Monument Road

by Michael Wiley

  If he said anything to that as I walked down the driveway to the Nissan, I didn’t hear it. My head was buzzing too loud.

  I drove back to the Cardinal Motel, did my pushups and sit-ups, and then stood in the shower. The stream from the showerhead went from weak to weaker, and currents of cold water flashed through the hot, but I soaped my body, rinsed, and soaped again. My sweat went down the drain, and though my stains ran too deep to ever wash away, I scrubbed and lathered and rinsed again as if I could clean myself to the bone.

  I dressed afterward and ran my fingers through my hair, then squared the towel on the towel bar. I fixed the bed sheets. I balled up a strip of toilet paper and dusted the night table and the top of the TV. I carried the bathroom garbage outside to the bin.

  Before leaving to pick up Cynthia, I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. ‘I know you,’ I said to the face that stared at me, and then I closed my eyes and turned away before I could change my mind.

  When I pulled up at the Cineplex, Cynthia ran to the car from the ticket booth. The clouds had blackened as the sun started to go down, and thunder rolled across the sky. As Cynthia climbed in, the first raindrops splattered on the windshield. She smiled at them, smiled at me, and gave me her fingertip wave. ‘Hi.’

  ‘Where to?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m starving,’ she said. ‘Take me out to eat.’

  Now the rain came hard, pummeling the hood and roof, and she watched me as I drove toward downtown, then cut back again on Philips Highway.

  When I pulled into the lot at Sahara Sandwiches, I said, ‘It’s close to where I live, and it’s better than it looks.’

  Inside, the fluorescent lights glared, and the air smelled of the deep fryer. Three stools, covered with orange vinyl, faced a white counter.

  ‘Here or to go?’ the grill man asked when we ordered gyros and fries.

  ‘Here,’ I said.

  But Cynthia said, ‘To go,’ and then, to me, ‘I want to take you somewhere.’

  As we waited for the food, the old black prostitute who’d ducked under a bus shelter when I walked back to the Cardinal after my first trip to the Regency limped in, rainwater running from her hair. She winked at me and said, ‘Hey, there.’ She eyed Cynthia and then came to me. ‘Give me a cigarette.’

  The man behind the counter reached for a pot of coffee. ‘Leave them alone, Felicity.’ He poured a cup and set it on the counter for her.

  ‘No need to be rude,’ she told him.

  Cynthia had me drive across the river and into the industrial area northwest of the city. An overpass took us across a big railroad yard. The rain came down hard, and lightning cracked the sky. After we passed the Nextran Truck Center and the White Wave Food Warehouses, she said, ‘Turn at the next entrance.’

  The sign said Cardice Cold Storage, the words draping over the image of an iceberg. At the back of the parking lot there was a gray warehouse with nine truck bays and a street door. Cynthia pointed at a spot next to a white van. ‘Park there.’

  When I turned off the car, she grabbed the food and darted through the rain and into the building. I got out and followed her.

  The lobby had brown carpet, cheap wood paneling, and a metal desk. The air felt like an open refrigerator. An attendant, wearing yellow coveralls over a thermal T-shirt and a flannel shirt, sat on a metal chair behind the desk. A parka, a wool hat, and snow gloves lay on a table next to him.

  Cynthia stood at the desk talking with him. She waved me over and said, ‘Mr Tony, this is my friend, Franky. We’ll be about a half hour.’

  He considered me. ‘This one don’t look like he’ll last that long.’

  We went through a door into a small interior hall with a heavy door.

  ‘You’ve brought other guys here?’ I asked.

  ‘Once or twice,’ she said.

  She opened the door, and we went inside. The walls and the high ceiling were fat with insulation. Heavy-duty metal racks, rising thirty feet from the concrete floor, stood in long rows. Ice crystals coated them and the plastic-wrapped boxes on the shelves. Vented machines with icicles hanging from their brackets blasted icy air from near the tops of the wall. Industrial fans, mounted on the ceiling, circulated a freezing wind. Toward the back of the warehouse, there was a separate metal shed, covered with extra insulation, which was coated with frost.

