George Pelecanos - The Way Home

Other than for work, Ben had no need for a car. He was on a bus line, and he was not far from the Fort Totten Metro station. You stayed in the District, it was easy to get around.

He liked to take walks in the cemetery, eighty-some acres of hills, trees, monuments, and headstones, some of the nicest green space in D.C. He entered at the main gate, at Rock Creek Church Road and Webster Street, and walked up past the church to the high ground, where the finest, most ornate monuments were located, and down a road so narrow it did not look like a proper road, to the Adams Memorial, his favorite spot. A marble bench faced the statue, the monument shielded by a wall of evergreens. On his weekends off, he’d sit on the bench and try to write poetry. Or open a paperback novel he had slipped into the pocket of his jeans.

Ben could read.

He had been at Pine Ridge until the age of twenty-one. The incident with Calvin Cooke had kept him behind the fence and razor wire, even as his friends had been set free. At eighteen, Ali and Chris had rotated out when they’d achieved Level 6. Lawrence Newhouse had been released, violated the conditions of his parole, was reincarcerated at the Ridge, and went on to do adult time for gun charges, first at Lorton before it closed, and then at a penitentiary in Ohio. By the time Ben had walked free, he was the old man of the facility. The guards had clapped him out, the way faculty did for kids graduating elementary school.

Under supervision, he lived in several halfway houses with other men. He stayed to himself, kept his appointments with his parole officer, walked by unlocked cars without stopping, was piss-tested regularly, and always dropped negatives. Chris, by then employed by his father, put him on as an assistant and taught him the carpet-and-floor-installation trade. Ali, then a student at Howard but already working the system, found out about a special night program at UDC, funded by the District and local charities, set up to educate ex-offenders. Ali got Ben enrolled.

There he met his teacher, a kind and patient young woman named Cecelia Lewis. In the schools of his youth, and his high school classes at Pine Ridge, he had worked with instructors who tried to get him to read, and corrected him, always corrected him, when he could not make out words, and he became ashamed and got to where he hated to look at books. Miss Lewis read to him, which no one had ever done. She read from newspapers, comic books, books written for teenagers, and then from adult novels, not fancy ones, but clearly written books with good characters that anyone could appreciate and understand. She would read from a book, and he would hold a copy of that same book and follow along, and after months of this, twice a week at night, the words and sentences connected and became pictures in his head. He was reading, and a door opened, and when he went through it he felt as if things were possible now that had not been possible before. It was like putting on a pair of prescription eyeglasses for the first time. The world looked new.

Of course, he fell in love with Cecelia Lewis. He picked flowers from people’s gardens and window boxes on his walk to the Red Line train, handing them to her when he arrived at her classroom, and he wrote poems, sensing they were awful but giving them to her anyway to let her know that she had reached him deep.

They never did make it to bed. They never even kissed. When he finally expressed his feelings to her, she told him that it would be inappropriate for a teacher to have that kind of relationship with her student, that it was certainly not him, that she did care about him as a person, whatever that meant, and that they should remain friends. Her eyes told him something different, they said she was into him, but he understood her reticence and didn’t press it further. When the semester was over, he never saw her again. No matter. Cecelia Lewis had changed his life, and there would always be a place for her in his heart.

Ben had a girl now, nice woman named Renee, built low to the ground, lived over in Hyattsville and worked at a nail salon. She was easy to get along with. They stayed in mostly, had pizza delivered, sat together, and laughed. She didn’t complain about Ben watching his basketball on the TV, didn’t ask why he seldom took her to restaurants or clubs. Maybe she knew that he was uncomfortable in such places and, in general, out in the world. Renee was just cool with it. She was all right.

Ben’s cell sounded. Its ring tone was that old Rare Essence “Overnight Scenario” joint that Ben loved. He checked the ID and answered.

“Wha’sup, Chris?”

“Checkin up on you.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not cryin over that bag of money, are you?”

“I wished I had it. But I’m not blown by it.”

“So what’re you doin?”

“ ’Bout to take a walk. You seein your redhead tonight?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Should I call you in the morning and wake your ass up?”

“No need. I’ll swing by and get you, same time as usual.”

Ben ended the call. He slipped Of Mice and Men, a worn Penguin edition he had bought used, into the rear pocket of his jeans and headed out the door in the direction of the cemetery. There was still an hour or so of summer light, enough for him to sit and read in peace.

Chris lived in a house that had been converted into three apartments on a street of single-family homes in downtown Silver Spring, just over the District line in Maryland. He had chosen it when he’d seen the built-in bookshelves in its living-room area, a place to house the many biography and US history titles that he read and collected. Ali had gotten him hooked with the Taylor Branch books on Dr. King and the civil rights movement, which were two volumes when Chris was incarcerated and had grown to a trilogy after his release. He liked anything by Halberstam, the unconventional takes on the world wars by Paul Fussell, David McCullough’s entire body of work, and war memoirs like E. B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed, which he felt was the finest book of its kind ever written. He was inspired by these extraordinary writers and their subjects, even as he was aware of and resigned to his own very ordinary life.

His place was small but entirely adequate for his needs. He did not have many possessions other than his books, and he kept a neat and uncluttered apartment. He lined his shoes up in pairs under his bed, heels out, as he had done beneath his cot at Pine Ridge. He had a small television set and bought the most basic cable package so that he could watch sports. Every morning, before he went to work, he made his bed.

The other tenants of the house were the Gibsons, a young punkish couple, the husband a rock musician, the wife a private music teacher, and Andy Ladas, a middle-aged man who kept to himself and smoked cigarettes on the porch at night as he slowly drank bottled beer. The four of them took turns mowing the lawn with regularity, and the couple went beyond the call and landscaped the yard, keeping the property in better shape than many of the homeowners on the block did. Despite this, there were rumblings on the neighborhood Listserve about keeping future renters off the street. If they wanted him gone, fine, he’d go. He’d had the sense that he’d be moving around frequently, anyway. That his would be that kind of nomadic life.

But he was feeling different lately, since he’d been going out with Katherine. Yeah, she meant more to him than the other young women he’d been with since coming out. If pressed, because he was not one to talk about such things, he’d even admit that he was in love with her. But also, he felt that this change in outlook had to do with his age. Just as it felt normal to rebel as a teenager, settling into something more permanent felt natural as he moved into the tail end of his twenties.