Chapter 35 Zeth
Zeth
Four Years Ago
Chino
Dr. Walcott, Yankees Fan, profuse sweater and prescriber of wonderful drugs, has a nervous disorder.
I’m pretty fucking sure he does, anyway.
Every meeting we have, he chews his way through at least three pens.
Three pens in the space of an hour. That’s gotta be costing the state at least a couple of hundred bucks a year, I figure, considering he probably goes through five pens during his sessions with the truly scary motherfuckers they have caged in here.
Pathetic, really. I mean, why work in a prison if you’re this terrified of your patients.
Except we’re not called patients in here.
We’re called inmates. If we were on the outside and sitting in an office with good ol’ Walcott, drinking our coffee, he might actually be a good doctor.
But with mandatory treatment like this, people tend to be a little reticent.
Obstructive. Unwilling to cooperate, if you will.
I usually fall into the latter category, but today I’m being forced to sing a different song.
“As you’re aware, the appeals board has reviewed your case.” Walcott flips through the papers in my file, scanning its contents while somehow managing to keep one eye trained on me. “They rejected your lawyer’s request for early release right out of hand. You’re aware of that, too?”
“Yeah.” Charlie’s lawyer, the slick city boy with the immaculate hair, immaculate suit, and immaculate shoes, did tell me that. Not like I’d even hoped the appeal would go through, anyway. To be honest, I was surprised the judge had only given me ten years in the first place.
“Given the violent nature of your crime and your apparent lack of any remorse, they didn’t feel it appropriate that you be released until you serve at least half your sentence. Where are you at with that right now?”
“Two years served.”
“Well, you’ve got a long way to go then, Mayfair. At least another three years before any chance of parole unless we do this thing right.”
“Three years isn’t so bad,” I tell him, smirking. But of course it’s bad. Three years might as well be thirty in here. Anyone tells you they kicked back and did an easy stint in Chino, they’re fucking lying. This place is hell on earth.
Walcott pauses. “Well, what if I were to say you could walk out of here in six months?”
“I’d say that sounds good.”
Walcott shakes his head, sighing, looking over my papers once more. “I really don’t know how he did it, to be honest. A deal like this frankly shouldn’t even be on the table. Your lawyer must be playing golf with the right people.”
Hah. Fuck my lawyer playing golf with the right people.
The deal the parole board cut me had more to do with Charlie’s boys paying a few visits to a few judges’ houses.
No violence involved, of course. Just bricks of unmarked bills, a few bottles of single malt, and a few choice words whispered into the right ears.
“So this is where we find ourselves, Zeth. If you work with me willingly, then we both win. I get to help you, and you get to leave. Do we have a deal?”
I feel like I’m giving something away when I reply, “Sure.”
He can tell I’m none too happy about it.
“Great. Okay. Well, customarily I’d start with the offense that landed you in here, but I think perhaps today we’ll go back to the beginning.
Let’s start off with your childhood.” He sits back, the end of the black ballpoint he’s been turning over and over in his hand going into his mouth.
He just fucking looks at me like he’s waiting for me to tell him something very terrible and specific that explains exactly why I am the way I am.
“I’m sorry. Did you ask a question?”
“Your childhood, tell me about it.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Was it a happy one? Did you have many friends? Did you get on with your parents? You know, that sort of thing.”
Typical bullshit psychologist. My chair groans as I slouch back in it—I’ve stacked on fifty pounds of muscle since I was dragged, cuffed, through the gates of this shithole.
“It was fucking miserable. When I was four, I went to live with my uncle in California. He was a drunk, and he liked hurting little boys.” I suspect not everyone Walcott interviews is quite as blunt as I am. The man blanches.
“And when you say he hurt you, do you mean…” He trails off uncomfortably, gnawing on his pen again.
“No, I do not mean sexually. I mean with a baseball bat. I mean with his steel toe caps. I mean with his fists.”
Walcott writes that down. I can practically see it on the fucking paper now: Beaten as a child. Explains violent tendencies in adult life. An attempt to understand, to control what happened to him in his early years. An attempt to take back perceived loss of power.
But even as a kid when my uncle was whaling on me and my still-forming bones were snapping like kindling, I didn’t feel like I’d lost my power. I was just waiting. Waiting for the day when I was bigger and stronger than he was. Biding my time.
“And what about your parents? Why did they leave you with your uncle?”
“Because they died. My father had a headache. They were going out to a movie. Left me with a babysitter. My mother said she’d drive, but she was pregnant, ready to pop, so he wouldn’t let her. Doctors said he had a burst aneurism at the wheel. Wrapped their Chevy around a streetlight.”
Talking about my parents isn’t something I like to do, but with that six-month-get-out-of-jail-free card on the table, I don’t really have much of a choice.
I don’t tell Walcott about the important stuff.
The few hazy, coveted recollections that keep them alive inside me—the smell of my mother’s perfume, sweet and light and floral; her dark hair tickling my face when she kissed me goodnight; my father’s booming laughter; the thrum thrum thrumming of the baby’s heartbeat inside my mother’s round belly.
I had sat for hours, listening as the unknown creature had flipped and kicked, and my mother had stroked my hair, telling me stories.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Walcott says. He affects a level of sympathy in his voice that almost makes me believe he is sorry. “And what about later? After you left your uncle?”
This is now treading into dangerous ground.
I won’t talk about Charlie. I can’t. I’ll die in here before I ever get out otherwise.
“I lived on the street. I did what I had to survive. Stole, worked casual jobs, moved around a lot. Avoided the system.” My uncle kept on cashing the checks the government sent to cover my care until the day I turned eighteen and they stopped sending them.
These fuckers have no proof I even really know Charlie.
To bring him up now is to open a can of worms marked Danger: Extremely hazardous to health.
“I see.” Walcott writes all of this down.
No fucking point, though. The story I’ve just given him is a tale as old as time.
Within the walls of this tormented place, I am nothing special.
“Okay, Mayfair. Tell me something happy, then. What’s the single happiest memory from your childhood?
” His pen having caught up with him, the nib hovers over the paper, ready to record whatever profound moment I am about to impart.
“No.”
Silence.
“Listen, if you don’t plan on cooperating—”
I cut him off. I can’t be fucked dealing with administrative threats. I just want this session over. “I’m not being difficult, Dr. Walcott. I can’t give you the single happiest memory from my childhood because there isn’t one.”
“Not even one?” He seems doubtful.
I tell him the truth. “Nope. Not even one.”
Because even the memories of my parents—the perfume, the hair, the laughter, the thrum, thrum, thrum—they are perhaps the saddest parts.