Almost Home (8 page)

We all lived in that hospital waiting room for nearly two weeks. I didn’t mind, it was more comfortable than anything at home. The air was nice and cool, everything was spotlessly clean, and there was even cable television. Jack brought sandwiches from home to eat, or when he scraped up enough money, there were hamburgers from a fast food place. We only ate in the cafeteria once, because the food was so expensive, but I found it to be quite tasty. Every so often I snuck down to grab a few handfuls of crackers or breadsticks from the salad bar when no one was watching. I loved hospital food. I thought it was delicious.

When I was allowed to go in and see my grandmother she was so high on morphine that she didn’t know what was going on around her. She weakly raised one hand to point at a mirror on the wall and asked me to change the channel.

She called me a “little shit” and told a story about how we would become vampire hunters, because you could get a huge reward for bringing in a vampire egg. She only started coming back to reality once the doctor gradually decreased the morphine dosage. She was going to survive after all, though now she only had one leg.

A sixty-five-year-old amputee with two heart attacks under her belt, she was in no condition to take care of herself. She couldn’t be expected to move into our filthy and squalor-ridden palace, so we had to move into her trailer in Lakeshore.

I couldn’t pack my few belongings quickly enough, knowing that this was my last time in the shack. It seemed too good to be true; I was escaping hell. I’d never have to see this place again. I didn’t waste time taking a last look around, as there
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was nothing I wanted to say goodbye to. We didn’t own a great deal that was worth taking other than our clothes and a few appliances. The furniture was all ready for the trash.

Ah, but I did find a treasure in that place before I left. It was a parting gift from the ghosts. There was only one closet in the house, and it hadn’t been opened in years. It was packed full of clothes that no one wore and other assorted trash that should have been thrown out years ago. My mother and Jack decided to go through it to make certain they weren’t leaving behind anything useful (yeah right, like a pirate might have crept in and buried a treasure). Jack was pulling things out and tossing them on the floor while my mother looked on. At one point he climbed into the closet so that he could reach an area that extended up to the ceiling. This was the area where the fire had once started. He handed everything he found down to my mother, and she tossed them out onto the floor with her nose wrinkled in disgust.

Suddenly something dusty and black was thrown out. Up until this point, I had no interest in anything they were doing. I was just eager to leave. Something about that dusty black bundle drew my attention, so I picked it up. It was a filthy, tattered, dry-rotted, and moth-eaten trench coat. My heart skipped a beat because of its perfection. I had to have it.

“Whose is this?” I asked.

My mom said, “No one’s, it’s just trash.” I was slipping it on before she even finished speaking. “That’s filthy, you need to wash it,” she told me.

Jack, who had just climbed down, took one look and said, “It’ll probably come apart if you try to wash it.”

And that was how I came to own my very first trench coat. From then on, I was never without one. That seemed to be the one thing that people remembered about me more than anything else. Everyone who described me always began with “He wears a long, black coat.” It became the symbol of all that people associated with being of me. That particular one eventually disintegrated, but I went on to find others. I felt safe when wrapped up in them, covered up and shielded.

It was the greatest security blanket of all. I felt hidden when wearing it, as if bad things couldn’t find me. Without it, I felt exposed and vulnerably open to the world. I was never self-conscious or a victim of self-doubt when draped in all that black cloth. There’s no reason to fear anything when you float through the world like a dusty black ghost.

XIV

Once in my grandmother’s “Lakeshore Estate,” we had to build two ramps—one to get her into and out of the trailer, and one to bridge the slight drop between the kitchen and living room. It was next to impossible for her to navigate her wheel chair through the narrow hallway, so we put her bed in a corner of the living room. My mother and Jack took her old room, and at long last I had a room of my own. I rarely ventured outside that room while at home. It was small and dark, the light was encased within a smoky glass globe. I had a black vinyl couch to sleep on, and a small metal shelf to store my things. One entire wall was covered by a three-panel mirror. The closet had an odd folding door on it, and the floor was covered with short, brown carpet. I immediately covered the walls with pictures and posters of pro-skaters, and set up the cheap, second hand stereo that had been my Christmas present—I made it my place.

