The End of the Sentence (7 page)

I stopped by the library to make sure Ralph had been right when he handed me Lischen’s spare keys. The doors were locked there, though, and there was no movement inside, despite her saying she’d be working.

The interior of the truck smelled of her perfume. I nearly turned back. It was Sunday, after all. Chances were there’d be no visiting. I could go home, to my safe little house, where no one could find me. 

For another two days, anyway. No. I had to go to the prison.
Approved
. 

I did go home for a moment, and grabbed a stash of letters, but I took off from the front door without looking back, afraid I wouldn’t manage to leave if I considered it any more. 

I hit the highway and headed north to I-84, cursing the strangeness of Oregon, the 55 mph speed limit that anywhere else would be 75. It was already mid-morning, and I worried I wouldn’t get into the prison before it closed. I should have called. My mind had gotten soft here, and now I expected the rest of the world to feed me lunch and tuck me into bed. It felt good to take the ramp out of town. 

I worried my way west, driving a parched landscape, patches of trees as I moved toward Portland, and then, green and dark everywhere. A national forest, so lush it seemed impossible after all the desert. Beside the highway, the river gleamed silver as chains. I looked to the left and saw Mt. Hood, the volcano rising up, snow like a cape over its shoulders. Bridal Veil Falls, a flash of white, a sign announcing a landmark. 

I was breathing again, feeling like a real person again. Other cars around me, towns, people. I was driving. I was okay. Nothing was wrong now, not really. I believed, for a moment, that I’d moved on, and then I remembered I was driving toward a prison. 

They’d tell me he was dead, and that I was only getting letters as a formality. They’d tell me I needed to pay for his burial. I’d get a motel room, and watch cable TV. I saw signs advertising rooms for $29 a night, old neon with cowboys on them. A motel, a swimming pool, an orange soda. That was what I’d find once this was done. A reward for making sure. That’s all I was doing. Making sure. 

The prison itself, when I finally got to it, was weirdly beautiful. I’d imagined concrete blocks, and instead it was Art Deco curves, a watchtower rising over the front entrance, and tall arched windows lined with dark tiles. The sun hit the complex in a way that tricked my eyes into thinking I was somewhere nice, a hotel not terribly far from the seaside, maybe, except for the loops of barbed wire around the tops of the walls. The gates were open, to my surprise. I’d expected to fail. The guard motioned a window roll-down, and I struggled with it for a moment, unused to the manual operation in Lischen’s truck, but then got it down, and tried to look not guilty. Why? I wasn’t guilty. 

The guard looked at me, sighed, and said, “Visiting hours are over, mister.”

“I need to see the warden,” I said, that notion falling out of my mouth unexpectedly. 

“There’s procedures,” the guard said. I looked at the wad of gum he was nursing in his cheek. Bright pink. I could smell the strawberry on his breath. He looked barely old enough to be out of high school, and he’d shaved badly. His face was nicked. 

“I need to see him,” I said, and pulled the sheaf of letters out of the glove compartment. The guard looked at them, grimacing. 

“I don’t know what you got here,” he said. “But it looks like a mess.”

“Letters from a prisoner. From this prison. They’re threats,” I said, to make it stick. 

The guard sighed and blew a bubble, giving up on me. “You can go and see what you get in there,” he said. “But nothing goes out without getting read. Can’t be much too bad in them. Most guys just write porn to girls. I don’t know why you got a guy writing to you, unless those are porn.”

He looked at me, curious now. “You getting porn from someone in here? That what’s wrong?”

“No. Do you recognize his name?”

The guard looked at the envelope again, at Dusha’s name and at my address. “I think I’d remember that one,” he said. “But I haven’t been here long. There are records in the office. Might be for nothing, and you drove a long way. I used to play basketball near Ione, in high school. That place doesn’t even got a team.”

He waved me through the gate, and pointed at the lot.

There was a sign in blue paint on the wall outside the front prison office, a layer of bullet glass, and a receptionist behind that, who had no interest in looking up at me. 

