Traveling Down the Catawba River with a Friend

I’m sitting in Barnes and Noble at about six-thirty in the evening. Just dropped Story off for her theater rehearsal. It was a fun drive from our rushed dinner at home across town to her theater class. I’m not as good as my wife Kara at some of these things. Long drives with Story for me tend to be pretty quiet. We wrestle over what music to listen to. She wants Broadway musicals. I’m craving Willie Nelson. It’s hard to find a place to meet in the middle between those two things. But tonight, I have stories for her. I’m feeling excited because I went to the comic book store today and found a huge graphic novel- Jonah Hex, Shadows West. This is a rerelease based on a classic, but it has good art and a promising story. It’s a western which made me thing of my old friend, Snapper. Story knows a little about Snapper, not a lot because I don’t spend a ton of time telling her prison war stories, but for some reason, tonight I’m up for it.

“Yeah, you told me about Snapper, but what was he in prison for again?” she asks.

The truth is a little more complicated than the story I tell her. I tell her the same thing that Snapper told me, the same thing that he was prison-famous for, but the truth is that like all stories, the truth is much more complicated.

Snapper robbed banks.

He was one of the best friends I had in prison.

Story asks me if I had many friends in prison.

“Yeah,” I say. “Lots. I met lots of really great people in prison.”

“Then why were they there?”

“That’s a tough question. I guess a lot of it was drugs. Alcohol. Sometimes it was because they had just been hurt so much that they didn’t know how to be in the world.”

“How long was Snapper locked up for?” she asks.

“Oh man, I don’t know really. He was in and out of prison his whole life.” I tell her that Snapper escaped from prison four different times. “The last time he escaped he went to see his brother one last time, then told his brother he was going to go fishing and asked him to call the cops and tell him where to pick him up.”

“If he knew he was going back then why’d he escape to begin with?” she asks.

“That’s what I asked HIM?!?” I exclaimed. “That’s exactly what I asked him. He told me that he just had some stuff to do that only he could do. I never did figure out what that was. I think he needed to move some money he had buried.” Sometimes in prison you don’t ask the follow up questions because you just don’t want to know. The truth was that while Snapper loved for people to know his old back robbing stories most of the money that he stole was from the hotels at truck stops where the sex workers made their living. He told me once that that money wasn’t traceable, and there was a LOT of it.

It’s even more tangled than that though. Snapper confessed to me one time with great embarrassment that his charges were based on a sex crime, some underage girl.

He said, “I SWEAR Blink, I didn’t do that! I would NEVER do that!”

And I believed him.

Because I wanted to believe him. I have no idea if he was telling the truth to me or not. I’ve met an awful lot of innocent men in prison. That taught me a life-skill that I didn’t even know I needed. It gave me the ability to not care anymore if the story is true. It just doesn’t matter.

 I loved Snapper.

We spent endless hours…months….

Years.

Walking that yard together telling each other stories.

We had a special place out on the yard, an iron-grated drain that ran underneath the yard where we could hear the water flow after a heavy rain. We called it “the pond” and on nice days Snapper would bang on the door to my cell.

“Hey Blink, it’s nice outside. Wanna go sit by the pond and tell stories?”

We’d go out there and sit and talk, we’d daydream about the day that we’d get out. Snapper was under “the old law” so he’d come before a parole board every few years and make a case about how he had reformed himself and was finally ready for the free world. They’d deny him, like they always did, but somehow he’d shrug it off, disappointed but hopeful for the next one.

Snapper wanted us to get out and go dig up some of the money he had hidden, who-knows-where? We’d buy a pontoon boat and set sail down the Catawba River. We spent a lot of months on that river, swatting mosquitoes, and spitting tobacco juice for the fish to pick at.

Snapper had helluva stories to tell. That was part of the reason we spent so much time together. He had spent a lifetime surviving some war that only he knew about, and I was there to bear witness.

I told Story that Snapper and his brother, the one he had gone to visit when he’d escaped that time hadn’t really been friends since they were kids.

