Hell's Half Acre Read online

  Once a cop, he says. Always a cop.

  Fuck you, kid.

  You talk like a cop.

  Then laughter, like glass breaking apart.

  Hours pass, maybe days.

  My neighbor with the torn voice tells me that they never turn off the lights, that time is therefore elastic and that if I am not insane now, then surely I will be soon.

  The young black guard returns and says the detectives are ready to interview me. I am led down the hall in shackles. My unlaced boots loose and flopping.

  Voices.

  Hey killer what you got in that bag is it my true love’s head?

  I don’t listen. I maintain a straight face. I keep my expression straight and true, like a well-groomed garden. I want to get out of here and I need to look right.

  The guard is silent.

  A security check-point and we wait to be buzzed through. Something stinks of sweat and vomit and I have a pretty good idea it’s me. Now I catch a muddy glimpse of myself in a bank of plexiglass and baby I’m a fright. Bruises and black streaks on my face and scarecrow hair. I touch my face and remember lying in the street, bloated and damp and I have to say my hat’s off to that bouncer. He bounced me good.

  The guard deposits me in another small, windowless room. He tells me to shut up and wait, as if I have a choice. I sit at a scarred wooden table and flash back to the interrogation room back at the Denver P.D., not to mention a thousand and one poorly drawn rooms from the movies and television. I have been on both sides of the table and I know that interrogation is a pretty simple game of rhetorical hide and seek. The results are written in advance, like the streaming threads of fate, but however you arrive there the scene is bound to be ugly, and numbingly tedious, poorly designed and self-consciously acted.

  Even so. I didn’t kill anyone and I want to see the sun today. I want a cigarette. There are right answers and wrong answers. The right answers will get me out of here. The right answers will put me on the street with the other humans. The wrong answers will get me a shot of Thorazine. I think of my neighbor, the one tormented by Jeremiah and I wonder if I should present myself as a paranoid Christian. A lot of good it’s done my neighbor.

  The first cop is a short white guy, heavy and morose, with a bad mustache. It droops down over his lip and his tongue darts in and out as if to taste it. He adjusts his belt and gun and crotch and belly and heaves himself into the chair across from me, sighing. The second cop is small and pale. He doesn’t look like he weighs more than 140 or so and his hair and skin are the same pale beige color and basically he has a lot to overcompensate for and I have a feeling he’s as mean as he can be. He stands against the back wall, silent and staring.

  Name? says the first cop.

  Phineas Poe.

  Middle initial?

  None.

  Interesting.

  Is it?

  Phineas Poe, he says. Formerly of the Denver P.D., Internal Affairs Division. He spits out these last eight syllables like bad meat.

  Long time ago, I say. Hell of a long time.

  Do you know why you’re here?

  What’s your name? I say.

  He stares at me. He stares at me for a while and I wonder if he’s counting to ten. His tongue darts out again, pink and terrible. That mustache truly bothers me and I try not to look at it. I realize that I have made a mistake. Questions will only make these guys angry. Your lines are already written so just spit them out in the proper order and everything will be fine. I tell myself to sit up straight. I try to indicate by my expression that I’m an okay guy. I’m intelligent and cooperative and respectful and all that shit but I don’t really think my face can handle so much at once. I glance at his pale little partner and he’s licking his lips, as if he just can’t wait for me to say the wrong thing.

  Where are my manners, says the first cop. My name is Captain Kangaroo.

  I tell myself to shut up, shut the fuck up. Don’t breathe.

  But it’s like I have a manic little butterfly in my mouth, dying to get out. I shoot a glance at the pale little cop and I say it. I just say it.

  I guess that makes you Mr. Green Jeans, I say.

  He smiles at me and his teeth are the same shade of beige as his hair and skin.

  Again, says Captain Kangaroo. Why are you here?

  Because of a misunderstanding?

  A misunderstanding.

  That’s right.

  I see. What did you do tonight?

  Nothing interesting, I say.

  He yawns. Tell us anyway.

