by Deeanne Gist
Boon, Watt, Hurley, Saltzman. Jeffries—he’s scheduled soon, after Striker and York. He looks up at her from his bunk. She can see he is resigned.
She looks inside each cell, meeting their solemn eyes. Wincour, Casey, Williams, Caird, Irvin, McLear, Graham, Becker.
There is one cell she never tries to peer inside: Arden’s. She walks faster as she passes Arden’s cell—something about it emanates a horror that scares even her.
Sutro, Hakim, Dupree, Holt, Shaw. She breathes easier.
The warden is watching her from the end of the row. He stands alone, swinging the big old-fashioned ring key. He has looked much older recently, she notices, and she feels a pang of sympathy. She has heard about his wife’s having late-stage cancer.
“Deciding which guy to take next?” he asks her.
“I have a waiting list,” she quips.
He leans his head back and roars, a clean, bright laugh that shakes off the bars and surprises both of them. He has nice teeth, she notices. His shirt is unbuttoned at the top collar, and she can see silver tufts in his black chest hair.
“Oh my. Well, take your time. We won’t be waiting around for you.”
“I know.” She smiles and steps around him.
She finds the priest in his office. His head is bent over a book, and the lamp catches the bald spot on top of his head. Precious little spot, she thinks. He looks up, startled. A pink flush catches his cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“It’s okay. I was reading—this,” he says, and turns the book so she can see the title. The White Dawn: An Eskimo Saga, by James Houston.
Word was out about Striker defacing a copy of the book. The priest thumbs the pages. “I was hoping if I read it, I could understand why it means so much. And if I can understand that, maybe I can understand these men.” He puts down the book. “But it just seems like a story.” He trails off, the pink still in his cheeks.
She feels a wave of protection toward him, to be so uncertain in his grown-man body. “If you understand what makes him tick—what is magic for him—then you can understand anyone,” she says.
“Yes. But I wasn’t thinking of the word ‘magic.’ ”
“It’s magic,” she says.
“The church has funny positions on magic.”
She shrugs, her shoulders thin under a warm blazer. It is always cold down here in the dungeon.
“I’m not talking black magic or even magic-magic,” she says. “Not potions or prophecy or punishment.” She stops and searches for the words, unconsciously leaning against his desk with one hip. He looks up at her, sees the feathery black hair framing her delicate pale face while she thinks. “I’m saying hopeful magic. I don’t know this inmate. But I imagine he knows magic, if he is reading books. The book itself doesn’t matter. It’s that he found another world in it.” She looks down at the priest. His mouth is slightly ajar. “Men like York, like Striker. Even men like Arden. They can see the magic just like us,” she tells him. “No matter what they did, they can see the magic. I think your God would understand that. He may send them to the fires of hell, but he would understand that their eyes can be the same as ours.”
“And their souls?”
She takes a breath.
“I’m sorry,” he says automatically.
“Don’t apologize.” She smiles and collects her thoughts and shifts her body to accommodate them. Her small hand lands near his larger hand on the desk. “I don’t know,” she finally says. “What is a soul?”
“Is it your magic?” he asks.
“It could be.” She smiles and, without thinking, touches his hand.
The touch lies there. The warm current is back, a sense of connection for her—a connection she has rarely felt with another person. They let the moment lie and absorb, and she is thankful that he doesn’t pull away from it or make amends or explain it. He just seems okay with it, and that fills her heart with pleasure.
She is almost regretful now about what she has come to do. But she will do it anyhow, because it is her job and her client. She gently pulls away her hand.
She takes out a small syringe she has hidden in her inside jacket pocket. She knew it would pass the metal detectors. It is the standard plastic needle and syringe used by diabetics and drug users alike, sold by the weight in drug supply houses and supplied free on the streets for heroin addicts, in hopes of reducing nasty diseases. She got this one in five minutes by stopping at a pharmacy.
The priest looks at the syringe in her hand. She can tell he is thinking: Have I been played? But he knows that he has not, that she came on this mission and found something else. For once he feels he understands.
“I need some blood from York,” she says. “I need you to go to him and ask him to fill this syringe. Then I need you to cap it and return it to me as soon as possible.”
“I don’t know how to take blood.”
“You don’t have to. York will know. He’s been in prison for years. He’s got a high H number.”
“Come again?”
She smiles. “Prison slang for doing heroin. This is a dirty prison, by the way. Heroin addicts want to get sent here because the supply is so good. York will know how to pull his own blood. Oh, and please wear gloves when you touch it.”
The priest looks at her sad dark eyes. “What do I tell him?”
“The truth. That the lady wants his blood.”
“What if he says no?”
“He won’t.”
“Why not?”
She reaches back into her bag and pulls out a photograph she took of Troy Harney at the end of her visit. It was full dark by then, and the woods outside were covered in blackness. Troy had invited her to stay, but she had demurred, feeling the heat of his loneliness. She didn’t want to deal with a man climbing in her bed, even a polite man who would listen to no. So she had said sorry, but please, let me take your picture right here in the kitchen. Troy Harney had obliged, and here was this picture of him, his brown eyes caught red in the flash.
