“Excuse her vulgarity, Mr. Hokanson,” the reverend said.
I nodded.
“You better go,” Kenny said.
And go I did, glad for the street and the gathering night and the balming, cleansing cold air.
4
Later that year, in Cellblock D, a lifer serving time for cutting up two fourteen-year-old girls and then dumping their bodies down a grain elevator, got hisself hitched to a 348-pound babe from Astoria, Kansas. Not, you understand, that the lifer was any prize hisself.
Warden, being warden, wouldn’t give them permission to set up an impromptu wedding chapel inside the prison, so they had to make do with a wedding on the yard, with the woman’s blind mama and deaf papa. Also in attendance were several of the lifer’s fellow convicts, including two killers, three bank robbers and six just kind of generally bad people. They all wore Aqua Velva, they all sang the Barry Manilow song “Mandy” (that being the bride’s name and the lyrics having been typed out for them) and they all kissed the bride, three of them in the French manner. The bride’s mama sang along, but not her deaf papa.
This would not be the way they got married, with such public scorn or ridiculous setting.
Oh, no.
Dear Reece,
I’ve spent the last few weeks looking through bridal magazines. I dream of the day when I, attired in white, and you, attired in a good blue suit, approach the altar and quietly take our vows.
I read the newspaper clipping you sent about the in-prison wedding and, honestly, I was appalled. Don’t these people have any self-respect? Don’t these people understand that they’re being mocked? They’re the type of people who go on “Oprah” and “Geraldo” without seeming to understand that they’re being used as buffoons. (Yesterday, Geraldo’s topic was “Women Who Sleep with Their Daughters’ Girlfriends” and here we had three women blithely talking about having affairs with teenage girls. I just couldn’t believe it. I know you think it’s silly that I read romance novels but that’s exactly why I do — to block out all the filth and despair and lunacy I see every single day in this sorry old world.
I’m enclosing a novel I hope you like. Chapters Six and Nine were especially entertaining. I thought so, at any rate. Not my usual cup of tea, I admit, but I also admit to being engrossed.
Oh, darling, I know our day will soon come and I’m so happy that you agree that I shouldn’t come and visit you in prison. I don’t want our first meeting to be behind bars. That would set a tone for the rest of our lives. I’m glad you believe that Roger is a good enough lawyer to get you a new trial. He’s working at it diligently and believes we’ll soon see some results.
In the meantime, darling, read the novel I’ve enclosed. I hope you agree with me that it’s a most instructive book.
Wild Wanton Love, My Darling,
The novel was a shiny new paperback that showed a kind of studly young cop holding a punk up against the brick wall. Cop had a big Magnum pushed right against the punk’s head. The title was Battleground, Miami — Bloodbath. He hated these dimwit kind of books. All these hero cops. Not a dishonest, sadistic, stupid or incompetent one among them. All pretty pretty boys with their sweet summer sweat, and every one of them a hero.
Why would Rosamund (by now, she’d told him her real name but he, like her, preferred Rosamund) who loved gentle and delicate and beautiful things like a book like this?
He tried reading it straight through. He was no literary critic, to be sure, but as far as he could see this Robert David Chase guy was the hackiest of hacks.
Giff turned and fired his Magnum, chuffing death into the startled face of the drug dealer. But it was more than just bullets that were destroying this lizard’s life. It was freedom and the American Way and summer nights on Indiana porches and snowball fights on Christmas Day that were really killing this scab-sucking criminal. This scumbag coke merchant was like a vampire, see, he couldn’t stand the light of decency and honor, and now he was going down down down, way way down, into the darkness, into the pit, into the eternal abyss, man, way way way way down, man. Way down.
He couldn’t be sure, having always fallen asleep in his English classes, but this Robert David Chase seemed like a really awful writer. Really really awful.
Those were his feelings, anyway, till he came to Chapters Six and Nine, both of which were told from the viewpoint of one Haskins P. Washington, a self-described “entrepreneur of the flesh” — i.e., a pimp.
Haskins, it seems, this all told in flashback, had been incarcerated for life before finally escaping six years into his sentence.
Here’s how it went. When prisoners worked farm detail, they worked outside the prison walls, usually in fields not far from highways or arterial roads on which there was heavy truck traffic.
Haskins decided to take advantage of this (1) by getting himself on farm detail, which took fourteen months and (2) by then having a friend of his rent a truck and drive by a certain field on a certain day at a certain time, at which point friend stopped the truck at a certain point and two other friends with Uzis jumped from the back of the truck, firing hundreds of rounds to protect Haskins P. Washington who came barreling across the road from the field, and who then hopped in the back of the truck, which then sped away.
This was Chapter Six.
Chapter Nine contained another escape plan — this involving abducting a prison official and putting a chopper down in the middle of the yard — but this was pure Hollywood and sounded crazy as hell and completely bogus as a serious escape plan.
But Chapter Six, now that was another matter.
Chapter Six, he practically memorized as he began making plans of his own...
5
After buying USA Today, the Wall Street Journal and the Chicago Tribune, and after eating a small piece of pie mostly because I wanted to sit at the old-fashioned Coca-Cola fountain and pretend it was 1958 and that I was a popular quarterback and all-around nice guy, it having been a far, far better world back in those days, I tucked the newspapers under my arm and strolled back to the motel.
It was misting now, a chill shimmering prairie spray, and it gave me the animal desire to be in some place snug and warm, the way I’d felt passing the restaurant window earlier.
The crowd had pretty much gone. Once the body had been removed, what was the point in hanging around? The police, in and out, in and out, carrying small plastic evidence bags, sure proved to be disappointing as spectator sports. So drift home or drift to the tavern and speculate on who killed Sam Lodge, and why, and if you got a chance to embellish on the basic tale (“I heard they decapitated him; I mean, I’m not sure of that but I think that’s what somebody told me”), so much the better. A couple of brewskis and some bone-chilling bullshit horror story. What could be better?
If it had resembled a lively movie set before, the parking lot now resembled its old shabby self, even shabbier in the mist. I went to the front office and asked the old-timer where I’d be sleeping tonight.