The Volunteer

by Barbara Taylor Sissel

  He’d fired twice, automatically, without thinking.

  Kill or be killed.

  That simple. And complex. And incomprehensible now. In a world where babies laugh and shopping carts have crooked wheels and the light bulb in the shower needs replacing, it’s unbelievable. Jarrett can’t forgive himself. The memory is like a sucker punch. When it comes over him, he goes loose in his knees; he can’t breathe. A person would have to be insane to want to live with it, the terrible knowledge of what he took from that federal agent’s family. From his own family.

  In news stories that delve into his background, the press has labeled Jarrett a trafficker, not of drugs or humans, but of pre-Columbian artifacts; they have called him a tomb raider and a grave robber, although he never did any actual unearthing of the relics he helped to smuggle into the country from South America. It seems surreal; it has been characterized as romantic. It is neither.

  Stupid. He’d been stupid and reckless and not just with his own life but with that of his children and Grace.

  Every day, in the clear, twenty-twenty vision that hindsight renders, he can see a dozen, a hundred other ways he could have handled the situation. Ways that do not include killing. No one had to die. The fact that they did is on Jarrett and knowing this, living with the memory is like a fly that won’t leave, one that bites and bites the same sore place.

  Grace is adamant that he is a different man today and that’s why his life is worth fighting for. Believing this comforts her. But it torments Jarrett. He isn’t different; he has no better understanding of himself or his nature or what drove him now than he did then and she has no idea how her faith burdens him.

  He sticks his feet into his shower slides and wipes his hands down his face, pausing when he encounters the old V-shaped scar tissue that dashes his right eyebrow, then pulling furrows down his cheeks. Somewhere along the darkened corridor now a man groans, a toilet flushes. It’s two-thirty a.m., fairly dark and quiet. In another half hour, the guards will switch on the overhead lights. They’ll bring breakfast. Another day is beginning, one of the handful that is left to him.

  o0o

  Later that afternoon on the other side of the Plexiglas, the free side, Cort watches as Jarrett pushes his fists through the slot in the door of the visitor’s booth to allow the guard to unlock his cuffs. Jarrett remembers when Cort would look away from this, but now, after six years, it’s routine: the sight of his brother being shackled and unshackled like an animal has become ordinary. Crazy ordinary.

  Jarrett rubs his wrists, unhooks his phone. He thanks Cort for coming the way he thanks everyone who visits him. “I know it’s not easy.”

  Cort shrugs. They’re brothers. Thanks isn’t required.

  “What’s wrong?” Jarrett asks because he can tell there’s something.

  “A couple of punks jumped Brian at school yesterday. Thomas ran interference on them.”

  Jarrett grins. “Tell me he knocked them on their ass.”

  Cort gives him a look.

  “What?”

  “How can you be such a damn idiot?”

  Cort is always asking Jarrett this question and it pisses him off although not as much as it once did. It was the first thing Cort said after Jarrett’s arrest when he was booked into the county jail in Houston. There’d been other questions since that are even more unanswerable: “How could you get yourself involved in ...let this happen ...do this to Grace, your children, Mom, your family?”

  Cort and Jarrett had shared a room growing up; they’d shared beers, cars, advice, the usual minor league hell raising. But not murder. Cort never got caught up the way Jarrett did. Cort isn’t wound as tight. When she was alive, their mother used to say she thought Jarrett was born furious. She wasn’t sure because he’d been a toddler by the time she and Lonny adopted him. They’d adopted Cort as an infant a few months later after his birth parents drowned in a boating accident. Like Jarrett, Cort knows how it feels to be without a history, a true home place. A family to whom you belong by blood.

  But Cort is all right inside his head about it. He knows who his real family was; he knows they’re all dead, that dead was the only way they’d have left him. Cort has that, where Jarrett only has himself and the understanding he came to growing up, that his real family didn’t want him. He’d worked at not caring, at making himself believe he didn’t need them, people who would abandon him, who would leave a child behind like yesterday’s news. But the hurt is back there; he feels it inside himself sometimes, the small painful weight of that lost little kid. It closes his throat and pisses him off. It makes him want to punch somebody.

