Pimping Accomplished

Stephen King writes an Entertainment Weekly column once a month: this month's is about Mischa Berlinski's novel FIELDWORK, and after talking about how good it is, and how it will probably never do better than the twenty-thousands on Amazon's bestseller list, King theorizes about of how (not) to market a book. As usual he is folksy, glib and occasionally funny. But this time around his I'm-just-another-guy tone comes off as faintly disengenuous, and his observation that selling a book and pimping are two different things (and that publishers don't understand this) strikes me as both irrelevent and fundamentally unhelpful.

Of course every year King blurbs a ton of new books by new writers, and he can say whatever he wants, but I'm not convinced it's possible to be Stephen King and still grasp how finicky the marketability of fiction -- and new books by unestablished writers -- can really be. In this circle-the-wagons retail economy, especially in bookselling, is pimping all that shameful a term, or even a practice? Of course nobody needs to pimp a new novel by King (or Jonathan Franzen, or Cormac McCarthy)--all they need to do is build awareness. The audience is already there. But since authors, publishers and readers all benefit from the book arriving in the hands of the consumer, isn't the question of selling versus pimping an issue of semantics?

One thing I'm pretty sure of, and that is that his remark that a good cover and a good title can make all the difference, is a little bit reductionist. Getting a write-up on the back page of EW by Stephen King, on the other hand, might actually help the thing.

The current Amazon ranking for FIELDWORK is 3,395.

Pimping accomplished.

Family portrait

One of my favorite images, taken in a museum in Washington DC...

Includes Reader's Guide

Today while examining a copy of The Memory Keeper's Daughter that I found in my kitchen under a bunch of old magazines and stale toast, decided that the closest thing you can write to sure-fire commercial fiction these days is a book that includes some kind of reader's discussion questions in the back. I'm not exactly sure why, but for some reason books that come complete with questions in the back seem to end up on bestseller lists, and sometimes on Oprah.

Maybe people just feel better about reading books these days if they can answer questions afterward -- I don't know. In any case, I've decided that what I need is a book with discussion questions at the end. Herewith, a list of questions that can be applied to my book.

1) Why do the dead children have no eyes? Do you think someone ate the eyes? If so, what do you think they tasted like?

2) Why do you think the author uses so much blood in the book? Do you think he's sick in the head or just really infatuated with gratuitous violence?

3) Discuss the antagonist's use of the word "bitch" to taunt the main character. Does this seem needlessly antagonistic? What about when he calls her a "cunt"? What do you think the author meant by this?

4) Does it seem to you like the author could use therapy? If so, how much?

5) Discuss the theme of entrails throughout the book.

6) One of the novel's most pervasive themes is "the history of murder in New England." What do you think the author means by this, or do you think he just put that in there to sound like he had some bigger ideas?

7) When do you think the author will get around to writing something worthwhile?

8) What do you think the author likes to eat for dinner? Perhaps lobster? Do you think he eats at Red Lobster, especially now that it's Lobsterfest? Would you maybe like to buy the author some lobster?

Three Teeth Later

It's called the alveolar process of the maxilla. It's the part of your bone that your upper teeth connect to. And it turns out, you can break it pretty easily.

I spent yesterday in two different emergency rooms, three pharmacies and a dentist's office. Jack, my five year old, did a face-plant from a bench to a concrete floor and landed on his...well, his mouth. The results were unbelievable. Screaming. Bleeding. Throwing up.

And that was just me...

He took a series bunch of stitches in his mouth, lip and gums. The dentist actually pushed part of the bone back into place. It was a miserable day and a really hard night. But they say the mouth is a fast healing area, and the bone itself is going to regenerate.

Today he's eating, talking and playing with his trains. He's watching Scooby Doo and eating pizza. He's antagonizing his little sister. He's singing "Roxanne" at the top of his lungs and combining it with the theme from Jaws. Duh-DUH-duh-DUH-duh-DUH....Rooooooxxannne....

It's a cliche but it also happens to be true. Kids are amazing.

Series or stand-alone?

Everybody knows that a series of books sells better than a stand-alone, right? This is a gross generalization, of course, but I've already been encouraged to attempt a sequel, or perhaps several, to Chasing the Dead, so much so that I've actually considered doing this. I could do it, probably -- the end of the novel sets itself up for a follow up.

The problem is that most horror fiction, which is what I have been publishing lately, generally doesn't lend itself to continuing characters. There are plenty of exceptions, sexy vampire hunters and Necroscope-style monsterpieces, but for the most part, if you're out to scare the bejeebers out of people by taking a commonplace situation and turning it suddenly into a supernatural creep-fest, which is the sort of thing I naturally gravitate toward, then you're probably living in one-off land. This is actually sort of the opposite of the continuing detective novel or Ian Fleming's Bond books, where new readers want more and more with every title, and the author, now awash in royalties, obliges with an endless variations on the same character(s) and settings.

The interesting wrinkle is that I have a continuing character that I could work with, well outside the realm of horror. This is a fellow named Pete Watson, a detective with multiple personalities (great gimmick, right?), star of an unpublished novella called Split, which got optioned by CBS for a series last year. The only thing keeping me from writing a series of Pete Watson multiple-personality detective novels is that A) I don't read detective books and B) I'm not sure I could write one, let alone a whole series of them. I probably could (I've written whole novels on assignment before, back in my ghostwriting days) but I'm not sure how well it would work. It occurs to me that, for the subconscious to do its work properly, you should be at least plausibly aligned with the material you're working in on an instinctive level. Which is just a fancy way of saying, If you're faking it, the reader will know.

But, of course, there is such a thing as stretching. Trying something new, in this case a novel-length first person detective story, just to see how it pans out. It certainly wouldn't be the first project to go directly from my hard-drive to the dustbins of history, if it didn't work out. And while I think it is important to write what you feel in your heart, it's also at least a little foolish not to consider the commercial possibilities of what you write. When Elmore Leonard saw that Westerns weren't going to keep selling like they had in the 50s and 60s, he switched to crime novels and never looked back (well, almost never...there was Cuba Libre, after all), to staggering success. Of course, these crime novels were also stand-alones, but they enjoyed a much larger audience then the oaters he'd been writing up till then. John Banville just released a crime novel called Christine Falls, as Benjamin Black, and it's doing just fine.

Is it possible that the Western-to-crime novels transition (or in Banville's case, the literary novel-to-crime novel transition) is no more of a jump then horror-to-detective novels? Is it within the realm of consideration, even advisable, to write both, the way Joe Lansdale goes back and forth and every which way in between? I don't know, but I do know this: in a landscape as unstable as today's publishing industry, it doesn't hurt to diversify as much as possible.

Just ask Benjamin Black.

Full Disclosure

By now most of you know--unless you've been living under a rock for the last few weeks, that is--that I'm actually Stephen King's eldest son. By publishing my first few novels under the name Joe Schreiber, I was able to make my own way in the field of horror fiction without worrying about the shadow of my father, but I think now that I don't have anything more to prove, it's safe to reveal my true lineage.

Which is why, in the interest of absolute fairness, I must also disclose that my biological mother was, in fact, the youngest of six children (spawned by four different mothers) who, in fact, carried on the name of a certain Rhode Island recluse by the name of Lovecraft. Her own mother, Darla Stigwood Hemingway (second eldest sister of Ernest from the old Lake Walloon days) emigrated from Spain after a brief but fecund dalliance with William Faulkner. Faulkner was on loan by Howard Hawks at the time, on one of his all-too-frequent jaunts through Hollywood, doing a brief production rewrite of Poe's Descent into the Maelstrom, during which my great-great-grandparents gathered in a mausoleum to drink three ounces of the blood of William Shakespeare from a tiny, leathery flask made (so family legend has it) of Chaucer's foreskin. This bit of admittedly pointless trivia is made perhaps marginally more interesting only because, after this whimsical ritual, all of them partook of a certain pagan fiction-writers ceremony under conditions of such secrecy that its origins were recorded only in a series of coded palimpsests stored in the basement of the Vatican itself, in the far right corner, next to the porn.

In any event, whether or not the novels of Joe Schreiber King (or, as I'll be known from now on, simply Joe King) will prove to be more popular than Joe Schreiber, only time will tell, but I assure you, for those future biographers who may be reading this, a Certificate of Authenticity is on file at the office.

Last Train Out - Chapter Seven

This is the final chapter of LAST TRAIN OUT. Serialized here over the last week, it is a novella inspired by Frank Grigware, who escaped from Leavenworth Prison in the early 1900s.


Chapter Seven

For eight months he drifted back and forth between Arizona and New Mexico, taking work as a cook but never staying anywhere longer than a week or two. He thought of venturing to El Paso to find Irish’s friend Ramirez but worried about bounty hunters that might be waiting for him near the border. More than once he began a letter to Sarah, only to abandon it after a sentence or two when he realized that he was writing to a memory whose material essence had rather disturbingly begun to fade. Besides money or the lack of it there was nothing stopping him from bolting northeast to Chicago and wandering dusty and fatigued into one of her lectures. It thrilled the dramatic side of him that he’d forgotten he had, and in the evenings he often fantasized about their reunion, which of course must realistically end with a return to prison. Two nights in a row he dreamt of Irish’s face glaring sternly at him from a campfire, reminding him of the unfinished task before him. It was actually very funny because Irish had never been so pedantic in life. For him revenge had always been something that would happen in its own time and certainly didn’t preclude the immediate pleasures of women, food or horses. There was a town of nine hundred souls called Patagonia where Tom finally got tired of trying to titillate the taste buds of cowboys and walked off the ranch where he’d been working with no idea what would be next. In Tombstone he found himself standing outside a shabby Wild West Show that had been making the rounds through Southwest circuit for the last four decades. The skinny, tight-lipped daughter-in-law of the original owner ran it and the poorly patched carnival tents appeared to be the same ones from forty years earlier. Tom felt obscurely compelled to pay his two bits and go inside. In general such spectacles had been replaced by rodeos but apparently word of their demise had not yet reached this motley deputation of trick riders, ropers and alcoholic clowns that galloped up and down the bleachers on a nightly basis. One of the exhibits was the poorly mummified body of a Cheyenne warrior supposedly killed at Little Big Horn, a sad and ghastly thing cinched together by rope and catgut. For an extra quarter you could pitch rocks at it and from the look of things many had done so.

