Vengeance. Zachary Lazar

put photos in front of you, leave you alone with photos of someone’s head blown open. They do that for ten hours. Say they know you’re guilty, they have witnesses saying you’re guilty. Then it’s, ‘We can make it easy for you, or we can make it hard for you.’ It’s not torture, but it’s a kind of torture.”

      “So you said what?”

      “I said what I had to say. That’s what people do. That’s what everyone does.”

      They were rehearsing the crucifixion scene behind us as we spoke. The previous night I’d had thick dreams that left me disoriented and vaguely anxious, and now before me, as in one of those dreams, a group of four men in oversized white T-shirts was overseeing the torture of a man playing Jesus whom they led down a staircase toward the cross. Seventy or so onlookers were pretending to weep or jeer or stare in awe. One of the prison guards was laughing at something in the distance. My escort was, as usual, not around, though she was supposed to be monitoring my questions. I wasn’t supposed to be asking questions about the inmates’ cases. I watched as Jesus, now bearing the wooden cross, was hounded around the dusty arena by a mob of persecutors casting fake stones. On the dirt mound to one side, the two other crosses had already been raised up on their hinges and two other men playing thieves had been strung up, sagging there from the gibbets.

      “Imagine that you’re in a barn,” Kendrick was saying now. Now imagine that the barn is on fire . . .

      He was being pulled away to go rehearse—along with his bit part in the play, he was one of the singers in the chorus, the Shepherds. I was a little relieved that we could stop talking for a while. As we both moved farther into the arena, toward those three crosses on their mound of dirt, he asked me if I’d call his mother when I got back to New Orleans. I wrote her number down in my notebook and told him I’d think about it. Or maybe I didn’t even say I’d think about it. Maybe I just said I would, or at least that I’d try.

      I saw Deborah sitting at a picnic table near some inmates beneath a huge plastic tent as I stood in the line for lunch. She looked exhausted, her sunglasses on, not even noticing me. I said before that I could hardly get away for a drink of water or a trip to the bathroom, and that was true in one sense, but in another sense, it could not have been true because I sometimes managed to sneak away for a few moments of privacy, smoking a cigarette outside the arena, alone, trying to absorb what I’d heard. There was a blue brick cube designated inmate restroom, all of its walls decorated with a cartoon of a po-faced convict in prison stripes, a ball and chain around his ankle. There were boarded-up concessions stands for the rodeo:

      Camp “C” Concept Club

      Boiled peanuts $3.00

      Hog cracklins $5.00

      Pig tails $1.00

      Lunch was a pile of gluey rice with yellow gravy and some starchy vegetable the same color. Deborah had been joined by a few women prisoners when I sat down with her. They were talking about St. Gabriel, where in the past Deborah had been to shoot pictures on Mardi Gras and Halloween, the women in costumes, and on Christmas, when their children came to visit the decorated prison. The budget had been slashed since then—no more Mardi Gras, Christmas scaled back to almost nothing. One of the women said that last year all the kids received the same boxed Christmas gift: a ball, a tiny toy truck, a plastic cup. Her son had looked at the cup in particular and said, “It’s a cup,” uncertain as to how it could be construed as a gift. “Why can’t they give one Xbox game for the same money?” she asked, for she knew that her son had understood the stigma of the cup.

      I was seated a little ways down, across from a woman named Mary Bell, who was pretty and who was being eyed this whole time by virtually every man under that huge plastic tent. She was sending out secret gazes to a million points behind me, very discreetly, her eye movements almost undetectable, though she was constantly looking, constantly smiling. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a face move the way Mary Bell’s face was moving that day, taking in all that attention after so long with no attention.

      I’d been hungry, but now, after eating about half of my food, I was sated, overly full, though I felt ashamed at not being able to finish. There was the pile of rice, gravy, that colorless vegetable. The inmates left, their plates clean. I looked back over my notebook at what Kendrick had just told me and I thought about telling it all to Deborah, but every time I recounted such stories they lost their weightiness and became mere anecdotes. Instead, I put my pen away and looked back down at my plate.

      “My next project,” Deborah said, “is kittens. Color photos of kittens.”

      “You’re tired of despair?”

      “Kitties in sweaters. Santa suits.”

      “There’s always hopelessness. You could try that.”

      “How do you like it so far? Are you adapting to prison life?”

      “I don’t think so. I think I’m at a total loss so far.”

      She smiled, her eyes hidden by her sunglasses. “Well, that doesn’t sound very good.”

      That night, I stayed up until two o’clock while Deborah slept, transcribing the day’s notes onto my laptop. Most of them would be meaningless after twenty-four hours, single words that triggered paragraphs of associations as I typed them out. When I finished, I did another Internet search of “Kendrick King” and found the old Times-Picayune article, then I pulled up a court record that was eight pages of blurry single-spaced text. After five hours of transcribing the shorthand in my notebook, I couldn’t penetrate much of the court document. There were two other people, a man and a woman, who were almost certainly involved in the murder that Kendrick was imprisoned for, but what Kendrick’s role in it all was I still couldn’t say. I went outside for a cigarette break and the cigarette break reminded me of freedom—I knew it was a cliché, but I felt it powerfully. I was free to think about Kendrick’s case or not to, though that wasn’t really true: I kept thinking about it. Above me, the night sky was full of stars—Orion, the hunter, and a white moon like a desiccated slice of lime.

      That whole week, Deborah and I didn’t talk much about why we were there, though we spent a lot of time together when we weren’t working—driving to dinner, having a drink in our rooms. It was as if to put in words what we were investigating would dissolve whatever it was we were both privately trying to see. I was trying to see everything clearly, but I realize that I missed at least as much that week as I took in. On the morning of the first dress rehearsal, for example, they were all getting their costumes on in the warren of livestock chutes beneath the arena’s grandstand—I remember that. I remember Vernon “Vicious” Washington, the superheavyweight boxing champion of Angola, walking comically out of the makeshift dressing room in full biblical dress and a white headwrap, but no shoes on his enormous dust-covered feet. (“They run off with the props,” he’d said, explaining the lack of sandals.) I remember the actress who was playing Mary being nearly thrown off the back of the donkey, who it turned out had not been quarantined after all and who was braying with a rich, horn-like call that sounded like a Jewish shofar, only louder. I hadn’t been able to figure out who was blowing a horn until I finally went out to look and saw it was the donkey, bucking and rearing, the actress trying to hold on in her biblical tunic and veil, her posture one of helpless resignation. I remember that after everyone was dressed, there was this poignant vision: a long queue of men in one chute, a long queue of women in another, separated by brown bars, waiting for the sound technicians to fit them with their microphones, while in their outlandish costumes they talked in pairs across the bars all down the line—one-to-one, man-to-woman, without exception—as if involved in some sort of Bible-themed speed dating. It reminded me of Mary Bell at lunch the other day, sending those almost imperceptible smiles to the men behind me. I remember an excitement and focus to those conversations that was reminiscent of high school. I remember all that, but what I missed was some fracas in the distance, a scuffling that was over almost as soon as it began. I learned later what it was. It was two actors, a man and woman, who’d been detained by the guards for embracing each other too long. I heard a rumor later that they were husband and wife.

      So you see, I often missed what really happened, even