She placed a bright red lipstick kiss at the end of the letter, and below that she wrote Thinking of you.
She came to see me on the next visiting day and brought me a batch of fudge. The scooped neck of her dress exposed the sprinkle of freckles along her collarbone. I had an aching erection the whole time we talked.
She thought she must be awful bad luck for the men in her life,seeing as she had a husband and a brother and me all in prison. She didn’t care that she was bad luck to Kinder, but she was sorry about me and Earl. She thought a curse ran in the women in her family. Her mother’s most recent ex-husband, Burke, had been killed in a car crash a week before their divorce was to become final. He was on his way back to Indy from Cleveland after phoning her and saying he wanted to talk about the two of them giving it another try. God only knew what was in store for her mother’s new husband, a car mechanic named Jocko who’d already had a few scrapes with the law.
Her mother’s problem wasn’t that she was bad luck for men, it was that she took up with men who were no good, and I told Mary she’d made the same mistake with Kinder. She wasn’t bad luck, I assured her, not for me.
When our time was up we touched fingertips through the wire mesh and she looked like she might cry and laugh at the same time. She whispered Oh baby how I wish. And blew me a kiss as she got up to go.
T hat winter the wind came off the lake and over the dunes even harder than usual. It ripped through the prison grounds every day like an icy sandblast. I’d walk in the yard with my collar up and my hands deep in my pockets, my eyes stinging, and I’d think and think. By winter’s end I’d come up with an escape plan.
It was different from my others in that it was long-range and called for patience, never my strong suit. Still it was a plan we all agreed on. We was only six of us to begin with—me, Red, Charley, Russell, Walt Dietrich, and Okie Jack.
It was my plan, but in fairness I have to give a lot of credit to Fat Charley. He always insisted that a plan should be simple as possible. The more complicated the scheme, he said, the more things that cango wrong with it. The way he saw it we needed only one thing to try a break—guns. With guns and a little luck we might be able to take hostages and use them to get past the gates to the outside.
When Charley had first mentioned this idea to the rest of us, Russell smacked a palm up to his forehead and said Guns, of course—why the hell didn’t I think of that? Then he laughed in Charley’s face.
Red said That’s a pretty simple plan all right. Why don’t we just ask the warden if we can borrow the keys to the place? That’s even simpler and it’s got about as much chance.
That was the problem in a nutshell—how to get the guns into the joint. Months crawled by and none of us could think of a way. Then there was a major change in inmate job assignments and Dietrich was made the supply clerk in the shirt factory. That’s when the answer to the gun problem came to me.
I didn’t say anything about it right away. I wanted to have the thing worked out as much as possible before running it by the guys. I grilled Dietrich like a cop about the supply procedures in the shirt factory. And then I had a talk with Pearl Elliott. I needed her to convey a proposal to a Mr. Williams, the shipping manager of a certain trucking company in Chicago. She was gone for a week before coming back and informing me that the deal was acceptable to Mr. Williams, but he’d have to have his money in advance. No tickee no washee was how he’d put it to her.
The following afternoon out in the windy yard I laid it all out for the other guys. The whole thing depended on John and on the assumption that he would get his parole when he went up for it sometime in the coming spring. I wasn’t sure he would throw in with us, and if he hadn’t, the plan would’ve died then and there. But he was as
She came to see me on the next visiting day and brought me a batch of fudge. The scooped neck of her dress exposed the sprinkle of freckles along her collarbone. I had an aching erection the whole time we talked.
She thought she must be awful bad luck for the men in her life,seeing as she had a husband and a brother and me all in prison. She didn’t care that she was bad luck to Kinder, but she was sorry about me and Earl. She thought a curse ran in the women in her family. Her mother’s most recent ex-husband, Burke, had been killed in a car crash a week before their divorce was to become final. He was on his way back to Indy from Cleveland after phoning her and saying he wanted to talk about the two of them giving it another try. God only knew what was in store for her mother’s new husband, a car mechanic named Jocko who’d already had a few scrapes with the law.
Her mother’s problem wasn’t that she was bad luck for men, it was that she took up with men who were no good, and I told Mary she’d made the same mistake with Kinder. She wasn’t bad luck, I assured her, not for me.
When our time was up we touched fingertips through the wire mesh and she looked like she might cry and laugh at the same time. She whispered Oh baby how I wish. And blew me a kiss as she got up to go.
T hat winter the wind came off the lake and over the dunes even harder than usual. It ripped through the prison grounds every day like an icy sandblast. I’d walk in the yard with my collar up and my hands deep in my pockets, my eyes stinging, and I’d think and think. By winter’s end I’d come up with an escape plan.
It was different from my others in that it was long-range and called for patience, never my strong suit. Still it was a plan we all agreed on. We was only six of us to begin with—me, Red, Charley, Russell, Walt Dietrich, and Okie Jack.
It was my plan, but in fairness I have to give a lot of credit to Fat Charley. He always insisted that a plan should be simple as possible. The more complicated the scheme, he said, the more things that cango wrong with it. The way he saw it we needed only one thing to try a break—guns. With guns and a little luck we might be able to take hostages and use them to get past the gates to the outside.
When Charley had first mentioned this idea to the rest of us, Russell smacked a palm up to his forehead and said Guns, of course—why the hell didn’t I think of that? Then he laughed in Charley’s face.
Red said That’s a pretty simple plan all right. Why don’t we just ask the warden if we can borrow the keys to the place? That’s even simpler and it’s got about as much chance.
That was the problem in a nutshell—how to get the guns into the joint. Months crawled by and none of us could think of a way. Then there was a major change in inmate job assignments and Dietrich was made the supply clerk in the shirt factory. That’s when the answer to the gun problem came to me.
I didn’t say anything about it right away. I wanted to have the thing worked out as much as possible before running it by the guys. I grilled Dietrich like a cop about the supply procedures in the shirt factory. And then I had a talk with Pearl Elliott. I needed her to convey a proposal to a Mr. Williams, the shipping manager of a certain trucking company in Chicago. She was gone for a week before coming back and informing me that the deal was acceptable to Mr. Williams, but he’d have to have his money in advance. No tickee no washee was how he’d put it to her.
The following afternoon out in the windy yard I laid it all out for the other guys. The whole thing depended on John and on the assumption that he would get his parole when he went up for it sometime in the coming spring. I wasn’t sure he would throw in with us, and if he hadn’t, the plan would’ve died then and there. But he was as
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