The Last Act: A Novel

by Brad Parks

  It’s not like I had much to contribute to the conversation. The prison laundry was only so interesting. When I wanted to know how her pregnancy was going, I had to ask her how my cousin Amanda was doing. She answered in the third person.

  We actually talked about the weather a couple of times. So little of our two-year relationship had happened over the phone, it’s like we didn’t know how to make a meaningful connection without eye contact.

  So even with the “I miss yous” and the “I love yous” that ended the calls, I usually hung up filled with melancholy, despairing that we were already growing apart. And if that was happening after a few days, what would six months do to us? Would we be recognizable to each other after it was over? Would her heart have wandered to some tall guy who wasn’t currently incarcerated and whose long-term prospects were more promising?

  It made me want to get out of Morgantown that much faster. Toward that end, I continued stalking Dupree from a distance in an effort to learn his patterns and preferences.

  His job was in food service, which was a prized gig at FCI Morgantown, because it inexplicably paid better than the other jobs, even though it didn’t seem to require any more work. (Plus some of the guys made extra money stealing food and reselling it. It had been explained to me there hadn’t been a chicken soup in years at Morgantown that actually had meat in it, because chicken was such a popular black market food.)

  He liked bocce, whose rules I was at least three decades too young to know, though there was no set time he played. He just showed up sometimes and joined whoever was there.

  His idea of exercise was sitting on one of the stationary bikes in the cardio gym and pedaling while he read a magazine. From what I could tell, the magazine got as much of a workout as he did. Unsurprisingly, his commitment to it was sporadic.

  He read books, sometimes out in the recreation area, when the weather was nice. But so far the only thing I had seen in his hands were military histories, which stopped me from trying to strike up a conversation. Fact was, I didn’t know much about the pivotal battles of World War I, but Pete Goodrich should have.

  I kept hoping to discover he was a fan of a certain genre of television, which would allow me to get close to him by feigning enthusiasm for the same reality show, news program, or family-oriented situational comedy. But he wasn’t a regular viewer of anything, as far as I could tell.

  The only thing he did reliably and predictably, besides report to work, was participate in a hold ’em poker game in the Randolph card room. It commenced at seven o’clock each day: he and three other guys—always the same three, always at the table farthest from the entrance. With the way they huddled around it, they didn’t appear keen to invite anyone else to join.

  No matter where I spotted him, I immediately shifted him into my peripheral vision, lest he become aware I was looking at him. Once or twice, I could have sworn he was staring at me. But that was probably just my overactive imagination.

  I kept hoping for natural opportunities to approach him, but none presented themselves. And after a week of watching, I was getting impatient. I hadn’t gotten myself tossed in prison just to gaze at him furtively from afar like some unrequited lover. If I was going to get him to whisper the location of that cabin, I needed to find a way to force contact.

  My first tack was to see Mr. Munn and ask about getting switched onto food service. His reply was to show me the waiting list of inmates who had made that request already. When I asked how long he suspected the wait would be, he said, “Oh, you’ll be there in no time. Six months, maybe a year.”

  So that was out.

  Really, my best shot was probably the poker game. If I could somehow get a spot at the table, I could foster a relationship.

  Most of what I knew about hold ’em poker came from a run as Nicely-Nicely Johnson in a regional production of Guys and Dolls. The cast decided it would be good character development to learn how to play craps and poker. Within a week, we all became sharks.

  Asking Dupree to join the game felt too direct, too risky. If he said no, where would it leave me the next time I tried to talk to him? He’d start wondering why this Goodrich kid kept pestering him.

  Of the three other guys, there was a tall one who I often saw going off to food service with Dupree. I also noticed them hanging out in the rec yard. He seemed to be Dupree’s closest friend.

  Then there was a guy with a ponytail, whom I saw only at the poker table or fleetingly at meals—when all we did was shovel food in our faces and leave.

  But there was one of them I saw every day in the laundry. His name, I soon learned, was Bobby Harrison. He was a big guy, about six feet tall and pushing three hundred pounds, only some of it sloppy. He had a round, pinkish face. I put his age around forty-five.

  It wasn’t exactly difficult to find downtime on laundry duty. So one morning about a week into my stay, I walked up to him during the lull that always came after we got the first loads started in the washers. He had sequestered himself in the corner with a paperback, which he read through granny glasses.

  “Hey,” I said. “I’m Pete.”

  He looked up from the book and said, “Bobby.”

  “Noticed you in the card room in Randolph, playing hold ’em.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Can I join you guys sometime?”

  He weighed this for a moment, then said, “Probably not.”

  “Why not?”

  He shrugged. “Table only sits four.”

  “I’ll sit at the next table over and lean in.”

  He shook his head. “Nah, that’s okay.”

  “Why not? Don’t you want to take my money?”

  “It’s not that.”

  “What is it, then?”

  He closed the book, keeping place with his finger. “We don’t cheat. We’re just a bunch of crooks playing a nice honest game of cards. But every time we’ve let a new guy in, he cheats.”

