by Neely Tucker
“This one dude, he come up to me one time I’m up here, he looked alright,” Sly said. “And so I say, ‘Hey, nigger what you doing today?’ You know, passing the time, waiting on Uncle Reggie to come out his room. And this dude, he says, just like a regular motherfucker, ‘I been in hell most of the day. They’s Christians and Jews. Lots of Jews. All the Negroes are burned to toast, and many people speak Chinese. The hell god says, ‘Suck my balls.’ And he goes on like that till they come get him up off me.”
“That would—”
“So I ask the orderly—guard, nurse, you can’t tell—‘What’d he do?’”
“Yeah?”
“Killed his family. Every last one. Said that they were ‘servants of Satan.’”
“Shit,” Sully said. It was starting to feel like a roller coaster ride: it looked fun from a distance. Then you got up on the thing and started thinking, hey, wait, this shit is crazy.
A pause, then he couldn’t help but ask: “That dude still in here?”
“Where else he got to go?”
“I was hoping maybe he died.”
“That’d be news. But if he did, he’s still here. The ones ain’t got no money? Bury ’em right there.”
Down the hill, far over, a small forest of tombstones on the slope, in the trees. “Talk about your life sentence,” he said.
Sly said, “Everybody up in here, it’s a life sentence, ’cause there ain’t no sentence. Your ‘indefinite hold.’ But it’s definite alright.”
They were coming up on the building before Sly spoke again, this time in the instructional. “Okay, look, going through here, signing in, all that? You make like you put your ID in the slot, but you don’t. That’s for the camera in the corner. You go past all these niggers, you don’t say shit. You walk right with me, we go up in the ward, through the control room thing they got, they buzz us in, you sit in the chair right next to me in the big TV room and you don’t say shit to nobody till I tell you. You hear?”
“Just out of curiosity, who’s your connection in here?”
“I got connections, in what you call the plural,” Sly said, “wherever I need to be. If I don’t got connections, I don’t go. You want to talk to the freak, right?”
“I do.”
“Then listen. They ain’t even gonna bring him out his room. We gonna go in there, sit and talk to Reggie. This orderly, he’s gonna walk down the hall to boyfriend’s door. You watch him. He’s going to go in and secure him. That ain’t going to be but a minute. When he steps out the door, you step in. You got two minutes to chat. The orderly’s going to wait right outside the door. Then he comes back in, party’s over, you come out. Clear?”
Sully felt the adrenaline surge through his veins. Hold it steady, champ, he thought, hold it steady. “Yeah. I mean, sure.”
* * *
Doors and locks, people saying no, hey, you’re not on the list, you can’t go in there, that’s a secure area, no access, back up before I make you back up, permit denied—that’s what getting past guards was. That was the deal.
And that was how you made your money in this gig: getting past the guards. What kind of reporter stayed outside the tape with the rest of the proletariat? How could you find out anything there? You had to get in.
They were coming up on the front door, frosted glass, a tiny black receptor to the right for your magnetic ID. If you didn’t have one, you had to hit the button and wait for them to buzz you in. Sly—wearing slacks, a light blue-gray shirt, sleeves artfully rolled up, sunglasses propped on his head—pressed the buzzer. There was a pause and then the door clicked, Sly pulling it open.
Lock one, cleared.
The guard station, a box of bulletproof Plexiglas, was set into a long wall with a door on either side. It was a standard jail or prison two-lock process: Once they pressed the buzzer to unlock the first door, you walked in, stopped, and it locked behind you. You were then in a locked chamber adjacent to the guard station. Then a guard at the second level pressed the buzzer to open the second door to let you inside. The second door could not be opened unless the first door had locked behind it.
Sly walked to the Plexiglas, said hello to the guard behind it, put his driver’s license in the tray that ran under the window. Then he said his name and Uncle Reggie’s, and with a jerk of his head back at Sully, “This my cousin. I told Vinny he was coming today.”
