Good Behavior Page 15

  Jesus, the man’s actually human. He’s a fucking genius.

  “I’m going to accept the plea agreement reached by Mr. Henry’s attorney and the prosecutor. I’m sentencing him to eight years, with six of that suspended—to be served as probation. Here in the state of Illinois if an inmate serves what is called good time, meaning if he has not been the cause of any disruptions and hasn’t possessed any contraband, he’s released after serving at least half of his sentence.”

  Three more months … that’s enough time to still send me to prison.

  “Mr. Henry has been an exemplary inmate, has caused no problems for the guards, and so I will suggest that for the remainder of his time he remain at the Paradise County Jail.”

  My God, it was like winning the lottery. I looked at my family. My dad smiled and my mom beamed. I looked at the judge. I couldn’t believe it.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Kline rushed me past my mom so she wouldn’t have a chance to hug me again, but that was okay. In Illinois, you serve only half your time if you haven’t gotten into any trouble in jail, and I had already served nine months. I’d be home in three months, and that was all that mattered.

  [ FORTY-EIGHT ]

  After the Fourth of July, after Joan left with her dad, everything got quiet. David went to southern Indiana to visit his grandparents, and Gladine decided that I was no longer such a great influence on Philip, so our contact was limited. It was awful, being isolated from Philip, stuck in town after a lifetime of fucking around on the farm. I missed him, but at least I could still visit on the weekends. The days got longer, and things moved slower, and I was not getting letters from Joan.

  I got a job at a welding shop.

  I got up at seven thirty in the morning and took a shower, got dressed, watched television for a few minutes, and smoked a cigarette on the back porch. Then I rode my bike out to the welding shop, a small sheet-metal warehouse next to a cornfield less than a mile outside of town, and clocked in. I used sharp little tools to take the burrs off pieces of steel. I cut myself and bled. I bandaged myself up and went back to work. At noon, I rode my bike back into town and had lunch with Dad, which was nice actually—we started getting along fairly well—then I rode back out to the factory.

  They were teaching me how to weld. Someday, I’d be a welder. I’d wear one of those cool visors and make sparks fly all over the place, and while I was working no one would approach me or look directly at what I was doing for fear of being blinded forever. I either cleaned the burrs off the steel, wiped down big steel structures with some kind of chemical that made me nauseous, or swept the floor.

  At five in the afternoon, I rode my bike home and had dinner with my parents. One of our staple meals was fish sticks, baked beans, and fried potatoes. An uncle of mine came over in the evenings to tutor me—I had no math skills. My GED test was approaching. I tried to call Joan sometimes—no one answered. I left messages. I told her I loved her. I was worried and I had no way of finding out if she was even still alive.

  Finally, she called.

  I took the cordless phone out into the garage—and Joan accused me of fucking around on her. I was suddenly certain that she had hooked up with somebody else, that this was her way of ending our thing without taking any responsibility. I punched the wall. I yelled into the phone, “WHAT are you doing? WHY are you doing this?”

  “You know why.”

  “I can’t believe you’re doing this.”

  She hung up. And that was it. That was the last time I talked to her.

  Philip and I were out in a field, on a hill looking north. We were drinking a couple of beers we’d stolen from Philip’s dad. It felt like the end of the world. Joan was gone. David was never around anymore. I was not in school, and I hated my job. Everything was different.

  “Philip, I look around at all these fucking slaves and wonder how they do it.”

  “I don’t know, man.”

  “Not us.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “Not us.”

  “We’re true anarchists, man. No rules, no laws.”

  Philip took another swig from his beer, nodded.

  “We’re beyond everything.”

  We were silent for a long time. I lit a smoke and drained the rest of my beer, tossed the can. Then I yelled, as loud as I could, “FUCK YOU, AMERICA!”

  We went down to the road, and as we were walking back to Philip’s house, a nice-looking Honda stopped beside us. It was Justin O’Reilly.

