by Allen Eskens
“Go ahead.”
“Because you only have a few months to live, why would you agree to spend it talking to me?”
Carl adjusted himself in his chair, gazing out the window at the drying towels and the barbeque grills littering the apartment balconies across the way. I could see his index finger stroking the arm of his wheelchair. It reminded me of how Jeremy strokes his knuckles when he is anxious. “Joe,” he said finally, “do you know what a dying declaration is?”
I didn't, although I gave it a shot. “It's a declaration made by someone who is dying?”
“It is a term of law,” he said. “If a man whispers the name of his killer and then dies, it's considered good evidence because there's a belief—an understanding—that a person who is dying would not want to die with a lie upon his lips. No sin could be greater than a sin that cannot be rectified, the sin you never get to confess. So this…this conversation with you…this is my dying declaration. I don't care if anybody reads what you write. I don't even care if you write it down at all.” Carl pursed his lips, his stare searching for something far beyond the immediate scenery, a slight quiver in his words. “I have to say the words out loud. I have to tell someone the truth about what happened all those years ago. I have to tell someone the truth about what I did.”
That evening, my head pulsed with waves of excitement. I had secured a tragic subject for my biography assignment, and, to top the evening off, I had a dinner date with Lila Nash. Okay, not a date. But I had a girl coming over to my home to share a meal with me. This had never happened before. When it came to dating, I always stuck to restaurants. I had never cooked for a girl or served a girl a meal in my home. I had come close once, but, like many of my plans back in my high-school days, it came to ruin.
Somewhere in my adolescence, I discovered that I was neither handsome nor ugly. I fell in that vast ocean of so-so guys that made up the background of the picture. I was the guy that you agree to go to homecoming with after you found out that the guy you really wanted had already asked another girl. I was okay with that. In fact, I think that good looks would have been wasted on me. Don't get me wrong, I had my share of dates in high school, but, by design, I never dated anyone for more than a couple months—except Phyllis.
Phyllis was my first girlfriend. She had curly brown hair that sprayed out from her head like the tentacles of a sea anemone. I thought she looked peculiar until the day we shared our first kiss. After that her hair struck me as daring and avant-garde. We were high-school freshmen, following the well-worn path of juvenile courtship, testing boundaries, hiding behind corners to steal a kiss, holding hands under the table in the cafeteria, all the things that seemed so wonderfully exciting to me. Then one day, she insisted that I introduce her to my mother.
“Are you ashamed of me?” Phyllis asked. “Am I just someone you mess around with when it's convenient?” Try as I might, I could not convince her that my intentions were honorable unless I brought her to my house for a formal introduction. Looking back now, I should have simply broken up with her and let her think I was a jerk.
I told my mother that I would be bringing Phyllis by after school that day. I talked about the visit as often as I could that morning, hoping to get across to my mother that she needed to be on her best behavior for that one hour of that one day. All she had to do was be cordial, sober, and normal for one hour. Sometimes I ask too much.
As we strolled up the front walk, I could smell food, or the remains of food, burning in the kitchen. Phyllis had been smiling for the entire walk from school to my house, nervously folding her fingers together as we got closer. I stopped at the front door, hearing my mother scream at some guy named Kevin. I didn't know any Kevin.
“God dammit, Kevin, I can't pay you right now.” I could hear the slur in her words.
“That's just great,” a male voice hollered back. “I bend over backward to help you out and when I need the money you fuck me over.”
“It's not my fault you can't keep a job,” Mom yelled. “Don't be blamin’ me.”
“No, but it's your fault I got no money,” he said. “I ain't got no retard kid to pay my bills like you do. You owe me a hunnerd dollars. I know you get welfare or some shit for that kid. Just pay me outta that.”
“Fuck you! You piece of shit. Get outta my house.”
“Where's my money?”
“You'll get your fuckin’ money. Now get out.”
“When? When do I get the money?”
“Get out. My kid's coming home with some little skank, and I need to get ready.”
