Vengeance. Zachary Lazar

on the still-emerging sets with tape measures, levels, hammers, and saws were not hired carpenters but inmates. The man standing next to me in the Texas Longhorns cap with the Nikon camera was an inmate. He was a reporter for the prison magazine, he told me, covering the same story I was covering. A man who happens to be the son of God is betrayed, convicted, and sentenced to death. On the third day, he rises from the grave to save the world with a message not of retribution but of mercy.

      As I said, I’d begun to lose track of what was happening almost as soon as Deborah parked her truck, and this sensation didn’t stop—I was alone, and began to wander, talking to more and more people on the edges of the action, writing down what they said, although little of it registered clearly. When I wrote down the word murder, for example, it didn’t register much more than if I were a nurse writing the word allergy in a medical chart. The reporter in the baseball cap was a murderer. He’d set his girlfriend’s house on fire then shot her to death. I couldn’t get this past act to match up with his present—in the arena, he was just a middle-aged man, small, soft-spoken, with a slightly sunken-in, sunburned face. Like almost every other inmate at Angola, he was expected to die on the prison grounds. In Louisiana, a life sentence literally means life. There’s almost no parole. The state also has the highest rate of incarceration of any place in the world.

      “A life sentence comes with an exclamation mark and a question mark,” one inmate told me. “Wow!” And then, “When this gonna end?”

      “Imagine you’re trapped in a barn,” another inmate said. “Now imagine that the barn is on fire. You will do anything you can to get out of that barn. You will do anything you have to to get out of that barn.”

      Murder, kidnapping, rape, drug addiction, poverty, abuse, all pointing to the terminus: life in prison. Deborah had told me to come without expectations, to not prepare, and it was true, I didn’t need to prepare, or even ask any questions beyond the most basic ones, but I didn’t know what a burden of information was there waiting for me. I interviewed more than forty people over the course of that week, and what they told me filled up more than ninety pages of typewritten notes. After a while, I became an ear and an eye, nothing else. I found it impossible to go to the bathroom or even find a drink of water much of the time, because on my way to do either I would be interrupted with another story, another tragedy, another life presented for my appraisal.

      Imagine you’re trapped in a barn. Now imagine that the barn is on fire.

      The inmate who said that was Kendrick King, who was thirty-one, in the ninth year of his life sentence. As it happened, I recognized his face from one of Deborah’s photos—even in black and white, you could sense what Deborah called Kendrick’s “Weimaraner eyes,” a striking glint that in real life turned out to be the product of his caramel-colored irises. He was tall and wore knee-high rubber boots and a baseball cap with its bill folded in a way that made his face look gaunt, slightly spectral. He cuffed his jeans in meticulous folds over the tops of his boots. Because Deborah had mentioned him, and because I’d seen his photo, I’d looked up his case before we met, and that was how I knew that Kendrick King might be serving life for a murder he’d had nothing to do with. I still don’t know if he had anything to do with it. When I tell friends this story, they look at me as if I’m naïve. What I tell them is that almost none of the inmates I spoke to that week claimed to be innocent. Even Kendrick King didn’t make that claim until I prompted him by telling him what I knew. What I knew was what I read from the Times-Picayune of May 2, 2004:

      A Jefferson Parish jury convicted a Westwego man for his role in a murder last year despite his claims that police coerced a confession from him.

      Kendrick King, 22, will spend the rest of his life in prison, the mandatory sentence for second degree murder.

      That first time we spoke, we stood in the shade and he told me his crime (murder) and his sentence (life without parole) and his roles in the play (Man in Crowd, Shepherd Three)—answers to the questions I asked everyone, which usually led to them telling me their whole life stories. As we talked, it came out that Kendrick’s mother was from Saint Lucia and that he’d spent a part of his childhood in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and so we made small talk for a while—the carnival parade in Crown Heights, the beef patties and the colorful flags of the different islands, the soca music and the reggae, those big vines of grapelike fruit whose thick skin you peel back to reveal the delicately flavored plumlike innards. Guineps. Ackee. We talked for a while like this, Kendrick bemused that I’d heard of any of these things, and then we compared cities—he’d lived in New York, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Castries, New Orleans. I’d been to all of those places, including Castries, St. Lucia, so we traded some memories.

      “I have to tell you,” I finally said. “I know a little bit about your case. I mean, what was in the newspaper.”

      He looked at me, then examined his fingernails, his hand down by his waist.

      “I guess what I’m trying to ask you is, it sounds like maybe you were pressured by the police to tell them about something you didn’t do,” I said.

      “I didn’t say anything. I never confessed to anything.”

      He stood with one of his feet against the wall, a hand braced on his bent knee, as if about to elaborate, but he seemed blocked by a sense of futility. Perhaps he’d told the story so many times that it no longer had a beginning or an end, only a series of entry points, and so there was no obvious place to start. The phone records that showed he was at his girlfriend’s house at the time of the crime. The Mazda that his girlfriend had with her at work all day. The pair of shoes at his mother’s house. I’ve since come to learn all the minutiae of Kendrick’s case. When I try to explain it, I feel blocked myself—blocked and hopelessly unpersuasive.

      “You saw the paper,” he said. “There’s a lot of the story in there, but it’s confusing. That’s always the problem. I could have pled out and got years, not life, but I didn’t want to do that, I didn’t want to lie. My own attorney told me we should just go ahead, go to trial, say the truth, but the truth was too confusing. Many people in here have that story. Many people in here had the same problem in one form or another.”

      “But if you weren’t involved, it’s not confusing, it’s simple.”

      “There’s nothing simple in the legal system. You know that. Especially not when you’re a young man who looked like I did.”

      I hadn’t told him anything about myself yet. I hadn’t mentioned my reason for being there, or raised the possibility that I wasn’t precisely the kind of person I might look like I was. There were obvious differences between us, and beneath them there were hidden, more mysterious differences, but there were also things we both understood. I don’t want to sound wistful, but I think part of what kept us talking was that the fundamental problem of what we didn’t and couldn’t know was understood.

      He had a tattoo on the inside of his forearm, dark green against his brown skin. It was a Star of David, or at least it was a six-pointed star, and because I wanted to change the subject, I asked him about it. I wondered if it was a Rastafarian symbol, knowing his Caribbean background, but he said no, it was a Theosophical symbol. He’d studied Theosophy in Angola, among other things, in his nine years there. The tattoo represented the male principle in balance with the female principle, one triangle for each. It was also a Seal of Solomon, he said, used to drive away demons. The biblical King Solomon had worn a ring with the symbol, half of it made of brass, half of iron; he signed commands to the good spirits with the brass side, to the evil spirits with the iron. I wrote all this in my notebook—star of David tattoo is really Theosophy, 2 pyramids joined, Male/Female, good/evil, Eileen Baker in Pasadena, CA, was Theosophy instructor for K., Theos Society gives free books to inmates—glad to have moved on to something other than the story of what had brought him here.

      “I don’t know how you deal with the day-to-day of this place,” I said.

      “There are ways.”

      “Bible study.”

      “You asked if they coerced me, the police, yeah, of course they coerced me. They had me detained for almost ten hours. There’s