The Life of the World to Come (22 page)

For weeks, Rachel and I had asked Therese if she would talk to us about Michael; for weeks she denied our request. It wasn't until December that she relented, citing exasperation with my escalating torrent of phone calls. With the final appeal so close to its resolution, it hardly mattered what she had to say.

“Like I said, I just think it would be helpful for us to talk.”

I trod cautiously toward the porch, my palms outstretched, the way you might approach an armed bank robber or a grizzly bear. A pair of vicious-looking Doberman pinschers eyed me lazily from the dying lawn.

“Helpful for who?” she called out.

“Look,” I said, now making my way up decaying wooden steps to face her, “I'm not the police. I'm not a journalist. I'm on Michael's side; I'm his lawyer, okay? It's my job to watch out for him. I only want to talk.”

Therese lit a cigarette, an act that for her required tremendous effort and concentration.

“What's there to say? They said he killed John Jasper—”

“Did he?” I interrupted.

“No!” she snapped back, glaring at me with sudden contempt. “No he did not. John Jasper was not a good man. You know he fucked all the junkies, right? John Jasper took advantage of weak people. He was a worse sinner than anyone who ever stepped foot in that goddamn house.”

“Okay, but—”

“They tried to get me to say I fucked John Jasper! I never fucked John Jasper. And Michael, he knew I never did, and there goes your whole reason they said Michael wanted to kill John Jasper supposedly in the first place. There it goes away.”

She fumbled with her cigarette, which the heavy wind first blew out, then blew out of her trembling hand and onto the porch. She didn't seem to notice.

“Why did Michael write in his journal that he wanted to put a bullet in John?” I asked her, as calmly as I could.

“Nothing to do with me, that's for damn sure. The doctors over at Willow Creek said he had to write down all his feelings, so he wrote down his feelings. Besides, Michael saw right through John Jasper. He saw right through to the heart of him. He knew the truth in everybody. He knew what John Jasper was doing, listening to all them broken-down women tell their stories, and then turning right around and catching them at their lowest, and just hunting them down like they was wounded prey.”

“That's exactly what Michael said when I asked him,” I said.

She lit another cigarette, and studied me skeptically.

“You talked to him a lot, did you?” she asked.

“Sure,” I replied. “We talk a lot. For hours, sometimes, when they'll let us.”

Therese emitted a gruesome, snorting laugh.

“Hours,” she said. “That's funny.”

“Why?”

“I mean, Michael, he don't talk much, does he?”

I scanned her dead, cavernous eyes to gauge her sincerity, and, cursing, she dropped the cigarette again.

“Wait, Therese,” I started, “when's the last time you went to visit him?”

Just then, a minor crash came from inside the house. A gruff voice within hollered out: “Who's that?”

“Who's that?” I whispered to Therese.

“Nobody!” she answered defensively, just loudly enough that it could conceivably have been meant for either of her interrogators.

“What the fuck, Therese?” yelled the voice.

“It's nobody!” she shouted. This was for him.

Seconds later, a squirrelly man with no shirt on burst open the screen door. He looked to be mid-fifties, but was dangerously thin; in one hand he held the flapping remains of what appeared to be a meager turkey sandwich, and in the other he held a rifle.

“Get back in the house now, Clay,” she scolded him, unimpressed by the display.

“Who the fuck is this?” he raved, pointing the sandwich accusatorily at my torso. A renegade fleck of lettuce jumped ship, touching down on my shoulder.

“I'm nobody,” I said.

“He's no one,” Therese chimed in. “He's a lawyer.”

The man abruptly shoved the sandwich between his teeth, freeing his second hand to cock the rifle.

“Whoa whoa whoa,” I started.

“He's Michael's lawyer,” Therese clarified. “They're about to make a final decision on frying him or not.” I wasn't sure how she knew this; it hadn't come up at all. The man lowered his rifle slowly, and let out a protracted “oh” of recognition.

“I'm Leo Brice,” I said, extending my hand.

“This here's Clay,” Therese grunted dismissively. We shook, the limp sandwich still protruding from his mouth.

