Killer Move

The warden laughs. In a way, he is sorry to see this prisoner leave. He is not the only malleable man among a population dominated by feral recidivists and borderline psychopaths, but he is intelligent and reasonable and has—most important—responded well to the program of rehabilitation that the warden has accentuated during his tenure; which is why the prisoner is sitting here now rather than being kicked unceremoniously back into the world like the rest of today’s lucky few. Hunter has expressed contrition for his crime—the murder of a twenty-eight-year-old woman—and exhibited a sustained understanding both of the conditions and circumstances that led to the event, and ways to avoid such triggers in the future. He has said he’s sorry and shown genuine awareness of what he is apologizing for. Nine years is an unusually long time to have lopped off a sentence, especially for a murder crime, and the warden feels proud on the man’s behalf.

Meanwhile, the man sits in front of him. Polite, silent, immobile as a rock.

“Anything else you want to discuss?”

“No sir. Except, well, just to say thank you.”

The warden stands, and the soon-to-be-ex–prisoner follows suit. “A pleasure. I just wish everyone in here could look forward to this kind of ending.”

“People get the endings they deserve, sir, maybe.”

The warden knows this isn’t even remotely true, but he reaches out and the two men shake. The warden’s hand is warm, a little damp. The other man’s is dry and cool.

The prisoner is escorted along a series of corridors. Some are the pathways that have circumscribed his universe for the best part of two decades, routes between mess hall and workshop and yard that echo with the shouts and cage rattling of men—thieves and killers, parole violators and pedophiles, carjackers and gangbangers anywhere from eighteen to seventy-one years in age—whose names and natures and varying degrees of moral deviance he has already started, with relief, to forget. A few call out as he passes. He ignores them. They’re ghosts, deep in the caves. They cannot hurt him now.

Subsequent corridors are foothills of the route out, the freedom side of iron gates and multiple locks. As these start to predominate, the man experiences moments in which it is difficult to maintain a flatness of emotion that has been hard-won. To walk these halls is to feel as if you are making unexpected headway in the endless maze in which you have spent a third of your life; to sense you may finally be escaping the madness that had colonized every corner of your mind—except for the tiny, central kernel in which a soul has crouched, interred in time, for a period long enough to hold four Olympic games.

In Holding & Release Hunter signs papers under the supervision of correctional officers who treat him differently now, but not so very differently. To them, as to the world outside, this period of time will never quite be over. Once a criminal, always so—especially when your crime was murder. Murder says you are not like the rest of us, or so it comforts us to pretend.

A clear plastic packet of possessions is returned to him. A watch, a wallet holding seventy dollars and change, other trinkets of a former life. He is shown to a wire cage room where he changes back into the clothes in which he entered the prison, in view of officers and the other men who are being released. He is used to his every move taking place in front of other men, but he is looking forward very much to the moment when this ceases to be so. The clothes still fit. A pair of jeans, a long-sleeved black T-shirt, and a battered denim jacket. An outfit that is effectively timeless.

An officer escorts him down a set of stairs and into an open courtyard adjacent to the yard where he has taken his four hours of outside time per week. They walk across this space to a gate. The gate is unlocked for him.

He walks through it.

The world.

A cab is waiting forty yards down the road. The other prisoners released today will be ferried away in the back of a van. This man wanted real life to start right at the gate, however. He walks straight over to the car and gets in without looking back.

“Where to?” the driver asks.

Hunter names a nearby town. He rests back in the seat and stares through the windshield as the driver starts the car and begins the journey away from this place. He appears in no hurry to converse, and neither does he turn the radio on. For both of these facts, his passenger is grateful—though he has no need to mentally rehearse what he is going to do next, or the broad strokes of how this first day is going to be spent. He has done that already, and so it’s done. Hunter knows how important it is to keep his concerns and aspirations driving forward, leaving every yesterday behind. The past is the past, and inviolable as such. The only thing it can do in the present is drag you back.