“Tyra. Yeah.” He looked at the car, and we saw the same things: Tyra impatient and flushed, Sara in the back. “I might have to do something about that.”

“You want me to drive?”

“Nah.”

“Home, then?”

“Sure, yeah. Why not? But you ride up front with me.”

Tyra didn’t like it. No one cared. She collapsed into the back seat like an angry child, drank herself into a sullen stupor, and slapped Jason’s hand when he tried to get her out of the car. “Sara?” he said.

“Tyra. We’re home. Let’s go.”

She blinked at the condos, the trees, the setting sun on clean glass. “I can do it myself.”

She made it to the door without looking back, then stumbled inside. For an instant, I was alone with Sara, but the mood was gone for her, too. She kissed my cheek, said, “Bye for now,” and walked up the same stairs.

That night in bed, I tried to hold on to the good parts: the meadow, the taste of Sara’s mouth. I played the day like a tape, but the tape kept breaking. I saw the beatdown on the bus, the batons that rose and fell and slung blood like red paint. That was the loop, over and over: Tyra half-naked and teasing, Jason strangely frozen. I saw all those men—the lust and rage—but in my dreams, the loop tightened and drew smaller. I saw one face, a single man. He stood at the back of the bus, damp-eyed and staring; and that’s what I remembered when I woke.

His tongue on filthy glass.

That terrible, awful smile.

5

It took a long time for things to settle on the bus, and that made sense. The guards liked beatings; prisoners liked a riot. A guard went down. Clubs rose and fell, blood all over the floor. One prisoner stayed clear of it; he always stayed clear. Part of that was choice, and part was his age. After seventy-three hard years on God’s good earth, he was too withered and thin for most convicts to care about or even notice. Fifty-two years. That’s how long he’d been inside. Half a century for the rape and murder of twin sisters all the way back in 1920. If he closed his eyes, he could still see the day it happened, the narrow girls on a red-dirt road, all that emptiness and time, the wildflowers they’d tucked behind their ears.

But that was then …

Watching the violence on the bus, the old prisoner kept his back to the window, and ran the odds in his head. Four guards and a driver. Seventeen other convicts. The convicts were chained, but chains could be weapons. Point in fact: Justin Youngblood, a guard in his fourth year. Three men had him down, a chain between his jaws, teeth cracking as he screamed.

The old prisoner thought: Sixty-forty, guards.