© John Hart 2006

I’ve heard it said that jail stinks of despair. What a load. If jail stinks of any emotion, it’s fear: fear of the guards, fear of being beaten or gang-raped, fear of being forgotten by those who once loved you and may or may not anymore. But mostly, I think, it’s fear of time and of those dark things that dwell in the unexplored corners of the mind. Doing time, they call it-what a joke. I’ve been around long enough to know the reality: It’s the time that does you.

For some time, I’d been bathed in that jailhouse perfume, sitting knee-to-knee with a client who’d just gotten life without parole. The trial had damned him, as I’d told him it would. The state’s evidence was overwhelming, and the jury had zero sympathy for a three-time loser who had shot his brother during an argument about who’d get control of the remote. Twelve of his supposed peers, and not one cared that he’d been drinking, that he was cracked to the gills, or that he didn’t mean to do it. No one cared that his brother was an ass and a felon in his own right, not the jury and least of all me. All I wanted was to explain his appeal rights, answer any legal questions, and get the hell out. My fee application to the state of North Carolina would wait until the morning.

On most days I was ambivalent, at best, about my chosen profession, but on days like this I hated being a lawyer; that hatred ran so deep that I feared something must be wrong with me. I hid it as others would a perversion. And this day was worse than most. Maybe it was the case or the client or the emotional aftermath of one more needless tragedy. I’d been in that room a hundred times, but for some reason it felt different this time. The walls seemed to shift and I felt a momentary disorientation. I tried to shake it off, cleared my throat, and stood. We’d had bad facts, but the decision to go to trial had not been mine to make. When he’d stumbled from the trailer, bloody and weeping, he’d had the gun in one hand, the remote control in the other. It was broad daylight and he was out-of-his-head drunk. The neighbor looked out the window when my client started screaming. He saw the blood, the gun, and called the cops. No lawyer could have won the trial-I’d told him as much. I could have had him out in ten, but he refused to take the plea arrangement I’d negotiated. He wouldn’t even talk about it.

The guilt may have been too much, or perhaps some part of him needed the punishment. Whatever the case, it was over now.

He finally tore his gaze from the jail-issue flip-flops that had known a thousand feet before his and forced his eyes to mine. Wet nostrils shone in the hard light, and his red eyes jittered, terrified of whatever they saw in that jigsaw mind of his. He’d pulled the trigger, and that brutal truth had finally taken root. The trail had wound its way across his face as we’d talked for the past few hours. His denials had sputtered to a halt, and I’d watched, untouchable, as hope shriveled and died. I’d seen it all before.

A sopping wet cough, his right forearm smearing mucus across his cheek. “So that’s it, then?” he asked.

I didn’t bother to answer. He was already nodding to himself, and I could see his thoughts as if written in the dank air that hung between us: life without parole and him not yet twenty-three. It generally took days for this brutal truth to bore through the bullshit tough-guy act that every dumb-ass killer carried into this place like some kind of sick birthright. Maybe this joker was smarter than I’d given him credit for. In the brief time since the judge handed down his sentence, he’d grown the lifer stare. Fifty, maybe sixty years behind the same redbrick walls. No chance of parole. Not twenty years, not thirty or even forty, but life, in caps. It would kill me, and that is God’s own truth.

A glance at my watch told me I’d been in there for almost two hours, which was my limit. I knew from experience that the smell had by now permeated my clothes, and I could see the dampness where his hands had pawed at my jacket. He saw the watch come up and he lowered his eyes. His words evaporated in the still air, leaving a vacuum that my body settled into as I stood. I didn’t reach to shake his hand and he didn’t reach for mine, but I noticed a new palsy in his fingers.

He was old before his time, all but broken at twenty-three, and what might have been sympathy wormed into a heart I’d thought forever beyond such things. He started to cry, and his tears fell to the filthy floor. He was a killer, no question, but he was going to hell on earth first thing the next morning. Almost against my will, I reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. He didn’t look up, but he said that he was sorry, and I knew that this time he truly was. I was his last touch with the real world, the one with trees. All else had been pared away by the razor-sharp reality of his sentence. His shoulders began to heave beneath my hand, and I felt a nothingness so great, it almost had physical weight. That’s where I was when they came to tell me that my father’s body had finally been found. The irony was not lost on me.

The bailiff who escorted me out of the Rowan County Jail and to the office of the district attorney was a tall, wide-boned man with gray bristles where most of us have hair. He didn’t bother to make small talk as we wound through the halls packed with courthouse penitents, and I didn’t push it. I’d never been much of a talker.

The district attorney was a short, disarmingly round man who could turn off his eye’s natural twinkle at will; it was an amazing thing to watch. To some, he was a politician, open and warm. To others, he was the cold, lifeless instrument of his office. For a few of us behind the curtain, he was a regular guy; we knew him and liked him. He’d taken two bullets for his country, yet he never looked down on people like myself, what my father had often called “the soft underbelly of a warless generation.” He respected my father, but he liked me as a person, and I’d never been sure why. Maybe because I didn’t shout the innocence of my guilty clients the way most defense lawyers did. Or maybe because of my sister, but that was a whole different story.

“Work,” he said as I entered the room, not bothering to get up. “I’m damn sorry about this. Ezra was a great lawyer.”

The only son of Ezra Pickens, I was known to a few as Jackson Workman Pickens. Everybody else liked to call me “Work,” which was humorous I guess.

“Douglas.” I nodded, turning at the sound of the office door closing behind me as the bailiff left. “Where’d you find him?” I asked.

Douglas tucked a pen into his shirt pocket and took the twinkle from his eye. “This is unusual, Work, so don’t look for any special treatment. You’re here because I thought you should hear it from me before the story breaks.” He paused, looked out the window. “I thought maybe you could tell Jean.”

“What does my sister have to do with this?” I asked, aware that my voice sounded loud in the cramped, cluttered space. His eyes swiveled onto me and for a moment we were strangers.

“I don’t want her to read about it in the papers. Do you?” His voice had chilled; the moment had not played well. “This is a courtesy call, Work. I can’t go beyond the fact that we’ve found his body.”

“It’s been eighteen months since he disappeared, Douglas, a long damn time with nothing but questions, whispers, and the looks that people give when they think you can’t tell. Do you have any idea how hard this has been?”