Читать книгу Vengeance - Zachary Lazar - Страница 10

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Guineps—those big vines of grapelike fruit whose thick skin you peel back to reveal the delicately flavored plumlike innards. The carnival parade in Crown Heights, the beef patties and the colorful flags of the different islands, the soca music and the reggae. It was these seemingly trivial things we’d made small talk about that now revealed their enormous importance.

The story was “too confusing,” Kendrick had said. When I got back to New Orleans, it occurred to me how susceptible I’d been to that phrase, “too confusing,” how credulous I’d been about his claim that he was innocent. It was one of the reasons I felt trepidation about calling his mother, though I’d told him I’d try to do that. What I mean is that I didn’t know if my credulity was anything more than soft-heartedness. It also made me uncomfortable to discover, after returning from Angola, that in some way I had been perceiving Kendrick’s story as a version of my father’s story. It was something out of a movie—not even a realistic movie, I’d written about the aftermath of my father’s murder. There was the grief over the young man they’d all had a special liking for, and then there was the sense that his death would never seem real, that the sudden violence was so incongruous with his personality that the two could not be held in the mind at the same time. I saw that I could have used some of these same words to describe my impression so far of Kendrick. It was complicated (“too complicated”). The word death, of course, would have to be replaced with incarceration. The connection was the word incongruous, the way that what had happened in both my father’s life and Kendrick’s seemed unrelated to who they seemed to be as people. I tried to explain some of this to Kendrick’s mother, Sonia, when we finally spoke on the phone, but the phone made it hard to discuss anything very seriously, and so we decided to meet in person near where she worked, up the river from New Orleans in Ascension Parish, for her schedule was too busy to meet anywhere else.

I took I-10 toward Baton Rouge, past the airport, the suburbs, the long stretch of Lake Pontchartrain, then the Atchafalaya Swamp with the bony gray trunks of bald cypresses piercing through the bright green tupelos. It was not an unpleasant drive, but it was long enough that Sonia often slept between her shifts at the house of a coworker friend. She was a lab technician for a petrochemical company, working twelve-hour stretches that for four weeks were in the daytime and for the next four weeks in the night. She’d been a bank teller for several years, she’d told me on the phone, but after Katrina that job had disappeared, so now she commuted to this lab almost two hours from home, occasionally supplementing the income she made there by cleaning houses back in New Orleans so she could buy Kendrick clothes and send him money for extra food from the commissary and also so she could afford to visit him. I got off the interstate and the industrial corridor began—fertilizers, reagents, vinyl, polyethylene. I thought of the brief, inadequate note I’d sent to Kendrick a few days before, one of a series of thank-you cards I’d written to the people I’d interviewed, placing them in little envelopes that I left unsealed so they could be screened by the prison administrators. Having stuffed these cards into a manila envelope, I sent them to the assistant warden, Cathy, asking her to please distribute them for me. She’d told me the administration wanted to keep “all interaction between [me] and the inmates under its supervision.” If I wanted to go back and do more interviews, then I couldn’t write letters—the administration would not “support pen pal relationships.”

Dear Kendrick,

Thank you for talking to me the other week. I hope we can follow up more sometime soon. You were one of the first people to give me his story and I will always be grateful for what you told me. In the meantime, I still like conch, even if you St. Lucians prefer to call it lambi.

About two miles down Ashland Road, I came upon the main Shell plant, acres of depopulated furnaces, storage tanks, metal tubes, scaffolding, pipes—the illegible machinery of ethylene manufacturing—the vast sprawl of it reminiscent of Angola. (I learned later that like Angola it had been built on a former slave plantation.) I got lost somewhere on the river levee and had to check the map on my phone, then called Sonia for directions. There were a few cattle in the fields, most of the houses in ruins, the rest an agglomeration of trailers or plain wooden shacks. There was a church with three crosses in front made of rusted sheet metal attached to iron scaffolding, the sheet metal torn away in shreds. I eventually found Sonia’s friend’s house down another road, beyond a gas station and store, the Yousef Quick Stop. When she opened the door, she was dressed in a pale blue lab coat, and she kept talking with someone on her cell phone as she showed me in. The house had a purplish gray sectional sofa and a flat-screen TV that was turned up so loud I didn’t know how she could have been having a phone conversation over it. It gradually occurred to me that she was so accustomed to having the TV on that it didn’t register to her that it was actually on.

“I told you Girl Ville, Girl Ville,” she said after she hung up.

“You’re right, I know,” I said. “I didn’t understand.”

