Shaker

by Scott Frank

  Roy walked up to her and said, “Hey.”

  She turned to him, took him in for a good long while and said, “What happened to your face?”

  “I got into a fight.”

  She gave him the briefest kiss on the cheek, and then moved over. He sat down on the tabletop beside her, put his feet on the bench alongside hers and couldn’t help but notice that the shoes she wore were brand-new.

  “I tried to come last week, but they said you were somewhere you couldn’t have visitors.”

  “Where’s the Captain?”

  “You really think this is the kind of place for him?”

  “There are lots of little kids here.”

  “You want him to see you like this?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “And the other kid?”

  “He’s fine, too,” Roy said.

  “Everybody’s fine. I’m so glad.” She got out her cigarettes and lit up another.

  “Who’s with him?”

  She paused mid-light and stared at him.

  “The Captain.”

  “Oh,” she said and lit her smoke. “Lucinda.”

  “Who?”

  “The nanny.”

  “He has a nanny?”

  “You poked that kid’s eye out.”

  “I didn’t,” he said. “I missed.”

  She shifted on the table to face him now.

  “They’re tacking eleven months onto your sentence.”

  “What?” Roy couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  “You nearly killed him. What were you thinking?”

  “He was threatening me.”

  “Well,” she said, “he’s not threatening anybody anymore, that’s for damn sure.”

  She studied him for what seemed like a minute and then said, “You’re different.”

  “I am?”

  “You can’t let this place change you.”

  “You’re just now worried about that?”

  She leaned away from him, as if trying to get a better perspective, and looked at him over the top of her sunglasses. “You’re not backing out of our deal, are you?”

  “It’s not easy here.”

  “I understand,” she said. “But I think that maybe you’re…” She gestured to the bruises. “Making it harder than it has to be.”

  “I don’t think I can make it, period.”

  “You have to.”

  She looked at the cigarette, decided that she didn’t want it after all, and dropped it in the grass. She said, “I have to go,” and then slid off the table. “It’s a long drive.”

  She turned back to Roy and opened her arms.

  “C’mon,” she said. “Give me a hug.”

  He did as he was told. She held on to him and whispered, “This is the right thing, for everyone.”

  “I’d really like to see him.”

  “I’ll send you a picture.”

  She kissed him once on the top of the head and started across the grass for the parking lot, Roy keenly aware that every eye in the joint was on her back. A guard opened the gate and a second later a red Cadillac Seville pulled up alongside her. Roy couldn’t see who was driving, but he had a pretty good idea. She opened the passenger door, paused to look back, waved, and then slipped inside the car.

  It would be sixteen years before Roy would see her again.

  —

  The only legitimate rehabilitation effort at Boonville was the agricultural program where inmates were taught various farming techniques, including cattle ranching. In many ways, the cattle were treated better than the boys. They were well fed and housed in the winter in a huge barn built and paid for by Armour Meats.

  Roy became a Boonville Cowboy and worked the pasture alongside Albert and another inmate, Bob Spetting. They would do everything from feed the horses to help the actual cowboys gather the herd and run it a few miles north to the meatpacking plant in Jonesburg, on a part of the Missouri River known as “Slaughterhouse Bend.”

  Once there, Albert would always have a smoke, strike up a conversation with any members of the Killing Gang who happened to be outside on break. Albert told Roy that he was going to get himself a job upon his release from Boonville the following year. Taking in the smell and the sounds coming from inside, Roy couldn’t understand why anyone in his right mind would ever want to work in a place like that.

  But then, Albert wasn’t in his right mind.

  Before Roy, Bob Spetting had been the closest thing Albert had to a friend in Boonville.

  Roy first met Bob at dinner one night, shortly after his mother’s visit.

  After what had happened in the dormitory, Roy no longer had to prove himself, but there was always the occasional challenge. Thankfully for Roy, Albert would always magically appear ahead of any violence. Roy wasn’t sure why Albert had taken him on in this way, but it was clear that, for whatever reason, he was always watching Roy.

