Stagger Bay (2 page)

The bailiff watched me close as he let me go through the motions of cleaning up a bit in the bathroom. Like I was going to drown myself by sticking my head down the toilet bowl.

And then we were in the courtroom.

I was first on the docket – apparently a man convicted of home invasion, multiple murder, torture, and sex crimes against children and dumb animals deserved special attention, especially in a backwater town like Stagger Bay.

The judge looked down from on high, posing for the local reporters haunting the peanut gallery I figured. She cut quite a theatrical presence; I was in awe of her authority all right.

“Do you have anything to say before sentence is passed?” she asked.

I jangled my shackles. “Would it help if I said I’m innocent? The real killer is still out there, Your Honor. I don’t know why I was chosen for this, but Stagger Bay will be just as dangerous after you put me away.”

She was silent for a moment, perhaps even weighing my words. “A jury of your peers has convicted you of rape and murder, with multiple special circumstances. The prosecutor has asked for the death penalty.”

Mister Prosecutor stood there somberly as if he wasn’t gloating inside, as if he didn’t smell the kind of blood in the water here that would feed him to satiety if he ever made a run for DA.

“The evidence, though convincing, is still somewhat circumstantial,” the judge said, her tone making it sound like she’d just swallowed a stanky old bug. “Therefore, I am not imposing the death sentence.” She paused once more, as if waiting for me to thank her.

I raised my gaze to find her staring right back at me in loathing. “I believe you did do it, and that there isn’t a circle in hell low enough for the likes of you. Therefore, I am sentencing you to life without the possibility of parole. I hope you come to beg God’s forgiveness – but I’m unsure if I would even wish him to grant it.”

Then, with a haughty swish of robes, she was gone. I was flanked tight by a couple of deputies, but I managed to turn my head and look at the spectators as the packed courtroom gave out with a guttural growl of satisfaction.

Neither Angela nor Sam was there; I hadn’t seen nor heard from either of them since my arrest. The only love I got was seeing my big brother Karl sitting as close behind me as he could manage on those painful-to-the-ass hardwood benches, just as he’d sat through every day of my short trial.

Right then he looked pretty grim. But he pasted a smile on his face and raised his fist in solidarity, silently urging me to take it like a man.

My shackles prevented me from returning the salute as my entourage of cops reprised our shuffling course through the gauntlet of spittle, insults, and threats.

I was on my way to natural life in the Slams.

Chapter Three

Angela didn’t call or write – but Karl explained that, during his one and only visit to me while I awaited transfer to the penitentiary.

I was proud of Karl for mustering the nerve to see me in the hell hole they called the County SHU: Stagger Bay’s Secure Housing Unit. I knew that to visit me he had to run a gauntlet of searches and scanners and warrants checks, wending ever deeper into the constipated bowels of the beast with the only payoff at the end getting to stand in front of my handsome mug with a smeared scratched sheet of unbreakable plexiglas between us, both of us clutching our phones as cold substitute for a brotherly embrace.

Karl’s voice came tinny and inhuman from my ear piece; I wouldn’t even have recognized it if I hadn’t watched his lips synching to the words on the other side of the plexi. His words grating and hissing over the cheap phone line, he told me how Angela started using again as soon as I was popped, then ODed and checked out right after I got sentenced to natural life. Karl figured the OD probably wasn’t an accident.

I told him to shut the fuck up about that one. Neither of us had slugged the other in more than a few moons but Karl was fortunate the barrier was between us that day; he would have taken a cheap shot from me and I knew by heart all the spots that hurt him the most.

“And Sam?” I asked.

“They’re making noise like they’re gonna stick him in CPS, but I’ve got him covered, Markus. As long as I’m breathing and perpendicular, he’s with familia.”

I shut my eyes. “You’ll have to go all the way straight now.”

“If you did it, it’s got to be easy – he’s my blood too, baby brother. I’ll have my stuff sent up here from San Fran, find me and Sam a place. You know I can always glom the folding cash if it comes to that.”

