The Program

by Stephen White

  The phone company doesn’t tell you that about 800 numbers.

  Ron instructed me not to tell old friends where I was, of course. So I didn’t, even in my fantasies. In my imaginary calls I would tell my old friends that I wasn’t in the South anymore and that it was pretty where I was living. In the calls that I fantasized some of my friends would play twenty questions trying to tease the location out of me, and others would act as though it was the last information they might ever want to learn.

  A few wouldn’t even ask my new name.

  • • •

  I DECIDED TO make an exception to Ron’s caution about calling old friends. I made the exception, I told myself, because of Khalid.

  Yes, Khalid. You’ll see soon.

  The first call I made from my present to my past was from a pay phone in the lobby of the Boulderado Hotel, using a phone card I’d purchased at the Total station on Twenty-eighth Street where I got gas. I blocked caller ID and called my old friend Andrea Archer in Sarasota. To say she was surprised to hear my voice was an understatement. She asked me where I was almost immediately, and then she apologized profusely when I told her I wasn’t allowed to reveal my location. She wanted me to divulge my new name two minutes further into the conversation. I told her my name was Peyton. And she made me laugh as she wanted to know, “How the hell did you come up with that name?”

  “Peyton Place,” I admitted.

  She howled. “You despised Peyton Place.”

  I hadn’t told her my last name. If I had, she would have gotten a kick out of the fact that I’d chosen it because of how much I detested Connie Francis. Andrea had always mixed her up with Anita Bryant.

  I said, “The witness protection people said to pick a name that no one could tie to me. So I picked two names that I hated.”

  “If I did that,” she said without hesitating as long as it takes a hummingbird to flap its wings, “my name would be Menstruate Pantyhose. I hear something else in your voice, though, don’t I?”

  “I wanted to use Roberts as a last name. They wouldn’t let me. Too obvious, they said.”

  “You’re too sentimental. You know that?”

  From Andrea I knew it wasn’t a criticism. I said, “He was the sentimental one, not me. That’s what’s ironic.”

  “You know what Robert’s doing right now, don’t you? He’s probably sitting around in heaven, enjoying the view, pointing out all this irony to his new cronies. You know he’s holding court up there.”

  Andrea could always make me laugh, and she could usually make me cry. I knew she was right; Robert was certainly holding court up there. But I spent more time wondering if he’d found someone new in heaven than I did wondering about his relationships with his new angel cronies. As much as he loved me, I always felt that I was replaceable.

  Me, yes. Landon, never.

  He could never replace Landon. I liked to think I was part of her package. It gave me solace.

  When we hung up, I told myself that it had been okay to call Andrea. The next time I spoke with her I’d deal with Khalid.

  THE SECOND TIME I called Andrea from Boulder I did it from my home. The phone number was blocked to caller ID, and I used a convenience-store phone card to place the call so it wouldn’t show up on my bill. Andrea was thrilled to hear from me again, and the sound of her voice soothed me like a scalp massage from Robert, but the conversation quickly developed into something that left me feeling as though I were trying to swallow chicken bones.

  Khalid. Here he comes.

  The conversation started off in a manner that would’ve surprised me from almost anyone else I knew, but not from Andrea. She wanted to know if I’d taken her advice from the previous conversation and consulted a nutritionist yet. “A real one,” she elaborated. “One who knows something about herbs.”

  “Herbs?”

  “You know, an herbalist? Because I’ve been reading this stuff that I got from a guy who lives up in Winston-Salem—you’re not there, are you? That would be a stitch. And he’s not only a nutritionist but he’s also an herbalist, and by the way, he’s willing to do a consultation over the phone. I mean it, he’d do both of us at the same time, a conference call for the same fee; the man is not into the money at all. He’d actually like to set up a foundation, if you can believe it. So that this information is available to everybody. And from what I’ve read already, I’ve got to tell you that the orange juice you drink every morning? Bad. Got to go. Wrong way to start your day. And I think we’re eating the wrong fish and we need to trade in some of the cooked vegetables for more raw vegetables and soybeans. Raw cauliflower especially. I don’t pretend to get it. But that’s easy enough, right? Cauliflower? Who’d have guessed?

  “The main thing is, we have to start with a cleansing fast. That comes first. And massages with essential oils. But only the right ones. Apparently the body can’t accept some of the essential oils until your diet is balanced, the same way we can’t digest some of the things we need until our diet is balanced. Makes sense, right? But the main thing, first, is that orange juice. Has to go, okay? Do you have a fax machine? This material I have is only about nine pages; I’m sure you’ll be as excited as I am when you read it.”

  Andrea didn’t exhale at the end of her speech. But I did it for her. “No fax on my end, Andrea. Sorry. I’d have to give you a number, and I’m not allowed to do that.” With some pride, I announced, “Hey, I got a credit card in my new name today, Andrea. I’m official.”

  What she said in response took a lot of words but basically amounted to, “That’s nice.” Andrea wasn’t usually lacking in the empathy department, but I assumed she was still recovering either from my tepid response to her Klaxon call for me to examine my nutritional well-being or from my refusal to trust her with a phone number. Regardless, I was beginning to accept the reality that the daily vexations that are inherent in not having an identity are hard to understand until you haven’t had one.

