by Paul Griffin
“Your Honor?” he says. Mack’s lawyer tries to hush him, but Mack says, “I did it. I killed him.”
The judge takes off her glasses. She nods to Mack’s lawyer. “Is your client on medication, legal or otherwise?”
“I don’t do drugs, ma’am. I don’t drink either. I know what I’m saying, and I’m saying what I mean. I’m guilty. I don’t want a plea deal either. I want to pay in full. He murdered my dog, I murdered him, eye for an eye, like that. He paid his due. What’s mine?”
The judge gets mad and calls the district attorney and Mack’s lawyer to the bench and gives them an earful.
Mack calls to the judge, “I want fast-track sentencing. That’s in my rights. Give me fast-track.”
I turn to Vic. “Why is he doing this?”
“Shh now,” Vic says. “Easy, Céce. Deep breath.”
“Why isn’t he fighting this? Larry murdered Boo. All the newspapers said it: mitigating circumstances. I don’t, he’s, it’s like he wants to go to prison.”
A security guard tells me to quiet down, but mine is just one of many pleading voices.
I turn to my mother. “We could get him a lawyer and help put together an explanation for why he lost it. I know everything about him. I could help him with his case. He needs me, Ma. I can’t desert him. I swore—”
“I demand fast-track,” Mack yells.
The judge writes something in her file and waves her other hand without looking at Mack, and the bailiffs sweep Mack away.
(Five days later, Monday, July 27, late morning of the forty-sixth day . . .)
He still hasn’t called me.
We’re downtown again, this time for Mack’s hearing. This place is a lot different from last week’s mahogany-paneled chamber. It’s this small shabby room with plastic chairs. No dais this time. Just a wobbly, chipped Formica folding table. This dude slouches behind the table. Cruddy shoes, no jacket or tie. Ring around the collar. No way he shaved today. He’s been texting for fifteen minutes solid. His fingers are flying, but otherwise he’s emotionless.
Mack’s father is here. He’s nodding but not really listening as Mack’s court-appointed lawyer whispers to him. Mr. Morse keeps checking his watch and hissing, “Shit. Be late again.” I tried to say hello before, but he doesn’t remember me now that he’s sober, or hungover.
This isn’t the trial. There won’t even be a trial, because Mack pled guilty. His sentence won’t come down for months, but today Mack gets to talk about what happened and more importantly, to offer his genuine remorse. That is, if he talks.
The guy behind the table isn’t a judge. He’s a court-appointed interviewer. Based on what Mack does or doesn’t say, the interviewer will make a recommendation to a judge who will decide the final sentence. The interviewer also has discretion to offer an appeal to the district attorney’s office, if he thinks the DA’s penalty recommendation is too severe.
It’s all too confusing. Why won’t they just let me tell everybody about the real Mack? The one who gives away his money to strangers and risks his life to save abused dogs. The one who saves people. The one who loves me.
The one who killed a man?
I try not to imagine it. What his face looked like as he swung the bat at Larry’s head. Would I have recognized him? How could that be Mack Morse?
They bring him in. He won’t look at me or Ma or Vic. He’s in a faded brown jumper, hands cuffed behind his back. He knows I’m here. When he came in, he did a double take on me before he dropped his head.
“Mack,” I say, but the guard or whoever tells me, nicely, that I can’t do that.
The interviewer dude keeps right on texting without any acknowledgment that Mack is sitting in front of him. He finishes his text and eyes Mack without a word for a long time. He flips open Mack’s file and takes another long time to study it. Then he closes the folder quickly, takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. “So you pled guilty straightaway, without even waiting for a deal offer. What’s up with that?”
“I did what they said, the exact way they said it,” Mack says. “Why waste everybody’s time on jury duty? Lying about big stuff, like murder or love? It makes me sick. You do what you do, and as you reap you must pay for it in full. The Bible says that.”
But what about us? What about what we did? What we had. What we made together. Doesn’t he owe it to us to fight for it? To fight for me? Or was our love a lie, then?
