by Jim Nisbet
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
First published in paperback in the United States in 2010 by The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
NEW YORK
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New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
Copyright © 2009 Jim Nisbet GREEN GREEN GRASS OF HOME by Curly Putman Copyright © 1965 Tree Publishing Co.,
All rights reserved. Used by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress
eISBN : 978-1-590-20586-0
ONE
The priest had a cold in his nose and an uncertainty as to his sexual identity; he’d never performed this service before; and there was an optional line in the prayers he had to get right. The printer had clearly marked the line in the text by enclosing it in brackets and setting it in italics.
[especially those who are condemned to die]
O.K ., he thought, here goes.
“O God, who sparest when we deserve punishment, and in thy wrath rememberest mercy …” Here he nodded toward the prisoner, his deference separating the insignificance of his own priestly suffering from the enormity of the prisoner’s crime, but including both within the magnanimity of the wrath and mercy matrix. “… we humbly beseech thee, of thy goodness, to comfort and succor all prisoners,” here it is; he cleared his throat politely and said it, “especially those who are condemned to die.”
The priest paused and blew his nose. He had read it correctly, the italicized insert in the Prayer for Prisoners. Though the phrase was clearly optional, he’d inadvertently included it in the prayer one sleepy Sunday morning, while reading it to an old con with a touch of malaria doing a mere one-to-five for passing bad checks. To put it mildly, the oversight had exacerbated the man’s delirium.
“Especially,” he repeated quietly, not without a touch of satisfaction, “those who are condemned to die.” He mopped his brow and replaced the wadded and filthy Kleenex among the ballpoint pens and mechanical pencils stamped with the names of various funeral homes in the inner pocket of his black linen coat, and sniffled.
Wreathed in chains, shirtless, Bobby Mencken sweltered on the edge of his bunk as he strove to take in every detail of the proceedings. Not that these details weren’t readily apparent to him—in fact, each minute facet of the cell asserted itself to him as never before; he felt veritably besieged by the infinitesimal. But the problem was not in his perception of these details nor in his ability to concentrate on them. The problem was that each detail vied for its individual importance, clamored for equality or superiority to all others, while most of his brain, or at least that part of his brain that he’d left in charge of such things howsoever many haywire events, details and years ago, refused to accept an iota of what was happening to him as significant, meaningful, or important. So much had happened to Bobby Mencken, so much had gone wrong.…
Why worry now?
“Give them a right understanding of themselves, and of thy promises; that, trusting wholly in thy mercy, they may not place their confidence anywhere but in thee.…”
Due to the priest’s nasal congestion, “Mercy” came out as “merdzy.” Bobby, who knew a little French, remonstrated or “highfived” with his brain a moment on its unhesitating taste toward making the obvious pun, converting “merdzy” to “merde-y,” but tacitly agreed with the image of a life passed in a haze of shit, before he drew its attention to the irony of the meaning of the full statement, “right understanding of themselves, and of thy promises.” Bobby looked at his manacled wrists, and turned his hands palms upward, accompanied by a gentle clinking as the links of chain resettled. All his life he’d trusted these hands to get him out of whatever scrapes his mind had gotten him into. Warden Johanson had warned Bobby that he didn’t like to let a man languish in chains as he waited to meet his Maker. But that was before Bobby had nearly choked to death a guard called Peters, nine months ago, with his bare hands. Therefore, guards had come in just before the priest arrived and manacled him. He passed his gaze over the shadowy figures lurking along the causeway outside his cell. There were now at least four of them there, in the combat boots and dark blue regulation jumpsuits with no pockets, belts or laces, specifically designed to keep unarmed guards overheated and mean while mingling with the “population.” He knew them all. One was a former Green Beret; another wrestled Sumo on the weekends; a third made it a point of honor never to discuss his Masters Degree in Business Administration; and the fourth felt the same about his sadism. And—what’s this, a fifth? Bobby cocked his head just a bit, to get a glance at the fifth guard, and his eyes hardened. It was Peters, who had the pointed, almost clipped ears, the ball-peened brain, the stubby legs, the tertiary syphilitic demeanor, the monaural instinct, the unquestioning eyes, the tenacity and the pinhead of his nickname, Pit Bull. Though Bobby had never heard the click of claws as Pit Bull Peters padded along the line, population consensus figured the man for having everything but the collar of his namesake, which, undoubtedly, lay on the floor of a hog-wire pen near Warden Johanson’s office, attached by a short, thick chain to a well-anchored cement post. This particular bull, this guard Peters, was a killer, and everyone in the prison knew it; he’d killed five times in nine years without so much as a suspension without pay, and as a result was as renowned, as feared, as revered for his familiarity with sudden death as … as …
Pit Bull Peters was as renowned a killer as Bobby Mencken himself.
Bobby Mencken scowled and raked the sweat off his face with his forearm. He’d just as soon not have to think about Pit Bull Peters. Not tonight. Tonight, cool was going to be enough of a trick.
The priest, catching the prisoner’s expression over the rims of the little square half-rim glasses perched on the tip of his sore, pink nose, frowned slightly.
