by Tony Masero
By the time the case came to court and the process of appeals had been gone through it was eighteen months later and Washington State had abolished the death penalty but within a year they reinstated it. The confusion and legal wrangles aroused by the State Senate held sentencing in abeyance and it was not until later that, having been advised to plead guilty by their counselor, the two were condemned to life without parole rather than face the certainty of the hangman in what appeared to be a clear case of two instances of first degree murder and the secondary crime of robbery with violence.
There followed an up-to-date interview with Gil Gurns from his cell in Walla Walla, the Washington State Penitentiary, where he was still serving out his sentence.
In the intervening years Gil Gurns had changed considerable. He was no longer the freedom loving, hip and outdoor soul Cole remembered. Large and over-muscular, his body was distended by steroids and the relentless lifting of yard weights. His head was shaved and one side of it populated with sharp edged prison tats of something resembling a large black spider. A flourishing mustache swept from beneath his nose and a long scar ran from his upper lip and over his left cheek. Little trace remained of the original buckskin clad child-of-God that had naively sold his rucksack for a small fortune but instead earned himself a prison sentence in return.
‘It’s a fact,’ he said coldly, staring hard into the camera. ‘We was innocent. I’ll say it now and say it until I die. We did not kill those people; all we did was try to help a guy. He was a man carrying a child with him and me and my partner tried to help him out. The man we thought was a State Trooper turned out to be nothing of the kind. He was no more than a common criminal, like I’m accused of being,’ here he gave a snort of either disgust or humor; it was hard to tell the difference. ‘Randy and me been locked up all these years for something we never did. It’s what they call a gross miscarriage of justice and if you’re out there, fella?’ he jabbed a pointed finger menacingly at the camera. ‘If you’re watching this? You know who I mean. Do the right thing. Admit your guilt, ‘cos we carried enough grief all these years for what you did.’
‘Wow!’ said Caitlin. ‘He sure looks mean. I wonder if he is telling the truth.’
‘Could be,’ Cole said disconsolately.
‘I doubt it,’ she said. ‘Mean looking fella like that. Got to be, isn’t it? They couldn’t get it wrong.’
‘It was a lot of years ago now,’ Cole said. ‘People change.’
Caitlin sighed and stretched awkwardly, ‘I guess. But look Mister Junger, it’s real late and if you like you can stay here the night rather than drive back, you’re welcome. I know how bad it can be if you’re not used to the roads.’
‘Mighty kind of you, but best I get going. I have to pick up some tools before I’m up here again tomorrow.’
He got to his feet and Caitlin unwound herself from her chair. As they did so there was the sound of a heavyset vehicle arriving outside, pulling up and settling on its springs. Cole glanced out of the window to see an old El Camino sitting in the yard outside. The muffled boom of music came from inside the cab and then silence as the radio was switched off and the car door of the Chevy was opened with a squeak and then slammed shut.
‘My boyfriend,’ Caitlin explained, biting her lower lip with a touch of nervousness.
The door burst in and a large frowning figure appeared in the doorway. He was a young man, around twenty-two or three years of age; his hair greased and combed back straight from his forehead. The face was hard boned and chin unshaven. He wore a checkered wool shirt, denims and heavy work boots.
‘Who’s truck is that outside, Caitlin?’ he asked, looking Cole up and down. ‘It yours?’ he asked. His tone was belligerent and dismissive all at the same time.
‘This is Mister Junger, the plumbing contractor,’ Caitlin explained. ‘He’s come to fix the shower. It broke today.’
‘What? You bust it up?’
‘No, it’s the base it just broke.’
‘Hell,’ he spat. ‘Things don’t just break. What you do? You drop something?’
‘Um, this is Demus Barnes,’ Caitlin introduced coyly. ‘He stays here with me….’
‘Never mind that. I asked a question,’ Demus said irritably, sighing as if the simple query was a matter of great importance.
‘No, honey. It just broke,’ Caitlin explained quietly in a deferential tone. ‘It wasn’t an accident. It was just too old, is all.’
‘What you going to do about it, fella?’ Demus asked, swinging around and staring at Cole. His eyes were feverish and enlarged. Cole could smell the stink of cannabis and liquor oozing off of him.
‘Well, I’m just on my way out,’ he said. ‘I’m sure your lady will explain everything.’
‘I’m asking you, friend. Not her.’
‘Okay,’ shrugged Cole, answering passively. ‘We have to take out the old fittings and I aim to put in a new base if the drainage underneath is okay.’
Demus nodded, shaking his head up and down a few times. ‘Just so you do a good job. I won’t have Caitlin suckered into parting with her cash for poor work.’
‘I’m sure, Mister Junger….’ Caitlin began.
‘I like to get things straight at the beginning,’ Demus cut her off. ‘So, don’t interrupt me, huh? Now are we clear on this, Junger. I want it done proper or I’ll want to know why.’
‘You’ll have a good job,’ Cole promised quietly.
‘See that we do,’ Demus eyed him again before standing to one side. ‘On your way then.’
Without another word, Cole left the house and as he made his way to the truck he heard the sound of raised voices following him into the night.