  “What are you guys up to?” he asked.

  Ever since he broke my nose, we got along all right. Though as far as I was concerned, Justin and I had always gotten along. It was Norton I wanted to decapitate with a chainsaw.

  “Nothing.” I leaned against the car. “Just talking about getting the fuck outta here.”

  “Oh, yeah?” His stereo had been on, kind of low, but he turned it off.

  Philip said, “Going to Canada, fuck us some Canadian bitches.” He laughed. “Kill some motherfuckers on the way.”

  “Shut up, Philip,” Justin said and looked at me. “Canada, huh?”

  I shrugged. “You want to go?”

  “Nah.” He smiled. “Somebody’s got to stick around to keep Norton out of prison.”

  “I heard that,” I said.

  Then Justin waved and drove off. We started walking again.

  Philip said, “You should blow Norton’s head off before we go.”

  “Maybe.” I nodded. “I’d like to.”

  [ FORTY-NINE ]

  I stretched the phone cord across my cell and sat down on my bunk.

  “David’s working on a farm now,” Philip said.

  “Yeah, doing what?”

  “Shoveling shit, castrating pigs. All that disgusting shit they do on farms.”

  “How much is he getting paid?” I really didn’t care. I just didn’t know what else to say.

  “Six bucks an hour.”

  “Not bad.” I took a sip of my coffee and heard the jingle of a guard’s keys. It was about time for the crazies to go to rec.

  “Is Joan still around?” I asked.

  “I think she went back to Utah.”

  “Really?” I felt immense relief.

  “Yeah. Probably never see that bitch again.”

  “I hope not.” I got up and grabbed my window blind—the folded sheet of paper—from under my bunk and stuffed it against the cell door’s window.

  “I talked to Amy the other day,” he said. “She said to tell you hi.”

  I stopped in the center of the cell. “Amy? How’s she doing?”

  “Okay, I guess.”

  I sat back down on my bunk. The crazies were passing my door. One of them kicked it. “Get the fuck out of here!” I yelled. Then I was quiet for a minute. I said, “She still in Colorado?”

  “Yeah.”

  I took the blind down from my window.

  Philip said, “I’ve got to go do this scared-straight shit at the prison next week.”

  “Might be interesting,” I said.

  “Fucking sucks. A year probation, community service, this scared-straight shit.”

  “Sounds like cake, man.”

  “Cake, my ass.”

  “You got off easy.”

  “Easy? Are you nuts?”

  “You’re complaining? I’ve been sitting in here for a fucking year, and you’re complaining?”

  There was a silence that seemed uncomfortable, so I told him I had to go.

  “All right,” he said. “How many days left?”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  “Well, I’ll see you in twenty-eight days then.”

  “All right, man.” And I hung up.

  [ FIFTY ]

  One day when I came home from the welding shop for lunch, Dad had ordered food for us from the diner across the street, the same thing he had always gotten there: two fish deluxe sandwiches with fries.

  “You’re doing real good, Nate,” Dad said. “You rea
lly put us through hell for the last couple years.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “But now you’re a working man.” He smiled.

  “Yup.” I gave a fake grunt. “I am a working man.”

  “Getting your GED, working every day.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Now it don’t seem so much like you’re gonna end up dead.”

  I looked at him. I didn’t know what to say.

  “ ’Cause that’s what it looked like for a long time. We expected it.”

  We ate in silence for a while; then he said, “You know, I died all those times and was brought back to life—I always thought there was a reason for it, like I was meant to do something important.”

  I bit into my fish deluxe.

