19. Bede

Chapter 19

Bede

B y the time Saturday rolled around, Bede figured he had a good handle on things, better able to navigate a Winston-less future. But naturally, that was when Galen reminded him at lunchtime that there was a mandatory counseling session right after lunch for all parolees.

At Wyoming Correction, counseling had been an on-again, off-again event that nobody had kept track of. He'd stayed away from those meetings as much as he could.

While he didn't want to complain about having to go, as that always drew more attention than was wanted, luckily Toby expressed what probably all of them were thinking.

"Do we have to?" asked Toby in a voice that grated on Bede's ears.

"You do," said Galen, even prettier when he was relaxed and smiling than when he was all riled up and pissed off.

"And what'll you be doing?" asked Bede, fully expecting to be told it was none of his business.

Of course Galen surprised him, but then, maybe Bede's help about that IRS bill had softened him up.

"We have a team meeting during that time," Galen said, standing up with his tray. "After that, we'll have some light maintenance work. And then Sunday you have the whole day off."

Bede hadn't had a day off in years. Not in the five years he'd been in prison, where he always had to be on and ready for anything. And not before that, as the drug trade went on twenty-four-seven.

Hustling to bus his tray, he stood behind Galen and, over his shoulder, quietly said, "Explain what you mean by day off."

"It's exactly what it sounds like," said Galen, not looking at Bede, but turning his head slightly in Bede's direction, creating an intimate circle of two. "Meals are at the usual time, but you don't have to be any specific place or do anything. Some people have visitors, which is allowed between the hours of ten and five. You can nap. Swim. Read one of your books. Whatever you like."

Hands now empty, Galen turned and looked fully at Bede, giving Bede the idea that Galen was considering the fact that men behind bars never experienced a simple and honest day off. Of what it might mean.

"Ask in the counseling session if the idea of a day off continues to be confusing for you," said Galen, the corner of his mouth twitching as he teased.

Bede's mouth twitched in response, and for a moment it felt as though they were two young boys in the back pew of a solemn church trying not to laugh. And he'd not laughed in five years behind bars. Not since Winston died.

"I'll be there," said Bede.

He could not let himself believe that a new location, a new environment, could make so much difference in how he felt. Calm, reasonably happy. And especially that someone who, by his very existence, should not be Bede's friend, could make him laugh.

A parole officer was generally thought of as the enemy. You couldn't laugh with the enemy, could you?

Because of the heat, Bede grabbed a shower before the counseling session, and put on a clean t-shirt before striding back to the mess tent.

His small excitement at the idea of having an hour to just sit around, basically napping in the back row, was squashed by the circle of metal folding chairs that had replaced the long tables.

The rest of the parolees were already seated, and a very young man, looking out of place with his bright cheery smile, waved Bede to come on in, using his clipboard like a baton.

Out of the corner of his eye, Bede saw Galen going into along the path that would wind in front of the team leads' tents. Galen turned to look at Bede over his shoulder in a way that was probably not meant to be flirty but was. Those gray eyes scanned Bede up and down, then he looked away and disappeared into the woods.

Which meant that Bede had to focus on the counseling session, and pretend he was totally interested when in fact he was not. He took a seat, crossed his arms over his chest, and didn't bother to contain a low glare aimed at the counselor.

Who was not just young, as many of the counselors at the prison had been, but youthful. Hopeful. Eager to be of use.

All of this was demonstrated by his slightly nervous introduction— Hi, I'm Micah —and the way he began a little speech about how proud he was of the Farthingdale Valley Fresh Start program, and what a great man Leland Tate was.

The way he sat on the edge of his folding chair. The way he asked their names, taking such care to pronounce them right, then marking something on his clipboard, that smile always in place. Bede nearly sprained his eyeballs in an attempt not to roll them every other minute.

He manfully soldiered through the forty-five minutes of group counseling, responding to questions aimed at him, pretending to pay attention to everyone else's responses. He was about to run screaming out of the tent, when Micah handed out a packet of papers to each parolee, along with a brand new pen, and made the offer of a clipboard from the box beside him.

