The Best American Mystery Stories 2012 (23 page)

Moultrie's called James just often enough that responding to the recorded request to pay for a call has become habit: once James even accepted the charges for what turned out to be a wrong number or misdial, some other poor fuck in some other prison hoping to get word of something to someone.
Tell Mama I'm in here,
the voice had wailed into his ear over the shriek of a prison common room, and there'd been nothing for James to do but gently replace the phone in its cradle.

And now Moultrie, mellow Moultrie—who used never to worry about much of anything and often slept, James remembers, past noon; Moultrie, who any afternoon in 1983 might have announced to an admiring James that pretty soon he'd be quitting one of the interchangeable menial jobs he held to go off to follow the Dead; Moultrie, who several summers after that would tap into something called the Rainbow Family Gathering, and even more recently hitchhiked all the way to Burning Man, threatening to stop in Houston on the way—now Moultrie, he frets. Apparently. He's called James twice—at least a five-dollar charge each time—to confirm the make, model, and tag number of the car James will be parking in the prison lot, and once more since then to make sure he's still planning to show up.

James hunches over the steering wheel, fumbling to turn on the windshield wipers, to swipe at the windshield with a bit of ragged Kleenex scavenged from underneath his seat. The difference between damp night and warmer morning has fogged the curving glass. His mother doesn't realize arriving in time for visiting hours meant he had to leave Houston in the middle of the night. Moul­trie has no idea how what he did has aged her. James flicks on the radio, looks down at the passenger seat at Moultrie's carefully written directions, and noses the car into the exit lane.

 

It's that time, just pre–morning drive time, when in other circumstances James might be leaving a woman's apartment, shirt untucked, shoes off and in one hand so he doesn't wake her when he lets himself out of her apartment. The time of morning when there's still dew to spangle the windshields of all the recently waxed compacts in the parking lots and, once he slips behind the wheel of his car and turns on the radio, the DJs can play pretty much what they please, the flip sides of hits and songs that never made the top ten. This time of day always feels like a fresh start, and James wishes he had a better reason to have driven all this way.

It's approached so delicately, in code—Moultrie's situation. His misstep. He pled guilty to the charges against him in the hope he'd somehow beat the mandatory sentence and serve less than the three-plus-something years that trafficking—a felony, James would like to point out to both his mother and Moultrie, a federal crime—had meant. The fact that he didn't beat anything and 'll now be serving at least four years out of fifteen means he harbors great enmity toward his lawyer, one found by James's mother, who either failed or did not fail to live up to his end of the bargain and cost a sum she'll be struggling to pay off for the duration of Moul­trie's sentence and probably past that—but Moultrie has never once admitted to
being
guilty.

All in all this situation has given me time to reflect on my life and see my accomplishments and mistakes with open eyes.
Alone in the car, James allows himself to roll his eyes. This is not fucking
Oprah
—Moul­trie was
busted.

There's probably an actual town with a main street and square cached between the interstate and the state highway leading to the prison, but James will never come back here again. Sometime in the future he'll speed along I-12 past the signs indicating this exit and remember only the Kentucky Fried Chicken and Home Depot from Moultrie's map, and the deserted McDonald's playscape he just passed. The restaurant behind it is already open, circled by vehicles waiting their turn at the drive-through.

Three strikes and you're out,
Moultrie reminded him over the phone.
I didn't even get one!
His tone had been righteous. Rapists were in and out in much less time that he'll be.

He'd just made a misstep.

 

The prison, or, as Moultrie labeled it so carefully on the return address of his letter, the
correctional facility,
turns out to be in a field that might've once grown corn or cotton. Its location falls somewhere between country and town, and it could be located anywhere, in fact probably is; there have to be a thousand places just like this all over the country. It could be a school or a sewage treatment plant or rehab facility or any of a number of vaguely institutional things. The gravel parking lot is already almost full by the time James pulls into it, a fact that reminds him this is podunk minimum-security stuff. He'd expected something more—the Big House and the Pen and cinematic lockdowns.

The line to check in at the guard box at the edge of the lot snakes back five yards or more, consists almost entirely of girls who look too young. Possibly too young to have finished high school, certainly too young to drink, or to possess the babies half of them hold in their arms. He takes his place in their midst, is surreptitiously looked over and then ignored. At the front of the line, the security wand dips and crackles, passing over the Baggie of change and car keys a girl with hair combed into an elaborate up-do clutches in one hand, then over the apparent self-portrait drawn in ballpoint on lined notebook paper she holds in the other. The envelope of photographs she also wants to bring in apparently will require permission from someone higher up, a sergeant.

“I'm going to have to wand you, little man,” the guard says, bending toward the toddler who's wandering blithely toward and then away from the gate. The guard reaches out and tugs gently at the straps at the back of the little boy's overalls: the wand in his hand passes over the tiny tennis shoes, their laces tied in neat bows; over the dingy blue plush stuffed animal hugged in one hand.

James waits his turn, wondering if the real punishment of jail might lie in the complete tedium of it.
Everyone
is bored—the girls standing in line with their arms folded and their hips lazily cocked, some of whom holler across him about the Greyhound bus they took to get here; the guards, who over and over again in a monotone explain rules everyone already understands.

But everyone seems to know each other, and the guards are less uptight than Security at the Houston airport.

“How you doing, Miz Cantrell?” the guard in the booth says to the elderly woman in front of James. He extends his clipboard for her to sign. Everybody else knew to put their coins for the vending machines into Zip-loc Baggies, but James is going to have to toss his loose change into a bowl before he walks through the metal detector.

“Moultrie Woodruff,” he announces when he gets to the window of the booth. It's so simple, like a password. One second, he's out in the free world, then the security wand blesses him with a flourish, and there he is—on the inside.

