Townie_ A Memoir Part 18

While I poured it, she said, "Dad, this is Andre. His father is with us at G.o.dine."

He gave me the once-over in my barman's uniform. "What is he, a printer?"

"No, Dad, his father is one of our authors authors, one of the best short story writers in the country."

"Oh." He took me in again, a slight shrug in his shoulders, this young man before him getting paid to be subservient. "Nice to meet you."

"You too, sir."

His daughter apologized for her father, but I was already busy taking orders from polite men and women in summer-weight suits and c.o.c.ktail dresses, clothes my mother and father had never owned or worn. These were cheerful people in their forties, fifties, and sixties, so many of them fit-looking and tanned, flashy watches on the men's wrists, delicate bracelets of gold or silver or turquoise and silver on the women's, their earrings glittering, their teeth as straight and white as the rich girls I'd known at Bradford College, and as pleasant as they were to each other and to me, it was clear I was being put in the same category as all the other people in their lives who performed services for them that made them feel more comfortable, well-traveled, well-fed, well-housed, and soothed, services they paid for with money the rest of us would never know. And it was like waking from a dream of rain to find yourself wet and getting wetter.

But the outrage I'd had in Austin was largely gone; all night long I saw these people not as a cla.s.s, but as individual men and women. There were no woods, only trees.

These people threw a lot of parties, too: for a judge retiring from the bench; for a daughter or son going off to a job in some city; for weddings and engagements; to celebrate a promotion; or-and there were many of these-just to have a party, as if the summer itself was being celebrated.

And what was wrong with that? What was wrong with taking your money and spending it on a good time?

There was the twenty-fifth reunion of lawyers who had all gone to Harvard Law School, an inst.i.tution I had never heard of until I found myself standing in my tie and vest behind an outdoor bar not far from a hot tub and swimming pool where a dozen men stood around drinking and laughing and shooting the s.h.i.t. Most of them were in shorts and Bermuda shirts, and they all wore a heavy bra.s.s graduation ring on the ring finger of their right hands. Some were tanned and handsome, their temples beginning to gray, a few others pale and plump and bald, like they'd spent their entire lives sitting behind a desk in a suit in a dim office. But they seemed happy to me, or at least happy to be among one another again, each of them a rich lawyer. Behind them, their wives swam in the pool or soaked in the hot tub or sat in the shade of ma.s.sive umbrellas at gla.s.s tables sipping from gla.s.ses of wine I'd poured for them.

The men drank beer or scotch on the rocks or vodka tonics I would squeeze a wedge of lime into, and one of the handsome ones, the host who owned the ma.s.sive house beside us, he turned to one of the portly ones and said, "You hear about Rodney?"

"No, what?"

"He's banging nails now."

"What?"

"Yep, said he was fed up with it all. He had a very healthy practice, too."

"Banging nails nails? I can't believe it."

"Yep, banging nails. Says he's never been happier."

As if the slang of that one phrase could begin to capture the painstaking geometry of building safe, long-lasting structures of concrete and wood and gla.s.s. But hearing this story pushed me further down the stream of my thinking, that those on the top were human beings too, and not all of them were happy, were they? Who was I to judge them?

ANOTHER EVENT, a midafternoon in late August, and my car wouldn't start so I'd left Pop's house early and walked down side streets, then under the railroad trestle and past the gas station up to the roller-skating rink and the train depot behind it. It was hot. I was sweating in my black nylon pants and white b.u.t.ton-down shirt, my black bow tie stuffed into one of my front pockets. I carried my black vest tucked under my arm, and I could smell the river-rust and oil and dried mud. I was a week from leaving for Wisconsin and this would be my last job working for the warm bis.e.xual Jew who made me laugh and told me once he was really an abstract painter, that he loved the work of a man named Rothko. I did not tell him I was trying to teach myself how to write, but I felt closer to him when he told me that, and I thought of creative people having to earn a living like everyone else. How you had to work but needed time to create. My catering boss seemed to have given up on finding that time. Jeb, too. What was I going to do about that? What was my my plan? plan?

