Hangman

by Michael Slade

  “The painting dates from the fall of 1893. The lithograph from 1895. From the first day it was displayed in Berlin at the close of that century, Munch’s howling homunculus has provided the screaming meemies in stressed people everywhere with the perfect image of how they feel about whatever is driving them up the wall. Whatever the cause, here’s one thing you can do: clap your hands over your ears and scream your head off.

  “We recently had an exhibition of Munch prints here. With it came a side exhibit called ‘The Scream and Popular Culture,’ a collection of kitsch demonstrating how this image has become the universal icon of angst. ‘A scream a day keeps the shrink away,’ read the caption on a poster with multiple images of Munch’s print. The Scream was on sale as a key chain, a stress ball, a mouse pad, a fridge magnet, a tie, an inflatable doll, and a whoopee cushion that—Eeeeeeeee!—let out a scream when you sat on it. Macaulay Culkin adopted the pose in the ad for Home Alone. An American bank printed checks with The Scream on them. A feminist button featured the image with a quote from Margaret Atwood: ‘Men are afraid of being laughed at. … Women are afraid of being killed.’ Whatever your angst, be it fear, pain, or outrage, The Scream vents it. Who today doesn’t have things to scream about? Taxes, traffic, school, politicians, Monday morning, bullies, abuse, advancing age, a worsening sex-per-week ratio. One look at The Scream and you think, Yes, that’s how I feel! Which explains why—except for the Mona Lisa—Munch’s howler has become the most published, appropriated, caricatured, parodied, and down-right popular high-art image since we evolved from apes.”

  Phelps let out an exaggerated sigh. “So much fuss about a picture of a woman who has lost her earrings.”

  Alex laughed.

  “I stole that line,” said Phelps.

  “Oscar Wilde?”

  “No, Dame Edna. The question you posed in your message was, What does The Scream mean? Well, that depends on your point of view. Thanks to pop culture, it means everything and nothing today.”

  Phelps began to close the book. “I trust that answers your question?”

  Alex stopped him. “Actually, I was hoping for Art History 101.”

  “How deep do you want to go?”

  “To the bottom,” she said.

  “May I ask why?”

  “You’ve read about the Hangman? Police believe the killer wore a Scream mask in Seattle and left a similar mask on the victim here. Obviously, Munch’s icon speaks to the Hangman. I’ve come to you for an inkling as to what it says.”

  “The Scream as a clue to murder?” Phelps’s interest was piqued. “The place to start is with the artist’s place in history. Edvard Munch, 1863 to 1944. Munch marks a pivotal point in Western art. ‘I paint not what I see, but what I saw,’ he wrote. That distinction is subtle but crucial, Ms. Hunt. Before him, painters viewed the world around them for inspiration. After Munch, they turned inward, to the landscape of their minds and souls.

  “In a world where God is dead, only the individual remains to fill the void. What Freud did was liberate the tormented self. What Munch did was illustrate the torment released from our heart of darkness. Obsessive and nightmarish, his work augured the twentieth century so completely that even with its end a hundred years later, the howls of outrage, pain, and fear captured in Munch’s Scream still echo. Does the Hangman hear the screamer’s shriek as his own?”

  “Do we know Munch’s inspiration?” Alex asked.

  “Yes, an ancient Inca mummy on exhibit at the Paris World Fair of 1889. Excavated in Peru, it was found bound in a fetal position inside a large clay jar. With its gaping eye sockets and open mouth, it had survived the ravages of time with its fear intact. A macabre reminder of the horror of death, that relic made a deep, lasting impression on Munch. A few years later, the artist fashioned that antiquity into his icon of angst.”

  “The Scream is Death incarnate?”

  “That’s why it works.” Phelps flipped to notes in the appendix of the book. “For Munch’s esthetic inspiration, we have his own words.”

  Alex read the note above his finger:

  I walked along the road with two friends. The sun went down—the sky was blood red—and I felt a breath of sadness—I stood still, tired unto death—over the blue-black fjord and city lay blood and tongues of fire. My friends continued on—I remained—trembling with fear. I felt a loud, unending scream piercing nature.