  “I don’t cheat.”

  “That’s what cheaters always say.”

  “I’ll roll up my sleeves. Nowhere to hide any cards.”

  “No, thanks,” he said. “But thanks for asking.”

  He went back to reading. My polite brush-off was complete.

  Except I wasn’t giving up that easily.

  “I’ll pay you for your spot,” I said.

  He looked back up. “How much?” he asked.

  I thought back to what I had learned during wad. Goods were more valuable than services. This was a service. If a haircut was two cans . . .

  “Five cans,” I said.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Ten.”

  “Fifteen,” he said.

  “Fifteen? For one night? That’s outrageous.”

  “No, it’s not,” he said. “The buy-in for our game is five cans each, for a total pot of twenty. It’s winner take all, and I win a lot. So you’re costing me a chance to win, plus I lose out on the enjoyment of the game. That, to me, is worth fifteen cans.”

  Nearly half my monthly allowance. Including the five-can buy-in to the game, it was twenty cans total. I wouldn’t be able to afford a second game until I went to commissary next week. Playing one game a week would hardly foster the closeness I needed with Dupree.

  Unless, of course, Masri and I could get our can-smuggling operation going. Then I could play every night. Which is what I needed to arrange with Harrison.

  “I want a volume discount,” I said. “I’m not going to be able to make this worth my while unless I can play with these guys all the time, so I can learn their tells. I want to know I can buy your spot every night. And if I do that, I think you ought to knock your price down a little. Ten cans.”

  “Ten cans,” he said. “Every night.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Can you afford that?”

&nb
sp; “I can make arrangements,” I said. “And, of course, you can’t tell the other guys I’m doing this.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Now you’re making me think you’re cheating.”

  “Not cheating. I’m just that good. Ten cans a night for your spot in the game. Let’s agree to doing it for at least a full month.”

  “A month!” he said.

  “That’s right. Ten cans a day for a month.”

  Bobby got this faraway look. For that kind of money, he could buy himself a drinking problem. Or a pot habit. Or whatever he wanted.

  “All right,” he said. “You got a deal.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Let me make some funding arrangements and get back to you.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Before dinner, I found Masri in the television room, watching SportsCenter with his ears encased in headphones.

  I touched his shoulder to get his attention. He stayed tuned to highlights of a nicely executed six-four-three double play, then lifted a headphone flap.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “You got a second to step into my office?”

  He stood, and I led him back down the hall to my room. My mountain of a roommate, who had continued to be polite but quiet, was elsewhere. At an institution that housed nine hundred men, Masri and I had what passed for privacy.

  “I was hoping for a status update on our hustle,” I said.

  “Funny you should ask. I actually have developed some intel that may be of assistance. I don’t have it totally nailed down yet. But what I know is encouraging.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “This comes courtesy of one of my former associates from Hazelton, who came here about six months ago. We had done some business over there, so there was a trust factor. He explained how things work here. From what he tells me, the common method of getting things in here is what is known as ‘running the hill.’”

  “Running the hill,” I repeated.

  “According to my source, there is one CO assigned to watch over the five cottages each night. He’s supposed to make the rounds between them. But usually he makes the midnight count and then he picks one cottage and hunkers down there until the three A.M. count. And that’s if the staffing levels are what they’re supposed to be. If they’re short-staffed, which they often are, they skip out on having a man in the cottages altogether.”

  “God bless federal budget cuts,” I said.

  “Exactly. Once you figure out your cottage is empty, you slip out. Remember to prop open the door with a rock or something, so you don’t get locked out. A cloudy night or foggy night is preferred, but the overhead lighting is pretty crappy here, so you can move in the shadows most of the way. The only really dangerous part is between the rec area and the woods, when you’re in the open. At that point, you just have to haul ass. That’s why they call it running the hill. But a young buck like you should be able to do that no problem. Once you’re in the woods, you’re safe. You do your business, then reverse operations for your return.”

  “What about cameras?”

  “Well, yeah. They have them. But apparently there are some blind spots. That, and this is too big a place for the COs to watch everywhere at once. I think the general feeling is that it would cost millions of dollars to staff this place well enough to make it airtight, and the BOP just doesn’t think it’s worth that to stop some low-level cons from sneaking in a few joints.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Still, sounds risky.”

  “Well, it’s interesting you should say that, because I responded the same way. That’s when my guy told me about the unicorn.”

  I am sure my expression reflected my dubiousness. Masri was enjoying himself.

  “The unicorn,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said, and now his voice was even lower. “‘The unicorn’ is the code name for one of the most prized possessions here at Morgantown. It’s, get this, a full guard’s uniform. The shirt. The pants. The belt. The radio. Everything. The sizes are all medium, so if you’re too big, you’re out of luck. But you should be fine. Just roll the pants a bit. Once you put that thing on, you don’t even have to run the hill. You can stroll up it, as easy as you please. It’s the hottest of hot contraband.”

