Stay with Me

by Paul Griffin

  “You just called me son?” Blue Eyes laughs, says all proud, “This time? Grand theft auto, bitch. What you in for, stealing a apple pie?”

  “Just a little old murder is all. I’m two-five to life, baby.”

  One of Blue’s punks cackles out, “I seen him on the TV. He’s the Soda Can Killer.”

  That just gets a big old laugh.

  They think that’s weak, huh? Swinging a Sprite instead of a nineratchet? They keep it up, they’ll know true violence.

  The kid with his head on my shoulder is awake now. He’s looking at me, too out of it to wipe his own nose. I put my arm around his shoulder tighter, to better hold him upright, to hell with what everybody thinks.

  From the corner this guard watches me. He has a mustache trimmed real neat. He’s kind of short. His eyes are fierce on me, but when I look at him, he looks away. He’s been watching me since I came in.

  The preacher lady comes around offering Bibles.

  “You gave me one already, ma’am, last time I was in here.”

  “I think I might remember you, child. How are you, baby?”

  “Good, ma’am.”

  “Did you bring it with you, your Bible?”

  “No ma’am, but I don’t deserve the Bible no more.”

  “Of course you do.” She tries to put it into my hand, this little hardback pocket Bible, but this other guard, a huge one, comes up and snatches the Bible from her. He waves that tiny Bible in the preacher lady’s face.

  “Now ma’am, I warned you about this last time you came in. I was nice to you, told you all printed matter has to be softback cover.”

  Preacher says, “And I told you, the company that donates them only had hardback books this time.”

  “That’s not my problem,” the guard says.

  “Then what is your problem?”

  “’Scuse me?”

  Preacher says, “Even when I brought in the softback that time, you wouldn’t let me give them out.”

  “That’s because those had staples. Has to be softback with a glue binding.”

  Preacher yells, “You are going to deprive these young men of the saving grace of the Holy Word?”

  Guard says, “Now, you know it’s not about that.”

  “It is about that,” preacher says. “It is exactly about that.”

  “I’m a religious man myself,” the guard says as he walks off with the Bibles. “But next time you try to give one of these boys a hardback book, I will have you arrested.”

  The preacher huffs back to the middle of the circle. “Let’s sing,” she says.

  The boys stand and hold hands, except for me and the ragdoll kid. I don’t like singing much. Maybe if I was good at it, but I’m the worst. I hate the sound of my voice.

  I help the kid back to his bunk. While he sleeps I sit at the foot of his cot and look at the TV, but I can’t tell you what’s on it. All I see is Céce and me being together, and damn it but I can’t even beat off with all these kids and guards around and the moth-trap lights up there that never turn off.

  That other guard, not the one who took away the Bibles but the one with the mustache, the dude who’s following me from a distance all the time? Well, he’s staring at me again. And when I look at him, he again looks away.

  I’m trying so hard not to think about her, what she’s going through. She’s got to move on. I don’t exist anymore.

  THE FORTY-SEVENTH DAY . . .

  (Tuesday, July 28, morning)

  CÉCE:

  I’m down in the basement, looking at the bed. I spark a cigarette I bought loose off some dude in the street. First puff, I throw up. I can’t even smoke right.

  Anthony called while we were at work last night. He sounds happy on the machine, sort of. When I replay the message, I hear he’s faking.

  I don’t want him to know about Mack.

  (The next morning, Wednesday, July 29, the forty-eighth day . . .)

  I make myself as pretty as I can be: not very. How somebody as beautiful as him ever went out with me . . . I burn my fingers on the curling iron. The last time I used it was right after I saw The Outsiders for the first time, and I tried to make myself look exactly like Cherry Valance, two and a half hours frying my hair.

  I raid Carmella’s messy makeup cabinet. All this guck on my face, and still you can see the bags under my eyes. Next I borrow a pair of Ma’s heels. They’re too big, so I put bunched toilet paper in the toes.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Ma says. Pink eyes, totally hungover, forty looking sixty.

