Chapter 6

“From the President of the United States,
To the lowliest rock & roll star.
The doctor is in, and he’ll see you now.
He don’t care who you are.
Some get the awful, awful diseases,
some get the knife, some get the gun.
Some get to die in their sleep
at the age of a hundred and one.”
-Warren Zevon, “Life’ll Kill Ya“

The light went on in the room ahead. There was a buzzing sound, and then another door inside that room opened. Something orange moving inside and something blue moving past the wire-reinforced window in the door in front of her that hadn’t opened yet. The old institutional tube light in the hallway where she stood waiting flickered overhead. There was a latching sound inside the room, and then the partial figure of a person in a blue uniform filled the window. A louder, closer buzz, and the door was opened.

Helena Medina ... No. “Parker,” she reminded herself, the judges wouldn’t let it be Medina and make this exercise completely unnecessary; stood in the doorway. Behind her, Propappou placed a hand on the shoulder of the jacket she’d worn three years ago, tiny snags from her run through the woods now grown into large rips that had been patched with the logos of various punk and metal bands. She’d had to remove the pins and studs she’d secured or reinforced other parts of the jacket with before coming this far.

Her hand touched his, then let go. Troy stood at her side, out of view from inside the room. With her other hand, she reached out and touched his for a moment. He did the same and they smiled at each other. A second later, she stepped through alone.

Wade John Wayne Parker sat at a table in an orange jumpsuit and glared past his daughter at the old Greek man behind her. He gave the old man a look that said he wanted to jump up on the table and laugh and mock him for the courts not letting him steal her away and that the only reason he wasn’t was that he was aware his ankles were chained to his chair and that the guards would surround and beat him. Byroni Medina returned it with eyes demanding that Zeus immediately blast this malaka pimple from the ass of the Earth with his thunderbolt. Their eyes remained fixed while a guard offered to get Mr. Medina some coffee until the closing of the door forced them to break contact.

Helena walked up to the chair on the other side of the plexiglass partition that bisected the table between them, and looked around, seeming not to notice the man seated three feet from her. Wade broke the silence, his voice coming through a grill in the glass that seemed to be floating in space a few inches above the table.

“One of the guys owes me a pack of smokes. I guess the fact that you’re here means the judge saw reason, huh?”

Helena looked down at the seat of the chair. She flicked an imaginary bug or speck off of it. If she’d heard, she didn’t react.

“How’s the new foster family? Must be doing something right, even if they keep letting that old bastard bring you for Father’s Day. You still letting his half-goat stick it in you?”

Helena let that go and continued looking at the red lights on the cameras in the corners. Things were actually going great with her foster family. Her case worker had proven very agreeable about her situation and always felt the compulsion to let Helena know a couple days before any visits or “surprise inspections.” The foster family she was with were also more than happy to agree to Helena’s proposal of cashing and handing over her entire maintenance check each month in exchange for lying to the social workers that she was home every night instead of spending all her time at the Medina house and keeping her room clean but otherwise undisturbed for when she had to be there for visits. She smiled and waved to one of the cameras, as if noticing them for the first time.

“OK,” Wade said. “We’re gonna be like that. Fine. I’m sorry, ok? Maybe if the cops had kept me all weekend, I wouldn’t’ve come home so pissed, and your mom...”

Helena turned at the last two words and quick-walked over to the chair, an expression on her face that said that she was extremely interested in whatever he was going to say next.

“What,” she asked. “What possible reason are you going to tell me my mother gave you that made you HAVE to beat her to death that’s going to make me go ‘Oh, ok?’ WHAT? Let’s hear it!”

Even through the glass, Wade Parker took half a jump back before responding with more anger.

“Look, I was drunk, ok!”

“I watched you kill my mother, Wade. I KNOW you were drunk! You were ALWAYS drunk! That excuses NOTHING!”

“This ... look, shit happens. You shouldn’t have let them call the cops on me!”

“And let you kill me and bury me in the marsh like you always say you should have?” He began to open his mouth to deny it. She shouted him down before the words left it. “Don’t fucking tell me you weren’t! You bought the fucking garbage bags and duct tape! Because the other guys weren’t dumbfuck enough to go along with your ‘my daughter can be our accomplice, she’ll risk jail for us, won’t ya sweetie’ plan! Booze didn’t tell you to be a piece of shit criminal, YOU told you to do that!”

“Well, those days are over, honey. I’m sobered up now, can’t get a drop in prison. Got my AA chips and everything.”

Helena sat and listened with a blank look on her face again, remembering playing checkers using his 3-day and 1-week coins whenever he was inside before and she could have friends over. And stories of how guys got booze smuggled in were a standard amongst the “uncles” who’d visit.

“I ... I’ve been going to church in here too, honey. Getting right with the Lord. I know Jesus is going to show me the way.” He took out a little hand-made wooden cross out from under his jumpsuit to show it’d been hanging on his neck this whole time. “I made this in the shop. There’s one for you too.”

Wade gestured to a small gift box on her side of the glass that separated them.

Helena lifted open the box lid and saw a cross identical to the one he was wearing. She set the lid back down on top of it.

“Maybe you can wear it to my next parole hearing. And something nicer than what you got on, and the board’ll know I’ve got you on the outside to look after now. I’ll get a real job and take care of you and we can be a family and it’ll never happen again.”

A look containing ten viewings of Scarface‘s worth of “Fuck You” appeared in Helena’s eyes. A look that made Wade miss the look of infinite disgust and rage he’d gotten from Propappou a few minutes earlier.

“‘It’ll never happen again.’ Now Julie owes ME a pack of smokes.”

The look didn’t leave as a big smile spread across the lower half of her face and she picked up the little box and stuck it into her inside jacket pocket, then began rooting around in it.

“I made something for you too, Wade. Something special. Spent a lot of time thinking about it.”

Wade Parker leaned forward and smiled as Helena fished in the lining of the jacket, the pockets long torn into the lining, making for easier shoplifting. At last, she produced a folded-up piece of lined yellow note paper from the depths of the jacket. She stood up and looked at the guard on her side of the glass and the one on the other side.

“Leave us for a minute, please,” she asked them. “And tell them to turn off the cameras too.”

Both guards nodded and stepped out into the hallway. When they were gone, she sat back down and faced him.

“You wrote me a fucking poem,” he asked, too upset that she didn’t bring him any of the things he’d asked her to get for him on the outside and ready to mock whatever it was to question what she’d said to the guards or notice that they did so without a word upon Helena’s request. She noticed the red lights on the cameras shut off and smiled.

“No. I just wrote it down because I wanted to get it right.” She looked down at the paper, then fixed him with a gaze that he’d never seen from her. “Now, shut up.”

He found himself no longer wanting to speak as she read.

“You’ve just decided to join the Aryan Brotherhood. After I leave, you’re going to go out into the yard, find the biggest group of tough-looking black guys you can find, and start loudly proclaiming your new-found ideals and beliefs to them. Use the N-Word a lot. Tell them how they’re inferior to the white man and ought to be rounded up and sent back to Africa, go ahead and get creative with it. Whatever they do to you after that, you’re going to accept it and not fight back. This is all your own idea.”

Helena folded up the paper and got up, Wade silently nodding and not understanding why he knew that was exactly what he’d made up his mind to do after she left. She knocked to let the guard know she was ready to leave. The other came into the room on his side.