“I don't know,” he said.
“Don't the Indians believe if a man holds a thing dear some of his soul rubs off on it? But Lamar don't have a soul. Maybe his evil rubbed off on his stuff. I want to see what's left in it.”
“Bud, that's crazy.”
“Well, maybe it is. But I'm going to go nuts if I just sit around that house and take Percodans. It'll be a nice trip.”
They took Oklahoma 7 east from Duncan toward the small penitentiary city 125 miles away. It was a bright summer's day, and on either side of the highway, the farmland spilled away, the neat fields broken up by stands of trees or low hills, all of them decorated with the rhythmic pumping of the oil wells, which somehow looked like giant insects at their feeding, up, pause, and then greedily down again.
Now and then, they'd blow by some hopeful rural town, usually with pennants flapping and gas station signs climbing heroically into the sky and a small civilization of fastfood joints.
Bud loved it: highway America. Always different, always the same. He loved the snap of the wheat in the wind and the small tidy places and the neatly furrowed fields and the high blue sky and the green everywhere. It had given him such a thrill to roll down that ribbon of concrete in his unit, aerials whipping, lord of it all, and all who looked on him knew that he was the man that counted.
He looked over at Holly. She was such a pretty young thing. He didn't believe he'd ever seen a person in whom the features were so perfectly formed. Why did she like him so?
She looked over and smiled. She had nearly perfect teeth.
“What are you thinking. Bud?”
“I'm wondering how come of all the men in the world you picked me. You could have had any of them.”
“Well, I could not have, and you know it. I picked you because you were the kindest and the strongest and the bravest and the best. Who wouldn't pick such a man?”
He shook his head. The absurdity of the praise almost irritated him; he remembered the fear, the sense of worthlessness he'd felt when Lamar brought the shotgun to bear for the last moment, just before pulling the trigger. Whatever his virtues, they were valueless that day.
The cloud that passed through his mind must have shown in his eyes.
“Bud,” she said, "can't you let it go? The thing with Lamar, Ted's death, that horrible thing. It's over. The others will get him, sooner or later.”
“It's forgotten. Okay? I swear it.”
“Oh, Bud,” she said with a sigh, "you are such a wonderful liar.”
That seemed to let the tension escape, and they drove the rest of the way in a buoyant mood; he flirted and she laughed. They listened to the radio. There was an oldies station in Oklahoma City that they picked up, KOMA, and Bud knew more of the songs than Holly did. They made jokes about the troopers parked by the roadside or occasionally cruising down the other side of the highway strip.
It was light and pleasant.
In under two hours they came to the small city of Mcalester, and from the highway they could see the city's only remaining industry—its prison. From Oklahoma 1 as they headed in, it looked somehow magical, like a Moorish city or a Camelot: the high, white, fortresslike walls shining in the sun. It looked so cheerful, so promising, but it was such a fantasy. No cheer in that place, and goddamned little promise.
“Here we go,” said Bud, turning off Route 1 for the two-mile spin up West Street, until it delivered them into the prison itself. Was it his imagination, or did he feel a sense of dread and evil as they approached, as if the air, somehow, had gotten heavy?
Mcalester State Penitentiary was everything you thought of when you heard the word "prison.” The walls were huge and blank and festooned with cruel razor wire, and up close the fraudulence of the whitewash revealed itself, because you could see the ancient bricks mortared into place in the millions and you knew that under the bright paint they were dingy, as though soaked in woe.
“So much bad comes out of a place like that, it makes you wonder,” said Bud, as he turned off West Street onto Prison Boulevard, in the shadow of the vast south wall itself.
“The convicts call ’em gladiator schools. It's where a young kid with a wild streak learns how to be a burglar, a butt fucker a cop killer, and how never to feel nothing about what he's done. You don't want to know what goes on inside a place like that. You can't begin to imagine it. But I'll tell you this: Nothing good ever came out of an American prison. I'd drench ’em in napalm and turn every last boy inside into ashes and black bones, and start over.”
“The newspapers would scream,” Holly pointed out.
“They would until they watched the crime rate fall.”
Bud pulled into a slot marked law enforcement just shy of the admin building that crouched under the walls and turned his truck engine off.
Lamar and O’Dell and Richard:
They'd come this way. He remembered from the newspapers that first day after the escape: the arrows pointing to a second-floor grated window in the admin section of Cell block A out back, where that poor boy had parked his truck and they had climbed into it and waited for him to come to his death. Then they'd driven out the gates, turned left, turned left again, and come down this merry little street with the cheery visitor's center, the warden's big house like a mansion, even a tacky little museum, before turning down West Street and heading out into the world.
“Open that glove box,” he said.
She did and saw a small black gun.
“That's a Beretta 84 .380,” he said.
“Thirteen shots.
Safety's on. Anything happens—”
“Bud—”
“I know it's silly and not a thing will happen. But you know how my mind works. Anyhow, you take that gun and push the safety down with your thumb. Then all you have to do is pull the trigger thirteen times. That should make him really mad, so after that, you slug him with it.”
“Bud, you are so strange. Do you really think there's going to be another prison break?”
“No. But like the man says, if you want peace, prepare for war. I'll be back in an hour, okay?”
“Yes sir, it's not a problem.”
“You sure?”
“Yes sir. I brought a paperback book along to read.”
“Good.”
They were expecting Bud, but if he anticipated any personal apology for the things that Mcalester had unleashed, he got none: only professional courtesy, distant and cool but not rude. He checked his Colt Commander with an assistant warden, who took him into a bleak little office.
There in three battered cardboard boxes were all that remained in the Big Mac of Lamar Pye, his cousin O’Dell, and Richard Peed.
“No letters,” said the assistant warden.
“Lamar and O’Dell haven't gotten letters in years. Nobody cared about them or even knew about them. Until they broke out, they didn't exist.”
Bud nodded.
“I don't know what you're looking for,” said the assistant warden, "but if you think you're going to find it there, I think you'll be disappointed. How long do you want?”
“Oh, an hour or so?”
“That's fine. Sergeant. Take your time. No rush. No one's going anywhere.”
Bud sat down and pulled over O’Dell's box. It was mostly clothes, neatly laundered blue jeans and plaid shirts, a few prison denims of the sort that were no longer strictly mandatory.
The underwear, all clean. No porn. He seemed not to have a sexual bone in his body. A model airplane, poorly assembled. Some kind of World War II ship, with glue smeared all over it. A shank, cut from a shoehorn, wickedly vicious. And, finally, a cigar box, just as a small boy in a fabled boyhood would have, a Huck Finn.
Bud opened the thing: first off, he saw a faded picture of a farm woman, taken, judging from her hair, some time in the sixties. She had that severe. Depression-era look, no meat at all on her sinewy features, narrow eyes that expected no mercy from the world. Her taut mouth held a tension of sorts. She was hunched in a cheap coat, though the sun was shining. The picture was blurry, but in the background he saw white clapboard, a farmhouse perhaps.