They Got Their Show
By: Garrett Davis
It is midnight in Ponderosa and Nick Velasquez can’t sleep. The public doesn’t want him to sleep. It’s been like this ever since it hit all the big streaming platforms. The viewers stay up bingeing and he… well, he has been bingeing in his own way. With a bottle of tequila in one hand and a lit joint in the other, Nick wanders from room to room like a ghost in his own house. He shuffles through indents made in the living room carpet. Depressions from the furniture his esposa, Marcella, took with her when she left. Can’t look at my eyes without seeing our little girl. Nick pulls on the joint, its coal shifting from a deep cherry red to bright yellow in the darkness. He exhales a plume of smoke and walks down the hall, his sobriety trailing behind him. And just when things were getting back to normal. He’d gotten a job at a local taxi company, found a support group with minimal woo woo, hell he’d even gotten Marcella on the phone once or twice but then the docuseries hit Netflix.
He’s been circling the house all evening, like water going down the drain, each revolution getting smaller and smaller bringing him down inevitably to a single point. His daughter’s room. Everything is, more or less, as Carmen left it; Notorious B.I.G posters, a half-made bed and her diary open to a blank page dated June 17th 1995. Stumbling into the room, he squares off with the closet. A four-year-old Carmen wouldn’t sleep if the closet door was left open at night. She got scared that if it were left open, monsters from the dark could just walk on in. So being a good daddy, Nick made a big show of closing the doors and threatening any would-be monsters inside. It became a nightly ritual until at fifteen, her embarrassed protests hit home. Nick takes a swig from the bottle and wipes his mouth using the back of his hand. He’d asked her once why the monsters didn’t simply push the door open.
“Daddy,” she had said, “The handle is on the outside.”
Swaying slightly, it seems to Nick that the evil behind those bifold closet doors is almost palpable. It might be the drugs or maybe it’s the liquor but he swears he can feel pressure built up behind those doors. He sees darkness leaking out from underneath and marvels at the strength of those flimsy tarnished brass hinges. Putting the bottle down, he extends a shaking hand.
“Don’t do this,” he whispers to himself.
The doors open, revealing stacks upon stacks of banker’s boxes. They’re piled floor to ceiling, each one labeled in fat black ink: 1995. He takes a shot of tequila for each box he brings to the living room. Marcella had been nice enough to leave him an old reclining chair and he had since bought a secondhand television. So bathed in blue TV light, Nick gets to work. He organizes statements, arranges and rearranges glossy eight by ten photographs and rereads old newspaper clippings. Back in 1995 Carmen and a local boy Benjie left the house to rent a movie from Blockbuster. They did this every weekend. Nick would give Carmen twenty dollars and she and Benjie would walk the three blocks to the video store. But on June 17th, 1995, they never returned.
The docuseries plays in the background. When did I put that on? It details what they call shady police work and circumstantial evidence. It claims that the country has put an innocent man on death row. Nick glances at his masterpiece, laid out just as he remembers it; each document linked by a thread of red string, and they all lead to Benjie. He’d cut Benjie’s photo out of one of Carmen’s old yearbooks; they’d gone to school together. Benjie is fat in the photo, his face pitted with acne. Every grad class has one fat loser that no one likes—no one but Carmen that is. Nick puffs on his joint in contemplation. He never understood what made them such fast friends. He finds his answer in another memory, something Marcella once told him. Her words hang in the forefront of his mind and he’s so high he swears he can actually hear her say it.
“She wants to fix him,” Marcella had said, “she just doesn’t know that yet.”
“Well she’s certainly not in it for his brains,” Nick says aloud, reliving the conversation in real time. “If I had a line-up of potential school shooters… I’d pick that sad little puto nine out of ten times.”
The public, however, didn’t seem to feel that way. Benjie is on the screen now, much older and less ruddy in the face. Nick suspects he’s wearing makeup for the shot. The lighting is good — the angle flattering — he almost looks handsome. Like lipstick on a pig.
“Did you kill Carmen Velasquez?” The interviewer asks.
“No,” Benjie answers, “Why, uh, why’s everyone still asking that? I’ve been in here nearly, uh, twenty years and my story hasn’t changed. And do you want to know why?”
“Why?” The reporter asks.
“Cause it’s the truth. I ain’t never hurt a fly in my life.”
When Benjie says this, Nick hears the pings; likes and retweets being sent out from the viewers. He picks them up like radio waves on teeth fillings. They sound like the bells and whistles on an old pinball machine. I’m on a whole ‘nother frequency, hombre! That’s when it falls apart. He sees the mistake in his careful plotting on the floor.