  My pants and shirt stiffened as the rainwater froze.

  ‘This is insane,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Cynthia said happily. She took our bag to one of the racks and, using a box as a table, unpacked our food. She shivered as she handed me my gyros.

  I looked around the space, from the metal shed to the wide interior loading docks. ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s my favorite place. All ice.’

  ‘Yeah, but why?’

  She shrugged and bit into her pita.

  ‘How did you find it?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve been coming here since I was eight years old.’

  We ate – shuddering in the cold, our clothes turning brittle with ice, the grease in our sandwiches congealing, soft as cheese. I ate an oil-crusted French fry and said, ‘Tastes horrible.’

  She ate one too. ‘Yeah.’ Then, eyeing me, she took another fry from the bag and fed it to me.

  ‘I don’t get this,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t need to.’

  My legs trembled with cold. She laughed as she watched me shake. Then she started trembling too. I looked at the ceiling and around at the rest of the wide room.

  I nodded at the separate metal shed. ‘What’s in there?’

  ‘That’s the deep freezer,’ she said. ‘They use dry ice. A hundred and ninety degrees below zero. You want to try it?’

  ‘This is what – a test?’

  ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘Or maybe it’s a gift. I don’t know. You want to go in?’

  ‘Another time,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll hold you to that.’

  We left the warehouse after twenty-five minutes. I could hardly bend my fingers, and my feet were numb. Cynthia thanked the attendant, and, as we went back out into the rain, he said to her, ‘I think this is a record. By ten minutes at least.’

  ‘Feel better?’ Cynthia asked when we got back into the Nissan.

  ‘I feel cold,’ I said. The car windows steamed as the chill radiated from our clothes.

  She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. Her lips felt hot. ‘So, what now?’ she asked.

  ‘Go for ice cream?’ I said.

  She was quiet for a moment, then said, ‘Why don’t we go back to your room?’

  The idea scared me. ‘I haven’t been with anyone since I got out. I was barely with anyone before. There was one girl. At a party in high school.’

  ‘So maybe it’s time.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said.

  We sat for a minute longer. Then she said, ‘Start the car, Franky.’

  By the time we reached the river, the rain had eased, and when we merged onto Philips Highway, it turned to mist. Still, the water standing on the pavement slicked off the backs of the tires and hissed against the bottom of the car. Cynthia sat next to me, her eyes on the road, her hands crossed in her lap. When we pulled past the Cardinal Motel sign and into the parking lot, she looked at the shabby building and looked over her shoulder at the red neon bird.

  ‘Nice place,’ she said.

  ‘It’s complicated,’ I said.

  We went inside, and I locked the door behind us. She eyed the bed, the TV, the night table, and the dresser. ‘It’s not so bad,’ she said.

  ‘I needed a place to get started,’ I said.

  She walked to the bed, touched it, walked to the TV, touched it too. ‘I live with my mom and dad,’ she said.

  ‘We do what we need to do,’ I said.

  She went to the window shade, looked under it into the parking lot, and let it fall back into place.

  She faced me. ‘Do you know that woman who asked you for a cigarette at the restaurant?’

>   ‘The hooker? I’ve never seen her before. Or I’ve seen her – out on the street – but I don’t know her.’

  ‘Because I wouldn’t blame you if you did.’

  ‘As I said, I’ve been with no one.’

  ‘Good,’ she said, and she came to me.

  ‘Hold on,’ I said, and I went to the lamp.

  But she said, ‘Leave it on.’ Her voice seemed to catch in her throat. ‘I need to show you something.’

  She unsnapped the top of her pants, stared at me as if uncertain about what we were about to do, then unzipped and lowered the pants to her knees.

  Her legs were scarred. Mottled red and gray. Shiny. Pitted. They looked like old sicknesses – leprosy or the plague. ‘What is it?’ I said.

  ‘When I was little, we had a fire. I was sleeping in my bed.’

  ‘Christ – I’m sorry.’

