Then the tall grasses and the lake.
The stained concrete floor, cold, dark wet.
The cotton fields at night, crickets buzzing.
Spades in junior high. Fuck you lookin’ at, cracker? Kick your peckerwood ass.
I slumped outside the storage room, crossing the dark hallway, where a red exit sign glowed at the end. A supply closet, a bathroom, another office. The television sounded a laugh track far behind me, and I dragged myself away from it using the bricks in the wall, leaving blood like a slug’s trail. I passed the office. That’s where Rocky was.
They’d knocked everything off the desk, and she sprawled across it. Her clothes were on the floor, lying on the blotter and pens and papers they’d thrown there. A lamp on top of a filing cabinet cast down a shroud of brass light across her body. Her limp face hung toward the door and her dull grayed eyes met mine, empty, her expression shocked, indicting. A necktie wrapped around her neck. The tie was paisley, I remember.
I left her there.
I threw myself into the door’s long handlebar, clanging the hard metal, and then I was on the gravel parking lot, the night both dark and bright, purple and gold, and it all smeared. I stumbled up and a streetlight flashed on the knife in my hand, painted with my blood. I doddered and blundered into a man coming around the corner of the Dumpster, zipping up his fly.
Jay Meires’s face twisted when he saw me, and then he snarled, reached for something, and I threw myself on him. I plunged my thumb into one of his eyes and fell with my weight till the eyeball burst, and my thumb kept going farther in. He almost screamed, but it was quick. I put the knife in his other.
I sat on his neck and kept stabbing at his head.
I pulled myself up, still alone, standing over Jay’s ruined face.
Bushes. Parked cars. We were behind the bar, and a block ahead, past a vacant lot, a stream of crossing cars broke the night. I started limping as fast as I could for the road. Voices rose behind me.
I was in the field, the dark grass slicing my arms, and they were yelling at me from the bar.
I started dreaming again and when I opened my eye I was standing in the middle of the road. Car lights blazed over me, brakes squealing. Headlamps fractured, blinded me.
I started screaming, waving my hand. A few cars almost hit me and one swatted my elbow with its side mirror, spun me around, and the car screeched to a halt.
White flared in my eyes. People honking. I was crying and screaming. I thought the boys were right behind me.
I yanked open the driver’s door and the man inside tried to drive away. I can still see his face, mouth gaping, eyes wide. Somehow I put the knife in him. Pulled his shirt and tossed him out the car.
They found me less than a mile away, smashed into the side of a CPA’s office with the steering wheel in my chest.
I woke in the bleached, sterile lighting of a hospital, so thirsty I couldn’t stand it, and when I tried to open my mouth a shattering pain nearly drove me unconscious. Two policemen were posted outside my door. Gauze patched over my left eye, and later I’d learn that I lost it. My hairline was jagged, my eyebrows ripped, bristled with coarse stitches, my nose fattened and spread like margarine.
Nobody would tell me anything. A couple cops stood by while someone from the D.A.’s office told me about the charges, but I couldn’t speak yet or write anything with my mangled hand. My tongue was fat, dry as sandpaper, and its stitches scraped the roof of my mouth. I could feel the bolts in my skull without touching them.
The man I’d stabbed lived. The attorney didn’t mention Rocky’s body, or Jay Meires. Nobody mentioned Stan Ptitko.
Two weeks later NOPD officers escorted me out of the hospital and to the city jail’s infirmary. I told the city’s lawyer my story about what happened, about Stan Ptitko and Angelo Medeiras and Frank Sienkiewicz, and Rocky. All of it. The man said I needed to be properly deposed, and that they’d have to wait until I wasn’t on so many drugs, painkillers and such, because the defense could play games with that. There was something with the feds, too, like these local guys wanted to keep me away from the feds. An assistant D.A. said they’d get me off the medication for a couple days and take my full statement.
