The Volunteer

by Barbara Taylor Sissel

  Yesterday, in the rec yard, Mo D said Cam was a meth-head, that he’d been on the stuff when he abducted and murdered his girlfriend. Mo had called Cam a drug-crazed kid. Mo had been on a rant about it; he’d come off like drugs were to blame. Like Cam isn’t the one who took the drugs in the first place. Like if you just took away all the drugs people wouldn’t be violent. Jarrett thought of saying it wasn’t that simple. He thought of telling Mo D that he’d been as sober as daylight when he’d pulled the trigger and shot the men who were his victims. But his life is so short now, he doesn’t want to waste time arguing.

  Reaching under his bunk, he pulls out the book L sent to him. It’s a collection of talks given by an eastern mystic named Jeddu Krishnamurti. Jarrett never heard of the guy until L gave him this book. On the flyleaf she’s written that she found it in a prison library and that it saved her life. Like Krishnamurti, Jarrett has no clue who L is either, or how she knows of him. He’s only sure L is female because in her first letter to him, she said she wasn’t the sort of woman who stalked prison inmates. “I don’t want to be married to you or any of that,” she had said. “I’m not a religious nut....”

  In the note she enclosed with the book, she had written that she knew what it was to seek death, to know utterly and completely that death was what you deserved and that orchestrating it yourself was the final act of courage. She had tried for it twice herself and failed, she said. After the second time, she had found Krishnamurti’s book and ever since, she’s been unsure about her beliefs. L had ended that letter by saying she would be interested to hear Jarrett’s thoughts.

  He opens the book now at random.

  Questioner: “So you have the two energies, you have the violence and the love.”

  Krishnamurti: “It is the same energy, sir.”

  Jarrett closes the book. Cam is quiet. The run is quiet. There is no nose-burning, eye-watering smell that would be pervasive by now if the guards had made good on their threat to gas his cell. Jarrett wonders who to thank for the blessing. God? Does he believe in God? A hereafter? Given that he has less than one month to live, he should probably decide.

  The prison chaplain has offered to baptize him. Martin said that once a man is saved, he will often look back on the sinner he was and not recognize himself. The padre has counseled that this should be a moment of extreme joy. He has warned that shame and guilt are their own jailors. Jarrett understands the padre’s meaning in his head, but it’s hard to keep to the high road when what you see behind your closed eyes are the wounded images of your family’s faces and what your heart knows is that you’re their Judas.

  He wonders who L is. She has seldom given him much of a clue and seems more interested in who he is, his history, his background. When she asked what led him to become involved in smuggling, Jarrett wrote back that he’d married into it. He’d explained it was what his father-in-law had been into. Pre-Columbian antiquities and Cuban cigars. He had written that running artifacts across the border was safer than running dope or illegals. Although, looking back, Jarrett guesses they had all been wrong about that.

  In one letter, L wrote that prison wasn’t a building, but a locked room in your mind. She has written to him of isolation, anguish and remorse, the unrelenting anger and frustration you can feel when you’re locked up, and it’s as if she’s walking around inside his head taking down dictation. Something in the way she puts words together makes Jarrett think she’s been incarcerated herself. He’s written things to her that he would never tell anyone else.

  He has said to L that if by some fluke he ever got out, he would go after Cort; he would kill his brother, whom he loves, with his bare hands, for loving Grace. Jarrett has written to L that he is sorry he ever married and became a father. He has admitted that he is afraid for his children. Suppose the evil in him is something he has passed on to them? He has spoken to L of his fear that he is going to hell and nothing can save him.

  Later when he sits down in the visitor’s booth opposite Grace as he’s lifting the heavy old fashioned receiver, a bizarre thought occurs to him: What if she is L? The notion takes his breath. But almost immediately he sees it for the head game that it is. It happens a lot when you’re locked up; your brain conjures all sorts of craziness. Jarrett had known this guy in the county lock-up, Beaner, who thought he’d been abducted, that the jail was a planet located somewhere in a remote corner of the universe. He’d talked to his abductors, Jarrett had heard him, Beaner, thrashing in his bunk, begging the little green men to carry him home.

