“Actually, Your Honor, I’m suggesting he’s too dangerous.”
Another murmur stirred the courtroom. The judge waited for it to settle. “Perhaps you could explain.”
“Your Honor, the defendant served three combat tours in Vietnam, a time in which he learned to kill and do it well. Many here have heard the stories—”
“Rumors, Your Honor.” Jason’s lawyer interrupted. “Unadulterated and irrelevant.”
“Be that as it may”—the DA raised his voice—“the defendant was dishonorably discharged after attacking a highly decorated superior officer. It took four men to subdue the defendant, and three were severely injured in the process, two to the point of hospitalization in intensive care. It takes a dangerous man to do that kind of damage, and local authorities don’t relish the responsibility of keeping someone like that in custody. Our jail is overcrowded. Its officers lack the training necessary to deal with someone as demonstrably violent and capable as this defendant.”
“Your Honor—”
“I have a letter, Your Honor, from the warden at Lanesworth Prison attesting to the dangers of holding Mr. French in custody. Even at a state prison farm—with all its facilities and experienced officers—this defendant was suspected in two unsolved killings and multiple beatings—”
“Suspected, Your Honor. Neither tried nor convicted.”
“Your Honor, if I may approach with the letter.”
“Hardly necessary, Mr. DA. Your request is unusual but well within the prerogative of your office. If you want the defendant in state prison, that’s where I’ll send him. Madam Clerk, enter the order and call the next case.”
* * *
An hour passed before they came for Jason. He spent that time alone in a cell.
“Open five.”
When the door opened, Jason blinked but stayed where he was.
“Come on, let’s go. Your ride is here.” Jason waited five beats, then rose as if from a Sunday nap. The guard stepped back, and four others entered to bind Jason in full restraints. “All right. Nice and easy.” They formed up around him, and Jason began the shuffle step that kept him on his feet and moving. They traveled one hallway, and then a second. A bus waited in the parking bay. LANESWORTH PRISON. INMATE TRANSFER. “Stop here.”
Beyond the bus, a concrete ramp sloped to the open street. Jason heard distant traffic; tasted the fumes. When the bus door opened, a uniformed corrections officer stepped down. The name tag said RIPLEY. Jason knew him. “Paperwork?” He held out a hand, and one of the local officers gave him a clipboard. Ripley dashed off a signature, and handed the clipboard back. “Any problems I should know about?”
“Meek as a kitten.”
“We’ll take it from here.”
Ripley summoned two officers from the bus, Jordan and Kudravetz. Jason knew them, too. They got him up the steps and onto a bench. When Ripley mounted the bus, he threaded between the seats until he reached the place Jason sat. He was midfifties, broad, strong, and prison-pale.
Jason met his eyes, and said, “Captain Ripley.”
“Prisoner French. Do you understand what’s happening and why?”
Jason nodded once. He knew.
“Would you believe me if I said I’m sorry for you?”
Jason met the guard’s steady gaze. Captain Ripley wasn’t a bad guy, just trapped, like the warden was trapped. “I would,” Jason replied.
“It’s a long drive,” Ripley said. “At least you have that.”
He returned to the front of the bus, locked the steel mesh door, and sat on the other side with Jordan and Kudravetz. The driver cranked the engine, and rolled them into traffic. Jason watched the city slide past, the businessmen and tall buildings, the construction crews and pretty women. A clutch of hippies filled a street corner, protesting the war; and Jason watched them slide past, too: the men who’d never fought, the women with angry faces and flowers in their hair. A moment’s resentment flickered, but Jason was too much a prisoner to really care.
He thought of Tyra, instead.
He thought of X.
When the city fell away, it took little time for the fields to spread out and the forests to rise. The bus made multiple turns, moving ever eastward until the roads narrowed and buckled. The driver downshifted when it got bad, but the old bus still rattled and clanked.
The prison was close.
Jason saw it in the tangled woods and narrow cuts, and in the ditch lines filled with stagnant water.
Not just close, he thought.
Here.
The bus slowed on cue, turning at an enormous block of stone where words, carved long ago, told the sad, grim truth of things:
LANESWORTH STATE PRISON FARM, 1863
ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE
Before his time at this place, Jason had never read Dante, but could now quote entire passages. “Through me the way to the suffering city; through me the everlasting pain.”
Ripley turned his head, his fingers hooked in the mesh. “What’s that, prisoner?”
“Dante’s Inferno,” Jason replied. “Divine Comedy. The gates of hell.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I just hate that sign.”
Ripley didn’t understand or care enough to ask again. “Four miles,” he said; but Jason knew that, too.
Four miles of private road.
Eighteen thousand acres.
The prison crowned a rise in the center of all that emptiness, and Jason felt a familiar chill when he saw the blackened stone. Ripley said, “Welcome home,” but Jason heard a softer voice, instead, a knowing whisper and the long-ago words of Dante Alighieri.
Nothing was made before me but eternal things,
And I endure eternally.
The voice belonged to X.
Jason was home, indeed.
19
After Jason’s court appearance, we sat in my car, waiting for a bus to slide out from the belly of the courthouse. Chance was not happy about it. “Tell me again why we’re doing this.”
He’d said it before, but few things were real to me now: Becky, my brother, this question of manhood and war.
“Can’t we go to the quarry or something?”
“Chill,” I said. “That’s the bus.”
A bus emerged and rolled past us—same white paint and black letters—and I saw my brother inside. I knew where they were taking him, so I couldn’t explain this need, but I wanted to see the prison and make it real. I stayed far back, but kept the bus in sight as it moved through the city and into the countryside. It took an hour to reach the far, empty place where Lanesworth waited for my brother, and when we got there, I stopped on the verge of the state road, and watched dust rise as the bus split a brown-green field and disappeared under a canopy of trees.
“We’re not going in?” Chance asked.
“This is far enough.”
“Finally, some sense.”
He spit through the open window and I felt a wave of anger. “How many times have I been there for you, Chance? When your dad left. When your mom got sick. I could name a hundred others, and I didn’t bitch about any of them, did I? I went to the hospital. You lived in my room for a month.”