Final Argument: A Legal Thriller Part 16

Isaac was there at Branville, and so was Darryl's old friend from ACI, William Smith. Old home week. Best part of the joint, keep meeting old friends. Stick around long enough, you never lonely.

At Branville there was a factory that made furniture. They made desks for prosecutors. They made swivel chairs for judges. Men working there earned eleven cents an hour. But Darryl was put in food service, was.h.i.+ng dishes, earning nothing. He lived in a dormitory with seventy howling maniacs. They played sports at Branville. Darryl was six feet four by then, over two hundred pounds. They gave him a baseball glove and put him in right field. He was a poor fielder, but with brute power he could hit; when he connected with the bat, the softball soared and struck high up on the concrete walls.

The team played games against teams in the local North Florida Factory League. The factory teams were almost all young white men. In the first game that Darryl played in, Branville lost by the score of 33 to 5. Darryl got two hits, made one leaping catch of a line drive, and let one ball scoot between his legs for an inside-the-park home run. After the game he said to William, "How come we not good enough to beat these dudes? We all brothers 'cept for the white motherf.u.c.ker at second base and Rivera on third. Brothers up in the majors, the NBA, they beat the s.h.i.+t out of the white boys. What wrong with us? Don't we wanna win?"

Isaac was in the same cell block, happy with his decks of cards. He ran a little poker game, won a few cartons of cigarettes a week. Booze was made at Branville-yeast from the bakery, sugar, raisins, and apples from the chow hall, alcohol from the medical department. Darryl won some cartons of Marlboros playing poker. He bought a pint of home brew. He felt sick, threw up, was found by a hack in the shower room with what was left of the pint and sent to the hole for a month.

The door of his cell was steel, with just a tiny slit for a food tray and mail. Darryl never got any mail, he never received a visit in any joint he had ever been in. It was winter in northern Florida, and heat came from a pipe that extended from ceiling to floor. He threw water on the pipe and it sizzled.

In the morning he looked through the iron bars of the window. He could see a pewter sky, half of an unused pitted concrete tennis court, a gun tower, and some men in gray sweatsuits jogging through the fog like ghosts.

There was a dude across the way called Crazy. Crazy told Darryl that he'd been in the hole for eight months.

"What you do?" Darryl asked.

"Don't remember," Crazy said. "Musta been something pretty good, though."

With a long wire, Crazy pa.s.sed Darryl an old crumpled Camel pack with three Marlboros and a Viceroy in it, and a book of damp matches. Now Darryl was in Crazy's debt and couldn't tell him to shut the f.u.c.k up when Crazy shouted at the top of his lungs all evening long until after midnight to a brother called Teabag, who was on the tier above. It sounded to Darryl like they were yelling in Swahili.

Twice a week each man was allowed a shower and an hour's exercise in a walled yard. During Darryl's month in the hole there was a murder in the shower room. Teabag went berserk, killed one dude he didn't like, and cut two others-he'd been carrying a shank under a towel. Darryl asked another brother why Teabag had shanked the two other dudes. The brother said the hack had asked Teabag that same question, and Teabag had looked puzzled and said, "Well, they was standing right there."

When Darryl got out of the hole, there was a movie in the Branville auditorium that Sunday afternoon. The movie was Hotel. One of the characters, a professional thief, was played by Karl Malden. The men yelled for him whenever he was on-screen. At the end, led away in handcuffs by the police, Karl still managed to steal an ashtray. The men cheered wildly.

Coming out of the movie into the suddenly bright sunlight, Darryl felt a moment or two of dislocation. In the yard he could see a couple of palm trees, a few men in T-s.h.i.+rts and denims tossing a football back and forth. A jogger moved by, face slick with sweat, sneakers sc.r.a.ping on concrete. Darryl heard the iron of the weights clank in the distance as dudes did bench presses and curls.

Stupid, Darryl thought. Got to be something better. But what? Nineteen, and this all I know.

On parole after twenty months in residence at Branville, he returned home to bunk down on the wooden boards of the back porch of his mother's house.

