Life or Death (4 page)

‘Who are you really?’ she asks, accusingly.

‘A stranger who appreciates your kindness.’

‘If you’re fixin’ to rob us, we don’t have any money.’

‘I just need somewhere to sleep.’

‘You told Daddy a pack of lies about your girlfriend running off. You been here three hours and you haven’t asked to use the phone. Why are you really here?’

‘I’m trying to keep a promise to someone.’

Rosie makes a scoffing noise. She is motionless, half in shadow and half out.

‘Who do these clothes belong to?’ Audie asks.

‘My husband.’

‘Where is he?’

‘He found someone he liked better ’n me.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Why? It ain’t your fault.’ She looks past Audie into the darkness. ‘He said I got fat. Didn’t want to touch me any more.’

‘I think you’re beautiful.’

She takes Audie’s hand and places it on her breast. He can feel her heart beating. Then she raises her face, pushing her lips against his. The kiss is hard, hungry, verging on desperation. He can taste her hurt.

Breaking her grip, Audie holds her at arm’s length, looking into her eyes. Then he kisses her forehead.

‘Good night, Rosie.’

4

Prison tried to kill Audie Palmer every day. Awake. Asleep. Eating. Showering. Circling the exercise yard. Through every season, scorching in summer, freezing in winter, rarely in between, prison tried to kill Audie Palmer, but somehow he survived.

To Moss’s mind, Audie seemed to exist in a parallel universe where not even the worst of deeds could alter his demeanour. Moss had seen movies about people returned from Heaven or Hell because something in their life had been left undone. He wondered if maybe Audie had been sent back from Hell because of some glitch in the devil’s bookkeeping or a case of mistaken identity. If that was so, a man might appreciate penitentiary life because he had witnessed so much worse.

Moss first set eyes on Audie when the young man walked up the ramp with all the other new arrivals. As long as a football field with cells on either side, the ramp was a cavernous place with a waxed floor and fluorescent lighting that buzzed overhead. The mainline prison population watched from the cells, catcalling and whistling at the fish. All at once the cell doors opened and people spilled out. This only happened once a day when it was like rush hour on the subway. Prisoners were settling accounts, placing orders, collecting contraband or looking for targets. It was a good time to draw blood and get away with it.

It didn’t take long for someone to discover Audie. Normally, he’d be news because he was young and good-looking, but folks were more interested in the money. There were seven million reasons to befriend Audie or to beat the shit out of him.

Within hours of his arrival, his name had spread on the prison grapevine. He should have been shitting bricks or begging to get into The Hole, but instead Audie calmly paced the exercise yard where a thousand men had paced a million paces before. Audie was no gangster or wiseguy or killer. He didn’t pretend otherwise and that was always going to be his problem. He had no pedigree. No protection. To survive in a penitentiary, a man needs to form alliances, join a gang, or find a protector. He can’t afford to be pretty, or soft, or rich.

Moss watched all this from a distance, curious but with no skin in the game. Most fish tried to make a statement early, marking territory or warning off predators. Kindness is seen as a weakness. Compassion. Benevolence. Toss food in the trash before you let another man take it from you. Never offer your place in the queue.

The Dice Man tried it on first. He offered to get Audie some prison hooch. Audie declined politely. The Dice Man tried a different approach. He upended Audie’s chow tray as he walked past his table. Audie looked at the puddle of gravy, mashed potato and chicken. Then he raised his eyes to the Dice Man. Some of the other cons laughed. Dice Man seemed to grow six inches. Audie didn’t say a word. He crouched down and began scooping up the mushed-up food, putting it back on his tray.

People cleared back a little, sliding along benches. They all seemed to be waiting for something, like passengers in a stopped train. Audie was still squatting on the floor, picking up food, ignoring everyone. It was like he inhabited a space of his own creation, outside the thinking of other folks, a place that lesser men can only dream of reaching.

The Dice Man looked at his shoes. Gravy had splashed on them.

‘Lick it off,’ he said.

Audie sighed wearily. ‘I know what you’re doing.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You’re trying to goad me into fighting or rolling over, but I don’t want to fight you. I don’t even know your name. You’ve started something and you think you can’t back down, but you can. Nobody is going to think less of you. No one is laughing.’

