No Tomorrow

by Jake Hinkson

  I lay on the cot and wished that I could just fall asleep forever. To just fall away, to drift into nothingness…

  But I lay there awake and alert in the windowless dark, listening to Eustace snore at his desk while the wind shook the sides of the building. The only light came from the stove in the next room, one feeble yellow streak shivering on the floor and casting quivering shadows through the bars of my cage.

  I thought of Amberly alone in the desert, asleep now in the earth. Had I ever really thought we could be together? Had I ever really thought there was a place in this world that would have allowed it? Had she? Perhaps she did, but more likely she just wanted to escape, to get away from this place. The town had seemed like it was prison. Her whole life had seemed like bondage, I suppose, and I must have seemed like a compatriot there to liberate her from her jailers. Did she love me, ever? Probably not. That thought had sent me into a rage just a few days before, but now it didn’t. Now, as I looked at the gray walls and black bars of my cell, I knew that I would pledge love to anyone who might come to the door to rescue me. If that’s how Amberly had regarded me, I couldn’t really blame her.

  Had I loved her? I think so. I had felt something like love, and that’s really all we ever have to go on – that tangled mess of desire, fear, and need that we call love.

  Now, though, love itself seemed so small. Had I really done such horrible things in pursuit of love? I wished I’d stayed in California. I wished I could wipe away the past. Obadiah and Amberly and all the rest of them.

  Yet even as I lay there, I listened for Lucy to return. I didn’t want to wipe her away. I knew she was the closest thing I had to a friend.

  ~ ~ ~

  Somewhere in the night, she came back. The office door opened and her boots crept over the floorboards. I heard her gently wake her brother.

  “You can go on home and get some sleep,” she told him. “I’ll be fine. You come back at seven-thirty. We’ll get a bite to eat and then go over to the courthouse.”

  The big man moaned as he stretched and stood up. She walked him to the door and locked it behind him.

  “Lucy,” I said.

  She appeared in the doorway. She wore a heavy coat, slacks and boots. “You’re awake?”

  “I can’t sleep.”

  “That’s understandable.”

  “Would you talk to me a bit?”

  “Let me put on some more wood, and I’ll come back.”

  She loaded up the stove and drug the desk chair back into the room and sat beside my cage.

  “How are you faring in our little jail?”

  “I find it unpleasant.”

  “That’s the intended effect of the place, I reckon.”

  “Well, it’s working.”

  She nodded and leaned back in her chair.

  I said, “I’m surprised to see you in slacks.”

  “It’s cold outside.”

  “I know, but I was told that ladies in Stock’s Settlement did not wear britches.”

  “They do in the middle of the night in the howling wind.” She tilted her head back at the office. “Besides, I have a change of clothes for the courthouse tomorrow.”

  “What will happen to me tomorrow, Lucy?”

  She took a deep breath. “If I’m a fair judge of the general mood around here – and I think I am – I expect your case to move with lightening rapidity. The judge and prosecuting attorney have nothing better to do than try this case. They’ll arraign you and call up a jury. If the judge is in a particularly dark mood, he’ll start the trial. If he thinks his reputation is on the line, he’ll finish the trial before supper.”

  “I don’t even have a lawyer.”

  “Then he’ll assign you Oglesby again.”

  “That little man who sat next to me at the inquest last time?”

  “Yes. Bartholomew Oglesby. He’s every bit as good a lawyer as you think he is.”

  “Oh my God.”

  The stove light flickering on her cheeks and chin gave her eyes a golden glint. “I’m afraid so, Billie. I don’t take a lot of pleasure in telling you, but I thought you should know. Anything the judge regards as hindering the proceedings he’ll wave away like he’s shooing a fly off ice cream.”

  “Is there … is there any chance I’ll be found innocent? Are you saying the verdict is certain before a jury has even been called?”

  She drew a deep breath. “It doesn’t look good, Billie.”

