Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [145]
There was the crack of the bat, its splintered echo throughout the sunlit park, then we were all standing again cheering for these men we did not even know, cheering as one of them sprinted home and tapped the plate, dust rising up from beneath it like smoke from some underground fire.
PART III
HOLYHEAD
14
THE PRE-PAROLE CENTER was three stories of rambling brick for convicts from Canon City Penitentiary. It used to be a sorority house just blocks from the University of Colorado campus. The south windows looked out over the yard and its live oaks, the brick fraternity houses on the other side of the street, the rise of the Flat Irons beyond. The city of Boulder was nestled at the base of them, these naked rock faces hundreds of feet high, left behind by a glacier thousands of years earlier. In their crevices grew aspen and columbine and blue spruce, and there were trails you could hike to the top and look west toward Nederland and the Rocky Mountains or east out over the plains toward Denver. Over a year had passed since I’d watched that baseball game with my father, and now I stood in an inmate’s room, staring at the stars over the ridge of the Flat Irons.
I was doing a head count. It was long after lights-out, and when I opened the doors to their rooms, the light from the hallway spilled over men in bunks. Some would be curled under blankets like boys, others lying flat on their backs and snoring, a few more facedown, a bare arm hanging off the side of the mattress. It was hard not to think of their victims then.
There was Harlan G., who’d done five years for armed robbery. He committed most of his crimes in convenience stores during the day, and he wore no disguises. He liked to have security cameras pointing at him, maybe a customer or two in there as well, and the climax was always the same, sticking his loaded .38 in the face of the man or woman behind the counter just to see the terror in their eyes, to feel the absolute power he had over them as they did whatever he asked them to do, which was to empty the register into a paper bag he’d hand them. One time, though, he didn’t even ask for money, just walked into a store on a June afternoon and pressed his pistol under the chin of a man who looked like his father, the man who’d beat him up regularly as a kid.
It was hard to imagine anyone beating up Harlan G. He was short and a lean 190 pounds of prison weight-room muscle. He had flat gray eyes and a flat crooked nose, and his only tattoos crawled up both forearms, two dragons, the one on the left breathing fire, the one on the right getting its head lopped off. But with Harlan G., who was quiet and kept to himself and who other inmates stayed away from, we never knew which part of him was the slayer or the slain. Was it the old Harlan getting its head lopped off? Or the new one, the man who worked for an HVAC contractor in Boulder and was forced to go to AA meetings and classes in anger management, the one who, as a condition of his parole, was not allowed to travel back to his old neighborhood in East Denver? It’s where the projects were, and it’s where he and a lot of the other inmates had been raised.
There was Dozer whose real name was Gil, a six-foot, 330-pound biker with the Sons of Silence. He’d done time for weapons violations and for dealing cocaine and crystal meth, and the first time I saw him was on a Friday night. He walked into the office without permission, swearing, two house-rule violations already. His voice was a booming rasp staccato, gun blasts from a rusty barrel. “Those fuckin’ frat boys park in my fuckin’ space one more fuckin’ time I’ll take a fuckin’ bat to their motherfuckin’ heads!” Dozer’s hair was a gray two-foot braid down his back, his jacket black leather he had custom-tailored by an old woman