Tunnel Vision

by Aric Davis

  “All right,” said Betty.

  “If either of you want something from the vending machine, you can call me or one of the other guards over to your table by raising your hand, just like in grade school. We will come to your table as fast as we can, and then one of you can walk to the vending machine with me. Are there any questions?” Betty and June shook their heads, and the guard locked eyes with them one after the other, before leaving them to their seats and the void on the other side of the glass.

  “I can’t believe we’re doing this,” said June in a choked voice. “I can’t believe we’re going to meet him. I’m not sure if I feel excited or sick.”

  “You’ll be fine,” said Betty, though not at all sure she was going to be fine. “Trust me. There’s guards all over the place, and he’s going to want to talk to us, not come over the glass and hurt us. This is going to be good, I know it.”

  June nodded but didn’t say anything, because the door in front of them was opening and two guards and Duke Barnes were walking through it.

  Duke was thinner than he’d looked in the recent pictures on the website, but still not as thin as he’d looked in the pictures from before he went to prison. His arms were sleeved in mottled greenish and gray prison tattoo work, and similar designs were climbing out of his cuffs and collar. Duke had huge knuckles—from fighting, Betty assumed—and though he was rail thin, he also looked taut, as though what was left of him was all muscle. His clothes were the same orange as the rest of the inmates’, but his were ill fitting, draped over him as though it had been impossible for the prison to find the proper size for him to wear.

  Betty and June watched the man as though he were a movie star or punk rock hero that had been zapped into place in front of them. Duke was no one to lust after in schoolroom fantasies, but he had been all they had been thinking of for weeks. Seeing him in person felt both perverse and impossible, Batman brought from the pages of a comic book and presented to them in human form.

  As the guards set Duke before them behind the glass, Betty could tell he was trying to pretend disinterest in the audience. It occurred to her for the first time that Duke might have a legion of female followers, girls that believed in the words on the website and not the story about a girl who’d been beaten into submission and then stabbed to death by a man more animal than human. Whether Duke was guilty or not, Mandy was still dead, and there should have been respect for that. Instead, Duke was the champion of a popular movement that should have been interested in proving his innocence by finding the man who had really committed the crime, rather than solely focused on freeing the one who might not have.

  When Duke looked from Betty to June, his face changed. It was gone in an instant but both Betty and June had seen it, and Betty knew what had caused it. Duke was seeing Mandy, a Mandy before dope, an impossible Mandy even if she’d survived her Duke days. June was Mandy as she’d been before, before she was left to bleed out on the dirty floor of an abandoned house.

  Duke cleared his throat, and the guards walked off without a care in the world. Betty found herself wondering how long it would take them to come back if Duke decided to launch himself over that partition, after all. She figured it would be too long by half. Duke was pale and yellow, but his tattooed forearms sheathed iron sinews.

  The three stared at each other for what felt like forever, Duke’s eyes switching back and forth between them, and then Duke picked up his phone and, eyes drilled into June, said, “Is this some fucking joke?”

  “No,” said Betty into her handset.

  His gaze flicked to her.

  “No,” she said again, amazed that her voice was steady. “This is Mandy’s niece. She didn’t know about you or Mandy until just a few weeks ago. Her parents never told her about either of you.”

  “Not a bad call,” said Duke, his voice raw gravel as it came through the phone. “What are your names?”

  “Betty.”

  “June.”

  “All right,” said Duke. “Now tell me why in the hell you’re here.”

  “We want to know about you and Mandy,” said June.

  “We want to know everything,” said Betty.

  “You two have heard of the Internet, right?”

  “We want to know what you told the police about the man in the green jacket, we want to know about your roommate, and we want to know about her diary,” said Betty. Her voice had risen as she spoke, but looking around the room she could tell the words had been lost in a fog of noise. People at every table were talking loudly—men complaining about the lack of money for the commissary, women complaining about money for rent, and not a happy child within earshot.