Without the pills, sick, pulsing headaches beat out on me. Another attorney came to visit. The cops must have thought he was my lawyer. They brought me to a visiting area shaped like a railcar, with a counter bisected by an iron mesh grating that cut the room in two. Institutional green walls, that heady, metallic smell of desperation. I sat down and faced through the wire a man in a suit.
His head looked soft and pink like a pencil eraser, with a ring of short dark hair hung around his ears and thick red lips, glasses, all his features blunted and plump. Round nose, round double chin and knoblike ears. His suit made him look slimmer than he was, as did his heavy glasses, and he set a briefcase down on his side of the counter and opened it, but I couldn’t see what was inside.
It occurred to me that I recognized him, that he was someone who knew Stan.
“Mr. Cady,” he said. “I am speaking to you now as outside counsel for an unnamed party who believes themselves tangentially concerned with your recent felonies. It is my understanding that your speech is extremely limited at this point, so I will proceed from that understanding in order to explicate my reasons for meeting with you.”
An expandable gold watchband nestled in the thick hair of his wrist. The shiny surface of his fingernails passed over some papers, closed the briefcase. A crushing, white-light headache was coming on like a freight train.
“My interest in your case is to determine for the sake of my client’s representation whether you intend, as part of your own defense, to attempt to indict other persons in your crimes. Ostensibly to lessen the punitive consequences of your actions.”
I could only cock my head at him. He spoke with a put-on, overenunciated purr, an old-world Southern accent that rounded off, like all his features.
“In other words, are you planning on making it easy for yourself by pointing the finger at somebody else?”
I nodded: affirmative. The screws in my head dug down. A sheriff’s deputy stood at the door, facing away from us but alert.
The lawyer nudged his glasses up his nose. “This is what I am here to ascertain, so that my client might have a chance to assemble an effective defense. Now. Naturally that defense would include a body of witnesses to cross-examine in corroborating or disputing your version of events.”
I watched him with the bones around my eyes throbbing, and I focused on the metal grating between us, where the paint had chipped and flaked to rust.
“So—that witness list would include persons we presume you were most recently acquainted with, correct? Whom you traveled and associated with. This would include one Nancy Covington, owner and operator of the Emerald Shores motel in Galveston, Texas. Correct?” He moved a sheet of paper to the top of his briefcase and appeared to read it. “This would include a young child. Correct? A four-year-old girl, I believe.”
The screws in my skull felt like they were twisting deeper and I thought about the metal grating. How completely a man could depend on a thin sheet of iron mesh. The lawyer didn’t even know it, or maybe on some level he did, but that screen between us was the most precious and important thing in his life right then. He kept reading.
“The name I have here is a Tiffany Benoit. Currently residing with Nonie and Dehra Elliot, as we speak, at one 540 Briarwood Lane in Round Rock, Texas. Correct? These people. This is the same person. Correct? You were traveling with her. Is that correct?”
Now he stopped at last and we just stared at each other.
That’s what the whole visit was about. They’d wanted me to know that they knew about the little girl. Knew where she was.
The lawyer just got up and left me alone shortly after that, even though I hadn’t answered any of his questions, and I figured now at least I could get back on the pain meds, because my deposition was blown.
My story changed drastically. Now I told the D.A.’s office that I couldn’t remember what had happened.
This wasn’t my first arrest or my first trial, and they got after me hard because they were pissed that I’d changed my story.
Thirteen years in Angola.
I just ate it.
The port investigations dropped off.
I didn’t figure I’d last much longer anyway, and I didn’t want to, because too often when I closed my eyes now I saw Rocky’s face, slack and tilted up to the light of the lamp, her body laid as if that desk were an altar.
I was glad I wouldn’t have to live with that much longer.
I limped now, from the car wreck, and I wore a patch on my left eye along with a new face, asymmetrical, ridged, my eyebrows misaligned, nose like a piece of spoiled fruit. My fingers never straightened quite right and the knuckles stayed fat and killed me when it rained. The state gave me new teeth. So many were broken that the dentist just pulled whatever was left and made bridges.
