oody Morrison had the clothes on his back and the few dollars in change he’d been arrested with two years earlier. The guards were nice enough to keep his belongings in a caged room, neatly folded and tagged in a sealed paper bag. His shirt now hung loose and he had to borrow a safety pin from one of the guards to tighten his slacks. The tips of his shoes were scuffed. Before he left, they said he was the finest dressed convict they’d ever seen.

“Ex,” Goody said, taking it in stride and smiling as he walked out.

The summer heat blew out of the desert hot and fierce. Goody breathed in, smelling dust and pollen from the high weeds across from the prison walls. He sneezed and laughed and kicked dirt clods until he reached the nearest bus stop, a few miles down. He listened to the silence of the day. No bus was coming anytime soon. He sat on the bench and flicked dust from his shoes with the red silk handkerchief he’d pulled from the back pocket of his slacks.

Before he stood up, he re-read the letter a convict named Earl gave him that morning. They shared walls for only two months but Goody figured it was worth a second read. Scribbled on the paper was an address, a few names—names Goody had learned too much about in the last stretch of his sentence. Earl liked to talk before lights out, mostly about the girl he loved. Goody mostly listened, Earl’s sweet black voice chiming through the bars of his cell like an old record. Sometimes it was almost relaxing.

Earl would talk about this girl like a lover would. He called her Mounds. She used to wear these pink sweaters, he’d say, that’d drove him wild. And her hands, her little white hands folded over her lap when she spoke to him and the little brown mole off center on the back of one of them and the way she pinched it and ran a nicely manicured fingernail around it. The way she sometimes gnawed on it when she thought nobody was looking. Earl would laugh his deep laugh and Goody could hear his bedsprings shake as he remembered. He’d go on, about this girl. About the boy he killed for her. The way the kid’s blood dotted the white mini skirt that Mounds wore that day, the way she wiped the blood from her cream colored thighs and brought her hands to her pink sweater. Blood red fingerprints over the hot pink cotton swirls and bra straps underneath.

“Just make sure you go now,” Earl would say. “When you get out I mean. Just make sure you make a stop for ol’ Earl and tell them what I been meaning to say. They won’t listen to me. No, sir. Tell them it was a mistake. And Goody? You can bring me back a nice bottle or two when you get yourself settled. Just another sip’d be nice. And Goody? Hey, Goody? You look them up for me, ‘specially Mounds. Tell her I didn’t mean to. You hear me Goody?”

Before he fell asleep, Goody always promised him he would.

Goody calculated miles in his head, figured out east and west; the sun was just about overhead. He listened for the bus again, looking down both sides of the highway. It was too long of a walk, even Goody knew that. He stuck his thumb out west and noticed the white crescent moon of the fingernail. He took one last look at Earl’s handwriting, the random feel to it, the way he circled the tops of his i’s. And for a moment he wondered if what Earl once told him was true, that you never get a second chance to make things right, but there was no sense in not trying.

 

ut in the middle of a town fifty miles east of the prison, a preacher danced with a group of children within a circle formed by bales of hay. The entire hay filled street was closed down, the smells of popcorn and hot dogs in the air. Goody sat on the steps of the local grocery store, watching the preacher dance. He’d traveled through the night without complaint.

He walked across the street and rested his back against the cool shaded brick of an old office building. He polished his shoes with the red handkerchief. Down the middle of the street a boy walked back and forth, rolling a small wagon behind him. The boy had a sandwich board draped over his shoulders. It read: LEMONADE 25 SENSE. Dozens of papers cups wobbled and splattered inside the wagon.

“Hey kid,” Goody said.

The boy looked over with wet brown eyes and came to the edge of the shade. His face was pale with sweat, his hair sticking to his forehead. His legs shook under him. Goody dug through his pockets and sorted out two quarters. He flicked the change into the boy’s cupped hands. The boy picked out two full cups and handed them over. Goody grabbed one and told the boy to keep the other. The boy drank it in one thirsty gulp and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“You know you misspelled your sign,” Goody said, crunching down on ice.

The boy looked at him, drops falling from his chin to the edge of the dusty road. “That’s how my mama spells it,” he said, and walked back to the middle of the festival.

Goody crunched an ice cube and watched the preacher sneak up behind the boy. The preacher grabbed a cup from the wagon and ran away, squealing and dancing towards the festival’s onlookers lining the opposite side of the street. They all laughed and thought it a part of the day’s events, and the boy with the sign dangling over his body kept on down the road with the same wet brown eyes.

The preacher walked towards Goody. “Goody Goody Gumdrop,” he said, propping a foot against the brick building. He stared over at the group of people across the way.

“Thought you were never going to finish,” Goody said, standing up and wiping off the sleeves of his shirt.

“Beats that old sawdust and bloody knuckles back at camp.”

“Preacher’s don’t lie.”

“No we don’t.”

The preacher sat down and drank the rest of his lemonade. He breathed hard.

