The Most Wanted (28 page)

“Honey,” he said, laughing, “we all are locked in here. You think they want me and you to get up and walk on out of here and catch the bus to Laredo?” Of course, he was right. “I won’t pay no mind,” Dillon said. “I understand. In here, you got to use the toilet in your cell with the bars open out there. I like to had me a locked bowel for two months. A person likes his privacy. What I’ll do, I’ll turn the radio up loud.” So I pulled on my shirt and stood up. And then I saw the blood. Not a little bit, like Elena and Annie said. Rivers and splotches and maps of Argentina made of blood.

“Dillon,” I said weakly. “Look here.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” he said. “Shoot. Did you bring anything?”

“What do you mean? Like, a transfusion?”

“No, I mean, like . . . pads.”

“Actually, I . . . yeah.” I thought of Annie’s packages. “But . . .”

He went behind the screen and wet a washcloth with warm water and told me to lay down. He washed me gently, and then he played the radio high so I could pee. The bleeding was just on the surface. It didn’t last. We ate chips, and we sang along to Brooks and Dunn; one of the guards came back to check us, and I put on my nightgown with the clouds, and Dillon smoked and clapped when I modeled it for him. Then I sat cross-legged on the bed and read all of “The Highwayman” to him, looking up and repeating the parts I knew by heart. He applauded at the end of that too. “My wife the poet,” he said. “That ain’t nearly as good as ‘Every Bride,’Arley.”

“It is so. It’s totally better. He’s famous.”

“Arley, listen. You write like an adult. No joke. I know about these things, Arley. I’m a big reader, from way, way before us. And you really write. You should go to college someday and be a famous poet.”

“So should you.”

“It looks like I’m going to the school of hard knocks, girl.”

“Not forever, though.”

“No, baby, maybe not forever.” He looked so sad then, I got up and sat on his lap. He pulled off my nightgown and unbuttoned his shirt, and we sat with our chests pressed together, his nipples standing up rosy just like mine, his breastbone as hairless and soft as a girl’s, though packed tight with his muscles. His skin was fair, almost golden, and mine’s dark. We looked like complementary fabrics, pretty. You were supposed to like men with hair all over their chests, but I liked Dillon’s smoothness. Eric has a furry chest—not that I’ve ever seen him really undressed. You can see a curl of his hair over the neck of his T-shirt, though, and feel the crackle of hair against a dress shirt when you press against him. It’s not that I think it’s unattractive. But when I look at men in magazines, it’s always the smooth ones that catch my eye and make me wonder how their skin would feel on mine. Even months later, when it was torment to think about that night, I could still blush remembering what I did then. And I could still get wild on it, so wild that, though such thoughts shouldn’t even have possessed me, given the shape I was in, I would have to roll on my own hand in the dark, and I’d end up crying.

I raised up now like I was on the vaulting horse, and reached with my hand and put Dillon inside me, and I felt him grow and fill me until it was really frightening. By then, between my legs felt like I’d been peeled. But after a moment, the pain gave way to that purring sting. You knew you had to get rid of it or die. Every few minutes, Dillon would start to move faster, and the sting would fade away, and I all but got mad at him. “Wait!” I told him. “Stay just how you are for a minute, okay?” And I balanced myself on my long, strong, track-cured legs and rode him until I wouldn’t have cared if the guard came in and poured himself a Coke right then. I wouldn’t have stopped. “Get the condom,” I told Dillon, panting. “Get it.”

“Arley, we already done it twice. I don’t have enough spit in me left to make a baby chicken, much less a real baby.”

“Get it anyhow,” I told him. “Annie said for us to use them.”

“Annie.” He spit it out, disgusted, stopping altogether. “Annie ain’t your husband.”