  “Yep.”

  “Then will you at least let me come with you?”

  “Nope.”

  “At least let Vic drive you. You said you would.”

  “I said I’d think about it.” I leave.

  Two trains and a city bus later, I’m at the gate with a bunch of women. They all smoke. None smile. We avoid each other’s eyes. We’re waiting for the shuttle to take us over the long skinny bridge to the island. Half an hour later, it comes.

  The bus chugs over to Visitor Intake. “You’ll have to leave that stickpin in the locker.”

  “Really?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Four hours after I left the house, I’m in the waiting area. After another hour an older corrections officer says, “Macario Morse can’t see you today.”

  “He can’t see me, or he says he can’t see me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which?”

  “Miss—”

  “I’ll tell you what, sir. You go tell that sonuvabitch I’m not leaving until he gets his ass down to see me.”

  Folks stare.

  This guard has seen it all and often. He pats my hand.

  “Please,” I say. “I have to see him.”

  The guard speaks softly into the phone. “Thanks.” He hangs up. “They’re gonna track him down for you.”

  “They don’t know where he is?”

  “They’ll find him,” the guard says. “Where can he go, right?”

  “Oh. Right.”

  The guard pours me a cup of his thermos coffee. I hate coffee because it gives me a headache. I drink it anyway. All the other women are there with their men. They’re henpecking them. They’re loud. I swear I’m never going to lose it like this with Mack. The last thing he needs is for me to flip out on him. A baby cries.

  This isn’t like the movies, with the glass partitions and the old phone handsets. This is an open room. Everybody sits around wobbly tables spaced far apart, under lights that are too bright. Lots of guards in here. They see everything, but they allow a good amount of contact between visitors and prisoners. They patted us down and scanned us with metal detector wands before they let us in. I remember ...

  Mack and me at the shore with Boo, sunset. We’re watching this old couple hunt the sand for gold, waving their metal detector wands back and forth, back and forth . . .

  I’m the only one without somebody to visit. The guard lets me wait in his office.

  “Need a medic,” a young guard calls to the guard in the office. The young guard has a woman in cuffs. Her mouth is bleeding.

  One woman says to another, “I saw it. She kissed a razor blade into his mouth.”

  The girl kicks as they drag her out. She’s pregnant. Her sweat suit is dirty. I’m self-conscious about what I’m wearing now. Bright pink blouse and pressed jeans I paid too much for. Ma’s shoes, fake leather but looking fancy.

  Dusty paper Christmas decorations from last year or maybe years before spin over the loud but feeble air conditioner. The heat makes me drowsy. I close my eyes to escape back to our day at the amusement park. We’re . . .

  . . . on line for the Freefall, in the next-up box. Cloudless sky, furious wind. The rain stopped fifteen minutes ago, and the park is still pretty empty. We’re going to get our own car, just him and me.

  “You, me, a bunch of dogs,” he says. “In the country. A little house. Nothing fancy but real clean. Quiet. No computer o
r phones. Just us.”

  “Perfect,” I say, “except we need a TV.”

  “The test. The one for the gifts and talents. You’re gonna hit it out of the park.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Now Céce, c’mon. What happens after that? You have to move away?”

  “No. I’d go to a different school, but here, in the city. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “But after that, you’re going to college.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You better.”

  “If I do, I’ll stay close to home and day-hop.”

  He looks away. “I just don’t want to embarrass you, you know?” “Stop saying that.”

  “I don’t want to hold you back,” he says. “You can have anybody you want.”

  “And I have you.”

  The car comes. The padded safety bars creak as we pull them down. We’re sitting there in the dock, waiting. The ride attendant is on the phone. Something’s wrong. I’m starting to squirm. Mack squeezes my hand, and I feel better.

  “They made me take this test,” he says. “A reading thing on the computer. When one word was on the screen, I could figure it out. But when you put two words next to each other, they would shimmer.”

