She shook her head.
“If you know, you need to tell us,” Rachel said, her voice harsh and demanding. “We’re his best hope of—”
“If I knew I would,” she said.
I looked at Rachel with narrowed eyes and shook my head.
“Sorry,” she said to Wanda. “Your daughter wasn’t helpful and made it clear she didn’t ever intend to be.”
“My daughter’s under a lot of pressure. ’Course she puts it on herself. She’s very hard on herself. Doesn’t feel as though she can relax or let her guard down. Not even for a minute. She feels she has so much to overcome, to prove.”
“Why?” Rachel asked.
I knew the answer and was hoping Rachel wouldn’t ask
the question.
“Because,” Wanda said, “her father’s a cripple, her brother’s in prison, and her mother’s a janitor.”
I thought about how much more comfortable Wanda was with herself than Tracy. She had nothing to prove, nothing to apologize for, no agendas or motives. She just was. And it was a thing of beauty. How does a mother like Wanda have a daughter like Tracy?
“What I’ve seen,” I said, “her mother’s the best thing going for her.”
She smiled. “Thank you.”
“Nothing happened with you or your husband that might make Michael think he had to get out now, did it?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Nothing has changed. Things are very difficult for us—financially I mean. We can’t afford to live here anymore. We’ll probably move up to Pottersville. Somewhere like that. Might be your neighbors. But we’ve always been poor, and I haven’t said anything to Michael.”
“What about a girlfriend?” I asked.
“If he has one I don’t know anything about it.”
“If he contacted you or came to see you would you tell us?” Rachel asked.
She shook her head again. “No. Probably wouldn’t.”
This was a direct contradiction of what she had said earlier, but I didn’t say anything.
“So he could be hiding at your house right now and you wouldn’t report him?”
She nodded. “That’s right,” she said. “But he’s not. You’re welcome to check.”
“We will,” Rachel said.
“No we won’t,” I said.
“Don’t get me wrong, Ms. Mills,” Wanda said, “I’d try to talk Michael into turning himself in, but I wouldn’t turn him in. I couldn’t.”
“I understand,” I said. “If you think of anything, please let us know. You can reach me through the prison or the sheriff’s department anytime.”
“I will,” she said. “Michael talked very highly of you. Please find him. Please don’t let anybody hurt him. He’ll have had a good reason for running. Bet my soul on it. Please find him before anybody else do. I don’t want some trigger-happy kid to kill my boy.”
Chapter Twenty-five
“I still can’t believe you made me ride in this thing,” Rachel said.
We were getting back into the pimped-out Monte Carlo in the mostly empty Gulf/Franklin Center parking lot.
“Hate the game not the player,” I said with a smile.
She laughed.
When I cranked the car and turned on the headlights, I could see Wanda Jensen’s coworker walking toward us. I cut the lights, switched off the car, and Rachel and I got out.
“That your ride?” he asked, his voice matching his incredulous look.
“Doesn’t look like a pimp, does he?” Rachel said.
“It’s a loaner,” I said.
“From who?”
“My dad.”
He looked even more confused.
“You and Wanda work together?” I asked.
He nodded.
Soft spoken and easy going, he was as much as six inches taller than my six feet. His dark skin shined even in the dim light from the street lamp above us, and I couldn’t tell if its sheen was the result of oil, sweat, or the thick humidity of the moist night air.
“You know her family?”
“Daughter teaches here,” he said. “Son’s in prison.”
“They racist?”
“Miss Wanda’s not,” he said
“What about Michael?”
He shrugged. “’Bout like most people ’round here. He kill that brother on the river?”
“You think he could?” I asked.
Brow furrowed, eyes narrowed, he cocked his head to the side and considered me. “Most men could kill, but it’d take a bastard and a half to do something like that.”
“Could he?”
“Can’t say he couldn’t,” he said. “Don’t seem like the type. But hell, most of ’em don’t, do they?”
I get most depressed when I’m lying alone in the dark, tossing and turning in my uncomfortable bed, unable to sleep. My little life closes in on me and I feel the full weight of the futility I’m only vaguely aware of most other times.
It happened later that night in my dark bedroom, as lightening from an approaching rainstorm intermittently, momentarily blinded me as it shot through the windows and lit up the small room. The brilliant light was followed by a low rolling thunder in the distance.
It was times like these, when the darkness descended, that I relived my failures, mistakes, and regrets in obsessive detail, wondering what I might have done differently, wishing I could take back so many decisions, imagining where the path not taken would’ve led.
I never felt more alone or lonely than I did in moments like this. Thinking about all the ways I had managed to alienate others, isolate myself, all the choices away from instead of toward friends, family, and lovers. Why did I need so much space? It was a slow suicide, a potentially fatal flaw I still didn’t fully understand.
Anna’s pregnant, I thought. Mom’s dying. I’m utterly and completely alone.
This nearly always happened when I laid in bed for too long unable to fall asleep or when I fell asleep only to wake a little while later. I felt myself being pulled down—not into the underworld of dreams and rest but into a deep abyss of darkness and despair.
