The Best American Noir of the Century

In there, in Allison Roche’s landscape, I saw how her heart had responded to this man she called Spanky, not Henry Lake Spanning. She did not call him, in there, by the name of a monster; she called him a honey’s name. I didn’t know if he was innocent or not, but she knew he was innocent. At first she had responded to just talking with him, about being brought up in an orphanage, and she was able to relate to his stories of being used and treated like chattel, and how they had stripped him of his dignity, and made him afraid all the time. She knew what that was like. And how he’d always been on his own. The running-away. The being captured like a wild thing, and put in this home or that lockup or the orphanage “for his own good.” Washing stone steps with a tin bucket full of gray water, with a horsehair brush and a bar of lye soap, till the tender folds of skin between the fingers were furiously red and hurt so much you couldn’t make a fist.

She tried to tell me how her heart had responded, with a language that has never been invented to do the job. I saw as much as I needed, there in that secret landscape, to know that Spanning had led a miserable life, but that somehow he’d managed to become a decent human being. And it showed through enough when she was face to face with him, talking to him without the witness box between them, without the adversarial thing, without the tension of the courtroom and the gallery and those parasite creeps from the tabloids sneaking around taking pictures of him, that she identified with his pain. Hers had been not the same, but similar; of a kind, if not of identical intensity.

She came to know him a little.

And came back to see him again. Human compassion. In a moment of human weakness.

Until, finally, she began examining everything she had worked up as evidence, trying to see it from his point of view, using his explanations of circumstantiality. And there were inconsistencies. Now she saw them. Now she did not turn her prosecuting attorney’s mind from them, recasting them in a way that would railroad Spanning; now she gave him just the barest possibility of truth. And the case did not seem as incontestable.

By that time, she had to admit to herself, she had fallen in love with him. The gentle quality could not be faked; she’d known fraudulent kindness in her time.

I left her mind gratefully. But at least I understood.

“Now?” she asked.

Yes, now. Now I understood. And the fractured glass in her voice told me. Her face told me. The way she parted her lips in expectation, waiting for me to reveal what my magic journey had conveyed by way of truth. Her palm against her cheek. All that told me. And I said, “Yes.”

Then, silence, between us.

After a while she said, “I didn’t feel anything.”

I shrugged. “Nothing to feel. I was in for a few seconds, that’s all.”

“You didn’t see everything?”

“No.”

“Because you didn’t want to?”

“Because…”

She smiled. “I understand, Rudy.”

Oh, do you? Do you really? That’s just fine. And I heard me say, “You made it with him yet?”

I could have torn off her arm; it would’ve hurt less.

“That’s the second time today you’ve asked me that kind of question. I didn’t like it much the first time, and I like it less this time.”

“You’re the one wanted me to go into your head. I didn’t buy no ticket for the trip.”

“Well, you were in there. Didn’t you look around enough to find out?”

“I didn’t look for that.”

“What a chickenshit, wheedling, lousy and cowardly…”

“I haven’t heard an answer, Counselor. Kindly restrict your answers to a simple yes or no.”

“Don’t be ridiculous! He’s on Death Row!”

“There are ways.”

“How would you know?”

“I had a friend. Up at San Rafael. What they call Tamal. Across the bridge from Richmond, a little north of San Francisco.”

“That’s San Quentin.”

“That’s what it is, all right.”

“I thought that friend of yours was at Pelican Bay?”

“Different friend.”

“You seem to have a lot of old chums in the joint in California.”

“It’s a racist nation.”

“I’ve heard that.”

“But Q ain’t Pelican Bay. Two different states of being. As hard time as they pull at Tamal, it’s worse up to Crescent City. In the Shoe.”

“You never mentioned ‘a friend’ at San Quentin.”

“I never mentioned a lotta shit. That don’t mean I don’t know it. I am large, I contain multitudes.”

We sat silently, the three of us: me, her, and Walt Whitman. We’re fighting, I thought. Not make-believe, dissin’ some movie we’d seen and disagreed about; this was nasty. Bone nasty and memorable. No one ever forgets this kind of fight. Can turn dirty in a second, say some trash you can never take back, never forgive, put a canker on the rose of friendship for all time, never be the same look again.