  “All right,” said Duke. “Well, you know some things that most people don’t, good for you.”

  “Tell us about the man in the green jacket.”

  “You know this only goes a half hour, right?” he asked, seething with bitterness. Duke was used to being the idol, and now he was back in the hospital, a confession demanded from him. It was clear he was used to people that believed in him coming to visit from the land beyond the wall, and now he had two would-be adversaries holding court across the table from him.

  “A half hour is plenty of time to tell us the truth,” said June.

  Duke held his hands up in front of himself. “Look, I need you to be quiet,” he said to June. “Let your friend talk. You look and sound way too much like Mandy, and it makes it hard to concentrate.”

  “Because of what you did?” June snapped back.

  Duke nodded. “Why else would I feel bad about it?”

  THIRTY-NINE

  I have Lou drop me off about a half mile from Paul’s house with instructions to meet me in the same spot in an hour. The sun is threatening to go away for good soon, so I get moving. I can use the exercise, and I really don’t want him to know how I’ve arrived. The next time might be on a bike, or pulling a Radio Flyer decked out with a few bales and a sign that says “Not Weed” for security reasons. I know I’ll need better than that, but Lou is out, the bales are too big to just throw on a bike, and there is no way I want Paul knowing where I live. I could ask Betty to help me drive it in her car, but I don’t want to ask, and I can’t even imagine what would happen if we got pulled over. I’ll need to think out of the box, but that’s all right. I do OK at that.

  When I get to Paul’s house I pause at the base of the driveway. There are a few cars in it that scream, “Drug dealer inside!” but I do my best not to think about it. I need to go inside, so there’s no point in getting nervous about it, especially when I’m already wound up like a top.

  I weave my way around the cars, and the closer I get to the house, the louder the music gets. It wasn’t audible from the curb, but it’s clear now that there is a very loud stereo inside. Par for the course. The house is a dump, the neighborhood sucks, and there’s a few hundred thousand bucks’ worth of cars in the driveway. It’s a sure bet the house is furnished like a rapper’s mansion.

  Three knocks on the door gets me nowhere, so I do it again, and this time I’m met with a very polite “Hold the fuck on!”

  I do, even though following instructions has never been my strong suit, and a few minutes later a young gangbanger opens the door and looks me up and down. “What the hell do you want?”

  Now there are a few ways to handle this sort of impoliteness, but I think it’s important to note that the young man I was speaking to was wearing a semi-auto stuffed into his pants. I’m a firm believer in politeness, but also in seeing the inside of my house again.

  “I’m here to talk to Paul,” I say. Giving the backpack strings a tug, I add, “I have the stuff he wanted.”

  “Oh shit, you should have said that. Come on in,” says the kid, grinning.

  He’s my age, maybe a little older, and he’s running the door for a drug dealer with a gun in his waist. I might share with him my estimate of his life expectancy—somebody sure as hell should—but I err instead on the side of caution and follow h
im inside.

  The smell in the house is sort of like the music: mildly pervasive outside, in-your-face once you step in. Smoke, both tobacco and marijuana, has formed a nearly impenetrable cloud. I watch as the young banger locks the door behind us, then follow him down a short hallway past a filthy kitchen where a half-naked woman is sleeping on the floor and on into a packed family room.

  All things considered, “family room” may not be the best way to describe it.

  Paul and his friends are spread out on a sprawling couch and the floor. Beer bottles, glasses, and improvised ashtrays provide an idea of what the afternoon has entailed, and the sight of an Xbox One and a flat-screen TV showing Madden confirm any suspicions that I might have had.

  The room ignores me, everyone focused on the TV. These guys are worse than civilians: they’re sitting in a house that’s a thief’s wet dream, and they can’t even be bothered to turn around at the appearance of a new body in the room.

  Paul is sitting on one end of the couch. He’s holding a mixed drink and a girl that doesn’t look like she’s legally able to get a driver’s license. She’s smiling, but the sight of it puts a rotten feeling in my stomach. Knowing you have to lie down with snakes is one thing; being happy about it is another.

