The Body and the Blood

by Michael Lister

  “No, he got all his shit.’Course, don’t mean shit to him now.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Beneath tall, twisting oak trees, their roots spreading out in all directions, disappearing into sandy soil, I sat on a wooden-slat bench eating shrimp creole out of a Styrofoam cup from the Cajun Café.

  Above me, the oaks’ enormous branches created a thick canopy, from which Spanish moss waved in the breeze.

  I was having a late lunch alone in the lakeside park near the center of town.

  Lunch options in Pottersville for a bachelor who didn’t cook were limited to a no-name café featuring traditional southern fried fare, Rudy’s, a cross between Waffle House and the no-name café, Sal’s Pizzeria, and now, the Cajun Café, a taste of New Orleans.

  Unlike the other restaurants in town, the Cajun Café could make it anywhere—not just in a small town with limited dining options, but, thank God for her mercies, the local lady who operated it only wanted to live in Pottersville.

  The midday sun had burned the chill off the morning air and heated up the day, but beneath the tree branch canopy it was cool and comfortable.

  Numb inside and weary even before Justin was murdered, I was now sleep deprived and frayed. Beside me on the bench was Thomas Moore’s book, Dark Nights of the Soul, which, not for the first time, I was rereading. I was in need of help, of spiritual nourishment, and few people had provided that for me over the years as much as Thomas Moore. His gentle approach was soothing, but like most things these days, it didn’t seem to be penetrating, getting past my mind, down to the deeper parts of my being.

  I had come to the park in search of silence and serenity. I had come to the right place. Now, if I could just let them in.

  Before me, beyond the swollen bases of the cypress trees encircling it, the water of the lake was still and smooth. Behind me, the slow-moving traffic on Main Street created a breezy resonance that sounded like the tide intermittently rolling to shore. To my right, stay-at-home moms watched their toddlers playing on the enormous jungle gym, their laughter and squeals rising to meet the twirps and songs of birds in the trees.

  I took in a deep breath, held it, then let it out very slowly.

  The creole was hot and spicy, thick with chunks of onion, tomato, bell peppers, and large Gulf shrimp, the sun-dappled park peaceful, the breeze cool and refreshing, the moment perfect in every way . . . until my dad and brother walked up.

  “Eating alone’s bad for the digestion,” Jake, my younger brother, said.

  “I’m not alone.”

  He rolled his eyes.

  He assumed I was talking about God, and, though I had been referring to the living Eden in which I sat, ultimately I didn’t see much difference, so I didn’t say anything.

  Two years my junior, Jake was a couple of inches shorter and about fifty pounds heavier. Though he was in his early thirties, his thinning hair and soft body gave him the hayseed in middle-age look so many of the guys around here had.

  “How’re you doin’, Son?” Dad asked.

  Jack Jordan, the sheriff of Potter County, had somehow managed to have a son as different from him as if I’d been adopted. Though it couldn’t have been easy, he’d been extremely understanding my whole life, but his recent verbal jabs let me know he was beginning to resent my differences and independence. He appreciated me as an investigator—though he couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t work for him, and I knew it hurt him—but he couldn’t understand me as a minister, a prison chaplain. To his practical way of thinking, I was a fanatic, a wishful thinker—a daydreamer who spent too much time on frivolous things that didn’t matter.

  As different as I was from dad, I was far more so from Jake.

  “I heard about the inmate who was killed last night,” he added.

  “Why didn’t you say anything to us?” Jake asked.

  Dad said, “FDLE notified us after they were well into the investigation. We always cooperate, and they would have processed the scene either way, but it seems like I’m always the last to know anytime there’s a crime committed in the prison. Any idea why?”

  I shrugged. “I honestly think it’s just lack of coordination. Not intentional. I should’ve called you, but this is the first time I’ve even paused since it happened, and I figured someone else already had.”

  He nodded and thought about it.

  As sheriff, Dad was the chief law enforcement officer of Potter county, and was normally the first called in when a crime was committed. Ordinarily, there was a lot of interdepartmental cooperation—crime scene and lab work was processed by FDLE, crimes on the river or in the woods always included the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, but the sheriff’s department was always involved, usually in charge.

  “FDLE’s letting Tom Daniels run with it,” I said.

  “Your other daddy?” Jake said.

  A redneck who could hold his liquor, and often did, Jake had always seen my addiction as a sign of my weakness, and I think a lot of his anger toward our alcoholic mother came out as disdain for me. It’d explain the rage he continually directed toward me much more adequately than sibling rivalry.

  “You helpin’ him with it?” Dad asked, ignoring Jake.

  I nodded.

  “Do me a favor and keep me informed. Seems like I’m the sheriff of this entire county except for the land the prison’s on.”

  I nodded again.

  “People’re beginning to talk. Election’s only a year away.”

  One of the things I had always most respected about Dad over the years was that very few of his decisions were dictated by political expediency, but lately that seemed to be changing, and I found myself looking at him differently, wondering if it were because he was getting older or the talk that he might have real competition for the first time in a couple of decades.

  “What’ve you got so far?”

  I told him.

