Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [149]
Alan D. would call her a murderer, and legally speaking—and maybe even morally speaking—he was right. But as I smiled back at Frances, something I was going to have to stop doing so regularly now, I knew I didn’t see her quite that way; I saw a woman who’d been hurt and hurt and hurt till she was so full of it she could only do two things: die of it, or push it all back out into the face of another. It was a nearly unavoidable flow of bad feeling, and as I stepped out into the cool spring air of this city in the foothills, I knew that’s what joined me to these offenders, that shared ability to turn a wound into a wounding, one that might even kill another, the one who deserved it.
I HAD another job, too. On my off days and nights I worked for a private investigator who sometimes brought in wanted men for the bounty on their heads. For this work he used more than one name and months earlier had given me a new one. It’s what I used when he introduced me in meetings with state and federal agents in a high-rise building in Denver. It’s where the U.S. marshalls all looked in shape and wore crisp shirts and expensive ties, well-oiled handguns clipped to their belts above ironed pants. The agents from the New York office of the DEA wore sweaters or open-collared shirts, and they talked fast and chewed gum and one of them kept looking me up and down, this twenty-three-year-old in corduroys and a leather jacket, this kid my boss introduced as his “associate.” The CBI agent was undercover, a big Latino in a dark T-shirt, his arms wrapped in tattoos, and he sometimes glanced over at me in these meetings as if I were a potted plant in the corner somebody should water but not him.
I didn’t like my new name. It was monosyllabic and too common, but I was glad to have it. My boss had a few aliases, but his real name was Christof. At thirty-five he was over six feet and a sloping 230 pounds. He wore a thick Western mustache and had dark circles under his eyes from kidney damage he’d suffered in a car accident years before, and he lived in the canyons above Boulder and drove a 1953 black Buick Skylark he’d named Beulah.
I’d met him at the center where we both watched over men like Dozer and Manny and Harlan G. Christof was friends with the supervisor, and he’d asked him for a few shifts a week. We both started as correctional technicians the same night. Christof probably needed the extra income, or was keeping an eye on an inmate involved in a case he was working on, I didn’t know. But I liked how directly he spoke to everyone, how he looked people in the eye deeper than anyone I’d ever seen before. This made some people nervous, including me, but especially Alan D.
Briefing me and Christof in the closed office, Alan D. had a hard time looking straight at him. Cristof would already be leaning back in the chair at the main desk, a damp mukluk crossed over one knee, and he’d give Alan his entire attention, his eyes narrowed slightly above those dark rings above that thick mustache and pursed lips. Then he’d nod his head, and Alan would turn to me and his cheeks would flush as if he’d just been revealed in some way.
Christof gave the inmates that direct gaze too. It was a look that said he knew what they were capable of, both the good and the bad, but he also knew they could grow free of the bad, could rise to the higher parts of themselves he was seeing too. This seemed to scare the shit out of them. Most had a hard time looking him in the eye, and they’d sign in quickly at the half-door of the front office and head to their rooms. But I noticed, too, that on the nights he worked, far more inmates than usual dropped by. They’d knock on the