Three-Fifths Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright Notice

  For Michelle, JJ and Miles

  You are my everything

  March, 1995

  The dumpsters stunk of half-eaten food and the sweet sour of stale beer. Streetlamps lit snowflakes that hovered in the stillness like trapped fireflies. The cold air stiffened Bobby’s lungs and he fought back a wheeze. He tucked his cigarette behind his ear, took a hit from his inhaler, then lit up. The sulfur from the match pierced his nose and made his eyes water. He wiped the blurriness away and saw through the fence surrounding the dock that someone was on the other side.

  “Who the hell is that?” Bobby asked Luis.

  Luis shrugged. Bobby moved closer, fingers through the chain link. A large white man sat on the edge of a red pickup bed, parked in the shadows between the streetlights. Thick arms wrapped around his knees, which were pulled into his chest.

  Bobby and Luis traded nervous glances. He felt at the knot of cash in his pocket and gave Luis the once over. The scrawny fry cook stood a head shorter than Bobby and a good twenty pounds lighter. No help there if whoever this guy was decided to make a move.

  “You want to go back in through the front?” Bobby asked Luis.

  “Nah, my car is parked back here. Whatever, man, don’t be a pussy.”

  Bobby flashed his middle finger. Fuck it, if he isn’t scared... He pushed and the gate creaked open. The man’s head popped up. He jumped down from the bed of the truck.

  Bobby and Luis both paused before they continued on, keeping their distance while trying to appear that they weren’t. Show no fear, but don’t look at him, either. He gave the guy a quick nod and watched from the corner of his eye as the stranger held his hands out, confused.

  Luis and Bobby walked faster.

  “Yo, Bobby,” he said. “Where you going?”

  Bobby slid to a stop. When he turned, his mouth fell open and his cigarette stuck to the inside of his lip. Aaron had shaved his head completely. His pale arms were covered in tattoos, their designs obscured in the darkness. He sparked his lighter and the flame illuminated his face, revealing a topography of violence past. A raised scar ran across the bottom of his eye, another on his lip curved up towards his nose. Bobby wanted to look away, but instead squinted for a better look. Aaron snapped the lighter shut, throwing his face back into the shadows.

  “Holy shit,” Bobby said. “Look at this Hulked-out motherfucker.”

  Aaron smiled a mouthful of large, bright-white teeth. Bobby jerked his chin back in surprise. Aaron tightened his smile, covering them with his lips.

  “Get your narrow ass over here,” Aaron said. He held his arms out and Bobby walked into Aaron’s tight embrace. Bobby gave him a couple of hard slaps to the back to get him to let go but Aaron squeezed harder. He stunk of beer and body odor. As Bobby pulled back, Aaron kissed the top of his head. Bobby pulled away and Aaron looked him in the eyes.

  “I missed you, man,” he said.

  “All right, all right,” Bobby said. He pushed Aaron off and laughed. “Let go of me, you

  queer.”

  “Hey, fuck off with that shit,” Aaron said. He gave Bobby a playful shove. Bobby caught a look behind Aaron’s half-hearted smile and remembered that first day in the visitor’s center. Stupid. He opened his mouth to apologize when Luis called to him from the open driver’s side door of his car.

  “Bobby! See you tomorrow?”

  BOBBY GAVE A dismissive wave. Luis sucked his teeth and got in. Aaron took unsteady steps back to his truck where an empty six-pack container sat next to another half-empty one in the bed. Aaron sat on the edge and traced the toe of his boot in the snow. Bobby sat next to him as Luis drove off.

  “Hanging with the beaners, now?” Aaron said.

  “Luis? He’s okay,” Bobby said. He elbowed Aaron in the arm. “One of the good ones, you know?”

  “Uh huh.”

  Bobby stopped smiling. Aaron winked at him and elbowed him back.

  “Three years!” Bobby shouted, and smacked him on the shoulder. “Jesus, kid, it’s good to see you.”