  It was her next sentence that started my problem with the chicken bones. “Remember Khalid Granger?” she said.

  “Of course,” I responded, feeling the first sharp edge of something catch on my epiglottis. Asking me if I remember Khalid Granger was like asking me if I remembered my father. She knew that.

  But she’d brought him up, I hadn’t.

  “Scuttlebutt around the courthouse is that the decision on his final appeal is due this week.”

  “And?” It was all I could manage to say. Andrea’s forced nonchalance on the subject of Khalid Granger was not contagious. She’d always been totally comfortable with what happened to him. What we did to him.

  She said, “If he loses the appeal—or when he loses the appeal—the judge will probably set a date for his execution.”

  I cleared my throat and asked, “Commutation?”

  “Not likely. Not in this state. Not with this governor. Not in this environment. Not given who the victims were.”

  She said, “Are you ready to have it behind you?” The words didn’t surprise me as much as the inflection did. I didn’t think that her tone was begging me to answer affirmatively.

  The moment she mentioned Khalid, I’d carried the phone to the kitchen, rushed to the sink, and poured a glass of water from the tap. One of my new neighbors had informed me that the local water came from a glacier near the Continental Divide. I remembered that information as I sipped, momentarily wondering how it got from there to here. Then I replied, “I guess.”

  “What’s wrong? You sound funny.”

  Andrea could always tell. “I think I’m coming down with something,” I lied. “The climate’s so different here.”

  I used to be a truthful person. Now the lies sprouted from my tongue like tulips in the spring.

  Andrea said, “The herbalist will help. You’re not eating right. We both know it, babe. You’re under stress, and we know that stress is not your best thing. What kind of different is the climate?”

  A KILLER WHALE

  This one’
s been submerged for a long time. When I talk to Andrea, I always feel the motion of the water as this huge creature slithers deep below the surface, but I rarely catch sight of its dark flesh or its white underbelly. But she usually doesn’t mention him to me. I’m grateful for that.

  Khalid Granger is the whale.

  Back then? He was a twenty-seven-year-old black man living north of Sarasota, Florida.

  Me?

  Back then? I was a twenty-seven-year-old white prosecutor living in the same county as Khalid Granger.

  For some amount of time he and I walked the same streets, breathed the same air, shared the same birth year and even the same month. But socially, racially, and economically Khalid and I never really even lived on the same planet.

  So what brought us together?

  Khalid and I collided over the bodies of an elderly vacationing Mennonite couple from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, who were shot to death during the aftermath of a gas station robbery that couldn’t have gone worse even had the perpetrator meticulously planned it to be an unmitigated disaster.

  The details of the crime start out mundane, become almost comical, and end in abject tragedy.

  It goes like this:

  A solitary black man wearing a ski mask approached the counter of a convenience store on Highway 41 just north of Sarasota, raised a handgun, pointed it at the store’s clerk, and demanded money. The clerk, a nineteen-year-old woman named JoBeth Reynolds who had a psychiatric history longer than Khalid Granger’s criminal record, took one short look at the robber’s handgun and fainted flat to the floor. JoBeth busted her head on the terrazzo as she completed her fall, and she stayed unconscious for the duration.

  Her participation in the robbery was officially over.

  The robber then took a single shot at the security camera that was suspended from the ceiling about six feet behind the counter and actually hit it. Square in the lens. A single shot.

  Lordy.

  The videotape record of the event was officially over.

  My account of what happened after the onset of JoBeth’s unconsciousness and after the camera’s demise is a necessary mixture of police supposition and forensic science, some parts of the story heavier on the supposition, some parts more reliant on the science.

  The police surmise that the robber was unable to operate the cash register without the assistance of JoBeth, the unconscious clerk. And they decided that the robber wasn’t a particularly patient man. They reached this conclusion because the method that the suspect chose to open the cash drawer was to lift the whole big Casio machine off the counter and drop it on the floor in front of the candy display. A whole mess of gum and Life Savers came down with it.

  The method was inelegant, but it was reasonably effective, though dents on the machine indicate that it took at least two tosses before the cash drawer popped. Loose coins spread as far as twenty-six feet from the cash register. Two quarters were found actually touching each other beneath the toe-kick on the soft-drink dispenser at the back of the store. What are the odds of that, do you think?

  The bills from the cash drawer subsequently all disappeared from the scene.

  While the robber was on his hands and knees scooping up the bills, he made a serious error in judgment: He turned his back to the front door.

  Enter the elderly Mennonite couple from Lititz, a small town in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The husband held the door for his wife, who stepped into the store first and was likely immediately distracted by the site of the cash register upside down on the floor and the young black man in the ski mask scurrying around it on all fours hustling up money.

  The lead detective on the case, a man named Mickey Redondo, theorized that the elderly Mennonite lady’s next move was to step on a roll of dimes—though his partner Jack Tarpin was a proponent of the stepped-on-a-roll-of-Life Savers theory—whereupon she immediately did a header. Postmortem examination showed that her right wrist had been broken badly in the fall, as had her right hip.

