The Lazarus Heart (21 page)

"Benny and Jared
were
married," Lucrece growled, interrupting Harrod. "I don't give a shit what the fucking state of Louisiana says, they were married."

"Ms. DuBois," the judge said, leaning his black-robed bulk toward Lucrece, "I would strongly caution you to watch your language in my courtroom."

"I'm sorry," she said, not sounding it one bit. Harrod coughed dryly into one fist and continued.

"Then, Ms. DuBois, would you say that you respected your brother's relationship with Mr. Poe the same as you would any
legal
marriage?"

"Of course I did. I
do."

"Because in your opinion the homosexual union between your late brother Benjamin and Mr. Poe was as sacred as any legal, state-sanctioned marriage, am I correct?"

"Yes," Lucrece hissed. Harvey Etienne put one big restraining hand on Jared's shoulder.

"Tell me, Ms. DuBois, do you believe that adultery would be a violation of that union?"

This caught Lucrece off guard.
"What?"

"Just answer the question, Ms. DuBois," Harrod said, standing very near her now. "Do you believe that a marriage, even an illegal homosexual marriage like your brother's, would be violated by the sin of adultery?"

"What are you trying to get me to say, Mr. Harrod?"

"All in the world I want from you, Ms. DuBois, is a straight answer to my question."

She watched him for a moment in silence. Jared could see how hard Lucrece was breathing, could see the fire sparking in her green eyes. Harvey tightened his grip on Jared's shoulder.

"Because if you
do
hold that union sacred, Ms. DuBois, I'd be very curious to know how you justified your own relationship with Mr. Poe."

John Harrod was resting one hand on the oaken rail of the witness stand, his eyebrows arched in expectation of her answer and a smug, victorious smirk on his lips. He bent close to Lucrece and spoke as low as he could and still be heard by the entire courtroom.

"I'm waiting, Ms. DuBois. I'm sure everyone in this room is waiting to hear your answer."

"Objection,
Your Honor," Harvey Etienne said, standing again but still pressing down hard on Jared's shoulder. "This is immaterial and prejudicial,
and
the state has offered no evidence whatsoever to substantiate such a charge."

"Come on, Ms. DuBois," Harrod urged through a big Cheshire-cat grin. "Just tell the truth. That's all I'm asking you do. Just tell us the truth."

"Your Honor!" Harvey Etienne shouted, and the fat judge struck his gavel three times in quick succession. It made a sound like gunfire. He wiped one sweaty hand across his exasperated face and turned toward Harrod.

"I presume this is leading somewhere, Mr. Harrod," he said.

"It goes directly to motive, Your Honor." Then, looking over his shoulder at Jared and his lawyers, he added,
"And
I have witnesses. Witnesses who will attest to knowledge of a sexual relationship not only between Lucrece DuBois and Jared Poe, but between Ms. DuBois and her own brother."

"You're a sick, hateful son of a bitch," Lucrece said. Leaning slightly forward in the witness box, she spat in his face. There was a brief shocked silence in the courtroom.

"That means a lot, Ms. DuBois," Harrod said at last, taking a handkerchief from his pocket. "Coming as it does from a confirmed sodomite such as yourself."

Jared lunged across the table, dragging Harvey Etienne after him, and the court exploded in a turmoil of shouting and camera flashes.

"You leave her the fuck alone, you bastard," Jared screamed over the pandemonium. "You leave her alone
now
or I'll fucking kill you."

Then Etienne was hauling him backward across the table, scattering briefs and legal pads. An expensive briefcase clattered loudly to the marble floor and vomited more papers. There were other hands on him, pulling him back toward the chair where he was expected to sit still and listen while John Henry Harrod lied and twisted the truth to fit his needs, while he hurt Lucrece. Jared lunged again and was rewarded with the sound of his collar tearing.

But Harrod had turned his attention away from Lucrece, took one cautious step toward Jared.

"It
is
true, isn't it, Mr. Poe? It's true that you killed Benjamin DuBois because you'd decided that you
really
wanted his sister and neither of them could keep their hands off each other. You were
jealous,
weren't you, Mr. Poe?"

"Shut up!" Lucrece screamed from the stand. "Please make him shut up!"

