Back at the truck, Seward takes the wheel. He drives them to the outskirts of town, over the railroad tracks and away from the water. He’s lit the cigar that’s hung from his lips for most of the day, and the smoke, oaky and cloying, billows in the truck’s cab before whisking out the window. He slows at each intersection to read street names, muttering beneath his breath. “West Pershing,” he finally says, satisfied, and turns onto the sought-out street.
The truck bumps along the rutted pavement. Beer cans and broken glass line the curb, where shotgun shacks stand squat, windows open, doors ajar. Local prostitutes have gathered on the porches; through the truck’s open window Lane can hear them calling and laughing.
Seward slows the truck down in front of the only commercial building on the street, a single-story, wood-sided building flanked by these shotgun shacks. PIKE’S PLACE is painted in bold black letters shadowed in white along the top of the building, and the windows have been frosted, so that you can’t see through the glass. A single lamp affixed to the wood above the black-painted door lights the threshhold; Lane watches the door open and a man stagger from within. He doesn’t ask what they’re doing here; he’s heard about Pike’s Place from other inmates who had perked up when they heard that Lane would be accompanying the captain to New Iberia. But he hadn’t thought they’d come.
Seward grunts. “Funny, just six years what you can forget. Could used to find Pike’s like the nose on my face.” He puts the truck in gear and continues driving down the street until they come to a lot where a handful of other cars have parked, by the edge of a cemetery. He pulls in and cuts the engine. For a moment, neither man moves or speaks. Outside, the marble crypts glow in the moonlight. Many of the headstones are old, cracked, and covered with moss, their lettering losing definition, but a few clustered together in one corner are recent and uniform, small white stones beside limp American flags. Seward breathes loudly and pats the side of the truck, draws long on his cigar.
“You can forget a lot,” Lane says, finally.
The captain looks at him questioningly.
“Six years.”
Seward grunts.
“What happened to her?”
“Happened to who?”
“Your grandbaby.” It had stuck with Lane earlier, that detail.
The captain winces. He looks away. “Born and died in a day,” he says, pinching the cigar from between his lips. “Took her mama with her. 1937. Year I came to Angola.”
“What’d you do before?”
Seward gives a bitter laugh. “Farmer, out in Avoyelles Parish. Didn’t have a pot to piss in.”
“So you came to Angola.”
“That’s right. Where the money’s at. Used to bring sorghum to load up here at the ’Beria port, made in three years not half what I done made in six.”
Lane gestures toward the back of the truck. “And how many men you killed in six years?”
There’s a pause. “Killed’s a way of puttin’ it. Brought justice to’s another.”
“How many?” Lane asks again.
The captain takes another long drag on his cigar, squinting at Lane down the stubby length of it. “Enough.” He tosses the smoldering nub out the window and into the dirt. “Get out,” he instructs. Seward gets out of the truck himself and goes around to the back. By the time Lane has joined him the captain has swung the heavy doors of the trailer wide open. He stands there, surveying what’s inside in the same posture you’d assume before a work of art, arms crossed, head tilted slightly to the side. Lane glances uneasily around them, but they are alone.
Lane stands beside the captain and looks into the trailer. Back at Angola, he’d seen the chair only from a distance, as deputies loaded it up from the garage on the hill. He’d been struck by how regular it was: for all intents and purposes, a chair. Now close, in the moonlight, he can see all the awful details. The wood along the lower beam is singed in the spots to which ankles have been strapped. The wood is darkened at the end of each arm, stained by the grip of hands sweaty with fear. A crown of metal is bolted to the top, and a black hood is draped over the seat back, to cover a face that shouldn’t be seen. Overall, the chair is larger than Lane had judged it to be from afar, made of heavy oak and proportioned so that even a man of Seward’s size would be dwarfed. Lane has heard of a boy who’d had to sit on a pile of books while he died so that his arms could rest more easily on the oaken ones. He doesn’t know if this is fact or prison lore.
“Get in,” the captain instructs.
“Sir?”
“Climb up and get in. Take a seat.”
Lane grabs the side of the trailer and hoists himself inside. He looks at the chair’s wooden seat, the nicks and scratches and stains, all of unknown, storied origin.
“Sit.”
Lane turns around. He sits. The wood of the seat is as hard as the wood of any wooden seat, and the rungs of the ladder-back knock every few knobs of his spine. He thinks of the bodies that have slumped here, scorched and smoking.
“How does that feel?” The captain stands framed in the trailer’s doorway, his head glistening in the moonlight. Spanish moss dangles in the view, hanging from a branch Lane can’t see.
“Like a chair,” he says, finally.