Monument Road

by Michael Wiley

  ‘He’s the daddy of my little girl,’ she said.

  I went back to her desk. She was a thin-faced woman, her hair done up in cornrows with yellow beads. ‘No offense,’ I said, ‘but he never mentioned you.’

  She had hard, dark eyes. ‘I couldn’t let my little girl grow up with that in her life. I cut him off when he went in.’

  ‘But you’re still working here?’

  ‘I’ve got to do something, right?’

  I knew Jamar’s story. He’d shot an old man and his wife while robbing their convenience store. He seemed to have no regrets. ‘You think he’s innocent?’

  She gave me a sad smile. ‘No,’ she said. ‘That man was born guilty.’

  So Hank pulled a second chair alongside her desk, and for the rest of the morning I used her computer to try to track down four witnesses who’d testified against another death row inmate – Thomas LaFlora – who’d been convicted on charges of killing a couple of crackheads twenty-five years ago. LaFlora had a date with the needle in seven weeks, but Hank thought the police coerced the testimony against him. After the witnesses testified, the prosecutor – Eric Skooner, who’d since risen to become chief appellate judge – dropped drug charges against them, and one of them went on to testify in two more capital murder cases.

  As I made my searches, I found that three of the four were now dead, including the repeat witness. But if I was right, the last one, the only woman among them, lived with a husband in Callahan, northwest of the city.

  ‘You’ll go with us to talk to her later this week?’ Hank asked.

  Sweat bristled on my back. ‘I don’t know about that.’

  ‘A man like you, with your background, you could persuade her. One look from you and she’ll come clean.’

  I tasted bile again. ‘Right.’

  After lunch, Jane and Hank closed the office so they could drive to the state prison in Raiford and stand with other protesters who would hold a vigil for Sam Nines until the execution team hooked him up to the pentobarbital.

  The afternoon was hot and getting hotter, and as I rode a bus back to the Cardinal Motel, my skin felt like it belonged to another man. My sweat stung. I could hardly rip off my clothes on the bus or tear at myself with my fingernails, so I pulled my knees to my chest and rocked back and forth until the other passengers stared at me and one went forward to talk to the driver. I got off a mile from the motel and walked up the highway shoulder, clawing at my arms, telling myself that I was not Sam Nines and I was not Thomas LaFlora – I was Franky Dast and I was free. I looked at the sun in the hot July sky. The glare bounced from the metal of passing cars. Heat rose from the pavement. I dug my fingernails into my arms. As I walked past a bus stop, an old black hooker standing in the shade gazed at me and said, ‘Hey?’ but she didn’t mean it.

  ‘Free,’ I told her, and she shrank deeper into the shade.

  By the time I reached the yellow sign with the big red cardinal at the motel, I’d sweated through my new pants and shirt. I planned to go inside and stand in a cold shower, though if I could have slipped from inside my skin and crawled out bloody and new, I would have done it.

  But in the parking space by my door, Detective Higby waited for me again. He sat in a blue Pontiac, the windows closed, the engine humming. As I approached, he got out, squared his feet, and crossed his big arms over his chest. He stared at me from my feet to my face and grinned. ‘What’s wrong, Franky?’ he asked. He moved so he blocked the line to my door. ‘You having a hard time adjusting? I hear it can be tough. Even if you’ve got no conscience, your body knows where it belongs.’

  ‘Get out of my way,’ I said, and the words tasted sour in my mouth.

  ‘You know what’s worse than prison bars?’ He tapped his forehead. ‘The bars in here. Those ones’ll drive you crazy.’

  ‘I’m free,’ I said.

  He looked disgusted. ‘You’ll never be free.’

  I tried to step around him, but he moved toward me – then stopped. ‘Jesus Christ, you smell,’ he said. He wiped his hands on his pants as if he’d touched me.

  So I slunk into my room and locked the door.

