“I understand.” I get up and pace around the room. How can I make her hear me? “Look, I believe in what your firm does. I’ve always opposed the death penalty. I’d like to help fight it.”
“Our clients are not the most popular people.” Her voice lowers. “We just finished a case, for example, in which we defended a man who’d previously been convicted of child molestation. Can you defend a child molester?”
My grandfather has been dead for eight years, but suddenly I see him and my body seizes. I see him alive, wearing one of his tweed newsboy caps, sucking on a hard violet candy, and me as the adult I am—sitting with him, a legal pad propped on my lap, trying to take notes but noticing only those hands that touched me, the body I know too well. In the vision I hold my knees very still, trying not to let them brush against his. Then suddenly I’m a child again, and there’s his face after he’s taken out his false teeth, grinning gummily, his breath wet and murky, tinted with a note of lavender. I am very small, small enough to be both fascinated and repelled by the black expanse suddenly inside his mouth. The doll lamp bathes his face in yellow as he grins at me. “I’m a witch,” my grandfather says. “You remember what that means.”
This job will be my test. If I really oppose the death penalty, I must oppose it for men like him.
“Yes,” I say. “I can defend a child molester.”
Twenty-One
Louisiana, 1991–2000
Early December 1991, and Ricky lasts a few scrub-brush weeks living with Bessie, Alcide, and his younger brother Jamie, but he hates it. Living with them is like going back in time. He works whatever odd jobs he can pick up and spends the rest of the hours smoking pot by the river, trying not to think about where Jamie’s going in his life and where he so far has failed to go.
But then he catches a break. There’s an opening at the local Fuel Stop, doing maintenance. Maybe one of the guys from the river gets him the gig; maybe Ricky stops in one day for a Coke and sees a handwritten HELP WANTED notice in the window. But he stops in. He can push a broom and he takes orders well, at least right now, now that he’s trying to please. He’s proud of the polo they give him. Maybe this one will be his for longer than a few weeks.
First payday, he cashes the check and rents a motel room to live in. He’s not thinking straight—the room will burn up the checks faster than he can earn them, if he thought about it he’d know this can’t last long—but back in the Georgia prison, when his counselor asked him to make a list of his goals, he wrote, “Get my own place,” and he’s got one now. It’s so sweet to be living alone. The room isn’t much, but it’s his. Iowa is dotted with welfare motels, longer-stay rentals, and his room is made for a man down on his luck who’s looking to invent a new kind. He’s got a coffeemaker and a hot plate and bedsheets he pays a couple of bucks extra for and a small television he can play as loudly as he wants, and he can smoke in the room, too. He spends his evenings lying flat on his back on the bed, his head cocked up on the pillows, chain-smoking into a black ashtray on the nightstand with a plastic cup of peppermint schnapps next to his head. Doesn’t seem lonely if it’s the best kind of aloneness you ever had. Even the noise from the other rooms—there’s a man a few doors down who smacks his wife and kids; there are people selling drugs and who knows what else every hour of the night—can’t get to him. It’s nothing like prison. It’s not even anything like living with Alcide and Bessie and Jamie in the trailer, so much emotion and history and hurt piled atop one another. This room may not seem like much, but inside it, he’s free.
Then, one evening, he goes to the parking lot to have a smoke under the stars.
*
Standing outside is a woman. Maybe she’s leaning against the side of the building, one hand resting on the top of the trash can, her head thrown back as she exhales into the night sky. Tired skin and tight eyes, her hair falling out of a ponytail, but she’s pretty in a closed-up kind of way. The kind of face that has lived, that holds secrets.
The woman brings her head back up. She stubs the cigarette out on the top of the trash can. She studies him a minute. “I know you from the Fuel Stop, don’t I? You work outside?”
Ricky nods.
“My name’s Pearl,” she says. “I’m a cashier there.” Maybe it’s the late fall night that makes them talk with each other, that turns them reflective, the grace of cool dry air in a state that spends so much of the year so hot and muggy, the grace of the darkness to two people who right now in their lives want nothing so much as cover. Standing there in the motel parking lot, maybe rooting in her pack for another cigarette, perhaps knowing that when this one’s empty it’ll be a stretch to buy another but still needing that cigarette, trying not to hear the sounds of her children June and Joey as they play-tussle on the other side of the motel room door while Terry’s got the television up too loud again, to drown out their chatter, Pearl is cash-strapped and kid-exhausted. She’s smart enough to see that the motel is wearing her and Terry and the kids out, but there’s no way to have anything different, not on her salary. Ricky feels free in his room. But she feels trapped.
That must be what she’s thinking when she listens to Ricky talk under the night sky. Maybe he tells her how he wants a little bit of land down by the Calcasieu River where he can go and not bother nobody. He’ll hunt and fish and earn a little money at the Fuel Stop, just enough to keep him in cigarettes and booze and pay off the land so it’s truly his. When Ricky dreams, he doesn’t dream friends. He dreams a place where he can be who he is and where there won’t be anyone around to look that other damning thing, normal. Where it’s just him and he’s normal. True, a man living by the river, talking to no one, would be an object of fun or bogeyman stories among the neighborhood kids. But he kind of likes that idea. Because maybe there’ll be some kid like he was who doesn’t fit in, who just wants to get away, and he’ll hear about Ricky and he’ll know it’s possible.