  Aaron laughed and reached back to hand Bobby a beer. He pushed it back towards him. “Still, huh?” he asked. Bobby nodded. “You’re of age now, man, and we didn’t even get

  to celebrate.”

  “I’m good, man. You know that.”

  “Come on, one won’t kill you. Three years, you said it yourself. How many times do I get out of prison?”

  “Hopefully just this once.”

  “Exactly. So throw one back with me, huh? Besides, alcoholism isn’t genetic, man.”

  “Are you retarded? Yes, it is.”

  “Really? How about that.”

  Aaron chugged his beer and sent the empty sailing into the lower parking lot where it shattered into musical shards. Now under the streetlight, Bobby studied Aaron’s face. His nose looked like it’d been broken more than once and the scar under his eye looked raised and swollen, as if someone had stitched it together with barbed wire. There was something more than the physical damage to his face. A veneer of sadness, of pained and disingenuous smiles. He picked at the label on a fresh bottle. Bobby squeezed his shoulder and gave him a shake.

  “You all right, kid?” Bobby asked.

  “Don’t I look it?” Another tight smile.

  Bobby shrugged. “Eh. Kind of.” He patted the truck. “This is a beauty, by the way.”

  “The old man had it waiting for me. A welcome home present.”

  “That’s a hell of a present.”

  “Said I earned it.”

  They laughed. Aaron hadn’t earned much of anything as long as they’d known each other. His father was an investment banker and a major donor to the campaigns of local government officials. Father and son took great advantage of the resulting perks. Speeding tickets disappeared. Arrests for shoplifting comic books erased from permanent records.

  Then possession with intent to distribute. A third strike. And he had mouthed off to the judge. Long, hard time awaited.

  And yet, only three years. Membership had its benefits.

  “Look, I’m happy to see you and all, but it’s fucking freezing out here. Let’s go somewhere, and give me them keys because you’re already wrecked.”

  “Just a couple more minutes, all right?” Aaron pleaded. “I’ve been indoors for over a thousand days. This air feels so good, man. Even when they let us in the yard, the air there felt different. Like when it passed through the fence, it got dirty.” He brushed snow off the side rail of the truck bed. “This thing felt like a coffin on the way over here. Hell, you want it? You can have it.”

  A few of the guys in the kitchen were on work release or parole. Russell, the general manager, had done time when he was younger. He often told the story of how he made it, how he got out, and how he wouldn’t let them make the same mistakes twice. “You have to understand that this system is designed to keep you young bucks in it. Once you got that label, that prison stink on you? You never really have a shot after that. Especially not when you look like us. They’l
l look for any reason to put you back inside. Can’t pay your court fees because that job keeping the walk-in clean only pays minimum wage? Back in. Get caught hanging with one of your homies who caught a charge, too? Back in. You young brothers have less than half a chance. People will talk to you about accountability, tell you that you have none. That you have a commitment to that life. If you keep going back in, that might end up being the case. If you’re in long enough, if the things that happen to you are bad enough, you don’t know what to do with yourself on the outside, that even though you tell yourself differently, that there’s no way you ever want to go back, it’s becomes the only home you know.”

  Bobby never bought it, the system being out to get them. Invariably, the cops would show up and haul one of Russell’s pet projects out the front door, leaving Russell standing in the doorway, shaking his head. But as Bobby sat on the edge of that truck and watched Aaron chew at his nails, some of what Russell said resonated. Aaron was no long-timer, but the life he’d led before prison had been easy. Problems of his own making disappeared with a phone call from his father to the right people. Maybe now, back in the world, Aaron realized he had gotten used to the dirty air of incarceration. Maybe that world, in some way, held more comfort for him than this one. It seemed so irrational and yet there it was.

  Bobby shrugged off the thought and held his hand out for the keys. They climbed into the truck. When Bobby reached down to adjust his seat, his hand brushed against something rough. He pulled out a brick, broken at the edges.

