The first part of my plan went perfectly.
Bobby showed up, followed by Mitch and Jerry. We shared some somber reflections about Doc, gone but not forgotten. All three knew about the cell phone, of course. They professed total ignorance about the pills, the pee, and the rest of the things that seemed so at odds with the cheerful, kind, affable guy we knew.
“Guess you never know what a man’s really doing with himself when you’re not around to see it,” Jerry opined.
No, Jerry, you sure don’t. . . .
Once we had eulogized Doc to what felt like an appropriate degree, we moved onto the business of the game. Just like I had paid him to do, Bobby proposed me as Doc’s permanent replacement. Actually, he laid it out like it was a foregone conclusion. Mitch and Jerry acceded to it with polite murmurs. Ultimately, my cans would spend as well as anyone else’s.
Then we started playing. As in the first two nights, my only real goals were to stay in the game as long as possible and to continue neighborly relations with Mitch. When I lost, I did so good-naturedly. When I won, I did so without gloating.
I was in the midst of trying to draw an inside straight—odds of success: roughly one in thirteen, but what the hell—when Frank rounded the corner and entered the card room. His proportions were such that he changed the air pressure when he entered a room. Even Bobby, no dainty flower, glanced Frank’s way.
Frank lumbered over to Mitch, who was on the other side of the table from me, and loomed above him.
Well above him.
“I got a problem with you, Mr. Dupree,” Frank said.
The words themselves were not especially intimidating, particularly with the courteous title thrown in. And, speaking strictly as a thespian, his inflection was a little flat. But being as it came from a mouth surrounded by 350 pounds, it was effective enough.
“And what’s that?” Mitch asked. He was trying not to show fear, but his already high voice had climbed another half an octave, bringing it into alto territory.
“I’m hearing you a snitch,” Frank said. “That inspection was because of you.”
Jerry and I put our cards down on the table. Mitch was still clutching his. Bobby sat up like a rod had been inserted into his back. These were fighting words, except no sane non-colossus would take on Frank.
“Well, now, people hear all kinds of things,” Mitch said. “That doesn’t make them true.”
“Lost my Slim Jims because of you,” Frank continued.
“I’m sorry to hear that. But I had nothing to do with it. I lost a pair of socks my missus knit for me. Why would I bring that on myself?”
Bobby interjected: “Yeah, didn’t you hear? The inspection was just because there’s some kind of big cheese from the BOP coming in.”
“Don’t know when I’m going to get Slim Jims again,” Frank said, ignoring them both. “They was a special occasion. Afraid I’m going to have to beat you up now.”
Again, Frank’s delivery left a lot to be desired. And, again, it didn’t matter.
“Now what’s that going to solve?” Mitch asked.
“Make me feel better about losing my Slim Jims,” Frank said.
“I didn’t have anything to do with you losing your—”
Frank interrupted whatever Mitch was about to say by grabbing his neck. I sprang to my feet, rounding the table, ready to begin my intervention.
“I could tear your throat out right now,” Frank growled. “That way you couldn’t snitch no more.”
Mitch’s eyes flared with fear. Frank leaned into him a little, increasing the pressure. The other guys at the table were simply frozen. Only in action movies do people react to unexpected conflict with instant heroism. In real life, they need a little time to figure out what’s even happening.
“Okay, that’s enough, Frank,” I said in a stentorian voice.
But Frank wasn’t paying me any attention. His hubcap-size hand was covering the entire front of Mitch’s fleshy neck, with the thumb and fingers wrapping around to the back.
“Don’t like no snitch,” he said, with his teeth bared.
This time it actually was theatrically convincing. But I had this sudden fear he wasn’t acting. It was like I was seeing a different side to Frank, a savage side that was only coming out now that he quite literally held a man’s life in his huge hand. Morgantown was supposed to be reserved for nonviolent offenders, but had Frank slipped through the cracks somehow?
I spoke with renewed force: “I said that’s enough, Frank. Knock it off.”
Mitch wasn’t speaking. It wasn’t clear to me if that was from fear or from being physically incapable of getting air into his lungs.
Whatever the case, this had gone on long enough.
“Stop it!” I said. “Now!”
I pushed Frank with both hands. He didn’t budge.
“They gave me a point,” Frank said. “Never got no points before.”
Mitch was clutching at Frank’s hand, trying desperately to rip it off. His efforts to move Frank were as successful as mine.
This had to end. Immediately. But I couldn’t even seem to get Frank’s attention, much less stop his behavior. Not knowing what else to do, I gathered my legs underneath me and, with every bit of strength I could summon, launched myself into Frank’s midsection.
This finally staggered him. A little. He took two steps backward, releasing his grip in the process.
