Seasons

He has his last check sent to my home address. It’s from the Montana Department of Corrections in the amount of $401.63. Maybe I shouldn’t have opened the envelope, but I thought it might’ve had something to do with the letter I’d drafted on his behalf for his parole hearing. I wrote it on university letterhead to try to impress the board members. Whether it helped or not, I do not know, but I’m told that he’s free now and his check is still here. I’m sure he needs the money. I know he’ll call. I just don’t know when. It’s been a month, and I’ve begun to worry.

I hope that all the letters we write each other while he’s in prison make some kind of difference. But I had also hoped that all the hours we spent talking and poring over the Big Book at Bill’s Diner would have made some kind of difference and they ultimately did not. We talk as many hours on the phone. We work on the Steps meticulously, laboriously, and we attend meetings together three times a week. Often I pick him up at his mother’s house, and he seems happy. He seems committed to living a clean and sober life. I know he is proud of himself the night he claims his first-year chip, and I am proud for him. His mother, a recovering alcoholic-addict herself, gives him his cake in front of a packed room, and she is proud, too, and crying. I know there are some there who never thought he would get this far, but he proves them wrong.

I’ll call him Ty, though that is not his real name, and he bucks the odds for ex-felons and lands a good-paying construction job. He gets his driver’s license back after having it revoked years before and buys a lowered Honda. And the girls, he soon has plenty of girlfriends, because he’s handsome and charming, and they seem drawn to that bad-boy reputation. I caution him not to play one against the other, to get one girl’s hopes up and dash another’s. Deceit is endemic to our old lifestyle and we can’t go there anymore. Hurting women is degrading, and in degrading them, we are, in effect, degrading ourselves. That’s a tough one for Ty, and I know he hears my admonitions, I warn him many times, but I don’t believe he ever really listens. I personally know this lie all too well, having cheated on my first wife, and now, sober, finally realizing how selfish and devastatingly hurtful duplicity is.

I won’t tell him that he let me down because this isn’t and never has been about me. But I think it’s fair to say that Ty gives up on himself. I also think it’s fair to say that someone who’s spent nearly ten of his twenty-eight years in juvenile hall and prison has a skewed vision of himself and that it makes him more susceptible to giving up and returning to the criminal mind-set he knows best.

For Ty, the life of chaos and turmoil begins early, being thrown into foster care at the age of nine when the courts determine that his parents are unfit to raise him. Then, when they clean up, he’s allowed to return home for a year before his parents start using again and the insanity overwhelms them, as it does Ty, because this time around he discovers their stash of meth and helps himself to a sample. Nothing, before or since, has ever made him feel better than the rush of that first blast, but then his parents are busted again, and he’s right back where he left off, in foster care. And it’s not as if these foster homes in the backwoods or small towns of Montana, or anywhere for that matter, necessarily have a child’s best interests at heart. A kid like Ty gets bounced around from place to place as if they’re more trouble than they’re worth, and since he’s using meth now whenever he can get his hands on it, and since the government checks for his care don’t amount to much, he finds himself on a whirlwind tour of the state of Montana, until, maybe inevitably, he winds up most at home in youth detention centers for stealing and robbing to feed his growing habit. How is he supposed to learn about love and kindness, right and wrong, good from bad, when his friends and family apparently don’t know much about these things, either? Or, if they do, is it possible that they’re simply too high, stoned, or drunk to share them? At some point these questions become an irrelevancy and fade into the background of his life. The drugs turn into their own problem independent of one’s past.

Despite all the adversity and hardship, I advise him to stop blaming others for his own troubles. I advise him to forgive his father. I advise him to forgive his mother. I know she feels intense guilt for abandoning him, but she leaves the man who batters her, moves to California, and turns her life around. She works her way through college, remarries, and becomes a registered nurse, and now she allows Ty, a grown man, to live in her home. And she is, after all, the reason he and I know each other. She is, after all, the person who introduces us at a meeting, and how, when I invite Ty for a cup of coffee later that night, he asks me to sponsor him. More important, however, is that issue of forgiveness. He’s no safer harboring resentments than I am. In the poor schools I attend growing up, I take beatings from black and brown students because of my white skin, but it hardly compares to the vicious attacks he suffers in prison. I’ve never had to choose sides according to race to survive, and I’ve long since learned to move beyond my prejudices and anger and make all sorts of friends without regard to color or sexual orientation. Does he remember we worked on this? Does he remember how I repeatedly tell him that he can’t allow himself to see the black and brown faces of those who hurt him in all the black and brown people who have not? That hate begets hate. This is a hard lesson for him, because he prides himself as a fighter who knows to strike before being struck, who knows that the first one stunned is most likely the first one to hit the ground, and it’s on the ground when others join in, swarming.

