by Jim Nisbet
“They caught Bobby,” Royce said. “Running from the scene with the gun in his hand.”
She nodded forlornly. “They caught Bobby running from the scene. It turned out later he’d seen the police car coming and realized it was all over for him. So he just dropped the gun into the ditch and kept heading at the police car like he was jogging or something.” She shook her head. “He did actually have a sweat suit on, and running shoes and a headband. He was skinny enough to be a jogger, too. Of course, there were a few miles of tracks up and down both arms at that time.”
Royce feigned mild surprise. “Really? Last time I saw him I watched him pick up—”
Whoops. Watch it, Royce, he said to himself, you almost said he picked up two of the guards trying to strap him down so you could put a couple of intravenous needles in him. Royce looked at the bottle on the table next to him. He’d drunk a pint of Old Overholt and about a quarter of this fifth. He hadn’t slept in a long time. Staying on his toes was getting difficult.
Yet here, now, he was getting the story he’d come to discover.
He sat up straight and curled his fists towards his chest. “Hell, they must have weighed close to three hundred pounds.”
“What did,” she asked distantly.
“Those barbells. The only exercise they’d let him take the whole time he was on Death Row was supervised solitary gymnasium type workouts, with weights, shooting basketball, stuff like that. He looked terrific the last time I saw him.”
She looked puzzled. “You mean with muscles and all that stuff?”
Royce nodded.
“Yeesh,” she said.
“Well,” he said, “it’s like mind control when you’re inside. You have to do something, get focused on something, be disciplined.”
“I guess so,” she said.
“Cigarette?”
“Thanks.”
He lit her Salem. Royce held the match before his pursed lips and blew on it gradually, increasing his wind until it went out. “Speaking of doing something,” he said, dropping the match in an ashtray, “what happened to you and Eddie?”
Colleen stared into space.
“Do you mind my asking?”
“What?”
“It’s a good story, you know.”
“Yeah,” she sighed, “I guess it is.”
“So is it over?”
“Sorry. I’m kind of running out of gas. It was a long time ago. The idea of Bobby Mink with muscles kind of confuses me.”
“Thurman liked to say Bobby was ‘humpy.’”
She smiled and smoked her cigarette.
Royce waited.
Then she said, “There was a dumpster.”
“A dumpster?”
She smiled distantly. “Behind the store. I don’t think Eddie ever had the slightest intention of running away. I do think he was surprised to see Bobby waiting for us out back. If Eddie had been the lookout, and it had been Bobby and me coming out that window, we never would have seen Eddie again. But there Bobby was. Like I said, Eddie is the kind of guy who can improvise as he goes along. Anything to leave behind a trail of confusion and himself in the clear. When he saw Bobby standing there, he got rid of the gun. Simple as that. He saw the dumpster on the way out the window, and another solution offered itself. Anything to avoid the same cliche Bobby was about to provide the story with, of running directly into the arms of the cops. Not Eddie. Eddie is into a high form of dance called survival. Since Bobby was into getting himself caught by hanging around and being useless, Eddie helped him out and at the same time turned him into something useful. Very useful. Bobby gave the cops everything they wanted. They didn’t even take the trouble to look for anybody else. Bobby spent a year in jail before the trial, and then got convicted by a mess of people who assumed from the beginning he was in that robbery and killed that woman solo, all by himself, no help, alone.”
She shook her head and blew smoke into the air between them. “It was all Eddie’s fast thinking, and it handed Bobby the rawest deal you can imagine: first degree murder with special circumstances, the death penalty. But Bobby never ratted on Eddie because he thought I did it.”
“What good would it have done if he had?” Royce asked. “They had nothing on either one of you. It would have been Bobby’s word against you and Eddie.”
She looked at him. “That old fan he tore out of that window was the greasiest thing you ever saw. It must have been blowing flies out the back of that building since Bob Wills was born. They could have lifted a clear set of prints of Eddie’s right hand any time they wanted, at least until somebody got around to fixing that fan, and probably after. All they did, I’m sure, was nail it back up. I’ll bet you a dollar that to this day there’s Fast Eddie fingerprints in the grease around the sheet-metal shroud of that old exhaust fan.”
