Black-Eyed Susans (30 page)

“Billy?” I croak out
involuntarily.

“Yeah, he hates that. But
somebody’s got to give him shit, don’t you think?”

Terrell, loosening me up. I attempt a
smile.

“How did you get
yours?” My fingernail raking my chin feels like the soft edge of a knife, the
taunt before a killer draws blood.

“I got this scar by making the wrong
friends when I was thirteen,” Terrell says easily. “I stepped off
God’s path early on. Here I am.”

Two minutes in, the conversation already at
God.

“Do you believe in our savior Jesus
Christ?” he asks.

“Sometimes.”

“Well, Jesus and I’ve gotten
real close in here. Jesus and I have plenty of time every day to chat about how I
screwed up my life. How I screwed up my family’s life. My daughters, my son, my
wife will all be paying the price for a night I got high again and didn’t know
where I was.” His forehead is now almost touching the glass. “Look, it took
guts for you to come here and we don’t have much time. I got something to say. I
need to cross you off my list. You need to accept that my dying isn’t your fault.
I don’t want to die being anybody’s burden, OK?”

“I shouldn’t have
testified,” I protest. “I didn’t remember anything. I was just a prop.
It was all hocus-pocus. The jury couldn’t look at me without seeing their
daughters.”

“And the big black boogeyman who got
her.” Astonishingly, he says this without rancor. “I had to let go of that
years ago. It ate me alive. Every night, I hear the ones who’ve gone crazy. They
chatter away to folks who aren’t there. That, or they’re so quiet for weeks
you wonder if their brains just flew out of their heads and there’s a big hole
there. I made up my mind not to go crazy like that. I meditate. Read the Bible and Mr.
Martin Luther King. Play a lot of chess in my head. Work on my case. Write my
kids.”

He’s trying to reassure
me.
“Terrell, I thought years ago you might be innocent. And I did nothing
.
You have every right to hate me.”

“If you can’t remember, why are
you so sure it wasn’t me who took you that night?”

“The killer keeps planting black-eyed
Susans for me. The first time was three days after you were convicted.” I offer
Terrell a pretend smile. “It’s OK if you think I’m crazy. I
would.”
I do.

“I don’t think
you’re crazy. Evil sneaks up on little cat feet.
It sits looking over harbor
and city on silent haunches.
I know that ain’t the way the poem goes.
It’s supposed to be fog on little cat feet. Fog. Evil. It works either way. You
usually can’t see the headlights comin’ at you until it’s too
late.”

I blink away the image of this giant on a
cot reciting a Carl Sandburg poem, trying not to listen to men scratching up the walls
like cats.

“When I first saw you,” Terrell
is saying, “you were sitting in the box in that pretty blue dress, shaking so hard
I thought you might shatter to pieces. I saw my daughters sitting there.”

“That’s why you didn’t
look at me,” I say slowly. There had been such debating back and forth over The
Blue Dress. Everyone had an opinion. Mr. Vega, Benita, the doctor, Lydia, even Aunt
Hilda. The lace was itchy, but I never told anybody. When I testified, I had to casually
flick my hand at my neck and my shoulders to make sure I wasn’t really crawling
with bugs. The Blue Dress was nothing Tessie would ever wear in real life.
The hem
should hit her just slightly above the knees so the jury can see the brace on her
ankle. Not too sexy. She’s going to wear the brace, right? Can we gather in
the waist to emphasize that she’s still pretty much skin and bones? The color
makes her look a little bit yellow, but I think that’s good.

“I wasn’t going to make it worse
for you.” Terrell’s voice brings me back. He’s grinning.
“I’m a pretty ugly man.”

A guard rattles the cage at Terrell’s
back. “Gotta go, Terrell. Closing early.”

“A man’s going down
tonight,” Terrell tells me matter-of-factly. “The Row’s always
extra-tense when a man’s going down. This is the second time this month.”
Terrell is rising while he speaks into the receiver. His broad body fills the window,
softer and rounder than I expected. “It took real guts for you to come here,
Tessie. I know you’re tied up about this. Remember what I said. When I die, let it
go.”

My stomach dances with sudden panic.
This is it.

