Watch Me Go

by Mark Wisniewski

  And now the judge says, “Mr. Sharp, I understand you had concerns about whether Mr. Gerelli is the attorney appointed to you. And I want to commend your caution in that regard. But foremost I want to assure you that he, the man just to your left, is indeed Mr. Gerelli and your appointed and astute legal counsel, one and the same.”

  Great, I think.

  “Do you understand me, Mr. Sharp?” the judge asks. Behind him, dusty windows reveal branches of a tree reaching between buildings across the street.

  “Yes, Your Honor,” I say, and a twitch attacks one of Gerelli’s thumbs.

  “Would you like to speak privately with counsel before you plead?” the judge asks.

  “No, sir,” I say to the judge.

  “Then how do you plead?”

  “Innocent,” I say.

  “In my court, it’s either guilty or not guilty, Mr. Sharp.”

  “Then with apologies for that mistake, sir,” I say, “it’s not guilty.”

  And I expect a buzz of whispers from the onlookers behind me, but then I get it that no one who stands accused where I do is guilty—unless guilt can be traded for freedom.

  “Well,” the judge says. “Mr. Sharp is indeed a flight risk. There can be no arguing that. So he gets a remand to Correction in lieu of bail. In a few minutes we’ll tell Mr. Gerelli the date of your pretrial conference, okay, Mr. Sharp?”

  I nod, and the judge nods back, but more as a signal, it seems, to the guards behind me, who guide me by my elbows back to the navy blue door, which, on this side, says, CORRECTION FACILITY—DISPLAY SHIELD AT ALL TIMES. Another guard throws a dead bolt and opens the door, and I’m headed back through the bright hallways, then up the elevator to the holding-cell floor, where, now, at least ten guys stand in the large pen.

  And when I’m entering my smaller pen, someone behind me shouts, “I need privacy with Sharp,” and a guard yanks me to a halt, then into a small, mostly yellow room, where I stand alone until Gerelli walks in and closes the door.

  “Why the hell did you say that,” he says.

  “What,” I say.

  “‘Mistake’! It’s on the record, man! You admitted to making a mistake! You—”

  “I was just referring—”

  “No, you did not refer! You merely said, without an explicit referent, the phrase ‘that mistake’! Which could therefore be argued, down the line by prosecutors, to refer to one of the murder charges! And you might also care to know, Mr. Sharp, that you are up against life, and as such my client, so therefore, all of my boundless respect for your natural intelligence and homespun ambition notwithstanding, I am, for your own legal and personal darned good, asking that you and I, right now, stipulate that I, your attorney, know what the fuck I’m doing!”

  Wow, I think.

  “Fine,” I say.

  And we stand in what’s now relative peace.

  “You need me, man,” Gerelli finally says, as if using this peace to persuade me.

  “Fine,” I say.

  “So I have two questions for you,” he says, and he gestures to have us sit, which we do. “One is what happened? Two is what do you want besides freedom?”

  He opens his briefcase, takes out a pen and a legal pad, aims the pen down to write.

  He says, “I trust you understand that your friend Bark has signed an affidavit saying you shot the cop.”

  “And his bullshit is still on the news?”

  Gerelli leans across the table. “At the top of every hour.”

  I swallow hard, imagining Jasir watching Bark’s televised lies.

  “To answer your second question first?” I say. “I want to see three people. My son, his mother, and a buddy of mine named James.”

  “Full names and addresses?” Gerelli asks.

  I answer this as best I can—James, I figure, is still at his grandma’s in Queens, and I don’t know Madalynn and Jasir’s address in Bed-Stuy—and I watch Gerelli write, and he asks, “Why this James guy?”

  “Been tight with me and Bark since high school.”

  “So we need his testimony.” He underlines James’s name twice. “And, of course, I’ll try to contact your wife—”

  “She’s not my wife.”

  “What, divorced?”

  “No. Just . . . you know, never married.”

  “But this Jasir is your son.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ve supported him over the years.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Not always?”

  “No.”

  “Ever?”

