Haussen’s head flew back.
Crashed against the passenger window.
Bounced.
He fell across the seat.
On to my lap.
On a night when I expected nothing.
Nothing.
I shoved him and opened my door.
Shouldn’t have. The interior light went on. Some things best unseen. Abandoned to nature. Sunk in saltwater. Dumped in a swamp.
Wind gusted through the open door, raining mist and light.
Blood spatter. Fishhooks for nightmares.
Haussen’s eggshell head.
I tipped out of the car, on to my hands and knees. On the flooding pavement. Under the slamming rain.
And vomited.
I had killed a man.
After eight years. Writing appeals on scraps. Whispering into the plumbing. Gripping the bars when lawyers visited. Saying, I’m an innocent fool who picks up the phone when he should let it ring, who answers the door when he should hide in the attic, who stops on Monument Road to help two boys when he should drive drive drive.
I’d killed a man.
I pushed myself to my feet. Stumbled from my car. Stared at the sky. The rain burning my eyes. I stumbled past the Chinese restaurant. The sign said Chopstick Charley’s. As if that was possible.
I walked to the side of Philips Highway. Empty except for a pair of headlights blasting through the blasting rain. Tunnel of light. To take me from here to there. If I stepped into it.
As every dying man must.
The rushing tires in the wind and rain. A last denying of the real that is here and not there. If I stepped into it.
As every dying man must.
I closed my eyes. Held my breath. Stepped into the highway.
Wheels, metal, light shot past.
The driver as unconscious as a brass bullet.
I opened my eyes. I opened my mouth.
Double tail lights.
Red.
Snake eyes.
I’d missed my bus, my train, my flight.
I stood in the highway.
Five minutes.
Ten.
Couldn’t catch a …
Fifteen.
I stood until despair met futility, cleansing in a dirty rain, because what more could I lose?
What does a man do when pounding his head on a prison wall fails to kill him and he gasps through the bed sheet he has wrapped around his neck?
He writes another appeal.
He whispers into the plumbing.
He rattles the bars.
He lives because when he looks in the rearview mirror, death has quit the chase.
What does a man do when he stands on a highway waiting for a car or truck that never comes?
He stumbles back across the restaurant parking lot.
If only Randall Haussen had let himself out of the passenger door.
But his head lay against the dashboard, blood jagging through the vinyl. Yellow fluid pooling in his ear.
Again, I bent to vomit. Couldn’t.
So I dragged him from the seat and hoisted his body into the trash dumpster. I chucked his gun in after.
My hands – black with rain and blood and the dark night.
I wiped them on my shirt.
Realized what I’d done.
Stripped off the shirt and threw it into the dumpster.
Realized.
Always a step behind.
I climbed into the dumpster with the rats and the rancid Kung Pao chicken and Haussen’s body. I wiped down his gun with my shirt. I threw the shirt toward my car. I tumbled out and lay on the pavement, wishing the rain would wash me downriver.
Scared boy that I was.
Foolish boy, answering the door, picking up the phone, shooting a man in the head.
I’d killed a man.
Self-defense being only self-justification. Dead being dead.
I drove toward the Cardinal Motel but turned at Emerson and, after the railroad tracks, pulled into an open-air, self-service car wash. Open all night, but lights off except the business sign, which said, CAR WASH.
I put my pistol in the trunk, opened all four doors, and sprayed the inside of the car with the pressure hose. The water tore chunks from the vinyl, soaked the seats, ripped the last fabric threads from the inside roof. Flakes of paint and dirt floated in the footwells and cascaded from the car and into the car wash drain. The passenger window had cracked where Haussen’s head hit it. His hair and blood stuck to the fracture. I punched out the glass with the hose nozzle.
I wet vac’d the water out of the footwells and off the seats. I scrubbed the stains with my shirt, hosed the car again, and vacuumed again.
Sometime during the early hours, the rain weakened to a drizzle and then, as the first sunlight grayed the clouds, stopped entirely.
I dug in a garbage can for a plastic bag and stretched it over the punched-out window. I dug for another bag, wrapped the pistol in it, and stuck it under the front seat.
Then I drove to the motel, let myself into my room, and locked the door. I lay on the mattress and stared at the ceiling.
I’d killed a man. That was a fact, final and irreversible. Did that fact – that act – make my story of myself – as a man who would fight for himself with laws or a sharpened spoon but would never take another human life – a nasty fiction? I’d had a choice – to kill or be killed – and I had killed. Too easily, it seemed to me. Too automatically. With the instincts of a natural killer, the deadly reflexes that Higby said he saw in me.
What did that make me?
A fist knocked on my door. My heart pounded. Outside, my neighbor Jimmy talked to his girlfriend Susan, saying something about me. The fist knocked again, and Jimmy spoke. ‘You all right?’ After a while, they went away.
I peeled myself from the bed and climbed into the shower with my clothes on. Haussen’s blood and the filth from the Chopstick Charley’s parking lot ran from my shirt and pants and runneled into the drain. I stripped then and cranked the water to cold and stood until I shivered.
