Thorn in My Side (4 page)

I said what I knew he was thinking. “You should’ve killed
me
if you were going to kill someone. Wouldn’t that solve all your problems?”

His voice turned serious. “We need to get our story straight right now.”

“I have work to do.” I tried to put the jack back into the telephone, but he grabbed my hand. “What is wrong with you?”

He was looking over my shoulder. “The police are here.”

“Don’t joke with me.”

I felt a firm hand on my shoulder. It wasn’t Wayne’s. I looked at the hairy, knobby knuckles and let my eyes trace up a dark blue sleeve to the man standing behind me.

“Mr. Edgerton?”

I felt my throat work. Both Kirk and I said, “Yes?” at the same time.

The man looked confused. He scratched his square jaw. His beard was coming in even though it was early in the morning. His shoulders were broad, though they only contained one head. “I’m Detective Peter Jensen with the Atlanta Police Department. I need to talk to you about a case.”

“The police?” Kirk gasped. “What do the police want with my brother?”

I shot Kirk a look. “Which one of us do you need to speak with?”

He looked from me to Kirk, then back again.

Kirk asked, “Which is it? Are you here to talk to me or my brother?”

The detective was obviously not in the mood to be questioned. “Could you please stand, Mr. Edgerton?”

“Which one?” we asked in unison. I could feel a bead of sweat roll down my back. And then another bead roll down Kirk’s.

Suddenly, Jensen jammed his hand into my armpit and jerked us up from the chair. He spun us around, and we had to reach out to keep from smashing face-first into the cubicle.

“Oh God,” I prayed as I felt my arm being jerked behind my back. There was the metallic clinking of handcuffs.

“Screw you, pig!” Kirk’s hand flew into the air in his John Travolta move. Jensen reached for Kirk’s wrist, but Kirk was taller. “I want a lawyer!”

“You want me to add resisting to the charge, too?” Jensen pressed Kirk’s face into the wall. “Give me a reason, asshole. Just give me a reason.”

“Officer,” I tried. “I’m not resisting—”

Jensen kicked me in the back of the knee, and I crumpled to the ground. Kirk fell on top of me.

“No!” he screamed. “It’s not fair!”

“Neither is what you did to that woman.” Jensen’s knee dug into my back as he clamped the cuff around Kirk’s wrist. “You beat her down like a dog in the street,” he mumbled. “What kind of animal are you?”

“It wasn’t me!” Kirk screamed. “It was my brother!”

Chang and Ang Bunker are perhaps the most famous conjoined twins in history. Called “Siamese twins” because they hailed from Siam, they worked in a traveling circus most of their lives. Having made their fortune as a freak show, they retired to Tennessee, where they farmed the land by day and tended to their wives and families by night.

Yes, they had wives and families. Chang and his wife had ten children. Ang and his wife had eleven. Because their wives—who, by the way, were sisters—did not get along, the two men had separate households. Three nights would be spent in Chang’s marital bed, and then the next three nights would be spent in Ang’s. They were gentlemen farmers. Respected citizens. Their sons fought for the Confederacy, which, while not exactly laudable, had some tinge of honor.

The twins died on the same day. Chang succumbed to pneumonia during a long January night. The next morning, Ang woke to find his brother dead. His wife and children heard his cries of grief and came to comfort him. A doctor was sent for. The plan was to separate the two, but Ang refused. He would not be parted from his brother.

He died a few hours later.

Today, the surgery to separate the two men could be performed in a few hours. Doctors would refer to them as xiphopagus twins, joined at the sternum by a tiny piece of cartilage and sharing a liver with two independently functioning halves. The liver is a remarkable organ, the closest thing to a salamander that the human body has. Slice it into pieces and it will grow back as one.

The adorable Hensel girls are craniopagus twins, meaning they are joined at the head but, for the most part, have two separately developed bodies.

The more reclusive Gaylon brothers are omphalo-schiopagus twins, with four arms, four legs, and fused abdomens. They live in the embrace of their loving family, which consists of nine brothers and sisters.

Kirk and I are thoraco-omphalopagus twins. We are fused from the upper chest to the lower chest. We share a heart. A liver. Part of the digestive system. We are also, to my knowledge, the only conjoined twins in the American penal system.

Aggravated assault. Rape. Murder. It was hard to quibble with any of these charges once they showed the crime scene photos. Poor Mindy Connor. The police photographer’s flash was even more harsh than the xenon parking lot lights of the Pink Pony. She was not a pretty girl. Nor was she a girl. Forty-three years old. She’d lost custody of her children five years ago because she preferred the needle to the demands of motherhood. Her father said she was trying to get off drugs before she died. She’d taken up knitting to give her hands something to do. Maybe it was Mindy, not the grandmother, who’d made the sleeves too long on the reindeer Christmas sweaters in my dream.

