Method 15 33 (31 page)

Vanty and I have two long-term inside jokes. And millions more short-term inside jokes. We laugh a lot, Vanty and I. Ever since he was a baby, I’ve sat in his room and either read to or talked with him before he coils in to his own sleep routine. I can tell Lenny listens in to our serious talks or tittering laughter by leaning his ear against the wall dividing our room from Vanty’s room. Knowing this comforts Lenny, comforts me. Again, an angel with a hand on my head.

One of our long-running inside jokes is that before reading for the night, I pick an arbitrary time limit on how long I’ll read and then set a vibrating timer that goes off in my pocket. “I’ll read for 21.5 minutes,” for example. When the timer goes off, I stop, playing a joke about being literal, then
I close the book, which inevitably leaves a scene completely uncompleted or a thought undeveloped, or a sentence half-read, and thus, Lenny hanging. When I very first did this when Vanty was five, he cried because he was so enchanted with what was happening in the book, and he thought I was going to make him wait until the next night. And though I was only kidding about finishing my reading for the night, I was immensely relieved that my little boy felt so strongly for a story so as to cry real tears. Which meant he wasn’t like me. He wouldn’t be separate from the world, like me. The next time I stopped a story short because my arbitrary timer went off, he laughed at my lame joke about being literal, which is something I am often truly accused of, and so Vanty understood I was really teasing at my own expense. So he laughed. And I laughed. And we laugh every single time. I hope we still have this very personal joke going when I’m sixty and he visits with my grandchildren.

Our other long-standing inside joke is that we speak fake French when we’re in public. But with Vanty, because of his disarming charisma, people actually believe he is speaking real French. Even a French woman once asked him, in broken English, what province he was from! While I do enjoy playing this con with Vanty, just for our own personal amusement and to fortify our insular life together, I have begun to worry about Vanty’s heightened social abilities and whether they actually make him a man apart, separate from the world like me, but in a different way. I’m not really sure how far he can carry this skill or what it means or whether it’s good or bad. With respect to Vanty, I try hard not to fall prey to my typical mode of categorizing everything and everyone in neat black and white boxes; rather, I work hard at allowing him organic growth. But now I wonder if certain aspects of him should be tamed or refined or reined in. Is it right that he reads body language like he breathes air? Is it normal that he commands a group to silence just by walking by and looking in? Did the principal just
tell me last night that her “advisory board” is made up of the PTO President, the Superintendent, and Vanty?

Despite Vanty’s exceptional people skills, it is still Lenny in this trifecta of ours who remembers the family birthdays and the right Christmas presents to buy for grandparents and friends. Vanty doesn’t
go to
people, they come to him. And I’m beginning to worry that this is somehow a scary, although useful, quality. Or maybe I’m just obsessing over every possible thing that might harm my precious boy someday and really, he’s just perfectly fine.
Will I ever be settled and calm, easy in and out of his presence? Here he is before me, giving me that mock annoyed and loving eye roll again
.

“Get your ass inside and get my dirt slides together. And if you have any homework, you better get it done now, Mr. Smartypants. We’ve got a lot of work to do. Oh, we’re having homemade burritos for dinner—Dad’s making them. So I guess you got your way again because I told him if he made those damn footballs one more time I was going to starve myself.” Vanty starts to walk away, but I stop him, not ready to release him from standing before me. “Oh oh, and Grand Nana is coming in from Savannah tomorrow, so make sure your pit trap of a bedroom is clean,” I say, shooing him inside. “And if you want to talk about
One Hundred Years of Solitude
tonight, let’s do that. I’ll read you my favorite passage for exactly 1.2 minutes.”

“Jun-a se in qua a twie,” he says in a very convincing fake French.

“Yeah, yeah, I love you too. Now go.”

I watch my beautiful, untroubled—although possibly frightening—boy glide inside 15/33 Headquarters. I begin to dead head the purple wave petunias in the blue pots by the entrance so as to force away the sad tremble in my chin.
He’ll be gone to college next year
, I remind myself.