She was saying “Carville,” not “Girl Ville”—Carville was the town we were in. I hadn’t been able to make out this simple statement over the phone because of her Saint Lucian accent. I looked at the living room, which had the sterility of a model home, or perhaps more aptly of some of the guest facilities I’d seen at Angola. Sonia had been washing some spare lab coats in the laundry off the kitchen and now, as she went to put them in the dryer, she asked if I wanted anything to drink but I told her no, I’d brought some mineral waters for us—they were in my bag, along with my notebook and pen and a copy of the book I was planning to give her, my book about my father. It was, of course, what had led me here, as I’d explained when we first talked on the phone, telling her the story of my connection to Deborah and how it had brought us together to the passion play at Angola. Sonia had remarked on the element of fate in all this, though I was still reluctant to look at it that way, to feel grandiose in that way. Like many people, she didn’t know what to say about my book when I presented it to her. We were back in the living room, sitting on the sofa, the mineral waters on the coffee table before us, and she held the book in her hands like a family album, as if trying to take in what it must mean to me. To suggest we might have something in common because of my father’s death felt slightly wrong to me, but I also felt I had to explain again why I was there. Tears had started to well at the edges of her eyes when I mentioned Kendrick, the tears distorted and accentuated by the fact that she was dressed for work in her boxy coat. I thought of her son, his “Weimaraner eyes,” as Deborah had called them, and I remembered something I’d written in the book Sonia was now holding: My father could be quiet. There was something he held in reserve, a mystery about him, even a romance, but there wasn’t crookedness, there wasn’t criminality. The connection I kept seeing between Kendrick and my father gave me an uncomfortable sense of distance from the moment I was in now, as if I were watching Sonia and myself on a screen, insufficiently attentive to the fact that in her mind her son was the victim of the most horrible injustice. She placed the book on the sofa beside her, then reached for a tissue from the box on the coffee table. I told her we didn’t have to do this if she didn’t want to, but she said no, she wanted to, and when I asked if she was sure, she recoiled slightly, as if a little indignant that I didn’t understand.

“I invited you here,” she said. “Not many people ever asked me about this. I invited you because it’s good to talk.”

She showed me a Polaroid of her and Kendrick taken at the prison on his last birthday, standing with their arms around each other before a painted backdrop of a waterfall surrounded by steep mountains with rounded crests like those in China. She looked completely different in the picture, dressed in a neat beige suit with pearl earrings, rings on her fingers, her hair and makeup freshly done. Kendrick, in a white T-shirt and jeans, peered into the camera with the solemn pride of a figure in a nineteenth-century daguerreotype. She told me a little about what their visits involved, saying that it wasn’t like in the movies—they sat at tables in chairs, not in those booths with phones separated by glass. They were able to hug each other, kiss each other, to interact like a normal mother and son. She even smiled slightly when she began to describe the food she could order for them—pizza, barbecue chicken, jambalaya, po’boys. When they ran out of things to say, she told me, which could happen because she often spent the whole day there, six or seven hours, there were TVs they could watch, and if people brought kids there were coloring books and even video games for them to play.

“I’m coping,” she told me. “There’s times when I don’t have enough money to send, and I tell him I’m sorry, I know you need food, but it’s either food or I keep coming to visit. One or the other. It’s hard on him, I know. He lost some weight last time. I could see that he lost it.”

We sat in silence for a while, then she asked me if my mother was still alive. This question always surprises me, though I’ve heard it many times. I said yes, and she asked another question people often do, was my mother okay?, and I told her yes, it was a long time ago. She had remarried, we had moved to another city, she and my stepfather were still together.

“We talked about a lot of heavy things when I was writing my book,” I said. “I didn’t really remember my father, even though I should have—I was six when he died, old enough to have memories. But it was a blank spot for me, who he was, so I liked talking to my mother about it, even though it was hard for her. I maybe take things too seriously sometimes, to the point that it’s a little ridiculous. Maybe there’s something wrong with me, wanting to keep having conversations like that.”

We looked at each other as if to acknowledge that what I’d just said was a little absurd, though this acknowledgment somehow also seemed to imply the opposite: that we understood each other enough now to be able to speak frankly. She told me then that a few days ago she’d learned that the kidney disease she’d had for several years had progressed to the point where she needed treatment. This was what she’d meant before when she’d said she was “coping,” that in fact she didn’t feel well most of the time. She hadn’t told Kendrick about this, and she asked me not to tell him either, though I’d explained to her that I couldn’t communicate with him anyway. She was hoping that her other son, Marcus, might be able to come stay with her for a while when she started dialysis treatments. He lived in New York, and she knew he couldn’t stay forever, but she didn’t know what else to do. She told me then that Kendrick had been difficult before the play, that he had somehow gotten it into his mind that his twelve-year-old daughter, Aysha, might be able to come to the prison to see him perform, though neither he nor Sonia had had any contact with Aysha in many years. She said she’d stayed in touch with Aysha’s mother, Janelle, for a short time after Kendrick went to prison, but after Katrina everyone had scattered, and now she didn’t even know where they lived. One of the last times she’d seen Aysha was at the trial, she said—Aysha crying for her father, Sonia and Janelle telling her he would come home soon, lying to her in that way because that was the only thing one could do.

“She was finally getting to be a talker,” she said. “She’d been slow learning how to talk before, but she had it by then. With her, it was like silence, silence, silence, then all the sudden—full sentences.”

She was three, the last time she’d seen her father, I thought. Kendrick was twenty-two—a part of him was still twenty-two, it occurred to me, still referring when we met nine years later to rappers and basketball stars that no one had talked about much in those nine years.