  “Not ever.”

  And here my face radiates. And Gerelli leans back and slaps his thighs with both hands, then inhales and holds his breath.

  “Well, this is all a problem,” he finally says. “Because—Mr. Sharp—not being your spouse, this Madalynn could be asked to testify against you. So I would need to watch what you say to her, and—”

  “I don’t care,” I say.

  “But Mr. Sharp—”

  “She loves me, man.”

  Gerelli frowns cynically. “And let me guess. You also love her.”

  I nod, and he snares me with a pout that commands:

  Don’t be a goddamned fool.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” I tell Gerelli. “But I don’t care. You asked what I wanted, and I told you. And you gave me your best advice, which I took. And now I’m asking you again: I want to see Madalynn and Jasir.”

  “Mr. Sharp, the existence of Jasir, a son unsupported by you, will not win over a jury.”

  “You don’t get it,” I say. “Jasir is why I’m back here.”

  Gerelli’s adoration of law, I sense, tries to grasp this love I’ve finally found for Jasir. In the margin beside Jasir’s name, he jots a question mark.

  “Okay then,” he says. “Tell me what happened.”

  I just did, I want to say. Madalynn and Jasir happened. But instead I talk about the phone call Bark got from the woman up near Poughkeepsie, and I make it clear that Bark got this call only two days ago, and that I’d never met this woman before that call and haven’t seen her or contacted her since. Gerelli writes in a scrawl I doubt he’ll be able to read, and I tell about how, two mornings ago, Bark drove James and me upstate, how we three teamed up to take the drum. How I helped carry it but barely. How we left it on that straightaway upstate, then how we went to Belmont Park and won the trifecta. How then Bark wanted his gun and James said no and I stuck with Bark out of friendship. How the gun always scared me and Bark double-parked to get beer and I got in the driver’s seat. How the cop baited Bark and Bark fired.

  “And that’s the truth?” Gerelli says.

  I nod and say, “I wish it weren’t.”

  “And then what?” Gerelli asks, and I tell about how I drove to Passaic and agreed to ditch Bark’s gun someplace remote. How Bark and I agreed to park his truck and take separate buses, how I saw the breaking news in the minimart and abandoned the westbound bus for the woods. How I then hoped to find someplace where no human being lived—but then met Gabe and couldn’t stop thinking about Madalynn and Jasir.

  “So you headed back for love,” Gerelli says with a straight face.

  “Yes,” I say, and I inhale until my throat catches. Am I nervous about Madalynn and Jasir, or is Gabe’s death finally really hitting me? I vow not to break down—not around Gerelli.

  Gerelli stands and grabs his pen and legal pad and says, “So I’ll get right to contacting these people.” He packs his briefcase and his cell phone rings. He cusses but answers, says “Right” distinctly, folds the phone closed, pockets it, holds his briefcase at his side, turns to face me.

  “Is that it?” he asks.

  “You tell me.”

  “W
e’ll talk tomorrow,” he says, and all I can do is picture Gabe last I saw him, watching me, with Bark’s gun just beside me, as I fought the bass in that sparkling stream.

  And not long after Gerelli leaves, I’m walked back by guards to my holding cell. The big pen now holds close to twenty. And it holds more still as evening gives way to night, brothers always the majority. At some point, a guard brings me a bologna and cheese sandwich, which I eat while wishing I’d tried that liverwurst. I’m given a pint carton of milk I sip slowly. My answer to catcalls at me from the large pen is to remain seated on the concrete floor faced away from them. I sit like this for hours, shoulder blades numb against the gray bars, trying to think good thoughts, like about the years I taught myself basketball, but any good thought ends quickly.

  Then I hear, “Douglas.” A guard has opened the pen, and he and three others, without another word, take me out and past the big pen, which is now packed, then down flights of stairs and outdoors.