  “You were there when it happened?”

  I nodded.

  “Any idea who did it?”

  “Don’t even know how it was done. Yet.”

  A loaded log truck raced by on Main Street, its enormous diesel engine protesting the grinding of its gears. The sun ducked behind a cloud, and the day turned dark, the wind coming off the water cold.

  To our right, a kid who looked big enough to be in school began banging on one of the metal support poles of the jungle gym with a stick. The noise was loud and annoying.

  Jake turned toward the playground. “Hey kid. Cut that shit out.”

  Dad winced, but ignored him. “You need to let us help you,” he said.

  “How?”

  “Starting with a little piece of information for background. My department would be a valuable resource for you and the prison if you’d just let us.”

  “I know. I do.”

  “We responded to a call from Michael Pitts’s house less than a week ago.”

  My raised eyebrows asked the question.

  “Call came from his wife. Nothing much came of it, though it should’ve—I didn’t know about it until after the fact.”

  “Happenin’ a lot lately,” Jake said.

  “They extending him a little law enforcement courtesy. Said it wasn’t nearly the worse case they’d seen, but there was no doubt that it was a case of domestic abuse.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Michael Pitts was maybe one of five of the very best football players Pottersville had ever produced. A quarterback with an amazing arm who was even more dangerous on the run, it was Michael’s field generalship that most impressed the college scouts. He won the state championship for 1-A schools two years in a row with a team that shouldn’t have made it past the district playoffs.

  In high school, Michael Pitts was a living legend, the hero of every young boy—boys who had no doubt he would finally put their small town on the map.

  But all that seemed like a lifetime ago now.

  I found Michael Pitts where he spent every fall afternoon—
sitting alone in the bleachers of the high school football field intently watching boys with a fraction of his talent practice half as hard as he had.

  He nodded at me when I walked up, but continued to focus on the practice without saying anything. Beside him, I sat in silence, waiting until he was ready to speak.

  On the field before us, six enthusiastic men tried to motivate twenty-six teenagers who were not. Only three of the men were coaches. The others—a hardware store owner, a banker, and a father—were merely attempting to be close to what the boys unknowingly had in abundance.

  Next to me, Michael Pitts shook his head.

  “All the talent in the world can’t make up for attitude,” he said. “But attitude go a long way in making up for talent.”

  I nodded.

  “As things get better for these kids, they get softer, attitudes gets worse. Got no motivation. Want the easy way outta everything. Everything’s somebody else’s fault. Everybody owe ‘em somethin’.”

  He was right of course, but I knew that much of the anger he expressed was at the injustice of his own unfulfilled promise, and not merely at the blatant lack of character in the boys before him.

  I studied him again sitting in this place that must be haunted for him. Did he hear the roar of the crowd? Smell the sweat and dirt and hamburger grease as it dripped down from the patties and sizzled on the charcoal? Did he taste the blood and bile and Gatorade? Was he thinking the best part of his life was over?

  “Try to talk to ‘em, but they won’t listen.”

  We didn’t either when we were their age, I thought.

  The last of the setting sun backlit the small figures in practice pants and old torn and ripped jerseys, the plastic smash of their helmets and pads reverberating through the stadium like cheers on game day.

  “You ever think about coaching?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I can do it,” he said, continuing to stare straight ahead at the practice, “or could, but I can’t teach somebody else how to do it.”

  I nodded. “It wasn’t something you were taught.”

  He nodded.

  The something that he hadn’t learned—the gift—had been taken from him just as quickly as it had been given. Cruelly, it had been his just long enough to make him dream.

  During the last game of his last season, Michael Pitts had broken his ankle. One wrong step and the road less traveled was no longer his to choose.

  God created the world out of chaos, I thought, and sometimes the chaos shows through.

  “Do you like being a correctional officer?” I asked, though I knew of no one who did.

  He shook his head. “Hate it.”

  I didn’t ask the obvious question, but he answered it anyway with a question of his own.

  “What else’m I gonna do?”

  Most correctional officers I knew would ask the same question.

  “Before I started,” he continued, “I was roofing with my uncle. Minimum wage. No benefits. No security.”

  Limited options, I thought. Why they build prisons in rural areas.

  One of the coaches blew his whistle and the players lined up on the goal line and started running wind sprints. No one, not a single player nor any of the adults, had acknowledged Michael Pitts’ presence the entire time I had been here, and I wondered if it was that way every afternoon.

  “I hear you’re a good officer,” I said, just to be saying something.

  “Compared to assholes like Potter. Look, I’m gonna tell you some things ‘cause I know you’re gonna hear ‘em sooner or later anyway.”

  I nodded.

  “Like I said, one day I’m roofing, six months later I’m walking inside a prison. I don’t know exactly what I expected, but—well, let’s just say I wasn’t ready. Wasn’t prepared for what I found inside.”

  “None of us are,” I said.

  “In training—what little you can get in six months—the main thing they taught us was to hate inmates. They brought a lady in to teach us CPR, but as soon as she left, the officer training us said the way to give CPR to an inmate was to remain standing, stomp on his chest with your boot, and blow air down at him. But I don’t hate inmates. And I actually did CPR on one. Saved his life.”