Now I was reaching for my wallet to buy a round-trip ticket, but all my money was in the bank whose account I was just about to close and there was just enough in my wallet for the fare and a one-way ride on the T. They usually fed us at these parties, though. Before guests arrived, my boss would fix me a plate of whatever they were serving. He'd have me eat in the corner of a kitchen or out on a back porch where no one could see me.

On the train I dozed in the heat, woke up thinking how I was always leaving places. Two hours later I was standing behind a rented bar in the living room of two white doctors from South Africa. He was some kind of surgeon, and she was an anesthesiologist. They were both small-boned and ruddy-faced, and it was clear from framed photographs on the walls that they ran marathons together. I spent long periods against the wall between a lamp and a bookcase doing nothing. My boss and the others were serving dinner outside on a patio beneath the deck, and from where I stood I could see the early evening sky, streaks of coral and purple that were already becoming bottom-lit from the city below. I could hear conversations, too. This was a small party of no more than thirty people, and most of them seemed to be like their hosts, married and in shape and doctors of some sort. Many spoke in that Afrikaans accent I had at first mistaken for Australian. They talked a lot about work, about long hours and the difficulty of collecting on insurance claims, about hospital bureaucracy, the ever-present threat of malpractice suits, a dull conference in a fun city. They talked about where their kids would be going to school in the fall, the lessons they were taking in piano, dance, math, and horseback riding. Sometimes, there'd be a lowered voice, then laughter, and something vaguely s.e.xual and extramarital would be in the air, but not once did I hear any talk of their home country, the one currently in flames; Mandela was withering away in prison, and the agents of apartheid were ma.s.sacring children in schoolyards, injecting resistance leaders with lethal drugs and throwing them out of helicopters. Rape was being used as a form of ma.s.s torture, and in the townships black South Africans had begun to murder anyone suspected of collaborating with the white minority by necklacing them, forcing a gasoline-doused rubber tire over their heads and lighting it on fire.

All of this and more I'd learned in Austin, Texas. Now I was serving the murderous ruling cla.s.s in one of their homes, and of course they weren't talking about it. They were free of it. They were here now. They were Americans.

The party and our cleanup was over by nine o'clock. I tried to stay polite to whoever talked to me, but it was like coming down with a fever at a picnic and trying to pretend you felt fine. After I'd loaded my boss's van with plastic bins of leftover food, the trash bags of half-eaten food, the crates of china and cases of wine we hadn't opened, he handed me a check and offered to drive me to North Station. I thanked him but told him I needed some exercise, that the late train was still two hours away.

He gave me a half hug and wished me luck in Wisconsin, then he drove off and I was walking down a hill street of more fine homes, my bow tie in my pocket alongside my last paycheck, this money that may as well have been stained with dried blood.

It was a Sat.u.r.day night in late summer, and I could smell mown gra.s.s and pool chlorine, citronella candles and cigarette smoke. From behind a wall came the splash of water, a woman laughing. Jazz played on a record player through an open window somewhere, and I imagined more doctors lived there, or professors, lawyers, businessmen and businesswomen, anthropologists, psychologists, people with culture. People who read books and knew things. All those full bookcases back in the South Africans' house: medical journals, yes, but also novels and collections of short stories, books on art history, music, and world wars. Wasn't learning from these just the beginning? Weren't we then supposed to do do something? something?

At the bottom of the hill were the tracks of the subway train. One was just pulling away, its windows bright lighted squares of faces, most of them young and laughing and on their way to a good time. To the left was an intersection of streets and rail tracks where there were restaurants and bars, their doors open, rock and roll playing, a rising tide of voices and laughter, a horn honking, a shout, the smells of baked flour and oregano and the exhaust of a small imported car shooting past me for Kenmore Square where I was walking, this need to move and clear my head. But being in the midst of all this humanity could not possibly clear my head. Life, it seemed, was one big party, and what happened in faraway places or shadowy places at home or in places where people's skin was darker was just bad news n.o.body wanted to hear.