  “How The Scream works is as fascinating as why,” said Phelps. “The diagonal lines of the bridge leading to other people cannot hold back the sagging curves of the sky or the wavering lines surrounding the overwrought mind of the Screamer. The upright figures he/she/it passed a moment before on the bridge are disinterested peers central to the horror. They refuse to acknowledge the overwhelming anguish they just witnessed. See how they have turned their backs on the screamer?”

  “I see a woman.”

  “I see a man,” said Phelps. “What the screamer represents is an asexual wraith, an apparition of a living being portending his or her death. The eyes are wide open, but peripheral vision is lost. The hands are clasped over what must be ears on a skull-like head. The narrow ellipse of a mouth screams directly at the viewer. The body lacks the ramrod uprightness of the figures in the background, and as it loses human anatomy, the torso twists like a worm into an S-curve conforming to and extending the curves of the warped landscape. The net effect is a pathological loss of self.

  “The Scream captures a psychotic experience. It is an objectivization of subjective sensation. The open issue is what caused the loss of identity? The bridge leading to nothing is a simile for death. But is it death in the past or death in the future that wrenches this scream from the screamer?”

  “What’s the original worth?”

  “Fifty to sixty million dollars. It was stolen from Oslo’s National Gallery in 1994, on the first day of the Lillehammer Winter Olympics. Ransoming it was a foolish crime. How do you sell history’s second most famous painting?”

  “The thieves were caught?”

  “Yes, when they tried to collect the ransom.”

  “Was Munch insane?”

  “That,” said Phelps, “is for you to decide. He was raised in a dysfunctional Norwegian home. His mother died of tuberculosis when Munch was five. His father was a religious fanatic who raved about the Bible. When the boy got tuberculosis, the fever brought visions of hell. Munch was fourteen when his beloved sister, Sophie, died of the same disease. An obsession with death was the only constant in Munch. When his father was on his deathbed, he bequeathed Munch his Bible to save his son’s doomed soul.”

  “A healthy life,” said Alex.

  “His images say it all. A pathological sense of isolation broods at the heart of his art. What Munch shows in The Scream isn’t an expression of his state of mind, but proof of it. ‘Could only have been painted by a madman,’ he scrawled on one version of The Scream. The picture is autobiography raised to the level of universal pain. Munch suffered a nervous breakdown and went to a Danish clinic, where the cure was electric shocks.”

  “Hmmm,” said Alex.

  “The lithograph is part of a series titled The Mirror. When the Hangman looks in this mirror, what does he see?”

  “I wonder,” said Alex.

  “I hope I’ve helped,” said Phelps.

  Clues …

  Clues …

  Clues …

  Always watch for the clues.

  The Echo

  Seattle

  November 8

  Jeffrey Kline, barrister-at-law, was mistaken when he thought, In choosing America for the first lynching, the Hangman embarked upon a self-defeating course of action. The hangman never became a national icon down there. The hangman as a named and feared executioner, hanging cons around the country and the commonwealth, was a British horror.

  Not so.

  It’s true that America has no pantheon of hangmen to rival Ketch, Calcraft, Marwood, Berry, Billington, Ellis, and Pierrepoint. But that’s because A
merica prefers to focus on the condemned as the celebrity of the gallows. The Last Meal—the best on the prison menu—is basically an American tradition, and in the early days of the Wild West it was followed by the local madame sending the best of her brothel in to satisfy the doomed man’s other appetite. Whether by their own or society’s desire, American hangmen went to great trouble to stay out of the public eye.

  Can Britain boast that a future head of state hanged a ne’er-do-well? America can. When Grover Cleveland was the sheriff of New York’s Erie County, the soon-to-be twenty-second and twenty-fourth president of the United States personally sprang the trap for the killer Patrick Morrissey.

  As for the act of hanging itself, Yankee ingenuity developed the “jerk-’em-up” gallows. The invention had neither a drop nor a trapdoor, replacing them with a heavy weight attached to the end of a noosed rope looped up over a horizontal beam. When the elevated weight was released to plunge to the ground, the con was yanked high into the air so all could see him die. The jerk-’em-up gallows was ideal for the paying spectacle of a “sheriff’s ball.” Like the ball on Bedloe’s Island in 1860.