  He took in a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  “Something other officers’ll never let me live down.”

  Wind sprints completed, the players took a knee around the coaches at center field, the other men standing close by.

  “I didn’t go in hating inmates, but the longer I’m inside . . . way they act. . .”

  “Not all of them.”

  “Some actually act like human beings. But most of them act like animals. I don’t know how much more I can take.”

  He didn’t start out hating inmates, but that had changed. The abyss was looking back at him, and in the process of working with monsters he was becoming one. Maybe slowly, but inevitably we all were.

  Eventually, practice ended and the stadium was once again as empty as the dreams it held.

  “What you afraid I’ll hear?”

  “Sometimes we have to give an inmate a tune-up. Amazing what a little attitude adjustment’ll do. Only thing some of them respond to.”

  I nodded.

  “When I first started administering them, it was almost surgical. I never did it when I was angry, but more and more I’s always angry. Grew to hate the men more and more, the tune-ups I gave them got worse and worse.” He turned to me suddenly. “I’m not a bad man.”

  “I know that.”

  “I’ve done some bad things.”

  “To Menge?”

  He nodded.

  “Did he retaliate?”

  He nodded again.

  “How?”

  “Got me on video. Blackmailing me with it.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “How the hell a inmate make a video of a officer?” Merrill asked.

  I had run into him at Sal’s Pizzeria, a small storefront next to the Dollar Store with a kitchen and a takeout counter, the three round tables placed next to the plate glass window an afterthought. It was noisy, dusty from yeast and flour, and cramped. Sal preferred carry-out customers.

  Merrill and I, the only patrons in the establishment, were sitting at the center of the three tables near the front window.

  “How the hell an inmate video anything?” he said again.

  I recounted Pitts story to him.

  About a year ago, video cameras were placed throughout the institution to record all use-of-force incidents because of the number of inmates alleging abuse and retaliation by correctional officers. What they captured was intended to corroborate the written reports and witness statements that had previously been all that was entered into evidence.

  Permanent surveillance cameras were mounted only in confinement—one on each end of the hallway, showing the front of the cell doors but not inside them. Every other post in the institution was dependent on handheld camcorders, which were kept, along with blank discs and batteries, in a case with a seal on it in a secure location. Each week the seal was broken, the camera and battery checked, and the broken seal submitted along with an incident report to Central Office.

  Of course, only a few of the cases of use-of-force can be predicted. Most erupt with little warning and no time to wait for a video camera to be retrieved from a secure location. Consequently, most of what was captured was after an inmate had been subdued. But once the camera was out it must follow the inmate through his post use-of-force medical exam and his placement in an appropriate cell. And occasionally, as in the case of tune-ups, the officers involved delayed the retrieval of the camera until what it captured wouldn’t get them indicted.

  Still, they had to video at least some portion of every use-of-force, which was how Justin Menge caught Michael Pitts in the act.

  Justin had orchestrated every aspect of it from the very beginning, but he had to have help to accomplish it, which Chris Sobel, Jacqueel Jefferson, and
Milton White gladly provided.

  Pitts had taken Menge into the empty shower cell, which was where most tune-ups took place so any blood spilled could be washed down the drain. The door to the shower cell, unlike the others, consisted of bars—bars through which Menge’s cuffs had been threaded.

  Leaving an officer in the wicker, Potter had brought the video camera down into the PM quad and sat it on the table to wait until, at the end of the tune-up, Pitts would uncuff the beaten and provoked Menge and video him fighting back.

  But while Pitts was busy with Menge, Potter got distracted by a fight between Milton White and Jacqueel Jefferson just behind the quad on the small PM rec yard. The staged fight provided enough time for Chris Sobel to grab the camera and video Michael Pitts beating, some would say torturing, Justin Menge.

  “Real smart sons a bitches working G-dorm,” Merrill said shaking his head.

  “It was a good plan.”

  “Not if it got his ass killed.”

  “True.”

  Sal had finished Merrill’s pizza before mine, and he offered me a slice while we talked, but, being the purest I am, I declined. A pizza should have meat—preferably pepperoni and bacon—but no vegetables, and certainly no form of fruit, and I told him so.

  “You think the disc really exists?” Merrill asked.

  I shrugged.

  “Sounds like prison legend to me.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “but the scenario he described seems plausible. And if there’s not a disc, why would Pitts make it up? An inmate trying to deflect suspicion off himself onto Pitts, sure, but why Pitts? Why tell a lie to implicate yourself?”

  Outside, a woman in a faded flowery house coat, soiled white tube socks, pink slippers, and a white straw cowboy hat with a Rebel Flag button pinned to it, pulled up in her motorized wheelchair, which she drove around town in like a car. Her sun-damaged skin was wrinkled and leathery, making her look far older than she was, and she had the soft, shapeless mouth of a person with no teeth.

  “So where’s the disc now?” Merrill asked.

  “No one seems to know. Pitts thought he’d confiscated it from Menge’s cell during a shakedown, but later when he tried to watch it at home it was a National Geographic disc about gorillas.”