The White Road

In a life that had not been short of misfortune, of pain and humiliation, Angel would still look back on September 8, 1971, as the day when events went from bad to very bad indeed. For on that day, a judge sentenced Angel and two accomplices to a nickel in Attica for their part in a warehouse robbery in Queens, a destination partly dictated by the fact that two of the accused had attacked a bailiff in the corridor after he had suggested that by the end of the day they would be facedown on bunks with towels stuffed in their mouths. Angel, at nineteen, was the youngest of the three to be imprisoned.

To be sent to the Attica Correctional Facility, thirty miles east of Buffalo, was bad enough. Attica was a hellhole: violent, overcrowded, and a tinderbox waiting to explode. On September 9, 1971, the day after Angel arrived in Prison Yard D, Attica did just that, and Angel’s luck really started to run out. The siege at Attica that resulted from the seizure by prisoners of several parts of the facility would eventually leave forty-three men dead and eighty wounded. Most of the fatalities and injuries resulted from the decision of Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller to order the retaking of Prison Yard D using whatever force was necessary. Tear gas canisters rained down on the inmates in the yard and then the shooting began, indiscriminate firing into a crowd of over twelve hundred men followed by a wave of state troopers armed with guns and batons. When the smoke and gas had cleared, eleven guards and thirty-two prisoners were dead, and the reprisals were swift and merciless. Inmates were stripped and beaten, forced to eat mud, pelted with hot shell casings, and threatened with castration. The man named Angel, who had spent most of the siege cowering in his cell, fearful of his own fellow inmates almost as much as of the inevitable punishment that would befall all involved when the prison was retaken, was forced to crawl naked over a yard full of broken glass while the guards watched. When he stopped, unable any longer to take the pain in his stomach, hands, and legs, a guard named Hyde had walked over to him, the glass crunching beneath his heavy shoes, and had stood on Angel’s back.

Almost three decades later, on August 28, 2000, federal judge Michael A. Telesca of the Federal District Court in Rochester finally divided an $8 million settlement among five hundred former Attica inmates and their relatives for what had taken place in the aftermath of the uprising and siege. The case had been delayed for eighteen years but in the end some two hundred plaintiffs got to tell their stories in open court, including one Charles B. Williams, who had been so badly beaten that his leg had to be amputated. Angel’s name was not among those attached to the class action suit, for Angel was not a man who believed that reparation came from courtrooms. Other prison terms had followed his time spent in Attica, including a total of four years in Rikers. When he had emerged from what would be his final prison term, he was broke, depressed, and on the verge of suicide.

And then, one hot August night, he spotted an open window in an apartment on the Upper West Side, and he used the fire escape to gain access to the building. The apartment was luxurious, fifteen hundred square feet in size, with Persian carpets laid over bare boards, small items of African art tastefully arrayed on shelves and tables, and a collection of vinyl and compact discs that, with its almost exclusive emphasis on country music, led Angel to suspect that he had somehow wandered into Charley Pride’s New York crash pad.

He went through all of the rooms and found them empty. Later, he would wonder how he had missed the guy. True, the apartment was huge, but he’d searched it. He’d opened closets, even checked under the bed, and he hadn’t even found dust. But just as he was about to lift the television out onto the fire escape, a voice behind him said: “Man, you the dumbest damn burglar since Watergate.”

Angel turned around. Standing in the doorway, wearing a blue bath towel around his waist, was the tallest black man Angel had ever seen outside a basketball court. He was at least six-six and totally bald, his chest hairless, his legs smooth. His body was a series of hard curves and knots of muscle, almost entirely without fat. In his right hand he held a silenced pistol, but it wasn’t the gun that scared Angel. It was the guy’s eyes. They weren’t psycho eyes, for Angel had seen enough of those in prison to know what they looked like. No, these eyes were intelligent and watchful, amused and yet strangely cold.

This guy was a killer.

A real killer.

“I don’t want no trouble,” said Angel.

“Ain’t that a shame?”

Angel swallowed.

“Suppose I told you that this isn’t what it looks like.”

“It looks like you tryin’ to steal my TV.”

“I know that’s what it looks like, but-”

Angel stopped and decided, for the first time in his life, that honesty might at this point be the best policy.

“No, it is what it looks like,” he admitted. “I am trying to steal your TV.”

“Not anymore you ain’t.”

Angel nodded.

“I guess I should put it down.” In truth, the TV was starting to feel kind of heavy in his arms.

The black guy thought for a moment. “No, tell you what, why don’t you hold on to it,” he said at last.

Angel’s face brightened. “You mean I can keep it?”

The gunman almost smiled. At least, Angel thought it might have been a smile; that, or some kind of spasm.

“No, I said you could hold on to it. You just stay there and keep holdin’ my TV. ’Cause if you drop it-” The smile broadened. “I’ll kill you.”

Angel swallowed. Suddenly, the weight of the TV seemed to double.

“You like country music?” asked the guy, reaching for the remote control and causing the CD player to light up.

“Nope,” said Angel.

From the speakers came the sound of Gram Parsons singing “We’ll Sweep Out the Ashes in the Morning.”

“Then you shit out of luck.”

Angel sighed. “Tell me about it.”

The half-naked man settled himself into a leather armchair, rearranged his towel carefully, and trained the gun on the hapless burglar.

“No,” he said. “You tell me…”

The man named Angel thought about these things, these seemingly random events that had brought him to this place, as he sat in the semidarkness. The final words of Clyde Benson, just before Angel had killed him, replayed themselves in his memory.

I made my peace with the Lord.

Then you got nothing to worry about.

He had asked for mercy but had received none.

For so much of his life, Angel had been at the mercy of others: his father; the men who had taken him in back rooms and sweat-filled apartments; the guard Hyde in Attica; the prisoner Vance in Rikers, who had decided that Angel’s continued existence was an insult that could not be tolerated, until someone else had stepped in and ensured that Vance would no longer be a danger to Angel, or to anyone else.

And then he had found this man, the man who now sat in a room below, and a new life of sorts had begun, a life in which he would no longer be the victim, in which he would no longer be at the mercy of others, and he had almost started to forget the events that had made him what he was.

Until Faulkner had chained him to a shower rail and begun to cut the skin from his back, his son and daughter holding the hanging man still, the woman licking at the sweat that broke from Angel’s brow, the man hushing him softly as he screamed through the gag. He remembered the feel of the blade, the coldness of it, the pressure on his skin before it broke through and entered the flesh beneath. All of the old ghosts had come howling back then, all of the memories, all of the suffering, and he could taste candy bars in his mouth.

Blood and candy bars.