To reach Ronnie Jones, I head north on the nearest “heroin highway,” I-81. I travel roughly the same path in my car, only in reverse, that Jones’s drugs did by bus, his heroin camouflaged inside Pringle’s cans and plastic Walmart bags on the floor beside him or his hired drug runners.
On the suburban outskirts of Roanoke, I drive near the upper-middle-class subdivision of Hidden Valley, where a young woman I’ve been following for a year named Tess Henry was once a straight-A student and basketball star. At the moment, she’s AWOL—her mother and I have no idea where she is—although sometimes we catch glimpses of her on our cellphones: a Facebook exchange between Tess and one of her heroin dealers, or a prostitution ad through which Tess will fund her next fix.
I pass Ginger’s Jewelry, the high-end store where parents of the addicted still drive from two hours away simply because they can think of nowhere else to turn. They’ve read about Ginger’s imprisoned son in the newspaper, and they want to ask her how to handle the pitfalls of raising an addicted child.
Up the Shenandoah Valley on the interstate, I pass New Market and think not of the men who fought in the famous 1864 Civil War battle but of the women who grew poppies for the benefit of wounded soldiers, harvesting morphine from the dried juice inside the seed pods. Three decades later, the German elixir peddlers at Bayer Laboratories would stock America’s drugstores with a brand-new version of that same molecule, a pill marketed as both a cough remedy and a cure for the nation’s soaring morphine epidemic, known as “morphinism,” or soldier’s disease. Its label looked like an amusement advertisement you might have seen on a circus poster, a word derived from the German for “heroic” and bracketed by a swirling ribbon frame: heroin. It was sold widely from drugstore counters, no prescription necessary, not only for veterans but also for women with menstrual cramps and babies with hiccups.
Outside Woodstock, I pass George’s Chicken, the poultry-processing plant where Ronnie Jones first arrived to work in a Department of Corrections work-release program, clad in prison-issue khakis. I pass the house nearby where a cop I know spent days, nights, and weekends crouched under a bedroom window, surveilling Jones and his co-workers from behind binoculars—a fraction of the man-hours the government invested in putting members of Jones’s heroin ring behind bars.
I head northwest toward West Virginia, the crumbling landscape like so many of the distressed towns I’ve already traversed in Virginia some four hundred miles south, down to the same hillary for prison signs and the same Confederate flags waving presciently from their posts.
At the prison, I park my car and walk through the heavy front door. A handler named Rachel ushers me through security, making cheerful small talk as we head deeper inside the concrete maze and through three different sets of locked doors, her massive cluster of keys reverberating like chimes at each checkpoint.
We pass through a recreation area, where several men—all but one of the prisoners black and brown, I can’t help noticing—push mops and brooms around the cavernous room, looking up and nodding as we pass. The manufactured air inside is cold, and it smells of Clorox.
Ronnie Jones is already waiting for me on the other side of the last locked door, seated at a table. He looks thinner and older than he did in his mug shot, his prison khakis baggy, his trim Afro and beard flecked with gray. He looks tired, and the whites of his eyes are tinged with red.
He rises from the chair to shake my hand, then sits back down, his hands folded into a steeple, his elbows resting on the table between us. His mood is unreadable.
The glassed-in room is beige, the floors are beige, and so is Rachel, in her beige-and-blue uniform and no-nonsense shoes, the kind you could run in if you had to. She tells us to knock on the window if we need her, then leaves for her perch in the rec room, on the other side of the window, the door lock clicking decisively behind her.
I open my notebook, situate the questions I’ve prepared off to the side, next to my spare pens. I’m thinking of Kristi and Ginger and of Tess’s mom, and what Jones might say that will explain the fate of these mothers’ kids.
Jones leans forward, expectant and unsmiling, and rubs his hands