The Enchanted (12 page)

When I left the state mental hospital at eighteen and the wind chased the papers from my hands and I walked until I found that house, I thought maybe my soul was hiding behind the fluttering cloth over the window.

My soul was not there. The ideas were there, and the ideas hatched into something too terrible to name.

I had good attorneys, even for back then. They were not like Grim and Reaper. They hired a man who had the same job as the lady. The man brought in witnesses. Some of the jurors cried. I listened to the witnesses—the social workers, the neighbors, even my grandparents, looking so very old and sad—through a veil of hair. The newspapers said I was without emotion. How could I have emotion, hearing my life played backward?

When the jurors came back and said no death, the attorneys slapped me on the back, while behind me, I heard a woman groan. The attorneys said a life sentence was unheard of in cases like mine.

The attorneys seemed ecstatic, but they were not going where I was going. I had been handed a bomb to carry for the rest of my life. The bomb was my life.

T
he attorneys for whom the lady works have a private firm. They have a nice table in a conference room. They have a secretary to answer the phone. There are enough honors and plaques and awards on the walls—many from the cases she worked on—to make your head spin.

They have everything but common sense, she thinks.

The attorneys refuse to believe that York genuinely wants to die. They refuse to discuss whether he has a right to consider it. They've been arguing about it for close to an hour.

“He is not changing his mind,” she says.

“How do you know that?” asks the younger attorney somewhat belligerently.

She takes a sip of her coffee and calms her voice. “I've been pushing him lots of different ways. I even told him I'd want to kill myself, too, if I were him.”

“You told him what?”

“But I get nothing. He reacts a little, and then poof. It's gone.”

“He's committed,” the older attorney says thoughtfully.

She gives him a grateful glance. “Not just committed,” she says. “If he were just committed to dying, we could try to change that—make him get committed to living. No. This is something different.”

“What is it?” he asks her, and she can see the respect in his eyes.

She pauses. “He's ready.”

The older attorney winces. The younger one just looks truculent. He changes the subject. “How is the work going?” he asks her.

“Well enough,” she replies evasively.

“Finding anything?”

She thinks of York's mom, sitting on her bed in a flowered blouse with her bare wet legs. She doesn't feel like talking about it. She drinks her coffee and doesn't reply.

“We only have a few more weeks,” he adds, as if she doesn't know this. She takes another sip.

The two men let it go. They trust that if something is there, she will find it.

As she leaves the office, the older attorney puts a hand on her arm to gently stop her. She turns and sees the interest in his eyes. The lines of care etched around his eyes tell her it is a warm interest, a nice interest.

She can't go there anymore. She has before, and it never works.

T
he building that scares me the most is Cellblock H.

I don't like to even think of it, a cold white building in the middle of our warm beige stone. Our stone walls are alive, but Cellblock H was made out of cold concrete, built during the 1960s by men representing all the advances in modern mental health science. The walls are spackled
smooth. There are no windows in Cellblock H, not even the narrow windows with bars like the other men have in the other cellblocks. That no one cut windows is like God deciding a body doesn't need to breathe. It is a building without a throat. Men go in there and never come out.

The officials call it the Intensive Management Unit. The inmates call it the death house. The crazy men—well, crazy in a way that annoys the guards—get sent to Cellblock H. If you are quietly crazy here, no one minds. Cellblock H is supposed to provide all the best in care. The orderlies don't wear uniforms, and guards don't strap guns. Air-conditioning whisks away all bad smells, and soundproof walls silence even the loudest screams.

The cells are tight boxes of solid metal, including the doors. There is a narrow slot for the meal trays, but it's closed between feedings with a soundproof metal hinge. When a man is locked inside one of these metal boxes, no one can hear him scream. An inmate can stay in those metal cells for days, for weeks, for years. No one knows or keeps track. Only a clipboard hanging outside tells the guard who is in the box and when the inmate was last fed. If the clipboard gets dropped or someone takes it away to make copies, it might never get returned. Then the man inside the box is truly alone.