And did I I really want to hear it? Didn't I want to be in one of those bars drinking a cold beer and watching all the pretty young women? Maybe talk to one of them? Maybe dance? Liz had been accepted to the University of Colorado at Boulder, and all summer she'd been renting an apartment in Boston. The day before she left, we stood under the sun in her parking lot. Her hair had blonde streaks in it from afternoons at Wollaston Beach, and she was tanned and looked happy. really want to hear it? Didn't I want to be in one of those bars drinking a cold beer and watching all the pretty young women? Maybe talk to one of them? Maybe dance? Liz had been accepted to the University of Colorado at Boulder, and all summer she'd been renting an apartment in Boston. The day before she left, we stood under the sun in her parking lot. Her hair had blonde streaks in it from afternoons at Wollaston Beach, and she was tanned and looked happy.

Write me from Wisconsin.

Write me from Colorado.

I will.

Me too.

She gave me a kiss and a hug and I climbed into my car knowing these were lies we'd just told while smiling and waving goodbye. Who was I to feel above anyone? And now I was going off to study the work of dead men n.o.body read anymore.

But the thought of turning away from what was written about injustice would be like turning my back on a thousand little brothers, all of them standing there with their arms at their sides while grown men punched them in the face.

KENMORE SQUARE was a small pulsing city, a place I knew only as the subway stop that had gotten me here. A few hours earlier, it was a sunlit convergence of traffic from three directions, two-and three-story buildings on all sides that under the sun were like well-dressed grandfathers dozing on park benches, but now the old men had been replaced by the neon-electric young; the bottom floors were a wall of light-slashes of yellow, orange, and blue-a record shop, an organic pizza joint, a beer garden and Chinese takeout, an underground dance club called Rathskeller's, an Irish pub and Italian eatery, its doors and windows open, round tables set up with candles burning in gla.s.s lanterns, Italian stringed instruments colliding with the ba.s.s thump of the dance club, the perpetual river of cars and their engines, the talk and drunken yelps and falling and rising laughter of hundreds of college kids back in town just before Labor Day. The girls were in shorts or skirts and spaghetti-strap tops, their hair pulled up or cut short or flapping down their backs as they walked or ran across the square from one buzzing spot to another. Many of the boys were in shorts and sandals and the short-sleeve polo shirts they were all wearing now, blue or pink, the collars pulled up, this street gang of investment bankers' kids. There were musicians playing guitars and fiddles and saxophones. In the recessed doorway of a dry cleaning shop, a black kid with drumsticks was tapping out a rhythm on an upside-down joint compound bucket, a coffee can in front of him overflowing with dollar bills. Five punk rockers stood under a streetlamp in tight black leathers and chains. The sides of their heads were shaved clean, and their Mohawks rose from the tops of their skulls red and purple and white, these outfits they could barely move in, this hair that was their art.

I smelled pot smoke, gum on concrete, and the warm granite of curbstones. Up in the hills, the ruling cla.s.s was putting their white kids to bed, and all the world was doing what all the world did, taking care of their own desires and needs, and right now I needed air and quiet. I walked by a bearded man wedged into a sandwich board. He said something to me and held out a pamphlet, a bright portrait of Jesus Christ in robes looking mournfully at the viewer. I shook my head and stepped past him into a well-lit bookstore.

The air was cool in here, the carpet absorbing my footsteps. Something cla.s.sical was playing, something with violins that sounded sweetly melancholic, like a sick lover has finally died and the one left behind is on the cusp of knowing she's relieved.

Older people browsed from aisle to aisle, and I did too. All these books. Thousands and thousands of them. On everything. You could live a dozen long lives just reading what's in this one store and still not be finished. Meanwhile, more were being written. Every day men and women across the earth were stealing time to find a quiet place to write. And some had to hide what they wrote. They could be shoved into a cell or put up against a wall and shot for these words coming out of them. And I'd written that morning. Sat at the desk in the borrowed room of Pop's small campus house. I'd been imagining the life of a girl who did not love her family the way she thought she should. Who would read this? And why? What good good was this doing for anyone but me, the feeling it gave me every time, that somehow by escaping to the dream on the page I became more fully here. was this doing for anyone but me, the feeling it gave me every time, that somehow by escaping to the dream on the page I became more fully here.

So what. what.

