Crouching over the water, he looked before him at rivets studding the metal wall, their green heads flaking to bare primer the color of cherries. The sink was spilling over. Dizziness circled his vision, and he leaned on the basin and rested his knee on the metal toilet that jutted left from the same clogged pipe that served the sink.
The noise of heavy shoes and the cries of prisoners, the screech of buckets on the catwalk, the whanging of steel gates, the slosh of water against bulkheads — men swearing and ruining mops against iron bars — all of this was so like the atmosphere of a large seagoing vessel that the two experiences, penal and naval, blended for a moment in Bill Houston’s perception and he tried to cling to the idea that he might only be assigned temporarily below decks.
In Pearl Harbor he’d wandered once through a destroyer in drydock — the choked and baking Somerville, out of San Diego — and loose inside it, he’d been deeply alienated from its haunted stationary silence, its failure to live by moving. That afternoon he’d been a trespasser in a forbidden sepulchre, a sailor on a ship on dry land, helpless to travel or float or do anything but walk away on two legs, leaving whatever errand had brought him to that place unaccomplished. And now he felt the same, but he couldn’t depart. They had him this time. After this time there would be no other
When the guards came to make him presentable and bring him out temporarily among free people, he refused the razor they offered. “It’s your face,” the fat guard said, and handed him a shirt, and the other fat guard gave him back his boots. They were both fat. They flanked him enormously as the three of them proceeded along the gauntlet of cages to the control unit of A-wing of the Maricopa County Jail’s main building. The prisoners they passed were silent, casting their gazes to the right or left of Bill Houston, but all attended his passage with a frozen zeal that they could hardly disguise and that he had never witnessed in any men anywhere. “I stepped in some shit this time, didn’t I?” he told the guards. He was perspiring in the mechanically refrigerated air, and he wanted them to fool around a little, the way guards always fooled around. But they were alarmed, too, by the uniform ice-quiet of men who normally reacted with vocal interest and derision to their comings and goings, and so they kept quiet themselves.
They took him handcuffed through doors and corridors into a pre-war section of the building which smelled of fresh paint, and then down a hallway strewn with dropcloths and stepladders. The painters working there said hello and chatted with the guards as they passed. It eased Bill Houston’s mind to know that in some circles he remained anonymous. When they ushered him into a spacious conference room still in the midst of its remodeling, where two overhead fans revolved wearily in the ceiling and a workman’s radio played softly, he looked at his lawyer for the first time. It was the same lawyer Bill Houston had always been saddled with — about five-six, round glasses and mustache, western string tie, a public defender looking twelve or thirteen and clutching a plastic briefcase with probably nothing inside of it. Bill Houston sat down across the table from him and said, “I can’t get up no confidence in you.”
“If you could afford fancy counsel, you wouldn’t be here,” the lawyer said. “I’m assuming that. I’m assuming you’re a person who doesn’t like to kill people. I’m assuming you wanted money and that you didn’t want blood. I’m assuming you’re not homicidal.”
“I’m not,” Bill Houston said. “We didn’t mean it.”
“That’s what we’re going to convince the jury of. We’re going to convince them you’re stupid and tragic, but basically a nice guy.”
“How’s my brother?”
“Which one?”
“There ain’t but one involved here. James.”
“James is alive. He may need more surgery later. Burris is now involved. He’s in custody, too, over in the Annex, and so is a man named Dwight David Snow. Nobody wanted to talk to me, but my guess is probably James gave them up.”
“No way.” Bill Houston shut his jaw tightly against a sudden feeling he might cry in front of his lawyer.
“He was hurt pretty badly, William.”
“Can we cop a plea or something? What’s your name?”
The lawyer looked tired. “I’m Samuel Fredericks, known to everyone as Fred. Or, actually,” he admitted, “as Freddy.” He looked tired even of his name. “The prosecution is offering you this deaclass="underline" You agree to plead guilty to first-degree murder, and they’ll agree to do everything they can to execute you The Assistant DA says it’s almost like going free.”
“Shit,” Bill Houston said. “Does it hurt?”
“What?”
“Does it hurt. The gas.” Bill Houston laid his head down on his arms and felt a misery descending that made him want to puke. “If it don’t hurt, I’ll do it.” With a tentative tongue he tasted the metal of the conference table. To hear himself say “the gas” was wrenching. He was living somebody else’s life, some murderer’s. “Does it hurt?”
“You can’t imagine,” Fred said.
Across the run was some fellow who stayed in his cell’s top bunk — though nobody occupied the lower one — with his right arm flung across his eyes and the fingers of the left examining, one by one and continually until he slept, the rivets in the ceiling above his face. Bill Houston spent a great amount of his own time leaning against the bars of his cell, his own arms hanging out into the catwalk area as though he breathed through them the air of relative freedom; and he watched this man. He didn’t want to lie down because on his back he was defenseless against his thoughts — the fear that he would confront a door opening onto a gallery of faces, the loved ones of the man he had killed. That he would walk amid a crowd of officials, normal people who knew how to live their lives. He would be made to look on the dead face of his victim. He had a feeling he was going to find out something terrible about himself, something even worse than that he was a murderer, something so essentially true as to be completely unbelievable. He dreamed of witnesses. The twisted relatives behind the glass — the more they tormented him, the more vividly they themselves were agonized, and he could never pay anybody the price. It wasn’t the punishment that hurt — it was the punishment’s failure to be enough. These visions and comprehensions were no less present when he stood embracing the vertical bars of his cell, but they seemed less actual then, less likely to happen, as if by butting up against what kept him from walking freely in the world, he came to know what kept him safe from the future.
The motionlessness of his defeated neighbor across the run drove Bill Houston to activity. He walked the cell and sometimes exploded into grunting bouts of calisthenics that left him exhausted and temporarily serene. He petitioned for a pen and pad, and when his thoughts turned to Jamie he let them burn a message — three or four words a day, he was no scholar — into the page:
Seperation is painfull. I still think of you everyday. There was a flood here it was on the 2nd day after they got me — Later everybody found out it was 2 cooks — they did it on purpose & screwed up the drains in the kitchen — Hey I hope you get a chance to tell everybody Im sorry. This is beng delivered by Freddy my lawyer. Im glad James didn’t die.