The Hotel Eden(33)
But it hasn’t deterred me. Cassie and I are meant to be together, that’s clear, regardless of the age difference. I’m going back up there in a night or two and busting her out. Football season’s over, and it’s time to be me. My heart knows what to do, and it says, Scale the wall, break her out!
MR. HOWARD LUGDRUM
SHE WAS HERE almost a year before she told me. Though I knew instantly we’d pick up where we left off, my heart steady through the years to the one woman I loved, Cassie waited to be sure it was still me, I guess, that a man with one arm could be trusted. So last week we were at tea in her room after her counseling session, and she looked at me funny and told me something amazing: I have a daughter! A daughter! Having Cassie back in my life after so long seemed almost too much for me to bear, and now … a child. Well, not a child but a young woman. And, Cassie told me, I could see her if I went by the north pine grove sometime after nine that night, Halloween. I’d see a blue-and-white Ford and my daughter would be in it! It was all I could do to get the afternoon hours out of the way; it was a waiting like no waiting I have ever known. My daughter! As it happened, I don’t know if I saw her or not, just somebody’s butt in the moonlight.
SHERIFF CURTIS MANSARACK
FALL IN GRIGGS is a good thing: the leaves change color and there’s football and the smell of the first wood fires. Halloween’s my last big chance to score a beer bust, and I almost never miss. I didn’t miss this year. Every year there’s a hook, sometimes more than one, and it takes a week or two for things to quiet down. I don’t mind the hooks; the waxed windows are worse. I’d trade the waxed windows for two more hooks. Soon it will snow and life gets real easy: there’s no cop better than old Jack Frost.
PERSON BEHIND LAST TREE IN THE TWILIGHT
AT NIGHT, AS I drift through these woods, I tap my hook from time to time against my leg and the feel of the hard iron spurs me on past fence and fern, past drooping branches and the cobbed underbrush. What I need is an older-model American car parked alone in the dark, one with a grip handle I can snare. The lift handles are no good, and everything anymore has the aerodynamic lift handles. I want a ’60 Fairlane or a ’58 Chevrolet, a car with bench seats big enough for two young people to get comfortable and tangle up their clothing and their brainwaves so that they forget the dark, the woods, the person with a hook, every Halloween, approaching through the leaves.
A NOTE ON THE TYPE
NO ALPHABET COMES along full-grown. A period of development is required for the individual letters to bloom and then another period for them to adjust to their place in the entire set, and sometimes this period can be a few weeks or it can be a lifetime. No quality font maker ever sat down and wrote out A to Z just like that. It doesn’t happen. Getting Ray Bold right required five months, these last five months, an intense creative period for me which has included my ten-week escape from the state facilities at Windchime, Nevada, and my return here one week ago. Though I have always continued sharpening my letters while incarcerated, most of the real development of Ray Bold occurred while I was on the outside, actively eluding the authorities. There’s a kind of energy in the out-of-doors, moving primarily along the sides of things, always hungry, sleeping thinly in hard places, that awakens in me the primal desire toward print.
And though Ray Bold is my best typeface and the culmination of my work in the field, I should explain it is also my last—for the reasons this note on the type will illuminate. I started this whole thing in the first place because I had been given some time at the Fort Nippers Juvenile Facility in Colorado—two months for reckless endangerment, which is what they call Grand Theft Auto when you first start in at it, and I was rooming with Little Ricky Grudnaut, who had only just commenced his life as an arsonist by burning down all four barns in the nearby town of Ulna in a single night the previous February. Juvenile facilities, as you can imagine, are prime locations for meeting famous criminals early in their careers, and Little Ricky went on, as everyone now knows, to burn down eleven Chicken Gigundo Franchise outlets before he was apprehended on fire himself in Napkin, Oklahoma, and asked to be extinguished.
But impulsive and poultry-phobic as he may have become later, Little Ricky Grudnaut gave me some valuable advice so many years ago. I’d moped around our cell for a week—it was really a kind of dorm room—staring at this and that, and he looked up from the tattoo he was etching in his forearm with an old car key. It was Satan’s head, he told me, and it was pretty red, but it only looked like some big face with real bad hair—and he said, “Look, Ray, get something to do or you’ll lose it. Make something up.” He threw me then my first instrument, a green golf pencil he’d had hidden in his shoe.