Drifting South. Charles Davis
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