“Nice to meet you, Clay.”

“Go back inside, Clay,” she chided, and he did, without another word.

Something was dawning that upset me deeply.

“Michael talks all the time,” I told her as soon as we were alone again on the porch.

“What'd you say?”

“Before, you said he doesn't talk much. That's not true though—he never stops talking, as far as I can tell. When's the last time you even saw him?”

“None of your goddamn business: that's when.”

“You know, it's funny—we'd always assumed that you were still coming to visit him; I guess we never really asked.”

I began to feel hot in my neck—betrayed, even, by this stranger.

“But it seems like you don't really know him at all—not the version I know. Not the peaceful man. Not the person who's … ready to die. And he's ready, Therese, he's ready. How could you not—”

“You watch yourself,” she muttered.

“You stuck by him for years,” I went on, starting now to fume uncontrollably. I was shaking on the inside—what was this? “You testified for him. How can a person insist on loving someone and stop? When did you stop?”

“Fuck you.”

“How can you just leave him to live and to die on his own when you—”

“Shut the fuck up, lawyer!”

“When you love him? You're not supposed to just disappear like that—don't you know that? Don't you know what happens when you are just … gone like that? I know what happens, Therese—let me tell you what happens when you go. When you leave someone behind, he has to keep living. He doesn't just stop, he has to keep—”

Therese shoved me meekly in the chest, and the Dobermans looked up.

“Don't you talk to me like that!” she bellowed.

“Did you kill him?” I asked abruptly, and she melted back. “You did. What am I saying—of course you did! You killed him.”

“Fuck yourself!” she barked, and the Dobermans barked, and she recoiled.

“You killed John Jasper. You shot him, and you let Michael take the fall for it. God fucking dammit, Therese. You killed John Jasper, and now you're killing him. You're killing him! You're killing Michael. Don't you know that? You're killing him.”

“I didn't ever do a damn thing wrong!” she hissed up at me. “I never killed anybody, and you're a goddamn liar for thinking it.”

“Michael doesn't talk much. Ha!” I huffed. “Michael talks. He talks now—talks to me. He can't kill: the person that
I
know, he has no vengeance in him. He's incapable of it. But you: you can kill. You killed, twice already. Three times! You killed John Jasper with a handgun, and you killed Michael when you let him sacrifice himself for you, and you killed Michael
again
when you gave up on saving him. Three times.”

“You don't get to talk to me like that,” she said, suddenly deflated. “You got no idea how hard it was with him. You got real nerve coming down here and telling me I gave up.”

We stared each other down for a long moment, unspeaking until each of our tempers subsided. She brushed the lettuce off of me—in the presence of the rifle, I'd opted to let it rest.

“I'm sorry,” I said, and I was. I was sorry I'd come at all.

“You're letting him go,” she went on, subdued. “You gotta let him go. I let him go a while back now; it ain't easy. But he's gone. He's been gone. He was gone the day they locked him up—he was never gonna come back again. There wasn't a damn thing I could do to save him; let him save himself or be done with it. He's in the past, lawyer. He's gone.”

I noticed that my heart was racing, and maybe had been for some time.

“He isn't gone,” I said, my voice cracking slightly.

“He is,” she answered.

“He isn't
dead
,” I said back, louder. In the following silence, I composed myself. All at once, it seemed so strange to be there, accosting this defeated woman for no tangible reason on her sad front porch. I smiled grimly and nodded, and walked back to the car.

“Well, he ain't here,” she called after me, and this was very true.

“Like Maimonides,” I said to no one at all, and I left that place forever.