Benjie and Carmen were found three blocks from the Blockbuster video in an alley. Benjie was unconscious and Carmen... both of them were covered in her blood. The autopsy report says her throat had been slit from behind, but that the cut hadn’t been deep enough to be fatal. The attacker — probably in a panic — had bludgeoned her to death with a cinderblock that had been used as a doorstop. The knife was in Benjie’s unconscious hand when the police arrived. Benjie never denied that the knife was his. His toxicology came back clean. There was nothing to explain his blackout. The detail that Nick had overlooked all this time was the pendant of St. Christopher hanging around Carmen’s neck. The patron saint of protection, a birthday gift in case daddy wasn’t around to deal with the monsters. It is missing in the crime scene photo. Benjie had been searched and it wasn’t on his person at the time. Nor could it be found in the subsequent combing of the crime scene. Could someone else have taken it? Would that prove someone else was there?
A phone rings, yanking Nick from his thoughts and making him jump. The call display says: Dispatch. Everyone in the company is required to be on call once a week. That meant if some suit and tie needs a lift to the airport at three A.M, you saddle up and ride. Tonight isn’t his night, he’s sure of it, and so he lets it go to voicemail. The display goes dark momentarily before dancing and lighting up again. Nick picks up, opening his mouth to set free a string of expletives only to find his brain hadn’t yet finished translating them to English. What does come out is a sort of involuntary muffled burp.
“Listen Nicky, before you fly off the handle,” the Dispatcher said, “I want you to know that I know it’s late. Not only that,” he continued, “but I know that it’s not your night tonight. I got a call you might find interesting.”
There’s a beeping as Dispatch patches two lines together. When it’s done, Nick hears a recording taken for quality assurance purposes. The recording starts with an automated message from the incoming caller. It says:
“You have a collect call from Ponderosa Penitentiary. To accept charges and connect, please press the pound key.” A button is pressed and the line crackles as it is transferred.
“Ponderosa Taxi, how may I direct your call?” The recording says.
“Uh, hello?” Comes an unmistakable voice from the other side, “I was wondering if I, uh, could schedule a pick up?”
Suddenly, it feels hard to breathe. Nick’s throat feels as though he’s been gargling gravel and sleet. He knows that voice, has heard that voice in his haunted dreams for nearly thirty years — Benjie.
“What’s the address?” asked Dispatch.
“Well, uh, I get out tomorrow and I — will you pick people up from the prison or is that weird?”
“We’ll pick you up but we won’t break you out.”
Benjie laughs. The thought of anything resembling joy coming from his piggy snout makes Nick’s blood boil. He almost hangs up right then and there, he wants to throw the phone and watch the cheap plastic explode into a million little pieces, but he doesn’t. Instead he snuffs out the joint in a crystal ashtray and brings the liquor bottle to his lips. Nothing comes out. The worm clinks against the bottleneck.
“Nicky? Are you still there?”
“Yeah,” Nick says. “I’m here.”
“So, what do you say?”
“I say you got some goddamn giant bull balls. Did you dream this up on your own? Who put this loco idea into your thick skull?”
“Whoa, Nick buddy,” he replies. “I don’t know what you think I’m suggesting but whatever it is, I ain’t! I just figured that maybe you’d want to see him. Maybe apologize, get that — uh, whatcha call it — document?”
Nick sits down in his recliner. His head hurts something fierce. Pinching the bridge of his nose, he says “It’s denouement, not document; a nice neat ending.”
“Well, well, well… look at the big brain on you! Listen, his Gran passed away while he’s been locked up. Give him a lift to her old house. Get whatever is on your chest out and in the open, and say your goodbyes. Hell, he’ll probably skip town after! I know I would. The whole world knowing my story… I’d get out.”
Nick stares at the pictures lined up on the floor; all the papers, the bits of string. Reminders of his sobriety going up in smoke. These snapshots are all that he has left of his daughter. It’d been hard to let her go, even knowing that the man responsible was behind bars… what would he do now? “I’ll think about it,” he says.
“You’ll do the right thing,” Dispatch replies. “See you tomorrow.”
There’s a click and the line goes dead. Nick jumps to his feet and launches the phone at the television. Spiderweb-like fissures bloom from the impact crater. The pixels fail to communicate with each other, and the colors go all wrong. A large triangular swath of the screen goes lime green. The footage cuts to Benjie at a metal picnic table in the prisons exercise yard. He’s looking wistfully out through the fence to the hills beyond. A yellow shard splits his sitting area in two. The sky is red with color distortion. Someone from behind the camera asks, “Do you think if Carmen were around today you’d still be friends?”
