скачать книгу бесплатно
“This is a complete waste of time.” He closed my file and threw it onto a stack of other files.
I noted mine was the thickest and an old pain shot through me in a thousand old places.
“The reason we received the order to release you two days early is certainly not because of good behavior, it’s because the Bureau of Prisons has red-tagged you a security risk. The unannounced change of date reduces the threat of another violent incident just before, or on, your actual court-order release date. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
I nodded.
“Your file reads that either you have a very difficult time playing with others, or someone has wanted you dead for quite a long time. If it’s the latter, we would rather that not happen on our grounds, especially the moment you walk out of the gate unprotected. You will be a standing duck for anyone who may have been waiting for such an easy opportunity. It’s happened before and we don’t need the mess or paperwork.” He started showing what looked like his first real smile. “Your safety will very soon be your own responsibility. I do wish you good luck with that.”
He acted like he was waiting for me to say something. I couldn’t think of anything to say besides wanting to tell him that if the guards were to leave, I’d probably try to mop the buffed floors of his office with his face to get rid of that real smile and the smirk I’d had to stare at. He was lucky because if it were just another day and I had a ton more time to pull, I’d try it even if I was chained up with guards all around me. I’d get one lick in for sure somehow that he’d carry with him for a long time, and maybe he wouldn’t smirk at and talk down to the next man sitting in front of his desk who’d pulled his time. He definitely wouldn’t smirk at me again.
I kept staring at young Mr. O’Neil, thinking how three months in isolation and catching another charge for assault on a federal officer and two more years on the tally is worth every minute of it, every now and then.
But not that day.
Hewas lucky. And I figured that Iwas lucky, too, because my better nature was in charge of me sitting before him. The nature I’d known as a boy. He finally asked if I had any questions.
I leaned forward as far as I could and shook my head.
He shot up all of a sudden. “You won’t be out for long.” He then nodded at Dollinger, and that’s when I could feel being let free. I could feel it all over me like I was standing under a waterfall. It made me nervous, and that was a feeling I hadn’t felt since I didn’t know when. It hit me at that moment how long it had been since I’d felt anything at all except rage or rainy-day late-morning hollowed-out lonesomeness.
The guards stood me in an elevator, facing the back of it, and we went down to the bottom floor of that building and when the doors opened, we all walked like a formation again into a bright room that looked like a poured concrete box. Wasn’t anything in it that wasn’t colored gray. Even the prison clerk behind the counter wore a gray uniform and he must’ve been down there so long, his face had taken on the same colors of the walls and file cabinets.
“What hand you write with?” the stump guard beside me asked.
I raised the first finger on my left hand and he took off the one cuff from it, and then cuffed that bracelet through an iron ring mounted onto the top of the long counter. One of the older guards behind me took off the leg irons, being careful to stand clear in case I bucked.
I looked over my shoulder and made sure he was out of the way, then I stretched and shook out the cramps in my legs as the clerk handed me a pen and shoved paper after paper in front of me to sign while telling me what I was signing. But I’d learned to read and write, probably the only good things I did learn in prison, and even though I was in a hurry to get out of there, it looked like they were in a bigger hurry than me to finally get me out-processed. I saw on the clock that it was shift change.
I decided to take my time reading those papers. I read careful and signed every single sheet with the name “Shady.” They’d been kicking me all day long. I figured I’d get in one last kick from Henry Cole.
“Where’s my belongings?” I asked.
The clerk bent down and pulled up a wire basket that held a big paper sack. He dumped the sack onto the counter. A button shirt, dungarees, old drawers, white socks and a pair of withered-up brown shoes lay in a heap. Uncle Ray’s revolver wasn’t there as I surely knew it wouldn’t be, and the razor and whetstone and Ma’s roll of money were gone, too. But it made me want to smile seeing the clothes because I could remember wearing them. It made me feel young in spirit for one of those too-fast seconds you try to grab hold of but the next second it’s off on some breeze.
I didn’t want the clothes to wear, knew they wouldn’t fit and I figured it might be bad luck anyway to put on clothes with sewn-up bullet holes, but it was nice seeing them because they brought back a feeling of better times. I did need the shoes because I figured there was still a ten-dollar bill sewed between the sole and the bottom leather for just such a predicament, as Uncle Ray had taught me when I was a boy in Shady Hollow, just before he’d gotten killed.