I get that.

I also get that being a so-called man in prison is about respect and dignity. Inmates are stripped of these things, and in their place emerges a warped sense of masculinity. What passes for honor is in truth largely fear, and if someone brushes shoulders with Ty when he’s walking the halls, or looks at him the wrong way, that’s reason to fight or worse. But outside those walls it’s a different world, and respect is about control. About treating others as he would like to be treated. It is not earned through violence but rather by turning away from it whenever possible, by being responsible, calm, and collected instead of exploding and striking out. We boil it down to a simple phrase, a mantra that I ask him to repeat every time he feels the rage building inside him, regardless of the cause or rationale: Lose your cool, go back to prison . . . lose your cool, go back to prison. Even he admits that this small suggestion makes a significant difference when one night six months into his sobriety he stops at a Burger King in San Bernardino and the kid working the drive-through gives him change for a ten instead of the twenty he hands him. Rather than consider the possibility that it’s an innocent mistake, he immediately thinks the worst, that the kid is trying to cheat him, and Ty calls him on it. He insists he’s right. The kid insists he’s wrong, and instead of letting it go at that, Ty parks his car, gets out, and tries to go inside. But it’s late and the doors are locked. Only the drive-through is open, and yet he is about to pound on the glass doors and start hollering, demanding his money, before it dawns on him that if the cops come they’ll surely take the word of the kid in a paper hat over an adult ex-con on felony probation for grand theft auto and possession of narcotics.

“I heard your voice, man,” he tells me, “and I said fuck it and got back in my car. Shit, I didn’t even wait for my burger and fries.”

I praise him.

I tell him that’s progress. I tell him that he did the right and smart thing. That he can’t afford to lose his temper anymore. That he has to relearn how to live peacefully and that means letting go of his hate and resentment toward blacks and browns and cops and prison guards and gays and lesbians and kids working at the Burger King, and, yes, even the molester in our group who’s on the Megan’s Law list for lewd or lascivious acts with a child under fourteen years of age. This guy did his time, too, and we’re supposed to help even the most wretched among us, including white supremacists, when the mutual goal is sobriety. I work with Ty because he needs the guidance of a clean and sober older man who’s battled anger and addiction much longer than he has.

Ty graduates from the youth detention centers to the state prison one night while he’s walking the streets in downtown Billings, Montana, and comes across a Corvette. It’s parked in the driveway of a car dealership, and it’s idling, keys in the ignition. He looks around but doesn’t see anyone. To hear him tell it, it’s the owner’s fault. Only a fool would leave an extraordinarily fast and expensive sports car alone with the motor running and not expect an eighteen-year-old kid strung out on methamphetamine to slip behind the wheel and take it for a ride. Since he plans to return it after a couple laps around the block, maybe a quick drive through town, he sees no harm in his actions. The owner won’t even have time to report it stolen before he has it back. That he’s already on probation for misdemeanor petty theft, a crime he says he didn’t commit, apparently doesn’t cross his mind, not when he’s high, anyway, and feeling down over his girlfriend breaking up with him just hours before. It’s why he’s walking the streets at night in the first place, trying to figure shit out, what he said to her, where he went wrong, and the last thing he’s thinking about is how a little joyride might make his situation all the worse, assuming he’s caught, though he’s sure that he won’t be. Besides, fuck the law. Fuck cops. He keeps seeing the sweaty face of that black pig who threw him facedown on the hood of the cruiser and cuffed him on the petty theft charge outside Wal-Mart for stealing a bicycle, which he swears he didn’t do. He tells me what he tells the cop. That somebody gave him the bike. He says he had no idea it was stolen. He tells me he can’t walk the streets without the pigs shaking him down every time they lay eyes on him. “That’s fucked up, man,” is how he puts it. “You feel me? You feel me?” These are phrases he uses often, and no, I don’t feel him, but I’ll nod and agree as he lays out his story for me, because as his sponsor I need to gain his trust before I can help him, assuming I can, and I’m not so sure about that. His problems, like my own, run deeper than drugs and alcohol, though without sobriety he can’t even begin to address them.

