by Rudy Wiebe
Jones: Hoo, fuck. Was that that one that was on the news?
Wenger: It was on the news?
Jones: Yeah.
After a moment Wenger mutters something that ends in “fuckin’ queer.”
Jones: What’s that?
Wenger: The guy was a child molester.
Jones: Oh, you’re kidding. Who?
Wenger: I don’t know his fuckin’ name. We only just met this once.
Jones: Oh, you didn’t know him at all?
Wenger: I didn’t know the guy. I met him twice […]. The guy was still alive when we put him in the car and then they took off.
Jones: Well, they shouldn’t be able to get you then […] if he wasn’t dead when he left …
Wenger: Well, they gotta fuckin’ prove it.
Jones: You have to prove it.
Wenger: (Inaudible.) Figure out how long he was dead and what time it happened.
Jones: Well, that’s right. And how he was dead, or what killed him.
Wenger: Oh they already know that. Dead by strangulation, or getting hit over the head too much.
Jones: White guy or Indian?
Wenger: White guy.
“Fuck.” Jones leans closer as if in camaraderie, but actually Wenger is talking so quietly he is concerned about “inaudibles” and worried that Bradley, listening, making back-up notes, will mess up this run by hauling him out to adjust the mike. “I probably know him if he’s from here.”
Wenger: I don’t think [he is].
Jones: […] Like was he fuckin’ around with some kids here in town?
Wenger: He told, uh, he’d come around, he takes ’em, he goes like this to ‘em [Police note: Wenger displays motion of someone parting vagina lips] (inaudible) cunt. Says he was goin’ up on a charge for it. Now that’s what I gotta find out. That way I have something reasonable, a reason for it.
Jones: For doing what you did, yeah? So what’d you do, did you ask him about it and then just punch his lights out, or?
Wenger: […] This all happened so fast and then the one, there was four of us there … the fourth one, I don’t know where the fuck she is […].
Jones: […] You’re sure he was still alive? When he left you?
Wenger: I’m not sure.
Jones: Well, you had to carry him like out, or what? [Wenger nods] Oh, so what’d the guy do, did he get caught with him right in his car?
Wenger: He was found at the dump.
Jones: Fuck. You ever done time?
Wenger: For impaired.
Jones: Oh fuck that [Jones changes directions] maybe you can get this down to manslaughter or something. If they go first [degree], you’re lookin’ at twenty-five.
Wenger: […] No, its second degree right now […]. I had three kids there […]. He’s telling my buddy, there, Oh, I like your kids. All this was happening, I wasn’t even there (inaudible).
Jones: The other guy was holding the rope on him, so, that should get you off, eh?
Wenger: Ah, the other guy said he’d take it all.
Jones: He said he would? What, he told the cops that?
Wenger: He told me that.
Jones looks at Wenger in amazement; he is sitting curled up on the bed now, his knees against his chest and his arms wrapped around his stocking feet as if he were frozen. After a while Jones says quietly, “So you got an old lady?”
Wenger nods, though it may be he is simply rocking himself.
Jones: She’s in, too?
Wenger: Yeah. We all did […] We all did the beating, but, the one guy did most of the damage. With the stick.
Jones: What kind of a stick, like a bat, or what?
[There are several inaudibles here; Jones explains them at the preliminary inquiry: “I know Mr. Wenger told me that the victim was choked with a telephone wire […]. it’s probably repeated two or three times throughout our overall conversation.”]
Jones: Fuck, what the, you shoulda taken him out and dumped him in a slough or something […] the dump, that’s the first place the pigs look.
Wenger: I told [Ernie] that, he said fuck, he fucked up […]. It all happened so fast, I can’t sleep since I got in cells […]. If it wasn’t for me too, he’d still be alive maybe.
Jones: Why?
Wenger: I was the only one strong enough to (inaudible) him […]. Couple of times he tried to run (inaudible).
Jones: Yeah. Hindsight’s twenty-twenty, eh?
Wenger: Shoulda, coulda, woulda.
Jones: What’s that?
Wenger: Shoulda, coulda, woulda. If.
Jones: […] So your old lady’s charged too. That’s pretty tough. You guys got kids? How many?