  “Shimmer? Like—”

  “They melt into each other. If I blink, they come together again for a second, but then they start to shimmer all over again, and I get a headache.”

  “Okay, so you’re dyslexic. A lot of—”

  “It’s not dyc-dyslexia. Doctor called it an unquafilied. Wait. Can barely say it. Un, qualified. Neuro, logical. Processing disorder. If somebody reads to me, I get the gist okay. And if I dictate, I can make my way to communicate writing-wise, but who’s ever gonna take the time to write down what I say?”

  “I will.”

  He shakes no. “My handwriting is scratch. I type a word a minute, it comes out wrong. Vic gives me a takeout, I say, ‘I don’t need a ticket, just shout out the address,’ right? Every time I apply for a job, I have to take the application home and get my old man to fill it in. Yeah, I get by, but getting by don’t make me—doesn’t make me a solid prospect for somebody like you. They made me take the IQ again too, back when I was locked up. They had to read it to me, modified this version they use for the blind, and I had to talk it back. I came out room temperature on an August afternoon.”

  “I have no idea what that means.”

  “That’s how my counselor explained it. One hundred IQ. Flat average, fifty percent on the nose.”

  “You’re so not average. You’re gifted.”

  “Look, Céce, it’s like the dude who gave me the test said: I have got to figure out how to build the little house that is Mack Morse with the toolbox God gave me. I’d do better if I kept things simple. Be a small farmer, grow one thing, tomatoes, sell ’em at street markets. That’s why I get along better with dogs than people. Smartest dog is as smart as a three-year-old kid. After three, kids start getting mean anyway.”

  The car jerks upward. The chain pulling us up cli-cli-clicks. I’m getting dizzy.

  “They made me take Ritalin,” he yells over the clicking noise, “but it freaked me out. I wasn’t me anymore, and I wasn’t someone better, so I quit it. I’m never gonna get better, okay? This is the way I’ll be for good.”

  “Okay,” I yell back, over the clicking.

  “Okay what?”

  “I’m totally okay with this, with us, the way we’ll be. The way we are together.”

  He shakes his head, looks over the rail. We’re really high now, halfway up the tower. “I’m having a hard time figuring out where I fit in is all,” he says.

  “You fit in with me.”

  He double-squeezes my hand—I love when he does that. “I’m just saying, comes the time when you find somebody else, I don’t want you to feel bad.”

  “Now I’m feeling bad. I’m getting pissed. I don’t like you thinking about yourself this way. Hey? I’ll never leave you.”

  The car stops. We’re at the top of the tower now. We’re both breathing really fast. He’s looking at me, and he isn’t turning away. “Just don’t tell anybody about it, all right? My processing thing. Please?”

  “This is forever, you and me. I promise.” Somebody fires a gun next to my ear, and we’re dropping—

  —dropping down into a sandbag trench. “I promise, Céce,” Anthony says. “I promise I won’t die.” He reloads his rifle and fires at a satellite.

  Boo runs from me when I say “Stay.”

  My grandfather comes home from his night shift. Seventythree, and he still has to work. He drives a forklift. He makes us breakfast and sings folksongs to us. He sings in the shower too, when he isn’t honking to blow the forklift soot from his nose. He dies there while we take turns yelling at him through the door to stop using all the hot water.

  Vic is all alone in his little apartment over the restaurant, doing the crossword.

  I’m taking the gifted and talented test. Three minutes before time is up, I’m not even halfway into the first section.

  My mother sips beer at the kitchen table, staring into nothingness.

  Marcy cruises Facebook in a daze.

  Mack and me are up on the roof, inside the hutch. We’re lying back on his sleeping bag, looking through the hatchway for satellites. The sun rises, peaks, falls. I want him to kiss me, to crush me, but he won’t even look at me. I ask him if he wants me to give him a blow job, and he rolls away. I’m alone now. The shadows swell across the hutch walls like fastgrowing bruises.