I moved away from books with words in them to books of photographs. They were big and glossy and the largest ones were laid out on a table. On the cover of one was the black-and-white portrait of a bodybuilder standing in the same pose as the statue of David, except this man had so much more muscle, his skin oiled and shining. He'd probably spent his entire adult life achieving that. I thumbed through the pages, saw pictures of ma.s.sively muscled men whose names I still knew. I had worked so hard to be one of them so no one would even think of trying to hurt me or anyone I loved.

I closed the book and slid it back into place. I hadn't been in a fight since Devin Wallace. I picked up the next book without really looking at the cover, opened it to the images of famous war photographers, some in color, others in black and white, all of human bodies shot or stabbed or burned or blown-up. The first one I had seen in a magazine on our kitchen table when I was a boy. It was the ma.s.sacre at My Lai. Over five hundred villagers lying in the ditch where they'd been shot to death by American soldiers. Old men and women, women and their babies, boys and girls, a tangle of naked b.l.o.o.d.y flesh, each bullet hole a dark intrusion. Beneath this was the photo of a small Vietnamese man in baggy clothes. His hands were tied behind his back and his eyes were squinting as if he'd just been hit with a blast of air and not the bullet ripping through his brain from the handgun of the officer at his side executing him in the street.

I turned the page. My mouth had gone dry and there was a buzzing in my fingertips and here was another man at the precise moment of his death, his arms spread as he fell backwards, his rifle falling, the open sky behind him. There were the bodies of American soldiers on the beaches of Normandy. They lay facedown in the damp sand, and their rifles were half buried and the helmet of one still had a pack of cigarettes stuck in the band. There were the charred bodies of the men Jimmy Carter had sent into Iran to rescue the hostages, the melted pieces of their helicopter littered around their bodies like a broken promise. There was Mussolini hanging shot and upside down alongside his mistress. There was the photograph of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima, another of a bandaged Marine rushing through a defoliated stretch of mud to his wounded comrade. And there was one of a woman and her three young sons in El Salvador, all four of them lying dead outside the shack they'd lived in. The woman had dressed that day in a white cotton skirt and a blue sleeveless top. It looked like a man's T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, and she'd tied the hem tightly around her waist. Her hair was wrapped up in a red kerchief, and she was barefoot and her three boys were too, none of them older-looking than nine or ten. They wore shorts and were shirtless and they must've been huddling close to their mother and she must've tried to turn them away from the shots for now two lay on their stomachs and one on his side and her bare arms lay across all three of them, dark pools of blood in the dust beneath them. On the skin of the boys were small black marks. I looked closer and saw they were flies.

I closed the book and set it down and walked out of the store and across the square, a car honking at me and others, this sea of hopeful drunk youth from the land of my birth. That family had been murdered by a death squad armed by the government armed by us, paid for with the taxes of the mothers and fathers who had sent their children to this city to learn and to grow, to work hard and become successful people who would then make money and pay their taxes that would go where and do what?

I followed the crowd and walked down concrete steps to Rathskeller's. A live band was playing, the drums louder than the rest. A bouncer glanced at us from his stool that propped open the door, and I could see into the happy shadows of the club-a gang of boys downing shots, couples dancing jerkily under a light the color of flames, a hundred yelled conversations and crackling laughter, a crowded smoky haze the waitresses moved through. The bouncer wanted five bucks and I was glad I didn't have it and turned and walked past a line of people my age I felt so far away from, though gone were those barely suppressed feelings of moral superiority. What I felt instead was uselessness. I had no use.

Only a year earlier it had been easy to see people as members of cla.s.ses, as groups that could then be influenced, steered, and changed. But I no longer saw them that way, and why was I leaving for the Midwest to continue studying them like this? How could a man aim his M-16 at a young mother and her three boys? What part of himself did he have to kill to kill them? How was it possible for a woman and her children to be gunned down while elsewhere, at that exact moment, people laughed and drank and ate and made love?

There was a dime in my pocket under my check and bow tie. Soon I was standing in an outdoor phone booth dialing my father's number. When he answered, I told him I wasn't coming home.

Why not?

I don't know, I'm just-I'm f.u.c.ked up.

You been drinking?

No. The world's f.u.c.ked up, Pop. It's just so f.u.c.ked up.

