God'll Cut You Down (24 page)

“I was scared,” Daisy says. “You know, I’d never been in a fight, I didn’t know what to do. I mean, do you push her? So she kept getting in my face and yelling at me and threatening me. At one point she did tell me she’d kill me, and I just thought, you know,
Yeah right, you’re twenty-five pounds and you know I’m bigger than you—I’ll just step on you.
”

WEEK FROM HELL
catalogs another tattoo of Vincent’s:
Mama’s name on right hand.

And just one week and a half from their meeting at Battlefield Park, that right hand with Mama’s name was around Daisy’s throat. The two were at the house in the woods.

“He wanted to take my car,” Daisy says. “And I told him no. And he ended up choking me and telling me, ‘I’m taking your car.’ I had red marks on my neck. It made me think,
God—take my car and please leave.
And he took my keys and left. From somebody who had never been in any kind of abuse in her life, to have somebody right in your face choking you . . . I mean, it scared me.”

Daisy stares down at the
WEEK FROM HELL
in my lap.

“Vincent did not like the word
no
,” she says. I picture Vincent demanding from Richard the rest of his wages, and Richard refusing.

One hour later, Vincent came back with Daisy’s little white car. He had kicked in one of the doors.

“When he came back, it was that, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. I never meant to hurt you.’ You know, that kind of manipulation. Making me feel like I was the one who was wrong for getting mad or getting upset.”

A couple of nights after the strangulation, Vincent and Patrick took Mexican Dad’s truck and burst a tire. The boys had no phone and walked back to the house in the woods.

Daisy told them, “No problem.” The three of them plus Jasmine piled into the other truck on hand, belonging to cousin of Mexican Dad.

They drove off to Mexican Dad’s truck, changed the tire, and split in two for the trip back home: Jasmine and Patrick in Mexican Dad’s truck, Vincent and Daisy in the other.

The two drivers, Vincent and Jasmine, pushed it on the highway.

They started speeding.

Then racing.

Other cars were beeping and flashing their lights.

Vincent didn’t stop in time to turn down Daisy’s road. He just kept going. Jasmine swerved into Daisy’s road at the last moment, but there were lots of loose rocks on the turnoff. She skidded straight into an electrical pole. The transformer on the top of the pole fell off and crushed the truck.

Jasmine and Patrick were okay, but Mexican Dad’s truck was totaled.

Daisy looks miserable for a cherry-cheeked girl in a bright lime top, sipping iced tea from a neon straw.

“I don’t know why at that point I didn’t wake up and think,
What are you doing? You just totaled your dad’s . . . What’s he going to think when he gets back from vacation and his truck is totaled?
But, you know, things happened.”

What happened was that Daisy, Vincent, Patrick, and Jasmine went to a party. Daisy took her first ecstasy pill. Patrick and Vincent went into
a room—she didn’t know what they were doing in there, but they came out with red eyes. She was also smoking pot, falling down the back of the couch like a dollar coin.

Time to go. Vincent got behind the wheel of cousin of Mexican Dad’s truck (not Daisy’s white car with the door kicked in, or the truck wrapped around the pole at the end of Daisy’s street). Vincent swerved off. Patrick was with them, but Daisy realized Jasmine had been left behind. Daisy’s eyes were pumping like little hearts. Now red was rolling in and out. Now a siren. Vincent was zigzagging on the road. Now she was pushed against a cop car, being frisked. They were squeezing her legs like they were trying to get toothpaste.

Out from Daisy’s pocket the cops pulled a little pinch of pot.

Out of Patrick’s pocket they pulled Mexican coins and Mexican bills.

“Hey, that’s not his!” Daisy slurred. “They’ve taken that from my home!”

The cops said, “Shut up,” and frisked Vincent.

Out from Vincent’s pocket they pulled a knife.

Vincent started spinning tales. He told them his name was Dave. He then told them his brother’s name and information.

They soon figured out who he was. And that he was out on probation with a knife in his pocket. Vincent was arrested and charged with careless driving, public drunkenness, giving false information to police, no driver’s license, no insurance.

