by Jim Nisbet
“Without a trial?” asked the man at the telephone.
“Already had one trial,” said the messenger. “Warden says this man’s been enough trouble already, and that Peters died in his line of duty, which at the time was escorting Mencken to his last reward. And to his last reward is where he’s going to go. Tonight.”
The man looked again at Royce. “Warden says to say they’ll be right along. The prisoner’s having a little trouble working up his nerve.”
Little doubt about what that meant. The messenger disappeared the way he had come, leaving the door open.
“Now all we need,” the man at the telephone said as if to himself, “is for this here phone to commence ringing.”
Fresh sounds began to reach them from the hallway; of steel doors opening; of men blowing kisses, whistling, yelling goodbyes, insults and shouts; clanks, crashes, then silence; followed by the sounds of many crepe-soled footsteps, and something being dragged down the hallway. Out of the corner of his eye Royce saw the curtain secluding the witness room draw back, and he glanced toward it. Several men and two women stood uncertainly among the benches beyond the glass. One he recognized as columnist from the Dallas Star, a staunch defender of the death penalty. The others he imagined as members of the press and of the government, perhaps from the district attorney’s office. He really had never wondered about the people who came to these things, why they came, who they were. But he wondered how long it would be before one or several of these people were joined or replaced by television cameras. Now he looked at them, and they at him. Once the curtains had been drawn back the fascination with death and its devices would not desert them, until the curtains had closed again. What did they think of him, the physician beyond the window, as he rolled the sleeves of his white shirt to his elbows, and removed his tie? Damp patches of sweat had appeared beneath the arms of his shirt and in the small of his back, but perspiration was never unusual in summertime Texas, even at night. He became aware of the hum of the long twin fluorescent tubes overhead, which ran exactly the length of the gurney. Because both the door to the gas chamber and the door to the witness room opened adjacent to each other onto the same hallway, he had just begun to discern the mutter of subdued conversation among the witnesses when the insistent muddle of rubber-shod feet eclipsed it, and five guards arrived at the door dragging the sagging shirtless form of Prisoner 61-204. They’d beaten him senseless.
Royce’s jaw tightened at the sight, and he shot a hard glance at Warden Johanson and Reverend Thomas, who followed the pathetic apparition through the door.
“What’s this,” Royce said coldly, not taking his eyes off Johanson, “a lynching?”
Warden Johanson was a big man, and a hard one. He’d been in corrections for thirty-two years and Huntsville had been his baby for eight of them. Mencken had given him a great deal of trouble. Had Johanson even taken the time to look personally into his case he might have found a conviction a little less neat that almost anyone would like to see in a capital case, but a conviction, by a jury, it was, period. Johanson’s job began afterward, and he looked the part. He weighed at least two hundred fifty pounds, had a bald head and a broken nose and stood over six-foot-three in expensive leather riding boots some trusty kept immaculately shined for him. He always wore dark glasses and a broad-brimmed Stetson except, apparently, at executions, and a concho belt with a silver buckle fashioned into a bull’s head with silver horns and turquoise eyes.
Johanson looked ruefully at Bobby Mencken, who was draped, apparently unconscious, between two guards, one for each arm. Mencken was bleeding profusely from many cuts and abrasions all over his upper torso, and already his face had begun to swell. “That’s one tough sonofabitch,” Johanson said, rubbing the knuckles of his right hand. “He just killed a good man in cold blood.” He looked around and raised his voice. “Peters was the only man I trusted to get Mencken out of that cell when his time came.” He lowered his voice and regarded the unconscious man. “He broke Peters’ neck with that damn twelve-inch chain there, between his wrists.” Royce could see arcs of blood beneath the iron cuffs. Johanson gestured toward Mencken and shook his head. “Then he spit in the man’s face and kneed him in the balls as he died.” He shot a fierce glance toward the red telephone. The man guarding it wiped a smile off his face. “Even with a reprieve,” Johanson snarled, “he wouldn’t live long back in population. The other guards won’t put up with a man’s killed one of their own.” He sucked thoughtfully on a skinned knuckle. “I thought we were going to have to shoot the sonofabitch to get him down here.” Royce raised an eyebrow. It was hard to believe Mencken had been capable of such an outburst of energy. Royce had prescribed Mencken enough Valium to tranquilize ten out-of-work actresses.
