Sweet Nothing (6 page)

“Prepare it
à
la
b
ordelaise,
” the prisoner called to him as he left the cell. “I'm sure your wife has a nice recipe.”

I released him from his chains after the group departed, and he was silent for the rest of the day, a madman, as Maître Bergerot had said, chasing his mad thoughts.

THE SOULS OF
children have more worth than the souls of adults, which, sacred though they are, have nonetheless been battered and tarnished by the various degradations encountered along life's rocky path. Thus, if a man who's killed eight men—outside of war, of course, where he'd likely be decorated for such slaughter—if a man who's killed eight men deserves death for his crimes, a man who's killed eight
children
surely deserves death twice over, or thrice, or eight times. Perhaps, in the glorious future we're hurtling toward, some genius will discover a way to return the dead to life again and again, and we'll have true justice at last, as we march our villains to the blade and drop their heads into the basket as many times as is necessary to square their accounts.

I'm not the man for such math, though. I leave that bleak reckoning to the judges and priests, as I lack the certainty required for it. I've known the dark wind that scatters consoling scripture and common wisdom like so many dead leaves, revealing the barren ground beneath. I've wandered lost through a wilderness unbounded, where no law tempered rage and no morality constrained lust. It was violent and carnal and instantly familiar: my true heart, the true heart of man, and turning from it every time to return home was like tearing myself away from a looking glass.

So, no, I'm not the one to set the sentences. I've seen through the eyes of a snake. I've seen through the eyes of a wolf. I'm too close to beastliness myself to pass judgment. Let me watch over your monsters instead, feeding them, changing the straw in their cells, until the hour comes for them to pay the price that the learned lay upon them.

AT THE END
of the first day of trial, the soldiers assigned to transport the prisoner to and from court returned him to his cell. He was bleeding from a cut on his forehead.

“Did they beat you?” I said.

“No,” he said. “It was a stone thrown from the crowd.”

Hearing footsteps on the stairs, I quickly moved the lamp away from the door and closed the feeding slot. The commander appeared out of the shadows. I was expecting Pascal, the guard who watched over the prisoner at night.

“Pascal is refusing his watch,” the commander said. “The details that came out at the trial have apparently enraged him. I need you to stay on until midnight, when I'll relieve you myself.”

“Fine, sir,” I said. “If someone would only go around and let my wife know.”

“I'll send a man right away, and also arrange for your dinner,” the commander said.

“Thank you, sir,” I said.

“We'll be rid of this vermin soon enough,” the commander said. “Another week or two.”

“Yes, sir.”

A few hours later I heard someone else descending. This time it
was
Pascal, along with two other guards from another section of the prison. They carried clubs and breathed cheap brandy.

“Step aside,” Pascal said. “We mean to take the bastard.”

“By whose order?” I said.

“By order of the citizens of Bordeaux,” Pascal said. “There are hundreds of them at the gates, demanding satisfaction.”

“Satisfaction isn't justice,” I said.

“Unlock the door,” Pascal said.

“I won't,” I said. “And neither will you.”

One of the other guards, a sadistic oaf called Dédé, sprang forward and brought his club down on my shoulder with all the strength of his drunken righteousness. The blow shook me to my toes and drove tears into my eyes, but I stood my ground. Dédé raised his club to strike me again and would have cracked my skull if Pascal hadn't stopped him, saying, “Enough, man. He's one of us, after all.”

“No, he isn't,” Dédé said. “He's a damned coward.”

The oaf backed away but looked as if he was waiting for any excuse to continue the beating.

“This scum doesn't deserve your mercy,” Pascal said to me.

“I'm a guard, and he's my prisoner,” I said. “It's simply my duty to see that he comes to no harm.”

Pascal blinked twice and squinted at me, then turned for the stairs. “Let's go,” he called to the others. They followed reluctantly, Dédé muttering over his shoulder, “You'll answer to the people for this.”

