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By Root 915 0

time. This time I'm not locked up with white-collar criminals, and not really blue-collar ones, either, since none of my fellow inmates seems to have had the sort of job on the outside that would require him to wear blue-collared shirts. But the story of the soft hero doing hard time is one you've heard before, so I won't bother to tell it to you here. Besides, I'm nearly a third of the way through my twenty years (the rest of the sentence says "to life," but who can think about that and still care about living it?), and my time hasn't been all that hard so far. The other inmates know I'm writing a book, that I'm telling my story, and they respect that and pretty much leave me alone. After all, they can't stop telling their own stories, either: to one another, the guards, their families, their lawyers, the parole board. Even if they've never actually read a story before, they can't bring themselves to stop telling their own. Who knows, maybe this lack of reading will help them the way all my reading and my mother's reading didn't exactly help us. I wish them well.

It's hard to write in here, though, harder than you'd think. For one thing, I get letters, lots and lots of them. Wesley and Lees Mincher (they're married now and she's taken his name) write me every month or so, always on English Department letterhead, and always demanding their three thousand dollars back. I write them back and tell them that I appreciate their testifying against me in exchange for their immunity from prosecution, and that the three thousand dollars have gone the way of my parents' house and they're out of luck. They don't seem to believe me; they seem to think that, as in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, I've hidden their treasure in some cave. At least that's what I think they think. It's hard to tell from their letters. When Wesley writes them, the letters are so thick with verbiage that you need an explanatory footnote just to understand his "Dear's" and "Sincerely's." And when Lees writes, she calls me a cunt so often I've started to think that's her nickname for me, the way Coleslaw was for the Mirabellis. Other than their missing three thousand dollars, however, they seem happy.

Once in a while, I get letters from Peter Le Clair. He, too, testified against me in exchange for immunity and feels guilty about that in the extreme. I know this because his letters say, "Sorry," and that's all they say. I send him long letters back about nothing in particular, just so he'll have something to read besides his library books, and then something to burn in his woodstove once he's through with them. Occasionally, after sending him one of these letters, I get one back that says, "Thanks," which I appreciate.

Mr. Frazier didn't testify at my trial ― maybe because he hadn't done anything wrong and had no need for the immunity they offered him ― but I've not heard from him, not once, and since he seemed like a guy who would take great pride in writing long, formal letters with his antique fountain pen, I have a feeling he is dead and his house in Chicopee already broken up into apartments. Maybe he's with his brother, in some happier place. Last year I finally read that book his brother loved so ― Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward ― and Mr. Frazier was right: it's about a utopia, a perfect, egalitarian Boston of the future, so perfect that I found it wide eyed and goofy and more than a little boring. But if that's where Mr. Frazier and his brother want to be, who am I to say they shouldn't?

That's not all: every day I get letters and more letters, not just from people who are angry about the houses I confessed to burning, but also about the houses I didn't burn. For instance, I keep getting letters from a woman who's furious that I tried to burn down the Mark Twain House but not the Harriet Beecher Stowe House, which was right next door. I didn't know that, as I've explained to her in my letters over and over again, but she won't listen. She insists that I didn't think enough of Stowe as a writer to burn down her house and how this is just typical and