The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction

by Maxim Jakubowski

  I grabbed his arm and dragged him back down off the seat. “For Christ sake, man, cool it!”

  But he went into high laughter and punched my arm with feverish exuberance, and then jerked a tiny American flag from his inside jacket pocket and began waving it around above the windshield. I could see the sweat on his forehead.

  “It’s worth it to live in this country!” he yelled at them.

  He put the car in gear and we went on. I looked back and saw one of those cats crossing himself. It put things back in perspective: they were from nowhere. The Middle Ages. Not that I judged them: that was their scene, man. Unto every cat what he digs the most.

  The guard on the gate directed us to a small wooden building set against the outside wall, where we found five other witnesses. Three of them were reporters, one was a fat cat smoking a .45-calibre stogy like a politician from Sacramento, and the last was an Army type in lieutenant’s bars, his belt buckle and insignia looking as if he’d been up all night with a can of Brasso.

  A guard came in and told us to surrender everything in our pockets and get a receipt for it. We had to remove our shoes, too; they were too heavy for the fluoroscope. Then they put us through this groovy little room one by one to x-ray us for cameras and so on; they don’t want anyone making the Kodak scene while they’re busy dropping the pellets. We ended up inside the prison with our shoes back on and with our noses full of that old prison detergent-disinfectant stink.

  The politician type, who had these cold slitted eyes like a Sherman tank, started coming on with rank jokes: but everyone put him down, hard, even the reporters. I guess nobody but fuzz ever gets used to executions. The Army stud was at parade rest with a face so pale his freckles looked like a charge of shot. He had reddish hair.

  After a while five guards came in to make up the twelve required witnesses. They looked rank, as fuzz always do, and got off in a corner in a little huddle, laughing and gassing together like a bunch of kids kicking a dog. Victor and I sidled over to hear what they were saying.

  “Who’s sniffing the eggs this morning?” asked one.

  “I don’t know, I haven’t been reading the papers.” He yawned when he answered.

  “Don’t you remember?” urged another, “it’s the guy who smothered the woman in the house trailer. Down in the Valley by Salinas.”

  “Yeah. Soldier’s wife; he was raping her and . . .”

  Like dogs hearing the plate rattle, they turned in unison toward the Army lieutenant; but just then more fuzz came in to march us to the observation room. We went in a column of twos with a guard beside each one, everyone unconsciously in step as if following a cadence call. I caught myself listening for measured mournful drum rolls.

  The observation room was built right around the gas chamber, with rising tiers of benches for extras in case business was brisk. The chamber itself was hexagonal; the three walls in our room were of plate glass with a waist-high brass rail around the outside like the rail in an old-time saloon. The other three walls were steel plate, with a heavy door, rivet-studded, in the center one, and a small observation window in each of the others.

  Inside the chamber were just these two massive chairs, probably oak, facing the rear walls side by side; their backs were high enough to come to the nape of the neck of anyone sitting in them. Under each was like a bucket that I knew contained hydrochloric acid. At a signal the executioner would drop sodium cyanide pellets into a chute; the pellets would roll down into the bucket; hydrocyanic acid gas would form; and the cat in the chair would be wasted.

  The politician type, who had this rich fruity baritone like Burl Ives, asked why they had two chairs.

  “That’s in case there’s a double-header, dad,” I said.

  “You’re kidding.” But by his voice the idea pleased him. Then he wheezed plaintively: “I don’t see why they turn the chairs away – we can’t even watch his face while it’s happening to him.”

  He was a true rank genuine creep, right out from under a rock with the slime barely dry on his scales; but I wouldn’t have wanted his dreams. I think he was one of those guys who tastes the big draught many times before he swallows it.

  We milled around like cattle around the chute, when they smell the blood from inside and know they’re somehow involved; then we heard sounds and saw the door in the back of the chamber swing open. A uniformed guard appeared to stand at attention, followed by a priest dressed all in black like Zorro, with his face hanging down to his belly button. He must have been a new man, because he had trouble maintaining his cool: just standing there beside the guard he dropped his little black book on the floor like three times in a row.

