by John Hart
“Why? Because you say so?”
“Yes.”
“You?” Fury in her voice. “You—you fucking asshole?” She moved forward, all eyes and angry edges. Even the bystanders stepped back. “So give me what I came for.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“An apology, you arrogant prick.”
“Fine, I’m sorry.”
“Oh no, more than that. Spell it out so everyone here knows. Tell them what happened! Tell them what you really are!”
For an instant, I thought Jason would do the gentle thing, and elaborate in whatever manner it took to calm her down. He’d say something, I thought, anything; but Jason was not that kind of man. I saw the coldness glint in his eyes, as sudden and sure as sun on glass; and Tyra must have seen it, too. She made a wordless sound of pure rage, then lunged for him, fingers clawed. He danced away again, but she followed at a stumble, swung for his face. But Jason was no kind of runner. He caught the wrist, twisted her where she stood, and pushed her away. Her foot caught a root; she sprawled in the dirt.
“You bastard.” She said it softly, tears on her face. “You fucker.”
Jason turned to the men at the house. “Somebody call her a cab, all right?”
“Don’t do me any favors.” Tyra found her feet, and scrubbed at her eyes, smearing the mascara. “You don’t do favors, do you?”
“I want you to wait for the cab,” Jason said.
“Screw you.”
She weaved across the yard, and fell into the ruined Mercedes. I said, “Tyra, don’t be stupid.” But she’d already turned the key. “Jason, do something.” She got the car started, but he showed the same pitiless stare. Tyra gave him the finger, as wheels spit out grass and dirt, and she slammed into another car. “Jason, come on…”
“Fine. All right.”
He crossed the yard as she struggled with the gearshift, metal grinding. “Gibby’s right, Tyra. Let me have the keys.”
He was ten feet away when she bent for something on the floor, and reappeared with a gun in her hand. “You stay away from me.” The gun was small and silver. Jason acted as if it wasn’t there. “I’ll pull the trigger. I’ll do it.”
She pointed the gun at his chest, but was spilling tears that cut tracks in the mascara, and turned back at the corners of her mouth. People were moving, ducking for cover. Only Jason was calm. “You shouldn’t have the keys or that gun.”
“You don’t love me. You don’t get a say.”
“I’m trying to help you, Tyra.”
“Stay back.” She worked the clutch, the stick. The car lurched, and metal scraped. She forced a different gear; rolled forward and stopped. For an instant more, Jason was pinned on the barrel of that small, slick gun. “It would have been easy,” she said. “You could have said yes.”
“Maybe.”
“Don’t follow me.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
It was the wrong answer, I thought, fuel on a burning fire. The look on her face was terrible as she struggled to contain whatever emotion burned hottest. Fury. Want. Need. The tension stretched until she tossed the pistol on the seat beside her, and rocked the little car off the curb. She looked back only once—another tortured gaze—then she gave my brother the finger, and gunned it.
7
I didn’t tell anyone what happened between Jason and Tyra, but thought about it all night and even when I woke. I’d never seen such raw emotion in a woman or a man so cool in the face of it. Tyra’s volatility was beyond question, yet in two short encounters, she’d bared everything a woman could bare—body and soul—and I was frustrated at how small I felt afterward, how my own life felt made of expectation, stillness, and pent-up frustration.
I wondered what Robert would say about that.
And what Jason was doing.
After school, I drove by the house on Water and Tenth, but no one there had seen Jason since the dustup with Tyra. They didn’t know where he’d gone or when he was coming back. “What about Tyra?” I asked.
“That crazy bitch?”
No one had seen her, either, so I left them on the sofa, and felt my way to the condo Sara and Tyra shared across town. I didn’t know if I wanted to see Sara or not, but hoped for some kind of epiphany. Parked on the street, though, nothing came. Her door was closed, the windows blank. I tried to imagine arousing the kind of passion I’d seen in Tyra, the qualities it would take in a man to generate so much desire and rage. I couldn’t get there, couldn’t even imagine it. I chewed on that, disheartened, then remembered Becky Collins and how she’d pressed that slip of paper into my hand.
Saturday night.
Seven o’clock.
On the way home, I took the top down, turned up the radio. At dinner, I spoke when addressed, used my manners, and ate everything on my plate. The quiet was no less oppressive, but I thought of Becky and Saturday night. I doubted she’d kiss me, but that was all right. We’d talk, and get to know each other.
I thought I had time.
I was wrong.
The trouble came first in hints, and started with my father. He stopped me after dinner, and took me into his office, a narrow room jumbled with files and boxes and books. Family photos covered one wall, awards and citations the other. “I don’t want your mother hearing this.” He closed the door, and looked hesitant. I’d seen my father angry, perplexed, and disappointed, but this reticence was strange to me. He twisted his fingers, and had trouble meeting my eyes. “Have you seen your brother?” he finally asked.
“Not for a few days.”
“No phone calls? Nothing?”
“What’s going on?”
He moved to the window, and peered into a dark night broken by streetlamps on the road. He stood there for a bit, then turned as if he’d reached some kind of decision. “Sit down, son.” We sat in flanking chairs. He leaned close. “I think Jason might be in trouble. They’re just rumors at this point, but cop rumors. You understand the difference?”
