The Red Scream

by Mary Willis Walker

  “I wonder how she managed that,” Molly said.

  “She told me on the phone that she was going to give it to some friend of hers in the Associated Press Dallas Bureau. She wanted me to know in case the publicity might affect his appeals.”

  “Will it?” Molly asked.

  “Not a chance.”

  “The Associated Press?” Molly said. “I wonder if—”

  “Yeah,” Tanya said. “It was picked up by the New York Times, Miami Herald, Chicago Tribune, and a bunch of other papers around the country. Pretty amazing.”

  Molly’s heart sank. She sat down in the one chair in the room not covered with stacks of paper. “Yeah, pretty amazing. But I must admit I don’t much like being called credulous and a liar in the national press.”

  Tanya smiled for the first time since Molly had known her. “Yeah. The pot calling the kettle black.”

  “Well, I’m not sure I like that metaphor. Louie is certainly a pathological liar. I may be a member of the press, but I don’t like to think of myself as a kettle to his pot.”

  Tanya looked a little lost at that. “Well, anyway. It’s amazing this Dodgin person could arrange that kind of coverage. A death-row inmate saying he’s innocent is not exactly hot news.”

  “How do you figure it?” Molly asked. “His recanting.”

  “Pretty simple. Louie sees that our great state has executed fourteen men already this year, two of them last week. For the first time he believes they’re actually going to do it to him, too.”

  Molly nodded. “He’s trying to save his sorry ass. Where are you with his appeals?”

  “We’ve filed his federal habeas petition in U.S. District Court, Western Division. We claim his constitutional rights got violated during the trial, the confession was illegally obtained—the usual stuff. Now we’re waiting for the attorney general to make his response.”

  “When will you hear?”

  “Tomorrow probably.” Tanya’s expression didn’t change. “But Louie’s got no issues. Like I told you when his date was set, this is a loser of a case. But this publicity might be good for us in the long run.”

  “How do you see that?” Molly asked, getting out her little tape recorder. She held it up to Tanya and raised her eyebrows.

  In response, Tanya shrugged. “Well, you know how it works. With public opinion being what it is, the capital punishment issue is going to be a long fight and we’re going to lose lots of the battles. Lose. Lose. Lose.” On each word, Tanya’s voice got more dour. “You get an article like this where Louie says he’s innocent and no one really believes it. But then he gets executed. And maybe some people, just a few, are left with a tiny doubt. Maybe he was innocent. Maybe an innocent man can get put to death and they begin to think, well, maybe we shouldn’t do something that’s so final.”

  She pushed her hair away from her face, but it sprang back immediately to its original position. As determined as a Brillo pad, Molly thought.

  “Actually,” Tanya continued, “I’m so busy right now with fifteen active cases—four with dates set already. And this new case—Edward Silvas—has some real merit, so I don’t have much time for Louie Bronk.”

  “A matter of triage?” Molly asked.

  Tanya winced. “We’re doing everything we can for Louie. But we are overwhelmed with 368 men on death row right now and the speeding up of executions. We are down to 13 lawyers and our original idea of getting volunteers to do it pro bono just does not work. We can barely keep out heads above water. And funds are shorter than ever.”

  Molly knew it was all true. It might make a good article sometime, but it wasn’t what she’d come for. “Have you seen Louie recently?” she asked.

  “Monday. When I was in Huntsville to see Edward.”

  “How is he?”

  Tanya shrugged. “How long since you’ve seen him?”

  “Two years.”

  “Well, he’s really changed. In the year and a half I’ve been handling his appeals, he’s aged twenty years. He’s still harping on those god-awful poems of his, of course, trying to get me to take them to someone who would make them into a book. Who would be that crazy? And he’s been converted or brainwashed or something by this Sister Addie who works the prisons. He talks about her constantly and spouts all this Christian sentiment—more God’s wills and Sweet Jesuses than you ever heard. It’s enough to make you spit up.”