  As she fell, and perhaps screamed, the robber heard the commotion behind him and, probably in panic, he came up firing.

  The first shot caught the elderly Mennonite gentleman in the thick of the throat, slightly off center, barely missing his Adam’s apple but definitely decimating his carotid artery.

  The blood spray was profuse.

  The second shot flew out the still-open door of the store and was ultimately recovered from behind the display on the gallons meter of the premium gas pump outside the convenience store.

  The third and fourth shots that the robber—now the murderer—fired entered the supine body of the Mennonite lady. She died quickly from her chest wounds.

  THE LOCAL POLICE department was on the case in a flash. The only witness to the aftermath of the robbery and the two homicides was a man who had been pulling into the parking lot of the convenience store to buy gas and who reported seeing a solitary black man walking quickly from the scene, heading north. The man who witnessed the black man leaving the store was also the person who discovered the two dead bodies and the unconscious clerk behind the counter. Given the scene he stumbled on inside the store, the man was a frantic wreck and not the most reliable of witnesses by the time the police arrived.

  Enter Khalid Granger, who fit the general description given by the witness at the scene. The witness had reported that the man he had spotted leaving the parking area of the convenience store wasn’t wearing a mask. He was a solitary black youth, not a teenager, but not too old, either. As I said earlier, Khalid was twenty-seven years old at the time of his arrest. The witness remembered that the suspect sported a pencil-thin mustache, and so did Khalid. And the witness estimated the size of the suspect at five-ten, one eighty or so. Khalid stood five-eleven and weighed in at an intimidating one ninety-five. Both men were wearing baggy pants slung low on their hips.

  Khalid was walking on the sidewalk about three and a half blocks from the crime scene when patrol officers who were scouring the nearby streets for any signs of the suspect stopped him and questioned him about the crime that had just occurred at the convenience store. Khalid denied any knowledge but was subsequently detained for further questioning. The probable cause for his detention was that his appearance matched the physical description given by the witness. In addition, the officer’s report noted that Khalid was discovered in the vicinity of the crime scene.

  In law enforcement, “vicinity” is a notoriously elastic concept. Almost as elastic as “probable cause.”

  On Khalid’s person the officers discovered one hundred and forty-three dollars in small bills rolled tightly and bound by two rubber bands. The roll was comprised of two twenties, six tens, seven fives, and eight singles. The amount closely matched the estimated proceeds from the convenience-store robbery, which was later determined to be one hundred and thirty-six dollars. Khalid’s wad had been crammed into the top of his left boot.

  After further questioning, Khalid was arrested and ultimately charged with armed robbery and with the murder of the Pennsylvania tourists.

  To make a long story shorter than it deserves to be, I helped convict Khalid Granger of the two murders, and I assisted in getting him sentenced to die in the infamous Florida electric chair for his crimes.

  But even before that day—the day he was sentenced—Khalid Granger had become one of my killer whales.

  Now he was one of the oldest whales in that pod.

  ANDREA ASKED, “DO you want to know when the decision on the appeal comes down? I’ll let you know.”

  “On Khalid?” For some reason I’d never called him “Granger.” To my memory, not once. Maybe in court I’d referred to him as Mr. Granger. To me, he’d always been Khalid.

  “Yes, on Khalid.”

  “No, I don’t think so. Maybe I’ll call you and see … you know, what… I don’t know.”

  “I can leave you a message somewhere. Let you know if a date’s been set for the execution.”

  “That’s not necessary,
Andrea. I’ll keep an eye on the news from Florida. USA Today likes to cover those things. I like talking to you. You know I’ll be back in touch, soon.”

  “What about the conference call with the herbalist? Can we do that? I really want to do that.”

  “I have to talk with somebody to make sure that’s okay. See how to set it up from my end. Security, you know?”

  “Hey, honey, I’ve been yakking so much about myself, I haven’t even asked. How’s your little baby?”

  “Not little. But she’s fine, Andrea. She misses her daddy. But all in all she’s taken all that’s happened and all the moving more in stride than I have. Her defenses are better.”

  “She still doing the same stuff? Soccer and spelling? No interest in boys, yet, I hope.”

  “Not that I’ve noticed, which is fine. I’m not ready for that. That was going to be Robert’s department. But yes, she’s still in love with soccer and spelling. She still studies her spelling lists all the time. All the time. And her room looks like a shrine to Mia Hamm and Briana Scurry.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind.”

  Andrea was quiet for a moment on the other end of the line. Then she brought tears to my eyes by asking, simply, “You really miss him, don’t you?”

  I had to swallow and squeeze my eyes shut before I could speak. “I wish the pain would start to ease. Everybody told me that if I cried enough and talked enough and enough time passed that the pain would start to ease. I don’t know why it hasn’t been true, yet. I still reach for him in the middle of the night, and I shock myself wide-awake when I realize that the sheets are cold on his side of the bed. I pick up the phone to call him sometimes when I’m feeling lonely at work. I dream about him sometimes at night, and I fantasize during the daytime that he’ll be waiting for me at home to rub my neck and give me advice.”