And, tonight, Senator Tyler was being interviewed by Gus Merriweather, the Fox News star with bad hair.
Senator Tyler was from East Nashville, a poor, dilapidated suburb of – you guessed it! – Nashville, Tennessee. His story was all too familiar these days. Like so many, he was a kid without a past. Journalists had asked him about it, asked him if his parents had died, if he’d been abandoned, and how he’d ended up at the Nashville Christian Home for Children. He’d never answered them, as far as I could tell.
Just as the interview started, Emma Jacobson, a short, nineteen-year-old girl, got up and sat next to me.
“Are they doing Tyler tonight?” Emma said, rubbing her eyes, and she looked up at me and smiled. Cute blonde with blue eyes. She reminded me of me.
“They are?” I asked.
“That’s what I just asked you.”
April opened her eyes. “We’ll know in a second, right? So, why don’t you two —”
“Here it is,” I said, and waved for April to shut up.
“People want to know who Senator Tyler really is,” Gus Merriweather said. “Is he just a lucky kid from Nashville, Tennessee? Is he just another pawn being played by the corporations and big government? Is he being controlled by organized crime? Some say your money seems to point to the latter.”
“I think you know, Gus, what my colleagues in Washington are saying,” Senator Tyler said.
“Embezzlement, money-laundering, racketeering – the list goes on,” Gus said with a laugh. “Is there anything you’d like to add to it?”
“Yes. I’m running for the office of the President of the United States.”
And the studio audience went crazy. People screaming, clapping, throwing flowers onto the stage, the works. Then came the chant: “Ty-ler! Ty-ler! Ty-ler! Ty-ler!” Gus Merriweather let the audience have their two minutes, standing up halfway through the chant to join them. And Senator Tyler? He struck me as being one of the most gracious guys I’d ever seen.
The studio audience settled down.
Gus Merriweather said, “Tell us about the childhood of America's next president.”
“I – now, let’s not get ahead ourselves,” Senator Tyler said, and he smiled. “But, if you’ll pardon the remark, I . . . I was a living abortion.”
When I heard that part about being a living abortion, I jumped so fast and so high that Emma, who was just snuggling up to me, screamed like she’d just seen a ghost. April? She looked like she’d just guzzled a pot of coffee she was shaking so hard.
“Nobody wanted you,” Gus said. “And so you —”
“Well, I wouldn’t put it that way. Seems to me that plenty of people wanted me – I’m just glad that Dr. Sissy Tenpenny at Nashville Christian Home for Children got me before the government snatched me up when nobody was looking. I didn’t have to wait long before she and her people welcomed me.”
Polite audience applause. Me? I was shaking from head to toe. April got up and stood next to me like a kid needing Daddy when there was a monster under her bed. Emma took my hand. Living abortion? Wait long? Or had the senator said Long Wait? But maybe April and I were dreaming.
“And since you’ve been in the Senate, Dr. Tenpenny and her group have been able to rebuild the old home for children and build another just like it across town,” Gus said. “And all thanks to you.”
Senator Tyler smiled.
“How about a face from the past, Senator Tyler?” Gus said.
And the senator suddenly scraped his hand through his hair. He looked at Gus Merriweather with a half smile and said, “A face from . . . from the past?”
“It’s been a while, Senator, but Dr. Tenpenny is here with us,” Gus said, and he stood up as a gray-headed and feeble Dr. Tenpenny entered. She walked with a cane and needed help getting up the steps and onto the studio stage. The audience clapped politely. She took a seat across the table from Gus and Senator Tyler and smiled.
“So, Dr. Tenpenny,” Gus said. “Senator Tyler – Kevin Tyler – he came to you at the age of two?”
“And ran away at the age of sixteen,” she said with a smile. “Always the troublemaker, always into something, but always sorry afterward. Today, he’s our most generous benefactor – and, thanks to Kevin, we’re planning not only a third, but the fourth home for children here in the Nashville area!”
More audience applause.