  Albert E. Hicks—Hicksie to his friends—was tried and convicted of piracy on the high seas. Hicksie was a notorious Manhattan underworld thug who murdered three men on an oyster boat bound for Deep Creek, Virginia, before it reached port. Because piracy was a federal rap, it was thought he couldn’t be hanged in the city of New York, so the execution was set for an island in the outer harbor. Because access to Bedloe’s Island was restricted to those with boats, the hanging was perfectly placed to charge admission. The “sheriff’s ball” earned the federal marshal more than a thousand dollars.

  As for the hanging, it was quite an affair. Two hundred marines surrounded the scaffold on three sides with a hollow square. Ten thousand customers anchored within sight of the gallows. A man named Isaacs placed the noose around Hicksie’s neck; then, from the privacy of his booth beside the scaffold, the hangman cut the rope that held up the weight. Down it plummeted and up jerked Hicksie, hanged high in the sky for all to see, where it took the strangled man eleven minutes to die. Such a good location did Bedloe’s Island prove to be that a quarter-century later it was selected as the site for the Statue of Liberty.

  In America, you can say the foundation of Liberty is hanging.

  The room in which the Hangman sat thinking about Hicksie and the jerk-’em-up gallows was dark except for a beam of light focused on a print of The Scream hanging on the wall. The shriek of the screamer echoed in the killer’s mind, for Munch’s icon of angst captured the pain and outrage the Hangman felt tonight, an outrage screaming for such eye-for-an-eye revenge that death would come as a blessing to tomorrow night’s victim.

  The jerk-’em-up gallows.

  What should I use? the Hangman wondered.

  The boom?

  The anchor?

  The halyard winch?

  I’m coming for you, fucker.

  The Yardarm

  Seattle

  Thursday, November 9 (Seven days ago)

  Bart Busby was a bully.

  Always had been.

  Always would be.

  Bart knew that bullies were created, not born, and that he was the Frankenstein monster of a brutal family. His earliest memory was of his Ma screaming at him that she hated his guts. She made it clear from then on that she had never wanted a child, and that his birth had stolen opportunity from her. She could have been a movie star, or a game-show queen, or any number of other glittering celebrities. But instead, she had ended up a Cinderella drudge, struggling to manage a waitress job, housework, and him, while her precious youth was going, going, and then gone. That’s why Ma spent money on herself and not on Bart. Because he owed her everything for ruining her life.

  Bart’s relationship with his Pa was even rougher. “Spare the rod and spoil the child” was Pa’s favorite motto. Pa worked for Boeing as a riveter, one of those guys who fastened sheets of metal together, a line of work he despised as being beneath him. But if he had to labor at such a shitty job all day to feed his family, then by God, he expected Bart to toe the line. If Pa came home from work to find Bart hadn’t done something Pa expected should be done, he’d whip off his belt and thrash the boy until his buttocks bled. Bart still had the scars to prove it.

  Whenever Bart was thrashed with Pa’s belt or Ma’s tongue, the next day he would take it out on someone weak at school. Bart had several whipping boys he liked to pick on. Bottle Bottoms was a runt who wore thick glasses. Bart would seize them from his face to taunt the little wimp, then push him back repeatedly with a series of chest shoves, telling him he should be in a school for the blind. Nicknamed after Quasimodo, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Quasy was a humped kid burdened with a deformed spine. Bart would follow him at school and kick his behind, asking if being a cripple made it easy for Dad to bugger him standing up.

  Bart knew he was a bully, and he was proud of the fact. Pushing others around gave him satisfaction. The experience of watching someone else writhe in pain or feeding off their fear of him built Bart up. If they sniveled and cried, so much the better, for it felt good to see their blotchy faces, streaming tears, and snotty noses. Mix in a bit of blood, and that was best of all.

  There were other benefits too. Extorting things of value allowed him to replace the allowance denied by Ma. Because his victims were all outcasts and geeks, the approval of the in-crowd was guaranteed. He sensed the support of like-minded kids, and their silent approbation was thunderous applause to his ears.

