Wrong Thing (12 page)

“You made me come twice.”

“I mean just now.”

“That's cool. I liked it anyway.”

It was around ten o'clock when they got out of bed. Vanjii asked if she could take a shower, and the Kid told her to go ahead. He asked if she was hungry, and she said she was. The Kid said he'd make some risotto. She went into the bathroom. The Kid went to the kitchen and put some rice in a rice cooker. Then he went to the bathroom and knocked on the door. “Hey, can I come in?”

“Yeah,” she called to him.

He opened the door. She was naked, sitting on the toilet, taking a piss. She grinned at the Kid. He went over to her, knelt in front of her and kissed her. Everything about her turned him on. He didn't have any toilet fetish that he knew of, but even the sight of her sitting there pissing excited him, and so did watching her wipe herself with a piece of toilet paper, flush, stand up, get in the bathtub, turn the shower on . . .

She closed the shower curtain. He opened it, got in there with her, closing the curtain behind him. He looked at the whiteness of the shampoo in the darkness of her hair. He put his arms around her. “No getting us all hot, okay?” she said. “I need to get to work.” But when they washed each other and she was soaping his hard cock with her hand, it was too much for her, and she insisted that he fuck her right there in the shower. Then they rinsed themselves off in a hurry, wrapped themselves in towels, went back to the bedroom and put their clothes on.

In the kitchen, she watched him cook. He chopped an onion and a few slices of bacon, then cooked them together in a big skillet. Then he added the rice, stirring it so the bacon fat would get mixed in. He kept on stirring it as he added hot chicken stock, a cup at a time. “This is the important part,” he told her. “You don't want to put a lot of stock in all at once, just enough to keep the rice from getting burned. You let it get absorbed into the rice, then you put in a little more.”

“Cool. Who showed you how to do that?”

“Nobody. I read it in a book. Do you like to cook?”

“I guess. But I always use the same recipe.”

“What recipe?”

“You open the can, pour it in the pot and put it on the stove.”

The Kid laughed. “I can't eat stuff like that.” He poured some more stock into the skillet and kept stirring. “You can't get stuff like this out of a can. Wait and see.”

When she tasted it, she didn't argue. “This is awesome,” she said.

“Yeah, thanks. My roommate Miguel says he can't eat his mom's cooking no more, since he started living with me.”

“You always cook for him?”

“Yeah, usually. I like cooking for people. And he don't know how to cook.”

“He lucked out getting you as a roommate.”

“That's what he says. He's scared I'll get married or something and then he'll starve.” The Kid laughed. “I keep telling him, learn to cook. It ain't hard.”

“Will you show me?”

He looked at her. “Yeah.”

J
esus Griego couldn't believe he was going to die. He'd been waiting for more than twenty years. Every time they were about to kill him, the lawyer did something, there was another delay, and it didn't happen. But now the lawyer was telling him that this time was different, that there would be no delay, that they were going to kill him. The lawyer was saying he was sorry, the appeals had been exhausted, and Jesus was trying to figure what he could say in return.

When Jesus was twenty, he was working in Phoenix, cleaning swimming pools for the white people. He drank, smoked pot, did speed, sniffed paint if he couldn't get anything else. He'd been getting high since he was ten. One Saturday afternoon he was driving his truck with a couple of friends a few miles outside of town. They picked up a hitchhiker, a guy in his forties. They drove into the desert, parked the truck and they all got out. Jesus and his friends told the guy to give them his money and ID. He did. The guy told them he was afraid of them, said he wouldn't call the cops, he just wanted to see his son grow up. They shoved him to the ground and kicked him until there was shit in his pants and brain fluid was leaking out of his nostrils. Jesus got an idea. He told his friends, “Check this out.” He got in the truck and rolled it until one of the wheels was on the guy's head. Then he revved it, spinning the wheels. His friends laughed and cursed as they jumped back to avoid splashes of the dirty red soup the guy's head was turning into.

The prosecutor gave Jesus a choice. He could forgo his right to a trial, plead guilty, and he could be paroled within fifteen years. Or he could plead not guilty and take it to trial, in which case they'd press for the death penalty.

The public defender told him to accept the deal, told him that there was no chance of an acquittal, and that what he'd done easily met the criteria for the death penalty, that the murder be “especially heinous, cruel or depraved.” But other people told Jesus that the public defender's job is always to talk the client into pleading guilty to avoid inconveniencing the courts. So he told him he wanted a trial. He got one, and the judge sentenced him to death.