“The Bible also talks about forgiveness,” the interviewer says.
“I must’ve skipped over that part.”
The guy nods and nods, and then he sighs. “Are you sorry for what you did?”
“Honest, mister? I’m not all that sorry. You didn’t know Larry. He was evil. Everybody’s playing it up like he was some sort of war hero, but my lawyer told me he had a dishonorable discharge—”
“We’re not talking about the victim here. We’re talking about you.”
“Okay, do I wish I didn’t do it? Yeah, I wish, but wishing don’t mean I’m sorry. Wishing don’t mean anything. It’s done, and there’s no going back.” He sounds so different. Rougher. Harder accent. “What? You want me to lie, tell you I’m sorry?”
“I want you to be sorry.” The dude pulls his pen and writes in his file. “I have to tell you, at first I thought that the ADA’s petition that you be treated as an adult was extreme, but now, seeing you, I think you’re well aware of what you did, and I think you think you were justified in doing it. You are aware you’re being treated as an adult?”
“I been treated like a goddamned adult since I’m seven years old,” Mack mutters.
“You have something to say?” the interviewer says. “Speak up.”
“God-forsaken,” Mack says even more quietly and to himself.
“Tell me what you just said.”
“Fuck you, man. Just make your report and let me be on my way.”
“You’re leaving me no wiggle room here, son. I have no choice but to concur with the ADA’s recommendation. Unless the judge sees something in you that I don’t, I think you’re looking at a long haul. I mean, given the heinous nature of this crime, your prior record, the fact you skipped out on probation? I bet the judge gives you fifteen to twenty-five, to life.”
“What does that even mean?” I whisper to Vic.
“Shh,” Vic says. He pats my hand gently, but his eyes are hard on Mack.
The interviewer explains to Mack that he’ll be at a juvenile detention center until he turns eighteen, then he’ll be remanded to an adult facility for a long time after that. Mack seems to know all that already. He shrugs. “We done?”
Two guards lead him out. His shackles clink.
“Mack? Mack. Mack, please.” I’m screaming, “Look at me. Look at me,” but he won’t. He won’t look at me.
(Monday, July 27, afternoon)
MACK:
Can’t look into her eyes. Not hers, her mom’s, Vic’s. Won’t. I’m dead now. The dead shouldn’t look on the living.
Maybe just a peek. One last stolen look. She came dressed so nice. She probably thought they would give her a chance to speak for me.
She’s wearing that junky stickpin.
I make myself look away. If I lock eyes with her, she’ll have hope. She can’t have hope here. Only one way this one’s going.
“We done?” I say to my interviewer.
“You’re done, yeah.”
“Thank you for your time,” I say, and the interviewer looks at me like I got three eyes.
They march me out.
Last night I had this weird thing, kind of a prayer I couldn’t stop thinking. I prayed my mom would be here. If she knew about it, the hearing, I believe she would have come. I do. I don’t know what she would have done if she was here. But it would’ve been nice to see her.
The old man is here, though. My lawyer got hold of him. Figured maybe the interviewer would show some mercy, me being Pop’s only child and such. But with the old man all in his dirty jeans and he
didn’t bother to wear shirtsleeves, all them tats on his arms, I don’t know what my lawyer was thinking, bringing him into the building. The guards escort us out together into a side hall and ask us if we want to say good-bye. We both shrug. They take us to a holding cell.
“Landlord tossed me from the building,” the old man says. “I had to find me a new job too. Thanks a whole bunch, Cario. Best I could get is casual-status humpin’ at them damn Roadway docks.”
“Sorry to hear that.” I am too. That was a sweet little janitor gig he had there. Near-free rent in that basement apartment, decent pay, nobody over his shoulder.
“Pulling the overnight in them trailers? Like a hundrit twenty, hundrit thirty degrees in there. Gonna be at least three, four years before I got enough seniority to get me a spot on a forklift. I’m fifty-one years old.”
“I know.”
“The hell was you thinking?”
“I wasn’t.”
