"You're kidding. Why would you want to do that?"

"To see Cole."

"Who's Cole?"

"A friend."

"An inmate?" The joking has gone out of her voice.

"Yeah."

"I didn't realize you were in touch with anyone at Patuxent."

"I'm not."

"Then how do you know he's still there?"

"You kill a cop, they never let you out."

Candy brushes a hand at her hair. When her bangs flip off her forehead, she looks like Mom, only younger and prettier and with a skinny leg in her boot.

"After being cooped up at Patuxent for a dozen years, it surprises me you want to visit," she says.

"You visited."

"That was to see you. Somebody I love."

I don't tell her how I feel about Cole. "If it's too much trouble, don't bother."

"It's not too much trouble." Her hand is at her hair again. "If that's what you want, that's what we'll do."

She tugs the wheel and the tires squeal and we tunnel back through the cloud. It hits me that Cole could be dead. I don't mention this to Candy. It's too late. Now that the idea is in my brain, I have to learn whether he's alive or not. Your problem is you don't think, Nicky always says. But my problem is I can't stop thinking about a thing once I start.

I don't recall how old Cole is. Not like Mom, but he's way up there and doesn't have long to go. All the years he's been locked up, I figure he'd rather burn than be buried in another box. But it could be he doesn't get to choose. That's how it is in prison. They say, and you do what they say, or else it's into the hole.

If he hasn't shaved, his mouth'll be as whiskery as Mom's. But I bet there'll be gla.s.s between us. So no touching. Just looking and pressing hands against the gla.s.s, like me looking through the car window where trucks rip by so fast I'm afraid they'll suck me out onto the highway.

I change from the window to looking at Candy, and she says, "This used to be farmland, with people selling vegetables beside the road. On the drive home from Patuxent, we'd buy fresh corn and tomatoes. Do you remember that, Maury?"

"I wasn't in the car."

"I mean the times when we visited you."

"Yeah." A fire flickers from drawer to drawer in the box in my head, and I follow it, hunting for Cole and a place to be with him. But pa.s.sing cars and trucks set off a racket, and in the side mirror headlights burn out of the cloud like the point of Mom's cigarette. My mind can't find a safe spot.

"Do you remember visiting me when I was in the hospital?" Candy asks.

"I remember the little girl in the machine."

"Yes, an iron lung."

"Did she ever get out of it? Or is she like Cole, in for life?"

"I don't know, Maury."

By the time we're on the parking lot at Patuxent the cloud's gone, just like Candy promised. Or maybe it was never here to start with. The sun feels nice, but it makes a pool under me on the pavement, and I step away. The lockup building stares back at me through two tall chain-link fences.

They're easy to climb, these fences, till you hit the barbed wire on top. I saw a guy tangle himself up there trying to escape. Guards hollered for him to climb down, and when he didn't, they said they'd shoot, and when he still didn't, they shot him. He hung there a long time, his clothes snagged in the wire. They had to take a ladder and cut him down, just like I cut the tree branches from the fence at Nicky's house. I don't want to think about any of this. But like Cole, whether he's alive or dead, it sticks in my brain.

"Ready?" Candy asks, locking up with the frog chirper.

We go into the gatehouse through a gla.s.s door so thick it shuts with the sound of the safe where Nicky keeps her money. For a minute we're locked between one gla.s.s door and the next. It's so tight, I have trouble breathing. Then at a buzz we move through a metal detector into the big room where everybody waits. I make the buzzing noise to myself. It's Sunday and there are as many people here as in church this morning. It smells like feet and dogs, and I'd never lie down on this floor.

A guard drags a police dog on a leash, telling it, "C'mon, checkup, checkup." And it snuffles at shoes and bags and up and down your legs. These people don't mind. They come every week, they're used to a dog with its nose in their privates. But when the teeth and wet tongue get near Candy, she flinches.

A black guard in a booth talks through a microphone and matches our names against the visitors list. When I ask for Cole, he looks at me. He looks so long, I have to look away. I'm scared he thinks there's a mistake and I belong back in jail.

"Ole Cole," he says, "he ain't too popular these days. Ain't had visitor one since I been on staff. You kin?"

"He's a friend," Candy talks for me.