  The Army cat said to me, as if he’d wig out unless he broke the silence: “They . . . have it arranged like a stage play, don’t they?”

  “But no encores,” said Victor hollowly.

  Another guard showed up in the doorway and they walked in the condemned man. He was like sort of a shock. You expect a stud to act like a murderer: I mean, cringe at the sight of the chair because he knows this is it, there’s finally no place to go, no appeal to make, or else bound in there full of cheap bravado and go-to-hell. But he just seemed mildly interested, nothing more.

  He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, suntans that looked Army issue, and no tie. Under thirty, brown crewcut hair – the terrible thing is that I cannot even remember the features on his face, man. The closest I could come to a description would be that he resembled the Army cat right there beside me with his nose to the glass.

  The one thing I’ll never forget is that stud’s hands. He’d been on Death Row all these months, and here his hands were still red and chapped and knobby, as if he’d still been out picking turnips in the San Joaquin Valley. Then I realized: I was thinking of him in the past tense.

  Two fuzz began strapping him down in the chair. A broad leather strap across the chest, narrower belts on the arms and legs. God they were careful about strapping him in. I mean they wanted to make sure he was comfortable. And all the time he was talking with them. Not that we could hear it, but I suppose it went that’s fine, fellows, no, that strap isn’t too tight, gee, I hope I’m not making you late for lunch.

  That’s what bugged me, he was so damned apologetic! While they were fastening him down over that little bucket of oblivion, that poor dead lonely son of a bitch twisted around to look over his shoulder at us, and he smiled. I mean if he’d had an arm free he might have waved! One of the fuzz, who had white hair and these sad gentle eyes like he was wearing a hair shirt, patted him on the head on the way out. No personal animosity, son, just doing my job.

  After that the tempo increased, like your heart beat when you’re on a black street at three a.m. and the echo of your own footsteps begins to sound like someone following you. The warden was at one observation window, the priest and the doctor at the other. The blackrobe made the sign of the cross, having a last go at the condemned, but he was digging only Ben Casey. Here was this MD cat who’d taken the Hippocratean Oath to preserve life, waving his arms around like a TV director to show that stud the easiest way to die.

  Hold your breath, then breathe deeply: you won’t feel a thing. Of course hydrocyanic acid gas melts your guts into a red-hot soup and burns out every fibre in the lining of your lungs, but you won’t be really feeling it as you jerk around: that’ll just be raw nerve-endings.

  Like they should have called his the Hypocritical Oath.

  So there we were, three yards and half an inch of plate glass apart, with us staring at him and him by just turning his head able to stare right back: but there were a million light years between the two sides of the glass. He didn’t turn. He was shrived and strapped in and briefed on how to die, and he was ready for the fumes. I found out afterwards that he had even willed his body to medical research.

  I did a quick take around.

  Victor was sweating profusely, his eyes glued to the window.

  The politician was pop-eyed, nose pressed flat
and belly indented by the brass rail, pudgy fingers like plump garlic sausages smearing the glass on either side of his head. A look on his face, already, like that of a stud making it with a chick.

  The reporters seemed ashamed, as if someone had caught them peeking over the transom into the ladies’ john.

  The Army cat just looked sick.

  Only the fuzz were unchanged, expending no more emotion on this than on their targets after rapid-fire exercises at the range.

  On no face was there hatred.

  Suddenly, for the first time in my life, I was part of it. I wanted to yell out STOP! We were about to gas this stud and none of us wanted him to die! We’ve created this society and we’re all responsible for what it does, but none of us as individuals is willing to take that responsibility. We’re like that Nazi cat at Nuremberg who said that everything would have been all right if they’d only given him more ovens.

  The warden signalled. I heard gas whoosh up around the chair.

