Drifting South. Charles Davis
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