“When do I get my money?”
“Get out before I call the cops and tell ’em you're driving without a license again.”
“You fucking bitch.”
Kevin slammed his way out the back door about the same time that the smoke detector shrieked to life, fed by the burning food in the kitchen. I looked at Phyllis and saw that she had folded close the shutters of her brain, albeit too late to block out the experience that would surely be the focus of some future therapy sessions. I wanted to apologize, to explain, or better yet, to disappear, slip through the cracks between the porch planks. Instead, I turned Phyllis around by her shoulders, walked her to the corner, and said my last goodbye to her. The following day at school, she made a point of avoiding me in the halls, which was fine by me because I would have avoided her anyway. After that, I never dated any girl for more than two months. I couldn't endure the humiliation of bringing another girl home to my mother.
I thought of Phyllis as I cooked the noodles for my dinner with Lila. For the first time in my life, I would bring a girl home and not worry about what would meet me at the door. But then again, I wasn't bringing a girl home. This wasn't a date, despite the amount of time I spent getting ready, combing my hair just so, applying a little extra deodorant and a tiny hint of cologne, picking out clothes that said both “look at me” and “I don't care.” I even made Jeremy take a shower in my bathroom across the hall. All this effort for a girl who threw a cold shoulder at me with the force of a middle linebacker. But damn, she was cute.
Lila arrived at seven, wearing the same jeans and sweater that she'd worn that morning when she left for class. She said hello, glanced around the kitchen to see that I had started the water boiling, and then went to Jeremy, who was sitting on the couch.
“What's the movie tonight, handsome?” she said.
Jeremy blushed slightly. “Maybe Pirates of the Caribbean,” he said.
“Perfect.” She smiled. “I love that movie.” Jeremy smiled his best goofy smile as he pointed the remote at the television, and Lila pushed the button to start the movie.
I felt a strange jealousy watching Jeremy and Lila on my couch, but that was exactly what I had asked for. I used Jeremy to coax Lila to my home, and she came to see him, not me. I turned back to my spaghetti noodles, glancing over at Lila every now and again to see her attention split between the television and a stack of my homework papers on the coffee table.
“Are you researching the war in El Salvador?” she asked.
“The war in El Salvador?” I said, looking over my shoulder. She was reading the newspaper article I'd copied at the library. “You have an article about the signing of a peace treaty between El Salvador and Honduras.”
“Oh, that,” I said. “No. Look at the column below that.”
“The one about the girl?” she said.
“Yeah, I'm interviewing the guy who killed her.”
She went silent for a moment as she read each of the articles I had copied at the library. I watched her face wince as she covered those parts of the story that expounded upon the more gruesome details of Crystal Hagen's death. I stirred the pasta and waited patiently for her response. Then she said, “You're kidding, right?”
“What?”
She flipped through the articles again. “You're interviewing this psychopath?”
“What's wrong with that?” I asked.
“Everything,” Lila s
aid. “It amazes me how prison scumbags can sucker people into paying them attention. I knew this girl who got engaged to some creep in prison. She swore he was innocent—wrongfully convicted, waited for him for two years until he got released. Six months later he was back in prison after he beat the crap out of her.”
“Carl's not in prison,” I said with a sheepish shrug.
“He's not in prison? How could he not be in prison after what he did to that girl?”
“He's dying of cancer at a nursing home. He only has a few months,” I said.
“And you're interviewing him because…”
“I'm writing his biography.”
“You're writing his story?” she said, with more than a hint of condemnation.
“It's for my English class,” I said, almost as an apology.
“You're giving him notoriety.”
“It's an English class,” I said. “One teacher and maybe twenty-five students. I'd hardly call that notoriety.”
Lila put the papers back down on my table. She looked at Jeremy and lowered her voice. “It doesn't matter that it's only a college class. You should do a story on the girl he killed, or the girls he would have killed if he hadn't gone to prison. They deserve the attention, not him. He should be disposed of quietly, no grave marker, no eulogy, no memory of the man. When you write down his life's story, you're creating a marker that shouldn't exist.”