I stood for several minutes, reading the sign over and over again, like a mantra.
“You can’t talk your way out of problems that you behaved your way into.”
I wondered why those instructions were facing prison guests, rather than prisoners. 

The receptionist looked up, at long last. I could see from the lines of her face that she spent her time behind that glass biting the insides of her cheeks out of boredom, or disgust. 

“You don’t think you’re here for a prisoner visit, do you? You’re not on any of my lists.”

“I didn’t tell you my name.”

“Well, you missed basic visiting hours, and there aren’t any specials scheduled, so you can assume I know how to do my job.”

I pushed the letters through the slot in the glass. She looked at them, with a complicated expression on her face. One part excitement, one part revulsion. She was thinking I had a pile of porn again, I suspected. When she looked up, that expression was gone. 

“No one by that name here,” she said. 

“I’ve been getting them, sometimes a five or six a day,” I said. “Somebody’s sending them.”

“We control mail in and out,” she said. “These are stamped, but this isn’t our prisoner. Not ours. He’s not on record.”

I looked at her.

“That’s true,” I said. “He’s not. He died in 1957.” Her face changed. “He was executed. I’m here to pick up his bones.”

She sighed. “Some people are fools. Leave well enough alone, but no. You think you’ll sell a dead man’s bones on eBay? There’s a prison cemetery here, and if he’s dead and nobody claimed him, he’s in it. What you’re doing here sixty years late, I don’t know.”

“I’m not leaving until I see someone. I want to pick up his bones. And I want these letters explained.”

“Do you know where you are?” 

“The penitentiary,” I said. 

“Then don’t fuck with me,” she replied, startling me. “Don’t threaten, don’t pretend I can’t throw you out if I want to. Prisons aren’t for tourists. The only reason you’re getting this far is that it’s the end of the day and nobody has procedure for this.”

She slammed the door behind her as she went deeper into the prison. I waited to be thrown out. Guards with guns? This didn’t seem like a prison to me. It seemed like a post office, and the receptionist an irritable postal worker. 

A door opened across the room. 

“Malcolm Mays?” The man beckoned to me. Khaki uniform, badge. Maybe in his sixties, with teeth that looked older. His skin was as though he’d pulled the plug partway on an air mattress, before realizing he didn’t want to go flat. “You’re wanted.”

“I was cleared,” I said, without even thinking of what I was saying. 

He looked at me. 

“Wanted back here,” he said, and beckoned again. “It’s the end of the day, and I’m due home for Sunday supper. Just come with me.”

My spine felt like a spring. I couldn’t decide whether to go back beyond that door with him, or to leave, claiming confusion. He decided for me. He grabbed the letters from my hand, and looked at them. 

“You’re coming with me,” he said. “I’m Warden Kern, and you’ve got some explaining to do. Thank you, Lois.”

The receptionist shot me a triumphant look as I went into the prison itself. On the warden’s belt, I could see a holster. The door clanged shut behind us, and a red light came on above it. He saw me looking. 

“Security,” he said. “This is a prison. What do you have there, Malcolm Mays?”

“How do you know my name?”

“It’s right here on these letters, isn’t it? It is.”

He led me into an office, and slammed the door, dropping into a soft desk chair while I sat awkwardly in aluminum. He looked hard at me.

“And I know these letters. I wondered if you were real.”

“Who did you think they were going to?”

“What are you trying to do here, Mays? You’re in my house now. I’m two years out from the end of my sentence.”

“What did you say?”

“Retirement,” he said. “This place is a sentence like anything else. I have a man ready to come up and sit where I sit. I have grandkids. Tell me what you want, I’ll tell you what you can’t have, and you can be on your way.”

“I want to see Dusha Chuchonnyhoof,” I said. 

“Deceased,” he said. “In 1957. Executed by gas chamber. You know that already. You said it out there.”

“He’s not dead,” I said. “He’s haunting my house. Or, not my house. Haunting my mail.”

The warden’s lip curled. “He’s dead.”

