Stagger Bay Read online

  Karl’s voice came tinny and inhuman from my ear piece; I wouldn’t even have recognized it if I hadn’t watched his lips synching to the words on the other side of the plexi. His words grating and hissing over the cheap phone line, he told me how Angela started using again as soon as I was popped, then ODed and checked out right after I got sentenced to natural life. Karl figured the OD probably wasn’t an accident.

  I told him to shut the fuck up about that one. Neither of us had slugged the other in more than a few moons but Karl was fortunate the barrier was between us that day; he would have taken a cheap shot from me and I knew by heart all the spots that hurt him the most.

  “And Sam?” I asked.

  “They’re making noise like they’re gonna stick him in CPS, but I’ve got him covered, Markus. As long as I’m breathing and perpendicular, he’s with familia.”

  I shut my eyes. “You’ll have to go all the way straight now.”

  “If you did it, it’s got to be easy – he’s my blood too, baby brother. I’ll have my stuff sent up here from San Fran, find me and Sam a place. You know I can always glom the folding cash if it comes to that.”

  A screw rolled up to lurk, meaning our visit was over. Quickly, knowing they’d just turn the phones off on us in mid-sentence if we dawdled, I said, “Don’t put money on my books. I’ll hustle up my own end. I’ll write to Sam, care of general delivery. And Karl…”

  My brother waited, brows raised as the screw made an imperious beckoning gesture at him.

  “You don’t have to come visit me again. I’ll do my own time.”

  His face crawled with mingled relief and shame, and his eyes dropped. Then his shoulders squared and he gave up with a wink and a grin, just like he wasn’t saying goodbye forever.

  I hold tight to that memory of my big brother Karl, walking tall away from me until he was out of my sight at least. It was the last time I ever saw him.

  Chapter 4

  I commenced my sentence knowing my aloneness for true now, my only comfort knowing Karl would care for my son as best he was able.

  I wrote a few long rambling letters to Sam, trying to tell him something of who I was and where I’d come from, and a few of the things me and his mom had to overcome trying to give him a normal life. I told him to be strong and live proud. Oh yeah: and that I was innocent; that his dad wasn’t the kind of person that could or would have done the things they said I did.

  He never wrote back and after a few years I stopped writing and focused my energies on doing my time.

  Some things, the less said the better. Prison was like that – men dissolved here like oil slicks spreading across tainted water.

  For years I dreamed about Angela and Sam almost every night. But after a while the dreams stopped coming, and Angela’s face grew harder and harder to see clearly in my mind’s eye.

  Finally she subsided into a dim, almost archetypal presence: ‘The Abandoned Wife,’ sunk straight off the deep end to drown in the midst of a Lovecraftian submarine horror show.

  All I had to do to remember Sam’s face, however, was study the nearest convenient reflective surface and mentally subtract thirty years. Seeing my mirror image showed me Sam as an adult man: A son who'd remember me only with bitterness and never speak my name; never have known me at all.

  I’d leave no mark on the world other than the damage I’d done as a kid and whatever DNA Sam shared with me, my only legacy an anonymous prison grave when my carcass ran out of steam and followed my heart. After that realization my plummet took about as long to complete as it takes to describe, it was gradual as a roller coaster filled with screaming passengers soaring off the rails.

  For a long while I drifted through a sort of waking trance. I spent months on end as this dimensionless drifting point surrounded by the infinite expanses of time and space that encompassed me. I guess technically I checked out of the human race all the way for a couple of years, just going about my business on auto-pilot as it were, one more sleepwalking robot.

  Then by a total fluke I started reading, making up for dropping out of school in seventh grade: An old white-froed blood I crossed the color line to play occasional chess with turned me on to the Western Canon and my war dance with the Masters commenced.

  Dostoevsky and Patricia Highsmith, Dickens and the Viking Sagas and Virginia Woolf. Sylvia Plath and Robinson Jeffers, Langston Hughes and Gracian and the Stoics. I lost track of how many pages I perused containing the brilliant thoughts of twisted geniuses, most long dust.

