The Enchanted (15 page)

Go, horses! Run! The whole dungeon is trembling with the heat of their pass, and I can hear the other men of the row cry out with something like fear and wonder as our walls shake. Their hooves are retreating once more, and I am on my knees, my hands swaying in unspeakable pleasure in the fresh dust they have shed.

The radio calls from farther away. The tower lights flash and then flash again, and the men rise from the dirt of the yard outside, dusting it off from their hands, laughing embarrassedly to each other. They do not stop to listen carefully for the sound of the golden horses as they retreat far underground. They do not feel the pang I do at knowing the horses ran so close to me and have ridden away once again.

I do not know when they will come back. They have cleaved back down to the underworld, where red rivers burn and cliffs ignite. I do not know the name of the place they come from. It could be hell or heaven or the gate to either—it defies me as much as their names. But I know the golden horses gallop there, their manes like tongues of fire, their legs stretched out with the pure joy of running, their hooves unafraid of damning the dirt.

T
he lady is not at the prison during Striker's execution. She is never around during the executions, not of her clients,
not of others. She feels for the priest that he has to be there, but watching men die holds little interest for her.

She is more interested in the living.

She takes the photo of little York and his mother back to Auntie Beth, as promised. The thrill of the blue forest does not abate for her. She hopes to stay the night in the same motel, hopes to spy rental signs for cabins along the way—just dreaming, she tells herself.

Auntie Beth is quiet on this visit. The lady is accustomed to that. A fatigue sets in with the families she works with. There comes a point when all the secrets are told and all that is left are their spent ghosts. She has told Auntie Beth that once the case is over, she will disappear from her life. She always tells the families this important truth.

So they enjoy their friendship for the moment, wrapped in the early-afternoon glow on the front porch as they sit together.

Auntie Beth rubs at her swollen toes, wrapped in her huge pilled slippers. “He gonna die?” she finally asks.

“I don't know,” the lady softly answers. “Sometimes they do.”

Auntie Beth nods, sighs. She looks at the hills. No promises. The lady sees that she has rubbed a little lipstick for rouge on her cheeks, tidied her iron hair with old clips. These little efforts by families for her visits always touch the lady to the quick.

“Gonna cry when it happens, even if he deserves it.”

“Of course.”

“You know where his mama is buried?”

“No.”

“I'll get you the address.” The old woman hesitates and then busks her knees against the lady: a quick gesture but a knowing one. “I want to ask you . . .” she stops.

“Yes?”

“I was gonna ask—those poor girls.” Auntie Beth stops. Her chin trembles, and the lady sees grief even in her teeth.

“Yes,” the lady says. Her voice sounds like it can absorb a river of tears.

“You'll say sorry for me? To their families?”

“Yes,” the lady says. “I will tell them sorry from you.”

The old woman breaks down in tears, there on her front porch, and eventually, the lady reaches one hand over and holds her shoulder as she sobs.

T
he lady feels drained as she makes it to the address Auntie Beth has given her. It isn't much as far as addresses go, but it's easy to find: the back grounds of the state mental hospital.

They used to have paupers' graves back then. She thinks of the crematorium at the prison and wonders which is worse: to be buried a number or burned?

The slot for York's mom seems too narrow for a body, and the lady has a gruesome image of the pauper corpses laid side by side, endlessly spooning under the earth. York's mother was one of these, entombed in a shroud,
buried with dirt thrown over her and only the sky watching. No one was here to say goodbye. There is just a small rusted metal nameplate lined up with the others. There is a date of her death but no date of her birth. Perhaps they didn't care to check.

The lady looks up and sees she is standing among hundreds of nameplates, stretching to the desultory woods behind the old hospital grounds. The newer grounds—the fancy places they parade for the public—are up front, fresh with splashed pastel paint and sculptures and a big fancy building.

But the truth is back here, the lady thinks, buried in a slot too narrow to contain a body. York's mother. Shirley. Buried like thousands of other mentally disabled people over the years, nameless and willed to be forgotten.

She reminds herself to make sure her mother has a proper grave when she passes, with a headstone and her name and nice flowers at the side. The normal people in the graveyard can scoot over a bit, she thinks, and make way for Mom. The thought makes her smile.

The lady is glad that she came. Sometimes the roads she takes don't bring her anyplace she can offer in court, but they give her insight all the same. It feels good to stand with her beaten black boots crunching the dirt above York's mother's bones, to feel a recognition: You existed, you counted, you were here.

She takes a picture of the grave, because you never know. Maybe York would like to see where his mom is buried.

As she leaves, she passes an old pink building with
windows weeping rust, surrounded by a falling cyclone fence. She looks to the iron bars of the windows and remembers this was once the children's ward, where, for infamous decades, children as young as eight were housed in nightmarish conditions, drugged with heavy psychotropic medications, and, she has heard, raped by older kids. She has heard stories of what life was like for the children in that building, before they shut it down.

And then she goes looking for the doctors who treated York's mother before she died.

U
nknown days have passed. I am sitting on my cot, thinking about dust. The dust from the horses running after Striker's execution settled over my cell. I have taken care to disturb it as little as possible. I like how it looks, mantled over the stone.

Slowly, my footprints mar the floor. I can't help it. I have to get up to use the toilet, to take the food trays.

The footprints look like reptile prints—like a prehistoric monster has been walking my floor, striding with mincing feet toward my cot.

I crouch on my cot and hold the blanket over me. I pretend the monster is coming for me. Is he coming? Is he not?

T
here are some things I can never discuss. One is the bad thing I did after I was released from the mental hospital
when I was eighteen. I wouldn't want the idea of this thing to be in the world. Ideas are powerful things; we should take more care with them. I know there are some who would disagree—those who think ideas are like food they can taste and then spit out if they don't like it. But ideas are stronger than that. You can get a taste of an idea inside you, and the next thing you know, it won't leave. Until you do something about it.

