I have something to live for, he told himself. How many men in here can say that, especially once their thighs go flabby and their cocks only stand up when they need to pee?
Morris wrote several times to Andy Halliday, who now did have his own shop – Morris knew that from American Bibliographer’s Newsletter. He also knew that his old pal had gotten into trouble at least once, for trying to sell a stolen copy of James Agee’s most famous book, but had skated. Too bad. Morris would have dearly loved to welcome that cologne-wearing homo to Waynesville. There were plenty of bad boys here who would have been all too willing to put a hurt on him for Morrie Bellamy. Just a daydream, though. Even if Andy had been convicted, it probably would have been just a fine. At worst, he would have gotten sent to the country club at the west end of the state, where the white-collar thieves went.
None of Morris’s letters to Andy were answered.
In 2010, his personal swallow once more returned to Capistrano, wearing a black suit again, as if dressed for her own funeral. Which will be soon if she doesn’t lose some weight, Morris thought nastily. Cora Ann Hooper’s jowls now hung down at the sides of her neck in fleshy flapjacks, her eyes were all but buried in pouches of fat, her skin was sallow. She had replaced the black purse with a blue one, but everything else was the same. Bad dreams! Endless therapy! Life ruined thanks to the horrible beast who sprang out of the alley that night! So on and so forth, blah-blah-blah.
Aren’t you over that lousy rape yet? Morris thought. Aren’t you ever going to move on?
Morris went back to his cell thinking Shit don’t mean shit. It don’t mean fucking shit.
That was the year he turned fifty-five.
One day in March of 2014, a turnkey came to get Morris from the library, where he was sitting behind the main desk, reading American Pastoral for the third time. (It was by far Philip Roth’s best book, in Morris’s opinion.) The turnkey told him he was wanted in Admin.
‘What for?’ Morris asked, getting up. Trips to Admin were not ordinarily good news. Usually it was cops wanting you to roll on somebody, and threatening you with all kinds of dark shit if you refused to cooperate.
‘PB hearing.’
‘No,’ Morris said. ‘It’s a mistake. The board doesn’t hear me again until next year.’
‘I only do what they tell me,’ the turnkey said. ‘If you don’t want me to give you a mark, find somebody to take the desk and get the lead out of your ass.’
The Parole Board – now three men and three women – was convened in the conference room. Philip Downs, the Board’s legal counsel, made lucky seven. He read a letter from Cora Ann Hooper. It was an amazing letter. The bitch had cancer. That was good news, but what followed was even better. She was dropping all objections to Morris Bellamy’s parole. She said she was sorry she had waited so long. Downs then read a letter from the Midwest Culture and Arts Center, locally known as the MAC. They had hired many Waynesville parolees over the years, and were willing to take Morris Bellamy on as a part-time file clerk and computer operator starting in May, should parole be granted.
‘In light of your clean record over the past thirty-five years, and in light of Ms Hooper’s letter,’ Downs said, ‘I felt that putting the subject of your parole before the Board a year early was the right thing to do. Ms Hooper informs us that she doesn’t have much time, and I’m sure she’d like to get closure on this matter.’ He turned to them. ‘How say you, ladies and gentlemen?’
Morris already knew how the ladies and gentlemen would say; otherwise he never would have been brought here. The vote was 6–0 in favor of granting him parole.
‘How do you feel about that, Morris?’ Downs asked.
Morris, ordinarily good with words, was too stunned to say anything, but he didn’t have to. He burst into tears.
Two months later, after the obligatory pre-release counseling and shortly before his job at the MAC was scheduled to begin, he walked through Gate A and back into the free world. In his pocket were his earnings from thirty-five years in the dyehouse, the furniture workshop, and the library. It amounted to twenty-seven hundred dollars and change.
The Rothstein notebooks were finally within reach.
PART 2: OLD PALS
1
Kermit William Hodges – plain old Bill, to his friends – drives along Airport Road with the windows rolled down and the radio turned up, singing along with Dylan’s ‘It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.’ He’s sixty-six, no spring chicken, but he looks pretty good for a heart attack survivor. He’s lost forty pounds since the vapor-lock, and has quit eating the junk food that was killing him a little with each mouthful.