“Don't hold back,” I said. “Tell me what you really think.” I pulled a thread of spaghetti from the boiling water and threw it at the refrigerator. It bounced off the fridge door and fell to the floor.
“What the hell are you doing?” she asked, looking at the noodle on the floor.
“Testing the spaghetti,” I said, glad to be on a different topic.
“By flinging it around the kitchen?”
“If it sticks to the refrigerator, it's done.” I bent down and picked the spaghetti strand off the floor and tossed it into the garbage. “And this spaghetti isn't quite done yet.”
When I left Hillview earlier that day, I felt good about my project. Iverson had promised to tell me the truth about the death of Crystal Hagen. I would be his confessor. I couldn't wait for my dinner with Lila, to tell her about Carl. In my imagination at least, Lila would be riveted by what I was doing, sharing my excitement, wanting to know all about Carl. After seeing her reaction now, all I wanted to do was avoid that subject for the rest of the evening.
“Did he tell you what he did, or is he telling you he was framed?” she asked.
“He hasn't said a thing about it yet.” I pulled three plates from the cupboard and walked them to the coffee table in the living room where we would be eating. Lila got up and grabbed some glasses from the same cupboard and followed me. I cleaned my backpack, my notes, and the newspaper articles off the coffee table. “We haven't gotten to that point yet,” I said. “So far, he's told me about growing up in South St. Paul, an only child. Um…let's see…his father managed a hardware store and his mom…” I paged through my memory, “worked at a deli in downtown St. Paul.”
“So when you write this guy's story, you're simply gonna write down whatever he tells you to?” Lila placed the glasses on the table by the plates.
“I also have to get a couple of secondary sources,” I said, walking back to the kitchen. “But, when it comes to what he did—”
“And by ‘what he did’ you mean raping and killing a fourteen-year-old girl and burning her dead body,” Lila added.
“Yeah…that. When it comes to that, there are no other sources. I have to write what he tells me.”
“So he can feed you a line of bull, and you'd tell that story?”
“He's already done his time. Why would he lie?”
“Why wouldn't he lie?” Lila said with an edge of incredulity. She stood at the end of the kitchen counter, her hands flat on the Formica, her arms stiff, her fingers spread. “Put yourself in his shoes. He rapes some poor girl, murders her, spends his time in prison telling every cellmate, guard, and lawyer who cares to listen to him that he's innocent. He's not gonna quit now. Do you really think that he's gonna admit that he killed that girl?”
“But he's dying,” I said, flinging another spaghetti strand at the refrigerator—it stuck.
“That proves my point, not yours,” Lila said, with the air of a practiced debater. “He gets you to write your little article—”
“Biography—”
“Whatever. And now he has a written account out there in academia, painting him as the victim.”
“He wants to give me his dying declaration,” I said, pouring the spaghetti into the strainer to rinse it.
“He wants to give you his what?”
“His dying declaration…that's what he called it. It's a statement that's true because you don't want to die with a lie on your lips.”
“As opposed to dying with a murder under your belt?” she said. “You see the irony, don't you?”
“It's not the same thing,” I said. I had no argument as to why it wasn't the same thing. I couldn't hack my way past her logic. Every turn presented another blocked path, so I signaled my defeat by carrying the noodles to the coffee table and dishing them onto the plates. Lila picked up the pan of marinara sauce and followed me. As she started to pour the sauce, she stood up and grinned like the Grinch on Christmas Eve. “Oh, do I have an idea,” she said.
“I'm almost afraid to ask.”
“A jury convicted him, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Which means he had a trial.”
“I assume so,” I said.
“You can look at his file from the trial. That'll tell you exactly what happened. It'll have all the evidence, not just his version.”
“His file? Can I do that?”
