No Man's Land

by G. M. Ford

  Melanie, on the other hand, had gone fey. Lapsed into a controlled rage, determined that no other child should suffer like hers had, the Michigan housewife began a campaign for the protection of children, demanding that local law enforcement agencies initiate school awareness programs, demanding that state lawmakers enact legislation designed to protect children from the kind of interagency jurisdictional finger-pointing that had allowed her daughter to be kidnapped in broad daylight from a public park, had allowed some scum to hold her daughter for four days before dumping her torso behind a gas station like so much garbage . . . a tragedy abetted in some measure because local law enforcement powers were unaccustomed to cooperating with one another. By the time her rage began to subside, nearly three years later, Melanie had testified repeatedly before the U.S. Congress, had appeared on every talk show from Larry King to Leno, had been primarily or partly responsible for eleven separate pieces of legislation designed to protect children, including the Amber Alert System, and had, by virtue of her sheer ubiquity, been offered her own reality TV program, American Manhunt, which for the past seven years she had used as a personal medium for the expiation of her guilt and anger.

  After seven successful years, all in the top twenty-five, ratings had recently begun to slide. It was no surprise. As any number of astute critics had pointed out, American Manhunt was the seminal program of the new “reality television” craze sweeping the airways. Everything from the FBI Files to Survivor owed its existence to the groundbreaking work done by American Manhunt. Not only had the show spawned its own competition, but, as some wit had once pointed out, no one had ever gone broke underestimating the attention span of the American public. Thus far, Melanie had managed to keep the matter in perspective. Not only was seven years a darn good run, but she was presently engaged in negotiations with a major production company for her own daytime talk show.

  “Oprah with an edge,” they said.

  Having removed the last of the TV makeup, Melanie applied SPF forty-five sunscreen to her face, followed by a careful layer of translucent powder. She puckered up for a final application of Beach Coral lip gloss and was good to go. All she needed to do was change into her beach clothes and sandals. Melanie rose to her feet She was halfway across the room when her dressing room door popped open. Assistant Producer Patricia Goodman walked into the room. Patricia was fat and fifty; she was also Marty Wells’s niece or cousin or something, which, as far as Melanie was concerned, explained why someone with a job description so nebulous was still on the set. Patricia closed the door behind herself and looked up at Melanie. “The girls are ready whenever you are,” she said in a bored voice.

  Melanie stopped in her tracks, a small glimmer of memory picking at her consciousness. “What girls?”

  “The twenty-five job shadow girls.” When Melanie did nothing but frown, Patricia went on. “The high school girls. You’re going to spend the afternoon showing them around the production lot. Showing them the ins and outs of the business. You’re their hero. Remember?”

  It came to her then. There’d been a contest. In all the local high schools. Selling magazine subscriptions or something. Winners got to come down and follow Melanie around for an afternoon.

  Melanie walked quickly to the mahogany gateleg table she used for a desk. She pushed paperwork aside until she could read the cluttered calendar below. There it was. One to five, with a dinner in the cafeteria to follow. Right there in black and white. She banged the table with the flat of her hand. “Son of a bitch,” she said.

  Patricia took a step back to stand with the door against the back of her dress.

  “Problem?”

  “Of course there’s a problem. I was going to—” She stopped herself, not wanting to lay out the dirty laundry of her life in front of Patricia. Unwilling to mention the growing distance between Brian and herself. The recriminations or worse yet, the silences. She waved a dismissive hand. “I’ll be along in five,” she said instead.

  She waited until Patricia had let herself out, then jabbed a button on her phone. Leslie picked up. “Call Brian for me. Tell him something’s come up. Tell him—” Again she stopped herself.

  “Tell him I’m sorry, but something’s come up.”

  She returned the receiver to the cradle, took a deep breath and headed for the door.

