The Most Wanted (19 page)

Because I was so young, back then, I had to rely on other people to get Dillon and me together. I mean, together in the sense of face-to-face. I started getting closer to Connie. Not to use her, but because she was going through the same thing with Dillon’s brother. It was like we were kin, sisters-in-law or something, and so we had a special connection, even though she was a lot older. Also, she was pretty immature. She still is, but at least she’s not with Kevin LeGrande anymore. After his part in what happened, Kevin’s going to be in Solamente River for a long, long time, and even Connie doesn’t have enough patience, nor should she.

Anyhow, it was Connie who told me how Dillon had to put people on his list and give a reason why each one was included (he said I was a friend he’d met through his mother’s church), so they could be approved in advance. Otherwise, they plain wouldn’t let me in. And they wouldn’t call ahead to tell me, either. They’d just stop me at the door. She told me I was going to get searched too, but just my purse and my pockets. It helped me not to get scared when she walked me through it, how it was going to feel when they locked those thick green steel doors behind you. How it would rob your breath, even though you knew you were going to get to walk right back out and go home after an hour went by.

The last few days before I went, I was so nuts I couldn’t think about anything but Dillon. At home, I kept looking at his picture, which I had taped inside my French book, and trying hard to see what he really looked like. But the picture was a little far away. He was hunkered down next to a tree, like he was looking off into the distance. He had on normal clothes—I didn’t know, back then, that people in prison wore jeans and T-shirts; I still thought you would wear striped pajamas or a surgeon’s outfit or something. His legs were strong-looking. But I couldn’t tell much about his face, and to tell you the truth, I couldn’t even look at it that long. When I did, the longing and the awe in me got so sharp my insides ached and turned, the muscles clasping so tight I could sit up at night and feel a sore place, as if my period were about to come. I could be all alone, and still be as embarrassed as if fifty people were leaning over my shoulders and pointing and staring. It was as if Dillon himself could see me—as if he could look out of that picture and could tell just how my eyes licked over his jaw and his neck and the skin of his shoulder, where his shirt was pulled away a little, like a kid trying to catch every single drop of ice cream before it melted.

When I was in school, I didn’t even dare open to the picture. Everyone’d see. They’d see my face flush and my eyes lock on a spot far away. See my thoughts materialize above my head in block print, strange thoughts, hot to the touch: awe is not too strong to describe it. I just couldn’t take it all in—the oneness that Dillon seemed to want for him and me. Dillon was a man, a whole man, with strong muscles and perfect eyes and a history of griefs and jokes and books he’d read and songs he knew, and he was all mine, to know, to love, maybe even to touch. A whole other person. I wanted to know everything about him. I wanted to eat his past like a loaf of bread, so it would settle inside me too. Then I would be able to recall the first time he washed his car without a shirt on or listened to the oldies station from Lake Charles until the sun came up. I didn’t just want to hear about these things; I wanted to have seen them. I wanted to really feel the first time he got a bee sting, the six months when he ate nothing except banana flakes, when he learned to walk in heeled boots without wobbling his ankles, the time he tried to patch his dog Donut’s ripped-open leg after she tangled with a coyote. I wished I could have lain beside him the night his papa was burned, while he tried to block his ears so he wouldn’t hear his mother’s wails; when he was six and lost a tooth in school and cried because he didn’t know baby teeth fell out and thought he’d done something wrong; and the first time he’d tried to impress a girl by swinging out on a mustang grapevine over the swimming cove at Grapetree Fork—that, actually, I didn’t like to think about very much. But I guess if that memory had been offered, I’d have taken it too, because it was part of him and because much as you hate to think of the boy you love with someone else, one of the things that makes you want him most is that other girls do too. Then and before, plenty of girls would have wanted Dillon, no matter what he’d done. He was nothing if not pretty. It still makes Annie crazy when I say that. But I’m not going to stop saying it just because it bothers her.

At last, Saturday came. I was meeting Connie G. at the Greyhound, which meant taking two city buses downtown.

I had to leave early. That meant running right by my mama, which felt like running past a firing squad. There wasn’t no excuse that would be good enough to get me out of my Saturday chores.

At first I thought she was just going to ignore me, and for once I was really happy about that.

She saw me, though.

“Where you going, girl?” Mama asked, soft and blurry, bent over her coffee like it was a flower and she the bee.

“I have to go out.”

“Out where?”

“Just to meet a friend. I have to go right now.”

“You get you back in here, Arlington. You know you have your things to do. You don’t go noplace on a Saturday.”

She didn’t even look up. She sure didn’t bother to get up.

“Bye now, Mama,” I said, and I opened that door and ran, and I didn’t stop until I came to the bus stop. I got on and paid the driver and sat down, and then I took another bus and got off at Alamo Station. Connie was standing there with her backpack slung over her shoulder. I paid again, and we sat down toward the back of the Greyhound, but not too close to the bathroom. Connie started to take out the presents she had got for Kevin LeGrande. An electric razor. A box of Midnight mints. A deck of tarot cards.

I didn’t have a thing. Not a thing. I looked at Connie and started to cry. “Are you always supposed to bring them something?”

“Well, it’s not necessary. Not everybody does.” She was just being nice. It made me feel even worse.

“I’ve been thinking about him so much, I forgot about . . . everything,” I told her.