  On this particular night, Roy had just sat down for dinner, was preoccupied with thoughts about his brother and this nanny, Lucinda, when someone said, “He don’t look that mean to me.”

  Roy looked across the table where a big redheaded farm kid now sat beside another, equally large inmate. He snatched a piece of bread from Roy’s tray and asked, “How’d you kill your pop?”

  Roy ignored him.

  “You’re kinda small, so I’m guessing it wasn’t nothin’ to do with your hands.”

  Roy surprised himself and snatched the bread back. He took a bite and looked the other kid in the eye. He’d reached the point where he didn’t care. It wasn’t so much bravery, as he was just done with this place. His mother had put him here, left him to his own devices, and then had taken his little brother away from him, all because he had become the very thing he’d been pretending to be in order to save the kid from a foster home. Roy was angry and just wanted out.

  “Maybe one of these days,” the redhead was now saying, “me and you’ll go a round in the basement. How’s that sound?”

  Roy was about to get up and leave when, before he knew what was happening, Albert and another kid sat down on either side of Roy, Albert saying as he swung his legs over, “You go a round with this one,” he said, patting Roy on the back, “he’s going to tear those big ears off your deformed head and eat them in front of you and all your farm boy pals.”

  Albert looked at Roy and smiled. “He’s not big, but you can see that he’s scrappy and smart, and those are the ones you gotta look out for.”

  The redhead asked, “This guy your friend, Albert?”

  “Al-bare, dipshit. And yes, he’s my friend.”

  The other kids froze. Weren’t sure what to do next.

  “Go on, get out of here and go jiz all over pictures of sheep or whatever the fuck it is you farm boys like to do.”

  The guy on the other side of Roy started laughing. Roy remembered him the first time the Boonville Cowboys had come into the hall. He had a face covered with dark red acne, two black gnats where his eyes should have been. He was the one who handed Roy the bedspring that night in C Dorm.

  Albert said, “Bob Spetting, say hello to Roy.”

  The creature called Spetting held out his hand, but when Roy turned and held out his own, Spetting grabbed hold of it and spit into Roy’s palm. Roy jerked his hand away as Bob started laughing.

  Albert shook his head and handed Roy a napkin. “You’ll have to forgive Bob,” he said. “He’s mildly retarded. Not enough to really feel sorry for, but enough to annoy you now and then, and one of the few truly mean retards I’ve ever met.” He then reached behind Roy and hit Bob on the back of the head. “Shake his fucking hand, Bob.”

  Bob turned and once more held out his hand. Roy hesitated, but then grabbed it. Bob squeezed hard enough to bring tears to Roy’s eyes as Albert went on.

  “Bob’s mommy and daddy thought Bob was gonna die by the time he was twelve. Imagine how pissed off they must be.”

  Albert turned and pushed his chair back a bit, crowd
ing the terrified kid at the table directly behind him. If Albert noticed or cared, Roy couldn’t tell.

  Roy then looked around the hall. He could see that the other boys were all watching him. Not openly, they were too afraid of Albert for that. But Roy could see that they were paying attention. It occurred to Roy in that moment that he’d been wrong. The way to survive this place wasn’t to spend every day hiding. The way to survive was to simply not give a shit.

  —

  One day Roy woke up and found himself nearly as tall as Albert. He had grown six inches seemingly overnight. He couldn’t get used to his new body. He no longer recognized himself in the mirror. He started lifting weights with Bob and was soon bigger and stronger than most of the other kids. One positive result of all this growth was that Bob would no longer randomly punch Roy in the arm, or pick him up and throw him in the manure pile. The bad news was, it once more made him a target. But this time, it wasn’t the other inmates who came looking for him, but the guards.

  They had begun goading the inmates into fighting with each other down in the basement so that they could bet on who would win. If you didn’t fight, you lost privileges, would find rocks in your food, or could even lose a cush job. Like being a Boonville Cowboy.