I ran my one free hand through everything, checking careful and hoping with all the hope in me to find a folded piece of pretty yellow paper with her handwritten words and scent on it. Amanda Lynn’s letter to me. Feeling through that pile of old things, I was afraid that it hadn’t made it through all of those miles and years. But I looked and kept looking, because if by some chance it had survived such a journey, I was going to be certain right then about locating it. I kept feeling for it, not paying any mind to anything else. It was the letter she’d given me in Shady Hollow, the same one I’d never gotten to read, and the same one that was taken from me after a shoot-out years before, and before I’d even learned how to read. I could read now, but that letter and whatever was in it was as gone and still as big a mystery to me as she was. The scent of her was nowhere in that dumped basket of old things, either. All of it just smelled like the sort of dust that only collects in a prison.
“What’re you looking for?” the clerk asked.
The quiet noise of his voice sounded like a slamming door to me. I gave up my search, stared down at the truth before me, grabbed the shoes and clothes and threw them back in the bag. I took hold of everything in my one uncuffed hand, then after I’d signed the last of the paperwork and it was official that I was a free man, they uncuffed my other one.
“Want to throw those clothes away?” the clerk asked.
“They’re mine and I’m taking them,” I said.
Just like I knew I could give that young assistant warden sass and the one green guard some serious mouth, I could surely speak to that clerk like a man would to another man and not get in a bad way about it. I felt like saying more, and I would’ve said more with so much battery acid still going through me, but he’d treated me fair and seemed all right.
I could’ve raised a lot more ruckus than I did that long day and gotten away with it. I wasn’t getting out on parole. They’d denied me that three times. I knew, too, as much as I was glad to be getting out of there, that some of those guards were glad to get rid of me, so I didn’t expect any trouble from them. It’d been a long twenty-one years on both sides of the bars in the two prisons I’d been in.
Around five that evening, I walked through the yard toting my paper bag of all I owned in the world, and with no steel on me anywhere. I had on a nice suit of clothes that the prison issued me, blue pants and a white shirt, stiff black shoes and a canvas tan jacket. In my pocket was fifty dollars of state money, and a bus ticket to Wytheville, Virginia. Ma was on my mind heavy at that big moment.
She’d told me from the time I was a little boy I’d grow up to be a wealthy, powerful man, and that I had a true good nature hiding amid the boy mischief in me. She also told me that one day I’d use that wealth and power for the good, because I’d outgrow the bad and all that was left would be the good. But I never could figure why she’d say such things, except maybe that was the sorts of hopeful wishes all ma’s say to their young’uns.
On my last day in prison and with so many things working in me, I knew for certain I’d turned out not to be any of those things, especially good. I’d turned out to be no good account at all…an apple knocked from a tree limb when not half-ripe, then left on the ground to do nothing but rot slow and turn dark from the inside out. I figured if I’d turned out to be anything, I was maybe just an old name in some worn-out old story told in the beer halls of Shady Hollow.
Somehow I’d aged behind gray prison walls to be almost as old as Uncle Ray was when he died. That hit me hard on the morning of my release. I didn’t know if he was a good man, but he was a far better man than I’d ever turned out to be, and he’d passed so young in such a bad, bloody way trying to protect me.
I never expected many visitors or letters or anything like that while I was locked up. Most of the people I was close to couldn’t write and didn’t have the means to up and travel to prisons for visits, plus most of them steered as far from them as they could anyway. But I did expect to hear from a few, like my ma and my brothers, and maybe even Amanda Lynn. Just maybe. I don’t know why, but every night I hoped to hear something from her that next morning, but that next morning always was exactly like the sliver of a fast-fading golden streak on a double reinforced concrete wall morning before it. I never heard from nobody, and my worries over it grew every year, but I kept trying to tell myself things like it was because they wouldn’t know the name that I’d been going by for so long, and they were having a hard time locating me.
But even trying to believe in that reason, Shady Hollow would’ve gotten some wind of what had happened to me. Had to. And they would’ve known I wouldn’t have given the police my real name of Benjamin Purdue all of those years ago.
I was raised better than that.
Ma had to know where I was, I was almost sure of it, if she were okay and nothing bad had happened to her after I’d left. She’d know where I was, I kept telling myself, probably just like some of the religious prisoners I’d known believe Jesus always knows where they’re at and he’s listening to the prayers that they mutter asking for the same old important tired things and important worn-out blessings over and over while trying to fall asleep.
Ma wasn’t some God or some God’s perfect son in some fancy black book that you best never disagree or quarrel with too much, though. She was real. She was as real as the bars in my prison cell or as real as the feel and look of a sunny day long ago in a place I’d seen through young eyes, not through bars. She was real, and she’d told me that she’d find me, and that I could never ever come back home until she did, when it was safe.
At the end of serving my state and federal time, I was thirty-eight years old, tall and convict lean with a head of hair still dark as Ma’s, and a ponytail fell halfway down my back.
