We Live in Water (15 page)

Wade didn’t know why the men called him Beans.

Ricky grabbed a Taco Bell bag with his picker, flicked it into his garbage sack. “You’re like them scientists on TV explaining black holes. More you talk, less I get.”

2

AT GROUP
, Wade just listened.

Ricky always got emotional in the big circle. He twitched and wept and said he could see the “patterns I been chained to my whole life.” The social worker in the wheelchair asked if that meant Ricky was “ready to go straight now.”

“Oh fuck, definitely,” Ricky said.

After group Wade asked Ricky if he was really going to quit dealing drugs.

“Oh, that ain’t what I’m here for, Beans,” Ricky said. “I diddled my neighbor’s kid.”

3

WADE DIDN’T
even know they still made Fanta, but there were two empty cans in the weeds along the highway.

“How’d you get caught, Beans?” Ricky asked.

Wade paused over a cigarette pack. Pall Malls. Did they still make Pall Malls? This stretch of highway was a time machine. “One of the partners had a girlfriend,” Wade said. “Anna. After his wife found out, I started seeing Anna. Next audit, my partner pointed out some internal controls that I’d let slip. Trust-account funds that had mingled into my . . .” Wade stopped and stared up at the sky. “Black holes,” he said.

“How much you take?” Ricky asked.

Wade looked back down at the sandy tufts of grass along the highway, at the line of orange-vested men with their garbage-picking spears and trash-bag shields. “Not enough,” he said.

4

ANOTHER TIME
Ricky said, “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Beans. Everybody up in this shit for some kind of greed or fucking.”

5

WADE’S LAWYERS
said they could get him transferred back to Seattle for community service, but he didn’t want some old client seeing him cleaning pigeon shit in Pioneer Square. His kids wanted nothing to do with him. And until the divorce was finalized, he didn’t even know which house to go to.

No, he said, he’d just do his community service in Spokane.

At the hearing, Densmore got the judge to agree to shorter probation in exchange for a steeper fine and Wade’s involvement in a community-service pilot program. Wade had never worked with the criminal side of the firm before; Densmore was crudely efficient, brusque even, as if this business was beneath him. The hearing took all of four minutes. It was between the lawyers. While they talked at the bench, Wade looked down at the white socks he had on beneath the suit Densmore’s secretary had brought for him.

“We’ll see you back in Seattle in six weeks,” Densmore said when it was over. He closed his briefcase. “Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to try to catch the four
PM
flight.”

Back at Geiger, Wade looked for twitchy Ricky to say good-bye, but apparently he’d been caught flashing one of the female prisoners on the federal side of the fence and shipped back to the sex farm at Shelton.

6

REAL ESTATE
was practically free in Spokane. Wade had known that, of course, but it seemed somehow profane to be standing in a fully furnished, two-bedroom downtown loft that went for half the monthly price of his sailboat moorage. He walked from room to room, the property manager a step behind. She explained that Wade would need to provide “bank statements, pay stubs, references, that sort of thing.” In the kitchen, Wade used her laptop to call up his personal checking account. The property manager said not to worry about the references and the pay stubs.

She suggested a nice restaurant a few blocks away, and Wade went alone, took a seat at the bar. He had a scotch and water, his first drink in sixteen months. He closed his eyes as he drank it. His counselor at Geiger had once asked him if booze wasn’t perhaps “the first knot in your life.” How to answer something like that? It was knots all the way down.

“Want me to pour the next one straight down your gullet?” the bartender asked.

Wade looked down at his empty glass, then up at the bartender. She was in her thirties, slight and attractive, with short black hair. She smiled at him, a little warily. Then she filled him up again.

“No sense dirtying a glass if you’re going to inhale it,” she said.

He tipped it, barely let the whiskey touch his lips, then put it down.

“Attaboy,” she said.

7

THE VOLUNTEER
coordinator was a thin woman with a flesh-colored eye patch and an atrophied left arm that curled into her breast like a hawk’s claw. Wade wondered if she’d had a stroke.

