Free Dark and Bloody Ground by Darcy O'Brien

hills thickly forested and infested with snakes. James Earl Ray, who for a few months was Benny Hodge’s cellmate at Brushy, made an escape attempt in 1977. Along with several other inmates, Ray staged a fight during a baseball game and scrambled over the rear wall while the guards were distracted. One prisoner who bolted spontaneously without his shoes fell and was quickly captured. Ray and others scattered up into the mountains.
    Warden Herman Davis directed his men to forget about the other escapees until Martin Luther King’s assassin was run to ground. Fifty-five hours later, a mile or so into the forest, they heard twigs snapping, and the bloodhounds found Ray in a hole, trying to cover himself with leaves, dehydrated and exhausted. At Brushy a man may make it over the wall, but he soon discovers that he has nowhere torun. This absence of hope could partially explain why there were seven murders at Brushy between 1976 and 1980.
    When Sherry filled out her application, she already knew from her sister-in-law something about how it was on the inside; and Sherry had been selling marijuana and Quaaludes (downers) to two other guards, a fellow she knew from high school and his buddy. (She was able to buy the pot from friends at a hundred and eighty dollars per quarter pound and sell it to the guards for six to eight hundred dollars; the pills she bought for two dollars and fifty cents each and sold for twenty dollars apiece.) She understood how the prison’s microeconomy ran on drugs at wildly inflated prices. Still, she had much to learn.
    When she passed her interview, Warden Davis told her she could start work in two weeks. She and Charlene were walking through the front gate, heading for the parking lot, when a state car pulled up. In the back seat, staring straight ahead, was the best-looking man she had ever seen. The sight of him made her gut flip.
    “Who’s the hunk?” she asked Charlene.
    “That’s Benny Hodge.” Charlene explained that Hodge had been let out for the day to go see his new baby at the hospital in Knoxville.
    “He was messing with some girl,” Sherry asked, “while he was locked up in here?”
    “He sure did. He married her, too. That’s Benny.”
    “Lord have mercy.”
    For the next two weeks Sherry thought about Benny Hodge. She tried to imagine how he had managed to knock a girl up while he was behind bars. There were no conjugal visits allowed at Brushy and besides, they hadn’t even been married when she became pregnant. Had he sneaked her into his cell? Had Benny been able to slip it to her in the visiting room under the eyes of the guards? It must have been some quickie, that was for sure, and Benny must be hung like a bull. Sherry dreamed about him day and night.
    She spotted him again on the job at Brushy. She was in Shack Number One, a wooden structure directly in front of the main prison building, with a clear view of an alleyway to the left. Through a window she watched Benny Hodge unloading big cases of canned produce from a truck and carrying them down the steps to the basement storeroom. The other prisoners working with him staggered under a single case. Hodge was lifting three and four cases at a time and carrying them effortlessly. He barked at the other men, directing them like a foreman.
    If Sherry had not known Hodge for a prisoner, she would have thought he ran the place. She watched him bending and lifting, never breaking a sweat. When he turned toward the stairs with his load, he was only fifteen or twenty feet from her window. She admired his forearms and saw the muscles in his back working under his denim shirt. The bright early-fall light made his hair shine brownish-blondish and look so soft when it fell forward that she wanted to feel it on her face and smell it.
    He was different from the other prisoners. Except when he shouted orders, he spoke to no one, and no one to him. Sherry had not been close enough to him to look into his eyes, but she saw that they