A screw rolled up to lurk, meaning our visit was over. Quickly, knowing they’d just turn the phones off on us in mid-sentence if we dawdled, I said, “Don’t put money on my books. I’ll hustle up my own end. I’ll write to Sam, care of general delivery. And Karl . . .”

My brother waited, brows raised as the screw made an imperious beckoning gesture at him.

“You don’t have to come visit me again. I’ll do my own time.”

His face crawled with mingled relief and shame, and his eyes dropped. Then his shoulders squared and he gave up with a wink and a grin, just like he wasn’t saying goodbye forever.

I hold tight to that memory of my big brother Karl, walking tall away from me until he was out of my sight at least. It was the last time I ever saw him.

Chapter Four

I commenced my sentence knowing my aloneness for true now, my only comfort knowing Karl would care for my son as best he was able.

I wrote a few long rambling letters to Sam, trying to tell him something of who I was and where I’d come from, and a few of the things me and his mom had to overcome trying to give him a normal life. I told him to be strong and live proud. Oh yeah: and that I was innocent; that his dad wasn’t the kind of person that could or would have done the things they said I did.

He never wrote back and after a few years I stopped writing and focused my energies on doing my time.

Some things, the less said the better. Prison was like that – men dissolved here like oil slicks spreading across tainted water.

For years I dreamed about Angela and Sam almost every night. But after a while the dreams stopped coming, and Angela’s face grew harder and harder to see clearly in my mind’s eye.

Finally she subsided into a dim, almost archetypal presence: ‘The Abandoned Wife,’ sunk straight off the deep end to drown in the midst of a Lovecraftian submarine horror show.

All I had to do to remember Sam’s face, however, was study the nearest convenient reflective surface and mentally subtract thirty years. Seeing my mirror image showed me Sam as an adult man: A son who'd remember me only with bitterness and never speak my name; never have known me at all.

I’d leave no mark on the world other than the damage I’d done as a kid and whatever DNA Sam shared with me, my only legacy an anonymous prison grave when my carcass ran out of steam and followed my heart. After that realization my plummet took about as long to complete as it takes to describe, it was gradual as a roller coaster filled with screaming passengers soaring off the rails.

For a long while I drifted through a sort of waking trance. I spent months on end as this dimensionless drifting point surrounded by the infinite expanses of time and space that encompassed me. I guess technically I checked out of the human race all the way for a couple of years, just going about my business on auto-pilot as it were, one more sleepwalking robot.

Then by a total fluke I started reading, making up for dropping out of school in seventh grade: An old white-froed blood I crossed the color line to play occasional chess with turned me on to the Western Canon and my war dance with the Masters commenced.

Dostoevsky and Patricia Highsmith, Dickens and the Viking Sagas and Virginia Woolf. Sylvia Plath and Robinson Jeffers, Langston Hughes and Gracian and the Stoics. I lost track of how many pages I perused containing the brilliant thoughts of twisted geniuses, most long dust.

The Canon was great, if I’d ever been exposed to it in school I never would’ve dropped out. I figured my ‘teachers’ hadn’t gone out of their way to hide the classics from me, but they sure hadn’t gone out of their way to park them under my nose neither.

Please don’t think I was naïve enough to mistake any of these authors for friends. Please don’t think I ever humbled myself to them.

Never!

On the contrary: I
knew
these were dangerous people; I suspected and mistrusted them all. Reading the Canon was like chewing on broken glass, I felt the power thrumming through those books the first time I picked one up. Their scintillating words and arguments were too lovely to be anything but lies.

It was a tightrope walk to fend off their verbal assaults on my brain even as I did my best to glean what I could from the collective wisdom they’d constructed from nothingness and dust. I was as on guard with them as if facing an enemy – but I couldn’t put them down, couldn’t stop turning the page – and if these folk were reaching out from beyond the grave to infect me with the same ideas so many of them died for, then I’m guessing the damage was surely done.

I gravitated to some more than others of course. Herodotus chatted me up about the Spartans. Marcus Aurelius gave comfort despite letting it be known our lives were no more than blips in infinity, over almost before they began. Plutarch showed me that everyone had warts and all lives end, even the great ones – most of the guys he wrote about suffered travails making my current situation look like a leisurely dog walk in the park.