  Grace is saying something about Brian, a visit to the dentist. Jarrett tries to focus, to care, but Jesus, where does she think they are? At the breakfast table? It occurs to him that he feels more of a connection to L, a woman he has never seen, never touched, never made love to and somehow the idea is vaguely sickening. It’s as if he’s committing some kind of emotional adultery against Grace, his wife, who has done everything but lay down her life for him. He watches as she noodles her finger along the edge of the countertop that separates them.

  “You won’t believe this,” she says, “but I heard Blanca Salazar is coming.”

  “To watch me get the needle?”

  “Jarrett! For God’s sake.”

  “It’s a long trip from Guadalajara. I didn’t realize she hated me that much.”

  “She blames you because Rafe’s dead and she’s a widow left to raise her poor little fatherless child alone. When I heard her say that on the news, I almost gagged. As if she and Rafe weren’t in it up to their eyebrows.”

  More than that, Jarrett thinks. Deeper than he ever knew. Rafe Sanchez had been Grace’s father’s pilot, his South American connection. Someone whom Jarrett had believed was his friend. Tilley hadn’t expected that, Jarrett thinks, that he and Rafe would hit it off. Rafe was supposed to be Tilley’s man. But Rafe had played Tilley, played him and Jarrett both, and Rafe had died for it. Jarrett looks at Grace. “Why do you care anymore what she says when it’s done?”

  “It’s not done, Jarrett. She’s out there deliberately courting the media, looking for attention. She’s got them so stirred up they’re stalking our kids. She’s after a book deal, a movie deal, whatever, and she’ll twist the facts, you watch! She’ll try to make herself and Rafe look like victims. She’ll cast you as the monster. You would never have been involved if it wasn’t for Rafe and my dad. And Blanca knew. I know she did.”

  “She lost her husband too, Gracie.” Jarrett lowers his face; his gaze is soft, pleading. “Let’s not waste time—” he begins.

  But she explodes. “I lost my father! I’m losing my husband! I’m raising three children alone. We were friends, guests in Blanca’s and Rafe’s home. We were Carlito’s godparents, Jarrett.” Grace pauses. Her jaw trembles, but her gaze is fierce. “I didn’t know what Dad was doing. How could I not know?”

  Jarrett looks at the ceiling; he brings his gaze level. “This has to stop.”

  “What?”

  “Everyone being hurt by what I did.”

  “How will your execution stop it, Jarrett, except for you?”

  He puts up his hand. He wants her to shut up, to not tell him again what a coward he is, to not recount the cost of his actions.

  She lays aside the receiver, pulls a tissue from her pocket, presses it against her face, blows her nose. Retrieving the phone, she asks “Why won’t you face facts?” and her voice is as deadly flat as her expression.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ending your appeals, you aren’t doing it to save us grief. You’re getting the State to do what you can’t.”

  “Which is?” he asks although he’s heard the term state-assisted suicide used in conjunction with his name before.

  “Kill yourself. You always do this, make decisions without considering the effect on your family. You keep your secrets and do what you want and the hell with everyone else.”

  “It’s my life.”

  “It isn’t just your life, Jarrett. Why can’t you
see that? You aren’t the only one effected. Look at Thomas. He’s angry and fighting all the time. He won’t even come here.”

  “So, if you were the mother of the marshal I murdered would you feel the same? Or suppose you were Blanca, Carlito’s mother? Never mind how you feel about her, do you think you would be asking me to live?”

  “I’ve told you before, that’s an unfair question. I’m not their mother. I’m your children’s mother. I’ve already lost my father. What good is it if you’re dead too? It won’t bring Dad back or Rafe or the U.S. marshal. I’m sorry if I sound cold and unfeeling; I’m sorry for their families, but you aren’t the same man who did those things.” Her eyes fill. She bites the inside of her mouth.

