The Midnight Boat to Palermo and Other Stories

by Rosemary Aubert

  “I remember.”

  “What?”

  “I remember it wasn’t 8:30 at all. It was 9:30.”

  Judge Marshall popped the rest of his half of the sandwich into his mouth. In order to avoid saying anything.

  “You weren’t with me because you were sick. When it got to be almost 8:30, I asked you if you were ready to go and you said you didn’t think you could handle it. I told you I’d wait half an hour to see whether you might feel better, and I did wait, but by the time I got my cloth shopping bags together and checked with you to decipher the list you wrote in your terrible handwriting, and found my own keys to the car, it was past 9. I remember that I thought it was great the way you didn’t tell me it was too late to go out by myself….”

  Judge Marshall laughed.

  But his wife became agitated again. “How am I going to convince them?”

  “Of what?”

  “How can I make them believe that this time I know what I’m talking about?”

  He could have offered to speak to the prosecutor and offer himself as a witness. He could have told his wife about The Great Race, admitted that he’d not been as sick as he’d pretended to be.

  He could have quoted those cases he’d thought of up there in the courtroom when he’d realized she was making some kind of fool of herself.

  But he didn’t.

  He hadn’t worked in the courts for fifty years without realizing that justice, like every other game in town, is a crap shoot.

  Before she’d gotten in this mess, she’d told him to stay out of court when she was on the stand. Because she knew that he could influence her. And even without his legal training, without his having told her year after year what he had been doing all those days in court, she had understood that it wasn’t fair for her to use any recollection except her own.

  That hadn’t changed. She was the witness. Not him.

  And she was a cute little old lady. A jury who didn’t believe her deserved to be responsible for letting a murderer go free.

  If he was a murderer.

  Judge Marshall reached into the paper bag on his lap.

  “Look,” he said, “an apple. Let’s share it.”

  “Like Adam and Eve?” his wife said.

  “No,” he answered. “Like you and me. Every man for himself.”

  His wife smiled again. A sweet smile. Anybody who took her for a liar deserved to get whatever they had coming.

  THE BIKER AND THE BUTTER

  “Them damn cons is going to kill me. It says so right here. They’re animals—nothing but animals. And now they’re going to kill me….”

  “Jass, calm down. It’s a joke. I’m sure it’s only a joke.” I took the note from her hand. It smelled of stew. There was a little bit of bright orange carrot stuck to it, and a big spot of grease made some of the words nearly illegible. It was written in pencil on a piece torn out of a brown paper bag. All the letters were capitals.

  “Your cooking sucks,” it said, “and so do you. You’re dead meat. Just like you feed us.”

  “It’s that biker,” the cook said. “I should of knowed before coming to cook at a damn halfway house!” Now she was weeping. Big tears were sliding down her face. She was a middle-aged black woman from Jamaica. I’d tasted her cooking. Once she gave me a piece of apple pie. It didn’t taste bad, but when I’d got halfway through it, I found a little piece of raw broccoli. Nothing to worry about, but it took my appetite away.

  “It’s that biker—He’s after my ass. He thinks he’s smart. He hates blacks. All them white cons do….”

  “Jasmine—” I came around from behind my desk in the reception alcove and stood beside her. I felt sorry for her. I felt like putting my hand on her shoulder or patting her on the back. But I didn’t touch her. It was a rule of the halfway house that nobody touched anybody else under any circumstances. Touches could so easily be misread. “Jass, I’ll take it up with Ms. Fulsome-Bright. I’ll tell her you were threatened….”

  “Nothing she can do,” Jasmine said, still crying, “I still gotta cook for them beasts.”

  I handed her back the note. “At least Ms. Fulsome-Bright can find out who wrote it.”

  “I told you, that biker wrote it. Acts so big around here. Well, there’s people inside can fix him—”

  I stared at her. Was she implying that she knew somebody inside? That was against the rules, too.

  “He can’t read, Jass. And that means he can’t write.”

  She just laughed. “He can read all right. That whole literacy thing’s just a scam. Make you think they can’t read. You a bigger sucker than Ms. Fulsome-Bright.” She laughed and shrugged her shoulders. “Do me a favor and don’t tell Fulsome-Bright nothing. If they think I’m poisoning them, maybe I should start.” She threw the note in the trash and stomped back to the kitchen. I got the feeling there was going to be a lot of hot jerk coming out of there for some time.

  I called it my day job. Running the halfway house office was my only job, of course, but I sometimes needed to feel that a fifty-year-old woman with a university education working as a secretary had to explain herself somehow and that was how.

  The days were like my days everywhere. Things to do and people to look after, usually at the same time. The things to do—parole reports, travel passes, petty cash, scheduling community visits so that the parole officers could visit the offenders’ families—weren’t hard. Looking after people was hard. Because I wasn’t supposed to be doing it. “You’re not a social worker,” my boss told me, “not responsible for the inmates in any way, except to hand out transit tokens, check travel passes and sign clients in and out of the house when they leave for work—you got that?”