“Uh, oh yeah,” Benjie says. “Even now.”
The episode ends. The credits roll, and Nick passes out.
The next morning has Nick’s head feeling like an egg about to hatch. He opens bloodshot eyes to find himself laying on the floor amidst his papers. He doesn’t remember hauling the banker’s boxes out. He kisses his finger and plants it on a photo of Carmen. What am I going to do? Bones creak as he pulls himself up to his feet. His saliva is thick and acrid tasting from last night’s binge, so he lumbers over to the kitchen and puts his head under the faucet. Cool water runs across his face, soothing the pounding heat within his head. Then when the water clears of rust, he takes a mouthful, gargles and spits it back into the sink. He’s drying himself with a hand towel when the phone goes off again. This time it’s only his alarm: nine thirty. The television screen is still on — still fractured — and stuck on a pause menu.
It asks him: Are you still there?
He runs a hand over his shaved scalp. Am I all here? Would I know if I wasn’t? He vaguely remembers talking to Dispatch on the phone but is unsure what had driven him to pick up in the middle of the night. Regardless, the pendejo Benjie was getting out today and Nick wanted to be there… for better or worse.
Ponderosa’s prison is surrounded by artificial hills made of red sand. These mounds make it so the entire complex sits in a gulley. Towers are situated at each corner of the high fence line and are made of grey concrete and tan brick. Local legend has it that an inmate tried to escape once. He allegedly managed to get through the fence but was shot through the head by an eagle-eyed sniper in the furthest tower. A camera crew is set up at the front gate, awaiting thirty-six-year-old Benjie to set foot outside the penitentiary for the first time in twenty years.
The road is surprisingly crowded for being so far outside the city limits. Nick parks his taxi on the shoulder across the street. A crowd of onlookers, fans of the series, watch and wait for Benjie along with the local news crew. Nick pulls a ball cap down low on his head and gets out of the vehicle in order to mingle with the crowd.
It isn’t long before a lone figure in ill-fitting khakis and a faded jean jacket makes his way down the long-fenced corridor towards freedom. Prison food and weights had robbed Benjie of his girth and transformed him into a short lean man. Although the ruddy red cheeks remain. Nick shivers despite the asphalt radiating midday heat, baking him from below. The hairs on the back of his neck stand up. It was more like seeing a zombie than a ghost — a recognizable face and body, but devoid of the soul.
For years Nick had prepared to watch this man die, had dreamt of being there when the needle plunger was pushed. He tries to summon some of that rage, that kind that made him wish old sparky hadn’t been outlawed. The kind of rage that makes eye for an eye seem reasonable. He finds that he can’t. Maybe Benjie is a victim of the docuseries as well. Could the true villain be the corporation? Is it right to profit off the pain of grieving families? Parading corpses like science projects to pick apart; as if justice is no longer about right and wrong, but about who can argue their points best. Just how could they have eight, one hour-long episodes, interviewing every relation and suspect about how they knew Carmen, and not uncover who she was? How she would sing in the shower till there was no hot water left in the house or how she was such a fussy eater that she’d eat French fries but not a baked potato. That her first words had been Dada.
No one was here for Carmen, they were all here for Benjie. The crowd of onlookers rise from their lawn chairs and cheer. Some of the tailgaters shake up beer cans and open them, spraying foam everywhere. Women wave hand painted signs with hashtags like: #WESTANDWITHBENJIE, #INNOCENTUNTILPROVENGUILTY, #MISSINGNECKLACE. Benjie sees them too but quickly looks to the ground, his cheeks getting redder still. Then without looking up, he raises a fist into the air and the onlookers go wild. It sounded like the home team had just won the super bowl outside the prison.
A correctional officer stops Benjie at the gate. They exchange a few words, smile and shake hands. The guard opens the door and the inmate steps through a free man. More cheering. Someone lights off a few bottle rockets which go whistling overhead, their pops unheard amidst the jubilation. Microphones are held in front of Benjie’s face.
“Benjie,” says one reporter, “tell us how you feel?”
“Uh,” Benjie scratches the stubble under his chin. “I guess I’m glad it’s over.”
“Benjie,” another says, “what’s the first thing you’ll do now that you’re out?”
“Oh I’ve been thinking about this one a lot,” he answers. “I’m going to finally rent Toy Story from Blockbuster.”
The reporters, crew and crowd all chuckle at this. No one is thinking of Carmen. Why should they? The public’s hive mind has a short memory. They don’t care much for the dead and gone. Benjie is alive; he might still have a future. Everyone likes a happy ending, don’t they?