  Paul still hasn’t seen me, his focus on the TV and nothing else.

  “Yo, Paul, your delivery boy is here,” says the kid who brought me in.

  Paul turns, spilling some of his drink and forcing the girl off his lap. “That was fast,” he said. “I like that, people don’t always jump when you ask them to, but you look like the kind of motherfucker that would ask me how high and on which leg.”

  I nod. Whatever he wants to think is fine with me. I’m rusty, I know that, but I could rip this prick’s head off without breaking a sweat, even while his friends filled me with lead. But that’s not how we play. The voice is an ice pick in my brain, Dad telling me not to be so shortsighted.

  “Where’s the shit?”

  “In my bag. Can I get it?”

  “Do your thing,” says Paul. “If you try and pull a piece or do something stupid, I have a feeling you know what’s going to happen.”

  I do, no lack of clarity there. Football is paused, and all eyes are on me. Since I figure these idiots have all the trigger discipline of a freshman on prom night, I play it as cool as possible. Unzip the bag, one hand in, nothing but a sack of green comes out.

  If I’d been expecting a wow moment when the dope cleared the nylon, I’d have been sadly let down. There’s no reaction at all, other than the kid who let me in taking the bag from my hand and bringing it to Paul.

  Paul takes it from him, opens the bag, takes a sniff, and then hands it to the girl who’d been on his lap. “Go roll blunts, bitch,” he says, and like a dutiful dog, the girl takes the bag into the kitchen. I hate him so much at this moment that it’s hard to look relaxed, and it’s all I can do not to say something, anything to make him react and give me an excuse to hurt him.

  Instead, the moment fades and Paul says, “You can get going. Rio will show you out. I’ll be in touch, Nickel, but I really hope you didn’t waste my time.” The other guys in the room are nodding, trying to look tough while they sit high, drunk, and distracted by digital men playing a game none of them had the talent to even attempt in real life.

  “You’ll like it, man,” I say. “Just let me know what you want me to do.”

  Paul nods, but he’s already watching the TV again, the distraction immediate. Rio taps me on the arm and I reshoulder my backpack and follow his lead. I don’t want to be there any more than they want me interrupting their little party.

  I’m walking in front of Rio to the door when I see something I don’t like at all.

  On the bottom of the steps heading upstairs there’s a coloring book. I can see the scribbled-in pages from where I stand, and just a few steps up sits a little boy clad in only a pair of briefs. He’s clearly malnourished, eyes sunken into his head, and biceps thinner than his wrists should be.

  I’m a coward, act like I don’t see him, and go outside.

  I could hear Dad screaming at me as I passed the boy, could hear Sam’s last breath rattling in his throat out in the snow at the camp. There was nothing I could do, not with Rio at my back, and not with a room full of thugs a hallway away. The only question I have now is whether I’m going to follow through as planned and hope Paul actually pays, or do what’s right. Thinking back to the woman passed out on the kitchen floor clouds my thought process further, as it seems a fair conclusion that the sleeping—or worse—woman was his mother.

  I leave the house, deciding that I’ll walk a few blocks before calling Lou. Pointless precaution, of course, as even Rio has better stuff to do than watch me walk down the road alone. Still, I walk, and I’m halfway to the end of the block when I see the sign, and despite what happened in the house, I’m grinning. I might decide not to do the deal with Paul, or I might swallow my pride and go for the money, but at least one problem is solved. The asking price at the garage sale is only thirty bucks, and with a few mods, my dope transportation issues have been solved.

  FORTY

  “So you admit you killed her?” Betty asked, and Duke nodded.

  “Absolutely, just not in the way you’re thinking,” said Duke. “You’ve got an idea in your head that I put that knife in her, but I didn’t. I loved that girl. Hell, I still love her. That’s why it makes me feel sick when she talks.” Duke was looking at June, wincing as if seeing her physically pained him. “The sound of your voice makes me feel even sicker than I already am. It makes me feel like I’m already in hell.”

