by Proehl, Bob
“Pictures would be good,” he says. The waiter arrives with two towering burgers. Emmeline, eyes saucer-wide, grabs hers with both hands and chomps in, showing none of the caution or reserve of a teenager, only the voracity of a perfectly normal kid.
Warden Pitt’s office is an old trailer that reminds Carrie of the head counselor’s office at the summer camp she and her brother Brian had been forced to attend when they were kids. It has the same faux-wood paneling that makes it look like a ski lodge crossed with a travel agency. It smells like years of stale cigarettes. Warden Pitt personalized the space by using framed posters with the name of a virtue in bold white below an image that embodies it. A marathoner throwing his body across the finish, the word PERSEVERANCE stamped below it. A bear nuzzling a kitten. Emblazoned underneath: TOLERANCE.
“You understand this is a formality, Miss Norris. We’re putting the whole thing to rest.” He’s pudgy and sweaty, squeezed into a secondhand military uniform decorated with a spatter pattern of buttons and pins you’d expect from a chain restaurant waiter. He likes to give the impression that he’s where the buck stops. Carrie’s figured out enough about Topaz Lake to know Pitt’s a regional manager in general’s clothing. He signs paychecks and requisition forms. He moves someone else’s money around. She’s surprised he’s involved in the investigation of the power outage the night of the Christmas pageant. Usually something like this is handed off to men with more stomach for cruelty. The fact that he’s questioning her means she’s safe. The real investigators moved through anyone they thought was involved in the days immediately afterward. What he’s said is true: this is a formality.
“I’m taking this incident as an opportunity to speak to some of our residents about what it is we’re doing here,” he says. “To clear up any ambiguity of mission.”
“You call yourself ‘warden,’ ” Carrie says. “That’s pretty unambiguous.”
Pitt shakes his head the way a teacher might at an ignorant child. “The word actually means something closer to ‘guardian,’ ” he says. “I’m here to watch over you all. I see to it you’re fed and clothed. Like a father, really.”
Carrie imagines jumping across the table, sinking her fingers into the roll of fat above his collar, and squeezing until his eyes bug out.
“Of course,” she says.
“What we’re doing here is an experiment,” he says, clicking into the practiced part of his speech. “An intentional community, if you’re familiar with that phrase. The people I work for believe that you people will ultimately be happier separate from the rest of us. The general public is happier with you separated from them. They feel safer. I think in time, you’ll come to feel safer as well, among your own kind. At some point, we were sold the idea that integration is an inherently American ideal. But what is that based on? Where’s the evidence? If you think about any group of people, they will naturally tend toward their own. That’s how you get your Chinatowns and your Koreatowns. Your Harlems and your Comptons. I think of Topaz Lake as a prototype. Resonant Town, version one point oh. Do you follow me, Miss Norris?”
“Chinatown doesn’t have armed guards at the gate,” she says.
His jaw tenses. “No, but there were structures that pushed people together.” He forces his palms against each other like he’s compressing a cartoonishly large sandwich. “Laws, economic conditions. Now, because of the idea that we should all be one big melting pot, such things no longer exist. The people I work for have been forced to be more proactive. Thinking outside the box.”
“You have literally boxed us in,” Carrie says.
“But have we hurt you?” he says, cloyingly sweet. “Haven’t you found here a wholeness that eluded you on the outside? A sense of true community?”
Carrie glares at him. She thinks about Public Day, before the shooting. The sense she had that everyone was in it together for a second, before it was shattered. She thinks of the night on the beach at Coney Island and the feeling of unity. She could never separate that night from that first kiss, but it seemed as if the kiss could have happened only that night, she and Miquel part of something bigger than themselves. Something large enough to draw them together. There were more people like them at Topaz Lake, but it didn’t feel bigger than that night on the beach.