He’d done at least ten years when Goody first met him. He was his first cellmate. A tall lean man, always clean shaven, with a boyish look. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old when they nabbed him for crimes he swore he didn’t commit. He did a shade over eleven years, graduated seminary school inside, and married himself to a woman who swore to him she’d wait forever. He had written Goody every few months after he first got out, thinking it was important to keep in touch. The letters eventually stopped.

The letters didn’t say much, updated addresses, phone numbers, different jobs the parole officers set up. None of them mentioned his wife. None of them mentioned much at all. Goody didn’t even think to ask about her. It wasn’t important.

“You surprised?” Goody said.

“Thought you might stop by sometime.”

The preacher stared at the people across the street.

“No,” Goody said, “You surprised at how good I look?”

He snapped his handkerchief from his pocket and waved it in the air. They shared a laugh.

“So what are we going to do now, Gumdrop?” the preacher said.

“Not sure. Seems like a nice enough place here. But I’m moving on somewhere.”

“Nice, sure, but there isn’t anything for us here. Never will be. Never will be anything for us.”

“Looks like you’re doing all right,” Goody said.

The preacher stood up, pulled his shirt off and flung it over his shoulder. His chest hair matted to his skin.

“Nah. This here’s just part time. Just passing through, really. I figured I’d just wait for an old buddy to get out, see where things might take us. Like the good old days.” He looked at Goody for the first time, smiled. They had no good old days together. “They got me a job at the feed mill a few miles from here when I first got out. Couldn’t handle it. So I split. You know, Gumdrop, I just got to be around people. That’s what I’m good at.”

Across the street, the preacher stared at a little girl atop her father’s shoulders. He took his last sip of lemonade and threw the cup to the dirt. The girl noticed him and ducked her face behind her father’s head. The preacher stared at her, waving his fingers at this little girl. Goody hoped her father wouldn’t look over. There was no telling what might happen. The preacher then laughed, elbowing Goody in the side as they walked down the road, his eyes wrinkling at their corners.

“How’s it feel to be out, Gumdrop?”

Goody looked at his ex-cellmate. He couldn’t yet tell if he’d missed him or not.

“Different,” Goody said. And the preacher knew exactly what he meant. As they walked, Goody saw him continue to stare at the child across the street.

 

hey stayed the night in a barn at the outskirts of the town. Goody figured it’d be a good three hour drive to get to where Earl was from, and he needed some rest. He had his eye on an old Chevy pickup he saw down the road. At first light, he thought. The preacher was set on moving along with him, no matter where Goody was going. He told him he’d already violated his parole anyway, and the odd jobs he was able to find barely met any sort of needs.

“Almost no use for us anymore,” he’d said, climbing up the ladder at the side wall of the barn. A few minutes later Goody heard him sleeping, up above him, laying amongst the hay and rotted out support beams. He felt he could easily kill him, just up the ladder from him. But those days were gone. Goody kept both eyes lightly closed the rest of the night, the sounds of the open air covering him.

The next day they hot-wired the Chevy and found an empty road north and followed it to the highway. It ran east and west, one lane in each direction. Goody stuck his arm out against the wind. The preacher sat alongside, his shirt around his neck, playing his tongue against his teeth. Goody already wished he’d never found him.

They’d made it over a hundred miles by the time the truck stopped. When Goody felt it sputter he ran it off the highway, looking in the rearview to make sure nobody was coming up. There was some good foliage off the road now, turning greener the more west they went. They pushed the Chevy by its doors a few hundred feet into the trees and bushes. The preacher was worn and wiped his head with his shirt, kicking the side of the truck. Birds scattered out of the bushes and Goody watched them fly up into the trees and perch. The Chevy rolled a few more feet, stopping its front tires at a felled tree.

“Now tell me, Goody Gumdrop. What do a couple of good old boys like us do now?”

He was leaning against the back of the truck. Goody saw he wasn’t having any fun. The preacher had day old stubble. He was beginning to smell. They both were.

“There’s a river down the way,” Goody said, pointing through the trees and bushes. “Saw the bridge before we turned off.”

“We gonna float away?” the preacher said. He laughed and played his teeth with his tongue.

Goody walked down through the trees, towards the bridge now overhead. The preacher followed behind, talking low to himself, keeping a good distance. The sky was clouded over where the tree line broke for the winding river and Goody stripped naked, folding his clothes on top of his shoes on the rocky shoreline, holding on to a low hanging branch above the water so the river wouldn’t sweep him away as his body floated helpless in the cold current.

 

hey walked into the town just after sunset. Neither of them said anything. They kept mostly to themselves since they ran the Chevy off the road. Goody never mentioned Earl or his letter. He never said why they made it to this small town. He figured the preacher never knew the old man or what he’d done and it didn’t make any sense to him to try and explain it. They walked down the sidewalks, one in front of the other. And every once in a while Goody fingered the letter in his pocket, running the tips of his nails along the edges, just to make sure it was still there.

