The dash radio crackled as chain-lightning danced low on the
horizon. In the next moment the truck cab jangled again with
the biscuits and gravy of country-western music. A solitary
gust of wind buffeted Jake's progress down the road and a dozen
large drops of water splattered across the windshield. Then
it stopped. This was the big country under the influence of
rolling weather.
A bump on the wipers and Jake cleared his view. Though the
tremendous line of thunderheads was ten miles distant their effect
on his sense was to reduce the two-lane county road to a thin
cleft shot through a leafy sea of green -- deep with maize --
unbroken to the drooping fringe of blue.
"Jake ol' boy," he said to himself, "looks like you're in for
a cloudburst sure enough."
A few miles back he passed a large plain billboard. It read:
**State Penitentiary**
*Do Not Pick Up Hitchhikers**
Jake didn't have to read the billboard, but he did. He didn't
have to seek the hard-edged prison complex set back from the
road but he did that too. Bored wonder often invites a man to
look again as if for the first time. And with its guard towers
and double fences, the red institutional brick, the place always
attracted Jake's attention. On this route there was little else
to see but the crops standing in endless rows and an hollowed
out clapboard house leaning at an absurd angle.
The thing was, in seeing the prison, Jake always felt a sense
of care for the men locked up in there -- and guilt somehow for
his own freedom. They were after all still men. The easy and
obvious answers are like guards, he thought. There is lots of
pacing going on both sides of the bars.
Something fluttered to the side of the road up ahead. Jake lightly
touched the brake pedal and downshifted. He sat up and focused
ahead. Nearer now, the something lifted for a moment. Slowing
down and close enough to make out the shape Jake stopped. A
gust of wind lifted the thing clear of the road to wedge it
in the gully of the opposite shoulder. There were no other
vehicles. Jake parked and clambered out for the plane.
He turned it over. It was a balsa replica of the Spirit
of St. Louis in all its glory. The wingspan was twenty-four
inches, and the ribbing was skinned tight with milky translucent
paper. There was a small tear in the fuselage but the propeller
was rubberband powered. Lovingly handcrafted likely it was months
in the making.
The wind was picking up now. Jake carried the plane up to the
truck. He searched the road up and down. For miles around the
only model plane builder would be in that cluster of buildings
behind the guard towers, behind the fence. Jake thought about
that as he stowed the plane in the cab.
He liked the idea there might be a secret message hidden inside
written by a desperate inmate -- someone looking at a life
sentence for murder or something equally incredible.
Half-right, he would find out later the entire plane itself was
the message.