Come home.

It was his his home, his and his third family's, but hearing him say that was like feeling his arm reach out and pull me in for a hug. home, his and his third family's, but hearing him say that was like feeling his arm reach out and pull me in for a hug.

No.

Don't miss your train, son. Come home.

No, I can't. I just-I'll see you tomorrow.

Andre?

Yeah?

Meet me at Fenway Park. It's where the Red Sox play. There's an afternoon game and I've got tickets. I'll give one to you.

A game. How could people play games games?

Maybe.

I hung up and began walking away from the noise and bright lights and music and laughter. The night was cooling. Three blocks north was a concrete overpa.s.s. It had two levels of traffic coming and going, and on the other side were the brownstone apartments and mansions of the rich. I could see the glow of their windows, the nearly translucent curtains separating the city from their cooled rooms. Then I was standing on the sidewalk under the bridge. It was dark here, the only light coming from pa.s.sing cars. Across the street a hooded homeless man sat on a guardrail beside a shopping cart. It was stuffed with bundles wrapped tightly in trash-bag plastic, and hanging from the front was a clear sack of empty bottles and cans. Taped to the cart's handle was a small flag jutting out at an angle, a rally flag of some kind, the soiled logo of a sports team or car racing team or college crew. Behind him and up a dirt embankment just under the overpa.s.s, four or five men were pa.s.sing around a bottle. One of them was yelling about something, his words so slurred they sounded like a foreign tongue.

I turned and left the sidewalk and walked over matted gra.s.s. I climbed a rise to the concrete pad that held the footings that held the steel girders on this end of the bridge. There was broken gla.s.s here and old rags, a white sweater balled up beside a square of warped plywood, but no men or women. Down to my right a culvert of water flowed west under Storrow Drive and the jogging park beyond into the Charles River, MIT on the other side, Harvard, the best schools for the finest minds, and I stepped over broken gla.s.s and up the concrete incline till I could touch the steel of the girders. I smelled mud and dried urine and the sticky sweetness of cheap wine. In the shadows I could see how the steel plates were bolted into the concrete and between each beam was a six-foot gap. The footing they rested on was chest-high, and I reached out and brushed away a few pebbles, an empty beer can, a rotted sock. The underside of the overpa.s.s was sixteen or eighteen inches above where I'd just cleaned and as each car or truck rolled over me, I could feel a slight compression in the air, the tires a muted rumble.

I pulled myself up and kept my head low and lay down on my back. To the left was a concrete wall, at my feet and head was steel; the only way at me was from where I'd just come, and I turned on my side in that direction and curled my legs up and rested my head against my arm and pushed my fingers between my knees. The drunks sounded closer than before, but I could see them fifty or a hundred yards away huddled in the darkness on the other underside of this bridge. I could still hear the Sat.u.r.day night noise of Kenmore Square, but it was muted now, and I closed my eyes, and there were the three dead boys, their mother's body doing all it could not do.

Then I was a boy again, curled in my bed across from Jeb's while downstairs Mom and Pop and their friends laughed and drank and argued, and all across the earth wars raged like fires, and not one of us seemed to know how to put them out.

I WOKE just an hour or two after dawn. Sometime in the night I must've rolled to my left because I opened my eyes to concrete, the embedded grain of the plywood forms it had been poured in. I started to roll away, but then remembered the five-foot drop. The traffic above my face was constant now, the roll and b.u.mp over the expansion joints of one car after another. My mouth tasted like dry iron and I was hungry and thirsty and turned to see a pale blade of sun shining onto the matted gra.s.s beside the culvert. Down the length of the overpa.s.s and up the other embankment the drunks were gone. I reached into my pocket for my boss's check, hoping to see a Boston bank written on it. There was, though it was also Sunday, wasn't it?

But I had a bank card in my wallet, and I knew there were bank machines in Harvard Square across from where men played chess under the trees in front of Au Bon Pain. An hour later, after a long walk, I had money and was eating a croissant at a small table there. The orange juice was cold and freshly squeezed and I began to feel grateful for these gifts, small as they were. The despair from the night before hadn't completely lifted, but was it wrong to feel grateful for the small gifts in my life? Wasn't I fortunate to have something in the bank? Wasn't I fortunate to have a plastic card I could push into a machine to get it? Now I was eating in the sunshine, watching men play chess in the shade. I'd played it once but wasn't good at it. With chess, you had to think ahead and weigh the probability of your opponent's countermoves. You had to be cool and rational and clear-headed, three qualities I just did not seem to possess.