“No.”
“Okay. Fair. How should I say this? Your brother’s name has come up in, uh … recent investigations.”
“Drugs?”
“Why would you ask that?”
“His history, I guess.”
“Has he been doing drugs?”
“I don’t know.”
“Would you tell me if you did?” He studied my face as if looking for a secret door. “How about his location? If you knew where he was, would you tell me that?”
“I want to know what’s going on.”
“I can’t discuss that.”
“Hey, you brought me in here.”
“To ask if you’d seen him. To warn you. Jason might be a lost cause. You’re not.”
“Jason is not a lost cause.”
“I’m not asking you to rat him out or to stop seeing him. If he’s in trouble, I can help him. If he gets in touch, tell him that.”
“You could tell him yourself if you hadn’t chased him out of our lives.”
“Complications, son. We’ve discussed this.”
“Will he be okay? The cops, I mean.”
“If I can help him,” he said. “If I can find him in time.”
He touched my shoulder, nodding as he spoke. Neither of us knew the world was ending.
8
The same darkness pressing down on Gibby’s house deepened the sky above Lanesworth State Prison Farm, forty-five miles east. If anything, the night sky there was blacker, unspoiled as it was by streetlights or traffic or civilization of any kind. First opened in 1871, the walls at Lanesworth were three feet thick, the windows little more than barred slits in the stone. Situated at the end of a four-mile private road, the prison filled an empty corner of a rural county; and though it had not worked as an actual prison farm in over forty years, the signs of its original intent could still be seen in the ditch lines and fallow fields and new-growth forest. Before nature had retaken so much of it, men had suffered in the cold, died in the hea
t. The chain gangs were long gone, but the prison still sprawled across eighteen thousand acres of lowland and scrub. Built to house a thousand men, it held twice that number now. A few inmates were classified as moderate offenders, potentially dangerous, but most were the worst the state could offer. Killers. Drug dealers. Serial rapists.
In a subbasement beneath death row was a string of cells that stayed warm when others were cold, and cool when others were hot. In one such cell, a killer stood beside a bed, but it was not his bed, and not his cell. He didn’t like the man whose cell it was, but nothing at Lanesworth was about like.
In a corner of the same cell stood a man known as Prisoner X—or just, X. That wasn’t his name, but people called him that. They thought it was short for Axel, his true name, or because he’d killed ten men, and eaten parts of them. Others said that he’d killed his wife for infidelity, but only after he’d emasculated her lover, then cut Xs into his eyes. X had been an inmate for so long that people didn’t really care anymore. He was part of the prison, like the steel and concrete and stone.
“Higher, please. Your left hand.” X gestured, and the man by the bed complied. Shirtless in prison jeans, he stood with both hands up and fisted. “Excellent. Perfect.”
The man by the bed was only two inches taller than X, but wide and rawboned and forty pounds heavier. Raised hard in the Georgia mountains, he’d run away young and grown up a thief and a killer, a bare-knuckle, fight-for-cash brawler on the streets of Atlanta. He’d been inside for less than five weeks, but every guard told the same story, that the kid could take a beating, spit blood, and come back for more, that he was a serious, determined, no-bullshit kind of fighter.
“Don’t move,” X said. “You’re moving.” X was not a great painter, but he wasn’t bad, either. He made a few more strokes with the brush, then said, “It’s strange. I know.”
“It’s a freak show, is what it is.”
The kid talked tough, but the doubt was in his eyes. He’d heard the stories. He was, in fact, having his portrait painted in a subbasement beneath death row. X enjoyed the young man’s doubt, but didn’t let the pleasure show. That would be weakness, and X despised weakness in all its forms. After a final stroke, he turned the painting so the young man could see it, a hyper-contextualized impression of violence and its aftermath: the broken stance, the bruising, and the blood. “You understand what comes next?”
“They told me, yeah.”
“Good.”
X put down the painting and stripped off his shirt, revealing a narrow torso corded with muscle. Even at forty-nine, there was nothing soft, not anywhere.
“I’m not afraid of you,” the young man said. “I think the stories are only stories.”
X smiled, but it was not a nice smile. Backing through the open door, he moved from the cell to a narrow corridor that ran the length of a halfdozen other cells, all devoid of prisoners. The corridor ceiling was twenty feet high, the light fixtures rusted where old water stains discolored the concrete and stone. A guard sat near a metal door, but knew better than to watch.
Trailing X from the cell, the young man said, “Why me?”
“Was it four men you killed, or five?”
“Six. Bare-handed.”
“Is that not reason enough?”
“I don’t fight for the fun of it.”
“For what, then?”
“Cash money. Or if someone needs killing.”
“And today?”
“They say the warden is in your pocket. That you own the guards, too.”
“You fear retaliation.”
“Yeah, well. Busting up random convicts is one thing…”
He left the thought unfinished, so X pulled a sheaf of cash from his pocket, counted out some bills, and dropped them on the floor. “A thousand dollars for the fight. That’s a hundred a minute for the next ten minutes of your life.”