  3

  Cutter Kehoe was a genetic rarity. A third generation Biker, directly descended from that aberrant strain of humanity for whom the term white trash had so astutely been coined. These were the recycled slag of an older civilization, the misfits, wastrels and whiners who became the dejected camp followers of the new nation’s hardy pioneers. Always a day late and a dollar short, arriving after the good stuff had long been spoken for, they were without roots, so they kept moving west, toward the unclaimed land, until moving became a way of life rather than simply a habit, and the notion of honest toil became a last resort rather than a calling.

  Some fell into cracks along the way, choosing life as Kentucky hillbillies, West Virginia coal miners, as Okies and Texas dirt farmers. Their inbred descendants are still there, still lolling about porches, eking out marginal lives on hardscrabble land, still hostile to outsiders and prone to unpredictable acts of violence. Kehoe’s grandfather Jimmy made it all the way to sunny California before the blood took over, propelling him on a suicide ride atop the new Indian Superchief he’d bought with his separation bonus. Armed and drunk, he was still looking back under his G.M. Ford arm at the Highway Patrol car when the motorcycle hit the threecable guardrail at just over a hundred. His pregnant common-law wife, Patricia Bostitch, identified the initials inside his engineer boots.

  Kehoe was the only man outside the Special Containment Wing who lived alone in a two-man cell. They couldn’t prove he’d killed the skinhead, so they couldn’t officially adjust his sentence and stick him in Extreme Punishment. By the time the yard bulls had forced the crowd apart, the little guy with the red SS bars tattooed on the back of each hand had spilled his purple contents out onto the concrete, his pinched face quizzical, as if amazed at how his organs had slid through his slick fingers, rolling out onto the rough stone, where they gleamed and quivered like sea life. Reviews of the yard videotapes were inconclusive, so Kehoe got ninety days in his own little cell in A Building, as far away from his Biker buddies as the heat could put him. A Building was where they kept the droolers and the chesters, the habitual baby rapers and those fuckers who were so out of it you couldn’t even let them loose in a maximum security prison. The thinking was that a few months with the gomers and goners might give Kehoe a little humility. After a week, even the wet brains stayed on the far side of the yard. After two weeks, Kehoe had the yard to himself.

  Kehoe was the first man Driver liberated. He came out of his cell with a swagger usually reserved for Saturday night bar fights, head swinging, silent, moving on the balls of his feet, checking both directions of the empty walkway.

  “Kehoe,” the voice rang from the overhead speaker. His eyes found the speaker and the little black camera. “Yeah . . . who’s runnin’ his mouth there?” he asked.

  “Driver.”

  Kehoe scowled and thought it over. “That really you, Captainman?”

  “Sure as Kurtz is watching cartoons on the inside of his skull.”

  Kehoe broke into a grin. “They surely ain’t gonna like you taking over the intercom, Captainman. Gonna get you down in the SCW for sure.”

  “No time soon,” came the reply.

  “Where you at, Captainman?”

  “The control pod.”

  Kehoe stopped moving . . . looked at the camera again. “You shittin’ me.”

  “Why don’t you come on up and join me?” Driver said. Before Kehoe could respond, the security gate at the far end of the concourse began to slide aside. Kehoe took a step back. The voice sounded again.

  “No death penalty in Arizona, Cutter. What are they gonna do? Give you another life sentence?”

  Kehoe grinned again
and pointed at the camera. He moved with a loose-jointed quality that belied his long, ropy arms and enormous hands. “You got a point there, Doc. Other than ninety at a time in the SCW . . . really ain’t much the blues can do to a pair of no-parole lifers like us, now is there?”

  “Not a damn thing,” rang from the ceiling.

  “What you got in mind, Captainman?”

  “I got hell to pay in mind, Cutter. Hell on wheels.”