Because he was out of money with no other prospects Tom took a job traveling with the show, cleaning out the stables and taking down tents between performances. He quickly got to know the performers and their individual foibles. The mood among them varied wildly from day to day depending on criteria unfathomable to him. On any given afternoon the sharp shooter might stagger from his tent too drunk to go on, raving and throwing rocks at the crows that followed the show from town to town. Or he might be as courtly as you please, addressing everyone including Tom with an almost aristocratic deference. The star of the show was a tall and ancient cowboy named Frost Evans whose sole claim to fame was the decade he’d rode with Buffalo Bill Cody in the late 1880s and missed no opportunity to describe his performances in Paris and Madison Square Gardens forty years earlier. At seventy, Evans’ body was such a wreck from decades of abuse that the scar tissue seemed to be the only thing holding it together, and he suffered hemorrhoids so virulent that he typically needed to medicate himself into a near stupor just to mount his horse. There were plenty of younger people in the show as well, girls with lipstick on their teeth and sly young men that were always rolling cigarettes and trying to grow moustaches. Between them they also carried half a dozen children, a dirty and perpetually sneezing lot that circulated a continuous stream of illnesses among themselves in an endless marketplace of germs and immunity. None of the children had ever been to school and Tom took it upon himself to teach the younger ones to read simple words and eventually write sentences. He tutored them in math, science and history from memory, the old skills returning unbidden. For this he was neither thanked nor snarled at by the parents who simply accepted his appearance here as they would a change in the weather or a stillborn infant. From trick riders to sideshow barkers, the outside world was no more or less mystifying to these people then it was to a pack mule and attempts to grapple with it in greater detail had no doubt brought them nothing but frustration and grief. As winter came Tom knew he would not be with them long but his money situation was now dire, having been robbed of his last thirty dollars during the night three days before. The daughter-in-law had been known to advance money to men who spent an hour or two with her in her trailer. Sensing that he was considering this option she’d told Tom in no uncertain terms that the scars on his face wouldn’t matter to her once the lights were out. Instead Tom borrowed five dollars from the sharp shooter, bought a bag of potatoes and dried beef and made it last till payday. He’d lost almost twenty pounds since leaving the grandeur of Horse Heaven Ranch, enough that the pants he’d brought with him had to be secured by rope.

The show traveled to El Paso in February, a full year after Irish’s death, and on his night off Tom went looking for Irish’s friend, the merchant named Ramirez. For some reason he’d expected to find a thriving general store but the old Mexican maintained a plain single-room shack outside of town with individual items from pickaxes to potions dangling from the walls and sacks of flour, coffee and sugar piled on the floor. Ramirez himself was scrawny and half-blind from diabetes but livelier than anyone Tom had met since he’d left the ranch. When Tom mentioned John Irish, the Mexican leapt from his chair with excitement and brought out a bottle of excellent tequila from below the counter insisting that Tom join him in a drink. Of course he’d heard about Irish’s death and how he’d taken Dietz with him but was delighted to add Tom’s first-hand account to the rich stew of narratives on which he obviously fed. He listened rapt as Tom described their escape from Leavenworth. Then almost reluctantly Tom brought out the old photo of Strayhorn that Irish had shown him back in Oklahoma several years ago now and handed it to Ramirez who squinted at it for a full minute in silence before nodding.

“I have seen this man not so long ago. He came through here perhaps two months ago wanting to buy medicine for his his nose. Always sneezing and coughing, a very sick man. I sold him gingko root because it is good for that and he wanted me to send him more. I asked him where he was going. He told me he was on his way to Ciudad Camargo to Presa Boquilla that is known for the restorative powers of its waters. He said he heard there was a mission there and a priest Father Santiago who has the gift of stigmata, the wounds of Our Lord, who has been granted the authority to absolve sins.” Ramirez flicked his dark gaze up reverently at Tom. “This is true.”

“And his name was Homer Strayhorn?” Tom asked.

“That I do not recall but it was this man. He may have given me another name. I am sorry I cannot offer you better information.”

“There’s no need to apologize. I don’t have the words to thank you.”

“Please it is an honor to be of assistance to a man who rode with John Irish.”

Tom walked out of the shack into the last light of day with a euphoric feeling of urgency and energy that he thought he could never feel again. He remembered wondering how Irish had managed to act younger every day and in that moment at least he understood. Scarcely thinking he stole the fastest horse from the Wild West Show and rode it five miles toward the border before realizing that he was virtually penniless, without food or water and the six-hundred-mile journey across Mexico would be impossible without money. He could not go back to the show now that he’d stolen the horse and the notion of waiting any longer to find Strayhorn was intolerable to him. For a long time he stared south into Mexico as if awaiting the voice of John Irish to tell him what to do. Then it did and he smiled. “You fool,” he told himself. “You great fool, he was telling you about it the whole time.” That night he rode northwest by moonlight, crossing the New Mexico border near dawn and reached the Animas Mountains the next afternoon. The mare had done very well for him and he knew the terrain ahead would be difficult so he stopped at a roadhouse near Little Hatchet Peak and let the horse rest for almost eighteen hours. In the late morning he spent his final dollar on a huge breakfast of steak and eggs and followed the range north toward the Gila Cliff Dwellings where he had buried John Irish. Their pace had slowed but he felt little urgency now. He could see what was going to happen very clearly and it would happen whether he rushed or simply moved steadily forward. In the cliff dwellings he rode up to high plain where the outlaw said he’d gone every day he was in Leavenworth to smell the wind coming up from Mexico, the place he’d said they could never take away from him. Here the cliff dwellings to his immediate right were partially swallowed by shadow in the late afternoon. Tom dismounted and walked to the pile of stones that marked Irish’s grave. After a moment he climbed down slowly into the ancient cave, smelling the scent of every animal that had ever sought refuge here from wolf to man. Descending with the rock floor crumbling under his boots he struck a match with his thumb and held it steadily in front his face until his eyes adjusted to reveal great sacks and steamer trunks piled high against the stone wall. Many of the sacks were still stenciled with the words Northern Pacific Railroad. He filled his jackets pockets with the currency that he found inside, stuffing the saddlebags as well. It was getting dark and he could hear the wolves now in the mountains. Not out of fear but only because they reminded him of Irish, Tom Ford spent the night in the cave with the bags and strongboxes that were all that Irish had left in the world. At dawn he rode to Las Cruces, left the horse with a note of apology to the Wild West Show, and bought a train ticket south. His last act before boarding the train into Mexico was to mail a postcard to Sarah at her office in Northwestern upon which was written the two words Ciudad Camargo.


Back in Chicago Sarah had spent the last year in a kind of daze disrupted only by her immediate obligation to Tom’s father, Norton Ford, whom for want of any better ideas she’d brought with her back from Wyoming. Particularly in academia, if one has enough money, reality can become a supreme kind of white noise that once tuned out allows one to focus wholly on the minutiae of punctuation and tenure. Tom’s father had rescued her from all this by requiring constant attention. Sarah had tried renting him a house in Oak Park just down the street from her own, staffing it with maids and butlers who could prepare the old man’s meals, monitor his health and insure his safety. She got him a driver and a bank account. With no other dependents and an influx of money from the booming stock market it cost her practically nothing to provide Tom’s father with the comfortable lifestyle he’d never had. But Ford rejected it wholesale, complaining that he was unable to sleep in the beds or eat the food as long as the noise from the city, inaudible to Sarah, leaked through his windows. In fact the only solace he found was the nearby Frank Lloyd Wright studio which he visited on a daily basis, remarking that its prosaic beauty reminded him soothingly of the prairie. On one occasion he’d actually bumped into Wright himself who’d stepped out with his cape and cane to chat with Ford about the geography of the Great Plains. “Decent enough,” Ford reported afterward, “for a city man.”

For months Sarah teetered on the brink of leaving the University and its fussy punctiliousness but again it was Norton Ford who saved her from visiting such extremes. She’d gotten him a part-time job cataloguing botanical specimens from earlier expeditions, a task that enabled Ford to cope with each day as an agreeable collection of plants and grasses. Those few samples that he not recognize on sight he would look up, although he often tended to use the Native American rather than Latinate terms for certain flowering succulents. Of course the moment she stopped shoveling her own money into the life sciences department Ford’s position would be eliminated and he would be lurking outside her door every waking hour, asking when he could go back home, a concept that no amount of explanation could make clear for him. Still Sarah realized she preferred having the old man around, despite one dispiriting incident when he’d pulled out the old 32 Rimfire rifle that he’d brought back from Wyoming and threatened to shoot out the lights of the house across the street. There was a gentleness in him that reminded her of Tom and in the wake of what happened to Dietz down in New Mexico she felt compelled to maintain a death gip onto whatever she could of the man she’d lost, seemingly forever.

