Requiem Opus
We walk in after a long night at El Patio Cantina and straightaway Elle tidies up the living room, gathers my scraps of Kate: stacks articles on the windowsill, slides pictures into yearbooks, moves annotated obituaries from the couch. I tell her there’s an easier way to clean; I warm up the fog machine. I hug and kiss to stop her destruction of my scattered palace. I grab the gas mask and fall on the couch and grin. Do you smell something toxic, baby? The wild beast bucks as I sprawl. The insects get to buzzing.
Soon Elle and I will move to a new living room and things will not be the same. She will be in charge of the décor and things will not be the same.
Take off the mask. Don’t be a child. Elle reaches behind me to get at scraps that have slipped between the cushions of the love seat. I rip them away. She gathers faster and raises her voice: It’s never about me. It’s always on some couch or about some story and it’s not really ever about me. She waves the paper when she says story. She has never asked about Kate but she knows enough to indict the scraps. I follow Elle around the living room and snatch up the loose papers. I put them in places she cannot easily reach—stuck in the frame of the mirror, folded over the handle of the saw, tossed behind the TV. She jumps and grabs at the mounted saw but comes down with a floppy leg ripped from a cardboard skeleton. She swings the leg, she punches, she reaches out to rake the skin of my face but I’m fully masked so I just back up and laugh. Baby. My pants are around my ankles. I have no shirt belt, no way to hold myself together. I trip—crash into the tile mask-first. Elle drops a handful of scraps, drops the cardboard femur, and slams the bathroom door. The crooked vigas that run the length of my ceiling are the character of this room, the long brown fingers of the hands that built it, the Gothic spine of the beast it has become. There’s a growl. The Barcalounger is upset without its family. The futon is loud with piss. The ripped skeleton screams. There’s static on TV. Goddamn, Kate. I don’t guess forgetting is the problem. I don’t guess you died because there was something you couldn’t remember. You are an inexplicable urge I will always have. Elle will become that longing too, the loss of something I can’t quit feeling. The bugs collide and the fog machine pumps glycol and the hanging handsaws squeal. I stand on the coffee table with handfuls of scraps and wad them and throw them everywhere at all the noise of the room but it doesn’t stop. I throw them into corners where I will never come across them again, and when I’m out of scraps, I still feel the need to flail so I begin to conduct. I’m on my toes and my hand is as high as I can reach and I’m slamming it down to make a beat of the noise and jerking it up again—Boom! Boom! Boom! The futon explodes into crescendos. The Barcalounger lingers in dense countermelody. The vigas wobble deep and drop. I cue the saws with my left hand for high-pitched tremolos, the mirror with my right hand to echo it all. Something shatters. Elle is out of the bathroom and throwing glass against the wall. I fling my wrist at her as if I’ve conducted what she’s done. It is unforgettable. Another glass hits the wall and becomes a thousand decibel shards. Elle and I are launching glasses and smashing up the walls. Scraps and shards. The symphony devolves into cacophonous regret—fades. In a moment there is only the sound of my mask-muffled breathing. Elle wipes a strand of damp hair from her face. We sit, very close to each other. The fog comes entirely. For one moment, there is no story but ours. Then she grabs a broom and I get to my knees with the dustpan. We sweep away the rubble.