“My aunt's a paralegal at a law firm in St. Cloud. She'll know.” Lila pulled her cell phone from her pocket and scrolled through her contacts until she found her aunt's number. I handed Jeremy a paper towel to use as a napkin so that he could start eating, and then I listened to Lila's end of the conversation.
“So the file belongs to the client not the lawyer?” she said. “How do I find that out?—Will they still have it?—Can you e-mail that to me?—Perfect. Thanks a bunch. I gotta run.—I will. Bye-bye.” Lila hung up her phone. “It's easy,” Lila said, turning to me. “His old attorney will have the file.”
“It's been thirty years,” I said.
“But it's a murder case, so my aunt said they should still have it.”
I picked up the newspaper articles, paging through them until I came across the name of the attorney. “His name was John Peterson,” I said. “He was a public defender out of Minneapolis.”
“There you go,” she said.
“But how do we get it from the lawyer?”
“That's the beauty,” she said. “The file doesn't belong to the lawyer. It belongs to Carl Iverson. It's Carl's file and the lawyer has to let him have it. My aunt's gonna e-mail me a form that he can sign requesting the file, and they have to give it to him or whoever he sends over to get it.”
“So all I have to do is get Carl to sign this form?”
“He'll have to sign it,” she said. “If he doesn't sign, then you know that he's full of crap. Either he signs it or he's nothing more than a lying, murdering bastard who wants to keep you in the dark about what he really did.”
I'd seen my mom wake up in the morning with the remnants of her previous night's binge still smeared in her hair; I'd seen her stumble into the apartment cross-eyed drunk with her shoes in one hand and wadded-up undergarments in the other; but I'd never seen her look as pathetic as she did when she came shuffling into the Mower County Courthouse wearing her jail-orange jumpsuit with her wrists in handcuffs and shackles on her ankles. Three days of no makeup and no showering brought out the burlap in her skin. Her blonde hair with its dark-brown roots hung heavy with dandruff and greasy build-up. Her shoulders slumped forward as though the cuffs on her wrists weighed her
down. I had dropped Jeremy off at Mom's apartment before heading to the courthouse to wait for her first appearance.
She entered with three other people also dressed in orange. When she saw me she waved for me to come up to the wooden railing, her on one side, standing beside the attorney's table with its comfy chairs, and me in the gallery with its wooden church pews for seating. A bailiff held out a hand as I approached her, a signal to not get close enough to pass weapons or other such contraband to the people in orange.
“You need to bail me out,” Mom said in a frantic whisper. Up close I could see that the stress of her incarceration had hung deep crescent bags of exhaustion under her bloodshot eyes. She looked as if she hadn't slept in days.
“How much are you talking about,” I said.
“The jailer said I'll probably need three thousand to bail out. Else I gotta stay in jail.”
“Three thousand!” I said. “I need that money for school.”
“I can't take jail, Joey.” My mother started to cry. “It's full of crazy people. They stay up all night yelling. I can't sleep. I'm going crazy, too. Don't make me go back there. Please, Joey.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out. I felt sorry for her—I mean this was my mother, the woman who gave me life. But if I gave her three thousand dollars, I would run out of money midway through my next semester. My thoughts of staying in school were colliding with the vision of my mother in her most desperate hour. I was unable to speak. No matter what I said, it would be wrong. I was rescued from my dilemma when a couple of women entered the court through a door behind the judge's bench, and the bailiff called for everyone to rise. I took a deep breath, thankful for the interruption. The judge entered and instructed everyone to sit down, and the bailiff escorted my mother to a seat in the jury box to sit with the other folks in orange.
As the clerk called what she referred to as the “in-custodies” up to the bench, I listened to the dialogue that went back and forth between the judge and the attorney, a female public defender handling all four defendants. It reminded me of a Catholic funeral mass I had attended when one of my high-school coaches died. The litany had been spoken by the priest and the parishioners so many times that the rote presentation seemed toneless to us outsiders.