One Monday We Killed Them All (3 page)

“He got any personal stuff out the cell?”

“He give what little he had to the guys on his row, Boo.”

“Thanks, Joey. You get on back to work now.”

Joey left. Boo Hudson put an envelope on the edge of the desk where Dwight could reach it. “In there, McAran, is your gate pass to go out, and the twenty dollars we got to give you by state law, and the three dollars and six cents which would be our cost on a bus ticket from Harpersburg to Brook City. Sign this here receipt saying you got it.”

McAran hesitated, picked up the envelope and with an insulting thoroughness counted the money it contained. He put the bills into an alligator wallet with gold edges, flipped the nickel and the penny into Hudson’s metal wastebasket. There was no trace of expression on his face.

Boo Hudson colored and said, “I hope that pleasured you, McAran. I hope it pleasured you the same way you bitched
yourself outa getting not one day of good time took off your sentence. If you’d come in here with the right attitude, you could have been walking free a year and a half ago, and you would have come off parole today.”

Dwight turned toward me. He spoke with a minimum of lip movement. His voice was huskier than I remembered. “Is the sentence over now? Can I leave right now?”

“Yes.”

“What would happen to me if I picked up this fat bag of ignorant garbage and ruptured it a little?”

“Now you hold on!” Boo Hudson said, his voice rising to a squeak.

“He’d probably have his people stomp you up a little and throw you out the gate, Dwight.”

McAran turned and stared at Boo Hudson. “Not worth it,” he said. “Too bad. Why don’t you die a little faster, Hudson, instead of just rotting away and smelling up the world? Put your mind on it and you could be dead in a month.”

“You’ll be back in here!” Boo yelled. “You’ll be back in here, by God, and I’ll break you the next time, I swear. I’ll have you begging and screaming like a girl. I’ll tell them what to do to you, you—”

“Let’s go,” said Dwight McAran, and I followed him out of the office. We were escorted across an angle of the yard through the drizzle to the gate. The gate guards made a phone check on the exit pass, then gave the coded signal to the tower to lift the outer gate. We crossed the road to the parking lot. I suddenly realized he wasn’t beside me. I stopped and looked back. He was standing under an elm tree with his fists on his hips, staring up at the rain-wet leaves. A small boy pedaled down the road on his bicycle. McAran followed the boy with a slow turning of his head. Then he gave a curious contortion of his body, a sort of massive shuddering shrug. Perhaps in that moment he threw off some of the hopeless weight of the prison years. At any rate, when he turned and walked toward me his stride was subtly changed, and his clothing seemed more suitable to him.

ii

When McAran got into the car with me, he was as casual as though I were giving him a lift from his home to the grocery store.

As we left the lot, he said, “Not much miles on this for a six-year-old car.”

“It didn’t have much on it when we bought it. Maybe it was turned back. We took one trip in it. Except for running up here once a month, it just gets used around town, and most of that by Meg.”

“There was sixteen times she came up when she couldn’t get to see me. Hudson could have let her know.”

“At least she could bring you stuff those times and leave it off. That was something she felt good about doing, even when she couldn’t see you.”

“Stop where I can buy cigarettes, will you?”

I pulled into a gas station. When we were on the road again, I glanced over at him from time to time. Awkward silences can be created only between individuals who are aware of each other. Dwight McAran was so totally indifferent to any impression he might be making, he could have been sitting entirely alone. I glanced at him. In the line of the thickened brow, in the weight and placement of his pale green eyes, in the curve of the broken mouth, I could see a remote echo of the contours of the face of my beloved wife. It seemed a savage paradox that this could be true. It was as if someone had defiled a picture of her. His face was not a suitable place for this inference of warmth and sensitivity.

He is one of those men who do not seem particularly big until you notice some small detail, such as the great thickness of wrist. When you realize he is all in proportion to that dimension, he begins to look increasingly massive and indestructible. They comb our hills looking for these boys, knowing their merciless toughness, and, as in the case of Dwight, they give them football scholarships and keep them eligible to play as long as possible before losing them
to the pro leagues. McAran was an All-State fullback. After a knee injury slowed him one step, the University converted him to offensive guard. He had time for one pro season as a rookie linebacker with the Bears before he killed Mildred Hanaman.

