The Done Thing

by Tracy Manaster

  I was right. Pam did come to the pool. Her face was still as a silk mask. It was a shame you would never get to see her with better hair.

  “Pammie. What did he say?”

  More than anything I envied you being there for her birth, for holding her new-faced and thinking, even for a moment, it wouldn’t be complicated to care. There’s no rational way to know this, but I believe: that silk face was the one Pam had brand new.

  She stared at the water. Even knowing it was there I couldn’t see her tooth against the tiles. Pam sank to her knees, drawn down like her child had only just discovered gravity.

  “What did he say to you?”

  “Goodbye, Lida. He said goodbye.”

  The gnats swarmed then. She’d knelt down in their low territory and they were drawn to her like sap. She didn’t raise a hand to stop them. Whenever they landed or got near to landing, I was there. I brought my hand down. On her shoulders. On her neck. Swat against Pam’s back. Swat against her arms. If the clerk looked up from her desk she’d have to come running. I’d look crazy, violent. She would think I was a hard, cruel woman, that I never loved Pam, not at all.

  48.

  ARIZONA D.O.C.-STEMBLE

  FORM SIU-014t

  Inmate: Lusk, C.D. 58344

  To: Inmate Services-Stemble

  Re: Last Meal Request

  Following the dismissal of my plea for Executive Clemency and with the approach of my Execution Date, I request the items below for my final meal:

  Two (2) grilled cheese sandwiches

  Nine (9) strips of bacon

  One (1) tomato, firm

  One (1) bag Doritos chips

  One (1) bowl tapioca pudding

  Three (3) cans Coca-Cola

  Three (3) cups cubed ice

  Three (3) cups crushed ice

  I have read and attest I comprehend the following:

  1) That my Final Meal Request will be considered in conjunction with the items on inventory at Food Services-Stemble and 2) that Inmate Services shall make a reasonable but not exhaustive effort to procure items not available in prison stores provided that such items are 2a) locally obtainable and 2b) not prohibitively expensive and 3) that my Final Meal 3a) shall not exceed reasonable portions as outlined in ASPM section IV-023 3b) shall not include tobacco products 3c) shall not include alcoholic beverages 3d) shall not include any foods to which I have a documented medical allergy and 3e) shall be consumed within the standard allotted forty-five minute meal period and 4) that the SIU-014t form is my only and official means of conveying my Final Meal Request and 5) that form SIU-014t, once submitted, can not be resubmitted.

  Clarence D. Lusk, Inmate 58344

  Wallace F. Collier, D.O.C. witness

  Cc: Food Services-Stemble

  They left you with a copy. It came to Pam with your effects. Pink and tissue thin, like the triplicate sheet of an ordinary bank form. Even for this you couldn’t be trusted with a real pen. The writing came through light as spider steps.

  I know you, Clarence. Better than you’d like. Some of my best dreams are of ice. I see you, last tapioca pearl gone from your tongue. Coke taste clings to crushed ice. Into your dark mouth. If you had sunlight to reflect it, the cubes would glint like gems. In the cell’s dim though, ice is just as rare. You grind your teeth down on the cold. Crunch. Your mouth fills with cool sparks. Chewing ice is the best way to splinter your teeth, but let’s not pretend that matters. You take another handful.

  You take a single cube and then another. You put them on the floor. Your shoes come off. You stand on the cubes. Cold shocked soles. Cold veins up your calves. You take a cube for each armpit and draw your arms close to keep in the slippery chill. You squat. Cubes for the pits of your knees. You passed a fevered final night. You felt embers in your joints. You slither a handful down your back and press against the wall to hold it. Your guards—you’ve had double watch non-stop since you came to the Death House—eye one another but say nothing. They try not to talk to you, not now you’re off the pods. You’ve known these guards longer than you ever knew your wife. You take another ice cube and anoint. Forehead and earlobes, the crevice between ear and skull. Over your eyes like pennies. Into the well of your tongue for the ferryman. You slip it all around your groin.

  You’re quaking now, Clarence. A thought with all the force of prayer. Let the ice hold out. Let it be your last best shell. May the needle be frozen piercing it. May the poisons fork through you much cooler than blood. May you at least be cold getting on the gurney. May you believe the cold is why you shake.

  49.