As I put on dry clothes, Jimmy and Susan came back with Bill Hopper. The fist knocked. The fist knocked again. I went to the door and listened to them.
Hopper’s pass key rattled in the lock.
I yanked the door open.
They stared at me.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Jimmy said. ‘We thought you were dead.’
‘I did,’ Susan said.
‘No,’ I managed to say. ‘Not me.’
‘A guy shot you last night,’ Jimmy said. ‘In the parking lot. I watched—’
‘Shot at,’ I said. ‘Missed.’ I asked what I had to ask. ‘Did you call nine-one-one?’
‘’Course not,’ he said.
‘But someone did,’ Hopper said. ‘The cops came. I had to let them check your room.’
Susan glanced at my car with its bagged-up window and steamed windshield. ‘What happened?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing happened.’ I tried to close the door.
‘You all right?’ Hopper asked. ‘You look like someone—’
‘I’m all right,’ I said. ‘Tired.’ I closed the door.
Sweating.
I couldn’t stop sweating. I lay on my bed. I paced from my door to the bathroom, and I couldn’t stop sweating.
Voices spoke to me.
Sounds spoke.
The trigger snapping, the gun shell exploding, Haussen crashing into the glass. The pleasure of it. Only a fool would deny it.
Be that kind of fool. No one saw the bullet boring into Haussen’s head. No one knows.
Jimmy and Susan know. Bill Hopper knows.
The cops came.
But only to the motel.
If no one saw and no one knows, it didn’t happen.
It happened. It’s in my sweat.
At seven thirty in the morning, I called Jane’s cell phone. It rang four times and bounced to voicemail. ‘Christ,’ I said to the recorder, hung up, and tried again. Again, it rang four times and bounced to voicemail. I hung up and tried Hank’s phone.
He picked up on the third ring. Still sleeping, mostly. My call, a waking nightmare.
I said, ‘Haussen came last night. I—’
‘Franky?’ – my words not yet penetrating.
‘Randall Haussen,’ I said.
‘What? What about him?’
‘He came to the motel last night. I—’
‘What the hell are—’
‘I did. I—’
‘Look,’ he said. ‘Jane and I spent most of last night filing emergency appeals for Thomas LaFlora. The courts will ignore them. The governor will. At four this afternoon, we’re driving to Raiford. We’ll stand with the others at the vigil. We’ll be there when the announcement comes out that LaFlora is dead.’
‘I—’
‘The last thing we need today is more of your bullshit.’ He hung up.
I lay on my bed and closed my eyes.
My mind raced. I thought I would never sleep again.
Then, as if a hammer smashed me, I slept.
I dreamed of the day my sideways-moving friend Stuart died in the exercise yard.
He’d gone back to the bench press for the first time since he returned from the medical center where the doctors wanted to cut off his diabetic leg. He’d sometimes done sets with three hundred pounds before he got sick, but now he did two-fifty and just five reps before he let out a chestful of steam, dropped the bar on the support, and laughed. ‘Hell,’ he said, and shoved himself up from the bench. He took two steps, swayed to the side, and crashed to the ground.
When I got to him, his eyes were already stone, and white froth came from his mouth. I thought he’d had a heart attack, and I yelled at the guards to get the nurse. They pointed their guns at me. They pointed them at Stuart on the ground. They pointed them at the other men in the yard. They told us to line up, backs against a wall, as if they were a firing squad.
Then they called the nurse. He ambled and shambled across the yard and stood looking at Stuart’s big body.
One of the men yelled, ‘He ain’t breathing.’
So the nurse ambled and shambled back to the medical center and got an oxygen tank. By the time he came back, ten minutes had passed. He fidgeted with the valve and the mask, and something was wrong with the mask, so he threw it on the ground and started back to the medical center to get a new one.
I stepped out from the wall and said, ‘Let me.’
The guards aimed their guns. The other men stared as if I’d yanked down my pants.
But the nurse spat on the ground and said, ‘You want to put your lips on that motherfucker, have at it.’
I took off my shirt and wiped Stuart’s face. I gave him mouth-to-mouth.
After a minute, something rattled in his chest. His eyes got a kind of soft focus, and he looked at me – then up at the sky – with the gentlest expression I ever saw.
His eyes went white then, and his chest let out another load of steam. He died on the ground by the bench press. The nurse checked his pulse and found none. The guards ordered us back to our cells. I never saw Stuart again.
But in the dream, he turned his gentle eyes to me and said, ‘It’s all right. It’s all right because it’s the way it’s got to be. You beat yourself up and all you do is give yourself bruises and a black eye, and then the girls don’t love you. It’s all right. You man enough.’
‘Enough for what?’ I asked.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘You cry all those tears for what? You making an ocean of your own now? What you going to do with that ocean except drown?’
‘I’m not crying,’ I said. ‘I wish I could cry.’
That afternoon, I skipped my appointment with Dr Patel.
That evening, I didn’t pick up Cynthia from the Cineplex.
That night, the executioners threaded a needle into a vein on Thomas LaFlora’s left leg, and, as Jane and Hank chanted and prayed outside the gates at Raiford, an innocent man died.