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Second & Atlantic
“What is this place?” Jesse finally asks, maybe the fourth or fifth time they go there. Mike supposes it’s a good thing, this bit of situational awareness, the kid finally taking some interest in his surroundings. And the old Barelas machine shop is pretty impressive when you stop to look around. A shabby cathedral of blue and green glass, sitting proud in the middle of the city as if no one had ever told it it wasn't needed any more.
“A machine shop,” Mike says. “Where they used to work on the engines for the railroad. You never saw it open?”
“Uh, no,” says Jesse. He’s found an oddly-shaped piece of metal on the floor and is turning it over with the scuffed toe of his sneaker. “It’s been closed since… I don’t know. I got in here a couple of times when I was a kid, just, like, exploring, but then they put up the barbed wire.”
Tattered clothes lie in corners. A scrubby plant forces its way up from a crack in the brickwork floor in a broken window's width of sunlight.
“How’d they get the engines in here?” Jesse asks.
Mike indicates the tracks embedded in the ground.
“Oh.” Jesse rubs the back of his neck, kicks the bit of metal from one foot to the other.
First & Mountain
It’s a hot, cloudless day. They wait at the lights as a train passes, carrying away the sound of bells. Jesse drums his fingers on the car door, at first randomly, but the train is taking its time and eventually he gets a passable funk-type rhythm going.
“Hey, d’you mind?” Jesse asks, gesturing at the radio. Mike’s bored too, so he shakes his head. Music splatters the inside of the car.
“—and after he’s been hooked, I’ll play the one that’s on his heart—click—amor prohibido, los dice, todo el mundo—click—here with your afternoon traffic report on ninety-seven point three…”
Jesse settles on a guttural screech of a voice backed by artillery-style drums. Mike raises an eyebrow at him, and he sheepishly turns the volume down, then off.
“I don’t really listen to that shit any more,” he mumbles, fingers tapping on the door again. “It’s kinda juvenile.”
Adams & Central
“Kid, I gotta ask,” he says, late one night, as Jesse fidgets with his coffee mug. “You and Walter: how’d that start?”
“He was my teacher,” Jesse says, rubbing his eyes and reaching for the sugar packets; briefly he flashes Mike a hollow-eyed look that says yeah, it’s exactly as fucked up as it sounds. “My high school chemistry teacher. Yeah.”
“Your high school teacher.”
“We weren’t— I wasn’t at high school,” Jesse clarifies. “I left, like, six years ago. It’s not like he made me his— child laborer or whatever. Anyway, I had my own operation, but then Mr. White’s asshole brother-in-law busted my partner, and Mr. White showed up at my house wanting to know if I’d work with him. Or rather he told me he’d turn me in if I didn’t. So.” Jesse drums the edge of the table with both hands. “That’s the story.”
Jesus, Mike thinks.
“Was he a good teacher?” Mike asks.
“I guess. I don’t know. I was a crappy student, so.” He drinks his coffee. “How about you?”
“How about me?”
“This job. You know, working with Saul, and…” He glances around, too timid to mention Gus Fring in a public place, even though he’s just discussed cooking meth with a named individual. “How’d you get into it?”
Mike just scoffs, shakes his head.
“What did you do before?” he asks instead, and Mike doesn’t particularly want to answer that either, but from the look on Jesse’s face it’s like he’s wondering if Mike’s before could be his after.
“I was a cop,” Mike says. “Thirty years.”
“Damn,” Jesse says, impressed.
“I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“I had this… thought, once… about being like a social worker,” Jesse says, and it’s clear that he’s never told anyone this before. “But you need all these certifications and shit, and it’s like… I don’t know. I dropped out of college, so…”
“Ever thought about going back?”
Jesse sighs. “I don’t know, man. It’s like… sometimes you just gotta accept that you missed your chance, you know? Like, you could have been something, but that was in the past, and now it’s like… closed doors.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-five,” Jesse says.
Matty made it to twenty-seven.
Eubank & Signal
The drop point is in an empty lot, beneath a cluster of prickly pear, ten paces past a FOR SALE sign. The blank windows of half-finished houses gape back at them. It rained last night; the last of the floodwater foams darkly in an arroyo.
Leaning against the car, Jesse fishes a device out of his pocket. Headphones swing from his hand on a skinny cord as he lights a cigarette.
“What’s that?”
“MP3 player.”
“Is that the one with the little discs?” Mike asks. He knows it’s not, but he might as well make conversation. Take Jesse’s mind off things.
Jesse chuckles. “Uh, no. It’s— it’s all digital now. Lemme show you.”
He scrolls through song titles on a bright, smooth screen. Consumer tech is all so effortless these days; no more twiddling dials or whacking the top of the TV set to clear up the picture. Hundreds of channels beamed right into your home. Perhaps that’s the problem for kids Jesse’s age: they have too many things to distract themselves with.
“I wanted to get the new iPhone, but, y’know.” Jesse shrugs, putting the device away. “Kind of a waste when I have to throw mine away every couple of weeks.”
“Uh-huh.”
“An iPhone is, like… well, it’s a phone, but it’s got like super high processing power and lots of memory, so you can download music and apps and whatnot.”
“Is that so?” Inside the car it’s twenty degrees warmer; Mike tosses Jesse a bottle of water.
“And GPS-assisted mapping, so you can always know exactly where you are.” Jesse takes a swig. “Which I guess has security implications for us.”
“My granddaughter wants one of those phones with all the bells and whistles,” Mike says. Jesse’s face brightens, as it usually does when he mentions Kaylee. “Not until you’re sixteen, I told her. Of course, by then, I suppose they’ll have made a fancier one.”
“Yeah, right on,” Jesse says. “I worry about kids being on the internet, y’know? It’s changed so much since I was coming up… everything was simpler then. ‘Course, I got into enough trouble the old-fashioned way, but… kids should just be allowed to be kids.”
“No argument there," Mike says. He wants to tell Jesse that another life is possible, that there are no closed doors besides the ones you close yourself, especially not at twenty-five, but he'd be making a hypocrite of himself if he did. He pulls out onto the road once more, mapping out the rest of the day's errands in his head.