To love someone so much you are heartbroken just to look at them. This, is to have a child
.

I said there were three things to mention. Lenny. My company. And now, the last, and surely the least, Brad.

Vanty, Lenny, and Nana are the only ones for whom I keep the Love switch on all the time, without any moment of “off.” For others, I’ll switch on sometimes. And for others, Love is never on, only vast, unending hate and even, a distinct emotion of homicide. If it weren’t for Lenny’s angel touch on my head, several more people on this planet would be no more.

It’s a new day at 15/33. After polishing this manuscript one last time, I lock it away, only to be opened and shared upon my death, just as Liu rolls up to our building. Liu’s wife, Sandra, jumps out of the passenger side of their Ford F-150, the only vehicle Liu will drive anymore. I think he’s on his fourth since I met him. Sandra is making ridiculous faces at him, asking him what best demonstrates a man’s reaction to eating a “shit burger.” As is a daily occurrence, she’s working on some new sketch.

Personally, I think a man chewing a shit burger would look like a cat does when dry-heaving a hairball, so as Sandra reaches the red kitchen door of 15/33, I show her my best impersonation of a cat hacking up a hairball. My own cat, Stewie Poe, meows disapproval at my theatrics. He’s stretched in all his flabby stomach glory and reaching a lazy paw in an annoyed way because I’ve disturbed his first of thirty naps of the day. His gray fur sprawls from his resting body, and he looks like a ruling Pharoah in the way he lounges on the turquoise rug in front of the ocean-blue hutch—as close as he can be to his cat dish. Stewie is a real pain in my ass, jumping on my face when I sleep, loudly demanding chopped filet and white tuna fish instead of regular cat food. I’ve got no one to blame but me. I’ve always had real awe for how expertly cats expose their distaste of almost everything, how nonchalant they are in dismissing even the hand that feeds them. So, I pretty much cater to whatever Stewie wants. But I make him wear pink bells on his purple collar as my revenge.

“Hey there, girl, you ready?” Liu asks me, standing by his still-running truck.

“Yeah, yeah, I like it. Do it again,” Sandra says to me, as she passes through the kitchen doorway, approving of my shit-burger face.

“Liu, hang on, let me grab my coat,” I say, and I grab my white safari-style jacket, hanging on the red pegs by the door. As I do, I again demonstrate my hopefully comic face to Sandra.

“Perfect. That’s how I’ll write it then for this script. You guys don’t be too cruel today,” she says as she pours herself a mug of coffee from the pot I brewed just for her. She heads into her writer’s office after crouching with her mug to stroke Stewie’s fat chin.

I walk backwards out the door, watching Sandra, continuing my contorting face-act for her, and hop into Liu’s truck.

“She said not to be too cruel today,” I say.

Liu bounces his nose up as he swallows back a smile.

We’re pretty much going to be as cruel as we can be today.

“Yeah,” I say. “Sure.”

Liu’s in his late fifties now. He’s got a thick head of gray hair. He still works out like he’s got some federal mission that requires him to chase kings of kidnapping through forests, so his body remains compact; his forearm muscles flex as he turns the wheel of the truck.

I know what he’s thinking about, and I’m thinking it too. It was the bed of a truck, just like this truck, seventeen years ago, in which Brad slid down his scarf gag by aggressively using his tongue and teeth and tried to avoid our punishments by sucking gasoline from the tube of a spare gasoline can, down on his knees and with his hands cuffed behind his back and his legs tied to a hook. It was Lola who smelled the opened gas on the air, and Liu who ran and slapped Brad’s face so hard we thought he broke his jaw. We’d been sketching out the capture of The Doctor and The Obvious Couple, standing in a circle by the hood of the truck, when, fortunately, the heavy odor rode the cold air like water down a steel slide—easy and fast. If Brad had succeeded in exiting the world, I would have had to wait until my death to trudge into hell to torture him. Thankfully, I don’t have to wait.