However troubled Ty’s past, I’m not buying that even a drug-addled eighteen-year-old, especially one on probation, doesn’t have the ability to assess the wisdom of jumping behind the wheel of a Corvette, gunning the engine, and tearing off down the street. Something else is at work here. And I think I understand it from the homes and office buildings I burglarized when I was a teenager. I’m not proud of what I did. It was wrong. It was bad. I knew it then and I know it now. But breaking and entering and the excitement of what you might find, of what you might get—guns, cash, jewelry, it’s always a surprise—coupled with the risk of getting shot or caught by the cops is a tremendous adrenaline rush, a huge thrill, a real kick. So a part of me is with him when he hits the gas and he’s thrust back in his seat, the road ahead disappearing beneath him, the lampposts and buildings blurring to the sides. Another part, the sober adult, feels shame and guilt for identifying with Ty. The compulsion for crime is a compulsion akin to addiction.

He’s excited, animated, gesturing as he tells me about the Corvette at Bill’s Diner where I also meet regularly with my own sponsor who is slowly wasting away from cancer as Ty and I talk. I shake my head, more in resignation than disapproval, because I know that there’s only one way this story can end. Of course he gets lit up by the Billings police, and of course because he’s young and stupid and whacked out on meth, instead of pulling over he leads them on a high-speed chase through town and onto the interstate and soon enough crashes the Corvette into a telephone pole. He doesn’t hurt anyone but himself, breaking his leg and shattering his kneecap, which will leave him with a slight limp for the rest of his life.

“It was fucking wild,” he says, and he says it gleefully, as if it’s something to be proud of. I would prefer that he feel regret for his actions, as I came to feel for my crimes as a teenager, and I tell him that it was not fucking wild. It was fucking stupid. His smile fades, as it should, and he could’ve left then. He could’ve gotten up and walked out of the diner but he chose to stay.

I’m glad he does.

Maybe he’s ready to listen to the old dog and stop romanticizing crime and rationalizing irrational drugged-out behavior. This one impulsive act turns a violation of probation on a misdemeanor petty theft charge from a six-month sentence in the county jail to a years-long stint at Montana State Prison for grand theft auto, possession of narcotics, evading arrest, and a host of other serious tack-on charges. And Ty is lucky it isn’t worse. The district attorney pleads a twelve-year sentence down to eight, and somehow, though his behavior in prison is far from model, he’s out in six. If he violates the conditions of his parole, however, if he tests dirty, and his parole officer tests him monthly, it’s back to Montana to serve out the remainder of his eight-year sentence. For Ty the cost of getting high is the difference between living free or wasting life locked up.

In some ways, he knows how to function better in prison than in the complicated world outside of it. The longer you’re in, I’m told, the harder it is to stay out. I ask Ty the question I ask of two other ex-cons I’ve sponsored, one of whom is back in prison, the other last spotted by another A.A. member a few months earlier on the streets of San Bernardino, apparently using again. I have also asked this same question of a group of prisoners I visited for an A.A. meeting, and I do it, as I do with Ty, to shed light on the obvious.

“These crimes,” I say, “how many did you do when you were high?”

“Just the ones I got caught for?”

“All of them,” I say.

“Fuck, I did a lot of stuff, man. I can’t even remember it all.”

“Were you high? That’s all I’m asking.”

He shrugs. “Yeah, mostly. Either high or coming down. Jonesing, you know.”

“You see what I’m saying,” I say.

“What?”

“We fuck up when we get loaded. We do stuff we wouldn’t ordinarily do. Like steal Corvettes. Or hurt or rob people. I bet you wouldn’t have done half the shit you did if you weren’t high.” Ty is drinking a Coke, and he looks away, begins fidgeting with the straw. “Something has to change,” I say, “and that something is you.”