  I turned on the TV full volume and went into the bathroom. My face in the mirror was pale – prison pale, the pale of sickness and death. My hair was slicked down with sweat. I had prisoner’s eyes. The eyes of a camp survivor. A dying man. I stripped off my clothes and looked in the mirror again. I’d done pushups in my cell, hundreds a day, and I’d lifted weights in the yard. I’d done squats, and I’d run in place for hours at a time. I’d done sit-ups on my skinny bunk. My body was strong, muscled. My skin – which had felt loose and foreign on the bus – looked taut. I still wanted to rip it away and tear off the muscles until all that remained of me was bone. But I turned on the shower, cold, and stepped under the stream. Free, I thought – free – though I worried that Bill Higby might be right that I’d lost that possibility of freedom on the day he accused me of killing the Bronson boys, or maybe even before that – maybe on the night when I pulled over to check on the boys and their broken-down car. I blamed Bill Higby for my loss. If I could go to death row for a rape and murder I didn’t commit, why shouldn’t Higby suffer for taking away my freedom?

  That thought comforted me. It gave me enough strength to step out of the shower, dry myself, and get dressed.

  What should a free man like me do? I stared at the TV. A talk show panel was discussing bisexual bombshells.

  I watched for a half hour, and then my skin started to creep again, so I turned the TV off, checked through the window, and went out to the bus stop. I caught the number seven back toward downtown. When it reached Atlantic Boulevard, I got off and transferred to a bus heading to the beach. The reintegration counselor Jane and Hank set me up with – a man named Dr Patel – said I should return to the activities that gave me pleasure before I went to prison. ‘Spend time with your family,’ he said.

  ‘My mom died when I was a baby,’ I told him. ‘My dad died when I was locked up. And pleasure’s not the word I think of when I think of Jared.’

  Dr Patel nodded thoughtfully and said, ‘Sex is also good.’

  That ache, raging at first, had deadened over the years. ‘Maybe,’ I told him.

  ‘For some men, the desire never comes back,’ he said. ‘For others, when it comes back, it slams into them like a truck. You’re still young. Be ready for it.’

  More than anything, when I was in prison, I missed the woods and the water. When I was a kid, I would run on the paths that snaked from my backyard into a slash pine forest and, deeper, past loblolly bays and live oaks. I would skip over the tangles of roots, my shoes denting the sandy soil, sinking in where a path dipped low toward the swamps – unless I sped up and skimmed over the wet ground as if I was floating or flying. Or sometimes Dad would put Jared and me and a bunch of cast rods into his car and take us to the beach, and we would surf-fish in the salt and bright spray.

  Pleasure, Dr Patel said.

  I would find it at the beach. Or if I didn’t find it, I could strip off my clothes, peel off my skin, and drown myself. No, the doctor said, ‘Beware of dark thoughts. In a month or two – or a year – you’ll see the difference. Your life will look like a kaleidoscope, spinning from dark to light. Resist the dark. Refuse it when it comes, because it will come. Look forward.’

  Into the salt and bright spray.

  Wishful thinking. Halfway to the beach, in a gray stretch of boarded-up car dealerships and fast-food restaurants, I got out of my seat and walked to the front of the bus. The beach seemed too much – too much water, too much sound, too much air. A crushing weight. When the bus stopped at the Regency Mall, I got off.

  When I was a kid, the mall drew shoppers from around the city and south from the Georgia border. In the days before Christmas, traffic would back up for miles. On summer nights, you couldn’t get a ticket for a new release at the AMC Cineplex unless you came three hours early.

  But now the Regency was dying, th
e parking lots almost empty. I kicked gravel as I crossed the hot pavement toward JCPenney. This time of year usually brought afternoon thunderstorms with lightning that jagged the sky and made ceilings shake even in a bolted-down prison. Rain would come hard and pound the buildings, and you just knew that it cleaned and renewed someone somewhere. But this afternoon the sun hung in a cloudless sky, and renewal seemed like an impossibility. I went around the side of the store, kicked more gravel, passed a truck loading zone and a Belk department store.

  At the other side of the lot, the Cineplex looked just as it did before my troubles started – a block of pale yellow concrete with inset brick-red pillars, like a too-sweet cake.

  A poster in the ticket window advertised an Afternoon Kids Classics Series with Home Alone, Mrs Doubtfire, Toy Story, and Karate Kid. Today the Cineplex was screening Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.

  ‘One,’ I said to the man in the booth.