  We cross a sidewalk crammed with media. I wonder if Gerelli knew I’d be relocated this soon, and if so, why he didn’t mention it. I still keep emotion from my face, or think I do until I’m headed toward a white van whose windows are caged over with painted-white steel grids, ten huge Carolina blue letters on the side facing me that together spell one word:

  CORRECTION

  56

  JAN

  I SAT IN THE BACKSEAT, on the far left, watching the orchards outside the window, my mother beside me, Colleen in the passenger seat directly in front of Tug while Jasper drove in a quiet of his own.

  Then Jasper clicked on the radio, changed music to news, and dealt with an incline by giving the Galaxie more gas, and Colleen stared out her window but down, at the yellow and blue wildflowers sprouted through emergency lane gravel. Tug would later tell me that right then he was trying to decide which was the better time and place to ask me to delay my return to Arkansas—right away, within earshot of everyone, or as soon as we got home and found time alone—and those wildflowers kept rushing past, yellow, blue, sometimes a purplish blur, and, in this stubborn reticence of everyone’s, Tug remembered overlooking The Crux with his father during the last silence the two of them shared. Maybe, Tug realized only now, his father had been silent then because he’d been planning to run off from the Corcoran household to someplace remote, someplace where no loan shark or wife or anyone could further bedevil him, and then, on the Galaxie’s dash radio, a forecast called for clear skies to the south, and the broadcaster went on to announce that a corpse had been found in a forty-gallon drum discovered by someone on the Saratoga County Highway Department’s cleanup crew, the identity of the body being withheld until the next of kin knew, and Jasper braked hard, and my mother actually cussed, and Tug said, “Turn around.”

  And the Galaxie changed lanes violently to make the next exit, then hairpinned using the overpass and sped east, and everything Tug saw was radiant. He saw radiance through the clouds, radiance on the grilles of oncoming cars and bouncing off the slow lane—Tug’s thoughts themselves felt radiant. He told himself this radiance was a result of the angle of the sun at this time of year, but whatever it was, it had begun too suddenly to be explained away so easily, and it grew stronger as the speed-trap trooper who’d clocked the Galaxie gave chase and pulled us over, stronger still as the trooper and Jasper talked, maintaining this great strength as the trooper sped to escort us, and when the Galaxie finally stopped near the cluster of black brick buildings, the parking lot asphalt gleamed. And then there stood Jasper, on that lot, Colleen staying put in the Galaxie as if there were no way out, and I opened my door just after Tug opened his, and Tug said, “Jan, please just stay here,” but I followed him and Jasper and the trooper to the building, and nearly caught up with them just after they stepped in. The trooper told a sergeant why all of us were there, and this sergeant gathered up forms and a clipboard and a pen but kept calm, very calm, as if he, too, knew Tug’s father as the same Tom Corcoran who’d once jocked, and then this sergeant told Jasper to take a seat in the lobby but said nothing to Tug—this sergeant was just leading him. Tug was then walking in a hallway he perceived as being the color of radiant milk, and the sergeant kept on leading, and Tug wanted every gesture between him and his father’s body long past over and done with: the nod Tug would give, the squeezing of the wrist by Tug one more time because they’d squeezed wrists in the grandstand while his father’s winners had won, the touching of the hair, the thank-you. But Tug also kept thinking his own feet were taking him toward his father too fast, and the radiance, whose existence made even less sense in that hallway, seemed to have grown worse.

  Then, from maybe four feet behind, I whispered, “Tug.”

  And he turned and saw me.

  “I’ll do it if you can’t, Tug.”

  “But I need to do it myself.”

  “But I’m not sure you should.”

  “He’s my dad, Jan. The guy’s my father.”

  And we kept on, toward a door the sergeant held open, and now, inside the room Tug entered, any radiance or brightness seemed cast by the room’s overhead lights, and the sergeant neither spoke nor nodded but Tug kept right on past him and kept going, and soon Tug kept his gaze fixed on one of the table’s silver legs, because he had known at first glance. He had known from the shape and from his father’s height, and from having seen all that radiance, and all he could think was: There’s no need.

  And I stood behind Tug, in the doorway, and Tug quickly said, “It’s him.”