A doctor finally looked at me again, and he couldn’t say for sure what the spots in my chest were. He wanted to do a bronchoscopy or CT-guided biopsy. He figured it was the same thing as the other doctor. There was a slight chance it might be tuberculosis or sarcoidosis. At best the irregularities were currently benign, but they would almost surely not stay that way. The cysts or carcinomas were in a kind of stasis, as he explained it, and at any time they could turn malignant, metastasize. They needed to do surgery on me. He wanted to slice them out, have a look. Many treatment strategies, he said. They’ll move you to a nicer place when you undergo treatment. It was only a matter of time, he said. Unless you’re some kind of medical miracle.
I told him no. When he said that the state would pay the costs I told him no again.
For the first couple years I shared a cell with a black man named Charlie Broedus. We got along all right and I wasn’t bitter at him when he got released. I kept expecting to die.
After a month inside I went to the library, looking for something to read. I didn’t know where to start. A state librarian came in twice a month, and she suggested things. That’s how I became friendly with the librarian, Jeanine.
There was no dramatic awakening of personality between us. I think she just liked seeing a convict check out something besides law books.
When I read I got involved in the words and what they were saying so that I didn’t measure the passing of time in typical ways. I was surprised to learn that there was this freedom made of nothing but words. Then I felt like I had missed some crucial point, a long time ago.
I’d always had good hands, and I could weld, fit pipes, break down an engine, box, shoot, but I started to understand that certain skills had only ever constrained me, made me into a function, a utility. I hadn’t really understood that until now.
My injuries kept me from working the farm that gives Angola its nickname. Jeanine helped get me the job in the library, as her assistant. She had mousy brown hair teased in a style that was out of fashion by the seventies, flabby arms that trembled when she stamped a card, and she lumbered when she moved. At times I would detect tears in her eyes and she would excuse herself to the back office and not come out until the end of the day.
I stacked shelves and pushed the cart down the cell block. Nobody much bothered me. Charlie Broedus was released in ’92, and I watched them come and go and pretty soon I was just a fixture there, in the stacks, at the lunch table, eyes on the page. All this reading increased my thinking. I could picture things in ways I hadn’t been able to before. Like I’ve said, though—none of this made me a different person.
I know who I am.
I thought about Rocky too much. And I thought about Carmen. I wondered where she was, if she’d made it out. I never heard from her again.
Each day I imagined murdering Stan Ptitko, and I would think about the different ways to do it, getting up close and feeling the rattle, watching his eyes. Taking him out in the woods somewhere and making it last.
Each night I went to bed waiting for the cancer to thrive, but it just sat there, dormant, biding its time. I did nearly twelve years like that.
Just like that.
Paroled right before the New Year of the new century, and I was alone in New Orleans when the clocks struck. Fifty-two years old, hitting the streets. Color schemes had changed in general, everything gone darker. Everyone had phones. People drove more Jap cars. Electronics were more widespread, TV screens everywhere. The Quarter looked just the same, the iron balconies and row houses and patios, the bars along the streets bursting with crowds. The piss smells and vomit in the gutters, the wail and bleat of the horns and thumping of the bass drums. People had been saying that everything might just shut down and stop working on New Year’s, something about the computers. But I knew it wouldn’t happen. I’d learned that after eleven years forced sobriety, I couldn’t drink anymore. Alcohol made my liver twitch like an insect pinned to a wall. One more thing.
I stood in Spanish alcoves and watched the crowds churning through the streets, down Dauphine and Bourbon and Royal. Everybody kissed at midnight. Strangers sharing champagne bottles, lips pressed, hands stroking necks. Whenever someone glimpsed me watching from the shadows, they turned away.
I stayed in New Orleans because I was going to kill Stan Ptitko. His bar was still there, and its name was the same.
