Let Me Call You Sweetheart

21

In Trenton State Prison, Skip Reardon lay on the bunk of his cell, watching the six-thirty news. Dinnertime had come and gone with its dreary menu. As had become more and more the case, he was restless and irritable. After ten years in this place, he had managed for the most part to set himself on a middle course. In the beginning he had fluctuated between wild hope when an appeal was pending and crashing despair when it was rejected.

Now his usual state of mind was weary resignation. He knew that Geoff Dorso would never stop trying to find new grounds for an appeal, but the climate of the country was changing. On the news there were more and more reports criticizing the fact that repeated appeals from convicted criminals were tying up the courts, reports that inevitably concluded that there had to be a cutoff. If Geoff could not find grounds for an appeal, one that would actually win Skip his freedom, then that meant another twenty years in this place.

In his most despondent moments, Skip allowed himself to think back over the years before the murder, and to realize just how crazy he had been. He and Beth had practically been engaged. And then at Beth’s urging he had gone alone to a party her sister and her surgeon husband Were giving. At the last minute, Beth had come down with a bug, but she hadn’t wanted him to miss out on the fun.

Yeah, fun, Skip thought ironically, remembering that night. Suzanne and her father had been there. Even now he could not forget how she looked the first time he saw her. He knew immediately she meant trouble, but like a fool he fell for her anyway.

Impatiently, Skip got up from the bunk, switched off the television and looked at the trial transcript on the shelf over the toilet. He felt as though he could recite it by heart. That’s where it belongs, over the toilet, he thought bitterly. For all the good it’s ever going to do me, I should tear it up and flush it.

He stretched. He used to keep his body in shape through a combination of hard work on the job site and a regular gym regimen. Now he rigidly performed a series of push-ups and sit-ups every night. The small plastic mirror attached to the wall showed his red hair streaked with gray, his face, once ruddy from outdoor work, now a pasty prison pallor.

The daydream he allowed himself was that by some miracle he was free to go back to building houses. The oppressive confinement and constant noise in this place had given him visions of middle-class homes that would be sufficiently insulated to insure privacy, that would be filled with windows to let in the outdoors. He had loose-leaf books filled with designs.

Whenever Beth came to see him, something he had tried to discourage of late, he would show the latest ones to her, and they would talk about them as though he really would one day be able to go back to the job he had loved, building homes.

Only now he had to wonder, what would the world be like, and what would people be living in when he finally got out of this terrible place?