Kirk’s idea had been to throw Mindy’s body in the Dumpster behind the Pink Pony. In retrospect, that might have been a wiser choice than my scheme to leave her lying on the ground by the Blue Ridge Parkway. What can I say? I was much more sentimental back then. Fresh mountain air. Towering pine trees. Deer. Rabbits. Truckers who would look out the window of their cab, see a dead body on the road, and immediately call in the state troopers.

Kirk and I had separate lawyers during our trials, separate defense cases during which we blamed each other for the murder. Was Kirk solely responsible for what happened to poor Mindy Connor? Being honest, I really can’t say. The forensic evidence was compelling. My hands
had
left bloody fingerprints on her back. Was that because I had helped carry her body or because I had prevented her from escaping while Kirk’s fist pummeled her face like a windmill? The rape wasn’t really rape, but a transaction that took place before the deed went down. This is hardly the kind of defense you can put up when the dead woman’s mother and father are sitting in the front row behind the prosecutor. Neither Kirk nor I even tried—him, because it would make him look even worse, and me because my sperm is genetically no different from Kirk’s.

We were neither of us arguing innocence. We were arguing levels of complicity. In the end, Kirk was right. The state couldn’t sentence one of us to death row without sending the other.

Six months have passed since Kirk’s conviction, six and a half since mine. We haven’t talked to each other since Detective Peter Jensen put us in the back of his police car.

“Tell him she attacked us!” Kirk hissed while Jensen walked around to the driver’s side of the car. “We were defending ourselves!”

“Shut up,” I said. “You freak.”

That was it. Kirk wouldn’t speak to me after that. Wouldn’t look at me. Wouldn’t help me tie my shoe or straighten my belt. Not that our lack of vocal communication mattered. I knew Kirk’s excuses before they came out of his mouth. This wasn’t like our previous brush with the law where he could play the conjoined card and get away with it. Beating up a barfly with a gold tooth and a diamond earring was not the same as brutally murdering a woman and dumping her on the side of the road.

Which is what we had done. There was no getting around that. We had committed a violent act against another human being. A mother. A sister. A daughter. A child.

“We sinned against this woman,” I told my prison Bible study class. “Our only option is to repent and hope that God forgives us.”

Beside me, Kirk snorted, but otherwise kept his mouth shut.

“She was a prostitute,” I told the class. “She was a fallen woman. But that was because of the scourge of drugs. Her addiction gave her no choice. We—” and here I looked at Kirk—“had a choice. We could’ve done the right thing, but we chose not to.”

“Amen,” a few mumbled. Others just stared openly. They always stared. Even after six months, they still could not stop staring.

I always helped stack chairs after the meeting. It was a difficult task with one hand, but Kirk stubbornly refused to do anything to assist me, even if it was more expedient. That wasn’t all he’d given up on. Forget flossing. He’d stopped brushing his teeth. His beard had grown in. His eyebrows were dangerously close to meeting in the middle. I’d tried to shave them back just the other day, but he’d growled at me. We looked like we were auditioning for the Georgia prison system’s inaugural performance of
Jekyll and Hyde
.

There was usually a spring in my step after my Bible study class. Kirk, of course, quashed the spring with his woeful drag. So it was that we were scraping along like Lear when I finally stopped and turned my head to him.

“Kirk, we’re going to be in here the rest of our lives. We have to make the best of it.”

“Go screw yourself.” He scratched his beard, and I heard him mumble, “Not that you’ve got the equipment to do it.”

I gritted my teeth as I walked toward our cell. “We deserve what we got. We killed that girl.”

“Your bloody fingerprints were on her.”

“Your sperm was inside her.”

“I paid for that!”

His words echoed through the prison block. The other inmates eyed us curiously.

I lowered my voice. “She was an innocent.”

“I’ve heard your holy roller Jesus bullshit enough for today.” He stopped our progress. “Enough for the rest of my life, actually.”

“Well, I don’t know what you’re going to do about it.”

An inmate, Big Tiny, passed us. I don’t know why they called him that. I suppose it was ironic. He was around five-five, skin and bones. Still, he gave Kirk the angry eye.

Kirk eyeballed him back. “You got somethin’ to say?”

Big Tiny held up his hand, kept walking.

“This is stupid.” I started to leave, but Kirk stopped me.

“You hit her, too, Wayne. You were just as mad as I was.”

“You were jealous,” I shot back. “And for nothing. Nothing at all.”

“I know she touched you.”

I shook my head and started walking again.

He stopped me. “Just tell me the truth. She touched you.”

“What does it matter?”

He threw his hand into the air. “It matters!”

So, this was how he wanted it to be. I gritted my teeth, braced myself to finally say what had never been said. “You’ve always been so damn jealous of me.” Even as I said the words, I realized they were true. “You make such a big show about being the dominant one, having all the good equipment, making all the right moves, but I see it now, Kirk. I see it loud and clear.”

“What do you see?”

“That you need me more than I need you.”

