Patch waited each week for his time with Marty Tooms in a state of suspended agony, not sleeping more than an hour the night before, the questions bouncing around those hard stone walls till he caught the most pertinent and filed them away.
He grew quieter in the day, Cooper pulling him aside during his library work and asking after his mental health. In the yard he watched big men shoot hoops as he strolled the perimeter fence. The workmen in their dustbowl kicked out so much of it Patch could feel the sting in his eye. On his second lap he was joined by an old man known as Tug on account of his crimes. In 1964 he had been gambling on a St. Louis riverboat when the dealer hit such a streak that Tug lost a year’s rent money. Tug followed him up to the lido deck and tipped him over the side, claiming to the jury he just wanted to wipe the smirk off his face. Unfortunately for Tug, and the dealer, a tugboat was passing at that same moment. Six hours later they fished the man’s body from the Mississippi River.
“So you can order in books?” Tug asked.
“What do you want?” Patch said.
“Just making talk, Pirate. A man can’t inquire?” Tug’s fuse was short, like his stature, a little under five feet. Patch mostly spoke to the top of his head.
They walked another revolution. “Ursula Andress.”
“Excuse me?” Patch said.
“Honey Ryder.”
Patch sighed heavily.
“Dr. fucking No. The Bond girl. Ursula Andress. Born March nineteenth. Pisces. I’ve been in love with her since 1955. Used to picture her face when I—”
“Jesus. I can’t get movies.”
“I see the shit you’ve got in that library. Fucking books on soap production. Who the fuck wants to produce soap in a prison? You know how dangerous that shit is in the shower block? And you can’t get me nothing with my love in it?”
He ranted awhile longer, the disappointment palpable.
“I’d like to ride me one of those,” Tug said, and pointed in the direction of a tracked excavator. He wore his white hair long like the moustache that traced the downward swing of his mouth. He carried a kind of optimism Patch had not seen in men who would die in prison.
“Make you feel bigger?” Patch said.
“What the fuck does that mean, One-eye? I’d drive it at these fences and tear them down right during yard time. Watch them scramble.” His grin turned into a laugh so high and manic Patch guessed that optimism was born of the loose screws in his head.
“Only way out,” Patch said.
“Quickest way out.”
A watchtower stood a thousand yards out.
“Anyone ever make it?” Patch said.
Tug’s moustache twitched a little as they looked out toward the wilds, the land bowing to the ravine. “Not for forty years. Sonny Parker. Tunnel.”
“Pickax?”
Tug rolled his eyes. “No one tunnels out of here. You see that machine over there? It’s a pile borer. Missouri bedrock. You can’t get deep enough without mechanical intervention.”
Patch watched the steel core of the drill, wider than his shoulders at the flutes. “So how then?”
“Sonny had a crew. You don’t break out of anyplace without assistance. So his crew drilled a shallow hole and tunneled in over where the new five-wing is. Only twenty feet and they were under each fence. This hole was about ten inches round.”
Patch frowned. “Small enough for a rabbit.”
Tug grinned. “Big enough for a gun.”
“They smuggled a gun into prison?”
“Sonny used it to get himself out, Dillinger-style.”
They turned when a fight broke out. Nothing meaningful landed before Blackjack scooped up one of the men and dumped him against the fence.
“You’re not thinking of trying something, Pirate?” Tug said.
Patch saw a couple of drops of blood on the ground, soon trodden into dust. “I’ve got no place to go.”