Layman's Report

by Eugene Marten

  “That was twisted,” she said happily at the intermission. “Aren’t you hungry?”

  Fred offered to go to the concession stand. She’d screamed up a big appetite and ordered a list of items that she qualified with a large Diet Coke. It was a long walk.

  He negotiated the parking lot, tried to avoid speaker wires stretched between cars liked booby traps, arms stuck out of windows ending in cigarettes. People walked their dogs. They sat on car hoods reclining against windshields, peered from the backs of station wagons, dangled legs from tailgates, deployed lawn chairs and blankets and blasted heavy metal from auxiliary speakers. Reek of beer and varieties of smoke. There was a playground in front of the screen and during the intermission it was flooded with brightly lit children. They overran the slide, the seesaws, crawled through tunnels, climbed. They swung on the swings, high, higher, disappearing in darkness at the height of the arc and sometimes for good. Distended shadows cavorted on the big white screen at his back like the tableau of a feature not on the marquee.

  During the day it was a flea market.

  The restrooms were in the same building as the concessions. They smelled of piss and mothballs and worse and not a single toilet was flushed. Fred in his suit standing over a porcelain trough next to a guy in a heavy metal t-shirt, each with a cigarette stuck to his lower lip.

  “Think the poor bastard made it?” the guy said.

  “Bet he makes it to part two,” Fred said. He tried to speak without breathing.

  “There’s another one?”

  “No end in sight, I’m sure,” Fred said, and the other guy left without washing his hands as if already on his way to the box office.

  The line in the concession stand snaked around two long steel rails. Pinball and video games, the light heavy and yellow with grease. You could see the kid from Kentucky here, playing Pac-Man, pulling on an Icee the size of a fire extinguisher. Fred bought hot dogs, fries, popcorn, a shake, Coke, dispensed ketchup and mustard and liquefied cheese from huge jugs equipped with plungers like detonators. Outside he joined the audience returning to their vehicles, purchases carefully arrayed in hands and arms like offerings. There was a shoving match in the gravel.

  He got back to the car just as the floodlights over the screen went dark and there appeared an animated countdown to the next feature.

  “I thought those devil trees got you,” she said, and took things off his hands.

  “What’s this one about?”

  “Mad genius brings the dead back to life.” Again.

  This time the agent of resurrection is a serum that glows in the dark. A decapitated zombie lurches around campus with its head tucked under its arm. Comes upon the dean’s daughter strapped nude to a table. Uses its tongue but not to talk.

  “He ain’t shy,” she said. “He doesn’t miss a trick,” and she screamed with a chorus of car horns. Fred heard an invitation and put his arm around her shoulders. It was a stretch. He touched her knee, found a bulge and cupped it. She pulled at her shake. A smell came off her he couldn’t quite define. He reached in as if to find its source, groped like someone feeling for change in a sofa. She drew the line.

  “We can go to my house,” he said. “No one’s there.” No one ever was.

  “We came to see a movie,” she said, open and shut.

  Fred fell back. She had her honor, he had what he had. He rolled down the window, lit a cigarette.

  “You understand,” she said.

  “What’s not to?” he said.

  “Where’s the garbage?” she said, and handed him the empty cup. He put it in the bag at his feet and she reached for his zipper.

  “I thought”

  “There’s other things we can do,” she said and took out her upper plate.

  3. To calculate Rope Length, Subtract Chin Height from Scaffold Crossbeam Height and add Drop Distance from Drop Distance Table.

  4. Using three-quarter (3/4) inch Manila hemp, mark rope at Rope Length and cut additional seven (7) feet.

  5. Boil rope for one (1) hour and stretch while drying to eliminate all spring, stiffness, and tendency to coil. Dry thoroughly.

  6. Make loop as shown from Standing Length to Running End. Distance from A to B should be approximately eighteen (18) inches. Distance from C to Running End should be approximately thirty-five (35) inches.