“Come on, Dillon,” I said, wanting the stinging to begin again. “Come on.” But instead, he took me by the hips and pumped me slowly, his green eyes looking light-to-light into mine, his lips a firm line, almost angry. He’d draw away from me so long, I thought he would never move into me again, and then he’d ease back in, staying a long time, pulling away again. I should have stopped him. But pretty soon, there was no me left to stop him. That spreading hot sting was the center of the world; it was all that was, and all that mattered, and fucking was all I ever wanted to do, then or ever again. It drew all my reason down into it, and splashed that reason over until it drowned, and I was holding my breath and biting on Dillon’s lower lip and pounding on Dillon’s shoulders, crying, “Please, please, please, please,” until I fell forward, fighting for air, feeling my insides jumping and dancing all on their own, my hair falling across his back and mine like a tent, big enough to hide us both.

It was horrible that we had to wake up in the morning. I wanted it to be the night before. I wanted to brush my teeth. Dillon looked terrible, like an old man, in that faded-out wrinkly T-shirt we found under the couch. His eyes were hollows of madness, like it says in “The Highwayman.” “You’re going to leave me,” he kept saying.

“I never will,” I kept saying back, as the sun rose up, making the inside of that little trailer, so golden and homey the night before, look dirty and tired. When I finally put my skirt back on, didn’t blood gush again and seep all over the back of it. Then Warden Southwynn knocked to bring me out, and I was crying and wouldn’t come. A guard came, and when I heard them put the leg irons around Dillon’s feet, I started to cry even harder, so I could hardly kiss him good-bye, and finally the warden went and got Annie. She brought a blanket from the car, so when I had to walk between the buildings again, past those prisoners watching me with swivel eyes, that blanket was wrapped around me, hiding me down to the tops of my shoes. Annie walked right beside me, feeling to me bigger than Dillon, bigger than the guard, bigger even than the prison, walking me right out the door, out the gate, and into the backseat of her car, where I lay down and fell asleep and slept curled up all the way home, just sometimes waking to make sure I could see the back of Annie’s head and to wonder, in a haze, why I could feel my heart beating in the bottom of my stomach.

A Sound of Bells

 

I’ll always remember our first night

together, you so flushed and shy,

me knowing what I know but

scared too because you are the first one

 

I loved. We poured our loneliness

into each other and filled the emptiness

and dark corners of this place with joy.

Seeing you naked made me feel so tender.

 

I think of your long straight back,

your strong legs, see your hair on the pillow,

your dark eyes close, and say your name

over and over. Arlington. It is the sound of bells.

 

Dillon Thomas LeGrande

The Terrain of Love

 

I thought love would be something so large

and bright I could not contain it, like an armful

of exploding firecrackers. I see now

 

that the terrain of love is small scale. There

are the fine golden hairs on the backs

of your hands, your voice as it thickens

 

when you say my name, your thumb

on the pulse in my throat, the day we first

stood together, not touching, just knowing.

 

Arlington Mowbray LeGrande

I
LOVED THE
terrier quality Stuart had. He thought he was such a tough guy.

I think it was the reason he was a death row lawyer.

After all, death is the biggest adversary. It’s bigger than the cruel blank corporation. Bigger than racism, even bigger than malpractice. Death’s the biggest bully of all, and it gives a five-foot-nine guy from Hoboken a definite swagger potential, being the one who beats death back. But for Stuart, there was even more to it. He could make cutting remarks about the mothers-of-many who were my clients at Women and Children First—telling me that the quid pro quo for legal services should be getting spayed—but could always find compassion for the most heinous criminal on death row. No one got there by choice, Stuart said. No one chose to be evil. The Talley kid’s father died in Vietnam, and his mother’s crack dealer boyfriend beat her senseless in front of him. Kim McGrory was five when his grandma locked him in the barn and had a stroke the same night. It took four days for the police to find the child.

“See?” Stuart would ask people, “See what I mean?” He could understand voters supporting the death penalty in the abstract—but specifically? Up close? How could you? The pity and pain and rage were just too great. He didn’t even see it as a liberal-conservative split. It was humans against the inhumane. Stuart played sports with more intensity than skill, followed the major leagues with the reverence of a boy who got his first pair of thick glasses in fourth grade. But his job was really Stuart’s World Cup, his U.S. Open, and his Final Four.