I stood and brushed the crumbs off my pants. There was still grit there from sleeping under the overpa.s.s, and I slapped off as much as I could. On the sidewalk I stopped two guys my age, both of them in jeans and T-shirts. The taller one held a grocery bag under his arm, and I asked them where the Red Sox play.

"Today?" the shorter one said. "Home."

"Fenway Park, right?"

He narrowed his eyes at me, trying to decide whether I was f.u.c.king with him or not. "Where do they play when they're at home home?"

"Yeah, I'm supposed to meet someone there."

"That's right, Fenway," the taller one said, and he started walking again. "It's right off Kenmore Square."

The short one shook his head and kept walking too, and so did I, back in the direction from which I'd come.

MY BEER was cold and the sun was hot on my face. It was the first baseball game I'd ever watched with my father, and the second I'd ever seen. He sat two seats away from me in the crowd, this living, breathing quilt I felt sewn into. He wore a red short-sleeve shirt and a baseball cap, its visor shadowing the sun, his thick beard lit by it. In one hand he held a plastic cup of beer, in the other a smoking pipe. He'd draw from his pipe, then sip his beer, his eyes intently on the men playing down in the field. Between him and me was Richard. He was a poet who ran the bookstore at Bradford College, and I'd always liked him because he was thoughtful and kind and quiet. I sat beside him in my dusty black pants and white shirt, my black vest stuffed under my seat, my pocket full of cash.

Then Pop and Richard and I were standing with all the others under the sun, cheering for a player who'd just hit the ball past another player out in the field. It was clear to me the runner was on our side and that's why we were rooting him on as he made it to the last base before home. We sat back down and Richard and Pop were talking about that player, something about his record for the season, a good word, I thought, though I a.s.sociated it with falling leaves or snow or rain or heat. Every now and then Pop would glance over at me and take in my face and hair, my whiskers and wrinkled bartending clothes, and I'd catch the concern in his eyes before he winked at me; he must've told Richard something, too, because they were both treating me with the gentle reverence reserved for someone in trouble.

But that afternoon, drinking too much beer and sitting in the sun with my father and his friend, trouble was momentarily out there in the streets, away from the thousands of men, women, and kids watching these famous men play this famous game. Maybe the trick was to turn it all off sometimes. To concentrate on something comprehensible, though I knew it would take me years to understand this sport with all of its rules and apparently hidden strategies. I kept glancing over at Pop. He knew baseball and enjoyed every bit of watching it. He also spent his mornings writing deeply about men and women in some kind of pain. What was wrong with taking a break from all that?

There was the crack of the bat, its splintered echo throughout the sunlit park, then we were all standing again cheering for these men we did not even know, cheering as one of them sprinted home and tapped the plate, dust rising up from beneath it like smoke from some underground fire.

PART III.

HOLYHEAD.

14.

THE PRE-PAROLE CENTER was three stories of rambling brick for convicts from Canon City Penitentiary. It used to be a sorority house just blocks from the University of Colorado campus. The south windows looked out over the yard and its live oaks, the brick fraternity houses on the other side of the street, the rise of the Flat Irons beyond. The city of Boulder was nestled at the base of them, these naked rock faces hundreds of feet high, left behind by a glacier thousands of years earlier. In their crevices grew aspen and columbine and blue spruce, and there were trails you could hike to the top and look west toward Nederland and the Rocky Mountains or east out over the plains toward Denver. Over a year had pa.s.sed since I'd watched that baseball game with my father, and now I stood in an inmate's room, staring at the stars over the ridge of the Flat Irons.

I was doing a head count. It was long after lights-out, and when I opened the doors to their rooms, the light from the hallway spilled over men in bunks. Some would be curled under blankets like boys, others lying flat on their backs and snoring, a few more facedown, a bare arm hanging off the side of the mattress. It was hard not to think of their victims then.

