He’s trying to reassure me. “Terrell, I thought years ago you might be innocent. And I did nothing. You have every right to hate me.”
“If you can’t remember, why are you so sure it wasn’t me who took you that night?”
“The killer keeps planting black-eyed Susans for me. The first time was three days after you were convicted.” I offer Terrell a pretend smile. “It’s OK if you think I’m crazy. I would.” I do.
“I don’t think you’re crazy. Evil sneaks up on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches. I know that ain’t the way the poem goes. It’s supposed to be fog on little cat feet. Fog. Evil. It works either way. You usually can’t see the headlights comin’ at you until it’s too late.”
I blink away the image of this giant on a cot reciting a Carl Sandburg poem, trying not to listen to men scratching up the walls like cats.
“When I first saw you,” Terrell is saying, “you were sitting in the box in that pretty blue dress, shaking so hard I thought you might shatter to pieces. I saw my daughters sitting there.”
“That’s why you didn’t look at me,” I say slowly. There had been such debating back and forth over The Blue Dress. Everyone had an opinion. Mr. Vega, Benita, the doctor, Lydia, even Aunt Hilda. The lace was itchy, but I never told anybody. When I testified, I had to casually flick my hand at my neck and my shoulders to make sure I wasn’t really crawling with bugs. The Blue Dress was nothing Tessie would ever wear in real life. The hem should hit her just slightly above the knees so the jury can see the brace on her ankle. Not too sexy. She’s going to wear the brace, right? Can we gather in the waist to emphasize that she’s still pretty much skin and bones? The color makes her look a little bit yellow, but I think that’s good.
“I wasn’t going to make it worse for you.” Terrell’s voice brings me back. He’s grinning. “I’m a pretty ugly man.”
A guard rattles the cage at Terrell’s back. “Gotta go, Terrell. Closing early.”
“A man’s going down tonight,” Terrell tells me matter-of-factly. “The Row’s always extra-tense when a man’s going down. This is the second time this month.” Terrell is rising while he speaks into the receiver. His broad body fills the window, softer and rounder than I expected. “It took real guts for you to come here, Tessie. I know you’re tied up about this. Remember what I said. When I die, let it go.”
My stomach dances with sudden panic. This is it.
The words are boiling up in a desperate rush. “I’m going to testify again if they’ll give you a hearing. Bill is a terrific lawyer. He really believes there is… some hope. Especially now, with the DNA results on the red hair. It’s not mine, of course.” I pull a copper strand over my ear.
Terrell knows every bit of this already. Bill has already spent an hour with him. He’s nearby, finishing up the habeas appeal on his laptop. All the other things Bill hoped might come through to bolster the appeal haven’t.
“Yeah, Billy’s a good boy. Never met a more Lord-guided man who doesn’t believe one inch in the Lord. I’ve still got a little time to change his mind.” Terrell winks. “Take care of yourself, Tessie. Let it go.” And he hangs up.
I’m frozen to the plastic chair. It seems like everything has been neatly decided with that final click of the receiver. Terrell’s fate. Mine.
He leans over and touches a finger to the glass in a direct line with my moon scar. It begins to throb. A Susan, tapping. He’s too good to be true, too good to be true.
His mouth is moving. I’m panicking. I can’t hear through the glass.
He repeats it a second time, carefully forming the words.
“You know who it is.”
Bill didn’t want to bring me here tonight, but I insisted. We are only a few hundred yards from the infamous Death House unit known as “The Walls,” where Terrell informed me just hours earlier that a man was going down. The Walls is a quaint, stately old building too tired to sigh. It’s been witnessing death by rope and electricity, gunfire and poison, for more than a century.
Next door, there’s a small white frame house with a neatly covered barbecue grill on the front porch. Embracing the other side, a church.
Terrell is lying in his cell a few miles away in the Wynne Unit on Death Row, about to put away his reading. Bill has told me that even with lockdown and lights out, Terrell will know before we do if tonight’s execution has been carried out.
When I ask how that can be, he shrugs. The prisoners have their ways.
Tiny ice pellets crackle on my jacket. I pull up my hood. We won’t be allowed inside. We are merely voyeurs.
I’ve breathed in the dust of my premature grave, but I’ve never felt anything as oppressive as the weight of this air. It’s as if a dying factory threw up death, spewing plumes of grief and misery, hope and inevitability. The hope is what makes it seethe. I wonder how far I’d have to run to get away from this toxic cloud. Where its filmy edges end. Two blocks from the death chamber? A mile? If I peered down from space, would it be smothering the whole town?
Huntsville is a mythical place that I had all wrong. In my mind, Huntsville was a single house of horrors. A giant slab of concrete in the middle of nowhere where the state of Texas locks up Things that deserve to die. Where stuff happens that you don’t ever, ever need to know about unless it’s on a big screen with Tom Hanks.
That’s what Lydia’s father, a big fan of Tom Hanks and the revengeful philosophy of Deuteronomy, always told us.
I was badly misinformed. Huntsville is not just one badass prison but seven scattered around the area. The death house that looms in front of us in the waning light doesn’t sit in the middle of nowhere.
It’s a 150-year-old redbrick building with a clock tower where time has literally stopped. It’s located two blocks off the quaint courthouse square, in the middle of town. People are downing chicken-fried steak and strawberry cake right now at the city’s best restaurant, within easy eyesight of The Walls.
The cops are casually roping off the front of the prison with crime scene tape. We are within shouting distance of a windowless corner of the building, where the execution will take place.
I’m trying not to let Bill know how bothered I am by all of this matter-of-fact efficiency. It started right away, when Bill easily slid his car into a spot at the side of the brick prison wall and shouted up to the guard on the roof to ask if it was OK to park there. She shouted back, “Sure,” like it was a middle school basketball game.
The Fors and the Againsts are obediently positioning themselves on opposite sides of the building, with four hundred yards between them, fighters in a ring who will never meet.
So civilized. So uncivilized. So casual.
A few Texas Rangers stand idly by, watching the small but slowly gathering crowd. No one appears concerned there will be trouble. Two Spanish television crews are setting up for live shots, while the rest of the press corps is composed of dark heads in a lit building across from the prison. A group of Mexican women are kneeling beside a blown-up portrait of the condemned, singing in Spanish. Two-thirds of the anti-death-penalty crowd is Mexican. The other third is mostly white, old, resigned, and quiet.
Tonight, a Mexican national is going to be executed for pumping three bullets into the head of a Houston cop. And then, in nineteen days, it’s Terrell. And then a guy who hit his pizza delivery girl in the head with a baseball bat, and then a man who participated in the gang rape and murder of a mentally challenged girl on a lonely road. And on and on.