by Billy Coffey
“Abel, stop,” Dorothy calls. She’s past the ball field now and closing in, her run turning to a loping jog.
Abel goes back to take Dumb Willie’s hand. “Come on,” he says. “I bet my daddy’s right up the road. There’s another lane.”
He pulls (an act Abel knows is useless given Dumb Willie’s size, but one that at least peels the big man’s attention away from the birds) and moves them both on. At the side of the field rests a bank of trees. Past there is a turnoff to the left, where they find a large parking lot. A fence, barb-wired just as Arthur’s had been, encircles several buildings. Abel sees tall trees, a basketball court, a softball field.
“My daddy lives here,” he huffs, working one long leg and the other shorter one. The world tilts from one side to the other and yet remains so perfect. “You ever seen a house that big, Dumb Willie? My daddy’s rich.”
Dumb Willie walks beside. His hand remains stuck in Abel’s. He grins and echoes, “He. Rich.”
Nothing matters to Abel anymore, not how far they’ve come or all they’ve endured, even all that’s happened to him in the last day. What counts is he’s here, and his daddy is here. The rest can wait a bit. All the bad and the tears are coming, but they are not now, and now is where Abel chooses to live. Now is—
He stops at a sign fastened at a spot where the parking lot begins. The three words printed steal Abel’s thoughts, his very breath.
FAIRHOPE CORRECTIONAL CENTER
He lets go of Dumb Willie’s hand.
“A. Bull what’sit . . . say?”
“Abel?” Dorothy calls near. She’s walking now, that leather bag motionless against her hip, hair no longer flying. “Abel?”
He turns away from the sign when Dorothy’s hand settles upon him. She looks to have grown older in the short time since they left her back along the main road.
“My daddy’s here? Why’s my daddy here, Dorothy? This is jail.”
“I don’t know, Abel.”
“He said he could look out his window and see Kable Street. This is Kable Street. This is the only place. Here,” he says, digging into his back pocket for an envelope. “See? Two-thirteen Kable Street, number eleven.” He points to the marker by the sign. It reads 213. “This is the place.”
Dumb Willie keeps his eyes to the sign, as though waiting for enlightenment.
“Did you know he was here, Dorothy?” Abel asks. Tears sting his eyes as he turns and shields them from the sun. “You said you know Fairhope.”
Dorothy bends to a knee. “I do,” she says, “but all I know is ways, Abel. Not streets. I can’t read. I would’ve said if I knew. I promise it.”
Abel rubs his eyes. The water from them shines like lights in his hand. He flicks the tears to the hot blacktop of the parking lot, close to a pile of smoked cigarettes. The sight of that pile only makes him cry more. Those cigarettes are the same brand his momma smokes. “I ain’t ever gone see him, Dorothy. They won’t let me in to see my daddy.”
“We ain’t got to take one more step, Abel,” Dorothy says. “Not a one. We can turn right now and talk things over. Important things. Stuff you got to know. Dumb Willie,” she says, “why don’t you help me with Abel here, let’s get . . . Dumb Willie?”
Dorothy cuts between Abel and the sign for the correctional center, halting the spell those three words have cast. He blinks. When Abel turns, he finds Dumb Willie has gone off far to the other side of the lot, heading toward that garden.
“Dumb Willie,” he calls, “where you goin’?”
The big man turns. He yells over a shoulder, “You ain’t a. Bass . . . terd.”
“We got to snatch him,” Dorothy says. “Nobody can find Dumb Willie, not here. He’s wanted.”
“No.” Abel walks past her and through the lot. “I don’t know what Dumb Willie’s doing, but he does. He’s gone ’long with us enough. Time we go ’long with him now.”
*
Dumb Willie turns again, though only long enough to make sure Abel and Dorothy follow. He doesn’t break his stride until meeting the line of trees between the prison and the field. Now he slows and slips in between the branches with a hunter’s stealth.
Abel sneaks in as well, Dorothy just behind. She tugs on Dumb Willie’s sleeve and asks, “What in the world are you doing, Dumb Willie? They catch you, you’re done.”
