Torch (44 page)

In the end he had not been charged with dealing marijuana because his attorney had convinced everyone involved of what, in fact, was true: that bag of marijuana in the tackle box had been only for Joshua’s personal use. It had helped that the judge was a regular customer at Len’s Lookout and had known his mother; it had helped that Bruce had built the cabinets that sat in the judge’s kitchen. At his hearing it was agreed that Joshua would go to jail for eighty-five days and be on probation for a year afterward, waiving a trial or a right to appeal. He signed the papers in the judge’s chambers of the Coltrap County Courthouse with his attorney standing next to him—Lisa and Claire were waiting out in the hall. Immediately afterward, he was led away in handcuffs, past Lisa and Claire, who both gasped and wept upon seeing him, down a staircase to the basement, to the underground hallway that took him to the processing room where the little paper man dressed in black marker held vigil, and then past him, to the locked world beyond, to jail.

The afternoons in the jail were great fields of time, punctuated by group or individual, exercise or visitors, or nothing at all, in which case Joshua would convince one of the guards to give him a pen or pencil so he could sit at the tiny table in his cell and draw. Vern would be next to him, reading his Bible, which he read so often that it was no longer a book but a stack of pages that he had to keep in a shoebox that Pat McCredy
had brought in for him, which had once contained a pair of her many Birkenstocks.

Joshua now knew a great deal about Vern from the two hours they spent together each week in group. Hour one was called “sharing,” hour two was “moving beyond.” Often moving beyond got cut short because sharing ran so long. Sharing did not run long because the inmates sat down with much desire to share, but because Pat McCredy was so insistent about—and, Joshua had to admit, good at—forcing things out of each of them. With Vern, at least by the time Joshua came along, she didn’t have to work too hard. He told them about how he used to hit his wife and son, about his own childhood growing up on a dairy farm that his family no longer owned, about the death of his father by tractor, about his mother who drank herself into a stupor all through his childhood and then killed herself accidentally by lighting her bed on fire with a fallen cigarette when he was sixteen. He told them about his twin brother who was mentally retarded, and who still lived, as it turned out, in the very nursing home across the street—he’d lived there for almost fifty years, ever since their mother died. Joshua listened to this without looking at Vern, seeing him only peripherally in his assigned seat immediately to the left, though sometimes he had to turn and face him whenever Pat McCredy demanded that it be so, when she had an exercise for them to do, as she often did, between sharing and moving beyond.

“I want you to go back,” she said to them one day, “to what you dreamed for yourself when you were a kid.” She inhaled a big breath and closed her eyes and slowly exhaled her breath as if she were meditating all alone in a room.

In the silence, Joshua gazed at Tiffany, who sat directly across the circle from him, studying the ends of her hair in one section and then another, delicately tugging strands of it from time to time to snap off a split end. She was somewhat bitchy and just okay-looking, but she moved him anyway, the pure sight of her: the feast of her face, her mannish hands and flat chest, her plush hips and butt that seemed to have absorbed all the fat that refused to settle anywhere else. She was older than him, twenty-eight, and he felt more sorry for her than he did all the men combined—not only did she have to reveal her innermost feelings, but she also had to reveal them to a bunch of men in jail. All she’d done was write bad checks.

“Let’s do this together, folks,” Pat McCredy said without opening
her eyes. “Let us all remember together when we were kids. Let’s go back there. What did we want for ourselves?” She opened her eyes and stood and made her way slowly around their circle of nine chairs. She was at least six feet tall, her brown hair dim with gray and pulled back in a thin braid. Her shoulders were wide and hard-looking; her hips squarish and flabby, hoisted a few inches too high, it seemed, by her impossibly long legs. The overall effect was that she was part woman, part something else, part horse or buffalo. She wore a green turtleneck and green tights beneath an enormous beige smock that went down past her knees, her feet in purple Birkenstocks. From the loose pocket at the front of the smock she took a stack of tiny squares of construction paper and made her way around the circle, handing them each one piece, instructing them to write one of their childhood dreams. They had pens already, and journals she’d given them and forced them to decorate with finger paint and glitter, colored markers and crayons. Pat McCredy was big on writing things down. The journals, they could keep to themselves; with the pieces of paper anything could happen, but most often what happened is that they were collected by Pat McCredy, who used them as what she called “starting points” in individual.

