Now and Again (11 page)

Soon after Maggie started working at the prison, Valerie had said, “You have quite a reputation. Misty Mills told me all about you.” At the time, Maggie had made a self-deprecating gesture and said, “Whatever it was, I hope it was good.” But now competing thoughts about what Misty might have said about her wrestled in her brain. Too much time had passed for her to bring it up again and ask Valerie for specifics. Besides, Maggie didn't want to let on that there was anything to tell, which could prompt Valerie to talk to Misty and Misty to put two and two together if Winslow had let on that he was missing a document.

Instead, she approached Misty at church the next Sunday. “What did you tell Valerie about me?” she asked.

“I told her to keep an eye on you.”

Again, there were multiple interpretations. Was it a friendly gesture, or was something a little more sinister being implied?

True was standing nearby and must have sensed her hesitation, for she came over with her plate of donuts and linked her arm through Maggie's. “Everybody knows you have a good heart,” she said.

“No doubt I do,” said Maggie. “But what does having a good heart really mean? Having a good heart is meaningless if you don't do good things.”

“You're kind, for one thing, and you don't do anything bad, do you?”

“Thank you, True, but everyone does bad things. I always thought the key was for the good to outweigh the bad, but now I wonder if that's even possible. And just try putting those people with good hearts in a difficult situation and see what they do then. What if it's the circumstances and not the people that are bad?”

“I don't see how circumstances can be bad,” said True. “That's like blaming a road for having potholes.”

“But people could fix the potholes,” said Maggie. “Instead of worrying so much about whether people are good or bad, maybe we should pay more attention to changing their circumstances.”

“I thought you were against changing circumstances,” said Misty. “Don't go to war against a dictator. Don't try to free an oppressed people. Don't make an omelet because you might break a few eggs.”

“Maggie doesn't believe in eggs,” said True with a giggle. “Not if it means upsetting the chickens.”

“I'm just saying that there are plenty of people to free right here—people who have done less wrong in their lives than I have,” said Maggie a little recklessly, given the documents hidden in her drawer.

“Just so you know, this is what I warned Valerie about,” said Misty. “This is a perfect example right here.”

L
yle started taking an interest in what other people had to say on various subjects, and without Maggie with him night and day, it was as if he had an open socket that was now free for other connections. Sometimes Jimmy sat in Maggie's old chair in the lunchroom, and for the first time since high school, Lyle was reminded of the term “best friend.” He made ball-and-chain jokes with Jimmy, and just talking about how a wife tied you down made Lyle feel kind of liberated.

In early March, Lyle towed Jimmy's car to the shop when it broke down. A few weeks later, Jimmy used his chain saw to clear a branch that had fallen on the shed during a winter ice storm, after which Jimmy asked Lyle and Will to go fishing with him up at the lake the next day.

“They can't,” said Maggie. “Will is taking the SAT next weekend, so he needs to study.”

“What am I going to learn in a week?” asked Will.

“That's like saying it's no use saving a penny,” said Maggie. “Every little bit helps.”

“Your mother's right,” said Jimmy. “Love does much, but money does more.”

“My point was about education, not about money or love,” said Maggie.

“Anyway,” said Will. “I know all of the test-taking techniques. Mr. Quick has been drilling them into us for weeks.”

“Say, I've got an idea,” said Jimmy. “Will can bring his book in the car. I'll quiz him on the way up.”

The next morning Jimmy tooted the horn when it was still dark. While Will settled into the back seat, Lyle stowed a cooler full of sandwiches and drinks in the trunk, along with the SAT review book. As they drove into the rising light, Jimmy switched on the radio looking for the top-of-the-hour news and weather. “They do the weather last,” he said.

Just over half of the thirty thousand additional troops being sent as part of the so-called surge have arrived in Iraq, yet political pressure at home calls for quick results and a firm pullout date,
said the radio announcer.

