82 Desire

somethin’ out of Gone With the Wind , doesn’t it? He wasn’t nearly as dashing as he sounds. Little roly-poly fellow. You’d swear he was just barely competent.” He paused and chuckled again. “Some kind of Peter Falk-Columbo act. The man’s a great actor, I’ll tell you that.”
    Ray chuckled along with him, thinking that at last he might be getting somewhere. “Mr. Newman, could we get together and talk about this?”
    “I don’t know what there is to talk about. I don’t know anything else.”
    “Okay. Let’s leave it like it is for now. I know it’s a lot to assimilate—the fact that they did this as policy. But I believe they did and I believe we can prove they did. And I believe we have recourse. Let me just give you time to think it over, and then I’ll call you back.”
    “Fair enough, Mr. Boudreaux. Fair enough.” His voice told Ray he’d already started processing it.
    Ray disconnected, feeling triumphant, almost ready to holler out at Cille that things were finally starting to break, when he heard the little stutter tone of his voice mail. He decided to check it before hollering, to see if anything else good had happened. It was Ronnie, his son.
    “Dad, I need a little help. I’m in … uh … Central Lockup … uh … there’s been a little trouble. If you could do anything to get me out of here, I’d really appreciate it.”
    Central Lockup? How was Ray supposed to take that in?
    But he grasped in a millisecond the fear and misery in his son’s voice. It was heartbreaking to hear the boy trying so hard to be cool, yet unable to hide his desperation.
    Ray hung up the phone and walked very quietly out of the house, trying not to attract Cille’s attention. Now if he could just get away…
    He backed his car out of the driveway at about sixty, swung around, and laid rubber like some high school gangster. But at the end of the block he slowed to a normal pace—Cille wasn’t going to run down the street chasing him.
    He drove over to South Broad Street—the thing was somewhere near police headquarters, he knew that much—trying to picture his baby son, towheaded Ronnie, in Central Lockup. Thank God Cille hadn’t picked up the phone—maybe he could solve this thing, whatever it was, without her even having to know about it.
    Central Lockup (officially the Intake and Processing Center), which sounds like something out of prerevolutionary Russia, in fact looks more like an airport waiting room than a jail. Ray exhaled as he walked in, realizing that he’d pictured an environment where everything was metal, a good deal of it rusty, all of it clanking. On the drive over, he could almost feel a coldness that permeated first the air and then the brain of anyone who breathed it, detaching it from the skull, spinning it around like some mad, squishy top.
    When he saw the reality, his spinning brain had only one thought: This isn’t so bad.
    Yet reason told him it could hardly be worse.
    He let himself be led docilely through the steps in getting his son out of jail—he had to find a lawyer who could get a bond set, then find some cash, a near impossibility, and then a bail bondsman. Then he had to post bond, and then he had to get his son in the car and take him somewhere other than home—he couldn’t really be around him right now—and listen to how he had been stupid enough to get busted for a joint or something.
    It turned out it was theft—or that’s what the cops called it.
    He had yet to hear Ronnie’s version.
    He already knew a lawyer from his troubles over his lease, and the lawyer was home and so, in time, was a judge. Ray used his ATM card to get the cash.
    His normally red-cheeked son was as pasty as cinder blocks. The boy’s hazel eyes—neither brown nor really green—were huge with remorse and pleading. I’ll do anything. I’ll go back to first grade and start over. I’ll be a Cub Scout again, I’ll clean my room every day, I’ll scrub the toilets, for Christ’s sake. Just take me out of here now!
    And after Ray had, when Ronnie was safely in the car, he said, “What if your mother had had to see that?”
    “Dad, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I could kill myself. I swear to God I could.” And at nineteen years of age, he burst into tears.
    Ray drove round and round till the tears dried up and Ronnie could tell his story. “It was just a big misunderstanding,” he said. “You know? I picked up two shirts instead of one. I was at The Gap, shopping,