As soulless as I am, I do not want others to do what I have done. Some ideas need to stay silent inside me, like the letters inside some words.

I am not afraid to tell about the second bad thing, the one that got me sent from general population to this dungeon. I can tell it because I know what I did and why I did it. You can read about it in the court trial transcripts.

“Warden, what did you find the day of March fourth?”

“I found a body at the bottom of stairwell 4A.”

“Tell me about that stairwell.”

“It serves the library.”

“Okay. Tell me more.”

“I was called at 0900.”

“Please elaborate.”

“A trusty had found a body.”

“Warden. Please be more forthcoming.”

“The body was of an inmate. Number 114657.”

“And?”

“He had been bludgeoned about the head—no, that is not accurate. His head had been crushed against the steps.”

“And what was the cause of death?”

“Profound brain injury.”

I can see the spots even now.

“Warden, tell me. Did you eventually identify a suspect?”

“Yes.”

“And how?”

“The suspect was sitting next to the corpse—crying.”

“Please point him out to the court.”

The warden points to me.

“Crying, you say.”

“Yes. Well, weeping. Silently.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing at that time. He doesn't talk.”

“Doesn't talk because he can't or doesn't talk because he won't?”

Here the court record shows a long pause.

“I can't say.”

“Warden, that's not correct, and you know it. I understand there is a time on the record when the defendant is known to have spoken. There is, in fact, a recording.”

“Yes. To my knowledge.”

“So he can talk.”

“Sir, it is not up to me to judge what someone can do.”

I remember how the warden found me there, crying on the stairs, absently wiping blood all over my face as I wept. The warden had looked down with a sad expression and slowly pulled his service pistol from the holster. I
could tell what he was thinking: It was him and me alone on the stairs and no one to say what went down.

“Okay. Fine. But your investigation determined he was the culprit.”

“Yes. From the blood and brain matter on his hands.”

“In other words, he was red-handed.”

My attorney calls out with a tired voice: “Objection.”

T
his time there were no high-powered attorneys or crowds in the courtroom. There was no fizzle or pop of cameras. No newspaper covered the story; one prison inmate killing another is not newsworthy. There was no one like the lady to explain how I was supposedly a product of my past. There was just me, my court-appointed attorney, the district attorney, the judge, and a group of tired jurors in the prison courtroom who wanted to go home.

The only mystery for them was why I had done it. Had he said something to me? Raped or hurt me? No one knew. There were just the two of us, and one was dead, and one of us would not speak.

Only the warden knew.

I wanted to ask him later, Why didn't you shoot me, warden? You could have raised your service pistol and ended me with a spray of blood and bone. I lifted my head for you—you could see I wasn't going to fight it. You could have filed a report that said self-defense. You didn't even need to file a report. You could have just tumbled me off
to the oven and been done with me. No one would have cared. Many would say it would have been a blessing not just for me but the family of my victim.

The warden had just looked down at the dead man next to me, at his bashed head and leaking soft wet brains over the stone steps. He saw the inmate number on the prison shirt. He recognized the heavy face and narrow rabbit teeth. He knew this inmate from the library, watching that day. He knew who the inmate was and what kind of man he was—a man like Risk.

The warden knew what my life was like outside the library. The question for him was not why I had killed this man. It was why I had waited so long.

Even if the outside saw another nameless number, even if the mattresses of my life said just another, the warden saw something different. He saw what had been done to me. He saw
me.
And in that moment, I mattered. He holstered his pistol and he reached down and he took my bloody hand. He raised me up. He said he would take me someplace safe, someplace no one would ever hurt me again.

My attorney tried to point out that I had been good for many years—a model inmate, he said, spending all his time in the library. Even that didn't matter when they found me sitting next to another nameless number, crying with his brains on my hands.

That is the way murder is. It isn't like TV. It isn't like the books. It is holding a man's head in your hands as his eyes flutter and die. It is watching the blood pour and the
body twitch and thinking how easy it was. It is thinking: At least it is better this time, I made it quick. And: At least I didn't look inside.

The warden was the last one called to testify. No mitigation, no worries. There was no jury weeping this time, no woman moaning in the back row, and it was for the better.

The warden passed me on his way off the stand. I didn't look up at him. I was hiding behind my hands the entire trial, having been shaved of my hair by the prison doctors. But I felt the warden when he passed, and I knew the gift he had given me. It was the gift of privacy.

It took only an hour this time for the jury to decide. Death.

I was glad when the warden led me to the dungeon. I was glad when he opened this cell door himself and I stepped inside, knowing I would never leave again until the last journey. By that time I had realized others could see the monsters coiled under my skin, see the screaming fear. They could see the wet mattresses and splayed legs and all that has come before and could come again.

I couldn't have that. Not anymore.

I knew that I would never again see the beautiful soft-tufted night birds outside the window, never again sit in the library with the slanting sun through the bars. And that was okay, because I brought those ideas with me, stored in my heart.

Even in the dungeon, I cover my head with my blanket.
Whether heaven or whether hell, I will never escape who I am. The only answer now is to wait. We are all safer that way, just as the warden knows.

S
ince I came to the dungeon, time has lost all meaning. I cannot tell you exactly how long I have been down here. The lightbulb in the metal cage above me flickers on at what I think is morning, and it turns off at what I guess is night, but unless I were to mark the walls, I have no way of knowing how many years have passed. I could tell you about the books I have read, and I could tell you of the times when the horses have run—with every execution, it seems—and of the random times when the little men come to visit, and of the dark times when these halls fill with pain. But I cannot tell you of time.