Dumb Willie purses his lips. Shakes his head. In a whispered voice that reminds Abel of the way his momma would talk when trying to get him to understand a thing a child could never, he says, “A. Bull. Ain’t. A. Bass. Terd.”
“We have to go,” she says. “Right now. This place isn’t safe.”
“Wait,” Abel says. He’s looking out from their hiding place and into the field where the men work. Some are weeding, others working a hoe or staking tomato plants. Hilling corn. All in the same sort of dress, those jeans and denim shirts. The two men across the way stand with arms folded and sunglasses gleaming in the sun, joking with each other. Barely paying attention. Abel thinks he understands now. Dumb Willie didn’t come here because it was a garden to look at.
“Those are prisoners out there. People from the jail, Dorothy.” There are thirty of them, maybe forty. All spread out over that wide space of rows. “I bet my daddy’s out there.”
Dorothy is silent.
“I can find him,” Abel says. “I just don’t know which one he is.”
The three of them squat in a line from right to left—Abel, Dorothy, and Dumb Willie on the end. They look out into the square of dirt to study faces, careful not to stick their heads beyond the thick limbs. One of the guards breaks away and makes a slow walk around the far side toward the front. He nods to a few of the prisoners, lets one show him something on one of the cucumber plants. The man doesn’t look afraid of the people he guards, nor they him.
“I bet this ain’t no regular prison,” Abel whispers. “There’s some like a supermax, that’s where the worst people go. Like terrorists and serial killers. Then maximum security and medium security, those can be bad too. But then there’s minimum security. That’s where prisoners who ain’t dangerous go sometimes. I bet this place is one a them.”
Dorothy looks at him. “How you know that?”
Abel shrugs. He taps his cast, his legs and chest. “It’s hard to break a bone if all you’re doin’ is holding a book.”
“But we don’t know which one’s your dad,” she says, “or even if he’s out here. And even if he is, those guards will see.”
“They won’t see.”
The guard straddles the midpoint in front of the field now, looking and nodding. Abel and Dorothy inch closer, trying to see. A radio squawks. Across the garden comes the garbled sound of “Hey, Sanders, how’s it going?”
“Sanders,” Dorothy whispers. “Your daddy’s letter mentioned a Sanders, didn’t it?”
The man plucks a radio from his belt and pushes a button. “Clear and good,” he says. “Be some good supper over here a month or so.”
“Abel,” Dorothy says, “I could go try to talk to him. Your daddy said he looks after things. Sanders’ll know where your daddy is.”
She moves off, back toward where they came from. Abel looks at the empty place where Dorothy sat and finds another empty place beside it.
Dumb Willie’s gone again.
“Wait,” he whispers.
Dorothy turns, her eyes counting one where there should be two. She groans.
Far down among the tangle of oaks and pines, Abel catches a smudge of blue. He crawls off after his friend before Dumb Willie gets himself shot, Dorothy right behind. Sanders remains at his spot in front of the garden and then moves off again, easing his way toward the far side, where he and the other guard turn to watch the kids playing baseball in the field beyond.
“Abel,” Dorothy whispers, “we have to get him out of here. I need to talk to Sanders.”
Abel doesn’t answer, too focused on the knotted maze ahead. He hears a chirp and sees Dumb Willie standing at the nar
row edge between the trees and the garden. Not twenty feet away, three sparrows hop in and out of a row where a man stands silent, a hoe limp in his hands. He is thin and blond-haired. Stubble rings his cheeks and chin. His clothes look too large for him, as though his body has lost weight. Bent forward, head low.
Dorothy comes along behind Abel. “Get Dumb Willie,” she whispers. “I’ll swing back around and see if I can talk to that man Sanders.”
“No.”
“Abel, that man knows where your daddy is.”
Abel nods. “So do I.”
-4-
He moves from his hands and knees to his feet and weaves among the trees to where Dumb Willie stands. The walk feels like forever. Like how walking down the hallway to Principal Rexrode’s office had felt, but more. Longer than forever.
Abel vows to relish each step.