And he was charged with one more thing: grand larceny, for the stolen Mexican money. The cops carted Vincent to Rankin County Jail.

Daisy was charged with possession. Just shy of seventeen, she was sent to a different location, Rankin County Juvenile Detention Center in Pearl.

Daisy spent four days and nights in juvenile detention. She met girls who had to sleep with men for food.
I’m not supposed to be here,
she thought.
Where are my parents?

“Your parents could have gotten you out,” the jail officer told her, “but they didn’t.”

What, are they just gonna leave me?
she thought, distressed and furious.

She had come in Friday morning, and on Tuesday morning, the judge decided to release her without a record but
with
an ankle bracelet. It was her seventeenth birthday.

Jamie was, to say the least, furious. It was now summer holidays, and these would be the rules: no friends, no cell phone, no Internet. Each morning, Jamie would wrap up the computer modem and cords in her handbag so Daisy could meditate like a disgraced monk without distraction over what she’d done. Daisy and her ankle bracelet wallowed all by themselves in the house for months.

Meanwhile, mother was having her own adventures with Daisy’s confiscated cell phone. A male called and left a voice message: “I’m gonna come to your house and I’m gonna shoot your family. You got my brah arrested. It’s your fault.”

Jamie took the cell phone to the police and played the message. The policeman said, “Be careful.” That was it.

Back home, Jamie called the number back.

“If you come to my house, there’s only one person that’s gonna get shot, and it’s not gonna be me,” said Jamie.

“Oh, I . . . I . . . I was just joking, I was just joking,” said the gangsta at the other end.

Jamie was terrified.

Even that wasn’t completely the end. Daisy and Jamie were called to court to appear as witnesses in the first trial of Vincent McGee.

Mum and daughter Reyes pulled up at the perfectly neat square in the center of Brandon. They walked past the Confederate soldier statue
and into the Rankin County Courthouse. Daisy was terrified. This would be the first time she’d seen him, the car-kicker, the throat-choker, since the arrest. Two men had volunteered to go with her, to “be a presence,” keeping Daisy at ease, and perhaps warning Vincent not to try anything: an uncle who was a highway patrolman and a cousin who was a constable.

Daisy and her two policemen sat down in the front pew.

Vincent entered the courtroom.

Jamie saw Vincent, her daughter’s beau, for the first time.

“The sad thing was, when he walked in, he smiled,” Jamie says. “This big, bright, beautiful smile. I mean, he’s a handsome kid. And none of his family were there, and I just thought that was so sad.”

“Well, his family continued not to be there when he was sentenced to sixty-five years,” I tell her.

Jamie looks glum. “Really? Even though, you know, I’m sure they’re so sick of him and all that he’s done in his life, it was just sad that nobody showed up.”

Vincent did have a beautiful smile. But the meaning of that smile was up for debate.

“He felt very entitled, and when he walked into that courtroom, I mean, I saw it,” Jamie says. “It just, like, oozed out of him that he was this wonderful person that everyone should want to be like, when really he’s . . . I mean, he’s a murderer, you know? And who would want to be like that?”

Fantastically, Vincent had declined a lawyer. It was announced he’d represent himself. To keep things simple, the prosecution focused on one charge, which happened to be the grand larceny: $300 in Mexican pesos, $200 in Mexican paper dollars, and Jamie Reyes’s three-hundred-dollar silver ring.

Vincent had sat still through the mention of his other transgressions. But he snapped at the words
grand larceny
.

“No! I didn’t do that!” said Vincent.

The judge told Vincent to shut his mouth.

Daisy took the stand. Vincent McGee, attorney-at-law, paced back and forth before her.

“You really gonna say I did this?” Vincent said. “Are you really gonna try and blame me for all this that you did?”

“Yes,” Daisy said.

Vincent snapped.

“Are you stupid?” he said. He started calling Daisy all sorts of names.

The floorboards creaked where Daisy’s two policemen sat, as they prepared for
something
.

“Get off the stand! This is done!” said the judge. He found Vincent guilty and gave him ten years for grand larceny, suspending nine of them. But that meant the four years suspended for assaulting the law enforcement officers came down on him, and so that morning Vincent was sentenced to five years in state prison. His ankles were shackled. His hands were cuffed to his belt. And then he was gone.

