Vengeance. Zachary Lazar

and in the hooded robe that was his costume, sipping coffee by himself on a wooden bench. It was not just the monk-like robe that made him look baleful—his mood that day was different, menacing and closed off. It seemed to take him a few seconds to even recognize me. He looked off to one side, down a line of large blue plastic barrels full of bottled water, perhaps ashamed of some things he’d told me earlier. The day before, he’d claimed that he knew who’d really committed the murder he was incarcerated for: it was a young man who was only twenty at the time. He said that he would never divulge the man’s name, that he couldn’t put someone like that in prison, even if it meant getting out himself—he knew too much now about what it was like here, no one deserved to be in a place like this. He shared this with me on a set of crowded bleachers, in everyone’s view (in prison, unless you’re in solitary confinement, there’s almost never any privacy), and he looked straight into my eyes, his own eyes moistening in urgency and embarrassment by the end. He looked straight ahead at nothing for a while, then finally raised his chin at another inmate, not in friendship or greeting but in something like simple acknowledgment. It occurred to me that life there was an unending performance shaped by the constant gazes of other people. It was impossible to know what to believe. Self-deprecation, self-awareness, ironic distance—these traits of sincerity can be faked but can they be faked beyond detection? If Kendrick was a liar, then he practiced the art of lying at a preternaturally subtle level that I’ve seldom seen matched in any other art form, which is to say that the performance contained no trace of artifice.

      It was the day of the first performance when I found him on that bench in his robe with his coffee. Along with his costume, he was wearing a wristwatch he liked to wear, its band a braid of white plastic, its thickly bezeled face vaguely nautical. I asked him if his mother was coming—there was a free bus from New Orleans he’d mentioned before—but he said he didn’t think so, he hadn’t heard from her, things were not good for him right now.

      “I ain’t seen my daughter in nine years,” he said then. “She’s twelve now. You have kids?”

      “No.”

      “No kids?”

      “We didn’t want any. It was by choice.”

      He became scientifically neutral, assessing this. “I was hoping my daughter would come out today,” he said.

      “I’m sorry.”

      “I know you can’t do nothing for me. I understand that. You’re not a lawyer. That’s not why you’re here.”

      He said he was done with the courts anyway, done with filing briefs—his appeals process had been exhausted years ago. He said that his one hope now was that someday he might get legal asylum in Saint Lucia, his mother’s birth country, where he qualified for citizenship. That was his last chance—if they weren’t going to give him parole, then maybe they’d at least let him go to Saint Lucia, where his family came from.

      I said I hoped so. I hope so. I meant it in good faith, but given where we were it was impossible to say it without at least a trace of bad faith.

      I wrote down his DOC number in my notebook and said I’d send him a letter when I got back to New Orleans. I didn’t know yet that he wouldn’t be permitted to receive it.

      The day of that first performance was bleak, the sky the color of soot, the forecast predicting storms. There were maybe a hundred and fifty of us in the audience, about two thirds of whom were inmates, watching in the cold as a line of actors and actresses in shepherd’s robes, including Kendrick, took their places in the center of the arena. Their garments were sand-colored, with rope belts and hoods that resembled those of desert saints in some early Renaissance painting. They began singing some minor-key phrases, their voices dirgelike and plush, a sound of grief, and before they could finish the first verse the sky erupted in a heavy rain that engulfed them. From my place in the grandstand, the downpour was like a white scrim obscuring everything before me. Beneath the awning, out of the weather, an inmate was doing sign language to a group of fellow inmates who were deaf. The narrator was delivering a prologue, telling us that his name was Luke, that he was there to tell us the story of our dear Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, while across the aisle from me a woman who must have been an inmate’s mother held up a digital camera, as if by continuing to film the play she could prevent it from being canceled. The singers’ voices were beautiful and they were beautiful in their beige and white biblical costumes, but the rain was so strong that you could hardly pay attention to anything else. The Virgin Mary hunkered in her salmon tunic as the archangel Gabriel announced to her that she would soon have a miraculous child. Despite the rain, the actors were staying in character—it was what they were there to demonstrate, their ability to maintain self-discipline—but it seemed almost certain that they would have to call the play off in another minute or two.

      As if in response, the Shepherds broke into full-fledged song, a gospel standard in a minor key called “Mary, Did You Know?” They had worked out the harmonies themselves, wide, surprising chords that flirted with the edges of atonality, Kendrick’s deep bass undergirding it all. Mary, did you know, the blind will see, the deaf will hear, the dead will live again. Their singing was almost casual in its flawlessness, even as the rain lashed down on them. The juxtaposition of those two facts seemed to suggest that this situation was not so different from any other day in their unluxurious lives.

      I saw the play many times, but in that first performance, begun in the heavy rain, something happened that reason tells me was mere coincidence but that the spirit of the day made seem uncanny. It was still raining. John the Baptist had just been charged with blasphemy, a mob had formed, and at the moment they were about to attack him John looked up and saw Jesus approaching in the distance. It was His first entrance. Suddenly the rain stopped—it didn’t wane, it ceased completely. It was implausible how tranquil the weather became at the moment He appeared. The sudden lull resulted in a chorus of birdsong—so many birds started singing at once that you could barely hear Jesus’ first words over the PA system. John baptized Him in an artificial oasis, then the actor playing Jesus did something I hadn’t seen in rehearsals, so it surprised me. He pulled from beneath his green robe a live dove he’d been hiding in his hand. When he released it, it flew out above the grandstand—all those singing birds and then a live dove escaping from His robe.

      I hope so, I’d told Kendrick about his dream of asylum in Saint Lucia.

      I hope so.

      It’s easy to lose track of yourself. I don’t mean in an existential way, I mean in a way that impinges on other people’s lives.

      2

      Guineps—those big vines of grapelike fruit whose thick skin you peel back to reveal the delicately flavored plumlike innards. The carnival parade in Crown Heights, the beef patties and the colorful flags of the different islands, the soca music and the reggae. It was these seemingly trivial things we’d made small talk about that now revealed their enormous importance.

      The story was “too confusing,” Kendrick had said. When I got back to New Orleans, it occurred to me how susceptible I’d been to that phrase, “too confusing,” how credulous I’d been about his claim that he was innocent. It was one of the reasons I felt trepidation about calling his mother, though I’d told him I’d try to do that. What I mean is that I didn’t know if my credulity was anything more than soft-heartedness. It also made me uncomfortable to discover, after returning from Angola, that in some way I had been perceiving Kendrick’s story as a version of my father’s story. It was something out of a movie—not even a realistic movie, I’d written about the aftermath of my father’s murder. There was the grief over the young man they’d all had a special liking for, and then there was the sense that his death would never seem real, that the sudden violence was so incongruous with his personality that the two could not be held in the mind at the same time. I saw that I could have used some of these same words to describe my impression so far of Kendrick. It was complicated (“too complicated”). The word death, of course, would have to be replaced with incarceration. The connection was the word incongruous, the way that what had happened in both my father’s life and Kendrick’s seemed unrelated to who they seemed to be as people. I tried to explain some of this to Kendrick’s mother,