There is a prison on the eastern plains. You can smell Kansas from the gates.
A man sits behind its bars because a woman was raped twenty-two years ago.
She was assaulted after a party. She told the police there were three of them; she knew them; she’d seen them at the party. While the three were questioned, their relatives visited her in the hospital. Her eyes were swollen shut but she could feel the sharp point they held to her throat. She could hear her baby crying in the hallway. Afterwards, she had a dream. When she woke she remembered that it was this man who raped her. He was riding his bike with his son when they arrested him. “She was hurt pretty bad,” the jurors said. “Someone had to pay.”
This man is forty-eight. He’s been here a long time, but you wouldn’t know it. Maybe you would if you’d known him before. He is older, but newer somehow. His prison garb hangs from his wiry frame like holy garments, free of the dust from the yard that clings to everything else. His moves are composed, like a dancer’s. Even in his cell, cement blocked from the sun, he shines.
He used to be a thug. He stole clothes. He stole a lot of things. He called it boosting. His girlfriend smoked crack that he bought with his profits. “Her kind of bouquet,” he jokes. If there wasn’t enough money, she had sex for her drugs. He never used, but he drank.
His rap sheet was long for a twenty-seven year old, even in the projects. His mother likes to say, “Born on a Sunday, worth something someday. “ If you had measured the man in days of lawful living, he wouldn’t have amounted to much.
Prison changed him. It wasn’t violence or Jesus. It was something less obvious. Watching him move about the lunchroom, you get the sense that he runs some aspect of the operations here. Most of us leave our trays on the long plastic tables; he collects them. When someone chokes on rotten meat, he offers water. More than the staff, he is our keeper. The guards sense it too. Some of the younger ones even defer to him. Maybe it is just a function of the passage of time. Shelved here for twenty-two years, he was bound to pick up habits from the people he sees every day. The ones who bring him books, who sign him up for classes.
But it’s not simple obedience that marks this man. It’s not mere experience. There is a light to him. He seems bound for glory, if hopelessly off track.
Not everyone can see the light, and not everyone wants to. Some make it hard for him. “How’s that boy of yours?” the guard with the pencil moustache likes to ask. “Has he been to see you yet?”
But even the guard with the pencil moustache shakes his head at the good things that come to this man. Fortune doesn’t visit the prison often, but it’s come here for him more than once.
Maybe he’s just lucky. He wouldn’t say so.
Maybe he’s guilty. But I don’t think so.
Those lawyers from New York didn’t think so either. They wanted to help him. How they learned his name, he’s not sure.
The lawyers thought the rape kit would free him. But a crime lab isn’t a library; you can’t just check out the evidence. You need a court to grant you access. After a time, a judge finally agreed.
“The Court orders the District Attorney to retrieve the rape kit from the crime lab and preserve it for testing.”
The detective working the crime lab the day the order arrived was the original investigator on the case. Instead of preserving the evidence, he threw it away.
At the time of the trial, people were barely talking about DNA. Innocence was a matter of documentary proof and testimony. Cases like this one rose and fell on inexact blood typing analyses. Experts who said they couldn’t exclude the defendant from the guilty pool admitted that it was just that, a pool. By their estimation, there were millions of others who could have been standing over the body. So maybe back then, you wouldn’t see the harm in tossing a rape kit after a conviction. It was a shoddy witness anyway.
But things were different in 1995. By then, the testing had begun in earnest. The DNA was lighting up crime scenes, illuminating the killer holding the knife, just as surely as it eliminated another suspect altogether. Some of those accidental inmates had walked out free men. He might have been one of them. When the court told the lawyers to go and get the rape kit, it was there, on the same shelf where it had been for eight years.
And then they incinerated it.
“A mix-up,” the detective explained. “A simple mistake,” the D.A. assured the court.
“The problem,” the judge told the courtroom, “is the case law. It imposes a tough standard. You’d have to show that the evidence they destroyed would have proven you innocent.”
And then it was over. Whoever’s DNA was in the kit caught a lucky break that day. The molecular code strong enough to break a man out of prison is also flammable. Absolution was engulfed in a blaze of – what? Carelessness? Ruthlessness? Either way, it’s gone.
Before he learned about the smoldering evidence, the man made a mistake. He allowed himself to mentally pack his bags. He had already risen right up out of here, blown across Kansas and all the way to Baltimore. He smelled his mother’s Sunday mornings, coffeecake and perfume and a purple velvet sofa. It was, he vowed, the last time he would let himself believe.
But still things come his way.
The lawyers from New York took it hard; they weren’t accustomed to loss. They expected headlines and documentaries, not the quiet drive east. The sun rose while they drove away from Denver, a fiery ball low on the plains that looked nothing like the obscured sunrises of New York. Before they left, they handed the case off to a local lawyer, an old prosecutor who had once spent an entire week in a dumpster digging for a receipt.
The man was watching television one night, and there was the old prosecutor, talking about his case. And then the prosecutor was visiting him in prison, along with the television crew and a young reporter. The reporter was eager to show off the legal knowledge she’d picked up over weekends in the law library. The man discounted her; the prosecutor loathed her outright. Neither expected her to make a difference.
“He wore a curl,” the victim had told the police. “His hair was long and greasy.”
“Officers noted grease marks on the bed linens,” the detective had testified.
The reporter knew a state senator who’d started out as a public defender. The senator’s political career had been solid, but not stellar. He was looking to make his mark, so she brought him the video they had made in the prison. She handed over the court files and the letters from the New York lawyers and the transcript from the trial, where the man’s defender had barely said a word.
