“Yeah, fucking disonancia cognitiva!”
Jesús tried hard to clarify for him that that Lord didn’t exist anymore. A minor God, a rebel, was who created the universe. The Unnamed. It was the only way to explain the Earth’s state of imperfection. Brad nodded but looked at him sideways, unconvinced. Jesús went on to describe that night in Starke Prison when he was possessed by the Unnamed, how he had been transformed into an avenging angel and was given the mission to cleanse the earth of corruption. Brad interrupted him and asked:
“Whoa, hold on a second—what angel?”
“I’m half man, half angel.”
“And how do you decide who the corrupt ones are that need to be eliminated?”
“A voice tells me when to stop in a town and go in a home and KILL THEM ALL.”
“Kill anyone who crosses your path? The just pay for the sinners?”
“There no just and sinners. We all sinners.”
“So that justifies killing anybody. Whoever it was, you were only fulfilling an assigned task.”
Brad sat up.
“I think I have an idea, Jesús. A way out. The State of Texas wants the death penalty. My mission is to prove that you are mentally incompetent and can’t be executed.”
“But it isn’t true.”
“It’s not?”
“I’m not crazy.”
Brad didn’t answer. Jesús continued: “It don’t matter. I can’t be executed ’cause I can’t die, see? I don’t believe in my death. I know the body rots. But I’m eternal. I am going to live forever.”
Brad didn’t argue. He came to see him again two days later. He gave him a black notebook like the ones Jesús had written in before and a supply of pencils.
“Write down everything that’s on your mind. All your desires, your fears. You can exaggerate. The wilder the better.”
Jesús thanked him for the notebooks. He got started writing and filled a fifty-page book in a single day. He explained his mission on earth and his dreams of traveling by train doling out justice, blazing sword in hand, trains that passed over rivers of blood and under steel-colored skies and a long, hard rain of ashes.
He avoided talking to fellow inmates as much as possible during mealtimes, in the bathroom, and in the yard. There was nobody there like Randy, who had somewhat alleviated his days in Starke. The Latinos, the blacks, and the whites were all equally corrupt here. He would make believe he had decapitated them, raped and impaled them, burned them with acid, bitten them in the neck and let them bleed to death.
He wrote it all down eagerly, leaving nothing out.
He wished the same for the prison guards, the doctors in the infirmary, the families who came to visit other inmates: a world of bodies waiting for the dagger that would bore a hole in them and deflate them, and once they were on the ground they’d be swept into the sewers. Holy be not thy name. The same thing for Brad: so close to him, and all he wanted was to twist his neck. The coward, always coming to visit him in the company of another agent. Not to mention María Luisa: he told her never to come back. The temptation was too great.
He felt like watching El Santo movies. They told him he had to follow the regular programming, they didn’t take special requests. He asked Brad for El Santo magazines. “I’ll see what I can do” was his response.
Brad showed up one morning with five El Santo magazines. The serial wasn’t in sequential order, but it was better than nothing.
In Lucha en el infierno, El Santo went up against a group of kidnappers led by Rocke. Jesús enjoyed one of the strips where Rocke turned into a demon and fought against El Santo. It started when El Santo walked into a room. “On the other side of the doorway, he could feel his whole body start to freeze. Soon, the mirrors seemed to come alive. A bloodcurdling scream was heard, as if from beyond the grave. ‘Our Father!’ El Santo screamed. ‘Ugh! Who art in heaven! Holy be thy name . . . Thy Kingdom come . . . Ugh! I can’t breathe! Your will be done! Lord, don’t let this demon take control of me . . .’”
The story ended with El Santo suspended in midair. Would the demon triumph? Jesús knew he wouldn’t. El Santo always won in the magazines. It was so stupid.
In Santo vs. el conjuro de la oscuridad, Jesús enjoyed the story of El Santo confronting a giant snake. “I must be hallucinating.” The serpent curled up against El Santo’s body. “Agh! It hurts! You won’t master me!” El Santo cut the serpent in two. “You may hurt me in body, but nobody will ever wound my soul.”