At the mention of “Vinny,” the guard, a heavyset black guy wearing a dark blue uniform, looked up from Sly’s ID. He looked at Sly, then at Sully. He kept his eyes on Sully and said something to someone else in the booth. Another guard materialized behind him and then the security door clicked open on the right. Sly walked in, it shut behind him, the far door opened, and he was in.
Sully, not making eye contact with the guard, pulled out his wallet and his driver’s license. He put his hand in the slot, but did not actually put his ID in it. The guard, looking over his head and not at him, pressed the button. The door clicked, he stepped into the lock box, and as soon as the door behind him clicked so did the one in front.
He pushed it open, the air stale and flat and a hundred years old. It smelled like the doors hadn’t been opened since the Eisenhower administration. Sly was standing there, talking to one of the guards like they were best friends, Sly twirling his sunglasses around by one of the stems, smiling. “Hey, I already signed you in. Jamal here is gonna take us upstairs.”
Lock two.
The third lock was to get into the day room of the ward, and that was easy. Jamal put his badge to the buzzer and swung it open. He nodded to them both, said he’d get one of the orderlies to go get Reggie. Sully and Sly walked into the room. The door swung back behind them. From the other side, they could hear Jamal rattle it to make sure the lock had engaged.
“Hate that sound,” Sly muttered.
Sully started to razz him, to say, “I guess not,” but dropped it. The room, what did you want to say, did not invite levity.
You would not know it was a day room for the criminally insane if you saw it in a picture. You needed the smell, the tang, for that. Large, airy, light-filled, some worn carpets by the window, some by the couches, which had no cushions. There were two televisions, both high on the wall, out of reach. Maybe the lobby of a cheap hotel, it looked about like that.
The smell was something like Pine-Sol poured over vomit and mopped up and left to dry.
Three patients were in the room. Two were watching television. One was staring out the floor-to-ceiling window. The two watching television turned to look at them, the new fish in the aquarium, then over at the control booth. After a minute, they went back to looking at the television. The third one, Sully didn’t think that guy had moved since this morning, so he walked over and looked out the window, too. The view was over the grounds, the old cemetery, the bluff falling away toward 295, the Potomac way down there. A maintenance guy was mowing the yard, but without a grass catcher attached, just spewing the dead dry grass out of the blower.
He was about to turn and make a comment to Sly about the inmates—sorry, the patients’—multimillion-dollar view, when he heard Sly’s raised voice behind him.
“Uncle REG-GIE,” Sly was saying, walking toward the couches. A burly man with a thick gray beard and matted hair coming up on him, swallowing Sly in a bear hug. “I mean, hey, brother. Look at you.”
Sully came over from the window and, keeping Sly between him and Uncle Reggie, joined them as they sat on the couches, taking a seat where he could see down the hallway toward the patients’ rooms. As soon as he sat, Reggie stopped looking at Sly and looked at him. “Who this motherfucker here?”
Sly looked over at him, like he’d just noticed Sully. “Friend of the family,” he said.
“Not mine,” Reggie said, lumbering to stand back up. “Not this family. The fuck’s with his face? Talk to me, boy.” Sully scratched the back of his neck and look
ed down. Sly pulled on Reggie’s sleeve and said, “Calm down, Unc. He was a friend to momma back in the day. He straight.”
Reggie sat, still confused but glaring, scratching at his neck, just like Sully was. Behind him Sully could see an orderly walk by in his white sneakers and sky-blue scrubs. He went to a door halfway down the corridor on the left, stopped and looked back at Sly. He pressed his magnetic stripe to the keypad, it buzzed, and he went in.
“Okay,” Sly said. “Go.”
Sully pressed down on the balls of his feet and stood, his heartbeat coming up harder in his chest.
“Now where he going?” Reggie said.
“You talk to me,” Sly said. “You tell me about why this skinny white motherfucker, Hinckley, is getting some ass up in here and you just wearing out your left hand.”
“’Cause I eat with my right,” Reggie said, throwing back his head to laugh, half his teeth gone, Sully moving past him, smiling, walking like he wasn’t in a hurry to the door.