The words are boiling up in a desperate
rush. “I’m going to
testify again if they’ll give
you a hearing. Bill is a terrific lawyer. He really believes there is … some hope.
Especially now, with the DNA results on the red hair. It’s not mine, of
course.” I pull a copper strand over my ear.

Terrell knows every bit of this already.
Bill has already spent an hour with him. He’s nearby, finishing up the habeas
appeal on his laptop. All the other things Bill hoped might come through to bolster the
appeal haven’t.

“Yeah, Billy’s a good boy. Never
met a more Lord-guided man who doesn’t believe one inch in the Lord. I’ve
still got a little time to change his mind.” Terrell winks. “Take care of
yourself, Tessie. Let it go.” And he hangs up.

I’m frozen to the plastic chair. It
seems like everything has been neatly decided with that final click of the receiver.
Terrell’s fate. Mine.

He leans over and touches a finger to the
glass in a direct line with my moon scar. It begins to throb. A Susan, tapping.
He’s too good to be true, too good to be true.

His mouth is moving. I’m panicking. I
can’t hear through the glass.

He repeats it a second time, carefully
forming the words.

“You know who it is.”

Bill didn’t want to bring me here
tonight, but I insisted. We are only a few hundred yards from the infamous Death House
unit known as “The Walls,” where Terrell informed me just hours earlier that
a man was going down. The Walls is a quaint, stately old building too tired to sigh.
It’s been witnessing death by rope and electricity, gunfire and poison, for more
than a century.

Next door, there’s a small white frame
house with a neatly covered barbecue grill on the front porch. Embracing the other side,
a church.

Terrell is lying in his cell a few miles
away in the Wynne Unit on
Death Row, about to put away his reading.
Bill has told me that even with lockdown and lights out, Terrell will know before we do
if tonight’s execution has been carried out.

When I ask how that can be, he shrugs. The
prisoners have their ways.

Tiny ice pellets crackle on my jacket. I
pull up my hood. We won’t be allowed inside. We are merely voyeurs.

I’ve breathed in the dust of my
premature grave, but I’ve never felt anything as oppressive as the weight of this
air. It’s as if a dying factory threw up death, spewing plumes of grief and
misery, hope and inevitability. The hope is what makes it seethe. I wonder how far
I’d have to run to get away from this toxic cloud. Where its filmy edges end. Two
blocks from the death chamber? A mile? If I peered down from space, would it be
smothering the whole town?

Huntsville is a mythical place that I had
all wrong. In my mind, Huntsville was a single house of horrors. A giant slab of
concrete in the middle of nowhere where the state of Texas locks up Things that deserve
to die. Where stuff happens that you don’t ever, ever need to know about unless
it’s on a big screen with Tom Hanks.

That’s what Lydia’s father, a
big fan of Tom Hanks and the revengeful philosophy of Deuteronomy, always told us.

I was badly misinformed. Huntsville is not
just one badass prison but seven scattered around the area. The death house that looms
in front of us in the waning light doesn’t sit in the middle of nowhere.

It’s a 150-year-old redbrick building
with a clock tower where time has literally stopped. It’s located two blocks off
the quaint courthouse square, in the middle of town. People are downing chicken-fried
steak and strawberry cake right now at the city’s best restaurant, within easy
eyesight of The Walls.

The cops are casually roping off the front
of the prison with crime scene tape. We are within shouting distance of a windowless
corner of the building, where the execution will take place.

I’m trying not to let Bill know how
bothered I am by all of this matter-of-fact efficiency. It started right away, when Bill
easily slid
his car into a spot at the side of the brick prison wall
and shouted up to the guard on the roof to ask if it was OK to park there. She shouted
back, “Sure,” like it was a middle school basketball game.

The Fors and the Againsts are obediently
positioning themselves on opposite sides of the building, with four hundred yards
between them, fighters in a ring who will never meet.

So civilized. So uncivilized.
So
casual.

A few Texas Rangers stand idly by, watching
the small but slowly gathering crowd. No one appears concerned there will be trouble.
Two Spanish television crews are setting up for live shots, while the rest of the press
corps is composed of dark heads in a lit building across from the prison. A group of
Mexican women are kneeling beside a blown-up portrait of the condemned, singing in
Spanish. Two-thirds of the anti-death-penalty crowd is Mexican. The other third is
mostly white, old, resigned, and quiet.

