The Life We Bury by Allen Eskens Page A

day we first met, and now he was telling me his Leave-It-To-Beaver upbringing, all the while hiding that dark tangent that shifted his world onto an axis the rest of us could neverunderstand. I wanted to cry bullshit. Instead, I nodded and prodded and listened as he painted his world egg-shell white.
    It was during the second hour of our interview when he said, “And that's when the US government invited me to go to Vietnam.” Finally, I thought, an event that might explain the monster. Carl had grown weak from all the talking he was doing, so he put his hands on his lap, leaned back in his wheelchair, and closed his eyes. I watched the scar on his neck pulse as blood passed through his carotid artery.
    â€œIs Vietnam where you got that scar?” I asked.
    He touched the line on his neck. “No, I got that in prison. This psychopathic Aryan Brother tried to cut my head off.”
    â€œAryan Brother? Aren't those the white guys?”
    â€œThey are,” he said.
    â€œI thought the different races stuck up for each other in prison.”
    â€œNot when you're a convicted child molester—which I was. The different gangs have dibs on the sex offenders of their own race.”
    â€œDibs?”
    â€œSex offenders are the runts of the prison litter. If you get shit on, you take it out on the runt; if you need to earn a tear tattoo, to show you're a tough guy, why not kill the runt; if you need a bitch…well, you get the picture.”
    I cringed inside but kept my composure so that he wouldn't see my revulsion.
    â€œOne day, about three months after I got to Stillwater, I was on my way to dinner. That's the most dangerous time of the day. They send two hundred guys at a time to the mess hall. In that crowd, the shivs come out. There's no keeping track of who did what to whom.”
    â€œIsn't there a place where you can get out of the general population? Oh…what's it called…protective custody or something like that?”
    â€œSegregation,” he said. “Seg for short. Yeah, I could have asked for seg, but I didn't.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œBecause at that point in my life, living didn't matter all that much to me.”
    â€œSo how'd you get the scar?”
    â€œThere was this big gorilla named Slattery who tried to get me to…well, let's just say he was lonely for some companionship. Said he'd cut my throat if I didn't give him what he wanted. I told him he'd be doing me a favor.”
    â€œSo he cut your throat?”
    â€œNo. That's not how it works. He was a boss, not a worker. He had some punk do it, some kid looking to make a name for himself. I didn't even see it happen. I felt a warm liquid running down my shoulder. I put my hand up to my throat and felt the blood spurting out of my neck. Nearly died. After they patched me up, they forced me into seg. Stayed there most of the rest of my thirty years: noisy, surrounded by concrete almost every hour of the day. It could drive a man crazy.”
    â€œIs prison where you met your ‘brother’?” I asked.
    â€œMy brother?”
    â€œVirgil—wasn't that his name?”
    â€œAh, Virgil.” He took in a deep breath, as if to sigh, and a wave of pain jolted him upright in his chair. The blood drained from his fingers as he gripped the sides of his wheelchair. “I think…” he said, tapping out a series of short breaths, as if he were giving birth, waiting for the pain to pass. “That story's…gonna have to wait…for another day.” He waved a nurse over, asking her for his medication. “I'm afraid…I'm going to be asleep…in a very short while.”
    I thanked him for his time, picked up my backpack and recorder, and headed out. I stopped briefly at the front desk to fish my wallet out of my pocket and find the business card Virgil Gray had given to me. The time had come for me to hear from the one person in the world who believed Carl to