The Accomplice: The Stairway Press Edition

by Darryl Ponicsan

  “Nonetheless, it was serious enough for you to be concerned?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then why didn’t you go to the police?”

  Beef remembered sitting in the back of the squad car. It was an opportunity missed, for which he would never forgive himself. “At that time, missus, as you know, I had come to Pueblo and committed perjury. I was open myself for a charge.”

  “Oh, I see. You were willing to let a girl be killed rather than put yourself in a position where some charge might be made against you because of what you did in Pueblo; is that right?”

  It wasn’t that simple. But Beef decided to stay on the ground he and a lawyer might understand.

  “Normally, a man doesn’t go and commit a crime and then go to the police, for any reason. I been in prison. I know what it’s like. A year or two in prison and you forget who you are. You come out and you do crazy things that send you back to prison. Look, I knew when I helped with the annulment that it was a crime, but somehow I convinced myself that it was all right. Nobody gets hurt and I get a hundred dollars. It was crazy and it was stupid. I tried to talk to her myself, tried to tell her to let it alone, let it work itself out, but all she wanted was to see Maria dead.”

  “Liar!” shouted Ginny from the table.

  “C’mon, Ginny Mom, what’s the point?” said Beef.

  “I wish I never heard your name, Bomba!”

  “You never did, missus,” he said sadly.

  Beef Buddusky drew a sentence of one to three, and was delivered to the prison at Canon City.

  BOOK 4

  ONE

  He lay on his bunk, his hands behind his head, looking at the bulge in the mattress above him.

  “Knock-knock.”

  “Who’s there?” Beef asked dutifully, but with no sense of play.

  “Highway cop,” from his cellmate, Norman, an armed robber.

  “Highway cop who?”

  “Highway cop every morning with a hard-on,” said Norman, filling their tight cubicle with his own moist laughter.

  Beef did not laugh. He had become as morose and moody as his old girl Mae, and only infrequently did Norman bother to take up again the challenge to amuse him. The best that could be said for him, according to Norman, was that he was short and soon another cellmate would replace him, one who might laugh once in a while and help pass the time away.

  Beef dug under his flat and lifeless mattress and withdrew a dirty folded slip of paper. He unfolded it carefully; some daylight could be seen through one of the creases. He reviewed the list he had made months earlier.

  With his meaty hand that could hardly tolerate a pencil, Beef had scrawled at the top of the list, “The Murder of Maria Wynn and Baby Girl Wynn.” The inclusion of Baby Girl Wynn followed long, solitary debates during which he concluded that two lives were taken, in spite of the official one count of murder. So. At the head of the list, Ginny Wynn herself. Goes without saying. At any particular point in time she could have stopped it by letting the young people live their own lives.

  Second, Rudy Montalvo and Danny Yanez, Montalvo first because Yanez was mentally retarded and needed a guiding influence for any action. Both were simple minds, even to Beef. They were used to being moved to action by more facile minds. The boys didn’t know Ginny, they didn’t know if they could trust her. All they knew was that she was a cop’s mother. They certainly couldn’t have given any thought to their prospects for getting caught.

  Next on the list, Juan Barrajas. His guilt was much greater than his own, he reasoned. He arranged the meeting. He knew what she wanted. Why didn’t he stop it or tell the police? Well, he was a sick, old man with poor command of the language, in debt and facing prison, whose only hope was that Gordon would quash the arrest.

  Mrs. Lister was next on the list. If anyone was privy to all that was happening it was Mrs. Lister. At any time she could have gone to the police, but Ginny had a strange and powerful hold over her, the reason for which was unknown to Beef. Mrs. Lister was certainly as guilty as Barrajas. Almost equally guilty.

  What of Gordon himself? Why didn’t he protect his own wife? Could he not know what his mother was capable of doing? Or was he really...that way with his own mother? Beef could not believe it. That was an invention of the district attorney, to turn the jury against them.

