The superintendent shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Now, there’s just one more thing, and then I’ll leave you in peace here. It’s about the sedative.”
Beachum stiffened. His lips went thin and the line of smoke coming up from his cigarette smeared as his hand shook. “I don’t want any sedative.”
“The sedative is completely optional,” Luther told him quickly. “I would just like to strongly advise you that it can make things a lot easier.” Here, he slipped into an open, man-to-man tone. He had given these speeches enough times now so that his changes of inflection came more or less automatically. “Hell, Frank, it’s as much for me as for you,” he said. “Having this thing go smoothly is gonna be in the best interest of everybody concerned in the long run. This sedative they give you, it’ll make …”
“I don’t want it,” said Beachum tightly. Then, because you don’t have much leverage when you’re in a cage, he seemed to force himself to go on more reasonably: “I appreciate the offer, Mr. Plunkitt, but I wanna be clear in my mind.” He averted his eyes and added: “I want to be able to see my wife, all right? I’m not gonna make any trouble, I just wanna be clear for that.”
“Fair enough.” Luther knew when to let it alone. “It’s your choice. If you change your mind, just let the duty officer know or let me know. I just wanted to give my little sales talk, that’s all.”
The prisoner kept his eyes lowered, looking at his hands. His cigarette had burned down nearly to the filter now. It was making Luther antsy as hell. Finally, Beachum reached out and crushed it in the tinfoil ashtray beside him. Luther sighed with relief.
The warden stood another moment, watching the condemned man through the bars. His business was done. He had nothing more to say. He lingered, as Beachum’s hand returned to the coffee cup. Beachum swallowed as if there were a bad taste in his mouth. Then he lifted his face to the warden again.
Plunkitt nodded once, quickly, and turned away. He walked to the door, feeling the prisoner’s eyes on his back. Those dead man’s eyes, that face.
Walking down the hall to his office, Luther was still angry at himself. He could still see the prisoner’s face. He imagined it, as it would look tonight, staring up at him from the gurney. It was a hell of a way to be thinking, he thought. Pretty soon, he was going to start talking like one of those sisters of mercy who turned up in the death cells from time to time. Or like one of those solemn lunkheads from the TV news who thought they were the first to discover that condemned men were human beings too. Gosh agony, they would announce into their minicams, these people have intelligence, some of them, and personalities and problems and senses of humor—and they’re going to kill one of them. Gosh agorry. Film at eleven.
Luther nodded and winked at a passing secretary. His gait was relaxed and steady. His smile was bland. No one could have known what he was feeling. But he knew. That weight in his stomach. It was as if a number seven sinker were tied to his innards by a twelve-pound test line. It had been there ever since Beachum’s death warrant had arrived. And it made him angry at himself.
He had been working with criminals a long time now. Dangerous, dangerous men. He knew they could be appealing characters. Smart, funny, thoughtful, some of them. They could run a million games on you, play you like an instrument, a million scammy riffs. And, sure, they were men just as he was and some of them had had rough lives. But that was the whole point, wasn’t it. They were men. And men made choices. That’s what a man is. A man is the creature who can say no. And if you chose to do murder, to end the life of some mother’s child in agony and fear, to blackwash a dozen other lives with grief and anger, then it was your humanity itself which condemned you, wasn’t it? Because you could’ve said no. A man can always say no.
Luther looked ahead as he walked, and his features softened a little. Arnold McCardle, fat as life and fatter, was waiting for him outside his office door.
McCardle sank deep into Luther’s leather sofa. His white shirt bellied wide out of his gray jacket. The arc of it made his red tie fall so far short of his belt buckle that it looked, Luther thought, like a clown’s tie. Sure enough, the deputy superintendent was a right jolly fellow, with sparkling eyes in a great block of a face. Round his bulbous, beer-veined nose, his puffed cheeks glowed as he blew across the rim of his coffee mug. The mug was nearly hidden by the huge paw that held it. His other hand tapped a manila folder absently against his knee.
