Ed sat speechless behind the wheel.
‘You coming?’ I asked.
‘When you’re my age, screw Driver’s Ed.
I’m gonna teach you to drive.
And then you, me and Ange’ll go for another ride.
Deal?’
‘Deal,’ I said.
I climbed out,
stood on the sidewalk.
He stayed where he was, staring out the
windshield.
I knocked on the passenger window. ‘Ed?’
He turned to me and winked.
‘Tell Karen I’ve gone to get milk,’ he said, and
pulled away again slowly.
Karen squealed. I smirked.
But while we waited for him to return
I got to thinking,
even way back then
when I was too young to understand much:
you can know all the facts you want about
a person
– height, weight, the way they like their eggs –
but you’ll never know for sure what’s
driving his heart.
ED NEVER CAME BACK
Ed didn’t return with the milk
or Aunt Karen’s car.
We waited all evening, night,
the next day
and the rest of the week,
but by Sunday
it was clear –
he was gone.
‘You owe me the cost of a car,’ Aunt Karen told Mom.
‘It’s your own fault – you gave him the keys.
I wouldn’t trust Ed with a toothbrush.’
They argued.
Screamed and shouted,
Mom swearing at the top of her lungs
that she was fed up with the whole damn lot of us,
Aunt Karen storming home,
riding the bus since she’d nothing to drive.
‘You won’t go too, will you?’ I asked Angela,
tucked up next to her in an armchair,
eating nachos.
‘Don’t worry,’ she told me.
‘Everything’s gonna blow over,
go back to normal.
You’ll see.’
But since when had our family been ‘normal’?
Since
never.
WHY HE LEFT …
I was in the next room making a space rocket from
two cardboard boxes Ed had brought home.
Their voices came through from the kitchen,
quiet at first then louder and louder
until I couldn’t ignore them.
‘You forgot to get bread for Joe’s lunch,’ Ed said.
‘So go to the store. You have money,’ Mom told him.
‘Yeah, but I’m not his parent.’
‘Well, no, but you sure as hell act like mine.’
Silence.
‘You know,
it’s about time you got your own place,’
Mom said.
‘You’re kicking me out?’ Ed asked.
‘You’re like your father,
and he wasn’t very likeable.’
‘Well, thank God I’m not like you.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Oh, come on, Mom. Look at you. You’re a joke.’
‘What?’
‘A. Joke. Everyone knows it. Even Joe.’
‘Take that back.’
‘No. You’re either drunk or hung-over.’
‘So get out.’
‘No.’
‘I said get out! It’s my house.’
More silence.
A smack.
Ed tumbled out of the kitchen,
one cheek
flashing pink.
‘I can’t take this any more,’ he said.
It was a few days later that
he took off in Karen’s car.
NELL
‘For you. From Sue,’ a voice says,
making me jump.
I knock my head against the hood and
drop the car battery.
A girl is standing with a
tray balanced between two hands.
She places a plate of eggs, a bottle of water,
on the roof of the car,
pulls a plastic fork from the
pocket of her apron,
hands it to me.
She’s wearing a bowling shirt like Sue’s,
the name Nell embroidered in black.
She turns and struts off.
But I don’t want her to leave.
I want to talk to someone,
have a regular conversation
where I’m not begging for something or
having to explain what I’m doing here.
‘You work at the diner?’
It’s the only question I’ve got.
She stops. Turns.
‘Do you have an above average IQ?
You’re very sharp.
You should be on a game show.’
I call out.
‘Wanna share my water?’
I hold it aloft,
jiggle it about,
try to be funny,
pretty sure I look and sound like an idiot.
She grins.
‘I hear that stuff can kill you.’
She marches off.
The laces of her sneakers trail on the ground;
her hair is tied haphazardly on top of her head
and wobbles when she walks.
I’m about to shout again,
a third-time-lucky kind of thing,
but don’t.
Sweat has pooled at the base of my back,
my head hammers from the heat.
