Life Expectancy

Lumpy Dumpy, someone's pet turtle.
        By Sunday, January 26, Lorrie had been on a regular diet long enough and with sufficient success that we deemed her ready for a holiday dinner, Tock style.
        Never had our Christmas table been so heavily laden. Serious discussions were held as to the possibility of the table cracking under the burden of so many delectables. After calculations in which the kids contributed their unschooled but imaginative mathematics, we concluded that we were two dinner rolls shy of the weight required to trigger a collapse.
        Eight of us gathered around the table for the postponed feast, the children boosted on pillows, the adults lifted higher by good wine.
        Never had the Christmas candles painted our faces so warm, so bright.
        The children glowed like blithe spirits, and when I looked around at Mom, at Dad, at Grandma, at Lorrie, I felt that I was in the company of angels.
        During soup, Grandma Rowena said, "The wine reminds me of the time Sparky Anderson uncorked a bottle of Merlot and found a severed finger in it."
        The kids squealed as one, grossed out and delighted.
        "Weena," my father warned, "that's not an appropriate story for the dinner table, especially not for the Christmas dinner table."
        "Oh, on the contrary," said Grandma, "it's the most Christmasy story I know."
        "There's nothing whatsoever Christmasy about it," Dad said exasperatedly.
        Mom came to the defense of Grandma: "No, Rudy, she's right. It is a Christmasy story. There's a reindeer in it."
        "And a fat guy with a white beard," Grandma added.
        Lorrie said, "You know, I've still never heard the story about how Harry Ramirez boiled himself to death."
        "That's a Christmasy story, too," my mother declared.
        Dad groaned.
        "Well, it is," Grandma agreed. "There's a midget in it."
        Dad gaped at her. "What makes a midget Christmasy?"
        "Haven't you ever heard of elves?" Grandma asked.
        "Elves aren't the same as midgets."
        "They are in my book," Grandma said.
        "Mine, too," said Lucy.
        "Midgets are people," Dad persisted. "Elves are fairies."
        "Fairies are people, too," Grandma scolded him, "even if they do prefer going to bed with their own gender."
        My mother remembered: "And wasn't the midget's name Chris Kringle?"
        "No, Maddy dear," Grandma corrected, "he was Chris Pringle, with a P."
        "Boy, that's Christmasy enough for me," Lorrie said.
        "This is nuts," Dad said.
        Mom patted him on the shoulder and said, "Don't be such a Scrooge, dear."
        "So," Grandma began, "Sparky Anderson pays eighteen dollars for this bottle of Merlot, which was a lot more money in those days than it is now."
        "Everything's gotten so expensive," Mom said.
        "Especially," Lorrie said, "if you want something with a severed finger in it."
        The next of the five terrible days was ten months away, which that night-bright with tinsel, fragrant with roast turkey-seemed like forever.

PART FIVE
        
    Just Like Pontius Pilate

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        You Washed Your Hands of Me Nine miles from Denver, the Rocky Mountain Federal Penitentiary, a maximum-security facility, stands atop a foothill stripped of trees and flattened into a plateau. The higher slopes behind it and the slopes below are thickly forested, but the grounds of the prison are barren, offering no obstacle if searchlights are needed, no cover for escapees trying to dodge gunfire from the guard towers.
        No inmate has ever escaped from Rocky Mountain. The two ways they get out are on parole or dead.
        The stone walls soar high, punctured only by barred windows too small for any man to squeeze through. The steeply pitched slate roof beetles over every rampart.
        Above the main gate to the walled parking lot, carved in stone are the words truth* law* justice* punishment. From the look of the place and considering the class of hardened criminal housed therein, the word rehabilitation was probably not an inadvertent omission.
        On that Wednesday, November 26, the fourth of my five fateful days, the lowering sky pressing down on the prison looked as bleak as any inmate's future. The icy wind bit to the bone.
        Before we were admitted through the gate to the parking lot, the three of us had to get out of the Explorer while two efficient