Jesús threw the magazines in the trash.
Every so often, specialists came to evaluate him. They were bilingual and had the patience to listen to him and read through his notebooks. Brad was pleased: he told Jesús there was a unanimous consensus in favor of supporting the psychiatrist: “The patient’s deliriums have completely taken over his thought process.” Jesús was furious: he didn’t ever want to see them again, the pigs, they were on the law’s side and useless.
Sergeant Fernandez showed up regularly with other agents to ask for statements. Brad told him he didn’t have to answer, but he wanted to talk. Fernandez told him reports had been coming in from other states as well as from Mexico and Canada, and he was suspected of having committed eight hundred unsolved crimes. Fernandez had thrown out several of them himself, all he needed was to ask about a few others. He described the cases and Jesús made an effort to remember.
He admitted to being the perpetrator of four other crimes, a few of them he wasn’t entirely certain about, but they sounded familiar: A nineteen-year-old boy was found near the train tracks in Ocala, Florida. His girlfriend had been raped, strangled, and buried in a grave in Sumter County, Florida. An eighty-year-old woman had been found in her home near the train tracks in Carl, Georgia. A man had been killed in front of an empty home in San Antonio.
The state continued collecting evidence for his case. He would be brought to trial only for the murder of the doctor who was killed in the Houston suburb. The prosecutor believed there was enough hard evidence there to convict him.
Brad continued with the psychiatric evaluations, preparing the defense.
He learned about the attack on the Twin Towers and was sure that now the time for vengeance was at hand. Ashes were falling over buildings and people; the age of the superheroes was over. The giant would be chastised for years of abuse. After the cataclysm, the Unnamed would come and there would be a chance to start anew.
Renata never once visited him. He never heard from her again.
Sergeant Fernandez couldn’t resist finally asking him why point blank before walking out the door. Jesús answered: “Why what?
“Why? Why did you do it?”
“I already said what I had to say.”
“I see the facts and understand them,” the sergeant said with a tired gesture. “But still the question remains, why? The Swedish girl, for example. What reason was there . . . Never mind, it doesn’t matter. I guess you’re just a glitch. An exception to the rule. But then comes the question, what if you’re not?”
“Then you’re fucked.” Jesús said defiantly.
Fernandez got up and mumbled something that Jesús heard as “Unnamed my ass.” And he left.
By the time the trial got under way, Jesús had already been incarcerated in Houston for four years. The trial lasted two weeks. The plaintiff’s attorney described in exhaustive detail the murders Jesús was accused of committing. Brad spoke about mitigating factors, the defendant’s mental disorders, that he believed he was half angel and half human. Jesús listened impatiently. When it was his turn to speak, he admitted his guilt and clarified the particulars, claiming to have done the right thing in each one of the cases.
Yes, he liked to hang around the house after committing his crimes, he didn’t eat out of coldness but because anxiety provoked hunger. Yes, he sometimes took his victims’ driver’s licenses and studied them, because he wanted to know more about their lives before heading on his way. Yes, he took jewelry, because it was easy to hawk in paw
nshops and because he could impress his wife; he never touched the money, though, he was afraid they would trace him through the serial numbers. Yes, sometimes he raped his victims after they were dead, because he hated the fucking gringas who never gave him the time of day and looked at him as if he were a piece of shit. There wasn’t any reason to feel remorse, except at having trusted María Luisa.
The plaintiff’s attorney said that Jesús was “evil in human form,” and Brad defended him. Jesús was forced to keep his mouth shut the whole time, when what he really wanted was to contradict Brad; he didn’t recognize himself in the loco his lawyer was describing. What was so crazy about being half human and half angel? They should spend a few hours inside his head, they’d see for themselves.
The jury quickly reached a guilty verdict. Brad’s argument that he couldn’t distinguish between good and bad was overruled. He had been lucid enough to use pseudonyms, elude the FBI and INS for years, and outmaneuver police from several different states and counties. He had the necessary perspicuity to select ideal homes to rob and vulnerable victims to kill.
