by Ron Carlson
The design is a result of too much time. I’ve seen them in every facility in which I have resided, these letters too cute to read, I mean flat-out baroque. Serifs on the T’s that weigh ten pounds; Bobby Lee had beaked serifs on his S’s that were big as shoes. His B was three-dimensional, ten feet deep, a B you could move into, four rooms and a bath on the first floor alone. I mean he had all afternoon while his lawyer said “We’ll see” a dozen different ways, why not do some gingerbread, some decoration? I kept my remarks to a minimum. But I’ve seen a lot of this, graffiti so ornate you couldn’t find the letters in the words. And what all of that is about is one thing and it’s having time. I respect it and I understand it—a lot of my colleagues have got plenty of time, and now I’ve got some again too, but it’s a style that is just not for me.
I became a car thief because it seemed a quick and efficient way to get away from my father’s fists, and I became a font maker because I was caught. After my very first arrest—I’d taken a red Firebird from in front of a 7-Eleven—in fact in my first alphabet, made with a golf pencil, I tried my hand at serification. I was thirteen and I didn’t know any better. These were pretty letters. I mean, they had a kind of beauty. I filigreed the C’s and G’s and the Q until they looked like they were choking on lace. But what? They stood there these letters so tricked up you wouldn’t take them out of the house, too much makeup, and you knew they weren’t any good. For me, that is. You put a shadow line along the stem of an R and then beak the tail it’s too heavy to move.
The initials that Bobby Lee Swinghammer had been carving into the back of his hand with a Motel 6 ballpoint pen looked like monuments. You could visit them, but they were going absolutely nowhere.
And that’s what I wanted in this last one, Ray Bold, a font that says “movement.” I mean, I was taking it with me and I was going to use it, essentially, on the run. Bobby Lee was right, it is plain but it can travel light.
I want to make it clear right here, though Bobby Lee and I had our differences and he did on occasion pummel me about the head and upper trunk (not as hard as he could have, god knows), he is not the reason I escaped from Windchime. I have escaped, as the documents point out, eleven times from various facilities throughout this part of the west, and it was never because of any individual cellmate, though Bobby Lee was one of the most animated I’ve encountered. I like him as a person and I’m pleased that his appeal is being heard and that soon he will be resuming his life as an athlete.
I walked out of Windchime because I had the chance. I found that lab coat folded over the handrail on our stairs. Then, dressed as a medical technician, with my hair parted right down the middle, I walked out of there one afternoon, carrying a clipboard I’d made myself in shop, and which is I’ll admit right here the single most powerful accessory to any costume. You carry a clipboard, they won’t mess with you.
Anyway, that windy spring day I had no idea of the direction this new alphabet would take. I knew I would begin writing; everybody knew that. I always do it. I’ve been doing it for more than twenty years. When my father backhanded me for the last time I fled the place but not before making my Ray on his sedan with the edge of a nickel. It wasn’t great, and I don’t care to write with money as a rule, but it was me, my instinct for letter-craft at the very start.
I also knew I’d be spending plenty of time in the wilderness, the high desert there around Windchime and the forests as they reach into Idaho and the world beyond. I know now that, yes, landscape did have a clear effect on the development of Ray Bold, the broad clean vistas of Nevada, the residual chill those first few April nights, and the sharp chunk of flint I selected to inscribe my name on a stock tank near Popknock. That first Ray showed many clues about the alphabet to come: the R (and the R is very dear to me, of course) made in a single stroke (the stem bolder than the tail); the small case a, unclosed; and the capital Y, which resembles an X. These earmarks of early Ray Bold would be repeated again and again in my travels—the single stroke, the open letter, the imprecise armature. To me they all say one thing: energy.
I made that Ray just about nightfall the second night, and I was fairly sure the shepherd might have seen me cross open ground from a rocky bluff to the tank, and so, writing there in the near dark on the heavily oxidized old steel tank while I knelt on the sharp stones and breathed hard from the run (I’d had little exercise at Windchime), I was scared and happy at once, which as anyone knows are the perfect conditions under which to write your name. Ray. It was a beginning.