On Valentine’s Day night, which would be the last of our best times together, Stuart was retelling the stirring tale of Trevor Bentley, who helped himself to the same dozen kids’ lunches every day for three years, until one day Stuart decided that it had to end.

He was up to the climax of the story, the part in which Stuart faced the bully—who had grown, over the years, to the size of Mean Joe Green—at the New Jersey version of the O.K. Corral. As he described the epic battle, I played my customary part, which involved teasing him to the brink of anger.

“It’s probably me, Stuart, but I can never quite picture a gangster named Trevor,” I chimed in, meanwhile taking advantage of Stuart’s rapture to rob him of choice morsels from his plate of mu-shu beef.

“Anne,” Stuart said, “you weren’t there.” I remember him tossing his chopsticks, both of them, into the air and catching them stylishly with one hand, then grinning in triumph. We each had our own chopsticks, and Stuart groused if I used his, which, he said, were perfectly weighted for the toss. He actually practiced doing this. It was juggling as a form of punctuation. “And his twin was even uglier and meaner. His twin ate raw sheep.”

“What was his twin’s name? Grace?”

“It was . . . Tristram,” Stuart told me, very softly.

“Ahhhhh.”

“Anne, for your information, Tristram was a knight of the Round Table . . .”

“So was Percival . . .”

“It was actually Tristram who finally beat the shit out of me. . .”

“Stuart, you never told me that part . . .”

The phone rang.

I told him not to answer it. I was sure it would be some urgent errand that would separate us: exculpatory evidence found, a stay reversed. It was a lot worse. When Stuart came back out to the terrace, he looked as though he’d lost ten pounds.

“What happened?” I asked. “Who died?”

“The Texas Defense Center,” he told me softly.

The call had come from Stuart’s boss, Mike Akers, a death row veteran with a flair for good publicity who’d managed to talk a Texas media gazillionaire with a tender liberal conscience into funding the center for the past five years.

Now the mogul was dead. And tonight, before the grass had even started to grow on his grave, his wife had simply snapped the string. She was a Broadway star; her charity was AIDS. The center could last until the end of the year, at most. Probably not that long.

I sat on Stuart’s lap, and he combed my hair with his fingers.

We’d always known this day could come. Post-conviction lawyers in capital cases lived out of the career equivalent of wheeled suitcases. They always had to be ready to roll. Lots of them shuttled among the big death row states—the current favorite now was Florida, where, one of Stuart’s former colleagues told him, there was “a kinder, gentler police state.” The old joke was that if it weren’t for weather, no one would do death row advocacy at all.

That night, I didn’t know what to say to Stuart. Wild possibilities chased each other through my head: We could . . . start a private practice. Stuart could join the public defender’s office. He could become the classy criminal-defense litigator some large firms carried for showy pro bono work. The likeliest possibility was the one I liked thinking about least—that we would have to move. That I would have to sell the house.

If we stayed together.

When Stuart suggested we wander over to what he now devoutly called “your neighborhood” and visit the clinic, I agreed, with a certain relief. Some knots just won’t undo themselves without tequila. In the car, we did something we hadn’t done for years. We held hands, and after a while, Stuart pulled me across so he could put his arm around my shoulders as he drove.

Amor Ausente was crowded with
turistas
fleeing the North for some pre-spring relief, and the tables were filled with couples. Valentine’s Day. Stuart’s news had made me forget—not that we actually observed greeting-card holidays. Since Charley had told me the backstory of the place, I kept an eye out for the melancholy owner, and sure enough, he was stationed at a window, ignoring the clink of glass and the laughter behind him, gazing mournfully out at Kings Highway as if he expected to see a damsel on a big wild horse appear over the crest of a hill. Luis found us an outdoor umbrella table and brought us margaritas, and we amused ourselves trying to make up stories about the other diners. We were good at this.

