Triptych

CHAPTER ELEVEN

John was lying in bed at the flophouse, half asleep, when a knock came at his door. He rolled over and looked at his clock, squinting his eyes to read the tiny numbers. Six-thirty. He had another hour to sleep before he had to get up.

“Knock-knock,” a woman said, and he laid back in bed with a grunt. “Rise and shine, choirboy,” Martha Lam sang. The first thing he had found out about his parole officer was that she loved surprise inspections.

“Just a minute,” he called back, sitting up in bed, rubbing his eyes.

“Not a minute, cowboy,” Ms. Lam insisted, her voice polite but firm. “Open up this door, now, you hear?”

He did as he was told-quickly-because he knew if she got it into her head she could throw him back inside before the day was out.

She stood at the door with one hand on the jamb, a cheerful smile on her face like she was happy to see him. She was dressed up as usual: pressed black shirt, gold lame vest and tight black leather pants. Between her hoochie-mama shoes and the Glock she wore strapped to her side, she could be the poster girl for a fetish magazine.

She glanced down at the tent in his boxers, then gestured down the hallway to the bathroom. “Go on and salute your little general. I’ll just poke around on my own.”

John put his hands over his crotch, feeling fifteen. “I just have to go to the bathroom,” he explained.

She gave him that cheerful smile again, her southern drawl making her words sound polite. “Fill me up one’a them cups from the cooler in the hall, why don’t you?”

He made his way to the communal bathroom as quickly as possible, peeing as fast as he could, spilling enough into the specimen cup for the random drug screening, then hurried back to his room. Ms. Lam would be going through his stuff now, and even though John knew there was nothing for her to find, he felt guilty, terrified she’d toss him back in prison. Guys back in the joint talked about parole officers, how they planted stuff on you if they didn’t like you, how they were especially hard on sex offenders, looking for any excuse to send you back inside.

She was holding a framed photo of his mother when he got back.

“That was taken last year,” he said, feeling a lump in his throat. Emily was standing in the visitor’s hall at the prison. John had his arm around his mother, the dirty white cinderblock wall behind them serving as a backdrop. It had been his birthday. Joyce had taken the photo because his mother had insisted.

“Nice,” Ms. Lam said. John always called her Ms. Lam, never Martha, because she scared him and he wanted to show her that he was capable of respect.

She opened up the back of the frame and checked it for-what? He didn’t know, but he felt himself sweating until she put the photo back down on the cardboard box that served as a bedside table.

Next, she went through the paperback books he had borrowed from the library, thumbing through the pages, commenting on the titles. “Tess of the d’Urbervilles?” she asked, pausing on the last book.

He shrugged. “I’ve never read it before.” He had been arrested the day after Ms. Rebuck, his English teacher, had announced in class that Tess would be their next major paper.

“Hm,” she said, giving the book a second, more careful inspection.

She finally replaced the book and put her hands on her hips, surveying the room. John didn’t have a chest of drawers so his clothes were folded and stacked in neat piles on top of the red cooler where he stored his food. He could tell she had already gone through the clothes because the shirt on top was folded differently, and he assumed she’d checked out the bananas, bread and jar of peanut butter in the cooler. There was one window in the room, but he had taped construction paper over it to block out the early morning sun. Ms. Lam had peeled back the edges to make sure there was no contraband hidden behind it. A bare lightbulb overhead illuminated the room and he noticed she had turned on the floor lamp beside the bed. The shade was askew. She had checked that as well.

She said, “Lift up your mattress, please,” then, as if they were old pals, she explained, “I just had my nails done.”

John took two steps into the tiny room and was at the mattress. He picked it up and leaned it against the wall so she could see the dirty box spring underneath. They both saw the back of his mattress at the same time. The bloodstains and some kind of gray circle of grime in the middle made her frown in disgust.

“That, too,” she said, pointing to the box spring resting flat on the floor.

He picked this up, and they both jumped back like a pair of frightened little girls when a cockroach scuttled across the dank brown carpet.

“Bleh,” she said. “No luck finding another room?”

