by R.J. Ellory
'The fish,' he said. 'You remember the fish?'
I smiled; I remembered it like it was yesterday.
Nathan shook his head. 'I remember when we were running down the street away from Benny Amundsen's place, those kids chasing us… Christ, you looked like you were gonna shit yourself.'
'Me? You shoulda seen yourself. And then when Eve Chantry appeared you nearly fainted right there in the street.'
Nathan laughed. 'You were the one who thought she was a witch. You were the one who told me she'd eaten her freakin' husband.'
'Everyone thought she was a witch, not just me.'
Nathan shook his head. 'No, man, you were the chicken- shit one, Danny, as chickenshit as they came.'
'Go fuck yourself,' I retorted.
Nathan pulled a face, a face like a scared weepy kid. 'Oooh, the witch is coming, Nathan,' he whined. 'Watch out for the witch who ate her husband.'
I turned to look out of the window, feigning indignance.
Nathan nudged me in the shoulder.
'Eat shit, Nathan,' I said.
'Eat shit, Nathan,' he mimicked in a simpering voice.
I turned suddenly and thumped him hard on the upper arm.
Nathan started laughing and rubbing his arm simultaneously. 'Fuck, Danny, that hurt!'
'Ooh, ooh, Danny, that hurt,' I replied.
And then he was laughing so much the woman ahead of us turned and looked at him like a reprimanding school- ma'am.
She turned back and Nathan pulled a face, pouting like a spoiled child. He pointed at the woman and mouthed witch.
And so that journey went - laughing like we possessed not a care in the world. Perhaps a pretense, a brave face for the world, but it didn't matter. Whatever that world was, it felt like we were driving away from it, and that was fine by me. We stayed in Georgia the first night, in a motel outside of Waycross, but I did not sleep, can neither remember closing my eyes nor ever really forgetting for a second why I was there. I sat up at one point, looked out through the window towards the fields beyond the highway, and somewhere within those fields I saw shadows moving, shadows like people, and I imagined they were out there looking for me, looking for us, already aware of our betrayal and plotting our capture and return.
I asked myself if I should go back. I asked myself if I would have ever actually received the burden myself. That was a question that would never be answered until I did go back. If I went back.
I remember walking back from the window and sitting on the edge of Nathan's bed. He slept soundly. I watched him for a while, and I realized that he slept so well because this was his decision. He had been committed and realistic, he had determined his course of action, and would have carried it through regardless of my agreement or presence. He had been true to whatever ideal he possessed. That's why he slept. And that was why I could not.
For a time, seated on the edge of that bed, I felt like nothing, with no more substance than one of the shadows out there in the fields beyond the highway. Perhaps those shadows didn't see Nathan because he was real. And perhaps Nathan would not have seen them either.
They were my ghosts, destined perhaps to follow me until I finally made a decision of my own.
My own private ghosts, neither taunting nor threatening, neither questioning nor scolding, they were just there.
I remembered the candlemoth, the small wooden frame that still hung over my bed back there in Greenleaf. It was a fitting gift from Eve Chantry, something that was trying so hard to be something else, and failing to recognize its own worth it kept on trying to be something else until it died.
As if in echo of that thought I remember looking to my left, and there, right there against the window, there was a flutter of wings. A single moth. It was beating its wings against the glass to come inside. It wanted the light. Wanted to reach the light. Wanted the light so much it would die to get it.
I did not open the window. I merely pressed my face against the glass to watch that thing tirelessly attempt the impossible.
And it watched me back, I was sure of that, and perhaps was puzzled why one who was so near the light would want to leave it.
And then I lay down again, a strange bed, a strange room, and with the sound of Nathan's breathing I tried to pace myself, to measure my own thoughts, and lose the sounds of rushing thunder that so relentlessly filled my head.
I knew I would not find peace. It was ironic, for this lack of internal peace had only come about because I was trying to avoid a war.
Someone else's war. I had to believe that, had to keep telling myself that it had nothing to do with me.
When dawn broke, daylight growing from the horizon, I dressed and went out and stood on the edge of the highway until the last of my ghosts had left the fields.
I must have been there an hour, perhaps more, and when I returned Nathan Verney was still sleeping.
Slept like a dead man.
I remember thinking that: Nathan Verney sleeps like a dead man.
I stood over him for a minute or two, and then I reached out and put my hand on his shoulder. He stirred, turned, breathed deeply, and then opened his eyes. He had been elsewhere, for when he rolled back and looked up at me there was a moment of puzzlement, and then realization dawned as to where he was and why.
'The war's over, right?' he said, and I smiled half-heartedly.