  “You want to end it quickly,” Albert said. “You don’t punch their face, you hit them in the throat.”

  He then demonstrated by hitting Roy in the throat. He went down to his knees gagging while Albert went on. “One jab, real quick, doesn’t have to be all that hard, you just have to nail the right spot. Do that, and the fight’s over.”

  Albert then crouched down and smiled at him. “I don’t care how big you are.”

  Albert taught him how to fight. Or, more precisely, how to quickly end one once it started. It was helpful to Roy, who fought exactly one fight in the basement: the redheaded farm kid. Roy fucked him up so bad, the warden found out about it and the fights were halted, Roy earning himself another week in the AU and sixteen more months on his sentence.

  Not long after that, Roy received a letter from his mother, imploring him to stop his violent ways. She’d heard about the fights and about the guard who’d been stabbed some fifty-four times in the showers. And while they didn’t directly accuse Roy of being involved (“no actual proof”), his mother got the feeling that they certainly assumed he was. She wanted to know if that was true.

  Of course, it was true, but she would never understand that Darryl Deems needed to pay, however delayed, for what had happened to Jerry Wethers two years earlier. Roy and Albert had spent months planning it so that there would be no witnesses or evidence of any kind. And while they made some mistakes here and there, they both learned a lot from that little experience. It was knowledge that would pay off once they got out.

  There was a photograph along with the letter. His mother and the dentist, Dr. Toomey, sitting outside at a table in what Roy figured to be Hawaii. Both were tanned and lei’d, dressed in shorts and shirts covered with hibiscus, a couple of blue-colored drinks in front of them.

  But what caught Roy’s eye was the little boy at the table with them. He sat in a booster seat, in his own shorts and flowered shirt, sipping his own little blue drink through a straw. His face was turned so that Roy could only see part of it. One eye, the barest hint of a nose and a corner of his mouth. Was he smiling?

  Roy kept turning the photograph this way and that in a hopeless attempt to get a better angle on the boy’s face. He knew that this one photograph, inadequate as it was, would be the only one he would get. Her way of cutting him off, but it felt more like she was killing him.

  The work in the pastures was hard, but it kept Roy outside in the fresh air, which was what kept him sane. Sitting in the saddle or cleaning out the stalls brought him a kind of peace. He remained quiet, never joined in any of the conversations, which were of only two varieties: Albert would talk about the various mobsters they’d meet and work for once they were all out of there, or Bob would talk about the famous women he was going to fuck the minute he was free.

  One afternoon, they were on horseback guiding sixty head of cattle into the pen when Bob proclaimed Lisa Simpson his latest crush.

  “I wrote her a letter,” he said, “telling her that maybe someday, when she was older, we could meet.”

  Albert asked, “She answer you?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You do know she’s a cartoon.”

  “I know.”

  “You cannot fuck a cartoon.”

  Bob just looked at him.

  “On top of that,” Albert went on, “she’s a child.”

  “Right now maybe. But in ten years she’s gonna be like sixteen or seventeen.”

  “What’s wrong with Betty and Veronica?” Albert asked. “They’re all grown up.”

  “They’re not real, they’re just a comic.”

  Albert looked at Roy, who had only barely been paying attention. “Can you believe this guy?”

  Roy just smiled and reached down and latched the gate behind the cattle. Their horses, as they did every night, automatically turning back to the barn at the sound, Bob now saying as they spurred them into a canter, “Plus, I said when she was older.”

  And then, one day, Albert was gone. He never said a word to Roy or Bob about leaving, just up and left without so much as an Au Revoir. Roy heard that he had moved nearby and was working at the Armour plant. Once, Roy and Bob saw him there, outside on his break, in a bloody apron, smoking with the other men on the Killing Gang. They waved from their horses, but Albert never looked their way.