Audie stood up. He was still holding the tray.

‘Do any of you think this man is funny?’ he shouted.

He asked the question so earnestly Moss could see people giving it some serious thought. The Dice Man looked around like he’d lost his place on the page. He swung a punch at Audie because that was his usual fall-back position. In the blink of an eye, Audie had swung the tray into the side of the Dice Man’s head. Of course that only provoked him. He roared forward but Audie was faster. He drove the corner of the tray into the Dice Man’s throat with such force that he dropped him to his knees where he curled onto the floor, struggling to breathe. The guards arrived and took the Dice Man to the prison hospital.

Moss thought Audie had some sort of death wish, but that wasn’t the case. Prison is full of people who believe the world doesn’t exist apart from in their own minds. They can’t imagine life outside the walls, so they bring their own world into being. A man is nothing inside. He’s a grain of sand under somebody’s shoe, a flea on a dog, a pimple on the buttocks of a fat man. The biggest mistake a man can make in prison is to believe he matters at all.

Each morning it began again. Audie must have fought a dozen men the first day and another dozen the second. By lockdown, he’d been bashed so badly that he couldn’t chew and both of his eyes were like purple plums.

On the fourth day, the Dice Man had sent word from the prison hospital that he wanted Audie Palmer dead. His gang made the arrangements. That evening, Moss took his chow tray to the table where Audie was sitting alone.

‘Can I sit down?’

‘It’s a free country,’ mumbled Audie.

‘It’s not though,’ replied Moss. ‘Not when you’ve been in prison as long as I have.’

The two men ate in silence until Moss said what he came to say. ‘They’re going to kill you in the morning. Maybe you should ask Grayson to put you in The Hole.’

Audie raised his eyes above Moss’s head as though reading something in the air, and said, ‘I can’t do that.’

Moss thought Audie was being naïve or stupidly brave or maybe he wanted to die. This wasn’t a struggle over missing money. Nobody in prison can spend seven million dollars – not with the worst drug habit or need for protection. And it wasn’t about the small stuff like chocolate bars or extra soap. In prison, you fuck up, you die. You look at a person the wrong way … you die. You sit at the wrong table at chow time … you die. You walk on the wrong side of the corridor or the exercise yard, or make too much noise when you’re eating … you die. Petty. Stupid. Unlucky. Fatal.

There were codes to be lived by, but these were not to be mistaken for any sense of camaraderie. Incarceration put people close together but it didn’t
bring
them together, it didn’t unify.

The next morning at eight-thirty the doors opened and the ramp filled. The Dice Man’s troops were waiting. They’d given the job to a newcomer, who had a fibreglass shank hidden up his sleeve. The others were stationed as lookouts or to help him ditch the weapon. The fish was going to be gutted like a fish.

Moss didn’t want any part of it, but there was something about Audie that intrigued him. Anybody else would have surrendered or kowtowed or begged to be put in solitary. Anybody else would have looped a bed sheet around the bars. Audie was either the dumbest sonbitch in history or the bravest.
What did he see in the world that nobody else did?

Prisoners had spilled out of the cells and pretended to be doing business but mostly they were waiting. Audie didn’t appear. Maybe he’d taken his own way out, thought Moss, but then came the crashing symbols and a thumping baseline of ‘Eye of the Tiger’ turned up loud, blaring from Audie’s cell.

He appeared, bare-chested, dressed in boxer shorts, long socks and trainers darkened with bootblack. Dancing on his toes, throwing shadow punches, he had a sock on each fist stuffed with toilet paper to look like enormous boxing gloves. With his face beaten to a pulp, he looked like Rocky Balboa coming out to fight Apollo Creed in the fifteenth round.

The kid with the shank didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Audie danced and jabbed, ducked and weaved, wearing those ridiculous gloves. But then a strange thing happened. Niggas started laughing. Niggas started clapping. Niggas started singing. When the song finished playing, they carried Audie above their heads like he’d won the heavyweight title of the world.

That’s the day that Moss best remembers when he thinks of Audie Palmer – watching him dance out of that cell, throwing punches at phantoms, ducking and weaving at shadows. It wasn’t the beginning of something or the end of something, but Audie had found a way to survive.

