Saturday night.
Seven o’clock.
On the way home, I took the top down, turned up the radio. At dinner, I spoke when addressed, used my manners, and ate everything on my plate. The quiet was no less oppressive, but I thought of Becky and Saturday night. I doubted she’d kiss me, but that was all right. We’d talk, and get to know each other.
I thought I had time.
I was wrong.
The trouble came first in hints, and started with my father. He stopped me after dinner, and took me into his office, a narrow room jumbled with files and boxes and books. Family photos covered one wall, awards and citations the other. “I don’t want your mother hearing this.” He closed the door, and looked hesitant. I’d seen my father angry, perplexed, and disappointed, but this reticence was strange to me. He twisted his fingers, and had trouble meeting my eyes. “Have you seen your brother?” he finally asked.
“Not for a few days.”
“No phone calls? Nothing?”
“What’s going on?”
He moved to the window, and peered into a dark night broken by streetlamps on the road. He stood there for a bit, then turned as if he’d reached some kind of decision. “Sit down, son.” We sat in flanking chairs. He leaned close. “I think Jason might be in trouble. They’re just rumors at this point, but cop rumors. You understand the difference?”
“No.”
“Okay. Fair. How should I say this? Your brother’s name has come up in, uh … recent investigations.”
“Drugs?”
“Why would you ask that?”
“His history, I guess.”
“Has he been doing drugs?”
“I don’t know.”
“Would you tell me if you did?” He studied my face as if looking for a secret door. “How about his location? If you knew where he was, would you tell me that?”
“I want to know what’s going on.”
“I can’t discuss that.”
“Hey, you brought me in here.”
“To ask if you’d seen him. To warn you. Jason might be a lost cause. You’re not.”
“Jason is not a lost cause.”
“I’m not asking you to rat him out or to stop seeing him. If he’s in trouble, I can help him. If he gets in touch, tell him that.”
“You could tell him yourself if you hadn’t chased him out of our lives.”
“Complications, son. We’ve discussed this.”
“Will he be okay? The cops, I mean.”
“If I can help him,” he said. “If I can find him in time.”
He touched my shoulder, nodding as he spoke. Neither of us knew the world was ending.
8
The same darkness pressing down on Gibby’s house deepened the sky above Lanesworth State Prison Farm, forty-five miles east. If anything, the night sky there was blacker, unspoiled as it was by streetlights or traffic or civilization of any kind. First opened in 1871, the walls at Lanesworth were three feet thick, the windows little more than barred slits in the stone. Situated at the end of a four-mile private road, the prison filled an empty corner of a rural county; and though it had not worked as an actual prison farm in over forty years, the signs of its original intent could still be seen in the ditch lines and fallow fields and new-growth forest. Before nature had retaken so much of it, men had suffered in the cold, died in the heat. The chain gangs were long gone, but the prison still sprawled across eighteen thousand acres of lowland and scrub. Built to house a thousand men, it held twice that number now. A few inmates were classified as moderate offenders, potentially dangerous, but most were the worst the state could offer. Killers. Drug dealers. Serial rapists.
In a subbasement beneath death row was a string of cells that stayed warm when others were cold, and cool when others were hot. In one such cell, a killer stood beside a bed, but it was not his bed, and not his cell. He didn’t like the man whose cell it was, but nothing at Lanesworth was about like.
In a corner of the same cell stood a man known as Prisoner X—or just, X. That wasn’t his name, but people called him that. They thought it was short for Axel, his true name, or because he’d killed ten men, and eaten parts of them. Others said that he’d killed his wife for infidelity, but only after he’d emasculated her lover, then cut Xs into his eyes. X had been an inmate for so long that people didn’t really care anymore. He was part of the prison, like the steel and concrete and stone.
“Higher, please. Your left hand.” X gestured, and the man by the bed complied. Shirtless in prison jeans, he stood with both hands up and fisted. “Excellent. Perfect.”
The man by the bed was only two inches taller than X, but wide and rawboned and forty pounds heavier. Raised hard in the Georgia mountains, he’d run away young and grown up a thief and a killer, a bare-knuckle, fight-for-cash brawler on the streets of Atlanta. He’d been inside for less than five weeks, but every guard told the same story, that the kid could take a beating, spit blood, and come back for more, that he was a serious, determined, no-bullshit kind of fighter.
“Don’t move,” X said. “You’re moving.” X was not a great painter, but he wasn’t bad, either. He made a few more strokes with the brush, then said, “It’s strange. I know.”
“It’s a freak show, is what it is.”
The kid talked tough, but the doubt was in his eyes. He’d heard the stories. He was, in fact, having his portrait painted in a subbasement beneath death row. X enjoyed the young man’s doubt, but didn’t let the pleasure show. That would be weakness, and X despised weakness in all its forms. After a final stroke, he turned the painting so the young man could see it, a hyper-contextualized impression of violence and its aftermath: the broken stance, the bruising, and the blood. “You understand what comes next?”
“They told me, yeah.”
“Good.”
X put down the painting and stripped off his shirt, revealing a narrow torso corded with muscle. Even at forty-nine, there was nothing soft, not anywhere.
“I’m not afraid of you,” the young man said. “I think the stories are only stories.”
X smiled, but it was not a nice smile. Backing through the open door, he moved from the cell to a narrow corridor that ran the length of a halfdozen other cells, all devoid of prisoners. The corridor ceiling was twenty feet high, the light fixtures rusted where old water stains discolored the concrete and stone. A guard sat near a metal door, but knew better than to watch.
Trailing X from the cell, the young man said, “Why me?”
“Was it four men you killed, or five?”
“Six. Bare-handed.”
“Is that not reason enough?”
“I don’t fight for the fun of it.”
“For what, then?”
“Cash money. Or if someone needs killing.”
“And today?”
“They say the warden is in your pocket. That you own the guards, too.”
“You fear retaliation.”
“Yeah, well. Busting up random convicts is one thing…”
He left the thought unfinished, so X pulled a sheaf of cash from his pocket, counted out some bills, and dropped them on the floor. “A thousand dollars for the fight. That’s a hundred a minute for the next ten minutes of your life.”