  Jarrett switches the phone to his other ear now. He meets his brother’s gaze and asks if Thomas is okay, if everybody’s okay. He asks because it’s expected, because he’s supposed to care and he does on some level; he truly does.

  But Cort isn’t feeling it and leaning his head on his knuckled fist he says he’s got to hand it to Jarrett. He says, “You probably won’t believe this, but I envy the hell out of you sometimes.”

  “Huh?” Jarrett’s at a loss.

  “Your wife’s got to take off from work to see the principal and try to talk him out of expelling your kid, but you’ve got nothing more to do than sit in here acting all proud and that’s my boy.”

  “No, that’s not—gaaah—” Jarrett’s groan is pure disgust and it’s followed by the incongruous sound of children laughing. Cort and Jarrett turn in that direction.

  “It’s Mo D’s grandkids,” Jarrett says.

  Mo D’s daughter Ruthie brings them every week. Mo D robbed a Stop and Go, abducted the owner and killed him eighteen-and-a-half years ago and he’s still not through all his appeals. He’s watched Ruthie grow up through the window; she’s watched him grow old. Jarrett would rather be dead.

  “So, this latest thing with Thomas,” Cort finds Jarrett’s glance, “I guess it’s one of those places where it’s just not real for you.”

  They’ve discussed it before, how disconnected Jarrett feels from life in the outside world: Grace might lose the house, Brian failed a math test, Thomas wants a motorcycle, Megan has started wetting the bed again. What is Jarrett supposed to do when he hears this stuff? Offer condolences? Beat his head on the wall? No one understands how nuts it makes him. Life inside isn’t real, but, anymore, neither is life “out there”.

  In his mind he’s done the only thing he can do to make it right. He’s asked to die. He thought it would bring his family relief. But Thomas, who’s fifteen and the oldest, is so angry at Jarrett, he refuses to visit. And Brian, who is eleven, and Megan, who’s in kindergarten now, won’t visit him without their big brother. Jarrett doesn’t want it to end this way between them, but he never wanted them to see him in here either. He doesn’t want to say good-bye; he doesn’t want them at his execution. His head is full of shit he doesn’t want.

  “Even if I could talk to Thomas, he wouldn’t listen,” Jarrett tells Cort. “You,” Jarrett adds, “he listens to you now.”

  “What do you expect? Your kid says he hates you and a day later you drop your appeals? He won’t admit it, but he blames himself.”

  “One thing has got nothing to do with the other.”

  “Tell that to Thomas.”

  “I did. I wrote him a letter.”

  “He’s scared, Jarrett, and it’s coming out as anger. It’s the only way he can deal with the fear; he’s the same as you.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  They look at each other.

  Jarrett turns his palm over. “I don’t know what you want me to do.”

  “Live. Say you want to live.”

  But Jarrett can’t.

  “Goddamnit!” Cort slaps the Plexiglas. “Why are you giving up? Thomas doesn’t understand. None of us do. You’ve always been tough. That’s what we’re used to.”

  “Yeah, well that was a front, a stupid act.”

  Cort hoots as if he can’t believe Jarrett would admit this about himself. />
  “Haven’t you heard?” Jarrett says. “Honesty is a side effect of imminent death.”

  The joke falls like a brick. A silence comes. Tight, full. Over-full.

  Cort breaks it. “I’ll talk to Thomas again. See if I can get him to change his mind.”

  “Yeah, why don’t you? After all you’re the expert, the Capshaw fix-it guy, Mr. Perfect, always running your damned interference. You meddle more than an old woman.”

  Cort sits like stone, wearing his Buddha face, waiting for Jarrett to get over himself.

  And Jarrett knows his attitude sucks, but still, he wants to say it. Say: “Okay, asshole, how would you handle it, if you were the one dying in here and I was out there picking up the pieces of your life?” But now his teeth clench and the sharp saw of his resentment grates over the tougher fiber of his regret and he wonders: Where does it end? The list of what he has to atone for, to find words to ask forgiveness for? And there’s so little time, he’s out of time.

  “Why do you always have to make it so hard on yourself?”

  “Forget it.” Jarrett rubs his head. “Tell me about Thomas, the fight, what was it about?”