  God. The word bursts in his brain. “I can’t stand to see you suffering this way.” But this is only part of it. The rest of what he can’t stand is knowing that, contrary to what Grace says, he is the same, the very same broken, angry man he was when he came in here. He thinks what his mother said about him is true, that he was born angry and he’ll die the same way. Grace says people can change, if they want to badly enough. Now she’s talked herself into believing he has.

  She sniffs and swipes at her cheeks again. “It’s not that I’m suffering constantly,” she tells him. “No one is. Wounds heal. Grief ends.”

  “When the debt is paid.”

  She shakes her head.

  “It’s no kind of life for our kids or Carlito or the marshal’s kids. As long as I’m alive, all their lives stay wrecked.”

  Grace shakes her head faster.

  Jarrett keeps talking. “You, Cort, the kids, lawyers, the financial burden, it’s a constant drain. You think I can’t see the toll it’s taking? It’s like I’m committing the murders over and over and over.”

  “It’s suicide.”

  “It’s the punishment that fits the crime, Grace. Sweetheart,” he adds and, again, he’s pleading.

  “Well, you keep winning, don’t you? Judge McPherson agreed you’re in your right mind. But even he said that if the depression were treated—”

  He interrupts. “I’m not depressed.”

  She talks over him. “—it’s possible you might change your mind.”

  “What McPherson said was that an inmate can be considered competent as long as he has a rational and factual understanding of the consequences of his decision, which I do.”

  “But that’s like saying you understand what death is. How can you? When none of us do? And if you do understand it so clearly, I wish you’d explain it to me and to our children.”

  “I would if they would see me.”

  Grace props her forehead on her hand. A sweep of her hair falls over her knuckles. Jarrett thinks how soft it is. He remembers the silken feel of it sliding through his hands and a sudden hurtful warmth tightens his groin. The sensation is so useless, so futile. He tightens his teeth against it.

  The silence captures the sound of their breath.

  “Cort tells me he’s back to painting houses.

  Grace looks up at Jarrett.

  “He’s doing that instead of renovation work because it pays more money, right? He’s doing it so he can help you out.” Jarrett slaps the counter. “Answer me.”

  “Yes,” she hisses. “I don’t know how I’d make it otherwise. Between the legal fees and the mortgage, not to mention the credit cards—”

  “The house is still on the market?”

  “Yes, not that it matters. The real estate agent says the asking price is too high, but if I come down, I’ll lose money. I can’t afford to keep it either. There’s just no place left to go except foreclosure.”

  “You’ve got to stop paying the lawyers. You know once the government is done with it, there won’t be one red cent left of your dad’s money.”

  She drills him with her gaze. “Okay, I will, I’ll call off the hearing if you promise me right now you’ll take an anti-depressant. We can petition the court for a thirty, or even a sixty-day stay, to see what effect it has.”

  “It won’t have any effect, assuming you would even get a ruling in your favor—”

  “If you won’t lift a hand to help yourself, then you leave me no choice.”

  Jarrett rocks forward. “I can’t stand to see you this way.”

  “Then take the medication.”

  “Gracie, please.” He holds her gaze. “Please, please, babe. Let this end. Let me do what has to be done.”

  Chapter 6

  Summer - 1979

  The night Jarrett Capshaw met Grace Tilley at Grace’s Table, he didn’t know she was “out of his league”. That’s how his mother would word her disapproval when the relationship became quickly serious, and then years later, when the scandal broke that left Grace’s father and two other men dead, the tabloids would make reference to the same disparity in his and Grace’s backgrounds as if that fact alone was responsible and Jarrett should have known better.

