Razor wire guaranteed the sobriety of any visitor. The vehicles in the visitors’ parking lot said plenty about the socioeconomics of the families of the imprisoned: Szabo’s shiny Korean rental stuck out like a sore thumb. The prison was a tidy fortress of unambiguous shapes that argued less with the prairie surrounding them than with the chipper homes of the nearby subdivision. It had none of the lighthearted mundane details of the latter — laundry hanging out in the sun, adolescents gazing under the hood of an old car, a girl sitting on the sidewalk with a handful of colored chalk. The place for your car, the place for your feet, the door that complied at the sight of you, were all profoundly devoid of grace — at least, to anyone whose child was confined there.
David came into the visiting room with a promising, small smile and gave Szabo a hug. He had been a slight, quick-moving boy, but prison had given him muscle, thick, useless muscle that seemed to impair his agility and felt strange to the father who embraced him. They sat in plastic chairs. Szabo noticed that the room, which was painted an incongruous robin’s-egg blue, had a drain in the middle of its floor, a disquieting fact.
“Are you getting along all right, David?”
“Given that I don’t belong here, sure.”
“I was hoping to hear from you—” Szabo caught himself, determined not to suggest any sort of grievance. David smiled.
“I got your letters.”
“Good.” Szabo nodded agreeably. There was nothing to look at in the room except the person you were speaking to.
“How’s Grandma?” David asked.
“I think she’s doing as well as can be expected. You might drop her a note.”
“Oh, right. ‘Dear Grandma, you’re sure lucky to be growing old at home instead of in a federal prison.’ ”
Szabo had had enough.
“Good, David, tell her that. Old as she is, she never got locked up.”
David looked at his father, surprised, and softened his own voice. “You said in your letter you’d had some health problem.”
“My shoulder. I had surgery.”
Szabo knew that the David before him was not the David on drugs, but, now that the drugs were gone, he still hadn’t gone back to being the boy he’d been before. Maybe it would happen gradually. Or perhaps Szabo was harboring yet another fruitless hope.
“Melinda still working for you?”
“I couldn’t do without her. She stayed with me even when I couldn’t pay her.”
“Melinda’s hot.”
“She’s attractive.”
“No, Dad, Melinda’s hot.”
Szabo didn’t know what David meant by this, if anything, and he didn’t want to know. Maybe David just wanted him to realize that he noticed such things.
“David, you’ve got less than a year to go. Concentrate on avoiding even the appearance of anything that could set you back. You’ll be home soon.”
“Home?”
“Absolutely. Where your friends are, where you grew up. Home is where your mistakes can be seen in context. You go anywhere else — David, you go anywhere else and you’re an excon. You’ll have to spend all your time overcoming that, when everyone at home already knows you’re a great kid.”
“When I get out of here,” David said in measured tones, “I’m going to live with Mom and Cliff.”
“In California?”
“Last time I checked.”
Szabo was determined not to react to this. He let the moment subside, and David now seemed to want to warm up. He smiled faintly at the blue ceiling.
“And, yes, I’ll write Grandma back.”
“So you heard from her?”
David laughed. “About her boyfriend, Barney. I think that’s so sweet. A relationship! Is Barney her age?”
“Actually, he’s quite a bit younger.”
As Szabo drove back to the airport, he tried to concentrate on the outlandish news of Barney’s role in his mother’s life, but he didn’t get anywhere. He couldn’t stop thinking about David, and thought of him in terms of a proverb he had once heard from a Mexican man who had worked for him: “You have only one mother. Your father could be any son of a bitch in the world.” That’s me! I’m any son of a bitch in the world.
He did have a mother, however, there in God’s waiting room with a new companion. His late father, a hardworking tradesman, would have given Barney a wood shampoo with a rake handle. But my standing, thanks to my modest prosperity and education, means that I shall have to humor Barney, and no doubt my most earnest cautions about the forty-year age gap between Barney and my mother will be flung back in my face, Szabo thought. Suddenly tears burned in his eyes: he was back to David.
Drugs had swept through their small town one year. They’d always been around, but that year they were everywhere, and they had destroyed David’s generation. The most ordinary children had become violent, larcenous, pregnant, sick, lost, or dead. And then the plague had subsided. David, an excellent student, had injected the drugs between his toes, and his parents had suspected only that he suddenly disliked them. Instead of going to college, he had apprenticed with a chef for nearly a year, before heading to prison. David didn’t think that he would go back to drugs when he was released, and neither did his father. But his bitterness seemed to be here to stay, fed, likely, by his memory of the things that he had done in his days of using. Perhaps he blamed himself for the failure of his parents’ marriage. The body he had acquired in the weight room seemed to suit his current burdened personality. The way he looked, he could hardly go back to what he had been.
The tractor was wet and gleaming in the bright sunlight. Barney was gathering stray bits of baler twine and rolling them up into a neat ball. He hardly seemed to notice Szabo’s arrival, so Szabo carried his suitcase into the house without a word. Once inside, he glanced furtively through the hall window at Barney, then went back out.
“Good morning, Barney.”
“Hi.”
“This shoulder thing is behind me now. I think I’m ready to go back to work here.” Barney looked more quizzical than the situation called for. “So let’s square up and call it a day.”
“Meaning what?” Barney asked with an extravagantly inquisitive look.
“Meaning the job is over. Thank you very much. You’ve been a great help when I needed it most.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, I think so. I’m quite sure of it.”
“It’s your call, Szabo. But there’s something about me you don’t know.”
“I’m sure that’s the case. That’s nearly always the case, isn’t it, Barney?”
Some ghastly revelation was at hand, and Szabo knew that there would be no stopping it. “But I’d be happy to know what it is, in your instance.”
Barney gazed at him a long time before he spoke. He said, “I am a respectable person.”
Szabo found this unsettling. Clearly, it was time to have a word with his mother. He asked her out to lunch, but she begged off, citing the new smoking rules that, she said disdainfully, were “sweeping the nation.” So he took her to the park near the river. Her size had been reduced by tobacco and her deplorable eating habits. She scurried along briskly, and any pause on Szabo’s part found her well ahead, poking into garden beds and uprooting the occasional weed to set an example. They found a bench and sat. Mrs. Szabo shook out a cigarette by tapping the pack against the back of her opposing hand, then raising the whole pack, with its skillfully protruded single butt, to her lips. There the cigarette hung, unlit, while she made several comments about the weather and dropped the pack back into her purse. Finally, she lit it, and the first puff seemed to satisfy her profoundly.