Heaven & Earth Holding Company

Upon Reading in Elmore Leonard’s The Hot Kid that Church Pewsin the 1930s Were Made by Convicts

10 Upon reading in elmore Leonard’s the Hot Kid that Church Pews in the 1930s Were Made by Convicts License plates, I always thought, in the metal shop in convict hell, in some crooked warden’s Big House slammer iron-bar hotel filled with Cagneys, Bogeys, Edward G.’s, where weasely stoolies got the shiv, where you bribed the screws with Lucky Strikes, Pall Malls, where Rocky Sullivan on his way to the chair ran pell-mell, cried like a drooly girl because Pat O’Brien, the last good priest, had asked him to, to do it so well that the Dead End Kids would think he was yellow, had pissed himself, so they’d go back to their homework, grow up to be priests themselves. License plates, Georgia’s sweet Peach, Pennsylvania’s Keystone, Wyoming’s rider on a bucking bronc, North Dakota’s Peace Garden, bright Florida’s Sunshine, lonely New Hampshire’s Live Free or Die, and somewhere in Sing Sing, Rikers, or Attica, Montana’s big Big Sky. All those dreams, that license, all those places to go. Not pews though, Judas Priest, not stinking Jonathan Edwards Jesus pews, row after row, on which to squirm, where children would sit, convicted already, ashamed, angels with dirty faces, their little legs dangling like spiders over the flames. ...