  “How do we get our hands on it?”

  “There’s a guy who rents it out. I haven’t talked to him yet. He’s pretty picky about who he lets have it. And apparently he’s been getting more picky lately. If he meets you and suspects a village is missing its idiot, you’re shut out. And the price is pretty steep. Thirty cans a night.”

  “Just made my commissary run. I’ll put up fifteen if you put up fifteen.”

  “Deal,” he said. “The other thing is, if you get caught, you have to agree to take a hundred percent of the heat yourself.”

  “What do you think that would consist of?”

  “If they catch you running the hill without the unicorn, it’s a month in the SHU. But with it?”

  He shook his head as he considered it. “I don’t see how they’d let you stay here. They’d ship you off to Hazelton or worse. They might even hit you with charges of impersonating a federal officer.”

  Which wasn’t covered in my exoneration agreement. I could end up with real time to go with my fake time. I wondered if Danny would cover for me, or if he’d be so pissed off he’d let me rot.

  “But we don’t need to worry about that,” Masri said. “There’s a reason the unicorn has been passed here for years. This thing is a hundred percent authentic down to the last button. No one has gotten busted with it.”

  It was like some kind of crazy exercise in game theory. Should the inmate take a twenty percent chance of a tough (but survivable) penalty that would keep the game alive? Or accept a much smaller chance—one percent? five percent?—of a catastrophic penalty that would end the game permanently?

  “Okay,” I said. “So who is this guy?”

  CHAPTER 19

  Amanda had not painted since leaving Hudson van Buren’s office.

  Every time she even thought about doing so, she found herself reliving the humiliation of that meeting; of allowing herself to be manhandled and half undressed while semisloshed on champagne; of having him casually dismiss her in that patronizing, paternalistic way.

  Mostly, she was furious. At him for being a pig. At herself—for drinking the champagne, for not wearing something more prim, for sitting on the couch when she should have selected a chair, for being too stunned and drunk to slap his smarmy face the moment he touched her, for all the things she should have done differently but hadn’t.

  Between the self-blame, the shame, the embarrassment, the fear of what a Hudson van Buren blackball would do to her career, and the simple worry that no one would believe her anyway—ultimately, it was her word against his, and who was she?—she hadn’t told anyone what had happened.

  Even Tommy and Barb. Especially Tommy and Barb. To them, Amanda had related the part about her work needing more maturity and left it at that. She said she hadn’t been painting because she wanted to reflect on that.

  But, really, enough. It was time to get back to work. For her own self-esteem—and sanity—as much as anything.

  She set up the easel by the window in Tommy’s old bedroom, positioning a drop cloth underneath to protect the carpet.

  The curtains were open wide. There was just no substitute for natural light when it came to revealing a painting. The canvas could look so different in the long red hues of early evening than it had in the direct white blare of noon.

  Amanda’s gift, if she had one, was that she could close her eyes and imagine what she wanted to paint. She knew exactly what image she was trying to create. Whether or not a painting succeeded was in how closely it hewed to that vision.

  Her subjects were always personal, things she had seen. Many of the images
came from her childhood in Mississippi. Her mother—or a woman like her mother—was a frequent subject. The woman scrubbed toilets. Or she cooked boxed mac ’n’ cheese, the store brand because it was cheaper than the name brand. Or she smoked a cigarette while looking anxiously out the window of a double-wide trailer.

  They were common scenes, depicting the people Amanda had grown up with, the white working poor of the rural South, the forgotten underclass of American life. Amanda brought empathy and understanding to them because, despite whatever refinement distance may have given her, she still was one of them. You could see it in every line and shading, in expressions that were grim or determined or focused or joyful or pained.

  There were other subjects too. Some from her time in New York. Some from other places she had been. Traveling with Tommy had helped her see an America that was bigger and more varied than she previously understood.

  Still, what Amanda had really discovered through her art and her travels was that people everywhere, of every age and shade, were basically alike. How they styled their hair or what clothes they chose, those superficial choices, were really secondary. What mattered to them were their own stories. The things they wanted. The people they loved. The goals they felt they still needed to accomplish. If you could capture that, you weren’t really painting poor white house cleaners in Mississippi or wealthy Saudi expatriates in Manhattan. You were representing something far more universal.

  Art journalists had labeled her work postfauvist, said she was influenced by Matisse. She understood they had to come up with something. The absence of real knowledge never stopped any critic.

  She just didn’t want to be defined by any labels. When Amanda Porter was painting, she wasn’t trying to be pre-something or post–anything else. She was just copying the image that was most prominent in her mind.

  What was in there now wasn’t her mother or anyone like her mother.

  It was a man.

  Without overthinking what she was doing, she had loaded her pallet with blues and purples, like she was preparing to paint a three-day-old bruise. She might add other colors later, to provide accent or contrast. But that initial palette usually defined the work.