  7. Wrap Running End six (6) turns. No extra rope should remain.

  8. Pull Running End to tighten loops, then lock loops and form Knot by pulling down at D and pulling up on Running End.

  9. Slide Knot up or down Standing Length to adjust size of Noose.

  10. Lubricate Knot. Melted paraffin is recommended.

  He was invited to Holman for dinner. Made four states in eighteen hours. The top of Alabama was pine trees and mountains, the bottom mangrove swamps, palmetto trees, alligators, a dog-sized species of rodent like a cross between a beaver and a rat. In between, the state was a vast sideshow: congregations of snake handlers, a moon rocket at a rest stop, a tiny museum whose sole display was Hitler’s typewriter, the woman who’d been struck by a meteor; there was the birthplace of Sun Ra and Hank Williams’s grave, an underground dance hall with a seven-acre lake. He passed tarpaper shacks, houses on stilts. A derelict mansion among strange-looking trees like deformed giants in suits of leaves. Near the Gulf he was briefly lost, got on Highway 64 and crossed a river officially called the Styx. Passed the Isle of Bones.

  The Regional Director of the Board of Corrections lived across the street from the prison in a big white house. Piazzas, a small lake out front, bald cypress hung with Spanish moss. After a tour of the facility, dinner was barbecued catfish and squash casserole at a big oak table in the dining room. An elderly dark-skinned woman in a maid’s uniform served them. The night was hot and a fan hummed in the window. After the prayer the Regional Director apologized.

  “We’ve got central air but it’s on the blink again, I’m afraid.”

  “If you like I could take a look at it after dinner,” Fred said.

  The Regional Director’s wife lowered her fork. “The warden used to live here. He’s probably getting even with us for pulling rank. Anyway,” she said, “we couldn’t possibly allow a guest.” Her voice was soft and lilted the lump of his last name. On the drive down he’d heard other people you couldn’t make head nor tails.

  “Fred,” Fred said.

  “Could we allow Fred to pass the greens?” the Regional Director’s son inquired. An enormous crewcut kid, so big he had to sit with one leg off his chair.

  “You’ve got arms,” the Regional Director said, and gave his son a look.

  “He certainly does,” the Regional Director’s wife said, and asked Fred if the meal was to his liking.

  “Never had anything like it.”

  “Just ain’t enough of it,” the Regional Director’s son said. He looked at Fred. “Guess you do a little cookin of your own.”

  The Regional Director gave his son another look and cleared his throat.

  “I’m sure Fred doesn’t want to talk shop,” his wife said, more to appease her husband, it seemed, than admonish her son.

  “I defer to the custom of my hosts,” Fred said.

  “What’s that mean?” the Regional Director’s son said. “I’m a redneck.”

  “Can we just pretend?” the Regional Director said.

  “I’m sure Fred knows better,” his mother said.

  “I think everyone knows something the next fella doesn’t,” Fred said. The world’s wisdom came in bits and pieces.

  The Regional Director’s wife didn’t appear to have heard. She was younger than her husband and looked at her son as though they were alone. “No one ever said you were put here to cure cancer,” she said.

  “Amen,” the Regional Director said.

  “I was put here to anchor the O-line,” the Regional Director’s son told Fred and stuffed his mouth. He was sweating. Bones cracked.

  “Easy,” his mother said, “you still have t
o make weight.” She looked at her guest: “You believe he’s just a freshman? U of A.”

  “Damn redshirt,” her husband grumbled. The Regional Director’s son looked hard at Fred. “Tigers or

  Tide?”

  Fred looked back. “How’s that?”

  “Auburn or U?” the boy asked impatiently.

  “I’m sure he doesn’t have a dog in that fight,” the Regional Director said. “For Pete’s sake.”

  “Buckeye?” his wife said. “Wolverine?”

  “What’s a seven-course meal at Auburn?” the Regional Director’s son said.

  “We’ve heard it,” his father said.

  “A six-pack and a possum,” the boy said, and the maid appeared with a pitcher of iced tea and refilled his glass. She refilled his mother’s from another decanter, and she too knew something the next fellow didn’t.

