It took just about an hour to reach Terre Haute, Indiana, by chartered flight. With Dad’s pull, I was granted entrance and ushered into a room with a table and two chairs facing each other.

The man wearing lime green from head to toe in cuffs and leg chains was much older than the man I remembered. The lines were etched deep and a scar he hadn’t had before cut low across his jawline.

His cuffs were attached to a ring on the table before one security guard left and the other moved back to stand next to the door.

“I didn’t expect to get a visitor. I guess—” he glanced over his shoulder before turning back to face me, “your mom and dad got you in to see me. I’m not sure why.”

He’d made it clear he didn’t want me to address him as Dad, though I wouldn’t have. For whatever reason, he didn’t want me in any way to associate myself with him for someone else to hear.

“I thought maybe we should talk before—”

“Before they execute me.” Chains rattled as he sat back. “What’s there to say? They sentenced me for a bogus charge.”

“They have evidence,” I said matter-of-factly.

“They don’t have dick. I’ve done a lot of shitty things, but killing that cop…that’s not one of them.”

He was right. He’d done a lot of shit. Maybe he did or maybe he didn’t kill the federal officer, but he’d seen to it others died.

“I need you to know that I didn’t do it,” he pressed, sitting forward to rest his arms on the table.

I nodded, offering him the only absolution I could.

“So what is it you want? To see a dead man walking? Doing a paper in that fancy school you go to?”

My response was slow. I hadn’t expected any reaction to seeing the man. But there it was, knotted in my chest so tight I found it hard to speak. I pinched my brow to pull myself together.

“You know, if I’d had a son, I would have wanted him in a place like that, making a good life for himself. Your dad sure must be proud.”

His clasped hands sat close to the middle of the table. If I had the inclination, I could reach out and touch him.

I cleared my throat. “My dad is proud. He taught me to be the man I am today. He trusts me to handle myself. I don’t need security to watch over me.”

He winced and pinched his lips together, then he nodded, more to himself than to me. I wasn’t sure if I was looking for it or if it had even been there, but a flash of hurt crossed his face.

“It’s a scary world out there. I imagine if your dad had enemies like I do, he would hire someone discreetly. Someone he could trust.”

Gavin hadn’t told me much more. He said with my dad running for president, it was best for all I didn’t know any more than I did.

“He probably would, but then my dad has always let me know how much I mean to him.”

There, the ball was in his court.

“You know, there was a boy I once knew. He was a curious thing. I’d shooed him away when I had business, but he was attached to me. I didn’t quite understand it myself, not growing up with a dad, but I couldn’t seem to rid myself of his affection.”

I stared straight at him knowing the boy was me. I remember feeling that attachment.

“Anyway, the kid was there one day, not that I wanted him to be. He came out of hiding, and clung to my legs like he was somebody to me.” He chuckled. “The guys, they made the mistake of tying us together like family, when in fact we weren’t.”

I remembered that day.

“He was just this chick I’d banged’s kid, you know?”

He pulled his hands apart and patted the table. “Anyway, they made comments like how that cute kid would grow up to be just like his dad. They could use his looks, you know. Despite the kid not being mine, I wouldn’t wish that life on anyone. I’d made my bed, as they say. I had to lie in it. I didn’t have to bring anyone down with me.”

What he didn’t say was that he’d told them I was just a kid. One of them, the guy in charge, had asked if they’d done right by him. He had to agree or risk pissing them off. Something I just realized. Then they’d gone on to say it would be good to wet my feet early.

“What happened to the kid and his mother?”

He shrugged. “She disappeared as fast as she’d shown up. She’d run away from a good home to live her dreams.”

“Did those dreams include you?”

“How should I know? She was a pretty thing, but I didn’t attach myself to no one. I tried to send her back home with the kid. I suspect she liked living fast and loose. Met up with the wrong guy and found trouble she couldn’t get out of.”

“So you’re sure you don’t know what happened to her…and the kid.”

I threw in that last part so the guard wouldn’t make the mistake of thinking we were talking cryptically about me. If the guy wasn’t dumb, he would have thought that.

He spread his hands as far as he could. “They disappeared. I never saw them again.”

“Or heard about them?”

His head drifted side to side. “I liked her and the kid well enough not to want harm to come to them.”

I wasn’t sure if I believed him or not.

“What did she look like?”

The private detective had sent yearbook photos of my bio mom. I wondered if she looked the same when he’d met her.

He hissed and sat back in the chair. “Let me think. It’s been, what, twenty or so years. Why would that matter now?”

I caught the security guy showing some interest. Thinking fast, tying the two things together could work.

“There’s a girl on campus, blonde, pretty, she’s missing. For my senior project, I’m doing research on capital crimes. Since you are the only person I…my parents could get me to see, I thought maybe you might have some insight.”

“Well, I couldn’t have taken her. I’m in here.”

His arms widened to accompany the room.

“No, but you must know people.”

He shook his head. “I don’t know nobody.”

“Sure you don’t. At least give me a description of the girl and I’ll form my own conclusions.”