“Well, why in hell didn’t they find any fingerprints in the first place?”
She blew a smoke ring. “There were no witnesses, that’s why. From the beginning the cops assumed Bobby had pulled the job by himself. When they matched the prints on the gun to him, and the ballistics matched the bullets in the clerk to the gun,” she snapped her fingers, “bingo. They had their man.”
Royce thought it was appropriate to say something. “Idiots,” he said.
“Idiots? Idiots?” She stabbed the cigarette in his direction. “They didn’t even run a paraffin test on him, to see if he’d fired the goddamn gun. Hell, the goddamn test was invented in Mexico, by a Mexican cop. If the Mexicans can invent the goddamn test, you’d think these cracker Dallas cops could use it. But no. Hell, no. They had their desperate Negro junkie and the murder weapon. Since he happened to have nine dollars on him at the time, they figured that’s what he’d stolen, that’s what he’d killed that woman for. The nine bucks made the crime that much more revolting.” She sat up and crushed the cigarette in the ashtray. Royce’s eyeballs itched with fatigue. He could see the night beginning to pale toward dawn in the bedroom window beyond Colleen. “But what am I complaining about?” She gestured broadly. “Between Bobby Mink’s noble integrity and the racist incompetence of the cops, Eddie and I are still walking around. Ain’t that a ethical dichotomy made in hell?”
“Ethical dichotomy?” Royce made a face. “Where’d you get a notion like that?”
“Hey, I’m cool,” she said bitterly. “I been to night school.”
Royce looked at her. Night school. “And Bobby?” he asked after a moment.
“Bobby?” She gave him a sharp look, then looked away. “Bobby’s in a better place. Even if he’s nowhere, he’s in a better place.”
“I knew he was innocent,” Royce said bitterly. She nodded sadly. A tear bumped along her rough cheek.
He’d noticed that the more the effects of whatever drug she’d done earlier wore off, the sharper her mind became.
This is not to say that she’d become optimistic. Just sharper. Less vulgar. Or, should he say, less colloquial. And where’s the surprise in that? In any case Royce yawned and thought it ironic she was waking up just as he was passing out. But, since a shot of heroin wears off after awhile, and alcohol has a progressively overwhelming effect if you persist in drinking it all night, there was no surprise, no irony, no twist of fate either. Just two ships passing in the night. Yeesh, as she’d said. He was just tired. Very tired. Now he could get vulgar and colloquial.
“But wait,” he said through his yawn, blinking his eyes. “You mean to tell me you and Eddie jumped in a dumpster out back of that store and were never discovered?”
She lit another cigarette. “Never discovered. It was on the back side of the building, away from the street, and maybe fifty feet toward a dirt embankment from the window under a big cottonwood, and completely dark. Eddie threw me over the side and followed me in. It was perfect. The thing was full of empty cardboard boxes and beer cartons nobody had bothered to flatten like I guess they’re supposed to. It was big, too, you could’ve hid five or six people in there. We just burrowe
d into the boxes toward the bottom and pulled several layers of them over the top of us. It was pitch-black and pretty funky in there, but not by the standards of a Dallas jailhouse.”
“They must not have looked too hard for you.”
She nodded and smoked. “They were out there all right, after they found the fan torn off the window. But the dirt was hard on account of about fifty years of bottle caps ground into it. Are you old enough to remember when sodas came in bottles, and the drink boxes had an opener on the side, and with a can underneath to catch all the bottle caps?”
Royce nodded.
She blew smoke and waved her hand at it. “I’m not. But the ground all around that old store was paved with bottle caps, like small cobblestones. Anyway, the point is there were no tracks to follow or anything. They looked around with flashlights and all. We lay there in the dark not talking, hardly moving, even after Eddie got his thing into me—”
Royce opened his eyes. “What?”