As soon as their footsteps faded, I sank to the ground, my left arm numb, my collarbone throbbing. This was too much for me. If they returned, they could have him, and the devil take them all. It was just me and the rats, though, until the commander arrived and sent me home for the night.

WHERE
ARE
MY
footmen
this
morning?
the prisoner asked.

The
trial's over,
I replied.

And
the
verdict?
the prisoner asked.

Death,
I replied.

What
a
pity,
the prisoner said.

IT TOOK NEARLY
a week for the guillotine to be transported down from Paris and erected in the square in front of the fort. The prisoner remained calm until the last day, when a final, furious storm of lunacy left him more lost than ever. I looked in on him at noon and found him pacing his cell. At one he'd stripped off his clothing. At two, he was abusing himself most frantically.

“Tell me about your children,” he called out when he sensed me at the feeding slot. “Little girls? Little boys?”

Revulsion like I'd never known nearly doubled me over, and it was as if I were the first man uttering the first word when I shouted, “Enough!”

“Do you bathe them in the evening?” he continued. “Kiss their little—”

“Another word, and I'll kill you,” I said.

“Me? Your dear cell mate?” he said. “I think not.” He thrust his free hand through the slot. “Come, brother, let me touch some soft part of you. The underside of your forearm, your eyelids, your tiny cock.”

“Enough!” I roared again and laid the hot lantern glass against his grasping fingers. When he pulled them back in pain, I slammed shut the slot and moved off down the corridor, where I begged God to help me douse the fire of my outrage with the blessed waters of compassion.

THE COMMANDER REQUESTED
I come in early the next day to assist him in readying the prisoner for execution. The prisoner spent his last hour alone with a priest, and then, at dawn, the commander and I entered the cell. We bound the prisoner's wrists, and the commander cut away the collar of his tunic. Because of the awfulness of his crimes, he was not to be allowed to enjoy the light of his last morning. It was left to me to place the black hood over his head. As I pulled it down, just before it covered his face, I sent him a thought—
I'll
pray
for
you
—but he wouldn't look me in the eye.

THAT WAS THE
last I saw of him. A trio of soldiers led him to a waiting wagon, which carried him out to the guillotine. I was told he went to his death quietly. The blade fell, the crowd that had gathered to watch cheered, the body was carted away.

The priest returned to the pit shortly after the execution. I sat where I always sat, staring into the empty cell and trying to work up the strength to prepare it for its next occupant.

“You were his guard?” the priest asked me.

“Yes, Father,” I replied.

He handed me an envelope. “He asked me to give this to you,” he said.

Inside was the list of the Wolf's victims from the newspaper. At the top of the page the prisoner had scrawled the words
Ma
Confession,
and next to every name, those of the known dead and those of the missing, he'd written,
Oui
.

I passed the list to the commander. He was pleased, elated even, and told me the rest of the day was mine, a reward for outstanding service. I climbed out of the pit, left the prison, and wandered the early-morning streets in a daze, unused to the bright sunlight and the raucous exuberance of the city coming to life. Women shouted from window to window across narrow alleys, shop owners joked as they set up their sidewalk displays, and children, everywhere children, their joyous voices ringing out like the songs of unseen birds.

I eventually found myself on the steps of Saint-Michel and collapsed there like a weary pilgrim. I'd lived in the shadows of its blackened stones and jagged spires since birth. As a boy I used to imagine that the church was God's armored fist and the tower beside it His sword. One felt safe with something like that always so close. Safe. Oh, how I longed to be a boy again.

Perhaps if I talked to a priest, I thought, he'd have some words of reassurance about the thickness of the walls between worlds and how one can wrestle evil without being infected by it. I wouldn't have believed anything he said, but it might've provided temporary solace, like a soothing balm for a wound that can never heal.

I couldn't bring myself to enter the church just then, however, to return to darkness and heavy silence no matter how sanctified, so I continued to sit on the steps and marvel at the many tiny delights the morning brought my way. The swifts darting so skillfully among the chimneys, the sound of a teacher calling her students to class, the smell of bread from an old woman's basket. And then, both ashamed and unashamed, I bowed my head and wept.