“Why do it?” they say. “You want to be famous?” It is a question so wrongheaded that it kind of hurts. Because what I do, I do for myself. Most of the time you’re out there in some dumpster behind the Royal Food in Triplet or you’re sitting in a culvert in Marvin or in a boxcar on a siding in Old Delphi (all places I’ve been) and what you make, you better make for yourself. There aren’t a whole lot of people going to come along and appreciate the understated loop on your g or the precision of any of your descenders. I mean, that’s the way I figured it. When I fell into that dumpster in Triplet I was scratched and bleeding from hurrying with a barbed-wire fence, and I sat there on the old produce looking at the metal side of that bin, and then after I’d pried a tenpenny nail from a wooden melon crate I made my Ray, the best I knew how, knowing only I would see it. And in poor light. I made it for myself. It existed for a moment and then I heard the dogs and I was on the run again.
There was once a week later when I took that gray LeBaron in Marvin and it ran out of gas almost immediately, midtown, right opposite the Blue Ribbon Hardware, and I could see the town cop cruising up behind, and I took off on foot. And I can run when there’s a reason, but as I run I always think, as I was thinking that day: where would I make my Ray. The two are linked with me: to run is to write. That day after about half a mile, I crawled into a canal duct, a square cement tube with about four inches of water running through the bottom. And with a round rock as big as a grapefruit sitting in that cold irrigation water, I did it there: Ray. It wasn’t for the critics and it wasn’t for the press. They wouldn’t be along this way. It was for me. And it was as pure a Ray as I’ve ever done. I couldn’t find that place today with a compass.
At times like that when you’re in the heat of creation, making your mark, you don’t think about hanging a hairline serif on the Y. It seems pretty plainly what it is: an indulgence. Form should fit function, the man said, and I’m with him.
After Marvin, that night in the water, I got sick and slept two or three days in hayfields near there. As everyone knows I moved from there to that Tuffshed I lived in near Shutout for a week getting my strength back. The reports had me eating dog food, and I’ll just say to that I ate some dog food, dry food, I think it was Yumpup, but there were also lots of nuts and berries in the vicinity and I enjoyed them as well.
Everyone also knows about the three families I met and traveled with briefly. The German couple’s story just appeared in Der Spielplotz and so most of Germany and Austria are familiar with me and my typeface. I hope that their tale doesn’t prevent other Europeans from visiting Yellowstone and talking with Americans at the photo-vistas. I’m still amused that they thought I was a university professor (because I talked a little about my work), but on a three-state, five-month run from the law you’re bound to be misunderstood. The two American families seemed to have no difficulty believing they’d fallen into the hands of an escaped felon, and though I did interrupt their vacations, I thought we all had a fine time, and I returned all of their equipment except the one blue windbreaker in good condition.
THOUGH I HAVE decided to tell my story, I don’t see how it is going to help them catch the next guy. Because those last five weeks were not typical in the least. Fortunately, by the time I arrived in Sanction, Idaho, Ray Bold was mostly complete, for I lost interest in it for a while.
Walking through that town one evening, I took a blue Country Squire station wagon, the largest car I ever stole, from the gravel lo
t of the Farmers’ Exchange. About a quarter mile later I discovered Mrs. Kathleen McKay in the back of the vehicle among her gear. When you find a woman in the car you’re stealing, there is a good chance the law will view that as kidnapping, so when Mrs. McKay called out, “Now who is driving me home?” I answered, truthfully, “Just me, Ray.” And at the four-way, when she said left, I turned left.