“And why did you run away from the children’s home, Senator?” Gus said.
The senator smiled and squirmed a bit in his seat. “I . . . I just saw a great big world out there and knew I could make a difference. Took my first job picking vegetables – all under the radar, of course – but I was a kid at the time. Made four dollars an hour, saved what I could while living on the streets, got my GED, and got into Vandy. All of that’s public record. But I couldn’t have done it without Dr. Tenpenny.”
“You love kids,” Gus said.
Senator Tyler reflected for a moment. Then he said, “Love’s a loaded word. Lots of meaning in it.”
“You’re saying you love kids, but not like you love a bowl of ice cream?” Gus said.
“Love says a lot of things,” Senator Tyler said. “If you really love people, what you are saying is that it is good they exist, that you want a close personal relationship with them, and that you want what’s best for them even if what’s best for them is going to make them feel like they’re passing a kidney stone.”
Sporadic clapping from the audience and a strange look from Gus.
“You love this country no doubt,” Gus said, “and it sounds like you’re asking every person in America out on a date.”
“November second of next year, Gus,” Senator Tyler said. “And yes. I want what’s best for America. And I’m asking for your vote in the primaries and on election day.”
When Senator Tyler spoke, you could read him. He meant every word he’d said. And you knew he had to be the real deal, too, because Congress was after him like a thirsty man after the last glass of ice water left in a hot desert. Nobody ever went after their own, no sir. They went after the people who threatened their power. Senator Tyler, I concluded, wasn’t like the rest of those people in Washington, and Gus Merriweather and Fox News must have been thinking the same thing.
A month later, at a well-attended, five-thousand-dollars-a-plate fundraiser in Washington, D.C., Senator Tyler was delivering a speech. I saw the whole dang thing on TV. A lone gunman entered the dining hall from a side door.
A single gunshot rang out.
And Senator Tyler fell.
Chapter Eleven
The Garbage Droid was hanging around the kitchen early the next morning, whirring around like it was trying to get my attention. When I saw it, I wondered how soon it would be before someone started making droid dogs. But if I knew those guys and girls up in DEAD, they’d have programmed them to poop all over the place.
April and I had gotten used to DEAD’s science projects wandering around the cafeteria, but maybe now’s the time to tell you about why they started showing up in my area. The Garbage Droid was big enough to carry a small person, but nobody over five-feet-six. If you remember, we’d used this same droid to carry Cletus down to the first floor to service the ladies and spare Elton from his male awakening. Now, other droids roamed the halls at Long Wait Prison, too. There was a second Clog Droid – that I’ve already told you about – the Dusting Droid, and there was even a prototype Soft Drink Droid. And just in case you’re wondering, none of them looked like R2D2 from those old Star Wars movies. They just weren’t as refined and streamlined back then, though that would come later. But first I have to explain to you why the Garbage Droid was in the cafeteria that morning after Senator Tyler got shot.
About a year ago, I started getting food orders I couldn’t keep up with. Calls for things that my clients thought were better kept secret. Sometimes it was a pint of Ben and Jerry’s, sometimes a steak, sometimes a tiny bottle of bourbon.
I got a call on my tablet from Wa
rden Neal one night. She’d just finished up in the gym, had run out of protein powder, and ordered me to send her up some clean white meat. I thought it was some kind of joke at first, that maybe she was looking for some cute white boy. But April laughed and told me that when Warden Neal asked for clean meat, she meant chicken breast. She also asked for some angel hair pasta. So I got her order together and started for the elevator. Before I had a chance to get very far, I got another call on the tablet. “Put it in the Garbage Droid,” she told me. “He’ll be there in two minutes – and make it fast.” Then I got another call on the tablet. Somebody in Administration wanted a pint of Rocky Road. When the Garbage Droid showed up, I opened it up, took out the garbage bin, and placed the two orders inside. To this day, I never know how Cletus and Elton ever managed to squeeze into that droid, and survive the back-and-forth to and from the first-floor meat market. But as soon as I closed the back end of that droid, it beeped and whirred and left in an awful hurry.
