good, and a relief, but also shook Roddy’s confidence about whether he had any talent at all for assessing what someone might do.
“Rod,” he said to Larry’s back, and wondered if that sounded uncool or in any way fucked up and desperate.
That was three days ago, when he actually was uncool, fucked up, and desperate. Now he has his footing, more or less. He can be herded into this rec hall and go to the pool table and pick up a cue and look around questioningly, and somebody will join him. He can slump in a chair and watch a dumb talk show for an hour without being disturbed, or he can say, or nod as somebody else says, “What shit, eh?” Easy moments, if not friendly ones. All he wants is to survive. Any particular attention, he hopes, will go elsewhere, be somebody else’s bad luck.
Mike maybe feels something like that. If Mike’s even close to being the person Roddy imagined, he’ll be suffering too, in his different way. Still, people can get used to things awfully fast; like Roddy himself, getting used to this place, that it has requirements and rhythms and customs and in that way is like outside life, only tighter and more enclosed. There are things that get done in certain orders and ways, and it’s kind of relaxing that there are some assumptions, it’s sort of a comfort.
So he is startled by an unexpected tap on the shoulder, whips around fast in his chair, jumping slightly, ready for — what? Not ready, only startled. So he’s not as relaxed as he thought.
It’s a guard standing behind him, saying, “Follow me,” and when Roddy stands, taking his arm. “Let’s go.”
“Where?” As if there’s a choice; as if this was an invitation he could decline if where they were going didn’t appeal. Anyway, there’s no answer. The guards, mainly, aren’t so much unfriendly as not interested, at least the ones on the day shifts, who are older than the night staff and so are more accustomed to bad boys and sad stories. This one steers him down the long corridor towards the front of the building, where the offices are, but he’s not going to see Stan Snell this time, but is suddenly turned towards the right and into a small room where, already sitting beside each other, with a desk between them and the doorway, are his grandmother and his father.
There should be some kind of warning.
For sure he figured they’d come whenever they were allowed to, but he thought he’d have notice. He also figured he wouldn’t have to see them so close and directly, because they’d be getting together in a big busy room, full of the buzz of families, and might even be separated by metal and glass, like in movies. Not that they’d be just across a little room, just them, and no place to look and only their own sounds to hear.
He keeps standing. They’re both looking up him, but sort of flatly. Hard to read. His dad’s wearing a suit, like he’s going to church. Roddy’s grandmother is also dressed up, in a plain navy dress she hardly ever wears and a white necklace and white clip-on earrings. Roddy feels exposed in his jumpsuit, and as if he’s made a mistake about the formality of the occasion.
He’s surprised how fat his grandmother is, sort of pathetic in this fluorescent light. It’s like she’s somebody new, a stranger, and her bulk kind of falls over the sides of the chair, but she’s empty-looking at the same time. “Well, son,” his dad begins. He never calls Roddy son, not for ages. Otherwise his tone’s as flat as his expression. “Quite a mess.”
Roddy has nothing to add to that. His grandmother does, though. “Why?” she says. Her plump hands are set flat on the table, fingers like hot dogs, or sausages. The two of them, really, her and his dad, they look lost here: the pair of them swamped and bowled over by life.
Oh, Roddy is angry. He looks away from them, off towards the corner, so they don’t see his rage. Everything in this place is grey-painted, or green. Colours supposed to douse flames, maybe.
This is what he was trying to get away from. Exactly this. Away, he could have made himself up without contagion from best dark suit, best navy dress, rippling flesh, disappointment. All that. Look what they’ve done. “Get that look off your face,” his dad says. Now his dad has an expression, and it’s anger, too. His voice is shaking with it. “Don’t you dare go glaring like that after what you’ve done. What the hell did you think you were doing?”
“Getting away,” Roddy blurts. It just comes out, and then what he didn’t mean to say comes out, too: “From you.” His grandmother’s face goes crumbly, like pastry.
“What did we do so wrong? What didn’t we do for you?” she asks, so softly and sadly it’s hard to hear, even in this small room. “What did you want we didn’t give you?” But those are such loser questions. He can’t answer questions like that. He won’t.
“Speak up,” says his dad. “What the hell got into you? Do you have any idea what you’ve done? And I don’t mean just to yourself, which is bad enough, you’ve ruined your life, you know, stupid kid.”
“Frank,” his grandmother murmurs. “We don’t want to spend our conversation this way, do you think?” Still, it’s a lot of words, from his dad. A little late, and unhappy and angry, but a lot of words, anyway.
Roddy narrows his eyes. Of course he fucking knows he’s ruined his life.
“You’ll be lucky if you ever get out of here,” his dad’s going on. “You and your friend Mike — he had something to do with this, didn’t he? You can’t tell me you could think up something this bad all on your own.” Roddy won’t tell him anything, including that. “And if that woman doesn’t get better, well, Ed Conrad says everything just gets that much worse. No bail, for sure.” He throws his hands up off his lap: in despair, in disgust? Or bewilderment. “I just don’t understand how you could do this. It’s not how you were raised. Was it drugs? Were you on something?”