“Tell him I found Troy.”
“Troy?”
“He’ll know when he sees the picture. Tell him—tell him there is more than one way to have a party.”
The next day the priest discreetly walks by her as she is rushing to leave the prison. He hands her a manila envelope containing the syringe. She is distracted, trying to leave the prison as a lockdown is going into effect, and she barely has time to say thank you. She escapes the slamming doors moments before the red lights flash and the whole place slams shut.
She peeks inside the envelope when she gets to her car. The syringe is full, the outside smeared with blood. Hopefully, the priest wore gloves. A man like York is bound to be a hot pot of hepatitis.
There is a little note penned in the illiterate block writing of the uneducated.
TROY LAST NAME? York’s note asks.
You little shit, she thinks. Plotting from death row to hurt the only man who wanted to help you. I’m not telling you his last name, not now or ever.
The next morning she sends the syringe to her friend the doctor on a rush order.
To get to the top of the guard tower, you first unlock a heavy door. Then you climb the narrow, musty stairs. The stairs rise above you into a dim and cavernous future. You go up, flashlight and baton and gun and regulation knife clanking, carrying your rifle in one hand, your accordion lunch box in the other. Your black utility belt is heavy. If there were a fire, there would be no way out, and you would roast here because the fire department leaves this enchanted place alone. You think this is what it was like, climbing the stairs of a turret in a castle or a dungeon so many centuries ago.
When you get to the top, there is no lady-in-waiting. There is only you in a small room shaped like a lighthouse. You put your rifle down on the desk under one of the open windows. From your spot, you see the next guard tower, and you wave at the guy. You leave your lunch box next to the radio, which you tune to your favorite country radio statio
n, lightly, because you know the bosses frown on loud radio. The radio helps you get lost in reveries of happier places and times. You have to keep the radio low so you can hear the noise calling off the yard—how annoying it is to hear the same voices every day, the shot callers, the pleasers, and the blowhards.
You take your seat at the open window. You put your rifle on your lap. You look over at your friend at the next tower, and then at the wide open sky. You can see the river that winds next to the prison on the other side of the wall. The scene outside is peaceful; the prison is set away from the town. Outside of the asphalt parking lot, where you can see the hood of your truck reflecting the blinding sun, there is no sign of civilization. Only the rolling hills.
The radio is softly playing. It’s a nice song that makes you think of swimming in the local creek when you were a kid. Down in the yard there is the crash of the weight pile and the endless hustle of bragging words. The big blue sky keeps the inmates contained, like flies in a bottle. They have no idea how small they are.
The worst part of being in the tower is the boredom. Hours of boredom, of hearing the voices and the weight pile and usual jeers—hey, Tommy, got that dope, hey Joe, what’s an ass like you doing in here—and all the time you know that at any moment all hell can break loose. Without warning, the yard can erupt in riot, like one of those zombie movies where the infection spreads and suddenly they are all arms out, blood and teeth and slaughtering and bloodshed.
So you start looking for the signs. You watch for the one inmate standing with his arms crossed, a careful look on his face. You look for new movements at the weight pile, or a solitary man striding across the yard in a direction he should not be heading. Sometimes it is the soft thud of the ball being thrown and then a player turning all of a sudden, rage etched on his face.
Most often it is the days when a new cat comes on the yard. The worst new cats are the famous killers. It doesn’t matter what they are famous for: It is the fame and not the crime that is the infection among disenfranchised men. The more famous, the more infectious they become. Those are the days you watch. You have already heard. Daniel Trubock, the famous wife killer, is coming into the yard today, if he dares.
He dares. You see his red hair cautiously coming out the orientation doors, bobbing uncertainly, and you see the inmates around him pause and then recede like waves at low tide. The big beefs at the weight pile turn and watch. You are not worried about them—men like Risk will take their time with men like Daniel Trubock. Right now they are just going to watch with sick grins. What you are looking for is the youngbloods, the hot young men wanting to make a name for themselves.
You stand up and hold your rifle, your hands calm. Your heart is fast but steady. All the rules say: It is okay to shoot. You know it in your heart, too. It is okay to shoot. The men below are small, and the infection spreads. If it spreads too far, too fast, it will get out of control before you can stop it, and then you have those terrible times when prisons riot and the smoke rises and guards like you are held hostage and tortured and dismembered and killed. It has happened here, you know, and you know it will someday happen again. You do not want to be one of those guards with your legs and arms strewn across the yard.
You lift your rifle like you do now, to your shoulder. You watch the little bobbing red head and pray you will not have to do this even as your heart hardens to it. The illness is spreading around your heart. You don’t want to. But you will, and when the infection spreads—you can feel it all of a sudden in the movement of the yard and the parting of the men as one guy cuts to the left and heads straight at Daniel Trubock, so fast it takes your breath away—then you know you have less than seconds to make a decision whether the flash you see in the running man’s hands is a shank or just the sun in your eyes.
You know in your heart what you will do. It will not be the attacker you shoot. It will be that little bobbing red head in the middle. That is the one your heart tells your finger to want—to get rid of the infection in your midst.