  The guards let Pammie bypass the metal detector. I felt mealy inside because back at the airport I hadn’t thought to insist on that. Her poor baby. A gloved guard approached her for pat-down. He used the backs of his hands. Pamela looked ill. I hoped the baby was a soccer baby. I hope he kicked the officer good and hard. Blue went before me through the search check. Seshet didn’t growl at Stemble’s still-haunched guard dog. Neither barked. Neither moved. They hardly seemed dogs anymore, we’d worked them so hard; neither knew it was meant to sniff the other’s nether parts.

  An officer ushered us into a waiting room. A second officer awaited us. No gloves. He introduced himself as Wally, our Special Operations Liaison. He was almost as tall as Blue. Whenever the walkie-talkie at his belt crackled, he answered with his full title. He probably didn’t have one on ordinary days. A water jug with knobs for cold and hot stood in one corner of the room. The wheel-cart beside it displayed wax cone cups and packets of instant coffee. Pamela looked shaky. There were no chairs anywhere. By rights we could have gone into the victims’ waiting room. They were bound to have a wealth of comfortable seating. Wally asked for our attention. We’d be joined shortly, he said, by two Media Witnesses and two Citizen Witnesses, chosen by lottery from approved petitioners. We should be assured that the families in Viewing Room A would be joined by the same number and type. The Media Witnesses were not permitted to ask us for statements while on prison grounds, though he was prohibited to interfere should we speak to them of our own accord.

  I wondered how many times Wally had done this.

  Four witnesses filed in. More guards. More gloves. I could tell which two were reporters; the citizens wouldn’t meet my eyes. They all hovered by the beverage cart, but no one drank. The phone rang and I just about crawled out of my skin. It was ordinary, white, wall-mounted. It looked just like the one in my kitchen. Wally answered. Listened. Hung up. They ought to have communicated via the handheld. Somewhere in the Death House you had to be thinking of the governor. How you’d hope if you heard that ring.

  “The condemned has been moved into the chamber,” said Wally. Yesterday Westin called you the inmate. I wondered when they’d made the change. “Please follow me.” A steady heavy sound. My heart or my steps down the hall. I walked close beside Pam. Her lavender conditioner and the aggressive mint of toothpaste. The witness room was laid out in three tiers, each carpeted in rumpus room brown. Five chairs per tier. They looked like ordinary folding chairs, except for the feet, which had been clamped to cement blocks that poked up through the rug. Each chair angled toward the front window, over which a heavy floor-to-ceiling curtain had been drawn. Pam took a chair up front. I sat on her right. Blue took the chair to her left. Seshet’s rump hit the curtain when she settled down on the floor. It swayed but let in no light. Wally stood up front, flanked by the curtain cord and a telephone with a green light bulb screwed into the top. Pam’s hands lay in her lap. She clenched and unclenched her fist. It looked like a beating heart.

  I heard my watch tick. It was 6 A.M. The phone bulb flashed once, sallowing all our skin in its dull green light. Wally picked up the phone and listened. He replaced the receiver. “There has been no stay,” he said. He was no longer slouching. Pamela made a weak mewl. Pump, pump, pump went her hand. Wally tugged on the curtain cord.

  You lay supine on the gurney. A leather strap at each wrist and ankle. Leather stripes, in b
enign belt colors, marched up your body. A band at mid-calf and mid-thigh, a thicker one across the waist like a seatbelt, one across the chest and a last one at your forehead, where Frank used to wear his terrycloth sweatbands. Four guards stood around you, still as stalagmites. I couldn’t tell if I knew any of them from yesterday. To a man they had great barrel chests. You probably couldn’t see around their torsos to the windows paralleling your either side. From the other one I knew Arceli Ring was staring. To you those windows would look like mirrors. It’s good you couldn’t see. If you could raise your head, Clarence, you’d catch mirrors reflecting one another. You’d chase down a scrap of memory. You’d be younger, bored, at a department store, maybe. Marjorie slimmer, taking her sweet time. You’d remember your own face in the hinged mirror. The back of your head in its companion. The mirrors in those mirrors. The front and back Clarences the new mirrors caught. The unwieldy sight of infinite you.

  You wore the same sort of jumpsuit as before. I hoped they burned it, after. Imagine if it cycled back through prison laundry.

  You could probably see the clock on the wall at the gurney’s foot. Either it or my watch was a full minute off.

