“How so?”
“You were right about Johnny. He was never in the service. He was in jail like you said.”
I love being right. It always cheers me up. “What about the story about how you knew each other? Was any of that true?”
“In the main,” he said. He paused and smiled, revealing a gap where a first molar should have been. He put a hand against his cheek where the bruising was deep blue with an aura of darker purple. “Don’t look now, but we’re surrounded.”
The track team seemed to spread out and around us like a liquid, settling into booths on all sides of us. The lone waitress was passing out menus like programs for some sporting competition.
“Quit stalling,” I said.
“Sorry. We did meet in Louisville, but it wasn’t at the Jeffersonville Boat Works. It wasn’t 1942, neither. It was earlier. Maybe ’39 or ’40. We were in the drunk tank together and struck up a friendship. I was nineteen at the time, and I’d been in jail a couple times. We hung out together some, you know, just messing around. Neither of us went in the army. We were both 4-F. I forget Johnny’s disability. Something to do with a ruptured disk. I had two busted eardrums and a bum knee. Bad weather, that sucker’s still giving me fits. Anyway, we had to do something — we were bored out of our gourds — so we started burglarizing joints, breaking into warehouses, stores, you know, things like that. I guess we pulled one job too many and got caught in the act. I ended up doing county time, but he got sent to state reformatory down in Lexington. He did twenty-two months of a five-year bid and moved his family out to California once he got sprung. After that, he was clean as far as I ever heard.”
“What about you?”
He dropped his gaze. “Yeah, well, you know, after Johnny left, I fell into bad company. I thought I was smart, but I was just a punk like everyone else. A guy steered me wrong on another job we pulled. Cops picked us up and I got sent to the Federal Correctional Institution up in Ashland, Kentucky, where I spent another fifteen months. I was out for a year and then in again. I never had the dough for a fancy-pants attorney, so I had to take pot luck. One thing and another, I’ve been inside ever since.”
“You’ve been in prison for over forty years?”
“Off and on. You think there aren’t guys who’ve been in prison that long? I could’ve been out a lot sooner, but my temper got the better of me until I finally figured out how to behave,” he said. “I suffered from what the docs call a ‘lack of impulse control.’ I learned that in prison. How to talk that way. Back then, if I thought of it, I did it. I never killed nobody,” he added in haste.
“This is a big relief,” I said.
“Well, later in prison, but that was self-defense.”
I nodded. “Ah.”
Rawson went right on. “Anyway, in the late forties, I started writing to this woman named Maria I met through a pen pal ad. I managed to escape once and I was out long enough for us to get married. She got pregnant and we had us a little girl I haven’t seen in years. A lot of women fall in love with inmates. You’d be surprised.”
“Nothing people do surprises me,” I said.
“Another time, when I was out, I ended up breaking parole. Sometimes I think Johnny felt responsible. Like if it hadn’t been for him, I might never have gotten in so tight with the criminal element. Wasn’t true, but I think that’s what he believed.”
“You’re saying Johnny kept in touch all these years because of guilt?”
“Mostly that,” he said. “And maybe because I was the only one who knew he’d been in jail besides his wife. With everybody else, he was always pretending to be something he wasn’t. All the tales about Burma and Claire Chennault. He got those from books. His kids thought he was a hero, but he knew he wasn’t. With me, he could be himself. Meantime, I got into grand theft auto and armed robbery, which is how I finally qualified for accommodations in the penitentiary. I did time in Lewisburg and a bid in Leavenworth, but I was mostly confined in Atlanta. That’s a real test of your survival skills. Atlanta’s where they’re housing all the Cuban criminals Castro’s sending over to keep us company.”
“What happened to Maria? Are you still married to her?”
“Nah. She finally divorced me because I couldn’t straighten up and fly right, but that was my fault, not hers. She’s a good woman.”
“It must be unsettling to have freedom after forty years.”
Rawson shrugged, looking off across the room. “They did what they could to prepare me for the outside. When I turned sixty, the BOP — Bureau of Prisons — started weaning me off hard time. My security level dropped to the point where I was eligible to move out of the joint. I got sent back to FCI Ashland, and what a revelation that was. It’d been thirty-five years since I’d seen the place. I’m looking at punks the same age as I was when I first got sent up. All of the sudden, I’m ‘getting it,’ you know? Like I can see the big picture. I did a complete turnaround in the space of a year, picked up my GED, and started taking college classes. I started taking care of myself, quit smoking, started lifting weights, and like that. Got myself buffed up. I went before the parole board this time and got early release.”
Ray paused to look around at the kids nearby. They were crowded into booths and tables, chairs pulled up. Menus were being passed hand to hand above their heads while the rustle of restless laughter washed across them in waves. It was a sound I liked, energetic, innocent. Ray shook his head. “Kids are up on my floor, about two doors down. My God, the shrieking and pounding up and down the halls. It goes on ’til all hours.”
“Are you still in touch with Maria?”
“Now and then. She remarried. Last I heard, she’s still in Louisville somewhere. I’d like to go back and see her as soon as I’m done with this. I want to see my daughter, too, and make it up to her. I know I haven’t been a good father — I was too busy screwing up — but I’d like to try. I want to see my mother, too.”
“Your mother’s still alive?” I asked, incredulous.
“Sure. She’s eighty-five, but she’s as tough as they come.”
“Not that it’s any of my business, but how old are you?”
“Sixty-five. Old enough to retire if I ever had a real job.”
“So you were released fairly recently,” I said.
“About three weeks ago. I went from Ashland to six months in a halfway house. Soon as I was sprung, I headed for the coast. I wrote to Johnny in April and gave him my release date. He said to come ahead, he’d help me out. So that’s what I did. The rest is just like I told you before. I didn’t know he was dead until I knocked on Bucky’s door.”
“What kind of help was Johnny talking about?”
Rawson shrugged. “Place to stay. A stake. He had some ideas about a little business we could run. I worked in the joint — every able-bodied inmate works — but I was only earning forty cents an hour, out of which I had to pay for my own candy bars, soda pop, and deodorant, stuff like that, so it’s not like I had any kind of savings built up.”
“How’d you pay for travel getting out here?”
“My mother lent me the money. I said I’d pay her back.”
“Who’s the guy who broke into Johnny’s place?”
“His name is Gilbert Hays, a former celly of mine. He’s a guy I did time with a couple of years ago. I shot off my big mouth, trying to impress the crud. Don’t ask why. He’s such a cocky piece of excrement, I’m still kicking myself.” His grimace opened up the split in his lower lip. A line of blood welled out. He pressed a paper napkin to his mouth.
“Shot your mouth off about what?”
“Look, we’re in the joint. What do any of us have to do except BS each other? He was always bragging about something, so I told him about Johnny. The guy was a miser, always squirreling cash away. Johnny didn’t come right out and say so, but he used to hint he had big bucks hidden on the property.”
“You were going to rip him off?”