Wenger: Three […]. Six, three, and two.
Jones: Holy fuck […]. Well, if this other guy’ll take the fall … you should be okay. Your old lady, she probably won’t get fuck-all. You know, unless if she wasn’t involved hardly at all […].
The cell door opens. Constable Witzke pushes the other male accused in and is closing the door, but Ernest Jensen turns quickly.
“Got any more cigarettes there, bud?”
Witzke gives him some. “One more?” Jensen asks, but Witzke just gestures and closes, locks the door. As Jensen turns into the room, Wenger is already off the bed and facing him.
“Ernie, you going to take the fall——”
“Who, me?” Jensen interrupts and wheels aside, walking the length of the short room as if he had been pacing there for the past three days. He twists the tap and drinks long as the water pours out. “[We all] take the fall, whatever happens. Don’t say nothing about nothing! It’s all gonna come out, probably. The way it sounds. Fuck, the cocksucker.”
His speech slips away into inaudibility. But Wenger persists: “You told me you were gonna take the whole bit. ’Cause I got kids.”
“I told them,” Jensen responds, “he was still alive when we took him to the car.”
“You told them that?”
“Yeah.” Jensen stops in front of Wenger; he is chewing an unlit cigarette and they are almost the same height, though Wenger is stockier. “They showed me that video [you did for them].”
Wenger sags. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. They told me everything you said.”
Wenger slowly retreats to the bed, sits down on its edge. Finally he murmurs, “I fucked up eh?”
Jensen bursts out with something about “… according to your lawyer!”
And Jones cuts in quickly, “Fuck, you never know, man, you might get it dropped down to manslaughter.… if a guy can grab five years or something, keep your shit together inside, you’re out in three.”
Jensen almost screams, “[If I] don’t keep my shit together I won’t fuckin’ live one, never mind! […] They charged me with second-degree murder.”
Jones has to contribute some acting to calm Jensen a bit: “If I didn’ have this fuckin’ parole hangin’ over my head, I could get bail […]. You done time in Drum [heller]?”
Jensen mutters, “Yeah fuck. Ten years ago.”
The cell door opens again.
“Wenger, your lawyer … your parents are here now.”
A bit of hope flickers across Wenger’s face; he goes out quickly. Constable Jones is relieved; the raw exposure of facts through argument is gone, but concentrating on two guys, trying to ensure audibility, is always so complicated.
“This fuckin’ kid,” Jones says confidentially, “he’s pretty scared, man […]. He says you did most of the damage.”
Jensen drinks water again and is pacing, “He said fuck-all.”
Jones: Why the fuck would he confess like that, the dumb—[Jones changes directions] Just a kid, eh, that’s why?
Jensen: That’s (inaudible) confessed, but [he’s] pointing fingers in my direction. Okay. I don’t know fuck-all. So like he just hung himself […] the re-make of the whole fuckin’ thing.
Jones: What, a video?
Jensen: Yeah.
Jones: You’re kidding. You mean, he
did everything?
Jensen: Yeah.
Jones: Well, if he did that, he’s probably hung you too.
Jensen: Well, touch and go […]. Either way I won’t do six months.
Jones: Well, you might end up doing a lot more than six months if they get ya.
Jensen: I’m thinking serious suicidal.
Jones: Oh fuck, don’t croak yourself man, don’t be stupid.
Jensen: [I’m not] fuckin’ dying for somebody else.
Jones almost laughs at the poor guy’s unthinking contradiction, but he has to stay sympathetic. “Hey fuck, settle down […]. From what the kid told me I don’t think you guys are going to have much of a problem, anyhow.”
Jensen: What do you mean?
Jones: Well, you’re gonna do a bit of time. Well, the kid says, number one, the guy’s a child molester […]. and number two, everybody kinda got a few licks in on the guy and then didn’t mean to fuckin’ kill him […]. It was a fight.
Jensen: If worse comes to worse, I think we should all be charged with manslaughter.
Jones: So big deal, you’re looking at a fuckin’ fin.
Jensen bends to the sink over the toilet, takes another drink from the tap, and is pacing again.
