Black-Eyed Susans, page 22
He taps the envelope I’m holding. “Read this.”
He doesn’t wave goodbye as he backs out of the driveway.
When I walk inside, Lucas is facing the door, leaning against the back of the couch, dragging on his beer. Waiting. “What’s wrong?” He’s already restacked the piles of clothes that toppled over, a Lucas-style apology. “What did he want?”
“Nothing important. I think I’m going to take a nap before I pick up Charlie.”
“You’re sleeping with him.” A statement, not a question.
“I’m going to take a nap.” I brush past him toward the hall.
“He could be using you, Tess.”
I close my bedroom door and slide down its back to the floor. Lucas is still calling after me. Tears prick at the corners of my eyes.
I run my nail under the flap of the envelope and pull out the tidy stack of court documents.
Bill might not think Tessie’s guilty. But I know she is.
September 1995
MR. LINCOLN: Tessie, would you say that you played unusual games as a child?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: I’m not sure what you mean.
MR. LINCOLN: Let me put it this way. You have a pretty big imagination, right?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: I guess so. Yes.
MR. LINCOLN: Did you ever play a game called Anne Boleyn?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: Yes.
MR. LINCOLN: Did you ever play a game called Amelia Earhart?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: Yes.
MR. LINCOLN: Did you ever play a game called Marie Antoinette? Did you lay your head on a tree stump and let someone pretend to lop off your head?
MR. VEGA: Your honor, once more, Mr. Lincoln’s questioning is simply designed to distract the jury from anything meaningful and from the man who sits in that chair on trial.
MR. LINCOLN: On the contrary, your honor, I’m trying to help the jury understand the environment where Tessa grew up. I find that very meaningful.
MR. VEGA: In that case, let me enter into the record that Tessa also played checkers, dolls, tea party, thumb wars, and Red Rover.
JUDGE WATERS: Mr. Vega, sit down. You’re bugging me. I’ll let you know when you’re bugging me, Mr. Lincoln, but you’re close.
MR. LINCOLN: Thank you, your honor. Tessa, would you like a drink of water before we continue?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: No.
MR. LINCOLN: Did you ever play Buried Treasure?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: Yes.
MR. LINCOLN: Did you ever play Jack the Ripper?
MR. VEGA: Your honor …
MS. CARTWRIGHT: Yes. No. We started the game but I didn’t like it.
MR. LINCOLN: We, meaning you and your best friend, Lydia Bell, whom you mentioned earlier?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: Yes. And my brother. And other kids in the neighborhood who were around. It was a super-hot day. A bunch of us were bored. But none of the girls wanted to be the victims after one of the boys brought out a ketchup bottle. Maybe it was Lydia. We decided to do a Kool-Aid stand instead.
MR. VEGA: Your honor, I used to dissect live tadpoles by the river when I was six.
What does that say about me? I’d like to remind him and the jury that Tessa is the victim here. It’s been a very long day for this witness already.
MR. LINCOLN: Mr. Vega, I have a really good answer for your tadpole question. But right now, I just want to note that Tessie’s childhood involved games about violent deaths, missing people, and buried objects. That art imitated life long before she was found in the grave. Why is that?
MR. VEGA: Jesus Christ, you are actually testifying. Are you calling what happened to Tessa “art”? Are you suggesting it was some kind of divine karma? You’re a son of a bitch.
JUDGE WATERS: Up here, boys.
19 days until the execution
Terrell and I are not breathing the same air. That’s the first thing I think. I wonder how many puckered lips of mothers and lovers have kissed the cloudy window that divides us.
The first thing I feel is shame. Until this moment, I’ve never really examined his face. Not in the courtroom when he was twenty feet away, not on the television when it blared our names like a celebrity marriage, not in a grainy image in the newspaper.
His eyes are bloodshot holes. His skin is shiny black paint. Pockmarked. A line drawn by a knife drizzles like milk down his chin. I stare at his scar and he stares at mine. More than a minute passes before he reaches for the phone on his side of the wall. He gestures for me to do the same.
I pick it up and press it hard against my ear so Terrell Darcy Goodwin can’t see my hand shaking. He sits in a tiny cubicle on the other side of the glass. The small vent above my head is pumping cold air and drying my throat into brittle paper.
“Billy said you’d come,” he says.
“Billy?” I croak out involuntarily.
“Yeah, he hates that. But somebody’s got to give him shit, don’t you think?”
Terrell, loosening me up. I attempt a smile.
“How did you get yours?” My fingernail raking my chin feels like the soft edge of a knife, the taunt before a killer draws blood.
“I got this scar by making the wrong friends when I was thirteen,” Terrell says easily. “I stepped off God’s path early on. Here I am.”
Two minutes in, the conversation already at God.
“Do you believe in our savior Jesus Christ?” he asks.
“Sometimes.”
“Well, Jesus and I’ve gotten real close in here. Jesus and I have plenty of time every day to chat about how I screwed up my life. How I screwed up my family’s life. My daughters, my son, my wife will all be paying the price for a night I got high again and didn’t know where I was.” His forehead is now almost touching the glass. “Look, it took guts for you to come here and we don’t have much time. I got something to say. I need to cross you off my list. You need to accept that my dying isn’t your fault. I don’t want to die being anybody’s burden, OK?”