  She smiled.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘You’ve been through it too, right?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘So we’ve got that.’

  ‘Does it hurt?’ I asked.

  ‘Sometimes. And sometimes my throat does. I breathed a lot of smoke. Cold air feels good, especially on my legs. I like ice.’

  I was afraid to go to her.

  She slipped off her shoes and pulled her pants off the rest of the way.

  She stared at me and said, ‘Your turn.’

  I took off my shoes and socks and pants. I unbuttoned my shirt and took it off too. I stood apart from her, and I shivered though I no longer felt cold. Then the shame of the pair of boy’s underwear hanging on my door handle came back to me.

  But she took off her shirt, unhooked her bra, and let it fall.

  I looked at her legs. I’d never seen anything uglier. ‘Can I touch?’

  ‘Please do.’

  We did our best at sex. But images of the men who’d come to me during my first night in general population kept flashing in my memory. When I fought those memories down, images of the Bronson boys – the photographs Higby had shoved in my face in the interview room and the big slides that the prosecution had showed the jurors – replaced them.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  She put her hand between my legs and whispered, ‘Never be sorry. Never.’

  When she bit my neck, the bite marks on Steven and Duane Bronson flashed in my vision.

  I tried lying on top of her, and she pretended to enjoy it, but I could see the pain.

  ‘We’re a mess,’ she said, when I rolled off of her.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said again.

  ‘But I don’t mind being a mess,’ she said. She kissed me and said, ‘Lie on your back.’

  She used her hands again and her mouth, and when I was ready or close to it, she said, ‘Good enough.’ She climbed on top of me and guided me inside her.

  In a burst, I was done.

  ‘Shit,’ I said.

  But she stayed on top of me, kissing my forehead, my lips, and my shoulders. And when she rolled off and lay on the bed beside me, she touched her hand to mine.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  But she said, ‘That was great,’ as if lying could make it true.

  So I lied too. ‘It was,’ I said.

  ELEVEN

  Some nights on death row, I lay on my bunk and I thought I could taste the boys’ blood on my lips. The salt. The copper.

  In solitary confinement, the dark has fingers. It plays you and plays you until you make cracked music like no French horn has ever made.

  Some nights, I wondered if I did it.

  With the lights back on in the morning, I knew I didn’t. I shouted my innocence at the walls. I wrote letters. I whispered into the toilet pipes so the men in the other walled-in cells would hear me.

  But some nights, I wondered if my memory lied.

  Higby told the jurors I bit Steven and Duane Bronson in the worst places imaginable. He said the teeth that bit the boys were my teeth. He said the lips that sucked away their blood were mine. Some nights, with the fingers of dark playing me, I believed it.

  I bit my arm. To taste the blood. To see if it was true. If it excited me. But it was my arm. My blood. Not theirs. I didn’t fool myself. I tried.

  Higby never showed Steven and Duane Bronson’s mother pictures of their bodies. He showed her only their faces. She could identify them, say goodbye. But he showed me. He showed the jurors.

  I told all this to the other inmates through the plumbing pipes. We were men suspended over stainless steel toilets, talking to ourselves until we heard echoes of our own voices. Or sitting under stainless steel sinks. Certain pipes resonated when others went silent. One man sang songs he’d learned twenty years ago, before he killed his wife and daughter. If I could have made the plumbing sing, I would have piped the Star Wars theme into the other cells. Instead, I whispered to the toilet, whispered to the sink, I didn’t I didn’t I didn’t, even when I wondered, Did I? And the echoes came back—

  I didn’t either.

  Me neither.

  I was in a different town at the time.

  A different state.

  Out of the country.

  Ask my mother, my brother, my sister, my lover.

  Liars. Most of them.

  Would I call any of them my friends?

  More or less.

  But the bar was low. When the people who bring you your food and allow you to bathe also plan to kill you with a needle, an inmate who flings his own shit at you if you get too close starts to seem neighborly.

