Some nights on death row, I lay on my bunk and I thought I could taste the boys’ blood on my lips. The salt. The copper.
In solitary confinement, the dark has fingers. It plays you and plays you until you make cracked music like no French horn has ever made.
Some nights, I wondered if I did it.
With the lights back on in the morning, I knew I didn’t. I shouted my innocence at the walls. I wrote letters. I whispered into the toilet pipes so the men in the other walled-in cells would hear me.
But some nights, I wondered if my memory lied.
Higby told the jurors I bit Steven and Duane Bronson in the worst places imaginable. He said the teeth that bit the boys were my teeth. He said the lips that sucked away their blood were mine. Some nights, with the fingers of dark playing me, I believed it.
I bit my arm. To taste the blood. To see if it was true. If it excited me. But it was my arm. My blood. Not theirs. I didn’t fool myself. I tried.
Higby never showed Steven and Duane Bronson’s mother pictures of their bodies. He showed her only their faces. She could identify them, say goodbye. But he showed me. He showed the jurors.
I told all this to the other inmates through the plumbing pipes. We were men suspended over stainless steel toilets, talking to ourselves until we heard echoes of our own voices. Or sitting under stainless steel sinks. Certain pipes resonated when others went silent. One man sang songs he’d learned twenty years ago, before he killed his wife and daughter. If I could have made the plumbing sing, I would have piped the Star Wars theme into the other cells. Instead, I whispered to the toilet, whispered to the sink, I didn’t I didn’t I didn’t, even when I wondered, Did I? And the echoes came back—
I didn’t either.
Me neither.
I was in a different town at the time.
A different state.
Out of the country.
Ask my mother, my brother, my sister, my lover.
Liars. Most of them.
Would I call any of them my friends?
More or less.
But the bar was low. When the people who bring you your food and allow you to bathe also plan to kill you with a needle, an inmate who flings his own shit at you if you get too close starts to seem neighborly.
When the court transferred me off death row, I listened to French horn recordings online in the prison library. Mark Taylor. Vincent Chancey. Old guys like Philip Farkas, who could have blown the hell out of Star Wars.
The thing about a French horn is you always know what you’re listening to. It’s like hearing a man singing with an accent. With a flute or a trumpet, the music gets so pure it seems to separate from the metal, lips, and fingers that make it. But with a French horn – with all those tubes turning the sound this way and that – you know you’re hearing twists against perfection.
I had a lot of time to think about such things. I talked about them to my friend Stuart. He seemed to understand, or at least he nodded along as he often did, because he generally ran the way the current was flowing, no matter the direction. If I had talked to the other men about the French horn, I might have given them courage to come at me with shanks. Them I would lunge at in the yard and make sure they backed away, or they would lunge at me, testing, always testing for a soft spot.
To see Stuart, you would think others would victimize him. A big, heavy, yellow-skinned black man, he carried himself like a gallon jug of water, always more sideways than forward. He had gentle eyes and lazy lips that went with the eyes. If you watched him lift weights in the yard, you knew that muscles rippled under the fat, but he seemed always short of breath, and, with the way he spoke – his Ts and Ds crumbling between his tongue and his teeth – the hyenas should have eaten him for dinner.
But, after lights out, the worst of the predators recruited him to hold down their prey while they took turns, though – as far as I knew – he never took a turn himself. And yet, in spite of the night times, the prey hung near him whenever they could in the daylight, as if he would shelter them. And sometimes he did. As the predators circled, he would slosh into the middle of the action and speak with the intended victim, and the predators would pause and then break from the pack as if they forgot their hunger.
I never learned what Stuart did to get sent to Supermax. He wouldn’t say, and no one else seemed to know. But we all knew he’d come for life plus thirty years. He laughed his gentle laugh and said, ‘I’m gonna stink this prison to high hell for every one of those extra thirty years. A corpse like mine gonna rot for a long time.’
So I told him about the French horn, and I told him about the Bronson boys and the letters I was writing, though admitting that you’d gone down for raping a kid was like inviting others to hang you from a bar with a bed sheet.
Stuart would listen and he would say, ‘You got to be strong, Franky.’
I couldn’t figure out if he believed me. Belief seemed beside the point.
‘If only I can get the government to test the rape kit,’ I said. ‘But they keep it locked in a box, like I’m asking for the key to their houses.’
Now and then, he asked a question like, ‘If you didn’t do those boys, who did? You got to have that.’ But mostly he just took it in. He seemed to absorb it.