“Well, hell,” she waved her cigarette, “we were there all night. For all we knew it was our last chance. I was pretty upset. He had to calm me down. Besides, Eddie bores easy.”
“I thought you were Bobby’s girl.”
She looked at him.
After a moment he shook his head. “All night?”
“Pretty much. We could hear the radios squawking and cars come and go. There was an ambulance, lots of sirens. The worst moment was when some big vehicle pulled right up to the dumpster, after we’d been in there at least an hour. It didn’t sound like it, but our worst scenario was of course the garbage truck had come to empty the trash. We could just see ourselves getting lifted up on those forks and inverted over the back of some huge rolling garbage compactor. Me with my pants down, Eddie with his thing hanging out….” She gave a short laugh. Royce had to smile.
“Then of course, we got compacted to death. Or arrested. Or shot. Or all three.”
“What was it?”
“Television truck. Remote unit. The sound we heard was the antenna going up. We got out of there about noon the next day. By then it had gotten pretty bad. It was real hot, of course, and both of us had had to piss a couple of times by then, right where we lay. And we couldn’t smoke, either. Yeah, I remember that; we couldn’t smoke. Pretty funky. Got home and watched the whole thing on the evening news.” She waved her hand toward the television set. “Just like tonight.”
They looked at the television. A row of five men arranged according to their varying heights and all dressed alike stood before the camera with their mouths open, obviously singing something. A telephone number appeared low on the screen in front of them, with the words GRACEPHONE above it and CALL NOW below it.
“Hey,” she said, not taking her eyes off the screen, the cigarette in her hand close to her face, “I’ve had enough stress and pain for one night. Want to get high and go to bed?”
THIRTEEN
For just a moment Royce couldn’t believe his ears. But his ears weren’t the problem. The problem was his desires. They conflicted. The last thing he wanted to do was a drug—any drug. Alcohol was fine with him; it was something he understood through long association. He knew what it would do to him, how and just about when. But the first thing he wanted to do, the thing uppermost on his agenda, was to sleep with Colleen Valdez.
To Colleen Valdez, the two went more or less together. You have drugs, that’s O.K. You have sex, that’s O.K. too. You have them together? You’re on vacation. That was something Bobby Mencken used to say. He’d come home in the morning, after a hard night of crime, and he’d dangle a bag of dope in front of Colleen, and he’d say, “Let’s take a vacation.”
She might say “Sure,” she might say “Break my arm,” or she might pout and say “Make me,” but the answer was always affirmative. Always.
That was the way it had been several years ago, when Colleen had been very much in love with Bobby Mencken. Everybody was younger; the whole world was younger. Exuberance was cheap and available in vast quantities, like gasoline in the fifties. But somewhere along the line things began to get more serious. The idea of money was everywhere, but the actual stuff became more and more of a rumor about something other people had somewhere else. Friends started to sicken and die from unnatural causes. Gunshot wounds, overdoses… lethal injections. She couldn’t really put her finger on when suffering had replaced fun as the ongoing environment, just like she couldn’t really put a finger on when junk became more important than anything else. Yet these things had transpired. It was as if one day she had looked up and noticed that somebody had moved all the scenery around in the theater since the last time she’d looked. The previous play, a comic farce, had closed. The new play, a tragic farce, had opened. As in the old play, the role she had in the new one was largely undefined. In the old play she’d been granted broad improvisational scope. In the new play, however, some force beyond her control, beyond her understanding, was always telling her what to do. And when to do it.
And now Eddie had bought the farm.
She was bored with all that snake business anyway.
It didn’t even occur to her that Royce would be thinking twice about her offer. She stood up and said, “Come on. Let’s take a vacation,” and headed for the kitchen. Royce stayed where he was and watched her hips move in her jeans when she walked. “Don’t worry,” she said over her shoulder, “I know you don’t go in for needlework.” She chuckled.
“Yet.”
Royce took his bottle and followed her.
