William was a student incarcerated on Rikers Island. He came to Matthew Hejna’s Waterways editorial meetings with a story he was working on in the dorm. “Murder, He Wrote” was first published in Strictly Business (Vol. 4 No. 1) and then anthologized in Streams 7. The location was the South Bronx where the narrator related a psychological exploration of crime and punishment.
We walked in past a bunch of tires, a place where bums sometimes sleep. A lot of burnt cars were around, underneath the train tracks from where the 6 train comes out of the tunnel. This place was known to me and my man as the car cemetery. In there was a little of something: crack bottles, needles, old rags, human waste and dead dogs that either got shot or electrocuted. It was also a place to get rid of people, so my partner knew someone was going to die that night, he just never thought it was going to be him.
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After he finished talking I pulled out my 38, and told him to keep walking. When he saw the gun he looked at me and knew one of us wasn’t walking out of there alive. “Why man, why me?” I remember the look in his eyes. Scared. Desperate. As if he was going out of his mind. All that came out of his mouth were begs, “Let me go, man, please, Columbia, let me go.”
“Shut up, man,” I told him, not out of anger but because his words were making me think twice about it. I felt tears accumulating in my eyes and then rolling down my face. “It’s me, kid, top of the world. Just me,” I said.
“I love you man. We are all we got.”
“Yo, Gee, I got to think of me. We all got to go someday. Your time just ended. Nothing personal, just business.”
“I’m scared, man, I don’t know what’s on the other side. Let me live, give me a chance,” was the last thing he said.
I knew if I let him go I wouldn’t last three days. That’s the type of people I got involved with. To their eyes, it’s either live or die. As I talked to him, he tried a desperate move and reached for his gun, so I shot him twice in the head.
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After that I didn’t think like a rational man. I didn’t care much for human life. Whenever I felt disrespected, I pulled out the gun and shot and asked questions later. One day I was walking across the street a little drunk. I tried to jump over a low chain fence and fell. These two girls that I knew from my block started laughing at me. I don’t know what came over me, but the next thing I knew I pulled out my gun and shot at them.
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I remember I used to ask myself, “Why does he not leave me alone? He’s dead.” But the more I tried to forget about it the more I suffered. I tried to go outside, stay around people but it never worked. He haunted me. Every time I saw money, Gee’s face flashed in my mind. His blood called me day and night and I always ended up back in the car cemetery where I took his life. I used to stay there sometimes from one in the morning to sometime the next day, just smoking and drinking, crying and asking him to forgive me.
Then I got arrested. Now I think to myself how foolish I was. It was all a dream, a fantasy, nothing but a foolish lie. All that money I had and today I don’t even have a bank account. My so called friends don’t even send me a letter. They are too busy chasing their own fantasies. As for my family, well I gave them up on the first $1000 that came. I’m only 17 years old and feel older than dirt itself. To make things worse I have a 10 to 20 year sentence on my back and a criminal record the size of an atlas. I know I’m going to die in jail. I’m facing the fact because once I go up north I ain’t coming back. The brothers of people that I have killed are upstate counting the days for me to get there.
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