God'll Cut You Down (36 page)

“No, it didn’t, did it?” Trip says. “What did you use, a lighter?”

“Mm-hmm. Pour the gas, run it out, light it up, whoosh.”

Trip looks around at the chest of drawers and closet, a beautiful match to the bed.

“What was the reason for doing it in the bedroom? Any reason in particular?”

“Nah, I thought the whole house would burn. Burn the whole house down.”

Vincent takes us to the other end of the house, the flashlight rolling over candelabras and antique table lamps on the way. The fire worked in the guest bedroom. The walls and floors are silver and black with ash.

The three men end up in what I’m guessing is the front room.

“Let’s get out of here,” says a voice in the dark. It’s Tim Lawless.

“You scared?” says Vincent.

“No, it stinks,” says Trip. “We just don’t like the way it smells in here.”

There’s a rustle and a
click click click
.

“Put the light on us,” says Trip to whoever is holding the flashlight.

The light rolls on. Trip is lighting a cigarette dangling from Vincent’s lips. Behind them is a baby grand piano.

•   •   •

L
ater, the investigators and Vincent are striding up the road.

“Get me Jessie Jackson, Al Sharpton. Need those guys!” says Vincent with a half laugh.

“This is gonna be, like, kinda the Jena Six, hey?” says Tim. Five years ago, blacks united across America to protest the jailing of six black students in Jena, Louisiana.

“The Jena Six, y’hear!” shouts Vincent.

“They’re gonna call you the Rankin One,” says Tim.

Vincent laughs.

“And they gonna come down from everywhere,” says Tim.

“Yeah. The white supreme-ist hollerin’, ‘Hear! Hear! Hear!’” says Vincent, imagining the white supremacist crowds furious he’s killed Richard Barrett.

“You think about the name of your book?” says Tim.

“Yeah,” Vincent says. “I think it gonna be
Consequence
.”

“
Consequence
!” Tim and Trip laugh.

“It’s a good title,” Tim says. “I like that. You do me a favor? You write that book now, I’m gonna give you one of my cards, you make sure you spell my name right in your book. I want credit, too, now. I give you a card. Tim. They call me Tiny Tim.”

Vincent’s sister Sherrie has phoned me and I don’t know why. The clock radio is glowing 10:07 p.m. Tiny moths block the glow from the lightbulb above my bed.

“You’re leaving tomorrow, my momma said. I’m sitting here watching TV,” Sherrie tells me. “I’m not doing anything. Do you have your stuff packed?”

“No, not yet,” I say.

I’m trying to figure what to ask her on my last night in Mississippi.

“My momma and her boyfriend are not here,” Sherrie says. “And I’m in her room. My uncle’s asleep or he’s drunk and, you know, he has a brother here. He’s handicapped and he keeps calling my name. He’s getting on my nerves. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I have a headache. I don’t feel well. I’m just stressed out.”

“What are you stressed about?” I ask.

“Everything,” she says. “Do you believe that the world is coming to an end?”

“Tonight? I don’t think it’s going to come to an end.”

“This year?”

“No, I think it should be okay.”

“Sherrie!” cries the tangled tongue of a man.

“That’s my uncle’s brother with the handicap,” Sherrie says. “Have you read the Book of Revelations?”

My mind winds back. I remember when I first dropped by the McGees’, Sherrie was shambling in the dark with her fat, floppy Bible.

“Yes,” I say. “I’ve read the Book of Revelations.”

“Did you read about the moon turning red?”

“I can’t remember everything. I read it a few years ago.”

“Did you see the moon turning red?”

“What, in real life? Like, up in the sky?”

“Yeah. Last week. It was red. It was so red. It was scary, but I was not scared because I knew that it was going to happen and I’ve been good forever.”

I drift over to my window and poke my head out, but I can’t find the moon.

“I’m concerned with this,” Sherrie says, “because I know this girl named Crystal and I hear things and I think that she is the devil, and every time I talk, she talks.”

“The Bible devil?” I squeak.

“Yes,” she says. “The other night, I was lying in bed. I was on the floor, actually, I don’t have a bed. So I was there on the floor wrapped up in the blanket and I started hearing her. She put her soul into a dog and she told me to ‘Come out here. Come out here.’ You know, trying to scare me to death.”