  The notion seemed to satisfy Kehoe. He hooked his thumbs in his pants pockets and started down the walkway toward the elevator, knocking on windows as he ambled down the cellblock. Driver flipped a half a dozen switches, then sat back in the chair. Watching Kehoe walk brought it all back to him. That first week in Walla Walla. How he could tell there was somebody else in the block other than him. How the trustees would make chitchat when they brought him meals, but would pass nary a word with whoever else was down there at the end of the row.

  Just scrubbed the floor and hurried back to feed Driver, looking thankful to have returned at all.

  Fifth night he was there. After the physical exams and the orientations. After the shrinks and the social workers. Just about the time they were about to assign him a cell in the general population. It was late. After lights out, when the voice broke the perpetual daybreak of the block. “Hey,” someone called with an adenoidal twang. “You there?”

  Driver slid from the bunk and padded to the front of the cell.

  “What?”

  “The Mexicans sold your ass to them Nazi skinheads,” the voice whispered, then paused in the darkness for the words to have the desired effect.

  “What?”

  “The Mexicans don’t buttfuck,” the voice whispered. “It goes against their macho thing. So, when it’s their turn, they always sell the fish for cigarettes. Usually to the niggers, for like, two, three cartons. Somethin’ like that.” A dirty laugh rolled down the concrete like a steel wave. “I hear they got thirty cartons for you. You worth that much?

  “No,” Driver had answered.

  A chuckle. “No is right.”

  The chuckle turned into a full, braying laugh. “Sheeeeet. You may be hot shit on a submarine, but around here you ain’t nothing but food, baby. That’s all . . . just food. That Kurtz ain’t but a biscuit away from four hundred pounds. He’s a lard bucket, but . . . I’m tellin’ you, boy, I seen you come in. You in deep sewage.”

  Driver said, “No” again. This time in his full voice. The sound of liquid moving through pipes suddenly filled the air. Somewhere in the distance, footsteps could be heard. And then a shout.

  “Gonna send you somethin’ first thing in the mornin’,” the voice said.

  And then the conversation was over. Later, sometime in the night, Driver closed his eyes and slept.

  As promised, a surprise arrived before breakfast. Guy mopping the floor passed it to Driver through the bars, rolled up in a paper napkin. It was an old toothbrush. The sharpened plastic shaft had a small hole drilled through the blunt end. A thin wooden dowel had been slipped through the hole, forming a T grip. Driver pulled the dowel from the hole, laying it gently in his palm next to the toothbrush.

  The voice whispered. “You put that in your shoe, Mr. Captainman. On the inside of your foot, business end forward;p. You can go the through the metal detectors all day long with that motherfucker in your shoe and nobody’ll know. Time comes to use it, make damn sure it’s together tight.”

  Driver had tried to stammer a thanks, but his throat had been too dry.

  “Remember, the Mexicans won’t help him none. They hate those Nazis damn near as much as I do. They’re just there to make sure Kurtz gets a fair shot at what he paid for. You start messing him up, they’ll be gone in a heartbeat.”

  The corridor lights snapped on and began to hiss. Kehoe talked more quickly now. “You best go for the face,” he said.

  “Anyplace else ain’t gonna stop that big piece of shit.” The words poked Driver hard in the chest like a thick a finger. And then the doors slid back and Cutter Kehoe came walking by with that same loose-jointed shamble Driver was watching now.

  He paused at the door of Driver’s cell. “You comin’?”

  Driver shook his head. Kehoe curled his lip again.

  “Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, Mr. Captainman. Might as well have breakfast. The juice is in on this thing. Not eatin’ ain’t gonna make no difference.” He smiled, then headed off down the corridor.

  Driver stood at the front of his cell and watched Kehoe step through the security gate and join the other prisoners on their way to breakfast, watched as the torrent of prisoners instantly split in two, as every man sought to put as much distance between himself and Kehoe as possible.

  4

  The house was shrouded in shadows as she unlocked the front door and stepped into the foyer. Melanie Harris could hear the sound of the television floating from the den. The long, tiled hall was illuminated only by the sudden surges of electronic light as they bounced off the walls and ceiling. She took off her shoes and started toward the back of the house. The cold tiles massaged her feet as she walked.