Cole had some thinking to do.
The TV program had shaken him up more than he cared to admit.
It was dark in his lonely apartment when he got back. He was welcomed by the stale air and stuffy flavor of nothing changing or being changed, no windows opened or furniture moved and the place holding all the fixed refuge of a bachelor’s home. He felt his way across the living room confidently in the darkness, as a blind man might, sure that everything would be as he left it.
Cole took a cold beer from the refrigerator and stood a moment in the light from the open door as he opened the bottle. Swallowing a mouthful he eased the door closed. Then leaving the kitchenette, he switched on a table lamp and went across to look out of the window at the street outside before pulling down the blind.
Rivers Bend was a small place, maybe six hundred residents and not covering more than ninety square miles. It was isolated enough for Cole to feel unnoticed amongst the population of semi or retired folk that made up most of the town’s population. A slow place but companionable if you wanted it and not if you didn’t. It suited Cole.
He sat down on his settee with the beer in his hand and went over the show in his mind. It had been a lot of years and he tried to remember the man he had been back then.
Certainly wilder. Jaded even. After the army it had seemed that he had lived in a rabid dream for a while. Lost and restless, unable to settle anywhere. His nights populated by nightmares and the day filled with flashes of recall. They had pretty much left him now, those memories of horror. Of the killing. The remorseless and ugly killing. At least for most of the time, now and then in an unprepared moment an image would jump into mind. Shocking sights that had a whole series of elements attached to them. Intangible elements such as lost memories of smell and time and environment. Sometimes he thought he could reach out and touch those memories they were so real. Almost as if they were three-dimensional holograms that rotated in flickering motions to show their ghostly and revolting appearance at every angle.
A helmet swimming full of a man’s brains lying trapped in simmering and humid heat. Acres of unrecognizable charred bodies after the napalm crisped and split them apart so that pink oozed through the charcoal exterior. The taste of burning palm thatch, rich and gagging in the back of the nostrils.
; He breathed a long sigh and swallowed from the bottle, his hand trembling slightly as he did so. The cold beer ran chill down his throat but did nothing to clear the awful taste that still lived in his mind. It did no good to bring it all up again. All the images that panned across his mind even at a mere consideration of that time in his life.
There had never been anyone to talk it through with. Not after Benny. So he’d kept his mouth shut from then on, after all, who in the country had anything good to say about their efforts in South East Asia. Oh, they spoke more kindly of it now but it was all too late for those who had suffered as they were rotated out of service and left high and dry to relive the terror and the pain over and again.
Unconsciously he rubbed his leg, the old wounds where the fragments had forced a path in his limbs. Places only remembered when the weather changed or he crouched and stretched too far in an awkward spot under a sink unit.
There had been some women since. Those were his softer moments but it was inevitable that the inability to communicate with anything but superficial expressions of commitment had led to separation and finally parting. He remembered some with affection. They had tried, Lord Almighty, some of them had tried their best to break through and reach him. But the cage was too tight and the bars to wide.
Susan had been one of the better sort. Beautiful and courageous. She had cared enough to try her utmost. An airhostess for United Airlines. Tall and slender, with wonderful legs, dark hair and a cheeky smile. She had loved him quite intensely, he recalled, and he her in his way, as little as it was. Where was she now, he wondered? The last he heard she had married an older man, born him a child and was living comfortably down in Florida.
He had made love to her in this very room once, on this settee in fact. Not long after he had moved in. He smiled at the memory. The soft mound of her smooth belly under his touch and the neat curl of her pubic hair below the bikini line. Much of his old anger had been eased out of him on that welcoming frame.
Susan had been as eager as he and they had been a couple for over ten months, a record in those days for him. Maybe it had been the separation enforced by her work that had kept them together, her flight schedule taking her away on a regular basis. Each time she had returned it had been like a first meeting all over again. Hungry and insatiable in their lovemaking, never able to reach a sense of complete satisfaction no matter how hard they tried. But it had ended like so many other times, in recrimination and complaint. Recriminations imposed by his own inability to express himself.
Cole looked around the indistinct forms of his living room as he considered the one-time mountain boy and drug smuggler Gil Gurns and his television appeal. That he should come forward and confess. Rightly unjust he might be but Cole considered it an unrealistic request all the same. The shadows in the room closed in as the pragmatic thought took hold. The light from the table lamp was dim and his possessions and the memories they encouraged were mere shapes in the darkness. They signified nothing of what he was or had ever been. It was all as detached from him as if a stranger’s belongings and he was alone in the darkness; separated by the pit of guilt and destitution of spirit he invested himself with.
He realized then that he was as much a prisoner as both Gil and his poor buddy.
Kept in isolation without friends or family. Locked in a world that must hide him from sight with a changed name and an innocuous occupation. Because, if he was confident of anything in all this, he was sure that they would remember, they never forgot a slight and even now after all this time they would come for him.
Chapter Four
The sun was out and the air crisply fresh and redolent with the scent of pine as Cole drove the Dodge up to Caitlin’s cabin next morning. He was early, he knew it but he had not slept well after all his ruminating and had been eager to get going in the early hours. So he had packed the truck bed with the tools he would need and set off with no more than a cup of coffee inside him.