He shook his head, dropping the box spring and mattress back into place. He had been fortunate to find this one. As in prison, even flophouses had standards and a lot of them wouldn’t take sex offenders, especially if the victims had been young. John was stuck in a house with six other men who were all registered with the state. One of them had a record for going after an eight-year-old girl. Another liked to rape old women.

“Well.” Ms. Lam smiled, cheerful again. “I guess the Pedo Arms will do for the time being.” She indicated the cardboard box by his bed. “Open this, please.”

“There’s nothing-” He gave up, knowing there was no use. He took the stack of books off the box and put them on the bed, then placed the photo of his mother on top of them, not wanting the frame to touch the dirty sheets.

He opened the box, showing her it was empty.

She went down her checklist. “Not hiding any Viagra in here, are you?” John shook his head. “Illegal drugs? Porn? Weapons of any kind?”

“No, ma’am,” he assured her.

“Still working at the Gorilla?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Anything changes, you’ll tell me about it first, right?” Yes, ma am.

“Well.” She had her hands tucked into her hips again. “All righty, then. Clean bill for today.”

“Thank you,” he said.

She wagged a manicured finger at him. “I’m watching you, John. Don’t you forget that.”

“No, Ms. Lam. I won’t.”

She looked at him a moment longer, then shook her head as if she couldn’t understand a thing about him. “You stay out of trouble and we won’t have any problems, okay?”

“Okay,” he agreed. Stupidly, he added, “Thank you.”

“I’ll see you around,” she said, heading for the door. “Keep your nose clean.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he agreed. He closed the door behind her, leaving his palm flat against the wood, resting his head on the back of his hand and just trying to breathe.

“Knock-knock,” he heard above him. Ms. Lam was in charge of the old-lady rapist, too. John didn’t know the guy’s name because every time he saw him in the hall, it took all of John’s willpower not to deck him.

He turned back to his room, blocking out Ms. Lam’s voice as she made her cheery rounds upstairs. John hated people going through his shit. The most important thing he had learned in prison was that you never touched another man’s property unless you were willing to die for it.

He picked up his T-shirt, one of the six that he owned, and refolded it. He had a pair of chinos, two pairs of jeans, three pairs of socks and eight pairs of boxers because for some reason his mother had always brought him underwear in prison.

John used his foot to upright one of his sneakers. Ms. Lam had searched them, too. The tongues were pulled out, the inserts crooked. Thirty dollars for a pair of shoes, John thought. He couldn’t believe how expensive clothes and shoes had gotten while he was inside.

Upstairs, he heard Ms. Lam say, “Uh-oh!” John froze, knowing she had found something. He heard the rapist mutter a response, then Ms. Lam’s voice loud and clear: “Tell it to the judge.”

There wasn’t much of a scuffle. She had a Glock, after all, and it wasn’t like there was anywhere to run in the dilapidated house they all called home. John couldn’t resist sticking his head out the door when he heard them making their way down the stairs. Ms. Lam had one hand on the rapist’s shoulder, one on the cuffs that were locking his hands behind his back. The guy was still in his underwear, no shirt, no socks, no shoes. They’d have a real nice time with him in the holding cell, as Ms. Lam well knew.

She saw him peering from behind the door. “He messed up, John,” she said, as if that wasn’t obvious. “Take it as a lesson.”

John didn’t respond. He closed the door, waiting until he heard a car door slam on the street, an engine turn over, the car pull away.

Still, he checked out the window, pulling back the construction paper in time to see Ms. Lam’s red SUV stop at the light at the end of the street.

John dropped to his knees and picked at the edge of the filthy brown carpet. He tried not to think about the roach they had seen or the mouse turds between the carpet and the pad. He found the credit report right where he had left it. Not contraband, but what would Ms. Lam say if she found it? “Uh-oh!” And then he’d be gone.

John slipped on his jeans and shoved his feet into his sneakers. He took the stairs two at a time. There was a phone in the hallway that they could use for local calls, and he picked it up, dialing the number he knew by heart.

“Keener, Rose and Shelley,” the receptionist on the other end said. “How can I direct your call?”

John kept his voice low. “Joyce Shelley, please.”