THE SUN HAS NEVER
felt as good as it does when I finally step out of that jailhouse and into a beautiful Friday morning, the air smelling a little like jasmine, a little like the ocean; happy weekend smiles on all the faces in the windows of a passing bus; and the mountains sitting right there, like they sometimes do, looking close enough to touch.

I've only been locked up for forty-eight hours, but this bit was worse than any of the others because it was so unexpected. The cops broke into the little casino Kong runs in the back room of his bar, saw the slots and the craps setup, and before you know it, I was being yanked out of my seat at the poker table and slammed against the wall, and when they ran my license, up popped a couple of speeding tickets that had gone to warrant. Two years I'd managed to fly under the radar, and just like that, I was back in the system.

But I'm not going to let it mess me up. I'm going to focus on the things I have to be grateful for—like the fact that Larry's waiting for me out front like he promised he would be, and that he passes me a big old cup of coffee as soon as I slide into his truck, and that he tracked down Domingo and collected the money D owed me and used it to bail me out, all on the back of a single frantic phone call. Unbelievable. You can count friends like that on one hand—hell, one finger.

“Larry, my man,” I say. “Let me buy you breakfast.”

THE DENNY'S IN
the shadow of the freeway next to the jail is the first place a lot of guys go right when they get out, to eat a decent meal and use a toilet with a door. I see a couple of dudes I was in with sitting at the counter—ID bands still on their wrists, property bags at their feet—digging into tall stacks of pancakes and double orders of ham and eggs.

“Tell me what I missed,” I say to Larry across the table.

He forks a sausage into his mouth and shrugs. Syrup glistens on his mustache. He's a listener, not a talker.

“Anybody die? Anybody hit it big?” I ask.

“It was only two days,” he says.

Yeah, but it sure seemed longer. Probably because I barely slept. The guy in the next bunk moaned and groaned all night, suffering through his dreams, and during the day I was too wound up to nap, surrounded as I was by bad men with bad intentions. I spent all my time guarding my personal space, displaying enough aggression to ward off the jackals but not so much that I riled the tigers. My hands are still shaking. When I lift my glass to drink, orange juice sloshes over the rim.

But back to the good stuff: I'm out, my only friend came through for me, and I've got a date this afternoon with Lupe, a beautiful girl I met last week at this pool hall where I shoot sometimes. We're going to the track, me and her and her kid. She couldn't get a sitter, so I told her to bring him along. “There's all kinds of kids there,” I told her. “They love it.”

“How's work?” I ask Larry.

He shakes his head. “Picked up a couple days drywalling, but it's slow.”

“Let me talk to my cousin. He's looking for help on that house in Eagle Rock.”

“You were supposed to talk to him last week.”

“Yeah, but then all this went down.”

I haven't spoken to my cousin in months because I owe him five hundred dollars. Larry knows this but doesn't call me on it. He's cool like that, always has been. What's crazy is that sometimes I wish he wasn't. Sometimes I wish he'd haul off and punch me in my lying fucking face.

He slurps his coffee and watches the waitress joke with two cops in the next booth. I remember him contemplating joining the LAPD right after he got married, going on and on about the health insurance and the pension plan. He acted like I was some kind of asshole for pointing out that two DUIs and a burglary conviction might hold him back.

“You've got to move out before the first of next month,” he mumbles without looking at me. “Shauna put her foot down.”

Like I couldn't see this coming. Shauna's been trying to find an excuse to boot me from their garage since the day I moved in.

“We need someone we can count on for regular rent,” Larry continues. “We're behind on everything.”

The rent bit is bogus. I've only been late once, maybe twice, in almost a year. I haven't paid for April yet, but it's only the fifth, and, guess what, I've been locked down most of that time. Larry could tell Shauna to back off. He could say,
This is my homeboy we're talking about.
But I've been married; I understand. And if me staying there is causing him problems, no sweat. I'll find somewhere else to crash until I get on another roll.