The postcard when it arrived changed everything. Sarah was on her way to the opera when it slipped out from the stack of magazines and solicitations for donations that arrived massively every afternoon. At once she cancelled her classes, packed a bag and called to reserve a seat on the next train south. Then there was the problem of Tom’s father to whom she’d discovered she could not lie, particularly not when it came to his only surviving son. Of her two options the only tenable choice was buying him a train ticket as well. In the morning she found Norton Ford at her doorstep, shaved and ready to go, dressed for the first time in one of the suits that she’d had made for him and carrying the Rimfire rifle along with his suitcase. Because he’d never been to Mexico and was going to “rescue” his son he insisted on travelling with the rifle, which he claimed had saved his life as a boy. The fact that he offered no further details of this story convinced Sarah that it was almost certainly the truth. They sat side by side on the train out of Chicago, neither of them speaking nor moving but only staring out the window as if the intensity of their combined gaze might somehow lubricate the passage of matter across space and hasten their arrival. It was not until they reached Kansas City that Sarah proposed they eat dinner. The old man nodded, following her obediently into the dining car where they both picked disinterestedly at their meals, which at that time were comparable to the better dinners one might find in Chicago or Manhattan. During those long hours Sarah understood the vast uncaring bulk of the North American continent in a way that no amount of geology could convey. The land itself was full of blood and forgotten bones and it could eat and had eaten and would continue to eat indiscriminately until there was nothing more to consume and then it would consume itself and go on. Sarah went a little mad thinking these thoughts and yet again it was Norton Ford ultimately who saved her, brought out a deck of cards and cut them on the table. They played in silence throughout the night and into the next day, the fragile conceit of arbitrary chance somehow smothering each other’s own deepest fears about what they might find out about Tom when they finally arrived.


Los hermanos, the brothers, argued bitterly and without verdict about the man that they were guiding south across Chihuahua. One of the brothers was convinced that the man was Tom Ford, the one who had escaped from Leavenworth Penitentiary almost three years earlier with John Irish. The other brother pointed out how the man’s face differed dramatically from the artist’s rendition on the wanted poster, the furrows of age that cleaved the man’s cheeks and forehead, the scars that were not described on the sheet issued by the U.S. Marshals. Not to mention, the other brother argued, that this man has plenty of money to pay us so why should we try to bring him in for what will almost certainly be less. In essence the argument boiled down to the choice between returning the man for the bounty or killing him. It would not take the brothers long after that to realize they were in absolute agreement about who their employer was and only the specifics of what should be done remained in question. Neither brother felt any particular hurry since the man they were guiding wanted to go to Ciudad Camargo, where they had several blood relatives including the magistrate himself and would not have to worry about making such decisions under duress. In their hearts each of them had already murdered the man many times over.

Throughout all of this Tom was of course peripherally aware of the brothers plotting against him though he judged there was little to be done. He needed them to get him across this unfamiliar country, past the banditos and treacherous passes that would otherwise have taken his life. It was that simple. Now that they were less than a day away he felt an absolute and unobstructed sense of purpose about how he would deal with Strayhorn and what was beyond that he left to the gods. Just a day or two ago he remembered how he’d once recited the Lord’s prayer every night and earnestly inventoried his heart’s desires on a daily basis as if wanting them intensely enough might somehow will them into being. Such alien behavior made him smile now. He could not explain exactly how this was different except that somehow his truest appetites had endured so relentlessly that they would be sated one way or another, either in this world or his departure from it. That night they rode into the flat and unremarkable village, beyond the fires that burned on the outskirts of the town toward the church that Ramirez had told him about. Tom was aware that the brothers were no longer riding alongside him as they had all day. For an indefinite period he rode alone. Then without warning dogs and children came up from the shadows to follow alongside his horse, the children begging him for money while the dogs simply hoped for scraps. He handed out coins to all of them and tossed the last remaining strips of smoked buffalo jerky to the hungry dogs. At the church he stopped and dismounted. Stepping into the sanctuary he felt his pupils shrink to accommodate the only available light that radiated faintly from the vespers near the dais. Tom came forward among the widows and old women in shawls bent low in the pews, their whispered prayers and sighs sounding not like Spanish at all but some other language whose syntax he knew only well enough to be disorienting. At the dais knelt the Mexican priest Santiago, a man so advanced in years that glistening youth had returned to his eyes and lips as if drawn back in sheer disbelief. The collapsed webbing of his skin around his eyes, cheeks and lips bespoke hardship beyond anything Tom had ever inflicted on himself with a knife and for the first time in memory he was brought sincerely and without the slightest premeditation to his knees.

“Are you Father Santiago?” he asked in Spanish.

The old priest gazed back at him and nodded once, seemingly untroubled by the interruption of his services.

“My name is Tom Ford. I have come a long way looking for a man named Homer Strayhorn who murdered my brother and another girl in cold blood. I have been told this man may have come to you to make his confession.”

The old priest did not move, then slowly raised one hand to chest level, a formal gesture whose literal translation Tom didn’t know. He told himself not to look at the old priest’s palms but could not resist letting his eyes stray there where in fact he saw no wounds that might indicate stigmata. At last the old priest answered in a voice that was surprisingly high and youthful, “Yes. I received the confession of the man you described, whose name is Homer Strayhorn. I took it on his deathbed in a room in this village one month ago. He described to me how he murdered your brother and the little girl because of a debt that was not paid by your brother. He asked me to absolve him of his sin. I told him that I could not do that. That night he had a seizure and his heart failed and he died. He is buried in a cemetery two miles west of here if you wish to visit the grave.” The priest turned away from him, returning his attention to the candles over his head, and did not look back at Tom. Tom walked out of the church and into the street. He was aware of the world within him and the world without him, those two discrete realms that for over a decade had been connected only by the tidal rhythm of his breath, joining together. He spoke his brother’s name aloud several times until it felt real to him again, as if Teddy where walking alongside him through the streets of this village, and then said in an equally audible voice, “I finished it for us. It’s done.” He went to the hotel that the brothers had recommended to him and went up to his room.
When daylight came he rode out to the cemetery to Strayhorn’s grave. It was an awkwardly carved stone bearing only by the man’s last name. Within a decade it would be crooked. Within a century it would be gone. He thought he would stay here in town and notify the U.S. marshals so that they could get a testimony from the old priest, so that he might be pardoned and go back to live in the states. Or perhaps he would simply stay in Mexico where questions of guilt and innocence became transparent and eventually vanished altogether. In any case he liked the hotel where he was staying and several days passed as he sat by the window, sipping the delicious house sangria and gazing down at the plaza below. Eventually he knew the brothers would come looking for payment and he assumed that’s who it was when, on the evening of the fourth day, there was a soft tapping at his door.

“Come in.”

The door opened and Sarah stepped inside. Tom stared at her as if faced with an apparition. The blood drained from his face and he went completely white. Standing up he let the cup of fruity wine fall from his knee to the tile floor where it smashed unheard by either of them. She came across the room and he took her into his arms. At this point Tom was aware of tears on his cheeks though he did not know to whom they belonged. They kissed first as they’d kissed in the yard at the prison and then as they’d kissed as students at Harvard and then as they’d never kissed before, the kiss itself carrying them backward across time to the people they’d never been, the lovers they should have been. He prayed aloud that she would say his name just once so it could not possibly be an illusion and she spoke it in his ear, first a whisper, then a plea, as they lay backward across his bed. Tom knew now that there could be no more time for anything but themselves now, only for themselves. Through her lips and ears and hands he worshiped the god that had given him such enlightenment finally after the long road of trials that each of them had endured.

As they made love for the first time, Tom kissing her lips each time he slipped inside her, the brothers that had guided him here moved unseen in the plaza below. It was mid afternoon and the village was asleep so that even the mission bells would not toll again until nightfall. They entered the hotel, passed up the stairs and came down the hall until they stood outside Tom’s room, each of them carrying a shotgun. Both had been drinking heavily since morning to build up the courage for what they were about to do. They were both perspiring as well because of the liquor and apprehension. In fact it was a combination of these details--the unsteady gait of the men and the uncharacteristic glint of perspiration on their faces--that had drawn the attention of Norton Ford, who followed the Mexican brothers up from the plaza. The old man had agreed to wait in the café while Sarah went in to ask about Tom but he gauged now that she had been in there too long. It seemed only yesterday that he himself had lost the love of his life and knew poignantly the narrow window we are often given to alter fate. Cocking the 32 Rimfire that he’d brought with him, Ford limped up the stairs in time to see the two brothers bursting into a hotel room. From inside he heard bitter shouting in Spanish, a language he did not understand, followed by Sarah’s scream and the unmistakable voice of his son Tom. Ford stepped into the room in time to see the Mexican brothers taking aim with their shotguns, one of them at Sarah on the bed and the other at Tom who stood naked facing the wall, execution-style. Raising his own rifle with the same calmness he’d owned through his entire life Norton Ford pointed it at one brother and then the other, blowing them cleanly from their lives and into history.


A week later Sarah and Tom returned to Horse Heaven Ranch where they would live for the next fifty-two years. Norton Ford died in the spring of 1919 and Tom buried him alongside John Irish in the Gila Cliff Dwellings. In 1972 he joined his father. Sarah was almost ninety but she rode with her children and grandchildren as they carried Tom’s body south into the Cliff Dwellings, continuing westward until the winds of Mexico rose noticeably from the south. The family rode in jeeps and 4x4s while up front Sarah sat up high and alone in the ranch’s horse-drawn hearse. In the distance she could see a storm brewing up in the mountains and down across the plains to the small open field where there were no trees. Tom Ford was buried on the Mexico border between his father and John Irish as a wild and driving rain turned the ground into a quagmire and the horses strained to pull the hearse across the field. She thought of how he had once written, “for me you are every animal and I’m the earth under your feet,” words that would stay with her until the day she died.


This is for Jim Harrison.