Luther, with a mug of his own, tilted back behind his great mahogany desk. He dipped his bland smile into the steam of the coffee.
“I got a feeling,” he said, “it’s gonna be a real asshole of a day.”
“Can’t see why not,” said Arnold with a wink.
“Any surprises last night?”
“Nary a one, no sir. Prisoner watched a movie, fell asleep round midnight. Slept soundly till about six. I don’t think he’ll give us any trouble.”
“I hope not,” said Luther. Then he changed the subject. “Skycock in?”
“I think he stopped off in execution block. To nurse his baby,” Arnold added dryly. Reuben Skycock was the prison’s maintenance engineer. He was responsible for the lethal injection equipment and he did tend to fuss at the thing like a mother hen. The day before, they had run through the whole procedure, using CO Allen as the prisoner because he matched Frank Beachum’s size and weight. Allen made the usual nervous jokes, lying there strapped onto the gurney, but Reuben never even cracked a smile. Checking his toggles, his stopwatch, his signal lights. His head bobbing from one of them to the other—just like a mother hen.
“Rehearsal went well though,” Luther said, finishing the thought aloud.
“Oh, yeah.” Arnold gave another of his trademark winks. “I promised Allen we’d give him a Christian burial.”
Luther let his smile broaden. Arnold settled his vast beam this way and that on the sofa, working out an itch in his ass.
“How about the state?” Luther said after a while. “They got their act together finally?”
Arnold drew a page out of his manila folder and slipped it onto the desk. “Guest list all finalized. Security passes made up. Duty roster—Whelan asked off it, did I tell you?”
“Yeah.”
“Says his wife doesn’t like it.”
Arnold smirked, but Luther, looking over the guest list now, said: “Fair enough. My Daisy’s not too fond of it herself.”
“The badges’ll go down to the gate at nine,” Arnold went on. “Got the witness list. What else? Roadblocks are up. There’ll be some demonstrators out there, pro and con, but just the usual.”
Luther let the page drop onto his blotter, raised his eyes. “We ever decide about that mining road?”
“Yup,” said Arnold. “You were right. It comes into sight when you widen the perimeter. It’s all secure.”
They sat quietly then for a while. The McCardle mountain expanded as he drew a contemplative breath, as he glanced down at his folder, holding it half open in one hand. “I guess we got it pretty much covered here, Mr. P,” he said finally. “Even have Debbie Does Dallas for the troops.” He snapped the folder shut.
Luther snorted. Debbie Does Dallas. It was SOP on execution nights to play a few soft-core porno films on the cell-block TVs. Give the inmates something else to think about, keep them from getting crazy. They didn’t really show Debbie Does Dallas, but Arnold liked to say that. He liked the sound of the title. He thought it was a hoot.
“How about the phones?” said Luther then. But he said it hazily, and he didn’t listen to the answer. His mind had traveled back to the prisoner again. He was picturing him, instead of CO Allen, strapped to the gurney. He was picturing Beachum’s mournful, craggy face.
Arnold was still talking about the phone checks when Luther said, “He have his medical and everything? The prisoner, I mean.”
“Oh yeah. Last night. Doc says he’s fit as a fiddle.”
“And his visitors all squared away.”
“Wife, kid, minister.
Your girlfriend from the newspaper too—she’s coming in at four.”
Luther lifted his chin a little, lifted one corner of his mouth. “Mea culpa,” he said, not for the first time on this subject. “Don’t know what came over me.” He swiveled a half turn away in his high-backed chair. Until he could see the photo of his son, Fred, on the cabinet behind him. Grinning, crewcut, thin as a stick. Seeming to shine in his uniform, his dress whites.
“Musta been love,” said Arnold.
“She was pretty persuasive. She kind of looked like she knew my darkest secret and was gonna tell if I didn’t play along.”