  You couldn’t see the curtain by the gurney’s head. The same green as surgeons’ scrubs, with two plate-sized holes midway up from the floor. You couldn’t see the door you’d come through anymore and you couldn’t see the red phone beside it. Your eyes must have landed on it; they had to, when you’d been wheeled in. A short man in a blue suit—Warden Kimpton—stood beside the phone. Prompted by no visible signal he approached the gurney. He changed places with a guard beside your head. The exchange happened seamlessly, soundlessly too, like the men on your side of the glass wore submariners’ boots. Kimpton produced a paper. The Death Warrant. He bent over you, reading. He was balding up top. He’d sunburned his bare spot. Pam’s heart fist contracted, released, contracted, released. We couldn’t hear a word Kimpton read. The warrant took a long while to get through. Pam got nearly two hundred fistbeats in before he finished. A guard stepped forward to reclaim the warrant. Kimpton said something and you nodded as well as you could. He produced a cordless microphone. He had to have got it from the guard when he handed off the warrant. I needed to pay better attention; this was happening; this was happening now. Warden Kimpton switched the mic on. It spat. He held it at an angle to your mouth.

  Your voice sounded deeper than yesterday. Deeper than I remember it free. Your position forced your diaphragm down. More air inside you to reverberate.

  “To my daughter that’s here today, I don’t want you hurting too bad. Remember you’re the best part of me. I knew it the first day you were born. I wouldn’t want you any different even if it meant I could’ve lived a different life.” Blue laid his hand over Pamela’s fist. It was still pumping. It made his fingers move. “To anyone my living might have hurt, I’m man enough to hope this gets you your peace, though I don’t see how it can. To everyone else who thinks I deserve this, just know that I’m a person here you’re killing, a person same as anybody, so think hard about what that means you deserve.”

  Wally’s phone flashed. The light shone on Pam’s face like fireworks when she was small. Wally didn’t answer. He began to close the drapes. As he did I saw the curtain above your head rustle. Some Special Operations Officer was there, prepping antiseptic.

  Only Blue’s fingers moved, riding Pamela’s hand.

  Only Seshet breathed. Wet and meaty and sour.

  The door opened. No warning. Every hair on my body came alive. Warm air in from the corridor. Peter Kershaw came in with it. He still had his briefcase, useless as a toy. He was weeping already. Tears without sound. Ordinary tears, ordinary sized. They should have been proportional. On his great griddle face they looked daubed on and delicate, salt pearls.

  Flash. Wally’s hand on the cord. The curtain inched back.

  You were lucky, Clarence. That took hardly any time at all. They must have found a vein on the first or second jab. Your flexing worked. Or the alcohol they swabbed you with, less to prevent infection than to tease blood back to the surface, despite the frightened constriction of veins, worming out the ready blue threads of you.

  A sharp intake of Pam breath beside me.

  I layered my hand over Blue’s. His skin was soft as a girl’s. I looked at my own hand. I’d forgotten my gloves. Pamela’s fist was still going. I felt her beat through Blue.

  You had the room to yourself. A clear tube snaked out of each curtain hole and down into you. One per arm. The second tube was only backup, but it made the whole getup look cyclic, like it would be possible to draw back out what they were going to pump into you.

  Your eyes shot quick as minnows from one tube to another. They should have at least warned you which side they’d use. We would tell your mother you died peaceful in your sleep. Unpredictable apnea.

  They’d perched a heart monitor on your chest. It made it easier to mark your lungs’ up and down. You worked them like bellows. Your lips moved too, like cilia, trying to usher in and out air.

  I could feel my heart all through me. To the tips of my fingers. Blue must feel it in my palm.

  Your eyes fixed wide on your left-hand tube. There. You saw it. Sodium thiopental began its downflow. Ten seconds to wink you from consciousness, sense by sense by sense. You struggled against four blinks but the fifth one took. Color—even the gymnasium shower hues of this last room—lost to you now. Maybe you felt the bands still; I watched your lung-work press against them. Perhaps you felt an itch in either forearm. Something under the skin that shouldn’t be. If you heard your monitor’s blip blip blip now it would be from a distance; you wouldn’t think it had a thing to do with you. If you smelled you smelled leather and strident cleaning—they had to give this room a solid go-over, between times—or your own sweat, that and whatever other dampness you’d begun to let go. If you tasted you tasted dry sponge mouth. Or maybe your erratic breathing raised a last belch. There, in your mouth, a spit echo of pork fat.

