Writing Free

Jolene thought of Roy’s oft-repeated mantra: I’ll come to the end of the road one of these days, and I won’t be where I was going when I started out. Now, it seemed, his self-prophesy had fulfilled itself.

They’d started school together in the square stucco building just across the railroad tracks from the town center. Why anyone would build a school on a barren tract of land like that, Jolene never knew. Most of the children had to cross the tracks, but she and Roy didn’t. They trudged up from the desolate street of thrown-together shanties which the city fathers threatened regularly to burn but never did.

Maybe they should have destroyed them. It was a poor excuse for a place to live. Most people didn’t live but rather existed. Day to day and hand to mouth, somehow they survived and eventually drifted away.

Jolene was luckier than most. She had two parents who literally gave her the clothes off their backs and food out of their mouths. “Learn everything you can, Josie,” her father always said. “Don’t end up like your ma and me.”

Roy, on the other hand, lived with his mother and whatever man she took in for what he could give her. Some of them ignored Roy; some of them knocked him around; some of them didn’t even know he existed because, after a while he started staying away from the house. He never said where he slept or what he ate, and Jolene never asked.

Maybe she should have. But, she reasoned, he wouldn’t have told her anyway. The one thing she knew was he came to school every morning. Some of the teachers looked beyond his unwashed body in ragged overalls, and others pretended he didn’t even occupy the last desk in the last row where he always ended up because his last name was Yancy.

Jolene, being an A for Akers sat in the second desk of the first row. The other girls didn’t speak to her, but she didn’t mind—much. She and Roy got along all right.

By the time they got to high school—which was on the right side of the tracks—they were considered pariahs. Jolene wanted to quit, but her parents said no. “Get that diploma, Jolene, and get out of here,” her mother said. “You know that’s what you got to do.”

Roy began to miss school more often. Jolene knew he was working so he could eat. The teachers didn’t seem to care if he showed up or not. At night he came by her place so he could catch up on what he’d missed. Somehow, he graduated with the class. The next day, he disappeared.

Jolene used her high school commercial course to get a job at the utility company, typing invoices, stuffing envelopes, and anything else the supervisor found for her to do. She gave her parents most of her salary, keeping out only enough to buy the kind of clothes she needed to work in the office.

When her father died two years later, and her mother a year after that, Jolene gave away or burned most of the stuff in the shanty and took a room with Mrs. Echols on Second Street right off the square. By the time she was twenty-five, she’d worked her way up to office supervisor in the water department.

Sometimes she thought about Roy, but not for long. With decent clothes and enough to eat, she blossomed into an attractive woman. Eventually she married Leon Morley, one of the linemen. They had two children, Eva Mae and Roy Lee, who went to the new school on the right side of the tracks and made plenty of friends.

Eva Mae was thirteen and Roy Lee eleven when Leon fell on a live power line and died instantly. His life insurance with the utility company finished paying for the house. Jolene went back to work, this time as a secretary in the district attorney’s office. That’s how she heard about Roy again after so many years.

~~~~~

“I read about how they extradited him from New Orleans,” Tilford Pollard said to the visitor in the outer office where Jolene worked. “He’d made a pile of money, hadn’t he?”

The other man nodded. “Unfortunately, he made it running guns and drugs.”

“Too bad,” the D.A. said. “He looked like a legit businessman until his wife went to the Feds.”

“Nah, wasn’t his wife, just his mistress. One of many. That’s what the problem was.”

“Oh, well, it happens. I went to school with a Roy Yancy. Don’t know why I remember the name. He wasn’t anything, just one of those shanty-town kids. Skinny. Dirty. Wonder whatever happened to him?”

How Jolene knew the extradited Roy Yancy was the same Roy she’d walked to school with and studied with for twelve years, she couldn’t say. But she knew. She was sure. And she followed every bit of news about the trial which dragged on for almost a year, because Roy Yancy could pay smart lawyers to keep him out of prison.

Unfortunately, they didn’t. When he was sentenced to life—mainly because he was behind some hits on his rivals—she wept. He’d gone so far—no matter how he got there—and now he’d lost it all.

It took some doing, but she found out where he’d been sent and wrote him a letter, mailing it from the next town over where she rented a post office box. He wrote back immediately.

“I never forgot you. You were a good kid. I was a good kid once, too. I never stole so much as a loaf of bread in those days, even when I thought I was going to starve. But you get tired of living with nothing. I won’t go into everything that got me here. Sure, there are things I regret, but it’s done now, and I can’t go back.”

When she wrote again, she asked if she could visit him. “I don’t know why you’d want to do that. You said you had a good job with the DA’s office and two kids to support. You don’t want to mess that up. By the way, I’m sorry about your husband. I don’t recognize the name. Guess he wasn’t from around there.”

But Jolene persisted, and finally Roy said she could come. She sent Eva Mae and Roy Lee to their grandmother’s house for the weekend and drove all night to get to the federal prison in time for visiting hours.

“Why did you come?” Roy asked as soon as she’d picked up the earphones.

“I wanted to. You look better than the last time I saw you.”

He laughed. “Yeah, I guess I do at that.”

“Did you really do everything they said?”

He nodded. “Everything. Maybe a little more.”

“Why?”

“I told you—I got tired of living with nothing.”

“I guess I can’t blame you, but I wish you’d come up with a better way to get what you wanted.”

“I didn’t.”

They talked about old times, not that those times were good to remember, but because they were a connection. When Jolene asked if she could come again, Roy said she could.

She couldn’t go that often, but they wrote letters. She found out what she was allowed to send and made up regular packages for him.

Her secret life, as she thought of it, went on for seven years. By then, Eva Mae and Roy Lee were in college, and she could visit Roy more often. “No easy way to tell you this,” he said on one of her visits. “I have cancer. I opted out of any treatment, so the doc says six months.”

She didn’t cry until she got home, and then she lay in the middle of the living room floor and pounded the carpet with her fists and wailed.

On her next visit, he told her he wanted to come back home to be buried. “Not next to my mamma in a pauper’s grave. I want something that lets the town know Roy Yancy was there. But I don’t want you involved. You might lose your job. The DA’s secretary can’t be consorting with a lifer.”

She went back once more. This time he was in the prison hospital, but he got her in by saying she was his sister and only remaining family member. She thought the prison officials knew better, but they let her in anyway.

“Remember when I said I’d come to the end of the road and wouldn’t be where I was going when I started out?” he asked in a voice so weak she had to bend down to hear him.

“I remember.”

“I was right.”

“I guess you were.”

“Don’t you be putting flowers on my grave,” he whispered.

She stroked his hand in silence.

~~~~~

He’d paid the local mortuary for everything. The newspapers got hold of the story and ran the headline

GANGSTER COMES HOME FOR BURIAL.

Tilford Pollard showed her the paper when he came to work that morning. “I never dreamed this guy was that scroungy kid we went to school with.”

Jolene shrugged because she couldn’t speak.

“Some story, huh?”

She shrugged again.

~~~~~

The marble monument topped with a little boy crouched at the feet of an angel and sheltered under its wings was the talk of the town. Jolene wondered where he’d stashed the money to pay for it, but she wasn’t surprised he’d managed to do it. Roy had always been resourceful.