“You haven’t heard? They scared there might be a riot.”
“Over what?”
“The hanging nigger on the front page of the paper,” he said. “They made sure none of today’s papers got on the ’pound, but some of the inmates on the outside work crews saw one and are already sayin’ they’s gonna be an uprising. They called a bunch of us in to be here when the work squads come back in this evening.”
“To discourage the uprising?” I said, smiling.
“Stomp the shit out of it was the word I got,” he said.
Of the many officers passing us on their way down to the compound, a handful were dressed in the special uniforms of the riot squad. Todd Sears and Shane Bryant were among them. In addition to search and rescue and the riot squad, they were also both on the pistol team. Had the prison not been built in Pottersville they may very well be doing time somewhere, but as it was they were well paid to do things they loved.
As they rushed by they waved to us, Shane yelling to Merrill, “Ready to crack some skulls?”
When they had passed by, he shook his head. “They love this soldier shit. Redneck take any opportunity to beat a nigger.”
I nodded but didn’t say anything. Something was bothering Merrill—and it wasn’t just the normal pain of being a smart, sensitive man of color living in the deep South.
“You figured out who strung him up yet?” he asked.
Though attempting to sound like his normal playful self, he wasn’t quite pulling it off. I could hear it in his words and the tension in his voice.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Don’t take a clerical detective to deduce I’m not, do it?”
“Well don’t make me try to figure out what it is,” I said. “Just tell me. What is it?”
He looked down the compound, gazing into the distance, his jaw muscles flexing beneath his dark skin. As I watched him, I realized that I had come to see him as invincible—both physically and emotionally impenetrable, and it was only on a rare occasion like this one that I was reminded otherwise.
“Everybody—including my mama—will tell you it was just a nightmare,” he said, “that I just dreamed the whole thing, that I was too young, just heard about one and it bothered me so bad that I couldn’t deal with it, but when I was little I saw a lynching.”
“Around here?”
“In the woods behind our house,” he said. “Well, really it was behind the church next door to our house. Preacher used to come from Marianna twice a month. I don’t know what he did, probably spoke to some white woman while he was getting gas or something, but they beat him unconscious, put a noose around his neck, pissed on him to wake him up, then yanked him up and let him swing.”
“How old were you?”
He shrugged. “Four or five. Maybe. Don’t know for sure.”
I shook my head. “I’m so sorry, man,” I said. “Why haven’t you ever said anything?”
“Wouldn’t’ve said anything now if I hadn’t been acting the damn fool.”
I waited, wanting him to say more, wanting to comfort or reassure him, but unsure how.
Seeming anxious to change the subject, he said, “What do you know about the river nigger?”
“Next to nothing,” I said. “No ID, no evidence, no autopsy yet.”
“Why hang him way down there? You think the escaped con did it? What’s his name?”
“Jensen,” I said. “Don’t know enough about him or why he ran yet. Can’t rule him out though.”
He nodded.
“Guess I better get on over to the south gate so I be ready if a riot break out,” he said.
“If you want, we can try to find out who killed the preacher you saw and where they put him,” I said. “What was his name?”
“Last thing I heard him called was nigger,” he said. “Just another dead nigger.”
Chapter Seventeen
I
entered the enormous building that housed the inmate library and made my way through the dented metal shelves that held the worn paperbacks, their pages ripped and torn, their tattered covers half hanging off the bindings.
Inmates filled the comfortable, air-conditioned building the way they did the chapel on hot days like these, browsing the shelves for something they hadn’t read ten times, donning headphones and listening to audiobooks, meeting with one of the inmate law clerks in the law library along the back, but mostly just prolonging their stay in the cool, quiet environment. It was one of only a few oases in the hot, humid, noisy wasteland that was PCI.
When I first became a chaplain every prison library in the state had a qualified librarian. Now many of them were overseen by non-degreed officers with little or no training. Of the officers who regularly rotated through the library, many of whom approached it as a babysitting job, the very best was Sandy Hartman.
A reader himself, Sandy was knowledgeable and helpful, quick with a recommendation or a review. I found him in the librarian’s office reading a paperback without a cover.
He stood when I walked in and placed the book on the desk.
“They already read the cover off that one?” I asked.
He smiled, his face red from his time on the river the day before. “Actually this one came that way,” he said. “We have a bunch of them that do.”
“Really?”
“You keep a secret?” he asked. “When paperbacks don’t sell, the bookstores don’t ship them back like they do hardcovers. They strip the covers off and return them and throw away the actual books. I think the shipping costs more than the book is worth.”
I recalled seeing the warning in front of many mass market paperbacks about coverless books.
“When I told the manager of one of the bookstores in Panama City how small our budget was out here,” he continued, “she said she knew a way she could help, but if it got out she’d lose her job. I’ve been picking up her trash ever since.”
He waited but I didn’t say anything.
“I know it’s wrong,” he said, “but the thought of all these books being thrown away when they could do so much good here … It just bothered me.”
I nodded.
“They found Jensen yet?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“What about your plane?”
I shook my head again. “Thanks for your help searching for it,” I said. “Sorry to waste the team’s time.”
“You didn’t. Usually not finding anything is a good thing. Hopefully it didn’t go down.”
I nodded. “Must not have. Somebody would have seen or heard something or reported it missing by now.”
“Sorry for how the guys act,” he said.