  And maybe he would have if Grace had been doing something other than waitressing the night they met. He’d been out with Paula Jean Baranski and his major concern had been whether dropping a hundred bucks on a meal in a posh restaurant would get Paula Jean into the sack for dessert. Then Grace came to take their order and from the moment he looked into her eyes, he was hooked. She named the house specials, pheasant, red snapper, something-something; he didn’t care. He was watching her mouth and wondering how it would feel to run the tips of his fingers along her full lower lip. He had to curl his hands into fists to keep from it. And it was messed up, too. She wasn’t his type. Grace was blonde; Jarrett preferred brunettes like Paula Jean. Grace was slim. He liked them better stacked on top the way Paula was. That’s what Jarrett would tell Cort later. Jarrett would smack his head, look at Cort and say: “What the hell am I doing?”

  And Cort would laugh, laugh his ass off. Jarrett always liked it when he could do that. Get a laugh out of Cort. Didn’t happen very often.

  Paula Jean, on the other hand, wasn’t laughing when Jarrett hustled her home with the screwball intention of returning to the restaurant to hook up with Grace. Paula Jean was pissed; she threw her shoe at him, called him everything but a white man and said he was making a big mistake, that he’d never get a second chance. He’d wonder about that after he went to prison, if Paula hadn’t been reading his future, even predicting it.

  He would guess the delay the old woman caused him that night might have been a sign, too, if you were into that sort of thing. Jarrett was back downtown, within a block of the restaurant, stopped at a red light, when he saw her. She was pushing a grocery cart packed with assorted junk along the curb. He didn’t really pay attention to her, though, until the punks jumped her, knocked her down and took off with her cart, then he reacted from reflex, jerked the car out of traffic, and got out running.

  He bent over the fallen woman long enough to hear her mumbled stream of profanity, long enough to register her ripe smell, a rank mix of booze and road filth, an underscore of lost hope. The punks, a half block ahead, turned out to be kids, maybe twelve, thirteen. He caught them, one by his skinny bicep, the other by his shirt collar and bounced them against each other making them both fall. Jarrett said he was a cop, that he could take them in or they could get home to their mamas. Struggling to their feet, they opted for the latter.

  “What the hell kind of morons are you anyway?” Jarrett dogged them a few steps. “Picking on a damn old homeless woman. If you’re gonna rob somebody, make sure they can take it.”

  He came back to the cart, righted it, and pushed it to where the woman waited. He still wanted to punch someone, but when the old woman offered to reward him with sex and showed him her toothless gums, his anger dissipated.

  “Thanks, but I’m gay,” he told her and he gave her five bucks because he knew how sick inside it made you feel to offer a gift and have no one want it.

  He should have gone home then, or back to Paula’s to try and make it up to her. The voice in his head even told him he should. It sa
id the restaurant was closed by now and Grace was gone. But Jarrett didn’t listen; he was never big on taking anyone’s advice, much less his own. The voice was wrong anyway. Grace wasn’t gone.

  His heart almost jumped out of his chest when he caught sight of her. Coming out the service door with an older man. Jarrett crossed the parking lot, intercepting them. Grace seemed startled to see him. The old dude demanded to know who he was.

  “Jarrett Capshaw, sir,” he answered, extending his hand.

  The old guy ignored it.

  “You had dinner in the restaurant tonight.” Grace’s gaze was quiet.

  Jarrett nodded. He studied her face, the faint suggestion of tension in her brow, the delicate point of her chin, the short sleek cap of her hair that even in the dirty fluorescence of sodium vapor light shone an icy shade of blond. She had unbuttoned the top two buttons of her man-tailored, white oxford shirt exposing the delicate hollow of her throat. Jarrett wanted to touch that place, to find and record the tiny pulse of her life that was there.

  She told the old guy Jarrett had ordered a house specialty. “The cinnamon-roasted pheasant,” she said and the lilt in her voice suggested laughter. She was enjoying Jarrett’s discomfiture, reveling in his rapt attention. He had no shame. He would pull the moon from the sky for her if she asked.