Deception Cove

A man goes into a cage for fifteen years and he’s bound to change inside, though in the end it’s up to him whether that change is for the better or the worse. Sometimes even he won’t know until he’s let back out into the world again, and at that point, there isn’t much that can be done but to stand back and keep watch, hope he isn’t broken beyond fixing.

Mason Burke had been eighteen years old, a boy and a wild one, when he walked into the Chippewa state pen on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and when he walked out again, his time served and fifteen years passed, he was no longer a boy and no longer wild, but still a mile shy of manhood and not fully tame, either.

He’d served his sentence quietly and without complaint, and he harbored no grudges. He was guilty of doing what the law said he’d done, what the courts had determined deserved fifteen years’ penalty, and in consequence he’d spent nearly half of his life a prisoner—though as far as he was concerned, he’d been treated fair.

But he hadn’t enjoyed prison. He’d learned how to survive, and how to pass the time, but just surviving fifteen years had forced him to stifle parts of himself he’d once thought were fundamental. He’d walked into prison a human being, albeit a flawed, reckless one, and as he stood outside those gates for the first time in one full decade and another half, buffeted by a chill November wind that swept across the barren parking lot, Mason couldn’t even be sure of his own humanity anymore, couldn’t be sure his time incarcerated hadn’t reduced him to something lesser, something base, something unfit for the world that awaited him.

He didn’t want to leave. That was the sickest part, the part that told Mason maybe something was broken inside him that could never be fixed. He wasn’t the first prisoner to have panicked at the first breath of free air, and he wouldn’t be the last, but as he stood gazing across that parking lot to the flat, dull land beyond, the whole world seemed impossibly large and alien, no walls and no boundaries, no structure, just a suffocating expanse of empty space and a lifetime’s worth of codes and social norms he’d missed out on learning.

He wanted to turn around and walk back in through the gates, return his civilian clothes to where they’d stored them all this time, go back to his old cell and stretch out in that bunk and let the prison walls envelop him, protect him from the outside just as much as they protected the outside from people like him. He’d have said he was scared to be out in this world, except fear was a reaction you learned to hide damn fast on the inside. You learned to push it down, ignore it, until it just went away and you didn’t feel scared anymore. The guys who got scared were the guys who didn’t survive.

But there was no turning back, and Mason wouldn’t have anyway, even if his sister hadn’t been standing leaned up against a dusty Dodge Grand Caravan, hands in her coat pockets, squinting across the lot at him, studying her younger brother as he took his first steps back out into the world.

She took her hands from her pockets, gave him a little wave, shy and stilted. “Hi, Mase,” she said, avoiding his eyes as he came across the pavement toward her. “Looks like you made it.”

“We thought you could live with us for a while, me and Glen and the girls,” Maggie said as she drove out of the parking lot and set the minivan on a two-hundred-mile course to the south. “There’s a spare room in the basement you can stay in, rent-free, just so long as you keep out of trouble.”

She was two years his senior, but it might as well have been twenty; she kept sneaking glances across at him like she was wondering who he was, wondering if he was still capable of doing the things he’d done long ago. Mason sat in the passenger seat and felt her eyes on him, and he looked out at the world as it passed his window. His stomach churned with the first stirrings of motion sickness.

“Glen said he could line up a job for you too.” Maggie’s voice was all forced cheer and fragile hope. “He says they’re always looking for good, hardworking men.”

Mason cleared his throat. “What does he do again?”

“Glen?” Maggie blinked. “Well, he’s a real estate agent, Mase.” She looked at him again. “Anyway, it wouldn’t be like you were working for him, exactly, just they sometimes need people to clean the houses they’re selling, do minor repairs, that kind of thing.”

“Clean houses,” Mason said.

“I mean, it wouldn’t have to be forever, just until you got on your feet, right?”

“I thought I might stay at Mom’s old place,” he said.

Maggie’s look was half pity, half wishful thinking, like she and Glen had probably had a hell of a fight about giving Mason that spare room, and familial duty had only barely won out.