I’d changed so much in prison that I figured quite a bit had changed in Shady Hollow. Not just the looks of me or the looks of that lost place, but the stuff inside of both of us. I hoped it wasn’t all hollowed out and hadn’t gotten as mean and hard as I had over those years. I wondered if even my own ma would recognize me. Almost all of Benjamin Purdue got killed a long time ago. I didn’t just go by the name Henry Cole now.
I was Henry Cole.
My whole life was still one awful, empty mystery. On my very last day locked up, I had a lot of reasons and questions and especially darkness inside of me—old wounds that had never healed up right, and a lot of other things I couldn’t even put to words—calling me back home.
But I guess the first thing calling me back was that sometimes a person just needs to go to his roots and see old faces that knew you when you wore a different face…a face with a smile on it that only a young man who thinks he’s got the world by the tail has. Sometimes a person just needs a thing like that in a real bad way. To go back and try to grab back hold of something you once had, and had felt the missing of it every day since. Then maybe some repairs could be made to some things.
Just maybe.
I was twenty-one years older than the day I’d gotten arrested, and as I was about to take my final steps toward being a free man, the last thing I cared about was whether it was safe or not to go back to Shady Hollow. I didn’t have a care if I died once I got there.
I was finally heading back home.
Home.
Chapter 2
I was still inside the fence but outside the walls, and the air already tasted different. I guess most of all, it just tasted clean. The prison control room popped the first gate, and I walked through it by myself and stopped before the second gate, doing just what the loudspeaker told me to do. Once the first gate closed, the other one chugged open, and I didn’t need any instructions on what to do next. I’d always figured I’d hurry at such a moment, but I didn’t. I took a firm step at a time, cleared the last gate and, as I’d suspected, there wasn’t nobody who I knew outside to greet me. I thought of the people who could have been there but weren’t.
Remembering what that assistant warden had said about somebody wanting me dead, I took a scan at the tree line about a half mile away in case somebody with a scoped rifle who had dying business with me may have found out my release date got moved up.
“Take care of yourself, Henry, yep,” the guard in charge of the beef squad said. I turned around to look at Dollinger. He was twenty yards behind the first gate, and he was nodding at me with his stick smacking into one hand that was as big as a ball glove.
“You’re getting a little slow with that thing. Bad thing for a man with your responsibilities,” I said.
“We’ll keep the light on for you if things don’t work out, yep,” he said.
He didn’t smile or wave or nothing like that and I didn’t, either. But out of all of the guards, he always did seem fairest to me and as that goes, I didn’t wish bad on any of those fellers who worked there. Well, a couple I did, but you just got tired of it all, and they were part of it all.
A van sat in front of me with the middle doors open. I knew it was my ride out of there. It felt strange getting in a vehicle without being all shackled up the way I could move so easy.
I slid into the backseat and sat my paper sack beside me. Except for looking to see if the driver had a gun on him anywhere—and I didn’t see one poking out in the usual places—I never took my eyes off of his. He was a mountain of a black man, almost as tall as Dollinger and twice as wide, but he looked gimped-up in his neck and right side the way he sat off-kilter and had a hard time turning his head. I sensed he was a former guard or soldier or police officer of some kind who’d gotten out on some kind of medical. Could be a stroke or car wreck, or he almost got beat to death by a prisoner or shot up, something that messed him up bad.
He didn’t say anything after we locked eyes so long in his rearview mirror. I didn’t have nothing to say to him and I don’t think he had much to say to me, either, at first. I was enjoying the quiet. There was always some sort of loud in prison, breaking the still. Always. Even at night, there’d be the sounds of loud ugly. Men pissed off at somebody or another, or just mad at the whole goddamned world, even in their sleep.
I rolled down my window and, besides the humming noise coming from the van and the nice sound of tires on gravel, all I could hear was the sounds of a country evening. It’d been a long time since I’d listened to such a peaceful thing.
But after we got held up for a few minutes at a train crossing, he started talking. His voice sounded nervous, but I knew sometimes folks just talk that way even when they were calm, so I noted it but didn’t pay much mind to it.
“Want to hear some music?” he asked loud.
I shook my head.
“Well, good thing,’ cause the radio don’t work.” He laughed a little and turned toward me all bent-up looking. His grin faded and he turned back around. “Wished it did, though. Sometimes wished it did.”
The train started hitting its whistle every five or ten seconds. Listening to it brought me closer to home, recalling the late-night sounds Norfolk and Southern trains made on the other side of the Big Walker across from Shady Hollow.
“How long were you in?”
I was suddenly back in that van, not sharing a bed with my brothers listening to a faraway coal train across a river.