  The condemned man didn’t move. He was following doctor’s orders. Then he took the huge gulping breath the MD had pantomimed. All of a sudden he threw this tremendous convulsion, his body straining up against the straps, his head slewed around so I could see his eyes were tight shut and his lips were pulled back from his teeth. Then he started panting like a baby in an oxygen tent, swiftly and shallowly. Only it wasn’t oxygen his lungs were trying to work on.

  The lieutenant stepped back smartly from the window, blinked, and puked on the glass. His vomit hung there for an instant like a phosphorus bomb burst in a bunker; then two fuzz were supporting him from the room and we were all jerking back from the mess. All except the politician. He hadn’t even noticed: he was in Henry Millerville, getting his sex kicks the easy way.

  I guess the stud in there had never dug that he was supposed to be gone in two seconds without pain, because his body was still arched up in that terrible bow, and his hands were still claws. I could see the muscles standing out along the sides of his jaws like marbles. Finally he flopped back and just hung there in his straps like a machine-gunned paratrooper.

  But that wasn’t the end. He took another huge gasp, so I could see his ribs pressing out against his white shirt. After that one, twenty seconds. We decided that he had cut out.

  Then another gasp. Then nothing. Half a minute nothing.

  Another of those final terrible shuddering racking gasps. At last: all through. All used up. Making it with the angels.

  But then he did it again. Every fibre of that dead wasted comic thrown-away body strained for air on this one. No air: only hydrocyanic acid gas. Just nerves, like the fish twitching after you whack it on the skull with the back edge of the skinning knife. Except that it wasn’t a fish we were seeing die.

  His head flopped sideways and his tongue came out slyly like the tongue of a dead deer. Then this gunk ran out of his mouth.

  It was just saliva – they said it couldn’t be anything else – but it reminded me of the residue after light-line resistors have been melted in an electrical fire. That kind of black. That kind of scorched.

  Very softly, almost to himself, Victor murmured: “Later, dad.”

  That was it. Dig you in the hereafter, dad. Ten little minutes and you’re through the wall. Mistah Kurtz, he dead. Mistah Kurtz, he very very goddamn dead.

  I believed it. Looking at what was left of that cat was like looking at a chick who’s gotten herself bombed on the heavy, so when you hold a match in front of her eyes the pupils don’t react and there’s no one home, man. No one. Nowhere. End of the lineville.

  We split.

  But on the way out I kept thinking of that Army stud, and wondering what had made him sick. Was it because the cat in the chair had been the last to enter, no matter how violently, the body of his beloved, and now even that febrile connection had been severed? Whatever the reason, his body had known what perhaps his mind had refused to accept: this ending was no new beginning, this death would not restore his dead chick to him. This death, no matter how just in his eyes, had generated only nausea.

  Victor and I sat in the Mercedes for a long time with the top down, looking out over that bright beautiful empty peninsula, not named, as you might think, after a saint, but after some poor dumb Indian they had hanged there a hundred years or so before. Trees and clouds and blue water, and still no birds making the scene. Even the cats in the black suits had vanished, but now I understood why they’d been there. In their silent censure, they had been sounding the right gong, man. We were the ones from the Middle Ages.

  Victor took a deep shuddering breath as if he could never get enough air. Then he said in a barely audible voice: “How did you dig that action, man?”

  I gave a little shrug and, being myself, said the only thing I could say. “It was a gas, dad.”

  “I dig, man. I’m hip. A gas.”

  Something was wrong with the way he said it, but I broke the seal on the tequila and we killed it in fifteen minutes, without even a lime to suck in between. Then he started the car and we cut out, and I realized what was wrong. Watching that cat in the gas chamber, Victor had realized for the very first time that life is far, far more than just kicks. We were both partially responsible for what had happened in there, and we had been ineluctably diminished by it.

  On US 101 he coked the Mercedes up to 104 mph through the traffic, and held it there. It was wild: it was the end: but I didn’t sound. I was alone without my Guide by the boiling river of blood. When the Highway Patrol finally got us stopped, Victor was coming on so strong and I was coming on so mild that they surrounded us with their holsters’ flaps unbuckled, and checked our veins for needle marks.

