seventy
HATE IN THEORY is worlds apart from hate in practice. Every armchair general watching the war on television is a different man than if he was placed on the other side of the camera. As Melissa stood over Michael, this realization slowly filled her body, starting with the trigger finger that felt like a lead weight with each passing breath, moving up her arm, and into her chest. She swallowed, but the saliva hung in her throat and felt jammed in like cement.
The culmination of all the planning, the scheming, the endless days of focusing on the man-child who selfishly murdered Marcus, was laid out before her. All she had to do was squeeze the trigger. She had done it on the firing range many times—it was easy, the gun so smooth that it took little effort. She had wanted this moment. Dreamed of it. Coveted it as the moment in time that would set all things right.
And yet, she doubted herself.
There would be no great resolve in shooting an unconscious man. Michael would never know. Would never see the look in her eyes when she blew a hole in his head. Would never beg for his life. He would never see in her eyes the pain he inflicted morph into righteous action.
Whatever guilt he carried in him, if he had any at all, was tucked away in his blacked-out soul. She would not see the guilt manifest itself in his face, his body. She would not see him suffer.
Was that what she wanted? Was that what all people who sought revenge wanted? To see contrition present itself in the contorted flesh of the accused? Remorse only being counted as real if the body presented itself with regret?
Regret is not believed if it is not visible. Is not physical. Michael could be filled with it, but Melissa could not see it. Before her, he slumbered on the ground, bleeding out from his leg, covered in bruises from beatings or thrashings, she could not tell. He had run a gauntlet. But it was not one that she had set up.
She sensed that even if she put a bullet in his head, she would get no relief. No victory. The boogeyman she had created in her mind over twenty years of anger lay before her like an etherized patient, calm, tranquil.
She lowered the weapon, wiped the smoke from her eyes, and looked at the burning house. Her past, any monument to where she came from, was now cinders. She stood on the brink of the abyss, the precipice of a new world. There was only one thing left tethering her to that old life.
She raised the gun again at Michael’s head, and breathed.
His unconscious face, illuminated by the dying embers, became clear through a break in the smoke. It was a familiar face, it was her face. Michael had the same jawline, the same cheekbones. His hairline matched that of her father’s, what she could remember from old photographs. His body was carried to birth by the same body that had produced her. Her mother at some point rocking him to sleep, singing the same songs that she could faintly recall when the nights were quiet and she listened to her memories.
This killer, this murderer, this destroyer of all things good, was not some mythical beast. He was flesh and bone. He was real.
He was her brother.
She lowered the gun.
Of all things she had considered in plotting Michael’s death, there was one thing that she had overlooked. Coming face-to-face with him. She had not entertained, not once in all her laid-out plans, that she would actually feel . . . empathy.
The feeling startled her as if she had jumped into a cold bath.
In his limp countenance he seemed, to her shock, human. Redeemable. A being that eats and breathes and thinks like all others of the species. He was not something apart, different. He was her, and as he lay there in the dirt, she imagined herself in his place.
Melissa walked slowly around the car, opened the driver’s door, and placed the gun back under the seat. She went to the trunk and retrieved a bag of supplies.
She walked back to Michael and bound his hands and ankles with rope. Once he was secure, she put a tourniquet on the wound. The blood had stopped flowing and his skin felt cool to the touch as she dragged him to the back door of the car. He was thin and the weight of his body felt skeletal. She loaded him into the back seat, closed the door, and walked to the driver’s side.
Melissa took one last look at the cabin. It was all but gone, and the heat began to diminish as the flames had nothing left to burn. It was dead. All dead. Her childhood home torched to dust. And with it, everything that said she had come from this godforsaken town.
She got in the car and headed back to Coldwater, Michael unconscious in the back seat, and the course of action she was going to take still undecided. She had no script for this. When he awoke, if he ever did, perhaps the story that she had written would unfold like she had planned. Perhaps he was the beast she envisioned.
Perhaps all she needed was the stimulus of watching him suffer.
Or perhaps—and this was the scariest scenario of all—she needed him to keep her from crossing over to the land of the murderous, needed him to be worth redeeming.
Perhaps, after all, she still needed family.
seventy-one
FRANK AND EARL WERE BEYOND RELIEVED when Clinton’s truck was the first vehicle that came into view. They double-stepped toward it and jumped in, looking back to where they had come from every five seconds, expecting to see a car come barreling after them.
“Get us out of here,” Frank said.
“What’s going on?” Clinton said, turning the truck back toward town and hitting the gas.
“Haywood’s lost it,” Earl said, his legs stuffed to his chin in the middle of the bench seat. “We went out to Michael’s, and he set the place on fire.”
“He did what?”
“No lie,” Frank said. “He set that place off without flinching. He left us out there because we told him we were done. Ain’t doing this no more. We’re already up to our necks. I ain’t digging no deeper.”
“Why did he torch the place?” Clinton asked.
