Free The Enchanted by Rene Denfeld

their families. And the next thing he knows, she is walking another man away from his deserved death.
    It isn’t that he minds when it is fair. There have been times when she walked guys and he was okay with it. He remembers one guy whom she got off. The guy had been convicted of murdering a drug dealer. The lady got him a new trial, and the jury decided it was self-defense. He himself walked that guy off the row and into freedom. He got heat for it later, but he stood by it. It was the right thing to do.
    He knows there are too many black men on the row. He knows there are too many men who had Grim and Reaper for their defense attorneys. He tells his new guards there are more than enough guilty men to go around, we don’t need to invent more. He is the first to admit the system needs fixing.
    What he doesn’t understand is helping the rape killers and serial killers and baby killers, the men like York and Striker and Arden.
    When he thinks about what men like York and Striker and Arden have done, he is firm in his truth. Enough years of being the jailer—of seeing men kill one another in prison riots, of holding the hands of rape victims as they testify in front of parole boards—and he knows that some men deserve to die. He can chat with a man like York, he can even show kindness to a man like Arden, but he knows in his heart that they deserve to die. Such men are like diseased dogs or demented animals. You can bemoan what made them killers, but once they are, the best thing is to put them down with mercy.
    Maybe, he thinks, the lady forgets about what these men did. She forgets that men like York hurt women, or men like Striker killed so many, and what Arden did is too horrifying to consider.
    He stops himself. No, he thinks again, the lady does know those things. She talks to the men’s families, she plumbs their lives, she has to know the pain they have caused. Yet she still tries to get them off, and this he cannot figure. This is the part that makes him mad.
    He realizes with a start that he is home. The brown ranch lies at the end of a cul-de-sac in a neighborhood that is comfortingly monotonous. Black bugs whirl against the front door, and as dusk falls, the bats will whirl like brown darts from the trees, getting ready to celebrate the feast of the porch light.
    As he parks in the driveway and opens the garagedoor, he sees a For Sale sign in the front yard. He blinks and the sign is gone.
    It is only eight o’clock, but he knows his wife will be in bed. If he goes upstairs, there will be a ring of sweat in the tub and moisture on the curtain. Her medication holder will be on the counter beside a glass with melting ice and gin. With dullness, he will see the empty wig stand and the litter of pill bottles, an army accumulated against the enemy of cancer, which is winning.
    He will go into the bedroom they have shared for twenty-two years, listening carefully for the tiny gasps of pain that will tell him what number she is today. Are you a four, dear? he wants to ask. I am a six, honey, he wishes he could tell her, just from the ache in my heart.
    She will turn over in bed, hiding the pain and reaching for the wig at her bed stand. No matter how many times he tells her “I love you no matter what,” she wears that damn ugly wig, even in bed. She will say, “Oh, honey, are you here?”
    And he will say, “Yes, honey, I am.”
    T he white-haired boy has a mouth like Cupid. The girls at school used to say his red lips were sexy. He rides in silence along with the others on the transport bus, nervously biting those red lips. He is only sixteen, but in our state, you can be judged as an adult even younger. It is not unusual for boys this young to be sentenced to our enchanted place.
    The older, con-wise men on the prison bus look at the white-haired boy. Some look with sadness, others with appraisal.
    The bus bumps down the prison road, under the watchtowers. The gates are