“Who can I say is calling?”

He almost gave her a different name, but relented. “John Shelley.”

There was a pause, a hesitation that kept him in his place. “Just a moment.”

The moment turned into a couple of minutes, and John could picture his sister’s frown when her secretary told her who was on the line. Joyce’s life was pretty settled and she seemed to be doing well. She had rebelled against their father in her own way: instead of becoming a doctor, she had dropped out of medical school her second year at Emory and switched to law. Now, she did real estate closings all day, taking a flat fee for getting folks to sign on the dotted line. He couldn’t imagine her doing something so boring, but then, Joyce probably got a good laugh out of him wiping soapy water off of cars all day.

“What is it?” his sister whispered, not even bothering with a hello.

“I need to ask you something.”

“I’m in the middle of a closing.”

“It won’t take long,” he said, then kept talking because he knew she’d cut him off if he didn’t. “What’s a credit score?”

She spoke in her normal voice. “Are you an idiot?”

“Yeah, Joyce. You know I am.”

She gave a heavy sigh that sounded more labored than usual. He wondered if she had a cold or maybe she’d started smoking again. “All the credit card companies, the banks, anybody who lets you buy anything on credit, report to credit agencies about how well you pay your bills, whether you’re on time, whether you’re slow, if you make the minimum payment or pay it all off each month or whatever. Those agencies compile your payment histories and come up with a score that tells other companies how good a credit risk you are.”

“Is seven hundred ten a good score?”

“John,” she said. “I really don’t have time for this. What kind of scam are you running?”

“None,” he said. “I don’t run scams, Joyce. That’s not why they sent me to prison.”

She was quiet and he knew he had pushed her too far. “I haven’t forgotten why they sent you to prison,” she said, the edge to her voice telling him she was having a hard time keeping control.

“What if somebody got my information and used it to get credit cards and stuff?”

“Then it’d wreck your score.”

“No.” He clarified, “What if they were paying off the cards and everything every month?”

She hesitated a moment. “Why would they do that?”

“I don’t know, Joyce. That’s why I’m asking you.”

“Are you for real?” she demanded. “What is this, John? Just ask me what you need to know. I’ve got work to do.”

“I am asking you,” he said. “It’s just that someone…” He let his voice trail off. Would this implicate Joyce in whatever was going on? Could she somehow get in trouble for having knowledge of this? He didn’t know how the law worked. Hell, last week he hadn’t even known there was such a thing as a credit score.

He didn’t know, either, if Ms. Lam tapped the phone.

He finally said, “It’s this scam some guys were running in prison.”

“Jesus.” She was whispering again. “You’d better not be getting involved in it.”

“No,” he said. “I’m keeping my nose clean.”

“You’d better be, John. They will throw your ass back in jail so fast you won’t even have time to think.”

“You sound like Dad.”

“Is that your way of asking how he’s doing?”

John realized he was holding his breath. “No.”

“Good, because he wouldn’t want me telling you anyway.”

“I know.”

“Christ, John.” She sighed again. He was upsetting her. Why had he called her? Why did he have to bother her with this?

He felt tears in his eyes and pressed his fingers into the corners to try to stop them. He remembered when they were little, how she used to play with him, dress him up in Richard’s clothes, pretend she was his mother. They had tea parties and cooked cupcakes in her Easy-Bake Oven.

He asked, “Do you remember that time we melted Mom’s present?” John was six, Joyce was nine. They had saved their allowance and bought a bracelet for their mother’s birthday. Joyce had suggested they bake it in a cake to surprise her, something she’d read about in a book. They didn’t realize the bracelet was costume jewelry, and when they put it in the little oven, turned on the hundred-watt bulb to cook the cake, the bracelet had melted into the rack. The smoke had set off the fire alarm.

“Remember?” he asked.

Joyce sniffed, not answering.

“You okay?” he said. He wanted to know about her life. Was she seeing anybody? She’d never been married, but she was so damn pretty and smart. There had to be somebody in her life, somebody who wanted to take care of her.

“I’m getting a cold,” she said.

“You sound like it.”

“I gotta go.”

He heard the soft click of the phone as she hung up.

