A Sad Soul Can Kill You (23 page)

Homer sat at the table in the county jail and looked at the attorney the court had appointed for him. He took note of her polished ability to stare him straight in the eye and try to fool him with her smile. He didn't trust her. He knew she was just like everyone else . . . smiling in his face while determining which part of his back that knife she kept sharpened would go into. And just because she was all dressed up and called herself an attorney didn't make her any different. That's just the way women were, and that's exactly why he wasn't going to admit to any wrongdoing.

“I'm not pleading guilty,” he said to the attorney. “Let's get that clear now.”

“If you go for a trial jury,” she said, “it's not going to look good for you.”

Homer was adamant. “I'm not pleading guilty. I didn't do anything wrong. I didn't do anything those girls didn't want me to do.”

The attorney sighed. “You realize they were minors, and that makes it against the law, right?”

“I didn't do anything they didn't want me to do,” Homer repeated.

The attorney closed her notebook and stuffed it, along with all her other papers, into her briefcase. She looked at him once more before she stood up to leave. “We'll talk again next week,” she said before leaving the visitor's room.

Homer snickered to himself as he watched her walk away. He was escorted back to the common room and walked slowly to one of several round tables that were scattered throughout the room. The tables, with four metal legs connected to small round areas for sitting, reminded Homer of silver spiders bolted to the floor.

He sat down at an empty table in the corner of the room and began to look at the books situated on an antiquated bookshelf several feet away. He scanned the variety of paperback and hardcover books on the shelf and suspected they were just as old as the piece of furniture they sat on. He heard a voice behind him and turned around quickly.

Three inmates were lowering themselves down onto the remaining round metal seats. One of them was a tall, athletic man who the other two inmates referred to as Big Butch. The second one was just as tall but slender, and the third inmate was short with a stocky build.

The voices blaring from the television bolted on the wall blended in with the voices of all the inmates. Homer pointed to his ear.

“I said what are you in here for?” Big Butch repeated.

Homer waved his hand. “Just some bogus charges,” he said.

“What kind of charges?”

Homer studied the massive bulge created in the inmate's arms when he placed his elbows on the table. “Some girls accused me of doing some things I didn't do.”

“Oh yeah?” the short stocky inmate said and glanced at Big Butch. “What kind of things?”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” the slender inmate said. “We're being rude. We didn't even introduce ourselves. I'm Stony,” he said. He pointed to the short, stocky inmate. “This here is Chunky.”

“And they call me Big Butch,” the tall, athletic inmate said. He stared hard at Homer. “You can see why.”

Homer nodded his head. “Yeah, I can. I'm Homer,” he said holding out his hand.

Big Butch ignored Homer's extended hand. “I know who you are. You the dude who likes to mess with little girls. I heard about you.”

Several other inmates had migrated to the table where Homer and the other three men sat. Homer relished the attention he was getting. For the first time in his life, he felt important, like people wanted to hear what he had to say, and so he continued to talk.

“Well, they weren't that little,” he said with a smile. “They were old enough to know what they were doing.”

“Yeah, but you said girls,” Stony said. “How old were they?”

“Let's just say they were younger than me,” Homer said and chuckled as he looked around the table.

“How much younger?” Stony continued to probe.

The looks of repulsion on the faces of the other inmates caused an uneasy feeling to sweep over Homer. He tried to brush it off by continuing to talk. “They weren't too young to know what they were doing,” he said. “And then they tried to say that I forced them to, you know, do things with me.” He laughed. “But they're lying.” He looked around the table. “We know how girls are, right?”

No one answered.

“Continue,” Big Butch said with a tense look on his face.

“Yeah, so I met this one girl,” Homer said. “And she just begged me to show her the ropes. You know, teach her the tricks of the trade.” He sat up straight. “So I did.”

“What kind of tricks did you teach her?” Chunky asked.

“Forget that,” Stony said backhanding the air. He glared at Homer. “Man, you making this seem like you was some kind of angel exalted in the sky.”

“More like a fallen angel,” Chunky said. “And you getting closer and closer to the ground as you speak.”

Homer tried to mask his nervousness. “What are you talking about? Those girls liked it, and I just told you they wanted it.” He looked at Big Butch. “You know what I mean, right?” He elbowed the side of his arm.

Big Butch looked at his arm, then at Homer. “No, man, I don't know what you mean.”