THINGS MOST SURELY BELIEVED
In the Year of Our Lord 2011
You Fucking Dust Devil
I drop down into an arroyo thinking that may ease the tide of desert flying at my face, but down here any reduced wind is countered tenfold by the greater frequency and size of debris caught up in the storm, no longer just an infinite spray of sand but now also weeds and newspaper and plastic bags getting swept up and launched down the chute where I’m stuck because climbing banks in a sandstorm ain’t the same as stumbling down them and anyway I’m dragging along dead-drunk Old Man Sam. The sting of a New Mexico sandstorm finds every nook of your skin. You never knew you had so much skin or that it had the capacity to feel so much. It burns a little, an allover paper cut where the pain never drives to the core, a place you can at least own it, bury it in your gut. Sandstorm pain crawls all over just on the outside so it never feels like it belongs to you, the pain of all the dirt in the world and you got to be aware of it, wear it all because the pain knows settling inside you would be a waste: you are already dead there. Nothing can change that kind of numb so it just blows over and blows on. A lonely thing to be dragging Old Man Sam through the arroyo in a sandstorm. The whole scene is an embarrassment for us both except there’s no forgetting how every now and then Sam gets his feet planted under him and shoves me off and holds steady while yelling into the wind, I am not done being reformed by pain, you fucking dust devil! And this strikes me as the most hopeful thing I’ve heard in a while, the thing I’ll find myself often reciting under my breath when those proverbial tough times come calling once again. Finally upon my ears: honest-to-god poetry. But mostly the scene is graceless like so many other stumbles homeward launched from a barstool at El Patio. Sam is dead drunk again and I’m half dead drunk, dragging him home because he has promised in his drunkenness to finally give me a scrapbook from his stint working at the penitentiary in Santa Fe. He said he’d kept a lot of shit from those days because he had big plans to make that shit a book. Some weeks ago we were at El Patio drinking as always and he asked what I was working on these days because he’d heard a lot of us hanging around Mesilla were claiming to be writers and I said, Something about the last man executed by New Mexico. I mean the previous and the final. Before we quit executing. And Sam said, But we are the forever-killing kind. Then he nodded a bunch and slapped the bar to emphasize the profundity of the statement and said, But you mean that shitbag Terry Clark? I used to always take my lunch-break nap on his lethal-injection table.
Art
Nineteen eighty-seven. The Penitentiary of New Mexico in Santa Fe. Terry Clark sits in his cell tracing the outline of his small plastic dinner plate onto a blank piece of paper. He is careful. Meticulous. He has time. He has only just been sentenced to death. These days executions are about patience. He finishes tracing and sets the plate beneath the small grate in the door through which his dinner was passed an hour ago. He ponders. In the top left portion of the circle he draws a bird. A dove that is rudimentary—strangely impressionistic. Terry has a steady hand and despite the amateur technique his bird is confident. He knows animals—was a ranch hand down by Roswell before this mess. He moves to the center of the circle. Stops. Examines his hands. Draws. Terry’s is the hand on bottom, palm up, fingers outstretched, a small dark attempt at a shadow on the slightly deformed outline of the back side. God’s is the hand on top, reaching down, fingers outstretched, the outline steady but marred by a giant black attempt at a shadow on the palm. Terry holds the drawing at arm’s length. Stares hard for a long time. Grabs his Bible and, using it as a straightedge, slowly engulfs the picture in a geometrically perfect crucifix and Star of David. He examines the finished product. The drawing is odd the way any attempt to capture the Holy Spirit must be odd—naïve or ignorant. Terry prints his name and the date, small in the bottom right corner, and slides the finished art into his Bible. He will show it off the next time the prison chaplain, Brother Maxey, comes to visit. Lord, I’ve been changed. Angels in heaven done sign my name. With the holy ghost in me now, those angels done sign my name.
Blow to the Head
At trial Terry Clark blamed it all on a blow to the head, a ranch-hand injury from a few weeks before the crime. Plus post-traumatic stress from his time in Vietnam. Back then they weren’t always calling it a disorder. Just stress. Terry claimed he reached the breaking point when, lowered by helicopter onto a refugee boat, he held a dying Vietnamese girl in his arms while fighting off pirates. Then, years later, working as a carpenter at the ranch in Roswell, a blow to the hea
d. Al Maxey, despite having become good friends with Terry while ministering to him on death row, doesn’t hesitate to dismiss these claims: Terry never saw combat.