  “Yes,” I told her. She was very young and relatively inexperienced. She’d become the director during a government program to give women under thirty the chance to advance their careers without prejudice due to youth. Like most people who are well educated but lack experience, she went by the book. “I’d like you to sign this,” she’d told me when she hired me. It was a form stating that she had the right to fire me without warning if I made the mistake of “interfering in the personal life or legal situation” of an offender.” I signed.

  All of the inmates, I mean the clients, were men coming out of federal prisons. They had become desperate and hardened, not by going to jail, I thought, but by the kind of life that eventually sends you there. I was afraid of them at first. Then, gradually, in various ways, I became afraid for them.

  Nonetheless, I kept clear, as they would say.

  I would have forgotten about Jass and the note except that an hour later I took a lunch break and walked out onto the wide verandah of the halfway house. Pete Peters, the “biker,” was sitting out there, and he was reading AutoBuy magazine.

  “Hello, Pete,” I said pleasantly. I liked Pete. Everybody said he was a biker, and he had the sort of roly-poly look of some of them. I’d heard they stayed fat in order to hide the fact that they had so many muscles. I didn’t know whether that was true or not. My university degree is in criminology, and I could tell you about the international organizational structure of motorcycle gangs and the chief crimes for which they are responsible throughout North America, but I wasn’t sure about the fat.

  I wasn’t sure about “colors” either, though I’d seen Pete wear a vest with a patch on it once or twice. One of the other cons had seen him and laughed. “Nothing but a baby biker,” the con had sneered. I wasn’t sure what he meant.

  Pete was studying the magazine with an intensity that was almost impressive. “Any bargains in there?” I asked.

  He smiled up at me. He still had most of his teeth. The federal government had a decent dental program for men inside, but it didn’t cover what a lot of them really wanted: gold caps. Pete’s teeth were all white. Pete was white. About thirty. Not bad looking. His hair was long, but very clean. A wisp of it rose in the breeze that brushed by the porch. It was July. I figured that when Pete’s full parole
was granted, he’d go back to being a full-time biker. Then his hair wouldn’t look so soft and clean. I didn’t know whether it was out of boredom or just the pleasure of being alone in the shower for the first time in a long time, but the men at the halfway house were about the cleanest people I ever saw in my life.

  Pete pointed to the magazine. “Look at this,” he said, “a brand new Caddy for under a hundred grand…”

  I came a little closer, leaned over, looked where he was pointing. I saw a picture of a car and a row of figures, but I couldn’t get close enough to make out what they were. I would have moved closer, but I didn’t want to break the rules by accidentally touching Pete.

  I talked to Pete on the porch a few times after that. There wasn’t a lot to talk about at first. People who live in halfway houses don’t talk about the past or the future as a rule. And their present isn’t very exciting. Get up. Fix your own breakfast. Look for work. Come back. Take a shower. Eat a supper cooked by Jass. Go to AA. Watch TV. Play video games. Sign the curfew sheet. Go to Bed. Get up. Fix…

  One day, though, something interesting happened to Pete. A man came for him in a limo. I was sitting in the reception alcove marking up the phone bill. Each parole officer had a list of approved phone numbers they could dial and I was matching up the bill with the list. “Accountability,” Ms. Fulsome-Bright chirped as she passed my desk.

  I was thinking something unsayable about her when the phone rang, making me jump. “Briarwind Correctional Residence,” I said.

  “Tell Petie to look out the window,” came a low, commanding voice.

  Of course my first reaction was to look out the window myself. Parked at the curb in front of the swinging Briarwind Correctional Residence sign (painted by inmates still inside) was the longest, lowest, darkest car I’d ever seen. Every window was heavily shaded. I couldn’t see anybody in it. Not even the driver. I always thought that was against the law. But whoever was in that limo wasn’t worried about a little offense like a window tinted a shade too dark.

  “Phone calls to residents while they are present are to be made to the house cell phone only. Would you like the number?”

  “Stuff it up there, sister,” came the voice. “Just tell Petie to haul his ass out here.”

  I did. And when Pete came down, I was shocked to see he was dressed in a suit. He looked far more like a businessman than he did a biker. Maybe all those rumors are wrong….

  Pete smiled at me as he reached for the sign-out log. “Job search,” he said. I had standing instructions to accept that as a sign-out excuse at any time during business hours. Ms. Fulsome-Bright had reminded me that trust is part of rehabilitation. She also reminded me that anybody out of the house after six without a pass would be back in jail within the hour.

  So I couldn’t question Pete. And anyway, I was alone in the house. Fulsome-Bright was at a community relations meeting and the parole officers were doing institutional visits—fishing for more residents for the house for when the present bunch made full parole and left. “Good luck, Pete,” I told him.

  “I need it,” he said. He sounded like he meant it, but of course it was against the rules for me to ask why.

  I never saw the limousine again and whatever the job was, Pete didn’t get it.

  But the letters started coming for him. It was my job to distribute the mail. By the time the letters for Pete started, I’d forgot about the note threatening to kill the cook. I didn’t remember it until I saw the look on Pete’s face when he got the first letter. I thought it must be a love letter. And of course, I thought Jass must have been right. Why would an illiterate man be so happy to get a letter?

  After that, he got one every week. Though I wasn’t supposed to, I read the return address. It was local. And the handwriting was flowing and feminine.

