He waves his hand. “See, you want to know — that day? Let me tell you. That day I’s hanging out at the happy shop ‘cause the crumbcrushers at home, five and six year old, they driving me nuts all the time. You know how it is. So I’s feeling good when I get back. Fry us up a mess of chicken wings. She puts the critters to bed. I’m busting suds in the kitchen, next thing I know she’s having at me with the bread knife. The fucking bread knife. She’s all, ‘You drunk, irresponsible … leave me with the kids … never know …’ That shit. So of course, I’m gonna do what?”
“Of course,” I say.
“Now, your mayor, he can get with that, right? You tell him. I done my nickel. That oughtta be enough.”
“Jim Washington,” I say. “Did you know him? Can you tell me anything about him?”
“Fuck. You heard of Karla Faye Tucker, right? They send a sweet piece like her down to Hell — Little Miss, just like you, Jerry Falwell, God, and shit in her corner — what shot I got? You wasting my time.”
I try to imagine my daddy as someone like him: scared, belligerent, improvising moment to moment just to save his neck. I try to see this man sitting bravely at a lunch counter — a tabletop similar to the one separating us now? — carrying the banner of civil rights. Suddenly, in this sad, stale room, filled with curses and last-minute pleas, the world seems lost, jerry-rigged, hopeless. Does it matter that we “won our rights”? We’ll lose them again if we don’t keep fighting, and who has the strength to stick? Does it matter what my daddy was like? He’s gone. We’ll all soon be gone.
“Hunnert and twenty-seven,” Elias says.
I shrug.
“Hunnert and twenty-seven.”
“What about it?”
“Number of poor willies George W. murdered since moving into the governor’s mansion. Regular slaughterhouse. What you gonna do about it? Can you fucking help me?’
I rise. The chair scrape echoes dully off the walls. “I’m not going to do anything about it,” I say, turn, and nod at a grinning CO to let me out of the room.
On the outside path the red-haired guard and I pass a cluster of cons in blue T-shirts and sweatpants taking their exercise on the other side of the fence. One rushes forward — he looks no more than twenty — asks me, “Are you anywhere, know’m say’n? I’m jonesing, babe, swear to God. Anything, anything at all.” Another calls, “Hey mink! Hey bitch! I got it for you right here!” He clutches his crotch. “Ain’t a thang! Even got us some raincoats!” He pulls a package of condoms from his pants. Behind him, an armed CO yells, “Shaadap, girlie!”
Red-head mumbles, “OI’ Satan’s a silent partner in the ownership of some folks, eh?”
As I leave the admin building and head to my car I’m thinking Straight lines; Evil travels in straight lines. I’m cold despite the heat. My bones feel soft. I have to turn and go back. I’ve forgotten to ask for my purse.
Off-duty COs crowd the café tables. Sweat rings wilt their cotton shirts. White guards in one part of the room, blacks in the other. A young brother says, “One thing I learned about white dudes. You can hang with ‘em long as no ladies around. Soon as poon’s on the scene, the whole deal just freezes up.”
“—don’t want to work,” an ofay shouts at his buddies. “You’ve seen ‘em.”
Barbara hands me the sugar jar. I stir my coffee, brush my bottom lip with my pinky. “Dirt,” I whisper. She cleans herself. “Thank you,” she says.
Kwako sighs. “Hard to figger. Always seemed a reasonable man to me. Lockup must put you through some changes.”
“Oh, he changed before that,” Barbara says. “Or he wouldn’t be in lockup to begin with.”
“Anyways, I’m sorry you didn’t get what you needed.”
I nod. “Thanks for coming with me.” The coffee fails to steady my nerves. The laughter, the flamboyant gestures of bragging men, the shifting, suspicious eyes in the room … we all ought to be locked up, protected from our own ugliness. The smell of pickles from Kwako’s half-eaten sandwich turns my stomach.
“What’s a six-letter word for ‘resistant’?” Barbara asks, tapping her pen on the table.
Driving through town, we pass the compound where Elias will receive a lethal injection a month from now: a dark, straight wall topped with razor wire. Behind it, peaked roofs and banks of curtained windows. At the base of the wall, scrappy flowers lie in wet clumps beside torn posterboards, remnants from a march against an earlier execution.
Back on the highway, Barbara and Kwako snooze. I pass the blueberry fields. A white-suited hoe squad chops weeds beneath the brambles, watched closely by armed, sunburned deputies. I doubt the land here has changed much in eighty years — the developers haven’t planted flags yet — nor has the treatment of prisoners. I imagine Cletus Hayes, feet shackled, stabbing the ground with a shovel. Behind him — behind me; I concentrate hard and on comes the mask; the hypnotic shuffling of chains, steady waves drawing me back, back — behind me, a fat guard in a Stetson brandishes a polished Springfield, just like the ones we use in the army. He yells, “Faster, boy! This rate, won’t be enough flavor in that sweet blueberry ice cream I’ll be licking later. Meantime, you’ll be drinking your piss in the brig!” My spine burns like kindling. Eyes itch. Whenever this asshole says “ice cream,” my mouth waters and I think of children eating, skipping, sailing kites — the kids Sarah Morgan has dreamed of with me. I think of her and the seed I’ve planted in her womb. I ponder generations, the world continuing without me. I can’t grasp the enormousness of it all. I look up at the mule-cart road, imagine it paved in the future, a sleek new jitney jingling by, ferrying — who? A light-skinned young woman, perhaps. My great-granddaughter, glancing out at the fields, trying to picture me here, her color — vanilla, with just a trace of berries if you look real close — her confusion, her advantages a consequence of my having been in the world, of having been a man in the world, for all this country’s attempts to tear me down. I lift my shovel — anh! anh! — and bust the earth’s dirty lip.
13
BITTER SAYS Grady died peacefully in his sleep — though apparently he was sleeping in a vacant lot at the time. Drunk in the middle of the day.
“Doc says liver failure.” Bitter rubs his eyes. “Well. It ain’t like we didn’t see it coming.”
Like your heart? I nearly ask.
“I on’y wish he coulda been comfy in the mud-dauber shack. Got word ‘bout an hour after you’d left for Huntsville. Tried to call Ariyeh on that fancy new phone you give me, but I couldn’t figure out the buttons.”
“I’m sorry, Uncle.”
“Regulars down at Etta’s pitching in to give him a proper burying. Can you take me to the coffin shop?”
The funeral home is on Navigation Boulevard, next to a Mexican restaurant. With its sandy stones of various brown shades and a tall chimney, it looks like a spotted giraffe. A sign by its entrance says the place specializes in shipping deceased immigrants back to Mexico, Europe, and Asia.
Inside, a tape of soft, slow harpsichord music augmented by a recording of water, wind, and birdsong competes with a loud air-conditioner in the front window. Dim lights in cheap tin frames — imitation gaslamps — cast a jaundiced glow from the white walls onto a deep red carpet. By the door, a small window has been covered with Saran Wrap poorly dyed to resemble stained glass.