  They gave you five grams. The half-life of sodium thiopental is 11.5 hours. If they let you alone, you’d wake up in sixty or so.

  I know my chemistry, Clarence.

  They gave you 100mg of pancuronium bromide. It stopped acetylcholine from binding to its receptors. It stilled muscle fibers. I watched your chest jiggle and stop. Your diaphragm fell in like a cake.

  Your heart kept on. Involuntary muscle. The heart is meant to keep on. One hundred milliequivalents of potassium chloride flooded yours. Hyperkalemia. Your heart was mechanical as anything. You couldn’t depolarize. You couldn’t contract. You tried; Clarence, I am sure you tried. Asystole.

  Warden Kimpton was there to announce your time of death and over his voice I heard my own. Cassava, I said, cassava, cassava. The stuck word, the every word, the poison plant, the plant that keeps scratch farming families alive.

  50.

  I have a diamond. It hangs from my neck.

  Rigel Francis Claverie came via cesarean into this world sixty-eight days after you left it, named for Orion’s brightest star.

  “But you can’t even see the stars,” I reminded Blue. Girl or boy, they’d have saddled their firstborn with Rigel.

  “I know they’re there. And I know they’re wonderful,” Blue said, which is just the brand of sentiment I’ve come to appreciate from him.

  They gave me a diamond at the hospital, a bit shy of a karat and flawless, with the explicit understanding that they’d never catch me up to Kath. I was glad; Pam looked scooped out and mottled; she’d labored almost forty hours and been split like a melon. Kath got a fat tourmaline, Rigel’s actual birthstone. She is still waiting for her amethyst.

  Pamela and Blue don’t know I’ve swapped out the stone. The price difference went straight into a savings account for Rigel. He may need it, later, with his parents going about buying up gems for old women. And besides, flawlessness is entirely too much to expect of any thing or one, even of Rigel, who is still so new. He can’t
tell if the diamond’s a little smaller, a little rougher. When I hold him it sways up above him and he stares at it as if at a hypnotist’s watch. If I’m still around when he meets the right girl, I will give it to him for her.

  He’s a smart boy. Just six months old and he can already flip himself over.

  On the day he was born I stood by the nursery where Rigel was safe in his baby bin among rows of other safe babies. I touched the glass, as if my warmth could pass through to him. He had wriggled himself asleep; his hand formed a fist and he held it steady by his ear. It looked like some kind of fanatic’s salute. The room was just a little larger than the room where I last saw you. Flat-backed behind glass. I needed ID just to visit the ward. They were vigilant checking. Wire enforced the nursery panes. Pamela and Rigel wore bracelets with bar-codes on them. I wanted them to hurry up and take the baby home.

  So it seems this is my punishment: I still think of you. Clarence, I know you won’t think that’s harsh enough for me. You never were forgiving. Just know that it isn’t easy, knowing what I owe you.

  I apologize. I’ve never been any good at explaining myself. I tend to make a mess with words.

  Rigel has a lip blister from how he drinks his milk.

  Rigel can never stay awake in a car.

  Pam and I take him to your mother most Thursdays. Family is family and we don’t have much of it left. Pamela is tentative around Marjorie, but I have decided to like her. For one thing, I’m no longer the most difficult woman in Pam’s universe. Call-Me-Art has never once looked at me askance. It isn’t fair or right. I should be banned for life. I know what I deserve, Clarence, I know. When she returned to work, Pam opted to keep her off Thursday schedule. She was used to it and it meant more time with the baby. Pamela misses—not you but—your presence. We talk about it less than you would like, but agree: our life is very strange without your shadow. Your mother is speaking again. Whole sentences now. Paragraphs even. On some visits she knows who we are. Sometimes she thinks that Rigel’s you. Her words sag out of her slumped mouth and sometimes her language is appalling, especially considering the presence of her great-grandson. Until last week her limbs were too uneasy to hold him. But Thursday we put him in her arms. Pam stood close by to spot. Rigel didn’t know these arms. He purpled with rage. Your mother stayed calm. She handed him back. “Maybe later,” she said, slurring just a bit, “He’s little. He doesn’t know he’s not part of you.”