“Open your purse, there, girl,” Connie told me, and I took out whatever I had: a pack of Beeman’s, my new hairbrush, my wallet, my makeup bag, and my little book,
Poems of Storytelling and Adventure,
which I’d bought for my Poe paper and was using now to memorize “The Highwayman” so I could show off for Mrs. Murray. Connie held the hairbrush up to the cold light from the window and said, “There now. It was just like you planned this all out. They need these nice things in there.” And then she picked up the book and set it on her lap. “Girl, you can’t even tell this has been opened up. You just take my pen here and write in it something he’ll always remember.” I took the pen and wrote, “Dillon. I will always remember. Love, Arley M.” And then I looked up at Connie, and she looked at me, and she shook her head side to side real slow, like she didn’t quite believe me, and then pulled me down on her shoulder and rocked me and rocked me as if I were a five-year-old scared of a windstorm. I did just what that little kid would do. I fell asleep on Connie’s arm, and I didn’t wake up until the bus stopped at a pretty green park, which was not a park at all but the planted land that surrounded the maximum-security prison on all sides, the way one of those little felt skirts surrounds a Christmas tree.

It was just like Connie said. Big heavy women guards with hair cut shorter than most boys’ used the palms of their hands to try to feel whether we had weapons (or bags of pills or pot, Connie told me later) in our pockets. Connie said the guards’ hair was so short because they didn’t want to risk prisoners grabbing hold of it. They felt up under my hair, too, and sort of pulled it out to its full length to see if I had anything stuffed in it. Then I did my braid back up.

Afterward, I waved good-bye to Connie and they put me on this little bench in a hall with doors at both ends. The doors had windows in them about the size of an envelope. One of the doors opened, and the guard led me into a narrower hall, with windows along one side. In front of every window, a bench was bolted to the floor. Some of the benches were empty. But on the rest of them, women were sitting, talking on telephones. When I got alongside, I could see that there was the exact same setup where the men were. They were all wearing black T-shirts and jeans, talking on phones at big scratched Plexiglas windows with crisscrossed wires embedded in the panes. One prisoner was pretty much the fattest person I’d ever seen. His rolls of flesh started under his chin and got bigger as they went down.

Then the guard stopped, and I saw him. My Dillon. He got up, quickly, and sort of glanced down, and then he smiled at me. It was a little boy’s smile, sort of silly and embarrassed, and I thought then that I would never love anyone so deeply again. One thing is for sure—I’ll never fall in love again at the same place in life I was then, the place where you don’t know anything about love or sex but what you feel right at that moment, for the first time, for the first person.

He motioned for me to pick up the phone.

“Hey,” he said. “Arlington. Arlington.”

“It’s me.”

“It’s you.”

We smiled at each other like fools. I had to look away.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine.” I felt my throat closing, could hardly get the words out.

“Thank you for those things.” The guards had brought the book and the brush around to him before I came in.

“That’s okay. They sure aren’t much.”

“They’re sure nice to me. And you sure are pretty.”

“So are you,” I said, then I said, “I didn’t mean that like it sounded.”

“That’s okay.”

We sat there.

“We only have an hour,” Dillon said then. “You get used to the idea that you don’t have much time to waste. You skip the small talk.” He motioned to me. “Lean closer.” I did. “Put your hand up on the window.” I did. He put his hand up on the other side, as if we were touching palm-to-palm. Our hands were exactly the same size; Dillon was pretty little for a man, though I could see he was strong. I couldn’t feel anything, of course, but I imagined that the glass got hot, the way it would with a stove coil underneath.

“Arley,” he asked. “Do you love me?”

I answered, “Yes.”

“Am I the very first one you ever loved?”

What did he think? I was
fourteen.
Dillon told me, though, and I guess I already knew it, that plenty of girls my age had already done
everything.
He thought that maybe one of Mama’s boyfriends had touched me, or worse. I told him that nothing like that had ever happened. He wanted to know what I’d done with boys, and I told him the truth. Not one thing. “People I knew,” Dillon said, “didn’t do much until they was in high school, at least. But I know, from personal experience—and excuse me for this, Arley—that Gracie Gutierrez was doing boys she wasn’t but in seventh grade. Not me. At least not then. But I know those who had her. Connie’s a good girl, though. I know she never slept with Kevin yet.”

“Well, how could she? He’s . . . he’s in here.”

“You’d be surprised, Arley.”

“Aren’t they always watching, though?”

“Not always. I mean, sometimes they look the other way in the visiting lounge. I’m sure some people have started families right in there.” He laughed. But then he reddened, right up to under his eyes. “I’m sorry, Arley. I shouldn’t talk this way in front of you.”

“It’s okay. I’ve heard it before.”

“Okay. And you know what else? They let you have an overnight visit with the person if you get married. Even in here. They have a special place.”

“A hotel?”

“No, honey. Not a hotel. It’s like a house trailer or something—I ain’t never seen it. A guy got married last month. You should have seen it in here that night. It went all around on the drums—that’s like, you know, the gossip—that they was out there, the two of them, and the guys were going crazy. I mean, they was ready to climb the walls.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Imagine.”

“A man misses such things, Arley. Some nights, it’s all you can think about. They don’t allow no flesh magazines in here or nothing. For that reason. Men in need of . . . pleasure can get pretty hard to control.”

“Do they hit you?”

“Who?”

“The guards and stuff.”

“No, not me. Not me, ever, honey. I just keep to my own business. I work in the library, and I work in the laundry. I don’t do nothing. I just want to get myself delivered out of here.”

“I sure want that for you too, Dillon.”

He looked at me with those green eyes then. He didn’t blink, like other people. He never seemed to. He could look at you forever; it could make you squirm if you didn’t know him. I looked back at him, and the light seemed to go down in the rooms we were in, both his and mine, rooms that were white and plain as nothing. All I could see were his eyes. Surrounded by darkness.