“He’s convinced Michael’s on his way back. He thought that if he had no home to go to . . . I don’t know . . . that he would move on? Stay out of Coldwater? Who knows? The only thing I’m sure of is Haywood’s gone and lost it. He’s completely off the reservation now.”
“There’s more,” Earl said. “That woman Lila was telling us about . . . she just headed out to Michael’s. She saw us plain as day on the road when she passed us. She’s going to be calling the cops for sure, man.”
“That same woman you saw snooping out there before?” Clinton asked.
Frank grunted an assent.
“Haywood tell you who she was?”
“No,” Earl said.
“That’s Michael’s sister,” Clinton said.
Frank and Earl looked at each other and cringed.
Clinton took his trucker cap off and wiped the grease from his brow. The sun was setting and the cool night air was sweeping through the street when they pulled into town. He parked the truck in front of Gilly’s and turned off the engine.
“What are we going to do?” Earl asked.
“I’m going in to get a drink,” Clinton said. “You boys can do what you want. If Haywood is going nuclear, then so be it. But you should think about where you stand, and where you’ll be standing when this is all said and done. Haywood ain’t never done us wrong. He’s one of us. We stick together around here. You guys should know that by now. If he’s got it in his mind that this needs being done, then let’s get it done and over with.”
Clinton got out and shut the door, then looked in through the open window at his two comrades sitting spooked in the cab.
“We’ve already come this far. I’m with you in that we never should have started this, but we did. Ain’t no changing that. But to leave it like it is, that ain’t good for anyone. We need to ride this through. If you guys can’t handle that, then go home. I won’t think any less of you. I can’t speak for Haywood, but we’re good no matter what.”
Clinton walked away from the truck, offered a tip of the head and a barely audible grunt to the shadows by the building
, and went into Gilly’s. At the side of the building, an ember glowed and then fell to the concrete. Davis emerged from the dark and followed Clinton inside.
Frank and Earl sat in silence.
“What we do, Frank?”
“We stick together. Clinton’s right. Haywood’s going to do what he’s going to do. A year from now, when this is all behind us, we still have to live here. Don’t think we’d be welcome in Coldwater much if we bail now.”
“So we just go along. That’s the right thing to do?”
Frank opened the door of the truck and stepped out. “Don’t know if it’s the right thing. But it sure feels like the only thing to do.”
He left the door open, leaving Earl sitting in the vehicle by himself, contemplating if this was another pivot point of his life, or if he had already passed all points of change.
seventy-two
THE FIRST STARS IN THE EAST hung like fireflies pinned to black felt, the creeping night engulfing the forest. Brake lights illuminated the smoke from the fire. When Melissa turned onto the road to Coldwater, the sun was below the horizon. The eerie orange glow that stretched out across the sky made Melissa think of a demon’s hand clawing its way out of the pit. She shook off the thought.
In the back seat, Michael lay motionless. She kept one eye on the road and one to the rearview mirror, having seen too many low-budget horror films to trust the ropes that bound his bloodied limbs.
Her mind was still a wave of confusion.
Driving back to Coldwater was at least action. Movement. Progress.
She was doing something.
The town came into view, and she turned onto Main Street, past Gilly’s, and into the parking lot of the motel. The lights from the diner shone out into the dark several feet from the building. The motor lodge, tucked in the back of the parking lot, was dark, save for the thin neon glow of the vacancy sign in the office window.
Melissa pulled the car in sideways right in front of her door. She got out, opened her room, came back to the car, and when she was assured she was the only living thing in the parking lot, save for the body in the back seat, dragged Michael into the room.
She closed the door behind her, parked her car in a more conventional manner, and grabbed the gun case from under the seat. She looked at it, took a deep breath, and stepped out of the car.
Melissa then went back to her room, opened the door, and went inside.
Across the parking lot, on the side of Gilly’s, an orange glow fizzled into existence and then diminished. A puff of smoke, an extinguishing flash of a cigarette snuffed out on the side of the building, and Davis, who had observed the goings-on, went into the bar.
He entered the back room where Haywood held court. Clinton sat to his left, looking up at the television suspended in the corner of the room. Frank and Earl sat sheepishly to the right, their drinks on the table but every aspect of their bodies withdrawn in on themselves as if showing the world that they were not really part of the entourage. Davis stood, grabbed his bottle from the table, and took a swig. Then he set it down.
“I think I just saw Michael,” he said.
The air in the room was suddenly sucked out and all the men stared at Davis as if his next word would stab them all in the heart. Clinton clicked off the television with the remote on the table.
“Where? Outside?” Haywood asked.
“Yeah,” Davis said. “Could have been him. I saw that woman you said was his sister pull into the motel. She parked in front of her room, then dragged in a body from the back seat.”
“A body?”
“Pretty sure.”
Clinton looked over at Frank and Earl. “Tell ’em,” he said.
“Tell me what?” Haywood said.
“We saw her, driving out to Michael’s house,” Earl said. “On the way back to town, when you left us out there.”