  “Getting a little low on the grits,” the Regional Director’s son said, and the maid went back to the kitchen without a word or other acknowledgment.

  “Getting a little deaf in her dotage,” his mother said.

  “Depends who’s doing the talking,” his father said.

  “Did you play sports in school?” the Regional Director’s wife asked Fred. Her son made a sound.

  “I don’t think I can remember that far back.”

  “Ever had your head flushed in a turlet?” the Regional Director’s son said, and his father thumped the table with the butt of his knife. “You’ll have to excuse my boy, he has trouble thinking and chewing at the same time.” He spoke to his food. “Any more noise like that and he won’t be chewing for a week.”

  “I should think an hour would do,” the Regional Director’s wife said, and her son said nothing but stuffed his mouth as if against the coming deprivation.

  “Fred’s a competition shooter,” the Regional Director said.

  “Well that’s just guns,” his wife said. “I mean something physical.” She performed delicate surgery on her fish.

  “I did the best I could with what I was given,” Fred said. “I have my interests.”

  “Putting bad boys to bed early,” she said.

  “I make things,” Fred said.

  “Y’all hear about the Auburn alum got pulled over for speeding?” the Regional Director’s son asked.

  “Cop says, ‘You got any ID?’” his mother said.

  “Tiger says, ‘Bout what?’” her son said and something flew into the fan. The kitchen was silent. Fred asked the Regional Director’s wife if she minded living across the street from the prison.

  “You mean ‘the facility’?” She hooked her fingers. “I sleep like a baby,” she said, lifting her glass as if to say she had help. “But my friends say they could never.”

  “You have friends?” her son said and touched a small pouch of loose flesh under her chin. She took his hand and put it on the table.

  “Personally I think they like coming here—makes them feel like they’re doing something dangerous.”

  “No one ever stays,” the Regional Director’s son said.

  “You can’t see much from here,” his mother said, “but I hear things. Basketball, mainly, and I know what a home run sounds like.” Her hand still covered her son’s. “To think,” and she snapped her fingers as if to interrupt her own reverie. “No more home runs. Just like that.” She looked at Fred. “How do you get into that line of work anyway? Doesn’t seem to be much competition.”

  “Well that ain’t healthy,” the Regional Director’s son said.

  “Just born to it, I guess,” Fred said.

  “Who could be born to that?” she wondered.

  “Say a friend of the family, then,” Fred said. Say one thing led to another.

  A grandfather clock somewhere struck the hour. The Regional Director’s son raised his hand from the back of the classroom: “I have a question,” and there was a hopeful silence.

  “If you had your choice,” he said to Fred, “what way would you pick?”

  Fred paused, expecting another censure. Then he swallowed some coffee and said, “Pistol shot to the back of the head.”

  “Good Lord,” the Regional Director said.

  “All I’ve got is the Kenmore in the kitchen,” his wife said. “Have you read Sylvia Plath?”

  “You’ve been in the kitchen?” the Regional Director said.

  “If it was me?” the Regional Director’s son said.

  “Eating yourself to death is not an option,” his father said.

  “Eating ain’t what I had in mind, but in present company I’ll go with the one where they shoot you full of drugs and you just fall asleep. Seems like a no-brainer to me.”

  His father said nothing.

  “Not as easy as you think,” Fred said. “The State of Texas has done it forty times and I’d say eighty percent of them were botches.”

  “Damn Longhorns,” the Regional Director’s son said.

  “You’ve got at least three drugs involved and it’s not easy to administer them in the proper dosage with the correct timing—especially by hand. How would you like to suffocate, slowly, but you can’t tell anybody because you’re paralyzed and everybody thinks you’re asleep?”

  “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” the Regional Director’s wife said.

  The Regional Director’s son chewed. You couldn’t tell if he was listening.

  “Well I’ve got a little room left,” the Regional Director said. “Anybody for pecan pie?”