Jared tore free, tumbled headfirst off the other side of the table, and was on his feet in an instant. He caught a fleeting glimpse of one of the court bailiffs, and there was a sudden crushing pain across the back of his skull. As he fell there was only the sound of Lucrece crying and, much farther away, the wood-on-wood crack of the judge's gavel.

Angola Prison lies at the end of State Highway 66 by a sharp bend in the Mississippi River, surrounded on three sides by deep and drowning waters, hemmed in on the fourth by the rugged, rattlesnake-infested Yunica Hills. Eighteen thousand acres of Louisiana wilderness set aside for the punishment and rehabilitation of evil men and crazy men and men who are simply too stupid not to get caught.

As in so much of Louisiana, so much of the South, time has
almost
stood still here. Angola is not so different than the day it opened its gates in 1868, barely three years after the Confederacy surrendered at Appomattox. A vast cotton and soybean plantation on the banks of the river, hidden away from the rest of the world by all-but-impenetrable stands of oak and slash pine, a world with its own secrets, rules, and deadly rituals.

Jared Poe arrived at Angola on a muggy October day, an afternoon still plagued by summer's heat, but the sky was a bright autumn blue. As the bus carried him through the front gates Jared craned his neck to look back the way they'd come, straining for one last pointless glimpse of lost freedom through a wake of exhaust and red clay dust.

The jury had needed only two hours to find him guilty of Benny's murder, two hours to decide how and where the rest of Jared's life would be spent. The judge had taken even less time to decide how it would end.

Death row wasn't far from the front gates, just past watchtowers four and five,

four concrete walls the same sickly green as pistachio ice cream or Irish Spring soap. Jared wondered if they'd always been that color or if the merciless delta sun had faded them as it did men.

There was nothing notable about his arrival, a dull ceremony of chains and keys and paperwork that concluded with Jared being led to his cell through a gauntlet of six barred doors; above one of them someone had painted death row in tawdry crimson, on the off chance, he supposed, that a man might think he was somewhere else.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here, and all that good shit. The air in the cell block smelled faintly of vomit, disinfectant, and tobacco smoke. Finally they locked him into the six-by-eight-foot cell that would be his last home. "Get used to it," the guard said as he slammed the door closed and electronic locks clicked solidly into place.

Jared sat in silence for the first five minutes, staring down at his prison-issue shoes, waiting for some small part of the nightmare to begin to feel real to him. When a voice whispered his name from the cell next door, he got up from his bunk and walked to the bars.

"Did someone say something to me?"

"Yeah, I said something to you, faggot," the voice replied in a heavy Hispanic accent. "You that Poe motherfucker, ain't you? You that fag son-abitch we been seein' all over television, ain't you?"

"Yeah," Jared answered. "Yeah, I guess I am."

"Yeah, well, you just listen to me, Anglo. There ain't no television celebrities in here. So you might have been some bad-ass spooky voodoo sonabitch down in New Orleans, but in here you just another piece of white meat waitin' your turn to ride Gertie.
Comprende?"

And then someone down the row of cells was yelling, "Why don't you shut your wetback mouth, Gonzalez? I got a fuckin' migraine and all I can hear is your big fuckin' mouth jabberin' away down there."

"Hey, man!
Fuck
you!"

"No, Gonzalez, fuck
you!
Fuck you
and
your burrito-eatin' whore-bitch of a mama!"

Jared went back to his bunk and sat down, listened until Gonzalez and the other man got tired of yelling at each other, then listened to the other sounds, all the captive sounds inside the cement box. Eventually he began to make a mental list of the ways someone could kill himself in here if he
really
wanted to, if there was finally no other sane choice left. He stopped at fifteen.

The long weeks became months, days creeping by at a caterpillar's pace, but then so many of them were gone and Jared was at a loss to explain how the monotonous routine of television and pasty, tasteless meals could have devoured so much time.

He was allowed to leave his cell only for brief showers and calls from his lawyers, who made uncertain promises about his appeal. Lucrece called only once and he made her promise never to do it again. Never mind how much hope he might have gleaned from the sound of her, he would not have it.