"Cole's visitor list, it's years, it's decades, out of date," the guard says.

"My brother traveled a long way," Candy tells him. "He traveled from California to visit his friend."

"Ain't up to me. His name's on the list, and I'll let him through. But inside they might could decide no and send him back."

"Can I go in with him?" Candy asks.

"No, ma'am." There's a radio in the booth and it's singing that rhyming music about ditches and b.i.t.c.hes and a.s.s and gra.s.s. "n.o.body gets in 'less his name's down here. And yours ain't."

"I'll be in the car," Candy tells me, smiling-maybe because she's glad to wait outside. Now I'm not sure I want to go in. But people behind us are pushing and the guard whistles through his teeth, waiting. "Stay as long as you like," Candy says.

"It's an hour, max," the guard says.

The ground in the yard is frozen. Under my feet there's an echo, like from an escape tunnel some con is digging. The wind that blew away the cloud pushes at me. But it doesn't have the sand in it that stings you in Slab City. My shadow pours out ahead of me. Every blade of gra.s.s is dead, and there's not a tree or bush to hide behind.

The building swarms with the smell I lived with when I was a boy. Bad food and bad gas and bad men. People talk about jail and think bars. But the worst is the smell and the banging steel doors. The noise shakes the cellblock, and that shaking is in my voice when I tell a guard at a desk my name and Cole's.

The belt around his belly has holsters for handcuffs, a walkie-talkie, and a nightstick. No gun. I don't know whether he believes I belong here or not. His questions come down so fast I can't keep up. They come down like snow, the first flakes melting and making wet spots. Then flurry after flurry, they pile up, and my head is as full as the gla.s.s ball at Mom's house where a blizzard buries the miniature town.

The guard says Cole's sick. Been sick for years. The guard doesn't let on from what. He might be sick from anything. In prison they've got diseases, and you can catch them. Or they catch you. I don't ask. Probably the guard wouldn't tell me. Probably he doesn't have to unless I'm a blood relative. He knows I'm on Cole's visitors list, but tells me he doesn't have to let me in.

"I came from California," I say what Candy said to the guard at the gate. "I came on a bus." I pull the plastic bus from my pocket.

He laughs. "Must have been a tight fit."

"I sat in the sixth row." I hold it out for him to look at.

"I get the picture. Lemme call upstairs and ask the supervisor do we make an exception for you."

Ten minutes. I count them on the clock on the wall. I don't do it out loud. I watch the red hand circle and the black hand jump, and I count to myself. Then the guard says I'm an exception and orders me to empty my pockets and put everything, including the bus, in a locker and he'll hold the key.

A different guard leads me through steel doors, downstairs to a tier that I never knew about. It smells like soap and the purple medicine Nicky paints on me when I cut myself. None of the men look really sick. Still, they're cuffed to beds. One or two call out to me.

"Hush up," the guard tells them. Then he whispers, "Buncha skull-f.u.c.ked toads."

The last bed in the line is behind hanging sheets, and the inmate is tied with wires and tubes, not cuffs. They snake into his arms and up his nose and between his legs. Stuff drips in and out of him. Mostly out, so that his face has that collapsed look of a cantaloupe that's gone bad. He has less hair than Quinn, just baby wisps above his ears. It doesn't smell like straw. Still, I know by his eyes that it's Cole.

I lean down and look at him and he looks at me. His eyes are full of water like you'd see on a rainy street. It's hard to say whether he recognizes me. To remind him who I am, I do what he used to do. I spread my fingers over his head. His scalp feels paper thin. I could crush it with one squeeze. But I hold on, remembering him holding me, teaching me, being my father. Nothing, not even the water in his eyes, budges.

"I don't know as I'd do that if I was you," the guard says. "They claim you can't catch it. But why run the risk?"

"Sleep," I whisper to Cole. "You're going to sleep for a long time."

When I'm ready, we walk back past the men cuffed to their beds.

"How long you known Cole?" the guard at the desk asks.

"Since I was a boy."

"Do you know his family? Anybody we could notify?"

"He had a wife and kids, but they never visited."

"We need to decide what to do."

"You mean burn him or bury him in a box?"

The guard gives me a look. "That's not my department."

"I know he'd rather burn, not end up in a box."