Chapter 6
The fallen priest comes down the row. I can hear in his footsteps that he doesn’t like what he has to do today. It has to do with Striker.
The guards are waiting outside Striker’s cell. “Number six,” the priest mutters, “number six I have shepherded to death this year.”
The priest’s lean body remembers the robes, but his shoulders have shrunk in refusal. Now he wears khaki trousers as if he picked them off a rack at random, and they hang on him as if they belong on a different person. He looks like he has lost weight all these months, serving a diet of death.
The guards hate the priest. To them, men like the priest paper the sky with romantic tissue-paper legends, but down here below the earth, in this enchanted place, we know life cannot be contained on a slogan or a prayer tablet. We know that kindness rules with the fist and chains rule with a turn to the sky, that all humans require penance and without it we all seek punishment, over and over again, until the body and mind are satisfied and we die.
We can hear the meagerness in his voice, the near whisper as he gets close to the cell and asks admittance. The little men with hammers sit back on their haunches deep in the walls and listen, chattering in happy gossip with one another.
I hear the fear in the voice of Striker as he responds. It is the fear of a man about to meet his death.
The doors clang open and the priest goes inside, accompanied by guards.
I hear Striker weeping.
The priest cannot administer last rites because he is fallen. But the soon-to-be-dead don’t care. Striker asks the priest for a prayer, and I hear the priest’s soft, melodic voice before I begin to fade into memories.
I hear music in my head, which is funny, because it is a song I have not remembered in so many years. It is a song that played on Lawrence Welk when I was a child. I remember now—I was staying with my grandparents. They had a home by the bay, out past the oyster beds. I must have been about eight, maybe a year before I was taken away. Isn’t it funny how, as you get older, some early memories come back? That is happening more often to me, as if memories of the outside are returning and this enchanted place is turning into the dream. I remember how the surf crashed against the wet rocks of the wild bay, and how my grandparents had a little weather-beaten house on the shore. I can see my grandpa’s red lobster hands, scarred from fishing. I remember thinking the sea was smoking from the spray it threw, and the wild seal smell of the rocks. My grandpa had told me that seals bobbed in the waves, and I stood for hours on the wet rocks that day, watching for them, thinking of their smooth, glossy brown fur, their plump bodies and large wet ebony eyes.
That night my grandmother gave me a bath, weeping silently while she scrubbed me, and she dressed me in pajamas that stuck to my damp back. I sat in front of their little television, waiting for my favorite song from Lawrence Welk. It was the song at the end of the show that I loved—the goodbye song. I heard it now as Striker wept.
Good night, good night until we meet again
Adios, au revoir, auf Wiedersehen, till then . . .
Good night, sleep tight . . .
Isn’t it funny how you remember? I remember my grandmother bringing me a mug of homemade hot chocolate, so hot the marshmallows seared my mouth, and a heel of fresh-baked white bread smeared with margarine. I ate my sweetie snack and she took me to bed and tucked me in, and I listened as the surf crashed against the rock, hearing the sweetness of that goodbye song as she and Grandpa talked in low voices in the bedroom next to mine.
“He could talk before, Eldridge,” she whispered.
“I know, Mother, I know,” my grandfather responded.
The next day I was wearing the same clothes I had worn the day before—my only clothes, now washed and pressed, the faded orange pants two inches too short and the shirt frayed at the buttonholes—and my grandmother’s face was red with tears, and I was waiting to get picked up by my mother and her new boyfriend. No matter how much I knew it hu
rt my grandmother, my heart was bursting with hope, and I couldn’t wait to dart out the door because I loved my mom and always would.
“I know, I know,” I hear the priest saying now.
The entire row has fallen silent to listen.
“Is it too late?” Striker begs.
The priest doesn’t answer. His heart is pale with practice. He can no longer lie. “God will tell you the answer,” he says quietly.
The row is quiet. On the other side of me, York sits in his cell and listens, his hands quiet in his lap. I sit on my cot, the blanket over my head, clutching The White Dawn to my chest.
This is the way it is, every time, all the time. Other people have doors to shut, rooms to cross. Here we have no privacy. We are trapped, naked to one another at all times. Every shit, every fart, every snore, and every cry in the night—we hear it all. Our doors must be fashioned out of desire. But maybe doors made of wishes are stronger than steel.
The prayers are done. The priest rises, sweaty, feeling as always that he didn’t do it right. God would like him better if he were better. Please Lord, he thinks, let me be better.
Striker wipes his face. He hunts for a sense of absolution in himself and turns to the priest as the man shakes out his sweaty trousers. “Is that all?” he asks.
The priest nods. Yes. That is all.
“I thought it would be more.”
The warden is at his cell door, flanked by guards. The guards are wearing the special black shirts of the executioners. The warden is dressed as he always dresses, in slacks and a dress shirt.
The warden doesn’t like to drag these things out. “Done?” he asks the priest deferentially.
The priest nods. He wishes the lady had been on this case. But Striker was not her client.
Striker is crying. “I don’t want to die,” he sobs.
That’s what you get, I think, for destroying my book, you bastard. I hope they mess up the medicine and you choke on your way to hell.