“Relieve the distressed …,” the priest recited, or rather, read, for he’d never been in a cell on Death Row, before or since Texas had reinstituted the death penalty. Anyway, he was clearly too disconcerted to rely on his memory, which was just as well, for the priest’s words raised one of Bobby’s eyebrows. No amount of Valium was going to relieve Bobby Mencken’s distress, and he wondered how much they’d given him, but then, a further thought caused a rueful smile to crease his features. He’d been born black, athletic, pansexual, half-crazy, good-looking, loyal, irrational, fun-loving, smart, eager, terrified and broke.
Would even death end his “distress”?
“… protect the innocent, awaken the guilty …”
The smile collapsed, and Bobby’s breath quickened. It was true that Valium had a certain effect on the merit he attributed to the circumstances around him, but it didn’t make him stupid. Like his last meal, the remains of which were piled on a tray next to him on the bunk, the priest had come with the program, and he didn’t want to miss a thing. But no prayer for those hopelessly maligned by fate was going to alter tha
t fate, God or no God, any more than the consumption of kiwi fruit, cantaloupe, honeydew melon, nine grain bread, greens and sprouts salad, and semolina pasta dressed in uncooked tomatoes, garlic, olive oil and fresh basil were going to improve his health over the next few days. He stared sightlessly at the priest’s shoes and burped. The pungence of raw garlic assailed his nostrils. They’d probably had to go clear to Austin to get that kiwi fruit. He hoped so.
The priest hesitated in his recitation, sighed, and resumed.
Judging by the man’s footwear, preaching wasn’t bringing home any more bacon than robbing convenience stores might. A slight movement behind one of the priest’s tattered black brogans caught Bobby’s eye, and gradually the feelers, then the head, then the legs and flat thorax of a large brown cockroach appeared on the smooth stone floor between them.
“… and forasmuch as thou alone bringest light out of darkness, and good out of evil, grant to these…”
Bobby recognized the roach as a regular visitor to his cell; he could tell by the bright magenta nail polish striping its legs and back, which matched the scraped remains of color on his own fingernails. These, his nails, were grotesquely long, inasmuch as Johanson had rescinded most of Mencken’s privileges, including possession of nail clippers or even access to a manicure, after the attack on Peters. Since Mencken made a point of never biting his nails, a habit he had come to consider a sign of weakness, his hands now resembled nothing so much as the claws of a vampire in some cheap horror movie: a movie too cheap, Mencken mused, to hire white vampires. He’d painted his nails and the roach’s legs and back, one slow day, as he inhaled the fumes of the acetone thinner in the polish until the plastic bottle had gone dry with the pigment still in it. That had been at least eight months ago. The roach stood there in its six crimson stockings and striped fuselage, waving its feelers, as if conducting the rhythms of the prayer floating down from high above it, almost as if it were a performer on a stage, and the priest’s black legs the surrounding curtains of a proscenium. Matilda the cockroach, little mistress of time and space, who could come and go in this place as she pleased, a testimonial to the ideal of effortless, stylish survival.
“… thy servants, that by the power of thy Holy Spirit they may be set free from the chains of sin …”
Bobby shifted his gaze to the priest’s face. The priest had put tremendous emphasis on the word “free”—set free from the chains of sin—as if speaking to a whole tent full of people. Aside from that, assholes like him had learned it from watching Martin Luther King on television. Could this fool really believe what he was reading? The priest was frail and pale and puffy, with thin sandy hair. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down his throat like a nervous commodities broker trading in mucus and obsequies. Thick black hairs curled over the slight knuckles of his finely boned hands, hands that had never known hard labor, hands that would blister as easily as the soft skin on the body would bruise. Bobby considered the praying minister, and his eyes assumed the cold look of appraisal peculiar to the hunter first sighting his quarry. What would it be like, he wondered, to have sex with this virginal priest? I could make him scream, he thought idly. But could I make him renounce his faith, mid-orgasm, just to gratuitously ruin him? He set about isolating himself within the delicate seams of a fleeting, fragile sexual fantasy. . . .
They both heard the steel clash of the electromechanical locks that segregated Death Row from the rest of the prison, and the first of a series of huge iron doors open, a long way down the causeway, nearly at the other end of the building. When the door closed and the long rods sealing it top and bottom shot home, their crashes coursed up and down the cell block, making everyone and everything they touched reverberate with the fear born of distant machinery in hell. No one could hear such sounds and not wonder what sad, ugly business they portended. The priest paused in his prayer, looked up, and found the prisoner already looking at him. Priest and prisoner exchanged glances, the former out of trepidation, pity, and respect for a man going so calmly to his death with a bellyful of health food—although, he was supposing, we can give wondrous comfort to a man such as this, with a little bit of prayer, not to mention a stiff dose of Valium. But as this thought flashed across his mind another interrupted it, which was, Prisoner Mencken, whom he’d never met before this midnight, was leering at him. Prisoner Mencken’s face was a mask of pure lust, and in spite of the heat, the priest shivered. Lust was something he preferred to discuss through the grill of a confessional. He suddenly found himself out of his waters, so to speak, struck dumb and helpless, a frog watching a snake, doing nothing, waiting, sitting on the lily pad that was his faith, tonguing the fly that was his prayer, watching the glazed eyes in the blunt, triangular head of his fate.