“Oh, Mase,” she said. “We sold Mom’s place after she died, didn’t we tell you?”

“I guess I must have just forgot,” he replied, more for her sake than his. Maggie hadn’t done much to keep him filled in on the family news while he’d been inside, and they both knew it.

“It was all falling apart anyway, needed so much work. Glen got us a good price, and—well, anyway. You didn’t want to be fixing a bunch of plumbing and redoing a roof first thing after you got home, right?”

There was only one right answer to that question, and that was to lie, so Mason just didn’t say anything. And Maggie waited long enough that his silence became an answer in itself, and then she sighed and reached for the radio, and Mason knew she was thinking the same thing that he was, that they’d driven just ten miles and they still had one hundred ninety more to go.

The first thing Mason did at Maggie’s house—after he’d set his bag down in that basement spare room, after he’d enjoyed a cold beer and a scalding hot shower, scrubbed as much of that fifteen-years-in-captivity stink as he could from his skin—was to find a picture in his bag of a big black-and-white dog, set it on top of the nightstand beside his new bed.

Then he borrowed Maggie’s phone and placed a call, to a Ms. Linda Petrie at the Rover’s Redemption agency.

He’d kept Ms. Petrie’s number since the last time he’d seen her, about six months before his release, had spent that whole stretch of time plotting this phone call. But Mason still felt the nerves as he listened to the ringing, drummed his fingers on his thigh and couldn’t help pacing, knew this was probably against some kind of regulation, knew he should hang up the phone.

But Linda Petrie picked up before Mason could make that decision, and then there was no sense in anything but moving forward.

“Rover’s Redemption.” She sounded the same as Mason remembered: tough, take no shit.

“Ms. Petrie.” The name came out rough, like he was out of practice. Like it took something extra to speak as a free man. “It’s Mason Burke calling you.”

Silence. Then, “I’m sorry, Mason…Burke? I don’t—”

“I figured you might not remember,” Mason continued. “You probably work with a lot of guys like me. I was up in the Chippewa pen this last go-around. Lucy was my dog.”

“Oh, Lucy,” Linda Petrie said. “Yes, I remember now, of course.”

Mason waited, but she didn’t say anything else, and he could sense by her tone that she wasn’t exactly comfortable hearing his voice. He wondered if this was how he was going to feel for the rest of his life, like he was asking a huge favor just hoping people would look at him straight, have a conversation.

“Well, I was calling because I’m out now,” he said. “And I got that postcard picture you sent of Lucy, and I wanted to check in and see if you knew how she’s doing.” He paused. “You know, how she’s adjusting to her new home, and such.”

Another pause. Then Mason heard Linda Petrie suck in her breath. “I really can’t discuss what happens to the dogs after they leave the program, Mr. Burke—”

“Mason please, ma’am.”

“Mason,” she said, but there was still that something else in her voice. “I’m afraid I just can’t give you any information,” she said. “It wouldn’t be appropriate; I’m sorry.”

“Did she find a good home?” Mason asked. “I don’t need to know where she is or anything, just that I set her up okay for when she went out into the world.”

That long silence again. “I can’t be talking about this,” she said. “Not with you. They’d pull the program if they found out I’d given this information to a—to a…”

She wanted to talk. Mason could tell. Something had happened, something was wrong, and the trainer was itching to talk to him about it.

“Is she alive, at least, Ms. Petrie? Tell me she’s still alive.”

But she couldn’t even do that.

“There was an incident,” she said. “Your dog attacked someone. From what I understand, she had to be destroyed.”

“Destroyed.” The word hit Mason like a roundhouse punch.

Petrie breathed out. “Listen, whatever happened, it wasn’t your fault. Sometimes a dog just goes bad.”

“Not Lucy,” Mason said. “I know that dog. Something must have provoked her.”

Petrie didn’t say anything, and Mason realized he was pacing, his body tense, muscles clenched tight. He wasn’t willing to believe it, not his dog, not Lucy. Not the dog he’d trained.

