High White Sun by J. Todd Scott

Author:J. Todd Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-03-20T04:00:00+00:00

25

It was two days after Jesse and T-Bob came back from Murfee that Thurman Flowers finally showed himself.

And it took only one look for Earl to know he’d been right about him all along.

He arrived in an old van filled with white power DVDs and books and boxes of clothes and a hot plate and other shit, so it looked like he’d been livin’ in it and he probably had. A man named Marvin Clutts was following behind in another car, a Jap sedan with Washington plates that was also full up of crap. Flowers wore dark pants and a white button-down shirt that had long gone yellow under the arms, with his hair slicked over to one side, held down with somethin’ that glistened beneath the Texas sun. He had a small mouth and tiny eyes behind frog glasses that didn’t make those shifty eyes any bigger, and he reminded Earl of a warden he once knew in Dalhart. That man had been vicious, a real prick, to both the inmates and his own bulls. He’d bullied out of fear and weakness, not strength, and he’d died hard from throat cancer, rotting from the inside out. First he lost his tongue, then his whole lower jaw, and then it went straight on up to his brain and that was that.

After he was gone no one said a word about him; didn’t talk or tell stories about him. No one remembered him and it was like he’d never existed at all.

Flowers was just that sort of man. He thought of himself as too damn important, controlling everything, and he looked at the world through those glasses like it was his own damn prison to run; to do as he pleased. He didn’t—couldn’t—understand the real secret that all smart bulls and wardens soon learned: that they didn’t really run the prison at all. It was an illusion that they had any control of the place, a bit of dress-up and pretend made fancy and almost real with their suits and guns and rules and walls. None of that was really needed because none of it mattered—all of that shit appeared to work only because the inmates pretended right along with it. For the most part, the world inside those walls was nicer and easier than anything they had to deal with outside of them, so most of ’em were never trying that hard to get out anyway.

And eventually, when Flowers was gone, he’d be no more missed or remembered than that warden from Dalhart.

He’d never really been needed at all.

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