“No worries,” I say, and that's enough about that. “So this chick Lupe, the one from Hollywood Billiards—”

“By the first,” Larry says, not letting it go.

“Do you think I didn't hear?”

He's given up on me. It's there in his eyes. My hands tighten into fists, and ugly thoughts blaze through my brain. But then I see all the food on my plate and the clear blue sky outside and remember that it's only me who can bring me down, and everything is fine again. Everything's great.

LUPE ALMOST BLEW
it for me the night we met. She kept smiling from the bar as I hustled some pigeon, and it was so distracting that, for a while, I thought they were a team. I let the guy take me twice for twenty a game, then came on as drunk and stupid and challenged him to another, this time for a hundred. He figured he had a fish on the line and said, “Whatever you want, bro.” I stalled all the way to the eight before putting it away, and then it was him begging for a rematch. I held back in that game too, making my win look like dumb luck. He left grumbling but unable to prove that he'd been had.

His money felt nice in my pocket—easy money always does—and I walked over and introduced myself to Lupe. “Ladies as pretty as you shouldn't be allowed near the tables,” I said. “You make it hard to concentrate.”

“You still whipped his ass, didn't you?” she said.

“No thanks to you.”

She was there with friends from the dentist's office where she worked as a receptionist, somebody's birthday. I bought the group a round with my winnings, but Lupe was the only one I was interested in. The click of the balls faded, the music, everyone else's dopey conversations. All I heard was her voice.

I like Mexican girls. That thick black hair. That brown skin. Those dark, dark eyes, full of secrets. And Lupe had this haughtiness that made me smile because it was such a put-on. She tried to act like nothing meant anything to her, like she was in on the joke, but I could see that was just a shield she was using to protect herself. You win a girl like that over, and you're going to learn what love is all about.

“So what are you,” she asked at one point, stabbing her drink with her straw, “some kind of hustler, some kind of shark?”

“Because that's not what you're looking for, right?” I replied. “You're a mom, got a son to think about. You don't need another bad boy messing stuff up.”

“Well,” she said, “maybe a little bit bad.”

When her friends started pulling at her to leave, she took out her phone and asked for my number, then dialed it as I gave it to her.

My phone rang, and I put it to my ear and said, “Hello?” staring right at her.

“This is Lupe,” she said. “Call me sometime.” And then off she went, swept away by her scandalized
amigas,
one of them whispering, “Oh my God. I can't believe you.”

It wasn't going to get any better than that, so I hurried home to Larry's garage, locked the door, and crawled into my sleeping bag before any randomness could ruin a perfect night.

I'M DUE AT
Lupe's at noon, which gives me enough time to pick up my Xterra from Kong's, where it's been sitting since I got popped, then drive back to Larry's and sneak a quick shower while Shauna's at the store. The hundred dollars stashed in the toe of one of my good shoes isn't much, but admission is free at Santa Anita today, and they've got dollar sodas and hot dogs, so I should be fine.

Lupe lives in North Hollywood with her sister. The two of them and their kids share a condo. Lupe's sister lived there with her husband, but then he ran off, and when Lupe got rid of her old man, the girls decided to throw in together.

I park in the loading zone in front of the building and give Lupe a call. She'll be down in a minute. While I'm waiting, I walk to the main entrance and look in through the lobby to the swimming pool in the courtyard. The water is perfectly still, and an old man is reading a newspaper at a table with an umbrella sprouting out of it. It's nice, nicer than anyplace I've ever lived.

Lupe and her son walk out of the elevator, and she looks as good as I remember, in tight jeans and a white tank top. The kid is wearing a Spider-Man T-shirt and Spider-Man sunglasses. I try to get the front door of the building for them, jerk it twice before I realize it's locked. Lupe pushes it open from inside.

“They're serious around here, huh?” I say.

“That's right, you lowdown, dirty varmint,” the kid growls.

“Jesse!” Lupe snaps, then says to me, “He gets all this weird stuff from cartoons. Half the time I don't even know what he's talking about.”