“Why?” she wanted to know.

Snapper sat out on the yard with me laughing that toothless grin when he told me that he had snuck up behind his brother when they were kids and “popped him in the head with a hammer!” bursting into chuckles of laughter even harder when he said these words.

“Yup Blink, he was just up on the porch in that rockin’ chair a’rockin away. Never even saw it comin’!” Snapper thought that was hysterical! I have to admit that even now I don’t really know what Snapper was laughing at, but this was coming from something that I wouldn’t call “an easy childhood,”

He was tough, hard. Life had made him hard, and he made terrible choices along the way.

Snapper and I used to play cards just about every night; Casino, which is the game everyone plays in prison. Even now I cringe when Kara wants to play cards.

She says, “You never really like cards, do you?”

I don’t. We played every evening before dinner.

For years.

 I’ve played enough cards that for me it always feels like cards are what you do when you want to waste your life away doing nothing. That’s probably not true, and even now, while remembering this, I’m thinking I ought to try to look up the rules to Casino again and see if Kara would like to give it ago. Maybe I’ve been a little unfair to the game.

One night we were there playing Casino at the metal tables in the dayroom waiting for them to call chow and talking about the death penalty. When I processed into the system in Raleigh, the processing wing had been the old Death Row block. They had since built a new block for Death Row, and had repurposed the bunks for us, but they hadn’t even painted or taken down the signs instructing us not to light matches during executions. I was angry that even this last honor was denied to the last friends someone may have on this mortal coil. I had always been opposed to the death penalty. Still am. Not Snapper though. When I asked him his particular views, they were less nuanced than mine.

“Some people just need killin’, Blink. That’s all.”

And while I could argue with him and disagree with him, in fact, we both knew a number of people who at some point had been on Death Row until North Carolina had commuted their sentences in an unusual wave of thought and mercy, I appreciated Snapper’s simplicity. There wasn’t much discussion to be had. Snapper didn’t go in much for philosophy. His world was a little blacker and whiter than that and it always had been.

Sometimes when I was in the mood to read a good Western I’d ask Snapper to go to the library with me. He had read them all. Snapper was definitely a reader, as all literate men in prison are. He read all the time. Somehow Dostoevsky never made it onto the list. He read William Johnston, Louis L’amour…Zane Grey. I loved Larry McMurtry, everything he’s ever written; not Snapper though…”not enough KILLIN’ in those!” That was how Snapper judged whether a western was good or not- by the body count.

I talked to Snapper the night that I got out. I had shipped off to minimum custody so hadn’t seen him for a few years. Not much had changed for him, but then, that’s prison. They kind of pride themselves on that.

“I beat you out, Snap!” I choked out holding back my tears. I had missed his damn voice.

“Yeah Blink! You sure did, but I’m right behind ya. You might as well go ahead and start fueling up that boat.”

“I’ll do that, Snapper. I can’t wait to see that river with you.”

Long pause.

“Hey Snapper?”

“Yeah Blink?”

“I miss you Snapper. I love you.”

“I love you too, Blink. You be good. You stay out there, and you be good. I’m gonna get out of here and you and I will ride down that river and see how far we can get!”

Snapper died in there. I was told they found him on his knees next to his bunk praying maybe. Snapper wasn’t a religious man, but I wouldn’t put it past him to give it a desperate shot. I remember him telling me once that he figured if there wasn’t a god then he’d never know and if there was then he’d probably understand.

I pulled up in front of Story’s theater class and insisted on walking her in, even though I know this embarrasses her. Most of the time I don’t. Tonight, I did mostly to be a bit of a nag. I could see her showing off a little to her friends by telling her dad that she didn’t really need him there in front of them. And I put an exclamation mark on the whole event by giving her a big hug that she shrugged off and walked out holding hands with my pride.

I climbed into my little car, put on some Willie Nelson and drove off towards the sunset still missing my friend.

Thanks for sitting by the pond with me all those summer nights, Snapper. Thanks for being my friend.

I still miss you.