Help I Am Being Held Prisoner

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Help I Am Being Held Prisoner Page 22

by Donald E. Westlake


  So I was finally out in the open, and it was all right. They knew my past, they knew what I’d done, they knew I wasn’t really a crook in their league, but they accepted me anyway. The party ended late and cheerful, with expressions of eternal friendship in all directions, and over the next several weeks every single one of the tunnel insiders came around to ask my recipe for stink bombs, or how to do some other one of my former outrages. I had become a kind of professor emeritus of the practical joke—retired, but still sought out for my expertise.

  Marian, of course, had been hearing about the bank robbery for the first time during that party, and she wasn’t sure for a while whether or not she was going to forgive me for not trusting her completely. But I explained that rather than a question of trust it had been a case of me not wanting her to have to worry about me, so that too sorted itself out, and life at last did settle down to comfort and joy.

  One afternoon in August, as Marian and I picnicked by a stream very near the Canadian border, I said, “You know, I keep thinking about Andy Butler.”

  “They never found him, did they?”

  “I don’t think they tried very hard. What could they charge him with? All he did was plant flowers.”

  “Yes, and all you did was park your car beside the Long Island Expressway.”

  I smiled, looking at the wild flowers along the stream bank. “Remember the book you gave me about the trickster?”

  “It was about you.”

  “No, it was Andy. I was just an amateur, but he’s the real thing. Knock knock.”

  She stared at me. “What?”

  “Knock knock,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said, laughing in bewilderment. “Who’s there?”

  “Amos.”

  “Amos who?”

  “A mosquito just bit me. Knock knock.”

  “Did it really?”

  “No, that’s just the joke. The first half. Here’s the second half. Knock knock.”

  “Who’s there?”

  “Andy.”

  “Andy? Andy who?”

  “And he did it again.” I grinned at her. “The butler always does it,” I said.

  “You don’t do it any more?”

  I spread my hands out on the grass; the black dirt was cool beneath the green leaves. “I feel as though Andy drew that whole thing right out of me,” I said. “When I saw those flowers through the warden’s window, it was like nectar, it was warmth running through me. I was my own sun, shining on those flowers.”

  “That was just relief.”

  “No, it was more than that. I was changed, like dough turning into bread.”

  “You won’t change back?”

  “Into dough? Can’t be done.” Nodding, tossing pebbles into the stream, watching the sun-glints scatter, I said, “What I’m going to do, when my sentence is up I’m going to stick around this area. Get a job, settle down, be Harry Kent forever.”

  Marian laughed at me. “Do you know, Harry,” she said, “prison has rehabilitated you!”

  And so it had.

 

 

 


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