Vernon God Little (29 page)

The class casually slips into character for the scene, the one where they're innocent bystanders at a chance event. Heads shake maturely. The Gurie twins swallow a giggle. Then Max Lechuga gets out of his chair, and goes to the bank of computer terminals by the window. One by one, he activates the screen-savers. Pictures jump to the screen of Jesus naked, bent over a hospital-type gurney.

I step up to Nuckles in the hall outside class. He ain't seen the computer screens yet. 'Sir, want me to find Jesus?'

'No. Take those notes to the lab and see if you can find me a candle.'

I grab the sheaf of notes from his desk, and head outside. Already I can see Jesus' locker hanging open in the corridor; his sports bag is gone. Nuckles returns to the class. I guess he sees the pictures, because he snarls: 'You cannibalsdare talk to me about the constitution?'

'The constitution', says Charlotte, 'is a tool of interpretation, for the governing majority of any given time.'

'And?'

'We are that majority. This is our time.'

'Bambi-Boy, Bambi-Boy!' sings Max Lechuga.

*

Dew tiptoes down Lori Dormer's cheeks, falling without a sound onto the path outside the lab.

'He took his bike. I don't know where he went.'

'I do,' I say.

I guess she feels safe, Jesus turning out the way he is. She's just real sympathetic. I'm still not sure how to handle the new Jesus. It's like he watched too much TV, got lulled into thinking anything goes. Like the world was California all of a sudden.

'Lori, I have to find him. Cover for me?'

'What do I tell Nuckles?'

'Say I fell or something. Say I'll be back for math.'

She takes one of my fingertips and kneads it. 'Vern - tell Jesus we can change things if we stick together - tell him …' She starts to cry.

'I'm gone,' I say. The ground detaches from my New Jacks, I leap clean over the school building, in my movie I do. I'm fifty yards away from Lori before I realize that the candle, and Nuckles's notes, are still in my hand - I don't want to ruin my Caped-Crusader-like exit, though. I just jam them into my back pocket, and keep running.

Sunny dogs and melted tar come to my nose as I fly to Keeter's on my bike. I also catch a blast of girls' hot-weather underwear, the loose cotton ones, white ones with bitty holes to circulate air. I'm not saying I catch a real whiff, don't get me wrong. But the components of this lathery morning bring them to mind. As Nuckles would say, the underwears are evoked. I ride this haze of tangs, dodging familiar bushes along Keeter's track. A sheet of iron creaks in a gust, somehow marking this as an important day, a pivot. But I'm embarrassed. The excitement of it puts me in a category with the ass-wipes at school, toking on the drug of somebody else's drama. Your neighbor's tragedy is big business now, I guess because money can't buy it.

I spy fresh tracks in the dirt. Jesus went to the den all right. The last bushes crackle around me as I squeeze into our clearing. But he's not here. It's unusual for him not to stick around and sulk, shoot some cans with one of the rifles. I throw the bike down and scramble to the den hatch. The padlock is secured. My key is back home, in the shoebox in my closet, but I manage to lever back an edge of the hatch enough to squint into the shaft. My daddy's rifle is still there. Jesus' gun is gone. I follow his tracks up the far side of the bunker, scanning the horizon all around. Then I catch my breath. There, in the far distance, goes Jesus - a speck away, standing up pedaling, flying, on the way back to school with his sports bag. I screech after him, catch myself running like the kid in that ole movie, 'Shane -

come back!' But he's gone.

Blood circulation re-starts in my body. It's interpreted as a window of opportunity by my bowels. Thanks. My brain locks up over a crossfire of messages, but there ain't much I can do. Believe me. I grab Nuckles's handwritten physics notes from my pocket. They're all I have for ass-paper. I decide to use them, then ditch them in the den. Some bitty inkling tells me they won't be top priority when I get back to class.

On the ride back to school I'm followed, then overtaken, by a rug of time-lapse clouds, muddy like underfruits bound for the fan. You sense it in the way the breeze bastes your face, stuffs your sinus with dishcloth, ready to yank when the moment comes. Trouble has its own hormone. I look over my shoulder at the frame of a sunny day shrinking, vanishing. Ahead it's dark, and I'm late for math. It's dark, I'm late, and my life rolls toward a new alien world. I haven't figured out the old alien world, and now it's new again.

