The White Road

I smiled. “There’s that. Mostly, I’m here because Elliot doesn’t believe that you killed Maria

He licked his lips. There was sweat beading on his forehead. “They goan kill me,” he said.

“Who’s going to kill you?”

“Larousses. Don’t matter if they do it theyselves or get the state to do it, they still goan kill me.”

“Not if we can prove them wrong.”

“Yeah, and how you goan do that?”

I hadn’t figured that out yet, but talking to this young man was a first step.

“How did you meet Maria

He sank back heavily into the sofa, resigned now to speaking of what had occurred.

“She was a student in Columbia.”

“I don’t see you as the student type, Atys.”

“Shit, no. I sold weed to them motherfuckers. They like to score.”

“Did she know who you were?”

“No, she didn’t know shit about me.”

“But you knew who she was?”

“’S right.”

“You know about your past, about the problems between your family and the Larousses.”

“That’s old shit.”

“But you know about it.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“She come on to you, or did you come on to her?”

He blushed and his face broke into a shit-eating grin. “Oh man, y’know, she was smokin’ and I was smokin’ and, ’s like, shit happened.”

“When did this start?”

“January, maybe February.”

“And you were with her all that time?”

“I was with her some. She went away in June. I didn’t see her from end of May until week, maybe two weeks before…” His voice trailed off.

“Did her family know she was seeing you?”

“Maybe. She didn’t tell them nothin’, but shit gets out.”

“Why were you with her?”

He didn’t answer.

“Because she was pretty? Because she was white? Because she was a Larousse?”

There was just a shrug in reply.

“Maybe all three?”

“I guess.”

“Did you like her?”

A muscle trembled in his cheek.

“Yeah, I liked her.”

I let it rest. “What happened on the night she died?”

Atys’s face seemed to fall, all of the confidence and front disappearing from it like a mask yanked away to reveal the true expression beneath. I knew then for certain that he hadn’t killed her for the pain was too real, and I guessed that what might have started out as a means of getting back at some half-sensed enemy had developed, at least on his side, into affection, and perhaps something more.

“We was screwing around in my car, out at the Swamp Rat by Congaree. Folks there don’t give a shit what you do, ’long as you got money and you ain’t a cop.”

“You had sex?”

“Yeah, we had sex.”

“Protected?”

“She was on the pill and, like, I been tested and shit but, yeah, she still like me to use a rubber.”

“Did that bother you?”

“What are you, man, stupid? You ever fucked with a rubber? It ain’t the same. It’s like…“He struggled for the comparison.

“Wearing your shoes in the bathtub.”

For the first time he smiled and a little of the ice broke.

“Yeah, ’cept I ain’t never had a bath that good.”

“Go on.”

“We started arguing.”

“About what?”

“About how maybe she was ashamed of me, didn’t want to be seen with me. Y’know, we was always fuckin’ in cars, or in my crib if she got drunk enough not to care. Rest of the time, she drift by me like I don’t exist.”

“Did this argument turn violent?”

“No, I never touched her. Ever. But she start screamin’ and shoutin’ and, next thing I know, she’s ru

“Then I found her.”

He swallowed and placed his hands behind his head. His lips narrowed. He seemed on the verge of tears.

“What did you see?”

“Her face, man, it was all busted in. Her nose…there was just blood. I tried to lift her, tried to brush away her hair from her face, but she was gone. There was nothin’ I could do for her. She was gone.”

And now he was crying, his right knee pumping up and down like a piston with the grief and rage that he was still suppressing.

“We’re nearly done,” I said.

He nodded and wiped away his tears with a sharp, embarrassed jerk of his arm.

“Did you see anybody, anyone at all, who might have done this to her?”

“No, man, nobody.”

And for the first time, he lied. I watched his eyes, saw them look up and away from me for an instant before he answered.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“I don’t believe you.”

He was about to give me outraged when I reached across and raised a finger in warning before him.

“What did you see?”

His mouth opened and closed twice without producing any sound, then: “I thought I saw something, but I’m not sure.”

“Tell me.”

He nodded, more to himself than to me.

“I thought I saw a woman. She was all in white, and movin’ away into the trees. But when I looked closer, there was nothin’ there. It could have been the river, I guess, with the light shinin’ on it.”

“Did you tell the police?” There had been no mention of a woman in the reports.

“They said I was lyin’.”

And he was still lying. Even now, he was holding back, but I knew I was going to get nothing more from him for the present. I sat back in the chair, then passed him the police reports. We went through them for a time, but he could find nothing to question beyond their implicit assumption of his guilt.

He stood as I placed the reports back in their file. “We done?”

“For now.”

He moved a couple of steps, then stopped before he reached the door.

“They took me past the death house,” he said softly.

“What?”

“When they was takin’ me to Richland, they drove me to Broad River and they showed me the death house.”

The state’s capital punishment facility was located at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, close by the reception and evaluation center. In a move that combined psychological torture with democracy, prisoners convicted of capital crimes prior to 1995 were allowed to choose between electrocution and lethal injection as their final punishment. All others were executed by injection, as Atys Jones would be if the state succeeded in its efforts to convict him of Maria

“They tole me I was goan be strapped down and then they was goan inject poisons into me, and that I’d be dying inside but I wouldn’t be able to move or cry out none. They tole me it be like suffocatin’ slow.”

There was nothing I could say.

“I didn’t kill Maria

“I know you didn’t.”

“But they goan kill me for it anyhow.”

His resignation made me feel cold inside.

“We can stop that from happening, if you help us.”

But he just shook his head and loped back to the kitchen. Elliot entered the room seconds later.

“What do you think?” he asked in a whisper.

“He’s holding something back,” I replied. “He’ll give it to us, in time.”

“We don’t have that kind of time,” snapped Elliot.

As I followed him into the kitchen, I could see the muscles bunched beneath his shirt, and his hands flexing and unflexing by his sides. He turned his attention to Albert.

“You need anything?”

“Us hab ’nuff bittle,” said Albert.

“I don’t mean just food. You need more money? A gun?”

The woman slammed her glass down on the table and shook her finger at Elliot.

“Don’ pit mout’ on us,” she said firmly.

“They think having a gun in the house will bring them bad luck,” Elliot said.

“They may be right. What do they do if there’s trouble?”

“Samuel lives with them, and I suspect he has less trouble with guns than they have. I’ve given them all our numbers. If anything goes wrong, they’ll call one of us. Just make sure you keep your phone with you.”