  The shadows are long on the visiting room floor. The room is empty. “Miss?” I’m sweating. I’m looking at the wall clock. I’m seeing the time. Still, I ask, “How long was I asleep?”

  “You have to leave now. The hours are over. You have to get that last bus. Call ahead next time, okay? Give him some time to get ready.”

  “Ready for what?”

  “Call first. You’ll see.”

  I hurry from the parking lot, out onto the avenue. The bus is anywhere but here. The cabs are gone with the visiting hours. So be it. I start walking. Ka-klick ka-klick, my spikes—Ma’s—nail the pavement. I’m tripping all over myself in these cheap heels. The toilet paper jammed into the toes is flat now, and you can see the shoes are two sizes too big. I look like an idiot, and I am. I’m a fool. Weeds creep tall through fractured sidewalks. No one plays ball or jumps rope or rides a bicycle or even strolls. The streets are barren up here, except for a stray dog that reminds me less of Boo and more of the one that bit me. It’s tracking me. I cut through an industrial park where sad-eyed men whistle at me from their tractor-trailers and double-flash their high beams.

  (Wednesday, July 29, afternoon)

  MACK:

  I almost go down to see her. Twice. To tell her to go away. To be mean to her. To make her hate me.

  I can’t.

  I can’t do anything but hunker in my cot and remember . . .

  . . . the Freefall.

  We kiss just as we start to drop. She squeezes my hand so hard she’s going to break bones. It hurts something beautiful. She’s screaming and laughing, her eyes shut hard. But I can’t close my eyes to blink even. I can’t stop looking at her like this. Her hair flying, coppery bands. It was dark chestnut when I met her back in June, but it’s lightened the littlest bit in all the sun we’ve been having. I’m turned inside out after telling her my secret. But she’ll never tell.

  The Freefall whooshes to an almost stop. We slow sink the rest of the way, maybe another twenty feet. She puts her hands inside my shirt and draws little circles into my ribs with her fingertips. I can’t stop looking at this beautiful girl. Her mom made us wear sunblock, and it smells like oranges.

  We float toward where we have to get off the ride. The sun flickers between the stanchions. When she gets out of the car, the sun is low on her, and her shadow is long. Just one of those days, you’re lucky if you get five of them in your life: middle of July but low 70s, feels cooler wit
h the north wind being so dry. Way up there an airplane glints. She takes my hand, and we stitch fingers and she kisses me . . .

  The kid in the next cot pukes on himself. The stink is worse in the heat. Has to be a hundred ten in here. I’m greasy. I wake humped up and hard and to the sound of the fellas laughing at me. Somebody throws a cup of piss at me and runs off, and that just makes me miss her so bad.

  There’s a million reasons I love her, but they all come down to one: She was good, and she let me be around her, and when I was with her, I was good too.

  Come chow time, I’m eating by myself at a table not too far from the guards. That kid who was falling out of his chair, he comes up to me. “Anybody sitting here?”

  “You see anybody sitting there?” I push my grub around with my spoon. You better turn it in after chow or you get sent to solitary. I wouldn’t mind. It would be quiet.

  Dude sits. “Hot out.” He’s got a bruise at his eye and a split lip.

  “Fell down, huh?”

  “Don’t hurt much.”

  “I bet.” I almost ask him what he did to land here, but then I don’t want to know. This is dumb, but in my mind I have it that he’s the good brother of that Bible story.

  “Name’s Boston.”

  “Mack.”

  We eat for a good while, just spoons clinking on our plates, and then I say, “Why they call you Boston? On account you hate the Yankees, right?”

  “I’m from Boston.”

  I poke at my peas. “Boston a nice city?”

  “Haven’t been in a while. Moved when I was a kid. But yeah, it was nice.”

  “I never been to Vermont.”

  “Boston is in Massachusetts.”

  “Like I said.”

  “Huh?”

  “Ain’t Massachusetts part of Vermont?” Back to saying ain’t. No reason to keep trying to better the way I talk now.

  “Massachusetts is part of Massachusetts,” he says.