“I’ll see what I can do.”
Deer’s voice sounded like a promise with the life beaten out of it.
* * *
But he did come back. And Toni Jo had done a lot of thinking in the meantime. To Deer most of it sounded desperate. This time, he visited inside her cell, the wall blocking them from the other inmates’ view.
“You know the D.A.,” she said. “He could get me released if he wanted. All we have to do is present new evidence that Arkie acted alone. And Arkie’s dead. He can’t contradict a thing. He said he’d been in touch with . . . Herald”—she hated saying his name—“had exchanged letters with him, so all we have to do is find one of those letters. Then we could prove that Arkie killed him out of jealousy, that I had nothing to do with it, and then I’m free.”
Deer stared blankly at the young woman, ghost pale with auburn-brown hair. Her innocence about everything was so stupendous he hardly knew where to begin. He opened his hands to her as if to show he had no tricks, no magic trumpet he could blow to bring down the walls of her Jericho.
He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know. I want to help you, but I can’t see . . . any way.”
“ Try,” Toni Jo pleaded.
After a long silence, Deer spoke.
“I’ve done some thinking, too. It’s nothing like what you have in mind, but it might make your time a little easier. There’s a ground-floor room. It’s bigger than this one. And cooler. With better accommodations. An easier view of the lake. It’s the only room down there.”
“That sounds nice,” she said. “I appreciate your concern. But would you also try the other thing? Promise?”
“I promise, but there’s something else about the room you should know before you decide to move.” Deer looked at Toni Jo to gauge her reaction to his next statement.
Toni Jo looked at him. What could be worse than where she was?
“It’s the solitary confinement room.” Deer bowed his head in shame. “It’s also the death row cell.” Toni Jo’s heart leaped. “It’s where they spend the last night. They’re allowed some visitors: family, close friends, clergy.” Their eyes locked for the first time in all his visits.
“I’ll take it,” Toni Jo finally said, as if she had been offered the last and worst room in a roach-infested motel. “Might as well get used to it.”
Grim humor. Deer had seen it happen before. The first stage on the road to acceptance of the condemned man’s death.
Chief Deputy Slim Deer didn’t want the transfer to look suspicious. He waited a week and had two deputies escort Toni Jo downstairs. The room had obvious improvements. A new paint job. Curtains, of all things, on the barred window. A dresser and a swivel chair.
“I hope you like it,” Deer said two days later. He was careful not to come by too soon after the relocation. “You’ll be more comfortable writing at the desk.” He had noticed she kept a journal of some sort.
They talked for twenty minutes.
“I got to get back. I’m on duty.” Her next comment held him a while longer.
“You know what I miss? Aside from freedom, I mean.”
“No,” he said. “What?”
“Birds.” Deer had expected something profound. His head went up, then slowly down, as if someone were pulling strings attached to his wooden head.
* * *
The bird was unpretentious. A blue parakeet. “He’ll keep you company when I’m not here,” Deer said.
After trying out Parakeety and then Keety, Toni Jo settled on Peety: too long, too cute, just right. She had time to fine tune her life. Nothing but time.
March, April. Deer visited when he could. Began to bring her things. It pleased him to add cheer to the monotony of her daily routine. Candy. Trinkets. Flowers. They learned how to laugh together. Deer had consulted Levine and Prudhomme. Had been working on Davis Avario. The D.A. couldn’t come up with anything, Deer told her. Toni Jo took the news with surprising calm.
May. Deer asked her to dye her hair. Brought it up casually.
“No,” Toni Jo said. Her reaction alarmed him. When he pressed for explanations, she stubbornly held her ground and offered no reasons. Deer finally had to reveal what he had intended as a surprise.
“It’s part of a disguise,” he said. Toni Jo frowned. “A date,” Deer said. “You’ve been telling me how much you wish you could see a movie. Well, this is it. Next Wednesday. A matinee of The Great Lie, with Bette Davis. The kids are all in school. I asked Mr. Randolph—he owns the Paramount—what his slackest day was and he said Wednesday, no question.” Toni Jo couldn’t believe what she was hearing. The sheriff’s son planned to take her, a death-row convict, to a movie in broad daylight. It was preposterous, like the plot of a Laurel and Hardy skit.
