by Lorraine Ray
Sunlight, bright, white, gleamed and glittered on the new snow. A young man's footsteps up a path punched blue craters. At the end of the path, two pine boughs bent across a doorway where gold letters on glass read "Graham County Jail."
The door to the jail creaked when it opened, and the young man walked a little too quickly across a plank floor and past the hides of a bear and a cow, some tattered serapes, an army of heavy parkas on a coat rack, and the wanted posters for 1954.
A dark wooden counter separated the visitor from the jail. Bringing a slender book out from under his coat, the young man opened it to a front piece photograph and placed it on the counter in front of a bull-necked officer. "I believe you have this man in custody."
The big sleepy man slid forward on his stool. He put on his half-glasses and took the book in his hands, peering at the photo. In it, an old man held an enormous earthenware olla, held the jar gently, for it was reconstructed of potshards, the jagged holes where large shards were missing exposed the pot's empty center. The old man in the photo had the face of a timid God in spectacles. He was bald-headed, sloped in his shoulders, with a large nose, a white moustache, and weak, sad eyes which evaded the camera. '"The author at Tishba'," the bull-necked man said, reading the title underneath the photo aloud.
"Is that someone you're holding?" asked the young man.
"Yeah," he said with a nod, "It looks like Little Mary Sunshine. That's what we call him. He smiles a lot. Almost all the time."
"I'd like to bail him," said the young man, "if that's possible."
"Sure," said the man. He got off his stool slowly. He reached under the counter and snapped a bolt back in order to life a hinged section of the counter. Motioning the young man forward, he performed a perfunctory search. "I've got to pat you down," he explained. "Griff!" he hollered up a narrow stairway.
A plump, slow-eyed gentleman with a large mole on his chin a detective magazine in his hand waddled down. "Yeah?"
"It looks like Little Mary Sunshine might be a professor. This gentleman will bail him."
"Say now, that would be something," said Griff with genuine enthusiasm. "We never had one of those in here before. I noticed how peculiar he was."
Climbing the stairs behind his guide, the young man watched the jailer's figure reflected on the glass of framed newspaper articles which clung to the crumbling adobe walls. The yellowed papers under glass told grisly tales of desperate last hours, of mayhem, and madness. Men dangled above poisoned wells or were hung by robbers before help arrived.
"Some of our bad guys," said Griff when he noticed the young man slowing to examine the articles. "Mormon Bill," he tapped a glass, "Texas Howard," he tapped another, "Shoot-em up Dick."
They climbed until the stairway opened out. At that juncture the walls became a dusty gray rock; the jail cells were blasted into the ridge. "You can see him over there," Griff pointed in the corner of a big communal cell.
Six empty cots were scattered across the concrete floor. On one that was shoved in a corner, an unshaven, filthy old man slumped, smiling in a pleasant, but vacant manner at his hands. The young man on the other side of the iron bars studied him without any acknowledgement from the old man.
"His bail is sixty dollars," said Griff, crossing his arms over his big stomach. "Do you want to speak to him?"
"No."
"Are you his... grandson?"
"No. I'm Paul Weaton's son. Professor Reedy left his car at the trading post."
"The wife's dead?"
"Yeah."
"And he's really a professor?"
"He was."
"A retired professor. Well, well. I've never seen one of them before. The world's full of peculiarities-"
"Please, keep your voice down," the young man whispered. "I'm sure he can hear you."
"Little Mary Sunshine? He don't care. He sits in his corner smiling away at the world. I don't know what he's got to smile about. All this trouble." Griff shook his head and led the way back to the stairs.
Halfway down, Griff swung around, "Say, have you really got sixty dollars?"
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THE END
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Big Paper Skeleton
