Milo places the empty bucket back in its little wooden slot at the foot of the well and they proceed on their way. They take the slightly curving path he named Lope. He named all the paths. Chicago, New York, Bright Leaf Trail, Dixie Highway, Salvation; he keeps the names to himself. Shielding his eyes, he looks at the nearest tin-sheathed tower. One of the guards, Hammersmith, idly watches him. He is the one brought his last letter, one of the four he has received in the last six years (since he left from Uniball), from his old train riding friend Frank. The letter was stamped Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Patches, long rectangular strips, were cut out of the pages. The religious fervor of our time is, then blank, a hole letting the air in. Must have been some fiery words. Then the sentence: Apples are America’s most loved fruit, then more air. Then: but what can we know of another’s anguish? then air, then the words: anyone whose suffering is one grain worse than our own is one we can’t, then more air. The words the heat of them, and then Frank’s fervor and cool distancing sliced away. Five other pages were similarly rejigged. The pages looked like paper cutouts. Here and there a partial sentence (in our own selves we have to find. .; confused and broke we embrace. .; cancer for. .; a tenderness most. .)scraps of words, a litter really, somebody’s fresh trash. He had memorized every bit, even the odd words (reddish, conservationist, river’s, unoffered) they were like gates, buckles, fasteners, letting life in, or out; there were dozens of them. He dug a hole in the clay under his bunk and hid the letter there, wrapped in a scrap of oilcloth. It would be all right if it wasn’t there the next time he looked. Frank was trying to tell him something important; the guards saw that. There was no return address: that too was turned into an air hole, escape vent.
He leans heavily on Milo’s thin strong arm. They roll as they walk, pals airing it out. Milo chatters about breakouts, about the new man, a gingercake named Arthur Fowler who, so Milo says, has tattooed a portrait of his superior court judge on his chest in an attempt to get a mistrial.
“I love the way courtrooms smell,” Milo says.
Two years ago Milo was thrown by a guard into a pyracantha bush and one of the thorns pierced his left eyeball. He can see light and shadow with that eye — enough in this world, he says, to tell what’s what. An escape attempt carried him to the bush. “Got to get me some wings,” he says now when asked about it.