“What?”
“I say how long were you in for?”
I liked him better before he got so windy with so many things working in me at that moment. He turned with a sack full of green apples and offered me one. I shook my head.
He pulled out a lock-blade knife careful and looked at me in his mirror quick before he grabbed one and started peeling it.
“A long time,” I said.
“Big day for you then,” he said, looking at me and smiling again like we were big buddies. “How long is that, if you don’t mind me asking.”
“I’ve been locked up in one place or another since I was a boy.”
I figured he’d pulled out that knife and was asking questions about how much time I’d pulled to figure out how bad a person he was sitting there with in the dark, stuck at a train crossing way out in the countryside. Peeling an apple was just an excuse to have some kind of weapon out if he needed one. Never know what something wild just let out of pen was apt to do, I figured was what he was thinking. I’d probably do the same thing if I was half-crippled and driving the van and was hauling somebody who looked like me. You’d ask the time first, not the crime. You’d maybe ask that later if the conversation got off on the right foot.
“Where you heading?” he asked, after a few moments and a dozen more train cars passed by.
“Home.”
“By your accent I’d guess that’s down South somewhere.”
I nodded, looking all around us again to see if we had any bad company. I wouldn’t feel safe until I was a long way from that prison. At least I knew the driver wasn’t a threat. He had the knife but not the eyes to use it.
“So where you heading?”
“Why?”
“What you say?”
“What’s it to you where I’m heading?” I said.
“Just talking…”
“You talk too much.”
He didn’t say anything for a long moment and then said, “Always had a friendly nature, I guess. No harm meant.”
I leaned back in my seat, remembering how I used to have the same easy friendly nature and used to enjoy conversation. I didn’t just enjoy it, I was good at it. Ma used to tell me that talking was my one true gift of many. I was the only person she’d ever known who could “outtalk a mockingbird,” she’d say on many an occasion with an ending to that always of “Let’s hush now, child.”
Anyway, after a while I finally said to the driver, “Gonna stay with my ma for a while. She lives in Virginia.”
His head was still and then he nodded and nodded like we’d made up and he peeped at me again in his mirror. “I used to take my family to Virginia Beach until the kids got older and my wife passed. She passed last year. Emphysema took her last breath. That’s when I started eating all the time and got fat. I smoked more than she did and she made me swear off of them before she died. Almost killed me quitting them. Probably eating will kill me now. Get rid of one bad thing, you just pick up another. You quit bad things but the hole the bad thing was filling never goes away is what it amounts to. Just end up filling it with something else no good.”
I blew out a deep breath, wore-out with his stories already, and I looked as far down the tracks as I could. That had to be the longest train I’d ever seen.
“Heard the place is all built-up now.”
“What is?”
“Virginia Beach. Probably wouldn’t even know it if I saw it.”
I didn’t say anything, but just hoped he’d still himself or I was gonna have to tell him to. I’d never seen a beach and I didn’t care to comment about it or his wife passing. I didn’t want to get ugly with him being as mangled up as he was and he seemed like an all right feller, so I figured me not saying nothing back would work to let him know finally that I wasn’t definitely in the mood for talk. But it didn’t.
“What you gonna do with yourself once you get settled in back home? Got you a girl to go see?”
“Had one a long time ago. How far’s the bus station from here?”
“Few miles. I say, what you gonna do once you get back home and settled in? Gonna go see that girl?”
I wasn’t going to talk about the only girl I’d ever had that I would ever call “my girl.” I wished I hadn’t brought the thought of her into that van. She wasn’t the kind of girl to be spoken of in such ways in such conversations in such places. But I knew he didn’t mean no harm even though it bothered me in a dark way and I said, “Have quite a few things to do,” louder and faster than was necessary.
“Like what?”
By that point, I figured he was one of those folks who couldn’t help himself to shut up even if he really tried. If he wanted to know what I was gonna do after I got home, I’d tell him a few things for him to ponder on, because I’d been pondering on them a long time.
“First thing I’m gonna do once I get settled home is find out why a man tried to kill me when I was seventeen years old for no reason I can figure.”
The driver’s voice dropped. “I see. You gonna go looking for him?”
“He’s dead. I got some other people I need to find and have some serious business about it. Gonna go see a preacher, too.”
The driver set his sack of apples to the side careful. “The preacher help you through your trials and tribulations?” His voice had gotten shakier.
“Not quite like that. He helped get me into my trials and tribulations. I’m pretty sure I’m gonna kill him over it. Been leaning that way heavy for a long time. Gonna go see a sheriff after that. I owe him a visit, too, just like that preacher. He might survive my coming. I haven’t made my mind up about him.”