The next three days were riddled with storms-the clouds spitting down rain one minute, parting for the sunshine the next-and John was basically out of a job until they cleared. He found himself wishing he hadn’t blown fifty dollars on that hooker. But then, sometimes he found himself wishing he had fifty more to give her. What question would he ask her this time? Maybe, what did it feel like to be in love? What did it feel like to hold somebody who wanted to hold you back? He wanted to talk to her again. He wanted to know about her life.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t afford it.

Growing up, John hadn’t had to worry about how to put food on the table or clothes on his back. His parents took care of everything. There were always fresh sheets on the bed, the toilet was magically clean and whenever he opened the refrigerator, it was filled with all the things he liked to eat. Even in prison, everything was provided for him. They had a strict schedule and firm rules, but as long as you did what you were told, you didn’t have to worry about anything.

During a good month at the car wash, John pulled in about a thousand dollars after taxes. Rent for his ten-foot by ten-foot roach-encrusted room was four hundred fifty dollars-a premium, to be certain, but no one else would take him in so his landlord felt entitled. Renting an apartment would have made things cheaper, but John couldn’t swing the hefty deposit, let alone the various connection charges and down payments utility companies required. MARTA wasn’t cheap, either. The city offered a Monthly Trans Card for unlimited bus and subway rides, but that cost around fifty-two dollars a month. Sometimes, John couldn’t afford to pay all that up front and he ended up shelling out a buck seventy-five each way in order to get to and from work.

Food, which mainly consisted of dry cereal, banana and peanut butter sandwiches and the occasional piece of fruit, ran around a hundred twenty dollars a month. John had to buy milk in small containers he could drink right away and stick with nonperishable foods. The cooler in his room was used to keep the roaches out; John couldn’t buy a bag of ice every day, especially in the summer when the heat would turn it to water before he could get it home on the bus.

For the privilege of being paroled, he paid the state two hundred thirty dollars a month. Rape and murder wasn’t cheap, and if he failed to make a payment, his ass went straight back to prison. The first money order he bought each month was made payable to the state.

This usually left him with a little less than seventy-five dollars each week for things that he needed. That was from a good week, though, and some weeks he pulled in considerably less. John forced himself to save money, skipping meals sometimes, making himself so dizzy from lack of food that he practically fell into bed at night. Once, in desperation, he had gone into one of the millions of cash-until-payday stores spotting the poorer parts of the city, but John couldn’t bring himself to pay 480 percent interest on a week-long loan. Even if he had been, they required you to have a checking account so they could wire the money directly to your bank. No bank in the world would give John Shelley a checking account.

Health insurance was a fantastical dream. John lived in terror of getting sick.

After the ill-fated phone call to his sister, John walked through the rain, kicking puddles, wishing he could kick himself for calling Joyce. She had enough trouble without him putting more on her. The truth was, he just wanted to talk to her, wanted to see how she was doing. John called her maybe once a month and she was always as happy to hear from him as she had been this morning.

A MARTA bus squealed to a stop in front of him and John checked the number before getting on. This month had been a good one, so he waved his Trans Card in front of the reader, giving the driver a nod of recognition.

“Getting cold,” the driver said.

“Sure is,” John agreed, enjoying the simple banter until he realized he’d have to buy a winter jacket. God, how much would that cost?

The bus jerked as it accelerated and John grabbed the back of a seat to steady himself as he walked down the aisle. The bus was packed, and he found a seat by an old black woman who was reading a Bible in her lap. Despite the weather, she was wearing a large pair of black sunglasses over her eyeglasses. She didn’t look up when he sat down, but he knew she had read him out of the corner of her eye.

There were scams to make money. There was always a scam, always an angle. Prison was full of men who thought they had discovered the perfect scheme. John knew that some of the guys at the Gorilla would steal receipts out of cars and change them into cash. The big chain stores were the best. All you had to do was walk in and find the same item number as what was printed on the receipt, then hand it to the girl behind the desk and get the cash. Easy money, they all said. Ray-Ray said it twice.