“She put her soul in a dog? And it was a dog that was outside your house?”

“Please don’t think I’m stupid.”

“I don’t think you’re stupid. I’m just trying to follow the story.”

I now know what I’m going to ask her on my last night.

“Do you reckon Vincent has got the devil in him?”

“I think he has,” says Sherrie. “Well, I know he’s there now because he killed a man. You know, murder, that sends you straight to hell. So he’s probably one of his people. One of the devil’s people.”

“Do you reckon the devil made him kill Richard?”

“I think so. Probably. I have no idea. I don’t know. He was just a violent person and it led him to death and now he’s marked with sixes.”

I think of the devil’s beard that sprouted from Vincent in the courtroom, and the last three digits of his social security number—666.

“Sherrie!” cries the tangled tongue.

“Vincent told me when he was really young one of his relatives made him round up dogs to hit,” I say. “And that’s why he thinks he might have started to get violent.”

“That’s possible. You know, you hang with the guys in the streets, these kind of guys are rough and like fighting dogs. When we moved to Jackson in ’95, ’96, he met a lot of guys. They were doing things, hopping in cars, hopping over car fences, stealing cars, doing different things. People he hung out with got him into things. Those were the people that accepted him, and he stayed in there with them, you know? And he’s always seen violent things. So when he grew up and thought he was a man, he thought,
Okay, I’ve seen men hit their women.
”

“Did you know China, his old girlfriend? I heard he beat her up.”

“He did. They just used to fight all the time. She was Korean and black. She was a very pretty girl. I believe the first woman he ever hit was China.”

Vincent, Sherrie says, wasn’t like this when he was small.

“I think he mostly got violent when he was in prison,” she says. “Because he had been stabbed and, you know, you can die in the prison. In prison the guards are never always there. And the prisoners all clique up into cliques. Being in there for so long and having to see what was going on, he knew either he was going to fight or die, so he had to defend
himself. And, you know, when he got out of prison, his mind was still in there. Once you’ve been somewhere and once you’ve been used to something, your mind is set on that. When you’re sixteen, seventeen, in and out of a detention center, from detention center to prison, back and forth, every three or four years, not being used to the world because you’re always in jail, you feel more comfortable in jail than you do home. And it’s just a lifestyle. It becomes your life, because when you get out here in the world, you’re lost because you’re used to having a schedule: You wake up, you shower, you clean, you go out, you get back to your room, you eat, and you do those things.”

Vincent, Sherrie says, didn’t handle Richard like a free man would have.

“He’s been in jail and has almost faced death because four or five guys jumped on him, and he knew either he was going to fight or die. And so, you know what I’m sayin’? So he comes out and he did what he did when he was in jail.”

“I wanted to know, when Vincent was in court, how come none of the family came?”

“Nobody was keeping in touch with me, telling me too much of anything. And I wanted to be there for him and help him out, but no one told me. So that’s the only reason I wasn’t there. Every time I see him on TV and the papers, I want to cry, because I know he’s going through so much and to have no family there for him, it hurts bad, man. I was locked up in a detention center. Nobody ever came to see me, you know? And I wonder, everybody else locked up had a visitation every other week. My momma never came and when she did come, it was on the wrong day.”

“Sherrie!” cries the tangled tongue.

“I don’t know if he’s better out or in,” Sherrie says. “Nobody likes to be locked up against their will, but, see, he’s so used to it. It’s really just his life. He’s never had a chance to get out here and work, get a decent job, have a decent home, a decent family. He’s never experienced that. And I know how he feels, but I just handle my things differently
from him. So I understand what he went through, but I know that wasn’t the best alternative.”

Sherrie breathes out.

“But we’re at the end of time,” she says, “so none of us will be dealing with this much longer. I don’t know if I’m going to die or get killed or what, but I haven’t done anything to anybody.”

“I don’t think anyone’s trying to kill you,” I say. “I think you’ll be fine.”

“Well, you know, reading the Bible has taught me that two people . . . two people are going to get killed and that they’ll be put in the holy city. What is the holy city? Do you think it’s Pearl?”

