Kell knew very well and good that some places just didn’t care what his background was. Places like backwoods bars or restaurants in small towns, or granaries, or gas stations, would take anyone for a day or so, paying them under the table. Hick diners would usually throw in a hot meal or two, and bars always had yesterday’s leftovers that they didn’t mind if Kell ate. Then, a few bucks richer, his belly full of greasy food, Kell would be on his way.
Nobody had been concerned about him for the past two years, nobody ever noticed him passing through, so he wasn’t really sure why they would give a shit now.
Well, the trouble had started when someone, namely a rail yard bull in Cheyenne, had noticed him and hauled him to the station manager, where the cops had been called. But that was the only time, at least until he’d entered the concrete-walled, razor wire-topped walls of Wyoming Correctional. Then there were eyes on him all the time, every minute of every shitty day.
“There is the valley program,” said Mr. Webber to everybody in the room, polishing his glasses once again. “We’ve not talked about that with him yet.”
“We already discussed it prior to this,” said Mrs. Allwood with a snap and a shake of her curly and surely dyed hair. “They won’t want him. He’s too young. He can’t go there.”
Kell didn’t bother to perk up and listen, because even though the idea of a valley program, whatever that was, was a new topic, it wouldn’t make any difference, anyway.
The prison was crowded and the fact that he’d come up for parole after only sixty days of a ninety-day prison sentence told him, without any uncertainty whatsoever, that they wanted to be rid of him.
He was costing the taxpayers money, he was taking up one half of one jail cell, and nobody would benefit from any of it, least of all him. This parole board was very likely to stamp his papers approved, job or no job.
“We can at least tell him about it,” said Mr. Howell. He smoothed his tie, taking a pause from his scratching, and straightened up, as if affronted by the idea that a mere woman would try to derail a discussion all on her own.
There were two men in the room, not including Kell, so of course they would squash the woman. He’d seen it before, in his travels. Men liked to be in charge, to direct the conversation and the decisions, and if a woman ever got in the way, they’d squash her.
His dad was like that, had always been like that, so Kell knew all about it. Not that he was going to speak up and defend her because that had never worked in the past.
“Would you like to hear about the valley, Kelliher?” asked Mr. Webber.
“It’s Kell,” said Kell.
Only his parents had ever called him by his full name, Kelliher, which was a nod to some ancestor in the past who’d been a log baron or whatever.
Starting in high school, he’d asked his friends and teachers to call him Kell, and everybody had complied, probably since Kell was easier to say than Kelliher. With that new name had come a new sense of being, a new weightlessness, buoyed up by the idea that he could become whoever he wanted to be. Which had led him to making a huge mistake with his parents.
He should have known better, he really should have, especially about his dad, but the energy of it all, new name, new ideas, new identity even maybe, had made him foolishly blind to how his parents would react to the truth about their son. Their only son.
Well, fuck that. Kell couldn’t trust anyone in that room to tell them whether he was interested or not, so the only response he could give would be indifference.
“Would you like to hear about the valley program, Kell?” asked Mr. Webber now.
Kell shrugged. “Whatever.”
He wanted to add a smartass comment like,It’s your dime, start talking, which he’d heard a trucker who’d given him a lift one time say, but he didn’t even have enough energy for that, so he shrugged again and chewed on that hangnail on his thumb, making it bleed, a little sliver of red.
Mr. Webber made a little presentation, as if he’d been practicing it for ages, about the Farthingdale Valley New Start Program, where parolees were hired to work on a retreat that sounded like it was meant to be a kind of adult sleep-away camp for rich people.
At the end of his time in the valley, Kell would have a cell phone, money in his pocket, and real job experience, along with some kind of certificate. There might even be a chance that he could study for his GED while he was there.
All of which sounded extremely boring, because who was he going to call on a refurbished cell phone? Well, maybe he would call Bede, his cellmate, but he’d probably be the only person. The money would be good, too, but doing any kind of work in a situation that sounded more and more like a chain gang was not on any future agenda Kell cared to have.
“Only if Bede can go,” he said, throwing it out there because what the hell and why not?
“Bede?” asked Mr. Howell, scratching his chest between his buttons again.
“That’s Obadiah Deacon, his cellmate,” said Mrs. Allwood, digging through her notes.
“The drug dealer?” asked Mr. Howell, his voice rising. When the other two members of the parole board looked at him in surprise, he pointed to the table as if announcing he was done with their shit even though the subject had only just come up. “Obadiah Deacon is a dangerous drug dealer who was up for parole not six months ago. We denied him, of course.”
“I wasn’t in that meeting,” said Mr. Webber with a slight shake of his head as if to imply that since he, Mr. Webber, hadn’t been there, the whole thing was entirely suspish.
“I expect that since Kell is Mr. Deacon’s second cellmate who’s been paroled that he expects he should be paroled, as well.” When both men turned their heads to look at her where she sat at the end of the table, Mrs. Allwood smiled pertly. “He was sharing his cell with Ellis Bowman. You remember. He was the drug dealer whose mother had died, only there was some issue about his parole and he went ballistic?”
Neither man appeared to know what she was talking about, so all she got in response were two pairs of wrinkled brows and a return of both men’s attention to Kell.