The kitchen looked like the inside of a mobile home that’d rolled off a cliff and somehow landed upright. Books, pots, pans, bottles, magazines, newspapers and cans were everywhere. The cast-iron, formerly white sink was stained a dark rust color, its faucet hidden among stacks of glasses and dishes. There was a corrugated drainboard, chipped and stained, on either side of the sink, a small four-burner gas stove to its left, a very old refrigerator to the left of that, then a small table in the corner with two chairs. A door to the left of the table behind one of the chairs led to a small bathroom you had to step up into. To the left of that a dilapidated double-hung window looked out on the open-air entry hall, and appeared to have been painted last during the Depression, when people had time for such things. A dish towel with faded red and white checks had been tacked over it with two wood screws. The rest of the room was dirty yellow, and the whole thing looked like a video game for cockroaches.
On the table were several sections of various issues of the Times-Herald and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, overflowing ashtrays, two half-empty Lone Star bottles with a cigarette butt in each, torn potato-chip bags and five dissimilar guitar picks arranged in a circle. In the center of these Royce placed the fifth of Ezra Brooks. One of the guitar picks fled, straight off the side of the table. Royce stamped at the roach and missed. Articles or parts of articles were circled in newspapers; some had pieces clipped out of them. Royce looked closely and saw that all were about Bobby Mencken’s execution and the various appeals and legal maneuvering that had led up to it. As he peered at these, Royce noticed that his vision was blurred. He was drunker than he thought. He steadied himself by the table, then sat heavily on the chair beside the refrigerator.
“Take a load off your feet,” Colleen said. A cigarette dangled from her mouth. She pursed the thick lips of her broad mouth around it, took a final drag and dropped the half-smoked cigarette into a glass in the sink, where it continued to smoke.
“Nice and domestic in here,” Royce said tiredly, squinting up at the light bulb in the ceiling above him. He opened the refrigerator: a bottle of catsup missing its cap, a half bottle of Lone Star likewise, a can of tuna fish, a half jar of jalapeno peppers floating in discolored brine, two white take-out cartons with wire handles.
“I haven’t eaten since I met you people,” he said, closing the door.
She pulled a small packet from the watch pocket of her jeans and dropped it on the newspapers, along with a creased length of aluminum fo
il she’d taken from the back of the stove, and sat down in the other chair.
“You know how to do this, Royce?” she asked.
“Not so good as I know how to do the other,” he said, attempting the lascivious.
“Yeah,” she said absently, “I guess that makes you motivationally transparent.”
“Come on,” Royce said, drawing self-righteousness from a renewed empathy with his role, “what kind of night school did you go to that taught you motivational transparence and no biology?”
“Hmph,” she said, “all of them.”
“Well,” Royce pouted, “my testosterone has been on ice for over two years.”
The packet had been torn from a picture magazine and cleverly folded into an envelope. She carefully opened it until it lay in a flat, colorful square on the table, about three inches on a side. An extremely thin line of beige powder lay along an inch and a half of the central crease.
“And I can eat better than I can do anything else,” Royce said sullenly, eyeing the square of paper. “Is there anything there?”
“In a little while, you can tell me.” With a knife she scraped about two-thirds of the powder onto the crease in the aluminum foil, thinning it out until the new line was about two inches long and evenly distributed. “Now watch me, Royce,” she said.
“With pleasure,” he said.
She held the aluminum foil folded in a slight V and made a couple of gentle passes beneath it with a butane lighter, closely watching the powder in the crease. The passes slowed. On the last one, a curl of thick smoke lifted from one end of the line of powder and followed the passage of the flame beneath the foil to the other end of the line, consuming the powder as it went. Her nose hovered about six inches above, and the smoke entered its flaring nostrils as she inhaled steadily, gently. Her nose followed the rising smoke across the sheet of aluminum foil until the smoke was gone. The lighter snapped off. Colleen inhaled deeply, held the breath, then sighed with satisfaction. Very little smoke came out with the exhalation.
