The Last Kind Words

I’d
come five years and two thousand miles to stand in the rain while they prepared my brother for his own murder.

He had less than two weeks to go before they strapped him down and injected poison into his heart. I knew Collie would be divided about it, the way he was divided about everything. A part of him would look forward to stepping off the big ledge. He’d been looking over it his whole life in one way or another.

A different part of him would be full of rage and self-pity and fear. I had no doubt that when the time came he’d be a passive prisoner right up to the moment they tried to buckle him down. Then he’d explode into violence. He was going to hurt whoever was near him, whether it was a priest or the warden or a guard. They’d have to club him down while he laughed. The priest, if he was still capable, would have to raise his voice in prayer to cover my brother’s curses.

I was twenty minutes late for my appointment at the prison. The screw at the gate didn’t want to let me in because he’d already marked me as a no-show. I didn’t argue. I didn’t want to be there. He saw that I wanted to split and it was enough to compel him to let me stay.

At the prison door, another screw gave me the disgusted once-over. I told him my name, but the sound of it didn’t feel right anymore.

“Terry Rand.”

The fake ID I’d been living under the past half decade had become a safe harbor, a slim chance to better myself even though I hadn’t done much yet. I resented being forced to return to the person I’d once been.

The screw made me repeat my name. I did. It was like ice on my tongue. Then he made me repeat it again. I caught on.

“Terrier Rand.”

Expressionless, he led me off to a small side room where I was frisked and politely asked if I would voluntarily succumb to a strip search. I asked what would happen if I said no. He said I wouldn’t be allowed to proceed. It was a good enough reason to turn around. I owed my brother nothing. I could return out west and get back to a life I was still trying to believe in and make real.

Even as I decided to leave I was shrugging out of my jacket and kicking off my shoes. I got naked and held my arms up while the screw ran his hands through my hair and checked between my ass cheeks and under my scrotum.

He stared at the dog tattoo that took up the left side of my chest, covering three bad scars. One was from when Collie had stabbed me with the bayonet of a tin Revolutionary War toy soldier when I was seven. I got a deep muscle infection that the doctor had to go digging after, leaving the area a rutted, puckered purple.

Another was from when I was twelve and my father sent me up the drainpipe to a house that was supposedly empty. A seventy-five-year-old lady picked up a Tiffany-style lamp and swatted me three stories down into a hibiscus tree. A rib snapped and pierced the flesh. My old man got me into the car and pulled the bone shard through by hand as the sirens closed in and he drove up on sidewalks to escape. The scar was mottled red and thick as a finger.

The last one I didn’t think about. I had made an art of not thinking about it.

The screw took pride in his professional indifference, courteous yet dismissive. But the tattoo caught his attention.

“Your family, you’re some serious dog lovers, eh?”

I didn’t answer. One last time he checked through my clothes for any contraband. He tossed them back to me and I got dressed.

I was taken to an empty visiting room. I sat in a chair and waited for them to bring Collie in. It didn’t matter that there was a wall of reinforced glass between us. I wasn’t going to pass him a shiv and we weren’t going to shake hands or hug out twenty years of tension. The only time we’d ever touched was when we were trying to beat the hell out of each
other. I’d been thinking hard about the reasons for that on the ride back east. How could it be that I had such resentment and animosity for him, and he for me, and yet when he called I came running?

They led him in, draped in chains. He could shuffle along only a few inches at a time, his hands cuffed to a thick leather belt at his waist, his feet separated by a narrow chain, bracelets snapped to his ankles. It took ten minutes to unlock him. The screws retreated and Collie twirled his chair around and sat backward, like always.

Like most mad-dog convicts, prison agreed with him. He was a lot more fit than he’d ever been on the outside. The huge beer belly had been trimmed back to practically nothing, his arms thick and muscular and covered in twisted black veins. There was a new gleam in his eye that I couldn’t evaluate.

He had old scars from drunken brawls and new ones from the joint that gave him a sense of character he’d never exhibited before. Like me, he’d gone gray prematurely. He had a short but well-coiffed mane of silver with a few threads of black running through it. I noticed he’d also had a manicure and a facial. He glowed a healthy pink. He’d been moisturized and exfoliated and closely shaved. The nancies on C-Block could open up a salon in East Hampton and make a mint off Long Island’s wealthy blue-haired biddies.

I expected that with his execution only two weeks off, and with five years gone and all the uneasy blood still between us, we would need to pause and gather our thoughts before we spoke. I imagined we would stare at each other, making our usual judgments and taking each other’s measure. We’d then bypass trivial concerns to speak of extreme matters, whatever they might be. With a strange reservation, a kind of childlike hesitation, I lifted the phone and cleared my throat.

Collie moved with the restrained energy of a predator, slid forward in his seat, did a little rap-a-tap on the glass. He grasped the phone and first thing let loose with a snorted, easy laugh. He looked all around until he finally settled on my eyes.

He usually spoke with a quick, jazzy bop tempo, sometimes muttering out of the corner of his mouth or under his breath as if to an audience
situated around him. This time he was focused. He nodded once, more to himself than me, and said, “Listen, Ma hates me, and that’s all right, but you, you’re the one who broke her heart. You—”

I hung up the phone, stood, and walked away.

I was nearly to the door when Collie’s pounding on the glass made me stop. It got the screws looking in on us. I kept my back to my brother. My scalp crawled and I was covered in sweat. I wondered if what he’d said was true. It was the best trick he had, getting me to constantly question myself. Even when I knew he was setting me up I couldn’t keep from falling into the trap. I wondered if my mother’s heart really had broken when I’d left. I thought of my younger sister, Dale, still waiting for me to read her romantic vampire fantasy novels. My father on the porch with no one to sit with. My gramp losing his memories, fighting to retain them, now that there was nobody to stroll around the lake with and discuss the best way to trick out burglar alarms.

Collie kept on shouting and banging. I took another step. I reached for the handle. Maybe if I’d made my fortune out west I would have found it easier to leave him there yelling. Maybe if I’d gotten married. Maybe if I’d raised a child.