He had worn hard-soled shoes and now he regretted it, the clicking on the tile. Everything seemed loud, the television, Uncle Reggie, the muttered conversation of the other two patients, the click of the locks. The security cameras, they had to be up on a wall someplace, tracking him, and he fought the urge to look up and find them. Act like you been here before. Act like this is routine.
When he got to the door—it had only the number 237 on it—he rapped it, three times, softly. The hallway back to Sly looked a mile long. In the chest pocket of his sport coat was his recorder. Fumbling with it, he clicked it and saw the tiny red recording light go on.
The door in front of him swung open a moment later. The attendant walked past and did not speak or make eye contact. Sully stepped inside and the door hissed shut behind him and he heard the bolt click back into its slot.
Nine feet away, staring at him with cloudy, heavily-lidded eyes—hazel, green and brown, swirling—was the killer he’d seen in the Capitol, on the street on Massachusetts Avenue.
He was seated on the side of a bed, his wrists handcuffed in front of him. The cuffs were part of a padded chain that ran around his waist and then to a bolt in the floor. His ankles were bound and these restraints were also connected to the bolt. Wispy black hair fell to his shoulders.
Sully put his hands behind him, his palms against the door, and leaned back against it. He smiled, just a bit at the corners of his mouth, looking at the raptor-like edges of the man’s teeth—had he never gone to the dentist?— the lowered chin, the slightly opened mouth, then said what he’d come to say.
“Hi, George,” he said. “Pity about your grandma.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
IT CONFUSED HIM, you could tell. The gaping mouth, opening and closing, a fish on the bottom of the boat.
He was ragged-headed, unshaven, raccoon pouches beneath the eyes, the cheeks puffy, the shoulders sagging under the restraints. The white jumpsuit was a size too big, billowing out like a balloon, making him appear small and lost beneath it. His knees rattled back and forth, his fingers reached and plucked under the cuffed restraints, as if he were playing an invisible accordion. It wasn’t clear if the movement was voluntary.
Silence, breathing. Silence, breathing.
“Wait, wait,” he said thickly, his tongue slow and lugubrious. “Sully?”
“We got to go a little quicker,” Sully said. “I only got two minutes.”
The man tried to rub his eyes, bringing a sharp rattle when his wrists hit the limit of their chains, startling him. He’d just woken up, they had him laced on some sedative, something.
“How’d you, how’d the fuck you get in here?”
“Introductions,” Sully said, ignoring him. “You know who I am, George. But you seem to be telling everybody you’re Terry Waters, your schizoid elementary-school buddy from Oklahoma, though you haven’t seen him in donkey’s years. You’ve been back by there, though, haven’t you? You went to see them, Terry and his dad. You drove right up there to the door. Did his dad tell you Terry was dead, buried out there in the woods by the creek, or did you figure that out all by yourself?”
The man coughed, cleared his throat. “Okay, no, wait.”
He blinked, the eyes still cloudy. Sully tried to set the man’s features in his mind’s eye. It was difficult to get a fix, the man sitting down, wrapped up. His hair and bronzed features the only color in the all-white room.
“Didn’t just happen to kill Dad, too, did you,” Sully said, “so that then you’d have Terry’s identity to yourself? I mean, the man had been dead three days when he was found. You choked him out, you know, I don’t know there’d be a lot of evidence of that.”
This time, the man in the jumpsuit reared back, regarded Sully as from a great distance, as if he’d been speaking to him through a long, dark tunnel, and only now could he make out the words. The eyes gained focus. For the life of him, Sully would swear he’d just offended the man.
“You, what you got to understand is, see, Sully, you don’t know everything,” he said, voice still thick, but clearing up now. “Sully. Sully. Look. This has gotten sort of fucked around. We got a bond, see, our mothers. I got a story to tell, you got stories to, to write. Us. Injustice. There are larger—”
“You tried to shoot me,” Sully said, voice rising. “Bond, my lily-white ass.”