Tuesday, she was a blonde again.
Wednesday, wearing a headscarf and sunglasses, she walked out of the lockup with Deer, who wore plain clothes.
In jail. Out of jail.
Dying. Alive.
She felt light enough to fly.
“Two,” Deer said into the opening of the glass column as he pushed a dollar down the concave silver bowl.
“The only two, Mr. Deer,” the woman returned with a wink.
Toni Jo feared being discovered. Her heart ricocheted around her ribcage. A smiling usher greeted them in the lobby.
“Help you find a seat?”
Deer laughed and gave the boy a dime.
“No, I think we can manage it on our own.”
Toni Jo, who in the last months had eaten little and slept a lot, devoured everything in sight. The heavy odor of buttered popcorn almost knocked her down. She had to have some. And a large Coke. Chocolate kisses. A Mars bar. Orange slices. Jujubes.
They started in the center of the theater and moved four times. Up, back, left side, right side. The freedom of movement was almost more than Toni Jo could handle, as if she would miss something if she didn’t see the screen from every angle. Deer finally settled her down.
“Easy, easy,” he whispered redundantly in the empty auditorium. “It’s not like we can’t do this again.”
Toni Jo smiled in the dark. After finishing her popcorn, she wiped her hand and slipped it into Deer’s. It was like holding hands with a statue. He was actually afraid of her. She was amused. A deputy sheriff. It was too cute, really.
An hour into the movie, Toni Jo had to let out some of the Coke. She hadn’t had a soft drink in over a year. She had taken in twice her fill, the squirrel anticipating a long winter.
Knowing he would decipher the code, she whispered into her date’s ear. “Will you excuse me?”
Deer sprung into action. “Sure, sure.” He stood and held her elbow as she stepped toward the aisle.
In the restroom, Toni Jo looked at herself in the mirror. She touched up her little bit of makeup. The outing was so impossibly wonderful that she only then realized there were no attendants. The Paramount couldn’t compete with the New Orleans movie houses. She recalled their names. The Orpheum, Loews State, Imperial, and New Carrollton. They were like palaces. As she picked at the side of her mouth with a tissue, her heart bolted and her eyes suddenly looked directly into her own eyes.
She could walk out of the restroom and onto the street. Who would expect to see her walking down the city sidewalks like a rich young wife on a shopping spree? She popped her purse open and put on the sunglasses. Her hands fumbled nervously with the scarf. She had to take it down and retie it.
Then she was out the restroom, heaving open the heavy glass entrance doors before the usher could reach her.
Her heels clacked madly on the sidewalk. She was free. Escaped.
Where should she go? She barely had time to formulate the thought when a voice called from behind her.
“Going to a fire?”
It was Deer.
She wanted to cry, to sob. Her throat felt like a bladder needing relief. She halted. Deer caught up with Toni Jo and walked around to face her. She
couldn’t bear to look at him. She buried her face in his chest and cried, partly out of shame before the man who had trusted her.
And partly because, for a few moments, she was not going to be hung by the neck until she was dead, dead, dead.
Deer held Toni Jo until her shuddering subsided. All right, she thought. Now we know each other.
He knew what she was capable of—had known, it suddenly hit her, what she would do even before she herself had seen the opportunity. And she knew him better now. He was smarter than she had given him credit for being, or craftier.
“I’ll never try that again,” Toni Jo said, looking into his kind face. “I promise.”
“I know,” Deer said.
“Can you forgive me? Will you take me to another movie?”
“I forgave you even before I asked you to the movie. I knew you would try it. Once. If not here, then somewhere else. As for another movie, we haven’t even finished watching this one.”
Hand in hand, they turned and walked back to the theater.
“But we can’t make ourselves too visible. Probably wouldn’t be a good idea to do the same thing twice. How about a picnic next time?”
