Caught

Lisa Moore

Searchlight
Slaney broke out of the woods and skidded down a soft
embankment to the side of the road. There was nothing but
forest on both sides of the asphalt as far as he could see. He
thought it might be three in the morning and he was about
two miles from the prison. It had taken an hour to get through
the woods.
He had crawled under the chain-link fence around the yard
and through the long grass on the other side. He had run
hunched over and he’d crawled on his elbows and knees, pulling
himself across the ground, and he’d stayed still, with his
face in the earth, while the searchlight arced over him. At the
end of the field was a steep hill of loose shale and the rocks
had clattered away from his shoes.
The soles of Slaney’s shoes were tan-coloured and slippery.
The tan had worn off and a smooth patch of black rubber
showed on the bottom of each shoe. He’d imagined the soles
lit up as the searchlight hit them. He had on the orange coveralls.
They had always been orange, but when everybody was
wearing them they were less orange.
For an instant the perfect oval of hard light had contained
him like the shell of an egg and then he’d gone animal
numb and cringing, a counterintuitive move, the prison
psychotherapist might have said, if they were back in her
office discussing the break — she talked slips and displacement,
sublimation and counter-intuition, and allowed for
an inner mechanism he could not see or touch but had to
account for — then the oval slid him back into darkness and
he charged up the hill again.
Near the top, the shale had given way to a curve of reddish
topsoil with an overhang of ragged grass and shrub. There
was a cracked yellow beef bucket and a ringer washer turned
on its side, a bald white.
Slaney had grabbed at a tangled clot of branches but it
came loose in his hand. Then he’d dug the toe of his shoe in
deep and hefted his chest over the prickly grass overhang and
rolled on top of it.
He lay there, flat on his back, chest hammering, looking at
the stars. It was as far as he had been from the Springhill penitentiary
since the doors of that institution admitted him four
years before. It was not far enough.
He’d heaved himself off the ground and started running.
This was Nova Scotia and it was June 14, 1978. Slaney would
be twenty-five years old the next day.
The night of his escape would come back to him, moments
of lit intensity, for the rest of his life. He saw himself on that
hill in the brilliant spot of the swinging searchlight, the
orange of his back as it might have appeared to the guards in
the watchtower, had they glanced that way.