Almost dark Friday night, they took me down to their dirty little reception room where I’d gone to talk to Mama a couple of times.
Friday had looked even better for me. By Tuesday it could all be over, Roger Blake had said. I smiled at the fat fucker of a guard. He stood by the door and inhaled Pall Malls, gabbed to himself, waved his cigarette.
Mary Louise slumped at the filthy cheap table, her hair hiding most of her face.
My face lit up and I reached across the table to take her hands. This time my pecker rubbed rough twill.
“Hey, you okay?”
She looked up and nodded. Her eyes were flat as slate. Like looking into a blackboard for some emotions. She was high. It was in the slope of her shoulders too, and the way her head lolled a bit too loose.
“Shit, Mary Louise, you’re fucked up. I thought you were staying at Mama’s?”
She nodded. Her hands under mine were ice-cold, the coldest thing I’d touched in weeks.
But I was too happy to let her get me down for long. So I squeezed her hands, ran my forefinger up and down her palm. My zipper close to busting.
“Roger Blake says I can walk on this. He told you that, didn’t he?” She nodded. Mumbled something. “Honey, I love you, you know that. I only wanted us together. With him gone we’ll have a good chance now. Hell, we’ll move to Norman or somewhere. Houston’s booming, they say. Okay? I’ll borrow some money and rent my own station. Shit, I’ll sell a million tires. I’m good at that. Okay?”
And on I went until the guard had a pile of butts to match my cockroaches and he slung himself over to cough out a “Let’s go, asshole.”
I stopped at the door and watched her stand and look at me and then she grinned like she used to when we’d go to a high school game together and yell till we were hoarse.
I almost leapt up the cement steps, gimpy leg and all, and swung the door shut behind me. If I’d believed a lot in God, like Mama, I d have got on my knees. Then again, I thought about how everybody really does believe. They have to, specially when things start going right. So maybe I mumbled something and went to the wall to jerk a thumb up to Willy Devereaux, the car thief. He passed over a Kool and I traded him a Winston. And we hung our hands out and inhaled deep as we could and blew smoke towards the bullshitting nigras.
His old lady’d come by with some cookies. They were store-bought but we ate a dozen apiece. And I told him about seeing Mary Louise and how we’d move to Norman. He said he knew of a closed Conoco station in town, out past the loop. We wondered about the rent.
“But you’ll have to put all that good stuff off, huh?”
“Not a bit.”
“Shee-it, man, you’re gonna do some ser’us time in them Walls.”
I took a deep breath and blew puffs of Kool toward the babbling nigras. “My lawyer’s gonna walk me right out of here. And then I’ll open up that station. Batteries, tires — look at the price of gas. Hell, station owners must be putting back a fortune.” And we talked on. He shook my hand a couple of times. Told me he could use a job someday, knew a hell of a lot about cars. “I’ll bet,” I said. And we laughed and later I laid down but didn’t sleep. Instead I jerked off twice, one right after the other, while trying to forget Mary Louise’s cold hands.
I’m Junior Jackson, remember? Remember me? So you can guess the rest.
Sure enough. Monday morning bright and early the peckerhead brings Willy Devereaux out dressed in a lime-green seersucker suit. I guess maybe lawyers have some sort of deal at Weiner’s. And Roger Blake looks at me sharply, his veins like black ink lines across his face, and I just stare at him and then back at Willy.
Willy lies like a sonofabitch of course. Has me strutting and cocky, a stone-cold murderer. The court buzzes, the old blue-haired ladies in the audience whispering hard. Blake objects and objects but the judge makes him sit down. Later Blake tears into Willy about the deal he’d struck with the D.A. All that sort of shit. But when he comes back and sits in the oak chair, he doesn’t look at me at all. Instead he takes a roll of Lifesavers from his shirt pocket and bites off one end.
And I don’t look up at the jury because I know they’re staring at me with jaws locked tight, fingers squeezing each other. I don’t look at Mary Louise because I’m afraid she’s just looking at the clock. Instead I look straight ahead at a spot about a foot under the short flagpole the American flag’s on. There’s a crack in the plaster and it looks like a river from up in a plane. A river cutting through snow. I let it carry Junior Jackson off because it’s pretty fucking plain to see that this story don’t end like old Job getting a bunch of new sheep and camels, a wife and kids. Or with the prodigal son’s homecoming feast. Or even old Jonah spit up on the beach with a new line of work.
I’ve been here six months. Roger Blake says I’ll only serve three years max. “It could have been a lot worse,” he says. He don’t need to mention it could have been a whole lot better.
Here’s what I’ve learned so far: You call nigras blacks; you can make a mean shiv out of a sharpened tablespoon; if you drop the soap in the showers, don’t bend down to pick it up.
Now there’s some revelations to take to the bank. There’s the lessons. Maybe when I get out I’ll make my living going from revival to revival. I’ll stand up at the pulpit and give the bastards my story. At the end I’ll raise my arms high over my head, my face sweating, and deliver the meaning of it all. Won’t it be fine to see their faces before the organ starts up.
Faye Kellerman
(b. I952)
Much of the work of Faye Kellerman explores the traditions of Judaism and Jewish orthodoxy as set against the vast secular society that is the United States (particularly southern California, which Raymond Chandler once defined as a foreign land). Her novels detail the alienation that is experienced even though assimilation was supposed to have taken place two or three generations back. Her characters are often bigoted and unforgiving, unable or simply unwilling to jump off the doomed roller coaster of their own hatreds once they are launched into a course of action.
Kellerman is fascinated by the plot possibilities inherent in the interplay between characters, an interest strongly demonstrated in her main series featuring Los Angeles police sergeant Pete Decker and the young widow Rina Lazarus. In Kellerman’s debut novel, The Ritual Bath (1985), Lazarus is attracted to Decker, but cannot fully fall in love with him because he is a gentile. It is then miraculously disclosed that Decker was adopted as a young child and is, in fact, a Jew. While this rather suspect, “carried-off-by-gypsies-as-a-child” plot line obviates a good deal of future character conflict in the series, it does clear the ground for other, perhaps more complex, religious conflict.
A foray into the past, The Quality of Mercy (1988), proves that Kellerman can easily handle other fictional structures. The book concerns Elizabeth I’s personal physician, Dr. Roderigo López, and his daughter, Rebecca. Lopez, who was ultimately hanged, drawn, and quartered for allegedly trying to poison his employer, may have been the template for Shakespeare’s Shylock. The finely delineated scenes of torture and violence in this book are certainly not for the squeamish. In fact, there is much that is deliberately, and necessarily, gruesome in most of Kellerman’s modern novels.