I need to eat.
Still standing,
I gorge on the almost-cold scrambled eggs
in a few greedy bites,
guzzle down the water too,
and I’m about to get back to rooting around
under the hood
when my phone rings.
A PRIZE
‘Al Mitchell here. Is that Joe?’
Ed’s lawyer sounds breezy,
not at all as serious as I’d imagined he would be,
and for a second I wonder
if Ed is
off the hook,
if we can fly back to New York together and
pretend none of this happened.
I know we’ll never be the Waltons,
but maybe we could be a messed-up family again.
‘Hello, Mr Mitchell,’ I say.
‘Nice to speak to you finally, Joe.
Angela’s told me a lot about you.
I’ve already called her.
I have good news.’
He pauses.
Takes a breath.
And I do too.
‘We got you full visitation rights to the row, Joe.
The warden’s secretary called my office,
said you can visit today.
And every day after that at two.’
I don’t reply.
This is good news?
That I can see my brother,
talk about girls and cook-outs,
do my best to haul his mind
away from the truth?
This isn’t something to celebrate:
this is just bad news turned upside down,
bad news inflated and painted
to twinkle like a prize.
‘I’ve lost you, Joe,’ Mr Mitchell says.
‘I think the connection’s bad.’
‘Thank you,’ I say.
And then, ‘I’ll visit this afternoon.’
The lawyer detects my disappointment,
tries again.
‘We still have one round left at state level.
Then we’ve got the US Supreme Court
and the governor.
I believe we can do this.
It’s not the end.
We save men all the time.
Oh,
and Joe?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Please call me Al.’
THE CHECKLIST
I look for a scrap of paper and the nub of a pencil
on the back seat of the car
so I can
scribble down
the three parts of the process left:
the state court,
the Supreme Court,
the governor.
I want to remember
what we are waiting for,
what to expect.
But I can’t find anything to write with.
And I guess it’s unlikely I’ll forget
Ed’s three slim chances
of getting out of here.
POOR JUSTICE
Ed didn’t have a lawyer for years.
After a few rounds in court
he was no longer entitled to a public defender
and we couldn’t afford to pay anyone
to represent him.
Ed was just left in Texas to rot
and we didn’t know what to do about it.
Wasn’t until he got his date through
that Angela wrote to every non-profit
in the country
and eventually found Al Mitchell,
who agreed to take on the case
for free
as charity.
And for the first time someone listened
and
made us think a different outcome was possible.
Al also explained to Angela
that most guys on the row don’t have a lawyer
and
spend half their time
begging for representation
or
studying the law themselves.
‘Like your brother did,’ he’d told her,
though we hadn’t known Ed
was educating himself in the law from his cell.
‘God. It’s better to be guilty and rich,
I reckon,’ I’d told Angela.
It was a couple of nights before I flew down to Texas.
We were eating noodles from boxes.
‘No doubt!’ Angela agreed.
‘But now we’ve got Al, we’ve got hope.
He said the whole case was based on bullshit.’
I chewed on chow mein
but didn’t respond.
Hope wasn’t really
my area of expertise.
DISTRACTION
I poke and pull at the car,
hands plastered in oil,
and don’t stop until one o’clock,
when the sun has cooked me through.
Then I take off without telling anyone.
I don’t want to go to the prison.
But I can’t be late either.
WHO IS EDWARD MOON?
A text comes through from Aunt Karen:
A lawyer by the name of
Alan Mitchell called.
Said you’re visiting Ed today.
Are you sure about this, Joe?
And of course the answer is
no.
I mean, who the hell is Edward Moon?
He was my brother
but I hardly know him now.
Last time I saw him I was seven years old.
What if I don’t like him?
And he might hate me.
We could sit there gaping,
wondering what the fuck to discuss and
counting down every awkward minute,
a bit like those parent–teacher conferences
where everyone is so frickin’ polite
and you can’t even make eye contact
with a person who’s been teaching
you every day for two semesters.