I’d told him to bring a pen and a notebook to our meeting, and now I ask him to get out that pen. Open that notebook. He’s quick to the task, and as he fumbles to open the notebook I detect enthusiasm in his eyes, a hint of eagerness, and his spirit buoys my own. He likes that I have a plan. I don’t tell him that it’s just basic A.A. protocol with a little extra due diligence thrown in for protection.

“Here’s what you’re going to do,” I say. “You ready? I want you to write this down.”

The list begins with having him call me every night between seven and nine, followed by daily readings in the Big Book, beginning with “The Doctor’s Opinion,” which I tell him I’ll quiz him on the next time we meet, here at Bill’s this coming Friday night before the meeting. I want him to pray every morning and ask God, whoever or whatever his God may be, to keep him sober today. I want him to pray every night and thank God, whoever or whatever his God may be, for keeping him sober today and ask that He do the same for him tomorrow. I want him to meditate when he wakes up. Just sit on the floor and be still and quiet and try to stop your thoughts from racing before you reach for that first cup of coffee. Begin with a minute or two and work up to ten. We’ll start with Step One and get to the Fourth and Fifth as soon as we can. These Steps made the greatest difference for me. When I did them with my sponsor, I tell him, I felt, for the first time in my decades-long struggle to get clean and sober, safe from the desire to pick up a drink or a drug.

No matter how meticulously we follow the same path, no one, including myself, can guarantee we’ll get the same results, but it’s more than worth a shot, and so this is how we begin. And we stick to it. And he does well, he does wonderfully until one night, a few weeks after earning his first-year chip, he goes to a party in San Bernardino where everyone is drinking and having a great time. Why can’t he enjoy himself, too? Couple that reasoning with the bright idea that his problem is and always has been with meth, not booze, and he’s free to have a beer or two. Or three. Regrettably he doesn’t call to share his bright idea with me before he cracks open that first beer, suspecting, I imagine, that I wouldn’t find it all that bright. Though alcohol may never have been a problem for Ty, I would’ve told him that it’ll make him vulnerable, that it’ll lower his resistance, and that soon enough he’ll return to his drug of choice.

But if alcohol isn’t a problem, why does he drive up the mountain drunk and crash his lowered Honda into a tree as he’s trying to maneuver the turn onto his mother’s street? It’s four in the morning, there are few cars on the road and no sheriffs around, and because he’s lucky and isn’t badly injured, he leaves the Honda, which is totaled, and walks home. It’s demoralizing and humiliating to confess to his mother that he messed up, but he’s her son, she loves him, and so she covers for him, reporting the collision to the sheriff’s department and the insurance company and telling them it was her fault, that she had been driving. A DUI is no small violation of Ty’s parole, and if not for his mother he could’ve ended up serving out the last two of his eight-year sentence at Montana State.

The next day, he calls me.

He says he slipped, that he screwed up, he needs to talk. We meet and he gives me the sordid details while hanging his head, unable to look me in the eyes. For having been in a crash, he fares well, incurring only a deep laceration under his chin, patched with butterfly bandages, and an oblong lump on his forehead that’s beginning to turn black and yellow around the edges.

He thinks he let me down when really he has only let himself down. He expects me to be outraged, to raise my voice in anger and reprimand him, like a child, but I do no such thing. I’ve relapsed myself more times than I can remember, and my own sponsor, when he learns that he has terminal cancer, retreats to the bottle after fifteen years of sobriety. But he’s sober again now. That’s what matters. That Ty is here. That he’s already back on track by meeting with me. All this is not to say that relapsing is no big deal. It is. But he can also learn from it, taking stock of the triggers that led to that first drink, and hereafter being vigilant of them.

Surprisingly, at least to Ty, I am neither shocked nor incensed. We beat up enough on ourselves when we screw up and don’t need anyone else beating on us, too. I suggest we get back to work right away, start over on the Steps, and do a more thorough inventory on the Fourth. Each time we relapse, there’s new stuff to add to the list, and also typically a few things we likely forgot to include the first time around. We part with Ty feeling a little better about himself, knowing that he’s not alone in relapsing, that sadly it’s more the norm than the exception with people like us. But that doesn’t relieve him from taking responsibility. I tell him that there may not be a next time. That he could die, like so many others who slip. Does he want to take that chance?