There was Harlan G., who'd done five years for armed robbery. He committed most of his crimes in convenience stores during the day, and he wore no disguises. He liked to have security cameras pointing at him, maybe a customer or two in there as well, and the climax was always the same, sticking his loaded .38 in the face of the man or woman behind the counter just to see the terror in their eyes, to feel the absolute power he had over them as they did whatever he asked them to do, which was to empty the register into a paper bag he'd hand them. One time, though, he didn't even ask for money, just walked into a store on a June afternoon and pressed his pistol under the chin of a man who looked like his father, the man who'd beat him up regularly as a kid.

It was hard to imagine anyone beating up Harlan G. He was short and a lean 190 pounds of prison weight-room muscle. He had flat gray eyes and a flat crooked nose, and his only tattoos crawled up both forearms, two dragons, the one on the left breathing fire, the one on the right getting its head lopped off. But with Harlan G., who was quiet and kept to himself and who other inmates stayed away from, we never knew which part of him was the slayer or the slain. Was it the old Harlan getting its head lopped off? Or the new one, the man who worked for an HVAC contractor in Boulder and was forced to go to AA meetings and cla.s.ses in anger management, the one who, as a condition of his parole, was not allowed to travel back to his old neighborhood in East Denver? It's where the projects were, and it's where he and a lot of the other inmates had been raised.

There was Dozer whose real name was Gil, a six-foot, 330-pound biker with the Sons of Silence. He'd done time for weapons violations and for dealing cocaine and crystal meth, and the first time I saw him was on a Friday night. He walked into the office without permission, swearing, two house-rule violations already. His voice was a booming rasp staccato, gun blasts from a rusty barrel. "Those f.u.c.kin' frat boys park in my f.u.c.kin' s.p.a.ce one more f.u.c.kin' time I'll take a f.u.c.kin' bat to their motherf.u.c.kin' heads!" Dozer's hair was a gray two-foot braid down his back, his jacket black leather he had custom-tailored by an old woman down in Loveland. I later learned the inside pocket was reinforced to carry a 9-millimeter, something the state had forbade him from doing ever again. I was standing behind the desk under the fluorescent light of the office, the only C.T. in the room, the new one he hadn't met yet, and I was weighing whether or not to write Dozer up right then for walking in like this, for a verbal threat and for profanity, but Dozer's case manager, Buddy J., stuck his head in the office door and said, "Take a breath, Dozer, and come see me right now, please." Buddy J. was from New York City. He had long brown hair and a brown mustache and wore black a lot. The inmates respected him.

"The little motherf.u.c.kers." Dozer wiped his forehead with the back of his tattooed hand. He pulled off his leather and glanced down at me as if I should've done something for him by now. He wore a dark T-shirt, his arms an endless scrawl of blue and purple and green, his throat too. As he walked by I read the white lettering across his ma.s.sive sagging chest: Riding a Honda's Like f.u.c.king a f.a.ggot Riding a Honda's Like f.u.c.king a f.a.ggot. On his back was: It Feels Good Till Somebody Sees You. It Feels Good Till Somebody Sees You.

Manny was older than my father, a handsome Latino with thinning hair and a graying mustache who liked to linger in the mess hall over cooling coffee and talk about the old days. It was winter now, a Sunday afternoon, and inmates who'd been denied weekend furloughs were allowed to lounge at the dining tables, playing cards or backgammon or dominoes. One of them was my age, a baby-faced kleptomaniac named Lenny. He'd sit in a corner and strum his guitar and sing mainly old Hank Williams. His favorite was "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," and even if he was a bit off-key now and then, the other men never told him to shut up. Instead they'd ask him to sing that one over and over again.

There were fifty-seven inmates in the house, but no more than a dozen or so would get weekend furloughs. Not because of any infractions weighing against them but because they were from neighborhoods that had forged them into the criminals they'd become. It was where their families lived-their wives and mothers, sons and daughters and brothers and aunts. But it's also where the inmates had learned the skills that had made them offenders, men and women who offend the rest of us with their stealing and dealing, their scamming and stabbing and shooting, with their rage.