Last Train Out - Chapter Six

What follows is the sixth chapter of LAST TRAIN OUT, a novella I've been running here throughout the week. Chapter Seven will appear tomorrow, after which this blog will become its usual shapeless but enthusiastic self.


Chapter Six

In early January Irish rode out with his daughter and her ranch hands into Chihuahua where he would accompany her until they crossed over the divide and rode west to the Pacific before turning back home for the ranch. With Juanita and Irish gone Horse Heaven Ranch became all business again and Tom, the only one who could not break horses, worked eighteen hours a day out of sheer guilt, cooking meals, mending fences and setting the broken bones of vaqueros and ranch hands. In the time remaining he helped add another wing onto the house though the rooms remained empty. Quietly he turned thirty-six years old though age had become an abstraction to him. Deep winter settled into the mountains creating a lovely and remote barrier of solitude and without his books he found himself telling stories to the other men at night, talking not only about Irish and Leavenworth but his days at Harvard with Sarah.

Irish came back at the end of the month with a thick beard saying he’d detoured through El Paso to talk to his friend Ramirez but there was still no news about a gambler named Strayhorn crossing into Mexico. Irish said he’d made several payments among low-level government officials for information but any further inquiries might arouse suspicion. As usual his supply of cash seemed limitless though there was only so much that money could do for them. Intelligence gathering was difficult because the old networks were virtually nonexistent now and the men he’d rode with all dead. Sometimes Irish would name them and they all had names like Jimmy the Kid Santiago, Bear Blood Ulmer, Diamond Desmond Cotton, Virgil Stokes who they’d all called Deadeye, all perished. They had died in fires and floods, had been shot by lawmen or jealous women or other outlaws or been hung or kicked by horses or drunk themselves to death. Melancholy preyed on Irish now that his daughter was gone again and Tom found himself fretting after his friend who sometimes had to drink himself to sleep at night if he slept at all. Irish said it would be better in the spring when they could ride together back to the cliff dwellings and look down into Mexico. In his heart Tom knew that the old outlaw would have been much happier living with his daughter in Isla Altamura and had come back to the ranch only because he’d pledged to help Tom find Strayhorn. But Tom knew Irish well enough now not to mention it or attempt to release Irish from his oath.

One afternoon in February Irish fell into a deep funk and began ordering truly exorbitant amounts of foie gras, caviar, truffles, champagne and oysters from his suppliers in New York as if testing the very limits of what was available to him here in what was quite literally the middle of nowhere. As the crates of food began arriving, word reached a nearby town of whole fleets of refrigerated trucks ferrying supplies to the Horse Heaven Ranch. One of the drivers found himself being bribed by a little man in a bow tie and when the truck pulled up the ranch house it was Dietz who climbed out the back. He walked up to the ranch house and knocked on the door. When no one answered Dietz walked around the back where Irish was watching two ranch hands breaking a stubborn roan mare in the corral. Irish saw him and shouted for him to bring the supplies inside. Through the kitchen window Tom glanced up from the pork loin on his cutting board and saw the short deliveryman reaching behind him for the shotgun he had strapped to his right leg. He shouted at Irish through the glass but the corral was too far off and by the time he got the window open Dietz was walking toward Irish with the shotgun raised, gesturing Irish away from the corral. Irish raised his hands with a smile as if welcoming the man in from a long journey. Dietz did not lower the shotgun or shift his eyes from Irish’s but only kept walking steadily toward him. The sun glinting down from directly overhead shone a bright spot on the little man’s bald spot as bright as a bullet. On the other side of the fence the mare threw one of the cowboys into the air the man landed with a grunt and Irish’s hand vanished into his barn jacket. It was still inside the jacket when Dietz fired both barrels into Irish from ten feet away blasting him backward into the boards of the corral. Tom came out of the ranch house with a shout of rage and disbelief. In a flash Dietz whirled and trained the shotgun on him, pumping another shell into the barrel and cocking back the hammer as he watched Tom come down off the porch toward him.

“I’m not coming with you,” Tom said. “I guess you better shoot me too.”

“Go on, get out of here. I’ll give you a half-day head start. It’s more than you deserve but that’s how she wanted it.”

“Who?”

Dietz started to answer and the words vanished as a single gunshot tore his head apart, spinning him around and pitching him on his back in the dirt. Sprawled behind him with his nickel-plated pistol clenched in both hands Irish was now smiling broadly through a puff of smoke. “For a second there I thought I was in trouble but I feel much better now.” Grasping the corral he attempted to haul himself upright then stumbled and fell over again. The ranch hands helped Tom carry Irish into the kitchen where they lay him on the table, cut off his clothes and cleaned his wounds. When Irish saw how much food and alcohol he’d ordered in the depths of his depression he began to laugh at himself and his own folly. In the end we always provide our own best entertainment though the degree of perspective required to truly enjoy it is often unfortunate. Irish asked for mescal then changed his mind and wanted red wine and a rare steak. Tom disinfected the scalpel and tweezers and got to work picking the buckshot from Irish’s wounds. At first it looked like most of the shot had missed Irish’s vital organs because he wasn’t coughing up blood and his breathing sounded normal. As the day wore on Irish grew solemn and advised Tom to pack whatever things he needed and leave quickly because other bounty hunters would be here soon and none would have Dietz’s hubris to come alone. At dusk he grew very grim. He’d developed a mild fever and asked for a razor so that he could shave his face before he died. “Nobody is going to photograph me looking like a goat’s ass.” After he shaved Tom sat up with him through the night while Irish talked about his daughter. “She truly liked you and she does not like many men. I certainly saw to that. What kind of father was I to treat my whores better than my own blood?” He posed the question without emotion as if offering a philosophical riddle. When morning came Irish rose to his feet and trotted out to watch the sun come up over the mountains, laughing at the cowboys who stared at him in amazement. “I cannot tell you how many times I have been shot and lived to see the dawn, my friends, I have pissed off many an undertaker in my day.” By afternoon he was laughing with the vaqueros, offering bets on how he would outlive all of them though afterward Tom heard him in his room retching violently. He went away for a while and appeared again at dinner, pale with yellow eyes but grinning hugely as he polished off a bottle of tequila and devoured another enormous steak. The meat was almost completely raw and Irish mopped up the blood with a fresh biscuit as if he were giving himself a transfusion through food. Underneath his chair Tom could see where Irish’s own blood had collected, staining the floorboards. When the plates were cleared Irish asked one of the vaqueros to bring down the fiddle from over the fireplace and he tucked it under his chin, playing a wild careening reel while stomping his foot and laughing. Just after dark he stepped outside and walked among his horses, naming each of them from as far back as he could remember. He died at seven o’clock that evening as the last of the light was seeping away from the mountains. Tom brought the body of his friend down into the cliff dwellings to the place that Irish had taken him that afternoon months before, the place had said he could smell the wind coming up from Mexico. He dug a grave by the glow of a lantern and piled rocks over it to keep the coyotes from digging up his corpse but when it came time to speak he found himself without words. “John Irish saved my life,” was the best he could do before turning to go back to the ranch. In the morning he packed his clothes and rode west with the dawn.

Last Train Out - Chapter Five

This is the fifth chapter of LAST TRAIN OUT, the novella I'm serializing here over the week. It is a work of fiction but inspired by the true story of Frank Grigware, who escaped Leavenworth Prison, at the beginning of the 20th century.

Chapter Five

They rode southwest through the heart of the storm and abandoned the train an hour before dawn at a broken-down bridge outside Garnett. The old bridge had been washed out in the flood of the previous spring and proprietorship of the creek returned to beavers, geese and muskrat that had been its original tenants. In the trees along the bank a woman simply known as Libby was waiting for them with horses. Still dressed in his King Lear costume, Irish swept her up into his arms with a laugh and addressed her high formal Spanish saying, “My beloved, from now on I shall only call you by your full name, Liberty.” The woman gave a dubious chuckle that made the skin around her gray eyes crinkle beautifully. She gave Irish a kiss as Tom had rarely seen any woman kiss a man, open-mouthed with hungry tongue, as if he were a meal she had been waiting a long time to eat. Tom wondered at the age difference between them, thirty years at least. The woman he thought looked no older than Sarah.

They rode in silence behind Libby through the leaning pines and across the stream several times to throw off their scent for the hounds that would inevitably come. The water in the creek was fast and cold enough that Tom sucked in his breath sharply each time they crossed through it, dizzy with freedom and the clarity of mind it brought. At Irish’s request Libby had brought them a bottle of whiskey to celebrate but Tom declined the bottle because in his current state the whiskey would be wasted on him. Looking down in the first light of morning he could see small trout hovering in the shallow spots. He felt like he could eat an entire steer and sleep a week or eat nothing and not sleep at all. A red-tailed hawk soared overhead in search of breakfast, probably not the same one that he’d spotted the day that he’d entered Leavenworth though hawks may live a long time. Raising his head he inhaled of the wind and the rain-scrubbed plains, the rich smell of Kansas soil that promised so much to those willing to pour their lifeblood into it. For the first time in his adult life he wasn’t thinking in words nor particularly thinking at all and it was wonderful.

They reached the whorehouse six miles west, where Libby apparently worked and news of their escape had already arrived, thrilling the girls who worked there. The house itself was a spacious two-story ranch house with chickens out in front and many rooms including a hidden space above the attic where Irish had taken refuge many times before when things were bad. There was a piano in the foyer that the girls took turns playing, sending cascades of poorly tuned tinkling throughout the house. Tom and Irish bathed and changed into dry clothes and catching sight of each other naked on opposite ends of the room broke out laughing with the realization that they had done it.