“Let’s clean him up,” Royce said.
“You clean him up,” Johanson retorted.
“Wait,” Royce said to the guards, who had been about to lay Mencken on the table. “Hold him up. Someone get me some towels, and hand me the bag behind the door.”
The four guards looked at Johanson, who nodded. “Don’t turn him loose,” he cautioned, and left the room. Royce saw him enter the room beyond the double-glass wall, no doubt to apologize for his institution’s tardiness, and perhaps to temper any future printed assessment of the spectacle. Royce would have expected Johanson to know a little bit more about journalists than that.
A guard showed up with some towels. Royce saturated one in hydrogen peroxide and set about mopping the blood off Mencken’s lacerated black torso.
“This is going to sting,” he said as he gently began, on the off-chance that Mencken was conscious.
“Sting me, motherfucker,” the man said through swollen, split lips, though his eyes remained closed and his breathing shallow.
“Tough guy,” Royce said. The peroxide foamed reddish brown as it sluiced the open wounds. Royce had never seen the like of the tattoos that completely covered Mencken’s upper torso and disappeared below the elastic waist of his blood- and sweat-stained prison whites. Unlike the simpleminded iconography of the average white prisoner’s tattoos—spiders, guns, knives, manatees, et cetera—the designs on Mencken were abstract and completely foreign to Royce, as was their method of application. They enwrapped the man’s body in layered strings of raised welts, as if necklaces of small beads had been inserted just beneath the skin, and attained their pigmentation only from the resulting scarification. Together with the mottled crimson tint flaking off the two long fingernails that hadn’t been snapped off in the fight, Mencken’s appearance was exotic.
“Yeah,” the Negro whispered, his eyes remaining closed, “now I’m,” his voice faded out, “toughest.…”
Royce dabbed the towel at the split lips. When they curled away from the sting he could see Mencken’s front teeth had been cracked. He looked at the sweltering guards holding Mencken. They stared back. None of them had escaped unscathed.
“What’d you kill him for?”
Mencken inefficiently spit flecks of red saliva. “My pencil,” he sputtered weakly, “Put some … lead my … pencil.…”
Royce stood up and stepped back. He had done what he could.
“Get these chains off him and put him on the table.”
The four guards raised Mencken off his feet and laid him across the table, while a fifth arranged the eight seat belts and two Velcro cuffs intended to confine the condemned man. They had Mencken’s legs strapped and Royce had turned his attention to his valise when he heard a mighty groan.
“Hold him!” a guard shouted. Royce looked up to behold the extraordinary sight of Mencken bench pressing two grown men. On either side of the table, the feet of each guard holding Mencken’s arms twitched above the floor, gradually inching upwards as Mencken, who undoubtedly had sustained a couple of broken ribs in the melee in his cell, his face streaming perspiration, drew each of his clenched fists full of custodial groin toward the ceiling. The guard perched in agony on each fist rose screaming as if suddenly, inexpli
cably buoyant.
“Stop him! Stop the mother!” This the man holding the straps neatly effected by springing lightly up over the edge of the table and dropping heavily on Mencken’s solar plexus, knees first. All the air was immediately expelled from Mencken’s body in a scream, taking his strength with it, and the man on Mencken’s chest slammed a fist into the side of the prisoner’s head. The blows knocked Mencken out, and the guards easily finished with the straps, taking their time. Royce stood by, horrified and helpless.
The guards then departed, leaving Mencken firmly secured to the stainless steel gurney, staring at the ceiling, his chest heaving, his breath a shallow whistle in his throat. He was drenched in pink-tinged sweat.
Royce glanced at the window. The warden was still in the witness room, glad-handing the members of the press with his back to the glass. But almost all of them stood staring into the execution chamber, pencils lifeless over their notepads, awed by what they had just witnessed.