  Molly had to chuckle. “Yeah, I feel the same way about it.”

  “It amazes me how all these self-professed good Christians down here are panting to put their fellow man to death, while we heathens are reluctant to allow the state to take life.”

  “I’ve got a theory about that, Tanya. It has to do with a belief in an afterlife. They feel, well, if we make a mistake it’s not such a big deal; there’s still the hereafter.”

  Tanya actually laughed aloud. “I think you may really have it there, Molly. I may steal that line.”

  Seizing on that sign of humor, the first she’d ever observed in Tanya, Molly decided to ask the hard question: “Tanya, I know you’re real busy here, but I wondered if there was any other reason you didn’t want to talk with me. I can be pretty dense sometimes. I wondered if I’d said something to offend you.”

  Under her suntan the lawyer’s face went red. “Oh. Not really. I—”

  “Or maybe someone suggested it wasn’t a good idea to talk to me.”

  “No!” She nearly shouted it, then lowered her voice. “I just … I knew you wanted to talk about Louie and there really wasn’t anything to tell you. No. I’m sorry about the phone calls.”

  “Just wondering,” Molly said casually. “I ask because it seems like everywhere I go lately people are trying to get me to stop writing about Louie Bronk. Tanya, tell me. Am I still on Louie’s visitor list? Do you think he’d see me if I drove over there today?”

  Tanya hit her head with her open palm. “Oh, I forgot to tell you. When I saw him on Monday he said he was sure you’d call and I should give you a message from him.” She paused dramatically with her dark eyes open wide. “The message is, he’s waiting for you.”

  In spite of everything, the three-hour drive from Austin to Huntsville affected her the way it always had. As soon as she got past Elgin on Highway 290 West she began to feel it—the soaring sensation, that old open highway siren call of freedom.

  It carried her back to her childhood in Lubbock when she and her daddy went on vacations. They’d take off in his pickup, leaving all the problems of the ranch behind, and just drive. Without any plans or time schedules. Thinking only of the stretch of road they were on at that very minute, he’d drive them wherever the spirit moved him—to San Antone, or Corpus, or Austin. They took whatever back roads looked interesting and stopped to eat at tiny cafes in dusty town squares.

  Two and a half years ago, while she was writing Sweating Blood, she had made this same drive once a week for four months to interview Louie Bronk about his life and crimes. Every Monday she’d leave her town house in Northwest Austin early in the morning with a cup of coffee to sip along the way and by ten o’clock she’d be in the visitors’ room at the Ellis I maximum security unit outside Huntsville.

  While making that drive she’d have the same breezy feeling even though she knew what was waiting for her at her destination: Louie Bronk’s highway stories, which were a far cry from hers.

  A love for the open road was one thing she and Louie shared. Louie, too, loved to get in the car and drive. Even more than she did. That’s how he had spent the only five years of his adult life when he hadn’t been in prison—cruising the highways. Often he’d drive thousands of miles in a few days, trolling the Interstate, just him in an old beat-up used car he’d bought for three hundred bucks, a six-pack or two on the floor, his hunting knife on the seat beside him, and sometimes a gun he’d picked up at some pawnshop. His face when he talked about those days took on a dreamy, beatific glow.

  As he described it to Molly, he would often drive man
y hundreds of miles in the grip of a growing fantasy before finding exactly what he was looking for. But eventually he’d find her—a woman in distress by the side of the road, her engine overheated or her tire flat, a woman who could have no inkling the kind of trouble she was in when Louie Bronk pulled up behind her and grinned.

  After each interview, Molly would sit in her car and breathe deeply as if in a decompression chamber. Then she’d open the windows and drive back to Austin. At about the halfway mark she’d stop to eat. She’d get home at five, sit down at her word processor, and write long into the night, absorbed in re-creating Louie Bronk’s road stories, his vision of the Texas highways as the very lowest reaches of hell.