  “But you killed her?”

  “By putting her in that house, and in that situation, yes, I killed her,” he admitted. “I was the junkie, she just loved the punk scene, and she was looking for what she thought was going to be a relationship with a really cool guy.” Duke smiled sadly at them. “I wasn’t all that cool. I wanted to be, but what the hell does that even mean? I was a mess, although I might be worse now.”

  The man is an emotional wreck, and he looks like something is eating him alive. But no, Betty thought. He’s just trying to play on my sympathies. She wanted nothing to do with that. His life was sad, but that would have been true whether he’d killed Mandy or not, and there was no good reason to listen to him bitch about the things he’d ruined.

  “You saw a man in a green jacket that night?” she asked.

  Duke heaved a sigh at that, already ditching his woe-is-me approach for bored annoyance at having to talk about his case with these schoolgirls. He did finally answer, though. “Yes.”

  “Well, why didn’t you stick to that story? You saw a person leaving, and then your girlfriend was dead inside the house. If that was me, I’d be screaming about what I saw, but you dropped it and confessed.”

  “I was stoned out of my mind, and I was sick after seeing her like that,” said Duke, heating up. “I saw a man—that part’s true—but I dropped the story because they refused to hear it, refused to, and I was coming out of my skin with withdrawals. So, yeah, I stopped saying the pointless words. What did I care? I wanted to die. Dying would’ve been a mercy.”

  Once again, Betty was shocked that no one was staring at what was beginning to be a tense conversation. Duke was glaring at her through the glass, then the air seemed to go out of him.

  “Listen,” he said. “What it came down to for them was getting me convicted. They never tried to catch anyone else. Maybe if that neighbor had seen the guy in the green jacket—would’ve seen both of us, I mean, him and me, two green jackets, instead of just the one, which could’ve just been me—maybe then things would have been different, but that’s not what he saw.” When the two of them just stared at him, he shook his head. “Look, this is pointless. You’re gonna believe what you’re gonna believe.”

  “We didn’t come here because we’re sure of what happened,” Betty said. “We want to hear it from you.”

  “All righ
t, I’m telling you. I was high on shit when I got to the house, but I’d also just scored, and I was about to get a lot higher. That was how it always worked. Mandy and I would go sell ourselves and then score dope and go back to that fucking house. That was the toilet our lives had become. It probably sounds pretty unbelievable, but I was happy to go back there with heroin to share with her. I’d had a good day and I’d bought good tar because of it. I can still remember how I felt, I can remember the weather, and there wasn’t a single part of me that was pissed off enough to hurt her.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “It has to do with the fact that even though I was a shitty person and a junkie, I still cared about her.” Duke seethed. “If I’d been mad enough to want to smack her around a little bit, I would have remembered that, too. It might even have been enough to make me convince myself I had done it. I was a little cloudy from dope, I can admit that, but I know where my head was, and I wasn’t thinking about hurting her.”

  “Tell us about your roommate,” said June. She hadn’t spoken since Duke had asked her to stop talking, and his head spun as if someone had fired a revolver next to his ear. The expression on his face wasn’t anger, but great surprise and pain.

  “I’m serious,” he said. “Let the other one talk. Please just keep your mouth shut.”

  June dropped her eyes to the table, and Betty felt sick thinking Duke’s disgust might be the only real proof they would ever get. He won’t look at her because she makes him see that day all over again, thought Betty. But is it guilt poisoning him, or regret?

  “We had a lot of people in and out of the house,” said Duke. “The last roommate we had was a guy named Jason, but he moved out three days before Mandy was killed. The police thought I made that all up, too, but I didn’t. Jason left and then Mandy died. If he’d been home, then she’d probably be alive, or at least we’d have a better idea of who killed her.”