  “But aside from a piece of wood you found nothing has changed,” I said. “Nothing has changed since the last time I sat in that courtroom.”

  “Except you snuck out of town with the dead man’s wife. We might be backwards, Billie, but we’re not blind.”

  In the dark of my cell, where she could not see me, I closed my eyes. “Is that what people are saying?”

  “People are talking. Angry whispers give rise to shouted indignation."

  She turned and looked over her shoulder as though she’d heard a noise. When she turned back, however, her face revealed that she’d just realized something. “The Picketts,” she said.

  “What about them?”

  “First Nathan baptized you. Then ole hopper-tailed Josiah ran the inquest that let you walk free. That’s why all three of them showed up in my jail within a few minutes of us being back in town. They’re afraid that they’ll be blamed for letting you escape. Lionel knows he needs to put a good face forward to protect the family name, so he’s been camped out here from the moment I pulled out of the city limits.” She smiled grimly at that. “I bet he’s been doing a lot of talking while Eustace and I have been gone. A lot of talking.”

  I suspected that she was thinking about her own reputation, about the way the Picketts had been badmouthing her while she was chasing me down. At that moment, however, I cared more about how all of this affected my chances the next day.

  “Tomorrow in court, what … what will I get?”

  “I expect you’ll get a life sentence.”

  “Not death?”

  She sat back in the chair. “Arkansas doesn’t execute women. I don’t think they’ve executed one in my lifetime.”

  “Other states do. California electrocuted a woman just this year.”

  “Yes, well, Arkansas takes a certain measure of pride in being different than California.”

  “So if not death…”

  She drew another long breath. “Like I said, it could be anything, Billie. You killed a man. A preacher. Ran him over like a dog and then ran off with his wife. That’s an atrocity compounded by an affront. I don’t think you should expect any kind of reprieve. I hate to put it so bluntly, but I’m just telling you what to expect.”

  I let that settle on me. Lucy watched the shadows on the wall.

  “I wish I’d never met that woman,” I said.

  Lucy said nothing to that. She simply sat there with her hands on her lap.

  I turned over on my cot and faced away from her. I stared into the darkest corner of the room. Its blackness comforted me. “Maybe death would be the only reprieve,” I said.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Eustace showed up the next morning with biscuits and black coffee. I couldn’t figure out how he’d come by them. Either he’d made them himself, or he’d stopped by Dub’s before he came to the jail. But exactly how would he order biscuits and coffee? I didn’t raise the question with Lucy, though, because she was too busy.

  A little after daylight began filling the outer room, people had begun showing up at the jailhouse. I sat on the cot and listened as Lucy received a group of church ladies, followed by some men, followed by a delegation from the courthouse.

  I didn’t recognize any of the voices, and Lucy didn’t bring anyone back to see me. One man asked if he could take a peek at me, but Lucy’s voice dipped into a drawl when she told him, “This ain’t a geek show, Tucker.” Tucker made a crack about Lucy’s lack of ladylikeness, but he left after that.

  Eustace brought in my breakfast on a ti
n tray. He set the tray on the ground next to the cage, and I reached through the bars. I couldn’t slide the tray through the bars without turning it vertical, so I just retrieved the biscuits and coffee and went back to my bunk to eat.

  Lucy had changed into a gray-and-green striped chambray dress with a green belt and matching shoes. Somehow, she’d found the time to fix her hair. I wanted to tell her she looked nice, but it seemed like an odd thing to do under the circumstances.

  “Would you like to wash up, Billie?” she asked.

  “Yes, please,” I said.

  She opened the cage and showed me to the small lavatory that seemed to be the only other room in the jailhouse. It was small and windowless, but it was comfortable enough. I used the toilet and splashed cold water over my face from the sink. Next to the sink was Lucy’s hairbrush. I picked it up and used it to tame my hair.

  Lucy knocked on the door.

  I opened the door, the brush still in my hand. She glanced at it. Ever so faintly, she smiled. “I have your bag if you want to change.”