“The thing you fail to understand is that these incidents make it harder for us to keep you safe,” he says, seeming truly hurt. “This morning, I got a report that a young man named—” He rifles through papers on his desk. “—Siu Zhang was repairing the inhibitor tower on the northwest fence when his harness broke and he fell to his death.” Warden Pitt overpronounces the name, saying it as See You. He looks at Carrie with mild inquisitiveness as her friend’s death registers. Siu, who sent the signal. Siu who volunteered, even though, like Miquel, he’d made his peace with life in the camp, found a girl he wouldn’t have met on the outside, a grad student from Wisconsin. Siu, who preferred Robert Fripp to Mick Ronson but played guitar like Ronson because he didn’t want to embarrass himself, who convinced Carrie that Easter was a better Patti Smith album than Horses, who put honey in his coffee and hot sauce on everything else.
“An accident, of course,” says Warden Pitt. If he has a gift, it’s his convincing belief in obvious lies. In the months Carrie’s been at Topaz Lake, Warden Pitt’s announced a dozen tragic accidents, always tagged with of course. “Think how unnecessary that is. Obviously my thoughts and prayers are with his friends and loved ones. There’s also the fact that death is off brand for what we’re doing here. It makes us look bad. Makes our experiment look like a failure.”
All Carrie can think is that this won’t be over until she kills Warden Pitt. Nothing else matters, not freedom, not Miquel. She will dream of his death the way she dreamed of meeting rock stars when she was a kid.
“I brought you in to offer you something,” he continues. “A show of good faith. You have a boyfriend, yes? Miquel Gray?” Carrie gives the faintest nod. “We generally don’t approve of premarital cohabitation. We’re not prudes by any means. But many people in our organization come from religious backgrounds, and they get a bit squeamish when it comes to this kind of thing. I’ve been looking at your work record and at Mister Gray’s work with the children. I’ve issued a special dispensation for the two of you. Mister Gray will be allowed to move into Hall H with you. One of the other residents has agreed to move into Mister Gray’s spot in Hall D, so everything is neat and tidy. He can pack his things today. Isn’t that nice?”
Pitt grins at Carrie, but there’s a nervous edge to his smile. He’s decided she’s a person on the fringe of insurgent groups within the camp, and he’s trying to buy her off with something she’s already secured for herself with the help of other prisoners and the sympathies of the occasional humane guard. What is it he hopes to get in return? Compliance? Carrie envisions the message Siu sent out into the Hive, moving like a great boomerang, gathering up help, a force of arms, and dragging it back here to land on Pitt’s desk. It’s been over a month, but maybe it’s taking that long to organize a proper response, summon an army to come tear down the fences around Topaz Lake. An answer to his hypocritical rhetoric. A reckoning for all the good he imagines he’s done.
Owen resents how cheap the phrase trial of the century has become. Google it and you get a hundred results. Ones from way back were trials related to major issues. The Scopes monkeys. Dreaded Scott. They decided the path of the country. But the phrase devolved into low-rent celebrity murder trials: roid-raged jocks past their expiration date, washed-up record producers, B-list television actors. By the time reporters affix the Powder Basin trial with of the century status, it doesn’t mean shit, except that the lowest tier of cable networks runs constant coverage. But this one meant something. Twenty-one men accused of lynching a family of Resonants, torching their home with the bodies inside. A crime that took years to come to light, covered up by the police and the town since it
happened.
Go there, the friend in his head says. On your own. Go there and see to it justice is done.
Owen looks around the table at what’s left of his team. They respect him more since he killed Darren. Or they’re more scared of him. It doesn’t matter. Either effect suits him.
“I have to go on a side trip,” he says. “A couple days. I’ll find you when I’m done. There’s something he needs me to do.”
If Darren were alive, he would have said something stupid, ruined the solemnity of the moment. And it is solemn. Because Owen’s not sure he’s coming back.
In the parking lot, they say their good-byes. Little Gail hops off Tabitha’s hand onto Owen’s shoulder, crosses it, and gives him a kiss on the cheek like butterfly wings. Marita yanks him into the black bone room for a split second. Don’t forget me, lover, she says, her skin like the coil of an oven burner against his. She pulls his head back by his hair and presses her face into his, not a kiss but an assault. She burns through his Hivebody, hot knife through butter, then lets him up again, breathless.