Now the lawyer was telling him that it was going to happen. He couldn't feel afraid because he couldn't believe it. He was forty-two. The longer he lived, the less plausible it seemed that they could kill him for something he'd done when he was a kid. Other people on Arizona's death row in Florence prison, people he knew and was friends with, had been executed, so he knew it could happen, knew it was true. He knew it, but he didn't believe it.

“I'm very sorry, Jesus,” his lawyer told him.

“It's okay. Thanks,” Jesus said. He liked the lawyer, who worked at the Federal Public Defender's Office in Phoenix. Jesus liked to read, but in recent times death row inmates weren't allowed to have books. The lawyer had helped him out there by giving him books as, he claimed, a part of a legal brief, telling the authorities that he wanted his client to read contemporary literature in order to find passages that he would quote when he had to present his case at the clemency hearing. They knew it was bullshit, but there wasn't much they could do about it.

Now the lawyer was asking him what he wanted for his last meal, what he wanted done with his body, and who he wanted to invite to watch him die.

Jesus thought about it. He wasn't close to anyone in his family except for his niece Vanjii, who was his sister's daughter. He couldn't even say he was all that close to Vanjii either, but she still wrote to him regularly, and visited him sometimes. She was the only one who did. He wrote to her and invited her to come but told her he would understand if she didn't want to. She wrote back right away, telling him she would come if she could, but that her car would never get her from New Mexico to Arizona, that she didn't have enough money to rent a car, and that her license was suspended. He told her not to worry, that he would put her on his witness list so that she could attend if she was able to. He was allowed five other witnesses, but he couldn't think of anyone to invite. His lawyer and an investigator both offered to attend, and he thanked them and agreed.

A week before the day, a letter came from Vanjii. She said she had a new boyfriend, and he had offered to drive her to Arizona.

Silent night? Not ever, not around here, thought the Kid. It was midnight and he was in his bed, Vanjii asleep beside him. As usual, there had been the intermittent barking of dogs outside. Now there was a quarrel between a woman and a man. The man's voice was so low the Kid couldn't make out what he was saying, but he didn't have the same problem with the woman. “You piece of fucking shit . . . Yeah, you are, that's exactly what you are . . . You fucking take me for every dime I got, and you don't fucking care . . . You're gonna just do what you want . . . Yeah, well, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you . . . I don't even want you in my house . . . That's it, motherfucker, walk away, just walk away . . . ” The Kid pressed his face into Vanjii's hair, grateful. He marveled at her ability to sleep through anything. He hoped to get some sleep himself before the morning, when they would get on the road to Arizona. He had never been there before, but he'd been told that the drive would take at least eight hours. On the floor of his bedroom, Vanjii's bag was packed and waiting.

They had given Jesus a mild sedative before they'd strapped him to the gurney. When they tried to put the catheters in his arm, they couldn't find a vein. So they dissected his arm. This procedure, which is called “cutting down,” took about a half-hour. When it was done, the arm wasn't recognizable as an arm, but there were veins, and catheters stuck in them. They bound what remained so he wouldn't bleed to death. Then they wheeled the gurney, with Jesus strapped to it, into the execution room and left him there for twenty minutes.

He raised his head and looked around. To his right there was a big window, but it was covered with a curtain. He wondered whether the witnesses were already there, whether Vanjii was standing on the other side of the glass. He couldn't hear anything, but he knew the glass was soundproof.

He started to cry. Rather, he thought he was crying, but he wasn't sure. There were whimpering sounds coming out of his mouth, and he could feel snot coming out of his nose, and he knew he was going to piss in the diaper he was wearing. But his eyes didn't feel wet at all. All of last night he had imagined this, what it would be like, how it would feel, getting ready for it. But now it wasn't like anything he had imagined, and he wanted his mother to come and protect him. He tried to think about the man he had killed, tried to wonder whether the man had felt like this, but it was so long ago that he only vaguely remembered it.

They came back to the room and told him there had been no last-minute stay of execution. His nose and mouth were covered in snot. He asked one of them to wipe it away with a tissue. The guy took his glasses off, wiped his face, then replaced the glasses and asked if he wanted to keep them on. Jesus said yes. Then they all left, all except for the warden. Someone on the other side of the glass rolled back the curtain.

Jesus almost recoiled when he saw Vanjii. He couldn't believe how close she was, standing there looking at him, with her beautiful long hair and young face and pretty blue dress. She looked at him, showing nothing, and then she smiled. He smiled back. His lawyer, Chuck, was standing beside her. Chuck winked at him. There were other people there, but Jesus didn't know who they were.