“You like horses?” I ask him.

“Are we gonna ride some?”

“We're gonna watch them race.”

“Dag-nab it.”

I keep my Xterra immaculate; wash it every week, polish it once a month. It's the only decent habit I picked up from my dad. He couldn't stand it when people paid good money for a vehicle then let it go to pot. “It shows they don't appreciate what they have,” he'd say. “That it came to them too easy.”

Lupe straps Jesse into the backseat.

“Is there TV in here?” he asks.

“No TV,” I say.

“My uncle has TV.”

I ignore him. You have to do that to kids sometimes, otherwise they think every silly thing that comes out of their mouths deserves a response. He's all wrapped up in a toy he brought with him anyway, some kind of ninja doll.

Lupe starts right in with a story about a girl she works with who misread the numbers on a lottery ticket and thought she'd won. She got on the phone and screamed to her husband and her mom and danced around the office and promised everyone a cruise.

“I felt so bad for her,” Lupe says, laughing and shaking her head. “She called in sick for two days afterward.”

I laugh and change lanes to get around a slow-moving semi with its hazards blinking.

“Hey, check it out,” Lupe says as we pass the truck.

The semi is hauling four huge palm trees, their roots encased in heavy wooden boxes, fronds tied to their trunks to keep them from blowing around. They look like prisoners on their way to execution. Lupe takes a photo with her phone. She's excited about being out, about the day ahead of us, and maybe even about me. I like that, that she can't hide it.

BY THE TIME
we park, it's five minutes to post for the first race. A couple of decent horses are running, and I'd like to get a bet in if I can, but Jesse doesn't know how to hurry yet. He stops to pick up a penny from the pavement, stops again to watch a ladybug crawl. I give up when Lupe kneels to tie his shoe right before we walk through the turnstile, grit my teeth as the announcer calls, “And away they go.”

“Would you have won?” Lupe asks when she sees me looking at a tote board a few minutes later.

“Couple a' bucks,” I say. “Not enough to cry over.”

We pass through the echoey cavern beneath the grandstand, which is full of horseplayers staring up at TV monitors or hunched over copies of the
Form
. The same anxiety that tightened my throat as soon as I drove into the place has these men squinting and licking their lips and slapping rolled-up programs against their palms. This hasn't been fun for any of them for a long time.

Lines have already formed at the betting windows for the next race, and a crowd has gathered beneath one of the TVs to watch a simulcast from San Francisco. “Come on, you motherfucker,” a guy in a Raiders jacket shouts at the screen as we walk by. I glance at Lupe and see that she's about to say
Hey, there are kids here
or something, so I rush her outside.

We emerge into the sunlight beside the track, near the finish line. I lead Lupe and Jesse up into the stands and snag three seats. It's ten minutes to post.

“You guys want hot dogs?” I say. “Cokes?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah!” Jesse chants, bouncing up and down.

Lupe jerks his arm and hisses at him to stop. “One plain and one with ketchup,” she says to me.

“Ketchup, ketchup, ketchup,” Jesse whispers as I walk away.

I HEAD STRAIGHT
for a window to put ten on Wilder Thing, the favorite, to win. Then, before I can stop myself, I also put ten on the second favorite. The race goes off while I'm waiting in line at the snack bar, and I watch it on a monitor. My horses come in second and fifth. So I lose, but at least I know how my luck is running. It'll be dollar exactas for the rest of the day, a ten-cent superfecta if the field is big enough.

Paul pops up behind me while I'm ordering the food.

“Get me a dog too,” he says, shoving a moist dollar bill into my hand.

“What the fuck?” I say.

“Come on.”

Paul is the type of person I need to avoid. He has no goals, no impulse control, no life. Last time I was with him at a card club, we wound up running from some drunk Iranians after one of them accused Paul of trying to lift his wallet. Paul swore up and down they were nuts but then got the crap beat out of him two weeks later for doing the same thing to someone else.

I hand him his hot dog and get no thank-you, nothing, just “You seen Whammy?”