“We can sleep here,” Irish said, growing serious. He was boiling a fresh kettle of water over the hearth and dropped three silver instruments into it, surgeon’s blades of varying sizes that lay at the bottom of the kettle and reminded Tom of the trout he’d seen before. On a shelf above the fireplace he saw a small shaving mirror no bigger than a cigarette case. “There is something you must do first. Do you know what that is?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want me to do it or do you wish to do it yourself.”

“I’ll do it.”

Irish nodded. “If you wish to have a drink or a woman now is the time. My guess is you won’t want much of either afterward, only to rest through the pain which will be bad.” He grinned and ran his fingers over his own cheeks in illustration. “How do you think I got this handsome face?”

Tom declined the women and whiskey and watched his own reflection in the mirror as he lifted the disinfected scalpel to his face and made two long shallow incisions below his cheekbones on either side of his mouth, hissing through his teeth. At first it was very bad but soon the flesh only ached and went numb. He cut notches on either side of his eyes and another across his forehead, blotting the blood as it flowed over his skin and mixed with his tears. By the time he finished his hand was shaking too severely to hold the blade. Taking it from his hand Irish silently handed him a boiled cloth to soak up the blood then carefully packed and bandaged the wounds. “You are stronger than you look. I’ve never seen anyone able to do that to themselves, let alone without crying out.” Tom nodded through gritted teeth. Now the pain was very bad again and he accepted several large gulps of whiskey before lying down on the bed beneath the low ceiling. Through the floorboards he could hear the girls laughing and the piano striking a series of sour notes as if a cat were walking up and down its keys. Tom closed his eyes, his entire face seeming to throb several inches above his head. He was vaguely aware of Irish standing by the single window overlooking the chickens in the front yard.

“How do you know that woman Libby?” he asked drowsily.

There was a smile in the old man’s voice. “Her mother and I were very close. A second-generation whore may be sweeter than the first if they’ve been treated well and I’ve seen to it that Libby has been treated very well indeed.” The planks squeaked beneath Irish’s boots. “Sleep while you can. Tonight Libby will take us across the border into Oklahoma and it will be harder for us there.” Tom heard the door shut behind him but nothing else, the notes of the piano following him down like a glint of polished steel or a lantern’s pale glow into the cistern of sleep.


By dawn Warden McLaughry had dispatched a posse of fifty guards along with announcing a five-hundred-dollar reward for the capture of Tom or Irish. Within an hour dozens of shotgun-toting local farmers and their sons had unleashed dogs to beat the bushes along the westbound train tracks. While McLaughry was still speaking to reporters from the Leavenworth and Kansas City papers, Deputy Warden Lemon stood in the infirmary watching Gustav Perez join Harkness and Rears in the taciturnity of death. The only escapee who had emerged unscathed was Afraid of His Horses, who now sat in the Hole stalwartly refusing to talk to the guards. At Lemon’s insistence they bound the Indian’s wrists to the arms of a chair while Lemon himself carefully broke each of Afraid of His Horses’ fingers with a pair of pliers. When the fingers were twisted beyond repair Lemon broke Afraid of His Horse’s hands as well though Afraid of His Horses would tell them nothing about Tom and Irish or where they might have gone. He sat perfectly still and thought of the son he’d glimpsed only once, hoping now that the young man never learned the identity of his father and the shame in which he’d failed his friends. Still it did give Afraid of His Horses a moment’s respite to imagine the boy hunting with his dogs or fishing, or tasting a woman for the first time. When Lemon and the guards finally gave up and left him alone Afraid of His Horses found that even with his broken hands he could quite easily manage the sharpened spoon he’d smuggled into his boot. Holding it between the heels of his palms he drove it methodically into the hollow of his throat, where it pierced his carotid artery. His eyes fell shut and his hands gave one last quick twitch. He was building now alongside his father and his grandfather.


At dusk Irish shook him awake. “It’s time.” He waited while Tom groaned and clutched at his face and wanted to tear off the bandages to stop the pain. “You must leave them on as long as you can. You’re young and will heal quickly but if your wounds get infected you’re through.” They sat on the floor without talking, eating the warm tortillas and strips of grilled pork seasoned with garlic and peppers that Libby had brought them along with a clay pot of red wine. Tom nibbled and moved his jaw as little as possible while Irish wolfed the food and used the tortilla to mop the juices from his plate. The apparently tireless outlaw had not slept at all but spent most of the afternoon among several of his favorite whores, renewing his familiarity with the flesh. “A man who has not made love to at least five hundred women in his life has lived in vain.”

“Then I certainly have lived in vain.”

“Ah but you are still very young. I myself was a virgin until I was almost fourteen. It was my second cousin Mathilde who finally did the honors. She had great pendulous breasts and webbed feet. My other cousins used to call her Duck Girl.”

“Mine was a prostitute in Boston,” Tom said. “It cost me ten dollars and a raving case of the crabs.”

Irish nodded thoughtfully and continued to chew. “Boston is a city I have never been to though I do admire their baseball team. Do you follow sports?”

“No.” Tom was amused at how garrulous Irish turned out to be, as if he’d been stifling himself for years within Leavenworth and had a decade’s worth of banter to dispel. He finished his food, washed his plate and Irish’s and wiped them clean, then took a last swallow of whiskey before descending through the trapdoor to the second floor. Libby told them about the posse of prison guards who come here while Tom was asleep, having discovered the abandoned train at the nearby creek. Of course she’d invited them to search the house thoroughly and several of the guards, tired and discouraged from the search, had elected to stay an hour or two longer to invigorate their spirits with the girls. None of them knew that just hours after Tom and Irish left a bounty hunter named Dietz would pay one of the girls three hundred dollars for telling him that the fugitives had been here all night and were travelling south.

Looking at Tom now, the whores exclaimed over his bandaged face, mourning the loss of his good looks somewhat jealously since each assumed one of the others had been the one he’d invited upstairs. Irish laughed and told them Tom was already engaged which, while not the truth, brought a giddy rush of pleasure through Tom’s stomach and chest and sent his heart staggering. It was followed instantly by the sadness of knowing he would almost certainly never see Sarah again. Tears swelled in his eyes and for the first time he was grateful for the bandages that masked his trembling face. Perhaps sensing his grief the girls sang them a song in broken Spanish to which Irish knew all the words. Tom, struggling to speak the evocative language without letting his voice break, mouthed the lyrics agreeably. When darkness fell entirely they got into the bottom of a wagon with Libby up on the buckboard and rode out south toward Oklahoma.

There was a hotel room waiting for them in Broken Arrow but Irish thought it “smelled wrong” and coaxed Libby into taking them several miles further, across the Arkansas River where she dropped them. Day was breaking and they would need sanctuary soon. In a cold abandoned farmhouse south of Tulsa Irish kissed Libby and told her to be good, which brought another smoky laugh from her lips. She rode off, then turned at the last moment and lifted her shirt flashing her bare breasts and brown nipples for Irish who whistled in low admiration. “She wants to make sure I come back and see her again.” For Tom who had not seen a naked woman since his mid-twenties the sensation was rather like someone grabbed his soul and twisted it hard along with several yards of his intestine. His heart belonged to Sarah but it was somehow reassuring to know that the more primitive hardware was still in working order as well. Irish surprised him further by taking out a photo of a stocky, bellicose man with a thick moustache and blocky shoulders, a file photo he said he’d procured from a friend in the Pinkertons, and holding it up to the ray of dusty light that sprang through the barn door. “This is Strayhorn. Do you recognize him?”

Tom nodded, remembering the sneezing, watery-eyed detective who had conveniently lost his hat down the family well, the man who had murdered Teddy and cost him his youth and the woman he loved all over an unpaid gambling debt. He found his urge for retribution was not blistering hot but remarkably cool and remote like a stone lifted from the cellar floor, something he could hold in his hands and examine objectively. It was important because he sensed that such detachment would keep him alive out here as it had in Leavenworth. Irish told him that they would rest today and tonight find out what they could about Strayhorn. Changing the dressing on his swollen face Tom prodded at the incisions gingerly, wincing each time his fingers brushed against the lacerated tissue, some of which had already begun to scab over. Irish watched him and said with a laugh, “I hope she loves what’s on the inside because the outside is not so pretty anymore.”

“That doesn’t matter now. We’ll never see each other again.”

Irish shrugged. “A week ago we were picking grubs from our dinner and today we’re free. Why not assume that you’ll be in her arms again in a fortnight?”

“You’re a romantic.”

“No sir I am a notorious train robber. Down in Mexico I have a daughter your own age that I would like to see again before I die. But if I must die first I would like it to be in helping you avenge your brother’s murder.” Without another word Irish leaned against the wall, tipped his hat forward over his eyes and began to snore.


Later that morning Sarah stood in the train station in Kansas City waiting to go back to Chicago. She had a lecture to deliver the following day at Northwestern but had already phoned the head of the department and told him that she might have to postpone it, depending on how much longer the police questioned her about Tom’s escape. The department head, a querulous but gossipy old buzzard that had fought tooth and nail to keep the university from hiring her, tried unsuccessfully to sound disinterested in the details. But Sarah knew that by the time she returned the entire department would be buzzing. Academia needs its celebrities as much as adolescent girls do. It wasn’t an atmosphere that she liked or disliked though it did amuse her how similar her colleagues were to the outside world to which they obviously felt aloof. A plant in the wild may produce a hundred flowers while the hothouse variety manufactures one fragile blossom, neither one more exotic than the other.