Dorothy comes alongside and whispers they have to wait. Abel keeps moving. He reaches the spot where Dumb Willie stands (that’s his name, the thing everyone but Abel’s momma has always called him, though in these last days Abel has come to believe his friend anything but that) and is met with a grin. There is no emptiness in it.
“Sparra,” he says, “showed. Me.”
Abel watches the man in the row. Gary’s head—That’s his name, he thinks, that’s my daddy—remains low. The sparrows flit and bob, searching the ground for food.
Dorothy asks, “You sure that’s him?”
“Dumb Willie says it is.”
They stand together, watching.
“Abel—”
“I can’t go over there,” he says. “Can I, Dorothy? My daddy won’t see me if I do. Just like everybody in Greenville never saw me, or that woman at the farm. There’s not many ever seen me. All I am’s a cripple boy. Country trash. Don’t nobody want to see nothing like that. It makes them feel too bad. It reminds them there’s something wrong with the world deep down, and they’d rather pretend there ain’t. That way they can go on without thinking it’s up to them to do something about it. To help.”
“That ain’t . . . ,” Dorothy starts, but then adds nothing. Because Abel believes she knows that’s true. Dorothy knows that’s right.
“But they always look at me,” Abel says. “Looking’s different than seeing, and folk always like to look at something worse off than them. My momma did that. She’d slow down whenever she seen a wreck along the road and she’d bring home a newspaper every night from the diner to see who died. Folk always want to know where they stand in life. They like knowing who’s above them and below. Only folk don’t even look at me no more. Just you and Dumb Willie and Arthur. You said they’re special. I didn’t know what you meant. Not until we went in the place at the landfill where that spring was.” He pauses. “I think you’re special too.”
Dorothy’s words come as stilted and garbled as Dumb Willie’s might: “Ain’t nothing special about me, son.”
“Yes, there is. And it ain’t got nothing to do with how I love you. Even if I didn’t, you’d still be special. You know that, Dumb Willie. Don’t you?”
Dumb Willie won’t answer, he just walks away. Farther off toward the back of the field, where he stands watching the man called Gary.
Abel nods. “That’s part of the secret you been keeping together all this while.”
“Abel,” Dorothy says, “I got to tell you something.”
There is a hitch to her voice and a strain that Abel cannot bear, and so he saves Dorothy from saying it.
“When did I die, Dorothy? Was it when Chris got me at the tracks or when I tried getting up into that boxcar?”
He lets these words fade in the breeze and wonders if he will go like that—not so much a breaking off as a wasting away.
Dorothy says in a soft voice, “Was the boxcar.”
He looks away from his daddy to Dumb Willie and asks in a quiet voice, “Does he know?”
“Dumb Willie never asked. And I never told.”
“Never do. Okay, Dorothy? Tell him it was Chris did it. It’ll be hard enough for Dumb Willie now. I don’t want him knowing he killed me trying to save me.”
Gary picks up the hoe and makes a little hollow in the dirt.
“I just wanted to see him,” Abel says. “Just this one time. I guess it’s my reward, like Reverend Johnny said. I’m sorry I brung you such a long way for something that you might think is so little. But it’s not little, Dorothy. It’s just not. That’s my daddy right there, and it ain’t no little thing.”
Dorothy’s soft hand settles at the back of his neck. “Abel, you of all folk got nothing to be sorry for. I could go over there for you. Talk to him, maybe. Say I knew you once. That you loved him and thought on him often. Maybe even that you got some of his letters. Anything that’d help. He looks awful ’lone.”
“No. That might draw attention. I don’t want Dumb Willie caught. And I got you to worry on too. Just keep here,” Abel says. “I’ll be right back.”
The first step is hardest. Abel must force his foot to lift up and out and down, not because he’s dead, but because of what he feels—fear and longing and still that joy, though now tempered by a lingering sadness. Another step and another, leaving Dorothy behind. Dumb Willie looks to battle a hidden urge to move forward and take these last steps with his friend.