“Mason?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“You just have to forget about this,” Petrie said. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out, but these things, you just have to move on.”

She sounded scared. Like she thought she’d made a mistake telling him, like he was going to run off and do something crazy now.

“It’s okay,” he told her. “You don’t have to worry about me.”

He ended the call. Replaced the handset and went back down his sister’s stairs to his basement bedroom. Found the picture of Lucy he’d propped up on the nightstand, and sat on the edge of the bed and stared at it for a while.

The dog wasn’t much to look at, the first time Mason saw her. Just a scared little black-and-white thing crammed up against the back wall of her crate with her tail between her legs, shaking, not making eye contact with Mason or anyone else.

She was a pit bull—at least partially, anyway—but she didn’t look like the pits Mason had seen growing up: solid, rough-looking dogs jacked front to back with heavy muscle, collared in chains, and boasting foul dispositions. The pit bulls Mason had known had been mean animals, goaded into aggression by owners who used the dogs to intimidate and impress—and, occasionally, to punish.

This creature, she wasn’t impressing anyone. And she sure wasn’t intimidating.

“That ain’t a dog,” Bridges Colson said, laughing, looking in at the little runt. “That there is fucking bait.”

Bait. They all had a laugh at that, the lot of them—hell, Mason included. Laughed all the way until Ms. Linda Petrie pointed him over to that crate, told him the little runt dog was his dog, no two ways about it.

Mason looked over at the other guys, their own dogs—puppies, yellow Labrador retrievers, German shepherds, a couple of gangly, hairy mutts—all of them strong, all of them happy as a TV commercial, big pink tongues lolling out, chasing balls, shaking paws, the whole doggie dream, and he looked in at his own little wretch and felt damn cheated.

But Linda Petrie was talking again, and there was something about when she talked, you wanted to pay attention. Like she didn’t give a shit, like she’d march right into the Chippewa pen and stand up in front of a couple of dozen hardened felons and not even worry if the two guards behind her would have her back if the whole show went sideways. And that’s pretty much how she did it.

“This won’t be happy hour,” she was saying. “And there’s nothing that says we have to keep you here, with these dogs. This is a privilege the warden has extended you, and if he or these two gentlemen behind me come to believe you’re abusing that privilege, well, hell, they’ll find someone else who appreciates the opportunity a little more. Are we clear?”

She looked hard at the men, each of them in turn, and when she looked at Mason, he nodded like the rest. Wanted to ask what happened if your dog washed out before you did, but Ms. Linda Petrie had moved on.

“This isn’t the start of some lifelong friendship, either,” she said. “You’ll work with your dog for six months, train them up, and then we’ll place them in homes with people who’ll care for them. You won’t get to see them again, so don’t bother asking. Anyone have a problem with that?”

Nobody had a problem. The trainer went over some other stuff, like from a script, how the Rover’s Redemption agency was truly grateful for their time and effort, and how if they let them, the dogs might just teach them something about themselves in the process, but Mason was kind of tuning the whole spiel out; he peered back into the crate at the pitiful creature within and wondered what in the hell this dog was supposed to teach him; it couldn’t even come out and say hi.

Wouldn’t last an hour on the yard, he thought. These hard boys would mess you straight up.

Beside Mason, Bridges Colson’s dog—a big, dumb golden retriever—was all over him, a real sight to behold; the meanest guy in the room, and he was giggling like a child as his dog gave him the most slobbery face wash Mason had ever seen.

Meanwhile, the little black-and-white runt at the back of the crate stared out at him, with big brown eyes that looked away fast when she caught him looking back. Must have weighed thirty pounds, tops.

The name on her crate said LUCY.

“Bit of a fixer-upper, that one,” a voice said beside him, and Mason looked up to find Linda Petrie standing there, didn’t even realize she’d finished her lecture. “Come out of a dogfighting sting down in Muskegon, about thirty dogs on the property, most of them too far gone to be saved.”

Mason looked at her. “They killed them?”