"We’ll stay here for a week or two,” Lori said. “While we find our own place. They won’t mind.”

“How far is San Francisco?”

“Maybe half an hour, once we’re back on the highway.”

“We going today?”

“Yeah, you ready?”

“I’m ready.”

The city was white, mixed now and then with clay browns, pale pinks and blues, some orange and some red, but no green. It was a city of buildings, of cable cars, narrow streets, and houses set back only inches from the roads; but there were no trees and no green space but what forced itself up through sidewalk cracks and on hillsides too steep to develop. The girls drove through the crammed streets to the waterfront, which was teeming with tourists and souvenir shops.

It was decided then that they split up for the afternoon to look for work, but there was so much to see, and Charlotte was soon sidetracked by the sight of Alcatraz. An old man sat in a booth on the boardwalk charging suckers ten bucks for a picture taken with him. Former Alcatraz Inmate, his shop sign read. For a moment Charlotte considered having her picture taken and mailing it to Vince. Or Jake. Whichever one opened the mail that day. Probably Vince. It could be Vince. But they were there and she was here, and the limiting distance made passing thoughts just passing thoughts. She bought a ticket and a cheap disposable camera, and cued up for the next ferry with the rest of the crowd.

The base of the small island was pretty, like a nature preserve with thickets covered in birds and their nests. The old grey buildings looked ready to fall, and the strength of the fortress now only existed in old photographs and stories.
Charlotte was glad to be alone. She paid for the audio set tour, and started off the journey around Cell Block A. Voices of old men who once lived in the rows of cages spoke to her through the headset. Their words were cracked with age, the righteousness of a grandfather, and underlying experiences youth could never understand. They were old with false purity. Charlotte walked and listened. In the deteriorating dining hall she listened to stories of uprisings, of young men crowded together, of forks used to stab, and the sight of a young woman walking outside on a pathway, visible through metal bars, the first time a female was seen by some in seven years.

The old man speaking remembered his tears. It was enough to fell him at the knees, the sight of a skirt swaying in a breeze. And he was a lucky one. He worked as a gardener planting the warden’s vegetables along that same path. That girl was the warden’s niece. She only came the time. Some men didn’t get to go outside. Some never saw the light of day. And that wasn’t just a figure of speech.

Charlotte wandered to the barbershop, now an empty cement room with elevated ceilings and barred windows so high only the blue sky could be seen. She listened to an old prison mate of The Birdman speak about that room, the one place where everything could happen. The barbershop. The Birdman was infamous inside, even more than Capone, who also sat in the barber’s seat in his own time like everyone else. Murder happened in that room, the former inmate said. There were men to be afraid of, but Capone wasn’t one of them. On the inside he was no one. It was The Birdman who could kill.

He got his name from his love of birds. He fed them through bars, and they flocked to him every time he wandered the exercise pen and carried garbage down the paths to the docks. He knew their scientific names, where they flew in the winter, knew the females from the males, could tell them apart from the sounds they made when he was lying alone, eventually in isolation, year after year. The Birdman. He killed inside and out, and was crazy, some said.

Charlotte thought her friend Jessie would’ve known a man like these men. But it was impossible to separate the two, as she listened to tales of New Year’s Eve music floating across the San Francisco Bay, and how the sound made them so happy, how they just laid in their cells that windless night and listened. Innocence in simple enjoyment, because there were no base pleasures to be had. A truly bad man wouldn’t enjoy the sound of a tune floating across water, or the sight of fireworks through thick, metal bars.

But what of a girl murdered and dumped at sea? Sometimes Charlotte wondered if Jessie had still been alive when she got tossed. The thought was sickening, but these men didn’t do it. They were in there for stealing, for tax fraud, for killing other men. They were human enough to enjoy a simple thing: a bird, the sway of a woman’s skirt, an old song. Sympathy flowed. People could change, and a place could change a person. In that was the hope for all who’d failed Charlotte.

The tour ended in Cell Block C. A new man, but still an old man, spoke of the time four men escaped, never to be seen again. Perhaps they made it or perhaps they didn’t, he said, but they would’ve had to stay clean, and it’s tough enough to teach old dogs new tricks. Law was on the outside and it would’ve caught up with them one day. The old voice turned on himself.

At the bottom of Cell Block C were the visitor booths, and voices blended in the background, the tapping sound of fingers on thick reinforced glass, the silence of a daughter, of a father not knowing the son before him, yet knowing the boy best of all.

Fifteen years, the voice said he’d been there, and not one person thought he was important enough to make that trip. Except once, after a decade, his mother and a young woman came. The girl was pretty, she was something else, and it was her desire to see him that made his mother make that trip. When she said, you don’t recognize me Gerry, he knew. Ten years, and here his little sister, a different person, someone he knew nothing about, had to meet him on Alcatraz. A pretty stranger, and he lost out. He lost out for all those years, and for all the years to come. It wasn’t worth it, the old man said. The words were for himself. God, it wasn’t worth it, what that ignorant kid who once was him, did.

Charlotte met up with Lori in an ice cream shop. She was already there eating a sundae from a paper cup, and waved with her spoon as she stood up to leave. They wandered back to the car, weaving through the crowds, between shops, and across sidewalks and streets.

“How’d it go? I got a job in a shell shop at Pier 39. Start next week,” Lori said.

“I wasn’t so lucky. Thought maybe some of the stores at Union Square.”

“They won’t hire you. It’s gotta be under the table to work without a Visa.”

“Oh, right. Well, I’ll try again tomorrow.”

She couldn’t get the graying voices out of her head – the old men once wanting to sing, the old men once moved by the sound of a soft bird. They were everywhere.