The Red Scream (26 page)

“Set yourself in front of the interview cage, please, ma’am,” he said in a deep East Texas drawl. “The prisoner’s in ad seg.”

Ad seg was administrative segregation, a type of isolation in which a prisoner was locked in his cell twenty-four hours a day, and on the rare occasions when he was brought out for a shower or a visit, he was cuffed and shackled.

“Why?” she asked.

The young guard looked at her as though she were a slow child. “ ’Cause his date’s been set, ma’am,” he said.

“Is that the rule?” she asked, surprised. “Sometimes they get their date more than a month ahead of time.”

“Yes’m.” He sounded bored. “Go on and set down.”

Molly sat opposite a steel-mesh cage on the other side of the divider. It was about the size of a phone booth and contained only a chair. She put her notebook and pen down on the ledge and waited, trying to relax herself into what she thought of as her Louie mode—that state of mind in which all usual judgments and morality were suspended. She thought of it as letting herself fall down into a rabbit hole where, at the bottom, there was a different reality—Louie Bronk’s world, which she was about to enter again.

chapter
14

Pretty gal all alone

On the highway, car broke down.

You pull behind her quick.

She gets to looking sick,

Mouth all dry

Starts to cry

Like a flood,

Sweating blood.

Please, please don’t.

Honey I won’t

Won’t hurt none.

There it’s done.

Weren’t that fun?

LOUIE BRONK
Death Row, Ellis I Unit,
Huntsville, Texas

A
fter a few minutes a door opened on the prisoner’s side of the room. Louie Bronk shuffled in, dwarfed by the two guards, one on either side of him. His hands were cuffed and chained to his waist. His feet were shackled and he clanked with each step.

One guard left while the other led Louie to the cage, unlocked it, and, holding tight to his upper arm, sat him down on the chair. As he locked the cage door, the guard said to Molly, “I’ll be right here, ma’am, if you need me.” He walked back to the door and stood at attention.

During this procedure, Louie had kept his eyes glued to the guard. He kept his head turned away from Molly and continued to stare at the guard.

Molly looked through the several layers of mesh at the man in the cage—a small figure dressed in a coarsely woven white prison shirt and pants. On his feet he wore the cheap soft slippers that were issued to all death-row inmates.

From the first, Louie’s appearance had struck Molly as one of insufficiency in every feature. It was as if his unwanted birth and stunted childhood had supplied barely enough love and nutrients to create a full human being. He was short and, except for the hard lump of a paunch that protruded above his belt, scrawny. His hair was sparse and limp, his lips mere gray lines, his eyes squinty and narrow, close-set, with no lashes or eyebrows. And his skin was papery-looking, insufficient to cover his body decently; his sharp, beaky nose and flat cheeks and long chin looked like naked bone.

He had aged in the past two years, just as Tanya Klein had said. His hair was even thinner now and totally gray, so you could see his scalp through it, and his arms, which used to have at least a stringy, tensile strength, had gone slack; the skin on the underside had loosened from the bone, making the crude blue images tattooed there wrinkle into an unrecognizable mess. If she hadn’t known what the tattoos were—a hawk, a serpent, and a naked woman—she wouldn’t be able to make them out now.

Still turned, staring at the guard, he said in a reedy, singsong voice,

“Time to die?

Go bye-bye?

Don’t you cry.

Gonna cook my goose?

Make me the caboose?

Set me loose.

Time for the red scream?

Or just a bad dream?

Man, let off some steam.”

The guard didn’t bat an eyelash.

“Still rhyming, Louie,” Molly said in a low voice.

He turned quickly and looked directly at her. Molly stifled a gasp. His mouth was collapsing. The flesh around his slit of a mouth had wrinkled and sunk inward like a rotted Halloween jack-o’-lantern. He was drying up, caving in. If the state didn’t kill him soon, there wouldn’t be much left to kill.

“Two years, Molly. You ain’t been here once in all that time.”

“Yes, I know.”

“As soon as you got what you wanted out of me, you stopped coming.”

She felt herself pulling up from somewhere in her chest the voice she had always affected with him in the past. It was a low, calm voice that never expressed judgment or anger, a voice that entered the most appalling of discussions without rising or cracking. “Louie,” she said in that old familiar voice, “you knew the deal was for the series of interviews. Did I ever say I would keep coming after that?”

“No.” He sat with his chained hands in his lap and tilted his head to the side coyly. “But it don’t seem right, not polite.”

Accustomed to his bursts of rhyme, Molly had always treated them as regular conversation. “It don’t seem polite to call me a liar either.”

He let his head drop back so that his long chin pointed at her and his stringy neck with its huge Adam’s apple was exposed. “I knew that would bring you.”

“If you wanted to talk you could have written me, Louie.”

He shook his head and said nothing, waiting for her.

They sat in silence. Then he said, “You wrote a book. Does it cook? I’d like to look.”

The hairs on the back of Molly’s neck prickled at the thought of his reading the book. “Are you saying you’d like to look at my book?”

“I ain’t a big reader, as you know, but I would like to see my poetry printed in a real book.” He grinned without opening his mouth. “I thought you might bring me one.”

“So you haven’t seen the book at all?” Molly asked.

“Nope.”

“But you recently made a statement saying it was a pack of lies,” she said.

“You wrote down the things about Mrs. McFarland just like I told ’em, didn’t you?” His voice was thin and aggrieved.

She nodded.

“Then you wrote lies. God as my witness.” He moved his hands up in the start of a gesture which was cut short by the chain attached to his cuffs. Quietly, he said, “Sister Addie says we are forgiven, but we need to set right the things we can.”

“All right,” Molly said. “Here’s something you can set right. I have some questions for you.”