“You wanted me to come alone to pick you up,” I said.

“So you can tell me what it’ll be like before I get there. Maybe what you want to say, you couldn’t say it in front of her.”

“Why do you want to come back to Brook City?”

“To have a nice visit with my loving sister.”

“Are you going to stay long?”

“I haven’t decided.”

I went into my speech. I hoped it didn’t sound as carefully planned as it was. “Dwight, I can forget about Meg and look at it from the cop point of view. You killed Paul Hanaman’s only daughter. You hadn’t made yourself what anybody would call popular around town even before it happened. It wasn’t like killing the daughter of—a mill worker.”

“Wasn’t it? Are you trying to tell me, Lieutenant Hillyer, everybody isn’t equal in the eyes of the law?”

“Come off it, Dwight. Paul Hanaman is still publisher of the
Brook City Daily Press.
He’s still a director of Merchant’s Bank and Trust. He’s still powerful in the party. None of that has changed. Neither he nor young Paul want you around town, reminding them of what happened to Mildred. With the kind of pressure they can put on people, how do you expect to get a job?”

“I won’t need a job for a while, brother-in-law. I’ve got some money stashed.”

I stifled the impulse to yell at him, and went back to my reasonable speech, delivered in a reasonable way. “I don’t blame you for wanting to make—this kind of a gesture, Dwight.”

“Gesture? Brook City took something away from me. I want it back.”

“You can’t get five years back.”

“They took my freedom, and the way I earn a living, and eighteen hundred and twenty-six nights out of my life.”

“Revenge isn’t a very—”

“Revenge? On who, Lieutenant? I killed Mildred, didn’t I? She was a sloppy pig with a bad temper, but you can’t go
around killing people because they have bad manners. It’s antisocial.”

“I guess I can’t keep you out of town.”

“Not legally. And you’ve got a lot of respect for the law.”

“But I can tell you it isn’t going to be smart to—to be conspicuous. There was an article yesterday in the
Press.
An editorial with a black border around it. It was called ‘Rehabilitation, Modern Style.’ It wasn’t pretty.”

“Should I sue?”

“Too many people don’t want you to come back. If they get the idea they can’t chase you away, they’ll see if they can stick you back in Harpersburg.”

“It’s about like I thought it would be.”

“It won’t be smart to hang around too long.”

“It’s just the way I want it to be, Fenn. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Hell, who can touch me? My sweet sister married the police force. She keeps telling me what a dedicated officer you are.”

“But I won’t be able to—help you very much.”

“Are you trying to tell me there are nasty people in Brook City who would twist the law to suit their own purposes? Why, if they can do that, Lieutenant, what the hell are you dedicated to? Free apples and free coffee?”

“There are practical considerations you just can’t—”

He slipped readily into the slurred nasality of hill country speech. “Law man can’t protect his own kin? Ev’body watchin’ you, make sure you don’t protect me too much, maybe? What they sayin’, boy? Pore ’Tenant Hillyer, got him a killer for a brother-in-law, but that Fenn, he smart enough to think him up some law duty over in the next county when we come around to stomp that ball-face killer face foremost into the mud.” He chuckled and resumed in his acquired diction, “You’re hung up right between Meg and your call of duty.”

“I didn’t ask for it.”

“It’s a handy thing Meg didn’t marry a milk man. There’d be more money in the house, but it wouldn’t have been so useful to me.”

“It must be a nice simple way to live, Dwight, to think of people only in what way you can use them. You’ve used Meg all your life. You’ve used everybody who ever came within reach.”

“You know, Fenn, that’s my great trouble, and I’m grateful to you for lifting the veil from my eyes. Now I realize I should concentrate on what I can give instead of what I can take. True happiness lies in that direction. Service, unselfishness, devotion, humility. Yes sir, the meek will inherit the earth.”

I glanced at him and saw that satanic smirk. “You haven’t changed.”