  I had a couple of drinks at a place called Mao’s. Then I wandered down the street and immediately got my ass handed to me by a very unfriendly bouncer. Then I woke up here.

  I guess you’re harmless, says Captain Kangaroo. I guess we should let you go.

  The two of them stare at me and I just feel weary.

  I know that I have a role to play here, I say. But I just can’t do it.

  What? he says.

  Why do we have to dance around this fucking bush? I say. The guard told me I’m charged with murder. Why don’t we talk about that?

  Are you suicidal? says the pale cop.

  I don’t think so.

  Do you ever entertain suicidal thoughts?

  Of course.

  How often?

  I entertain such thoughts every day. Don’t you?

  No.

  I think it’s normal.

  It’s not normal.

  Define normal, I say.

  The pale little cop begins to whistle tunelessly. His partner sighs and looks at his watch. The pale cop sits down for a moment and takes off his left boot, which is an imitation leather Teddy boy boot that zips up over the ankle. He comes around the table, still whistling and walking funny because he only has the one shoe on. He smiles and shows me the boot, like a salesman. I look at it politely. Then he bashes me in the head with the heel of the boot and I feel something in my neck pop.

  Normal, he says. There’s no such thing.

  No such thing, says the Captain. He speaks in a numbing monotone.

  That’s why we have crime in this country, says the pale cop. Because nobody feels normal and nobody wants to be normal.

  There’s blood in my mouth. I swallow it.

  Philosophy, I say. To be normal is to be dead.

  Exactly, he says. And you’re about one smart answer away from another bump on the head.

  You call that a bump?

  Okay, says the Captain. This is boring the shit out of me.

  He tosses an envelope on the table. The envelope contains crime scene photographs. I look at them one by one and they’re pretty bad. There’s so much blood I don’t recognize the girl at first. But it’s the yellow-faced girl I saw shitting on the street. Dead from every angle. Her skirt up around her waist and her pretty legs spread wide. It looks like her head was just about cut off. The last photo is a grim shot of her blackened fingers clutching what looks like a bloody five-dollar bill. I stare at her fingers until the scratches she left on my wrist begin to throb. There is something different about her and I realize it’s her hair. The girl shitting in the street had stringy brown hair like she was already dead, but in these photos she’s wearing a frizzy black wig.

  That’s odd, I say. It sounds terrible as soon as it comes out of my mouth.

  Odd? says the pale cop. I take it you’ve seen her before?

  She’s wearing a wig, I say.

  The pale cop shrugs. Her natural hair was falling out.

  Captain Kangaroo tosses another photo on the table, a Polaroid. I reach for it, then pull my hand back. I can see from where I’m sitting it’s a picture of a Japanese fighting knife that’s been dipped in blood and looks a lot like mine. I look at the Captain. He yawns and his tongue flicks out to taste the mustache.

  I guess I want a lawyer, I say.

  The pale cop flashes his brown teeth. I’m sure one will be provided for you, he says.

  Another guard comes to take
me back to my cell. He informs me that I can see my lawyer in the morning, before I’m arraigned. His words sound so strange. I wonder exactly how many courtroom movies and television dramas I have seen in my lifetime. I sit on my rubber mat and watch the water rise around me. I wonder if anyone has ever died by drowning in jail. My neighbors have become moody and silent, which makes me lonely. I contemplate my situation and it seems pretty clear to me that I’m fucked. The girl in the street was apparently killed with my knife. The medical examiner will find bits of me under her fingernails. The black wig she was wearing will turn out to be Veronica’s, the whore from the Paradise Spa, and even though I never came, the wig will no doubt have traces of my semen in it. What else. That’s enough, isn’t it. They don’t need much else.

  Phineas is fucked.