Once years ago the guards noticed a bad smell coming from one of the metal cells at the end of tier one. It was a cell they thought had been empty. There was no clipboard, so there was no reason to believe the cell was occupied. When they opened it, they found a man who
had died weeks before. The constant air-conditioning had whisked away most of the smell and preserved what was left of his hands. He had gotten so hungry, he had eaten off his fingers.

There was an investigation, like there always is. The lost clipboard was found; it had been buried in a laundry bin. The inmate had been the head of one of the prison gangs. There was some confusion over why he was in Cellblock H in the first place. There were whispers that a rival gang leader and a corrupt intelligence officer had set it up. The confusion was so great that the investigators threw up their hands and called it a regrettable mistake.

T
he little men with hammers are inside the walls of my cell.

I'm not sure how they get here so quickly. One minute the walls are silent and the next they are there, sometimes in force. They have a very distinctive smell, like wet sawdust and urine. They scamper through tunnels under the yard and under the buildings like gophers, until all of a sudden they pop up here, dozens of them. You'd think the walls would be tight. No. This place is pockmarked with holes and secret tunnels.

I hear them sneaking late at night in the wall behind my cot. I'm sure the warden sent them. No, I think. The warden is okay. He wouldn't do that. So who sent them?

I slide along the wall and press my ear to it like a stone spider, breathing softly in the dark.

The men scamper and giggle so softly. They snicker in low voices, as if they are having a real party in there. I can never make out exactly what they are saying. I have the dreaded fear that they are climbing to the ceiling to make it collapse. All the collected weight of the earth above will fall on us. It is a clever plan. We will die choking on dirt and dust. That's okay for me, but I don't like the idea of them doing that to the others. Well, they can kill Striker, but not the others.

“Don't do it!” I want to scream at the little men. “Don't tear down the walls!”

Of course, I can't talk. I can only huddle on my cot, miserable. I grind my teeth so hard that sharp pains explode along my exposed nerve endings. I listen to the scampering so long, I finally spit out one of my few remaining teeth. It lands on my lap, a long bloody yellow tooth crowned with black.

Hours later, the small men finally fall silent. I want to sleep but cannot. My jaw aches.

I don't trust them. What did they do? Why were they here?

I realize it now. They have strung a black whirling cord through the walls, and when they leave, they will push the start button and the phone recorder will play.

Please don't do this
, I want to whisper.
Please don't.

The little men don't care about me. I am just one of the cordwood bodies they scamper over deep in the night, eating the dead skins off the soles of our feet.

Is that a dial tone?

No. I fall back on my cot. A phone is ringing in a distant land. I put my pillow over my face and scream silently inside. I can hear it still.

A trembling female voice on the other line is answering. “Donald?” says the voice once again. “Donald?”

T
he lady and the priest are walking the grounds outside the prison, under the shadows of the cyclone-barbed walls.

They walk under the shady elms and step over the green spiny creatures under the walnut trees as though they are alive. The priest walks slowly, as if dragging his feet. The lady walks like a forest sprite waiting to find what is exciting around the next corner.

“Most Catholics would say you are doing God's work by saving lives,” the priest offers hopefully.

She shakes her head. “I'm not saving any lives. I'm only ending a few executions.”

“Is there a difference?”

She glances at him. He knows there is a difference. She looks at the high wall next to them. “There are almost a dozen men in there I've walked off the row. They won't die of execution. But I can't say I've saved their lives.” She pauses. “I can only say I postponed their death.”

His eyes soak up the clean look of her skin, the darkness of her eyes. “For a lot of people, that would be enough.”

“To live like that? I'm not sure.”

“Most of the men you've freed are happy to be in there,” he says.

She shakes her head. “What does that say about us or about them?”