  “You remember Jody Doaks.”

  “Like I could forget. That psycho had a cell two doors down from me until that shrink got his sentence commuted. Tell me, what was she thinking?”

  Cort doesn’t answer. He doesn’t look at Jarrett. And it’s weird somehow. Jarrett’s getting an odd vibration off him. “What’s up, bro?” he asks.

  But Cort only shakes his head and says he wonders about the shrink too. “I don’t know why she’d defend a pervert like Doaks. Why work that hard to get a guy like him off? People say she’s got a thing about death penalty cases, like she’s an advocate. She doesn’t seem that way though. From what I’ve seen of her on television, I mean,” Cort adds. “She’s hard to figure.”

  “What’s she got to do with the trouble that went down with the boys?”

  “Her? Nothing, but Doaks— Well, you probably won’t believe it, but the media ghouls are drawing a parallel. They’re saying stuff like you’re a mental case, that you’re depressed, incompetent, suicidal, you know. Thomas and Brian are taking flack.”

  “The retard’s sons.”

  “Yesterday these punks in Brian’s class jumped him and Thomas got in the middle of it. Just his luck a couple of those media jerks were there filming.”

  “They can’t use it.”

  “No.” Cort dips his glance.

  “What else?”

  “The parents are upset; they want something done.”

  “Like what? They want my kids kicked out of school?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But it’s not fair to punish them.”

  “You know how it works.”

  Fuck how it works. Jarrett would have said it, but anymore, his anger is so crippled with the sense of his disgrace that it’s useless. There’s nowhere to go with it, no one to point to but himself. “Accept it,” that’s the advice Jarrett gets from the prison shrinks.

  Martin Trumble the prison chaplain advises that Jarrett should accept Christ as his savior. And then what? Jarrett has wondered. You hope for the best? But he doesn’t ask. The padre, and a woman who writes to Jarrett, his prison pen pal, who signs her letters with the single initial L, are the only ones who have expressed concern for Jarrett’s immortal soul, the only ones who are looking beyond this world on Jarrett’s behalf, for whatever it’s worth.

  “I have to pick up supplies, get to work.” Cort is standing now.

  “Wait.”

  He sits again looking wary.

  “I fired my attorneys.”

  “Yeah, I know. So?”

  “So, Grace hired them back. No, don’t deny it,” Jarrett says when Cort opens his mouth. “We get as much news in here as anybody out there. Maybe more. It’s on her account that the media is all stirred up. Because she’s got the attorneys going back into court to petition the judge for a stay. She thinks if I take meds for depression, I’ll change my mind, but I won’t. And don’t either one of you bother talking to that nutcase psychologist that Doaks used either. It’s not happening.”

  Cort shifts his glance.

  “I mean it, Cort. You have to get Grace to stop. She’ll listen to you.” The taste in Jarrett’s mouth is sludge. It is salt, the salt of tears that are packed solid like dirt in his throat.

  Cort opens his mouth and closes it as if he can’t find anything to say.

  “It’s not a problem, is it? You’re making all the decisions, right? You and Grace together?” Jarrett pushes the words between them, hanging them out there, sweet and mean, and it’s a satisfying thing to see Cort redden. An image fills Jarrett’s mind, of himself smashing his fist into Cort’s face until it is no longer recognizable. For all that he loves Cort, he hates him, that he is free, that he has hope, a life. Grace.

  Cort knows this. It’s all over his face when he looks at Jarrett and he’s as broken over it as Jarrett is. His guilt is there, too. And Cort’s grief so tears at the shadows in his eyes that he looks as if he is the one facing death. He opens his mouth again, but before he can speak Jarrett cradles his receiver; he flattens his palm for a moment on the Plexiglas. Then he shouts for the guard.

  Chapter 3

  Friday, September 14, 1999 - 30 days remain

  Sophia tunes in to the local televised morning talk show, Good Morning, Texas, and adjusts the volume. She doesn’t do more than register the series of images that flash over the screen: the mug shot of a white male, early-to-mid forties, inscrutable gaze, is followed by a series of film clips taken of him and some other official types. Detectives or lawyers, is Sophia’s subliminal guess. But she isn’t really paying attention. She’s thinking of the things she needs to do before she leaves for the airport to pick up Carolyn who is flying in from Chicago for the weekend.