Mitch gasped for air.
“I’m no snitch,” he choked out. “What’s wrong with you?”
I wished he’d shut his face. If Frank—in whatever state of mind he now found himself—decided he was going to finish this job and crush Mitch’s windpipe once and for all, there was nothing I could do to stop him.
Yet somehow I was able to use the momentum I had gathered to keep herding him out of the room. It took all my might, because Frank was battling against me. But my lower center of gravity kept him off-balance.
Then, once we were out of sight of the poker table, Frank grabbed both my shoulders and set me upright, like he was playing with a particularly animated doll.
I was still so wound up I thought this was just the next round. Then I looked at his face. He was smiling at me. Gentle Frank had returned. Maybe he had never really left. I bent over and put my hands on my knees.
“Good God, Frank. I was worried about you there for a second,” I said, still breathing heavily from the effort I had just expended.
He wasn’t even winded. “Just wanted to make sure you got your money’s worth, sir.”
When I returned to the game, the guys were already in the midst of convincing Mitch the incident wasn’t worth reporting. Fights were rare at Morgantown, and unless there was physical evidence—a bruise, a cut, something like that—the administration wasn’t likely to pursue discipline.
Bobby also proposed, and I seconded, the notion that telling a CO would only reinforce Frank’s strange assumption that Mitch had been the snitch. Better to de-escalate the situation, leave it be, and hope Big Frank forgot about his suspicions.
“He’s my roommate,” I said. “I’ll talk to him later. I think I can get this whole thing to blow over. He trusts me.”
“All right, all right,” Jerry said. “Can we play cards now?”
At that point everyone else folded. Only a guy sitting on trip jacks was that eager to get back to the game.
The incident wasn’t mentioned the rest of the evening. And I thought it had been only a moderate success—worth the twenty cans, but ultimately just another small step in my journey—until the next morning on the way to breakfast.
It was one of those misty mountain mornings, with a late-fall chill in the air. I had my hands shoved in my pockets and was hurrying toward the dining hall when I heard Mitch’s voice from behind me.
“Hey, Pete,” he said. “Wait up a second.”
I turned to see Mitch double-timing. I stopped on the side of the path and resumed walking only when he had caught up to me.
“I owe you an apology,” he said. “I was so shaken up last night, I realized later I never thanked you for saving my ass.”
“Oh, no big deal, really.”
“Hell it wasn’t. That guy—Frank is his name? That’s one big son of a bitch right there. It was pretty brave of you to throw yourself at him. No way I’d have the stones to do something like that.”
I just gave him a modest little shrug. “Big guys never expect a little guy is going to go after them. And when you do, they think you must be nuts, so they back off pretty fast. How you feeling this morning?”
“I’m okay,” he said, rubbing his neck. “A little sore, but it could have been worse. I got the sense from the way he was squeezing that he wasn’t even trying that hard. Don’t want to know what he could do if he really put his mind to it.”
He looked appropriately haunted.
“I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” I said. “I talked to him last night and convinced him you had nothing to do with the inspection. Then I told him if he wanted to get to Mr. Dupree, he was going to have to go through me first. That scared him off good.”
I smiled. Mitch laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. Just like good buddies do.
“Well, I thought about it, and I wanted to give you a little thank-you,” he said. “Can you meet me in the card room at one o’clock?”
“Let me consult my calendar. Oh, I happen to have an opening then, yes.”
“Good,” he said, then added, “Come hungry.”
Three minutes before the appointed hour, I walked into the empty Randolph card room and took a seat at our regular table.
Mitch wasn’t there, nor did he show up at one o’clock, nor at five after. I hung out anyway. It wasn’t like I had pressing engagements elsewhere.
Finally, at about ten after one, he came hurrying around the corner.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “A damn CO came into the kitchen and wouldn’t leave, so I had to wait before I could sneak out with this.”
He unzipped his jacket and pulled out a rectangular silver-colored tin, then slid the lid off and set it in front of me. There was parchment paper on top. But my nose told me what was inside before my eyes did.
Freshly baked chocolate chip cookies.
I lifted the paper to reveal the bounty. There were six of them, baked to a perfect golden brown. The chocolate glistened, still gooey from the oven. My mouth flooded with saliva.
It wasn’t that the food at Morgantown was bad. It was edible enough. But this? I breathed in the delectable odor again and may have moaned a little.
“We cooked up a batch for that VIP who’s coming in,” Mitch said. “Wouldn’t you know a few just wouldn’t fit on the platter they asked for? One of the guys in the kitchen worked in a bakery as a kid. He won’t share the recipe, but it’s pretty dynamite.”