  I crush my eyes with the heels of my hands until I see stars but I am not transported back to my trailer in the desert or anywhere else. I wonder who it was, who set me up. John Ransom Miller. Molly. Jude. Jeremy, the spurned doorman. Veronica had no discernible motive but then motive is the biggest crock of shit in legal and literary terminology. Consider the waitress with a hacking cough who serves you hashed browns at five a.m., what the hell motivates her. The guy outside the diner, waiting for a bus with a hole in his shoe. The guy who drives the fucking bus, for that matter. What motivates them. What motivates any of us but money and sex and basic survival. Veronica had arms like winter twigs but she might well have been stronger than she looked. She had intimate access to that wig and if someone offered her a thousand dollars, who the hell knows, she might have been happy to shank a common street whore. How the hell do I know. I had my cock in her mouth for about ninety seconds but I didn’t get to know what was in her heart. I can’t help but laugh. I love this society we live in. I don’t know. I don’t know who rang my bell and it really doesn’t matter. It could have been any one of them. It wasn’t me, anyway. I was drunk as a lord but not drunk enough to kill.

  I am left to decompose for a few hours.

  At what feels like two in the morning, the new guard arrives with a gloomy kid in medical scrubs who takes samples of my blood and urine. Then at dawn I am served a meal of processed meat on white bread, half of a canned peach in sticky syrup, and a small paper cup of grape Kool-Aid. The meat is slimy, the bread damp. The peaches are gray and the Kool-Aid is grape only in name and color. I need my strength, though, and I consume the food mechanically, masticating with a dull efficiency that pleases me.

  Along about five, not long before the first pink fingers of dawn, I get another surprise. The guards bring me a cellmate. A white guy, cat thin and lined with tattoos. The hard leather arms of a welterweight. Dirty blond hair and eyes like smoke, a scruff of beard. His name is Sugar Finch, and when he sees me, he just grins. He grins like his mouth is full of locusts.

  sixteen.

  AND THE GUARDS TAKE HIS BODY AWAY AT NOON. I never get breakfast or lunch. I expect them to move me into another cell, an isolation unit, but they never do. I expect them to come beat me half to death, but they never do. I expect the detectives to send for me, so they can tell me just how badly I have fucked myself, but they never do.

  I dragged Sugar Finch into the corner, where the water was up to my ankles, and killed him with my hands before dawn. Impaled his eye sockets with my thumbs, just as I’d imagined. I skull-fucked him with my fingers and the blood spilled up my arms, all the way to my elbows. I don’t want to talk about it, not yet. I may never want to speak of it. It was the worst thing I’ve ever had to do. This little cell is now the perfect crime scene. I expect dire consequences, but none seem to be in the offing. No one says boo to me.

  Come six or seven next evening and my head is a pocket of rage. Tunnel vision. The angry flap of blackbird wings, just out of reach. I am crawling with imaginary bugs. My skin is slick with sweat and I’m cold. This is one of my usual headaches, with a touch of the delirium tremens thrown in. I reckon my body has designated this as happy hour and now it wants a fucking cocktail. And here comes the guard, just like that. Wonders never, so they say.

  Phineas Poe, he says. Time to see the judge.

  I don’t understand. They wouldn’t take me directly to be arraigned, not after I’d killed my bunkmate, would they. I would expect another round of questioning, maybe even a beating.

  The guard leads me down a long corridor with flickering lights. My hands remain shackled together but I consider myself lucky. I am told to wait in line with about twenty prisoners to be transported to court and several of the poor bastards are wearing those leg and crotch shackles that make them walk like angry ducks.

  The courtroom is fairly disappointing. The walls are a pale pea green and the floor is carpeted. The lights are fluorescent and everyone’s skin looks faintly orange. There are no shadows. I am taken in by the bailiff and led over to the defendant’s table where John Ransom Miller is waiting for me. He wears a black suit with black shirt and black tie. He has recently shaved and smells vaguely of licorice.

  You. You’re my fucking lawyer.

  He hisses at me to be quiet and sit down.

  This is just great.

  Quiet.

  Maybe I have something to say.

  Later, he says. You can talk later.

  I curse inwardly at him and sit down in a wobbly wooden chair. It seems to me that the state could step up and provide chairs that didn’t wobble but then maybe they have other fish to fry. Miller sits beside me and shuffles papers. I find my nostrils twitching every time I catch a whiff of licorice.