  The Canon was great, if I’d ever been exposed to it in school I never would’ve dropped out. I figured my ‘teachers’ hadn’t gone out of their way to hide the classics from me, but they sure hadn’t gone out of their way to park them under my nose neither.

  Please don’t think I was naïve enough to mistake any of these authors for friends. Please don’t think I ever humbled myself to them.

  Never!

  On the contrary: I knew these were dangerous people; I suspected and mistrusted them all. Reading the Canon was like chewing on broken glass, I felt the power thrumming through those books the first time I picked one up. Their scintillating words and arguments were too lovely to be anything but lies.

  It was a tightrope walk to fend off their verbal assaults on my brain even as I did my best to glean what I could from the collective wisdom they’d constructed from nothingness and dust. I was as on guard with them as if facing an enemy – but I couldn’t put them down, couldn’t stop turning the page – and if these folk were reaching out from beyond the grave to infect me with the same ideas so many of them died for, then I’m guessing the damage was surely done.

  I gravitated to some more than others of course. Herodotus chatted me up about the Spartans. Marcus Aurelius gave comfort despite letting it be known our lives were no more than blips in infinity, over almost before they began. Plutarch showed me that everyone had warts and all lives end, even the great ones – most of the guys he wrote about suffered travails making my current situation look like a leisurely dog walk in the park.

  A false imprisonment like mine? Everyone had troubles. Much worse had happened many times before, and would occur many times again.

  You had no rights, really. Does a man drowning in the middle of the ocean have a ‘right’ to keep on breathing? Does a man dying of thirst in the desert have a ‘right’ to water? Ask that question of the next desiccated corpse you stumble across in the Sahara – but you probably won’t get any answer from them.

  The Canon was as much a curse as a blessing though: its light was a cold one, constituting one more layer of solitary confinement. But the old books’ diamond hardness helped me construct a center to cling to, sometimes the only thing that kept me from mentally fading away into the walls of my cell. Their most galling price tag was the humiliating knowledge of just how small I’d allowed myself to be.

  Remember Bacon’s words? ‘We stand on the shoulders of giants.’ That phrase gave me chills the first time I ever read it.

  But then the cosmic irony had bitch slapped me almost immediately: how insulting to the memory of those ‘giants’ that any ‘standing’ I’d do would be such a stunted version, given my current domestic arrangements.

  Besides the mental sparring matches with my writer frienemies, I did pushups; I got up to a thousand a day on my fingertips. My shredded pecs got big enough I probably needed a bra.

  Time passed in a crawl.

  Chapter 4

  Then one morning – seven years, three days and nineteen hours into my sentence – I had a visitor. I was shackled up, my manacles connected to my ankle cuffs by a dangling vertical chain, and escorted to a private visiting room. It was the first time I’d had to wear the bracelets in a while, as I’d been in general population for years without a court date or any need to interact with someone outside the penal system. The chains weighed heavy on me, but the novelty of entertaining a guest outshone any inconvenience.

  “Hello, Markus,” my visitor said, ext
ending her well-manicured hand.

  I shook with her awkwardly, having to reach out with both manacled mitts. My chains jingled, and she made a face at the noise.

  She had wavy blonde hair cut page-boy style, and wore high-end cologne I found myself sniffing greedily. A skinny little sparrow of a woman, with thin bird’s legs extending from beneath the skirt of her tailored charcoal-grey business suit. Her face was a little bony, and her nose a tiny beak. As she was the first woman I’d seen since coming to prison, her presence was quite invigorating.

  “My name is Elaine Hubbard,” she chirped, “and I’m getting ready to have you released.”

  My mind raced but I was suddenly numb as if I’d been immersed in ice. I couldn’t accept the reality of her words. “Say that again, please.”

  “You’re going free, Markus,” she said, seeming to enjoy whatever was happening on my face.