The same thing happened again a week later. Seemed like Warden Neal was too busy to come get her meals, or she was always tied up. Come to find out it was the latter. But that’s her business, and I didn’t want to know anything more about it. So it got to be that I was sending a meal or two here and there every now and then.
But I could never tell when the warden was going to send that Garbage Droid. If I saw it, I just assumed the woman wanted takeout. I’d wait for her to message me, I’d get the goodies, and then I’d load up the droid – a droid who, I swear, was following me around like a puppy – and send him on his way.
But the morning after Senator Tyler got shot, the Garbage Droid showed up, and nobody ever messaged me. The thing just rolled into the kitchen and stared at me like it was waiting for something. About that time, my Boney informant came into the room. No need for me to describe the man other than by saying that he was scared out of his mind and shaking like a washing machine in a spin cycle. He stopped next to the droid, with his eyes on his watch, and he counted.
“Six, five, four, three, two, one,” he said, and he opened the back of the droid, tossed the garbage bin out onto the floor, and set two droid batteries inside. Then he grabbed April.
April resisted, of course. And I picked up a fork. Informant or no, if you messed with April, I messed with you.
“We have exactly five minutes before the system goes back up,” my informant whispered to April in his best hoarse voice. “If you’re not on this train outta here in ten seconds, I’m gonna be!”
April grabbed my hand, squeezed it, and slid into the back of the Garbage Droid without so much as a why, what for, or where to. And that was the last I ever saw of April Olson. That Garbage Droid sped away faster than a mouse being chased by a cat. I later learned that April got out of Long Wait Prison and went undercover.
I knew right away this little gig belonged to Bobby and Elton and, somehow, DEAD. The big surprise was why my Boney informant was involved, why he was trembling, and why he wanted to get the heck out of dodge. Then there were the droid batteries – odd, I thought – and then there was that little thing he’d said about the system going down. What did that mean? But, like most people at Long Wait in those days, I never expected any answers for the things I saw. I just let them go and hoped somebody’d clue me in later.
About all I knew was that April was gone. Where to? I hadn’t the foggiest.
I hated finding myself short-handed, and I’d come to miss April dearly in the minutes that followed. I’d still have some kids working on the food line, doing clean up – stuff like that – but I needed another girl like April. All I’d have to do was send a request up to Warden Neal and she’d fill the slot. But later that day, Emma showed up after lunch and, since she was free at the moment, she decided to hang around. I told her April was gone, and she smiled.
“If you need me, I’m available,” Emma said. And she said it with that huge smile girls reserved for those guys who just might be available themselves.
“What, you mean for dinner and a movie?” I said. I wasn’t about to hand her a time card or anything, or tell her she needed to be here in the kitchen at five every morning because that’s where a woman belonged. That would have been like giving your honey a gold-plated toilet plunger on her birthday and asking her to get to it. You know what I mean.
“What time can I pick you up?” I said.
Emma blushed, put her hair behind her ear, and smiled. “Just about any time, Shorty,” she said.
So, I guess we were on. We did dinner and a movie. The next day, she showed up at five a.m. She was ready to work and ready for a relationship, and that was all right by me. But this love thing was all so new to me. I had mixed feelings about it at the time, given what was going on in our private little hell here at Long Wait, but love was love. I couldn’t deny it. Neither could Emma. But hell came a lot faster than I could ever have imagined it. I should have known that the moment April went missing, they’d be coming for me. And come for me they did.
The Boneys and Warden Neal didn’t wait for lunchtime to end. They just marched their sorry butts into the cafeteria, cuffed me, and carried me off. My Boney informant came with them, and he looked like he was about to have a massive, soul-searching heart attack. He and I gave each other the eye as we hurried down the hall to the elevator, and it was right then that I knew my informant was a human being. I didn’t see any hatred in that man’s eyes that day, nor did I at any time after that. All I saw was a frightened man whose only thoughts at the moment were for his family. He’d been a hard screw over the years, no question about that. But something had changed in him.