Royce took a small, rubber-capped serum bottle from his bag.
“Listen,” he said quietly to Mencken, “can you hear me?”
Mencken said nothing, struggling for breath with closed eyes.
Royce glanced at the bottle in his hand, then looked over to the black guard still manning the telephone on the wall. This man composed his face into an inscrutable mask and looked away.
“Can you hear me?” he whispered again.
“Man,” came Mencken’s voice hoarsely between gasps, “I’m … ridiculously … alert. Did I miss anything? Am I dead?”
“No, but you’re very hurt.”
“Hey,” Mencken grunted, “you must be some kinda … doctor … or something.…” A drop of blood appeared at one corner of his mouth and trickled over his cheek.
Royce blotted it away. “You were prepped with Valium?”
“Must be why …,” Mencken coughed, “why I feel so … so calm, so serene.…” His eyes remained closed, his face was a ruin of pain.
Royce spoke quickly. “Listen, I’m supposed to give local injections of lidocaine, to numb your arms before I put the IVs in. I want to add morphine, which will numb a lot more than just your elbow. But you have to promise me it will be our little secret. O.K.? Will you go for that?”
“Man,” said Mencken immediately, “does a bear shit in the woods?”
“O.K.” Royce glanced up at the man next to the telephone, who stared straight ahead. His job was to listen for the phone.
Royce loaded a small syringe with seven milligrams of morphine sulphate. The needle squeaked when he removed it from the rubber cap of the serum bottle. He pointed the syringe upward and cleared the air from it by slightly depressing the plunger. A small jet of fluid glinted towards the ceiling.
Mencken had opened his eyes. “Don’t waste that stuff on the ceiling, man.”
He tied off Mencken’s left arm with the surgical tubing. A fine vein rose immediately in the hollow of the prisoner’s elbow, and he swabbed it with cotton. The smell of alcohol suddenly permeated the room.
“I was wondering which one it was going to be,” Mencken whispered.
“Sorry,” Royce replied softly, “I usually ask, but the left was convenient. Anyway, later it’s both.” When its point punctured the curved wall of the vein Royce deftly lowered the hypodermic and slid in the length of the needle. He pulled back a bit on the plunger, and a red plume blossomed through the transparent length of the syringe. Then he slowly pressed the plunger, forcing the contents of the syringe into Mencken’s arm, and loosed the knot in the tubing.
“Ohhhh,” Mencken breathed aloud, “Doctor …,” and he lifted his pelvis as far as the straps allowed it above the surface of the table, toward the ceiling, and rotated it obscenely, if feebly.
Royce was appalled and astounded at the physical and spiritual defiance exhibited by this man strapped to the table, who faced death without allowing his contempt for everything around him to flag for so much as a moment.
“Hey, Doc.” Mencken’s voice was drowsy, relaxed.
“Yes?”
“Boot it?”
So this Mencken, if nothing else, was a junkie, or had been. Royce was familiar with the term. Mencken was asking him to pull some of Mencken’s blood back into the syringe, then return it into his bloodstream, two or three times. Under the circumstances and logic of ordinary heroin addiction this practice assured the user of getting every last drop of precious dope out of the syringe. In any case, it was a psycho-sexual contrivance quite beneath the ethics of tonight’s endeavor. “Trust me,” Royce said, removing the needle.
Mencken relaxed and sighed shakily, deeply. “Man, that … feels good.…”
“Try not to nod out,” Royce asked. “It’ll look a little funny if you can’t stay awake for … you know.…” Maybe I’ll use smelling salts, Royce thought.
“Doc?”
“Yes, keep talking; that’ll help.”
“Doc, are you hip … to the irony … of your present … humanitarian … endeavor?”
Mencken’s voice was powerless. Royce looked at him. The man’s eyes were still clenched against the pain of the beating he had just suffered, and his bloodstream was coursing with morphine, yet he was as alert as anyone might be expected to be, on the threshold of his own execution.
“You mean, easing your pain somewhat, making you as comfortable as possible, just before they kill you?”
“Ye … Yeah.…”
“More or less, Mencken. More or less.”