“That would be wonderful,” Toni Jo said.
In a matter of two minutes, she felt like she had died and been born again.
* * *
June, 1941.
Toni Jo and Deer looked like any young lovers. From a distance, anonymous. A blanket picnic in Locke Park, cattycorner from the red-brick Convent of Hearts to the west and Joseph’s Drive-In to the south. Deer’s picnic basket was empty.
“Some picnic,” Toni Jo teased.
But Deer had a plan. They walked to Joseph’s and filled it with burgers in wax paper and fries in red baskets.
It was so simple. A picnic on a quilt under the open sky, and children playing near watchful mothers. Nothing like what Nevers had shown her—glitz and bustle. It took Nevers and jail to make Toni Jo appreciate a little outing.
Their fingertips explored each other’s hands while they talked. Deer kissed her, nervously, for the first time. Toni Jo thought: pity, sympathy.
Love? It was not what she felt, but it was nice. Better than the massive nothing closing in on her inexorably with each heartbeat.
Emboldened, Deer spoke of his ambitions. He would become sheriff one day, when his father stepped down. Then, after being sheriff a couple of terms, he would run for mayor.
With the Deer name, Toni Jo assured him, he could do anything he wanted.
He fell silent. He plucked grass blades and tore them lengthwise along their spine. Deer told Toni Jo he wished she could see his accomplishments. They were quiet for a while. Their eyes tracked a solitary ant trying to figure out how it was going to lift a French fry shipwrecked on the ocean of blanket.
Deer stood and helped Toni Jo up. They walked to a swing, and he pushed her wordlessly. Back and forth, slowly. Then he stopped pushing. Toni Jo looked over her shoulder, letting the pendulum run down.
Deer moved closer to her, put both of his hands on her left shoulder and whispered in her ear.
“I—.” His voice choked. He tried again. “I want to marry you.”
Toni Jo closed her eyes. She thought, This just can’t be happening. She admired Deer, even held a deep affection for him. He had done so much for her. She placed one of her hands over his.
“What would be the point? How could it ever work?”
She saw the months laid out like dominoes. They would have a private ceremony in the jail. Only one other person would have to know. The honeymoon was bound to be disastrous. She smiled at that. They would take a few short excursions from her cell. Then October would be there like a . . . what? Something big. She couldn’t think of anything that big. Death. Maybe it wasn’t size, but darkness going in one direction, or all directions, forever.
Deer slid one hand from under hers and held her hand between his.
She liked Deer. He had taken care of her. Who wouldn’t want to marry him? But she didn’t see the point. She had been with Nevers without a marriage. Anything was possible, he had taught her. She looked around. A few cars glided down Ryan Street. One of them pulled into the Borden’s ice-cream parlor and gave birth to more children than she could count. It felt like she had drifted above the trees like a hot air balloon and was watching the two of them from a distance. She could see them doing this again and again, for life. Till death do us part. A short life, whose dead-end was just down the road a piece. A long life would be better. A life sentence.
There! The stab in her heart, like the day her escape had fallen in her lap, too good to be true. She took a deep breath and calmed herself down. Then, in a casual challenge:
“If you can get me life, I’ll marry you.”
—spoken as an impossibility, like saying, “If I were a millionaire, this is what I would buy.”
* * *
Deer talked to everyone he knew. Consulted the best lawyers in town. Asked his father for help. The only advice he got from him was to stay away from the woman.
“She can ruin your career, your life. Be careful. You mess with mud, you get muddy.”
Toni Jo anxiously awaited Deer’s next visit. If the worst came, she wanted another plan, and if that didn’t work, another and another. Anything, any change at all from the slope her life was running down like a freight train with failed brakes was better than riding out the trip without trying.
“Then let’s be together while we can,” she said after the bad news. “The marriage isn’t important. I’m sorry, but it just didn’t mean as much to me as it did to you. I hope you can see it from my point of view.” She shrugged. “What difference would it make?”
They talked for a while, made plans for a trip at the end of June to his house on a hundred-acre tract next to his father’s land. Then she dropped Plan B on him.
