Stranger Son

by Jim Nelson

After drying, she took a folded pair of California prison issue from the stacks beside the tent flap and dressed. Outside, the officer led her to a second tent. At the end of the row of tents, a pyramid of grimy Jefferson prison issue was being burned. Green smoke stretched and reached skyward like a genie released from its lamp.

  In the second tent, she waited in two lines. The first was to take a mugshot. The second was to receive a perfunctory physical examination by a harried-looking doctor. The doctor checked her teeth, hair, nose, and throat. She stepped on a scale and a nurse called out her weight. The doctor asked if she suffered from any sexually transmitted diseases.

  "I don't see how," she said.

  "The officer tells me your clothes were filthy."

  "We got fresh changes off and on."

  "Were you regularly fed?"

  "Not regularly," she said.

  "Did they withhold food as punishment?"

  "They weren't that organized," she said. "They couldn't get their act together. It was like Folsom was the first prison they'd ever run."

  The doctor scratched notes across a pad on his knee with a ballpoint pen. He tore off the top sheet and stuffed it into a manila folder with her name on the outset tab. "She's undernourished," he said to the nurse. "Otherwise, she's fine."

  In a third air-conditioned tent, she waited two and a half hours. When her name was called, she sat where she was directed to sit. She answered all questions asked with quiet yeses and noes. The final yes she uttered was the magic incantation breaking the seal.

  The air-conditioned tent was a makeshift courtroom, one lacking a bench, podium, and jury box. The folding chair she sat in was the witness stand, and the man with the notebook computer seated beside the judge was the stenographer. No gavel was banged. The court's findings were announced like an auctioneer of seized refrigerators declaring the winning bid. The bailiff made an impatient one-handed wave to get her to stand.

  "That's it?" she said.

  "That's it," said the judge absently. She was already examining the next inmate file.

  Hanna Driscoll stepped from the tent into a chaotic parking lot of cars and paddy wagons and television cameras and reporters in suits and ties with microphones in hand. They were busy questioning a lawyer, it looked like. No one took much notice of her.

  Hanna strode with a plastic bag of her returned effects banging against her right leg. A line of prisoners in civvies waited for a bus. Hanna was in civvies too now. She changed in a makeshift changing room, one sectioned off from the makeshift court by blankets pinned to the tent's top. The state had generously arranged for pardoned prisoners a free ride to the Amtrak and Greyhound stations in the city center. From there, they were on their own.

  As she waited in line, a rust-red GMC Jimmy four-by-four pulled into the parking lot. Its suspension was so rough, the cut in the sidewalk made the truck jounce to and fro like a tuna boat. Its engine sputtered and growled and coughed before it died.

  A teenage boy in a flannel shirt and blue jeans jumped down from the driver's side. To Hanna's citified eye, he looked like a cowboy-in-training. She wondered who he was there to pick up. Some urban cowboy father who robbed a savings and loan, she supposed. Something like that. The Central Valley was filled with these rednecks. So was Folsom.

  The boy held his cell phone out in front of him. He walked about checking the phone's screen as though it was a metal detector. After a couple of circles around the lot, he stared at Hanna. He stared long enough to make her uncomfortable. She faced down the line, wishing the next bus would arrive. She wanted nothing more than to make as many miles as possible from the Free State of Jefferson. The capital of California was positioned far too close to the state line for her comfort.

  "Hello."

  The boy stood beside her. The phone remained outstretched before him.

  "Are you—" He held the phone for her to view the screen.

  Something within her collapsed. In this boy's face, she saw her grandfather when he was young. Yellowed photos were stored in shoeboxes in her grandmother's home, wedding photos of two flower children in regal paisley, his lapels like car fenders splayed beneath his chin. In the 1970s, he stood tall and grinning with her grandmother and their bridge daughter, a girl also named Hanna who loved origami and flowers and life itself.

  This boy was her paisley grandfather with the clock rolled back. This boy was her grandfather in the oldest of the photos in those shoeboxes, childhood pictures taken years before he met his wife. Photos of him in rolled-up jeans and dusty boots with hand-tooled points at each end. He kept his blond hair greased back to emulate the Oklahoma western radio crooners of yesteryear. The boy had the face of her grandfather—Barry.

  If she'd looked at the phone's screen, she would have seen a photo of herself in much happier times. Hanna stood over two blossoming girls flanking her, twin bridge daughters, each rotund at the belly and bearing her children. Silk ribbons were tied in their hair. Their vibrant blue dresses were pressed and neat. All three were smiling and exuberant—such a long time ago.

  She did not see the photo on the phone, though. She immediately took the boy into her arms and pressed him into her. An immense sensation bubbled up within her, a foreign one she'd not felt in sixteen years. Face wet, the world gone blurry, she remembered what it meant to be a mother.

  Jim Nelson's novels include Bridge Daughter (Kindle Press, 2016), Hagar's Mother, and Stranger Son. He shares his time between San Francisco and Tokyo.

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