Everybody saw through me. No wonder I was all alone. I deserved to be. I was every bad thing anyone had ever thought I was, and so much they were unaware of. I was a phony, a fake, a hollow, shallow person. Nothing meant anything. Nothing mattered—and what if it did? Was God something I created to give me a sense of purpose, some sort of order to the chaos, some semblance of meaning to the madness.
Even as I felt the emptiness, I knew it wouldn’t last. I knew I would feel differently in the morning, but so deep was my sense of futility that I couldn’t help but believe that what I was experiencing now was reality, the rest of the time a carefully constructed facade to help me get through the day.
Eventually the first few raindrops pelted the thin glass panes of my windows and pinged off the tin roof, followed by a downpour that brought release, relief, and finally sleep.
I hadn’t been asleep long when the first call came.
“You the one asking about Mike?”
The hoarse, twangy female voice was coarse in a way only alcohol, cigarettes, and hard rural living could make it.
“Who?”
“Mike. Mikey. Michael Jensen.”
“Yeah. Who’s this?”
“Someone who knows.”
“Knows what?”
“What he’s capable of.”
“What’s that?”
“Just ’cause a man goes to prison for one thing don’t mean he don’t do other, worser things.”
“Like what?”
“Ain’t gittin’ into ’pecifics. Just sayin’ don’t believe he ain’t dangerous. I was with him. I know. I know firsthand what he’s like.”
“Did he hit you?”
“No,” she said. “He beat the shit out of me.”
“Did he rape you?”
“Ain’t rape when it’s your wife. Least that’s what he used to say. Shit. I didn’t mean to … Fuck … I’ve
said too much.”
She hung up.
The second call came a few minutes later.
Chapter Twenty-six
After being sent home from the hospital to die over six months ago, Mom had lived much longer than anyone imagined she would.
Now she was being put back in the hospital.
Jake had called and asked me to meet him there. As much as he wanted to be with Mom, he hated hospitals and was extremely uncomfortable in situations like this. I could hear both sadness and fear in his voice and told him I’d get there as fast as I could.
Suddenly my self-pity and sadness seemed silly and self-indulgent. I could lose my mom tonight. As I sped toward Bay Medical Center in Panama City, I couldn’t think of anything else—not the finality of Anna’s pregnancy, not the lynching of a black man who was already dead and my best friend’s reaction to it, not the escape of an inmate or his mother’s concern about him, not the new chaplain who’d soon have my job, and not the serial rapist branding his victims with a knife.
As much as those things mattered to me, they didn’t mean anything at the moment.
Though I was here strictly as a son, I parked in one of the places reserved for clergy because it was closest and quickest and not being used in the middle of the night.
I found Dad and Jake talking with the doctor outside her door. He was a short, fat man with thick, longish, curly black hair and glasses.
“I was just telling your father and brother that your mom’s suffering from bleeding esophgeal varices.”
“Her throat’s bleeding,” Jake said.
“We’ll treat it with endoscopic sclerotherapy,” the doctor said, “but if we can’t get it under control …”
He drifted off and let that hang there a moment. None of us spoke into the vacuous void.
The truth is,” he said, “she’s already lived longer than we thought she would. She may just surprise us again.”
“What she needs is a transplant,” Jake said.
The doctor nodded. “A liver transplant would be a highly effective treatment,” he said, pushing his glasses up on his nose. “And who knows, we may still get one. Does she have at least six months sobriety?”
We all looked at each other.
“I think so,” I said, nodding. “There haven’t been any signs. And I’d know them.”
“He’s a drunk too,” Jake said to the doctor, nodding toward me, and I could detect no malice in his voice. “She ain’t been drinkin’.”
“Well let’s hope for the best,” he said.
“Is there anything we can do to help her chances of getting a transplant?” I asked.
He shook his head. “All we can do is wait.”
Jake sighed and turned and walked into Mom’s room.
“Thank you,” I said, and Dad and I followed after Jake.
Mom was sleeping in a nearly upright position, her mouth open, distressed gurgling and snoring sounds coming from it. Her jaundiced skin looked as thin and taut as parchment, etched by fine lines and small wrinkles.
“God I can’t stand to see her like this,” Jake said.
Dad nodded.
“She’s gonna be okay,” Jake said. “All she’s got to do is hang on until we get her a transplant. And she will. She’s strong.”
Convinced more than ever that Mom had been holding on because Jake was unable to let her go, I started to say something to him, but knew he would never hear it. Besides, how could I encourage him to let our mother die?
Mom’s lids parted and she looked up at us with weak, sallow eyes.
She seemed to be taking her final breaths, her helplessness increased by her inability to speak.
“We’re here, Mama,” Jake said, as only a Southern boy could. “We’re right here.” Without meaning to, Jake sounded patronizing.
She gave a half-smile half-frown expression that made my eyes sting and moisten.
“We’re gonna get you a transplant, Mama,” Jake said, his voice cracking slightly as his eyes filled with tears. “I swear to God we are.”