He rubbed at his chin. “Let’s see. If memory serves, she was a honey blonde with a tight little body and perfect fucking tits. Gets my dick hard, just remembering.”

Talk about the last thing I wanted to imagine. I tried to un-hear what my father thought about my mother that way.

“How old was she?”

“Don’t know. Young, high school probably.”

“And you? Not too old for her.”

Remembering that I have my birth certificate, which would have her birthday, I didn’t ask anything more about that. “Do you care you’re going to die soon?”

Flippantly, he said, “Who said I’m going to die?”

“So, it’s true. You’re going to give evidence to make a deal.”

“I don’t have to give them anything. They have everything they need to prove I’m innocent.”

“Do you worry that what you’re doing will put others in danger?”

The laugh he gave was dark. “There ain’t nobody I care about. You’re the first person to visit me in this hellhole for the ten years I’ve been in this joint. And your parents should have known better than to send you here looking for shit that ain’t got nothing to do with me.”

His voice turned low, reminding me how dangerous he was.

“They didn’t send me here. Talking to a real inmate will give credit to my paper. Too bad for the both of us, you were the lucky guy available on short notice to talk to. Apparently, like you said, no one cares enough about you to visit; the warden must have felt pity for you.”

His mother, my grandmother, had died of lung cancer not too long after his incarceration.

“Well, lucky me.” He leaned forward. “And don’t forget, lucky you. I had to agree to this little visit of yours. Your parents offered me some cash in my commissary account, so I agreed.”

The story I concocted had flaws that he plugged. It wasn’t lost on me that he was telling me he didn’t have to see me.

“Well, thanks for seeing me. I shouldn’t waste any more of your time.”

“Wait,” he said, as I started to get to my feet.

The look in his eye made me feel sorry for him and I sat back down.

“I should know more about the guy who’s going to write a paper about me.”

Was that his way of showing he cared about me?

“First, you give me some history about you, for my paper.”

When I lived with him, we didn’t talk much. It was more like do this, do that, sit here, hide there.

“There ain’t much to know. I grew up in a trailer near the water. Mom was strung out most of the time. The asshole that knocked her up left her strapped for cash. Or maybe that was the guy’s wife. Anyway, I didn’t have much of anything until I got a job.”

A job doing criminal activity, probably for the mob or something like it. I wasn’t ever privy to who the bad guys worked for. I just did what I was told until Mom got me out.

“Then life got a hell of a lot easier. Women came easy.” He pointedly stared at me. “I got to go on vacations and shit.”

“Was it worth it?”

“At the time.”

“And now, sitting here on death row, would you do it all again?”

“I can’t say. When you’re starving and you ain’t got clean clothes to wear to school. And damn if kids weren’t mean motherfuckers, you do what you have to.”

“A lot of people make it out without doing the shit you did.”

“Yeah. Well, a lot of people didn’t have johns and drug dealers coming to their house and a mother willing to trade you for her next hit because you look too much like the asshole who knocked her up and broke her poor fucking heart.”

I wanted to believe the worst of him. But even I felt bad for his life and the choices he had to make.

“What about you, kid? It’s easy to judge considering how you grew up. Did you have a nanny, someone to wipe your ass at your beck and call?”

“No. I wasn’t given everything I wanted. I had to earn it. There was no nanny.” But he knew that. I’d been too old for that when I’d been taken from his tender care. I snorted at that last thought. “I learned to sail and fish. Dad loves the water.”

“Yeah. Funny, I love the water too. Spent half my life there.”

“I didn’t like anything about water until Dad showed me his passion for it.”

“Sounds like you had a good father. Boys need a good father. Who knows what my life would have been like if mine hadn’t abandoned me.” He paused. “So are you graduating this year?”

I’d said I was working on my senior project.

“Yes.”

“Good for you. You seem like a good kid. Good thing you didn’t grow up like me.”

“I’d like to think that if I had, I wouldn’t have made the same choices you had and still ended up where I am today.”

His laugh was self-deprecating. “You’re right. You probably always had it in you to be a better man. I’d like to think that if I had a son, I would have found a way to make sure he ended up like you, even a daughter.”

Had he added that in to throw the guard off, or did he know he had a daughter somewhere?

“Are you certain you don’t have kids anywhere?”

“What guy who’s banged a chick can be sure about anything? But I can say no one has ever told me I was a father.”

His look, which the guard couldn’t see, said except your mother.

“Well, I think that’s it.”

He nodded and held his hand out. The guard was peeking out the tiny window in the door. He might have been signaling for someone to unlock it. I reached out and he clasped my hand. His was coarse, but familiar.

We’d let go before the guard turned back.

“Well,” he said, sounding slightly choked up. “If nothing else, I’ll remember my first and only visitor when they strap me in that chair. Put in your paper that I never killed no one despite what anyone thinks. I never did that.”

The guard had him unhooked, up, and shuffling to the door as he spoke.

I stood as the door closed, dumbfounded. He’d sounded so sure. But what did any criminal do but claim innocence? I’d seen things because I had been a curious kid. He didn’t know all I’d seen.