“Firm pullout,” said Jimmy. “That's the problem right there.” Then he called back to Will. “‘Oxymoron.' There's an SAT word for you.”

Poor construction has resulted in generators that don't work, overflowing sewage systems, and unreliable distribution of food and fuel,
said the radio announcer.

“We're supposed to build their country for them?” asked Lyle.

“If you break it, you own it,” said Jimmy. “I guess that's the thinking there.”

After the weather, Jimmy turned the radio off and said, “Okay, Will, now for the quiz like I promised your mom.”

“I might have put the review book in the trunk,” said Lyle. “If you pull over, I can get it out.” Outside the car window, the landscape heaved and buckled. Scrubby pine trees clung to the rocks and a stand of post oaks pushed out their soft new leaves.

“It's not that kind of quiz,” said Jimmy.

“What kind of quiz is it?” asked Will.

“Multiple choice,” said Jimmy. “Here's the first question. If you're interested in a girl, do you (a) tell her how much you like her; (b) wait for her to make the first move; (c) invite her on a romantic date; or (d) ask out someone else?”

“Let's see,” said Will. “I'm guessing A might scare her off, and I can eliminate D, so I'm guessing the answer is C.”

“B worked for me,” said Lyle, and Jimmy and Will laughed.

“Even if that's what you did with Mom,” said Will, “it wouldn't work with most girls. Most girls like to be pursued.”

“Correctamente,” said Jimmy. “And what if the girl doesn't think she's interested in you? In that case, you have to change her mind. So B is out, and telling her how much you like her not only scares her off, but it makes you look weak. Women like strong men. They like men who have options, not some sad sack who's mooning after them like a sick dog. I suppose you could ask her out on a romantic date, but that isn't as good as D.”

“No way,” said Will.

“You've got to establish yourself as a player. Then the women will come to you.”

“Jeezus, Jimmy. That's not how it was with Maggie and me.”

“You have to keep them guessing. It crossed my mind that all that weirdness up at the plant is just because Maggie needs a little excitement in her life.”

“What weirdness?” asked Lyle. “All she did is quit her job.”

“But why did she quit it? That's the buried question. People are curious if all that do-gooding talk was just a smoke screen for something else.”

“Who's saying that?” asked Lyle. Then he added, “And what would it be a smoke screen for?”

“Forget I mentioned it. It's just rumors, anyway. The point is that a romantic date is good too. The strategy has to fit the man. No percentage in acting like a player if you can't pull it off.”

Lyle had never been a player, but now he wondered if he had let Maggie down in some way, if he should have worked harder to keep their romance alive. And then he wondered if she had let him down too, if they were missing a crucial part of life because of something she had done or failed to do. Nah, he told himself. It was Jimmy who was missing something. “There's more to life than dating,” he told Jimmy. “You'd figure that out if you had a wife and kids.”

“I won't try to tell you your business,” said Jimmy. “But Will here has a chance to learn from a master.”

“A divorced master.” Lyle laughed before turning in his seat to look at Will. “Consider the source, son. Always consider the source when people are giving you advice.”

“Love and war,” said Jimmy. “Or, rather, love
is
war. Specifically, it's maneuver warfare. You have to feint and circle, and then you overwhelm. Women like a show of force—nothing over the line, that's not what I'm advocating. I'm just saying, who likes a pussy? Frankly, about the only thing more fun than seduction is war.”

“And fishing,” said Lyle.

“That goes without saying,” said Jimmy.

