Pete was past sober and loose-jawed. He went on: Last fall, Sheila Adams started helping out. She wasn’t the youth pastor. She was the coordinator. I think she made the title up. I think she was bored. The guy she was engaged to was an engineer at the chemical factory. He was away for awhile, down in Central America, on a mission to help people purify their water. It was with the International Pentecostal Church. Sheila was at home, bored, so she started coordinating with the youth group. I knew her from around. She was young, she was kind of foxy. But I also knew her because of how into all of it she was. Talking in tongues, moving around, the whole bit. Sometimes she’d cry in a service. Cry and laugh at the same time. Look. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. I don’t know why it was me that she picked. Maybe it’s because I was the oddball. Who knows what goes through women’s heads.
— You’d never had sex with a woman before?
— Never. Here’s how it went. I told you about those lockdowns? We did one for New Year’s Eve. It was all pop and chips and games. About eleven o’clock my friend Billy and a couple other guys came by outside. I got out a window and smoked some grass with them. Then I went back inside. After midnight I was a little weirded out so I went walking around the church to clear my head. Sheila was in the office. She had a key, I don’t know why. She called me in. I thought she knew I’d been smoking grass and she was going to let me have it, but … there wasn’t much talk. She closed the door and it just happened. Just like that. I was looking over at Barry’s desk the whole time, which was maybe five minutes. That was how it started. January. She’d need something, she’d need help over at her house. She’d give me a lift home from meetings. Once I skipped class and we did it in the afternoon. I thought I was in love with her but I guess I knew I wasn’t. Whenever we actually talked about anything, all she ever said was, that’s nice, or that’s interesting. And if it was something complicated, she’d say, look in the Bible. But she wanted to have sex all the time, and I was happy to give. It was all I could think about. But then in March, Sheila found out her fiance was coming home a couple months early. He’d gotten sick down there. He’d lost a bunch of weight. She told me we had to stop seeing each other. She said she was grateful for all the times I’d helped her out around her house. In a way I think she didn’t believe any of it actually happened. Me, I was a mess. I didn’t know how to deal with it but I knew I couldn’t say anything. I knew if even one person had any idea, how fast it would get out. Church people love to talk. I knew if it got out what it would do to us. I didn’t really care … about Barry. But Mom and Grandma, Luke, John, I care about them.
— You did just right, said Lee. So you quit going to church on account of this girl?
— Not right away. Sheila quit coordinating the youth group. I quit going to events. Her fiance came back from his mission and there was this big Welcome Home for him at the church. He was skinny and his skin was yellow. I was mad. I was so goddamn mad … But then we were at church this one Sunday in May. We were at church and everybody had the Baptism of Fire, hands in the air, talking in tongues. I saw Sheila, and she was right into it as usual. But the thing was, the face she was making, while she was blabbing out all these old languages, the face was the exact same as when she’d be having sex. Exact same. I don’t know why but I thought that was one of the funniest things I ever saw. I thought I was going to laugh my guts out right there in church. And then I knew. I knew how come I never had the Baptism of Fire. I didn’t go to church again. I quit school a couple weeks after that. It was the same there, Lee. Bullshit, all of it. I knew if I was going to head out west I was going to need to save some money. That’s all I’ve cared about ever since.
He’d halfway finished his beer. He was blinking against Lee’s cigarette smoke.
— Maybe I am passing up my chance for salvation. Maybe I’m going to hell. But I never chose to see through it all.
— I’m not sharp like you are, said Lee. I read the Bible a few times and I think there’s some real good stuff there. But they say God loves everybody. He cries if a bird dies. Sure. But then the same God would send somebody like you to hell forever? Just on account of you don’t get the call, same as some other people? I’m not sharp like you are, but I never got anybody, like a chaplain or a pastor, to work out that question so it made any sense.
— You don’t believe in hell?
— Sure I do. I seen it with my own eyes. It’s right here in the world where people make it for each other.
Lee didn’t know what advice he could give to Pete, if Pete was even looking for advice. Lee had known, of course, that Donna had left town to live somewhere else for several years, that Pete hadn’t been born here, but that was a different subject entirely.
They got a little drunker and they watched the television movie for awhile. Just a few beers remained. Pete said he didn’t think he could drive home until he sobered up.
— You’ll end up in the goddamn ditch, said Lee. Stay here.
Lee got a deck of cards and dealt it out onto a TV tray. He said he was going to teach Pete a kind of poker called Fishing Hole that he’d learned inside. You could play with as few as two players or as many as seven. Everybody would ante in and then the whole deck got dealt and each player’s cards got tallied up for points against whatever hands he might have been able to make. Sometimes a certain guy would book a regular game and would be able to rake a small profit. They played a few rounds. Pete felt like he’d been inducted into a secret order.
— Did you always do carpentry? said Pete. Like, before?
— No. I did a few building jobs here and there in town with some guys I knew, but when I went up, I wasn’t anything at all. I got my trade after I got there.
— Right away? said Pete.
— It wasn’t right away, no. I’d been in there almost ten years.
— Oh.
They played another round of Fishing Hole. They were using pennies and nickels and cigarettes to make their bets. Lee was winning, and he took one of the cigarettes he’d won and he lit it. He took a drag and let out a stream of smoke.
— Joe Holmes, a con I knew, he was in the woodshop. He sort of got me interested in it.
— He was, what, your cellmate?
— No, we weren’t two to a drum. Joe Holmes, I just knew him. When he was a kid he used to steal cars. He got sent to the reformatory, got out, stole cars again. After awhile the Crown got tired of him taking up space at the reformatory so they locked him up for good. But he wasn’t a serious guy. He wasn’t a fighter or a scrapper or nothing. He’d been in the woodshop for a few years when I knew him. Everybody thought working in the infirmary was where it was at because it was an easy go, but Joe liked the woodshop. He was kind of a trusty. The screws listened to him if he had something to say about the manning in the shop, and they didn’t give him much headache. And Joe, he just liked seeing things come together. That was all. He said he never knew that before he was inside.
— Do you still talk to him? Is he out?
— … No, said Lee. Say, did you know about the riot in 1971?
— I was a kid. It was just after Mom met Barry. Grandma got real upset when the riot was on the news. I don’t remember much more than that.
— The riot, right, I was there inside when it happened. There was this con named Dave Dempsey. He was a goof, Dempsey. He’d gotten sent up for kicking the shit out of his woman. She was a couple months pregnant when Dempsey had at her and she lost the kid. They nailed him hard for that. He was twenty years old, skinny, blond. To look at him when he got there-this was maybe 68 or 69-you’d think some old daddy would snap him up just as quick as can be, but Dempsey made himself useful. The real serious guys, they just put up with him. When they needed a guy to do something, Dempsey was who they used. And anyway … Dempsey and Joe Holmes …