Now it is an odd thing to meet a widow in that way, and the month that followed, five weeks really, were odd too, and I’m just getting the handle on it now. Mrs. McKay’s main interests were in painting pictures with oil paints and in fixing up the farm. Her place was 105 acres five miles out of Sanction and the house was very fine, being block and two stories with a steep metal snow roof. Her husband had farmed the little place, she said, but not very well. He had been a Mormon from a fine string of them, but he was a drinker and they’d had no children, and so the church, she said, had not been too sorry to let them go.
She told me all this while making my bed in the little outbuilding by the barn, and when she finished, she said, “Now I’m glad you’re here, Ray. And I hope tomorrow you could help me repair the culvert.”
I had thought it would be painting the barn, which was a grand building, faded but not peeling, or mowing the acres and acres of weeds, which I could see were full of rabbits. But no, it was replacing the culvert in the road to the house. It was generally collapsed along its length and rusted through in two big places. It was a hard crossing for any vehicle. Looking at it, I didn’t really know where to start. I’d hid in plenty of culverts, mostly larger than this one, which was a thirty-inch corrugated-steel tube, but I’d never replaced one. The first thing, I started her old tractor, an International, and chained up to the ruined culvert and ripped it out of the ground like I don’t know what. I mean, it was a satisfying start, and I’ll just tell you right out, I was involved.
I trenched the throughway with a shovel, good work that took two days, and then I laid her shiny new culvert in there pretty as a piece of jewelry. I set it solid and then buried the thing and packed the road again so that there wasn’t a hump, there wasn’t a bump, there wasn’t a ripple as you crossed. I spent an extra day dredging the ditch, but that was gilding the lily, and I was just showing off.
And you know what: she paid me with a pie. I’m not joking. I parked the tractor and hung up the shovel and on the way back to my room, she met me in the dooryard like some picture out of the Farmer’s Almanac, which there were plenty of lying around, and she handed me an apple pie in a glass dish. It was warm and swollen up so the seams on the Crosshatch piecrust were steaming.
Well, I don’t know, but this was a little different period for old Ray. I already had this good feather bed in the old tack room and the smell of leather and the summer evenings and now I had had six days of good work where I had been the boss and I had a glass pie dish in my hands in the open air of Idaho. What I’m saying here is that I was affected. All of this had affected me.
To tell the truth, kindness was a new thing. My father was a crude man who never hesitated to push a child to the ground. As a cop in the town of Brown River he was not amused to have a son who was a thief. And my mother had more than she could handle with five kids and preferred to travel with the Red Cross from flood to fire across the plains. And so, all these years, I’ve been a loner and happy at it I thought, until Mrs. McKay showed me her apple pie. Such a surprise, that tenderness. I had heard of such things before, but I honestly didn’t think I was the type.
I ate the pie and that affected me, two warm pieces, and then I ate a piece cool in the morning for breakfast along with Mrs. McKay’s coffee sitting over her checked tablecloth in the main house as another day came up to get the world and I was affected further. I’m not making excuses, these are facts. When I stood up to go out and commence the mowing, Mrs. McKay said it could wait a couple of days. How’d she say it? Like this: “Ray, I believe that could wait a day or two.”
And that was that. It was three days when I came out of that house again; it didn’t really make any difference to those weeds. I moved into the main house. I can barely talk about it except to say these were decent days to me. I rode a tractor through the sunny fields of Idaho, mowing, slowing from time to time to let the rabbits run ahead of the blades. And in the evenings there was washing up and hot meals and Mrs. McKay. The whole time, I mean every minute of every day of all five weeks, I never made a Ray. And this is a place with all that barnwood and a metal silo. I didn’t scratch a letter big or small, and there were plenty of good places. Do you hear me? I’d lost the desire.
But, in the meantime I was a farmer, I guess, or a hired hand, something. I did take an interest in Mrs. McKay’s paintings, which were portraits, I suppose, portraits of farmers in shirtsleeves and overalls, that kind of thing. They were good paintings in my opinion, I mean, you could tell what they were, and she had some twenty of the things on her sunporch, where she painted. She didn’t paint any of the farmers’ wives or animals or like that, but I could see her orange tractor in the back of three or four of the pictures. I like that, the real touches. A tractor way out behind some guy in a painting, say only three inches tall, adds a lot to it for me, especially when it is a tractor I know pretty well.