No. Not drugs. Hope. Possibility. Blindness to downsides. But his father doesn’t seem to think Roddy contains any possibilities of his own, figured out for himself, carried out by himself. He must believe Roddy is aimless and just lets himself be led astray lightly. He doesn’t even give Roddy that much respect.
“You know she’s paralyzed, right? What did you think, it’s like on TV, you shoot somebody and they get right back up? It doesn’t count, nothing real happens?” Honestly? Kind of. “Anyway, Ed says there’s no way to get you out on bail unless she’s in better shape. Not that we have the money anyway. A lawyer’s expensive enough, and we have to fork out for him because we can’t qualify for legal aid. And how could your grandmother and I guarantee your behaviour, if you’re capable of something like this?” All of a sudden his dad’s full of words. Where have they been? Has he been storing them up for the right occasion, along with a lifetime’s worth of bitterness? Like he’s the one who’s betrayed?
“He’s also saying you might as well get it over with, just plead guilty and take your medicine. Well, he says you’ve pretty much confessed anyway. The only way to get a break now is if the woman gets better real fast, or to give your friend Mike part of it. Not the shooting, everybody knows he didn’t do that, but the robbery. That it was a set-up between the two of you. Jesus Christ, Roddy!” This time his father slams his hands on the table.
“No wonder,” Roddy hears himself saying, “my mother jumped off a bridge.”
His grandmother gasps and says, “No.”
His father, though, his father completely changes colour, grey to red. He stands up fast. He’s a big man. R
oddy takes half a step back, even though he’s on the other side of the table. His dad’s mouth opens, but then closes again. He shakes his head. He looks down at Roddy’s grandmother and says, “We’re getting out of here. We’re leaving him to it.”
She looks from Roddy to his dad, who is already walking around the table, walking, not looking, past Roddy, walking past the guard and out the door. She stands. She has tears in her eyes. She has trouble getting her bulk around the table, between it and the wall. She pauses in front of Roddy and puts a hand on his arm. “Oh dear,” she says. Away in there behind the fat and trembling lips and sorrowful eyes, she’s all by herself. When he was younger, he had some idea her flesh was a place to hide in, where he’d be safe. Now he thinks if he tried to hide in there, he’d never get out.
Still, this is nearly as bad as what he did to that woman. He almost reaches out to his grandmother, except his dad, out in the corridor, says, “Let’s go,” and she turns and follows her son.
Loyalties, Roddy supposes.
What just happened? Once again, nothing he meant, not what he intended. The guard takes his arm. “Back we go, then. Man, you are one dumb peckerhead.” Like it’s his business.
There’s a tap on the door frame: his grandmother again. She puts a hand on Roddy’s arm, although the guard doesn’t like it and frowns. “Roddy dear. I know you didn’t mean what you said. You’ve always been a smart boy with a good heart, and I won’t believe that’s changed. Please dear, don’t let one mistake spoil it. All right?” She squeezes her plump hand on his arm again, and is gone. Shit. He wants to run after her, he wants to fly weeping into her lap like a kid. He does have a good heart. He wouldn’t even hurt a toad, or shoot a groundhog, so how come he has taken to hurting actual people? If he has a good heart, where in his soul does so much awfulness spring from?
His grandmother wears a perfume that’s like a combination of flowers, heavy on lilacs. He’s given her bottles and bottles of it for her birthdays, Christmases. The scent still hangs in the doorway, the corridor, as the guard starts taking him back to his new life; to the rec hall where guys are still playing pool and cards, watching TV. His new, strange, foreign territory: rooms like this one.
He has a memory of a few lovely dark moments out in that field, looking up into the sky, feeling purely contented and happy. He cannot get over the distance between now and just a few days ago. Probably the woman in the tight, wrinkled blue suit can’t get over it either. He hopes she’s not a nice woman. He hopes she maybe even deserves what has happened, so that maybe this isn’t so much to do with him, but with her being punished for something, and he just got picked for no particular reason to punish her.
It could all be her fault. Would that help?
The Short Book of James
Perhaps it was unusual even for a peaceable woman like Isla to reach the age of thirty-nine with only two encounters with cops, for speeding and for not quite coming to a halt at a stop sign. James came home pale one March evening, about to make up for that.
“We have to talk,” he said immediately. Naturally she was alarmed, and naturally thought something had gone wrong with the business. He was going to tell her he’d blown it and they were poor, or as poor as they could be, given that her own work was thriving. “Are the kids out of the way?” Jamie was upstairs doing homework, Alix in the basement, alone, watching TV. Isla would have thought them old enough to join any discussion of financial disaster, but didn’t argue. He sank into his chair in the living room without taking his overcoat off. He leaned forward, looked down into the oval hooked scatter rug she’d picked up three years before, a souvenir of a holiday which took them through Amish country. He was just opening his mouth to speak when the doorbell rang. James, already leaning forward, simply opened his mouth and threw up on the rug. Isla’s own mouth opened. He was shivering, looked fluish. Something was bad when she could look at him and hope he just had pneumonia, something like that.
There were two officers, one male, one female, both cold in the dark late-winter evening. They asked for James. Isla nodded towards the living room. “In there,” she said, hearing in her voice a distinct recognition that some new experience was cropping up in their lives. Alix came upstairs, Jamie down. James reached the doorway between the living room and the hallway, stood holding the frame, as if he might fall.
