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said.
    More curious than concerned, I asked, “What’s in the file? What’d he do?” Guy from home, vaguely familiar, normal interest, but casual.
    Clarke was browsing. “Hmmm … some minor shit back in the eighties, selling dope back in … where you guys come from, Tony.”
    I shrugged, and Clarke looked back at the file.
    “Sentenced to three years in 1992 … holdup in a conveniencestore in … Toronto. Hey, looks like he walks into a little 7-Eleven, hand in his pocket, threatens the owner—some Lebanese guy—who hands over a wad of bills. Strickland runs for it, storekeeper in hot pursuit, armed with a
bayonet
 … catches him a block away …”
    “Don’t fuck with the Lebanese. Guy probably from the civil war. Strickland’s lucky.”
    Clarke laughed.
    “Now,” he said, flipping through the document, “doing eight for a bank job last year, Bloor West. Taken down two hours later counting his haul in a Lakeshore motel room. Don’t fuck with the banks, eh?”
    I laughed, and thought no more of it.
    Then Clarke brought his name up again, two years later.
    “Christ,” I said. “What’s with this guy?”
    “You must know him pretty well,” Clarke said.
    “Don’t you think I’ve got enough to do without taking on one of your Millhaven problems? And for the record, I don’t know him at all.”
    “You’re mentioned in a profile report as a possible personal contact. You know his home life.”
    We were all around the boardroom table, case managers and support staff from around the region, five institutions from minimum to max. Meetings bored me and I was doodling an AK-47, trying to ignore what my gut said was an entanglement I didn’t really need.
    “He might be worth a visit,” Clarke said.
    Strickland had potential to reoffend but there was hope for him, Sophie said. She was the psychologist. Earnest Sophie.I used to ask myself,
How did she get in here?
Too pretty and too soft.
    “So let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re all thinking: Two guys from the boondocks, two guys with murky origins and all the psychological and social hang-ups associated with adoption—a perfect therapeutic fit. Is that what I’m hearing?”
    Sophie sighed. “I can’t imagine what you’re hearing. What’s
being said
is that there’s a chance you might be able to give a little bit of support to this guy. I think there’s something decent in the core of him.” This was the same Sophie who had brought one of our meetings to a halt with the stunner:
Evil is an adverb
.
    But I never forgot those words, or her smile, the flicker of the deep blue-hazel eyes dancing on my face.
    “You’re laughing at me,” she’d accused.
    “I would never laugh at you.”
    It was Sophie who talked me into seeing him.
    Looking back I can understand how Dwayne Strickland could charm Anna and Sophie, or any woman, really. To them he’d represent a wealth of possibilities for improvement. The nurturing instinct: take bad boys and make them good men. To me he was just another good-looking, fairly articulate young con. There are lots of them inside, contrary to popular belief. They don’t all have low foreheads and knuckles scabbed from dragging on the ground. Of course there are the losers and the predators, more than a few lost causes. But what kept me in the system for so many years was the obvious potential that I saw in so many like Dwayne Strickland, the possibilities of“rehabilitation”—a word that makes me sick and angry now that I’m out of it. Strickland was bright and presentable enough to have had a shot at making it in any walk of life, but maybe he’d wanted too much too soon, and maybe he was not quite so clever as he thought he was.
    I met him for the first time just after the first 1998 riot. Millhaven went through a bad stretch in the late nineties, inmate agitation for reforms exacerbated by ineffective management. They were rough times and maybe that’s why I finally succumbed to his