Lyle hadn't been fishing in a long time, and now he remembered what it was like to feel at one with the world around him instead of looking on from the bleachers while other people made the plays. As a young man, he'd had a vague notion that when he was called upon to provide for a wife and family, he'd do it by casting his line out into the world and reeling whatever he caught back in. That wasn't the way things turned out to be, though, and he'd been silly to think it. Still, he liked the way his hands knew what to do without his brain having to tell them. He liked knotting on the shiny lure and flinging it toward a far-off shore and then feeling it tug against the water and trying to spot it beneath the murky surface of the lake as he jigged it in. He settled into a soothing rhythm: the buzz of the line stripping off the reel as he flung it forward, the musical plunk
when the lure hit the water, the ratcheting purr of the reel, the smooth arc of his arm and flick of his wrist for the back cast, the cool spray of drops against his skin as the lure whizzed above his head, and finally, the shooting line and agreeable plink as it hit the surface of the lake. He liked watching the water smooth over it and imagining a whole mysterious world roiling beneath the surface, filled with creatures that would live and die without knowing a thing about Lyle's world, just the way he wouldn't know a thing about theirs.

B
y April, Maggie had changed her mind about the prison, not only because the idea of helping the prisoners filled an important requirement for her new life, but also because of the adrenaline rush she experienced when she found out shocking things—that Tomás might be innocent, that profit-driven private prisons relied on a steady stream of bodies for their cells, that “growth” was an industry buzzword, that she suspected her boss was cheating on his wife.

“Do you think DC is having an affair?” she said to Valerie one day when the director was out of the office.

“What makes you say that?” asked Valerie.

“He's been so cheerful recently, and he's lost a bit of weight.”

“Good lord!” said Valerie. “You seem to be just as eager to convict the innocent as you are to let the guilty go free. That seems to be a thing with you.”

Maggie had hoped she and Valerie could be friends the way she had been friends with True and Misty, but whenever she made overtures in that direction, Valerie would find an excuse to remind her who was the first assistant to the director and who was the second. “Let's not forget who you work for,” she said.

“I work for the director.”

“On paper, perhaps, but he hired you to help me.”

Valerie sold makeup out of her car, and as a gesture of friendship, Maggie bought a pot of eye shadow even though she worried that the makeup had been tested on defenseless rabbits. While Valerie was dabbing pastes and powders from her sample kit onto Maggie's face and showing her the results in a handheld mirror, she chattered about the great loves of her life and running off with her current husband to Las Vegas while she was still married to someone else.

“Oh, Johnny and I are all respectable and settled now,” she said. “But we sure had some fun first. Now, tell me about all of the terrible things you've done.”

Maggie couldn't think of any that would interest Valerie. She had once been spanked for losing her house key, and another time she had burned a pan of lasagna and blamed it on her sister. By far the worst thing she had ever done was to strap baby Will into his car seat and forget all about him for an entire hour one autumn afternoon. The idea that if it had been a hot summer day he would have cooked still kept her up at night, but she knew this wasn't the kind of thing Valerie was after. She had never had an illicit rendezvous in a forest or unbuttoned her blouse behind the bleachers or engaged in heavy petting in the back row of a movie theater or been groped by a stranger in a bar or on a bus. She had never had a doomed first love. Now she knew she never would, and the thought filled her with sorrow for the dark swaths of experience she would never know.

But when she skimmed the prisoners' files for indications of suppressed evidence or incompetent legal representation, it was as if she had circled around and was approaching the forest from the other side. Whenever she found something particularly egregious, she copied the document and slipped it into Max Gray's file, and then her nerves would tingle and her lungs would feel as if they might collapse for all the pressure put on them by her heart. What if she was discovered? What if Valerie or DC himself walked in and caught her in the act? On those days, she would breeze through her duties as if she had taken one of the little violet pills Valerie claimed to have taken in her youth.

It seemed as if her energy and confidence was catching, for even Tomás straightened his shoulders and started to speak up in class. He didn't seem to notice when Maggie forgot to bring him something special, just a bag of candies for the entire group. Instead of whining and looking hurt, he only inquired if she and her family were well.

“Very well, thank you,” Maggie replied, pushing away from the table rather than leaning forward as she usually did.

One day, it was Tomás who leaned forward into the vacant space and asked, “Do you have a dog?” And then he asked, “Why not?”