“Benjie, do you have anything to say to the family of Carmen Velasquez?”
After a pause, Benjie slowly replies, “You have no idea how sad I’ve been. Uh, thinking about how this series shows that, well, that the guy that killed Carmen is still out there. And well, that just makes it all fresh again, don’t it? I understand how badly they wanted justice and uh, I just want them to know that I don’t blame them for that.”
No more than ten yards away, hidden amidst the throng of people, Nick clenches his jaw and nods absently as Benjie speaks. His old man had the same expression on his face when his mother passed. He hadn’t understood it at the time, but he understands it now. It’s the look of a strong man trying his best not to break. He wants to call out to Benjie to… to apologize. To fight. Let them have it out right there in front of the cameras. And after, maybe then Nick could cry. He opens his mouth once, twice, three times — but nothing comes out.
Shoulders slumping, he wants nothing more than to sit down or shower. He feels… dirty. He retires to the taxi cab and cranks the AC to max, content watching the rest from afar. Benjie shakes hands with his supporters, one of the tailgaters offers him a cold beer and he drinks it. His lips pucker at the taste and everyone laughs yet again. It strikes Nick just then that will have been Benjie’s first legal drink. Imagine, your first beer at thirty-six!
When things begin to wind down, Nick flicks on the taxi’s service light. Benjie shakes one last hand and clambers into the back seat. Nick starts the car and Benjie rattles off his grandmother’s address. Benjie is flustered by all the activity. From the rearview mirror, Nick can make out the dopey half grin he’s wearing. Nick starts the car and the locks click shut. With the hat and glasses Benjie hasn’t recognized him.
“Gee,” Benjie says after a few miles in silence, “I forgot how fast cars are. I remember, uh, that I used to get car sick. If I get car sick will you pull over?”
Benjie’s knuckles are white on the armrests.
“Sure Benjie,” Nick mumbles and his knuckles are white on the steering wheel.
“Say, uh, I didn’t give you my name. Did you watch the series?”
“Something like that,” Nick says, taking off the glasses.
Even so, it takes Benjie a minute to realize who is in the front seat. Christ, have I aged that much or is the pendejo slower than I remember?
“Mr.—Mr. Velasquez?” Benjie blinks rapidly, “What are you doing here?”
“You’ve been in for a long time Benjie, I work for the cab company now.”
“I guess a lot has changed, huh?” Benjie sits back in his seat, relaxing ever so slightly.
“Everything has changed,” Nick agrees, “and nothing. Carmen is still gone. Did you know, I got your parole denied? You were sixteen years old when Carmen was killed. You should have got parole after ten years. Does that piss you off?”
“I mean, yeah,” Benjie says with a shrug. “But I had a long time to uh think, I mean while I was inside. At first, I felt like you were killing me, you know? Taking my best years, but then I thought — I thought you know, I’d probably do the same if our positions were reversed.”
“Why did you do it Benjie?”
“I didn’t Mr. Velasquez, I swear.”
“I mean the docuseries?” Nick says.
“I’m innocent,” Benjie says, “and it really helped that other fella, uh, a state over clear his name. It meant freedom. You don’t know what it’s like being called a murderer for twenty years when you and, uh, God know that you didn’t do nothing.”
“You know what it meant to me?” Nick says watching Benjie shake his head no in the rearview. “It meant that Carmen had to die all over again. Twenty years of people raising her from the dead, digging through the wreckage of my life; and for what? To help you? I was convinced you did it. Convinced that you took my sweet daughter away from me.”
“And, uh what do you think now, uh, sir?”
“I don’t even know anymore,” Nick sighs. “Seems to me that all these networks want to glorify murder and mystery, and in the end it don’t matter if you did it or not. If you did kill Carmen they got their show, and if you didn’t… well, they still got their show. Doesn’t seem right to me and I’m just caught in the thresher.”
The silence weighs heavy between them as they drive due South down the highway. The exit to Benjie’s grandmother’s house is a mile off. Tumbleweeds roll past in the opposite lane and get swept up in the swirls of dust left by the taxi cab as it blows past.
“You know,” Benjie says, his face going red, “I loved her too. But I, uh, don’t think she liked me that way you know?”
“Have you ever blacked out before, Benjie?”
“No,” Benjie admits. “That was the first time. Could you uh, slow down Mr. Velasquez? I’m feeling ill.”
The taxi goes past the exit, leaving Ponderosa behind.
Benjie’s brow furrows, “Say, uh, where are we going?”
“We’re going to Blockbuster buddy,” Nick says. “I’m taking you to Blockbuster.”
* * *
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