Method 15/33 Read online

  We pull into the visitor’s lot of our very own Indiana prison. After showing our IDs and approved passes and chit-chatting with our friends in the guard tower and stations, we wind our way to the visitors’ room. I keep my safari jacket on and all of the pockets zipped and buttoned, concealing my present for Brad.

  The visitors’ room is an awful square of concrete blocks painted mint-green. Light mint-green, the most despicable and cheapest color a shoestring budgeted government can afford. Which is fine by me. I don’t want the state spending my tax money on homing up the joint. Having to be surrounded by this nauseating color should be enough punishment to deter anyone from any crime, I think.

  The rectangular, wired, and barred windows start ten feet up from the linoleum floor. About ten square tables fill the room. A woman in her sixties in a black handmade sweater nervously rolls a tissue in her hands, and not once does she look up at me or Liu. She looks sweet, like any grandma crocheting on a park bench. I assume she waits for a son who has severely disappointed her. Another woman, about early thirties, but with the aged and curled, cracked mouth of a sixty-year smoker, rounds her shoulders and crosses her arms at another table. She appears so tough, a criminal herself, and I swear she’s planning to rip the hair out of my skull. I catch her ice-blue eyes and wonder how someone who could have been so beautiful allowed herself to throw it all away on some asshole behind bars. I want to talk to her, ask why she smokes so much, ask how someone with wise eyes can not see. But I stop, reminding myself not to judge. We all have our problems and devils to overcome, we all don’t have the same support, I say to myself, the same thing Nana has often said to me—teaching me perspective.

  A barred door cracks open and in enters three cuffed men, followed by five guards who surround the room, guns ready at their hips.

  “Oh hunny,” the black sweater woman weeps as she rises to hug a neo-Nazi with a cross tattooed on his face. As she stands, her sweater rises, revealing the confederate flag tattooed on her lower back.

  “Hey, Dad,” the ice-blue-eyed woman says to a white-haired man with the exact same glacier eyes. She too weeps, saying, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” into his shoulder, clearly wanting a return hug, which will not come because Daddy’s arms are still cuffed behind his back.

  Do not judge on first impressions. Always study further, I remind myself. Everyone is a puzzle. Stereotypes are rarely fully correct.

  Brad sees me and Liu and tries to back out of the room.

  “Sit down,” a guard gruffs, pushing Brad into a corner seat, far from the eavesdropping ears of Mr. and Mrs. Racist and Father-Daughter Blue Eyes.

  Liu and I take our chairs opposite Brad and smile wide to his heavy, distressed breathing. The years have not been kind to Mr. Fancy. When he was jailed, he was forty-three, so now he is sixty. He was balding gracefully back then, had that tight man-belly, but was impeccable, waxed, shaved, buffed, manicured, you name it. He belonged as some man’s prized bride on South Beach. Now, Brad is a shriveled grape. He’s lost some forty pounds over the years, and not due to exercise, due to unrelenting stress, which I may or may not have caused.

  His orange jumpsuit falls off his skeletal frame like a king-sized blanket on a toddler. His scalp is completely bald, but for the yellow knit hat he wears. His nails are filed, but not manicured, and his tarnished dentures reek.

  “Your boyfriend knit you that hat?” I ask, mockingly acknowledging the ridiculous thing on this head.

  “Still a little bitch panther.”

  I place my hand on Liu’s lap to prevent him from rising to strike Brad.

  “Oh, Brad, it’s okay. I understand you have to wear the hat. Harkin would be upset if he thought you didn’t like it.”

  The guard who had pushed Brad into the room laughs.

  Brad turns to the guard, “Oh tee-hee-hee, you mutton mouth.”

  “Watch it, Brad. You’ll sit here and listen to them as long as I damn well please. And your hat sucks. Harkin sucks at knitting. I’ll tell him you said so,” the guard says as a warning and rather calmly.

  Brad turns back to us, obviously squirming because the guard has him cornered.

  Harkin owns Brad. He purchased him with the one grand I’d slipped through one of the guards. Harkin is an especially rough inmate, having choked three of his “lovers” in another prison before being transferred. He’s serving ten consecutive life sentences for ax-murdering all ten members of a rival bike gang, in their sleep. Killed their pets too. Weighing in at 350 pounds and standing tall at 7’1”, Harkin is the Redwood of prisoners. Therapists convinced him to knit to ease his constant irritation, and so Harkin knits, but only with yellow yarn, because that’s the only yarn the state has, having confiscated a warehouse of Detroit-bound crates from an illegal import company in Gary.

  Harkin is a terrible knitter. His yellow hat for Brad is so far from Brad’s high-fashion days of velvet jackets and silk scarves.

  “So, Brad, we hear you’re trying to convince the state to give you a shot at parole again,” Liu says.

  Brad stares back, only at Liu. To me he has turned sideways, leaning away in his chair, as though I am poking him with the point end of a long sword.

  “You know, Brad, the deal was, you take a life sentence, no parole, and we wouldn’t seek death row. You know we could have gotten death twenty times over, with all those girls you carved up, all the dead babies, everyone we found in your quarry and elsewhere. Remember our deal, Brad. Remember?”

  Brad winces.

  “What you want to come out of here for anyway? Aren’t you comfortable?” I interject.

  “Fuck you and your little bitch panther,” Brad growls to Liu while continuing to physically shy from me.

  Liu and I stare back, waiting, and sure enough: “Ha, ha, ha, you two, so funny,” he says in a high voice.

