Russell was twenty minutes outside Portsmouth when he reached the village of Lucasville, a place that held nothing but miserable memories for him. He had spent five years in Lucasville after leaving Cabin Creek, working as a guard in the new maximum security prison built on a cornfield that had been owned by a local politician with connections in Columbus.
The prison was overcrowded from the beginning, and so dangerous that nearly a third of the inmates almost never left their cells, for fear of being assaulted or killed.
As he drove past the prison, Russell could make out the top of a glass-enclosed guard tower. The tower, its base obscured by the trees, seemed to float in the air, reminding Russell of a flying saucer.
It's for sure that most of those bastards belong in outer space, he thought, shuddering inwardly as he remembered what it was like being locked up with an army of killers and rapists who would as soon cut your throat as look at you.
The first couple of years were pure hell. Russell was assigned to the most violent cellblock, the “Kingdom of the Wild.” It was a place where an inmate might beat a man to death for a candy bar, or which TV channel they were going to watch. He had seen it happen.
It was the jack-off artists that bothered him most, however. Whenever a female guard was assigned to the monitor booth, the artists would whip out their tools and go to work, sitting directly in front of the monitor's window, where the guard had a clear view and vice versa. Russell couldn't believe his eyes the first time he saw it, but the other guard, a woman with two kids, didn't pay any attention. “I've seen a lot worse, and you will, too, if you stay here long enough,” she'd said.
Some of the female guards reportedly got off on it, at least that's what the hand-jobbers said. Russell had never gotten used to it, though. He was on the verge of quitting early in his second year, when he hooked up with Sinclair Smith, a black inmate with Columbus drug connections. Like Russell, Sinclair hailed from West Virginia. He was from Montgomery, just a few miles from Cabin Creek, and had hit the road when he was 15, after cutting a teacher who caught him selling shots of booze in the bathroom at Montgomery High School. He wound up in Columbus and became a small-time drug dealer.
But Sinclair was no longer small potatoes. In Lucasville he was known as the “speed king,” a man who could always be relied on to come up with bennies if you had cash or something else that interested him.
Sinclair and a few friends controlled the prison’s black drug scene. Their connection to the outside had broken down and Sinclair was looking for a new one when he found Russell. Within three years Russell had saved nearly $30,000. He used the money to open a small bar in Columbus, where he had made his own connections during his trips for the Sinclair Syndicate, as Sinclair liked to call his prison operation.
Wonder what ol' Sinclair’s doing this afternoon? Russell thought as he hit the gas pedal. Glancing over to his right, he saw the flying saucer dip slowly behind the trees.
SEVEN
Benny tensed slightly at his dad's mention of Alice Miller. He shrugged and leaned back in the rocker, gazing up at the porch ceiling, where the mud daubers were constructing a row of dried-earth igloos that looked like little Quonset huts. He tilted the chair back for a better look, thinking that the insects’ creations looked a lot like the pictures of the structures left behind by the ancient cliff dwellers.
Maybe that’s what happened to them, he thought. They’re mud daubers now.
“Well?” his father said.
“Well, what?”
“Benny, you know damned good and well what I'm talking about.”
“Look, dad, it's none of your business.” He got up, brushed some of the dust from his pants and turned to go inside.
Marvin grabbed his arm. “Sit down, Benny. I want to talk to you.” He took another long pull on the oxygen tank, coughed up some dark stuff and sent it sailing over the porch railing. “OK, maybe it ain't none of my business, but you know it's not right to be foolin' around with married women. After all, Alice Miller is married to a friend of yours.”
“Dad, Alice and Bobby are separated. And you know as well as I do that I haven't seen Ruth in more than six months. I can't help who calls me, can I?”
“No, but you can do something about Ruth and Billy. You can get your ass up to Columbus. You can get yourself a job and take care of your family. It ain't right; you down here, cuttin' up that mine while your wife and little boy are up there all alone.”
Benny shrugged and slapped at a fly on his boot.
“Besides, you're liable to get arrested for trespassing, or arrested for stealing, if you don't quit going up there to the mine.”
Benny yawned. “Flies seem to be getting worse, don't they?”
Marvin scowled. “Don't change the goddamned subject. I'm not talking about flies here.”
“Dad, I've told you before that the company doesn't care about that mine anymore. If they did they wouldn't have just walked off and left it. You oughta see the bathhouse. Two years ago, more than 300 men were in there after every shift. Now, it's a stinking shit hole, all busted up and full of rats. Looks like a place you'd see in New York City. It's unbelievable. Looks like that movie about the Bronx.”
“You could get a job...”
“Hell, I'd love to get a job. You tell me, where’s a mine electrician gonna get a job around here? What are there, 30 miners working on Cabin Creek these days? I can remember when there were 3,000. You tell...”
“Tell you, hell!” Marvin shouted, red-faced. “I don't have any goddamned answers. All I know is you can't stay around here, junking and drinking from morning to night. You're wasting your life, can't you see that?”
Grandma Early appeared at the screen door. “What's all the fussin’ about?”
“Oh, Dad's after me to go to Columbus.”
Marvin struggled out of his chair. “Damn it, Benny, listen to me. You can always come back when the mine reopens. I've seen these shutdowns before, lots of times. That mine will be runnin' full blast again, you wait and see. Just wait 'til those Arabs and Jews blow up the Middle East and the oil's all burned up, then you'll see.”
Benny shut his eyes, trying to make Marvin's voice go away. When he reopened them, the fly was back on his boot.
“Well, you're just plain wrong this time,” Benny said, waggling his foot. “Things will never be like they were around here; now they can get cheap coal from South Africa and Brazil, places where the miners are lucky if they make ten bucks a day. There’s no way we can compete.”
“You're forgettin' something, Mister. You're forgetting that this is the best steel-makin' coal in the world. They still need it for that, don't they?”
“Yep, at least they would, if we still made steel in this country. Besides, they build cars out of plastic these days. Did you know that?”
“Well, then, if...” Marvin's voice broke off in a fit of coughing that bent him double. When he finally got his breath back, he said, “If that's the case, and the mine ain't ever gonna reopen, then why ain't you in Columbus? Tell me that.”
Benny laughed. “Dad, you should have been a lawyer,” he said, getting up and going inside.
His grandmother was sitting at the kitchen table, stringing beans and listening to a teary fat woman on TV. The woman had on so much makeup she appeared to be wearing a mask. She was crying, and begging for money, saying her husband wanted to build a Christian retreat somewhere down in South Carolina.
“Seems like all the women on TV are crying today,” Benny said, grabbing a handful of beans.
“Don't be disrespectful,