by Alec Clayton
I finally finished my latest novel, Locked In. It’s my eleventh novel. It has taken well over two years to finish writing it, for Gabi to finish editing it, and for me to complete a final re-write.
Locked In is the story of a lifelong fight for justice and of romance and sexual obsession as remembered by Willie Ray Rivers, a newspaper publisher in Mississippi. After a stroke, Willie Ray is left paralyzed head to foot. He cannot speak, but he can hear. He can think, and he can remember. Cared for by his wife, Ella, and their friends Dream and Edgar, Willie Ray looks inward. His memories take him from a jail cell in Mississippi to Amazing Grace Church in San Francisco and back to Mississippi where he and Ella publish a crusading newspaper and become entangled in an ongoing struggle with corrupt city council leader Bubba Wright.
Here is a small excerpt from when the reader first meets Willie Ray:
I’m not writing this. I’m screaming it. But only inside my mind. It’s all in my head. YOU are in my head. I hear you listening to my thoughts. Skeptical as all git-out no doubt.
Not a word, not a sound escapes my mouth, which I can’t even open or close. At least I don’t think I can. It feels as if nothing happens when I try. Can I stick out my tongue? Can I smile or frown? Is my face frozen in some godawful expression I can’t even imagine? Somebody hold up a mirror, let me see what’s going on with my face.
Please. What’s going on with me? I can’t seem to move anything, not any part of my body. I try. Desperately I try. To move a hand, a leg, a foot, to lift an elbow, to move my head to the side. I hear something but I don’t recognize what it is. Is that a presence off to my left? I can’t look in that direction to see who or what is there. Nothing. It’s like I’m frozen. I can feel pain, though. On a scale of one to ten it’s about a seven. I guess that’s a good thing—I mean it’s a good thing I can feel anything at all.
My eyes are open, and I can see. Thank God I can see, but only straight ahead. I can’t look to the side beyond what peripheral vision allows. Am I wearing blinders like a freaking horse? I can raise my vision to the white ceiling where I see things on rods and wires which I can’t identify and don’t understand. It’s like I’ve been transported to some place like a laboratory out of some cheesy sci-fi movie. Or a hospital room. No, wait, it IS a hospital room. How did I get here? I look down to where my body is covered with a white sheet. I can see from my stomach area down to my toes, which stick up under the sheet like two little tents. I can see straight ahead to where there’s a dry-erase board on a white wall. My name is written on the board in handwriting I’ve never seen. Willie Ray Rivers. Yes, that’s my name, and scrawled under my name are the names of Dr. Jamison and Nurse Watkins. Further evidence that I’m in a hospital.
And here is Willie Ray’s run-in with the law in 1986 in the little town of Ellisville:
Amanda and I parked on the side of a secluded road and did some grass and climbed into the back seat and did some heavy petting, but she stopped me before we went all the way. She said stop, and I stopped.
Later. I had just dropped her off and was heading home. The road was dark and curvy, maybe not a safe road, but I knew it so well I could drive it blindfolded. I had a missing taillight on my sixty-three Chevy. The old car was pretty much held together with bent coat hangers and chewing gum. I didn’t know I had a missing taillight.
“License and registration,” the deputy demanded, speaking around a wad of chewing tobacco in a slow and slurry tone while leaning against the driver’s side window and shining his flashlight in the car. I hitched my butt up and reached in my hip pocket to dig out my wallet for my license, and then I reached to the glove compartment to pull out my registration papers. The deputy aimed his light at the open compartment. “What’s that?” he demanded.
“What?” I knew I was in big freakin’ trouble.
“That little purple pouch in there. What’s in it?”
“Oh, uh . . . Tylenol. I get headaches. I always keep a few.”
That was true. I had been plagued with debilitating headaches most of my life. I always kept a stash of pain meds on hand. But pain medication wasn’t the only thing I kept in that pouch.
“Hand it over.”
“I . . . uh . . . it’s just aspirin, I mean Tylenol. I promise.”
“Step out of the car, son.”
I was a goner, and I knew it. He opened the door and held it open for me to get out. He patted me down, finding nothing but some change. He spit tobacco juice into the dirt on the side of the road, and then walked around the car to open the passenger side door, his flashlight stabbing the muddy field to the right and a forest of pine trees in the distance, like I was some desperado, and he was checking to make sure I didn’t have an accomplice sneaking up on him. And then back to the glove compartment, fishing around with the beam of his flashlight, which came to rest on that purple felt bag with the leather drawstring. A girl I had dated a few times gave it to me. There was another bag inside the bag, a plastic baggie holding a bit of marijuana.
It was a muggy night, the heat of the day lingering until almost midnight despite it being fall, almost Halloween. The deputy didn’t look like he was none too happy. He took off his hat and wiped sweat from his brow with his shirt sleeve and said, “I guess I gotta haul you in, son.”
He said he didn’t want to do it, but it was his duty. I thought, if you don’t want to, don’t do it. Who’s to know?
He took me to the Forrest County jail in Hub City.
Inside, I was taken to a little check-in window. The cop in the window wore sergeant stripes on his sleeve. “Name?” he asked.
“Willie Ray Rivers.”
“Would that be short for William Raymond?”
“No sir. Just Willie Ray. That’s the whole name my mama gave me.”
“Date of birth?”
“June 12, 1958.”
“Address?”
“Fourteen twenty-nine South Church Street, Ellisville.”
I was stripped of my wallet and change, the Bulova watch Mama gave me for my last birthday, and my leather belt. A guard marched me down a semi-dark corridor with bars on either side, carrying a large white plastic bag. I barely noticed the almost silhouetted figures of men behind the bars. They stared in silence. I guess it’s only in the movies that jailbirds shout taunts at new arrivals. The guard stopped and opened a cell and said, “This here’s your new home, fella,” and gave me a little shove in the back to make me step in. There were three men in the cell, one sitting on a top bunk on my left and two more on the other bunk bed on my right. I looked back to see the guard step in behind me and close but not lock the bars behind us. Across the corridor I glimpsed what looked to be five men in another cell. They were all Black which I couldn’t tell in that first look but learned the next morning when there was more light. The cells were racially segregated, which I thought was coincidental. “Oh no,” one of my cellmates corrected me. They do that on purpose. Can’t let them jigaboos in the same cells with white men.”
There was no furniture in my cell other than the two bunk beds, metal springs for slats and a two-inch thick mattress, a brown wool blanket on each, no sheet. The cellmate perched on the edge of the top bunk with his legs hanging off was rhythmically scissoring the air with his bare feet in time to music he was humming. I recognized the song. It was George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord.” His feet were pink. His toes were gigantic. He was shirtless, and wavy blonde hair hung over his shoulders. On top of the other bunk sat a huge guy with curly red hair and a chest and gut that looked like boulders. The third guy was a scrawny little man who looked like a possum. They watched as the guard directed me to take off my clothes and hand them to him. I stripped down to my underwear.
“Everything,” he demanded.
I took off my underwear, embarrassed to be naked in front of these other men, which was really weird because as a high school athlete I had been naked in locker rooms in front of all my teammates in football and basketball and baseball. I don’t think I was consciously aware of their expressions or even their general appearance in those first moments, but in retrospect I saw my foot-swinging cellmate as watching impassively, and one of the others eyeballing me with what I took to be a wary expression.
There was a toilet standing right there in the open. We’d have to do our business in front of the other men—a toilet but no sink or shower, no way to wash up or brush teeth. The guard explained, “Washroom’s down the hall. You get ten minutes after supper and ten minutes after breakfast. Showers are Wednesday and Friday.”