  “Yes, please.”

  He handed me the suitcase through the door.

  “Here,” she said.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  She nodded and I closed the door. For a moment, I stood there. I could tell she hadn’t moved away. Perhaps she was just eavesdropping on me to make sure I didn’t set the place on fire or something, but I didn’t think that was it. I think, like me, she was simply taken aback by the strange, brief intimacy we’d just shared, one woman helping another to get ready to be seen by people.

  I took out a hunter green short-sleeved Kerrybrooke dress from my suitcase. It made me look like a housewife who was ready to entertain her husband’s office buddies, and I figured the more feminine I looked the better off I’d be.

  From the outer office, I heard the front door open and men’s voices spoke low but intently to Lucy. Lucy’s voice was little more than a whisper. It was a sure bet that they were talking about me, but everything sounded more urgent than it had before.

  I finished dressing and stepped out into the office. Lucy and Eustace were standing by the front door. Two men I had never seen before stood there with them. Lucy held a piece of paper in her right hand. They all stared at me.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  I didn’t really need to ask though. I could see it on Lucy’s face.

  They’d found Amberly.

  ~ ~ ~

  Despite the cutting winds blowing through the town square, it looked like the majority of the county had shown up. Men and women and boys and girls. Young and old. Families and clusters of rowdies. Some people looked well to do – some of the women looked as if they were on their way to church. Some looked poor and malnourished. They lined the street. They climbed up the frozen flagpole. They hung out windows and stood in the backs of trucks. They had all come to see me.

  As Lucy and Eustace walked me out, no one spoke. No one threw a tomato or jeered or cursed. They all quieted down as if some authority figure had shushed them. They just watched me as Lucy marched me across the street. The only sound in the town square was the scrape of our shoes against the iced-over road and up the steps of the courthouse. The doors opened and more people stood inside, lining the hallways as we walked though, crowding the stairwell as we went up to the courtroom. In the courtroom, every seat was filled and people lined the walls shoulder-to-shoulder. Even the judge was already there, sitting at his bench, waiting for me to take the only empty chair.

  Then Lucy turned me over to Bartholomew Oglesby.

  ~ ~ ~

  It was a lynching.

  Oh, I’d done everything they got me for. I’d fucked the preacher’s wife, and then I’d run him over with a car and whacked him on the head with a chunk of wood, and I’d killed Amberly and buried her out in the desert. I’d lied and cheated and killed. I’d done it all.

  But it was still a lynching.

  They moved through it all so fast, I couldn’t keep up. I didn’t even try. I could only think about Amberly. They’d found her out there in New Mexico. They’d pulled her disintegrating body out from under the rocks and ants. My beautiful Amberly.

  I really had killed her. She really was dead.

  I let those men have their say. I let them make their speeches to each other about how terrible I’d been, about how I’d done such an awful thing. What did it matter what they said about me? I hated them for thinking that their opinion of me even mattered. What did it matter that I’d broken their laws? They didn’t care that I had killed Amberly. Not really. Not as much as I did. No, they only cared that I’d killed Obadiah, that I’d humiliated and killed one of their own.

  They asked me how I wanted to plead. The little defense attorney turned and looked at me. It was for me to answer. The stupid son of a bitch didn’t even know how his client planned to plead. That’s how seriously they all took my defense. They all just wanted to watch me squirm, to fight and beg for the freedom that none of them had any intention of granting me.

  “Yeah,” I told the court, “I did it.”

  You would have thought that I’d stripped down naked. People gasped, a gasp that started in the front of the room and swept to the back and down the hall and out into the square.

  Josiah Pickett looked shocked, like he might need to hold on to something to keep himself balanced and upright. Oglesby just looked relieved.

  “You’re throwing yourself on the mercy of the court?” the judge asked.

  I was mad. I was mad at all of them, even Lucy and Eustace. I was mad at the town, and the state – hell, I was mad at the whole Goddamn world.

