Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [198]
“No, I don’t mind.”
But we would have to wait over two months, Pop’s body kept in a concrete crypt in that same cemetery behind the old Hale Hospital and the doctor’s office Mom had rented for us at the base of Nettle Hill. Life continued. Despite this black grief, I was working on something new and needed to do some research at the local county jail. I called them and soon was standing in a glassed-in walkway twenty feet over the main population. Below us, over a hundred men sat in orange or tan jumpsuits at tables and benches bolted to the concrete floor. They were playing cards or checkers, reading newspapers, or watching one of the TVs hung high in the corners of the room. From where I stood behind thick protective glass, I could see a lot of shaved heads and homemade tattoos, some of the men sitting with their legs spread wide and their chins up, an unlit cigarette between their lips. Others, narrow-shouldered or obese, sat off to themselves and avoided making eye contact. The public affairs officer beside me, an easygoing and talkative man in his late fifties who’d worked here for years, was brimming with stories. He was doing his best to give me good material, though I wasn’t looking for any; one of my characters had found himself in a jail like this, and I just had to see it for myself.
The man from public affairs pointed out one inmate after another. “That big one there? He kidnapped his own wife. You don’t even want to know the rest of that story. See those two under the TV? That old man and the other one? Uncle and nephew, only they never met each other till they got in here at the same time.”
I nodded and listened. The uncle was no more than fifty, his graying hair tied back in a ponytail, his nephew a foot taller and half-black or half-Latino. The officer kept talking about them, about the good story their lives would make, but ten feet away from them sat someone I knew.
He was thin. His hair was short, the color of old tea, and he was playing checkers or dominoes with a bald man. The one I knew said something, and I could see the chipped front tooth, that wise-ass mouth in a lined and pallid face.
“’Scuse me.” I pointed down to him. “I know that guy.”
“Who?” The public affairs officer followed my arm and finger. “Murphy? How do you know him?”
Dennis Murphy, his pine branch flicking out and slapping the old woman in the face. “We’re from the same town.”
“Yeah? Good story about him.” And the man from public affairs told me how two or three Thanksgivings ago, all four Murphy brothers were in at the same time, some awaiting a hearing or trial, others serving a sentence. “And Frankie, the bank robber—he’s dead now, by the way—he comes up and asks us since it’s Thanksgiving and all the brothers are together, would it be all right for their mother to bring them a turkey dinner? What the hell, we allowed it. We even had the kitchen make up some side dishes for them. So there’s Ma Thanksgiving Day, sitting down there at one of the big tables with all her boys. They had a good feed, too.”
He laughed and shook his head. I stared at Dennis Murphy. Except for the desiccated hair and yellowed skin, the lines around his mouth, he’d changed little since we were teenagers and his brothers were in their twenties and the four of them would walk into house parties down on the avenues and do whatever they felt like, later cruising by my gas station booth on Winter Street looking for revenge.
I followed the public affairs officer off the walkway for the rest of the tour, one concrete room and corridor after another. In the mess hall a gang of men in white jumpsuits were on a cleaning detail. They scrubbed tables and swept and mopped the floor, their faces hard, their bodies too, but they looked like boys to me, and when one or two of them glanced up at us—two men in suit jackets and pressed pants—in their eyes was the dull light of resignation, not, it seems, to the time they’d yet to serve, but to this, two village fathers walking by without a nod or a word, as if these young men were not right here in front of them,