The air was clogged thick with the odor of sweat and feces. Matthew had given him a bucket to do his business in, but he refused to empty it regularly. It sat in the corner of the cell with flies buzzing in the air. Sometimes they swooped down and landed on the dirty brim of the wood, but most of the time they just spun around lazily in the air.

Luis laid on the bare cot in the cell and looked up at the stone ceiling. His entire body ached with pain, and his open wounds burned from their exposure to the air. Matthew had beaten him, and the other deputies had watched. None of them had tried to step in, hadn’t even offered a word to their Sheriff. He had hoped, though without much conviction, that one of the men would step in and put their hand on Matthew’s shoulder. Maybe that’s enough, they could have said and that would have ended the torture then and there. But they didn’t. They stood by and watched Matthew throw his fists around until they were bleeding and raw, and until Luis’s face was almost unrecognizable. In the end, their silence stung almost as much as the punches Matthew had thrown.

A lot of the folks in the town had treated him with the same indifference before his arrest. They looked at him with furrowed brows when he entered a store; mothers crossed the street with their children when they noticed him in the distance. Even before Matthew had become Sheriff, law enforcement had been breathing down his neck, waiting for him to do something out of line, to give them an excuse to arrest him and beat him to a pulp.

In the end, the only excuse Matthew needed was a dead body and a convincing level of vitriol. Without evidence, without witnesses, he had pinned the crime on Luis and slapped handcuffs on him. The town had just watched. Then they built the gallows.

The door opened. A sudden stream of bright, yellow light flooded the Sheriff’s station. Even with his eyes closed, Luis flinched from the unexpected illumination. His vision was tinted a dark orange. When he opened his eyes, he saw Matthew’s silhouette standing in the frame of the door. He had his fingers looped into his shirt’s pockets, and he was cocking his head at an odd angle.

“Good to see you’re still alive,” Matthew said. He had adjusted the tone of his thin voice to that of a Shakespearian actor. To Luis, he sounded idiotic. He hadn’t bothered to learn any new words, nor had he even tried to read Shakespeare. The townspeople didn’t care, though. When they heard the affectation at his first speech, they crowed with excitement.

Finally, a man o’ the people, one of the older men had yelled.

Luis didn’t respond to his captor. He didn’t deserve a response. Instead he closed his eyes again and tried to envision Marta: the curve of her russet lips; the glint of her smile in pale, evening light; the way her dress blew in the wind as she stood in front of their house looking out upon the lush, green landscape.

“You listenin’ to me?” Matthew asked.

Though it wasn’t a question. He liked to hide commands with questions.

Luis sighed to himself and turned to look at Matthew. The silhouette turned and grasped a chair from a nearby desk. He picked it up and placed it in front of the cell. When Matthew sat in it, Luis could see the weight he had put on. His stomach was rolling over his belt, and his arms were thicker than they had been when he had first encountered the man.

“I need y’ to understand one thing,” Matthew said. “I’m not a racist. I didn’t arrest ya ‘cause o’ the color o’ your skin. After all, we fought a war over it. That’s somethin’ my brother woulda done, though. He didn’t like t’ air his dirty laundry, but there was a lot to him you didn’t get to know. But me? I don’t care what y’ look like. Hell, I practically don’ even see color. What I do see is a man who murdered another man in cold blood. We got your weapon at the crime scene. We know y’ did it. So we had to enact justice.

“Law and order. The world ain’t nothin’ without it. But I feel like some o’ you folk don’t understand that. It’s a pity too, ‘cause a lot o’ good, young folk die to the gallows ‘cause o’ that misunderstanding. But I’m sure if y’ asked the Sheriff before me, and the Sheriff before him, and y’ went up the whole line o’ law enforcement and asked them what they would o’ done in my shoes, I guarantee ya, all of ‘em would have said to arrest you.”

I don’t think you’re making the point you want to make, Luis thought to himself. Then again, Matthew wasn’t very self-aware, and for all he knew this was exactly what Matthew wanted to say. He was just trying to say it in such a way that Luis wouldn’t be offended by it, that he wouldn’t call him that dreaded word: a racist.

Wrap all the pretty words you want around it, Luis thought. God’s still gonna judge you the same way.

But he couldn’t say that. He didn’t want to deal with more beatings, more brutality, more unfiltered, unjust, unstopped white rage. As his mother had told him when he was a teenager, going out into a world that was both foreign and recognizable: don’t yell, don’t get mad at folks, don’t get angry. If someone’s pushin’ your buttons, you gotta stuff that rage down ‘cause if you even lift your voice one octave, law’ll come down so fast and hard on you. Never matters what the other person did or said. It only matters how you react.

The chair creaked as Matthew leaned forward, looking into the cell with beady eyes surrounded by globs of salty sweat.

“Why don’t you talk to me?” Matthew asked.

‘Cause you split my lip in half.

“I just wanna have a decent conversation. ‘Fore the chaplain walks in here and gives you last rites, that is. I just want us to have a dialogue, for us to come to some sort of understanding.” He paused and stood, wrapping his hands around the metal bars, sticking his nose through the gap between them. “I just wanna understand why you folk hate us so much that you kill us.”

Luis closed his eyes again. He was done listening to the clown. He was tired and in pain, and he wanted nothing more than to allow the warm embrace of Death to envelop him, to return him with Marta and to escape the world that seemed Hellbent on despising him for nothing more than the pigmentation of his skin.

Matthew’s tone turned nasty, as it always did when his questions went unanswered and his purported kindness went unheeded.

“Well have it your way you sick son-of-a-bitch!” he yelled, slamming his palm against the metal bars. “If I didn’t have a show to put on out there, I’d come in there and push a knife into your throat. Make you pay for everything you put my family through. I could even shoot you right now if I wanted to, and nobody would care. Nobody would question your death. I’d go on being Sheriff without any issue. Folks in town would trust me just the same, vote for me just the same, celebrate me all the more. You mean nothing to these people, and I mean everything.”

With the petulant whimper of a toddler, Matthew stormed away from the bars and exited the Sheriff’s office. He slammed the door behind him, blocking the blinding, yellow light from entering.

Luis remained where he had been at the start of their conversation: on the bare mattress, his hands by his sides, his body in immense pain, his brain miles away with memories of Rose and Marta.

Next Chapter: Emma