I’ve heard many jokes about poor people living in trailer parks, but I no longer considered myself poor. I was now in the lap of luxury—I could take a shower whenever I wanted, there was central heat for the winter, and a window unit air conditioner for the summer. The toilet flushed, there were no crop dusters, and we had neighbors. It was heaven.

This narrative would not be complete without a word about Lakeshore itself.

People who have seen it in the many years I’ve been locked up have told me it’s changed quite a bit, that it’s no longer the same place. Now it’s clean, the people plant flowers in their yards, and they wash their cars. People are neighborly and friendly, and even cops live there. Old people live there after they’ve retired. I suppose it is now be considered lower middle class. That’s a big difference from the days when I knew it. To hear of these changes saddens me, because I feel that the last vestiges of what I knew as home are now gone. The world has moved on while I’ve been behind these walls. I no longer feel as if I have any roots. It seems that there’s a whole new world out there, and I’ve become an old man in body and mind if not in years.

Lakeshore was a pretty big place, as far as trailer parks go. It consisted of about 200 trailers, give or take a few. They were nearly all run down and beat up, having put their best days long behind them. Nearly every one of them had a small 40

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yard surrounded by a metal chain link fence. The majority of those fences held dogs, which were the only form of “home security” we knew. Without a dog and a fence it was only a matter of time before everything in your yard was stolen and the gas was sucked right out of the tank of your car. The latter was accomplished with nothing more than a piece of hose and a bucket.

The heart of Lakeshore was indeed a lake. A lake so green and scummy that most fish no longer inhabited it, and you were strongly advised against swimming in it, because it wasn’t wise to swallow any of the water. The bottom of the lake was an old boneyard of newspaper machines, wheelbarrows, box springs and mat-tresses, rusted bicycles, tangled fishing line, busted tackle boxes, broken fishing poles, and anything else your mind could conceive of. Before we went on trial the cops claimed they found a knife there. I don’t doubt that at all, and I would not be completely surprised if they found a dozen more. My attorneys thought it was most likely planted there to make me look bad, which could very well be true. I also believe it’s just as likely to have been dumped there by one of the many people who used the lake as their own personal garbage dumpster. That lake was a monster. I miss it terribly now. I now think of it as being beautiful in its own green, scummy way, although I can understand why those who lack my nostalgia would not. In my mind that lake has become like the Ganges, capable of washing away the pain, fear, suffering and misery caused by eleven years of incarceration for something I didn’t even do. That lake has become a magickal thing to me now, and has come to represent “home” more than the Mississippi itself.

The streets around this trailer-lined lake bore the weight of a constant parade of stray dogs, shifty teenagers, and shady characters. It was what one might picture upon hearing the words “bad neighborhood.” It wasn’t safe to be caught alone, day or night. Roaming packs of hooligans tended to congregate around the small store at the entrance of Lakeshore, which contained two pool tables, and couple of video games, and a jukebox. You could purchase beer in cans or bottles, soft drinks (ditto), boxes of cereal, or the makings of a fine bologna sandwich. On the counter was a fishbowl filled with loose, stale cigarettes of every brand, all to be had for ten cents each. There were also several coin-operated washing machines and dryers, in which to do your laundry, but you had to have a sharp eye or else your unmentionables fell prey to theft. Jason and I spent a few idle hours there, along with his younger brother Matt and a few other neighborhood characters. After several years of seeing nothing but empty fields and crop dusters, this place seemed like a pretty happening spot. As long as you kept your eyes to yourself and didn’t try to mind anyone else’s business, you were fine. Anything else was asking for a fight. Some unknown marketing genius had given this estab-Damien Echols

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lishment the quaint title of “The Lakeshore Stop and Shop,” but I never heard a single soul refer to it as anything other than “the store.”