  “Just one more question,” the Regional Director’s son said, and put down his utensils and clasped his hands, affecting a scholarly brow: “Does it take more juice to fry a colored person than a white one?”

  The Regional Director was an avid collector of guns, and after dessert he showed Fred some of his rarer pieces: a French palm pistol dating from 1802, an assassin’s weapon that looked like a yo-yo with a barrel; a German handgun that was hardly any bigger with four short barrels, one placed on top of the other. They were just for show; the Regional Director couldn’t have fired these relics if he’d wanted to, as the ammunition for them no longer existed.

  After the guns there was billiards, and then the Regional Director took Fred to the verandah at the back of the house to remind him why he was there. He held a glass of brandy and smoked a cigar; Fred drank from his bottomless black cup. It was the hottest night he’d ever known. The porch light showed him a few palmettos but could not further penetrate a muggy darkness filled with frogs and crickets and other sounds he couldn’t begin to guess. One of them was a deep bellowing moan you could feel in your breastbone, and Fred was sure the wood rail under his hand was vibrating.

  “Either my boy’s still hungry,” the Regional Director said, “or that’s a bull gator looking for a girlfriend.”

  “Think he’s headed our way?” Fred said, half joking.

  “If he’d have gotten here a little earlier we could have had stew for supper.”

  “I don’t suppose it tastes like chicken.”

  “More like pork actually. But he’s probably a mile off. It’s rattlesnakes you want to watch out for.”

  Sheet lightning. It was hurricane season.

  Somewhere in the house they heard the Regional Director’s wife laughing at the television, then a car with a loud muffler pulling up out front. The horn played a school song, there was laughter. The voice of the Regional Director’s son. Then a car door slammed and the muffler roared off, trailing obscenities, a rebel yell.

  “So what do you think?” the Regional Director said.

  “Boys will be boys.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about.”

  “It’s not just a piece of paper,” Fred said. “I put my name to it and something goes wrong, I have to live with that. Not to mention what it would do to my credibility.”

  Something snapped and he jumped. There was a lantern-like device on the porch that attracted insects and killed them with voltage. It snapped and flickered, and then in vast a
mplification another round of lightning blue-lit the sky, as if a far greater scourge were being checked at the world’s threshold.

  “Looks like a bad one’s on the way,” the Regional Director said. “Here’s the best I can do: we let you make minimal repairs now, just enough to bring us up to speed for the twenty-third. We carry out the protocol as scheduled, then let you go ahead with full replacement.”

  Fred put out his cigarette. “Can I sleep on it?”

  “If you do it’ll be at a motel. Say yes and you can have the guest room. I wouldn’t wait too long, though; out here we get hail that’ll crack your skull.”

  Out front, across the street, the prison was silent.

  ATTORNEY FOR PLAINTIFF: Sir, in your professional opinion, is the electric chair of the State of Alabama in adequate repair to perform a safe, humane, and efficient execution?

  STATE ATTORNEY: Objection. The witness has already signed an affidavit. He’s just trying to get even with the State for rebidding his contract.

  COURT: Counselor?

  ATTORNEY FOR PLAINTIFF: Your Honor, a stipulation of the witness’s contract provided that he supervise and consult during the execution of my client to ensure that the equipment perform optimally—it has already been demonstrated to malfunction in the past. In annulling the agreement the State has disallowed this participation, thereby exacerbating the risk of another botched procedure.

  PLAINTIFF: Can I say something?

  COURT: No, that’s why you have an attorney. The witness may answer the question, preferably in English.

  WITNESS: The condition of the hardware notwithstanding, I’m concerned with the state’s plan to use three jolts of electricity during the procedure—especially the two-minute application of two hundred and fifty volts at the end.

  ATTORNEY FOR PLAINTIFF: Wouldn’t this just finish the job?

  WITNESS: On the contrary. Even if the first applications cause brain death, the lower voltage might act as a defibrillator, restarting your client’s heart and leaving a brain-dead vegetable strapped in the chair. And if the electrodes were to fail again, the State would have no means of completing the sentence.