The judge pronounced the verdict: Jesús would be executed by lethal injection. Brad embraced him, overwhelmed by emotion. Jesús broke down. Despite all the silliness of the mental incompetence defense, Brad had grown fond of him.
“Don’t worry,” Jesús whispered. “I’ll never die.”
“I’m going to appeal. In the end, justice will prevail.”
“No need,” Jesús responded. “Justice is me.”
He was transferred to a maximum-security prison in Huntsville. When he got out of the van he saw the barbed wire fence, the sentry towers around the perimeter, the security post at the entrance, and realized how serious it was this time. They made him get undressed in a tiny space where a guard said, “Welcome to the death pit,” and handed him a white uniform with the letters DR on the back for “Death Row.”
He was shepherded to the prison wing where convicts condemned to death were kept. It was a separate annex, no inmate rehabilitation necessary, and they spent most of the day isolated in cells that measured sixty square feet. There were few perks; Jesús got them to allow a radio and permission to listen to it for half an hour a day. He could tune in to radio stations on the border. He’d get nostalgic over corridos and rancheras, music that he never liked before but that now reminded him of home.
He kept up with the news, the war in Afghanistan, and relished the fact that Bush couldn’t find Bin Laden.
Women and autograph hunters wrote to him. His signature was worth fifty dollars. He sold locks of his hair. He even sold corns from his feet. Fucking gringos were batshit loco.
He got to know a few fellow death-row convicts. One of them, Cameron, had been wearing the DR on his uniform for nine years now; he was brawny and his forearms were covered with tattoos of skulls and snakes; they said he had torched his own home, killing his three daughters, who were all under five years old, though he claimed he was innocent and showed Jesús poems he’d written to the girls. He said the state had offered him life for a guilty plea, but he refused, he preferred to die. They’d never get him to declare he’d killed his own daughters.
Cliff had stabbed a man to death. Jeff kidnapped and murdered a woman. Wilkes robbed a jewelry store and killed one of the employees.
Later he realized it wasn’t worth the effort getting to know them. They were there one day and gone the next. And that made him obsess about when his turn would come.
Cliff’s last words were “I’m ready, I thank my father, who’s in heaven, for the grace he’s given me.”
Jeff’s were “I love you, Mom. Bye.”
Wilkes asked Jesús to draw a rose a day before he went to the execution room. It didn’t come out very well.
They were allowed out of their cells to mingle with other prisoners in the patio for an hour a day. He’d hang with Cameron and listen to him gab. Jesús wasn’t into flapping his tongue, and he knew sure enough Cameron was guilty—fucking gringos didn’t screw that kind of stuff up—but it was a good story. He put the pieces together slowly but surely as the days and months went by.
Cameron was born in Oklahoma in 1968. He never knew his mother. His father brought him up in a tiny, filthy house near the train tracks (couldn’t sleep at night for the rattle of the freight trains). He got bad grades and by fourteen was addicted to sniffing paint. He dropped out of school, started shoplifting in the malls, and was arrested several times. In 1998 he met Stacy and they got married. They moved to Corsicana, Texas, where Stacy’s brother lived. It was a depressing town some fifty miles from Waco, where jobs were scarce. They started fighting a lot because Cameron was getting plastered and whoring around. He’d hit her every once in a while. By 1991 they had three girls; Amber and the twins Kameron and Karmon. Stacy worked at her brother’s bar, and Cameron was an unemployed mechanic. He would stay at home and watch the girls. The twins were a handful, he’d lose his patience and yell at them a lot, but along with Amber, they were the only things of any value in his life. He spoiled them with presents whenever he could scrape a few bucks together.