In the strictest sense she did not need to work and was “provided for” (a phrase she hated) by the estate of her father, who had patented a rather ingenious type of surgical clamp fourteen years earlier while they were living in London. Now the clamp was considered standard in every operating room across America and Europe and the proceeds remained substantial, invested for her by a family friend back in New York with dividends paid quarterly. After college she’d gone to Paris and spent a year trying to smother her natural desire to dig up fossils by taking art lessons, voice lessons and failed attempts at poetry. She’d spent summers in St. Tropez and retained almost nothing from the experience except for the crackling glare of the sun on the hard hot sand and her lover, a fey cattle baron’s son from St. Louis who always cleaned his fingernails after sex. It took a moment of laughing at herself in the mirror of the Ritz before she truly could come home to who she really was and realized that Tom Ford must be part of her life. Of all the men she’d ever known he was certainly the most substantial and wore his past like layers of stains so vivid that even strangers could see where he’d come from if they looked hard enough. The more she’d known him the less hard she’d had to look until eventually all his levels had blended into one continuous and satisfying vista.

She was living back in Cambridge when news of his trial appeared in the newspapers. For that entire summer she held her breath, unable to pick up the telephone or pick up a pen to write him a letter. Only after he was convicted did Sarah realize that this was a kind of willful self-paralysis, as if remaining motionless where they’d first met would somehow dupe time and preempt his inevitable prison sentence. She would have suspended her own life indefinitely to stop time but of course time dithers forward to bury us all, saints, thieves and dinosaurs alike. Chicago proved to be as far as she could wrench herself from her East Coast memories although it brought her physically closer to the prison itself. Visiting him was a special kind of torture. The air inside was stale, breathed in and out a thousand times, and it had made Sarah feel old just standing there among the shuffling inmates. Tom’s eyes had sunk back in his skull. In their stilted moments together under the damp gray blanket of limestone it was like talking with a sick person who had nearly died and now saw daily life as transparent, watered-down yet profoundly terrifying. Not until yesterday when he’d pressed his mouth to hers in the rain with the cold grit seeping through their clothes had she felt a fiery splash of hope in her stomach and between her legs, the knowledge that something inside him had somehow survived. Walking out of Leavenworth yesterday she’d torn off the prison button that Tom had given her from her throat and flung it back at the prison that had minted it like some pitifully chunky foreign currency that bloody revolution had rendered worthless. She felt lightheaded now, her throat swollen with the beginning of a cold.

As she boarded the Chicago train a man followed her and later approached her in the dining car, introducing himself politely as Dietz. He was short with a neatly trimmed moustache and wore a bow tie with pictures of hunting dogs on it. Sarah found herself in conversation with the funny little man and he admitted that the tie was ugly but he wore it because it reminded of him of his own dogs, two English setter bitches back in Lincoln. After the intensity of the last forty-eight hours it was soothing to talk mindlessly of such pleasures and she told him fondly about the Vizslas she’d grown up with, dogs that her father had taken hunting in England and Scotland. After a glass of wine Dietz told her that he was a bounty hunter, not a Bible salesman though he had been mistaken for one in the past. With the air of one anxious about committing a faux pas he confessed that their meeting here wasn’t incidental. He had followed her from Leavenworth. Rather than being irritated Sarah decided she still liked the little man who struck her as at least marginally more intelligent than the guards and marshals that had barked questions at her back in Leavenworth, treating her as if she’d somehow masterminded the escape herself. Dietz ordered them both another glass of wine and sat back to watch the landscape roll by, clouds so low they seemed to scrape the grain silos in the distance.

“So why are you following me?”

“It strikes me that you might be our best chance of catching up with these two.”

“I already told the warden everything I know about Tom.”

“I’m sure you did,” Dietz said earnestly. “My only thought is that he might try to contact you when you get back to Chicago. If he does you ought to warn him to separate himself from Irish as soon as possible. The price on John Irish’s head is going to bring every bounty hunter out of the woodwork, myself included. The only difference is that I’m the one that’s going to nail him.”

“You think they’re still traveling together?”

“I’m sure of it. I spoke to a prostitute down in Garnett this morning who saw them together early this morning.”

“She saw them? So Tom’s all right?” Sarah didn’t bother to hide the relief in her voice. “Did she mention anything specifically about him?”

Dietz shook his head, a gesture that could have meant there was nothing more to say or he was simply choosing not the share it with her. Realizing that he was already well ahead of anyone else in pursuit of Tom and Irish, and that another opportunity like this might not come her way, Sarah offered him a deal. “What if I told you that not only will I contact you exclusively with any information I get from Tom, but I’ll pay you a monthly retainer to find him, whatever you want, as long as it takes. Money is not an object.”

Dietz wrinkled his brow. “You’re paying me to bring in your boyfriend?”

“Not bring him in, just find him and tell me where he is. Irish is the one you’re really after anyway. The price on his head along with the money that I’ll pay you should make up for whatever you lose by letting Tom escape. Just contact me before you make a move and let me know where he is.” Dietz still appeared reluctant so Sarah sealed the deal by writing him a check for two thousand dollars and sliding it across the table. “Please let me know if you need more and I’ll wire it to you wherever you are.”

Dietz put the check in his breast pocket and patted it anxiously. “I’ll do my best but understand that it might not work out that way. I’ve dealt with Irish before. He can inspire loyalty like no one I’ve ever met and if Tom gets in my way then I’ll have to bring him down too. Beyond a certain point fugitives are worth the same dead or alive.”

The warning reassured Sarah because it meant that Dietz was taking her seriously. “Just do what you can. Obviously I have no control over what you do when you find them but I know for a fact that Tom is innocent. He shouldn’t have to spend another day of his life in prison.”

“He won’t if I have to shoot him.” Dietz got off the train in St. Louis and Sarah rode on to Chicago feeling increasingly weak. She delivered her fossil lecture on schedule to an auditorium of attentive faces though she’d already caught a chill from her time in the rain and felt herself growing flushed until her bangs stuck to her forehead. In between each of the students she saw Tom gazing back at her and wondered where he was and if he was safe. That night her temperature rose to 104 and her physician insisted that she stay in bed. The phone did not ring and there were no messages. In the midnight depths of fever Sarah experienced a vision of the man she loved naked and dying in her arms while the last of his heart’s blood leaked from gunshot wounds in his chest. Her fear felt sacred because it brought her closer to him. She decided it was a kind of faith.


Strayhorn was long gone from the boarding house outside Tulsa though the matron showed Tom and Irish the room where he’d once stayed along with the columns of numbers pencilled meticulously on the walls from floor to ceiling. “Blood pressure and pulse,” Irish said. “The sorry bastard still thinks he is dying. He has no idea how right he is.” The house matron said Strayhorn hadn’t given any sign of where he was going, he’d just disappeared one day two years ago owing three months’ back rent not to mention the thousands he’d lost in poker. When she asked Tom what had happened to his face, he told her he’d been kicked by a horse up in Nebraska. They left the boarding house through the kitchen, not wanting to step out on the street if it could be avoided. Irish was unusually silent. At length he informed Tom that there were not many options for a man with that much debt because his creditors would bend heaven and earth to find him. Mexico and Canada were possibilities, the southern border being the obvious choice. They could ride down to Texas where Irish knew a shopkeeper named Ramirez that monitored much of the border traffic from his mercantile near El Paso. But Tom knew his brother’s murderer could have gone literally anywhere, vanishing into the West that was still as vast as the universe. Texas was a great distance to travel for the uncertain prospect of a rumor or perhaps even less. Irish agreed but said they could not stay here in Oklahoma. “People here have already started asking questions about your face. I know a ranch in New Mexico where we can be safe until your scars heal and by then my friend in El Paso may have something interesting to tell us.”

A week later they rode into a village called Magdalena just east of the continental divide. Beyond it and to the south lay the Gila Cliff Dwellings and the Horse Heaven Ranch where the middle-aged cowboys welcomed Irish back with tremendous pride. Without being asked Tom took on the job of cooking for the ranch, the last cook having run off two months earlier to Hollywood where he heard men were being paid a hundred dollars a month for pretending to be shot and falling off horses. Wandering through the nearby hills Tom began to pick up dried shrubs and trees and bring them back for the ovens. He quickly learned how mesquite and different types of wood smoke could bring out flavors in lamb, goat and pork and amused himself by whipping up absurdly ornate dinners with grilled meat and pungent goat cheese that the ranch hands gobbled in mass quantities. The scars on his face had puckered and healed and the men affectionately called him The Ugly Shoe. Life had slowed down considerably by the middle of summer and he spent days in the desert as Irish taught him how to shoot or ride through mountainous terrain. Throughout the ancient pueblos of the Mongolians and Mimbres tribes Irish rode not on instinct but with effortless authority and it dawned on Tom one afternoon that the old outlaw must have carried every inch of these hundreds of miles in his head. When he asked Irish about it Irish brought him to a high plain south of the cliff dwellings where they could see clear across the border into Chihuahua. “I came here every day that I spent in Leavenworth. That Deputy Warden thought that he could break me with electricity or the Hole but in my mind I sat here and smelled the wind coming up from Mexico. Once you have that they can’t steal it from you.” He told Tom about the only Apache that he’d ever seen in these parts, a very old warrior that had come down a decade earlier to the graveyard the Apaches had and stretched out to die among his ancestors. Tom thought of Lester Afraid of His Horses back at the prison and knew in his heart that one way or another Afraid of His Horses was dead.

