been worn down to little more than holes with elastic banding at the top.
I felt raped, and for all the coolheadedness I'd just bragged about to Nora, I wanted to get my hands on the bastard.
Six hours later, deep into the night, the cats snoring at my feet, the phone rang.
I picked up.
"Leave it alone, Mr. Payne. Just leave it alone."
Perfectly androgynous voice. Perfectly.
"You understand, Mr. Payne?"
And then he-she hung up.
I lay back down in my bed of shadows.
Knowing that I was now lying on my back, Tasha took the opportunity to walk up my body and lie on my chest, which she had found a most inviting bed.
I hadn't had to ask what the caller wanted me to leave alone.
8
Cellmate the first year is a fifty-one-year-old farmer named Renzler. Frank Renzler.
Frank, who has told him this story so many, many times, was a farmer with a wife and two kids. Bank foreclosed on him after two bad droughts in a row, so Frank couldn't help it: one day he just picked up his hunting rifle and drove into town and blew away the banker. Took maybe one-eighth of his head off with two shots.
He cries, Frank does. No, check that. Not merely cries. Sobs. Lies on his bottom bunk and just goes nuts.
Talks about his wife. His kids. How much he loves them and misses them and all he ever wanted to be was a farmer like his old man and his grandpa and why did the bank have to foreclose on him, anyway, why did they have to, huh?
He's also the one with the bowel problems. Guy must have diarrhea three times a day. Just sits there on the crapper, no more than four, five feet away from the top bunk, and cuts away.
In the spring, Frank finds the puppy.
Nobody can explain how it got inside the prison unless it was a stowaway on one of the potato trucks that come in here twice a month.
But there one day in the machine shop where he works, just all balled up in a pile of rags, is this sweet little puppy.
And Frank (as Frank tells it) just starts bawling like a little kid. Proclaims his discovery a miracle. "I know God put the little stinker there so I'd find her, so I'd have somebody to love till they let me out of here." (That's another thing: Frank is serving life without parole, but is always pathetically alluding to the "day they let me out of here.")
All of which is too good to pass up.
He lets Frank go six weeks always keening and blubbering on about what a sweet little puppy Angel is (that's what Frank calls her, Angel, her being an emissary from God and all), and then one day late, just as everybody is leaving the shop, he sneaks in there and does it.
Understand something.
He knows exactly what he's doing.
When he was a kid, he used to do stuff like this all the time.
Used to find neighborhood puppies and take them down in the storm sewer (the one place he was expressly forbidden to go) and then he'd experiment with puppies and kittens.
Cut off one leg and see if they could hobble around. Usually start with one of the front legs.
Then he'd take the opposite leg in the rear. See if they could limp around that way.
Of course all the screaming and thrashing about and all the blood—
Well, that was part of the fun, too, not just the crippling.
So in the machine shop, with the help of a knife his two-thousand-dollars-a-month bodyguard Servic got for him, he works over the puppy real good.
In the morning, Renzler finds Angel (he hears about all this later from other cons) and falls on the floor and goes into some kind of seizure.
They never seen nothing like it before, except one con who once saw a sixth-grade girl at Catholic school have an epileptic fit.
The guards come running and they see Renzler there on the floor, and it takes four of them to hold him down.
Finally, finally, he stops screaming and throwing himself around.
Then he gets real quiet, tears streaming down his cheeks and he looks at one of the guards and says, "You gotta loan me a knife so I can kill her."
The guard looks over at Angel there on a pile of
I felt raped, and for all the coolheadedness I'd just bragged about to Nora, I wanted to get my hands on the bastard.
Six hours later, deep into the night, the cats snoring at my feet, the phone rang.
I picked up.
"Leave it alone, Mr. Payne. Just leave it alone."
Perfectly androgynous voice. Perfectly.
"You understand, Mr. Payne?"
And then he-she hung up.
I lay back down in my bed of shadows.
Knowing that I was now lying on my back, Tasha took the opportunity to walk up my body and lie on my chest, which she had found a most inviting bed.
I hadn't had to ask what the caller wanted me to leave alone.
8
Cellmate the first year is a fifty-one-year-old farmer named Renzler. Frank Renzler.
Frank, who has told him this story so many, many times, was a farmer with a wife and two kids. Bank foreclosed on him after two bad droughts in a row, so Frank couldn't help it: one day he just picked up his hunting rifle and drove into town and blew away the banker. Took maybe one-eighth of his head off with two shots.
He cries, Frank does. No, check that. Not merely cries. Sobs. Lies on his bottom bunk and just goes nuts.
Talks about his wife. His kids. How much he loves them and misses them and all he ever wanted to be was a farmer like his old man and his grandpa and why did the bank have to foreclose on him, anyway, why did they have to, huh?
He's also the one with the bowel problems. Guy must have diarrhea three times a day. Just sits there on the crapper, no more than four, five feet away from the top bunk, and cuts away.
In the spring, Frank finds the puppy.
Nobody can explain how it got inside the prison unless it was a stowaway on one of the potato trucks that come in here twice a month.
But there one day in the machine shop where he works, just all balled up in a pile of rags, is this sweet little puppy.
And Frank (as Frank tells it) just starts bawling like a little kid. Proclaims his discovery a miracle. "I know God put the little stinker there so I'd find her, so I'd have somebody to love till they let me out of here." (That's another thing: Frank is serving life without parole, but is always pathetically alluding to the "day they let me out of here.")
All of which is too good to pass up.
He lets Frank go six weeks always keening and blubbering on about what a sweet little puppy Angel is (that's what Frank calls her, Angel, her being an emissary from God and all), and then one day late, just as everybody is leaving the shop, he sneaks in there and does it.
Understand something.
He knows exactly what he's doing.
When he was a kid, he used to do stuff like this all the time.
Used to find neighborhood puppies and take them down in the storm sewer (the one place he was expressly forbidden to go) and then he'd experiment with puppies and kittens.
Cut off one leg and see if they could hobble around. Usually start with one of the front legs.
Then he'd take the opposite leg in the rear. See if they could limp around that way.
Of course all the screaming and thrashing about and all the blood—
Well, that was part of the fun, too, not just the crippling.
So in the machine shop, with the help of a knife his two-thousand-dollars-a-month bodyguard Servic got for him, he works over the puppy real good.
In the morning, Renzler finds Angel (he hears about all this later from other cons) and falls on the floor and goes into some kind of seizure.
They never seen nothing like it before, except one con who once saw a sixth-grade girl at Catholic school have an epileptic fit.
The guards come running and they see Renzler there on the floor, and it takes four of them to hold him down.
Finally, finally, he stops screaming and throwing himself around.
Then he gets real quiet, tears streaming down his cheeks and he looks at one of the guards and says, "You gotta loan me a knife so I can kill her."
The guard looks over at Angel there on a pile of
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