XV

My first encounter with Jason outside of school occurred in the fall, sometime around the end of October. The reason I remember it is because in just a few days he’d show up at our door trick or treating.

I was sitting on my skateboard at the side of the street directly in front of the trailer. I had several pieces of wood that I was nailing together for about the tenth time to make a ramp. Most of it was old and cheap, more fit for the garbage than for construction. Every time I’d get it put together a bunch of knuckleheads came over to skate and the whole thing would collapse again. As I sat pondering the mystery of this endless cycle, Jason came peddling down the street on his bicycle.

When we saw each other there was the instant spark of recognition. “You live here?” I asked, to which he responded that he lived on the next street. We just hung around for the rest of the afternoon, until I was finally called in for supper.

Jason kept coming over nearly every single day after school, where we’d sit in my room listening to music, talking, and laughing at other people until we reached a fevered, manic pitch. I laughed harder in those early days than I have ever since. It was the kind of laughter that causes you to lose all control and fall over. Years later Jason and I talked about those days, trying to remember exactly what had been so funny. Neither of us knew, we only recalled that it had been the most hilarious period of our lives.

Occasionally his younger brother Matt came over with him. Matthew at that age looked almost exactly like the Garth character from the movie
Wayne’s World
.

He was constantly trying to make a deal. You never found him without a piece of merchandise he was trying to sell or trade—cassettes, an old telescope, mechanical pencils, and all sorts of other things. The one thing he had in abundance was pornography. Matt was the porn king of Lakeshore. He waited until bums and homeless people had moved on, then examine the articles they had left behind.

Nine times out of ten there were magazines. Bums may not have food, shelter, or money, but one thing they will always have is porn. Yeah, they had their priorities straight. Matt collected it, then sold and traded it to every kid in Lakeshore. I even had one or two of them myself. I remember Matt as being a businessman, one who couldn’t sit still as long as there was a buck to be made or porn to ped-43

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dle. He also wasn’t above stealing anything that wasn’t bolted down. Sometimes the capers he pulled off left Jason and I both howling with laughter, completely amazed.

At the age of twelve he walked into a grocery store, filled a shopping cart full of food and cigarettes, then pushed it right out the door, across two highways, and down the overpass back into Lakeshore. The memory of it still makes me laugh. At the age of thirteen he stood in a grocery store parking lot selling packs of cigarettes, the origins of which were dubious at best. Sometimes I think I miss Matt almost as much as I do Jason. It’s hard to believe he’s now grown, with a child of his own.

Soon every weekend found either me sleeping at Jason’s house, or him sleeping at mine. When we were at my place we’d stay in my room trying to laugh quietly while eating chips, drinking cans of generic soda, and listening to heavy metal cassettes. We were trying to be quiet so that Jack wouldn’t hear us—if he heard even the slightest sound he’d go into a rage, bellowing familiar phrases such as, “If you can’t be any quieter than that, then you don’t need to be having anyone here!” He went out of his way to make it unpleasant, and automatically hated anyone I befriended.

The very first night I stayed with Jason we decided to sneak out. I had never done this before, so I was doing it more for the thrill than to go anywhere in particular. The evening started out with Jason’s mom dropping us off at the bowling alley in West Memphis, with the instruction to go nowhere else. As soon as she left the parking lot, Matt departed the scene in search of other excitement. Jason and I went inside to play pool and associate with all the other hoodlums. This was the hangout for degenerates and there were mullets everywhere we turned.

After playing a couple games and exchanging greetings with the locals we decided to go find Matt. Perhaps there were more interesting things to be found there. We crossed the parking lots of grocery stores and strip malls to reach Wal-Mart, which we knew to be his most likely location. While there we paid a visit to the music section, put our money together, and bought the newest Metallica tape, then sat down to read the lyrics. We finally found Matt playing video games, and we all three made our way back to the bowling alley, where their mom soon picked us up.