by Joe Derkacht
“Hey, fool,” Jaime called to him. “I picked your trash off the floor.”
“So what?”
“You owe me, bro,” Jaime said cheerfully.
“Yeah, I owe you a real big thanks,” he replied sarcastically. “Thanks! See? I paid you. You want more? Thanks, ya freakin’ spick! You satisfied?” His voice trailed off in curses.
“That’s okay, hombre, I’ll just take it out of your hide later on.”
“I’m reading my mail. You know what reading is, don’t you?”
“Hey, that’s pretty good, comin’ from the gringo who don’t even know his own name. I almost laughed, ha-ha.”
Mark John cursed Jaime and turned back to Mertie’s letter, his lips soundlessly forming each word. He’d never been much of a reader, probably because of being jumped from school to school as a child, when school was in the picture at all, and he hated being interrupted. Any interruption forced him to start over from the beginning, like one of those people who learns a sales spiel by rote and can’t pick up from where he left off.
“Says here your bro, he’s doing okay, Duane, if you believe this newspaper clipping.”
Mark John rolled out of his bunk and landed on his feet. He jammed his forearm against Jaime’s windpipe. “I’m tryin’ to read!”
A clamor rose from the adjoining cells, men hollering approval.
Jaime, shorter but much stockier, made quick work of throwing him off. He sprang from his bunk and pinned him to the cell bars. Mark John gasped for air, eyes bulging, as Jaime returned the favor of a forearm against the windpipe.
“I don’t think you comprendé, hermano,” he snarled. “You touch me, I’ll kill ya!”
At last, seeing him start to lose consciousness, he released his grip and let him fall to the floor. Men hooted in appreciation from their cells and screamed for blood. A guard approached, and Jaime retreated to his bunk.
The guard stopped, eyed Mark John lying in a heap and glanced at Jaime, his face to the cell wall.
“Looks like you need to pick up your trash, Señor Gutierrez,” he said.
“Si,” Jaime replied.
“Como se dice trash in español?” The guard asked.
There was a smile in Jaime’s reply. “Basura.”
“So pick up the basura, ya spick.”
“Si, Capitan.”
Grinning, the guard continued his walk, and Jaime arose from his bunk. He crouched over Mark John, fists threatening. “Hey gringo, if I have to pick you off the floor--”
Mark John grunted, struggling to his feet and backing away by inches. As always, there was nowhere to run to in a 6x10 cell, where bunk beds, a desk with seat attached, and a toilet and sink took up most of the room.
Jaime sat down on his bunk and nonchalantly picked up the newspaper clipping. “Says here they think your bro will be muy famoso one of these days.”
Uncowed by Jaime’s threats, he glared from where he stood, his back to the cell bars.
“You better learn to handle that temper of yours,” Jaime said, dropping his exaggerated accent. “Unless, maybe you want somebody to kill you?”
“Why you readin’ my mail?” Mark John shot back.
“This your mail?” He asked, holding up the discarded envelope addressed to Duane McIlhenny. “Your name Duane McIlhenny instead of Mark John Davies like you’re always sayin’?”
He scowled and looked away.
“Every week the same, Duh-wayne. Mail comes, you throw it away. Why not throw away the packages this McIlhenny cow is always sending you, let me have ’em?”
“Name’s not Duane,” he muttered.
Jaime waved the newspaper clipping Mark John had ignored when pulling the letter from the envelope.
“There’s half a page here about somebody who looks just like you, except he wears an eye patch and uses crutches--a regular Long John Silver.”
“Don’t know nothin’ about it.”
“’Cause you’re too stupid, Duane,” he taunted. “You’re stuck in here, fool, and he’s out there, people comin’ from everywhere to look at what he can do with his hands. Statues all around--says here two of his statues were sold to help build a church, man.”
“Do you think I care, ya dumb Mexican?” Mark John said, swearing at him and climbing back up into the top bunk.
“Madre Mia!”
“What now?” Mark John demanded.
“Says here your hermano is deaf, dumb, and blind.”