He changed buses at the Lindbergh station, passing the closed car wash on the way. Figuring he was running what amounted to a fool’s errand, he took the long route down Cheshire Bridge Road, knowing it would pass the liquor store where he had met Robin. That whole week, he had been thinking about her, wondering what she was up to.

Somehow, he had imagined this kind of life for her, one that mirrored his own. Maybe she had been a little spoiled like Joyce, a daddy’s girl. He wondered about her younger brother, friend to Stewie the kisser. What was he like? Did she call him up some days when she was having an especially bad time? Was he as upset to hear from her as Joyce was when John called? John couldn’t imagine what it’d be like to have a sister who was a whore. He’d want to kill every freaking man who even looked at her.

The bus passed the liquor store, and he could see three working girls standing under the cover of the awning. One of them was the loudmouth who had fought with Ray-Ray. None of them was Robin.

John sat back in his seat, watching the fancy restaurants go by. The bus stopped at the corner where the movie theater was, and he stood so that the old black woman could get off. He read the marquee, not recognizing any of the movies. He had gone to a movie with his first paycheck, shocked when he got to the ticket counter and saw the prices. Ten bucks! He couldn’t believe how much a movie cost. Even a matinee was expensive.

The bus took a right at the intersection and the scenery changed, turning more residential. John stared out the window as the houses got bigger, the yards nicer. Morningside, Virginia Highland, Poncey-Highland. Through Little Five Points, past the new Barnes and Noble, Target, Best Buy. It didn’t start to get bad again until they were well down Moreland Avenue. Liquor stores, corner groceries and auto parts stores lined the filthy street. Signs advertised cheap check cashing, low-cost insurance; one proudly proclaimed, “The only place in town selling clothing by the pound.”

Men with dirty T-shirts wrapped around their bare shoulders stood at the bus stop, slipping on their shirts at the last minute before they got on. The bus took on a new odor as construction workers started to file in. Mexicans, Asians, blacks. Pretty soon, John was the only white person on the bus.

He got off the bus when the street turned almost pretty. This part of Moreland was bordered by Brownwood and Grant Park. Families had started to move in, reclaiming the in-town area for their own. They took care of their houses, kept their yards trimmed and demanded better treatment, nicer restaurants, safer streets, than the previous inhabitants had. John had learned a long time ago that the reason the middle class had it so good was because they expected things to be better. They wouldn’t settle for less than they were worth. They’d just get into their shiny cars and go where they were appreciated. Poor people, on the other hand, were used to just taking what was given to them and being grateful for it.

For the moment, the rain had cleared, the sun peeking out from behind dark clouds. John didn’t want to go back up Moreland, so he got off the bus and walked into Brownwood Park, cutting through the woods. He had looked up this area in the street atlas he found in the library and was glad to see the roads were much as he expected. New construction was going up all around him, three-story mansions towering over 1950s ranch houses. How much did something like that cost, John wondered. “What kind of job did you need in order to be able to buy your own house, raise your kids, maybe drive a nice secondhand car? He couldn’t fathom the amount of cash that would take.

He took Taublib Street into East Atlanta Village, surprised to find a couple of nice restaurants and a coffee joint where he had expected abandoned buildings and auto-body repair shops. There were a couple of boutiques, a bakery and a pet store. He looked in the window where a fat orange cat was sunbathing on a bag of dog food. A cat would be nice, some kind of animal to keep him company. The cockroach Ms. Lam had found didn’t really count. That would be a luxury for another day. John could barely afford to feed himself.

At Metropolitan Avenue, he took a right, walked down a few blocks and found himself in front of the East Atlanta branch of the post office. John stared at the squat, institutional-looking building. The sign outside showed the same zip code as the credit report: 30316.

The place was packed, cars filling the front and side lot, spilling onto the street even though there were signs warning against it. The driveway to the light blue Victorian house next to the post office was blocked by a large cargo van.

The rain had started again, a light drizzle that darkened the sky. John walked down Metropolitan about fifty feet, then turned around and walked back. He watched people going in and out of the post office, wondering why the hell he had come here.