Is it worth it?

He knows the answer.

So what happens that very day between the time we talk and a few hours later, at 6:45 p.m., when I come to pick him up at his mother’s house to take him to a meeting and he’s not there? She’s not home, either. I call his cell but it goes to voicemail. I leave a message, telling him to call me. He doesn’t. Days pass. I call once more. Once more it goes to voicemail. I suspect the worst, and my suspicions are confirmed when I see his mother at a meeting later that week. Ty got into a fight with his stepfather that afternoon, who is also a recovering alcoholic-addict, but an unforgiving one, and because Ty slipped, because he had his mother assume blame for crashing the car, his stepfather kicks him out of the house. I’m sure it’s an ugly scene, and I empathize with Ty’s situation, being thrown out with nowhere to go when he already feels rotten about himself, but that’s not an excuse to implode. That’s how we need to think, anyway, but the truth is that we each have our own breaking point where we feel compelled to shut out the world and all our thoughts and emotions and retreat to the place that brings us comfort from our pain, confusion, and anger. But does the drink or drug really offer relief? And, if so, how long does it last before life spins out of control again? The thing is, it’s all inside the head, and you can’t escape yourself. I’ve tried and tried and it’s never worked.

Ty is now something of a ghost. An enigma. Gossip abounds within the A.A. circle. One week someone spots him at the 7-Eleven in the neighboring town of Crestline. Another week he’s seen walking into the forest with a paper bag under his arm. His boss says he hasn’t been to work in a month but that someone broke into a shed at their construction site and stole a thousand dollars’ worth of power tools. He’s not saying it’s Ty, but Ty knew those tools were there.

Nearly a year passes before Ty is arrested at a storage unit in Skyforest with another tweaker, a girl, a sixteen-year-old runaway. Apparently the two of them had been living there, and inside the unit, among his dirty clothing and hers, the sheriff finds all sorts of stolen goods, from TVs to microwaves, which explains the rash of home burglaries reported in the crime log of the Mountain News. They also find a quarter ounce of meth, pipes and syringes, and a triple-beam scale for weighing drugs for sales. Ty is fucked. The paper prints his mug shot, looking drawn and wasted, his eyes sunken, his cheeks sucked in. The girl is a minor and escapes the public humiliation of a photo, or even the mention of her name. It’s another six months before I finally hear from him again.

It’s one of those automated calls from the West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga, asking if I’ll accept a collect call from an inmate. I think we have a time limit of fifteen minutes, but we don’t use more than five. All he wants is for me to visit him. Except for his mother, nobody has come to see him, no friends, no one from our A.A. group, not even the sister I never knew he had. This troubles me. Shouldn’t his sister have been part of his Fourth Step inventory? I find it hard to believe that there’s been no emotional injury, no bad blood between the two of them, which makes me wonder what else Ty didn’t tell me about and why. On a personal level I could not care less about the specifics, but the honesty part, coming clean with our resentments and those we’ve harmed, intentionally or not, that there’s no getting around.

In jail he’s well-fed and looks nothing like his mug shot. It’s amazing how quickly he rebounds, but then he is young. Thirty now? Thirty-one? A sheet of plexiglass separates us and we sit on hard plastic chairs and talk into old-fashioned phone receivers. He’s dressed in orange prison scrubs, and he tells me his “cellie is cool, down with the brothers,” and he does not mean blacks or browns. Smiling, he stands and pulls up his shirt, showing me his latest tat, the word peckerwood inked across his chest in large, Old English–style lettering. Am I supposed to be impressed? Is he showing me this in defiance of everything we talked about, that we tried to change and move beyond? Ty brags about how he “fucked up a nigger, a big motherfucker, too,” on the bus from the holding tank in San Bernardino to this place when the guy ordered him to “get up, white boys in the back.” I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to advise. If the visitors in the lobby are any indication, his color and kind are vastly outnumbered here, and maybe he needs to be this way again, full of hate and hostility, prison imperatives for staying alive. I wish he could once and for all clean up and do his time and learn from his mistakes and not waste the rest of his life killing whatever good could come of it. “There’s no iron in the yards here. They took the weights away in California, and you’re all buff and shit, man. Can you put together a workout for me, something I can do in my cell?” I tell him I will. We’re given one automated warning two minutes before the line allowing us to speak between the thick glass goes dead, and he nods goodbye to me as I stand. I nod back, anxious to get out of here, to put this day, this memory behind me.