  I looked around the circumference of the room seeing the paint worn away at shoulder height from all the men that had paced its confines before me, imagining how much despair these specific sweaty greasy walls had witnessed; how many dashed hopes and betrayed trusts. I’d never had much luck with lawyers before, and was skeptical of her words to say the least.

  “You’d best explain,” I said. “And I hope to God you’re not fucking with me.”

  “Have you ever heard of DNA evidence?” she asked. “It’s a relatively new technology. They’ve been breaking cold cases with it for a while now. It’s solving a lot of crimes, putting a lot of perpetrators behind bars that thought they’d get away with it forever.”

  I jangled my shackles, the noise almost sounding musical. “That’s quite reassuring. It soothes me; it’ll make me feel all safe in my warm comfy bed tonight.”

  She chuckled. “It’s also freed a lot of innocent people, too. People like you, Markus.”

  My heart was beating hard. She continued talking but I couldn’t understand a word she said.

  ‘Freedom,’ a voice whispered in the back of my brain – I shook my head at it. “So what made you take this on? What made you think I didn’t do it?”

  “Your brother,” Elaine said, a wistful expression crossing her face. “Karl was a good man.”

  “You said was. You’ll be rephrasing that, fast.” I was standing for some reason, and the screw on duty was suddenly in the room with us. I felt him hovering behind my shoulder ready to drop me hard and nasty.

  Elaine waved him out as if she was dismissing a dog, but like any pro he waited until my butt was planted back in my seat before leaving.

  “Was,” I repeated.

  Elaine nodded. “Apparently Karl started dealing drugs, and he was killed in a shootout with a Stagger Bay police officer. They found a handgun and a large quantity of marijuana in his possession. The officer was cleared.”

  “That makes me feel much better, it being deemed justified. But why are you still on it? Seems to me your debt would die with him, you don’t owe me a thing.”

  “You’re his family, and I know he’d want me to,” she said as if by rote. “We’d already been working on our investigation for a while when he died, so I thought it best to finish it.

  “And I have finished your part at least; you’ll be going free as soon as I’m done filing the paperwork.” She appeared pleased with herself.

  I figured she just might have a right to be but ignored that, groping further – a ship-killing iceberg loomed beneath the placid surface of her words. “Karl was helping you on an investigation? Into what?”

  “Well, it occurred to Karl that, since he knew you were innocent, the real killer had to still be out there. For the past seven years he’s been playing detective, putting in quite a lot of legwork on it I might add. I myself have only been involved for the past three years, since I moved to Stagger Bay and met Karl.

  “Then I got a hold of this DNA thing and had an independent lab in the Bay Area run the tests,” Elaine continued. “Yours didn’t match the samples from the crime scene, and the rest is history.”

  “What did Karl find out? About the real killer, I mean?”

  “Nothing he ever shared with me,” she said hurriedly. “You know, you’re entitled to $100 a day for your false imprisonment. That comes to about a quarter of a million dollars.”

  “Great,” I said, cracking a smile.

  “Don’t count on it anytime soon,” Elaine said. “The check would come out of Stagger Bay’s general budget. That much money could break the county, and they’re fighting the payout.”

  “I guess we can’t have it too easy, can we?”

  Elaine stood, we reprised our awkward handshake around my cuffs; then she was gone. And as quick as that, with no formality at all, I was free.

  Chapter 5

  I was scared spitless of my homecoming, the entire long bus ride back to Stagger Bay. Angela was dead and now Karl as well. Sam’s lack of communication made it plain he wanted nothing to do with me, and last time I’d been here most of the town stood in line to show what they thought of me.

  Wife gone, house gone, possessions gone, reputation gone. No job and no money in my pockets besides a puny handful of gate dollars. My prospects were glowing.

  I’d done my time up in Del Norte County, so the bus brought me into Stagger Bay from the northern end. New housing crowded the outskirts of town that hadn’t been there when I went up: palatial McMansions looking like they’d be more at home in Beverly Hills, or in Silicon Valley housing the dot.com moguls. A lot of active construction sites, mainly right on the coast line.

