Hard News

slope of her left breast.
    The woman continued. “We spend weeks investigating foster parents. If you think about it, who scrutinizes natural parents?”
    Good point, Rune thought. “Can I visit her?”
    The answer was no—Rune could see that—but Johnson said, “Probably.”
    “What happens now?”
    “We have a diagnostic caseworker on call. She’ll take Courtney to the emergency home tonight.”
    “I don’t have to do anything else?”
    “That will be the end of your involvement.”
    Rune hated civil-servant language. It was as if they took the words and quick-froze them.
    She turned to Courtney and said, “Will you miss me?”
    The girl said, “No.”
    No?
    Johnson said to her, “Honey, would you like to go stay with a nice mommy and daddy? They have some children just like you and they’d love for you to visit.”
    “Yeah.”
    Rune said to her, “You’ll be happy there.”
    Why isn’t she sobbing?
    Johnson said, “I’ll take her now. You have her things?”
    Rune handed over the bag containing the ratty stuffed animals and her new clothes. Johnson looked at Rune’s face and said, “I know how you feel but, believe me, you did the right thing. There wasn’t any choice.”
    Rune squatted down and hugged the girl. “I’ll come visit you.”
    It was then that Courtney sized up what was happening. “Rune?” she asked uncertainly.
    Johnson took her by the hand and led her down the corridor.
    Courtney started to cry.
    Rune started to cry.
    Johnson remained dry-eyed. “Come on, honey.”
    Courtney looked back once and called, “Zoo!”
    “We’ll go to the zoo, I promise.”
    Rune left the ugly slab of a building, feeling an intense freedom.
    And feeling too the weight of a guilt that matched her own 102 pounds ounce for ounce. But that was okay. She had a story to do.
    SPRING IN PRISON IS LIKE SPRING IN THE CITY. WEAK, AL most unnoticeable. You only sense it because of the air. You smell it, you taste it, you feel an extra portion of warmth. It flirts with you once or twice, then that’s it. Back to work, or back to the prison yard. Crocuses can’t break through concrete.
    Randy Boggs was waiting for Severn Washington in the prison gym when the smell of spring hit him. And, damn, it made him feel bad. He’d never been to college. School for him meant high school and this battered prison gym reminded him a lot of the one at Washington Irving High where, twenty years earlier, he’d have been working out on the parallel bars or struggling to do an iron cross on the rings, and, bang, there would be that smell in the air that meant they’d soon be out of school and he’d have summer ahead of him—along with a couple of weeks’ pure freedom before the job at the Kresge warehouse.
    Damn, what a smell spring has….
    He thought about a dozen memories released by that smell. Girls’ small boobs and hot grass and the chain-saw rumble of a 350 Chevy engine. And beer. Man, he loved beer. Now as much as then, though he knew there was no taste like the taste of beer when you were a teenager.
    Randy Boggs squinted across the gym and could see the loping figure of Severn Washington, two hundred thirty pounds’ worth, a broad face in between a scalp of tight cornrows and a neck thick as Boggs’s thigh.
    Washington had laughed and told Boggs not long after they met that he’d never had a white friend in all of his forty-three years. He’d missed Nam because of his eyesight and always stayed pretty close to home, which in his family’s case had been a Hundred and Thirty-seventh Street, where there were not many whites at all, let alone any that he’d befriend.
    That’s why Washington had been uncomfortable when, one day in the yard, Boggs began talking to him, just bullshitting in that soft, shy voice he had. At first, Washington later told him, he had thought Boggs wanted to be his maytag, his loverboy, then Washington decided Boggs was just another white-ass crazy, maybe methed or angel-dusted out. But when Boggs kept it up, talking away, funny, making more sense than most people Inside, Washington and Boggs became friends.
    Boggs told him that he’d been through Raleigh and Durham a bunch of times and learned that Washington’s family had come from North Carolina, though he’d never been there. Washington wanted to hear all about the state and Boggs was glad to tell him. From there, they talked about Sylvia’s, Harlem, Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon, Eddie Murphy, Denzel Washington (no