Arnold said something, but Luther missed it. Sad thing about visitors, he was thinking. Not much of a comfort to the dead man usually. When it got right down to it, in fact, the final visits were usually the hardest part of the Death Watch for the prisoner to bear. Luther had seen a man once—William Wade, Billy the Kid Wade, not two years ago—Luther had seen him fall to his knees and sob when his mother had to end her last visit to him. Fall to his knees and stretch out his two hands to her like a child being left on his first day at school. The tears streaming down his cheeks. “Mama! Mama!” Then, five hours later, when the gurney was rolled in, he was a cowboy again; he was Billy the Kid again. Shook hands with everyone, shook hands with Luther and clicked his tongue jauntily against his teeth. And hopped onto the table to be strapped down like a man hopping over a fence. It wasn’t the dying that got to you, Luther thought. In the end, when all hope was gone, when all bets were off, dying was something a man could accept. The dying was nothing like half so hard as the saying good-bye.
Luther sipped at his coffee, looking at his son’s photo. He sure hoped Fred could get that leave in November. Brenda and the kids would come down. Have Thanksgiving with the whole family together. Go out to the woods, him and Fred, and hunt up some deer. Luther was never a happier man on this earth than when he was out hunting or fishing with his boy.
“Let me ask you something, Arnold,” he heard himself say suddenly then—say before he had a chance to stop himself. He swung back around to face the fat man on the sofa. “What do you think of this Beachum fellow?”
Arnold drew back, almost comically—his fleshy face seemed to fold into itself like one of those rubber masks when you flatten it. It was such an uncharacteristic thing for Luther to say. But Arnold considered himself a man of the world and he thought: What the hell. The emotional side of this business got to all of them sometimes, even Luther. You couldn’t be too macho about it, bottle it up inside you. It’d give you a goddamned heart attack.
So, frowning sagely, the fat man considered his answer for a moment. Then he said, “I don’t think about Frank Beachum at all, Plunk. Sometimes I think about that little pregnant girl he shot dead over something like fifty dollars. But mostly, I think about doing my job.”
For the first time that morning, Luther let himself smile wide enough to show some teeth. Yes, he thought. Of course. That’s right.
You could always count on Arnold to keep your mind steady.
2
For a long time after the warden left, Frank sat at his table, the sheets of paper blank in front of him. His hand shook weakly as he reached to pick up the pen. Plunkitt’s words—your remains … the procedure … the funeral … thrummed in his head. The clock on the wall above CO Benson went on turning, and Frank felt it turn. Flinging the minutes away like chicken feed. It was hard to focus his mind, hard to think.
But he had to. They would be there soon. His wife and daughter. It was nearing eleven now and they would come at one. He had to do this, he had to get it done before they arrived. He put the pen’s tip to the paper—not for the first time that morning. And not for the first time, he held it there motionless. He had written this letter over and over in his mind a hundred times, for six years he had been composing it. But it was not so easy to set it down now in ink. It mattered too much to him. No real words could do what he wanted them to do. In his mind, the phrases were eloquent, even wise. They were charged with his desperate feeling. On the page, they were ashes. He might just as well have burned the paper and left that to his little girl.
He raised his eyes, his stomach clutching, his mind seizing with panic at the passing time. Benson glanced up at him hopefully. The guard, Frank knew, had been disappointed that he would not watch a video on the cell TV as most condemned prisoners did. But the movies made things worse for Frank. The actors pretending to be in trouble or in love. He was too aware of the camera watching them. No matter what they said or did, he was too conscious that they were only pretending, doing their job really, the work they enjoyed, waiting to go home to their wives or their husbands, their houses and their lawns. It made him feel ill. It made him remember that other camera, the one that was watching him—the eye of God. When he watched movies, he could see himself through that other eye, lying on his cot, gazing at the TV while the seconds were flung away.
Frank lowered his gaze to the page again. Finally, he began writing.