“Yeah”—he laughs, without humour. “Fuck my old lady, beat the fuckin’ charge, that would be funny!”
“You got an old lady now?”
“Oh yeah. I got a boy […]. She’s sitting in court [as we’re charged], she’s looking at us, and she’s crying […]. fuckin’ Heartbreak Hotel.”
Jones: Boy, there’s nothing worse than that. She bring the kid?
Jensen: No, no, he’s only three […]. See, he thinks that I should take the fall because he’s got kids; well fuck, I don’t got kids?
Jones: Well, he said you told him you would take the fall.… If you get in a fight and everybody’s all wound up and you fuckin’ threw a phone cord around the guy’s neck and choked him out, it’s how can they prove intent outa that? It was a drunken brawl […].
Jensen insists: They got very little, very little on me.
“Is that right?” Jones looks at Jensen bent over the sink again, the long drink of a confused, desperate man—hit him. “Why,” Jones asks, “why the fuck did you put it in the dump? Why not in a slough? There’s a hundred sloughs around here.”
Jensen mutters, “Juiced, man.”
“Juiced! A guy like you though, fuck, you’ve been around the block, you know better […]. Hey, the main thing is as long as you don’t crack to them.”
“Oh, yeah. I can beat it. What do you call that, uh, pathological.”
“Liar? Is that what you are?”
“Yeah.”
Jones proceeds very carefully: “You mean, you beat the polygraph?”
Jensen: Yeah, I could.
Jones: Is that right, well, that’s what you should do then. That’d give you an out.
Jensen: […] If it comes down to that, I can say, well, okay I transported […]. Just depends what he’s gonna do and what his old lady’s gonna do […]. See I can play dumb until we see what the preliminary [inquiry shows.…] I just hope they don’t fuckin’ bug us here.
And Constable Jones must lie, quickly, but he’s there as a lie for the cause of justice.
“No,” he says. “They can’t any more. No way.”
It’s working. For Constable Harvey Jones a cell shot usually does somehow, and if the dual recording machines stand up, a lot of useful evidence will be collected for investigation. Three suspects complicate things badly, but it isn’t his job to analyse the legality of this “surreptitious effort,” as Crown Prosecutor Hill will call his work at the inquiry. It isn’t for him to decide what’s admissible, whom they should break, if anyone; which one of the three—possibly even four—to use against the others in court. He simply follows Bradley’s orders.
And he’s already formulating his testimony—he knows it will be required—before the judge at the preliminary inquiry, and also the trial; there will likely be both in this messy business. Testify how the accused Ernest Jensen was distraught throughout: unsettled, pacing, drinking water at least fifteen times in half an hour, up and down, by turns confident and depressed. “Mr. Jensen,” he will say, “was just almost beside himself, he actually sat down on the bunk and stayed there for maybe two minutes […]. He didn’t look well, he looked like he was hung over to me, his hair was soiled. He was a very—I don’t know—he looked in bad shape.”
Jensen is thinking of something else. “That poor guy’s old lady though, fuck.”
“What?” Jones has more to fish. “She gonna go down?”
Jensen: She’s one violent motherfucker.
“Oh, is that right?”
Ernie is silent, pacing. Jones doesn’t even know Dwayne’s old lady’s name, but he knows she’s involved, so he goes for a quick, hard lie, something drastic to fish Ernie out.
“Well,” Jones says, “he told me, he says I woulda, we woulda never killed him, except she kept saying hit him, hit him, hit him. Is that right?”
But Ernie won’t bite; he says nothing, so Jones shifts fast to another usual police angle, “What is she, an Indian?”
Jensen: What’s that?
Jones: She Indian?
Jensen: Oh, yeah.
Jones: Oh.
Jensen: But that doesn’t mean fuck all. I don’t know what it is, she’s just …
Ernie’s voice trails away. Jones can only continue lamely, work away from exploiting a standard racial prejudice. And like most sudden prisoners, Ernie really cannot stop talking to someone; he will talk himself around to the vulnerability of his whole past life, the violence of his younger brother Al who is almost continually in prison, and the bad memories of his mother’s death while he was in prison as a teenager.
