Blood circulation re-starts in my body. It's interpreted as a window of opportunity by my bowels. Thanks. My brain locks up over a crossfire of messages, but there ain't much I can do. Believe me. I grab Nuckles's handwritten physics notes from my pocket. They're all I have for ass-paper. I decide to use them, then ditch them in the den. Some bitty inkling tells me they won't be top priority when I get back to class.
On the ride back to school I'm followed, then overtaken, by a rug of time-lapse clouds, muddy like underfruits bound for the fan. You sense it in the way the breeze bastes your face, stuffs your sinus with dishcloth, ready to yank when the moment comes. Trouble has its own hormone. I look over my shoulder at the frame of a sunny day shrinking, vanishing. Ahead it's dark, and I'm late for math. It's dark, I'm late, and my life rolls toward a new alien world. I haven't figured out the old alien world, and now it's new again.
School has a stench when I get back, of sandwiches that won't be eaten, lunchboxes lovingly packed, jokingly, casually packed, that by tonight will be stale with cold tears. I'm bathed in the stench before I can turn back. I drop flat to the ground at the side of the gym and, through the shrubs, watch young life splatter through slick mucous air. When massive times come, your mind sprays your senses with ice. Not to deaden the brain, but to deaden the part that learned to expect. This is what I learn as the shots fire. The shots sound shopping-cart ordinary.
I find a lump of cloth tucked in the shadow of the gym. Jesus' shorts, the ones he keeps at the back of his locker. Somebody cut a hole in back, and painted the edges with brown marker. 'Bambi' it says above. A few feet away lies his sports bag. I grab it. It's empty, save for a half box of ammunition. I keep my eyes down, I don't look across the lawn. Sixteen units of flesh on the lawn have already given up their souls. Empty flesh buzzes like it's full of bees.
'He went for me, but got Lori…' Nuckles snakes around the corner on his belly, slugging back air in blocks. 'He said don't follow him – another gun, at Keeter's…'
One of Jesus' fingers betrayed him. He hit Lori Donner, his only other friend. I look up to the school's main entrance and spy him arched over her crumpled body, shrieking, ugly and alone. I never see his face in its likeness again. He knows what he has to do. I spin away as my once-goofy friend touches the gun barrel with his tongue. My arms reach for Nuckles, but he pulls away. I don't understand why. I stare at him. His mouth turns down at the edges, like a tragedy mask, and spit flows out. Then a chill soaks through me. I follow his eyes to the sports bag, and leftover ammunition, still tightly gripped in my hand.
twenty-two
Nuckles looks white and pasty stepping down the court aisle, his hair is reduced to clumps. You'd say he had something more than a nervous breakdown, if you saw him. He's bony and frail under his ton of make-up.
'Marion Nuckles,' says the prosecutor. 'Can you identify Vernon Gregory Little in the courtroom?'
Nuckles's sunken eyes worm through the room. They stop at my cage. Then, as if against a hurricane wind, he raises a finger to me.
'Let the record show the witness has identified the defendant. Mister Nuckles, can you confirm you were the defendant's class teacher between ten and eleven o'clock on the morning of Tuesday, May twentieth, this year?'
Nuckles's eyes swim without registering anything. He breaks into a sweat, and crumples over the railing of the witness box.
'Your honor, I must protest,' says Brian, 'the witness is in no state…'
'Shh!' says the judge. He watches Nuckles with razor eyes.
'I was there,' says Nuckles. His lips tremble, he begins to cry.
The judge flaps an urgent hand at the prosecutor. 'Get to the point!' he hisses.
'Marion Nuckles, can you confirm that at some time during that hour you gave some notes to the defendant, written in your own hand, and sent him with them on an errand, outside the classroom?'
'Yes, yes,' says Nuckles, shaking violently.
'And what happened then?'
Nuckles starts to dry retch over the railing. 'Scorned the love of Jesus – erased his perfume from across the land…'
'Your honor, please,' shouts Brian.
'Doused it all in the blood of babes…'
The prosecutor hangs suspended in time, mouth open. 'What happened?' he shouts. 'What exactly did VernonLittle do?'
'He killed them, killed them all…'
Nuckles breaks into sobs, barks them like a wolf, and from my cage in the new world I bark sobs back, pelt them through the bars like bones. My sobs ring out through both summations, spray the journey to the cells behind the courthouse, and continue through a visit from an officer who tells me the jury has retired to a hotel to consider the matter of my life or death.
Friday, twenty-first of November is a smoky day, tingling with a sense that solid matter can pass through you like air. I watch the jury foreman put on his glasses and lift a sheet of paper to his face. Mom couldn't make it today, but Pam came by with Vaine Gurie and Georgette Porkorney. Vaine is frowning, and seems a little slimmer. George's ole porcelain eyes roll around the room, she distracts herself with other thoughts. She trembles a little. You ain't allowed to smoke in here. And look at Pam. When I catch her eye, she makes a flurry of gestures that seem to describe us eating a hearty meal together, soon. I just look away.
'Mr Foreman, has the jury reached a verdict?'
'We have, sir.'
The court officer reads out the first charge to the jury. 'How do you find the defendant – guilty, or not guilty?'
'Not guilty,' says the foreman.
'On the second count of murder, that of Hiram Salazar in Lockhart, Texas – how do you find the defendant, guilty or not guilty?'
'Not guilty.'
My heart beats through five not guilties. Six, seven, nine, eleven. Seventeen not guilties. The prosecutor's lips curl. My attorney sits proud in his chair.
'On the eighteenth count of murder in the first degree, that of Barry Enoch Gurie in Martirio, Texas – how do you find the defendant, guilty or not guilty?'
'Not guilty,' says the foreman.
The officer reads a list of my fallen school friends. The world holds its breath as he looks up to ask the verdict.
The jury foreman's eyes twitch, then fall.
'Guilty.'
Even before he says it, I feel departments in the office of my life start to close up shop; files are shredded, sensitivities are folded into neatly marked boxes, lights and alarms are switched off. As the husk of my body is guided from the court, I sense a single little man sat at the bottom of my soul. He hunches over a card table under a naked low-watt bulb, sipping flat beer from a plastic cup. I figure he must be my janitor. I figure he must be me.
Act V Me ves y sufres
twenty-three
On the second of December I was sentenced to death by lethal injection. Christmas on Death Row, boy. To be fair, ole Brian Dennehy tried his best. In the end, it doesn't look like they'll cast the real Brian in the TV-movie, I guess because he doesn't lose his cases. But my appeal will draw out the truth. There's a new fast-track appeals process that means I could be out by March. They reformed the system, so innocent folks don't have to spend years on the row. It can't be bad. The only news about me is that I put on twenty pounds since the sentence. It keeps out some of this January chill. Apart from that, my life hangs still while the seasons whip around me.
Taylor 's eyes flicker brightly through the screen. TV makes them sparkle, but they move strangely, as if she holds them back on a leash. Her grin is frozen like it came out of a jelly mold. I watch her almost-but-not-quite staring at me, until, after a minute, I realize she's reading something behind the camera. Her lines must be written there. After another moment I realize she's reading something about me. My skin cools as understanding dawns.