“He’s not my hermano.”
“All that and he’s still smarter than you,” Jaime added. “Pretty funny, when somebody’s circled his picture and written your brother on it.”
“Crazy old broad who says she’s my mother sends me that stuff all the time.”
Jaime laughed scornfully. “Have it your way, hermano.”
“I’m not your hermano,” Mark John muttered, turning back to his letter. He would have to start all over again.
Feb. 26
Dear Marky John,
This is your Mama writing to you. I know you don’t know, but this is the hardest thing I ever had to say in my whole life, honey. I just hope you will understand and accept what I have to say. I never thought a person could change--
He frowned at the word change. He had heard that kind of talk before. To his mind, it was a code word. Now what scam was she dreaming up? He concentrated again on her scrawl.
--but since Jesus healed me of my cancer--
Mark John crumpled the letter into a ball and cocked his arm to throw it into the wastebasket. Only a sudden cramp restrained him, kept him from releasing the wad even as his arm went forward. Frustrated, he mashed the crumpled piece of paper flat, and slipped it under his bed sheet.
“Liar,” he muttered. She was always lying, and lying about dying from cancer wasn’t anything new. So what if she had come up with a new wrinkle, sprinkled in a little religion? Jailhouse religion, hardly a new wrinkle, something to speed her release from prison. More crap, he thought to himself. He couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t lied to him. She lied to everybody. She lied to Ol’ Bert, she lied to people she met on the street, and she lied to him. It was always the same. He didn’t know why he had ever listened to her or why he even read her letters.
“You know what, hermano?” Jaime asked.
“What?”
“You and me, we could make a lot of money off this deaf, dumb, blind bro of yours.”
“Yeah, how’s that?” He asked, rolling over in his bunk and staring down at Jaime, who lay on his back, looking up, fingers laced beneath his head.
“Me and you, hermano, when they spring us from this joint, we could dance on down to Calneh and heist a few of those statues of his. It’s not like he’s locked them away for safekeeping or nothin’.”
“Great, something to look forward to.”
“Something to think about.”
“Yeah,” Mark John said, rolling onto his back and staring up at the ceiling, featureless except for a single overhead light surrounded by a wire cage. “Yeah, right. And we do the big U-turn right back into the slammer for another ten or twelve. Smart.”
“Hey man, what are they gonna do, put you in jail for stealing a few little statues from your own brother? I don’t think so.”
Mark John let out a long stream of curses.
“You disagree with me, hombre?”
Mark John peered down at him over the edge of his bunk. “I’m in here for allegedly assaulting him and his mother. What do you think, genius?”
“Oh, hey, allegedly, hombre.” He laughed. “You allegedly in jail, too, hombre?”
“I was innocent,” Mark John said. “All I remember is walking into this house and some big nigger--” He paused, instinctively glancing around and then remembering he was in a largely white cell block. Still, he dropped his voice to explain, “Some big black monster punched my lights out. Next thing I know, I’m waking up in the hospital with
one hellacious headache and a broken arm.”
“Wow, that’s tragic.”
“Yeah. I’m the one who’s busted up, and the pigs bust me instead of the other guy.”
“So what you’re saying is, you’re innocent, right?” Jaime asked.
“Right. I’m innocent. You bet I am.”
“Wow, me too,” Jaime said. “Can you believe it, two guys in the same jail cell, both of us innocent. What do you think the odds are on that?”
Wearily, Mark John told him to shut up.
“No, hombre, I mean it!” He insisted, punching the mattress above him for emphasis. “Think about it. Everybody on the outside thinks any two guys on the inside are guilty. But when you’re inside like us, everybody knows any two guys are innocent, maybe any three or four guys, in fact.”
“Why not all of us?” Mark John muttered under his breath, as he stuck his fingers in his ears to keep the sound out. Two years in jail--two years! Nearly his second anniversary! Only six or seven more to go, if he kept his nose clean and could make early parole. Thank God he had sold all his dope before he walked into that house in Calneh. Except for that, he might have been facing life!