I spent a portion of my prison money buying a rod from a black kid on St. Bernard, and I started haunting the streets that fenced Stan’s Place. It needed a pressure-washing, and a large piece of the tin roof was patched with blue tarp. A shallow ravine lay under a bridge to the northeast a few blocks, and I camped there for three days and two nights. I slept under the bridge, watching the place, wrapped in an old sleeping bag and a beat-up flak jacket, a hooded shirt, old slacks and tennis shoes, all from Goodwill. I thought of Rocky and that trestle she had to walk under on the way home from school, and about that night she’d spent there alone.
On the second day I saw Stan climb out a black Lincoln. He was much thicker, especially around the middle, and his hair had thinned.
I looked around and checked the double-action .38 and walked the next block clutching it in my jacket pocket. Before I knew it I was standing across the street from the bar. I crouched beside an old phone pole off the sidewalk, the hood pulled down, and watched the sleek black car, the metal door at the entrance. Three other cars sat in the lot, and I didn’t know how many people would be inside. I’d seen a few others go in before Stan, nobody I recognized.
A silver day with a rainy, arctic light, my breaths little tufts of white in the winter air. Even in the cold I was sweating.
Next door the lot was still vacant, its ditch choked with slime and wild red roses, empty forty-ounce bottles, brittle yellow newspaper. A short wall of brambles and shrubbery had grown over the low chain-link fence between the field and parking lot. A breeze blew over the lot and I nuzzled my face into the jacket. Being there was not easy. I kept thinking about leaving.
Eventually Stan stepped out again, alone. I could see his face clearly now, puffy and fallen, his forehead much higher, his chin doubled. He slouched in a white shirt and black pants, stood beside his car and cracked his back, stretched, looked away down toward town and the river. He glanced at me but didn’t seem to think anything about it. Old bum by the telephone pole.
It would have been easy. All I had to do was cross the street.
I don’t know if my body just remembered all the things they’d done to me, but terror clamped down on my balls, heart, and throat. I felt the cold metal of the gun in my hand and the idea of using it seemed suddenly impossible, the thought paralyzing. My body was sort of transfixed by this panic.
I had no idea I’d become so meek.
I just didn’t want anybody to hurt me again.
So at some point I’d become a coward. Or I’d always been one, and only just realized it, and now, like everything else about me, my insides w
ere on the surface, plain as day.
Stan climbed in the car and started the engine, the exhaust thick as clouds in the cold, swallowing the car. I stepped out from the rough wood of the pole, hugged my jacket around me as the Lincoln pulled out the lot. I stepped into the road, a little stunned that I was letting him go. I doubt he looked in the rearview mirror, but maybe he did. Maybe he noticed the shrinking figure that stood in the street, holding a gun.
I trudged across the vacant lot to the sidewalk on the other side of the bar. I tossed the pistol into a Dumpster, and I dragged my leg ten blocks to the bus station.
I wasn’t supposed to leave the state, but I rode the buses all the way to Galveston.
I’ve boarded up the windows on the bottom floor, and most of the places around us have done the same. Then the owners headed north in packed cars, some of them towing trailers or jury-rigged flatbeds. The president and governor have declared a state of emergency, and a mandatory evacuation’s been issued. Ike, they say, is inevitable. Elements rouse and converge, funneling ash-colored clouds. The drizzling rain fires sideways, so I skip my morning walk. I don’t check into the doughnut shop either. I started to pack a bag, but stopped. I sit on my couch and sip some hot tea and think about the man in the Jaguar, and I wonder why I lived through the night.
I start to tug on my overalls, but my leg is stiffer than usual from the storm and sitting up all night. I leave them lying on the floor, and Sage runs over and curls up on the smelly denim. The hotel doesn’t have any guests now, obviously, and I find Cecil in the office. He faces the computer behind the counter, tracking weather patterns, and he cocks one eyebrow at the storm depicted on the monitor. The spiral of clouds shown there is actually too big to imagine; the idea has to be contained by the picture on the screen, the way time has to be contained by a story.
“Maybe you shouldn’t stick around,” Cecil says. “I think I might be liable if something happens to you.”
Galveston Page 18