Liu and I have made this particular trip two times in seventeen years. This is our third. We have to make this trip whenever Brad attempts to plead for clemency, beg for a shot at
the parole board. Sometimes Brad needs to be reminded of what awaits him outside and how very lucky he is being tortured on the inside. Liu and I have friends in the Indiana State Prison system and also some informant-lifers for whom we may or may not have done a few favors. So we know everything. Literally everything.

We made a deal with Brad back in that truck: he allows himself to live, and we wouldn’t seek death. Instead, we’d hand him over to the state for life, but under our unofficial supervision. Back then, in the heat of his capture, Brad was most distraught about the prospect of not death, but death row, a sentence he surely would have suffered: recall, all the young bodies in the quarry. When we presented the deal to Brad, a little glimmer awoke in him, a kernel of hope, just enough to make him want to live, which is exactly what we wanted. You could say Brad took a very special kind of plea deal, one Liu and I gave, and, as such, the special Indiana prison where Brad now stews was converted to my very own.

Liu doesn’t take much convincing in aiding me in my enduring commitment to taunt Brad. He’s been hardened ever since his brother Mozi failed at his third suicide five years ago. Sometimes I worry about Liu, and how he’ll work all night on any of the cases we’re hired to consult on—but then I switch off any worry emotion when I walk into his and Sandra’s office and see her draping her body beside him, drawing him cartoons of his wrinkled brow. Some people accept their lot in life, go with it, persevere, and some of these people are rewarded with a good partner who props them up to climb every tree they need to climb in order to hunt and weed out every demon they seek to find.

We pull into the visitor’s lot of our very own Indiana prison. After showing our IDs and approved passes and chit-chatting with our friends in the guard tower and stations, we wind our way to the visitors’ room. I keep my safari jacket on and all of the pockets zipped and buttoned, concealing my present for Brad.

The visitors’ room is an awful square of concrete blocks painted mint-green. Light mint-green, the most despicable and
cheapest color a shoestring budgeted government can afford. Which is fine by me. I don’t want the state spending my tax money on homing up the joint. Having to be surrounded by this nauseating color should be enough punishment to deter anyone from any crime, I think.

The rectangular, wired, and barred windows start ten feet up from the linoleum floor. About ten square tables fill the room. A woman in her sixties in a black handmade sweater nervously rolls a tissue in her hands, and not once does she look up at me or Liu. She looks sweet, like any grandma crocheting on a park bench. I assume she waits for a son who has severely disappointed her. Another woman, about early thirties, but with the aged and curled, cracked mouth of a sixty-year smoker, rounds her shoulders and crosses her arms at another table. She appears so tough, a criminal herself, and I swear she’s planning to rip the hair out of my skull. I catch her ice-blue eyes and wonder how someone who could have been so beautiful allowed herself to throw it all away on some asshole behind bars. I want to talk to her, ask why she smokes so much, ask how someone with wise eyes can not see. But I stop, reminding myself not to judge.
We all have our problems and devils to overcome, we all don’t have the same support
, I say to myself, the same thing Nana has often said to me—teaching me perspective.

A barred door cracks open and in enters three cuffed men, followed by five guards who surround the room, guns ready at their hips.

“Oh hunny,” the black sweater woman weeps as she rises to hug a neo-Nazi with a cross tattooed on his face. As she stands, her sweater rises, revealing the confederate flag tattooed on her lower back.

“Hey, Dad,” the ice-blue-eyed woman says to a white-haired man with the exact same glacier eyes. She too weeps, saying, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” into his shoulder, clearly wanting a return hug, which will not come because Daddy’s arms are still cuffed behind his back.

Do not judge on first impressions. Always study further
, I
remind myself.
Everyone is a puzzle. Stereotypes are rarely fully correct
.

Brad sees me and Liu and tries to back out of the room.