I’ve often wondered what happened to him.

Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, 1979: Pennie and I had just moved into our first house.

It…

was built before Oklahoma became a state,

had never had a mortgage on it,

had been expanded 3 different times,

and was now barely 800 sq. ft.,

had sat vacant for more than 10 years,

and was sold to us for $21,500.

It wasn’t an impressive neighborhood.

Pennie looked out our front window and saw a frightening-looking man working on his car. She mentioned it to me. I looked out the window and saw a man in his mid-30s wearing ragged clothes with a dirty pony-tail that trailed below his belt. He had rented the unlivable shack across the street.

I walked outside to meet him. “Hi. I’m Roy. I live over there.”

“Hi. I’m Harold.”

I helped him fix his car, a worn-out Chevy Vega.

Harold and I became good friends. He was soft-spoken, respectful, and sentimental. Pennie liked him, too.

One Sunday afternoon, the phone rang. It was Harold. “Roy, do you have $400 in cash?”

Miraculously, I did have $400 in cash that day, an extremely rare occurrence. “Harold, if you had called on any other day, I wouldn’t have been able to say yes. But I do, in fact, have $400.”

“Man, I need you to come and bail me out of jail. I ran a red light at midnight and didn’t have my driver’s license with me. Can you come and bail me out? I can pay you back as soon as we get to my house, I swear.”

“I’ll be right there.”

As we pulled away from the police station, Harold said, “If you will, I need you to do me one more favor.”

“Okay, what is it?”

“Follow me to my boss’s house. He’s been wanting to buy my Vega and stuff a big motor in it to make himself a drag racing car. I’ve decided to sell it to him.”

We stopped at Harold’s house where he paid me back the $400, then I followed him a few miles to where his boss lived. Harold’s job was to mix cement all day and hand it up in 5 gallon buckets to the brick masons on the scaffold. They paid him in cash each week.

Harold gave his boss the car keys, got in my car again, looked at me with tear-filled eyes and said, “One last favor?”

“Whatever you need.”

“Drive me to the bus station.”

“Harold, what’s going on?”

He was blinking away the tears. “I’m going to buy a ticket on whatever bus is about to leave the station and I’m going to move to wherever that bus takes me. Roy, I’m an escaped convict.”

It took me a few moments to find my voice. “What were you in for, Harold?”

That’s when he told me his real name was Jeff-something. Sadly, I’ve forgotten Jeff’s last name because he spoke it just that one time, during a highly distracted moment, 39 years ago.

“I had just turned eighteen when my Dad beat the crap out of me and I decided to leave home. I hitchhiked and slept in open fields for a couple of days until I ran out of money for food. I was walking down the road on the morning of the third day when I saw a farmer working all alone. I walked over and asked if he would give me a meal and pay me a few dollars if I helped him all day. He said he would. At the end of the day, he gave me a meal but claimed he never agreed to give me any money. I was really mad, so I walked out to his barn and took a 5-gallon can of gas and a .22 rifle he had for shooting rats and then I started walking down the road.”

Back in those days, it was easy for hitchhikers to catch a ride when they were carrying a can of gas to give to whoever picked them up.

“I was planning to sell the .22 at the nearest pawn shop. It never occurred to me that the farmer had seen me and called the sheriff. I had only walked about 200 yards when I was arrested and taken to jail.”

“What happened next?”

“I had been in jail a couple of weeks when I hid under a big pile of dirty clothes in a canvas laundry cart just before they rolled it onto the truck. I don’t weigh much, so no one noticed. Then, when they stopped at a traffic light, I jumped out of the dirty clothes and scrambled out the back of the truck. That was the first time I escaped.”

My eyes grew big, I’m sure. “How many times have you escaped?”

“The third time was two years ago. They always catch me because of a traffic violation. I don’t have a driver’s license.” He smiled a weak smile. “I was really lucky they caught me on a Saturday night because the fingerprint place isn’t open on Sundays. If you hadn’t bailed me out of jail, they would have walked into my cell tomorrow morning and called me by my real name.”

“What were you in for the second and third time?”

“Escaping. They always increase your sentence when you escape. I’ve been in and out of prison for 16 years.”

“And the only thing you ever did was steal a 5-gallon can of gas and a .22 rifle?” Jeff could only nod as the tears ran into his beard. We didn’t talk for a while. Finally I asked, “How did you get out this last time?”

“I went over the wall.”

“What?”

“I went over the wall.”

“But how?”

“Roy, if everyone and everything that made your life worth living was on the other side of a 30-foot cement wall, but your side of that wall was an unendurable hell, do you think you could figure out how to get over that wall?”

I nodded yes.

“Roy, it’s not the wall that keeps you in prison; it’s the guys with the rifles in the tower.”

I quietly contemplated what he had said. After a moment, he continued.

“You go over the wall when the guys with the rifles don’t scare you anymore. Because one way or the other, you’re not going to live another day in prison.”

I’ve often wondered what happened to him.

Roy H. Williams