He considered he liked the young woman. Not in any proprietorial way but more in a recognition of similarities. Primarily the aloneness she wore like a shawl. He could not say he admired her shabby style and the unkempt state of her property but it was something deeper than superficialities that called to him. Cole could not lay a finger on it and did not dwell overly on the matter, it was just an instinct and he allowed it life as no more than that.
He honked the horn to tell of his presence, not wanting to catch her at an awkward moment. But the house remained silent so he got out of the cab and began to unload his equipment. When everything was ready and there was still no sign of life, he went up to the front door and rapped on the screen frame.
‘You there, Miss May?’ he called. ‘It’s Cole Junger, the plumber.’
Still no answer.
He pulled back the screen and pushed at the door. It opened easily.
A feeling came over Cole then. An old feeling of danger. He backed off a step aware of the sense of warning and not liking it. Desperately he looked around at the front of the property. Nothing moved and all was still in the bright morning light.
The sensation was at odds with the pleasant appearance of the place. The sloping hillside covered in meadow grass reached away behind, right up to the edge of the pine forest that stood silent and unmoving above.
Cole frowned, his brow furrowed and he steeled himself. Then he pushed open the door and went inside. The same pile of unwashed dishes welcomed him, the smell of stale fried food and an unclean house.
He stepped into the living room.
She was sitting in her leather armchair her body covered in a hooded duster. It was long and old, the yellow surface stained and dirty. The whole thing covered her and her legs that were drawn up underneath. He couldn’t see her face in the shadows cast by the hood.
‘Miss May?’ he said tentatively.
She stirred, a slight movement.
At least she’s alive, he thought. ‘You alright?’ he asked.
‘You can start work,’ she said, her voice soft. Lisping strangely and barely audible.
Cole moved into the room, looking around carefully as he came.
‘What’s wrong, lady?’ he said, more strongly now, convinced something was not right here. ‘Talk to me.’
‘It’s nothing,’ she managed, her husky voice thick and throaty. ‘Please, you just go ahead, Mister Junger.’
‘No, ma’am,’ he said. ‘What is it?’
He knew then and guessed the problem once he realized the Camino was gone.
‘Please,’ she mumbled. ‘I’m fine.’
He moved over to her and gently slid the hood away from her face, spitting a hiss of revulsion as he did so.
Her lower lip was split open in an ugly gash and the left eye swollen to golf ball size, maroon blotches marked her cheek and when she looked up at him the swollen eye flickered with liquid that seeped onto her cheek to mingle with the dried blood there. Her nose had bled and there was more blood, dry and dark that marked her chin below the puffy lower lip and ran down onto her neck. Cole could make out the impressions of fingers about her neck, red bruises that showed she had been near-throttled whilst she was beaten.
‘He do this to you?’
She looked away, ‘It’s alright. It happens sometimes. Please, do your work. I’ll be okay.’
‘You been sitting here all night?’
She sighed and reached over for a pack of cigarettes, taking one out with shaking fingers. Thin little fingers he noticed, the nails kept perfect and varnished, which was strange as the rest of the place was little more than a sordid hovel. She placed the cigarette awkwardly in the side of her mouth where the lip was not split and lit it with a plastic lighter.
‘That’s too bad,’ Cole said. It was an unnecessary statement of fact but in the saying it sparked a brew of anger in him. A coil that burned in his gut. It was a feeling he had not had in a long time.
Turning on his heel he went into the kitchen and clattered around until he found a serv
ing bowl. He washed it out and filled it with cold water, then taking a drying cloth that was grubby but all he could find he went back to the girl.
She sat as he had found her, coiled on her chair and blowing thin veils of smoke into the air. She was not a smoker, he could see that by the way she sipped the cigarette and blew out in little puffs.
‘Come on,’ he said gently. ‘Let me clean you up.’
‘I don’t normally,’ she said of the smoking, stubbing out the cigarette in a tin lid beside her. It was a form of apology or justification that one might make to a parent.
Cole approached her with the damp cloth, ‘Look at me,’ he said and she tilted her chin up to look at him with her one good eye.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘Hell, girl. There’s nothing for you to be sorry about.’
Gently, he dabbed at her face until she was used to his touch.
‘You have any ice?’ he asked, when the dried blood was eased away.
She sniffed, ‘Yeah, I think so, in the refrigerator if it hasn’t melted.’
He went to see, realizing on his way that there was no sound from the generator. When he checked the tray the ice had melted but there were a few cans of Bud still cool enough and he wrapped one in the cloth and brought it to her.
‘Here,’ he said, handing it to her. ‘This’ll get the swelling down.’
Dutifully, she held it to her jaw.
‘Over that eye would be better,’ he advised.
‘You’re very kind,’ she muttered.
‘I’ll go get the generator going. You got gasoline? I guess the tank’s empty.’
She nodded not saying anything.
Cole went outside to the generator shed, filled the tank and kicked off the machine. He went back inside, carrying some of his tools from the truck as he went.