Mad River

experts on everything else.”
    “Never thought of that,” Virgil said, studying her parts in an academic way. They were very good. “I mean, how would they get to be experts? What would you study?”
    “You know—how people think when they’re running. Where they’d run to. How they’d think about it. That kind of thing. You know, psychologists.”
    “Well, maybe somebody should,” he said.
    Then they got involved again, and then they went to sleep—Virgil liked sleeping with women (the sleeping part), and so it wasn’t until four o’clock in the morning that his eyelids popped open and he said, “Ah, man.”
    She twitched, and he groped around on the nightstand and knocked his wallet on the floor, and she woke up and rolled toward him and asked, “What are you doing?”
    “Calling Stillwater penitentiary,” he said. He found his cell phone.
    “At four o’clock in the morning? What for?”
    He told her, and she said, “I’m flattered, but if you’re going to do that, you’ll have to leave pretty soon.”
    “Pretty soon,” he agreed.
    “It’s been a while since I’ve done this,” she said. “You think . . . ?”
    “I don’t have to leave
immediately
,” Virgil said.
    •   •   •
    STILLWATER WAS THE biggest penitentiary in Minnesota, and though it wasn’t the only one, or the closest one, it was the one with most of the experts. Virgil talked to a skeptical duty officer who, in any case, said he’d pass along Virgil’s request.
    “Just get the warden to call me on my cell. He knows me. I’m going to assume that he’ll cooperate, and start that way.”
    “I dunno . . .”
    “Get him to call me,” Virgil said.
    •   •   •
    AT FIVE O’CLOCK in the morning, feeling fairly light in his boots, he and Sally shared a kiss in the cool morning air on the motel room’s doorstep, and he said, “I’ll try to get back tonight, but I don’t know how that’s going to work out.”
    “Catch the kids. When you come back, I want your full attention,” she said.
    •   •   •
    FROM MARSHALL, which was not all that far from South Dakota, to Stillwater, which was on the river that separated Minnesota from Wisconsin, was a three-and-a-half-hour drive, assuming no hang-ups in morning traffic. Virgil left Marshall at five o’clock, took six or seven phone calls from various prison officials, including the warden, over the next three hours, and finally the warden called at eight o’clock and said, “We’re ready to go when you get here.”
    “I’m hung up in traffic on 494 headed toward the airport,” Virgil said. “It could be a while.”
    “You got lights and a siren?”
    “Yeah, but that’d get me there about one minute sooner, and the noise would drive me crazy. I’ll just coast,” Virgil said. “Hey—thanks for this. It’s goofy, but it’s all I got.”
    “I think it’s kinda interesting,” the warden said. “I read about what you did up in Butternut Falls. This is sort of like that.”
    •   •   •
    STILLWATER PRISON SITS on a hill in Bayport, Minnesota, a few miles south of the town of Stillwater, and why it wasn’t called Bayport prison, Virgil didn’t know; nor was he curious enough to find out. The prison was not a particularly welcoming place, but neither was it particularly grim. Virgil had been inside perhaps a dozen times. He called ahead two minutes before he got there, parked across the street, locked up his guns, and walked over to the administration building.
    An assistant warden named Ron Polgar was waiting for him and escorted him to the warden’s office. The warden was a tall, thin, pink-faced man in his thirties, with steel-rimmed spectacles; a career correctional bureaucrat named James Benson, he could have been an accountant. He was notable for his adamant opposition to capital punishment, which Minnesota did not have, and would never have, if Benson had anything to do with it.
    “Virgil,” he said, standing up as Virgil came into the office. Virgil said, “How you doing, Jim?” and they shook hands.
    “You must be pretty much in a rush . . .”
    “Unless the Guard finds them this morning, which could happen,” Virgil said. “You got my guys together?”
    The warden nodded. “We’re herding them into a classroom right now. We’ve got the projector and screen set up with a laptop. I hope you know Windows.”
    “Yeah, I should be okay,” Virgil said. “How’d you pick the