“You know what?” Jaime demanded, talking louder, as if knowing Mark John was trying to block out his voice.
He gave up. Six or seven more years with a cellie like Jaime would seem like life. He didn’t think he could possibly face that much more time. He would go insane for sure.
“What?”
“When we make it out, it’s not us who owes society, but society owes us. What’s a few statues compared to fifteen years of my life?”
“Yeah, I see your point.”
“Yeah, no deaf, dumb, blind cripple guy can stop me from taking what belongs to me--us, I mean, man.”
“Riighht,” Mark John agreed, feeling his eyelids grow heavier by the second. Day in, day out, it was the same old story, once in a while a variation worked in here, a variation worked in there, but essentially the same. Sometimes it was his version of the truth, or of life, sometimes it was Jaime’s, and when it came down to it, neither really mattered a hill of beans.
The painful fact was that he was caught, stuck in a cage with no real hope for escape, and the walls and bars were closing in, with Jaime in the meantime yammering incessantly, driving him ever closer to the edge.
****
Chapter 42
Embarked upon her daily walk (the best possible exercise for most folks, being low impact and not meant to set her heart racing until it should be nigh ready to explode), Stella gave up three-quarters of the way around the block, exhausted as much spiritually as she was physically. It was a mistake not to have waited for Ioletta, who, ever since her notion to diet a long year ago, had done laps around the neighborhood each day like it was a march around the walls of Jericho. Luckily, the decaying but lovely old pergola across from Alliance Baptist Church offered Stella Jo a place of refuge. As weak as she was, she still didn’t wish to have anyone find her laid out on the sidewalk or in the gutter. She collapsed in the shade of the pergola’s intertwining Scuppernong vines, vines planted by the late Jacob Ayers’ great-granddaddy a decade before the opening shots of the Civil War. It was difficult to remember having ever been well, of having ever felt good. Her first bout with leukemia a year ago (only a year!) and its wasting effects seemed to have blended in with this latest bout, like competing ocean waves meeting in the middle and overrunning each other.
In reality the day was bright, warm, and humid, more like Calneh in early fall than in early March, but the world seemed to be closing in around her, her vision progressively tunnel-like, perhaps preparatory to the confines of a pine box? Elbows on knees, she wept into her hands, unable to recall when life had been anything but a struggle. Memories of Angel’s botched delivery, of Duane’s kidnapping, of Leonard’s grief-stricken death, stormed to the surface, and behind them blew the storm of Mark John Davies’ sudden appearance, his Duane-self long-obliterated, his curses when it was revealed she was his mother.
“That’s all she wrote,” was what the prison guard had said. She could certainly believe that now. Every week, sometimes twice a week, she sent a note to Duane at the State Penitentiary. Every week, six days a week, she expected to hear from him, to find a letter in her mailbox. Every week, six days a week (seven, when sufficiently obsessed to try the mailbox on Sundays, hoping she’d overlooked it Saturday), she was disappointed. He would never answer her letters, never admit that she was his mother and that he was her son.
God could care, she could care, friends and neighbors could care. But if Duane didn’t care? What use was it for all of them to care, when Duane didn’t care? He had a mind and will of his own and the prerogative to believe what he wanted to believe. If he didn’t want to believe, to admit to the truth, then he didn’t have to do it, no matter how much evidence stared him in the face. She couldn’t will him to do otherwise, and as much as she might wish it, neither could anyone else.
That’s all she wrote. In a few weeks she would be dead, and then it really would be all she wrote.
If you carry me, I’ll carry you.
Stella’s pulse quickened. Trucks rumbled by, children screamed and laughed in their street games, and a breeze ruffled her grape-leaf cocoon. Had she really heard that familiar inner voice?
If you carry me, I’ll carry you.
What do you mean, Lord? She prayed silently. It was ridiculous. The docs had nearly killed her with chemo and radiation and stolen her spleen besides (she was still bitter about her spleen even if she didn’t know what the thing was supposed to do). She was too sick to carry an infant, much less Him. Giggles might have surfaced, except that the story of Sarah’s laughter at the promise of Isaac came flooding into her mind.