“This is a very controversial pilot program,” she explained. “We don’t typically let ex-cons work with children. But our test results call for drastic measures, and since you white-collar assholes are the least likely to volunteer, we’re targeting a few hand-picked, nonviolent offenders to supply supervised, one-on-one tutoring.” She closed his file. “Now, this program is my baby, and I’d really hate to lose my job, so I’d consider it a personal favor if you could refrain from having kids bring you their mom’s checkbooks.”

“I’ll try,” Wade said.

She slid a contract across the table. “You check in at the school office every time. If you go walking alone down a hallway or contact a student outside school, anything like that? Start some Ponzi lunch-money scheme? It’s back to Geiger for you, my friend, and my little program dies. Understand?”

Wade nodded.

“Four hours a day, four days a week,” she went on. “Two days you’ll work at a high school, two days at an elementary school. Sophomores and second-graders. We’re assigning you to two very good, veteran teachers. Any questions?”

“I didn’t get your name.”

She seemed uncomfortable with this and looked away from him with her good eye. “Sheila,” she said.

“Well, Sheila,” he said, “thanks for this opportunity. I’ll do my best.”

8

MEGAN’S MOUTH
hung as if on a loose hinge, her eyes half-lidded. She blinked, sighed, stared at the page, at the equation, at oblivion. Wade had to fight to keep from reaching over and gently closing her jaw.

“Come on, Megan. We just went over this. The coefficients are . . .”

“Ni-i-ine,” she said, “and . . . fi-i-ive?”

“That’s right. And the variables.”

“Are the letters?”

“Right, although technically a letter could be a coefficient too, if there’re no assumed variables.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Sorry. So how would you go about solving this?”

Megan looked over her shoulder, back into the classroom, where Mr. Watkins was going over more complex equations on the board. Then she leaned in closer to Wade. “Were you really in jail?”

“Let’s just concentrate on these problems, okay?”

“Did you do a murder or something?”

“No,” Wade said. “I didn’t pay attention in algebra.”

9

THIS BOY
Drew kept trying to crawl up in Wade’s lap to read.

They were on a couch just outside the office; Wade looked up at the secretary and shrugged, as if to assure her that he hadn’t put the kid on his lap, that he wasn’t a pervert. But the secretary was giving some other kid his Ritalin from a drawer in her desk and didn’t seem to notice. “Why don’t you sit over here,” Wade said, and he gently moved the boy.

Drew was tiny for a second-grader. At first Wade wondered if he’d just forgotten how small seven-year-olds were, since his own kids were seventeen and nineteen now, but then he saw Drew with his class and the boy was a head smaller than everyone else. He moved his tiny index finger along each word as he read, as if each one was a story unto itself.

The boy brought the same book for their one-hour reading session every time.
The Wolf and the Wild
.

“Don’t you want to bring another book?” Wade finally asked him.

Drew considered this for a moment. “But I don’t know what’s in those other books.”

“Isn’t that the fun, finding out?”

Drew looked dubious.

10

“
IS IT
the . . . associative law?”

Wade pointed to the problem again. “No, it’s the other one.”

“Associative?”

“No, you just said associative, J’mar. It’s the other one.”

J’mar stared at him.

“Dist . . .” Wade said, his eyebrows arching.

J’mar stared.

“Distrib . . .”

J’mar stared.

“Dis . . . trib . . . u . . . tive.”

“Distributive?” J’mar said, as if he’d just come up with it.

“Nice,” Wade said.

11

THE BARTENDER’S
name was Sonya. She was married. Wade was a little disappointed, but also a little relieved.

“I like working with the little kids,” Wade said, “but the high schoolers are stupid. Distracted.”

“You had to go to prison to learn that?” Sonya refilled his whiskey.

“On the bright side, I
have
figured out how to fix the American educational system. End it at sixth grade.”

“Brilliant. Then what?”

