Yeah, he can hear her say, wrinkling her nose at him in that funny way she had.
Barbara Robinson was also nearly killed four years ago; she was at the fateful concert with her mother and a bunch of friends. Barbs was a cheerful, happy kid then and is a cheerful, happy teenager now – he sees her when he takes the occasional meal at the Robinson home, but he does that less often now that Jerome is away at school. Or maybe Jerome’s back for the summer. He’ll ask Barbara when he talks to her. Hodges hopes she’s not in some kind of jam. It seems unlikely. She’s your basic good kid, the kind who helps old ladies across the street.
Hodges unwraps his salad, douses it with lo-cal French, and begins to snark it up. He’s hungry. It’s good to be hungry. Hunger is a sign of health.
2
Morris Bellamy isn’t hungry at all. A bagel with cream cheese is the most he can manage for lunch, and not much of that. He ate like a pig when he first got out – Big Macs, funnel cakes, pizza by the slice, all the stuff he had longed for while in prison – but that was before a night of puking after an ill-advised visit to Senor Taco in Lowtown. He never had a problem with Mexican when he was young, and youth seems like just hours ago, but a night spent on his knees praying to the porcelain altar was all it took to drive home the truth: Morris Bellamy is fifty-nine, on the doorstep of old age. The best years of his life were spent dying bluejeans, varnishing tables and chairs to be sold in the Waynesville Outlet Shop, and writing letters for an unending stream of dead-end Charlies in prison overalls.
Now he’s in a world he hardly recognizes, one where movies show on bloated screens called IMAX and everyone on the street is either wearing phones in their ears or staring at tiny screens. There are television cameras watching inside every shop, it seems, and the prices of the most ordinary items – bread, for instance, fifty cents a loaf when he went up – are so high they seem surreal. Everything has changed; he feels glare-blind. He is way behind the curve, and he knows his prison-oriented brain will never catch up. Nor his body. It’s stiff when he gets out of bed in the morning, achy when he goes to bed at night; a touch of arthritis, he supposes. After that night of vomiting (and when he wasn’t doing that, he was shitting brown water), his appetite just died.
For food, at least. He has thought of women – how could he not, when they’re everywhere, the young ones barely dressed in the early summer heat? – but at his age, he’d have to buy one younger than thirty, and if he went to one of the places where such transactions are made, he would be violating his parole. If he were caught, he’d find himself back in Waynesville with the Rothstein notebooks still buried in that patch of waste ground, unread by anyone except the author himself.
He knows they’re still there, and that makes it worse. The urge to dig them up and have them at last has been a maddening constant, like a snatch of music (I need a lover that won’t drive me cray-zee) that gets into your head and simply won’t leave, but so far he has done almost everything by the book, waiting for his PO to relax and let up a little. This was the gospel according to Warren ‘Duck’ Duckworth, handed down when Morris first became eligible for parole.
‘You gotta be super-careful to start with,’ Duck had said. This was before Morris’s first board hearing and the first vengeful appearance of Cora Ann Hooper. ‘Like you’re walking on eggs. ’Cause, see, the bastard will show up when you least expect it. You can take that to the bank. If you get the idea to do something that might get you marked up on Doubtful Behavior – that’s a category they have – wait until after your PO makes a surprise visit. Then you prob’ly be all right. Get me?’
Morris did.
And Duck had been right.
3
After not even one hundred hours as a free man (well, semi-free), Morris came back to the old apartment building where he now lived to find his PO sitting on the stoop and smoking a cigarette. The graffiti-decorated cement-and-breezeblock pile, called Bugshit Manor by the people who lived there, was a state-subsidized fish tank stocked with recovering druggies, alcoholics, and parolees like himself. Morris had seen his PO just that noon, and been sent on his way after a few routine questions and a Seeya next week. This was not next week, this was not even the next day, but here he was.
Ellis McFarland was a large black gentleman with a vast sloping gut and a shining bald head. Tonight he was dressed in an acre of bluejeans and a Harley-Davidson tee-shirt, size XXL. Beside him was a battered old knapsack. ‘Yo, Morrie,’ he said, and patted the cement next to one humongous haunch. ‘Take a pew.’
‘Hello, Mr McFarland.’