School has a stench when I get back, of sandwiches that won't be eaten, lunchboxes lovingly packed, jokingly, casually packed, that by tonight will be stale with cold tears. I'm bathed in the stench before I can turn back. I drop flat to the ground at the side of the gym and, through the shrubs, watch young life splatter through slick mucous air. When massive times come, your mind sprays your senses with ice. Not to deaden the brain, but to deaden the part that learned to expect. This is what I learn as the shots fire. The shots sound shopping-cart ordinary.

I find a lump of cloth tucked in the shadow of the gym. Jesus' shorts, the ones he keeps at the back of his locker. Somebody cut a hole in back, and painted the edges with brown marker. 'Bambi' it says above. A few feet away lies his sports bag. I grab it. It's empty, save for a half box of ammunition.

I keep my eyes down, I don't look across the lawn. Sixteen units of flesh on the lawn have already given up their souls. Empty flesh buzzes like it's full of bees.

'He went for me, but got Lori …' Nuckles snakes around the corner on his belly, slugging back air in blocks. 'He said don't follow him - another gun, at Keeter's …'

One of Jesus' fingers betrayed him. He hit Lori Donner, his only other friend. I look up to the school's main entrance and spy him arched over her crumpled body, shrieking, ugly and alone. I never see his face in its likeness again. He knows what he has to do. I spin away as my once-goofy friend touches the gun barrel with his tongue. My arms reach for Nuckles, but he pulls away. I don't understand why. I stare at him. His mouth turns down at the edges, like a tragedy mask, and spit flows out. Then a chill soaks through me. I follow his eyes to the sports bag, and leftover ammunition, still tightly gripped in my hand.

twenty-two

Nuckles looks white and pasty stepping down the court aisle, his hair is reduced to clumps.

You'd say he had something more than a nervous breakdown, if you saw him. He's bony and frail under his ton of make-up.

'Marion Nuckles,' says the prosecutor. 'Can you identify Vernon Gregory Little in the courtroom?'

Nuckles's sunken eyes worm through the room. They stop at my cage. Then, as if against a hurricane wind, he raises a finger to me.

'Let the record show the witness has identified the defendant. Mister Nuckles, can you confirm you were the defendant's class teacher between ten and eleven o'clock on the morning of Tuesday, May twentieth, this year?'

Nuckles's eyes swim without registering anything. He breaks into a sweat, and crumples over the railing of the witness box.

'Your honor, I must protest,' says Brian, 'the witness is in no state …'

'Shh!' says the judge. He watches Nuckles with razor eyes.

'I was there,' says Nuckles. His lips tremble, he begins to cry.

The judge flaps an urgent hand at the prosecutor. 'Get to the point!' he hisses.

'Marion Nuckles, can you confirm that at some time during that hour you gave some notes to the defendant, written in your own hand, and sent him with them on an errand, outside the classroom?'

'Yes, yes,' says Nuckles, shaking violently.

'And what happened then?'

Nuckles starts to dry retch over the railing. 'Scorned the love of Jesus - erased his perfume from across the land …'

'Your honor, please,' shouts Brian.

'Doused it all in the blood of babes …'

The prosecutor hangs suspended in time, mouth open. 'What happened?' he shouts. 'What exactly did Vernon Little do?'

'He killed them, killed them all …'

Nuckles breaks into sobs, barks them like a wolf, and from my cage in the new world I bark sobs back, pelt them through the bars like bones. My sobs ring out through both summations, spray the journey to the cells behind the courthouse, and continue through a visit from an officer who tells me the jury has retired to a hotel to consider the matter of my life or death.

Friday, twenty-first of November is a smoky day, tingling with a sense that solid matter can pass through you like air. I watch the jury foreman put on his glasses and lift a sheet of paper to his face. Mom couldn't make it today, but Pam came by with Vaine Gurie and Georgette Porkorney. Vaine is frowning, and seems a little slimmer. George's ole porcelain eyes roll around the room, she distracts herself with other thoughts. She trembles a little. You ain't allowed to smoke in here. And look at Pam.

When I catch her eye, she makes a flurry of gestures that seem to describe us eating a hearty meal together, soon. I just look away.

'Mr Foreman, has the jury reached a verdict?'

'We have, sir.'

