“What?” Mainhart asked. “What did you say, chief?”
“Huh?”
“You were saying something.”
“Oh.” Reed looked at the paleness of his chief guard’s features. “Tell them... tell them that I got sick and had to go home.”
“But, sir, don’t you think with the break and all that, you better...”
Gerin Reed stood up from his desk feeling like a titan. He had always been a short man and he was still the same height, but it didn’t seem to matter anymore.
“You can take care of it, Peter. You can talk to them. Tell them that I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do about being sick.”
The puzzle in the head guard’s face tickled the warden.
“Tell me something, Peter.”
“What’s that, Warden?”
“Did you ever run down a beach as fast as you could, laughing the whole way and then, just when you’re going your fastest, want to take off and fly? But you know you can’t fly, and now running doesn’t seem to be as much fun anymore. I mean, if you can imagine flight, if you can feel it in your arms and down your spine, then... how can you go back to running?”
“I think you should see a doctor, Gerry. Maybe that dust can get in through your pores.”
“Nonsense. Nothing like that. I’m just sick, that’s all. Just sick. Just sick.”
Warden Reed walked out of his office and told his secretary that he’d need his car brought to the front of the prison. He waited patiently as the various locked doors were unlocked. He waited for the guards at the front as they searched his backseat and trunk. They were on special alert. The prison horns were sounding, announcing to the world that someone had escaped.
Warden Reed was looking at the foothills on the horizon. He imagined Winch Fargo out there running as hard as he could, wishing for flight.
His Ford’s engine sounded as good as it ever would, and the road was smooth. Every once in a while Warden Reed turned on his blinker and changed lanes for no reason. He let his mind wander as he drove a few miles above the speed limit toward his home in the Loma Linda Hills.
He thought about how when he was a boy he wished he could live in a nice house like the one he and his wife now owned. Their children had toys and comforts that he could never afford when he was a child back in Kentucky. Back then all his toys were sticks and thrown-away things that he imagined had magical powers. His red fire engine was a squared-off piece of kindling from the firewood his father cut into cords and sold. His air force was a squadron of leaves taking off every autumn for the German lines.
And when he looked off into the stars at night and asked his father if there was ever an end to all that way out there, his father would say, “I don’t have time to think about questions like that, Gerry, and neither do you. Now get to bed.”
Lying there in the bed, little Gerin thought about the stars and how they got there and where they came from.
On the day he left work early he was thinking about those stars. The sky was blue now, the stars hidden. Gerin imagined a world that was completely black, no light at all. He was looking out into the imagined blackness, and then slowly a large red rose came into being. Was it there before he saw it? Was it there in the blackness? Gerin didn’t know the answer, but he planned to go home and think about it. He knew that the answer to that question was in him. He knew that he’d been asking that question his whole life. And now, with a great sigh of relief, he could go home and sit back and think on it.
He parked the car in the street because there was another car in his driveway. He went up the concrete path through the lawn with the key out, but the door was unlocked.
He could hear them before he rounded the corner from the entranceway into the sunken living room. The young man’s sports jacket was thrown on the plastic-covered couch, and her dressing gown was on the floor. His pants were down around his ankles and he was on his knees holding one of her legs high enough to give a clear view of his large erection poised at the entrance of her gaping vagina. Karen’s butt was quivering — beautifully, Gerin thought.
“You want it?” the man on his knees asked.
“Uh-uh-uh,” Karen responded.
“No uh-uh,” the man said. “You gotta tell me if you want this.”
“Please,” Karen whispered.
“What?”
“Please put it in!”
Gerin thought of magic again when he saw his wife’s lover’s penis disappear there next to her quivering thigh. And then her loud moaning made him remember the rose coming out of nowhere.
“That’s what you been thinkin’ about, huh?” The man’s voice was huskier now. “That’s what you been wantin’?”
Karen barked out half a dozen clear “oh!”s and began to thrash around. When she reached around to caress his testicles, she saw something, a shadow maybe, and screeched as if in pain. She crawled away from her lover, leaving his full erection bobbing in the air.
“Hi, Karen,” Gerin said to his wife, and to her visitor, “hello.”
The lovers scrambled clumsily, grabbing for their clothes.
Karen donned her special nightgown, the one she took on their trip to Barbados, trying to make it look like normal clothes. She stood in front of the man — protecting him, it seemed to Gerin. Karen’s left cheek still had the rough impression of the carpet on it.
“Now don’t go crazy now, Gerry. Don’t get wild.” She was looking at his hands and belt line.
Gerin remembered that he was supposed to be angry if he found his wife of twenty years having sex with someone else. He was supposed to have a gun out. It was one of the few times he could kill in cold blood and get away with it — outside of the prison walls.
The lover was a young man, overweight. He had his pants up and his jacket on. He looked once at Gerin and then ran for the back door through the kitchen. Karen looked after him for a second and then turned back to Gerin, putting out her arms like a mother goose protecting her young.
Gerin saw all of this, but his mind was back at the prison. Back on the times when he’d be brought to the scene of a brutal beating, the corpse of a convict as its centerpiece. He listened to the lies the guards told of suicide or a fight among convicts. He knew when one of his own had murdered. The prison doctor would write up the death certificate. The county coroner would stamp it with his approval. The body was either buried or sent home following a letter from the warden himself giving condolences for the terrible mishap or self-demolition.
“Gerry, he doesn’t mean a thing to me. It just happened. I can’t deny it but... Gerry, are you listening to me?”
“Why don’t you put on something, Karrie? Call Sonia to come and sit for the kids and we can go out to dinner.”
Ray’s Lobster Grotto was painted all in red and looked out over the bay. It was an hour and a half drive from their house, but Gerin didn’t mind. He drove down toward the ocean, excited by every shift of hue caused by the setting sun. He kept moving his hands along the smooth steering wheel.
“Talk to me, Gerry,” Karen said when they came to a stop in Ray’s gravel parking lot. It was still early, so they were the only car there.
“About what, honey?”
“You know what. For God’s sake, you found me with another man on our living-room floor.”
“What’s his name?”
“Who cares what his name is?” Karen said. “What are you going to do?”
“Do,” Gerin Reed repeated.
“Talk to me, Gerry.”
“You asked me what I’m going to do, baby. What am I going to do?”