"Your assignment for this week is to fill out this job application and self-evaluation questionnaire. The Fresh Start program isn't over yet, but it's never too soon to start looking at what your next steps will be. I've written my cell number at the bottom of each application so you can text me with any questions you might have." With a laugh, Micah added, "In the real world, of course, you'd fill this form out online, but the paper and pen will give you time to think. To make notes to yourself."

Now Bede did let his eyes roll as he took his packet and his pen and hell, why not, a clipboard as well. At least the meeting was over, as Micah was standing up, telling everyone what a good job they'd done and that he looked forward to reading over their responses when they scanned and emailed them to him.

Micah was an idiot, opening himself up to all kinds of trouble. None of them had phones they could use to text him. But there was the old-fashioned landline in the mess tent, so Bede supposed that some of the parolees might think it funny to call Micah in the middle of the night.

That wasn't Bede's problem, though. The information on the application was the problem, and he glared at it as he stomped out of the tent and stood at the bottom of the steps while the parolees passed him in a swirl of energy.

He watched as Jonah thumped down the steps and flew into Beck's arms, Beck who had been leaning insouciantly against a pine tree, half a smirk sent Bede's way.

Bede watched them as they walked off and saw when Beck pulled his Sucrets box out of the pocket of his blue jean as he and Jonah walked off. Just two bad boys going to have a smoke in the woods.

Shaking his head, now all alone, Bede realized how hot it was standing there at the bottom of the steps. It had been hot all day, and didn't look to be letting up any time soon.

Just what were rich folks supposed to do the following summer when their tents got so hot, the air so still and unable to filter out the weird sounds coming from the woods all around? He couldn't imagine that they would put in air conditioning, as that would ruin the expensive, back to nature vibe.

In the meantime, he had to fill out this dumb form. It would be cooler by the lake, so he went there and plopped himself at a picnic table.

He took off his work boots and socks, and sighed as the coolness of the earth soaked up through the bottoms of his feet. Lifting his head, a bit of a breeze caught up with him, swirling from the almost-flat surface of the lake. A hillside of pine trees rose from the lake all the way up to the gray streak of Guipago Ridge, distinct and sharp against the blue sky.

With a clonk, Bede put the clipboard down on the picnic table and flipped through the job application, glaring at the blank spaces he was supposed to fill out. Which would be easy enough if he'd had an ordinary life, but he hadn't.

He'd been raised in a neighborhood where everybody knew everybody. When he'd been young and needed some quick cash, he'd just go to the corner bodega and help out for an afternoon. Or he could rent himself as a mule, and carry mysterious rolled-up paper bags sealed with duct tape, dropping them off at the local garage or one of the run-down motels on Colfax.

After high school, his first real job had been counting dollar bills in somebody's basement. From there, he moved on to weighing cocaine to be placed in rolled up paper bags.

He'd advanced through the years, and never had to apply for anything, so the empty boxes and spaces on the paper in front of him loomed like angry eyes.

Bede had hardly listened when Micah had droned on about coming to a crossroads in your life and how to take steps to make good decisions. Break down the issue. Talk it over with your friends. Weigh the consequences.

That last had been, Bede was sure, an unspoken warning about making bad decisions, the kind that would land your ass back in jail.

Bede had done his five years, and he sure didn't want to end up behind bars again. But what else was there for him? A return to the neighborhood in Denver, somehow get his own place back, the one he'd shared with Winston? Except Winston wouldn't be there.

Going back to Denver without Winston seemed surreal, meaningless. While he knew everybody there, they would be looking at him with sympathetic eyes, and not one of them, not one , would understand what he'd gone through. The scream that tore his heart out as he watched, handcuffed, unable to help, as Winston died in front of him.

Bede was sure that to the cops it hadn't mattered that a drug dealer was bleeding out, just like they didn't care when a whore got messed up in a back alley when she'd gone there to hook up with another john so she could make her monthly rent.

Well , was the unspoken opinion, s he was just a whore, after all .

Likewise, Winston had just been another drug dealer.