  When the court transferred me off death row, I listened to French horn recordings online in the prison library. Mark Taylor. Vincent Chancey. Old guys like Philip Farkas, who could have blown the hell out of Star Wars.

  The thing about a French horn is you always know what you’re listening to. It’s like hearing a man singing with an accent. With a flute or a trumpet, the music gets so pure it seems to separate from the metal, lips, and fingers that make it. But with a French horn – with all those tubes turning the sound this way and that – you know you’re hearing twists against perfection.

  I had a lot of time to think about such things. I talked about them to my friend Stuart. He seemed to understand, or at least he nodded along as he often did, because he generally ran the way the current was flowing, no matter the direction. If I had talked to the other men about the French horn, I might have given them courage to come at me with shanks. Them I would lunge at in the yard and make sure they backed away, or they would lunge at me, testing, always testing for a soft spot.

  To see Stuart, you would think others would victimize him. A big, heavy, yellow-skinned black man, he carried himself like a gallon jug of water, always more sideways than forward. He had gentle eyes and lazy lips that went with the eyes. If you watched him lift weights in the yard, you knew that muscles rippled under the fat, but he seemed always short of breath, and, with the way he spoke – his Ts and Ds crumbling between his tongue and his teeth – the hyenas should have eaten him for dinner.

  But, after lights out, the worst of the predators recruited him to hold down their prey while they took turns, though – as far as I knew – he never took a turn himself. And yet, in spite of the night times, the prey hung near him whenever they could in the daylight, as if he would shelter them. And sometimes he did. As the predators circled, he would slosh into the middle of the action and speak with the intended victim, and the predators would pause and then break from the pack as if they forgot their hunger.

  I never learned what Stuart did to get sent to Supermax. He wouldn’t say, and no one else seemed to know. But we all knew he’d come for life plus thirty years. He laughed his gentle laugh and said, ‘I’m gonna stink this prison to high hell for every one of those extra thirty years. A corpse like mine gonna rot for a long time.’

  So I told him about the French horn, and I told him about the Bronson boys and the letters I was writing, though admitting that you’d gone down for raping a kid was like inviting ot
hers to hang you from a bar with a bed sheet.

  Stuart would listen and he would say, ‘You got to be strong, Franky.’

  I couldn’t figure out if he believed me. Belief seemed beside the point.

  ‘If only I can get the government to test the rape kit,’ I said. ‘But they keep it locked in a box, like I’m asking for the key to their houses.’

  Now and then, he asked a question like, ‘If you didn’t do those boys, who did? You got to have that.’ But mostly he just took it in. He seemed to absorb it.

  TWELVE

  Dr Patel said, ‘You need to accept that freedom is essentially transgressive.’

  ‘I don’t know what that means,’ I said. My head was still full from my night with Cynthia.

  He leaned toward me until he seemed about to hold my hand. ‘To be free is to be unafraid of the law – to be able and willing to break it if moral conditions require that you do so.’ Outside his window, the sky over the St Johns River looked brilliant and hot. Any moment, the water under it might start boiling.

  ‘If you aren’t raping and killing, you aren’t free?’ I said.

  ‘Once upon a time in evolutionary history, that might have been true. For us now, it just means living without undue fear of the law.’

  ‘Even if the law has tried to kill you?’

  ‘Especially then.’

  I thought about that. ‘So it was OK to go to Higby’s house?’

  ‘You should confront your past,’ he said, ‘and you should ignore arbitrary boundaries.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But beware of taking pleasure from others’ misery. And beware of treating them unjustly.’

  ‘Unjustly? Higby is a hypocrite. He lies. He tried to get me killed and still would like to see it happen. I’ll cheer when a prosecutor buries him. I’ll bring the shovel.’

  Dr Patel leaned back in his chair. ‘May I ask two questions?’

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t.’

  ‘First,’ he said, ‘is it possible that Bill Higby sincerely believes you killed those boys?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘He had the evidence. He only needed to check. He could’ve opened the rape kit, run the tests, and let me go. He wanted me to be guilty. He needed it. He still does.’