  “I never did anything important,” he said, “but I hope you do. You understand me?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “So, you’re doing good. I mean it.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  Next day I’m grinding down the rough-cut edges of a piece of steel with an electric grinder, and I look up and around at all the other guys in the shop who are engaged in similar types of work. I look out the open bay doors of the warehouse, and there’s the bright sun and open fields and I think, “Is this it? Is this my life?” And I think of the whole Canada fantasy Philip and I always talked about. Canada. What the fuck? Get up there to some other town, maybe some town on the East Coast, a fishing town, and get a job like this, only I’m not cutting burrs off steel, I’m gutting fish all day long. Hardly worth the trouble. This is death, I thought. This is infinite misery, infinite nothingness. Then I thought of Joan. Maybe this bullshit would’ve been worth it if I still had her. The bullshit was worth it when she was here. Life seemed to mean something.

  My chest seized and my facial muscles clenched. It was a good thing I wore a visor. What if these assholes saw me crying? Imagine that.

  “Is Philip there?” I jumped up and sat on the welding table, lit up a cigarette. I had ten minutes. “Hey, what’s up? Philip, we’re changing plans. I want to go to LA, and on the way we’re stopping in Salt Lake City to put a bullet in Joan’s fucking head.”

  “Really?” He wasn’t completely surprised.

  “Really. That’s what I want to do.”

  “Okay. Cool.”

  I had the necklace, the cheap fourteen-karat gold necklace Joan had given me at the beginning of our relationship, and on this necklace I had both our engagement rings. I can’t remember why I had hers as well—seems like she should’ve taken it with her when she left. I would take this necklace and hang it over the door handle on the front door of her trailer, when we got to Salt Lake City, and when she came outside and found that necklace, she’d know that I’d come—and not come to plead for her love or to ask for her forgiveness. She’d get no tears from me.

  I loved a movie called Wisdom. It stars Emilio Estevez in the lead role, Demi Moore as his girlfriend. John Wisdom has a car-theft conviction on his record from when he got drunk on prom night and went for a drunken joy ride—wrecked the car. So since this conviction is on his record, he can’t get a real job and ends up in a fast-food joint, self-esteem shot, hating life. He decides to become a criminal (since, he reasons, that’s how society already sees him) but can’t decide what crime he wants to do. He runs over the list—kidnapping, robbery, murder. Nothing sounds good to him. He buys an Uzi and a big military jacket under which he can hide it, and sort of wanders around waiting for the crime to come to him. Middle of the night, sitting in a bus station, watching a little pay TV, a news story about all these banks foreclosing on all these poor farmers, taking their farms and land away from them, tossing them out on the street—poor, miserable bastards—and suddenly Wisdom gets an idea. He would drive across the country blowing up bank documents. He’d go into these banks and whip out his machine gun, just like he was going to rob the place, but instead he’d just toss dynamite at their filing cabinets. Now, you can imagine that I thought this mission of his was pretty weak, though I loved the whole idea—machine guns, banks. He ends up killing a cop and his girlfriend gets shot; then he himself is shot dead by a few dozen FBI agents. Man, I thought, what a way to go.

  So I said to Philip, “Tonight’s the night. All the way to California, Wisdom-style. That’s what I’m talking about. Get the pistol, get all your shit together, and meet me at the covered bridge at twelve forty-five … Yeah, a.m. I’ll be in my mom’s car—when I get to the stop sign, I’ll flip the headlights off and then back on. That way you’ll know it’s me. All right? You okay with this? Good. Be cool, man.”

  I hopped down from the table and went back to work for the rest of the day.

  [ FIFTY-ONE ]

  It was the middle of the night and the jail was dead silent. I put down my book and looked at my watch. It was four thirty. Mom would be getting up for work soon, just like she did every morning. She’d been getting up at four thirty every morning for something like fifteen years. She gets out of bed, turns the radio on in the kitchen, makes her morning cup of tea, and drinks it before she gets in the shower. What does she think about? How does she do it day after day? I asked her once, didn’t she hate work? She said of course. But if she thought about that, she wouldn’t be able to do it. So every morning, whether she’s slept well or not, whether she has a migraine or not—and she does get migraines; I’ve seen her cry because of her migraines—she gets up and goes to work.

