Pay the Piper (16 page)

“That was a long time. But Pris said you ran away after high school and married Kevin Shea.”

“Why did Pris say that? It was so long ago, I didn't think anyone in Delton even remembered.”

“I guess because she's uptight about you coming here. She's uptight about everything, so afraid something might happen about my parole. But I don't think a thing in the world could interfere with that.”

“How much longer do you have?”

“Two years.”

Only two years, for a life? She could not help the thought surfacing. “I thought you had nine years.” The law, too, seemed then to realize his being here was all a mistake.

“That was my sentence. I'm eligible for parole in three years and have served one. Actually, there's a chance I'll get out earlier. This prison is all politics. There are men at home the Governor owes favors. They're getting up a petition asking for my earlier release. There's opposition. The boy's grandmother, I'm told, has had her whole garden club write letters to the Governor asking for me not to get out early.”

“Letters like that would count?”

“Flower power. We'll have to wait and see what value it has.”

Laurel shyly asked directions to a bathroom. When she got up, she had the strange impulse to carry along the waste-basket he had littered with cigarettes and empty it. Hal did not like walking without Buddy in the administration building, despite being a trusty. “I made trusty in six weeks,” he said.

She said belatedly, “Congratulations.” But wouldn't he assume he'd make trusty right away, being who he was and a college graduate? Had he done anything to merit it? she wondered.

When she came from the bathroom's booth, the room's whole atmosphere changed. Everything grew still, as before a storm. Birds hushed. The sun seemed to shine with brighter intensity. She looked out past the railroad tracks paralleling the prison—the ones she had crossed coming into it—and past the highway she had traveled to get here. Men stood in the yard of a camp over there gripping a wire fence. Then a train came roaring past, a gossamer thread speeding on toward New Orleans and hooting in the distance,
You can't catch me
.… Hal mentioned lying awake at night, listening when a train came through and thinking of freedom, and knew other men lay awake listening too, but no one ever mentioned a train.

She stood drying her hands on a soggy, grayed roller towel. Beside its canister someone had written on the wall in pencil:

In Case of Fire

(W)ring This Towel

She laughed over the wit of country people. When she returned to the library, Hal looked at her beyond Buddy's back. “Time to step along, young lady.” Buddy recognized from their faces this was no ordinary leave-taking. He walked on ahead.

She went along the corridor beside Hal, longing to touch him. “Does the prison give you these oxford-cloth shirts?”

“No. I have my own shirts from home. I have my own pants, too. I order these jeans from Pettibone's in Delton. The pants the prison issues are too baggy.”

Clothes make the man, she supposed, but thinking of fashion here seemed inappropriate. Anyway, she'd have taken whatever the prison handed out. She realized now why the trusty at the entrance looked different from Hal. She wondered if the country boys resented his better clothes or knew enough to know the difference. They went through the foyer. “I wish there was something I could do for you on the outside.” In the free world, she thought.

“Well, how are you at turning collars on shirts?”

“Are you kidding? Genies do that.”

“You know what I really miss, Laurel? Something so simple as a baked potato and sour cream. Here, all the cooks know to do is fry potatoes or mash them.”

“I'll send you some. And sour cream mix. How could you cook?”

“I have a little oven. Pris keeps the cage supplied with food. She has themes. Chinese. Mexican. French. The guys won't eat half what she brings because they don't know what it is. It gets tossed out.”

“I'll send baking potatoes for everybody.”

Laurel felt very much part of a couple walking along with Hal. Never before had she sat for so long talking to someone, one on one. Hours had passed. Without a key being turned, they had been locked in together. They had sat in the two straight chairs, close together but never touching, the whole outside world a totally remote one as if they were never to see it again. And with no diversions but conversation. Buddy watched them approach and said, “Hal, I was thinking. I can arrange one more visit for Laurel, with some other prisoners for her to interview. But also, the day I take you out to cover the Indian Fair, she could meet us there.”

“Meeting a woman on the outside for a whole day would be like getting back to reality. Could you come?”

She certainly could come and took down directions to a town she had never heard of. As Buddy drove away with the trunk of his car lifted, it wobbled as if in goodbye. “I have to be searched again going out?” she said. “I was planning on stowing you away.”

“I'd almost try it. Some guys hid in the free-world bread truck but got caught. That's about all that delivery man can't do for you. He's the main supplier of drugs or liquor or anything you want. They make home brew in here, too. I could have a drink any time. But I never have. If I could get one look at Matagorda, I think I could pull time a lot better.”

She was glad he had refused to take a drink. “Why doesn't Buddy take you by when you're out?”

“I'm not allowed back into my county until I'm paroled. It's part of the deal I signed when I accepted the nine-year sentence the night before I was supposed to go on trial.”

“You didn't have a trial?”

“The District Attorney told my lawyers he'd have to try me for murder because that's what I was charged with. But he knew it was a manslaughter case, and he thought that would be the jury's verdict. My lawyers agreed. It spared everyone, not having a trial. My little daughter Tina would have had to take the stand, even.”

“But didn't you take a chance? A jury might have let you off.”

“We never claimed I didn't do it. Only that it was manslaughter. Not murder. I never shot that boy on purpose, Laurel.”

“I never thought you did,” she said. Did he think she would have come here if she had thought so?

Hal put out a hand to shake goodbye and held to hers. “When I find something good, I hate to let go.”

“I know,” Laurel said.

