Hadrian's Walls - Hardcover

Draper, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375403698 ISBN 13: 9780375403699

Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

The lifelong friendship between the two most famous citizens of Shepherdsville, East Texas--Sonny Hope, director of the local penitentiary, and Hadrian Coleman, the prison's most celebrated convict--is forever altered when Hadrian receives a governor's pardon, thanks to Sonny

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Robert Draper spent years as an editor and writer at Texas Monthly before moving to his current position as staff writer for GQ magazine.

Robert Draper spent years as an editor and writer at <i>Texas Monthly</i> before moving to his current position as staff writer for <i>GQ</i> magazine. A lifelong Texan, he lives in Austin with his wife, Meg Littleton.

Aus dem Klappentext

g debut novel is an intensely powerful story of imprisonment, both behind walls and within the personal confines of human relationships.<br><br>Shepherdsville, East Texas, is a town defined--architecturally, financially, and socially--by its state penitentiaries, among them the bleak Hope Prison Farm. It's a town where virtually every inhabitant is either an inmate or a prison employee, a town where crime literally pays.<br><br>Shepherdsville's two most famous citizens are Sonny Hope, its larger-than-life prison director, and Hadrian Coleman, its most notorious convict. Their friendship since boyhood has followed a pattern of mutual dependence, keeping them at once in collusion and on opposite sides of the law. At age fifteen, introspective and emotionally vulnerable, Hadrian killed a man and was sentenced to fifty years at Hope Farm. However, twenty years later, he achieves the unthinkable and escapes from the prison. <br><br>After years of life on the run, he's summoned back to She

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From Chapter One

As I drove into Shepherdsville, I did all I could to retrieve the memory that is surely stowed away somewhere--that of the country boy I was who, on his first-ever Saturday ride into town, saw for the very first time the legions and legions of men in white, stooped along highways and in cotton fields and in the courthouse garden. That moment, when I first laid eyes on justice's whipping boys, should have formed a powerful impression. Today, I could tell you everything about the first and last deer I ever shot, at the age of five. I could tell you about Mawmaw's fatal heart attack during a supper prayer, and how I ran away from home when my sister Mimi was born, and about the catfish that jerked the cane pole out of my hand and dragged it down the Minerva, and about driving in Pawpaw's pickup to the big city of Houston to see the Colt . 45's play Sandy Koufax and the Dodgers. And of course I could read you chapter and verse about my first kiss, with Flo Wattleston the prison chaplain's daughter, at the age of thirteen, and the taste of her mouth and the sweat of her palms against my back and the sweet desperation clawing inside of me.

          But then I thought of Pawpaw's big hardwood trees. If they could be dragged to the ground, what made a memory of mine so almighty that it couldn't buckle to its intended destroyer? Prison was that destroyer. It not only took from me what might have been; it took from me what actually had been. And so as I drove, I could only imagine the virgin shock that comes with observing the hoe squads and the cotton-pickers and the rosebush-trimmers and all the other forlorn, sullen losers in their ghost outfits, spread across the Shepherdsville terrain like dirty white fertilizer. I was long accustomed to the spectacle. To my eyes, the cons were nothing more than semi-animated infrastructure, kindred to the town's fire hydrants and dumpsters.

          Their awful homes came into view, one after the next: the Purvis J. Hope Prison Farm, six miles from town; the Carter Unit, for incorrigibles and death row cases, three miles further in; the Farenthold Women's Unit, just off the interstate at the city limits; the Diagnostic Unit, wedged between First Presbyterian, First City and the Wal-Mart; and the historic Shepherdsville Unit, also known as Big Red, which sat two blocks east of the courthouse in the heart of downtown. Even spread apart from each other as they were, you would be inclined to see the prisons in tandem, like bones strung along a pagan tribal necklace, or as some cancerous continuum blighting the town. What you would really be looking at was Shepherdsville's artery. Prisons fed money to the core, money to the outskirts, money everywhere. They were the common bond. They employed people, paid people, gave people something to talk about--gave them a whole new language, so that perfectly ordinary grey-haired matrons could be heard clucking at the D.A.R. luncheon, "They tell me the Winston boy's been in ad-seg ever since the lockdown," or, "Buddy says he wishes he could put an end to that turf battle over at the Carter Unit between the Aryan Brotherhood and the Mandingo Warriors, but after the last excessive-use-of-force citation he says he'd better leave it up to the CO-1s."

          Unlike the typical small town, there's always something to see in Shepherdsville by looking up--namely, the prison lights, the picket towers, the curls of razor wire, and if you're lucky, the sight of a helicopter tracking some poor bastard who'd scampered off of trusty duty. It had never occurred to me that this dismal skyline might change. But it had. To my surprise, I found myself driving past several gaudy new buildings, tall and prominent as they poked out of Shepherdsville like great gleaming spires awaiting a congregation of giants. They were state offices for prison bureaucrats, properly bland, but their presence was so alarming that I couldn't for the life of me remember what had been there beforehand. Texas Department of Criminal Retribution--Prison Industry Division. Texas Department of Criminal Retribution--Managed Health Care Division. Texas Department of Criminal Retribution--Legal Affairs Division. Texas Department of Criminal Retribution--Victim Support Division. Texas Department of Criminal Retribution--Inmate Education Division. And no doubt there would be more.

          A final building presented itself from the far east side of town: less boxy, composed of craggy limestone likely quarried from the hill country of central Texas and plunked down at the western edge of the Pine Curtain. I knew that had to be the Administrative Division. Sonny never was much for wandering in the forest. But up there, behind his one-way glass, he could be one with nature. Fond amusement welled up in me--replaced, then, by something else, and I shivered.

          At the light I turned left onto Walls Boulevard. A few blocks up ahead, the clock crowning the olive Italianate courthouse gonged six times. A sensation overtook me--one, I thought at first, of confinement. But this was different. It was the feeling of being trapped. I thought about the liver-spotted old cracker back at the icehouse by Bernadette Creek. What were the words of wisdom he'd stumbled upon: Not old Sonny Hope. He don't do squat for free.

          A honk of a horn slapped me awake. Here I was, in the belly of Shepherdsville. The familiarity of my surroundings brought a surge of joy, followed by a cascade of aching. The day-shift guards and deputies filing into the courthouse square café. The college students huddled in broad-shouldered, fancy-haired packs outside the Grizzly Bar & Grille. The fuzzy-eared coots feeling their way with their canes down those familiar well-ordered walkways bordered by shocks of azaleas and petunias . . . And extending out of the right hip of the square stretched the avenues, with their once-impressive procession of antebellum estates now hideously tricked up by the wives of Sonny's entrenched lieutenants.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1999
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0375403698
• ISBN 13: 9780375403699
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 321
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar