T. Boyle - A Friend of the Earth

But now, now he hitched up his pants and ambled down the hall and out the door into the courtyard, stunned all over again by the reach of the sky and the feel of the sun on his face, and he didn't have a worry. Twenty-six days. It was nothing. He'd move into the house Andrea had rented for them in Tarzana and mow the lawn and take the trash out, and he'd drive Sierra to school in the morning and be there for her in the afternoon, and he'd take her shopping, for ice cream, to the movies, and it would be like it used to be, before Teo and Sheriff Bob Hicks came onto the scene. Yes. And then there was Andrea. He'd love her in the flesh-all night, every night — and not in the pathetic theater of his mind.

A couple of the inmates were sunning themselves against the south wall of the dormitory-Anthony Imbroglio, a small-time gangster from Long Beach, and his muscle, a perpetually smirking fat-headed goon by the name of Johnny Taradash — and Tierwater gave them a noncommittal nod, not friendly exactly, but not disrespectful either. That was the thing here, respect. Even though the place was for nonviolent and first-time offenders-nothing like the maximum — or even medium-security prisons, where your fellow inmates were armed robbers, killers and gang members and you were locked in cells on a cellblock just like in an old George Raft movie-you could still get hurt here. For all the overweight accountants, pigeon-chested scam artists and inside traders with flat feet and staved-in eyes, there were drug offenders too, muscle-bound high-school dropouts, ethnic groups with gang affiliations-black, Latino, Native American — and all of them were angry, and they all pumped iron instead of worrying about their investment portfolios.

At the end of Tierwater's first week, Johnny Taradash had come to him and suggested he might want to have Andrea deposit a hundred dollars a month in Anthony Imbroglio's account at First Interstate in Los Angeles. For his own protection, that is. Tierwater was weak still, skinny as a refugee, but his temper-that uncontainable flood of rage that came up in him like Blitzkrieg at the most inopportune times-was as muscular as ever. He told Johnny Taradash to fuck off, and Johnny Taradash let out a weary sigh and began tearing up the room in a slow methodical way, ripping the covers off books, crumpling magazines, that sort of thing, and he left Tierwater gasping for breath on the concrete floor. The next day Tierwater smuggled a wrench and screwdriver out of the printshop and spent the better part of the afternoon removing a dull-gray scuffed metal leg from the desk in his room. He lingered in the doorway that evening, while Bill Driscoll turned to the wall and moaned in his sleep and the shadows solidified in the trees beyond the window, till he caught sight of Johnny Taradash's big head floating down the hall from the TV room, just behind the sleek, neatly barbered form of his boss. He waited. Held his breath. Then stepped out and hit Johnny Taradash flat across the plane of his face, swinging for the fences with everything he had. After that, there was respect.

He'd almost reached the visitors' hall when Radovan Divac, the Serbian chess fiend, came at him out of nowhere, demanding a game. Divac was a gangling, morose-looking character with a nose like a loaf of French bread and a pair of negligible eyes who'd tried to rob a federal credit union with a water pistol. "Come on, Ty," he pleaded, "I give you queen and, and — knight's bishop. Fi 'dollar, you beat me."

"Sorry, Rado," he said, brushing past him, "I've got visitors."

The Serb held up a fist choked with black pieces. "And the rook — I give you both rook. Fi 'dollar, come on!"

Tierwater gave his name to the guard at the door of the visitors' facility and went on into the long low rectangular room with its wrung-out light, its smell of flooding glands and the dust that hung eternally in the air. A segmented table divided the room: on one side were women in dresses, makeup and heels, accompanied by the occasional squirming infant or fiercely scrubbed toddler; on the other were the prisoners. Tierwater took one of the only two seats available-on the far end, next to a guard named Timson who must have weighed three hundred pounds. They were like umpires, the guards-bloated, titanic men with dead faces who called all the strikes balls and the balls strikes, enemies of the game and the players alike. Tierwater had learned not to expect much from them. He was listening to one of the new inmates tell his wife or girlfriend how thoroughly he was going to fuck her when he got out in six months-Right on down to the spaces in between your toes, baby-when Andrea and Sierra came through the door.

Andrea was wearing heels and a tight green dress with spaghetti straps that showed off her arms and shoulders. Sierra, in baggy jeans, high-tops and a sweatshirt that featured the name of her high school stamped across the front of it, stood against the wall just inside the door while one of the guards-another flesh-monster born of doughnuts and Kentucky Fried-frisked Andrea for contraband. Up and down her front with the portable metal-detector, both sides, now turn around, the wand re-creating each dip and bulge, the hair falling across her face in a shimmering, fine white-blond sheet, every prisoner watching with that starved prison light in his eyes, even the ones with their pregnant sixteen-year-old girlfriends propped up across from them like tombstones. Then Andrea was crossing the room, everything in motion, and Tierwater stood to place his hands flat on the table and lean into her for the kiss.

The kiss was the big feature of every visitors' hall encounter, and every inmate lingered over it, dreaming of another place and another time, savoring the female smell and the female taste as long as humanly possible. Tierwater was no different. Three hundred and thirty-four days without sex. That was paying your debt to society, all right. With interest. He clung to her with his lips as long as he could, and then they were sitting on opposite sides of the table, his erection throbbing insistently, and they talked about the things that counted for nothing, the mundane things, the things of the world outside the wire. "The deal's all but done," she said, "What do you mean — the shopping center '?"

"Uh-huh. Teo knew somebody back east-remember I told you last time? — and he came in and got it closed. No reflection on that Realtor you were stuck on, but she was a low-grade moron with about as much chance of selling that place as I've got of being named premier of China-"

"Elsa was a friend of my father."

"Yeah, well, she couldn't have sold that place if it was the last piece of property on the East Coast. She was tired. She was old, Ty — I mean, what is she: Sixty? Seventy?"

"What'd we get, just out of curiosity? I mean, this is what we're going to be living on for the rest of our lives, that's all. No big deal."

She pursed her lips. Shifted her buttocks. Let her hair fall and then swept it back again. "One three," she said.

For a vivid moment he saw the place he'd abandoned, the Mongolian barbecue that used to be a dry cleaner that used to be a notions shop, the dirty-windowed vacancy of the deserted drugstore, the model shop he'd haunted as a brainless teenager, the yarn store, the pet shop with its grimy aquariums and enervated birds and its smell of superheated death. It was a prime property, or at least it used to be, back in the sixties, when his father built the place. One three. Well, one three was better than nothing, and who would be crazy enough to buy the place anyway-even for half the price?

"That doesn't include the office building and all that parcel," she was saying.

He was doing the math. One three minus the six-hundredthousand second mortgage and the forty-odd for the Realtor's fee and the taxes on top of that-it would still leave them a nice piece of change. How many flyers could they print up with that? How many culverts could they block?