I brought out Olivia’s letter about the executions, and pushed it across the desk. He looked at it, at first cursorily, and then less so. At last, having brought out a cigarette lighter, and set the letter on fire, the warden spoke again. 

“Leave this alone. Get up from that seat, walk out to the lot, and leave this the hell alone.”

“He’s asking me to help him.”

“Dusha Chuchonnyhoof is legally dead,” the warden repeated, looking me in the eyes. “He was executed. By the power of the state, at the end of his sentence. There were witnesses. His death certificate was signed. And he’s buried in the cemetery here.”

“What if he didn’t die?” 

The warden’s hand moved toward his holster. 

“This is my prison, Mays. I’d know. And if I knew we had a prisoner here, a prisoner who wouldn’t die? It would be my business what I did with that prisoner. If that prisoner wrote letters, if that was part of the condition of his imprisonment, if that prisoner were passed to me by the warden before me, and by the warden before him, if all of us had been waiting a HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN FUCKING YEARS for that goddamned prisoner to be released? Do you think I’d fuck it up, Mays? Do you think I’d let him out into the world before his sentence was over? Do you think I’d surrender my prisoner to you?”

The warden’s hand was on his gun.

“Where is he?” I tried. “Can I see him? I don’t have to talk to—”

“Dead, Mays. Dusha Chuchonnyhoof is dead. No one sees him. You can’t go gape at a dead man.”

The extra flesh on the warden’s face now seemed filled with something that might make him levitate, a mascot from a balloon parade gone small in this office. 

“There will be no scandal here, Mays, hear me? If we had a prisoner here, if we did, a prisoner who wouldn’t die? We wouldn’t want the world to know, would we? There’ll be a moment when this all comes right and we’re waiting for that moment. A couple days left in that sentence. This is a job. I don’t truck with the devil in here. I don’t owe the devil my soul.”

Suddenly he was over the desk at me, his gun in his hand.

“If I find you got leaky lips, I can help you with that. A warden is authorized.”

The click of the safety.

“You ready to leave my prison now?”

I was. 

“Lois will let you out.”

Lois took me to the parking lot, and watched while I got into the truck. She watched while I drove out the gates, and away in the dark. 

Dusha Chuchonnyhoof was alive, real, and in that prison. He wasn’t invented. There seemed to be nothing I could do about it. 

He was coming home to me.

As I turned into the dirt lane at dawn, the truck caught on something. There was a bang, and the wheel jerked sideways in my hand. It fishtailed to a stop. I sat, shaking. There hadn’t been a bump. I hadn’t hit anything. Anyone. Not this time.

The front tire on the passenger side had blown. 

I looked everywhere to see what it had caught on, but found no rock, no litter from the yard, no tossed-aside piece of lumber with nails still sticking out. I couldn’t find the spare, either, so I heaved some of the paint, nails, and two-by-fours out of the truck bed, and hauled them back to the house.

A letter cartwheeled from the ceiling to land at my feet. I picked it up, intending to just pile it up with the others and burn the whole heap later, but it was the stationery and handwriting I had come to think of as Olivia’s. Whatever it said, I felt I owed it to her to read it.

I did not want to be in debt to a murderer, (though again, the thought pinched at me. I was guilty and free. What if he was innocent and caged?) and God knew I didn’t want to commit murders of my own. I already knew what it was to carry the burden of a death.

But I wanted to help Olivia. If I could free her, I had a duty to do so. Maybe I’d misunderstood what was being asked of me. I’d misunderstood things in my life before, and maybe more than I’d known. I heard my grandmother again, and I thought about fixing things other than the ones I’d broken. She hadn’t been the one who broke that goat’s back. She hadn’t broken the car engine, but she’d fixed them, all the same.

I turned the letter over.

I read over the words. I hadn’t promised to kill anyone, to cut off hands. I would help, if I could. That wasn’t a lie. I wouldn’t promise further.

I set it outside on the porch where I’d put the previous letter. I didn’t know what answer I wanted.