Her lids closed and she fell back asleep.
We were quiet for a long while, but eventually, inevitably our talk turned to the case.
“I think he was messin’ around with some white woman,” Jake said, “and her husband decided to teach him a lesson.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “You think he learned it?” I asked, an angry edge of sarcasm in my voice.
“I’m just sayin’ that’s the most likely thing that happened. It could be your inmate, but then why string him up?”
Ignoring Jake, I turned to Dad. “I think we’re spending too much time looking in the woods,” I said. “If he’s still in the area, he’s probably holed up on a houseboat or in one of the camps, waiting for things to die down so he can slip out—probably on a boat. He could head either direction on the river, come out at any town along the way, and disappear.”
Dad nodded. “I’ll have them start searching the camps and houseboats in the morning.”
“Rachel Mills said they found water in the victim’s lungs,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “But they don’t think drowning is the cause of death.”
“But at some point he was in the water,” I said.
We grew silent, our gazes drifting back to Mom.
“We need to get someone to stay with her,” Dad said.
“I’ve got somewhere I have to be,” Jake said.
“I’ll stay,” I said.
“But for how long?” Dad asked. “You two can’t do it alone. We’ll have to hire someone. Have either of you called Nancy?”
“I ain’t callin’ her,” Jake said.
“I’ve tried. I’ll call her again in the morning and let her know,” I said.
“Why?” Jake asked. “She don’t care.”
Eventually they left, and Mom and I were alone. Pulling one of the cushioned chairs over beside her bed, I sat down. Resting my elbow on the arm of the chair, and my head in my hand, I tried unsuccessfully to get to sleep.
After a short while of being unable to sleep I decided to call Nancy.
Divorcing herself from the chaos that was our family, my older sister Nancy had moved to New York the day after graduating from high school. Since then she’d had the least amount of interaction with us she could. None with Jake.
When after several rings I got her voicemail. I looked at my watch. It was a little after three here, an hour later in New York.
“It’s John,” I said softly. “Mom’s been put back in the hospital. I’m sure she’d love to see you. If you want to see her don’t wait. Call me when you can.”
I gave her the number and clicked off.
The call back was almost immediate.
“I can’t deal with this right now, John,” she said.
“Let me know when it’d be more convenient for you. I’ll see what I can do,” I said with an edge in my voice reserved only for family.
She hung up on me.
I leaned my head back and rubbed my eyes and I could feel the tension in my neck and shoulders, the fatigue in my stinging eyes.
A few minutes later, my phone rang again.
“It’s me,” she said.
“We don’t have a choice about when we deal with this,” I said. “Just how.”
“I know. I’m sorry. Let’s start over.”
“Okay. Nancy this is John. Mom’s been put in the hospital and isn’t doing very well.”
“Oh, John, I’m so sorry to hear that,” she said. “How long does she have?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, “but if she doesn’t receive a transplant, not long.”
She was silent a long time.
“You going to come?” I asked.
She sighed heavily into the phone and I had to hold it away from my ear for a moment. “I guess,” she said.
“Before or after she dies?” I asked.
“Really not sure,” she said. “When I decide, you’ll be the first to kn
ow.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
I was in the chapel Monday morning counseling with Sandy Hartman when the second body was discovered.
The more Sandy spoke the more splotchy his face became, and though his voice was soft, his words carefully chosen, real anger and pain leaked out of them.
“I’ve never felt so helpless in my life,” he was saying. “I tried to fight. I tried to get away. I tried everything I could. Nothing worked. He was so strong. So powerful. Like he had this force coming from within him.”
As I listened, I saw Chaplain Singer through the narrow panel of glass in my door. He stood there for a moment, then, with a look of frustration, motioned me over.
I shook my head and nodded toward Sandy, but his expression grew more intense and he continued to motion for me.
I had spent the weekend with Mom in the hospital. Mostly sleeping and unable to speak when she was awake, the quiet gave me extended time to think, to process the things swirling around my mind. Our attempts at communicating were more frustrating than anything else, so my weekend was largely wordless.
My aunt Amy had been late relieving me at the hospital and I had been late for work. Chaplain Singer was very disappointed. He had looked at his watch and shook his head when I came in, but continued to whisper into his phone. I knew this was coming, but I had no idea he would interrupt a counseling session to do it.
“I heard you used to drink,” he said.
I had opened the door just a few inches and he was leaning forward talking through the narrow opening.
“I’m with someone right now,” I said. “I’ll talk with you when we’re finished.”
“You’re not hungover, are you?”
I shook my head.
The question’s only purpose was provocation. He seemed frustrated it didn’t provoke me.
We were quiet a moment.
“Warden Matson runs a very tight ship,” he said. “It’s his way or the highway. If you don’t get on board, you’re gonna get run over.”
If he used one more ra-ra cliché I might just have to step out into the hall and pummel him.
“You’re already on his bad side,” he said. “You better tread carefully.”
I held my hand up. “Uncle,” I said. “I can’t take any more.”
Rivers to Blood Page 9