The woman cop spoke his name, his occupation, his place of business. “You understand why we’re here,” she said. All her words were statements, although in tone they came out as questions. The male cop faced James to the wall, patted him down, took out plastic handcuffs and fastened them to his wrists. It seemed to Isla that James put his hands behind himself, ready to be bound, without being told. She thought of all the programs they’d watched on TV in which this very scene had occurred. Although not usually in silence. On TV, people usually had plenty of loud questions, lots of high-volume denials. Bystanders also contributed, which she realized she, Jamie, and Alix were failing to do.
The male cop, moving slightly behind James and holding an elbow, shifted him efficiently to the front door. The woman hung back. “You know what this is about, too, I expect,” she said. Isla shook her head. If she’d spoken, she would have had to say, “No, what is it?” and she wanted as much time as there could possibly be not to hear the answer to that. This felt like a last, turning moment between an ordinary way of going on, a reasonably predictable, fairly comfortable existence, and a pit she was about to fall into.
She heard James say from the doorway a faint, breathless “I’m sorry.” Not “I’m innocent,” or “I swear it’s not true,” or “This is an outrage.” He did manage “Get my lawyer” and was gone. Isla could see headlights reflected off the open front door; the cruiser, she guessed, although without flashing lights. Well, no emergency here, no one running away or defending themselves, no one creating a threat or a disturbance. Just another unhealthy, unbreakable silence.
Finally Jamie said, “Mum?” He was fifteen, his voice was deep, but he sounded like a child; her scared little boy. James’s, also. And over there Alix, James’s little sweetheart, his angel, as well as his antagonist in a mute recent moment, now standing at the top of the basement stairs with her eyes wide and a finger in her mouth, chewing. A habit from childhood.
“It’s okay,” Isla said, but heard the voice of someone talking to toddlers. “Well no, it’s obviously not okay. But whatever it is, we’ll take care of it. I need to speak to the officer for a few minutes and then we’ll sit down and talk, the three of us. Why don’t you wait in the kitchen?”
“You might,” the constable warned her, “want to go down to the station. You might not have time.”
What, to talk to her children? “James can wait. Whatever he needs at the moment, he can just wait.”
Because here was the thing: if he’d been falsely accused of anything at all, he’d have been furious. He would have shouted, punched walls, railed. He would not have looked abject, guilty, defeated, whipped. He would not have thrown up. He would not have been silent or pale. He would never have said only, “I’m sorry,” and then, “Get my lawyer.”
She knew that much about him. She understood she was about to learn more. “Excuse the mess, I’ll just get rid of the rug,” and she rolled it, its faint knotted pinks and purples and blues shrinking up in her hands, and carried it to the kitchen where her children were sitting across the table from each other, doing nothing at all, not even speaking. “I’ll just be a few minutes. Don’t worry, it’s probably only some stupid misunderstanding to do with his work.” She got a garbage bag from under the sink, stuffed the rug into it, twisted it shut, gave it to Jamie. “Could you put this out in the garage? And Alix, while he’s doing that, you know how to brew coffee, don’t you? Would you mind? That’s for me. You guys have whatever you feel like.”
“Dad said to call a lawyer.” This from Jamie.
“Yes, I know
. We’ll get to that, but first we have to find out what this is about. In the meantime your dad’ll be fine. There are procedures. It’s not like TV.” As if she knew.
Back in the living room she sat carefully on the edge of the sofa while the cop, looking not very at ease and occupying James’s usual chair, introduced herself as Constable Donnelly, “Sylvia, if you like.” She seemed to be trying to keep her expression flat. Perhaps that’s always how cops tried to look. “Now,” she began.
She took a breath and locked eyes with Isla. “What’s happening is that your husband’s being charged with three counts of sexual assault, including one on a minor. Basically. Those are the main charges so far. There may be more. Probably will be, actually. And there are other charges, kind of under the umbrella of the assault ones. Included is what they’re called, some of them.”
Having begun, these words, these sorts of words, went on for some time. It occurred to Isla in the part of her brain that was observing this moment that the constable, Sylvia, was prepared to continue, word after word after word, until she could see that Isla had caught her breath and caught up. She was offering time. She was also observing Isla for shock.
Because, she would think, could anyone not know, truly, if her husband contained these possibilities? Would it be possible to share any kind of life at all with someone and not know? Yes, Isla could say, yes, that is possible. I guess it is.
She couldn’t tell what shapes her features might have fallen into. The rest of her body was frozen too, but at least she knew where it was. Her feet and knees were together, her hands clasped on her lap, a serious pose for hearing serious news. Sitting this way, she had managed to give herself the gift of stillness; an ability to absorb blows without falling or folding. She saw she had unfamiliar freckles on the backs of her hands.
“The charges,” Sylvia was going on, and on, “have to do with three girls from two of your husband’s stores. That’s one reason I say there may be more, the investigations are continuing and more may come forward on their own once they hear. I’m telling you that so you understand, I’m sorry, but this may be just the beginning, not the end.” Certainly the end of other things, though.