Joshua balanced his journal on his knee and placed the square of paper on top of that. He’d painted the entire cover of his journal midnight blue and then, with glitter and glue, added tiny white stars.

“Your childhood dreams—or dream—one is fine,” said Pat McCredy, prompting them, as if they were on a TV quiz show and needed to have the question rephrased.

He wrote:
To move to California
. It was true enough. It was personal enough. In individual he could work up the energy to discuss this dream with Pat McCredy, if called upon to do so.

“Is everyone done?” she asked, looking around.

“Hold on,” said Tiffany. Her hazel eyes flashed onto Joshua for an instant and in that instant he ached for her, felt that she ached for him, as if she’d placed her hand on his bare stomach or crossed the room and whispered something secret in his ear, but then he tamped it down. He was going to be good now, from here on out, nothing but strictly Lisa’s fiancé.

“Okay,” Pat McCredy said when Tiffany was done. “Now I want you to pass your paper to the left.” A mumble of protest rippled across the room, but there was nothing to be done, they were powerless to her,
and so they made their way around the circle, reading from the nine paper squares.
To be a singer
, said Tiffany’s.
To work as a clown at Disneyland
, said Frank Unger’s.
To be rich
, said Dan Bell’s. And so it went until they reached Vern. “To move to California,” he said while Joshua sat blank-faced and still as a doll listening to his own inane words.

He talked about it with R.J. the next time he came to visit—how they would move to California and be mechanics together someday—though they spoke of it differently now, as if it had been a joke all along.

“We should go just to prove my old lady wrong. She always said we wouldn’t go,” R.J. said, a flash of anger moving across his face, and then he laughed, like he always did when he spoke of his mother.

“How is she, anyway?” asked Joshua.

“The same.” He stared at Joshua for several moments with his dark eyes, as if he wanted to say more, though they both knew they couldn’t say much about Vivian and Bender with Tommy Johnson standing by, listening to every word. “Still fucked up,” he said at last, and cleared his throat. He’d slimmed down since he’d moved to Flame Lake. Without his baby fat he looked taller and older, and, even Joshua would admit it, more handsome. “Oh, and you know my dad went back to drinking.”

Joshua nodded, expecting as much.

“He’s an old drunk.” R.J. laughed, and reached up to adjust the pendant he wore, an oval cracked in half along a jagged line. His new girlfriend, who lived in South Dakota, wore the other half. “I knew it for a while, but I kept thinking he’d go back to not doing it. He started out with just kind of sneaking around. Having a beer now and then and acting like he didn’t, but now he don’t even deny it.” R.J. turned and looked at Tommy, then back to Joshua. “That’s the thing I learned, eh. People don’t change.”

“Every once in a while they do,” said Joshua, feeling, without wanting to feel, affronted.

“Like who?” asked R.J., and then Joshua told him all about Vern, going on, with a kind of glee, about the details he thought R.J. would be interested to know—about Vern’s retarded twin brother who lived in the nursing home, about how he beat his wife. It felt good to be talking about someone else’s problems, though when he was in group listening to it firsthand it made him want to throw up. At times Joshua became almost dizzy, witnessing the mastery with which Pat McCredy would get the inmates to divulge. Her voice was like the softest stroke on a piano
key, so strong and sure and hushed. She had an entire orchestra of sounds and modulations. A single word from her mouth could be pitched in a manner to mean hundreds of things, to elicit the most revealing and incriminating responses. When she was done with one person, she would move on seamlessly to the next, fixing her gaze so intently it was impossible not to gaze back. “So,” she began each time, knowing, as she did with most of her questions, precisely what the answer was, “whose turn?”