Mrs. McKay showed some of these portraits at the fair each year and had ribbons in her book. At night on that screen porch listening to the crickets and hearing the moths bump against the screens, I’d be sitting side by side with her looking at the scrap-book. I’d be tired and she would smell nice. I see now that I was in a kind of spell, as I said, I was affected. Times I sensed I was far gone, but could do nothing about it.
One night, for example, she turned to me in the bed and asked, “What is it you were in jail for, Ray? Were you a car thief?”
I wasn’t even surprised by this and I answered with the truth, which is the way I’ve always answered questions. “Yes,” I said. “I took a lot of cars. And I was caught for it.”
“Why did you?”
“I took the first one to run away. I was young, a boy, and I liked having it, and as soon as I could I took another. And it became a habit for me. I’ve taken a lot of cars I didn’t especially want or need. It’s been my life in a way, right until the other week when I took your car, though I would have been just as pleased to walk or hitchhike.” I had already told her that first day that I had been headed for Yellowstone National Park, though I didn’t tell her I was planning on making Rays all over the damn place.
After a while that night in the bed she just said, “I see.” And she said it sweetly, sleepily, and I took it for what it was.
WELL, THIS DREAM doesn’t last long. Five weeks is just a minute, really, and things began to shift in the final days. For one thing I came to understand that I was the person Mrs. McKay was painting now by the fact of the cut fields in the background. The face wasn’t right, but maybe that’s okay, because my face isn’t right. In real life it’s a little thin, off-center. She’d corrected that, which is her privilege as an artist, and further she’d put a dreamy look on the guy’s face, which I suppose is a real nod toward accuracy.
“Are these your other men?” I asked her one night after supper. We’d spoken frankly from the outset and there was no need to change now, even though I had uncomfortable feelings about her artwork; it affected me now by making me sad. And I knew what was going on though I could not help myself. I could not go out in the yard and steal her car again and pick up my plans where I’d dropped them. I’ll say it because I know it was true, I was beyond affected, I was in love with Mrs. McKay. I could tell because I was just full of hard wonder, a feeling I understood was jealousy. I mean there were almost two dozen paintings out there on the porch.
But my question hit a wrong note. Mrs. McKay looked at me while she figured out what I was asking and then her face kind of folded and she went up to bed. I didn’t think as it was happening to say I was sorry, though I was sorry in a second, sorrier really for that remark than f
or any of the two hundred forty or so vehicles I had taken, the inconvenience and damage that had often accompanied their disappearance. What followed was my worst night, I’d say. I’m a car thief and I am not used to hurting people’s feelings. If I hurt their feelings, I’m not usually there to be part of it. And I cared for Mrs. McKay in a way that was strange to me too. I sat there until sunrise when I printed a little apology on a piece of paper, squaring the letters in a way that felt quite odd, but they were legible, which is what I was after: “I’m sorry for being a fool. Please forgive me. Love, Ray.” I made the Ray in cursive, something I’ve done only three or four times in my whole life. Then I went out to paint the barn.
It was midmorning when I turned from where I stood high on that ladder painting the barn and saw the sheriff’s two vehicles where they were parked below me. I hadn’t heard them because cars didn’t make any whump-whump crossing that new culvert. When I saw those two Fords, I thought it would come back to me like a lost dog—the need to run and run, and make a Ray around the first hard corner. But it didn’t. I looked down and saw the sheriff. There were two kids in the other car, county deputies, and I descended the ladder and didn’t spill a drop of that paint. The sheriff greeted me by name and I greeted him back. The men allowed me to seal the gallon of barn red and to put my tools away. One of the kids helped me with the ladder. None of them drew their sidearms and I appreciated that.