“The SAR team? I’m used to it. Hell, one of ’em’s my brother.”
“He’s not too bad. Not compared to the others. Some of them … I really like to dive and I’m pretty good at it––and I want to help, you know, make a difference, but I just can’t deal with all their … bullshit anymore. I resigned yesterday. Anyway … I know you’re not here to talk about any of that. How can I help you?”
“I’m looking for a book of Salvador Dalì’s work.”
“I’ve got a couple. Right this way.”
He led me to a large wooden bookcase inmates had built just outside his office. It had oversized shelves and held large, heavy art, architecture, and photography books.
He found three Dalì books and pulled them from the shelves.
“You looking for something in particular?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, turning toward him. “A painting called—”
I broke off abruptly, unable to continue when I saw the small scar on his neck. Nearly an inch long, the scar tissue rose off the skin, red and wormlike, just beneath his jaw line.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Let’s go back in the office,” I said.
When we were inside I closed the door.
“The scar on your neck,” I said. “How recent is that?”
He shrugged, his whole demeanor changing, as if he were shrinking in on himself.
“You feel like talking about it?” I asked.
“How do you know about it?” he asked, his eyes moistening.
“I’m trying to find out who’s doing it,” I said.
He shook his head. “It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to me in my entire life. By a long shot.”
“Where’d it happen?” I asked.
“In Medical. I was just going to get a snack out of the vending machine from the break room in the back. It was supper time and the sandwich I brought just wasn’t enough. He jumped me from behind. I never saw him.”
“No one was in the infirmary or the nurses’ station?”
“If they were they didn’t say or do anything,” he said, anger at the edge of his voice.
His breathing became more erratic and his chin quivered.
“He tackled me. Grabbed a handful of my hair and slammed my face onto the tile floor over and over again. Broke my nose, chipped my tooth—this one’s a crown,” he added, pointing to one of his front teeth. “He was so strong. Pinned me to the floor with his whole body, pressing down on me so hard I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t move. I tried. I tried so hard to get away, but I couldn’t. I was dazed, maybe even unconscious a moment.”
He paused, trying to regain control. I waited, nodding in an attempt to be reassuring.
“He kept whispering,” he said, looking down at the ground. “The whole time. Just whispering. I could feel his hot breath on my ear. God, it drove me crazy. It was almost the worst part. That and what he made me do to myself.”
I reached out and put my hand on his shoulder. He jumped when he felt it, but recovered quickly, then put his hand on mine and patted it. It was something no man had ever done in all my years of comforting and counseling the broken and bereaved.
“Have you talked to anybody about it?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“Would you be willing to?”
He gave me a small shrug. “Who?”
“How about Ms. Lopez?”
“How about you?”
“Sure.”
“I was so scared,” he said. “I thought he was going to kill me. You think you’d rather die than have some sick prick butt fuck you on the floor—until you’re in the situation. Then all you can think about is surviving, doing whatever it takes to stay alive. I did just what he told me. He said if I did, not only would he let me live, but he wouldn’t rape me.”
I nodded, trying to reassure him and encourage him to continue.
Several inmates had stopped what they had been doing and were now staring at Sandy. They couldn’t hear what he was saying, but they could see how upset he was—something that excited the predators who were always looking for a vulnerability to exploit. I felt like we should move, continue this in a more private place, but didn’t want to interrupt his cathartic flow.
“He made me hold my hand behind me,” he said. “Took my index finger in his mouth in a very sexual way, then he told me to finger myself or he’d slit my throat and fuck me up the ass while I bled to death.”
He hesitated a moment, took in a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“I did it,” he said. “I did that to myself. I would’ve done anything. There are worse things I thought. Far worse. Better me than him, right?”
I nodded.
“He then took the shank away from my throat and gripped my larynx so hard I thought he was going to crush it and made me stick the butt of the shank up my … up into … my … self. And I did it. He said that’s all I had to do and he’d let me go, so I did it.”
I waited for a long moment but he seemed to be finished.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “No one should ever have to endure anything like that. I’m so, so sorry.”
He nodded and gave me a tight-lipped half smile.
We were quiet a long time. I walked over and stood near the front of the office next to the glass and stared at the gawking inmates until one by one they returned to what they were doing before they saw blood in the water.
“You okay?” I asked when I turned back toward him.
He nodded and really seemed like he was.
“Feel like answering a couple of questions?”
He narrowed his eyes and nodded very deliberately. “If it’ll help you catch and castrate him.”
“You sure it was a shank?”
“Positive. It was homemade. I could feel it. It had tape on the handle and it was sharp underneath it. Even with the tape it cut me.”
I tried not to wince.
“You get a look at him? Any part of him? His hands? Arms? Anything?”
He shook his head. “He put some kind of hood over my head. I didn’t see anything. You think if I did he’d be breathing without a machine right now?”
I understood how he felt, but such sentiments coming from someone so soft spoken and gentle sounded hollow and kind of sad.
“Did he have a smell you can remember?” I asked. “A certain sound? Did he use poor grammar? Could you tell what race he was? How old?”
He closed his eyes, seeming to strain to put himself back into his nightmare.
“He had a fruity smell, sort of citrusy, like orange or lime-scented lotion,” he said. “And his breath smelled of coffee. I’ve always pictured him as a young white guy, but don’t know why.”