Dear Gail, he wrote,
This is kind of hard for me, because I’m not writing to the little girl I know—I’m writing to a young woman I’m never going to get to know. I’ve been trying for a long time to think of what to say to her—to you—because I wanted to give you some of the things I’m not going to get to give you over the years. I was thinking you might be able to turn to this letter when you’re older and you can understand it, and feel you’ve got some idea of who your father was and how much he loved you. But now I know I can’t do that. That’s why it’s so hard to get started. I had this idea that I would write down all this advice, and all these words of wisdom I might have had a chance to say to you while you were growing up in my house with me around you—things to watch out for, things I’ve seen and been through that might help you through the things that you have to see and go through. I guess I always figured that was part of what a father did—I always had to figure that out for myself because I didn’t have a father who taught me how to do them. But I did want to do them right, kid. I hope you know that, even though I’m not there anymore. I wanted like anything to do them right because I loved you so much. But the thing is, what I’m thinking now as I write this, is that it wasn’t about any of the things I would’ve said anyway. Not the words, you know. A guy wants his experiences and the things that he thinks about and believes to be important to somebody, to his kid most of all, but I don’t know now if they really are. What’s important really is who you are, the whole thing of you, even the way you smell and laugh and stuff, and that you’re there, whatever the breaks are, that you’re there standing up for the people around you, and that’s exactly what I won’t be able to give you. You gotta know that it’s killing me that I won’t be able to give you that and that I really wanted to. Don’t ever think, not for even a single second, that I didn’t want to be there, every day, all the time. It was just the way things turned out for us, but I wanted to. So that’s one thing I want you to know right there.
I don’t want to spend a lot of time telling you that I didn’t do what they said I did—kill Amy, I mean. A lot of guys in here who I see they spend all their time talking about that, saying that, about how they’re innocent, and it eats them up inside and makes them crazy. I hope your mother will tell you the truth and that you’ll believe her because she’s a woman who doesn’t lie as you’ll probably have figured out by the time you get this. But just so you hear it from me too, I never hurt her or did anything to her and never would have. It was just a terrible mistake that the law made, and that’s it. I did some rough things when I was younger and that was part of my life, but when I met your mother I put all that aside and all I wanted to do was love her and then you when you came so there was no reason for me to hurt anyone anymore. So here’s something else I want to say, because one of the worst things about being here and knowing that I’m going to die tonight is thinking about what it’s going to be like for you, about how you’re not going to have a father now like
I didn’t even though I wanted you to so much and how maybe you’ll feel you got cheated and all the cops and the lawyers and judges did a bad thing to you. And what I want—if I could reach out to you from where I am and tell you one thing more than anything else—is for you not to be angry about it all the time. In the Bible it says that the rain falls the same way on the just and the unjust so it’s been that way for thousands of years and believe me when I tell you it’s not going to get any different, not in this world. And when you’re on the receiving end of something that’s wrong you can get angry about it and think that everything’s screwed up and you never get a fair break and this and that. And there’ll be people around you, Gail, all the time, everywhere you go, and they’ll be telling you all the time about how you should be angry and how it’s good to be angry even and look what they did to your father and let’s change the world this way or the other way and on and on. So maybe if you have this letter you’ll know that that’s not what I would’ve wanted at all. The way I see it, Gail—little Gail—is that the Good Lord gives you a patch of ground, just that little patch of ground beneath your two feet. You see that patch of ground clear right to the ending, baby, don’t let anybody talk you off it with their big talk or anything else, you make sure that the people on that patch are okay, that you take care of them and be good to them, and when you get to where I am, I tell you sure as anything, they’re gonna say yeah, kid, okay, and open the door for you. And we’ll all be there cheering for you too, I promise, me more than anyone. So that means don’t be telling people how to do right or thinking about what they should be doing. Just look into yourself and find the right and do it, and if you’re good to the people on your patch of ground, they’ll do it too, and that’s the ticket right there, that’s everything. I know the bad stuff is painful, but you gotta believe that God knows what He’s doing. I believe that even now. So that’s what I would’ve told you if I was there.
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