  Without Larry.

  What will they do by themselves for two whole days? What will they find to say to each other? Sophia bites back a sigh. She will miss Larry. At least she can have a conversation with him; at least her daughter’s fiancé seems to enjoy her company. But when Sophia mentioned him the other night when Carolyn called and announced her plans to visit, she made some excuse about his having to work. And to make matters worse she asked Sophia to buy Hershey Kisses, the large size, which usually means trouble is afoot. Big trouble. Sophia pulls a crystal candy dish out of the cabinet. The chocolate kisses are a family tradition. Russ’s answer for Carolyn’s every hurt, from a scraped knee to a broken heart. What can it be this time? Carolyn would only say it was complicated. And that Larry wasn’t coming.

  Sophia’s heart falls. She loves Larry.

  She misses Russ. His willingness to take over the cooking. His weight beside her in their bed, their companionable silences, all those little things she’d never taken much notice of when he was alive. He was so much better at dealing with their daughter too. He and Carolyn had been so close. Why isn’t he here? Why did he have to go and die? It’s not fair.

  But it irritates her, all this brooding. She picks up the remote and raises the volume to distract herself. The news anchor, a pretty young woman named Pat Dubois, is giving a story lead explaining the film footage, something about death row. Sophia gets that much, but when Pat says, “Stay with us,” and the program cuts to a commercial for breakfast cereal, Sophia walks away.

  Puts on the kettle for tea, runs water over the sink full of dirty dishes she’s allowed to accumulate. Yesterday she’d dusted, run the vacuum, changed the sheets and cleaned the bathrooms, in her zeal, overworking herself. She let the housekeeper go after Russ died. It didn’t seem reasonable to have her come in and mop up after one person. But now Sophia worries that someone, specifically Carolyn, will drop in, pronounce the house a disaster and Sophia unfit. Everyone waits for it once you’re a widow: the signs of mental weakness. Senility. Dementia.

  The next thing you know, they’re taking your car keys.

&nb
sp; The way Sophia has taken Esther’s car keys. On purpose, out of revenge. That’s her mother’s latest claim, that Sophia holds a grudge against her and is now punishing her, and it’s ridiculous. As ridiculous as Esther calling the collision she’d had a fender bender when in actuality she’d driven herself head-on into the back of a U-haul trailer parked at the curb on her own street, in broad daylight. Not a small U-Haul either but one of the big ones. Esther claims she swerved to avoid hitting a dog, but a neighbor out jogging who saw the entire thing said there was no dog, that Sophia’s mother had driven up on the curb and into the back of the trailer as if it weren’t there. She’d been lucky to come away without injury.

  There have been other worrisome incidents too. A week before the accident, Esther called from the mall to say she’d forgotten where she’d parked the car. And one afternoon last March she’d left the post office, settled in behind the steering wheel and found she was unable to remember how to insert the key into the ignition.

  Cold. Esther had excused herself by saying her brain was cold.

  It’s hard for Sophia to imagine, to accept that her mother’s mind is going. Esther has always been sharp and aggravatingly opinionated. Esther knows best. Always. Sophia has joked to herself that her mother would outlive her on the strength of her opinions alone. After all, if Esther were to die, who would be left to tell Sophia what to think, what to do?

  “...declared competent and the motion to dismiss the balance of Capshaw’s appeals was granted in August.”

  Capshaw? Hearing the name, Sophia returns to the breakfast nook to stand in front of the television. Pat Dubois is talking about an execution that is scheduled for next month. She says the date: “October the eighteenth.” Now the camera angle widens to include another commentator, a man seated next to Pat. Sophia makes a face. She doesn’t care for Trent Hunter. He reminds her of Geraldo Rivera with his slick good looks, his coy, practiced demeanor. His regular segments for Good Morning, Texas called “The Heart of the Story” have earned him a reputation for sensationalism. People shake their heads at his tactics, but they watch him even as they complain. It never seems to occur to them that it’s their own appetite for Hunter’s sort of drama that keeps newsmen like him in business.