The Unwilling(53)

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.”

“Dude…”

“Two damn minutes, all right?”

He didn’t apologize, but Chance played tough about the things that really mattered. His mom was one. I was another. When dust settled in the field, I turned across the road, and drove us out.

“Did you get what you needed?” Chance asked.

“I’m not sure what I needed.”

“Look, man. If he didn’t do it, he’ll get out. Not for the guns, maybe, but you know…”

I had no response, and the rest of the drive was like that. In the city, I dropped Chance at the mall. His reasons were simple. “If I’m going to cut school, I may as well have some fun. Sure I can’t talk you into it?”

“Not today.”

“I can come with you if you want.”

“Nah, go on. I’ll see you later.”

I left him on the sidewalk, and drove to Sara’s condominium. There was no answer when I knocked on the door, but I saw an upstairs curtain twitch. “Sara, come on.” I knocked again. “Sara!”

When the door opened, she looked puffy and pale. “What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know. I wanted to check on you.”

“Well, now you have.”