  She worked in a factory, assembled thermostats. It was a repetitive job. She placed washers onto rods that attached to valves. They used to have family day at her job, and I went there a couple of times to see where she spent her days. The factory was a string of silver-arched buildings, like airplane hangars. It was hot in there, and noisy. There were windows high up, which were open, but it was still hard to breathe. It was an awful place.

  Mom got her job there not long after she married Dad. She must have learned early that if she didn’t keep the family afloat financially, no one would. Dad said working made him sick, physically sick, and he’d sleep for days. He didn’t want Mom to go to work either, so he’d sometimes sabotage the car, remove the plug wires, so that she’d have to stay home. She was suspended once for attendance, I think, because of this.

  Mom once told me she’d had plans to go to college, but those plans fell apart because she had to work. Dad never held a job for very long. There was a time when he did have a job for a while, as the maintenance man at a small office building near downtown Indianapolis. He had that job for two years. For those two years, the money seemed to roll in. Mom was happy, Dad was happy—we did things. We went on vacation; we got a camper and went to campgrounds. We got a new car, Dad got a new motorcycle, a credit card came in the mail. We were practically middle class. Then Dad lost the job, or quit, and the car and the bike were repossessed, the credit card became another debt, and the camper languished in the backyard.

  But Mom always did what she thought she had to do. She went to work every day. She made sure we had food, she paid the bills; every year we had new school clothes and supplies, we had good Christmases. And this was all because of her. Now she had a son in jail for armed robbery, and it was killing her.

  Sitting in jail, thinking about my mom at four thirty in the morning, I felt sick to my stomach. I felt like I wanted to vomit. I felt like I was shit, like I had done nothing but contribute to how difficult my mom’s life was. She should’ve left Dad, I thought, maybe married some reasonable man, and things could have been different. But maybe Dad had nothing to do with anything. He was, in a weird way, always there for me, and he loved me, and the more I thought about it, the more it became clear he wasn’t some kind of crazed loser who sat around the house all the time doing nothing. The man turned a shitty, run-down house into what felt like a middle-class dwelling. New floors in the kitchen and bathroom, new walls, new fixtures. He remodeled the entire interior of the house. He kept the roofs from leaking, kept the cars running, built the carport and
the garage and storage buildings with his own hands. In the winter when the pipes would freeze, he’d get on his overalls and climb down into the icy crawl spaces with a blowtorch and thaw out the pipes—it would take hours down there in the cold. He did what he had to do too, I suppose. They both did.

  Maybe I couldn’t blame any of this on anyone.

  Maybe it was all me. I was fucked up. Just completely fucked up, all the way to the core. Maybe it was so deep there was nothing anyone could do about it. The horror of this got into my stomach and twisted heavily.

  [ FIFTY-TWO ]

  Jim told me on the phone what happened at home that night after I left—the night the robbery happened. After getting dressed and gathering my supplies, I wrote a note for my parents, telling them that I wasn’t cut out for a life of nine to five, that I had to be free, even if it meant that I had to die. I told them it had nothing to do with them, that they had been fine parents, and that I had enjoyed spending my lunches with Dad for the past couple of weeks. I told them I loved them, but that greater things awaited me.

  Mom had left me a note on the dining room table, like she did almost every night. I read it. “Have a good day, honey. I love you.” I wrote underneath her writing, “I love you too.” Then I left.

  Apparently not long after I left, she got up to go to the bathroom and noticed my handwriting on her note. She read the note I’d left them, and woke Dad up. Dad checked his guns, found one missing, went outside, and saw the car was gone. He went across the street to a neighbor’s house, a guy he talked to sometimes, and showed him the note. Dad didn’t know what to do. The guy asked him if he had called the cops, and Dad said not yet. He went home and called the cops, then called Gladine, asked her if Philip was still there. She went up and checked, came back to the phone, and said he was. Dad told her to check again.