  I said, “I don’t give a damn what you do.”

  The judge leaned forward in his chair, his face turning pink. “Well,” he said, struggling for composure in front of the assembled audience. “I must say, in all my years on this bench I have rarely had to look upon such an obstinate face of moral degradation.” He turned to Josiah Pickett. “Does the county have a sentence it would like to suggest?”

  Josiah Pickett scrambled to catch the moment before it got away from him. He glanced at his notes, but they had not prepared him for this. He cast a quick look back at the room full of people waiting to hear him say something – especially at Lionel and Nathan on the front row. Then – and from where I was sitting I could watch it happen on his face – he had a thought. It was an obvious choice, really, the only way he could seize the attention of the people that was currently fixed on the judge and me. He said, “Given the unusually heinous nature of these crimes, your honor, given their root in the unholy sexual proclivities of the defendant, given the – the – the attack they represent on the God given roles of man and woman, and given that the state of New Mexico might want to challenge the jurisdictional sovereignty of the great state of Arkansas in this matter … uh, it is with a sure heart and a steady sense of justice that the county strenuously recommends the sentence of death be imposed.”

  It was wordy, but it did the trick. It got the attention of everyone in the room. It got the attention of everyone outside. Before it was over, it would get the attention of the whole country.

  ~ ~ ~

  The judge said he’d have to think about it for a while, so they hauled me back over to the jail. As Lucy and Eustace led me through the crowd, I didn’t look down. I stared into as many of those faces as I could. Let them have their look. Young, old, ugly, mean, sad, sneering. I stared back at all of them. Some of them I’d seen before. Helen the waitress, the old man who ran the motor lodge. I couldn’t really place most of them. Some women from the church, some regulars at Dub’s, some people I’d seen around town. They’d all become indistinct now, hard to really see anymore.

  But then we were almost to the jailhouse when I saw Claude. He stood by himself just beyond the edge of the crowd, just beyond the edge of the petty curiosity of the amassed townfolk. He stood there with his hands in his pockets. I wanted to wave at him, but I thought better of it. Might get him in trou
ble, and the fact of the matter was that he was the only one who’d been decent to me all along.

  He watched them lead me into the jailhouse, and then as they shut the door I could see him turn and walk away. I like to think he went back to his theater and started a movie.

  ~ ~ ~

  I lay in my cage and thought about nothing.

  After a while, Lucy came to the door.

  “Surprised?” I asked.

  “You’ve surprised me every step of the way, Billie. I have to admit. I’ve been behind you the entire time.”

  “Think I should have fought?”

  “I think you might have shown some repentance about murdering two human beings.”

  I flopped the crook of my arm over my eyes. “I don’t have anything to repent to the men in that room for. What I did, I did to Obadiah and Amberly. It was between the three of us. I take responsibility for my part, but I wasn’t alone in it. It took all three of us to make it what it was.”

  I moved my arm to see Lucy’s face.

  She stood with her arms crossed. She admitted, “I didn’t think they’d ask for death. Even Leopold and Loeb didn’t get death.”

  “Leopold and Loeb were in New York.”

  “I didn’t know you planned to walk in there and tell them all to go to hell.”

  “Well?” I said.

  “They’re going to kill you, Billie.”

  “Think so?”

  “Yes. Now I do.”

  I moved my arm back over my eyes. “Everyone you know is just a corpse waiting to happen, Lucy.”

  ~ ~ ~

  When it was time they took me back up to the courtroom. The crowds outside had begun to get restless, and people had moved around. The day was cold, and some stalwarts had started fires on the lawn rather than go home and miss the fun. I half expected them to spread out picnic blankets like I was the guest of honor at a church social. When I was led out, everyone stopped and gawked. This time, though, there was a sense of excitement. People smiled when they saw me, friends grabbed at the sleeves of friends so that no one would miss a chance to see me. It felt like a Goddamn movie premiere.