I asked her if Kendrick had ever had any trouble with the law before he was arrested that summer, and she said no, that in fact he’d had “a lot of friends who were police.” I didn’t know what to say to that. It was the first time I doubted anything she’d told me, though I believed she believed it herself. She went on to tell me that the summer Kendrick was arrested he was planning to become an EMT, because he wanted to “help people.” He’d gone back to community college and was planning to transfer to a four-year school, because that was “the caliber of person” he intended to be. I’d told her on the phone that I had no plans to write about any of this, though I’d also said that I never knew what I was going to write until I was actually writing it. Deborah made images—their value was obvious. The value of writing seemed far less obvious to me, just a groping around in the unknowable. As Sonia told me a story now about Kendrick learning to speak Spanish as a child, so that he could make friends with some neighborhood kids who only spoke Spanish, I thought that at least some of this had to be just sentimental exaggeration, but I didn’t press her. I remembered that day at the prison when Kendrick had told me that he knew who really committed the murder but that he would never divulge the other man’s name. I remembered the way he’d tried not to cry without trying too hard—the embarrassment of the effort, his fear of seeming too performative.

The night of his arrest, Sonia told me now, two detectives from the sheriff’s office had come by her house—they were looking for Kendrick as a potential witness, they said, and they left her their business card. When Kendrick came home a few hours later, he went to the detective bureau to clear things up, but he was gone a long time—it was four or five the next morning when the police car returned, pulling into Sonia’s driveway in the dark. It was summertime, hot, but she remembered that her hands went numb, she got so cold. They had come to pick up a pair of Kendrick’s basketball shoes, the detective said. They were bright green, she remembered—like all his shoes they were immaculately clean. A forensics team later tested the shoes for bloodstains but found no bloodstains. She said that not long before all this, she happened to have served on a jury in the same courthouse in which Kendrick would eventually face trial, and she remembered how the sight of all those young men in handcuffs had affected her. It was disorienting to remember now, like déjà vu, as if everything since had been just an illusion, or some sort of amnesia. They wouldn’t let Kendrick out of the car that night. They wouldn’t let her speak to him. It was the last time she ever saw him outside a courtroom or a prison, standing there shivering in the heat, looking at him through the window of the police car.

“I thought about calling ‘On Your Side,’” she said, referring to a public advocacy segment on the local TV news. She looked at me as if to see if I thought this was a good idea, something to pursue possibly even now. She told me then that a friend of hers had been at a beauty parlor recently, and there she had come across a woman who had made a statement to the police about Kendrick all those years ago, though she never testified at his trial. This woman had been a suspect in the murder herself, but she negotiated a plea deal and so she was free. Sonia’s friend had overheard this woman saying that there was a man in Angola doing time for a murder he’d had nothing to do with.

I brought up the Innocence Project of New Orleans, which offers free legal assistance to inmates who are serving life sentences or death sentences and who claim to have been falsely convicted. But as I wrote down the information and tore the sheet out of my notebook, I also remembered the caveats on IPNO’s website:

Please understand that we receive a large number of letters every week and it will take some time for us to respond to the application or inquiry.

Please tell your loved one to be patient. It often takes years before we can begin to review a case.

We do not have the staff to handle phone calls and they only slow down our review of applications.

“I brought you all the way out here on a Sunday,” she said, after dabbing at her eyes with another tissue, for she’d started crying again. I didn’t know what she meant at first, and she just shook her head, not telling me, as if resigned to the idea that I wouldn’t accept her meaning anyway. Sunday, I realized—the day of prayer. She was not at church but in Carville, in this house that wasn’t hers, microwaving meals she stockpiled at the dollar store, she’d told me earlier, between shifts at the lab. Her tears were tears of near hopelessness, made bearable by faith. Perhaps it was in some way a relief for her to talk to someone, as she’d said, but I couldn’t know. She thanked me in any case. She said the next time we’d have to meet at her “real house,” back in New Orleans, the house she’d bought several years ago that would one day go to her sons, including Kendrick, “as soon as he comes home.”

I picked up my bag to leave and we hugged and I said I’d stay in touch. She stood at the opened door as I walked down the driveway toward my car—I looked back, more than once, and saw that she was still standing there before the empty house, watching as I got into the driver’s seat. I waved at her a last time before I started the engine, then backed down the driveway. She didn’t stop looking until I was gone.

When I got home, I went online and printed out the long summary of Kendrick’s hearing before the U.S. District Court of Appeals, which was the most complete account of his case I could find at that point. The document was so confusing that I made a diagram of all the names of the people involved. I still couldn’t quite figure out how Kendrick fit into the mosaic of names. I looked them all up on the Internet, hoping for more clues, but almost none of them had a profile beyond some street addresses and phone numbers. Nothing on Janelle Bryers, the mother of Kendrick’s daughter, Aysha—not even an address. Nothing on his father, Donovan King, who Kendrick had told me now lived in Maryland.

Later, Sonia texted me a photo, a copy of the Polaroid of her and Kendrick posed before that painted backdrop of the waterfall and mountains. It occurred to me then that I didn’t know what the murder victim, Damien Martin, looked like. I only knew what Kendrick looked like, Kendrick and his mother, Sonia. I realized that this in itself was an enormous distortion in the way I was perceiving this story.