“Lock them up in empty factories, give them all the Red Bull, condoms, and nachos they want, pipe in club music, and check back when they’re twenty-five. Anyone still alive, we send to grad school.” Wade pushed his glass forward. “How’s that for a campaign platform?”

“Hate to break it to you,” said Sonya, “but I’m pretty sure you can’t run for office.”

12

IN
The Wolf and the Wild
, a little boy lives on a farm without any brothers and sisters. Every night he hears a wolf howling. One day he sees the animal at the edge of their farm.

That night his mother makes round steak. The boy hates round steak. He sneaks it into his lap and then into his pocket, and later that night he leaves it at the edge of the farm for the wolf. Every night after that, he takes some food out to the edge of the farm. Then one day he gets lost in the woods.

After a few hours, he sees the wolf in the distance, and eventually it leads him home. The boy tells his parents how the wolf saved him, but they only laugh, in a kindly way. “You probably just imagined it,” they tell him.

On the last five pages of the book there are no words at all. The boy is older, and he’s going for a walk with a sack lunch. In one panel he walks through the wheat field. In the next, he walks through the woods. In the next, he comes across the wolf. In the final panel, he is lying back with his head on the curled-up animal, staring up at the sky while he and the wolf share his lunch. This was Drew’s favorite part of the book.

“And that’s the end,” Drew said every time they got to that last page. Then he’d sigh, look up, put his hand on Wade’s arm, and smile.

13

WADE ROLLED
over and watched Sonya put on her bra. She wouldn’t look back at him.

“The funny thing is, it wasn’t that bad, being in prison,” he said. “They put you with other nonviolent offenders, the white-collars and the frauds. Stone liars. It wasn’t until work-release that I even met any
real
criminals. And even they were okay. You think it’s all going to be beatings in the yard and gang rapes in the shower, but it’s just a bunch of fucked-up guys at summer camp.”

She stood and zipped her skirt. She looked miserable. “I can’t do this,” she said.

He leaned back and stared up at the ceiling of his apartment. “The only thing I could never figure out was why they called me ‘Beans.’ I thought they meant that I spilled the beans. But I didn’t. Who was I going to testify against? It was all me.”

“I won’t be able to live with myself,” she said.

14

“
AND THAT’S
the end,” Drew said. He closed
The Wolf and the Wild
, put his hand on Wade’s arm, and smiled.

15

WADE KEPT
detailed reports on all the kids, the sophomores and the second graders: Megan’s progress in algebra, Tania’s struggles with geometry, J’mar and his quick mind for figures but inability to grasp concepts. The way DeAndre was working on sounding out longer words and Marco was anticipating story elements and creating voices for characters. And, of course, Drew.

“Most of these kids have no parental involvement in school,” Sheila told him one day at the office, as she looked over his notes. “These classes are ninety to ninety-five percent free and reduced lunch. Every kid is essentially living in poverty. Single-parent homes are the best case; a lot of them live with aunts, grandmothers, foster parents, random people.”

He always wanted to ask Sheila what had happened to her arm and her eye.

“But I have to say, you’re doing great with them,” she said.

“Thank you,” Wade said.

16

WADE FINALLY
talked Drew into bringing another book,
Dog Day.
The boy tried to crawl up in Wade’s lap again, but this time the secretary was watching. She opened her mouth to say something, and Wade nodded at her and gently pushed Drew back onto the couch. His own son, Michael, had been a lap-reader, and Wade felt a tug of regret just thinking about that little boy, now a big greasy kid who lived in a dorm room and wanted nothing to do with him.

Dog Day
was about two brothers who volunteer at an animal shelter, and who organize an adoption parade with the dogs through downtown Scottsdale, Arizona. Drew struggled, his finger vainly pointed at each word.

“Reh . . . Reh . . . Ret . . .”

Wade was supposed to just let him sound the words out himself, but the wrinkles in the boy’s forehead got to him. “Retriever,” he finally said. “It’s a kind of dog.”

Drew closed the book and rested his hand on Wade’s arm. “Can’t I just bring the wolf book again next time?”