Minutes later a court official walked over to the front pew. He crouched a little. He told Jamie and Daisy to stay put.

“Don’t leave the building,” the man said, “because we don’t have him.”

Vincent had escaped.

“They ended up getting him,” Daisy tells me. “I mean, he couldn’t go far with the shackles.”

I sit in the car with a dozen knots either tied or untied in my brain.

Tina, Vallena, and Earnest said Vincent was charged with and convicted of grand larceny “primarily” as punishment for dating a white girl. Vallena thought Richard attacked Vincent years later for the same reason, as a warning from the Klan.

Daisy is Mexican. That distinction mightn’t make any difference to Vallena, but would the Klan really get so worked up about a black man
dating a Mexican? Tina, Vallena, and Earnest also said officers connected to Daisy’s family bashed Vincent in his cell. But the chronology’s all wrong: Vincent doesn’t meet Daisy until a year and a half after he gets out of jail for the fight with the two officers. The two police officers by Daisy’s side in the courtroom have, through a game of telephone, traveled backward in time and become the two officers in the cell in the minds of Earnest, Vallena, and Tina.

Yet.

Vincent was arrested for grand larceny, giving false information to police, careless driving, public drunkenness, no driver’s license, no insurance. The district attorney chose to pursue only one charge—the grand larceny for the stolen Mexican money.

But weren’t the pesos in fact in Patrick’s pocket, not Vincent’s?

In Daisy’s
WEEK FROM HELL
, recording events as they happened, she wrote:
Patrick took dad’s Mexican pesos & gold clip & some coins.

I had brought this up back in the house. That Patrick swiped the pesos, not Vincent. This distinction didn’t seem to strike Daisy as important. Why should it? Here was this psycho who choked her, kicked in her door, pimped a prostitute, and was driving drunk without a license. What’s one little extra thing on the list, even if that thing is not necessarily true? He was the one who brought Patrick into her life, so he was responsible.

To Vincent and his family, however, this distinction is the main event. It’s the
only
event. Never mind choking a girl, kicking in a car, stealing vehicles, bashing China and selling her for sex, and drunk driving—these didn’t happen, or at the very least didn’t matter (and perhaps they didn’t know about most of them): He didn’t take the pesos.

And I can’t get past it, either. Vincent might have deserved to be in jail for what he did, but still, he was put in jail for something he
didn’t
do.

In its own messy, clunky way, this was the archetypal Deep South tale: a black man thrown in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.

It should be remembered that Vincent ended up serving a little under
three years, rather than five, and less than two months after he was released he stabbed Richard in the neck so many times, Richard’s head nearly fell off. Some might argue this vindicated locking him up in the first place. But that’s not how justice is meant to work.

There’s one other knot that revealed itself on the Reyeses’ couch with the neon cushions. A knot that was either untied or tied up twice as tightly, I don’t know anymore. Daisy said that when she was at the juvenile detention center, “the jail officers told me my parents could have got me out but they didn’t.” This sent Daisy into a flux of fury and distress. And there was a follow-up: “But then when I got out, my parents told me they
weren’t
able to get me out.”

Her parents had tried and were denied. Someone had lied to Daisy, telling one of the cruelest lies of all: that she had been abandoned by her parents.

This is uncannily similar to what happened to Vincent before the fight with the officers.
McGee understood that he was to be released on this day and no one had come to pick him up. Upon being told that his mother had been notified to pick him up but had failed to do so, McGee became very unruly.
Had Vincent been lied to as well? Had Tina been denied?

I’ve been dark on Tina McGee for abandoning him that day. I’ve framed her choice as the tipping point, the action that set in motion another action that set in motion another, all rolling down a hill to that night in the crummy little house and the killing of Richard Barrett. But what if she
did
want to get Vincent out but was told she couldn’t, as happened with Jamie and Daisy? What if she couldn’t get in to see Vincent, just like she had claimed to me she wasn’t allowed to see him before the trial?