What I didn’t tell her was about the nightmares that come every night to those who crossed the line of their own convictions, took the law into their own hands, and executed a fellow member of society; a man you executed who was tried and released by a biased judicial system that thrived on technicalities; a system that in the end let a man who killed twice, once with an overdose of heroin, a daughter and again a small child, a grandbaby shaken and thrown down on a hard concrete floor, while his twin brother watched, a killer the judicial system failed and let go.
Derek Sams.
He came to me every night and sat on the end of my bunk across my legs, cowboy-style. Stared at me with those glowing red eyes, the kind of eyes you sometimes see in photos. This might not be as bad if he’d just say something, anything. He’d sit there and stare. Oh, those stares. His weight on my legs, made my flesh and blood go numb from the pressure. When I did sleep, I saw it all play out again and again. Deputy Mack had been right in his description to Chantal, the way I used my experience to hunt him down, caught him in a friend’s apartment, a hideout up in the high desert, Lancaster. He wept and pissed his pants. He was on the floor in front of me on hands and knees, his friends watching, not calling 911, predators themselves who understood the rules of the jungle, anxious for me to do it. Their eyes alive with the excitement of it, their breath that came in short little gasps.
I let Derek Sams look down the barrel of my gun for a long time, let him see his future, something I later regretted, again and again, as he stared at me deep into the night. At the time, all I saw was the poor broken body of Alfred and how Alonzo, Alfred’s twin, was destined for the same treatment if I didn’t intervene. The law was broken when it came to child custody. I pulled the trigger without remorse. I gave Derek Sams a third eye to help him see his way to hell.
The description of prison caused gooseflesh to rise on Marie’s back, ripple under my hand as she shivered and shook.
“I’m sorry, babe. I shouldn’t have been so candid.”
She kept her head on my chest. Her hand came up to softly stroke my cheek. “Ssh, it’s okay. I had to know.”
We lay there a while, as she thought of incarceration, and I thought about what a heel I was for risking her world.
“Don’t,” she said, “Don’t even think about it.” She’d tuned into my thoughts.
We were on the same wavelength, something that will always amaze me. She read me no matter how hard I tried to conceal my thoughts. If only I’d met her a long time ago. But then she probably would’ve turned and ran away screaming had she met the old me, the cocky, brazen BMF, the Brutal Mother Fucker, that had inhabited my soul.
That night we’d met in the hospital, shot by my own brethren, broken in heart and soul, exposed emotionally, she stepped right in, took hold of the controls, and she’d never let go.
She said, “I made my own choice.” She balled her fist and gently pounded on my chest, “Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare try and take all this on yourself.”
I put my hand over her mouth and held it there.
She pulled it down. Her eyes softened. “Seven kids are a lot of kids.”
Just like that she’d shifted gears, knew it was time to look at the silver lining, get us back on track, facing forward.
“They’re great kids,” I said.
She nodded as her vivacious, big browns glowed with excitement.
I couldn’t help but smile and said nothing.
She said, “You remember what we talked about?”
I knew what she was going to say, but pretended I didn’t. “We’ve talked about a lot of things. You’re going to have to give me a hint.”
She squirmed. “It’s not right to ask. Not after all you’ve gone through.”
“Babe, spill it.”
Her eyes going large as baby brown moons. There was nothing she could ask that I wouldn’t do. Nothing.
“Bruno, I saw Tommy Bascombe and—”
She didn’t see me watching her on Wilmington as she got on the bus. When Dora Bascombe got off dragging Tommy by the good arm. Even after the ugly portrayal of our wonderful penal system, she was willing to step yet deeper into the quagmire of lawlessness.
Her eyes filled with tears. “You should’ve seen the way that evil witch treated him. It was horrible. It just tore my heart out.”
When I was released from prison, she met me at the gate with Alonzo. The whole thing with Alonzo started out as a simple surprise for me. She wanted to somehow get through to me, give me something to hope for and thought if she brought Alonzo on visiting day it might help. She went over to Alonzo’s paternal grandparents’ house, Derek Sams’s folks who had legal custody because their son was dead. “Murdered by the black bastard, the no-good bitch’s father.”
When she went over, she found Alonzo playing out front unsupervised in the parkway. Right next to the street as cars whizzed by on the busy boulevard not more than a couple of feet away. She said it wasn’t a matter of “if” he wandered into the street, it was a matter of “when.”
Marie quickly pulled up to the curb, leaned over, and opened the passenger door. She called his name, with nothing more in her mind than taking the child out of harm’s way. He toddled over dressed only in a urine-soaked Huggies diaper. He tried to climb into the car, his round belly atop of thin legs wouldn’t let him over the low ledge of the car’s passenger footwell.
Marie looked up, her heart pounding in her throat at the thought that popped into her head. This from a physician’s assistant who met a murderer while treating him for a gunshot wound inflicted by the police, corresponded with said murderer, and now contemplated “snatching” his grandbaby. That was the word she used to describe it later, “snatching.” She pulled Alonzo inside and left the door open so anyone in the house could see that it was something innocent. Alonzo cooed and played with her crucifix that always hung from a gold chain between her breasts. He patted her face, his smile huge.
She waited twenty minutes, or it could have even been thirty or forty as time played tricks on her. No one missed him. The car door still open, Alonzo curled up on the seat asleep in the warmth of the heater directed on him, the sun dropping below the tops of the houses, the world turning orange and yellow. With each passing minute she wanted someone to come out. At the same time she didn’t. She wanted the justification to drive off with the child, and every minute that passed reinforced her decision that continued to teeter, the battle over morally right and legal.
In court, at my trial, she’d had a firsthand look at what the grandparents were like. They attended every day of the trial, bitter and angry, full of revenge. Of course, I knew them on a more intimate level having done battle with them over custody after my daughter died of an overdose of heroin, one her common-law husband, Alonzo and Alfred’s natural father, Derek Sams, had given her. The day I lost the battle was the day I paid him a visit, the day I met Marie. She’d said, and I couldn’t disagree, “the apple didn’t fall too far from the tree.” The grandparents were intent on raising him in the same manner that they’d raised their now deceased son.
Marie reached over Alonzo, pulled the door shut, and drove slowly away, ten, fifteen miles an hour, twenty, then thirty, her conscience fighting a pitched battle. It wasn’t until she looked up in the rearview and saw the drunk grandfather stagger out to the sidewalk, as if he all of a sudden realized he was supposed to be babysitting instead of watching Jerry Springer and drinking Mickey’s big mouth beer.
She sped up and never looked back. She didn’t bring Alonzo on visiting days. She was too scared “they would be watching.” If Alonzo’s legal guardians reported him missing or snatched, it never made the news. She watched the six o’clock edition, the ten, and the eleven, expecting to see footage of the cops moving up to her door with a battering ram and with their long, black guns. They never came. She kept Alonzo for the better part of two years. It was easy to say she was the one who started us down this road. But deep down, I knew I was going to snatch my grandchild and lam out, the very second parole looked the other way.