There were things that nobody knew, that he would never tell anyone, no matter how hard Pat McCredy pushed. The deep jelly core of him that only he knew. It could not be spoken of. He had no words for it, what made him, what pained him, what rocked him and fucked him. This thing for which he had no words was his life, and his job in jail was to protect it from Pat McCredy. And so he did, speaking to her of arguments he’d had with Lisa or Claire, of career paths he might take, or what had kept him from once and for all getting his GED. For Pat McCredy he created the story of his mother and the story of his father—sad, heartbreaking really, but he’d survived, he was forging on (he left the story of Bruce out of it entirely, by maintaining that all was well on that front)—and Pat McCredy gave him the words. She gave him
closure
and
forgiveness, adult child
and the
five stages of grief
. She was good, she pried, she challenged him and applied her techniques, made him pour what she thought was his soul out onto paper, but he was better, fiercer, more who he was than she believed he had the strength to be, and so he held on, safe against her.

On one front she had made progress, he would grant her that. He’d made the mistake, in his first week in group, of writing the words
drugs and alcohol
on one of Pat McCredy’s squares of construction paper in response to her question, “What techniques do you use to ease your pain or sorrow?” He’d meant it as something of a joke, though in fact it was true. Over the past year he had become one stop short of what his mother would call a “big drinker”—not exactly an alcoholic, but someone who probably drank too much, too often. When he wasn’t drinking, pot kept him on balance throughout the day as he drove from place to place, delivering drugs. Meth he did not touch, a point that he, in his own defense, returned to over and over again in his individuals with Pat McCredy, though she was unmoved by this.

“It’s not what others do, Joshua. It’s what
you
do. Marijuana can be an addiction as serious as any other. As can beer.”

“But don’t tell me it’s like meth,” he insisted. “Are you aware of what’s happening with meth? It’s everywhere around here. It’s a serious, serious thing.”

“I
am
aware,” she said sternly. She loved to talk drugs and alcohol; they were her professional forte. “We’re not talking about this as a societal problem, however. We’re talking about
you
.”

“What
about
me?”

“Well, why don’t you tell me?” She smiled at him, waiting, and then she couldn’t help but say more, “I’m not the one who wrote that I use drugs and alcohol to ease my sorrow, am I?” She waited again. “Who was it that wrote that down, Joshua?”

“Me,” he almost yelled.

“Okay,” Pat McCredy said, more calmly than ever. “Then let us begin from there.”

In the end, much to Joshua’s relief, she did not pull out a yellow “permission to depart” sheet to request that he be allowed to attend the AA meetings in the basement of the hospital, as Vern and five of the other inmates, including Tiffany, had to do three times a week, all of them sitting there shackled in chains, one to the other, among the free-roaming alcoholics of Blue River. She warned him that this decision could change, as they “continued on this journey of self-discovery together.” For now, he was not an alcoholic or a drug addict and for that he was thankful. Instead he had what Pat McCredy called “issues with chemical dependency.” His use was situational, in her assessment, perhaps tied directly to his grief.

And it was, he realized one afternoon after his session with Pat McCredy, having not realized it before. She was right
—he
had been right when he wrote those words on the square of paper in the first place. In jail, he missed his nightly drinks, his daily joints more dearly than perhaps he missed any person. Drink did not open him up, it did not allow him to think and weep freely. Instead it bolstered him against his thoughts, against
her
, his mother. It was the thing that had helped him, all those nights in his apartment, or lying next to Lisa, go into his torpor. Three beers or shots were all he needed, though often he had more, each one a seal, a lid, a cure.

The nights in jail were the worst, as he lay on his cot stone-cold
sober next to Vern, staring at the dark ceiling, the yellow of the painted sun the only thing he could see. Early on, he’d had to strike a deal with himself: each night he would allow himself to cry, but only for thirty seconds. If he could not keep himself from crying, at least he could contain it with the voice in his head counting
one, two, three
as the tears streamed silently down his face, into his ears and hair. It wasn’t that he willed himself to cry, or that he was thinking particularly of his mother, or remembering things she’d said or done. It wasn’t even precisely
his mother
, though what he felt was directly tied to her—her life and her death. It was that he felt all of his sorrow, lodged in a furrow in his chest, palpable and real as an apple. It was there and it could not be avoided, would not be denied, and each night, for thirty seconds, he bowed to it. He was aware, as he wept, that his tears would gratify Pat McCredy, but he would never tell her about them. She would name them, define them, turn them into something other than what they were, something other than his own.