In early August Irish became suddenly very antsy and announced out of nowhere that his daughter Juanita would be coming up from her ranch on Isla Altamura to deliver horses. He had not seen his daughter in fourteen years and ordered five dozen lobsters from Maine along with fresh artichokes, eels, clams, oysters and sausage plus multiple cases of wine and port in celebration of her arrival. For days beforehand he rode the perimeter anxiously scanning the southern horizon for any sign of her team. When she finally came onto the property eight days later Tom was in the kitchen struggling to find space for the enormous shipments of wine and European cheese that continued to arrive on a daily basis. At first he did not even notice the cloud of dust spreading up over the ranch as forty horses came thundering up over the property with Juanita and four of her hands driving them in. Looking out the kitchen window at the men and horses his first thought was that it was a posse come to drag him back and he panicked in search of a gun though he hadn’t held an actual side arm since his teenage years. As the dust settled he saw that the horses were riderless except for the white one in front that carried Irish’s daughter. All the rest were wild and the ranch hands would spend months breaking them after their thousand-mile ride north. Juanita proved to be a small and breathtakingly beautiful woman with an Aztec sense of silent self-possession that rendered even her father mute with admiration. When she smiled the white teeth leapt from her mouth and she congratulated Tom on the lobsters that he’d stuffed and baked earlier that afternoon, serving them with chilies and limes. After dinner Irish got impressively drunk and danced with his daughter on and off throughout the evening before collapsing happily on a pile of burlap sacks. Juanita danced with several of the other ranch hands all of whom remained reverently respectful of her, not out of fear of Irish so much as respect. When it was Tom’s turn he took her in his arms and felt the cramp of longing followed by the usual embarrassing physical consequences. Juanita laughed and told him that if she had a dollar for every stiff cock that had been pressed against her in the last hour she could’ve simply given her horses away. Tom’s face flamed red except for the scars that remained ivory-white. Afterward they stepped outside where the night was startlingly cool under a gibbous moon and she told him about Madrid where she’d spent the previous winter inspecting horses, describing the flood of war refugees and guns as big as trees. There seemed to be no question about Tom’s past, perhaps because she already knew who he was or simply didn’t care. Standing with the sounds of the horses shuffling and breathing not far in the distance he recited some of the love poetry that he’d memorized from the books that Sarah sent him. Juanita told him that his accent was perfect Castilian and with his current tan he could’ve passed for a businessman from Barcelona except for his eyes that she said were frecuentado, haunted. Juanita took a sip of wine so that a faint residue clung to her lips and kissed him so lightly that he wasn’t even sure he’d been kissed until it was over and his own mouth became cool from the evaporating moisture. Whoever she is I hope you see her again, she said. Back in his room Tom wrote a rambling and incoherent letter to Sarah wherein he apologized for wasting so much of the time they’d had together.

In the morning he posted the letter before he could change his mind, his hands trembling from the blinding hangover. One of the ranch hands volunteered to take it to Albuquerque so that the postmark would be untraceable to the ranch. Tom felt incapable of preparing breakfast beyond simple huevos rancheros with pico for the ranch hands that consumed it happily through hangovers of their own. As usual Irish sprung out of bed completely unhindered by the oceans of wine and mescal that he’d had the night before. If anything he seemed more jubilant than ever because Juanita had announced she would be staying at the ranch until the end of the year. “My daughter and I will have Christmas together,” he crowed with delight. “We haven’t done that since she was twelve years old.” Tom wondered yet again what marvelous reverse sun the man walked under, that he was somehow able to grow younger every day.


Sarah spent the second half of the summer out in Wyoming helping excavate the femur of a Tyrannosaur near the sulfur springs of Thermopolis. Most of the funding came from her own pocket since the University tightened its purse strings with US involvement in the war looming inevitably. Remembering how frustrated she’d been as a grad student she personally paid for three of her favorite students to join the dig. The general mood of the camp was the weightless and tireless intensity of people doing exactly what they wanted and nothing more. As always her thoughts ran toward Tom and one Friday afternoon she drove down to Casper remembering something he’d said about his father being committed to an asylum there, though the man would have to be in his eighties now if he was alive at all. He was still alive but crouched in the most filthy and squalid conditions imaginable, cramped into a tiny, unventilated utility closet not much bigger than his son’s cell at Leavenworth. The air reeked of urine and rat droppings. When Sarah demanded to speak to one of the administrators they told her that the uncle that had been paying for his care had died several years ago and the bank had foreclosed on his ranch. Whatever money remained had been pissed away by the nephews before they’d wandered completely off the map. Disgusted but not particularly surprised, Sarah signed the necessary papers and drove Norton Ford away herself, not quite sure what to do with the old man. He was surprisingly lucid and asked meekly that she drive him back to his sheep ranch for a drink of bourbon, which was obviously not an option for several reasons. While she made up her mind she took him shopping for new clothes and brought him to the dig. Norton walked up and down alongside the dinosaur femur, chatting excitedly with the grad students about how much dinosaur bones resembled the skeletons of sparrows he’d occasionally pieced together as a boy. At the supper table he described in detail the geography of central Wyoming from his own childhood including fossils and undiscovered rock formations much to the fascination of Sarah’s field team. When he spoke of his wife and sons it was with enormous nonjudgmental love although his memories seemed to trail off with the afternoons he’d taken the boys fishing. Sarah was surprised when he reached into the single suitcase he’d taken with him from the asylum and brought out a scrapbook featuring headlines of Tom’s trial and conviction and more recent clippings of his escape. Clutching the newspapers in his fists the old man began to weep silently, confused whether these events had happened or if were simply “his mind playing tricks on him,” as the guards of the institution had apparently been telling him for years.
On the following Monday she received a parcel containing the previous week’s mail from a neighbor in Chicago. Midway through the pile Tom’s handwriting jumped out at her like a mouse from a grain-sack and Sarah almost cried out at the sight of it, tearing open the letter in her tent and devouring its contents greedily. Like the letters she’d written him in prison it drifted without rhyme or reason from English to Spanish and occasionally to French as he told her that he would risk anything up to and including his freedom to see her again. He asked her to forgive him for the time they’d wasted playing games while at the same time freely conceding that such silliness wove the very fabric of youth just as middle age spun out skeins of regret. He told her that she appeared frequently in his dreams though often in the form of a bear or eagle. “It’s peculiar. In these dreams I look around me but the land has a collapsed feel as if the world has lost a full quarter of its horizon. I know when I see you again the mountains and sky will slide over to accommodate you and north will be north once again.” He apologized for writing the letter after too much wine and then added rather nebulously, “For me you are every animal and I’m the earth under your feet.” He left the letter unsigned but there was a brown drop of blood dried to the bottom of the page. The envelope had been postmarked Albuquerque. That night Sarah cabled Dietz in Nebraska and gave him the news. She was ready to drop everything and board the next train to New Mexico but forced herself to wait until Dietz cabled back with a terse, “Stay where you are.” Three days later she spoke to the bounty hunter by phone and he told her that Tom was almost certainly not in Albuquerque and Irish would never risk living in a high-profile city. Still it was a start and Dietz was acquainted with several of Irish’s old haunts in the area. He would contact her as soon as he learned anything substantial. Against her better judgment Sarah told Norton Ford about the letter and the old man gaped at her in astonishment and happiness. “My son is alive. Thank you, Jesus. It’s a miracle, you know.” Sarah, who had not darkened the door of a church since her christening, was nonetheless powerless to agree.

Last Train Out - Chapter Four

This week I'm bringing you LAST TRAIN OUT, a novella inspired by the true story of Frank Grigware's escape from Leavenworth Prison in the early 1900s. This is the fourth of seven chapters that will be serialized here through Sunday.

Chapter Four

Eight years came and went. Across the plains Tom saw his country about to enter the war in Europe. He had read they would be using some form of poison gas in the trenches, exterminating farm boys and virgins on either side like rats or gophers. Somehow the unthinkable inhumanity of such efficiency horrified him even here. Letters continued to arrive from Sarah who now taught at Northwestern in Chicago though she’d only visited him once after their initial visit where they’d sat in anguished silence. There seemed little left to say. Tom’s hair had begun to thin and his lower back had developed a permanent cramp from leaning over the band saw in the carpentry shop. The routines of the prison had become the rhythms of his life and he ate, showered and slept in absolute accordance to a system of bells. Very rarely did he think about his brother and Nora Hooper. Thus he was doubly surprised when John Irish approached him one very late summer day in 1916 and told Tom that he knew who really murdered his brother.

Let us first take a closer look at Irish who never minded the admiring gazes cast upon the cool severity of his features, the arrogant nose and cheekbones raked back like the hull of a racing yacht. The intervening years had cut even deeper furrows into his face, bunching and gathering skin around the outlaw’s glittering sun-shot eyes. In the last eight years his tan stretched deeper and spots of benign melanoma had begun to appear across his nose and forehead, love-bites from a lifelong romance with the western sun. Irish thrived on hardship of every variety, including countless self-inflicted acts of moribund stupidity mottling both youth and dotage, throwing money around, loving the wrong women or drinking too much mescal, errors of judgment that he looked back on with unremitting fondness. In fact he drank in punishment as leather absorbs the continuous rubbing of time, toughening beneath its unrelenting pressure.

Recently he had become something of a tourist attraction at Leavenworth. Since the prison’s inception local church groups had conducted tours of the yard on a regular basis, allowing women and children to stare directly at the inevitable fallout of sin. On one such tour a seventeen-year-old girl had wandered too close to a convicted rapist and murderer named Victor Weingraub and Weingraub had startled everyone by lunging for her, whipping a hand-sharpened spoon from his boot and placing it to her throat. Whether he had sex, murder or hostage-facilitated escape on his mind was never established. Irish entered Weingraub’s blind spot from behind and seized the homemade blade by its sharp edge, twisting it free, simultaneously destroying Weingraub’s left knee with a side kick. The girl fled and Irish flipped the weapon into the dirt. He shook his head at the absurdity of what he was now forced to do. Violence against women disgusted him but he was far more irritated by the cut on his gun hand, which now was now bleeding copiously, ruining an otherwise pleasant afternoon. Methodically he drove his boot heel into the cartilage of Weingraub’s throat, unable yet to decide whether or not he should kill this fool or simply cripple him for life, until two of the guards dragged him off. The scene in Warden McLaughry’s office was not a pleasant one. As two legends on either side of the law the warden and Irish had developed an unspoken understanding, the warden acutely aware that Irish could’ve used his influence on the other inmates to make McLaughry’s job much more difficult, and that he had not done so. But the warden told Irish that if there were anymore bloodshed in public he would not be able to restrain Deputy Warden Frank Lemon, who had been looking for an excuse to demolish Irish since his arrival. To this Irish shrugged with the nonplused air of one insulted by his host. “Why if you’re not happy to have me as a guest here, warden, then I can certainly take my leave at any time.”