I was about to dive in. And then I remembered I wasn’t Tommy Jump.
I was Pete Goodrich, who was torn up from being away from his family, just like Mitch; Pete Goodrich, a husband and father whose greatest ambition in life had been to make a happy home for his wife and children; Pete Goodrich, who missed the simple pleasures of life on the outside, pleasures he wouldn’t get to experience for another eight long years.
Pleasures like chocolate chip cookies.
I can cry on command. Most experienced actors can. In a perfect world, when you cry onstage you’re doing so because you’ve become enmeshed in the character you’re playing and alive in the world being created. Depending on how good the writing is, I can sometimes summon that kind of emotion for a part.
And maybe Meryl Streep can do that all the time. As for the rest of us? Summoning tears eight times a week can require a little method acting.
So call me a hack, but I had a pet hamster, Mudpie, who was my best little buddy for four years before he went off to that big running wheel in the sky. I was nine, and it was my first experience of death. I cried for an entire day.
And even now, when I think about poor little Mudpie . . .
“Sorry,” I said, the tears already starting to roll down my cheeks.
“You okay?” Mitch said, alarmed. “You’re not allergic to chocolate, are you?”
“No, no. I just . . . my wife, Kelly, she used to make me chocolate chip cookies for my birthday. She’d serve them to me all warm like this. And I . . . You know, you try to just hunker down and forget everything and get into the routine around here, and most of the time I can do it. But then . . . Sometimes, it’s the little things, you know?”
I dabbed my sleeves against my face.
“I’m so sorry,” Mitch said. “We’ve all been there, friend. I keep hearing about how much better this place is than real prison. But it’s still prison.”
“Damn right,” I said, making a show of trying to compose myself.
Then, like I was embarrassed about having wept and was trying to deflect attention from myself, I said, “So what about you? What’s the thing you miss the most?”
“You mean besides the obvious?” he said with a grin.
“Yeah, besides that.”
He got a faraway look. “This is going to sound strange, but I miss, just, driving somewhere with my family.”
“Driving.”
“Yeah. Having the four of us together in the car. Maybe we’re planning to stop somewhere along the way and grab a meal. Maybe we’re traveling late at night, trying to get somewhere for the holidays. It didn’t really matter. There was just something about it. You know everyone’s okay, because they’re right there. You could reach out and touch them if you wanted to. You have kids?”
“Three of them,” I said reflexively.
“Yeah, so you know. You spend so much of your time as a family being pulled in this direction or that. One person’s over there and another person’s over there and you’re always worried about what might be happening to them, or worried they might be worried about you, or I don’t know. When you’re not with each other, a part of you is in the wrong place. But then finally you’re in the car, and you’re all going somewhere together so you know you’re where you’re supposed to be. It’s like you’re this perfect little unit and nothing in the whole world can stop you.”
I took in a deep breath and let it go. I was thinking about Amanda and the family she was growing, projecting to the life we would soon have.
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” I said. “Mine are little, five, three, and one, so—”
“So even getting them in the car is a triumph. I remember those years.”
“Well, right,” I said. “But once they’re all in? And you get them all buckled? And then you get on the way, and you turn the heat up a little, and you get some soft music playing, and they all fall asleep?”
“Ohhh. Best feeling ever.”
“You know it.”
And there we were, two dads sharing the small joys of fatherhood. Mitch touched the corners of his eyes with his palms, stopping tears I couldn’t yet see, then gave his head a shake.
“Speaking of the best feeling ever,” he said, “warm chocolate chip cookies have to rank in there somewhere, so let’s dig in before they get cold, what do you say?”
“Great idea.”
“Good man. Show me how it’s done.”
I reached into the tin and lifted out the one closest to me. It was heavy for its size, always a promising sign for a cookie—weight being a proxy for butter saturation. Then I slid it into my mouth and felt a minor explosion as the bitterness of the chocolate collided with the sweetness of the sugar.
“Oh my God,” I gushed, my eyes closed.
“Not bad, huh?”
“Amazing.”
He grabbed one. We chewed in silence, each of us savoring this small escape from the dreariness of incarceration. I might have been imagining it, but I swear Mitch was enjoying my delight as much as he was his own.
It was a rare trait to find in any man, much less one you had met in prison. And it was difficult to square the man contentedly munching cookies, talking about how much he loved family road trips, with a guy who could do the bidding of one of the most barbaric criminal syndicates on earth. I knew it was possible for both to coexist. Human beings are nothing if not complex monkeys.
Still, I had to admit—for whoever he was before he arrived here—I actually liked the Mitch Dupree who was now at FCI Morgantown. Which was nice.
One less thing I had to pretend.