Marston pulled two tokens out of his jeans pocket and handed one to Kell, then showed him where the little unlocked metal box was on the wall.
“They’re free,” said Marston. “It’s just to keep track of how much hot water gets used so they know how much propane to order.”
In any other lifetime, Marston would have said that having such a system was an invitation to cheat on how many tokens were needed, or that some of the ex-cons would steal tokens, because, hello, ex-cons. But to hear Gabe tell it, the ratio of hot water usage to tokens was at ninety-nine percent.
The one percent was a token that had gone missing, probably lost in the woods somewhere. So, overall, the system worked. Except in cases like this, when Kell didn’t seem aware of the token program and now that he was, didn’t seem willing to take a shower.
Marston had chanced to overhear Gabe asking Kell about when he’d last taken a shower, and Marston had been happy to volunteer his services because he’d been thinking the same thing.
Each morning that week, Kell had come to breakfast with sleep in his eyes, his hair oil-plastered to his head. He sweated it up during the day, loading and unloading hay bales, then came to dinner looking like he’d been ridden hard and put away wet. Only the showers were right there, so there was plenty of time to take one, plenty of tokens, too. So what was the problem?
Normally Marston didn’t think he would have cared. Ex-cons were grown men, after all, and could stay filthy if they wanted to, just as long as he had an opportunity to stay upwind of them. Which, come to think of it, didn’t make him a good candidate to be a team lead on this program, but Leland had insisted on Marston partaking and so here he was.
Should he ask Kell what was going on? Or would that be too much like asking a stranger to share what scared them?
“Do you want me to stand watch while you shower?” he asked, keeping a close eye on Kell’s reaction. Saw the twitch next to Kell’s left eye, the withdrawal, the way his shoulders curled forward.
A wild thought occurred to him that what Kell actually wanted was for Marston to showerwithhim, which was absurd, because he absolutely wasn’t going to do that. Inappropriate, not to mention completely out of line.
Then, as he banished those thoughts, he realized what it must be. In prison movies, the showers were always a dangerous place and while screenwriters probably overplayed it for the sake of drama, or maybe they didn’t, showers were always where the rapes occurred, the bad inmates trying to overpower or control the good inmates, if such an oxymoron was even possible.
“Why don’t you take the one furthest from the door?” he asked. “And I’ll take the one closest. Okay?”
With a sigh, Kell let out all the air in his body. His thin face was traced with shadows, his unwashed hair flat against his skull, sweat marks behind his ears.
“I’ll shower quick,” said Marston, unrolling his towel. “Then I’ll stand guard.”
The flicker in Kell’s green eyes told Marston what Kell had been unwilling or maybe even unable to say aloud. That prison showers had terrified him, and having Marston stand guard would be the only thing getting him through this.
Marston was tempted not to take a shower at all, and simply stand guard, but then, Kell wouldn’t acclimate the way he should, and would continue being afraid. With a little bit of Marston at the Hot Gates and a little gumption from Kell, he would get through this, and soon wouldn’t be so afraid to take a shower anymore.
Going into the dressing area of the first fancy shower, Marston quickly undressed, turned the hot water on, and showered as fast as he possibly could. When he turned his shower off and dried off, the other shower was running, which was a good sign. Then, getting dressed, he hung his towel on a hook to dry for a minute, and laid out his shaving things on the high-dollar slatted wood shelf above the sink.
The mirror showed him the familiar image of his face, his steady, square features, his blond hair now darkened by the shower. His unsmiling mouth. The stern expression in his eyes that seemed to be there all the time.
Apart from his strong jaw and the muscles in his neck, he never looked at himself much. Never sought out a mirror except to shave. Didn’t know what people thought when they looked at him. Didn’t want to think about it much, so he reached for his can of shaving cream.
He’d never owned a fancy shaving kit, but since the money was coming in steadily, he’d considered buying one of those fancy razors, complete with shaving soap and mug and brush. For now, he had a nice packet of disposables, so he foamed up and began shaving. Slow strokes down the planes of his face, the slight, slowrizz-rizzsound in his ears, the tug on his skin, soothing him.
Shaving was a ritual that he savored, as much as he savored clean sheets and regular meals, a far cry from his trailer park childhood in a ratty single wide, the shouts and cursing splatting against the walls as he and his siblings curled over their microwave warped plastic bowls half full of generic cereal and expired milk.
Once in a while, his dad would spend his welfare money on a liter of Jim Beam and a flat of a dozen donuts and call it a party. Or his mom would go to the food bank and grab whatever she could, grabbing too much of what would quickly spoil, and every bag of ramen in the place, which always made Marston wonder whether any other hungry family had gotten their fair share.
But she never took Marston or Molly or Martin with her, for some reason, preferring to go alone. And maybe Marston had an idea that her intention was to sell some of the food, because those ramen packets disappeared faster than they could be eaten, and any carton of eggs she happened to bring home were gone the next day.
If any of them complained they were hungry or that there were holes in their socks or that their teachers had sent a note home saying that one of them needed sneakers for gym class, they got smacked around hard and sometimes thrown in the narrow closet in their parents’ bedroom at one end of the single wide trailer, a spooky place surely occupied by monsters waiting to pounce. Otherwise, the three of them slept together on a mattress on the floor in the other bedroom in the single wide, the end that seemed to hang dangerously over the muddy river that ran along the edge of the trailer park.
When he was ten, welfare had come by and swooped up him and his siblings, and whether it had been because the food bank had gotten wise to his mom’s overeagerness at taking what she wanted, or whether the teachers at his school had filed a report, he’d never been told, like it was top secret or something.
After that had come a series of foster care situations, houses with gray, narrow hallways and badly painted rooms. Where the mattresses were flat, the blankets thin, the watered-down soup even thinner.
He’d never starved, though he’d been pretty hungry most of the time, and sometimes he’d been fostered in the same place as Molly and Martin, and they would sit on the back steps or the side steps, usually made of cement, and wonder together if their parents were ever going to come get them.
Right about the time his older siblings were long gone, vanished into the nearest big city, and Marston was graduating high school, without anybody in the audience to cheer for him, word had eventually gotten back to him. His dad had died in a drunk driving accident, and his mom had passed away from lung cancer, chain smoking to her last days while hooked up to an oxygen machine.
As for Marston, he had drifted, like the fleecy clouds in a summer Wyoming sky. On the day he’d been aged out of foster care, he’d taken his hard-won driver’s license, the old Ford Tempo he’d bought off a guy for two hundred bucks and fixed up in shop class, and headed west, to where the cowboys were. At least in his mind they were singing with the coyotes in star-speckled nights, watching over their herds of little doggies.
The truth of it was never as vivid as it had been in his dreams.