The smell of coffee crept out from the kitchen and down the hall. I heard the sizzle of grease on a hot skillet, and the clank of glass bottles rattling in the shelves of a refrigerator door. The house, at least, had forgiven me.

The plate was heaped with bacon, eggs and hashbrowns. It smelled good, and I wasn’t in the habit of turning down food. Leaning against a glass of orange juice was a letter from the prison.
Approved
.

I couldn’t make the two sides match up in my head. Olivia wanted me to help. She would help me, protect me, if I did. But the thing she wanted me to help was a monster who, as far as I could tell, had not changed his demand that I murder two people and forge their hands into shoes for him. He might not want to be a monster, but he seemed bent on making me one. And no matter what anyone said, the dead didn’t come back to life. Dead wasn’t the kind of thing that could be fixed.

Behind me, water splashed into the sink. A woman’s voice, humming. “My Baby Cares Just for Me.”

I carried the paint and spackle upstairs. There was work I could do, clean work, that didn’t mean walking down dark stairs and lighting a fire in a forge.

The outline of the red door had bled further through the paint, and the key was once again sticking out of the wall. The pencil on the nightstand lifted up into the air and floated across the room.
O-P-E-N
scrawled in loose letters above the key.

“It’s not a door,” I said.

OPEN
.
The pencil underlined the letters, pressing so hard the lead snapped. It was the first time I’d seen things actually moving in the air. The ghosts didn’t care any longer whether I saw them moving about. 

I turned the key, and felt it catch tumblers. Click.

The door opened into a space behind my bedroom wall. There were shelves, like a pantry, but not for holding food. On the shelves were six pair of horseshoes. No six and a half. Thirteen total.

I felt like I was standing before a crypt. The horseshoes rested together in their pairs, the hands of each lover. The bottoms of them were worn, rubbed smooth in places, scratched and nicked in others. Some of the hands wore wedding bands. In one instance, both hands were small, delicate-fingered, with long nails, as if both belonged to women.

Only the solitary shoe showed no sign of being worn. I had two horseshoes—the beautiful one, that had been left on the anvil’s horn, and the ragged one that had risen out of the dirt to grip my hand. Perhaps one of them was the mate, but I didn’t know how to tell, and it seemed wrong, to match up a pair that wasn’t true.

There was one more thing, heaped in a corner of a shelf. It was so tarnished that at first I thought it was iron, too. But no. Too light, and the metal near white when I scraped at it. Silver. A bridle made of silver. Even the reins, dangling from the bit.

I sat down in the doorway that wasn’t, and thought about what I could do, what I couldn’t do, what I didn’t know. I thought about who that bridle might be meant to fit. Maybe there was a horse waiting for me, like that mare. I wasn’t from horse country. I didn’t know anything about riding. I didn’t know anything about horseshoes, even now, and as I thought it, I nearly laughed with misery. I was only a month into a new life. How was it that I was supposed to know everything? How was it that these were the stakes?
Tell him you will help.
 

Hands holding hooves. Whose hooves? What
was
Dusha Chuchonnyhoof? No one had told me that, for all that there were threats and vows and promises. No one had said what sort of creature he was.
No one sees him,
Warden Kern had said. No one had described the goblin I was meant to keep bound. No one had told me why he needed binding. 

The bedroom window was open and I could smell fall coming in, leaves beginning to crumble into dust. There was a cool breeze hitting the back of my neck, but in the closet it was hot as a forge. 

Beneath each of the sets of shoes, there was a letter.

No, not a letter. A contract. 

The first one was written out in fading brown ink, the handwriting unfamiliar to me. It had a location too,
Gretna Green, Scotland
. 

I picked the paper up from the shelf, and shuddered. Beneath it, there was a long braid of hair, two different sorts. One red, one black, twisted into a coil and tied with a faded string. 

Beneath that, the signatures of the couple, the signature of Joseph Weyland, and a mark. The C and W brand. Followed by the signature of the wedding’s witness. The flowing looping lines, the dark ink, the handwriting I knew all too well.

the last line of the contract read, and then, it was signed.