  I didn’t say a word to them, man, not one. Not even my name. Like they had to look in my wallet to see who I was. And while they were doing that, Victor blew his cool entirely. You know, biting, foaming at the mouth, the whole bit – he gave a very good show until they hit him on the back of the head with a gun butt. I just watched.

  They lifted his license for a year, nothing else, because his old man spent a lot of bread on a shrinker who testified that Victor had temporarily wigged out, and who had him put away in the zoo for a time. He’s back now, but he still sees that wig picker, three times a week at forty clams a shot.

  He needs it. A few days ago I saw him on Upper Grant, stalking lithely through a grey raw February day with the fog in, wearing just a T-shirt and jeans – and no shoes. He seemed agitated, pressed, confined within his own concerns, but I stopped him for a minute.

  “Ah . . . how you making it, man? Like, ah, what’s the gig?”

  He shook his head cautiously. “They will not let us get away with it, you know. Like to them, man, just living is a crime.”

  “Why no strollers, dad?”

  “I cannot wear shoes.” He moved closer and glanced up and down the street, and said with tragic earnestness: “I can hear only with the soles of my feet, man.”

  Then he nodded and padded away through the crowds on silent naked soles like a puzzled panther, drifting through the fruiters and drunken teenagers and fuzz trying to bust some cat for possession who have inherited North Beach from the true swingers. I guess all Victor wants to listen to now is Mother Earth: all he wants to hear is the comforting sound of the worms, chewing away.

  Chewing away, and waiting for Victor; and maybe for the Second Coming.

  PALE HANDS I LOATHED

  William Campbell Gault

  We were doing all right, Norah and I. We’d been married three years, but the honeymoon wasn’t over. With us, the honeymoon should last forever, we figured at the time.

  I was a police reporter for the Star, and on that beat you meet a lot of people, none of them likely to bolster your faith in human nature. It was Norah who did that for me. It was Norah I turned to every night for a renewal of the faith, as they say. Besides all that, she could cook. Not many like her, none like her. None I’ve met, at any rate.

  We had a small home, out in Shore Hill
s, and a small nest egg in the First National, and a small heir in the rear bedroom named John Baldwin Shea, Jr. We had about everything we wanted except a new car, and cars just weren’t available.

  Maybe we were beginning to get smug. Maybe we had too much.

  This June Drexel angle was routine enough, at first. She was a witness in the Peckham divorce mess, and I happened to run across her in the DA’s office. I’d taken her out, quite a few times, in high school. The way she acted, in the DA’s office, it looked to the others, I’ll bet, as though I’d never stopped taking her out.

  “Johnny dear,” she asked, “have you come to rescue me?”

  I blushed, and stammered, “Hello, June,” and tried to ignore the laugh I was getting from the other reporters.

  The DA looked at me sharply. He was trying to get some dope on Peckham from June; the divorce to him was only incidental.

  June sighed, and said, “Johnny and I were such good friends.”

  The DA said, “I won’t be needing you any more, Miss Drexel.” And to the reporters, “That’s all, boys.”

  We started to file out, when he called, “Would you mind waiting a moment, Shea?”

  I closed the door and came back. I was probably still blushing. He had a smile on his broad face. “That’s where the Star gets its copy on Peckham, is it?” he asked.

  We’d been running a campaign on municipal building graft, and Peckham’s name had been mentioned frequently. “Hell, no,” I said. “I haven’t seen that babe since high school. If I never see her again, it’s OK with me.”

  He was smirking now. “Let’s not be modest, Johnny. You’re not a bad-looking guy, you know. You’re right in there, pitching, aren’t you?”

  I shook my head. I was beginning to get hot. “I’m happily married. That’s the way I intend to stay. She was just trying to embarrass me, and through me, the Star. She’s no dummy.”

  “No,” he said, “she isn’t.” He was looking thoughtful. He tilted his head to one side, studying me, and tried to look chummy. “The Star and I usually get along all right. We’ve worked together before, you know.”