Of course folks still wanted to know about the money, even the guards, who had grown up in the same dirt-poor projects as the men they were watching, which left them open to bribery and smuggling contraband. Some of the female correctional officers suggested Audie transfer funds into their bank accounts in return for sexual favours. These were women who could eat their own weight in burgers, but who started looking mighty fine after a few years inside.

Audie refused their offers. Not once in ten years did he ever mention the robbery or the money. He didn’t lead anyone on, or make any promises. Instead he conveyed a sense of calm and equanimity, like a man who had banished from his life all superfluous sentiment, all longings and all patience for the nonessential. He was like Yoda, Buddha and the Gladiator all rolled into one.

5

A beam of sunlight settles on Audie’s eyelid and he tries to flick it away like an insect. The light comes back and he hears a giggle. Billy is holding a small mirror and angling the sun through the open barn door.

‘I can see you,’ says Audie.

Billy ducks down and giggles again. He’s wearing tattered shorts and a T-shirt that’s too big for him.

‘What time is it?’ Audie asks.

‘After breakfast.’

‘Shouldn’t you be at school?’

‘It’s Saturday.’

So it is
, thinks Audie, rising to his hands and knees. At some point during the night he rolled off the bunk and curled up on the floor, which felt more familiar than a mattress.

‘Did you fall out of bed?’ asks Billy.

‘I guess I did.’

‘I used to fall out of bed but I don’t any more. Ma says I outgrowed it.’

Audie emerges into the sunlit yard and washes his face at a pumpjack. It was dark last night when he arrived. Now he can see a clutch of small, unpainted houses surrounded by rusting vehicles, spare parts, a water trough, a windmill and a woodpile stacked against a crumbling stone wall. A small black boy is riding a bicycle that’s too big for him, sitting on the frame to reach the pedals, navigating between fluttering chickens.

‘That’s my friend Clayton,’ says Billy. ‘He’s black.’

‘I can see that.’

‘I don’t have many black friends, but Clayton’s okay. He’s little but he can run faster than a bike unless you’re going downhill.’

Audie cinches the belt on his trousers to stop them falling down. On the porch of a neighbouring house he notices a thin man in a checked shirt and black leather vest watching him. Audie waves. The man doesn’t wave back.

Rosie appears. ‘Breakfast is on the stove.’

‘Where’s Ernie?’

‘Work.’

‘He starts early.’

‘Finishes late.’

Audie sits at the table and eats. Tortillas. Eggs. Beans. Coffee. There are glass jars of flour, dried beans and rice on shelves above the stove. He can see Rosie through the window hanging washing on a line. He can’t stay here. These people have been kind to him, but he doesn’t want to bring them trouble. His only hope of staying alive is to follow the plan and keep hidden for as long as possible.

When Rosie reappears he asks her about getting a lift into town.

‘I can take you at midday,’ she says, rinsing his empty plate in the sink. She brushes a strand of hair from her eyes. ‘Where are you heading?’

‘Houston.’

‘I can drop you at the Greyhound Depot in San Antonio.’

‘Is that out of your way?’

She doesn’t answer. Audie takes money from his pocket. ‘I’d like to pay you something for the lodgings?’

‘Keep your money.’

‘It’s clean.’

‘If you say so.’

It’s thirty-eight miles into San Antonio, heading north on Interstate 37. Rosie drives a small Japanese-made car with a broken exhaust and no air conditioning. They travel with the windows open and the radio turned up loud.

At the top of the hour, a newsreader lists the headlines and mentions a prison break. Audie begins talking, trying to make it sound natural. Rosie interrupts him and turns up the volume.

‘Is that you?’

‘I’m not fixing to hurt anyone.’

‘That’s good to know.’

‘You can drop me off right here if you’re worried.’

She doesn’t answer. Keeps driving.

‘What did you do?’ she asks.

‘They said I robbed an armoured truck.’

‘Did you?’

‘Hardly seems to matter any more.’

She sneaks a glance at him. ‘Either you did or you didn’t.’

‘Sometimes you get blamed for things you didn’t do. Other times you get away with things you did. Maybe we finish up even at the end.’

Rosie changes lanes, looking for the exit. ‘I don’t have a lot of moral authority since I don’t go to church any more, but if you’ve done something wrong you shouldn’t run away from it.’