He stops under an elm tree. A light wind shakes the leaves above them. July is around the corner, the red circle racing forward. The lady feels the press of panic. She shouldn't be here, talking, when York's execution date looms.

“Would you save them all?” he asks.

She knows he is asking about himself. “Yes.”

“Even someone like Arden?”

The lady considers what she has heard about Arden—about what he did, or as close as her mind will allow before it skitters away in horror. She thinks about how sad it is that we remember the killers and not their victims. What if the world forgot Hitler and remembered all the names of his victims? What if we immortalized the victims?

The breeze lifts the hair above his brow, and he waits for an answer.

“I would save Arden,” she says.

He nods, and they walk some more as if there is nothing left to say.

The lady has a sick feeling in her stomach. She feels like she has confessed a terrible sin, the sin of her willingness. But the priest feels a lifting of his entire soul. If she would save Arden, he thinks, she might save me.

T
he lady is debating in her head with the attorneys, since she doesn't want to do it in person.

She is asking attorney A, the little snot, about giving York some medical tests. Can she ethically ask him to do it without really explaining why? The younger attorney starts talking, and right away she knows this is going nowhere.

She hears attorney B, the older and wiser one, saying no, no, listen to the lady, she knows her shit. Then attorney B starts talking some law stuff that sounds like logarithms from hell.

She decides to deal with it herself. She is feeling oddly secretive about this case. She doesn't want the attorneys to know what she is doing just yet.

The answer is as easy as a phone call to a medical expert she knows: A vial of blood is all he needs. He'll get back to her within a few days.

T
he lady slowly walks the dungeon rows. She says their names to herself as she passes each cell. Jones, Hildebrand, Sandoval, Large, Hall. Junior, Martin, Pearson, Lockridge. Mayfield, Porter, Aguilar, Flack, Green.

The men look out at her behind bars. Ratcliff, Hoffman, Leopold, Mason, Curtis, Rogers, Dowd, Duncan, and Wyatt. Some of the men put their hands between the bars, as if pleading for help.

Boon, Watt, Hurley, Saltzman. Jeffries—he's scheduled
soon, after Striker and York. He looks up at her from his bunk. She can see he is resigned.

She looks inside each cell, meeting their solemn eyes. Wincour, Casey, Williams, Caird, Irvin, McLear, Graham, Becker.

There is one cell she never tries to peer inside: Arden's. She walks faster as she passes Arden's cell—something about it emanates a horror that scares even her.

Sutro, Hakim, Dupree, Holt, Shaw. She breathes easier.

The warden is watching her from the end of the row. He stands alone, swinging the big old-fashioned ring key. He has looked much older recently, she notices, and she feels a pang of sympathy. She has heard about his wife's having late-stage cancer.

“Deciding which guy to take next?” he asks her.

“I have a waiting list,” she quips.

He leans his head back and roars, a clean, bright laugh that shakes off the bars and surprises both of them. He has nice teeth, she notices. His shirt is unbuttoned at the top collar, and she can see silver tufts in his black chest hair.

“Oh my. Well, take your time. We won't be waiting around for you.”

“I know.” She smiles and steps around him.

S
he finds the priest in his office. His head is bent over a book, and the lamp catches the bald spot on top of his
head. Precious little spot, she thinks. He looks up, startled. A pink flush catches his cheeks.

“I'm sorry,” she says.

“It's okay. I was reading—this,” he says, and turns the book so she can see the title.
The White Dawn: An Eskimo Saga
, by James Houston.

Word was out about Striker defacing a copy of the book. The priest thumbs the pages. “I was hoping if I read it, I could understand why it means so much. And if I can understand that, maybe I can understand these men.” He puts down the book. “But it just seems like a story.” He trails off, the pink still in his cheeks.

She feels a wave of protection toward him, to be so uncertain in his grown-man body. “If you understand what makes him tick—what is magic for him—then you can understand anyone,” she says.

“Yes. But I wasn't thinking of the word ‘magic.'”