"... Mama there, drinking herself into the dirt. Sister selling p.u.s.s.y and sleeping on the job. A.J. live up at the Palmetto Club, cut the white man's gra.s.s. He say to us, 'Anytime you happen to pa.s.s by my place, I'd sure appreciate it.'

"I borrow a Colt forty-five from a dude I knew. I hike down to St. Augustine on a Saddy night and score off some f.a.ggots in a nightclub parking lot. Rule of the street is, live good while the bread's there. You ever hear what that TV brother Redd Foxx say to the white dude? 'Want to know what's it like to be a n.i.g.g.e.r? Friday, take out all you got in the bank. Spend it by Sunday.' Say that, peoples laugh. But it true. You do what you do not because you stupid but 'cause you know what's coming. You got a sense of the future-there ain't none, man.

"One dude say to me and a couple of friends, 'Run up and down Main or Union, n.i.g.g.e.rs, take what you want! Take their lives if you got to, but get what you need! We must make our own world, and we can't do this unless the white man is dead! Kill him, my man- gather the fruit of the sun!'

" 'I ain't ready for that s.h.i.+t,' I say."

He hadn't read Malcolm X then, he said. Racial justice were words mouthed by other men; they pa.s.sed him by like fast foreign cars. In music he liked soul: Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, the Motown sound, Isaac Hayes and the Shaft theme, which set his fingers snapping. But they were only background rhythms to the pointless flow of his life on the street. When he pa.s.sed the Mount Calvary Baptist Church on Front Street he heard the pa.s.sionate cries of big-bosomed gospel singers but never went inside.

He worked for a while pumping gas in a Mobil station, sold some weed on the side in the playground of the white kids' high school. A dude called Shorty Bigshoes ran the policy racket in black Jacksonville. Darryl went to Shorty Bigshoes for a job.

"You ain't got the cla.s.s for the numbers," Shorty Bigshoes told him.

"I can learn," Darryl said.

"Man, you been arrested for every petty crime in the book. You never did settle down to no one kind of hustle. You been locked up too much, doing life on the installment plan. The cops know you too good. I'm giving you the best idea you ever had-put the life down, get you a lunch pail."

A lunch pail was a legitimate job.

Shorty Bigshoes' words carried weight. Darryl went to his so- called stepfather at the golf club. He asked for help.

A.J. said to him, "I'm gonna speak to you of the good, the bad, and the ugly, while standing between questions and answers, knowing and not knowing. You listen real careful. Such uglinesses are now living on our planet and we pretends not to know why. But I can tell you-because the bad has changed places with the good! G.o.dliness and respect for elders changed places with macho man and wors.h.i.+p for the angry side of life is why! Pollution's the theme of this part of the century, outer and inner, and we hiding our heads in the muck of it so's not to see how high the tide's rising. Am I connecting? Touching what's left of your soul? You've always possessed a special tenderness for the aged and infant. You've always cared about animals-you remember your cat, Snuffy, got run over by a red GMC pickup? How you cried? Where all that gone to?"

"What you been smoking?" Darryl asked.

"The pipe of amazing truth, boy!"

"You a sick man, A.J. Was you run over Snuffy in the pickup, was a black Ford, and you was drunk. You whupped my a.s.s every chance you got. You f.u.c.ked my sister in the back of that pickup when she was ten years old, and after that you did it to her every chance you got, and that's why she is what she is, a sleepy hoo-er. You never in your life give me the kinda help I need."

To Darryl's surprise, a few days later A.J. came round to Marguerite's clapboard house and told him that a friend named James was head gardener at a fancy beach estate. James did the hiring of all groundskeeping staff. They needed a handyman.

"Handy at what?"

"Don't matter. James teach you. Just go where it says on this here piece of paper. You see James. Tell him you willing to learn."

James, a sinewy, bald old man, asked Darryl if he believed in Lord Jesus and the Christian work ethic. As if he were talking to a white man, Darryl said, "Yes, sah! I sure does!"

That was August '78. The following April, twenty minutes after sentencing by Judge Bill Eglin, shackled at the ankles and cuffed to a waist chain, Darryl found himself in a DOC van headed for Raiford and death row.