But then Dwayne Wenger is shoved back into the cell; his lawyer has been trying to work on “some kinda bail” but “people charged with murder don’t get out.”
And so the two blunder around the crime again, it’s all there is to their life, round and round, with Jones trying to elicit or confirm any useful detail.
Jensen: We can’t talk till the preliminary. If they show that video—
Wenger: I’m sorry, man.
Jensen: Don’t sweat it […]. There’s no reason to be sorry that this happened. We shoulda been more fuckin’ aware that night […].
Wenger: Shoulda, shoulda, shoulda.
Jensen: Shirley Anne. She was the fuckin’ instigator that one for sure.
Wenger: Started it, and we fuckin’ finished it […]. She’s the one that started the argument […].
Jones: So then, she was just inciting the fuckin’ guy? This bitch?
Wenger: Oh, she started. She told everybody what he said and that got us all worked up and then he phoned back and then, in a way we had it planned that we were gonna fuckin’ do this guy in.
Jensen is bragging, “Gonna die.” [At the inquiry Jones states he understood that Jensen meant “if he was a molester, they’d kill him.”]
Jones: Don’t fuckin’ admit that to the cops, man. Neither of you guys, like fuck, you gotta get your story together, for sure.
Wenger: I told them he came over of his own will.
Jones: Yeah, that’s good. Well, who phoned him, did you? Or your old lady.
Wenger: He phoned over, but Yvonne invited him.
Jones: Invited him. Fuck, don’t ever tell them that […]. And you got rid of the piece of wood, eh?
Jensen: Oh yeah, it’s buried […]. He wanted to play hard ball, but he got the hard ball. I don’t feel too good now, though.
Abruptly, Jensen is called out, and Jones works hard to take advantage of his absence. And Wenger talks, talks without seeming hesitation.
Wenger: Ernie fuckin’ kicked him in the balls six, seven, eight times when he was lying down there.
Jones: Oh, is that right? It was, and Ernie was hittin’ him with that thing?
Wenger: He shoved that th
ing up his ass.
Jones: Ernie shoved it up his ass. What, you guys stripped him? Before you did him?
Wenger: Ernie and I took his clothes off and said how do you like this (inaudible) fuckin’ diddling little kids. You’ll get your own medicine, and he shoved it up.
Jones: […] Ernie says your old lady gets pretty wound up, eh? […].
Because the guy was a skinner? That’s what pissed her off or?
Wenger: Yeah.… (inaudible) Ya gotta defend yourself […].
Soon Ernie is back in the cell, and on and on the story circles, for another hour. They try to co-ordinate each other’s booze-spaced memories of a terrible night. Was it accidental? As Ernie says it, “I still can’t piece it all together, that’s the fuckin’ worst part.”
But Dwayne is dead certain of one thing. “Shirley Anne started it all and she was fuckin’ right there until the bitter end.”
To keep up appearances, and to change tapes, Jones is called out of the cell as well. When he comes back he tells the two, “You guys are the talk of the town.”
For a moment they are diverted by their dubious fame, but Dwayne still feels bad about his video re-enactment and abruptly he confronts Ernie, who drove the body to the dump in Skwarok’s car.
Wenger: The car, you got lazy, didn’t want to walk home [i.e., from the dump, so he simply drove it back and parked it behind bushes in the park across from the house].
Jensen: That’s right.
Wenger: That was you, fucked up there.
In the face of this growing blackness, Jones tries to be helpful: “Shoulda torched the car. You should’ve drove it over into a lake.”
“Shoulda, coulda, woulda.”
“Yeah.” Jensen grinds it out; bending to drink at the sink again.
But neither can endure such confrontations. They know at any instant the door can open again like a sentence and they’ll be separated, and all their defensive, momentary togetherness will be gone. They must hold hard to whatever fleeting camaraderie they can find, and Ernie grabs for it with a laugh:
“We gotta watch ourselves from here on in,” he says. “But what can you do? Have another beer and go out and fuckin’ do it again.”
Constable Jones laughs uproariously. “I like your attitude!”
Jensen: Talk of the town, my in-laws will never, ever, ever talk to me now, never mind the last time.