*   *   *

The phone in room 207 of the Jackson Days Inn rang at exactly 9:08 on the morning of the fifteenth of December, all alto drones and flashing red bulbs. I'd been up, primed, waiting for this moment; I'd shaved for no one, put on a tie that nobody would see. At 8:52 I found a Bible in the bedside drawer, and began to read a story I'd heard about as a kid—a story Michael had also told me in glimpses. It was the story of Daniel, an interpreter of dreams. He went to work for a king with the somehow familiar name of Nebuchadnezzar; after serving as a faithful advisor for a time, trouble came in earnest. Daniel's friends refused to bow down before the king's golden statue, and as punishment for their audacity they were cast into fiery furnaces (only to have their lives spared by God). Nebuchadnezzar went insane, as prophesied, and another king named Belshazzar took over. This new boss proved no better, drinking wantonly from sacred Jewish vessels and praising every false idol in town. While Belshazzar was busy desecrating the temple, a disembodied hand appeared and inscribed on the wall the words “
Mene, Mene
,” meaning: your days are numbered. Now came the birth of an idiom we all know well—Belshazzar's fate was sealed, but only Daniel could read the writing on the wall. That was as far as I'd gotten by 9:08, when the room came alive with the frantic intrusion of an outside call, the one for which I'd been waiting.

“Why is your cell phone off?” asked Boots from across the buzzy line.

“It's not. I don't get very good service down here.”

“You know it's almost impossible to call someone in a motel room,” he said. “It's archaic. I had to, like, speak to the person at the front desk, and then I didn't have the room number, so she had to look you up—in a book. Not a computer; a book. I heard her flipping through pages. It must be like the land before time down there.”

“It has its charms,” I said solemnly.

“So Leo,” he went on, his voice dropping in tandem with the weight of the discussion, “Martha and Pete—they need you to come back.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Sure—no—I get that.”

“The case is over,” Boots said matter-of-factly. “It's been over, Leo, and they told me to tell you that they need you to come home. You missed your flight yesterday. They need you back at work—you can't stay down there for this; it isn't good for you.”

“I didn't miss it,” I said. “That was on purpose. I paid for the room. And I'm paying for the room tonight.”

“That's not what—they don't care about the room, Leo. You need to get out of there and you need to come back. You shouldn't be there for what comes next. That's not part of the job; you know this. You need to come back today.”

“Okay,” I said.

“And if you need to take a little time after that—”

“Okay,” I said.

“They said they'd be open to it, if that's what you need. I know this hasn't been easy for you, on top of everything that's been going on.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Anyway,” he said.

“Anyway,” I echoed. “That wasn't why you were calling, though, right?”

“No,” he conceded.

“Okay. So Boots?”

“You know why I'm calling?”

I swallowed hard, and loosened my pointless tie.

“I have an idea,” I said.

Boots sighed heavily over the phone, and then: “Martha wanted me to be the one who…”

“When?” I said, after he failed to keep speaking.

“Monday,” answered Boots. “They're going to kill him on Monday.”

[LIGHTS COME UP on the interior of an ornate courtroom. JIM DASHER, as portrayed by the well-known actor MARK RENARD, fidgets nervously at the defense counsel's table next to his client, the bedraggled backwoods machinist BEAU WADE DEAN. Behind the bench sits a stern-looking OLD JUDGE, and the jury box is filled with a DIVERSE AND ATTRACTIVE JURY. The courtroom is also full of OTHER PEOPLE.]

OLD JUDGE

Alright, very well then, Mr. Dasher. Let's hear this closing argument of yours.

[DASHER pauses to collect himself with a heavy sigh, then rises to address the court. He is visibly shaken—a tired, beaten man who has poured every ounce of himself into a hopeless case.]

DASHER

Your honor. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury. I stand here today because … well, to tell you the truth, I really don't know why I stand here today. I know that I'm
supposed
to stand here for my client; I know that I'm
supposed
to stand here for justice. And I know you're probably expecting to hear some sort of stirring, heartfelt closing argument. But I can't do it.

[EVERYONE murmurs and gasps.]

DASHER (cont.)

I can't give you what you want. I can't change your minds about my client, or about anything else for that matter. So I stand here today not for him. He's a lowlife, right? He's scum? Just another heartless murderer. We're better off without him, wouldn't you agree? I know I would. So no, I don't stand here for him. I stand here for America, ladies and gentlemen. Because something is very wrong in America. Something in this country is broken. Broken like the hearts of the victim's family; broken like the hearts of the family of Beau Wade Dean.