While she read an interview with one of Jon Allan Blue’s lawyers, Mark entered the break room. He sat next to her, his shoulder touching hers, his head craned to look at her phone.
“What are you reading?”
Although there was no reason not to tell him, although the letter would have made for an interesting conversation, she darkened her phone’s screen, shrugged, and said it was nothing.
She did not write back, but she did not throw Jon Allan Blue’s letter away. She took it home and kept it in a drawer in her nightstand. She read through websites about his crimes each night when she got home from work.
Some of the websites said the women Jon Allan Blue murdered resembled an old girlfriend who scorned him. People pointed to this woman as the reason he began to hate and want to hurt women. This seemed much too simplistic to Chloe. Besides, when she pictured him murdering young women, they were never brunettes like his old girlfriend. They were always blondes like Chloe.
Then, in January, Jon Allan Blue sent a second letter. It was almost identical to his first letter, asking the same question about the painting’s meaning with the same polite tone. At the end he wrote, I am sure it would be more convenient for you to answer my question through email. Unfortunately, Kentucky inmates are not allowed Internet access, so I would greatly appreciate your written response.
After work Chloe went to Eldon’s post office, a red brick building on Eldon’s main street, across from the diner and a heating-and-cooling business. She paid thirty-five dollars, not an insignificant sum on her paycheck, to rent a PO box for a year and mailed her first letter to Jon Allan Blue. She kept her response short. She told him she worked for the museum and his question was a valid one. There was no consensus about what the painting meant. All the suggestions he floated were possibilities. Wood himself, however, had always maintained it was a tribute to Iowan life. Before she closed the letter, she encouraged him to respond with other questions he might have. As she drove home, she felt the thrill of expectation, a blooming in her chest. She felt the same way when she was a little girl and stole a candy bar from a gas station — guilty yet buzzed on adrenaline and the satisfaction of doing something inadvisable.
The next day after work, she and Mark went to Eldon’s only remaining bar. The town’s population was nine hundred, but with each census it continued to dwindle. There were a lot of shuttered businesses, mobile homes with busted windows, and plastic toys left in front yards to bleach in the sun. On the sign in front of Eldon’s high school, the motto “Do No Harm” had been posted, which summed up the school’s aspirations for its students pretty well. The people who did leave for college rarely returned.
Chloe had never gone to college, never left Eldon at all. At eighteen, she hadn’t known how to afford it and wasn’t sure she was college material. She’d never performed particularly well in her classes, other than art, and was often lost in daydreams when she should have been listening to her teachers. She told herself someday, when she saved some money, maybe she’d study art. But years passed and the day never came.
The bar smelled like stale beer and cigarette smoke. Other than the Johnny Cash song playing, the only sounds were pool balls hitting one another and the occasional smoker’s cough. She and Mark ordered beers and talked about the girl who’d tried to shoplift from the museum gift store earlier that day.
“What kind of teenager tries to steal a tote bag printed with a Grant Wood painting?” Mark asked, although to Chloe the answer was obvious — a desperate one. She opened her mouth to say that, but a hand on her shoulder interrupted her.
“Your mama let you out to play?”
It was her mother’s ex-boyfriend, Frank. He flashed yellow teeth at her in a smile. He was tall and skinny, and his jeans, work boots, and the hairy backs of his hands were flecked with white paint. She had never liked him — a mean drunk who always looked at her like she was a flank steak rather than a human being. He leaned forward and slurred something else. By his inflection, she could tell it was a question. She did what she often did in such situations — appeased him and nodded and laughed, hoping she could make the interaction end, hoping his beer breath would move out of her face.
She realized she could have been agreeing and laughing about anything. He could have been asking if she were a dumb cunt, and she would have just laughed and nodded. The realization made her angry.
Frank leaned back and laughed, too. Then he continued on to the bathroom.
“Dick,” Mark said, but long after the man was out of earshot.
Jon Allan Blue responded to her letter a week later, thanking her for her response and asking what it was like to work at the museum. This started a series of short letter exchanges. They wrote about innocuous things — her job, his interest in art and Grant Wood in particular, their shared love of the Midwest landscape. Eventually, he began to write about his daily life in prison.
His cell on death row was 6 x 9 x 9.5 feet high. He woke at five A.M. to the rattle of the breakfast cart — powdered eggs and toast served on a Styrofoam tray with a plastic spork. At least once an hour a guard checked on him. Other than phone calls, legal visits, or exercise, he stayed in his cell. Death row had a particular smell — body odor and fecal matter. It was better back before 2011 when people were still allowed to smoke, he wrote. The smoke masked the stink. Although, you get used to it after a while.
He owned a 13-inch TV and said his favorite shows were American Idol and a drama about young lawyers. In another life, I would have liked to be a lawyer, he wrote.
Multiple prisoners in the wing watched Jeopardy together, each trying to yell out the right answer first. Men in the wing talked to one another, moving to the front of their cells and speaking loudly enough for their voices to echo down the hall. However, the talk was frequently the rambling of isolated, crazed men, so he put on his headphones and listened to the radio. He read a lot: news magazines and, lately, books about regionalist art and Grant Wood.
I’m not sure why American Gothic interests me so much, he wrote. I guess there’s something funny and sad and disturbing about it — all at the same time. I guess life is kind of like that, too.
One evening in March, she sat in her apartment reading his most recent letter.
She lived on the first floor of an old, creaky house sectioned off into apartments. As was often the case, she heard the girl who lived upstairs talking to her mother on the phone, telling her, yes, she was making good decisions, yes, this guy was a good guy, different from the last one.
Things are much the same here, Jon wrote in his latest letter. The appeals process drags on, but you know I doubt my attorneys’ skills and competence. It’s hard to describe how lonely this place is, especially in the evening. Your letters help make it bearable. It’s strange — I feel like I know you, yet we’ve never met. I would love to talk to you on the phone, if you’d be willing. I’m allowed limited phone privileges each week, and I can’t think of a better way to use them than hearing your voice. Please consider it. If you’re willing, let me know, and I’ll tell you how you can go about getting on my approved callers list.
As always, I wish you all the best, Chloe, and I think of you often.
She leaned her head against her futon. She’d bought it at the Salvation Army, and despite her best efforts, it still smelled of onions.