“Did she stop and talk to you?”
“No,” Frank said.
“And you saw clearly, it was a body?” Haywood asked, turning his question back to Davis.
Davis nodded while taking another sip.
“Has to be him, then,” Clinton said.
“Has to,” Davis said.
Haywood stood and walked around the room. His mind was racing, trying to calculate his next move in this grand chess match. He knew where his adversary was, and quite possibly, he was incapacitated, maybe already dead. Yet Melissa had inserted herself right in the middle of the game. How was he going to get around her? If he barged in there, she would be a liability that he would have to take care of.
His determination and anger got the best of any rational thought. Michael was just across the parking lot. The end was in sight. He merely had to go over and get him, take him back up to Springer’s Grove, and do things the right way this time. If Melissa got in the way, then so be it.
“Let’s go get him,” Haywood said.
“We just going to bust in there?” Frank asked.
“Might as well add B&E on to everything else,” Earl said.
“If that really is Michael she dragged into that room,” Clinton said, “it might be best not to underestimate her. She could be on the other side of that door with a shotgun or something.”
“Or something,” Davis echoed.
“And she ain’t going to quietly open the door if we all barge over there,” Clinton said.
From the bar, Lila walked into the room with a serving tray and picked up some of the empty bottles. She looked casually at the motley crew around the table.
“You boys need anything else?”
Haywood looked at her with slow revelation.
“Actually, there is one thing,” he said.
seventy-three
THE WARDEN LOOKED OUT THE WINDOW of his office. He was going to miss the place. The scene of the yard below, the cell blocks in winter, the expanse of cornfields before harvest time. He had managed the place for many years, and now it was time to move south to the mandatory retirement condos of Florida. He had always planned on retiring at sixty-five. That was the plan. But then Michael came to his prison. The young boy.
He felt obligated to stay, at least until the boy turned eighteen, and then he would just be like every other eighteen-year-old boy who came to prison and he could go off to retirement without any pangs of guilt.
That day had come and his wife enforced her will on his career, and he submitted his resignation that morning.
As he stood looking out over his kingdom he had a different feeling creep over him. One of almost sadness. The boy would no longer be his responsibility, and even though Michael was now a man, the warden felt somewhat like a father to him. He had in fact raised him, albeit in a non-fatherly way. He had clothed him, fed him, kept him safe. It had seemed an impossible task all those years ago, but he met the challenge, had grown to thrive on the challenge like a protector beating back the most vicious of savages. Now his time was done.
There was a knock on the door, and a guard entered with Michael. The guard ushered the prisoner to the chair in front of the warden’s desk and then assumed a granite posture next to the door. The warden remained looking out the window.
“I’m going to miss this place. Seems absurd. Every man in here wants to get out, and now that it’s my chance, I feel it almost impossible to leave.”
Michael sat stoically in the chair. He had had many conversations such as this with the warden, almost all one-sided. The warden would talk, Michael would listen, the conversation would end, and the guard would take him back to his cell.
“It’s not the prison I’m going to miss,” the warden continued as he removed himself from the window and took a seat in his own chair. “It’s the challenge. The challenge of taming barbarians. I don’t think I’ll get that same type of challenge down in Florida.
“I have to say, Michael, I think I’m going to miss you most of all. You’ve become more than an inmate to me. I know that sounds wrong. Sappy. I remember your first year here. I had no idea how you
would survive. I had no idea how I would keep you alive, to be honest. But we did it. And here you are.”
“Here I am,” Michael whispered.
“You’ll be up for parole someday. I’ve written up my recommendation. It is my hope that if that day ever comes for you, that you take advantage of it. The new warden won’t see you the way I do. He won’t see you as the boy who grew up here. Just keep yourself out of trouble, keep your head down, and you might walk out of here.”
Michael thought for a minute. “But where would I go?”
“Anywhere you’d want, I guess. I imagine this is what a father would feel like when his kid is going off to college. The worst thing you could do is think of this place as home. You don’t want to spend the rest of your life here, do you? I hope not.”
“I don’t remember much of anything else.”
“All you’d have to do is conduct yourself out there as you do in here.”
“By staying away from everyone?”
The warden nodded to the guard, who left the room and shut the door behind him. The warden stood and moved his chair around the desk and sat facing Michael.
“That might be the best course of action.”
The warden gathered up his thoughts and spoke slowly.
“Michael, I’ve seen things these past eight years that I can’t explain. You know the things I’m talking about. Now, I don’t think you actively . . . that you intentionally . . . did these things. I can see it in your eyes. Always have. You were just as scared of these things as anyone else in this prison. But it follows you, boy. It follows you wherever you go. I don’t know why, but it does.
“I believe that you are a decent kid . . . man. You’re a man, now. What you did, way back when, whoever that was, you’re not him anymore. I believe that. And so, my last piece of advice to you is to live apart. Don’t hurt anyone, either by action or . . . by just being.”
Coldwater Page 20