“Yeah,” Mencken smiled distantly, “me too. We … could have an interesting … discussion.…”
“I talk to myself about it all the time,” Royce muttered. He pressed a cotton swab soaked in alcohol over the bead of blood that appeared in the mouth of the tiny wound, whence he’d removed the needle.
“Doc,” Mencken whispered.
“Yes, Mencken?”
Mencken made slits of his eyes and looked at Royce. His voice came and went but his gaze was constant. “It’s more ironic … than you … think.…”
Royce held the wet brown shrinking eyes a moment with his own, then looked away. “I’m sure it is, Mencken,” he said. “I’m sure it is.”
“Yeah.… More.…” Mencken sighed and closed his eyes again.
Royce busied himself attending the details of the procedure. He quickly introduced a small amount of lidocaine, a local anesthetic, intramuscularly into each of Mencken’s forearms, just below the inside of the elbow. Again the room was very still and as he worked Royce could hear Johanson drawling officially in the other room. He was fielding questions from the press.
After a moment Royce tapped the first arm he’d injected.
“Feel that?”
Mencken said nothing.
“Speak up,” Royce coaxed him. “The IVs are pretty uncomfortable.”
“Don’t feel it,” Mencken whispered, then cleared his throat.
“O.K.” Royce uncoiled a tube from the stainless steel rack against the wall and fitted a sterile sixteen gauge needle to it. He checked the length of tubing for bubbles of air, then released a clamp on the tube until gravity forced a drop of fluid to appear in the hollow oval at the needle’s tip. Then he reclamped it.
“Here’s the first one,” he said quietly. “You’ll feel some pressure.” He pressed the thick needle into the vein. Mencken forced a little air through his nose, but his eyes remained slits and he said nothing.
Royce wrapped a band of white tape around the tube and sweat-dampened forearm. He repeated the process at the other arm, then released the clamps on the two tubes. Soon a red loop of blood and saline solution began to circulate from Mencken’s left arm, through the network of tubes and the glass manifold, and back into his right arm.
As Royce watched this plumbing he exchanged glances with the man standing watch over the telephone. As a prison guard this individual had probably seen everything twice, but the preparation for the injection was a hard thing for him to watch. Now he puffed out his che
eks, exhaling slowly, and pressed a handkerchief to his brow as he looked away.
Royce touched the condemned man’s shoulder. “All set.”
Mencken stared at the ceiling. “Jambalaya,” he said.
THREE
Having blown his nose and donned his chasuble, the priest entered the death chamber followed by Warden Johanson. Each had a part to play, and forgetting the recent violence so closely witnessed by both, each began to play it.
“Almighty God,” the priest sighed, “with whom do live the spirits of just men made perfect, after they are delivered from their earthly prisons; we humbly commend the soul of this thy servant, out dear brother, into thy hands, as into the hands of a faithful Creator, and most merciful Saviour; beseeching thee, that it may be precious in thy sight . . .”
And onward. While the priest was reading, a guard slammed the steel door to the entrance of the gas chamber with hardly any finesse at all. The clock on the wall read a quarter to one. Things took on a certain inevitability. Beads of sweat gleamed densely on Mencken’s upturned face. Johanson rocked back and forth off the toes and heels of his riding boots and clasped and unclasped his hands behind his back. The guard standing by the telephone stifled a yawn.
“Warden,” Royce said, just as the priest standing next to the supine prisoner began another prayer.
“Dr. Royce?”
Royce indicated the twelve-inch white clock with a sweep second hand high on the wall above the telephone. “Has it occurred to you that there’s no chance of reprieve now? Look at the time.”
Johanson didn’t look at the clock. “W hat about it?”
“The governor’s staff thinks this man has been dead for forty-five minutes. Shouldn’t you call and tell them there’s been a delay?”
Johanson glowered. “You do your job and I’ll look after mine, Dr. Royce.” He gestured toward Mencken. “This man’s condemned to die, and he’s going to die. We’re running late.”
Johanson turned toward the priest and barked, “You finished?”
The priest, his head bowed in prayer, looked up.