  Brian was spread out over the oversized Morris chair with a bowl of microwave popcorn resting in his lap. She stood beside the chair for a moment, hoping he’d acknowledge her presence or, better yet, scoot over a bit so they could sit crammed together, hip to hip like they used to. Instead, he kept his eyes glued to the TV.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey,” he answered, without taking his eyes from the screen.

  “Sorry about today.”

  “Yeah,” was all he said.

  She waited another moment, then crossed in front of him and sat down on the couch at the far side of the room. “How’d your day go?” she asked.

  “Same shit, different day.”

  The tension in the air was as palpable as a breeze. She hesitated before she spoke, not wanting to start the argument they’d so carefully been avoiding these past few months.

  “Maybe we could make the beach next week.”

  “I don’t care about the beach. I can go to the beach anytime I want.”

  “I said I was sorry. What else do you want?”

  His sudden burst of laughter was without a trace of humor.

  “Since when does any of this have to do with what I want?”

  “Something came up. I was busy. What can I say?”

  “Don’t worry about it. You don’t have to say anything.”

  She sighed. “Not tonight, huh? I’ve had a long day.”

  “You’ve always had a long day.”

  Her voice rose. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just what I said.” He sat up. Lobbed the bowl of popcorn onto the coffee table, where it bounced once before coming to rest. He threw his stiff arms out over the sides of the chair like a baseball umpire calling the runner safe. “That’s it,” he announced.

  “I’ve had enough.”

  “Enough of what?”

  “Of all of it. Of L.A. Of the sponsor cocktail parties. Of the network parties. Of the whole damn thing. I’m sick to death of all of it.”

  Her voice caught in her throat. “Of me?”

  “I didn’t say that. Don’t put words in my mouth.”

  She was on her feet now. “A lot of people would love to be where we are.” She clamped her jaw shut before she could blurt out something about being grateful for the two-million-dollar house in the Hollywood Hills, the matching BMWs, the maids, the gardener.

  “Yeah . . . well I guess I’m just not one of them,” he said. Melanie took several deep breaths to calm herself and sat back down.

  “I’d like to think I’ve done a bit of good. You know . . . that maybe what happened to Samantha . . .” The sound of the name stopped her for a moment. She couldn’t recall the last time she’s said the word out loud.

  Brian waved her off, as if he knew what was coming and couldn’t bear to hear it again. “That what you tell yourself? Tha
t it’s about Samantha? What a joke.”

  “Oh really?”

  “Yeah, really. Who are we kidding here? This isn’t about Samantha anymore. It’s about you.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Because it’s true. Whatever you could do for children you already did. These days it’s about ratings. It’s about sweeps week. It’s about what night and what time slot.” He waved a disgusted hand. “It’s about everything in the world except what we came out here for in the first place.”

  To Melanie, their past lives in Michigan were little more than a blur. It was as if her life had begun in that awful moment when the phone rang and the cold clear voice informed her that her daughter’s body had been found. In that minute of time, the previous twenty-seven years of her life had disappeared, leaving her only with the here and now.

  To Brian, living in Hollywood was a B-movie. Low production values and bad dialogue. A place where everything was big but nothing was real. He’d reestablished his law practice and was doing quite well, but he’d never taken to Los Angeles. Not from the first day, when they’d moved into that rental house in West Hollywood. Not for the past seven years, as the show grew in popularity and Melanie became a household name. None of it mattered to him. All of it just left him feeling empty and unsatisfied.

  And then there was the matter of children. Brian wanted to have some more. Melanie wasn’t ready. Wasn’t ever going to be ready. They both knew it, but neither of them had said it out loud, like so many things left unsaid these past few years. And then . . . like an alley cat thrashing his way out of a bag, the great unspoken phrase burst out into the air.