"Christ, Jared," she'd said, "I can't just let you sit there and fucking rot."

"Neither of us has much of a choice in the matter. I love you, Lucrece, but
please
don't do it again." Then he'd hung up on her. There was no room for hope in this shithole. That's what those sloppy red letters over the door on the way in were meant to remind you, just some illiterate fuck's hateful idea of a joke, the allusion to Dante surely accidental, but Jared had learned a long time ago that intention and message do not always go hand in hand.

Jared also got three short trips a week outside the pistachio building, a handful of minutes at a time in the exercise yard so he could stare through the fence at the forested hills on the other side or the empty sky overhead before the guard herded him back inside again.

One day he'd been half asleep in his bunk, had been rereading a tattered Clive Barker paperback and dozed off, and then Gonzalez was calling him, a loud whisper through the concrete. Jared got up and found the small polished piece of metal that he could hold between the bars for a mirror so he could actually see Ruben Gonzalez while they talked.

"Hey, man. They took Hector." Jared watched the blurry reflection of his neighbor's face in the scratched and dented surface of the mirror.

"When?" Jared asked, because he was expected to ask, not because he actually gave a shit. Hector Montoni had been convicted of raping twelve children in Baton Rouge and Biloxi, of murdering the last three. He'd made videotapes of every one of the assaults.

"Jus' about fifteen minutes ago, man," Ruben said. "He's
over
there by now. He's in the death house by now." Gonzalez stepped away from the bars, out of the range of Jared's mirror. For a while he mumbled prayers in Spanish.

Jared went back to his cot and picked up the copy of
The Great and Secret Show,
read one paragraph before Ruben started calling him again. This time Jared didn't bother with the mirror. He lit a cigarette and sat down on the floor beside the bars.

'Two thousand volts," Ruben Gonzalez said. "That's a lot, huh? That's a whole lotta juice to shoot through someone, ain't it?"

"Yeah, it is," Jared said.

"They say it tears
holes
in your body, man. They say it jumps right outta your eyeballs like lightning and blows off the ends of your fingers. Jesus fuck, why don't they just fuckin' shoot us or

something you know? Somethin' a little more humanitarian." "Humane," Jared corrected. "Something a little more
humane."

"Hey, screw
you,
you faggot sonabitch. You just sittin' over there so goddamn cool, man, like a fuckin' ice cube 'cause you got them fat-cat lawyers workin' for you, right? 'Cause you ain't used up all your appeals."

"Maybe," Jared said, and took another drag off his cigarette, blew smoke through the bars.

"Maybe?
What kind of macho bullshit is that, man?"

"Maybe
I just don't give a shit, that's all."

Ruben laughed a humorless laugh on the other side of the wall. "Yeah, right. You gonna give a shit when they come to drag your murderin' faggot ass out to that van and drive you off to the death house. You ain't gonna be sayin' maybe then, asshole."

"Maybe not," Jared said, and crushed out his cigarette against the floor.

"Fuck you, man." Ruben Gonzalez fell quiet for a while then, five or ten minutes, and eventually Jared heard him praying again and went back to his book.

A few months later Jared Poe was led out to the exercise yard for the last time. It was a sweltering late-August afternoon filled with mosquitoes and the threat of rain, thunderheads piling up off toward Weyanoke and the state line farther north. He stood near the fence watching the clouds, not smoking, just breathing cleaner air into his lungs, washing a little of the prison out of him with air that smelled like pine sap and sunlight.

And then the guard disappeared, the first time that had ever happened, and Jared was left alone. For the first time since the judge had read his sentence Jared felt an icy twinge of fear in his gut, a sudden rush of goose bumps along his exposed arms. He stood with his back to the fence and watched the dark doorway leading back into death row. It yawned back at him like an open mouth, the toothless mouth of something ancient that could swallow a man whole and leave no trace but his absence.

When the Cuban stepped through that black hole Jared knew this was a setup. He didn't have a fucking clue who the big man was or what business there might possibly be between them, but he
knew
it had to be a setup.

The man stood by the doorway a moment, staring across the gravel yard toward Jared. His dark eyes were filled with something that transcended hate, something that had lain a long time in the shadow of that gaze, getting fat on bad memories.