In his three-piece suit, he had risen through the ranks till he only dealt with high-level suppliers, the ones who could afford to rent out entire floors at the Oxford Hotel in Denver. Who had contacts on the coast or on the border and could ship in cocaine by the truckload.

For Bede, the lowlifes in his world had been those junkies who would do anything for their next fix. This had nothing to do with Bede, of course. When Bede happened to see a junkie on the street, he might briefly wonder if he'd been involved in the sale of whatever made the junkie's teeth fall out, their bones rattle beneath their skin. But he never slowed down.

He'd never really understood what it felt like to be like one of those whores or junkies on the other end of that kind of derisive opinion. That is until he'd been arrested and incarcerated, treated like he was less than dirt beneath a guard's boots.

But now, sitting in a beautiful glade, at a picnic bench that still smelled of new paint, looking at the view of a glass-surfaced lake reflecting the long, imposing beauty of the ridge behind the pine trees, maybe it was time to turn over a new leaf. Become a guy who raked leaves from his lawn in the fall and shoveled snow from his front sidewalk in the winter.

He'd never cared about any of that before, and now the application was showing him how hopeless it all was to become a regular guy because how was he supposed to fill out this dumb form? It was an assignment like back in school, and he had not studied.

Even if he did fill out one of the blanks with where he worked: 319 Adams Street (sometimes), or how long he'd worked there: two years, or who he'd worked for: Ralph the Mouth—there was no way Ralph would be willing to validate that, yes, Bede had been his best delivery boy for those two years.

If Bede put any of that on the form and Ralph found out? Ralph would kill him, and then the cops would have another dead body on their hands.

Even if Ralph didn't find out and kill him, Bede was a convicted felon.

He might— might —be able to get a job at a car wash in Cheyenne, or one of those dingy breakfast diners that seemed to spring up like dandelions only to go under inside of six months because too many people were getting food poisoning.

It was that or go back to Denver and wade through all the crap only to end up in a Winston-less world, all alone, and with most of his regular contacts and customers being suspicious that he was wearing a wire.

It would take years to build up enough trust to be able to get his old reputation back. Years before, he could afford the kind of three-piece suits he'd so loved to wear. He didn't really know any other kind of life, but what choice did he have?

It was a fucking crossroads, wasn't it. The fucking counselor had said it was, like he knew what Bede was up against, and it made him want to slap Micah good and hard.

Bede had skills, just nothing anybody in the real world would want.

He tossed the clipboard across the surface of the picnic table where it caught on something and teetered at the edge, threatening to fling itself to the grass.

"Something I can help with?" asked Galen's voice from behind him.

Bede turned, and if a fresh breeze sprang up all around the second he clapped eyes on Galen, it must have been a fluke. But no. The surface of the lake ruffled in response, and the air smelled like warm pine needles.

"No," said Bede, reaching for the clipboard, ignoring, or trying to, the soothing calm that Galen brought with him that surrounded him like a cloak.

Of course, the answer was no. No, he didn't need help. No, he didn't need Galen helping him. No, he didn't want to create a new life for himself.

His answer had to be no, because otherwise it'd be yes. Yes, he wanted help—needed it—but no, he did not want Galen to see him at his lowest point, where he'd so painfully come to the realization that if he wanted to move on, he'd have to make some hard decisions, and figure out how to go back to square one without totally demeaning himself.

"Seriously, no," said Bede as Galen slid along the bench on the other side of the picnic table.

So now that pretty face with its flushed cheeks and on-the-edge of laughter gray eyes, that mess of hair suddenly Bede could see himself sliding his fingers through—all of this was framed beautifully by the pine trees, the gray ridge, and the bowl of blue sky.

For a second, a full pound of his heart, Bede found himself wanting what he simply could not have: a new, law-abiding life with this guy. A lawn raking, show shoveling, grocery buying, bill paying kind of life. Full of the laughter that teased him now from Galen's gray eyes.

Yes, Bede had come to a crossroads in his life. He was willing to admit it, but at the same time, he had no idea whatsoever which direction he should take. But if taking the straight road made him feel the way that looking at Galen made him feel, then maybe he would say yes.