  There were nameless people on the list: two landladies who heard threats, employees at the hospital. All knew and none would believe. Beef closed his eyes and imagined them in a small room; he would hardly be noticed.

  At the bottom of the list was Maria’s name. She knew Ginny wanted her dead. She knew and did not adequately protect herself and her child. Beef gave nights of thought in the closeness of his cell to the theory that a victim subconsciously is an accomplice to his own murder.

  Beef had yet to write his own name on the list. A prerogative of the author. Let the others put his name where they pleased, on their own lists.

  Ginny, of course, had been found guilty. Like Montalvo and Yanez, she was sentenced to die. There were many points at which his life could have taken a path away from theirs. Why did he take window washing when he really wanted yard work or hauling? Why did he seek out the Salvation Army instead of a mission? Why did he stay at Ginny’s place after his stomach was full? To go back further, why did he get off at Colorado Springs when the driver who had picked him up was going as far as Pueblo? He should have gone on to Pueblo, even though he didn’t like the name of the place.

  Beef stood his time well. He did a favor for someone and landed a good job in the hot comfort of the prison bakery, plunging his hands pleasantly into the dough. He made no friends this time around and avoided involvements.

  Like so many cons who had no interest in the news while on the outside, he became a newspaper addict on the inside. Unlike the others, he did not lust for the world from which he was removed. He scanned the papers only for news of Ginny’s case and followed carefully the progress of the many appeals.

  He wanted her and the boys to live. There was too much blood on his hands already. He did not believe their deaths could make anyone feel better.

  So much of what he read he was unable to understand. He read of the boys filing for appeal and of Ginny’s deadline for appeal being extended two months and then another three weeks. Delaying tactics, he figured. He was fascinated to learn that Yanez’s appeal ran to only nine pages while Montalvo’s was one hundred twenty-one pages. Peculiar, he thought, since they were partners in crime. Beef sure admired anyone who could understand the law. There must be a good reason for why they made it so complicated, he thought, so that ordinary folks couldn’t make head nor tail of it.

  The DA filed a brief on their appeals, citing cases which supported the contention that the court did not err. Beef didn’t know what that meant exactly, but he was impressed by the fifty-five cases. That’s a lot of cases, just to support a contention.

  Ginny’s appeal was finally filed. Miss Ryan, her lawyer, claimed that some jurors were improperly kept on panel, and some jurors were improperly excused; extraneous and damaging issues about Ginny’s past life were improperly permitted; the case should have been moved to another county because of the pre-trial publicity; Juan Barrajas should have been ruled an accomplice, making his testimony invalid.

  Beef read about it carefully and it seemed to make sound sense to him. They did say a lot of unkind things about Ginny’s past life. There was one hell of a lot of publicity before the trial. If Barrajas was not an accomplice, then who was? But a month later the DA answered the appeal, citing eighty references of law, ten legal statutes, and one constitutional provision in a ninety-two-page argument. Beef Buddusky was impressed all to hell. How could you lock horns with that? Imagine, eighty references of law.

  Two weeks or so after the DA’s argument, oral arguments from both sides were heard before the State Supreme Court. By this time it had become old stuff.

  And all the while Beef Buddusky sat in his cell, not laughing at th
e dirty jokes from the bunk above him.

  A death penalty abolition bill sponsored by the governor seemed to be gaining great favor but it was killed by the judiciary committee, and on the following day the State Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the trio, as they were often called, should die. The opinion on Ginny ran to thirty-seven pages, on Montalvo, eight pages. Goose Yanez got only three pages. It seemed to Beef to express a consistent pattern and to say something significant about the value of human life, though he couldn’t say what.

  When he looked at himself in the mirror, Beef saw daily a closer resemblance to his father, whose dark destination was foretold in his face, if one had the power to read it. The other convicts ignored him. After he began working in the prison bakery, no one even bothered to make any sexual overtures.

