with the regularity of a workweek?
Walking along Foster, Jason thinks of something: This could be broken. His son could grow up in Portland Heights, where parents aren’t clouded in cigarette haze and indifference, where dads play ball with their sons. Maybe not ball—the old man had looked gimp-legged—but maybe read him the stock report, let him cut his first teeth on Daddy’s fat leather billfold. They’d be the kind of people to send their son to one of those schools where bullying is not allowed, not like Sappho, where even the principal jeered them on from the sidelines of dusty playground brawls.
His son could be popular; who didn’t like the rich kids? Everyone’d be clambering around Buddy to be invited over for video games, soda, and brownies. And his son could grow up with a set place in this world, not scrapping for it, but already decided for him. This is who you are, with the sun shining on your face as the team hefts you onto their shoulders at the end of the football game (because Buddy would be doubly blessed, Jason’s physical talents, John and Francie’s status).
And because of this life, and a good, classy woman, and having enough, Buddy would be a Law-Abiding Citizen, and would never know the inside and all its intricacies, the politics of bend over or be bent. Buddy would never think that even at six-four, just keeping your head down and quiet would be enough to get you ignored the first time the bars slammed shut behind you.
The cycle could be broken. They could grow old together, his son and the wife, and beautiful children, and not one of them would ever feel the sting of a hand in anger. Jason smiles to himself, his jacket jingling as he walks, the buckles clinking. It’s bitter, this gift he’s given his son, this future, but it’s good.
Jason checks under his jacket; still breathing.
FIRST THINGS FIRST. HE stops in at the convenience store. Milk is $3.49 a gallon, but a coffee is only $.69, so he goes to the coffee station and lets the hissing brown liquid spill out into the drain, one eye on the clerk, then empties the pint of cream into his cup, caps it. He pays for the coffee and another pack of Camels—no surprise he’s on his second pack today—with his last five dollars and leaves the convenience store with his head down as he passes the camera.
Next stop, drugstore. He goes straight to the baby section and lines up two boxes of diapers, like he can’t decide which. He fakes a sip of his coffee. Behind the boxes, he opens a pink plastic baby bottle, jamming the packaging behind the diapers. A freckled man comes into the aisle, short, square, wearing pointy shoes that squeak as he hurries past Jason.
“I never remember what I’m supposed to get.” Jason is pleased with how even and low his voice comes out. The man looks over, offers a pale smile.
“I know.” The man nods, rifling through rows of lotions, creams.
Quickly, working behind the diapers, Jason tips the cream from the coffee cup into the bottle, caps it, and wedges it in his back jean pocket. The whole thing takes eleven seconds; he loves shoplifting. Something for nothing. He pretends to sip from his now empty coffee cup, nods to the man holding two brands of lotion, his cell phone jammed in his shoulder, “Hon, do you want the lavender or the regular?”
First thing he’ll buy with the money: cell phones for both of them. Then a car, or a motor home, for the drive south, and he’ll fix her teeth, so he doesn’t have to look at the blackness in her mouth and think about what they did to her in Denver. Makes his stomach hot, swallowed rage. He’s hot anyway, he thinks as he walks smoothly out of the drugstore, back twanging, the full, brand-new bottle bulging his hip pocket.
Outside, cool air, relief—sweat is building between them. Is it breathing? Check. Last stop, the video store, where two teenage girls look at him and then back at their hands, tug the necks of their T-shirts lower.
Not much time left; it’s wriggling, going to wake up any second now. Jason heads to the drama section and scans. Ransom. He never saw it, but Mel Gibson’s decent. Jason will never forget the way he faced his savage end in Braveheart. The night they showed it on his cell block, everyone was quiet