“Why would the holy city in the Bible be Pearl?” I ask.

“What is the holy city? Jerusalem? They’re going to take me away to Jerusalem?”

Sherrie tells me she thinks “the rose of Sharon” in the Bible’s Song of Solomon is referring to her, because Tina wanted to name her Sharon but her daddy said no.

“I can read some to you,” Sherrie says. “The Song of Solomon. I want to read the part where it states about Sharon.”

“I’ve got a Bible with all my books,” I tell Sherrie. “I’ll just go and get my Bible, too.”

And Sherrie takes me through the Song of Solomon. It must be talking about her, she says, because Verse 1:5 reads:
I am black but lovely.

There’s this true crime book about an Aboriginal death in custody. The author paints precisely what happens the morning of the man’s arrest. He was wandering down the street like so. A woman was lounging over by that house. He was whistling this specific tune. The sun shone like this. The police van pulled over like that.

It bugged me, the precision with which the author knew about the
morning, while I was still floundering over whether Richard pulled up outside the McGees’ in a black SUV (like Vallena told me) or a bicycle (like Tina said). I spoke to the author, and as it happens, she didn’t really know any more than me. She just committed herself to a fair-enough version of events. None of the true crime writers know any more than me, they just commit. They just pull the trigger. Safran, pull the trigger.

•   •   •

S
o here’s what I think happened. Richard had come to Mississippi because it’s a place to hide if you’re a little queer. People will overlook it, act ignorant. From Vincent’s side, his community is decimated by poverty, partly the legacy of racism. Pain has been cascading toward Vincent’s house since before the Civil War. A black guy at my apartment complex told me, “You know why they’re called McGee? Why these Africans have a Scottish name? Vincent’s ancestors, their slave master would have been McGee.”

I once interviewed this ex–Christian minister, excommunicated after being caught having gay sex. He told me about his first gay encounter. He was in his midteens, in the 1960s. He knew no one gay in his rural Australian town. No one spoke of it one way or the other. He hadn’t really processed he was gay himself. One night he went walking. He ended up ambling along the side of the road just out of town. A car slowed down, pulled up twenty meters ahead of him. He headed to the car and climbed in. He had sex with the man in the car and left. Nothing was said before, during, or after about what they were doing. I asked the ex-minister, “How did you know to go to the car? How did the car know to pull over?” He said he didn’t really know, everything just drifted together that night on automatic.

I’m going to guess something like this went down with Richard and Vincent. Nothing said about what they were doing before, during, or after. Vincent with his prison rules that you’re not gay if you give and don’t take it. Richard the Grand Dragon of Cognitive Dissonance. That night in the crummy little house, Vincent and Richard danced their
unspoken dance of sex for money. A tinderbox of self-loathing over sex and bitterness and exploitation and small lives caught fire that night. That’s what happened.

And Richard pulled up on a bicycle.

Not ten minutes have ticked past since finishing the Song of Solomon with Sherrie and my cell buzzes again. It’s Vincent McGee. He sounds different.

“I need a wedding ring,” Vincent announces.

“You need a what?” I ask.

“I need a wedding ring. Think you can get me one?”

God and/or Fate gave me the perfect entry point to this murder. Because He wanted me to be here and document all this. And now, the night before I’m scheduled to leave, He gifts the story again, with a winding up of sorts, where otherwise there would be no winding up.

“You need a wedding ring?”

“Riiiight,” he says. “So I can propose.”

“No way!” I say. “You need a wedding ring for who?”

“You already know who it’s for,” Vincent says bashfully.

“For Chywanna?”

“Riiiight.”

A moth flutters in the window and lands on the arm of the couch. I toss up lying that it’s a butterfly for the book.

“No way,” I say. “Have you spoken to her since the flowers?”

“Yeah,” he says. “We been talking since she got the flowers, you know? Murbleandstatic.”

“I can’t believe . . . You’ve spoken to her since and you think . . . What did she say to you?”

“You know, so we did chat it up a bit and murbleandstatic . . .”

“I’m leaving tomorrow, so I won’t have time to get a ring.”

“You can go to murbleandstatic.”