  “They teach you masonry in the joint?” Bobby forced a laugh, but Aaron didn’t smile. He took the brick from Bobby and set it on the floor next to his beers. “Seriously. What’s that for?”

  “You remember that little mini-bat I used to keep under my seat in case shit went sideways?” Bobby nodded. “There was a pile of these broken bricks by a dumpster outside the prison so I grabbed one. Not everyone out here is going to be as happy as you are to see me.”

  “Yeah, all right, I get it, I guess. But a brick?”

  “Until I get a gun, yeah.”

  “O-kay, tough guy” Bobby said. He laughed, but Aaron remained silent. They shut the doors and Bobby started the truck. Aaron pulled his knees into his chest. The tight space in the truck made him turtle in on himself. For all of his new bulk, inked skin, and scars, he was an anxious mess. He was scared.

  “Man, you weren’t kidding, huh? You sure you’re all right?”

  Aaron reached for the radio. Bobby felt the inside of his ears tense, steeling himself for the bass heavy hip-hop Aaron loved to torture him with whenever he drove him to school.

  Instead, classical music filtered through the speakers. Aaron let his knees go. He stopped gnawing at his nails and relaxed into his seat. Bobby flashed him a side-eye. Aaron laughed.

  “Okay, okay,” he said.

  “Look, if there’s something you need to tell me…” Bobby said.

  “Take it easy. There’s a reason, I swear.”

  “I can’t wait to hear this.”

  Bobby shook his head and pulled the truck out onto McKnight Road. The light dusting of snow slithered back and forth on the street behind the cars in front of them like phantom snakes, and the heat of the defroster made the wipers drag and groan across the windshield. They stopped at a traffic light and the piece ended. The public radio station delivered a newsbreak.

  “I’m so sick of this trial,” Bobby said. “I don’t even have a television and I still can’t get away from it.” Aaron gave a little laugh but kept staring out his window. “I mean, you should hear the guys in the kitchen, just swearing he’s not guilty. Like they win something if he’s found innocent. It’s fucking crazy.” Bobby watched Aaron for a response, but nothing. “Oh, now you go quiet? You better say something, because right now I feel like you’re going to like flip out and murder me, like Colonel Mustard, with a brick, in the red pickup.”

  Aaron turned to face him and squinted. “You think I’d hurt you?”

  “No, no, I’m kidding. Kind of. You’re just kind of hammered already, which is cool, you should be, totally, but we’re listening to this sad old bastard music and you got arms as big as my legs and you don’t even talk like you used to like you used to and, fuck, man, I don’t know what to think.”

  “How did I talk before?”

  “Come off it, man, that wannabe wigger shit. You know.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said. He puffed his cheeks and breathed out through pursed lips. “Okay, so the music. I got a library detail when I first went in. You remember how skinny I was. After –”

  He stopped. Bobby glanced away from the road and towards Aaron. Headlights from a car in the opposite lane illuminated his face. His wet eyes glistened.

  “After it happened, they thought I’d be safer working there. There was this section where you could actually listen to CDs. Nothing but classical, though. Nothing aggressive. No metal. Definitely no rap. But then I read in one of the books there—”

  “They got you to read? Maybe this wasn’t so bad for you after all,” Bobby said, smacking him on the shoulder. Aaron didn’t return his smile and Bobby cleared his throat.

  “I found out that a bunch of this shit actually caused riots the first time they played them. That’s a trip, right?”

  Something new in his voice, an almost imperceptible crack, a slight waver, made Bobby not like where this story was headed. He nodded to answer Aaron’s question and longed for the quiet about which he had just complained.

  “What was I going to do?” Aaron asked. “I was just this kid, scared shitless. I never slept, and even when I’d start to pass out from exhaustion, the slightest sound made me jump. So I’d find a corner in the library stacks and just listen over and over again until I had to go back to my cell. And I waited for the end of the week when I’d see you.” He started to fidget again and cracked open another beer. He finished in five fast swallows.