“—themes to what we’re, no, see, no.” A deep breath, pulling it from the base of the lungs, like he’d learned it in yoga and he was restoring his balance here. Another deep one. “I’da wanted to kill you, I would have. Had the drop. I just wanted to get your attention. I wanted to get—” he stopped. “I shot some glasses on your table. I wanted us to meet, before they found me. See, what came to me,” another rumbling cough rattled his chest, “seeing all that shit on TV? They wanted to kill me. They did not want to take me alive. Or they wouldn’t be able to, just some trigger-happy asshole with no training, blam blam and too bad for me. So it dawns on me, what I needed to do is make sure that I’m safe. Make sure that they arrest me and not shoot me like a dog. I needed a witness, somebody to make sure they didn’t blow my head off and then put a pistol in my hand and call it self-defense. And who better a witness? Who better to keep them honest? Who better to tell the tale?”
He gestured forward, palms up, hands open, extended fingers, a wan smile. “You.”
Sully looked at him. “George?”
“Why do you keep calling me that?”
“That is bullshit.”
Waving the hands, no-no-no. Warming up to it now. “It isn’t. It really isn’t. You were there at the beginning, with Edmonds. You saw. Only you. Only you will understand. Can understand.”
“Understand what.”
“The nightmare.”
“Okay, look, let’s cut the crazy-man, mystical bullshit. Superior Court, fucking Glen Campbell. I’m not here for the circus. I’m here—” and, on instinct, on the fly, he changed. He’d been about to demand an explanation, or what passed for an explanation, on the murder of Edmonds. That was why George was here, that was the linchpin upon which the rest of this all revolved. But he saw playing the hard-ass wasn’t the right option, not now.
“I’m here,” Sully said, making himself slow down, his voice softer now, sliding to the floor, sitting cross-legged, back against the door, keeping eye contact, looking as deeply into the man as he dared.
“I’m here,” he repeated, faintly now, bringing it down to imitate an intimate conversation, “to hear about what happened to your grandmother. Miriam. The knife.”
“Miriam, the knife? Isn’t it supposed to be ‘Mack’? You know, the song?’”
Gently, again. The word had popped into his mind, gentle, and your instincts were there for a reason. Sully curled his fingernails in against his palms. The man in front of him, he wasn’t the killer in the Capitol. He was the boy in the back of the patrol car. He was the
boy bathed in blood. The horror this man’s life had been. Gentle. Nobody had been gentle with him in, what, how long? Sully had a flash vision of George leading prostitutes into hotel rooms, rough sex, taking them from behind, handcuffs and blindfolds, sex doubling as hostility.
And it slipped into his mind, as natural as the Mississippi running into the Gulf, Alexis whispering in the dark with me not to me, the way he had needed to take Dusty on her knees, the hands cuffed behind her, the others he couldn’t remember, the ones who had loved and encouraged it and the ones who had complained, the way he tended to black out afterward, not just fall asleep.
We have a bond our mothers only you the nightmares. . . .
And George, having read about his mother, not even Nadia, had him pegged to the marrow.
“Miriam,” Sully forced himself to say out loud, to snap back to the urgency of now. What did he have remaining, sixty seconds? Less? “You said her name in court the other day, George. In C-10. You slipped, brother. You were doing your crazy-man rant, and you shouted ‘Miriam,’ at the judge. Party’s over. Miriam Harper was your grandmother. You’re not Terry Waters, that was a kid you played baseball with. Rode horses. Your grandmother, Miriam, she slit her throat in a two-story country house outside of Stroud, Oklahoma. You called the sheriff. She bled out on you in the back of the patrol car. Miriam. It wasn’t your fault, George. But you got stuck with it. A terrible goddamn thing.”
The man staring at him, the accordion playing forgotten, his hands frozen in place. Stammering, the balloon of self-confidence punctured, all the air escaping. “You, you, are so off the, what is it, the—”
“Your granddad took you to the funeral home,” Sully said, quietly, as if someone might overhear. “William. He didn’t take you to the funeral because there wasn’t one.”
Softly as the benediction now: “It’s over, George. I know. I was there. The old house. Your old room. Tell me about her. Miriam.”
Nothing but emptiness, the eyes gone vacant, hollow, a canyon, still locked onto his.