"Like I say, it ain't up to me. Unless you're kin, it ain't up to you either."

When I fetch my belongings from the locker, I say, "I'd like to leave him something."

"What?" The guard eyes my plastic bus.

"Money for cigarettes and candy."

"He's finished smoking, and all his food drips through that tube in his nose."

I hand him ten dollars.

"It's your money, man. I'll take it," he says, "and when Cole pa.s.ses, I'll toss it in the kitty for the Christmas party."

He has to write up a receipt that I sign so no one accuses him of stealing. But he writes the date wrong and has to do it over again. Then carrying the pink slip of paper, I cross the yard, and the wind blows it out of my hand. The paper flaps in the dead gra.s.s, and I chase it. Like a b.u.t.terfly, it lands here, lands there. Nicky's afraid of anything with wings, even moths. I catch them without hurting them and set them free. But Nicky stomps them flat. Which is what I do with the receipt. Stomp it. A corner of it flaps at the side of my shoe, one wing still flying. I fold it in half and stuff it in my back pocket.

In the gatehouse, I spot a guard at the gla.s.s door spying on me, probably wondering what I stuffed in my pocket. I look over my shoulder like I left something behind, like pieces of me have broken off.

Candy's in the car, and the windshield mists from her breathing. She switches on the engine, and the gla.s.s starts to clear. I bet the mist is gone before I get there. I walk slow to make sure I win.

"Did you have a nice visit with your friend?" she asks.

I nod that I did.

"Was he happy to see you?"

I nod.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing. I'm good."

"If you'd like, Quinn or I'll bring you back for another visit." She pulls out of the parking lot. "Maybe you two'll stay in touch now."

There's water in my eyes. It doesn't stand still like in Cole's. It trickles down and tastes salty in my mouth.

"Oh, sweetie, I'm sorry," Candy says. "It must have been sad after all these years." Then she does that scary thing of taking her hand off the steering wheel and not watching where she's driving. Her fingers flutter in the air like the blowing sc.r.a.p of pink paper.

Quinn

"Why are you crawling?"

I rush over to Mom, but she rejects my help, and wades on hands and knees through the papers that have fallen from my lap. Maury's legal file crackles under her like ancient parchment. In her frayed housecoat, with her thin yellowish hair straggling down, she could be a character, half-wraith, half-clown, from a Samuel Beckett play, grumbling, "I can't go on, I'll go on."

She slumps against the cedar chest and jabs her gla.s.ses back up the bridge of her nose. "d.a.m.n! Forgot my cigarettes. Run downstairs and get them, hon. An ashtray too."

"Not until you tell me what's wrong."

"Nothing's wrong-" She strains to catch her breath. "-except I lost the spring in the legs. Easier to do the stairs on all fours. An old woman's no better than a baby. Now what about those cigarettes?"

"The last thing you need is a cigarette."

"Don't preach to me. I've had a raft of that from Candy. Just get my Kents."

I do as I'm told. It's a ch.o.r.e reminiscent of childhood, an encore performance of my original role as Stepin Fetchit. Mom was always ordering me to bring her a c.o.ke, peanuts, potato chips, chocolate-covered pecans-all the sweets and savories that I was forbidden to sample except with her permission. She warned me these were treats for the weekend, but only if I behaved. She warned me they'd ruin my teeth and my complexion. She warned me she'd blister my bottom with a hairbrush if I disobeyed her and sneaked a bite. The most I might hope for was an occasional nibble of the ambrosia she gorged on.

When I recounted this to Dr. Rokoko, he refused to believe me. He dismissed the story as a fabrication, another of what he refers to as my "burlesque shows," a blatant play for his sympathy. It took me the better part of a session to persuade him that I had raised the subject only to demonstrate how well trained I was as a child-and how happy!-to serve the household G.o.ddess. And here I am a grown man doing it again.

When I return, Mom is examining a photograph of herself as a schoolgirl. "Ever notice how women as they age, their eyes get smaller and smaller? I don't think men's do."

She flicks aside the snapshot like someone slinging cards at a hat, then lights a Kent. I rea.s.sume my seat on the folding chair. She shucks off her slippers, and her feet are not a pretty sight. Cracked and discolored, her toenails might be mistaken for the talons of a raptor.