“Damn right you wasn’t. Damn right.” He’d spit if wasn’t nobody watching, but the guards are just a little ways off. “Thing is, boy? I think that dude back there is right. You ain’t look too sorry to me.”
I don’t say anything. I’m sorry now all right. Being stuck in this here cage with this idiot, can’t see a world outside of himself. His problems, huh? I’d damn near kill again to get me a spot working a truck or any other damned thing, just to get outside. I got nothing in my life but cages and idiots since last week, and how many more cages and idiots to come. Never mind what I told the interviewer, now I’m starting to feel sorry all right. Sorry about every damned thing.
Can’t believe I’ll never see her again. How can that be? How could I do that to her? To them.
Boo.
I’ll never again have a dog at my side. I’ll never again know the give and take of the purest friendship.
“Y’all are on your own now,” the old man says. “Don’t expect me to come visiting you. I got to work. Damn, dude. Hell is wrong with you?”
Where do you start with that one? You don’t. You eat it. “My box,” I say.
“Fuck you mumblin’ about now?”
“The Bible box. The one Moms left me. I want you to have it.”
“Now what all would I want with a fake wood box?”
“I owe you, man. You took me around with you, you know?”
“And right about now I’m damn sorry I did too.”
“The box. It’s under my cot. Check it out.”
“Damn, I’m mad,” he says.
“I know,” I say. “You ought to be.”
“You don’t be telling me what I ought and ought not be doing, hear? You? Telling me? I wouldn’t let you do my goddamn laundry for fear you’d—”
“For fear I’d fuck it up, I know, you done told me how many goddamn times?”
He grabs my shirt. I put up my hands to block him, but he gets a backhand in there before the guards pull him off. He says, “I’m all right. I’m all right.” Straightens his greasy shirt. Stares me down long and hard, his eyes wet and angry. “You gonna have a hard time in there.”
“I expect so.”
“Damn. Damn. Shit.” I never noticed it before: He’s pinching the inside of his wrist. “I tried, boy. I tried.”
“I know you did.”
“I just couldn’t get it together, you know? I tried so hard.”
“It’s all right, man.”
“I don’t get it, boy. Why didn’t you hold out for a plea?” I shrug.
“Maybe I’ll come by on y’all’s birthday,” he says.
“You don’t got to.”
“You don’t want me to?”
“I hate birthdays,” I say.
He nods at me for a time, and then that turns to head shaking, and then he goes.
In the city pound, the mutts like me? The wild ones that bite? They put them down. I used to think that was flat wrong. That you could save any dog with training, with love. But now I know it: Once in a great while you come across a dog that is a killer down into his blood, the one who needs to be put away to keep the innocent safe, the one that’s past redemption.
Every other row of seats is ripped out of the bus. They space the seats double to keep the riders from biting, kicking, strangling each other. None of that matters now. I’m the only rider this trip. The cuffs choke my wrists. The cuff chain loops through the seat-back rail four feet in front of me. The chain is short. I have to lean forward, doubled over like I been gut-shot.
The guard waves the driver through. The driver gears the engine. The bus is green and hacks green smoke. The bus shimmies on its way over the one-lane bridge.
I made this trip once before, the time I cut that kid. Short bid, wasn’t but three weeks. It looks different now, the island. I notice stuff more this time. Little things. Maybe because I know I’m not leaving. Not free anyway. The bridge has green railings. The paint’s worn out like paint wears from hands on it, but I don’t see any people walking this bridge. Not the time I was here before and not this time either. The island isn’t green but for a few weed tree thickets and dying ball field grass. The island is rock, cinderblock and dirt surrounded by rolls of razor wire coming up out of the water. There’s more than one jail on the island. One for the ladies, a few more for the men. And then there’s the juvie unit. They thought of it last, for sure. It’s a hard-shell dome tent. They put it right in the airport takeoff path, which is just a couple hundred yards across the water. Every thirty seconds the ground shakes. The planes look like they’re going to drill the dome.