  It was just after dawn when the bus entered town, and I looked across the Bay at the Pulp Mill – it was the third largest such mill in the world, supplying jobs to a lot of people. The last time I’d been here, its twin stacks had vomited a foul effluvia 24/7 that could knock the nose right off your face if the wind was right.

  Now both stacks were idle, no smoke coming from either of them. Squinting from my distant bus-borne vantage, I saw no sign of activity in the plant itself, and its huge multi-acre parking lot was empty.

  The Greyhound swung down Fourth Street past a short row of chain fast food franchises and came up on what passed for a bus terminal in Stagger Bay: a one room building the size of a big city newsstand.

  A short kid was leaning against a beat-up white ‘70s Lincoln Continental as the Greyhound chuffed into the terminal. Spiky red hair, bright blue eyes with a bony jutting chin, and wide shoulders with big meaty hands hanging at the end of long arms: the spitting image of his uncle – and of his father too I suppose.

  I had no luggage to wait on, so I walked right up with my heart pounding.

  “Sam?” I asked.

  He nodded blank-faced and hip bumped erect off the car in one fluid motion. The way his shoulders rolled as he ape-shambled to the driver’s side door was like watching a home movie of me and Karl at that that age.

  Sam climbed in without so much as looking at me. I got in my side with equal enthusiasm. The seats were chapped leather but still comfortable.

  I snuck peeks at him as we drove, but he kept his eyes glued to the road. Despite that attentiveness he was a suck-ass driver, tail-gating and cutting off cars as he swerved from lane to lane in the big old Connie. I kept my opinion of his driving skills to myself as, to tell the truth, he drove exactly like his uncle.

  “Look,” Sam said out the side of his mouth, sounding distracted, as if I didn’t even have his full attention in this oh-so-heartfelt moment. “We got to be clear from the git go. I got too much on my plate right now to be wasting my time holding your hand. Still, Uncle Karl wouldn’t have liked it if I turned my back all the way on you, so I’ll try to watch out for you a little bit while you get back on your feet. But know this: We’re not going to be friends.”

  Sam continued. He’d obviously practiced this speech for a while, probably memorizing it daily in front of his bathroom mirror ever since he’d heard of my imminent return. “You can forget the whole father/son thing, it ain’t going to hap
pen. We ain’t gonna be swapping spit here. First thing first, let’s get you in a motel.”

  I gritted my teeth but kept my own puissant smile in place. “I don’t have enough for a room. I was hoping maybe I could shack up with you till I get on my feet.”

  He shifted his face out of neutral long enough to snicker. It sounded just like my brother laughing at me. “Ain’t that a bitch?” Sam said. “I thought you got a butt-load of money for seven years of wrongful imprisonment. But that’s just like the rednecks in this hick town: always scratching, barely able to keep things afloat. Hell, the whole county’s about bankrupt.”

  His face went blank again. “Anyways, I don’t have any room at my place.”

  I scoped out the car’s interior. Heaps of dirty clothes were piled in the back, and toiletry articles were scattered on the floor. Sam was living out of his car.

  “It’s all right, I’m sure I’ll have a place to lay my head by the end of the day,” I said. “So, how do you get by? What do you do?”

  “This and that, as if it’s any of your business.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I get it.” And I did: he was in whatever semblance of the Life this podunk town could support. If he was homeless I figured crime didn’t pay much in Stagger Bay. “I’d’ve hoped Karl would set you up a little better.”

  “Fuck you, you old hypocrite,” Sam said in casual tones. “Know what I remember about you? You were either working, or sleeping so I had to tiptoe around the house, or drinking, or sleeping it off – in which case I had to tiptoe around some more. Then you were gone and Mom was dead, end of story.

  “Far as I’m concerned, Karl’s my real dad – you was just a sperm donor. He was there, you wasn’t, remember? Uncle Karl taught me everything I know. He went straight and went clean when he took me under his wing, even if I don’t pretend to be. I won’t have you bad-mouthing how he raised me.”

  “He went legit? Elaine told me he was dealing again, that’s how come he got shot.”