“Now, they,” Stuart told me, sotto voce, inclining his head at a well-clad fiftyish couple engaged in intense though quiet verbal warfare, “they’re illicit lovers, though they haven’t, shall we say, done the do-si-do in about . . . six months. He’s married. His wife’s in a wheelchair—”

“Stuart!”

“Well, she is, and Female B, who will hereinafter be referred to as the Other Woman, has just found out that Couple A has bought a house on Cape Cod and they’re going there tomorrow to spend the Presidents’ Day week with their grandchildren. . . .”

“And isn’t this just going to be one more thing to be decided in the property settlement? And how can he stand to be away from her for so long?”

“And why doesn’t she understand that it’s all part of the plan, honey. The wife is going to love the house back East so much, she’ll want to stay there, and that will mean they’ll have so much more time together—”

“Time together? They were supposed to be married by now! Like, five years ago!”

“Don’t start on that now! You know what I’m dealing with! She wants to ruin me, and you want to ruin me too. I’ll be dead before I’m sixty. . . .”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “Enough of that.” But even a little of the game had warmed both of us to the core. We played the couples game for a reason, because most of the people we saw just didn’t look as happy . . . as
present
 . . . as Stuart and I knew we still looked together, even after ten years—and maybe they never had. We laughed more. We just laughed more.

“Let’s take a walk,” Stuart suggested after we polished off our meal and the tables began to fill up. “They’re as thick as mayflies in here tonight.” He motioned for the check.

“Everybody’s with their sweethearts.”

“Yep. Guys who probably haven’t taken their wives to dinner since this same night last year . . .”

“If you don’t take her out on Valentine’s Day, you’ll hear about it the rest of the year . . .”

“Did I take you out last year?”

We both laughed. “I don’t remember!”

A couple rushed past us, the man hurriedly shaking out his key ring. “Now they can barely wait to get started,” Stuart said. “His place or hers . . . whichever’s closer . . .”

“No,” I said, looking after them. “They’re parents. They have to get home for the sitter . . .”

“What a drag. Just imagine having to be home by a certain time,” he said.

“I wasn’t thinking of it that way,” I told him then, realizing suddenly it was true.

“What do you mean?” He was genuinely puzzled.

“It’s just . . . you always think of things from the point of view of your being the kid, not the adult.”

“Annie, you’re nuts.”

“No, you do. You identify more with the kid.”

“And you don’t?”

“No. I could see . . . you know, getting a sitter once in a while. I’ve had twenty years of going out for dinner and drinks, you know?”

“So you picture yourself sitting home rocking the cradle. Correcting Junior’s math papers. . . .”

“Sort of. Sometimes.”

“Anne, you’d be bored stupid inside two weeks.”

“Not really.”

“You’d be calling up Patty and offering to do a termination hearing . . .”

“No, I wouldn’t . . .”

“You’d be watching Court TV and talking to the screen . . .”

“Cut it out!”

“Well, Anne. I think you tend to romanticize things.”

“Honey, I think you do, too,” I said, thinking of the tears in his eyes on the night of the broken glass, the night he learned that Kim McGrory was near death. “They’re just different things.”

Stuart smiled wearily. “You could be right.” We stood on the street outside Amor Ausente for a moment, listening to the restaurant’s fountain. A fluted brass column about eight feet high shot water down into a series of shell-shaped bowls that got larger and thicker toward the bottom. In landing, the water made a series of little tones, like music.

“Charley built that,” I told Stuart.

“Charley the carpenter?” he asked. “I thought he was basically a paint-and-paper kind of guy.”

“No, he’s a landscaper and a landlord and a . . .”

“And a land rover . . .”

“I want to make a wish, Stuart,” I told him, “but I only have a penny. I want to make a dime wish, though.”

He reached into his pocket and gave me a shiny dime, and I held it high and dropped it into the bottom-most bowl. I stood there, screwing my eyes shut tight, clenching my fists.