Abel moves along the rows, past the eyes of convicts who look through him but see nothing. There are other sparrows now, hopping and singing. They do not scatter but leave room for him to walk, as though they are aware of the presence of some felt but unseen other. Abel slows as he reaches his daddy’s row. He looks back once to Dorothy, then over his other shoulder. Dumb Willie grins as only he can.
His father, so close. Inches away. It occurs to Abel that it never mattered he thought this man dead for so long and has only known him alive these last days, that never a moment passed when his father was not there. He lurked sometimes in a place of longing hidden deep inside Abel’s own heart, was there at every train, a vague form without eyes or face. He’d always wondered what his daddy looked like, what part of him had carried over. Now he knows. Abel wants to touch that hair so much like his own, thin like wisps of silk, like the fringes of an angel’s wing. He comes near and rises up on his toes, strokes the crown of his daddy’s head and down its side, caresses an ear.
The hoe drops.
Abel jerks his hand away as the sparrows take flight, coaxing an “Oooh!” from Dumb Willie at the trees. And the man’s face—Gary’s face, Abel’s daddy’s—begins to tilt leftward. Here is Abel’s own narrow chin and slender nose, a small mouth ringed with pale stubble. Two eyes that hold not the pale blue of Abel’s own sickness but the red of wail and mourning.
Those eyes blink. Blink again. His daddy’s mouth sets to trembling. His body goes rigid. And in this moment Abel realizes what is happening, this last bit of small magic. Because there are those whose souls and spirits are so tuned to the world far off and to come that they are not fit for the world here and now, and they are blessed because they see and know, but cursed by those who are blind and ignorant. Called dumb. Called crazy. Called—
-5-
“Daddy,” says the shining boy, and what Gary wants to do is shut his eyes because it’s not real. It’s not. And if he acts as though it is, there might be trouble and he’ll be sent away.
The boy is white beyond white, a color so bright and clear that it is beyond Gary’s description. He has never seen a color like that.
He turns and looks through the field, all those men spread out before him. There are yellows there, blues, tinges of orange and crimson and a black belonging to a man here because he swindled all those people out of their money. Gary looks across the field to where the guards stand watching the kids at play along the ball field. One is a purple. The other, Sanders, the calm color of deep ocean.
But this boy is not merely a color. He is not just white and shining. This boy looks as Gary did once, long ago when the world was darker.
“Daddy?” he asks agai
n. “Can you see me?”
“Abe . . . ,” is all Gary can answer, the rest swallowed by a rush and tears and a feeling that his body will rend itself apart. He holds himself tight, overcome by a rush of cold. “Abel?”
“It’s me. You’re my daddy. I came to see you.”
“Are you real? You can’t . . . you . . .”
The boy reaches out. There is a cast on his hand, yellow and shining as though it will fall away at any moment and explode into a million tiny stars. As though the arm it encloses is about to break free. He takes Gary’s fingers and eases them up. They touch Abel’s cheek, his two lips. They feel real, though barely. It’s as though Gary’s hand skims the frail surface of water.
“It’s me,” Abel says.
The years fall away, those endless memories that have followed Gary all this way now cast in murky shadow. Echoing voices in constant murmur of his own failures, chasing him down the long and dark path that led to this tiny place in Fairhope. Those walls, that fence.
“I see you,” he says. “I see your soul.”
That day flashes bright in his mind—a cold October Saturday when Gary was sixteen and he was out riding four-wheelers with his friends. Bouncing along those rocky fields. The wreck, the feel of himself flying. The darkness that followed. Waking days later in a hospital bed with his head wrapped and bleeding and a tube in his mouth, seeing the doctor and his parents there.
They were yellow, green, and a gray like clouds before a storm.
He could see them, could see their souls.
“I came to see you,” Abel says. “Me and my friends.”
The shock of it, seeing the most private parts of everyone, every friend and every enemy, every stranger, laid bare. The beauty of most, the horribleness of many. A by-product of the injuries is what the doctors said, though even then Gary knew that wasn’t the case. It was as if some tiny door inside him had been pried open to reveal hidden things meant for no human eyes.
