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WE KNOW THEM NOW LIKE WE KNOW BROTHERS
JULY 9 2007
THIS HAPPENED – I was passed out in the backseat of Ellis’s Land Rover when he killed those people – two of them, businessmen, and he shot them point-blank in the back of the head. I don’t even know why, or how – I never understood many of the things Ellis did. I didn’t even see the gun – his father’s, and I didn’t even know he had it but I knew where he would’ve hid it – in the glove compartment behind the driver’s manual where we kept the drugs and everything. I’m not going to deny that part, the drugs part, because the police don’t even believe that I didn’t help Ellis kill those people. And I deserve the time for drugs and I will do it, but they booked me on accessory to homicide or whatever shit because Ellis said in court “I’m pretty sure Nick was conscious,” and I stood up and I said “Ellis, Ellis, what the fuck?” and the defense used this to prove that I was violent and impulsive and obviously masterminded the whole thing. And it was Ellis’s fingerprints on the gun, it was all Ellis, all Ellis, but he had a shark of a lawyer and mine was provided to me by the city. “A million like you,” she said. “So many boys like you.” She shook her head whenever she looked at me, puppet-like.
I promise – when Ellis killed those people I was curled up in his backseat asleep like a cat. Ellis always said when I was passed out I looked like a cat, one of those horrible hugely fat ones – pictures with their owners holding them, draping like blankets – the kind of cats you suspect eat human flesh, fingers in the litterbox, indigestible, like owl pellets.
Ellis didn’t know those people he killed – we know them now. We know them now like we know brothers – Rich Jackson and Joseph Adams, and we know their wives and their children – two each, I cried when I met them. Ellis said something in court about him feeling like they needed to die. They separated him and me. I wanted to kill him like I’ve never wanted to kill anyone. I never wanted to kill anyone before I wanted to kill Ellis. I memorized his sentence like I memorized mine. Ellis – seven years in a “psychiatric facility” then three with counseling (they thought he was disturbed, brain irrevocably fucked up, too sensitive for prison), me – ten years. Tenyearstenyearstenyears. When I get out I’ll be twenty-eight. Chunk of my life wasted. My youth solidified into license plates and orange jumpsuits. And Ellis living in that bell jar, clean clean clean.
He came to see me when I was struggling pale through withdrawal. His shark of a lawyer standing behind him and my fingers tightened nooselike around the phone. “Nick,” he said – excuses formulating, percolating like coffee. “Nick I’m sorry but I have a family and you know my father – ” He stopped there and he looked at me. “You look like shit, Nick.” Fever plus three sleepless nights equals no soul in Nick Bird and I didn’t feel like explaining this to Ellis because he did it to me in the first place. Bell jar Ellis was all clean and shot full of methadone – I could see it in his eyes, this familiar glaze like a frozen pond. I squeezed the phone harder to stop my hand shaking.
I said “Ten years too long for your father.”
“Don’t do this,” said Ellis – he was whispering now. “You don’t even know how much this kills me – you don’t even know what I’ve been through.”
Cops found me they pulled me out of my mother’s apartment out into the hallway and against the wall – shoved, between my shoulderblades one hand, and others in my pockets – inside my sweater, the back of my neck, the insides of my legs. I was shaking and they found my pills in my pocket and shook the plastic bag in my face laughing. “Nicholas Bird you are under arrest for accessory to murder. You have the right to remain silent.” And they pushed down on my head and into the backseat of the car and then I was behind those bars, cross-hatched, and I was already in a cage. Bird in a cage, bird in a cage. Always a cage for Nick Bird, lap cat.
Ellis said my name in this smooth voice like I’d forgotten it. I was chewing my lip, the taste of blood like metal in my mouth. Ellis said “Nick. Nick. Talk to me.”
“We have ten years to talk,” I said. Ellis blinked twice and his lawyer took him by the shoulder and I hung up the phone when he looked up in that shark-face. “I want to go back,” I said. The woman behind me had braids like thin black snakes, and she nodded and took me by my left arm. Ellis looked up at me and he dropped his phone and the woman with the snake-hair took me away.
I wanted to kill Ellis, I wanted him dead because he locked me like a bird in a cage. But I couldn’t think like I wanted to kill Ellis because that meant I wanted to kill people and I belonged in here, I belonged in this box and these ten years were mine and they meant I had the capacity in me to kill.
Ellis came to see me again, lawyerless, a month in. I was less pale and I wanted my pills less but I hated Ellis more if possible – nights and nights, no sleep. I kept my eyes to myself, my hands to myself.
Ellis was there with this skinny white-dress woman who might have been a nurse, one of those denizens of the bell jar they shut him in Plath-like. I picked up the phone and he said “I’m so sorry.” He rested his head on his hand, hair greasy between his bent fingers. His sweater sleeve slipped and there were bandages wrapped in layers, bone-white.
I said “Ellis, oh God.” He pulled his sleeve back up and he shut his eyes and when they opened they were wet and they shone and he said “Nick it’s my fault you’re in here and there are four babies without fathers. And I did that to you and I ruined your life like I ruined theirs.”
The woman white-dress pretty fixed her eyes in mine. I said “What’re you going to do then El?”
“I talked to the lawyer and he spoke to yours.” I was looking at the bandage on his wrist and he said “Plastic knife takes ten minutes to draw blood.” He dug the heel of his free hand into the deep socket of his eye, tears on a sluggish bleed. I never wanted to die because this innocence keeps you alive, this stupid knowledge I’ve done nothing. Ellis, oh, Ellis. In a bell jar you breathe out your own failure, you bleed it out slow, ten minutes to chop out your veins with a knife like your tangible, plasticized defeat. The woman with the snake hair took me back home. Ten years too long to start hoping.