Tonight, a Mexican national is going to be
executed for pumping three bullets into the head of a Houston cop. And then, in nineteen
days, it’s Terrell. And then a guy who hit his pizza delivery girl in the head
with a baseball bat, and then a man who participated in the gang rape and murder of a
mentally challenged girl on a lonely road. And on and on.

Every few minutes or so, Blue Knights are
rounding the corners on their Harleys. They are former police officers avenging their
own, who would maybe like to push the syringe themselves. I watch them position
themselves on the far side of the prison, the pro side, near the execution chamber. The
police and guards have sprung to life, and are directing them to park a little farther
away.

“Are you sure you want to be
here?” Bill asks one more time. We are hovering in a little bit of
no-man’s-land, in between both camps. “I’m not sure there’s a
point.”

Of course there’s a point. The point is, I don’t know what I believe. I
just know what I want to believe.

I don’t say it, though. The less
emotion, the better. We agreed to an uneasy détente as soon as I called and asked
him to please take me
with him to Huntsville to meet Terrell. I
promised I wouldn’t flake out. My eyes drift across the street to a man holding a
battery-operated Christmas candle. He’s leaning against a railing backed up to a
gas station billboard that tells newly sprung prisoners to cash their checks
here.
He’s comfortably packaged between two women with the peaceful
countenance of nuns, and two men, all riding past sixty.

Bill follows my gaze. “That’s
Dennis. He never misses. Sometimes, he’s the only guy out here.”

“I thought there would be more people.
Where are all the people who scream on Facebook?”

“On the couch. Screaming.”

“When will it start?”

“The execution?” He glances at
his watch. “It’s eight now. Probably in about fifteen minutes. Usually,
it’s set for six and it’s done by seven. There was a delay tonight while the
federal court was debating a last-minute appeal that the condemned was mentally
deficient.” He gestures back across the street. “Dennis and that core group
of four over there show up more as a vigil than protest. I mean, at this point, the
writing’s on the wall. Dennis is the one who always stays until the bitter end,
even on the rare occasion when appeals go on until midnight. He waits until the family
of the executed walks out. Wants them to know someone is out here for them.”

I picture it—a skinny old Santa, his
Christmas candle, a lonely corner by a Stop sign, and the night.

“The woman with the bullhorn is
Gloria.” He redirects my attention to the sign-wielding protesters in the street,
who are oddly silent. No chanting. “She’s a fixture, too. She pretty much
believes everyone on Death Row is innocent. Of course, most of them are guilty as hell.
She’s much beloved for dedication, however. She’ll start counting it down
soon.”

“Where are the families
now?”

“The family of the victim, if any of
them want to be there, is already inside the prison. The family of the prisoner is in
the building across the street. I’ve heard Gutierrez has asked his mother not to
watch. Whoever
is
witnessing for him will walk across
with a few reporters as soon as all appeals have expired. That’s the high
sign.” He is directing my eyes under the clock tower, where there are steps that
lead up and inside.

A young television reporter in a brand-new
blue suit and a bright lavender camera-ready tie has appeared to my right. He’s
thrusting his microphone into the face of a woman carrying a sign that declares the
governor is a serial killer. The camera casts eerie light on both of their faces.

The protester’s shoulders are hunched
in an arthritic mountain. She’s traveling on red cowboy boots anyway. She drawls
her answers to the reporter a little cynically, as if she’s seen a hundred of him.
Yes, the lights of the whole town used to dim for a second every time a prisoner
was electrocuted. Yes, this is a typical crowd. Yes, Karla Faye Tucker was the
biggest zoo, being a woman. Someone on the square even advertised “Killer
Prices.”

The reporter cuts her off abruptly.

Bill nudges my shoulder. Gloria has raised
the bullhorn to her lips.

Shadows are moving across the street. Ice
keeps shooting out of the sky.

The air suddenly vibrates with the roar of a
hundred angry tigers, so loud and so fierce that it rattles my brain, the balls of my
feet, the pit of my stomach.