  I guess it must have been about a month later when Jass asked me to go to the store for some butter. When the parole officers were in, I often went to the store for things—odds and ends that we’d forgot to include in the weekly order we had delivered from a cut-rate food warehouse. But on that day, there was nobody in the house but Jass and me. To have left her alone there was against the rules. I was explaining that to her when Pete walked by. It was against the rules to send the clients on errands, but not as against the rules as it was to leave Jass alone.

  “Pete, can you run over to Sam’s and get us a pound of butter?”

  Pete nodded. I took the money from petty cash and sent him on his way.

  It seemed like a very long time before he came back, and when he did, he just plunked a small white plastic bag on my desk, along with a few coins, and took off upstairs to his room.

  I opened the bag. Inside was a foil-wrapped object exactly the size and shape of a pound of butter. On it, in large red letters was written, “Lard.”

  I snuck out of the house, took it back, got the butter, gave it to Jass and said nothing to Pete.

  But the next day, I went to the downtown literacy center. They gave me books written especially for what they called, “disadvantaged low-attention adults with specific reading skill insufficiencies.” Our Trip to the Bank showed several adults of varied ethnic backgrounds filling out deposit slips and presenting them to the teller….

  “Those are for retards,” was Pete’s simple reaction. It didn’t seem to bother him at all that I’d figured out his secret. He didn’t even seem to mind my offer to help him learn to read and write. Maybe the fact that it was so forbidden by the rules was in my favor. A biker is an outlaw, after all. But it bothered him greatly to be lumped in with others who couldn’t read.

  I left the books with him anyway, as the literacy center had suggested. Next day, when I was emptying the office trash, I found that somebody had put the literacy books through the shredder.

  But the letters kept coming for Pete, and now I knew that he couldn’t read them or answer them. It must be a very persistent lover, I thought, who would keep sending those letters when they weren’t getting any response. Of course, one of the other house residents could read the letters for Pete. I was fairly sure that that was how he had got along so far. I figured out, for example, that he had probably dictated the letter to Jass. There was no one else in the house articulate enough to have composed it. But would he let another man read a love letter?

  The reason I knew Pete was articulate was that he and I were chatting almost daily now. He told me a little about his motorcycle. And one day, he told me about his daughter. Just what she looked like and how old she was.

  I was at my desk at the time, and Pete was standing in front of it. I was at the computer, keying in a rejection letter that Ms. Fulsome-Bright was sending to some poor social sciences student begging for a placement. “I’m sorry to inform you,” it began.

  But when Pete started talking, I idly began typing not the letter, but his words. “My daughter’s name is Julia. She’s a sweet kid. Don’t look like her old man in the least….”

  When I finished, I ran the page off on the printer and handed it to Pete.

  “What the hell is this?” he asked.

  “It’s your words—”

  “What do you mean—my words?”

  “It’s what you said about your daughter. I put it down in writing. See—”

  I read it, pointing out each word. Pete seemed amazed.

  After that, we worked an hour a day. I used my lunch hour when Fulsome-Bright wasn’t around and the parole officers were downstairs in the kitchen eating with the clients.

  We made progress. In a week, Pete could write his name, address and the names of everybody in his family, whatever of his family he could remember, that is. In two weeks, he could write a couple of sentences. In three weeks you could send him to the store with a list and he could come back with most of the things on it.

  Of course, all this was highly risky, and it would have come to a bad end sooner or later. But never in my wildest imagination did I foresee what would really happen.

  The beginning o
f the fourth week of our working together, Pete Peters was found shot dead in the alley behind the halfway house.

  To make a long story short, there were all sorts of investigations. After quite a while, the police figured out it had been a hit from inside. One of those complicated things that involved communication between men still doing time inside and men on the outside who owed them favors. I never did learn what it was that Pete had done that cost him his life.

  But I did learn that it was not knowing how to read that killed him. Because the day of the shooting, when everybody else was out in the alley with the police and the media, I went up to Pete’s room. I wanted to find the papers we’d worked on—the print-outs of our conversations. I didn’t think they’d have a thing to do with what had happened to Pete, and they’d have a great deal to do with my being fired if they were ever found.

  It wasn’t hard to find them. They were shoved into a hole in the mattress. He’d saved every piece of paper. And of course, he’d saved every “love” letter.

  I had no intention of reading the letters, of course. I was just about to put them back in the hole when I noticed something odd. I noticed that each letter had a double envelope. Pulling one letter apart, I saw that the first envelope bore the return address of the prison where Pete had done time. The outside envelope, of course, was the one with the flowery handwriting.

  An old trick. A con inside sends a letter to someone outside who then remails it.

  I started to read the letter itself. It was brief. All it said was, “We’re waiting for the information, Pete. Send it now.”

  Before I could read another word, I heard footsteps, the light, nervous steps of Fulsome-Bright herself. She was going to demand to know what I was doing. And I was going to have to think fast to find something to tell her.

  I shoved Pete’s letters back into his mattress and rearranged the blankets as best I could.

  I kept the printouts, though. I pushed them into the pocket of my sweater. I managed to get out into the hall before the boss saw which room I was coming from.