The young man stared at the money like a dog would stare at meat. “I’ll take your money, old man, but you’re not going to last any ten minutes.”
He stooped for the bills, then came with his chin tucked and the big fists up. He thought the fight was a joke, that X was used up and stupid-crazy, an old man with half the reach. In a different life, he might have been right, but X, in motion, was a marriage of power and speed that few in the world could match. He worked the right eye first—four hard jabs—then bloodied the mouth, the nose; cracked a rib on the left side.
That was the first nine seconds.
X slipped out of reach, then came back for the face, two lefts and right, then a roundhouse kick that cut cables in the big man’s knees. X danced away a second time, not yet breathing hard. He saw the fear then, the understanding.
What if they were true?
The stories …
X smiled as that fear opened like a flower. The big man saw it, and hated it. “You paid me to fight, so fucking fight.”
He came harder that time, and X bled, too. It’s why he’d picked the big man in the first place.
All those kills.
That readiness.
X made it last the full ten minutes, but the fight was never close. X got hurt; the big man got ruined. By the ten-minute mark, he was bent at the waist and half-blind, too bloody and broken to lift his hands. He looked once at the guard, and X felt the first real distaste. “He can’t help you.”
“Do it if you’re going to do it.”
The man’s face was a mask of blood, one eye ruined for life, the right shoulder out of its socket. The rage was still there, though; he could go longer. But what was the point?
“Guard. We’re finished here.”
The guard kept his eyes down, but knew from long experience what to do. He got the big man up and out, and never looked at X.
When they were gone, X went into a second cell, washed blood from his hands and face, then taped up the cuts.
Bored again, he wandered the cells he kept like a suite of rooms: one for the wine, another for his art. Everyone knew he was rich, of course. Years ago, he’d been in the news all the time: the jets and mansions, the models and call girls and socialite girlfriends. Of course, the stories changed after his arrest: profiles on the family fortune, the long list of famous friends and political connections. An inmate had asked once how much money X really had, intending to leverage that information with violence of his own. He’d have considered it an easy thing: a rich man, new to prison. But X was unlike other rich men, so he’d given that inmate a long smile and a silent count, three full seconds before he’d torn the esophagus from his throat, and flushed it down a prison toilet. Since then, there’d been so few questions.
“Ah, well…”
He had his privacy and his comforts. For the privilege, he gave the warden an unholy amount of money each and every year, plus a solemn, cross-his-heart vow that the warden’s wife would not be gang-raped ever again.
Not on a Sunday morning.
Not with the kids watching.
* * *
It was late that same night that something broke the steady routine of X’s life. “Excuse me. Um … sir?” The guard was a large man, and apologetic.
“What is it?”
“Someone has been asking to see you. Francis Willamette. A prisoner. We didn’t want to bother you, but he’s been asking for a few days now, very insistent. We … um … we took a vote. The guards, I mean.”
X lit a cigarette, and leaned back. Six guards served on his regular detail, but he had other guards in other pockets. “What does Mr. Willamette want?”
“He says it’s about Jason French. It’s … um … it’s why we voted yes.”
“Then I suppose you should bring Mr. Willamette down.”
The guard backed from the cell, and hurried away. When footsteps sounded in the stairwell, the same guard said, “Third cell. You can go on down.”
“Are you certain? He’s not … you know?”
“He’s expecting you. You’ll be fine.”
When Willame
tte appeared, the same doubts seemed to fill every line in his face. X had met the old man once before. He’d claimed to be a chess player, but managed to embarrass himself in three moves. He’d lost weight in the years since they’d played that single game, and the skin was loose on his bones. One hand clutched at the cell door, and he held on to the bar as if he’d fall without it. X took in the sunken eyes, the brown teeth. “You claim to have seen Jason French?”
“Three days ago, yes, sir. On the road, um, I was on the prison bus.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“Because I can describe him in perfect detail, the car he was in, and the people with him, how he froze the moment he realized the bus was from Lanesworth. My memory’s photographic. Any detail you ask for.”
“Assuming all of that is true, why should I care?”
The old man was cunning enough to hide his satisfaction, but the glint in his eyes was pure greed. “We both know that you do.”
X stared for long seconds, his entire being dangerously still. He’d never cared about the stories that circulated in the general population, not who he’d killed or why he’d done it, or what really went down in the subbasement under death row. True or false, such stories were irrelevant. X stayed above them. But this, however, this presumption to know anything about X’s wants or needs or preferences …
The old man understood the shift in X’s eyes. “Hey, buddy, hey now. No judgment.” He spread his fingers, showing the seamed palms. “We all have our kinks. You. Me. It’s just that I’m too old to play games. Fifty-two years inside. I know you see the logic.”
X studied the old man’s face. The lips. The damp eyes. “So you can tell me about Jason French. What would you want from me in exchange?”
The old man took a breath, and named his price. Money. Pornography. Two days with a girlish inmate he’d seen once in the yard.
X shook his head dismissively. “Descriptions of an isolated encounter. A few flowery words.”
“I can tell you how to find him.”
X blinked, a hard thump in his chest. “Go on.”
“I know the car, the license plate. From there, it should be easy. Anyone on the outside could track him down.”