After thirty minutes of pacing up and down the street, John realized that there was nothing stopping him from actually going inside the building. His local post office was gloomy and smelled of bacon grease for no apparent reason. He bought his money orders for rent and his state fine there because it was only a ten-minute walk from where he lived. There were a lot of immigrants in the neighborhood, and sometimes people would bring in chickens and other small animals to ship to God only knew where. Oftentimes, he’d hear a rooster crowing while he was waiting in line.

The East Atlanta branch was well-lit, clean and just seemed to have a good vibe. Right across from the front door were rows of post office boxes, small ones at the top, large ones at the bottom. To his left was the office where two women were helping customers as quickly as they could. A line of people went out from the lobby all the way to the stamp vending machine by the front door. John pulled a blank envelope out of his back pocket and got in line, trying to act like he belonged. Inch by inch, the line moved forward, and he didn’t look back at the mailboxes until he was up close to the glass doors leading into the office.

Box eight-fifty was on the first row about eye level. The box next to it had an orange sticker pasted to it, the words too faded to read.

“Have a good one,” one of the ladies behind the desk called as a customer brushed past John on her way out. He stepped back quickly to get out of the woman’s way, mumbling an apology as rain dripped from his hair. When he looked back up, he saw someone heading toward the boxes.

John held his breath, clutching the envelope in his hand as a skinny black woman talking on her cell phone jabbed her key into the lock of box eight-fifty. She was laughing into the phone, saying something derogatory about a family member, when she jerked the key back out, saying, “Shit, girl, I just put my key in the wrong box.”

She pushed the key into the lock below eight-fifty, cradling the cell phone with her shoulder as she kept on talking.

“Sir?” the woman behind John said.

The line had moved, but John hadn’t. He smiled, saying, “Sorry. Forgot my wallet,” and stepped out of line.

What a stupid waste of time. There was no way he could sit on this box all day, and the odds of whoever had taken his name just showing up when John happened to be there were ridiculously low. He’d have better luck buying a lottery ticket.

He pushed open the door, tossing the blank envelope into the trash. The sky had opened up again, sending down a cold deluge. John shivered. A hundred dollars. A good winter coat would be at least a hundred dollars. Where would he get that kind of money? How long would it take to save up for a freaking coat?

He hunched his shoulders as he stood at the bus stop, cursing himself and the rain. He would have to start looking for a new job. Maybe something inside, something that had regular hours and didn’t depend on the weather. Something where they didn’t mind if you had a record, and if that record said you were the kind of man who should be put down like a rabid dog to protect the rest of the world from the evil inside of you.

John’s job choices were limited to the dangerous ones. Half the guys in prison were there because they’d knocked over a convenience store or a mom-and-pop diner. Most of the guys on death row had gotten their start robbing the local Quickie Mart, ending their criminal careers by putting a bullet in some low-wage worker’s head for the sixty bucks in the cash drawer. Before Ms. Lam had hooked him up at the Gorilla, John had almost been desperate enough to try the convenience stores. He knew now that he couldn’t keep working at the car wash, not through the winter. He needed a way to find money, and fast.

The bus was late, the driver irritated when he finally pulled up. John’s mood matched everybody else’s as he sloshed up the stairs and walked to the back, his thirty-dollar sneakers practically disintegrated from the rain. He fell into the empty seat at the back of the bus, half-wishing the lightning zig-zagging out of the sky would come through the window and hit him right in the head. He’d end up brain-damaged, a drooling vegetable taking up space in a hospital somewhere. He was beginning to see why so many guys ended up back in prison. He was thirty-five years old. He had never driven a car, never really dated, never really lived. What the hell was the point, John thought, staring glumly out the window as some guy struggled to close an umbrella and get into his car at the same time.

John stood up as the bus pulled away, looking out the window, keeping his eyes on the man. How many years had passed? His brain wouldn’t let him do the math, but he knew it was him. John was slack-jawed as he watched the man give up on the umbrella and toss it into the parking lot before slamming his car door shut.

Yes. It was him. It was definitely him.

Just as a million raindrops fell from the sky, there existed a million chances that John would go to the post office on the right day at the right time.

A million to one, but he had done it.

He had found the other John Shelley.