The court officer reads out the first charge to the jury. 'How do you find the defendant - guilty, or not guilty?'

'Not guilty,' says the foreman.

'On the second count of murder, that of Hiram Salazar in Lockhart, Texas - how do you find the defendant, guilty or not guilty?'

'Not guilty.'

My heart beats through five not guilties. Six, seven, nine, eleven. Seventeen not guilties. The prosecutor's lips curl. My attorney sits proud in his chair.

'On the eighteenth count of murder in the first degree, that of Barry Enoch Gurie in Martirio, Texas - how do you find the defendant, guilty or not guilty?'

'Not guilty,' says the foreman.

The officer reads a list of my fallen school friends. The world holds its breath as he looks up to ask the verdict.

The jury foreman's eyes twitch, then fall.

'Guilty.'

Even before he says it, I feel departments in the office of my life start to close up shop; files are shredded, sensitivities are folded into neatly marked boxes, lights and alarms are switched off. As the husk of my body is guided from the court, I sense a single little man sat at the bottom of my soul. He hunches over a card table under a naked low-watt bulb, sipping flat beer from a plastic cup. I figure he must be my janitor. I figure he must be me.

Act V

Me ves y sufres

twenty-three

On the second of December I was sentenced to death by lethal injection. Christmas on Death Row, boy. To be fair, ole Brian Dennehy tried his best. In the end, it doesn't look like they'll cast the real Brian in the TV-movie, I guess because he doesn't lose his cases. But my appeal will draw out the truth. There's a new fast-track appeals process that means I could be out by March. They reformed the system, so innocent folks don't have to spend years on the row. It can't be bad. The only news about me is that I put on twenty pounds since the sentence. It keeps out some of this January chill. Apart from that, my life hangs still while the seasons whip around me.

Taylor's eyes flicker brightly through the screen. TV makes them sparkle, but they move strangely, as if she holds them back on a leash. Her grin is frozen like it came out of a jelly mold. I watch her almost-but-not-quite staring at me, until, after a minute, I realize she's reading something behind the camera. Her lines must be written there. After another moment I realize she's reading something about me. My skin cools as understanding dawns.

'Then, when the big day arrives,' she says, 'everybody else, including witnesses, will assemble at five fifty-five in the lounge next to the visiting room. The final meal will be served between three-thirty and four o'clock in the afternoon, then, sometime before six, he'll be allowed to shower, and dress in fresh clothes.'

A stray, impassive thought bubbles up through my mind: that Pam will have to supervise my last meal. 'Oh Lord, it's getting soggy . . .'

'Right after six o'clock,' says Taylor, 'he'll be taken from the cell area into the execution chamber, and strapped down to a gurney. A medical officer will insert an intravenous catheter into his arm, and run a saline solution through it. Then the witnesses will be escorted to the execution chamber.

When everyone is in place, the warden will ask him to make any last statement …'

The host of the show chuckles when she says that. 'Heck,' he says, 'I'd recite War and Peace as my last statement!' Taylor just laughs. She still has that killer laugh.

I've seen a whole lot of Taylor these last weeks, actually. First I saw her on Today, then she was with Letterman, talking about her bravery, and our kind of relationship together. I never realized we got so close, until I saw her talking about it. She came out in November Penthouse too, real pretty pictures taken at the prison museum. That's where they keep 'Old Sparky', the State's first electric chair.

November Penthouse has these pictures of Taylor posing around Old Sparky, real fetching, if it's not too bold to say. I have one posted in my cell, not the whole body or anything, just the face. You can see a piece of the chair too, in back. I guess lethal injection wouldn't look so good for modeling, like with Taylor draped over the gurney or something.

On the bench in my cell I have one of those ole distractions with the metal balls that hang on fishing wire, in a row, and clack into each other. Next to it sits my towel, with my art project tools hidden under. Yeah, I still hide things under my laundry. Some habits are a real challenge to break.

Then, next to my towel, is the baby TV Vaine Gurie loaned me. I reach up and change the channel.

'The Ledesma man is wrong, is criminel, they are many more fax hiden than come out in court.'

It's my ole attorney, Abdini, speaking to a panel of ladies on local TV. Lookit ole Ricochet there, my man the underdog. He's dressed like for a Turkish disco.

'Vernon Little's appeal is in process now, isn't it?' asks the hostess.