Patrick pressed the bell again and listened for the chime. Nothing sounded and the basketball game kept going. Looking down the block he saw a few kids riding their bikes around in circles where the cross streets came together. The pavement beneath them almost black in the twilight and the lazy pull and swing of their laps seeming somehow, to Patrick, like vultures on the wing, circling high over some prey.
He sniffled with the cold and dug his hands into his pockets. He was dressed as he’d been the night before, in a padded canvas jacket and jeans. Work boots on his feet and a flannel shirt his son had given him. He watched the kids for only a moment longer before he turned and knocked on the door, listening for a second as the sound on the television lowered.
The only real time Patrick had ever spent in the city of Seattle was when his wife had been in treatment. He looked around at the neighborhood and tried to measure his memories of it then against what he saw today. Lines of waist-high chain link all the way down the block, dividing the sidewalks from the houses. Everything on this block simply built, worn away with time, but still holding. Craftsman-style wood frames over cement foundations.
He heard the latch go on the lock and then the door swung open. “Patrick?” a man’s voice said as the overhead porch light went on and Patrick stood looking into the eyes of a man six foot in height, wearing gray sweats, his head shaved to the skin, but a grizzle of white coming through in places along his scalp.
“How’s it going, Maurice?”
“People call me Maury out here,” Maurice said. “Come on in, Patrick. I’d heard you just got out. I thought you were living with your son, though. I didn’t expect to see you in the city.”
Patrick followed Maurice in through the door. There were piles of mail and magazines everywhere. Most of the magazines showing glossy pictures of women bodybuilders on the front, tanned almost to the point of rawhide, wearing nothing but G-strings and tops only large enough to hide a quarter of their veined breasts from view. Patrick stood taking it all in while Maurice went into the living room and turned the television down, so that only an aura of subdued excitement emanated up out of the speakers, occasionally an air horn cutting through it all.
“Maury is the name of a sixty-year-old Jewish man,” Patrick said.
Maurice looked away from the television and smiled. “Yeah, well, people don’t want to hire a man named Maurice. Makes them think I’m a sixty-year-old black man.”
“You are a sixty-year-old black man,” Patrick said. He cleaned a stack of mail from one of the chairs in Maurice’s living room and sat, his vision passing across the room in one sweep. One door leading off toward a kitchen, and another closer doorway that looked to go into a hallway and possibly some bedrooms. “You live alone?” Patrick asked.
“My grandmother left me the house when she passed a few years back.”
“Rent-free living?” Patrick asked.
“Yep, I needed it, too. Like I said, no one was hiring an ex-con with the name Maurice.”
“That why you changed it up?”
“Uh-huh.” He was back to watching the television again.
“You got any work now?” Patrick said.
“Turns out no one is hiring a sixty-year-old ex-con named Maury, either,” Maurice said, and then smiled, flashing a grin toward Patrick.
“You look like you’re doing all right,” Patrick said. “I saw the truck in the driveway.”
“Don’t be fooled by that. I leased it out. As long as I manage to make my payments it’s mine.”
Patrick tried not to let his eyes shift over the mess of a living room Maurice was seated in. “I guess you do have to look good while you look for a job, don’t you?”
“Appearance is everything,” Maurice said. He looked around on Patrick, running his eyes over him like he was appraising Patrick’s worth. “You want something to drink? I know you’re not supposed to imbibe, at least it’s not encouraged, but who’s really checking, you know?” Maurice laughed. He was already up and headed for the kitchen and when he came back he gave Patrick a tallboy. “You do okay in there without me?”
“Have you been reading the letters I sent?”
Maurice grinned again and looked around the room. “They’re in here somewhere. Looks like you survived at least. How many years has it been?”
“Almost six.”
“Shit, man. Time flies.”
“Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t,” Patrick said.
“Well,” Maurice said, slapping two hands down on the meat of his thighs and looking around the room like he might find whatever he was looking for right there. “There ain’t no business like ho business. You want to make a night of it, or what?”
“Not that kind of night.”
“Don’t be like that, Pat. You telling me twelve years away didn’t get you ready for what’s going down tonight? I mean what else are we going to do? You want to sit around and watch the wall? Because you know we did that for six years in Monroe and I’ll tell you it’s going to be just about as fun. Get your dick wet. Live a little. I tell you it’s all I’ve been thinking about since I woke up this morning, and you showing up tonight makes it all the better reason.”
“I’m not into that sort of thing.”
“What?” Maurice laughed. “Women?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Prostitutes? Okay, okay,” Maurice said, raising his hands up, palms out. “The man says it’s not his thing, it’s not his thing. But how about we go down the street to this place I know and see what we can find. We’ve got to do something about that limp dick of yours. You’ve been living like a monk for the last twelve years and you don’t want to cut it up a bit? You just got out of prison, brother. Let’s live this night up like it ought to be lived. You feel me?”
“I didn’t come here for this,” Patrick said.
“Tell me about it at the bar,” Maurice said. “Too much time in this place and I get claustrophobic.”
THE LIGHT WAS fading when Morgan came out onto the porch. He put two hands to his back and worked the muscles till his vertebrae cracked. Then he sat in the chair and simply stared out on his land.
Drake had followed him to the threshold and stood waiting behind him in the doorway. “What are you doing?”
“Thinking things through.”
“How’s it looking?”
“Not good.”
“I’m asking for your help,” Drake said. “I don’t have anyone else to ask.”
“I know that,” Morgan said. “But I just don’t know what I can do.”
Drake walked out and leaned on the porch railing with his hands down supporting his weight. He didn’t say anything for a long time. “They have my wife.”
“I can’t tell you where Patrick is,” Morgan said. “I just don’t know.”
“These men, you ever hear Patrick talk about them?”
“I heard Patrick talk about a lot of things. But I never thought about anything like this. You say one was bigger than the other?”
“Yes. His speech was a little slower, too. The smaller one seemed to be in charge.”
“They said they were friends of Patrick’s?”
“That’s what they said.”
Morgan shook his head. The sun was in the grass now, a low red light that seemed to emanate up out of the ground. “I don’t know about that,” Morgan said. “Your father didn’t have many friends.”
SHERI FELT THE car come off the pavement. The springs bounced down, and through the floor she heard the sound of gravel under the tires. Raising her head to look out through the small hole at the back of the trunk she saw the paved country road move away from her and the wheat grass build, the road narrow and the swish of the blades moving past the metal sides of the car as a wake of dust rose off the dirt with the car’s passage.