“Mr. Wickley? I was asking, would you mind retelling for us the circumstances of that charge?”
“Not at all,” he said, in the tone both weary and secretly glad to be asked of every old man who has a chance to tell a story, no matter how embarrassing. “My…perceived rivals at the time were teenagers. Children. During that night at the house on the lake, they split up to cover more ground. I saw the chance to seize one and I did. She’d accidentally fallen through a trapdoor and I found her in the basement. I gagged her and tied her up. I didn’t even consider she was only a little girl. I was blinded by greed. I am no danger to those children anymore. I don’t hate children.”
He stopped well before being carried away into saying he liked children. Words must be picked carefully in a parole hearing.
“You are aware, of course,” the commissioner said, “that those kids are no longer children.”
They giggled. The kids in the picture did, with their shiny hair and bucktoothed smiles. He heard them through the breast pocket of his orange jumpsuit.
He scoffed out of the gaffe: “I am sure I am not a danger to them, whatever their age.”
It burned him. The newspaper was scorching through his breast pocket.
“They were doing the right thing,” he said. “They weren’t meddling. They were the good guys.”
The commissioner leaned back in his chair just as the quietest, meanest member of the board saw it fit to intervene. “Still, the circumstances are aggravating. Here you are, doing fifteen years on account of being captured by four teenagers.”
“And a dog,” Wickley added.
“Yes, and a dog. That must have been a blow to your ego. You had problems with other inmates because of it. Some resentment would be altogether reasonable.”
Wickley looked down at his hands again, admired them upon finding them perfectly calm. Dry and undaunted, like tree trunks in the gentle breeze that carried the giggles of four teenagers. And a dog.
“What we mean to say is that there was, so to speak, some insult added to injury in the way you were apprehended. Actually, the word in the police report is ‘snared,’?” the commissioner read. “By means of a contraption involving…‘a high-speeding serving cart, two flights of stairs, and a fishing net’?”
Wickley watched him frown, briefly striving to pry an image out of the type, while the giggling in his own breast pocket grew into a television laughtrack.
“So, whatever—what we mean to say,” the man resumed, “is that some extra concern about you taking revenge is not unjustified.”
The prisoner drove his right hand to his heart. Violently. Slapping the picture silent.
“Gentlemen. I staged a haunting in an old mansion and dressed myself as a giant salamander to scare people away. I was captured by four teenagers and a Weimaraner. And I am sixty. Do you seriously believe I pose a threat to anyone?”
The board members chortled. The commissioner started putting away his papers.
—
Five days and nineteen hours later, he made parole.
The riveted iron doors opened the following Monday and sun shone on Wickley’s arid face, on the sentinel turrets, on a reservoir-sized puddle on the cobblestone road.
He put his box of belongings at his feet, took out the crumpled pack of Raleighs and lit one with the second-to-last match from his Sambo’s giveaway matchbook. The first drag tasted rancid, and yet periorgasmically good. The legendary afterjail cigarette.
Smoke curled away in the sun like a flower out of the animated film Yellow Submarine.
He unfolded the newspaper page he’d transferred from his orange jumpsuit to his civilian jacket pocket, next to a movie ticket stub for The Eiger Sanction. The grinning children in the picture met sunlight again.
The names in the second paragraph were highlighted in faded yellow: Peter Manner, Kerri Hollis, Andrea “Andy” Rodriguez, Nate Rogers, Sean. Peter Manner’s name was struck out in pen. That had been a recent addition; he’d overheard the news in the library two years ago. “Peter Manner, the kid in that flick with Lisa Bonet, he OD’d,” some convict had said, followed by the usual condescending platitudes on the rough lives of child stars and whatever. If bad fortune had struck out the other three names too, their deaths never made it to the prison grapevine. Not everyone stars in a Christmas blockbuster movie after all. The dog would most likely be a strike-out too, but lacking any official confirmation, Wickley would rather wait.
He further browsed the box for his father’s wristwatch and strapped it on. He was due to check in with his parole officer in two hours.
He picked up his box and crossed the street to a nearby pub.
—
They’d changed the label of his favorite beer. Also that of Coca-Cola bottles, the red background now shattered in the furiously sharp-angled pattern of the new decade. Two men by the window table were talking baseball, and Wickley, sitting at the bar, didn’t recognize a single name. He was going to light himself another cigarette when the barman approached and said, “Sir, you can’t smoke in here.”
He stared at the guy’s afterimage for a while before he tipped the cigarette back into the package and continued drinking. At least he’d called him “sir.”
The Pennaquick Telegraph clip lay unfolded on the counter while he enjoyed his beer. The verb is not an overstatement—he was really enjoying it. Now and then he side-glanced at the picture for no reason in particular. Perhaps because it was one of the few familiar things he could turn to: the panting dog, the smiling children. Even the dead one was smiling. Christ, even the deputy sheriff was smiling. The only one not smiling in that photo was him.
He glanced at the mirror across the counter. The old man there looked remarkably weary for someone who had spent thirteen years shelved in a cold, dry place, but not thirteen years older than the one in the newspaper. He had been blessed with one of those faces that age rapidly through the first three decades, but later remain relatively unchanged throughout adulthood. He continued not to smile now, but he somehow looked better than the detainee in the picture. Having lost the salamander costume helped.
The highlighted names stared up at the ceiling fan. He looked down at his hands and gnarled fingers slumbering on the counter, as unfazed as they were during the interview. They really didn’t give a damn.
He stayed on his stool, drinking in little sips, listening to a new but not bad song playing on the radio. One of the men by the window loudly rejected the idea of a player Wickley had never heard of being a better pitcher than one he remembered perfectly well.
Delicately, Wickley grabbed the newspaper clip, held it up, crumpled it into his hand, lit the last match in the book and burned it. The barman grunted at this act of arson not covered by the nonsmoking sign.
Wickley sprinkled the ashes on the floor and left for the restroom.