  So positively reinforcing was being a bully that Bart continued being one into his adult life. He was adept at selecting those who made the best victims, for Bart was an expert at picking up the signs. Those who were sensitive, quiet, and cautious; those who were anxious, isolated, and alone; those who habitually withdrew from confrontation; those so depressed they found no joy in happy occasions … all were easy pickin’s for Bart to bully. He had a macho distaste for weakness of any kind.

  Take, for instance, the wuss he encountered earlier today, on the final leg of a two-week selling trip to Oregon. A skinny, bespectacled, asthmatic Jew, the wuss was the proprietor of a family bookstore in Astoria. Bart, on the other hand, was a large, intimidating ex-football player, currently marketing office machines with the hard sell. The Jew’s wife was behind the till, so Bart made a point of telling him what a nice set of tits she had. The guy cringed. He was a bookish nerd. So in a false, convivial style, Bart proceeded to tell him in explicit detail how he would fuck a woman like her. All the while he had his eyes locked on her titties, a trick that invariably made a weak bitch squirm, and he ended by wiggling his tongue in a most suggestive way before giving the wuss a little wink of male conspiracy.

  “Bet that’s how you fuck her, huh? And who’s that over there? Not your daughter?”

  The wuss, like all true victims, fumbled the play. He tried to switch Bart off by laughing and making himself an object of fun, but Bart already had his eyes on the girl’s budding boobs. Finally, the wuss got rid of him the only way he could: by buying a new copy machine he didn’t need.

  God, that felt good.

  But nothing would ever feel as fine as convicting that kiddy-diddler of murder punishable by death. Bart had never had respect for any of his peers, so was it not ironic that he was chosen as a juror to give that scumbag trial by his peers? Pa had been a vicious asshole at home, but people outside the family thought he was some kind of saint. To them, Pa was a hard-working, charitable man, and from that Bart had learned how to put on a front. The front he presented to the court got him on the jury, and as a juror he was free to exert another lesson learned from Pa: Make sure no one ever gets the better of you. And in that jury room, Bart made sure no one did.

  Peter Bryce Haddon was Bart’s kind of victim. The defendant was slight, wide-eyed, and scared. Knowing it would jitter Haddon and make him look guilty, Bart made a point of staring hard at the accused throughout his trial. The ca
se had dragged on interminably, and my, how Bart had enjoyed watching the jumpy diddler squirm.

  After the verdict, and after the sentence, he read in the Seattle Star that Haddon was raped and castrated in a prison riot. As far as Bart was concerned, that was real justice. The diddler had raped and taken the cherry of that little girl, so tit-for-tat, the same was done to him. Besides, what use did a wuss have for balls?

  That incident had inspired the name of the boat Bart owned before the boat he was boarding now. In days of old, when sailors set out to sea, they took with them a clutch of cabin boys to bugger for sport and relief. Because the boys were virgins in the ways of nautical love, they spent the first day at sea stripped of their pants, sitting on greased pegs jutting up from the flat of a bench. After a day of rocking back and forth with the waves, the “peg boys” who would serve the crew were loosened up.

  Prison made Haddon a peg boy, so to speak, and in homage to what happened to that wuss in the riot, Bart had named his last boat The Peg Boy.

  After that, he thought being a prison warden would be the ideal job for him. How Bart would enjoy bullying the scumbags who got banged up for doing stupid things that he was too smart to get caught doing. It would be like tormenting rats in a cage. He would make them do very hard time.

  When he later read in the Seattle Star that Haddon had hanged, Bart was proud of himself. As far as he was concerned, that was ultimate justice. The diddler had strangled the girl he had raped, so tit-for-tat, the same was done to him. Besides, what use did a wuss have for life?

  Not only did the hanging give Bart another fantasy—for years after, he thought being the state’s hangman would be the ideal job for him—but the execution also inspired the name of the sailboat he was now boarding. In days of yore, the British navy used to hang pirates from the yardarm, the horizontal spar at the head of a mast to which the top edge of a square sail was rigged. Bart’s boat was a thirty-nine-foot center-cockpit sloop with triangular sails, so it didn’t have a yardarm topping its mast. That didn’t matter. The name had meaning for Bart. In homage to what that wuss had suffered on the gallows, Bart had named his current boat The Yardarm.