  Beef was passed over for parole his first time up. Six months later he tried again. By this time the State Supreme Court had closed the door on Ginny Wynn. District Attorney Ferguson recommended that Beef be released. The three perpetrators would die for their crime; Buddusky had been punished sufficiently for his. The Department of Institutions concurred in the DA’s recommendation and wrote in their evaluation of Beef for the Adult Parole Board:

  He plans to attend night school. In his remaining spare time, will attend church, watch TV, attend spectator sports. He feels he can stay away from bars with little trouble and looks back and sees the line of reasoning he used when drinking. Since he knows that, he knows he can have a better time outside without drinking. Knows he was sick in the past, does not want to be sack again. Mind and body are better. He has become introspective. We have shown him the road, and he has not refused the help. His future will depend entirely on whether he can put into practice what he has learned here. If he can, his future looks good, and no troubles are anticipated. He should be able to cooperate with parole officer in an excellent manner.

  He appeared before the Parole Board early in April and was asked what he hoped to do with his life. “I been giving it a lot of thought,” he said. “I have met many strange people, and strange things have happened to me and I behaved in strange ways that I can’t explain. What I’d like to do is study psychology. I’d like to know more about what makes folks do the things they do, because to tell you the truth I can’t understand people worth a damn. I’m no brain, but seems to me if I work hard and not be in too much of a hurry I could come to figure it all out and maybe...” Beef was shy about saying it aloud, “...maybe, who knows, I could be a psychiatric social worker or something.”

  The Parole Board looked down upon him and smiled paternally.

  “You show a mechanical aptitude, according to your test scores. Wouldn’t you be happier in a service station?”

  “No, sir, I think what I’d like to be is a psychiatric social worker.”

  They turned down his bid for parole without an explanation.

  On April 20, executions were set for June 23. On the nineteenth of June there was a clemency hearing before the governor. Two days later a justice of the Supreme Court granted a stay of execution until July 1. Beef was relieved.

  It went on like this, new execution dates followed by new stays of execution. In a way, they all waited together, Ginny at the women’s section of Canon City, Rudy and Goose up on death row, and Beef in the prison bakery. They were fed the bread he baked.

  After serving nineteen months and twenty-two days, he appeared before the Parole Board again. This time he promised to use his mechanical aptitude and forget about his notion of becoming a psychiatric social worker. He was paroled.

  But he carried his prison on his back.

  TWO

  At first the consensus was that it would be unwise for Beef to try to start a new life in Colorado Springs. There would be too many unpleasant associations with the past. Beef explained that only by immersing himself in these very associations did he hope to purge himself and leave the old Buddusky behind. This immersion theory was something he had picked up in a psychology textbook out of the prison library. Besides, he explained, he truly liked the Springs, he felt secure there, and his ex-boss had agreed to put him back to work shingling roofs. He wanted to get a foothold, he told them, and to settle down finally to a decent everyday kind of life. Marriage and kids, a feeling of pride and purpose, fried chicken on Sunday nights.

  You can do it, Harold, they told him, you can do it if you try.

  His first day out, Beef shook hands with the boss, who threw an arm around his shoulder and led him across the street for a beer. Beef was so unaccustomed to little kindnesses that the offer of a beer turned him softside out. He took a great long, cold swallow, his first in so many months. He would have only one. He was to stay out of honkytonks, a condition of his parole.

  “Well, old buddy, it’s nice you’ve come back to us,” said the boss.

  “Hell, you’re the one’s nice, hiring me back, after all that happened.”

  The boss lowered his head close to Beef’s ear. “What the hell was really goin’ on?”

  “Aw, boss...”

  “I’m only curious.” He was actually leering.

  “Everything I know I told on the stand.”

  “C’mon, buddy, nobody tells everything.”

  “I did. What do you expect me to say? Shit, thing is, I don’t even want to talk about all that. I just want to make a living. And I don’t want to be called Bomba anymore.”

  “No offense. I can understand, just gettin’ out and all. But...what the fuck is the story?”