There's nothing high-tech about his entrance. He just signs in, walks the thirty feet into the squared-off cinder-brick building, is buzzed through one small waiting area and into the next like livestock moving through a chute. Each group of guards waves him on with an astounding lack of suspicion; they don't even bother to prevent him from noticing, when he puts pen to paper at his second stop, that no one's been to see Moultrie in months. Somewhere, behind another set of closed doors, he can hear a loudspeaker summoning his stepbrother.

 

Moultrie's long ponytail has been cut off; what's left of his hair has gone gray. All the other inmates being visited seem to be the same age as the girls who've come to see them—as far as James can tell, they're all mere babies being visited by babies.

“James, man,” Moultrie says, moving forward.

James steps back.

“Hey, it's not like it's catching or something,” Moultrie says, his voice loud. “Not like if you touch me they won't ever let you back out again.” Their second try at an embrace dissolves into an awkward bumping of shoulders. “Let's just sit down, bro',” he says.

James realizes he'd expected—planned on—a pane of plastic between them. Where are the phones, the surveillance cameras? What the room resembles most is a school cafeteria, one where the folding chairs Moultrie indicates have been arranged in rows along the sides like bleachers. The vending machines are at the back.

“Can't sit facing each other,” Moultrie explains as they sit down shoulder to shoulder. “You might pass something off to me. How are you?”

“Okay,” James says. The wall in front of him looks mirrored, but he knows it's not, that there must be more bored-seeming, pokerfaced guards behind it. All around them, family groups have begun to settle in in a way that makes him realize they're going to sit here like this for the entire five visiting hours, the long haul.

“What's up?” he says, hands on his knees, because it's what he has always said, since he was fifteen and his mother and Moul­trie's father had just merged households and he used to get home from school and knock on Moultrie's bedroom door, and sometimes Moultrie would let him shake the seeds from the weed into the crease of
Quadrophenia
's double jacket before he cleaned and bagged it. James asks it even though it feels like saying to some cancer patient
How are you?
The answer can't be good.

“Thanks for coming, man,” Moultrie says formally beside him. “It's been a long time. Directions get you here okay?”

“Yeah.” Had those directions been so detailed, and Moultrie's handwriting so careful, just because it was another way to fill up time? The five hours ahead of them stretch into eternity. Driving here, James had imagined he'd stay for an hour or two; that maybe he'd be able to make it back to Houston before midnight, only half his weekend wasted. What can they possibly
do
here?

“What's your day like?” he asks finally, clearing his throat.

Moultrie pauses. “I read,” he says. “Read a lot. We got a group that reads the paper after dinner.”

“There a decent library here? What kind of stuff are you reading?”

“Elmore Leonard. Tom Clancy. Lot of the guys read romance novels.” Moultrie's lip curls. “But I just finished
Notes from Underground.
Dostoevsky. He's got it
down,
man.”

“What down?” James asks.

“This.” Moultrie waves an encompassing hand at the room. “Before that I read
The Fountainhead.
I keep to myself,” he adds abruptly.

James sits back. Maybe
now
the prison movie he'd imagined will start, and Moultrie'll say something like
I keep my nose clean.

“Got a job,” he says instead. “Mom tell you?”

James remembers hearing something about work in the kitchen. Framed by his mother's eternally optimistic voice as something good, something Moultrie could use later. On the outside. She has always looked on the bright side, at least as far as Moultrie is concerned.

“That one didn't work out.” Moultrie sighs. “I was real fucking depressed, those first few months, about my situation.”

There it is: the situation. The reason James is sitting here, the reason he can't think of a single thing to say.

“I'm in the shop now,” Moultrie says. He turns so he can look James full in the face, careful to keep both feet on the floor. He sounds awake for the first time since James arrived. “Painting signs.”

“Signs?” James says. The clatter of chairs scraped back on the linoleum is threaded through with the wails of fretful kids and the thud of a soda can as it rattles into the chute in the vending machine. He feels defeated by the clamor of so much important information needing to be conveyed so fast—five hours isn't much, when you've got a life you're sealed away from and a family out there doing stuff they need to tell you about.

“You brought change, man?” Moultrie asks, interrupting himself hopefully. As early as it is, everybody around them's drinking Coke like coffee, even the guard sitting, yawning, by the door. “I could use something to drink.”

“Sure.” James digs in his pocket.

“You've got to go get it. We can't both go. You might be handing something off to me. You know.”

“Oh,” James says, disconcerted. “What do you want?”

A Coke, a Baby Ruth bar, some vinegar and salt potato chips, maybe some Twinkies. As Moultrie lists them, James realizes Moultrie didn't ask him to bring change because he wanted to be as much of a host as possible and have a way to offer
something,
but more because whatever James brings back from the machines will be out of the ordinary, an unexpected entertainment. What's it like to be bored so shitless?

“Yeah, I know,” Moultrie says when he gets back. “I'm going to start working out again a couple of months before my date comes up.” He peels back the wrapper on his candy bar.

“So you've got this job in the sign shop,” James says. “You just going to let yourself turn to shit, man?”

“Huh? Like, you know, you've seen those signs they put up when there's going to be some kind of big meeting? About a piece of property? Like so somebody can make changes to it?”

“Oh,” James says. “Like for zoning hearings.”

“Yeah. And sometimes highway signs. You know, the big green and white ones.”

“People paint those?”

James never thought about where they came from, had assumed they were printed somehow, stamped out by some giant machine, and this is Moultrie, for Chrissakes, who could've gone to LSU, who could've done anything.

“Yeah,” Moultrie says simply. “I'm the best at it in here, so now it's mostly just me. Pretty cool. I get the shop to myself. There's a radio. Everybody else they tried at it, they just slopped the paint all over the place.”