Perpetual Winter: The Deep Inn by Carlos Meneses-Oliveira Read Free Book Online Page A

the fact that he knew very well he hadn’t killed anyone. He just wasn’t sure that he’d go home free that day because the judge maintained a serene face, immune to the web his lawyer had knit.
                  Ponces Branco declared a recess.
                  “The longer the recess, the better,” explained his lawyer. “He’s reading. The more he reads, the better,” his lawyer said.
                  Three hours later, he returned to declare that Lucas would be held under house arrest, with an electronic ankle monitor and police stationed at his door. He would not be free, but his happiness was so great it was like gliding on the wind, like seagulls on the Tagus River or the smell of the breeze from the sea while fishing early in the morning. He breathed in the entire day in just one gulp—free, yes, without guards, chamber pots, schedules, anonymity dissolved in the prisoners’ soup filling the jail’s large pots. He went home in his lawyer’s car. His brother ran to him, leaping into his arms, with a small Tyrannosaurus in his hand, shouting, “Brother, brother, you escaped, good.” His mother received him, intensely, repeating, “I knew, Lucas, I knew.” His father, his eyes brimming with liquid, gave him a strong, quick hug. He put his hands on Lucas’s face and said to him, “We have to figure this out, boy. You and I.”
                  They’d set up their nativity scene and had outdone themselves. To compensate for the lack of a Christmas tree, which his father wouldn’t let in the house, “neither that nor Coca Cola,” the manager at Lucas’s house had more than one hundred figures. Little houses with their own lights and small creeks with real running water that moved water wheels. Lucas looked at the small Aramaic village delighted with the colors, less bright but more diverse than the Christmas pines.
                  Night fell and the living room table was set with his favorite foods: Portuguese Pork with Clams, homemade pickles, and Sericaia (Alentejo Portuguese province Egg Pudding) for desert. He had died and gone to heaven. He spoke excitedly with his parents, something he hadn’t done for years. Lucas felt protected, like when he has a young boy. After supper, he took a cup of hand-dripped coffee with a cube of brown sugar and, while sipping it, looked out the window to see the lights on the street. Out there, the sight of a police car was five cold fingers slapping him in the face. He was still a prisoner.
     
    * * *
    He took his leave of his parents, stilling the palpitations and tightness of his heart. Lucas lay down. His spirit turned the last few weeks’ events over and over. How could he escape the steel grip that was dragging him down a bottomless hole? Why had this happened to him? He quit feeling guilty about the beating he’d given Quiroga. It had nothing to do with the rest. No, it had nothing to do with his having acted against the giant without one drop of sportsmanship. That was another story. It was not the expiation of a failure; it was a machination against him.
                  Revulsion came over him—he was thinking like his father, imagining traps and cabals executed by occult forces. Who’d waste a second on him? It was merely chance. He was at the wrong place at the wrong time and the judicial machine that has to find the guilty had found him and was not going to let him go. It was like a bulldog’s bite: even if the judiciary wanted to release him, after screwing him over, it couldn’t. His guilt was the other side of the coin of the system’s pacification. They had hunted someone bad to explain the evil. They could move on to another dossier and store his on a shelf. Just he, and perhaps that woman, had seen the small bathroom that didn’t appear in the police photos but out of whose door the murderer had left. The good judge must have twisted about to swallow that testimony. But, in