  “I wish I knew, boss.”

  He bought a pair of faded coveralls at the thrift shop and started back to work. When he wasn’t roofing, he mowed and trimmed and helped a trucker, anything to keep working and make a few extra honest dollars. Often he saw himself being pointed out to strangers as he loaded the truck. You know, the guy that was always with Ginny Mom Wynn, the one who posed as her son so she could bust up the marriage.

  Beef told the boss to respect his privacy or he would have to go work for someone else.

  “I feel bad enough, don’t you think, for what I done. I don’t want to have this thing hanging over me the rest of my life.”

  “Hell, Beef, sure it’s gonna hang over you for the rest of your life.”

  Though Beef no longer drank, the general lousiness that surrounds a drinker remained. He lost interest in food and was losing weight He smoked Kools until he gagged. He was always sleepy but unable to sleep, except to dream.

  In dreams he would be back at Canon City, and upon waking would find himself of two minds: happy he was free, but homesick for the tight security and routine of captivity. Sometimes during the day he would hear a song on the radio that was popular in the, joint, and he would stop what he was doing to remember hearing the song in Canon, as he kneaded dough or lay on his bunk, the earphones over his head.

  At a hamburger joint, he ran into Ed, who used to tend bar at the Ponderosa Pines. He sat next to him at the counter.

  “I heard you was back in town,” said Ed.

  “I called some time back. You were in jail.”

  “It was nothin’.”

  Beef ordered a cheeseburger and fries. “You back at the Ponderosa?” he asked.

  “Naw, I’m at the Elbow Room now.”

  Ed finished his sandwich and wiped his mouth with a napkin. He took the last sip of coffee.

  “You ever hear word of Mae?” Beef asked him.

  He turned on his stool and looked at Beef for a moment. “She’s dead, kid. I thought you knew.”

  Beef managed to ask how.

  “She got some bad shit,” said Ed.

  “I hope she wasn’t cold,” said Beef, remembering how she hated the cold, how she pinned her blanket to her sheet.

  Ed picked up his check. “Take care, kid. Drop in the place some night and have a beer.” He paid the check and left.

  Beef’s food was placed before him. In the time it took him to eat one fry, the rest of the food went cold. Now two were lost who could have b
een saved.

  He spent his evenings alone reading at the local library, mostly psychology. Though much of it made sense and Beef had no quarrel with what he read, it did not seem to go far in settling his own mind. He liked the part about defense mechanisms, because he felt he knew something about them. He knew any number of people, for instance, who couldn’t get what they wanted so they convinced themselves they never really wanted it in the first place. Rationalization. And he didn’t have to read the books to know that he had put his fist through so many windows and walls to keep from putting it through somebody’s face. Now, however, he could call it displaced aggression, the proper name for it.

  He found a bit of information on what they called a death wish, but not enough to satisfy him. He had the feeling the authors were avoiding facing it head on, as if their science had not come far enough to handle this concept. It seemed to Beef that anyone with a death wish could wrap it up neatly by stepping in front of a train, but no one with a death wish gets off that easily, he learned. They want to die but they’re scared to death to believe it, so they drink and smoke and if they become impatient, they become Evel Knievel.

  It frightened Beef. He was young, he wanted to live, he had not yet become the man he wanted to be. But he did not like living. The only joy he had out of it, since losing his childhood when he lost his father, was football, which in life is a very brief season.

  Could he have a death wish? Did he want to die? Every decision he ever made was in the direction of unhappiness and destruction, and life held nothing for him, not now that both Maria and Mae were dead and Ginny was soon to follow. But could he kill himself? The very idea gave him pain beyond his own body. Then why did he open the door whenever darkness leaned against it?

  One night, walking home from the library, a few books under his arm, he went out of his way, not quite deliberately, not quite by accident either, to the apartment where he had stood on the sidewalk and first seen her.

  The apartment was apparently occupied.