There’s no cells in there. Just bunches of cots lumped in raggedy rows. Scratchy blankets. The floors smell like they swabbed them with outhouse buckets. I know, we don’t deserve better, but I’m just saying, summer nights, like a hundred and some degrees in there under that tent, the jet thunder coming so patterned? You got a lot of angry boys in there. Going into the tent alone? Not having somebody inside? I feel like a bait dog about to get chucked into the pit.
I go to my chest to touch my peace medal, but it’s not there anymore. They took it from me on account it’s a weapon. I guess I won’t get to write that letter to Tony after all. He’s got to hate me bad by now. Good. That’s how it’s got to be.
If I cry, the driver will tell I cried, and then I’m marked for having the weak on me. I keep my eyes wide to let the water dry in the wells.
The way she didn’t pluck her eyebrows. Didn’t care what she wore and was the cuter for it. The taste of her mouth. How that girl held me. If only she was there that day, to quiet the hissing.
This evangel preacher lady, she’s still doing her thing. I seen her when I was in here last time. We circle up in ratty plastic chairs, careful to avoid the ones with urine puddles.
Most of the fellas don’t listen to the preacher lady. They just like the safety of being near religion. They bring their softback notebooks and sketch pictures and write songs and such. You have to sign the pencils in and out, and they’re wrapped with tape like a football so you can’t stab anybody with it. Some of the boys like to rhyme, and they make beats together, sort of soft, and all this is going on while the preacher lady gives her sermon, but she doesn’t mind. “Maybe it doesn’t seem like it,” she says, “but God loves everybody just as much as everybody else.”
And ain’t that just scary for the truth in it.
“Listen here, boys,” she says. “There was an old man, and he had two sons. One did everything right, and the other everything wrong. The bad one ran out with all his father’s money and blew it on a big fat crack-smoking party while the good one stayed home and worked for his father night and day and took care of the old man. The bad one came back broke, hat in hand, and the good one was like, ‘Pops is gonna stomp you, lazy, selfish fool.’ And don’t you know,” the minister lady says, “the father has a big block party for the boy who came back, and he takes him into his arms. The other son, the one who honored his father and stayed by his father’s side, he’s mad. ‘Why you giving him a bloc
k party after all the bad things he did?’ And the father says, ‘Because my son was lost, and now he found himself.’” The preacher smiles at us, suspicious. “Now, what do you all think about that? That seem fair?”
Nobody says anything, because they weren’t listening, busy doing their drawing and rhyming and stuff. But I don’t think that’s fair, that the slacker got a better deal than the good brother. I don’t say anything, though. I don’t like to talk out loud in front of preachers unless I absolutely have to.
The preacher lady sips water. The tent flaps are open to let in the air, what there is of it in the heat. Just past the flaps are concrete courts, rusted hoops, no nets. Weeds fork through cracks in the blacktop patches. The stalks twitch in a hot breeze that comes, goes, and never comes back.
One of the fellas a couple seats down from me, he’s nodding off in his chair. He’s drooling, spun out. Must have fakeswallowed in front of the nurse and stockpiled his T-bars and double dosed. Thorazine is no joke. He pitches forward.
I catch him before he smacks his head on the concrete. I hold him with my arm over him to keep him from sliding out of the chair.
This kid under my arm here, he’s what you call a ragdoll. Throw him this way or that, and he doesn’t care anymore. He falls asleep on my shoulder.
Everybody’s catcalling faggots and dick smokers and what all. Teakettle whistling. But I stay with this ragdoll kid, because you can’t let somebody fall and hit his head on the concrete. I scan the hecklers and zoom in on the loudest, a big old country boy with eyes so light blue the color bleeds out into the white part. He’s got his sleeves rolled up to his shoulders to show off the desecrations to his flesh, a pair of gothic crosses and white pride lightning. He can’t be older than seventeen, otherwise he wouldn’t be here, but he looks twenty-five easy, lots of confidence in those nasty eyes, that smirk. This Blue Eyes is a wannabe boss all right. He’ll be expecting me to crew up with him and his boys, for sure, starting out at the bottom. I smile at him. “What you in here for, son?” I say.