“Can I have a nickel?” Piped a child’s voice.
“Can I have a nickel?” Echoed an equally childish voice.
Stella leaned back against leafy grape vines, wishing she could see the faces attached to the two voices, which had come from no more than a few yards behind her, but felt strenthless, as Ioletta would have put it, to stand to her feet. The first voice she’d heard was Tweetybirdish, a girl’s, she thought, the second a boy’s voice, though little deeper than the first.
“You want a nickel, go out in the street and holler for a pickle!” Shouted the boy.
“I’m hungry!” Another voice cried shrilly.
Other voices chimed in. “Go out in the street and holler for a pickle! Ya’ll get yer nickel!”
“Holler for a pickle! Holler for a pickle! Ya want yer nickel?”
Smiling wearily to herself, Stella peered out beyond the latticework archway. Hollering for a pickle was something her Leonard had teased the boys with when they were young tykes. Across the street, men were trimming Alliance Baptist’s new building in stone. She wished one of them would see to the shrill, hectoring voices. But it was impossible to worry a man about a children’s game when he was in the middle of his work. Men seemed inured to shrill voices, whether a little girl’s or a wife’s. Especially a wife’s, as she recalled.
Her cane in hand, she checked the knot on her scarf before venturing back onto the sidewalk. Children tended to scatter, if the scarf fell away from her bald head. Maybe her hollow eyes frightened them, too. You would not have recognized her any more than friends who had not seen her in the past few months, aghast when they ran across her at Piggly Wiggly or the Rexall store or during one of their thrice yearly visits to church.
There were four children dancing and hollering around two waifs. When the four saw Stella, looming over them as if a ghost had appeared from thin air, they scattered with shrieks of terror. She felt stares from across the street, where the men labored upon their scaffolding. The remaining two urchins (that being the word, other than waifs, that came to mind, rising unbidden from a buried memory of Dickens) gazed at her with serious, hungry eyes. Please sir, MORE! Something told her
that these two children were all too familiar with illness, too familiar to be frightened by her appearance like the neighborhood children, who saw her weekly and still reacted as though scared out of their wits.
The two children were dirty and dressed in dirtier rags. A girl of no more than five or six years of age held a little boy perhaps three years old. The fact that the children were of indeterminate race, though their hair was both kinky and dirty blonde and standing on end, was irrelevant to her, as was their ripe smell.
“It’s lunchtime, children,” Stella said, gesturing for them to follow. Whatever you do to the least one of these, you do unto Me. The Voice had said, If you carry me, I’ll carry you, but it didn’t enter her head that she should take its meaning literally, and in any case she could not have carried either child. Behind her, little feet hesitated only momentarily.
Stella moved slowly, steadying herself with her cane, lacking the strength to walk faster.
“Are you sick, lady?”
“Yes, honey, I am,” she said, glancing toward the little girl, who now walked beside her little brother, holding his hand. “It’s not the kind of sickness you can catch from someone else.”
The girl’s eyes were big, serious, and blue, with long, fair eyelashes. “What you have?” She asked.
“Leukemia.” Just another word for death.
“Oh,” the little girl answered back. “Moms died from cancer.” Evidently, the time for crying about it was in the past; no tears streaked her thin, grimy face.
“My name is Stella. What’s yours, honey?”
“Miss Theron,” she said. “And my brother is Mr. Luke, though I just call him Lukey.”
“Well, Miss Theron, I hope you and Mr. Luke are fond of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”
It seemed they were, for they smiled at each other and smacked their lips, smacking them still as they arrived at Stella’s gate, their eyes growing in wonder as they spied the statues in the yard and the pirate-eyed man balanced on a wooden stool, hammering away at a block of stone. Hearing their bright, twittering voices, Angel was quick to lay down his tools and grab up his elbow crutches.
#
Ioletta stood in the kitchen doorway, a letter in each hand, one brought straight from Stella’s mailbox, the other from her own.