The day he arrived, three of the hacks took him into a room and showed him the chair. "That's it, n.i.g.g.e.r. Gonna sit your black a.s.s in Big Wooden Mama's lap and pull the switch. Ever see an egg in a real hot pan?"

"You can appeal, boy," another told him. "Got a whole system of appeals now. The last guy appealed, he lost every time, except right at the end his lawyer come running down here and goes, 'Rastus! Good news at last! I couldn't get 'em to reduce your sentence ... but I got 'em to reduce the voltage!' "

The hacks cracked up laughing. Darryl said quietly, "f.u.c.k you, motherf.u.c.ker"-figured he had nothing to lose, but he was wrong. On the way to his cell-he was handcuffed behind his back-they pushed him down a staircase. By the time he had bounced to the bottom his nose was broken, his forehead and one ear flowed with blood, an ankle had been sprained. The official report: "Inmate tripped and fell."

He often wondered why they didn't just kill you when you got there. Make you kneel by a ditch, put a bullet in the back of your head, boot you in. He'd seen that in a movie about a n.a.z.i death camp. It had seemed pretty awful then, but not anymore.

Lights came on at 4:30 A.M. Feeding time was an hour later. You never left your cell except twice a week to shower and get an hour's exercise on the covered roof. You had your own black-and-white Emerson TV, your own radio. The power stayed on all night. There was no work to do. Now and then, if you knew how to read, you could get hold of a book, usually tattered Erie Stanley Gardner murder mysteries or appeals for Christianity. You slept and ate and p.i.s.sed and c.r.a.pped in your cell. You never saw the men in the other cells except when they pa.s.sed by or during exercise hour, but you could talk to them-shout through the bars, play long-distance chess or checkers, make bets on ball games. Darryl knew the batting averages of nearly every player in the major leagues.

He had known some bad dudes but never been around such sorry motherf.u.c.kers in his life. He heard two men arguing over who had raped and killed the oldest woman.

"Hey, mine was seventy-two!"

"Well, you win, man, mine was only sixty-five... ."

Visitors were allowed once a week. Darryl put his family's names down on the list. No one came.

Three years later his old buddy Isaac, from Apalachia, made the trip to Q block and Big Wooden Mama. Isaac had robbed a liquor store of $240 in cash a few weeks after he got out of Branville back in '77. Two police cars had chased him. Isaac squeezed off a few shots from his Colt Detective Special, and one of them struck a young patrolman between the eyes. Cop killers moved more rapidly than others through the appeal hierarchy. Came time for Isaac to bequeath his worldly goods, he gave all his clothes and cigarettes to the boys he'd jailed with earlier in C block, and said, "None of these threads gonna fit Darryl, so he can have these here mementos of a wasted life." He left Darryl two packs of playing cards, a box of number 6 rubber bands, some plastic gla.s.ses and coins, as well as a couple of dog-eared, cellotaped paperback books on magic tricks. Darryl taught himself to be a magician.

Chapter 16.

A SEMICIRCLE OF thick black iron protruded from the wall next to the toilet. The shackles and chains wrapped around Darryl's ankles and waist were looped through the ring bolt. The handcuffs were shackled to the steel waist chain. This system of restraint had been invented three decades earlier by a U.S. Army general. Later the general was convicted for embezzlement of government funds. On the way to a federal prison camp in Pennsylvania, he was shackled and chained with his own invention. He was seen to smile.

Darryl, similarly trussed, sat on the concrete floor of his cell, back braced against the wall, long legs splayed out like a pair of scissors ready to close. He didn't smile.

One of the guards entered the cell with me. He blocked my path with a rigid arm and said, "If you move from this area of the room, sir, we have orders to immediately terminate this visit."

The guards seated themselves on the green-painted catwalk in opposite directions, each one on a metal folding chair about fifteen feet away from the foot of the bed. They were beyond earshot, but I was in both their lines of vision.

I sat at the foot of Darryl's bed. My pigskin briefcase, which the guards had searched, lay on the khaki blanket. In my lap I had a Sony tape recorder and a yellow legal pad.

I said to Darryl, "I can help you."

"Why you come back?" he asked, his eyes unblinking.