I’m not sure about any of this.
But I’m here now.
And seeing Ed
is why I’ve come.
PARENT–TEACHER CONFERENCE
Ed showed up for my parent–teacher conference in
ripped jeans.
I sat opposite my first grade teacher,
watched her features as she yabbered,
noted Ed listening,
wondered how much he understood
cos I couldn’t follow any of it:
tardiness, attainment, literacy.
Afterwards
Ed conjured up a candy bar from his denim jacket.
‘I swiped that, so please enjoy,’ he said,
not a hint of shame,
maybe even a slice of pride.
He never usually admitted to stealing stuff
even though I knew he couldn’t afford
the sneakers he wore
or the phone he used.
At home,
Mom was in bed.
‘It was parent–teacher night,’ Ed explained
from her bedroom doorway.
She groaned.
‘God, I forgot. Do they think you’ll graduate?’
‘It was mine,’ I corrected her.
Ed walked away.
Mom pulled back her blanket,
gestured for me to join her.
‘I have homework,’ I lied.
Mom didn’t protest. ‘Close the door.’
My hands were coated in candy bar chocolate and
Ed stood behind me while
I washed them in the basin,
one hand on my shoulder.
‘Mom cares more than she shows,’ he said.
‘Does she?’ I asked.
I was six.
Six years old, still wetting the bed,
no parent to walk me to school
make my bagged lunch.
And even then
I knew better
than to believe him.
SECTION A
‘The row’s apart from the rest of the prison,’
a guard says,
leading me out of the main building
into the heat.
He points the way to Section A
where Ed’s
locked up with the other death row inmates,
the damned safely separated
from the merely bad.
The Section A office is smaller, stuffier,
grey walls instead of green.
A massive guard, built like a marine,
looks up
from his desk.
‘I’m here to see Edward Moon,’ I say.
He stands slowly, sighing,
palm against his lower back.
‘You’re the brother.’
‘Yeah. Joseph Moon.’
I feel really young suddenly,
like I’m about to get grilled by the principal,
like I’m here cos I’ve done something dishonest myself.
‘ID,’ he says.
I hand over my driver’s licence
and he points to my backpack.
‘No bags.’
I open the top pocket,
take out a bottle of water.
The guard shakes his head.
‘Did you read the conditions of visitation?’
He licks his lips,
surprises me by speaking softly.
‘Got anything else, son? Penknife? Recording device?’
I hand over my phone and
he crams everything into a locker,
gives me a ticket like a cloakroom clerk and says,
‘This way.’
I’m led through a
sliding door,
a floor-to-ceiling metal gate
then
another entryway
that squeals as it
opens,
clangs as it
shuts.
So many doors and bars, but no windows,
not even high up,
out of reach,
to let natural daylight strain into the hall.
It’s all fluorescent lighting,
flickering and humming,
like the building itse
lf is
strung out.
From somewhere close by comes a holler –
a laugh, barbed and desperate.
The concrete walls press in on me,
my chest tightens.
Another gate,
opened and closed –
more clanging, crashing,
slamming, squealing.
The marine-guard studies my expression.
‘You’ll get used to it. We all do,’ he says,
like he could possibly know
how I feel.
I want to tell him to go
suck it
but
I think I might be sick.
I’m led
along a hallway,
a sign above it:
DEATH ROW,
words printed in sloping
red capitals
like a vicious warning.
‘I can’t let you see him if you’re gonna lose it.
Understand?’ the marine-guard asks.
‘Yes,’ I say,
understanding that despite
where I am and why I’m here,
I have to pretend I’m cool;
I have to pretend that visiting Ed
isn’t making me feel like someone’s
grabbing,
pulling at my guts with their
bare hands.
Maybe I should whistle too.
Would that help everyone feel better?
He taps a ton of numbers into
a keypad on the wall
before elbowing open the final door –
the door to the
visiting room.
THE VISITING ROOM
A row of five booths,
hard chairs in each of them and