For a while, the few hours he had slept, he had been elsewhere. For a few hours he had been granted the blessing of forgiveness. He had taken it, taken it willingly, and in taking it was now learning how it felt to have it withdrawn.
He was quiet for a little while, and then he rose, he washed, he dressed and, saying nothing to me, he went to the door and opened it.
I stood up, put my bag over my shoulder, and the pair of us walked down to meet the world once more.
The world was out there, it was the same as before, and it was as ready as it had ever been to take us on.
* * *
Chapter Fourteen
Even after reaching Sumter, even after watching the first and second appeals fall on deaf ears, I still believed that someone somewhere would realize the terrible mistake that had been made. I believed there was still a war to be waged, and - more importantly than that - I believed I possessed the spirit to fight it. I don't think it really ever came home to me, and I don't believe I lost that spirit, until Father John Rousseau sat across from me in God's Lounge and gave me the date.
November 11th 1982.
He told me on October 5th. Told me on October 5th that someone somewhere had decided I had thirty-six days left.
Coincidentally, one day for each year I'd been alive.
Father John said he would increase my visits, that he would now come for two hours every other day, that we would talk more, that we would have time to talk of everything before…
'Before what?' I remember asking him, which was unfair.
Before you die, Daniel, he'd said, and I'd turned to him and there was such a look of hard reality in his eyes I couldn't bear it for more than a second.
He'd reached out, reached out across the table there in God's Lounge, and he'd gripped my hand and squeezed it tight.
I realized that in that moment I had felt the first human contact for many weeks. Perhaps months.
Message delivered, Father John had left.
Clarence Timmons came soon after to return me to my cell. He didn't say a word. He knew the date had come. I was relieved he said nothing because I would not have known what to say in return.
Mr. West, however, knew exactly what to say. I was sleeping when he came, and he took a wooden chair from the corridor, just a plain deal straight-backed chair, and he dragged it all of ten yards towards my cell. Dragged it slowly, as noisily as he could, knowing full well it would stir me into consciousness.
When I opened my eyes I could see his half-lit face right there above me through the bars.
'Jesus Christ!' I started.
Mr. West raised his han
d and pressed his finger to his lips.
'Ssshhh,' he whispered. 'Quiet now… don't want to be wasting what little breath you have left there, Daniel.'
I closed my eyes and tried to shut him out.
I could smell him, the boot polish, the detergent, and beneath that something bitter and acrid and rotten… like some long-dead thing preserved in formaldehyde.
'Got your date eh?' West went on.
His voice was sibilant, insistent, penetrative.
'You know I'll be coming for you then, don'tcha?' he asked, a rhetorical question that required no answer at all.
'I'll be coming for you… and you'll piss yourself and cry and plead like all the others.'
I could hear in his voice that he was smiling.
'But there won't be a goddam thing you can do, Daniel, 'cause no-one gives a rat's ass what happens to you… hell, I doubt if anyone even remembers you're here. These lawyers and judges and pro bono social conscience paralegals, hell they get on their high horse about some bullshit, some weak-minded pathetic sense of guilt about how we shouldn't be frying your ass… but they get bored awful quick don't they? Get bored and go off to chase some crap about the ozone layer and chemical pollutants near playgrounds and Christ only knows what.'
West sighed, as if tolerating such people was a necessary part of his work.
'These people don't know what they're dealing with… they know nothing of life and death, eh Daniel?'
I opened my eyes.
Mr. West had leaned even closer.
I could see he was smiling.
'Life and death is a little simpler, a little more straightforward than they could ever imagine. And that's something that we both know a great deal about, isn't it?'
I opened my mouth to say something, but West stared at me, again pressing his finger to his lips.
'I'm gonna share something with you, Daniel, and hell you better listen 'cause I'm not the sharing kind see?'
I breathed out silently. I couldn't imagine being anywhere more terrifying in that moment.
'Eight years old I was, just eight years old, and the little town I came from was just a nothing place. Kids down there didn't get much of an education, but there was a schoolhouse, plain room wooden schoolhouse, and we went down there each morning and did what was asked of us -'
A sudden stabbing pain in my shoulder.
I jumped.
A nervous exhalation escaped my lips.
'Wake the fuck up, Ford,' Mr. West hissed. 'Don't you go fallin' asleep on me.'
I shook my head.
'Should think the fuck not.'
I opened my eyes wide.