  The theater smelled of sugar. I felt my way to a seat, sank low on the cushion, breathed deep – and closed my eyes. The smell, the dark, and the air-conditioned cool could have been anywhere and anytime. I could have sat in a theater in a different city, a different state, a different country – far from this place that had tried to kill me. Or I could have sat in this city but long before I went to prison, when, hanging out with kids from the neighborhood, I cracked jokes in the dark as a movie started, booting the seats in front of mine to tease my friends, laughing and laughing – until Jared lit a cigarette, cuffing it in his palm, and then a man with an AMC logo on his shirt came and kicked us out.

  When the screen lit up, I opened my eyes.

  Only two others sat in the theater – a woman with a young boy.

  The movie started and Rick Moranis shrank his kids with a ray gun shrinker. Within five minutes, I felt happier than I’d felt since before Bill Higby arrested me. When Rick Moranis threw the shrunken kids into the backyard like trash, I laughed and yelled at the screen, ‘That’s right. Goddamn it, that’s right!’ The woman with the little boy hushed me, and I tried to stay quiet, but something was happening inside me – something that felt good. When Rick Moranis’s son got picked up by a bumblebee, I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe. I got up from my seat and fled to the corridor.

  A teenage usher stared at me as if no one would grin so wide outside a theater unless he was on drugs or insane or both. I caught my breath and said, ‘Sorry.’

  The kid said nothing.

  ‘You see, I just got out of prison,’ I said.

  I was making matters worse, so I wandered to the concession stand.

  The girl who got my popcorn had straight blond hair that hung to her shoulders, and brown eyes. I guessed she was eighteen or nineteen. She wore a metal stud on one side of her nose and three rings in her left eyebrow. A tag on her shirt said her name was Cynthia.

  When she gave me my change, she said, ‘You look like you’re having a good time.’

  I stared at her eyes and wondered if I would feel a truckload of desire if I looked at them longer. ‘I’m having a blast.’

  I returned to the movie, and Rick Moranis’s son rode back into the house on a dog and fell into his dad’s bowl of Cheerios. When Moranis lifted his son to his mouth in a spoonful of cereal and milk and almost ate him, I felt an excitement I couldn’t account for.

  As I left the Cineplex after the movie, I looked back at the concession stand. The girl who’d sold me popcorn was watching me. When she waved with the tips of her fingers, I rushed out into the afternoon heat.

  I rode the bus back toward the Cardinal Motel but got off halfway down Philips Highway, went into the Sahara Sandwiches Shop, and ordered a gyros from a bald man with a moustache. I ate outside at a picnic table as the sun dipped behind the building. Fumes from trucks on the highway blackened the evening, but I felt as contented as I figured I ever would again.

  I walked to the motel then, and the hooker I saw earlier had left the bus shelter, though a wooden walking stick leaned against the wall where she’d stood, as if holding her place. At the Cardinal, the parking space outside my room was empty, and that made me happy too. I let myself in, stripped off my clothes, and did seventy-five pushups on the carpet. Then I turned on the TV and did a hundred fifty sit-ups. When I finished, I did two hundred squats, then another hundred sit-ups, and then more squats. An hour and a half later, when the ten o’clock news came on, I was still exercising, my body slick with sweat.

  I ran in place as a thick-shouldered anchorman said the twenty-six-year-old son of the chief appellate judge in Florida’s Fourth Judicial Circuit died earlier in the evening in a police-involved shooting. I’d seen the judge’s name that afternoon. Eric Skooner. Twenty-five years ago, as a young prosecutor, he sent Thomas LaFlora to death row for killing two crack addicts. Now, after giving a few details about the shooting death, the anchor noted that Judge Skooner had once been named Jurist of the Year by the American Board of Trial Advocates, but also that he’d once been arrested, though never prosecuted, for striking his now-deceased wife. The judge’s dead son, Joshua Skooner, had an arrest record – including two convictions – reaching back to when he was twenty, all for drug- and alcohol-related crimes.