But the crash of a second, closer door, and the sounds of several pairs of shoes striding slowly, purposefully down the ancient, worn stones of Huntsville, jolted the priest back to his duty, and he hastened to finish the Prayer for Prisoners Condemned to Die.
“… chains of, of sin … and … and may be brought to newness of life, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. The almighty and merciful Lord grant thee pardon and remission of all thy sins, and the grace and comfort of the Holy Spirit bless you and keep you, all the days of your life. Amen.” Whoops. He was rattled. Got the Absolution crossed with the Benediction. All the days of his life, indeed. The priest nodded his head, to cross himself anyway, and noticed the cockroach on the floor between his feet. A shudder ran through his delicate frame. If he’d been born Irish, he thought, he might be able to take this.
“A-fucking-men, Reverend,” the prisoner rejoined, laughing. Though he hadn’t darkened the door of a church in twenty years he knew a gaffe when he heard one. “All the days of my life, a-fucking-men. Come on, Matilda,” he continued, apparently speaking to the roach, “join in with the congregation.” He raised his voice at least an octave and repeated, “A-fucking-men, preacher man.” Mencken laughed strangely, looked up at the priest, and shrugged. His chains rattled. “She’s just another blasphemous entity, reverend, and knows no better.” He paused. His smile faded. “Like me.” He looked down at the roach and smiled. “She’s come to say goodbye to me.” He looked up at the priest. “Like You.”
The priest, head bowed, his obeisant cruciform frozen in mid-gesture, looked up through his eyelashes, past his fingers touching the middle of his damp brow.
Prisoner Mencken opened his mouth slightly, raised his chin, and passed the tip of his tongue over the lower edges of his upper front teeth.
Though he had never witnessed so obscene a gesture, so pellucid a flirtation, from so close up, the priest demurely finished crossing himself, closed the prayer book around his forefinger, thus marking his place in the Last Rites, and took a step backward, all the while watching the floor. By the random shouts, taunts and curses emanating from the cells down the block, the two men could gauge the advance of the small party coming to guide the prisoner Mencken to the site of his final departure.
After a pause the priest stepped forward and crushed the cockroach beneath the sole of his shoe. The sound was not unlike that you would make if you were to suddenly clench your fist around an empty matchbox. He turned his shoe a little to the left, and a little to the right. Then, still looking downwards, the priest took a step back again.
Equidistant between them on the floor lay a brown and yellow pulp. Here and there in it thin magenta sticks hinted that this had once been a cockroach with its legs painted in red nail polish by Prisoner 61-204 in his cell on Death Row.
The priest, in his fumbling way, while mulling further silent entreaties to his God regarding His memory and the prisoner’s soul, had absently thought to make a minor improvement in the last fleeting moments of the prisoner’s squalid lot on earth. He may even have expected some gruff form of gratitude from the prisoner, along the lines of, “Heh, well Revern’, I reckin dey gots ’em in hebben, too, ’cause, Lawd knows, dey’s plenty of ’em on dis ert’.”
; Mencken, on the contrary, looked at the smear on the floor and smelled the world around him, and saw its lurid colorlessness, which he knew all too well, and recognized that only one life in this cell remained to be snuffed out tonight. He had once tried the seaweed soup in a dingy basement Chinese restaurant in Oklahoma City, and what he’d been served had portended the odor, the taste, the color, and the consistency of life in this prison lo, these two years. The inedible soup had tasted of old tires, creosote, diesel fuel and fetid muck, of barnacled pilings rotting in the sun. For five years he’d wallowed in the stench, the monotones, the clanks and scrapes and groans, the thrice-breathed air, the purgatorial screams, the locker-room putrefaction of decomposing flesh, ruined bowels, and doomed souls passing month after month, year after year, decade after decade, rooted to a stone place that could offer no nourishment, in an atmosphere that provided no light, in a world that offered no hope. Yet he had waited, while forces larger than himself argued in an impenetrably arcane language over whether he should be allowed to die immediately, or languish and dwindle and gradually decompose in a small tiled room like this one over the next forty to sixty years. Waited for he knew not what, nor whom, nor how, nor when, steeling himself against prayer, miracle, magic, delusion, hallucination, metempsychosis—fortified only by pride, violence, vigilance, calisthenic regimen, an abiding hatred and … hope?
Mencken almost stopped breathing as he stared at the miserable remains of a miserable pet cockroach he’d named Matilda, and cursed his miserable self. Roger, check, ten-four, yes, hope, hopeless hope. He had permitted himself to nurture a pathetic seedling of hope that ran deep, hidden, and completely through his most inner self, and only that hope had allowed him to endure two years in this solitary room. Without that hope he’d never have laughed, slept, dreamed, or awakened in this infernal hive more than a night or two, let alone worked up the stupidity to strike a blow for decency by trying to kill Peters. But even then, hope had given him the sustenance and forbearance to endure the evil half-life of solitary imprisonment. And now?