“Bullshit,” he mumbled. “Freakin’ parasite. That’s all you’ll ever be.”

“You think you’d be running IBM by now? Shit, you’d be in the same place as we are now, except you’d be alone.”

“Shut your face.”

“Who helped you with your SATs?” I demanded. “Who made sure you passed Spanish so you could graduate?”

“I know Spanish.”

“
¿Cómo se llama usted?”

He looked nervous. “I said shut up.”

“Who got us that job at Dixie?”

“I was top salesman for—”

“After I was!” I screamed. “You wouldn’t’ve even been able to drive there except for me! You would’ve been on the bus! You would’ve been—”

“Free!” he screamed. “I woulda been free, dammit!” Spittle flew from his mouth. “I should’ve let you die in that fire.”

My mouth opened in shock.

“I could’ve let you die, Wayne. Smoke inhalation. You were almost blue by the time I shook you awake. Ang lived for three hours after Chang died. They could’ve cut you off me like they were slicing off a wart.
I
have the heart.
I
have the intestines. You’re nothing but a colostomy bag with a bad attitude.”

My lips moved wordlessly. I didn’t know what to say.

“That’s what I thought.” He pulled me down the hall. I followed him, my foot dragging as his words echoed in my ears. We went up the stairs, past the empty showers. Finally, I found my voice.

“You sanctimonious piece of shit.”

He reared around so sharply that I hit the wall. My head snapped back against the cinder block. For some reason, that was the last straw. I swung my fist, popping him in the nose. I felt like my face exploded. We both reeled, reaching out to brace ourselves. I tasted blood, but it was Kirk’s nose that was bleeding.

“’I didn’t kill her! It was my brother!’” I screeched Kirk’s famous words when Detective Jensen finally tackled him to the floor. “Remember that, Kirk? Remember you telling that cop that I was the one who killed her?”

“It was a strategy!”

“Strategy to get me convicted.”

He held out his arm, indicating the cellblock. “That worked out well, didn’t it?”

“Couldn’t play the conjoined card again, could you?”

“I should kick your—”

“Go ahead!” I yelled. “All these years, you’ve pretended like you were saving me, but it was you, Kirk. You were saving yourself. You always save yourself, because you’re an arrogant, self-centered, useless—” I searched for the word. I couldn’t find the word. And then I could. “Parasite!
You’re
the parasite.
You’re
the one who’s been sucking off me all these years. You think you’d be married with kids by now? You’d be working two jobs to pay child support and going to court-ordered anger management meetings!
If
you were lucky!”

“Hey.” Big Tiny was back. “Whatch’ all got goin’ on here?”

Kirk growled, “Shut up, Tiny. This is between me and my—”

Big Tiny’s fist slammed into Kirk’s face. My eyes rolled back. My knee buckled. A wave of nausea flooded over me.

“Over here,” Big Tiny said. I realized he wasn’t alone. There were two other men. Really big men. Angry-looking men. They dragged us back into the showers. I tried to struggle, but my head was on fire. Kirk was out of it. Neither one of us could stand.

Big Tiny slapped Kirk’s face. “Yo, you in there, dude?”

Fear took hold. Something bitter and chewy came into my mouth. It was the same taste I’d had that night when ABBA started playing.

“You there, freaky deaky?” Big Tiny was looking at me. I forced my eyes to stay open. My head didn’t nod so much as dip. “Hey.” Big Tiny leaned down to look at me. “Stay awake for me, now.”

He turned his attention back to Kirk. He slapped his face again. Hard. When that didn’t work, one of the men turned on the sink. Big Tiny cupped his hand under the faucet and beamed a jet of water into Kirk’s face.

“What the—” Kirk woke with a start. He instantly realized what was going on. We were in the shower. Three guys. Big Tiny standing in front of us.

“You know who I am?” Big Tiny asked. He rolled down the top of his pants, and I suddenly realized his name was not nearly as ironic as I’d previously thought.

“You know who I am, you murdering bastards?”

Kirk and I looked at each other. Was this a trick question?

“My name is Mark Connor,” he said. “Mindy was my sister.”

“Shit,” we both whispered.

“This here’s payback time,” Big Tiny said. He motioned for his boys to hold us down. Their hands were like clamps on my neck and shoulder. I felt my stomach lurch, my breath catch, my vision tunnel.

Kirk glanced over his shoulder at Big Tiny, then he looked at me. My brother didn’t seem scared. His eyes were full of hate, defiance. I felt a thrill in my heart. We were in this together. We would fight them off with our bare hands. Okay, we would more than likely lose and be defiled in unspeakable ways, but we were brothers again. Flesh and blood. Skin and bones. Heart to heart.

There is no friend who sticks closer than a brother.

Kirk smiled. I smiled back.

“You ready for this?” Big Tiny asked.

“Sure,” Kirk told him. “Do whatever you want to the asshole.”