  —

  Roy served out the rest of his time without incident, quietly reading books when he wasn’t working the pastures. Bob had been released six months after Albert and for his last eighteen months at Boonville, Roy ate by himself, slept in a room above the big dormitory with only three younger inmates, one of whom had Tourette’s and would bark in his sleep or strike his head against the wall. All these boys were considered weak and so Roy looked after them, the old love he felt for his own little brother finally finding some purpose in this shithole.

  That same dedication came out in Roy’s job. He liked to be around the horses and took good care of all of them. On top of that, he had become a skilled rider and taught his dorm mates. All of them would become part of the next group of Boonville Cowboys.

  The rest of the time, he lifted weights, walked the grounds, and didn’t talk to a soul. The new kids thought he was simple. When Roy heard this from one of the guards, he liked the idea. It occurred to him near the very end of his time there that being underestimated was as safe a way to live as keeping out of the way. It somehow felt more than just comfortable. It felt exactly right.

  So Roy did nothing to dissuade them.

  At night, he would look at the photograph his mother had left behind. He would study it, sometimes for hours on end, trying to imagine his brother’s face now that he was seven years old. Roy wondered whether or not he was happy, or if he ever thought about his older brother.

  On the day of his release, there was no one outside the gate to pick him up, so Roy took the bus to Raytown. He found himself walking up the same street Jim McDonald and Brent Garland had chased him that day six years ago, the whole incident now seeming like it happened in a different life altogether.

  When he reached his house, he knew immediately that it was no longer his. It had been painted a bright yellow; the drab wainscoting had been replaced with red brick. There were shutters on the front windows; a split-rail fence ran along the sidewalk. Red, white, and blue impatiens bordered a thirty-foot square of dark green sod. A Volvo station wagon was parked in the driveway, a pair of pink bicycles beside it. And while he hadn’t really expected his mother and brother to still be living here, he had hoped for some sort of clue as to where they might have gone.

  Roy stood on the sidewalk, was thinking about knocking on the door to ask about the previous owners when he heard a car round the corner. He turned to see a dark blue, m
ag-wheeled Malibu two-door rumble to a stop at the foot of the driveway. The driver’s door opened and Roy knew before he saw him that it was Albert. He uncoiled from the car and smiled at Roy across the roof.

  “You are nothing if not predictable.”

  Bob Spetting hung his elbows out the passenger window and said, “We just missed you at Boontown.”

  “Get in,” Albert said. “And meet my good friend, Harvey Cooper.”

  Roy hadn’t noticed the older man sitting in the backseat. He was about sixty, with his long gray hair pulled into a ponytail, revealing a face that looked like it had been baked too long in the sun. He stared straight ahead.

  Roy looked once more at the house, then walked around to the other side of the car. Albert had his own look at the place and asked, “You go inside, say hello?”

  “They’re not here.”

  “They out somewhere?”

  “They’re gone.”

  “Where?”

  Roy just looked back at him. Albert nodded and then tilted the front seat forward so Roy could get in.

  “Fuck them,” he said as Roy climbed into the back. “Fuck them all.”

  The mayor thought he was watching an action movie. A younger Bruce Willis or maybe Tom Cruise taking on a bunch of well-armed bad guys with his bare hands. BAM! He nails one guy in the throat and then BANG! He shoots another one. Wait—where did he get that gun? Oh, shit, he took it from one of them—nice! And now he’s shooting the other big one. BANG! And the first guy is crawling for his gun, he grabs it, but gets blown off his fucking feet!

  “Jesus,” the mayor said louder than he wanted to. “This guy is good.”

  Leila gave him a look cold enough to chill the entire room. She was pissed. She had barely looked at the screen since the little presentation began. Dressed in a white suit with a white, gold-trimmed Hermès scarf wrapped around her head like she had a million-dollar toothache, she kept her legs tightly crossed and stared out the window while everyone else watched the collected footage.

  Twice in the past ten minutes, she referred to Roy Cooper as “another Zimmerman.”