George Pelecanos - The Way Home

Pivot your hip, Chris. Aim for two feet behind your target and punch through till you get there. If you’re going to throw it, make sure it counts.

While other fathers were reading books to their sons and pointing out countries on the globe, Flynn was showing Chris how to shoot a gun in the woods and teaching him the police ten codes. It became a kind of shorthand between them. Chris would fall down and scrape his knee, and he would reassure his father that he was 10-4. Or Chris would call his father on the car phone, wondering where he was, and ask, “What’s your ten-twenty?” The code 10-7 meant out of service, but Chris learned from Flynn that to cops it also meant dead. So when Flynn buried Chris’s deceased hamster in the backyard, Chris said, “Mr. Louie is ten-seven.”

Flynn had taught his son that an off-the-ten code for an officer in serious trouble was a Signal 13. In elementary school, when Chris was just beginning to act up, he would come home and tell his father that he had been sent to the office, but that the offense was minor and nothing to worry about.

“It was no Signal Thirteen, Dad.”

“That’s good, Chris,” said Flynn with a smile.

The boy had spirit and fire, character traits that annoyed teachers but would serve Chris well as an adult. That’s what Flynn had always believed. But in this, and in everything else pertaining to the raising of his son, he now felt that he’d been wrong. Chris had been headed for serious trouble for a long time, and Flynn had missed the signals. It was as if he had been watching his kid drive a car, in slow motion, straight into a brick wall. Watching it, letting it happen, without so much as a shouted warning.

It’s not Amanda’s fault that Chris is what he is. It’s mine.

Speak to him.

I should try.

How’s it going?” said Thomas Flynn.

“It’s goin all right,” said Chris.

Chris had just seated himself at the table across from Flynn. Chris’s eyes were cool and he sat low in his chair.

“Where’s Mom at?”

“She wanted to come.”

“Why didn’t she?”

“I talked her into staying home today. Thought it might be good for you and me to see each other alone.”

Chris sat back and crossed his arms. “What are we supposed to do now?”

“Talk, I guess.”

Chris looked around the room. A couple of other boys, one in a black polo, one in a forest green, were being visited as well. The boy in black had a male visitor. Chris took mental note of this because it was rare. He returned his attention to his father.

“I’m not trying to be hurtful,” said Chris. “But, really, I don’t have all that much to say.”

“You say things to Mom.”

“Honestly? Mom doesn’t tell me to shut the fuck up. Mom never called me a piece of shit.”

“I shouldn’t have said those things,” said Flynn. “I was wrong.”

“How did you expect me to respond to that, Dad?”

“I didn’t think it through.”

“It sure didn’t make me want to change the way I was.”

“I know it.”

“It didn’t make me want to put my arm around you or get on my knees and beg you to forgive me. It just made me feel nothing. It was like you weren’t trying to be my father anymore and you didn’t want me as your son. I felt like, so be it. You know?”

“Yes, I do,” said Flynn. He looked down at his hands, tented on the table. “I took everything that happened… I took it too personally, I guess. I let my emotions get the better of me.”

“So what you tryin to tell me now?”

What are you trying to tell me? thought Flynn. He bit down on his lower lip. “I’m trying to tell you that I’m sorry about the way I reacted.”

Chris did not comment. A silence settled between them.

“Your mother said you called her last week.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m saying, she was pleasantly surprised. Normally you don’t call us at home.”

“They only give me ten minutes a week on the phone. Before, I was using that time to call my friends.”

“Why’d you change up?”

“My friends stopped taking my calls.”

“Jason, too?”

“I haven’t spoke to Country in a long time.”

“What about your girlfriend?”

Chris shrugged and shook his head. But Flynn could see that he was wounded.

“You’ll make new friends,” said Flynn.

“I got friends in here.”

“That’s good, Chris. But I’m saying, when you get out, it’ll be a new start. New friends, everything.”

Chris looked away.

Flynn breathed out slowly and said, “Mom told me you’re doing well in school.”

“I’m gonna graduate. A real high school degree, not some GED.”

“Excellent. With a degree in hand you could test into a community college.”

“That’s not gonna happen.”

“What, then? What will you do?”

“Work, I guess. I don’t know.”

Flynn used one hand to crack the knuckles of the other.

“Don’t get frustrated, Dad.”

“I just don’t want you to make that kind of crucial decision without thinking about it.”

“I don’t want to go to college. You didn’t go, and you turned out all right.”

“ Don’t… don’t compare yourself to me. Back in my day, with only a high school degree, you could still make something of yourself. But now there are two distinct societies, Chris, plainly separated. The educated and the uneducated. You don’t just go to college to learn. You go to mingle and forge a permanent network with people who all move up the chain together. Don’t go to college and there’s going to be a ceiling on your earnings. The pool will be limited on who you date and marry. Not only will you probably live in a lower-income neighborhood, but so will your children, and their peers will be lower income, too. Don’t you see how it works? There are people who strive to make it to the upper level of society and then there are the other people who stay down below.”

“It was you who was always cracking on the lawyers and doctors in our neighborhood. Saying how they came from privilege and money, and how they had a leg up. Being all sarcastic about how they never got their hands dirty or broke a sweat. Like how you sweated every day.”

“Chris-”

“You don’t want me to be like you?”

“You’re not listening to me.”

“I guess I’m just one of those other people. The ones who stay down below.”

“God damn it, Chris.”

“Anyway. All this talk about the future? It doesn’t mean nothin to me. I mean, I’m in here. This is what I got to deal with now.” Chris swept his arm around the room as if he were showing his father something grand. He pushed his chair back and stood away from the table. “Thanks for coming by. Tell Mom I was askin about her, hear?”

Flynn put his hand on his son’s forearm and held him a bit too hard. He knew that he should tell Chris he loved him and that now was the time. He tried to say the words but he could not.

“Sir?” said the guard on duty. “There’s no physical contact allowed.”

Chris pulled his arm free. He stared at his father for a moment, then made a chin motion to the guard, who let him out the door of the visitation room. Flynn watched his son walk back into jail.

The boys were sitting around in the common room on a cold night in early spring, cracking on one another, talking random shit, and killing time until lights-out. None of them were anxious to go to their cells, where a few would study, fewer would read books for pleasure, many others would masturbate, and most would simply go to sleep as their bodies wound down and the shield they felt they had to carry fell away. Though cell time was the one truly quiet, introspective time of their day, it was also the loneliest, and the most difficult to face.