A half-hour later, I was standing in Warden Neal’s office wearing nothing but my underwear, my socks, and my cuffs. The warden gave me the evil eye, checked me out, and stepped into the room adjoining her office. I heard footsteps, dress shoe kinda clicks, and then a door being slammed. I didn’t know what to make of it, standing there like I was, practically naked. And then Warden Neal yelled in her usually masculine tone of voice, “Just what the hell is going on in my prison?” And then something crashed into the wall and shattered.
The warden’s voice, punctuated as it was by the sound of things being broken, rattled me. A beating I could take – the sooner the better – because I liked getting those sorts of things over with. But what hit me especially hard at just that moment was that I was expendable, a chef quickly replaced. And that just might mean I’d never get to see Emma again. And that wouldn’t do, no way, no how. All I had to do, I told myself, was to spill the beans about what had happened to April Olson. That she’d just gotten into the back of that Garbage Droid, and gone. To where, I didn’t know – and that would be that. The warden would put me on her most-trusted list, and my Boney informant would get a one-way trip down the fish bait pipe. But that wasn’t going to happen either.
There’s no need to tell you what happened after Warden Neal returned. But let’s just say that when she was through with me, I could’ve been an extra in a slasher film. The warden tied me up, beat me with a whip, and asked me if I knew anything about April. It would have been so easy to tell her the truth. Turn that Boney guard over like a pancake with a spatula. But I didn’t.
I spent the next two days in the infirmary. I got bandaged up, fed, and pumped full of antibiotics. They told me I was heading to a cell to spend the next two days with some other kids. I smiled, thinking it was all some big joke. Two days? With a bunch of kids I probably know? Easy. I’d done a few stints in solitary – and solitary was something to worry about.
But when they walked me down that hall – a place I’d never been before – I knew something wasn’t right. It wasn’t the hall itself – dirty with peeling paint – or the garish, green glow of the sodium lights hanging from the ceiling. What struck me was the smell. It reminded me of a garbage can full of empty meat packages that had been sitting for too long next to a hot stove. That, and piss and crap.
“You’re gonna love this, kiddo,” the guard said. �
��And don’t you open your mouth and answer me, or I’ll make you shut it.”
I didn’t say a word.
“You like that smell, don’t you? It smells like what you cook in that kitchen of yours every day. Can you guess what’s on the menu, sweet pea?”
Eat sh-- and die?
I knew not to utter a word. But a sudden blow to my lower back told me this guy wanted an answer. He was as stupid as he was mean
“I asked you a question, moron,” the guard shouted, and he hit me again.
“Tuesday?” I said. “Chipped beef on toast, green beans, fried okra – and Ben and Jerry’s ice cream.” The last part was a lie.
“Ben and Jerry’s?” he growled. “I hope you die in here, and didn’t I tell you to keep your mouth shut?” And the guard swung his rubber truncheon against my lower back so hard I could feel my teeth rattle.
Then I saw it. The cell. And deep down inside I cried out for my mother. I started praying, hard and fast, praying with every ounce of strength I had that God would erase the day of my birth. I willed for the heavens to come down, for Bobby and Elton to see me or feel my energy reaching out to them and come to my rescue.
The guard told me to take off my shoes and socks and place them along the base of the wall with the others. Another guard opened the cell door. It was thick metal, solid on the bottom, cage bars the rest of the way up. The door squealed as it swung toward me. The cell was made for one person, but it was crammed full of people. The sight of it hit my brain like a locomotive on a fast run. Liquid feces and urine ran in a tiny rivulet from the threshold, draining into a hole in the center of the hall, and it squished between my toes, warm and wet. It didn’t take long for those Boneys to squeeze me into that little piece of fragrant hell, but I had bruises two days later to show that they’d squeezed me like a square peg into a round hole.
Dead Snupe Page 8
