amount of criminals sufficient to make theirs the county with the highest percentage of felons in the United States. But the arrangement raised not a single voice of disagreement. The prisons created jobs, and that was that. Early on, anyone who might have offered an objection recognized the futility of doing so.
And a prison job, unlike work at the sawmill or the Chevy plant, or Jordan Gum & Machine, was virtually recession-proof. Even in a flagging economy there were prisoners. In fact, in a recession there were more prisoners, as people without jobs found other, not always legal, ways to make ends meet. And inmates required guards, and janitors, and cooks, and office workers, and various other personnel needed to make a prison run smoothly. And here it was all tucked neatly out of the way, which was a luxury that building prisons in Upstate New York afforded.
CJ was gone before the prisons came, but he’d followed their coming through Sal. Like most Adelia citizens, his grandfather had approved of them, and had bent CJ’s ear about what they meant for the town, even as he knew not to place too much emphasis on their importance. Now that CJ was older, he realized that the Franklin prisons were a good metaphor with which to describe his now-deceased grandfather. Sal had only wanted what was best for Adelia, and had done everything in his power to see that happen, but a clear line of sight on history—almost a genetic predisposition for a Baxter—had instilled in him a fatalism that had only grown worse with age. In more than one phone call, Sal, well into a fifth of whiskey, had bemoaned the fact that nation building (his metaphor for both the advancement of Adelia and the Baxter line) didn’t work—that things happened regardless of the best intentions of learned men, or even the educated mechanisms of powerful forces exercised by these same men. Sal said the Kennedys were aberrations, that some grand societal juxtaposition of need and opportunity had served to make them American royalty. A little planning and a lot of dumb luck, Sal would say, in a manner that told CJ his grandfather was considering the metaphysical ramifications of an entire lineage—his own—having wasted more than two hundred years. And to make matters worse, he thought the Kennedys had squandered their opportunity, done nothing with their chance.
It was a perspective that made Sal happy for the prisons, and monumentally sad for the town that needed them.
Oddly enough, this line of thought—picked up somewhere around Cleveland—had caused CJ to consider the proposed article on his brother in a new light. When he was sitting on the porch of the house he’d probably never set foot in again, he’d understood that he wouldn’t write the article that The Atlantic wanted, regardless of what he’d said to Matt. Supporting his brother’s campaign just wasn’t something he could do with a clear conscience. But as his thoughts had gravitated toward Sal, one of the main subjects of their last few conversations lingered near the surface. They’d talked of the prisons. Over the last several years—after incarceration had become firmly entrenched as Ade-lia’s industry of choice—their phone calls had seldom included the prisons in the list of topics discussed. But a few months into Graham’s senate campaign, Sal had begun to drop hints that Graham was delving into an area that would see a significant impact on Adelia, and Sal had delivered these fleeting missives with enough rancor to convince CJ that Sal’s concerns weren’t just the inane ramblings of a man losing his grip on reality. The elder statesman of the Baxter clan was worried, and that meant there might be a story CJ could write after all.
CJ guided the Honda down Buckley, and just as he crossed the line where it turned into Main Street, Thoreau woke up. The dog raised his head, took a groggy look around, and gave one derisory sniff before standing and stretching. The factory buildings had disappeared behind CJ, as had the new residential development that took over the land where he used to go four-wheeling with his friends, and the Onochooie River from which he would pull crappie. It all looked strange to him, unsettling. But wasn’t it the job of a writer to imagine things as they might be? The difference was that he would never have substituted cookie-cutter subdivisions for the pristine land they’d replaced. Fortunately, he was through the area quickly, crossing the spot