“Aw, come on. Why else would they have agreed to meet me?” He sighed and shook his head. “That's why I can't figure out why they're complaining now.”

“Maybe because they were little girls,” Stony said, staring straight-ahead.

“They weren't that little,” Homer said, elbowing Big Butch's arm a second time.

“Don't do that again,” Big Butch said.

“Don't do what?”

“Elbow me. As a matter of fact,” he said, standing up, and the other two inmates stood up as well, “don't touch me at all. Those little girls might have ‘liked' it as you say, but I don't.”

They all walked away and the rest of the inmates dispersed, leaving Homer as he had begun—alone at the table.

“Hey, what's wrong with that dude?” Stony asked. “He's limping around here bragging about what he did to those girls like it's cool or something.”

“Nah,” Chunky said, “that ain't cool. That ain't cool at all.”

“Yeah,” Big Butch said. His face hardened. “Old short leg gon' need some schoolin'.”

“Who gon' be the teacher?” Chunky asked.

“I'll let you know,” Big Butch said as he looked over in Homer's direction.

When the “lights out” call rang out, Homer had long stopped talking. He lay down on the thin mattress, and as soon as he closed his eyes he saw the disapproving looks that had been on the faces of the other inmates earlier.

The story about the girls he'd told them in the common room had been meant to impress them. But the looks on the faces of Big Butch, Stony, and Chunky reflected anything but that. Homer tried to reason away their expressions as just the look of a hardened criminal. But no matter how hard he tried to pretend, his instinct told him something different.

An uneasy feeling came over him as he struggled to remove the visual images of their faces from his memory. Had he told too much? His mind began to race. What would they do to him? Homer had heard many stories about terrible things happening to inmates in jail. Was he about to be one of them? He thought about what the police officer had said to him earlier while he was conducting the strip search.

Homer, along with the rest of the newly admitted inmates, had been ordered to get undressed. He had carefully removed his shirt and pants and had stood with his socks and boxers still on.

Now, Homer's heart, once hardened under the guise of self-innocence, was beginning to crack.
What had the officer meant? Why had he laughed?
Homer began breathing rapidly as he imagined the worst scenarios for himself.

He turned onto his back and looked at the ceiling. Although his own voice had quieted, he could hear another voice emerging from within him. It came from a deep and long ignored place, and hinted of many sleepless nights to come. He stiffened as he realized what his court-appointed attorney had said was true—if he didn't plead guilty, he would probably end up in a prison cell just like this one for a very long time.

He kicked back the thin, sweat-soaked bedspread he'd been lying under and sat up. He looked around the cell that was smaller than the average college dorm room. It was surrounded by cement blocks that served as walls, and the steel bars that kept him caged in like an animal may as well have been a metal noose around his neck.

A spasm of pain rippled across his stomach. It had become a familiar pain ever since his wife, Sandra, had left him.
Or had he felt it before then?
He was no longer sure. But one thing he was sure of was that he didn't have what it took to be locked up day in and day out with people he would never spend one second with on the outside of jail. It was too much for him to bear.

He envisioned his life—no, his existence—as an inmate. The days turned into months, and the months turned into years. He stood up slowly and took his government-issued sheet off the mattress. He didn't belong there, and he was not going to give Big Butch or any of his cohorts the chance to do him harm.

Homer stood up on the wooden chair in his cell.

Perhaps if his mother had not abandoned him at birth . . .

He threw the sheet over the ceiling pipe above him.

Maybe if his wife hadn't left him . . .

He calmly tied both ends of the sheet around his neck.

If Tia hadn't rejected him . . .

He jumped off the chair.

If
anyone
would have cared about his feelings just once...

Soon, Homer's feet began kicking viciously at the air. Just as he was losing consciousness, he felt someone pulling him down, and then he immediately felt a sharp object pierce his chest. He struggled as the object penetrated his upper body a second and a third time. After the fourth time, Homer lay limp.

He closed his eyes right after Big Butch whispered “guilty” into his ear, spreading the conviction throughout his sad soul.

Wisconsin native Catherine Flowers is the creator of the Christian blog,
www.freefrombondage.com
. When she's not fully engrossed in her own projects, she enjoys working as a freelance content editor and writing content for other Web sites. For more information about the author, please visit www.freefrombondage.comorsendane-mailtoauthorcatherineflowers@aol.com.

 

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