Morris sat, heart beating so hard it was painful. Please just a Doubtful Behavior, he thought, even though he couldn’t think what he’d done that was doubtful. Please don’t send me back, not when I’m so close.
‘Where you been, homie? You finish work at four. It’s now after six.’
‘I … I stopped and had a sandwich. I got it at the Happy Cup. I couldn’t believe the Cup was still there, but it is.’ Babbling. Not able to stop himself, even though he knew babbling was what people did when they were high on something.
‘Took you two hours to eat a sandwich? Fucker must have been three feet long.’
‘No, it was just regular. Ham and cheese. I ate it on one of the benches in Government Square, and fed some of the crusts to the pigeons. I used to do that with a friend of mine, back in the day. And I just … you know, lost track of the time.’
All perfectly true, but how lame it sounded!
‘Enjoying the air,’ McFarland suggested. ‘Digging the freedom. That about the size of it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, you know what? I think we ought to go upstairs and then I think you ought to drop a urine. Make sure you haven’t been digging the wrong kind of freedom.’ He patted the knapsack. ‘Got my little kit right here. If the pee don’t turn blue, I’ll get out of your hair and let you get on with your evening. You don’t have any objection to that plan, do you?’
‘No.’ Morris was almost giddy with relief.
‘And I’ll watch while you make wee-wee in the little plastic cup. Any objection to that?’
‘No.’ Morris had spent over thirty-five years pissing in front of other people. He was used to it. ‘No, that’s fine, Mr McFarland.’
McFarland flipped his cigarette into the gutter, grabbed his knapsack, and stood up. ‘In that case, I believe we’ll forgo the test.’
Morris gaped.
McFarland smiled. ‘You’re okay, Morrie. For now, at least. So what do you say?’
For a moment Morris couldn’t think what he should say. Then it came to him. ‘Thank you, Mr McFarland.’
McFarland ruffled the hair of his charge, a man twenty years older than himself, and said, ‘Good boy. Seeya next week.’
Later, in his room, Morris replayed that indulgent, patronizing good boy over and over, looking at the few cheap furnishings and the few books he was allowed to bring with him out of purgatory, listening to the animal-house yells and gawps and thumps of his fellow housemates. He wondered if McFarland had any idea how much Morris hated him, and supposed McFarland did.
Good boy. I’ll be sixty soon, but I’m Ellis McFarland’s good boy.
He lay on his bed for awhile, then got up and paced, thinking of the rest of the advice Duck had given him: If you get the idea to do something that might get you marked up on Doubtful Behavior, wait until after your PO makes a surprise visit. Then you prob’ly be all right.
Morris came to a decision and yanked his jeans jacket on. He rode down to the lobby in the piss-smelling elevator, walked two blocks to the nearest bus stop, and waited for one with NORTHFIELD in the destination window. His heart was beating double-time again, and he couldn’t help imagining Mr McFarland somewhere near. McFarland thinking, Ah, now that I’ve lulled him, I’ll double back. See what that bad boy’s really up to. Unlikely, of course; McFarland was probably home by now, eating dinner with his wife and three kids as humongous as he was. Still, Morris couldn’t help imagining it.
And if he should double back and ask where I went? I’d tell him I wanted to look at my old house, that’s all. No taverns or titty bars in that neighborhood, just a couple of convenience stores, a few hundred houses built after the Korean War, and a bunch of streets named after trees. Nothing but over-the-hill suburbia in that part of Northfield. Plus one block-sized patch of overgrown land caught in an endless, Dickensian lawsuit.
He got off the bus on Garner Street, near the library where he had spent so many hours as a kid. The libe had been his safe haven, because big kids who might want to beat you up avoided it like Superman avoids kryptonite. He walked nine blocks to Sycamore, then actually did idle past his old house. It still looked pretty rundown, all the houses in this part of town did, but the lawn had been mowed and the paint looked fairly new. He looked at the garage where he had stowed the Biscayne thirty-six years ago, away from Mrs Muller’s prying eyes. He remembered lining the secondhand trunk with plastic so the notebooks wouldn’t get damp. A very good idea, considering how long they’d had to stay in there.