Louise was halfway out the door when she stopped, went back, and shoved the pages of manuscript into an unlabeled manila folder. The story, written last night when she couldn’t sleep, was the first fiction she’d tried in six or seven years.
Apart from letters to her folks, of course.
When the automatic lock bar at the top of his cell door slid back, Runyan rolled, fully clothed, off his bunk for the last time. His cell was stripped except for him and his clothes; the day before he’d given away all the makeshift possessions which had crowded it, and the curtains, pieced together from fabric scraps scrounged from the upholstery shop, which had shielded him from the corridor. His shaving gear and the miniature chess set carved in the woodworking shop would be waiting with his civvies at Processing.
He had observed one other ritual the day before: flashing the ace from a deck of cards as he moved about, to let others know he had one day left. Turning the knife in those remaining, as it had been turned in him scores of times. At the same time giving a little hope — if he can make it, so can I.
He crossed the lower yard through weak morning sunshine to Processing — despair on the way in, hope on the way out. Seven years before he had been herded in here from a bus at gunpoint; only a prisoner who had served out his time, or made parole, could walk out. Everyone else rode — in a bus or a meat wagon.
“Runyan,” he told the guard at the door.
The man had the cheery russet-tinged face of a beer drinker, but the face was totally without animation.
“LD.” Runyan handed him the heat-sealed plastic yellow card with his name, face, and prison number on it. “Inside and strip.”
The clothes Runyan stepped into were seven years out of date, but that was all right; so was he. It was like running a film backwards, a film which had lain in the vault unchanged for seven years while the world unrolled around it.
Accompanied by a guard, carrying his sheaf of release papers and his old yellow gym bag, he walked across the upper yard. Bright with grass and plantings, it might have been the plaza in some old California Mission town — except for the guard runway above, garnished with coils of barbed wire to discourage those hoping to leave on their own.
Getting closer to the outside skin of the prison was like coming up from a deep dive, the gloom around you turning progressively lighter, more delicate shades, as more and more sun filtered through, until you burst out with a huge WHOOSH of spent air. The final door was massive steel with iron latticework gates which could be clapped shut in case of a break.
One more check-out between him and the East Gate, beyond which the clock of time would start again. Here, no one was friendly, no one was hostile. They did this every day; Runyan would do it only once.
“Your check-out order, please.”
Runyan handed the cheery-faced woman guard his papers as a Chicano prisoner drove a prison bus up to the high chain-link gate. She put the papers aside.
“Wait here a minute, I got to shake down this bus.”
Runyan’s escort pawed through his gym bag while she looked inside the bus and into its engine compartment; the driver stood for her quick body frisk with his arms wide and his legs slightly apart, a blank look on his face. She came back and Runyan emptied his nearly empty pockets so she could shepherd him through the metal detector. It squealed.
“The zipper on your windbreaker.”
He removed the jacket and passed the detector. To his amazement, she suddenly grinned at him.
“Right down to the gate. And good luck.”
He thanked her. He and his escort went down the sidewalk toward the final gate a football field away. Outside the open motor-pool building, a radio blared as a couple of prisoners hosed down a truck. To the right, beyond the fenced visitors’ parking lot, raucous seagulls dipped and turned over the sparkling water of Richardson Bay.
At the gate building was a door marked THIS WAY OUT, FOLKS, but the guard blocked Runyan’s passage.
“Prisoners use the gate.”
It was of six-foot-high, black-iron pickets, one side opened inward. A taut, well-conditioned, hard-faced guard brought a clipboard out of the guardroom beside it.
“Name.”
“Runyan.”
“Check-out order and LD.”
Runyan handed over the precious warden’s release order and, for the last time, his prison I.D. The guard made a checkmark on a mimeo’d sheet on his clipboard.
“You’re clear, mister.”
Feeling light-headed, Runyan walked through the gate with his escort. No sirens sounded, no alarms rang. The guard stopped a dozen feet beyond the gate and handed him an envelope.
“Count it, then sign the receipt.”
He did. One hundred dollars.
“You’ll get another hundred from your parole officer when you report. The date, time and place are on your release papers.” He hesitated, then added in a different voice, “If you need transport to town, that little yellow house beyond the post office — with the sun painted on the front — that’s Catholic Social Services. They can help you there.”
“Thanks,” said Runyan, but the guard had already turned away, as if somebody else had been using his voice.
Runyan didn’t want transport to town. He wanted to walk forever down the narrow uneven blacktop, stuffing his lungs with free air as sharp as ammonia. He heard a car engine start up behind him in the lot outside the prison gate, but he didn’t turn. Through his mind was running the old Pete Chatman blues number, Gone to Memphis.
Only it was this morning, and Runyan was gone away from here. To his left the hillside slanted up sharply, crowded with old frame houses in peeling, weather-beaten pastels. To his right, below road level, was a quarter-circle of new condos made out of grey-painted wood and with the plantings not yet in except for a couple of FOR SALE signs.
Who the hell would want to buy a place within eyeshot of this sprawling miserable dragon with over 3,000 dead men living in its distended gut? Apparently somebody did; a new Continental was parked in the turn-around and a burly man with black curly hair had his hands cupped against a ground-floor window.
Runyan, swinging his gym bag like a kid let out of school early, moved off to the shoulder as the car from the prison lot came up behind him. Then his neck went rigid and sweat popped out under his arms. The car was pacing him. He’d known it: It was all a macabre joke, at the last second they were going to take it all away from him.
“Runyan?”
A woman’s voice. He didn’t turn, but relief washed over him. They wouldn’t send a woman to take him back.
“I’m Louise Graham? I wrote to you?”
He shot a quick look. Blue car, Lynx, wasn’t that a Mercury? Her window down and her face peering out from behind huge round sunglasses. Mid, maybe late twenties. Hair pulled back severely. He kept walking.
“I’m a journalist? Researching a book?”
Every phrase a question. She sounded like a writer, looked like a writer — or what he thought a writer looked like.
“You didn’t answer my letter? Didn’t see me on visiting day?”
Three minutes out, he was suddenly being forced to do things he hadn’t needed to do in seven years. Think. Weigh. Judge. Make decisions. Act.
He kept walking.
The car shot forward and slammed to a stop in front of him, blocking his way. He glanced back involuntarily; thank God, they were out of sight of the prison gates. She stuck an angry head out the window.
“Damn you, all I’m doing is offering you a ride.”
He was proud of the way his voice reflected nothing at all. “Sure you are,” he said.