“Let’s not be melodramatic. I’m sure it won’t come to that. We would shoot you like a dog, of course, and a man of your stature deserves better than a cheap pine box in an unmarked grave.”

Irish flushed but his voice did not change. “Why don’t you let me worry about the arrangements.”

“Don’t be a fool.” McLaughry felt his own voice tightening around his pulse now that he saw he was going to have to break the alliance that had served him well for almost a decade. “If Weingraub or any of the other inmates are a problem for you we have ways of taking care of them ourselves.”

“This isn’t about some penny-ante convict, it’s about this whole horse shit system of yours. In fact I’m half tempted to put you on the front page by walking out of here and exposing you for the prancing fairy that you are.”

Too late McLaughry realized that Irish’s monstrous pride had sustained a mortal wound and demanded satisfaction. Short of apologizing the warden had no other choice but to throw Irish into solitary confinement for two weeks, a poor political move. McLaughry knew it would immediately weaken his standing among the inmates as well as making him look ineffectual and ham-fisted when word reached his keepers in Washington DC. With real regret he let Frank Lemon take Irish to solitary, knowing that once Lemon got Irish in the Hole he would be helpless to the whims of Lemon’s hypertrophied sadism. The deputy warden was a wizard at creating new offenses for which more imaginative punishments would be required. Throughout the first week Lemon cut off Irish’s heat and reduced his diet to stale rolls and a single cup of rusty water. When that failed to produce satisfactory results he dragged Irish into the light and hooked electrodes to his chest, pouring water on the man’s skin to increase the charge until the body hair was burned away in patches. Throughout it all Irish did not scream or lose consciousness though at one point in the electrocution he did suffer a seizure so violent that he bit off the tip of his tongue and sent blood spurting from his mouth. One of the guards ran back to inform McLaughry, who with great relief seized on the excuse to get Irish released to the infirmary.

Tom Ford heard all this through the grapevine and so was shocked when the old man approached him spryly in the yard. There were no signs of torture that he could see. If anything Irish looked younger with a veneer of confidence, exactly the sort of outlaw verve for which Irish was justifiably famous. When he told Tom that he knew who’d killed Teddy, Tom sensed the sun freezing in the sky complete with a single buzzard dangling motionless in front of it. For a moment there was no sound at all as if the entire continent had fallen crushingly still. Irish then spoke the name of the man, Homer Strayhorn, a Pinkerton detective. Tom remembered the fellow who had lost his hat down the well back at the family house in Casper. “You knew Strayhorn?”

“The man is afflicted with the sickness of thinking that he is very sick,” Irish said, the formality of his voice reflecting a sort of Mexican gentility associated with eulogies. “No matter what his health he always assumes he is on death’s door. The Pinkertons fired him for gambling not long after you were convicted and he drifted down to Oklahoma to try to collect the bounty on my head. We ended up getting drunk together on mescal and he told me the whole story in a single night. A foolish boy from Wyoming named Teddy Ford owed him money and never paying and eventually Strayhorn grew weary of being laughed at and killed him. He murdered that little girl just because she saw him do it, then threw both their bodies in your well. The investigation was just a frame-up. You may choose to believe none of this but I promise you every word is the truth.”

Tom felt his legs loosen underneath him and sat down hard on the ground. The shock left him feeling hollow and faint, worse than when he’d first come through these gates. Irish gazed back with enormous sympathy. Telling a man the name of his brother’s killer was not a business to be taken lightly and Irish had resisted sharing this intelligence with Tom because it would be torment to rot in prison while the murderer rode free. But now he needed Tom for the plan that had begun to take shape in his mind during the last two weeks. “You and I are going to walk out of this stinking pit so that you can find this man Strayhorn and I might live out the remainder of my years in freedom.” When Tom told him that no one had successfully escaped Leavenworth and dozens had died trying, Irish shook his head. “We both know there are many worse things than dying. If you help me escape than I will help you find Strayhorn and take your revenge, if that is your wish.” Tom felt a thrill passing through him and knew that he was already an accomplice. He asked Irish what he could do to help them to which the old man replied you are going to put on another play. Tom said they’ll never allow me to do that again but Irish nodded and said, I think you are wrong, my friend.


In a boarding house in the Texas panhandle, Strayhorn stares miserably at the cracks in the ceiling. A mosquito lands on his left thigh and begins to drink sluggishly of his blood. Sitting up to swat it he erupts in a paroxysm of coughs. Every known thing on earth has risen up against him right down to the invisible molecules of pollen that prick his sinuses into a state of constant irritation. Strayhorn is a hypochondriac by nature and finds himself fretting in his hypochondriac way over his blurry vision, allergies and lapsing virility. The walls of this shabby room, where he has lain for the past month hiding from his creditors are covered with numbers written in grease pencil. These are the daily records of his blood pressure, pulse, weight and respiration, each one monitored and recorded with a gambler’s attentive precision. Of late he sees these elements collapsing as a quarter horse fails not all at once but through a conspiracy of little catastrophes and each morning he awakens to a more depleted version of himself. Even outline of his sweaty body on the sheets seems too small as if he’s shrunk during the night. His reverential superstition, another trait of the habitual gambler, brings to mind the killing of the young man and the little girl in Wyoming ten years earlier as the point at which his luck curdled. He had killed three men before that but only in the line of duty. At night the humid voices of his true dead, his victims, Teddy and Nora, uttering their maledictions from under the bed, moaning through mouths stuffed with dry leaves and moss. Strayhorn curses at them, threatens them, holds them at bay by reminding them that they are the dead and he the living at least for a few months more. Yesterday he found blood in his stool and he knows this can only mean the cancer is getting worse, crawling through his system, another blessing in its way.

From the beginning Strayhorn was grievously upset by the realization that he was going to have to physically assault Teddy Ford, an insouciant youth whose company the detective had genuinely enjoyed. He certainly gave Teddy every opportunity to pay what he owed but the kid’s debt only kept increasing, the interest accumulating as Strayhorn became known as a man who did not collect his debts, a deadly reputation for a lawman. Bravado demanded that he take action. Following Teddy out of a bar in Elk River, Strayhorn shadowed him through the streets back to the schoolhouse where Teddy was no doubt trying to shake another few dollars from his older brother. Strayhorn caught him and drove his fist into Teddy’s kidneys, punching and kicking him long after Teddy stopped pleading for mercy, until Strayhorn realized that he would either have to suspend the beating or finish it completely. He picked up a brick and bashed Teddy’s skull in. When he straightened up again he saw the girl sitting on a tree branch gaping down at him. Strayhorn can’t remember whether she said something or if he just thought she did. What he does remember is how he grabbed her ankle through the white sock with flowers embroidered on it and yanked her from the tree, wrapping his hands around her throat until his fingertips met on the other side. Her textbooks landed in the dirt. It was four in the afternoon but he felt sure that no one had seen him. That was where the idea had come from for dragging both bodies in a barn until nightfall and then carrying them to Tom Ford’s well. Strayhorn did not relish the idea of sending the schoolteacher to prison but self-preservation overruled it and within a fortnight an innocent man stood charged with his own crime. The hideous nightmares that came soon afterward left Strayhorn drinking too much, gambling stupidly and taking heavy losses until he’d eventually lost his job with the Pinkertons and left the region in disgrace, heading south into Oklahoma. Between the telegraph poles flashing outside the train windows he saw the little girl’s face. Before he’d thrown her in the well he’d pressed his lips compulsively against her cheek, now as cold as a lemon and whispered he was sorry though of course his sentiment meant no more to her than the maudlin tears that ran down his face.

And so he’d traveled south picking up poker games along the way. In Tulsa he thought his luck had started to improve but he only won enough to keep playing, falling further behind, his losses mounting as if he’d somehow inherited Teddy’s losing streak. Finally he found himself in that vast cathedral of debt so far beyond the scope of repayment that he can never emerge from it. It was a great relief to know that he could lose no more since only a lunatic would loan him money. There was no charge for the room and twice a week a girl from town, a missionary’s daughter, brings him groceries, apples and coffee, packages of sweet hot sausage and cheese wrapped in butcher’s paper. Strayhorn knows these acts of kindness are because he looks twenty years older than his actual age of fifty-seven and word is out that he is dying. Still every night he thinks of his creditors coming for him for the same reason that he himself came for Teddy, not out of anger but because one way or another every debt must be paid. There is a scratching at his door but it is only his landlady’s dog, a yellow mongrel with fetid breath, coming in from the hot sun to lick the salt from his palms. Sometimes the dog will stay for an hour or two and Strayhorn will confess his crimes as the dog lounges bored and sleepy at the foot of the bed, occasionally yawning or passing audible gas. Eventually the dog leaves and he is alone. Night falls despite his wishes.

One morning in late March the guards brought John Irish from his cell into Warden McLaughry’s office where McLaughry was waiting with Deputy Warden Frank Lemon at the ready. Between them stood Tom Ford looking appropriately sheepish. When Irish entered the room he took one look at Tom and shook his he