“Mr. Mac.” Schwartz’s head popped up just as Blanchard’s had when he’d wanted to catch Lloyd at something, only this time it was Lloyd who had caught Schwartz in a lie.
Schwartz began giving Lloyd tests. Lloyd was worried that he might fail them, but he didn’t say anything; he had already gotten the impression that this man thought he was stupid. But it was the tests that were stupid. First Schwartz asked him about a million yes-or-no questions. Everything from “Do you think your life isn’t worth living?” (no) to “Do you ever see things that aren’t there?” (sometimes, in the woods). Then came the pictures. One showed a man and a boy standing in opposite corners of a room. At first Lloyd just said what he saw. But this wasn’t good enough. Schwartz said he had to interpret it. “Tell me what you think is going to happen next,” he said. When Lloyd looked at it closely, he figured the boy had done something wrong and was about to get a good belt-whipping. Schwartz seemed pleased by this. Finally, and strangest of all, Schwartz showed him some blobs of ink and asked him to make something out of them. If Schwartz hadn’t been so serious, Lloyd would have thought it was a joke. But when he studied them (Schwartz had used that word — “interpret” — again), Lloyd could see all different kinds of faces and animals, as he had when he’d talked to Sheriff Lynch about his knife and shears.
It took only one little thing to tell him what the sheriff thought about this testing.
One morning the sheriff walked Lloyd down the hallway without a word, and when he unlocked the door to the white room, he stepped back, held it open, and swooped his hand in front of Lloyd like a colored doorman.
“Mr. Dogget,” he said, for the first time making fun of Lloyd in some secret way.
The sheriff turned and let the door close without so much as a glance at Schwartz. Lloyd wanted to apologize to the sheriff. He was beginning to understand that it came down to this: the worse the sheriff looked, the better he, Lloyd, looked. He felt he was betraying the sheriff, with the help of this strange, foul-mouthed little man. Schwartz seemed to see everything upside down. When Lloyd had told him about Mr. Mac, even though Schwartz said it must have been awful, Lloyd could tell that in some way he was pleased. When he told Schwartz about times when a lot of hours passed without his knowing it, like when he’d sat with that sheep, or about drinking at least a canteen of Mr. Mac’s white lightning every day for the past few years, Schwartz began scribbling and shooting questions at him. Same thing with the pills and reefer and acid and speed he’d done in his twenties. Even the gas huffing when he was just a kid. Lloyd felt dirty remembering all of it. Schwartz wanted details. Lloyd could almost see Schwartz making designs out of what he told him, rearranging things to make him look pitiful.
“I don’t want to do no testin’ today,” Lloyd said as soon as the door had shut. He sat and leaned back in his chair, arms dangling, chest out.
“Okay,” Schwartz said. “What do you want to do?”
“I been thinkin’,” Lloyd said. “It don’t make no difference if I was drunk or not. That don’t excuse what I did.”
“But you don’t know what you did.”
“That don’t make no difference. They got the proof.”
“They have evidence, Lloyd, not proof.”
Another bunch of upside-down words. “But if I can’t remember it, then ain’t what they got better than what I can say?”
“Lloyd,” Schwartz said, his head in his hands, massaging his bald spot. “We’ve been over this about every time we’ve talked. I know that it doesn’t make common sense at first. But our criminal-justice system — that misnomer — is predicated upon the idea of volition. It means you have to commit a crime with at least an inkling of intention. You can’t be punished in the same way when you don’t have any idea what you’re doing.”
This kind of talk made Lloyd’s head ache. “All I know,” he said, “is I don’t want to go foolin’ around with truth. It’s like the sheriff says — I got to get right with myself and be a man.”
“The sheriff says this?” Schwartz’s head popped up.
Lloyd nodded.
“Do you talk to the sheriff often?”
“I been knowing Sheriff Lynch since forever. He’s like my daddy.”
“But do you talk to him? How often do you talk to him?”
“Every chance I get.” Lloyd felt queasy. He knew he’d said something he shouldn’t have. But his pride in his friendship with the sheriff, perhaps because it was imperiled, drove him to exaggerate. “When we come from my cell, mostly. But any time I want, really. I can call on him any time.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be talking to him about your case,” Schwartz said.
“And why not?”
“Because anything — anything — you say to him becomes evidence. As a matter of fact, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to talk to him at all.”
“So who’m I gonna talk to? Myself? You?”
For the next couple of days the sheriff didn’t speak to Lloyd unless Lloyd spoke to him first. Schwartz must have done something. But the sheriff never looked at him hard or seemed angry. He mainly kept his words short and his eyes on the floor, as if he was sad and used to his sadness. Lloyd wanted to tell him how he was trying to get right but it was hard. Eventually Lloyd realized that even if he said this, the sheriff probably wouldn’t believe him. If he were trying to get right, then he wouldn’t be letting this Schwartz character make him look pitiful. Each morning Lloyd rose early, dressed, and rubbed his palms to dry them as he sat on the edge of his bunk, waiting. When he walked in front of the sheriff down the hallway to the white room, Lloyd could feel the sheriff’s eyes taking him in. He tried to stand up straight and walk with manly strides, but the harder he tried, the smaller and more bent over he felt. He was careful not to wrinkle his prison outfit, pressing it at night between his mattress and a piece of plywood the sheriff had given him for his back. He combed his hair as best he could without a mirror.
At night Lloyd lay on his bunk and thought about Schwartz. Of course, Schwartz had tricked him into more tests. Next they were going to take pictures of his brain. Lloyd studied Schwartz’s words: “volition,” “interpret,” “diminished responsibility.” They all meant you couldn’t be punished for your mistakes. This didn’t square with Lloyd; he had been punished for plenty of mistakes. That was what Mr. Mac had punished him for; that was what the sheep died of. When you missed one on a head count and it got lost and fell into a ravine; when you forgot to give one a vaccination and it got sick, like the one that had died before Lloyd was taken away, you were punished. But how could he expect Schwartz, a womanish city boy, to understand this?
On one side were Schwartz and the law, and on the other were the sheep and God and the earth and Sheriff Lynch and Mr. Mac and everything else Lloyd had ever known. Who was he to go against all that — to hide from that terrible, swift sword the Almighty would wield on the Final Day? His fear was weak and mortal; it drove him out of his cell to plot with this fellow sinner to deceive God. Some nights Lloyd moaned in agony at the deceit of his life. For in his pride he had latched onto the notion that since he could not remember his gravest sins (and he believed they were all true, they must be true), he should not have to pay for them in this life. Oh, he would pay for them in eternity, but he flinched at paying here. What upside-down thinking! What cowardice in the face of sins that were probably darker, cloaked as they were in his drunken forgetting, than any he could have committed when he had “volition,” as Schwartz called it. Because Lloyd did not know his sins, he could not accept his punishment; but for the same reason they seemed to him unspeakably heinous.