  “So Brad, I hear you’ve taken up gardening,” I say, laying my hand on the table in a way to force him to finally look my way.

  “So what’s it to you, little bitch?” He sweeps the table with his eyes, still afraid to swivel in my direction and meet me eye to eye.

  I unclasp one of the eight pockets on my jacket and pull out a leaf in a plastic bag.

  “I heard you’d taken up gardening. When was this, about a year ago? You’ve got yourself a little plot in the prison’s garden, eh?”

  “Oh, you, so clever. Got all the goons working for you, spying on little old me.”

  “I wouldn’t call them goons. I’d call them friends,” I say, very seriously.

  “Brad, listen up, listen close,” Liu says.

  Brad stuffs himself back further into his chair.

  “Anyway, you know what this is?” I say, pushing the plastic bag with the leaf toward Brad on the scratched table. The leaf is long and pointy, thin and leathery, and a deep green.

  “Hmph,” Brad says, crossing and uncrossing his legs, shifting his head in his right hand, then left. Squirming. Fearful in the way the deepening lines on his face register his inner recoiling.

  “Grew this myself, Brad. Went all the way to south China to snag a seed, all for you, Brad. All for you.”

  Brad twitches.

  “It’s a special hybrid; one part oleander, some parts something else that grows in remote locations amongst grasses in Asia. One of the most fatal and poisonous plants available to man. Just one bite and your heart explodes.” I pop my lips and fan my fingers like the tops are fireworks. “Pop,” I say and then pat my calm ticking heart.

  The guard behind Brad stands erect and walks closer to his comrade, showing he doesn’t want to hear this part of the conversation, but also showing he’ll allow it to continue.

  I lean toward Brad and whisper with a honey-dripping voice, as though I’m trying to seduce him, which I’m pretty sure is impossible anyway. “All I need to do is grind up a leaf and slip it any time I want into your instant mashed potatoes. Could be while you’re in here, or maybe, if for some impossible reason you get yourself out, when you’re squea
king out an unemployed existence in the box of a shithole where you’ll end up. I hear the burning pain from this hybrid is so excruciating, feels like gasoline burns your esophagus, rages in your chest, and dumps lava into your bowels, which are soon ripped open from within. And no one is going to care enough to do any investigation or toxicology on you, Brad. They’ll be satisfied at calling it a heart attack. This leaf, this plant, looks a lot like the plants you grow in your garden. Easy to camouflage.”

  “You bitch,” Brad spits, finally glaring up at me.

  And this is the moment I came for. The moment he did not want to give me. The moment I get to remind him.

  “You live at my mercy. Don’t you forget it,” I say, stabbing my index finger on the bagged leaf of death.

  Lui smiles. I grab the bag and replace it in one of my pockets, slowly.

  Sure, I could have killed Brad a hundred thousand different ways. But killing Brad wasn’t my, nor Liu’s, primary goal. Number One on our Brad Bucket List was to insure that he, as Liu put it, “Spend a lifetime in excruciating pain and unbearable humiliation.”

  When I’d heard Brad was enthusiastic in taking up prison gardening, enrolled himself in prison horticulture classes, got out of bed early to rake and weed and seemed to smile and whistle in doing so, I gave him a year to let the pleasure of his hobby settle in. I wanted him to experience a true emotional loss. Choosing to threaten him with a poisonous leaf would enable a loss, a fear, a deathly reminder every time he entered his stupid five-foot plot of crappy roses and wildflowers and saw another green leaf. I might ratchet up the game by sending him a variety of plant life through the guards, all with scientific facts about how they might be poisonous—none of them would actually be poisonous because I wouldn’t give him any weapons. And, soon enough, his pathetic garden would turn to dandelions and dirt and he’d have nothing to look forward to once again.

  Some victims want their closure on justice; they seek the death penalty or give forgiveness. And I’m perfectly fine with that. Other people, like me, are willing to press on all fronts for a very long time to try to attain a true eye for an eye. For Brad, given his gruesome crimes, I could have burned him alive and pulled him from the flames in just enough time for his body to have seared but his organs to have not fatally cooked. But even this would not have equalized the delicate eye for eye balance, as far as I was concerned.

  Liu nods to me as his silent question to see if I’m done. I nod back that I am, so as to allow Liu some parting words. He coughs to break the death glare I’m holding with Brad and says while standing, “We’re done here. You just sit tight and soon enough, don’t worry, if you’re a good boy and you stop trying for parole, which you’ll never get anyway, you’ll die of natural causes or Harkin will choke you. One or the other. And then your punishment in this life will end.” Liu stops to stifle a chuckle, but I tap him in the thigh and we share a knowing giggle. “Although,” Liu continues, “I’m pretty sure the devil has some sweet plans for you, Brad.”

  “Oh, she surely does,” I say, thinking on Dorothy, on Mozi, and on all the girls and babies in the quarry who didn’t survive.

  Liu and I drive back to 15/33, listening to Liu’s playlist of country and Ray LaMontagne, a perfect blending of the North and the South. He hums the words to the song “Trouble,” which works a sedation over me. We’ve known each other so long, there’s no need for conversation; no need for him not to sing in my presence.

  “Hey, Liu. You and Sandra should stay for dinner tonight. Lenny’s making burritos again.”

  “The footballs? Hell yeah. We’re in.”

  “Yup. And after, let’s dig in on the dirt samples from the university case. No way those grains and pebbles are from Massachusetts.”

  “Whatever you say, Lisa. You’re the boss,” Liu says. He winks my way before returning to the medicine of LaMontagne’s voice and lyrics.