A false imprisonment like mine? Everyone had troubles. Much worse had happened many times before, and would occur many times again.

You had no rights, really. Does a man drowning in the middle of the ocean have a ‘right’ to keep on breathing? Does a man dying of thirst in the desert have a ‘right’ to water? Ask that question of the next desiccated corpse you stumble across in the Sahara – but you probably won’t get any answer from them.

The Canon was as much a curse as a blessing though: its light was a cold one, constituting one more layer of solitary confinement. But the old books’ diamond hardness helped me construct a center to cling to, sometimes the only thing that kept me from mentally fading away into the walls of my cell. Their most galling price tag was the humiliating knowledge of just how small I’d allowed myself to be.

Remember Bacon’s words? ‘We stand on the shoulders of giants.’ That phrase gave me chills the first time I ever read it.

But then the cosmic irony had bitch slapped me almost immediately: how insulting to the memory of those ‘giants’ that any ‘standing’ I’d do would be such a stunted version, given my current domestic arrangements.

Besides the mental sparring matches with my writer frienemies, I did pushups; I got up to a thousand a day on my fingertips. My shredded pecs got big enough I probably needed a bra.

Time passed in a crawl.

Chapter Five

Then one morning – seven years, three days and nineteen hours into my sentence – I had a visitor. I was shackled up, my manacles connected to my ankle cuffs by a dangling vertical chain, and escorted to a private visiting room. It was the first time I’d had to wear the bracelets in a while, as I’d been in general population for years without a court date or any need to interact with someone outside the penal system. The chains weighed heavy on me, but the novelty of entertaining a guest outshone any inconvenience.

“Hello, Markus,” my visitor said, extending her well-manicured hand.

I shook with her awkwardly, having to reach out with both manacled mitts. My chains jingled, and she made a face at the noise.

She had wavy blonde hair cut page-boy style, and wore high-end cologne I found myself sniffing greedily. A skinny little sparrow of a woman, with thin bird’s legs extending from beneath the skirt of her tailored charcoal-grey business suit. Her face was a little bony, and her nose a tiny beak. As she was the first woman I’d seen since coming to prison, her presence was quite invigorating.

“My name is Elaine Hubbard,” she chirped, “and I’m getting ready to have you released.”

My mind raced but I was suddenly numb as if I’d been immersed in ice. I couldn’t accept the reality of her words. “Say that again, please.”

“You’re going free, Markus,” she said, seeming to enjoy whatever was happening on my face.

I looked around the circumference of the room seeing the paint worn away at shoulder height from all the men that had paced its confines before me, imagining how much despair these specific sweaty greasy walls had witnessed; how many dashed hopes and betrayed trusts. I’d never had much luck with lawyers before, and was skeptical of her words to say the least.

“You’d best explain,” I said. “And I hope to God you’re not fucking with me.”

“Have you ever heard of DNA evidence?” she asked. “It’s a relatively new technology. They’ve been breaking cold cases with it for a while now. It’s solving a lot of crimes, putting a lot of perpetrators behind bars that thought they’d get away with it forever.”

I jangled my shackles, the noise almost sounding musical. “That’s quite reassuring. It soothes me; it’ll make me feel all safe in my warm comfy bed tonight.”

She chuckled. “It’s also freed a lot of innocent people, too. People like you, Markus.”

My heart was beating hard. She continued talking but I couldn’t understand a word she said.

‘Freedom,’ a voice whispered in the back of my brain – I shook my head at it. “So what made you take this on? What made you think I didn’t do it?”

“Your brother,” Elaine said, a wistful expression crossing her face. “Karl was a good man.”

“You said was. You’ll be rephrasing that, fast.” I was standing for some reason, and the screw on duty was suddenly in the room with us. I felt him hovering behind my shoulder ready to drop me hard and nasty.

Elaine waved him out as if she was dismissing a dog, but like any pro he waited until my butt was planted back in my seat before leaving.