Maxey knows combat. He was a Black Beret in Vietnam. A door gunner in a Navy helicopter. The Gulf of Tonkin. Mekong Delta. The fighting HAL-3 Seawolves. Imagine Apocalypse Now. The sky of choppers. The river battles and big explosions. The strobe of war and the dirty faces of boys in its glow, their expressions melting or hardening or not changing one iota after making another kill. This was Petty Officer Maxey. He saw extensive combat and suffered more than a few blows to the head. But he became a preacher in the Church of Christ, the very church in which I was raised, the big aluminum warehouse of a chapel on Cuba Avenue in Alamogordo. My preacher: Brother Maxey, tall and lanky and always with those colorful ties, that thick mustache, hanging on to the pulpit Wednesday nights and twice on Sundays and, once in a while, working as a prison chaplain, ministering on death row, befriending a killer the papers spent fifteen years calling the most hated man in New Mexico.
Brother Maxey is adamant that the lingering fog of war had nothing to do with it. Or, at least not the killing part: What really got Terry was the ports. The Philippines. Japan. Hong Kong. Two or three days of pure debauchery. Not like anything you could imagine. Sexually and drinking and everything. Young girls. Those clubs in the Philippines and every sailor with a wad of cash burning a hole in his pocket. Brother Maxey says it matter-of-factly: Terry got hooked on little girls.
Brother Maxey and Terry were on the same WestPac tours in the Navy during Vietnam. They figured this out shooting the shit through the food slot in the door of the cell, a murderer and his state-sanctioned chaplain finding common ground in their past as servicemen in the state-sanctioned killing corporation. Imagine showing up at the cages where we house the worst of our kind and finding someone with so many of the same experiences as you, another man who as a boy walked the same ships and ran the same drills and wore the same clothes and visited all the same wild ports along with you and tens of thousands of other American sailors. We were all headed down the same road, Brother Maxey says. But I guess I pulled out of it.
That nod toward a history of sin lingers in the air of the office at the warehouse chapel where we’re chatting. Usually confessions flow in the other direction. I want to ask Brother Maxey to describe in further detail all of his transgressions but I’ll never do that, partly because I suspect he will only evangelize, witness only to get me spilling my sins, and partly because the older I get the less I believe in sin like he taught it to me. We humans are obliged to be good and fair to each other, generous even, but some otherworldly hellfire as punishment for not apologizing to a carpenter who was crucified two millennia ago, that’s a notion that increasingly strikes me as preposterous. Plus, as a writer, the Greatest Story Ever Told! sounds like nothing more than a challenge.
The silence breaks when Brother Maxey starts in on the story about baptizing Terry on death row back in 1987. He was washed of sin. No longer blamed the head injury. Took responsibility and repented. Accepted Jesus as his Lord and Savior. Brother Maxey believes he helped the killer save his soul, first with baptism and then through acceptance of just punishment. But then that also means Brother Maxey helped to kill a friend.
I’ve known Brother Maxey since almost before I can remember, sat through hundreds if not thousands of his sermons, dropped tithes from my paper-route money into his collection baskets, played guitar with his son in a hard-core-as-Jesus-gets Christian punk band. Brother Maxey was there when I gave my first sermon before I could even see over the pulpit, had to stand on a crate and even then pushed myself up on the pulpit to loom higher over the congregation, on tiptoes hollering about hellfire and most of my weight on my arms so I started shaking, which I’m sure was the most effective part of the sermon. I spent a lot of Sunday mornings envying Brother Maxey, feeling called to the pulpit myself, knowing I could probably work the congregation up into a frenzy as Brother Maxey never did. I was born into blood that flowed through preachers way back and in all the tributaries. There’s hardly been a Church of Christ west of the Mississippi since 1850 that didn’t have a Wheeler or an Oliver or some other farther-flung branch of my family tree banging on the pulpit at one time or another. This seemed for many years just the way things would go: I’d grow into another branch banging on the pulpit. But then I ate all the psychedelics and read a few books other than the Bible and went off to college in California, where my Granddaddy said there was nothing but fruits and nuts. When I came back to New Mexico, it was with the same blood but a different brain. This is the first time I’ve entered the warehouse chapel and visited Brother Maxey in years. He must know I’ve given up the faith, that I’m only here because I’ve experienced some great awakening and have begun to question if it was really all that glorious a decade ago when our congregation sat in the hard pews of the warehouse and sang “Amazing Grace” in honor of Terry Clark just after he was executed.