  The whole thing plays out with very little drama. The bailiff coughs and tells everyone to rise and there is great, unceremonious shuffling of bodies as a middle-aged white man with a shiny bald skull comes in wearing the standard dark robe. My name is called and the charges are read. The judge barely glances up through the whole thing, which takes about ninety seconds. He asks how we plead and I flinch as it occurs to me that Miller and I didn’t exactly discuss that. But he says not guilty and no one is surprised. The assistant prosecutor makes a fairly convincing statement about the horrific nature of the crime and claims that I am a vagrant and therefore a flight risk and should be held without bail. Miller says nothing, which pisses me off. He stares at his fingernails, bored, as if he knows the outcome already. Then the judge whacks the gavel and says that the prisoner will appear before the grand jury in one week and bail is set at two hundred thousand dollars and that’s that. The prosecutor mutters a few sweet nothings to herself and the bailiff comes to take me away. Miller informs me that because the police are holding my clothes as evidence, he brought me a suit to wear and he hopes it fits.

  He says he will be waiting for me outside.

  The process of being released from lock-up involves a lot of waiting on benches with three or four other gloomy fuckers who smell bad and look sorry as hell. I am given a small, grimy envelope that holds a mashed pack of cigarettes and ninety dollars. I had no wallet, of course. I had no identification and no jewelry. There is blood in my hair and I stink to heaven, so I ask to be allowed to shower but the guards ignore me and it seems like a good idea not to push it as I wouldn’t want anyone to get the bright idea to delouse me or something. Then I am given a new Hugo Boss suit in a sort of chocolate brown color and stylishly cut with narrow legs and wide lapels. The material is a wool and silk blend and light as a feather. There is a pale pink shirt to go with it and no tie, and I must say I look fucking sharp. I particularly like the way the bloodstains on my motorcycle boots complete the outfit and I start to snort and giggle like a mental patient.

  Then outside, flinching away from the sun like a rat. Miller waits for me on the steps. He asks me how I’m doing and his tone is casual, as if we are meeting for lunch.

  I’m a peach. Where is Jude?

  Detained, he says.

  How did you know I was arrested?

  He shrugs. Heard it on the scanner, actually.

  Cool, I say.

  Yes. He sniffs me.
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  I know. I stink.

  You’re deadly, he says.

  I assume you paid my bail.

  He smiles. It was the least I could do.

  Thanks. I take it you’re a good lawyer.

  The best, he says. And very expensive.

  Of course.

  I nod and he nods and the two of us stand there, nodding. I extract a bent cigarette from my pack and Miller hands me a gold lighter. I fire the thing up and it’s probably the best cigarette I ever had. The smoke drifts hazy in the sunlight and if I close my eyes, the traffic sounds like the ocean.

  You killed that girl, I say. Or arranged for someone else to kill her.

  Miller raises an eyebrow. I glanced at the evidence, he says. And it looks like you killed her.

  Oh, yeah. The evidence.

  Pretty damning, he says with a sigh.

  I agree. I am living in agreement. But doesn’t it strike you as a fat freakish fucking coincidence that just when you get tangled up with Jude and you want to cast me in a sensitive snuff film that you can screen at Sundance, I get charged with murdering a junkie on the street and then you happen to be a lawyer with the necessary juice to bribe a judge.

  I didn’t bribe him. But I could easily see to it that this goes badly for you.

  What about Sugar Finch? How did you arrange for him to be placed in my cell?

  My gift to you, he says. Did you like that?

  I loved it.

  Tell me about it, he says, Don’t leave anything out.

  Fuck you, Miller.

  My pleasure, he says.

  The DA was right, you know. I am a flight risk.

  You won’t run, he says.

  How do you know?

  Because you’re a nice guy. Molly thinks so, anyway.

  Please. Why not just let me rot in jail?

  Jude, he says. Jude won’t do the film unless you’re involved.

  I don’t deserve such faith.

  Miller whispers. Maybe…she wants you to protect her from me?

  I flick my cigarette away and sparks tumble down the steps. And as if this were a signal, a reporter appears out of nowhere with a cameraman.