"I like your company."

"Sound like c.r.a.p to me. You a free man."

"I made a choice. Coming back is part of it."

"Last choice I made, I say to the hack, 'Gimme channel seven.' "

"You made one when you tried to strangle me," I reminded him.

"You a smart dude. I keep forgetting."

"So why did you agree to see me? You said it was some kind of flimflam, you weren't interested."

"Man, you don't know s.h.i.+t from wild honey."

"Then maybe you can enlighten me."

"Something to do, man. Pa.s.s the time."

"Why do they call you Wizard?"

"I had a deck of cards or some rubber bands, motherf.u.c.ker, I'd show you."

I wiped some oily sweat from my forehead. If this was winter, what was it like here in August?

"Where did you learn magic and sleight of hand?"

"Here on the row, man. Taught myself."

He told me then about his dead friend Isaac and his time at Branville. "And from books. One called The Secrets of Alkazar. No dude ever named Alkazar. This magician dude named Kronzek make that up. But what he show you, that is definitely real."

"What can you do?"

For the first time, Darryl chuckled. His sleeves were rolled up; I saw his tattoos clearly. "Sweet deception," he said, "is the name of the game. I can cut rope, put it back together. Can do things with cards, make you think I's a real magician. You don't gonna believe what I can do."

"Why did they take away all your magic stuff?"

"This is Q block. They take all you got. What you want from me?"

"I want you to tell me what happened that night."

"What night?"

"The night you went to rob the Zides' house at Jacksonville Beach."

"You not gonna believe it. You never did believe it."

"Try me. Enlighten me."

"Okay," he said, smiling at last. "I enlighten you."

He didn't like the job at the Zides' because the chief gardener, James, got on his case all the time. Cutting the gra.s.s too short, boy.

See that bit of brown turf? No good. Now you're cutting it too long, boy. Have to do it all over again in a day or two.

He was given the job of hunting all over the estate for dogs.h.i.+t. The lady had three dogs already: Paco, the eight-year-old Doberman and guard dog; two amiable and witless c.o.c.ker spaniels named Myra and Mickey; and now she'd just bought a pair of three-month-old puppies, some kind of Chinese name Darryl couldn't p.r.o.nounce, and turned them loose on the lawns. They c.r.a.pped six or seven times a day each.

"You look for their doodoo," James said. "You find it, first you dump a lot of earth on it. Pick all that up in a shovel, get it into this barrow. Put it in one of those plastic sacks."

"Make good fertilizer," Darryl said.

"You don't know nothing, boy."

"You don't teach me. How'm I gonna learn?"

Old James turned away, said nothing.

But Darryl, no matter how hard he tracked, never could find all the soft smelly heaps. The lawns and flower beds were huge, and the Chinese puppies ran everywhere.

James confronted him. "The lady says she nearly step in doggy poo yesterday. Right by the front door. And she says they getting flies in the house. You too far away from the ground to look real good at it? You want binoculars? You need to crawl round on your knees to find all that stinky-poo?"

"My daddy say you teach me about gardening."

"When you're ready."

"How many tons of dogs.h.i.+t I have to pick up 'fore you think I'm ready?"

James ignored him.

Darryl rapped now and then with Terence, the chief security guard, and Terence smoked a cigarette with him one evening and told him that James never taught anything to his a.s.sistants. He was sixty-three years old and fearful that one of these years he would be put out to pasture in favor of someone who knew more than he did.

"That sure won't be me," Darryl said. He had a better view now of his own abilities and future. But he liked working outdoors. He could be a gardener, if he could ever get past mowing lawns and shoveling dogs.h.i.+t.

Paco, the guard dog, had to be taken for a two-mile run every afternoon. That became one of Darryl's ch.o.r.es. He and Paco bounded up the beach until Darryl's soles were swollen and his lungs felt on fire. But he liked it when they stopped to rest, liked the tangy salt air and the cold bite of surf on his big bare feet. Day by day the run became easier. He breathed rhythmically.

I could be a sailor on the ocean. Except no one never taught me to swim. s.h.i.+p go down, be one dead n.i.g.g.e.r go with it.