It takes two days to hitchhike to Gillette, where the trial is being held. There’s a room waiting for him at the Arrowhead Motel in a strip mall outside of town. In the room, there’s an envelope full of cash. His friend has physically been here, making preparations for him. Owen searches the room for traces: depressions in the carpet or wrinkles in the sheets. There’s nothing except the envelope.
The morning after he arrives, Owen tries to get into the courtroom for the trial, but there’s a queue. Family members and reporters get priority. Beyond that, there’s a lottery system for seats. Owen loses out the first two days but gets in on the third, when the lawyers present closing arguments. The air-conditioning in the courtroom is dead, and a collection of large, loud fans blow air hot as breath around the room. The lawyer for the prosecution is a black lady who looks like she has eaten exactly her full helping of shit from these people and wants no more. It takes a moment, but Owen realizes he recognizes her. She was sitting down the pew from him in the church, the one he didn’t feed to the null. He can’t be positive, but he feels sure of it. There’s something right about it, her being there at the beginning of his becoming, when he held back, and here now, when he is about to fully bloom. Owen likes her even though she has no vibration. This happens now and then, even to him. Affection for the cattle. Farmers must get it, too, but at the end of the day, they’re in the business of meat.
Kay Washington steps into the open space in front of the jury, sets her feet, and begins.
“A hundred fifteen years ago, outside Atlanta, Georgia, a black farmhand named Sam Hose was dragged out of his jail cell. He’d struck his employer, a white man, and gone on the run. It took the police ten days to find him, and in that time the papers whipped people into a frenzy, accusing Hose of rape, infanticide. When he was caught, excursion trains brought two thousand people to see him strung up, stripped, cut up, skinned alive, and burned. Souvenir hunters scrambled through the ashes and fought over his organs and his bones.
“Sixty years ago, in Money, Mississippi, three men dragged fourteen-year-old Emmett Till out of his grandparents’ house. A white woman in town said the boy had whistled at her. Turns out she was lying, but it didn’t matter. They beat on him and mutilated him before shooting him in the head and throwing his body in the river.
“Four years ago, in Powder Basin, Wyoming, twenty-one men gathered together in order to lynch Lucy Guthridge and her children, Sam, Paige, Jeb, and Melody. We owe it to the Guthridges to call this what it is, to use a hateful word we hoped we’d put to rest. You can call these men defendants, or assailants, or murderers. But when you talk about them as a group, you owe it to their victims to name them as the horrific assembly they were: a lynch mob.
“Sam was sixteen. Jeb was thirteen. Melody, eleven. Paige, ten. We know from the sworn testimony of Scott Lipscombe, one of the members of the lynch mob, that Sam and Paige were shot before they died. We know that all of the Guthridges were stabbed and bludgeoned. Spit on and kicked. We can’t be sure who was alive when the lynch mob barred the doors and set the Guthridge house on fire, standing on the lawn to watch as it burned to nothing. We can’t be sure how each of the children died. Only that they died. They were lynched for being different. With their deaths at the hands of these men, Lucy and Sam and Paige and Jeb and Melody Guthridge enter the ledger of names this country must never forget. Emmett Till. Sam Hose.
“Many men and women who died in a frenzy of racial violence never received justice. We were not far enough along in our moral development to condemn their killers. I like to think we are now. Finding this lynch mob guilty for the lives they’ve taken, holding them to account, will not settle our debts with the past. But we owe it to the Guthridges, and Emmett Till, and Sam Hose to find these killers guilty. We owe it to ourselves to say we have gotten better. We recoil in proper horror from what these men have done, and we cast them out of our society, which will no longer stand for this kind of blind violence. It falls to you to speak for the dead and for the living. To administer justice needed, if too late in coming. If men and women before you had been brave enough to do so, the Guthridge family would be alive. If you are brave enough, the next Guthridge family, the next Emmett Till or Sam Hose, won’t have to die at the craven hands of a lynch mob.”
