Vanishing Acts Read online

  I look down at my feet and pick up a Jolly Rancher wrapper, and begin to flatten it between my palms. "Don't cap it tight," I say.

  When he turns around, I shrug. "Moonshine. That's what you're making, isn't it?" Bread, oranges, hard candy--it wouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the chemical reaction Concise is aiming for.

  "Do your own time, not mine," Concise scowls, and he busies himself under the bunk again.

  Taking my towel with me, I head toward the bathroom. The shower stalls are empty at this time of day; Emeril is about to come on the Food Network and it is the one program that all races agree upon. I turn the corner and find Elephant Mike standing against the bathroom wall with his pants down around his knees, his eyes rolled toward the ceiling.

  I recognize the boy kneeling in front of him, too. He calls himself Clutch and is barely old enough to grow a beard. No doubt, like me, he received Sticks's and Elephant Mike's warning, and was offered their protection, for a price. The currency of which I've interrupted.

  A flush works its way up from my neck. "Sorry," I manage, and I leave the bathroom as fast as possible.

  On the television, Emeril throws garlic into a sizzling pan. "Bam!" he yells. I sit in the back of the dayroom and pretend to watch the TV, although I do not see a thing.

  If you pay Sheriff Jack thirty dollars up front, you are allowed the privilege of using the canteen. Funds for these luxury items are deducted from your account. A dollar-fifty, for example, will buy you either a bottle of shampoo or a twenty-ounce soda. You can buy soap that is like lye and rubs your skin raw. You can buy antihistamine and poker cards and a Spanish-English dictionary. You can buy Moon Pies and Paydays and Pop-Tarts and trail mix. Tuna, toothbrushes, a thesaurus.

  Sometimes I read the canteen order form, and think about who purchases what. I want to know who asks for Vicks VapoRub, if it reminds him of his childhood. I wonder who would order an eraser, rather than learn from his mistakes. Or, even worse, a mirror.

  They sell artificial tears, too, but it's hard to conceive of an inmate who doesn't have enough of his own.

  I share a toilet with a drug dealer. I have done business with a thrice-convicted rapist: three packages of cookies in return for a deck of cards. I have settled down to watch Thursday night TV beside a man who killed his wife and cut her into pieces with a Ginsu knife, stuffed the body parts into a truck tool box, and left it in the desert.

  Just last year, I gave Sophie the stranger talk: don't take candy from someone unfamiliar; don't ever get into anyone's car except ours; don't talk to people you do not know. Sophie, who was born in a small New Hampshire town where folks knew her by name when she walked down the street, couldn't understand the warnings. "How do you know who's a bad man?" she asked. "Can you tell just by looking?"

  What I should have told her at the time was: Yes, but you have to be watching at just the right moment. Because the same man who robs a general store at knifepoint might, at a traffic light, turn and smile. The guy who raped a thirteen-year-old girl might be singing hymns beside you at church. The father who kidnapped his daughter might be living right next door.

  Bad is not an absolute, but a relative term. Ask the robber who used the cash he stole to feed his infant; the rapist who was sexually abused as a child; the kidnapper who truly believed he was saving a life. And just because you break the law doesn't mean you have intentionally crossed the line into evil. Sometimes the line creeps up on you, and before you know it, you're standing on the other side.

  Off to the right, I hear someone taking a leak. It is underscored by the scrip-scrip sound of a weapon being honed on the cement floor--a toothbrush or a wheelchair spoke being sharpened into a shank. There's weeping, too, coming from Clutch, in the cell beside ours. He has cried every night since he's been here, into his pillow, pretending no one can hear. Even more amazing, the rest of us pretend that we don't.

  "Concise," I whisper quietly.

  "Yo," he says.

  I realize that I don't really have a question to ask him. I just wanted to see if he is still awake, like me.

  You come to visit me almost every day. We sit one pane of glass apart from each other, reworking the clay of our relationship. You would think that the conversations at a jail visit are grave and furious, packed with the emotion that comes when you don't see someone for twenty-three hours a day, but in fact what we talk about are the details. I soak up the descriptions of Sophie, making breakfast for herself by putting the entire box of oatmeal into the microwave. I picture the trailer where you are living, the inside as pink as a mouth. I listen to an account of Greta having her first run-in with a common snake. You hold up pictures that Sophie's drawn, so I can see the stick-figure family and my crayoned place in it.

  For you, too, it is all about the specifics of a world you can barely remember being a part of. Sometimes I tell you incidents that stand out in your childhood; sometimes you have precise questions. One afternoon you ask me about your real birthday. "It's June 5," I say. "The silver lining is that you're almost a whole year younger than you think."

  "I can't remember my birthdays," you muse. "I thought all kids remembered their birthdays."

  "You had parties. Pretty standard stuff: movies, bowling, goody bags."

  "What about when I lived here?"

  "Well," I hedge. "You were little. We didn't make a big deal about it."

  You frown, concentrating. "I can picture a cake. It's on a tablecloth I don't remember us having in New Hampshire." You look up at me, triumphant with recollection. "It fell on the floor, and I cried because we didn't get to eat it."

  That is the version that I fed to you, when it happened. "We had some of your nursery school friends over for your birthday," I say carefully. "Your mother had been drinking. She was singing and dancing and making a scene, and I told her to stop it. 'It's a party,' she said. 'That's what people do at parties.' I told her to go lie down, that I would take care of everything. She picked up the cake and threw it on the floor, and said that if she was leaving, then the party was over."

  You look at me, stricken; and immediately I'm sorry I brought this up.

  "She didn't know what she was doing back then," I say. "She--"

  "How can you defend her?" you interrupt. "If Eric had ever ... if he'd ..." You fall silent, a puzzle coming together. Along with your chin and dimples, did I give you the tendency to fall for someone dysfunctional? Would this gene be passed along to Sophie, too?

  "I don't want to talk about this anymore," you whisper.

  "Okay," I say. "Okay."

  I watch you sitting on the stool, bowed by the weight of what you're starting to remember, crushed by the episodes you don't. In this new place we've found, sometimes there aren't words, because the truth can be even more difficult than the lies. I lift my palm to the glass, pretending that it would be that easy to touch you. You lift yours, too, spread your fingers--a starfish. I picture the thousands of streets we have crossed, hand-in-hand. Of the high-fives we've exchanged after high school track meets and breathless father-daughter three-legged races. Sometimes I think my whole life has been about holding on to you.

  A poem circulating around D-block:

  A boy was born with skin pure white,

  He loved to fuck and he loved to fight.

  He was raised in the right way,

  Stood up for his race day after day.

  When he grew up and became a man,

  He got sentenced to do life in the pen.

  During his sentencing he stood straight and tall,

  He told the judge, "I'll do it all!"

  So when he went down to hit the yard

  Others tried him, and they tried him hard.

  He never once lost a fight to another race,

  When he walked by them, they gave him his space.

  The off-brands didn't like this a bit,

  So they all got together and put out a hit.

  The following day five of them tried,

  Wh