  “It didn’t take me long to memorize the movements of the pieces. Ten thousand repetitions, right? I must have doubled that. I started to hum the songs to myself to fall asleep. The first night it worked, the night I got my first hour of undisturbed sleep, it was the night before you visited,” he said.

  He stopped. He twisted his hands around his beer bottle like a wet rag. “It was just a beating the first time. That’s what got me the library duty. The night before you visited, Bobby, I tried to fight him, I promise you I did, but he was so strong. He bashed my head my against the wall of the cell and my body wouldn’t cooperate anymore. At least not with me. All I could do was try to make the music loud enough in my head to drown out the sounds. It didn’t work.

  “Later in the infirmary, it did, though. While they stitched me up, my brain kept trying to make me relive what he did to me, kept repeating how he told me that this was just the start, that the others would have their turn after he broke me in. So I hummed while the doc went to work on me. I remember how she looked at me, like, how could I be humming after all of that. It was the only thing that kept me from opening my wrists up with the teeth I had left.”

  Bobby curled his hands around the steering wheel and blinked away the burning in his eyes. He could not shake the vivid image of Aaron’s violation. He remembered Aaron on the other side of the visitor’s window, just hours separated from the incident, and now he understood why Aaron had never wanted him to return. They had broken far more than his face.

  “Aaron,” Bobby said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Did you put me in that cell?” Bobby shook his head. “Then don’t be sorry.” Aaron turned to look out his window again and Bobby reached for his shoulder, but pulled back, not sure why he had done either.

  Aaron shook it off and slapped his cheeks. “Sucked they didn’t have any comics in the library,” Aaron said with a belch. “You got a lot to catch me up on. But they kept me on library detail and I did read. Just fiction and stuff at first. Anything to get out of my head, you know? But then I got some assignments.
I had to start reading language, world history, all kinds of stuff.”

  “Assignments?” Bobby asked. “What do you mean?”

  “Your last name means ‘of a swarthy complexion’ in Sicilian,” Aaron said. “Did you know that?”

  What the hell did Aaron mean? Who gave him an assignment?

  Aaron cracked his last beer. Bobby accelerated.

  The truck hurtled past Duquesne and Bobby glanced across the river to the Incline. The tracks were lit by a row of white bulbs on each side. None of this fit. Bobby envisioned the day Aaron would get out countless times, but when he did, he’d had a different scene altogether in his head. They’d fall right back into their old rhythm. Bobby would make fun of DC comics. Aaron would make fun of Marvel. They’d revel in their mutual hatred of Image. Bobby would bitch at Aaron for his shitty taste in music. Aaron would make fun of Bobby’s shitty clothes. They’d compare shitty family lives. They’d have three years back. Instant happiness, just add water.

  They joked, they laughed but it was hollow, wrong. Aaron was different and it went beyond physical change, the bulking up. That much made sense. Even beyond the music, the tattoos and the way he talked, something hovered that dimmed the light that used to radiate from him. His smiles, tight. As though they weren’t allowed.

  Bobby had to change that. No matter what had happened to him, his best friend was home. Aaron still needed his help, but not like when they were kids. This was different. Bobby didn’t know if he could fix this. They hit Forbes Avenue. The Cathedral of Learning stood a beacon in the distance.

  “Where are we going, anyway?” Bobby asked.

  “Oh shit, yeah, North Oakland,” he said. “Got someone I need to meet up with tonight.” “Just got out and you’re back at it already?”

  “No, it’s not like that. I promised somebody I’d check in on someone. Stay with him for a bit.”

  “I get it, hanging with me and my mom in Homewood’s going to cramp your style. I’ll give it to you, a cell would seem like a resort in comparison.” Aaron laughed. “So what do you want to do, man? We don’t have to go there just yet, right? You’re out!”