An Account of Jailhouse Immersion
I really didn’t want to put him in a garbage can so I rigged up a laundry cart with a large plastic bag. The cart was plenty big enough to fit in. We placed the bag inside and filled it with water. He had a towel to dry off with.
You could see he was excited. I was joyful too.
The cart looked full enough. It was leaking here and there, but it didn’t matter. Just as long as it does the job, I said to myself. He climbed into the cart. Then I said I baptize you for the remission of sins (as I started putting him under) in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. He went under, but his knee-caps were sticking out of the water—I tried to push them down but to no avail. I pulled him up and helped him out of the laundry cart. He said Well, did it work? Of course my answer was No. I could see the disappointment written all over his face. He said Well, I guess we will have to try again tomorrow. I saw the hurt in him. I didn’t want to let him down. I suggested we get one of those 50 gallon garbage cans and wash it out. And the excitement was back. We washed a can—filled it with water. The water got past the halfway mark and I said: That should be more than enough. He said No. Go higher. I want to be sure.
He climbed into the can and as soon as he got in, the water overflowed. I said I now baptize you for the remission of sins—in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. He went down into the can, and yes, the water was flowing over! This time his back was sticking out. I pushed down on it but it did not move. I pushed down much harder and, yes, he went down fully into the water and was covered completely. Praise the Lord! I started pulling on him so he would come up. He came up and stood and asked Well, did it work? This time I was happy to say Yes! Welcome to the Lord’s church, brother. I gave him a hug before he even dried off. He was so happy. You should have seen his face! As we were mopping I said Look at all these sins all over the place! Come on, let’s get ’em all mopped up and dump ’em down the drain!
Sane and Ready for Heaven
November 5, 2001. The Penitentiary of New Mexico in Santa Fe. Dinnertime. This is not quite Terry’s last meal but it is the one where he exercises these last freedoms: fried jumbo shrimp, fried okra, french fries, vanilla ice cream and peach cobbler. He has been on death row for fifteen years and still has years more of appeals but has volunteered to go ahead and get the poison in his veins tomorrow night. He has found Jesus. He believes in a thing called grace. When his lawyers and groups such as Amnesty International tried to stop the execution on his behalf, claiming he was mentally unstable—suicidal—Terry wrote to the judge, wrote to the state’s Supreme Court, insisted he was sane and ready for heaven.
At his sentencing all those years ago he’d flung a kind of conundrum at the jury: If you come back with a verdict of death, then I’ll just have to live with that. But now he will live with death for only twenty-four hours more. He will have breakfast tomorrow morning, technically his last meal, but it will be the standard prison fare: soggy eggs and potatoes and
green chili. He will decline lunch and die on a mostly empty stomach at 7:12 p.m., the first man executed by New Mexico in nearly forty-two years. With his not-quite-last meal Terry gets two packs of Camel cigarettes from the warden, who often lets him smoke despite the prison’s ban on tobacco. Terry is a good guy these days, all the prison staff often said to one another.
This shrimp isn’t bad for prison food, Terry says. He shares the symbolic supper with Brother Maxey, who chuckles often as they eat. Though the moment is grave, it is always cause for celebration when a man repents. And here is one willing to repent to the death, a sincerity the likes of which most preachers never see. Brother Maxey laughs with only his face and even then just his mouth and even then there’s that mustache hiding his lips, the same long push broom he’s cultivated since his days in the Navy.
I wasn’t sure I even wanted a last meal.
Well, I’m glad you got the shrimp.
I knew I’d break down and get the peach cobbler, I guess.
The concrete death-house cell is small. The meal is large. The quiet loud as Terry scrapes around with his plasticware. Brother Maxey waits for Terry to speak. And waits. And then: The shrimp don’t seem important as spending the time with you in study and prayer. Terry works up the nerve to ask if the congregation down in Alamogordo will sing “Amazing Grace” for him once he’s gone. Brother Maxey can think of no better tribute. They gather the food back into the serving dishes.
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