8

Laurel drove north with a sense of relief that she had no farther to go than the hills. She felt something enormous had happened between her and Hal, and she sensed he felt the same way. No one had ever seemed to match her capacity for feelings, but she thought he might. She would write him cautiously, protecting herself in case he did not feel as she hoped he did.
Hal, I don't know about you but it seemed to me something extraordinary took place between us. I don't know words to describe exactly what I mean
. His letter crossed hers in the mail:

August 6

Dear Laurel,

Since our visit yesterday I have thought of little else. I hope you got something out of coming here. There is a story; there are many stories. I'm amazed at the speed and depth of our relationship. Ordinarily I'm not so quick to give of myself to a person, and I have a feeling you aren't either. Perhaps if we had known one another longer or lived closer together such a thing could never have happened. You have no idea how good it felt to say what I knew was the truth and to be able to talk, letting my guard down. Some of the things I spoke to you about I have never been willing to admit before, and that was forever frustrating the poor psychiatrists who worked with me so hard before my sentence.

Your visit had one result I didn't foresee and was totally unprepared for. I have tried to put it into this letter but I cannot. Perhaps later. Right now my view on your divorce situation is practically worthless. After being with you for one day I've lost my objectivity. I'm looking forward to our upcoming visit more than to anything for a long time. I've never had a harder time writing a letter.

Hal

Laurel danced cheek to cheek with Buff around the cabin. She wrote out their full names and crossed out all the similar letters, saying Love—Marriage—Friendship—Hate over the letters left, to see how things came out. She worked over the letters various times, using her maiden and her married name and the two in combination, until she got Marriage to come out at the end of both their names.

She knew this was all foolish and childish. But she was seventeen again and the feeling was wonderful. Their letters kept crossing in the mail as they wrote every day, waiting to see one another. Then one night Clarence Lee came from his house, tap-tapping, and announced a phone call.

“Hey.”

She choked back Hal's name. Clarence Lee's wife, Mabel, had turned down the television set, either out of consideration or to enable herself to hear. “How is this possible?” Laurel said.

“I've been to an AA meeting with Buddy. We stopped at his office on the way back to the cage. I'm using his
WATS
line. If anybody comes, I'll have to hang up quickly.”

“I'm not—you know—either.”

“Alone? Talking cryptically is something we'll have to get used to. I'll be able to call you off and on this way.” They went on trying to convey a lot with few words, and their voices shook. Lovers kept apart are bad enough, she wanted to say. But lovers who cannot be lovers? “Exquisite misery.” She remembered the words from his letter.

“I finished the books you sent,” he said. “We'll talk when I see you.”

“Only tell me if you liked
The Death of the Heart.
”

“That little girl's loneliness broke my own heart.”

“I knew you would like it too.”

She heard the creak of a door, and footsteps. It was like listening to an old radio program. The sounds fit into all the incredible excitement. “I've got to go,” he said. Did he say Honey or did she imagine that? As Laurel returned through the living room, Mabel said, “Don't sit over yonder pining your young 'un. Come over here any time.”

Laurel smiled. Mabel had misinterpreted lovesickness.

Hal came down the steps of the administration building. The most natural thing in the world would have been to rush into his arms; if only she could take his hand. “Hey,” she said, smiling to herself. He did not know she made half a joke.

“Hey,” he said. “Baby, Buddy's got another con for you to interview in the library. We don't have long. And he's not going to be on the farm long, either. I'm so tired of being at his mercy.”

Baby
, she thought. She had always longed for a man to call her that.

“Let's go to the rabbit hutches,” Hal said. “We can have some privacy. That day at the fair was nice, but having Buddy at our shoulders, I don't feel we said anything.”

“I know,” she said. “But without him, we'd have had nothing. Whose rabbits are they?”

“They belong to Purvis. He says raising them is all that keeps him sane. I don't know how he got started.”

“With two rabbits,” she said.

“I wanted to buy you something at the fair. But I'd have had to ask Daddy for the money, and I didn't want to answer questions. I'm going to tell my family something about us soon.”

“Don't worry them.” She felt such sympathy for his parents. His poor mother, Laurel thought. He said she still cried over her first sight of him, when he was allowed visitors for the first time, after six weeks. His head had been shaved when he came to prison. Laurel went with him toward the rabbits, thinking how demeaning prison was and that at his age he had to ask his father for pocket money.

“I got this for you, though.” Hal handed her a spoon shaped into a bracelet. “I give the boy who makes these my state-issued sack of tobacco each month. I'm never going to learn to roll my own cigarettes.”

“You didn't have to give me a present.”

“What I wanted you to take home is a replica of a Conestoga wagon one of the guys makes out of match-sticks.”

“That's just what I've always wanted,” Laurel said.

Hal turned and, seeing his face, she quickly apologized.

“Eastern humor,” she said. “Sorry.” It was out of place.

He said, “Things these guys think up to keep busy and to make money, I find touching.”

“I do too, Hal,” she said, keeping step. She was thinking how, before him, she had never been the sort of woman who prompted presents; she'd always wanted a man to give her a teddy bear. William brought home unexpected flowers from vendors in Grand Central, and she was touched; they were often a little the worse for wear, but she told him truthfully it was the thought that counted, and she put the flowers in a vase in the kitchen. That was where she would see them the most. Her father never in his life gave either her or her mother any present but cash. She had grown up with a lot fewer expectations than many women.

“We can't stay out here long. I just heard some of the guys complained about me having a woman visitor out of visiting hours last week, even a journalist.”

“I didn't know anybody paid attention to us.”

“These guys know everything. The closest to a big-time criminal we've got here is a boy named Gus, from Illinois. He told me today I seemed to have had a hard time saying goodbye to that writer. I told him I had, and I hoped something was going to come out of our meeting. These guys all know about my situation with Sallie. That she's waiting to hold me up for everything I've got and wants full child custody. Gus said, ‘The best thing that could happen for you, Hal, would be for your wife to die'; then he said, Laurel, ‘I know a Mexican boy who'll come up from Monterrey and wipe anybody's ass for five hundred bucks, in case you're interested.'”