In what they considered to be the middle of town, Goody and the preacher stopped. They exchanged a few words. The preacher may have thanked him for getting them there, but Goody didn’t remember. They stepped away from each other. There was what looked like a bar down the main stretch of road where the streetlamps started to spotlight the sidewalks. Red neon signs glowed in the front window. In front was a small group of girls smoking cigarettes. Every once in a while they looked towards them, some giggling and some waving them over in flirtatious intoxication. The preacher looked back once more at Goody and smiled, walking towards the bar. His teeth were pale gray in the dying light.

Goody turned his back and gripped the letter in his pocket. He read the street signs at the corners. He heard girls laughing and introducing themselves. They were smoking cigarettes. Goody could smell them. He read the names of the street at the corners and thought where it was that Earl had killed that boy. Where had the old, smooth black voiced man struck? And where had that young girl Earl called Mounds, the girl he thought loved him, watch him kill, her white miniskirt and pasty thighs splattered in blood? Had she ever really loved the old man? If so, did she know he would do it? For her? Had Earl known himself that he could do it? And when the body of the boy broke open so easily, could he have stopped, Mound’s eyes on him, sparkling?

Somewhere in the night the preacher laughed. Goody started to follow the one road out of town. He made it close to the highway and stuck his thumb out. Looking back from the small rise of the onramp leading away from Earl’s hometown before it curved away into the trees he could see the small open circle of girls under the light in front of the bar. The preacher was among them. They each stepped one by one into the bar, leaving the thin air of smoke behind them. Goody brought his thumb back and took the letter out of his pocket, folded it neatly into his palm, and walked down the embankment below the freeway, towards the one road leading back into the town.

The bar was dark and nearly empty. There were a few men hunched over the bar top. They looked at Goody when he came in then went back to their drinks. There was no bartender behind the bar. In the far corner was the group of girls. They sat around a table, drinking. The preacher was sitting between them. He had a drink and he was drinking. None of them noticed Goody.

The bartender came out from a back room, wiping his hands with a towel and running it along the bar top. He nodded towards Goody and stood in front of him. Goody ordered water.

“Hey, listen. You know those girls?” he asked.

The bartender slung the towel over his shoulder and squint his eyes towards the girls.

“Seen them a few times. College girls. Can’t say I know them.”

The bartender must’ve noticed Goody wasn’t from there. If he was, he probably would’ve known him by now.

“There’s a junior college up the freeway from here. Good football team.”

Goody drank his water, crunched on some ice cubes, and looked at the bartender. He went over the names from Earl’s letter in his head. The boy’s family, the boy himself, Mounds. He thought of asking the bartender about the killing, if it’d happened around here. If the boy had played football for the college? If his family was still here? If Earl had ever come in here before? How long ago had it happened? If the girl he’d killed for, if she’d ever showed up now and again, in her hot pink sweater? The bartender refilled Goody’s glass from a pitcher down at the end of the bar. Goody took a quarter from his pocket and placed it on the bar. The bartender nodded and walked away.

Goody looked back at the table in the corner. The preacher was gone. There were only two girls sitting now, sipping on their drinks and talking close to each other’s face. They were young, younger than Goody had thought. Maybe they knew her, Mounds. Maybe they’d taken classes with her or gone to local football games with her. He took the letter from his pocket, stood, and walked towards them.

Both girls startled when he asked them if he could sit down. They giggled and looked at each other. Goody sat down and the girls drank from their small straws. He sat across from them. They didn’t seem any older than eighteen but they were drinking. They didn’t exactly look at him. Goody coughed into his hand and thought of what to say. He brought Earl’s letter from his pocket again, setting it on his knee under the table. One of the girl’s eyes flashed over him, quickly. She brought her chin down and scratched the back of her hand. She was blonde. The other had dark hair. Goody thought they looked so young. He brought the letter to the table, folded over. He didn’t look at it. The girls giggled at each other again.

Goody looked behind him, down a dimly lit hallway where he thought the bathrooms were. The preacher and the other two girls were still gone. The hallway was quiet. Somewhere outside the faded sound of sirens came into the bar. They grew louder and in a moment the red and blue flashes lit up the walls through the windows and were gone again. The bartender looked out one of the windows, then towards Goody and the two girls. Nobody said anything. Goody fingered the letter on the table, spinning it around with the tips of his fingers. He reached down and wiped off the tops of his shoes. Another set of sirens sped past outside the bar, this time silently. Only colors. One of the girls looked towards the bartender and ordered two more drinks. She looked at Goody, held up another finger. The other girl, the blonde, stood up and went towards the nearest window, watching the squad car’s sirens fade into the night. Before she sat down she looked at Goody and smiled, fixing the short hem on her white skirt.

 

[END]

© 2006 Joshua Landers - Contributor's Bio

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