The courts are overloaded with cases and apparently it’s too much trouble to try him for burglary and the lesser offense of harboring and contributing to the delinquency of a runaway minor. Apparently it’s too much trouble to try him at all and his public defender strikes a deal with the district attorney. Ty serves two years for possession of narcotics and stolen goods in California and then he’s transferred back to Montana to finish up the last two of his previous eight-year sentence. Even though he loses another four years of his life to prison, which is exactly where he belongs, it’s still a gravy deal. Why I answer his letters, however, I do not know. Maybe I feel sorry for him. If that’s the reason, there is no rational basis for it. He knows where drugs took him before and they have taken him there again. He admits as much in his letters, heavily laced with remorse and sorrow, but at least he is clean now, they have A.A. in prison, and he says he attends every meeting they allow him. He says he’s reading the Big Book again, and the Bible, too, and praying. Lots of praying. I respond to his letters with encouragement, urging him to stay out of trouble, to try not to get into fights, and every few months I put a little money into his account for snacks and toiletries. Ty promises to pay me back but I don’t expect or want it. These are not loans. He asks for a subscription to Maxim and I get it for him. It’s the closest thing to pornography the prison allows, and it’s hardly pornography with women in lingerie and bikinis.

The Montana Department of Corrections may not in truth correct anything, other than what might be exacted through the punishment of incarceration, but they do understand the importance of money for a convict’s survival when he’s returned to the community. However meager the pay, they give him a job in the mess hall eighteen months prior to his release. In that time he saves two thousand dollars, not including his last check of $401.63, but as a former dope dealer he’s used to keeping his cash in hand. Maybe he never learned to open a bank account. Maybe it never occurs to him that his money would be safer in a bank than a hiding spot at his father’s place in the woods on the outskirts of Billings. He lets Ty stay with him for a few weeks until he can get permission from his parole officer to move back to California.

It sounds too incredible. It sounds so ill-fated, so disastrous that my first thought, when his mother tells me about it, is that it’s a lie. But she shows me her cell phone. She shows me the picture Ty sent her of the house reduced to ashes, and all his cash, of course, up in smoke with it. The only thing left standing is the stone chimney, and in the background is a skinny little boy, shirtless, poking through the rubble with a stick. I have no idea who he is. A relative? A curious neighbor kid? Assuming Ty stays clean while he’s locked up, it’s possible that losing all his hard-earned seed money sets him off again. It doesn’t have to be that way, though. He could turn the situation around and be grateful that no one is in the house when it catches fire and burns to the ground. He could consider that he narrowly escaped a horribly painful death.

He’s alive.

Terrible as it is to lose all that money, especially for an ex-con who needs every cent of it to get back on his feet, it is still only that, money, and he can make more. Awful things happen all the time, and he can use them as a way of strengthening his resolve to stay sober rather than letting it take him down, like that house, in a blaze of fire and ash. I know that looking at it this way is easier said than done, and when I learn that he’s back in California, living on the mountain again but I don’t hear from him right away, I begin to doubt. I begin to worry. I want to think that he’s fine, that nobody fresh out of prison after all those years would immediately return to the drug that put him there.

Of all people, however, I should know better.

Cell phone reception in mountainous terrain is poor. When he finally does call, his voice cuts in and out, but despite the intermittent static we manage to communicate. But it’s all business. Nothing congratulatory. No excitement over his release. Nothing about how wonderful it must feel to be free again. I want to chalk up his lack of enthusiasm to the urgency of a bad connection, the need to say only what needs to be said before we lose each other again, but there’s something off, something nervous and hurried in his voice, and we talk no longer than it takes to arrange a time to meet for him to pick up his last check. I assume he lost all his belongings in the fire, so after we hang up I rummage through my closet and dresser drawers for some clothes for him. I hesitate to part with one of my favorite jackets, but it’s November, winter is near, and he’ll need a good jacket. We’re about the same size, and it’s leather, black leather, with a heavy wool lining.