“How can you be sure? Maybe it’s my heart’s desire to be just like you. By God, it must be wonderful to be Fenn Hillyer, defender of the right! Why, if a man knows he’s doing the
right
thing, it doesn’t matter to him that any cheap member of the Common Council from the mayor on down can spit right smack in his face and walk away smiling. It doesn’t matter he’s never owned a new car and never will, and he can’t afford a pair of shoelaces except on the years that end with an odd number. It doesn’t matter at all that he’s stuck forever in a dirty little city, because they let him carry a gun and a badge and they let him defend the rights of mankind. But, baby, now you are stuck with me, so keep your head down and let the sweat run free because you’re never going to know from one minute to the next what I’m going to do, or how it’s going to affect Meg or you or the kids.”

I was coming down a winding grade, and in my anger I had pushed it up to seventy. I could have saved a lot of people a lot of agony if, at that moment, I’d snapped the wheel hard right and gone over the edge.

But what kind of an estate can a cop leave his wife and kids?

In a little while I broke a fifteen-mile silence to ask, “Was it really rough?”

“In the middle years. Not in the beginning. Not in the end. In the beginning it was easier because that Governor’s Committee was still in session. But they were waiting, because they’d had the word. That’s something every cop should know about prisons, Lieutenant. The word can be passed along, so that one man can do time so easy it’s like a hotel—but without women. Or they can give you hard time, so hard you bitch your own record and serve the whole route. Hudson was giving out the old crap about how I could have been out a year and a half ago. They had the word on me, and they held off until that Committee was
adjourned forever. And it got easier at the end, maybe because they plain got tired. Once you’ve convinced a man that even if he was to set you on fire you’d stand grinning at him until you fell over dead, once you’ve really convinced him, some of the heart goes out of him. But the middle years were bad. It isn’t like the situation where they’ve got to worry about marking you. They can cuff you to the bars and work you over with half a baseball bat. When bats get cracked in a game they saw them off neat and save the handle half for Boo Hudson. He gets wheezing so bad from the exercise, you’d think he’d keel over. I was either in solitary, or stuck with the hardest, dirtiest, most dangerous jobs. I got the worst cell in the oldest block, unheated in winter and a furnace in summer. They beat me and sweat me and tried to burst my guts with castor oil. When I’d get in bad enough shape to start passing out, they’d put me in the hospital, but I never asked them one time to put me in. Yes, Lieutenant Hillyer, it would be a fair thing to say it was really rough. Maybe it wasn’t supposed to be all that rough, even with the word to make it rough, but when a man won’t beg, won’t bitch, won’t cry, won’t change expression, won’t even wipe the blood off his mouth, and keeps getting back up just as many times as his legs will hold him, it seems to get them all sort of carried away.”

“Was that the smart way to play it?”

“I got exactly what I wanted out of it.”

“Personal satisfaction?”

“Hell, no! I have a reason for everything, Fenn. You’ve never understood that. It made me some useful friends. Also, I got a bonus out of it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I started something Waley and Hudson and all those underpaid screws can’t stop. They lost control. They don’t know how bad the situation is yet. But they will, Lieutenant. They will. They’re in there with the lions, and those lions have got the idea they don’t have to be scared of a whip and a kitchen chair and a whistle. That, I admit, gives me some personal satisfaction.”

“The prison system in this state is—not up to national standards.”

“No! Really!”

“There just isn’t enough money to hire really qualified—”

“And Harpersburg was built to house eight hundred prisoners under maximum security conditions, and there are almost seventeen hundred cons crammed into there, Lieutenant, and they’d cancelled all prison tours before I ever got there, because there’s things in there to see that would send a taxpayer running out into the street, yelping and throwing up.”

“But don’t public officials get a look at—”

“A fast tour of A Block, where everybody is always smiling, a look at one ward in the hospital, a little speech from the tame psychologist, and then plenty of bonded bourbon in the Warden’s office. It’s a great thing you do for law and order, brother-in-law, arresting the hard-nose cons like me and sending us up to Harpersburg for the rest cure.”

“I don’t decide what—”

“But you live with it, baby, and you’re a part of the whole stinking thing, and you keep your mouth shut because if you open it, they’ll lift your gold badge, and then good old Boo Hudson won’t give you the big hello.”