“I shouldn’t have testified,” I protest. “I didn’t remember anything. I was just a prop. It was all hocus-pocus. The jury couldn’t look at me without seeing their daughters.”
“And the big black boogeyman who got her.” Astonishingly, he says this without rancor. “I had to let go of that years ago. It ate me alive. Every night, I hear the ones who’ve gone crazy. They chatter away to folks who aren’t there. That, or they’re so quiet for weeks you wonder if their brains just flew out of their heads and there’s a big hole there. I made up my mind not to go crazy like that. I meditate. Read the Bible and Mr. Martin Luther King. Play a lot of chess in my head. Work on my case. Write my kids.”
He’s trying to reassure me. “Terrell, I thought years ago you might be innocent. And I did nothing. You have every right to hate me.”
“If you can’t remember, why are you so sure it wasn’t me who took you that night?”
“The killer keeps planting black-eyed Susans for me. The first time was three days after you were convicted.” I offer Terrell a pretend smile. “It’s OK if you think I’m crazy. I would.” I do.
“I don’t think you’re crazy. Evil sneaks up on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches. I know that ain’t the way the poem goes. It’s supposed to be fog on little cat feet. Fog. Evil. It works either way. You usually can’t see the headlights comin’ at you until it’s too late.”
I blink away the image of this giant on a cot reciting a Carl Sandburg poem, trying not to listen to men scratching up the walls like cats.
“When I first saw you,” Terrell is saying, “you were sitting in the box in that pretty blue dress, shaking so hard I thought you might shatter to pieces. I saw my daughters sitting there.”
“That’s why you didn’t look at me,” I say slowly. There had been such debating back and forth over The Blue Dress. Everyone had an opinion. Mr. Vega, Benita, the doctor, Lydia, even Aunt Hilda. The lace was itchy, but I never told anybody. When I testified, I had to casually flick my hand at my neck and my shoulders to make sure I wasn’t really crawling with bugs. The Blue Dress was nothing Tessie would ever wear in real life. The hem should hit her just slightly above the knees so the jury can see the brace on her ankle. Not too sexy. She’s going to wear the brace, right? Can we gather in the waist to emphasize that she’s still pretty much skin and bones? The color makes her look a little bit yellow, but I think that’s good.
“I wasn’t going to make it worse for you.” Terrell’s voice brings me back. He’s grinning. “I’m a pretty ugly man.”
A guard rattles the cage at Terrell’s back. “Gotta go, Terrell. Closing early.”
“A man’s going down tonight,” Terrell tells me matter-of-factly. “The Row’s always extra-tense when a man’s going down. This is the second time this month.” Terrell is rising while he speaks into the receiver. His broad body fills the window, softer and rounder than I expected. “It took real guts for you to come here, Tessie. I know you’re tied up about this. Remember what I said. When I die, let it go.”
My stomach dances with sudden panic. This is it.
The words are boiling up in a desperate rush. “I’m going to testify again if they’ll give you a hearing. Bill is a terrific lawyer. He really believes there is … some hope. Especially now, with the DNA results on the red hair. It’s not mine, of course.” I pull a copper strand over my ear.
Terrell knows every bit of this already. Bill has already spent an hour with him. He’s nearby, finishing up the habeas appeal on his laptop. All the other things Bill hoped might come through to bolster the appeal haven’t.
“Yeah, Billy’s a good boy. Never met a more Lord-guided man who doesn’t believe one inch in the Lord. I’ve still got a little time to change his mind.” Terrell winks. “Take care of yourself, Tessie. Let it go.” And he hangs up.
I’m frozen to the plastic chair. It seems like everything has been neatly decided with that final click of the receiver. Terrell’s fate. Mine.
He leans over and touches a finger to the glass in a direct line with my moon scar. It begins to throb. A Susan, tapping. He’s too good to be true, too good to be true.
His mouth is moving. I’m panicking. I can’t hear through the glass.
He repeats it a second time, carefully forming the words.
“You know who it is.”
Bill didn’t want to bring me here tonight, but I insisted. We are only a few hundred yards from the infamous Death House unit known as “The Walls,” where Terrell informed me just hours earlier that a man was going down. The Walls is a quaint, stately old building too tired to sigh. It’s been witnessing death by rope and electricity, gunfire and poison, for more than a century.
Next door, there’s a small white frame house with a neatly covered barbecue grill on the front porch. Embracing the other side, a church.
Terrell is lying in his cell a few miles away in the Wynne Unit on Death Row, about to put away his reading. Bill has told me that even with lockdown and lights out, Terrell will know before we do if tonight’s execution has been carried out.
When I ask how that can be, he shrugs. The prisoners have their ways.
Tiny ice pellets crackle on my jacket. I pull up my hood. We won’t be allowed inside. We are merely voyeurs.