  Some of the chapters she wrote from his point of view—showing how the movies in his head (as he called them) made him get in the car to look for the dark-haired woman waiting for him by the side of the road, enticing him; how long and hard he’d drive looking for just the right one; how exciting the moment of recognition was, the terror and helplessness in her eyes when she knew what was about to happen; how he craved that feeling of control, of total mastery of another person; how it thrilled him as nothing else could; how he did it once and found it easy to get away with. So he did it again. And again. And again.

  In each session he told a fresh installment of his road trips. After forty-eight hours of listening to the world according to Louie Bronk, Molly had had enough. She had the material she needed and his stories were breaking through the barrier of cool objectivity she’d erected for the interviews. She thanked him, said good-bye, and hadn’t been back to death row once in the two years.

  Until today.

  After turning onto Texas 21, she stopped in dusty Caldwell to pick up a Dr Pepper to sip as she drove. When she got to College Station, she caught Route 30 toward Huntsville. Here the landscape changed abruptly from flat prairie into the piney woods of East Texas. Tall pine trees shaded the road and the air felt cooler, so she turned off the air-conditioning and rolled down the window.

  She skirted the pretty old East Texas town of Huntsville, following a series of little-traveled back roads to the prison twelve miles north of town.

  When Molly turned in at the gate and drove toward the huge prison complex, she was awed, as always, by the red brick, more red brick—hard-edged, cold, and sterile—all in one place than she’d ever seen. From the flat clearing, hundreds of tons of red brick rose, surrounded by double Cyclone fences, twelve feet high and topped with swirls of shining razor wire.

  God knows we need prisons, she thought, but she was never able to reconcile her feelings about this place. Here in the midst of these beautiful East Texas woods and flower-studded fields, in this remote place, away from human eyes, we build brick fortresses to hold our most violent citizens. We lock them up and don’t think about them again—until they are paroled or executed, when they force themselves into our consciousness.

  As she drove by the first tall guardhouse at the corner of the complex, she could feel the eyes looking down on her. It had always been with her when she visited—the constant feeling of being watched by eyes seen and unseen. But at least it would please Grady; she’d gotten out of town as he’d suggested, and there probably wasn’t a safer place to be than right here.

  She pulled into the parking lot and sat in her truck for a minute watching a dozen trustees in their white prison coveralls working outside the fence, digging in the neat beds of lantana and petunias at the front gate. The first time she had come here many years ago she had been astonished by the meticulous maintenance and manicured landscaping of the place. The secret, she now knew, was that they had lots of free labor and a horticultural school for the inmates. Somehow all that effort only added to the sterility of the place.

  In her jacket pocket she put her driver’s license, her credentials from Lone Star Monthly, her car keys, a ballpoint pen, and her Steno book. Louie had never liked tape recorders, so she didn’t use one. After tucking her purse under the seat, Molly got out of the truck and locked it.

  As she walked toward the gate, she looked around for the horseman she knew must be somewhere near. Finally she located him in the shade of an oak tree, a gun on his hip and a shotgun in a sheath on the saddle. The horse’s head pointed directly at her, and as she walked, the horse took little steps so that it continued to face her.

  She entered the small brick gate-house just across the walk from the prison gate and picked up the phone there. When a man’s voice answered, she gave her name and said she was here to visit Louie Bronk on death row. After a wait of a few minutes, the voice told her to leave any purses or weapons at the picket and come on in.

  She stopped at the tall guard tower next to the front gate and looked up to the little room on top where the guard stood. She held up her key chain that had a Swiss Army knife and Grady’s tear gas attached to it. Weapons by anybody’s definition. The guard stuck his head out the door and lowered a plastic bucket at the end of a rope. She dropped her keys in and took a step back so he could pull it up. Then he motioned her to go on through.

  She opened the first heavy gate and let it clink shut and lock behind her before pushing the next gate. She walked across the narrow grassy strip, through the front door, and turned left into a small antechamber to the visitors’ room. A sign said “Death Row visitations weekdays 8–4.” The first few times she’d come here, she’d been surprised that “Death Row” was the official name they used in all the signs. It was such a raw and direct description, rare for a system accustomed to euphemisms.