The following afternoon I pick him up outside the 7-Eleven in Crestline. He’s leaning against the pay phone when I arrive. As he approaches my car, I can tell he’s lost weight, and when he climbs inside, he doesn’t look me in the eye. His hand, when we shake, feels sweaty and clammy, and I know immediately that he’s high. “I dig your new wheels,” he says. I’m driving a black BMW, and it unexpectedly becomes a measure of just how long he’s been away, because I’ve owned this car for several years. “Bet this fucker’s fast, huh?” He is right about that, and the idea of a car sends a signal to his brain. “I was going to buy a car. You can’t get a job without a car. I guess my mom told you about the fire. What fucking luck. Two thousand bucks. Poof. Gone. Can you believe that shit?” He talks fast, running his sentences together, and then he’s quiet, as if he suddenly realizes that he’s given himself away, that I know he’s tweaking, and his shame is palpable. But there’s no need for that. I want to tell him to relax. I already figured he was high when he called the other day and he confirmed it the second he climbed into my car and lowered his eyes.

On the way to my bank he continually pinches at the knee of his jeans, rolling the fabric between his fingers, releasing it, then pinching at it again. The teller, a middle-aged woman with a British accent, has seen his type before. There are plenty like him on the mountain and she is justifiably suspicious of cashing his check. He is used to it, being looked down on for the sagging jeans he wears, the oversized T-shirt, the blue knit cap pulled down over his ears. It’s the uniform of estrangement. At one time I aroused similar mistrust, not so much for my dress as that sunken, gaunt dead-giveaway look of your common junkie, of your common drunk, but I am a respectable man now. I am healthy. I have reclaimed my life, and this teller has never met that other man. She only knows who I am today, a professor with enough in my account to cover Ty’s otherwise worthless endorsement of his own check. I can see the disapproval on her face. What am I doing with this drug addict, cashing this check from the Montana Department of Corrections? What terrible things did he do to wind up there? How is it that he came into my life? I don’t judge or condemn her for it. Her reaction is a normal one for a person who does not associate with people like Ty and my former self. Despite outward appearances, he and I were once sadly in much the same position, and I have not forgotten who I once was and who I could very well become again. I have not forgotten about Ty, either, and I know that I am not supposed to give up hope on even the most hopeless among us, but he has worn me down. I have lost faith in him. He has traded one form of confinement for another, an even smaller cell, a prisoner locked up in his mind for the drugs he consumes.

The teller counts the cash out to me. I hand it to him as we leave the bank. I know it won’t last long. He thanks me. He smiles, and I see his teeth, already blackening around the gums. Instead of shooting meth, he is smoking it now, or doing both, though I don’t notice any tracks on his skinny arms. He must understand that when this little bit of money runs out and he can’t get a job and he commits another serious crime and gets caught that it will be his third strike and he will be sentenced to twenty-five years to life without the possibility of parole.

“Where you staying?”

“Just drop me back off at the 7-Eleven,” he says.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m meeting a friend.”

Some friend, I think.

His mother already told me that he’s not living with her. His stepfather won’t have him. The best I can figure is that wherever he’s staying, he doesn’t want me knowing about it, and I assume that’s the way it will be from now on for us. I let him off where I picked him up in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven with a garbage bag full of clothes and a good heavy jacket that I didn’t really want to part with. He’ll be surprised when he opens the bag and finds it. I think he’ll like it, and I hope it keeps him warm when the snow comes tonight. It’s in the forecast. Already the clouds are rolling in and there is a sharp chill in the air and the wind is blowing and the leaves of the trees are falling to the ground. The light is draining from the sky. Snow will soon blanket the mountains and a quietness will descend upon the streets of this small town, leaving Ty adrift and abandoned, feeling very small and very lonely, lost in the darkness of his own making.