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 the bars in my prison cell or as real as the feel and look of a sunny day long ago in a place I’d seen through young eyes, not through bars. She was real, and she’d told me that she’d find me, 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