  The visitors’ room was a long brick-walled room divided lengthwise by a partition that separated inmates from visitors. From the floor up to a height of three feet the partition was made of brick, and from there to the ceiling it was made of several thicknesses of tight wire mesh reinforced with glass. A wooden ledge at table height stuck out from it on both sides where the brick and mesh met. Old oak chairs were lined up along both sides of the divider.

  Though the room was entirely empty, as it often was on weekdays, which were reserved for death-row visitors, the guard motioned her down to the far end.

  “Set yourself in front of the interview cage, please, ma’am,” he said in a deep East Texas drawl. “The prisoner’s in ad seg.”

  Ad seg was administrative segregation, a type of isolation in which a prisoner was locked in his cell twenty-four hours a day, and on the rare occasions when he was brought out for a shower or a visit, he was cuffed and shackled.

  “Why?” she asked.

  The young guard looked at her as though she were a slow child. “ ’Cause his date’s been set, ma’am,” he said.

  “Is that the rule?” she asked, surprised. “Sometimes they get their date more than a month ahead of time.”

  “Yes’m.” He sounded bored. “Go on and set down.”

  Molly sat opposite a steel-mesh cage on the other side of the divider. It was about the size of a phone booth and contained only a chair. She put her notebook and pen down on the ledge and waited, trying to relax herself into what she thought of as her Louie mode—that state of mind in which all usual judgments and morality were suspended. She thought of it as letting herself fall down into a rabbit hole where, at the bottom, there was a different reality—Louie Bronk’s world, which she was about to enter again.

  chapter 14

  Pretty gal all alone

  On the highway, car broke down.

  You pull behind her quick.

  She gets to looking sick,

  Mouth all dry

  Starts to cry

  Like a flood,

  Sweating blood.

  Please, please don’t.

  Honey I won’t

  Won’t hurt none.

  There it’s done.

  Weren’t that fun?

  LOUIE BRONK

  Death Row, Ellis I Unit,

  Huntsville, Texas

  After a few minutes a door opened on the prisoner’s side of the room. Louie Bronk shuffled in, dwarfed by the
two guards, one on either side of him. His hands were cuffed and chained to his waist. His feet were shackled and he clanked with each step.

  One guard left while the other led Louie to the cage, unlocked it, and, holding tight to his upper arm, sat him down on the chair. As he locked the cage door, the guard said to Molly, “I’ll be right here, ma’am, if you need me.” He walked back to the door and stood at attention.

  During this procedure, Louie had kept his eyes glued to the guard. He kept his head turned away from Molly and continued to stare at the guard.

  Molly looked through the several layers of mesh at the man in the cage—a small figure dressed in a coarsely woven white prison shirt and pants. On his feet he wore the cheap soft slippers that were issued to all death-row inmates.

  From the first, Louie’s appearance had struck Molly as one of insufficiency in every feature. It was as if his unwanted birth and stunted childhood had supplied barely enough love and nutrients to create a full human being. He was short and, except for the hard lump of a paunch that protruded above his belt, scrawny. His hair was sparse and limp, his lips mere gray lines, his eyes squinty and narrow, close-set, with no lashes or eyebrows. And his skin was papery-looking, insufficient to cover his body decently; his sharp, beaky nose and flat cheeks and long chin looked like naked bone.

  He had aged in the past two years, just as Tanya Klein had said. His hair was even thinner now and totally gray, so you could see his scalp through it, and his arms, which used to have at least a stringy, tensile strength, had gone slack; the skin on the underside had loosened from the bone, making the crude blue images tattooed there wrinkle into an unrecognizable mess. If she hadn’t known what the tattoos were—a hawk, a serpent, and a naked woman—she wouldn’t be able to make them out now.

  Still turned, staring at the guard, he said in a reedy, singsong voice,