  The police weren’t identifying the officer who’d shot him, but news cameras showed an evening scene with police tape cordoning off a patch of a tree-lined street where a body, draped under a white sheet, lay on the pavement near two cars that had hit hard enough to mash their hoods. One of the cars was a yellow Mustang with a black door stripe. I figured that must be Joshua Skooner’s. The other was a blue Pontiac. A big man in a golf shirt stood next to it talking with three uniformed cops. He seemed to be bleeding from a cut on his chin, and he looked dazed. When I realized he must have been driving the Pontiac – and most likely had shot and killed Joshua Skooner – I felt the breath punch from my lungs. I moved close to the TV screen. The dazed and bleeding man was Bill Higby.

  I laughed. And I said, ‘That’s right. Goddamn it, that’s right!’

  FOUR

  Eight years earlier, on a rainy July night, the White Stripes played ‘Fell in Love with a Girl’ on my car radio – tore the song apart, Jack White ripping his fingers bloody on his guitar, Meg White punching holes in the drums. I turned the volume up, up, up until the speakers distorted. I crammed the accelerator to the floor. My car skidded around a bend on Monument Road, the rain coming hard and harder, the headlights glinting off the black asphalt, and I didn’t care. Pine and oak forest slashed past. The roadside would reach out and pull the car in if I didn’t take my foot off the gas, and I didn’t care. I remembered then – like a punch in the gut – once, when I was six years old, after a hit-and-run driver came through, the body of a hitchhiker rotted for three days in the palmetto undergrowth and no one was the wiser until another hitchhiker happened by and oh, the smell.

  Why, on a night like this – the rain falling hard and harder, Jack White ripping and Meg White pounding, my fishing rod, Dad’s .22, and three flounder in the trunk – why did that dead hitchhiker come to haunt me again? I was eighteen years old, I had a Buick Skylark that Dad let me drive when Jared didn’t need it for school, and I had a load of fish that I would fry on the stove so that when Dad woke in the morning he would smell breakfast and maybe, just maybe, come into the kitchen laughing.

  Twelve years of daytime sun and night-time rain had burned and washed the smell of that dead hitchhiker into the sandy soil, and he had no business coming to wreck my mood now. I eased my foot off the gas, though the music kept playing and a jet of rain smashed against the windshield. I eased the gas, that’s all – I didn’t touch the brakes and I didn’t second-guess the joy I felt as I blasted into the blind dark – but that’s when my life went to hell.

  If I’d kept my foot on the gas, I might’ve flown past the Bronson brothers and their broken-down Chevy Cavalier. Another car – all tail lights and brake lights to me – slowed for them and then sped away as I came up behind it. I might’ve done the same. I m
ight’ve looked in my rearview and waved Bye bye bye. Or my tires might’ve slid on the pavement, and the boys and I would have risen through the rain on a cloud of gasoline flames.

  If a hit-and-run driver knocked the ribs of a hitchhiker into his lungs and kept going, why didn’t I go, go, go?

  The truth is, I stopped to help.

  ‘You’re always answering the door when you should stay in the kitchen,’ Dad said more than once. ‘Always picking up the phone when you don’t know who’s calling.’

  Only a guilty man or a coward worries about who’s at the door, I thought. What worm is going to crawl through the phone into my ear?

  But honestly, I could have kept driving. Should have.

  I stopped, turned off the music, asked from my window, ‘Problem?’

  Two boys stood in the rain. Kids. Too young to drive. Too young to be out alone on the side of Monument Road at three a.m. The hood of the Cavalier was up, the engine steaming. Black rain fell against the black night.

  ‘Um,’ said one of the boys, the smaller of the two, blond hair slicked down by the rain.

  ‘Yeah,’ said the other. Thick face, black hair.

  ‘You steal this car?’ I asked.

  ‘Nah,’ the big one said.

  ‘Right. How old are you?’

  ‘Seventeen.’

  ‘Right.’ I got out and looked under the hood. Blood on my hands from the fish. The wet gravel silent under my shoes. The rain slapping my face. In the dark – no flashlight – as if I knew what I was doing. As if I could help. Joyous in the late night. Free the way I felt at that hour. ‘The battery?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t know,’ said the big one.

  The little one asked, ‘Can you fix it?’

  Engine steam might mean the radiator – even I knew that much. I touched the cap. Hot. ‘You have a cloth?’