  “Yes, but we need a direct visual ID,” the sergeant said.

  “But it’s him.”

  “Mr. Corcoran, I need to be able to swear you saw his face.”

  “No, you don’t,” Tug said. “Because his face is beside the point. Just let me sign that it’s him.”

  “Mr.—”

  “I’m not scared, sir. It’s just that I know.”

  “Tug, get it over with,” I said.

  “I can’t.”

  And I set a hand on a hip and walked straight over and lifted the sheet. The head was enlarged, swollen or waterlogged, the neck ugly as hell, and the hair looked oddly dry, like a clipped-off horsehair braid I’d found as a child in the hot-walker’s dilapidated stable. But the hair here had thinned precisely as Tom’s had, and it had receded that same distance past his darkest age spot, and what helped me endure this viewing of this ugliness was Tug’s motionlessness, and our silence.

  57

  DEESH

  THE THING ABOUT BEING RELOCATED this time is that I now appreciate it more for what it is, a chance to see as much of the world as someone in custody still can, the world of bright storefronts, of striding employed people late to meet someone they care about, of the grins on kids being made fun of by their pals.

  And then I am there, in Queens again, this time blocks from LaGuardia Airport, rolling onto a tree-lined road divided by a guardhouse, the bridge to Rikers Island, the only way on or off the island other than a swim that would kill any escapee, and it hits me that the city bus just ahead must be a Q100. In my youth I made jokes about the Q100—about how desperate women used it to visit their bad-boy lovers—but now, as this rattling van I’m in keeps close behind such a bus, I imagine how Madalynn and Jasir would feel riding a Q100 to see me, or waiting for one in Queens while innocent residents walk by.

  Then we roll off the bridge and onto the island itself. And it turns out Rikers isn’t just a building or two. Goddamned Rikers is more like its own town, and my mouth goes dry, one breath almost a gasp, though I’m also trying to see as much as I can, guessing which brick structure will house me, which loops of razor wire might be my view. Then I know which structure, since the van has stopped beside it. And then I’m being escorted out of the van and into that structure, joined by more uniformed guys, two, then three more, each with holstered black guns and varnished billy clubs, and they
take me up flights of stairs to the third floor. They leave me untouched as we head down the only route possible, a narrow concrete walkway flanked by opposite and adjacent cells, one cream-colored steel door to my right, one to my left and so on, until the walkway dead-ends at an unpainted cinder-block wall, which I stop to face directly, maybe four feet from it.

  To my right, a steel door has been slid open, into the wall. A guard uncuffs me and says, “Okay.”

  And you don’t feel the claustrophobia until you step inside, but for me the sense of panic sure does then come on fast, my face well beyond flushed by shameful heat when one of the guards slides the door closed and it clicks. I am shivering. I am chilled yet perspiring. I am up against the door to try to see out my only window, fingernail-etched Plexiglas maybe a foot square over steel bars painted the same cream color. And looking straight out, I can see only the cinder-block wall of the cell across the narrow walkway, though if I try hard, I can decipher part of the Plexiglas window on the cream-colored steel door across the walkway roughly six feet to my left, behind which someone, a brother maybe, tries to see me until our eyes meet.

  And, no, there will be no hearing him. There will be no hearing anyone but myself. There is stillness here about as pure as the stillness that welcomed me into those woods in Pennsylvania, though this stillness conveys terror more than that one did freedom: Neither moonlight nor sunshine will reach me here. There’s a mattress on a bed bolted to the wall, and there are two thin blankets. There is no pillow. And the toilet is kid size. The floor is gray, unfinished concrete. As is the low ceiling. If I look at the ceiling, I feel so trapped I get dizzy.

  So you won’t sleep on your back, I decide. I also know there will be no sleep tonight. Feeding the stillness around me is hunger inside me that wants people more than food. I would beg out loud for Madalynn right now if anyone could hear me. I caution myself to focus on innocent, grammar-school memories of her, since any desire for her tonight, as the woman she grew into and still is, will no doubt prove to be foolish.