'So we'd go down there, and on the way was this house, and on the porch of this house was some big old ugly mean sonofabitch dog, all teeth and noise, slavering jaws, snap- pin' and snarlin' and scarin' the living shit outta these little kids. Guy who owned the dog, fat ugly motherfucker, he'd just watch through the window and laugh as the kids scattered past. He fuckin' loved it, man, fuckin' loved every minute of it… but I saw him, I saw what he was doing, and hell if I was gonna let him carry on frightening those little kids the way he was. Let it go for a month, and then I took a big piece of steak, ground up some sleeping tablets my ma used to take when she got the fever, and I covered that meat in enough of that shit to floor a horse. Rode down there on my bike one night and hurled that meat up and onto the porch. Motherfuckin' dog didn't even wait to smell the thing, just wolfed it down in one mouthful.'
West laughed to himself, a cold and disquieting sound.
'And then I waited, waited for no more than ten minutes, and that dog was snoring like a rattlesnake in a tin can. I climbed over the fence, had a canvas sack, some rope and a tire iron. Went up those steps like I was on eggshells and then I tugged that bag under that dog until he was all trussed up inside like a Thanksgiving turkey. And then I took my tire iron and I smashed the living fuck out of its head, kept on smacking into that bloody pulp of brain and skull until I could see how soaked with blood the canvas was. I dragged that sack across the porch, down the steps and all the way over the yard to the street. I tied a rope to the sack, the other end to my bike, and then I cycled away, dragged that poor motherfuckin' mess of shit all the way to the end of the highway.'
Mr. West laughed again.
I felt sick to my stomach, the vision of a demented eight- year-old kid with a tire iron and a canvas sack with a dead dog inside.
'And then I set that fucking thing on fire, stood there while it burned… and hell if roasting a dog don't smell like a Sunday afternoon barbecue.'
Mr. West was silent for a few seconds, and those seconds stretched into some dark forever where humanity and empathy and compassion could never exist.
'And you know what, Daniel? Smells just like yo' gon' smell come your fuckin' birthday.'
West started to laugh - softly at first, like a distant train rumbling somewhere across the state line - and then he appeared to be caught in the contagion of the moment and his laugh became louder, more raucous, ugly and threatening.
'My daddy knew about people like you,' he said. 'Sympathisin' with the niggers and the Jews and all the other dregs of humanity. Worked his guts out trying to keep our home clean of scum. And hell, if they didn't kill him for it…'
West paused, and in his eyes was a sense of something as close to emotion as I had ever seen, was ever likely to see.
'People like you will never understand the war we're fighting… the war we will go on fighting until we take our country back. And my daddy knew that, and his daddy 'fore him, and as far as we're concerned you did us a service by killin' one of them niggers so we didn't have to do it ourselves.'
West sneered, his face twisted and contemptuous.
'You know what it feels like to see your daddy get killed, boy? See him dragged along the road by his own father, blood spilling from his head where those niggers beat him with sticks… niggers that weren't good enough to be shinin' his shoes…'
He stood up, dragged the chair back to the wall.
He paused for a moment, catching his breath perhaps, and then he crossed the corridor again and looked down at me.
'Sleep well you piece of shit,' he whispered.
I lay there, my eyes closed, and I listened until his footsteps had faded into nothing.
And then I started to cry.
Max Myers came down later, reached his hand through the bars and touched my hair. I had been drifting away, losing all sense of reality, and then I heard Max's voice saying I heard you got your date, Danny boy. We all gon' miss you, kid. Let me know if you need anything, okay? Let me know if you need anything at all.
And I reached up and touched Max's hand, and he gripped it, and I gripped back, and then his fingers slipped from mine and I heard him walking down the block, his soft-soled shoes on the linoleum, the squeaking wheels of his magazine trolley.
They would all come in turn, one by one, and say what they had to say, and express whatever emotion they were capable of expressing at such a time, and I would nod and smile as best I could, and hear them, and reply with whatever words I could, and believe that never would it be possible for anyone to understand how such a thing felt.
Except Nathan.
Perhaps Nathan.
Nathan knew exactly what it was like to know you were going to die.
But that's another story.
I'll tell Father John, tell him everything, and I've got thirty-six days to do it.
We'd left Greenleaf at the beginning of the second week of June. We'd left on a Saturday. By the following Monday we were in Jacksonville, Florida, we had spent nigh on $100 and we needed work. We stayed one night in a motel off of Highway 36, and then we went down to the coast.
I remember leaving the motel that morning, the cool clear sky the brightest blue, and for a moment I felt free. There was no other way to describe it, just free. That feeling lasted no more than a fleeting second or two, because as we turned right at the end of the pathwa
y towards the street I saw a squad car idling against the sidewalk, motor running, one officer inside eating a sandwich, the other standing on the curb, radio in his hand, talking to someone. I didn't hear what he said, couldn't have done from where we were, but I knew, I just knew my name was in among those sounds somewhere.