The file contained a picture showing the man with a head so clean-shaven it reflected the mile-high sun. He was standing outside a church. The image barely needed enhancement to read the program in his right hand, dated July 31, 1988. Two days before the rape and there wasn’t a hair on his head. The picture wasn’t marked; it had never been entered into evidence.
On the night the senator visited the prison, an early snowstorm whipped a cattle-killing wind across the plains. It took him an extra three hours to make the hundred-mile drive, stopping once for trucker coffee. When the senator arrived, most of the day shift was still here. They said they were waiting out the storm. But really, they were here to bear witness. The mark they’d seen on the man was real, they thought, and here comes proof, rolling east across the plains to right a wrong and give a man what was left of his life. By this time, most of them thought a mistake had been made, and most of the rest thought it didn’t matter anymore. They’d become shepherds of the light, except for the guard with the pencil moustache. People want some magic in their lives.
The two men sat together in the lunchroom, alone. No one could hear them, but you didn’t need to. Once, the senator put his hand on the man’s arm. At the end of the hour, they embraced.
From there a course was charted. The senator had a plan, and a back up. The last ditch involved calling in a favor from the District Attorney, whom he’d trained, at whose request the sentence could be shortened to time served.
But the first plan failed, and the second. And at three minutes to twelve on the last night of the senator’s term, the District Attorney called.
“I can’t do it,” he said. “I’m up for re-election.”
By morning, the reporter had written a story that would compromise the D.A.’s re-election effort. She had sources with unflattering information about his private life. He capitulated.
“I’ll file the motion. But he’s going to have to enter a guilty plea.”
Back in prison, the man was lying on his bunk when the old prosecutor arrived with the news. The man stared at the ceiling while he listened to the offer. He closed his eyes, and the prosecutor noticed how round they were, like a baby’s. Minutes passed; the cellblock hushed. “What are you doing?” the prosecutor finally asked.
“I’m listening. “
“For what?”
“The sound,” he said, “of Sunday.”
“What?”
The man opened his eyes and rolled to his side. “When I leave this place, it will be a Sunday.”
He dropped his voice. “Today is Friday.”
The prosecutor rubbed his brow. He’d risen from an old man’s intermittent slumber at 1 a.m., fearful that the man would reject the deal.
The cellblock heard the man’s decision: “I can’t do it.”
The prosecutor’s shoulders slumped. He let out a sigh, and looked sideways down the hall. He rose in the direction of his gaze and walked away.
The man pressed his face against the bars. “It’s not . . .”
The prosecutor stopped without turning. “Not what?”
“Not worth it.”
The prosecutor kept walking.
After a few minutes, a guard appeared to tell the man he could eat breakfast in his cell if he wanted some time alone. But the man was perched on the edge of his bed, smelling like soap and reading a book.
“No thank you. I’m ready.”
And that was it. He didn’t talk about his near escape, and no one asked him to. The routine was resumed, and he seemed relieved for it.
The guards thought they understood him then. He likes it here. They nodded in agreement. He’s afraid to be on the outside.
It’s been too long.
It had been a long time. Million-dollar lofts had replaced the projects where he’d lived. Artists and coffee houses populated the Five Points ghetto. Most of the people he’d known were dead or gone, and the rest were reformed. The drug trade had been pushed out to the neon-lit suburb bordering the city’s northeast side.
He didn’t know what he would do on the outside. One of his lawyers had sent him a book about men freed by DNA and how hard it was for them to start over. Like those men, he had never held a job and didn’t know if he could.
Most people on the inside are guilty of something. Maybe their sentence was too harsh or they’ve been reborn, but they live with the knowledge that they put themselves here, by mistake or way of life. And that knowledge tinges them.
Most people on the outside have their regrets. They’ve done something they swore they’d never do. Maybe they lied to their wife or spanked their children. And that disappointment dims a person. They wonder whether they deserve whatever it is they have.
A very few live like this man. Like the tree that consumes the cord wound round its trunk, he’s internalized his scars. At first, he said, he figured he owed some time. The routine was redemption, prison food his penance. After five years, though, he ran out of justification for missing his son’s childhood. He’d done some bad things, but not rape. Not murder, like some of the inmates. The last time he’d seen his son, the boy was small enough to balance on bicycle handlebars. The only children who show up here are the tattered offspring of the residents, wide-eyed and wretched. At least his son would never be haunted by this place.
He wasn’t sure when he reached the tipping point. He was staring at the ceiling listening to the old prosecutor when he realized that no matter what came next, there was no undoing this part of his life. He has spent almost as many days as a wrongful convict as he had a petty criminal. And he has something to show for his time here. A record. A truth. What would his future be worth if he traded the best part of his past?
Not long ago, his computer instructor confided in him. The teacher, a former community college professor, was wearing a three-day stubble and the same clothes as the previous Saturday. As the two men stared at the computer screen, the teacher started talking. He talked about his marriage, which was ending, and his car, which he’d been living out of for three weeks. His electric razor had run out of batteries. “She finally got tired of my mood swings, you know?”
And the man felt sorry for him. No, he thought, he didn’t know. No one had been tired of him, not in a long time. Most people considered him with a mixture of pity and admiration, not irritation. Not loathing. He’s even become a cause for some.
Maybe that explains the shine. He’s lived more like an honest man than a thief now. He knows he deserves better. And how many people can say the same?
About the author:
Jennifer Sullivan practices law in Boulder, Colorado. Her essay “Home Repairs” is forthcoming in the May issue of Self Magazine. “The Shine” won second place in the 2009 Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition. It is her first fiction publication.