“Stacy took off early that day, it was December, so she went to Salvation Army to get Christmas gifts for the girls. I stayed home babysitting. The twins started crying, so I got up to get them some milk and they quieted down. Amber was still sleeping, so I went back to bed. Suddenly Amber’s voice woke me up shouting ‘Daddy, Daddy!’ The place was full of smoke. I grabbed my pants and shirt and yelled for Amber to get out of the house. I ran into the twins’ room, but by that time I couldn’t see a thing. The burnt smell in the hallway was overpowering. My hair burst into flames. I smothered the fire on my head and fought to stay conscious, to get out of the house. I ran to my neighbor’s and asked them to call the fire department. I wanted to go back in, but there wasn’t no way. The firemen took a while to get there, and I knew my kids were already gone. The police arrested me a week later, all I could hear was a voice in my head screaming ‘Daddy. Daddy!’ I thought it was some kind of a joke.
“They needed a motive. The girls’ life insurance was only worth something like fifteen dollars and I wasn’t the beneficiary, it went to Stacy’s dad. But the district attorney in charge of the case, a real son of a bitch, said I was a sociopath and had killed the girls because they were interfering with my licentious lifestyle. As if going on benders and darts games with the guys were the world’s most rotten sins. The ‘expert’ who testified for the prosecution said my violent posters—Iron Maiden and Led Zeppelin, the fallen angels and winged skulls and hatchets—revealed a death wish and possible interest in satanist deeds. Oh, I drank a lot, I admit it, and I got a little heavy-handed with Stacy every once in a while, but it wasn’t all that bad. About the posters . . . how do you even respond to that? It was totally innocent, I just liked the music and all the paraphernalia, the look, I even got a skull tattoo. But the jury believed their story and turned me into a monster.”
Jesús thought about the shack where Cameron had grown up near the train tracks, how he had sniffed paint, was a petty thief and mechanic, had posters of a fallen angel in his house. Cameron was like his double, as if he had also been sent by the Unnamed. But why did he refuse to admit what he’d done? Was he really so afraid of death?
Jesús started hearing a voice at night that whispered, “Daddy, Daddy.”
Cameron’s turn came three years later. His last words were “The only statement I want to make is that I am an innocent man convicted of a crime I did not commit. I have been persecuted for twelve years for something I did not do. From God’s dust I came and to dust I will return, so the Earth shall become my throne.”
Tears welled up in Jesús’s eyes when he heard about his execution. He was going to miss him. He was surprised to feel such grief.
After Cameron’s death, appealing his case before the state became a matter of urgency, and he decided to look for a new lawyer. Brad had dropped the case, so, following the suggestion of another DR inmate, he t
ook on Elizabeth Gillis. She was an energetic redhead who set about writing and sending appeals as if she really believed there was a chance for an acquittal.
Jesús sent handwritten letters to the journalists covering his case. He wrote to a reporter from Houston’s channel KPRC that the prison food was disgusting and that he’d be voting for Steve Forbes or Gary “Beaur” in the upcoming Republican primaries because “this man do not want babies murdered.”
A year later he wrote to the same reporter saying he was happy about the attack on the Twin Towers and that the country had better watch out because it had “deservingly” made enemies all over the world. He said the attack had been prophesied in the book of Revelation and the government wanted to kill all the prophets, including Koresh and Bin Laden. He said it didn’t matter though because all prophets were one single voice and behind them was the Unnamed, and the Unnamed could not be touched by anyone.
He wrote another letter a year later saying that he admired George Bush but didn’t agree with sending troops to Iraq and Afghanistan because it would make them hate him. He wrote about hearing his speech in El Paso on modernizing the border and understood the reasoning. People here were materialists and they only cared that commerce flowed freely. He wrote out one of Bush’s sentences: “We want to use our technology to make sure that we weed out those who we don’t want in our country—the terrorists, the coyotes, the smugglers, those who prey on innocent life.” It made him laugh because the only ones they’d be getting rid of were the innocent ones, the honest workers and resourceful people like him who found ways to dodge the Empire “becose the empire is corupt and his end will be here pretty soon.”
He made up with his sister, and when she visited he found her pretty again. He wished she would come alone, but her husband usually came with her. He was a threatening presence hovering over their visits and didn’t let them talk in peace.
Whenever his mother visited, she ended up getting sick.
Norte Page 25