He was silent and she could see from the way his eyeballs shifted down and to the right that he was conjuring up a rhyme. Finally he said, “Sure thing. Give it wing. Let it sing. Ring a ding.”

“Okay. An article in the
American-Patriot
this morning said you made a statement yesterday and gave it to Addie Dodgin. I want to know if the newspaper quoted you right.”

He made a little puckering motion with his lips that she recognized as an indication to go on.

“First of all, the article said you made a statement claiming you did not kill Tiny McFarland, that your confession was not true.” She tried to catch his eyes but he was staring down at the tabletop. “Did you say that, Louie?” she asked.

“What else did it say?”

“That you said the authorities in Hays County fed you information about the killing so you could make a convincing confession. Did you say that?”

“What else?” he asked.

She tried to keep her voice neutral, as if she were just listing another item. “That you said everything you told me about the McFarland case for my book was a lie and that I led you on and encouraged you to tell those lies. Did you say that?”

He looked directly at her and smiled so she could see what had happened inside his mouth: many of his teeth were gone, leaving big empty gaps. Prison dentistry, no doubt.

“Well, did you?” she asked again.

He closed his mouth. “That’s the one that really gets ya, ain’t it?” He moved his head forward, closer to the mesh cage. “Ain’t it? Got you where you live.”

Molly had forgotten how infuriating he could be. “The article also said you have become a born-again Christian and that you want to do the right thing.” Molly put her hands together in a mocking prayer gesture. “Did you say
that
, Louie?”

“Well, I answer to God now. Don’t have to answer none of your questions, do I?”

She waited, trying to keep a grip on her temper.

“I mean what good’s it to me to answer? What did I ever get out
of answering all them questions took up so much of my time two years ago?”

She said nothing.

“Yoo-hoo,” he said in a high voice, “I’ll tell you. I got zip. I got dip. Goose egg. Mumbly peg. Molly Cates. Special rates.”

“What are you saying, Louie?”

“Maybe you should share some of the wealth with me since I cooperated so good. Maybe I deserve some of them big profits you’re raking in.”

Molly had to struggle to keep her voice low. “Louie, we talked about that and you signed a waiver, if you recall. I paid you for the use of some of your poems and you agreed.”

“You’re cheating me, just like people always done. You used some of my poems in your book, but you never did nothing to get the rest of them printed down in a book of their own like I asked. And the money I got’s all gone.” He lapsed into the high whine she remembered from his monologues about how unfair the world had been to him. Of course, it
had
been unfair to him, savagely unfair, but she hated the whining anyway.

“Louie, I told you at the start I would never pay a penny for interviews or give you any kind of approval over what I wrote. But you chose to talk to me anyway.”

“Worked out real good for you, didn’t it? You got a book. Gonna get rich. Television movie—miniseries maybe. About me. Why shouldn’t I get some money from it, huh?”

She felt anger building in her like a steam kettle. “First of all I’m not getting rich. And second, I don’t think it would be ethical for you to benefit from your crimes.”

“But it’s just dandy for you to benefit, ain’t it?”

He had her on the defensive, squirming and explaining, and she hated the feeling. It was so ludicrous she should laugh, but it made her furious. “What good would money be to you anyway, Louie?”

“What do you mean?” he asked with his eyes narrowed almost shut.

“You’re going to be dead in three days.” The minute the words were out, she wished she could recall them. It was inexcusable—to bully a helpless, chained, condemned man like that.

He looked up quick, with a grim set to his thread-thin lips. “No, I ain’t. I ain’t gonna be dead in three days.”

Christ, he was thick. Her anger flared again. She’d already proven herself a bully; why not go all the way? She planted her elbows on the tabletop. “Louie, believe me. No matter what you say or do, you’re going to die in three days. Your goose
is
cooked. It
is
time for the red scream.”

He shook his head and bent his lips into the smile she hated. “No, ma’am,” he said. “It won’t happen ’cause you won’t let it.”

Breathless with surprise, she rose partway out of her chair. “Me? Louie, I have nothing to do with this. Nothing. I have no power to change it, even if I wanted to.”

The guard, seeing her sudden movement and hearing the rise in her voice, came to life and took a step toward the cage door. Molly sat back down and waved him away with a sheepish smile.

Louie was scowling at her, his tiny close-set eyes narrowed. “What do you mean, ‘if you wanted to’? You always said you was against the death penalty.”

Molly took a deep breath. “I am against it.”

“So what did you mean?”

“I meant that you’re caught up in the mill of the criminal justice system and no one can stop it from grinding you up.”

“Ain’t you even going to hear what I got to say?” Louie demanded. “Before, you always listened to me. That’s why I talked all them hours—because you listened so good. But that was when you wanted something from me, I guess, before I was a cooked goose.” The whine had returned.

“Louie, you were a cooked goose then. You were cooked ten years ago when that Travis County jury convicted you of capital murder. But sure I’ll listen. What you got to say?”

He raised his head and spoke in a loud, firm voice. “This is true. Through and through. I tell it to you.” He stopped and glared at her.

“So tell me,” she said, through tight lips.

He raised his cuffed hands as high as the chain permitted and placed his spatulate fingertips against his chest. “God above as my witness, I really didn’t do that Mrs. McFarland.” He shook his head. “She wasn’t one of mine and I shouldn’t ought to of said she was. Sweet Jesus and Sister Addie forgive me.”

She felt her anger rising sour in her throat. His syrupy tone of voice and the sight of him with his hands over his heart enraged her. “Cut out that phony ‘Sweet Jesus’ crap, Louie. Don’t try that old jail
house con on me. You sat right over there”—she pointed to the spot where they had sat for the interviews—“and hour after hour you told me about the movie in your head that built up from the time you were eight years old, the fantasy of killing women and having sex with them. You told me about all those black-haired women on the highway.”