“Not at the moment,” Andy said. “I was on and off with an older woman I met in Charlotte. But we’re finished.”
“I guess she still in Charlotte?”
“I don’t know where she is. I wanted to be friends, but she’s not that way. I don’t understand women,” Andy confessed. “They’re always saying men don’t know how to be friends, but when I try to be a friend, they act weird about it.”
“That is the truth.” Pony slowly nodded his head. “You tell it, brother. Women never say what they want or mean what they say or admit to even wanting–unless it’s something they don’t want or they want you to think they do or don’t want. So they can play you, know what I mean? My wife’s a sweet woman when she’s not too wore out from doing the First Family’s laundry or mad at me for going back to lockup during my vacations and holidays. But to look at it from her side, I know I don’t always shoot straight with her, either.
“Sometimes I ought to just come out with it and say, ‘I sure do love you, baby.’ Or ‘You sure do look good to me right now, baby.’ Or ‘I carry this sickness in my heart, baby, ’cause I know I’ve spent most of our good years behind bars, and that’s not fair to you and you got no idea how much I just ache for you when I’m away like that.’ And I guess, Mister Andy, I don’t want to admit to her or myself that I probably fucked up my life forever, you know what I’m saying?” He sucked on the cigarette. “You know, it’s probably too late and I’ll probably never get out of lockup ’cause the governor will forget or the next one will or the one after that.
“And I guess I don’t got sense enough to cause trouble in the mansion and maybe get fired and then sue the Comm’wealth for discrim’ation, which would entitle me to lawyers who would take me on for a cause and look into my prison record and discover there’s some mess-up in the Department of Corrections computer and I would be a free man. As is, I don’t got no money for no lawyer and right now I ain’t no cause. My point being, if I did the wrong thing, everything would turn out all right for me.”
“I know exactly how you feel,” Andy agreed. “But you’ve still got to do the right thing, Pony. Look at Trooper Truth. He did the right thing by telling the truth about Major Trader, and now the governor suspects Trooper Truth of doing something wrong.”
“I hear you. I wish I knew Trooper Truth,” Pony said with a sigh. “He sounds like one fine person, and it’s ’bout time someone blew the whistle on Trader. I’ve known all along he’s a rotten apple up to no good. Yes sir, I wish I knew Trooper Truth. Maybe he could fix my mess with the Department of Corrections.”
“Why don’t you call DOC yourself and see if you can get someone to look into the matter?” Andy asked.
” ‘Cause I ain’t allowed to make no personal calls from the mansion. And they don’t listen to inmates, anyhow. Everybody in trouble says there’s been a mistake, so why should I be any different?”
Regina was hiding behind an ancient boxwood and heard every word. She had lost interest in pool and wished she had thought to wear a coat when she’d decided to sneak out into the garden and eavesdrop. She had a special talent for spying on others, and was hoping to gather a little intelligence that might be useful to her.
But as she listened to Andy talk to Pony, she felt herself go soft inside and forgot her original motive. She, too, had been frustrated in her occasional efforts to make friends and often felt wrongly accused.
Regina was shivering uncontrollably, her breath rising in frozen clouds. Her stomach was feeling funny, too, and her intestines were tacking this way and that as they filled with an ominous wind that seemed to have gusted up from the sewer.