“After you tell me. That’s all I ask. Tell me first. I’ll contact my press aide, and she can start to prepare our response.”
I stood up, dropped a dollar on the table for a tip, picked up the ticket.
He took it from my hand, then picked up the dollar and handed it back to me. “I invited you, Mr. Hokanson. I’m the one who should pay.”
Out on the street, in the fresh air and sunshine, he said, “A friend of mine has a summer cottage here. You can reach me there.” He gave me the address. “When your father was the biggest trucker in the state, you have friends everywhere.”
He put forth his firm but civil hand, and we shook again.
I went east, he went west.
10
“You screwed your own daughter. You hear that, guys, he screwed his own daughter?”
“That’s enough. Spence,” the counselor says. “This isn’t funny.”
“He put the pork to his own daughter.”
This is group therapy. Meets twice a week in a big, echoing room near the prison library. Pistol-hot in summer, blue-balls cold in winter.
Standard number is the counselor and six cons, one of whom is this rather prim fellow named Dodsworth.
Past couple weeks the cons have been kind of ganging up on Dodsworth. Few sessions back he told — they were playing this nasty game called True Life, where you tell the group the worst thing you ever did — he told the group that one night when he was really bombed his fourteen-year-old daughter gave him this big sloppy kiss and he got this killer erection and then walked around for the next six weeks impotent because he was so ashamed of what he’d felt for his daughter.
You could tell when he raised his eyes and started looking around at everybody that he’d messed up real bad.
Should never have admitted something like that.
Because everybody knows it’s the truth.
See, the way to play the game is, you make stuff up. Like, Well, I guess the worst thing I ever did was after I robbed this guy, you know, I found this dynamite out in the back and I blew up his entire house. Boards ’n bricks ’n stuff flyin’ everywhere. It was great, man.
And everybody laughs.
Because it’s crap and you know they know it’s crap and that’s half the fun.
Other thing is, tell only stories that reflect well on you.
For instance, to a con, blowing up somebody’s house can be a pretty cool thing.
That reflects well on you.
But plugging your own daughter?
Or even having the thought?
Bastard’s worse than a child molester.
“I don’t want to be in here no more,” Dodsworth says to the counselor. “Spence knows damn good and well I never touched Bonnie. I wouldn’t do nothin’ like that.”
“That ain’t what you said couple weeks ago,” Spence says. And winks. And everybody laughs again. “Maybe since Bonnie ain’t around you’d like to put the pork to one of us. Lesee now — who’d ole Dodsworth like to put the pork to—”
Another wink.
“Why, Mr. Haines!”
Haines is the counselor.
“I bet that’s who Dodsworth has the hots for. Mr. Haines!”
Lots of laughter now. Mr. Haines and Dodsworth both blushing.
Spence is a mean but very clever guy. You might not think so him being such a grungy fat-ass with enough faded tattoos to start an art gallery. But he’s got great cunning, Spence does, no brains, no power — but cunning. And that’s what it takes to be important in here.
He tunes out.
Sits there seeing it all but not seeing anything, hearing it all but not hearing.
And has the thought for the second time: I need to escape. I’ve been here too long.
Couple days later, on the yard, he gets his protector Servic alone and says, “You ever think about just walking out of here some time?”
“You gettin’ a little crazy.”
“Yeah, I guess so, anyway.”
“It comes and goes, kid. You just gotta ride it is all.”
“So you never thought about it?”
“Sure I thought about it. Who ain’t thought about it? But see those guys?”
He points to the towers located at either end of the yard. The guards in them are armed with rifles and legend has it that they’re damned good shots.
“You figure out a way to get past them guards, kid, you let me know.”
“Maybe there’s another way.”
“Maybe. But if there is, I ain’t never heard of it.” He pauses, looks at him. “Somethin’ happen?”
“Just all the crap. I got this group therapy session every week with Spence and—”
“Spence. Screw Spence. Don’t let him get you down, kid. He’s just mad ’cause his old lady’s sleepin’ with some coon back in Milwaukee.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“No wonder, then.”
“Bein’ mean’s the only thing he’s got left.”
Servic, who’s been a lot nicer of late, looks up at the guard towers again. “You ever figure out how to get past them towers, kid, you let me know.”
He laughs. “I will. I promise.”
They walk back to the rest of the cons.
11
There was a muffled cry and the scrape of furniture legs across a hardwood floor following my knock. Then there was just silence.
I stood on the McNallys’ front porch watching a cardinal perched on a bird feeder in a nearby oak tree. He bobbed and pecked relentlessly, red and vivid and sleek in this afternoon of graceful white butterflies and cute quick squirrels bouncing across the side lawn. It was springtime, and I wanted to be up on the Iowa River, standing in my waders and casting my line.
I knocked again.
Half a minute later, Eve McNally came to the door. Her forehead and left cheek showed red from where something had slammed hard against her — a fist, most likely. She wore a Grateful Dead T-shirt and a pair of red shorts. Her legs were shaped nicely, but she was already having problems with varicose veins.
“I didn’t invite you here,” she said. “Go away.”
“I want to talk to your husband.”
“He’s not here.”
“He’s inside, Eve, and I know it.”
“He don’t want to talk to you.”
“You haven’t got your daughter back yet, have you?”
She glanced over her shoulder. If I hadn’t known for sure that her husband was home, I knew now.
He appeared in the doorway, a big beefy man with hair so black it looked dyed, a blue panther tattoo running down the meaty biceps of his right arm. He wore a white sleeveless T-shirt and a pair of dungarees that hung precariously on the slope of his considerable belly. The panther looked angry, on the prowl. Presumably that’s how his master looked most of the time, too.