I’ve breathed in the dust of my premature grave, but I’ve never felt anything as oppressive as the weight of this air. It’s as if a dying factory threw up death, spewing plumes of grief and misery, hope and inevitability. The hope is what makes it seethe. I wonder how far I’d have to run to get away from this toxic cloud. Where its filmy edges end. Two blocks from the death chamber? A mile? If I peered down from space, would it be smothering the whole town?
Huntsville is a mythical place that I had all wrong. In my mind, Huntsville was a single house of horrors. A giant slab of concrete in the middle of nowhere where the state of Texas locks up Things that deserve to die. Where stuff happens that you don’t ever, ever need to know about unless it’s on a big screen with Tom Hanks.
That’s what Lydia’s father, a big fan of Tom Hanks and the revengeful philosophy of Deuteronomy, always told us.
I was badly misinformed. Huntsville is not just one badass prison but seven scattered around the area. The death house that looms in front of us in the waning light doesn’t sit in the middle of nowhere.
It’s a 150-year-old redbrick building with a clock tower where time has literally stopped. It’s located two blocks off the quaint courthouse square, in the middle of town. People are downing chicken-fried steak and strawberry cake right now at the city’s best restaurant, within easy eyesight of The Walls.
The cops are casually roping off the front of the prison with crime scene tape. We are within shouting distance of a windowless corner of the building, where the execution will take place.
I’m trying not to let Bill know how bothered I am by all of this matter-of-fact efficiency. It started right away, when Bill easily slid his car into a spot at the side of the brick prison wall and shouted up to the guard on the roof to ask if it was OK to park there. She shouted back, “Sure,” like it was a middle school basketball game.
The Fors and the Againsts are obediently positioning themselves on opposite sides of the building, with four hundred yards between them, fighters in a ring who will never meet.
So civilized. So uncivilized. So casual.
A few Texas Rangers stand idly by, watching the small but slowly gathering crowd. No one appears concerned there will be trouble. Two Spanish television crews are setting up for live shots, while the rest of the press corps is composed of dark heads in a lit building across from the prison. A group of Mexican women are kneeling beside a blown-up portrait of the condemned, singing in Spanish. Two-thirds of the anti-death-penalty crowd is Mexican. The other third is mostly white, old, resigned, and quiet.
Tonight, a Mexican national is going to be executed for pumping three bullets into the head of a Houston cop. And then, in nineteen days, it’s Terrell. And then a guy who hit his pizza delivery girl in the head with a baseball bat, and then a man who participated in the gang rape and murder of a mentally challenged girl on a lonely road. And on and on.
Every few minutes or so, Blue Knights are rounding the corners on their Harleys. They are former police officers avenging their own, who would maybe like to push the syringe themselves. I watch them position themselves on the far side of the prison, the pro side, near the execution chamber. The police and guards have sprung to life, and are directing them to park a little farther away.
“Are you sure you want to be here?” Bill asks one more time. We are hovering in a little bit of no-man’s-land, in between both camps. “I’m not sure there’s a point.”
Of course there’s a point. The point is, I don’t know what I believe. I just know what I want to believe.
I don’t say it, though. The less emotion, the better. We agreed to an uneasy détente as soon as I called and asked him to please take me with him to Huntsville to meet Terrell. I promised I wouldn’t flake out. My eyes drift across the street to a man holding a battery-operated Christmas candle. He’s leaning against a railing backed up to a gas station billboard that tells newly sprung prisoners to cash their checks here. He’s comfortably packaged between two women with the peaceful countenance of nuns, and two men, all riding past sixty.
Bill follows my gaze. “That’s Dennis. He never misses. Sometimes, he’s the only guy out here.”
“I thought there would be more people. Where are all the people who scream on Facebook?”
“On the couch. Screaming.”
“When will it start?”
“The execution?” He glances at his watch. “It’s eight now. Probably in about fifteen minutes. Usually, it’s set for six and it’s done by seven. There was a delay tonight while the federal court was debating a last-minute appeal that the condemned was mentally deficient.” He gestures back across the street. “Dennis and that core group of four over there show up more as a vigil than protest. I mean, at this point, the writing’s on the wall. Dennis is the one who always stays until the bitter end, even on the rare occasion when appeals go on until midnight. He waits until the family of the executed walks out. Wants them to know someone is out here for them.”
I picture it—a skinny old Santa, his Christmas candle, a lonely corner by a Stop sign, and the night.
“The woman with the bullhorn is Gloria.” He redirects my attention to the sign-wielding protesters in the street, who are oddly silent. No chanting. “She’s a fixture, too. She pretty much believes everyone on Death Row is innocent. Of course, most of them are guilty as hell. She’s much beloved for dedication, however. She’ll start counting it down soon.”
“Where are the families now?”
“The family of the victim, if any of them want to be there, is already inside the prison. The family of the prisoner is in the building across the street. I’ve heard Gutierrez has asked his mother not to watch. Whoever is witnessing for him will walk across with a few reporters as soon as all appeals have expired. That’s the high sign.” He is directing my eyes under the clock tower, where there are steps that lead up and inside.
A young television reporter in a brand-new blue suit and a bright lavender camera-ready tie has appeared to my right. He’s thrusting his microphone into the face of a woman carrying a sign that declares the governor is a serial killer. The camera casts eerie light on both of their faces.