“I’ve been thinking, Slim.” She hated the name. It made him sound like a cartoon sheriff, but she didn’t want to hurt his feelings by telling him. “It’s not so much my death as the way I’ll die that bothers me. Is there any way, you think, to get the way I’ll be executed to—. How do I say this? From hanging to the electric chair?”
Deer stared at her in disbelief. He pulled at his top lip, a habit he engaged in while thinking. The judge determined the week of the execution, but the warden could choose the day and time as long as he let the condemned man know a week ahead so he could prepare.
Warden White said he would look into the matter to see if it was possible.
He did. It was.
Toni Jo felt a terrible burden lift from her. Choosing the method by which she would die was somehow like getting a new life.
On the last day of June, they celebrated on Slim Deer’s farm. They rode horses. They fished with cane poles in a square cattle pond. The big red bluegills floated in the water on a nylon stringer. They would fry them in the early evening and eat them on the porch. Toni Jo hooked a bass. It was big and green and broke her line when it jumped. When Deer lifted the stringer, a thick, squat water moccasin held onto a bream. It had mangled the lower part of the fish’s body and wouldn’t let go. Toni Jo screeching with laughter and fear, Deer grabbed the black snake quickly by the tail and popped its head off.
Deer cleaned the fish by a horse trough, then cooked them over a butane tank on the screened-in veranda of his ranch house. Toni Jo watched and bantered from a porch swing while June bugs thumped against the screen with a familiar, domestic sound.
After supper, she took a long bath. In the jail, there were only showers. She felt clean as they kissed on Deer’s couch while listening to the radio. Evening smells wafted in through an open window: cattle, cut grass, and after-shave. Toni Jo desired him for the first time. Dinah Shore sang “I’m Through With Love,” reminding her.
It was too good to be true, she cautioned herself. Don’t count on anything. It could all come to a halt tomorrow, and then there would only be the long days to fill until the last one was cut sh
ort.
His caresses progressed. He asked permission. Toni Jo wondered if he had ever been with a woman. A tall, lean country bumpkin too good for his own good. But she really did feel something for him. Who wouldn’t?
In a very roundabout way, he asked, or rather hinted—Could they, would she like to . . . not now, but maybe the next time she came over?
“Why not now?” Toni Jo said.
Shocked, Deer lifted his head and dropped it, the marionette.
When they reached his bedroom, he turned the light on, then off. They talked in the dark between cool sheets. Eventually, he got around to it, said he was worried about, you know. Toni Jo had to think for a while.
“Oh,” she said. She thought, He’s afraid of getting me pregnant and can’t even bring himself to say the word. The smile died on her face as she thought of Nevers. Ripped a pregnancy from her without even pretending concern. She followed her thought as it played itself out. What difference would it make if she did get pregnant? After all, if she did—. The knife stabbed her heart again. Plan C. Or D. Or whatever she was on. She had lost count. She breathed hard. Deer mistook it for arousal.
“Why wait till next time?” she said into the dark.
“Well,” Deer began, “I thought . . .” No matter what he was thinking, he couldn’t say it.
Toni Jo took up the slack.
“There’s nothing to worry about.” She spoke carefully, like an apprentice laying down his first bricks. “Me and Arkie tried. We wanted children. After a while, I went to the doctor. He said it would be very difficult for me to have children. Maybe if he operated, but even then he wasn’t sure. He said I had a tilted uterus.”
Deer tried to process this. He was too embarrassed to ask. Tilted uterus. Lady problems. Private stuff. Things he knew nothing about and didn’t want to know. It was enough to know that she wouldn’t get pregnant.
So they finally got around to making love.
July, August. Several times.
Mid-July. Late in the afternoon, Toni Jo heard yells coming from the floor above her, then stomping. The inmates were enraged. She heard the bars being pummeled by fists, then felt the vibrations. She wondered if the outburst were over the food. Maybe the heat. She remembered what it was like up there. The riot, or whatever it was, lasted half an hour.
A Savage Wisdom Page 24