She goes back to her seat, and the defense attorney rises. He begins with a small chuckle to himself. He looks like every upperclassman who used to beat the shit out of Owen in high school.
“My colleague Miss Washington,” he says, “who’s come to us all the way from New York to lend her expertise to the prosecution, is a lovely speech maker. It’s easy to get a jury riled up by invoking the injustices of the past. If these men were part of the loathsome tradition she cites, I would step across the aisle and join her in condemning them. Lynching is a horrific crime with no place in this country, in this century. It’s a relic of a past we’d do well to put far behind us.
“The trouble is, Miss Washington has scant evidence that these men are guilty of the crime she claims they’ve committed. Or that there was a crime at all. The prosecution’s case rests on the testimony of a man on trial for the murder of his own son. In a fit of paranoia, he kills his son while the boy sleeps rather than allow the possibility his son might be a Resonant. The next day, broken by shame and guilt, his mind in fragments, he concocts the story of a crime whose horror outshines the one he’s confessed to. He makes a movie in his head and casts it with these men, the only friends he has. He groups them in with him, makes them culpable. You see, he says, I’m not the only one who thinks the only way to deal with these new beings is to kill them. Everyone I know is as guilty as me.
“Miss Washington would like you to take him at his word.
“Not the word of the police chief who investigated the deaths of the Guthridge family and declared it an accident. Or the medical examiner who autopsied the family and found nothing to indicate foul play. Or the community members who, one after another, have lined up to speak to the character of these men. And not the men themselves, who Miss Washington has already decided are monsters of the lowest order.
“She would like you to listen to Scott Lipscombe. A child killer. She would like you to weigh his word heavier than that of the entire town of Powder Basin, to see unbridled hatred where there is only an accident, a crime where there is only tragedy. She would like you to believe Scott Lipscombe beyond any reasonable doubt and label these men monsters.
“A fire destroyed the lives of the Guthridge family. Do not compound that tragedy by destroying the lives of these innocent men.”
The jury retires to deliberate. A wing of the Arrowhead’s third floor is reserved for them. Owen sees bailiffs taking trays full of fast food up to their sequester. The next day, his name doesn’t come up and he can’t get into the courtroom, where the audience waits to see if the jury returns a verd
ict. He goes back to his motel, then across the parking lot to a bar called the Chariot Lounge, where he finds a seat by the window. He nurses a Sprite, writes in his notebook, and watches the front of the motel. At four o’clock, two vans pick up the jury and take them to the courtroom.
Owen walks up to the bartender, who’s been watching him warily, and orders a vodka soda. He worries the bartender will ask for ID, but it’s dead and the man shoves him his drink, a browning wedge of lime perched on its rim. Owen finishes it and another. As he orders a third, the prosecution lawyer, Miss Washington, comes into the bar, looking defeated. He watches her order a glass of white wine, which the bartender pours from a single-serve plastic bottle. She reaches into her purse and pulls out a book, one of those little paperbacks. Something science fiction-y. Cautiously, aware of the sound of his footsteps in the empty bar, he crosses to her, sits down on the stool beside her.
“Is it over?” he asks. She looks at him, startled. “The trial. I’ve been watching it. On television, mostly.”
She nods. “Not guilty on all counts,” she says. “The jury didn’t believe there was a crime.”
“They didn’t believe a crime happened, or they didn’t believe killing a Resonant is criminal?”
“No idea,” says Miss Washington. “I’m sure someone will interview one of them. Maybe we’ll get a hint of what they talked about in deliberation. But something like this, I can’t help thinking they couldn’t hold these men guilty without holding themselves guilty, too.”
“I don’t understand,” Owen says.
“Everyone in that town fucking knew what happened,” she says bitterly. “The cops and the ME and the wives and kids. They all knew, and they all shut up about it. We should’ve had every single one of them on trial. Not just the rednecks who held the knives and the bats.”