In under two hours they came to the small city of Mcalester, and from the highway they could see the city's only remaining industry—its prison. From Oklahoma 1 as they headed in, it looked somehow magical, like a Moorish city or a Camelot: the high, white, fortresslike walls shining in the sun. It looked so cheerful, so promising, but it was such a fantasy. No cheer in that place, and goddamned little promise.
“Here we go,” said Bud, turning off Route 1 for the two-mile spin up West Street, until it delivered them into the prison itself. Was it his imagination, or did he feel a sense of dread and evil as they approached, as if the air, somehow, had gotten heavy?
Mcalester State Penitentiary was everything you thought of when you heard the word 'prison.” The walls were huge and blank and festooned with cruel razor wire, and up close the fraudulence of the whitewash revealed itself, because you could see the ancient bricks mortared into place in the millions and you knew that under the bright paint they were dingy, as though soaked in woe.
“So much bad comes out of a place like that, it makes you wonder,” said Bud, as he turned off West Street onto Prison Boulevard, in the shadow of the vast south wall itself.
“The convicts call ’em gladiator schools. It's where a young kid with a wild streak learns how to be a burglar, a butt fucker a cop killer, and how never to feel nothing about what he's done. You don't want to know what goes on inside a place like that. You can't begin to imagine it. But I'll tell you this: Nothing good ever came out of an American prison. I'd drench ’em in napalm and turn every last boy inside into ashes and black bones, and start over.”
“The newspapers would scream,” Holly pointed out.
“They would until they watched the crime rate fall.”
Bud pulled into a slot marked law enforcement just shy of the admin building that crouched under the walls and turned his truck engine off.
Lamar and O’Dell and Richard:
They'd come this way. He remembered from the newspapers that first day after the escape: the arrows pointing to a second-floor grated window in the admin section of Cell block A out back, where that poor boy had parked his truck and they had climbed into it and waited for him to come to his death. Then they'd driven out the gates, turned left, turned left again, and come down this merry little street with the cheery visitor's center, the warden's big house like a mansion, even a tacky little museum, before turning down West Street and heading out into the world.
“Open that glove box,” he said.
She did and saw a small black gun.
“That's a Beretta 84 .380,” he said.
“Thirteen shots.
Safety's on. Anything happens—”
“Bud—”
“I know it's silly and not a thing will happen. But you know how my mind works. Anyhow, you take that gun and push the safety down with your thumb. Then all you have to do is pull the trigger thirteen times. That should make him really mad, so after that, you slug him with it.”
“Bud, you are so strange. Do you really think there's going to be another prison break?”
“No. But like the man says, if you want peace, prepare for war. I'll be back in an hour, okay?”
“Yes sir, it's not a problem.”
“You sure?”
“Yes sir. I brought a paperback book along to read.”
“Good.”
They were expecting Bud, but if he anticipated any personal apology for the things that Mcalester had unleashed, he got none: only professional courtesy, distant and cool but not rude. He checked his Colt Commander with an assistant warden, who took him into a bleak little office.
There in three battered cardboard boxes were all that remained in the Big Mac of Lamar Pye, his cousin O’Dell, and Richard Peed.
“No letters,” said the assistant warden.
“Lamar and O’Dell haven't gotten letters in years. Nobody cared about them or even knew about them. Until they broke out, they didn't exist.”
Bud nodded.
“I don't know what you're looking for,” said the assistant warden, 'but if you think you're going to find it there, I think you'll be disappointed. How long do you want?”
“Oh, an hour or so?”
“That's fine. Sergeant. Take your time. No rush. No one's going anywhere.”
Bud sat down and pulled over O’Dell's box. It was mostly clothes, neatly laundered blue jeans and plaid shirts, a few prison denims of the sort that were no longer strictly mandatory.
The underwear, all clean. No porn. He seemed not to have a sexual bone in his body. A model airplane, poorly assembled. Some kind of World War II ship, with glue smeared all over it. A shank, cut from a shoehorn, wickedly vicious. And, finally, a cigar box, just as a small boy in a fabled boyhood would have, a Huck Finn.
Bud opened the thing: first off, he saw a faded picture of a farm woman, taken, judging from her hair, some time in the sixties. She had that severe. Depression-era look, no meat at all on her sinewy features, narrow eyes that expected no mercy from the world. Her taut mouth held a tension of sorts. She was hunched in a cheap coat, though the sun was shining. The picture was blurry, but in the background he saw white clapboard, a farmhouse perhaps.
He turned the picture over. ode ll mama camilla, anadarko, oklah 1967 it said, in bold, childish letters, though the writing could not have been O’Dell's since the man was hopelessly retarded and illiterate.
Next out came a coloring book. Bud opened it. Some time early sixties, badly done, the crayon strokes violent and mixed, paying no attention to the lines. The book was drawn from a Walt Disney cartoon movie called Sleeping Beauty, full of thin, beautiful blond people. An act of cruelty, Bud thought, to give such a thing to a hulking, damaged boy like O’Dell, with the hole in his face and the nothingness in his mind: He could just look and wonder at what he could not have, ever. A woman's flowery hand had written 'O’Dell's favorite book” inside the cover, and paging through, Bud finally came upon what must have been O’Dell's favorite page. It was a dragon, rearing up ferociously, about to strike a handsome knight with a sword.
Alone, it was not touched by a crayon; the image held too much power for young O’Dell to defile.
That was it. So little for a human life, even an O’Dell Pye's. He pulled the next box over, finding it heavy. It had to be Richard's, because the heaviness soon revealed itself to be books. Richard was a reader: In the Belly of the Beast, In Cold Blood, The Pound Era, Thus Spake Zarathustra by somebody whose name Bud could not even figure out how to pronounce. The books looked a little like Russ's, which somehow irritated him. Paging through them. Bud found lines highlighted in yellow marker. It was all gibberish, mostly about violence.
Thus speaks the red judge, 'Why did this criminal murder? He wanted to rob.” But I say unto you: his soul wanted blood, not robbery: he thirsted after the bliss of the knife. His poor reason, however, did not comprehend this madness and persuaded him: 'What matters blood?” it asked; 'don't you want at least to commit a robbery with it? To take revenge?” And he listened to his poor reason; its speech lay upon him like lead; so he robbed when he murdered. He did not want to be ashamed of his madness.
Crazy stuff. What the hell could it mean?
He guessed Richard was trying to figure out what he was doing in here.
Too bad, Richard boy. You made your decision, now you got to take the consequences.
Bud put the little book down and went through a few heavy and glossy paperback books on art, mostly painting, again nothing pornographic.
Some art supplies—sheaves of drawing and tracing paper, a small box with pencils, chalk, chunks of charcoal for sketching, but no sketches.
No weapons, just shaving gear, all neat, and a toothbrush, the toothpaste neatly rolled up. A comb, a Bic razor, some Colgate shaving cream, soap in a plastic box. It all gave Bud the creeps for some reason, and he soon tired of Richard and his intellectual vanities.
He pulled the last box over. gave, l.” it said on the outside.
The clothes were neat in a professional convict's way:
