Angels

6

Brian, the Death House three-to-eleven guard, wore the usual guard’s uniform of starched khaki. But as soon as Brian, Bill Houston, and the guards transferring the prisoner had entered the small red brick building that housed the condemned in their last two weeks of life, Brian took off his shirt and never wore it again except when leaving the Death House. He kept his fatigue-style cap on his head at all times, however, and also his mirrored Air Force sunglasses, which Bill Houston knew from experience were a hindrance to clear vision and could only be a punk affectation. Plainly, for Brian, the way he looked was the beginning of the way he wanted to be. He was only twenty-three or twenty-four.

“Well,” Bill Houston said, standing in the doorway of his new home with the three guards, “it ain’t exactly a dungeon or anything.”

“No,” Brian said. He was a serious man and a nervous one. “It’s dry in here.”

Bill Houston couldn’t think why the guard would speak of dryness, unless he meant to reassure him about a few spots of water here and there on the concrete floor, apparently remaining after a hosing down. On his right, through a doorway without a door, was the Waiting Room, consisting of two small cells side by side. To his left was a wide glass window through which he saw a small room like a radio station’s sound-booth. This was the room for the witnesses.

Directly before him was the gas chamber, looking like nothing so much as a shabby vehicle of transport. Its heavy air-lock door stood open wide, and he regarded with a dizzy incredulity the bulky metal chair with its leather straps, while Brian whistled and removed his khaki shirt, enjoying this.

“Have a seat,” Brian said. “Make yourself at home.”

Bill Houston tried to laugh. But he failed.

“No — seriously. Nobody would care. You want to try it on?”

Bill Houston saw that he made this offer not simply because it was in his power to make it, but because he really believed it might be accepted.

A group of men from the yard had gathered near the entrance — men who’d been going to the clinic to sell blood plasma under the supervision of a tall guard who now stood among them hatless under the hot sun, looking almost like their prisoner. Brian talked to them with true friendliness: “Anybody want to go for a little ride today?”

The men laughed — a burst of sound like the outcry of startled game birds. It carried out over the field and echoed off the walls that dwarfed them.

Through Bill Houston there raced an impulse, which he felt was not his alone, to say all right, sure, yes. But he said nothing. Swiftly on the heels of curiosity came the habitual yardbird fear and trembling, the knowledge that these people could get away with murder and the suspicion that they would like to try. It was the wholesale dream of these prisoners that they would be gassed to death while trapped in their cells. In their wild imaginings the borders of their confinement talked to them, and they were waiting for whatever would come, waiting for another name, waiting for giant times, waiting for the Search of Destruction. He knew a rush in his veins — he felt their need baked into these walls — and he wanted to make himself a sacrifice and his death a payment for something more than his stupid mistakes. If Brian could promise him he’d make the crucial difference for somebody, he would walk through the door and be slaughtered here and now.

He came within a yard of the opening and looked around inside the chamber. The seat of the chair rested on a cast-iron case perforated with holes to permit the escape of gas. Two straight two-inch pipes ran from directly beneath the witnesses’ window and into the base of perforated metal. He assumed these pipes fed the pellets of cyanide into their bath of acid beneath the chair. The thick leather straps for the arms and legs were plainly darkened by the sweat of those who had preceded him here.

He was wordless, and when it became obvious that he had nothing to report to them of what it was like to stand here condemned, the other prisoners moved on toward the clinic.

The guards waited patiently for Bill Houston, and Bill Houston stood waiting patiently to be terrified by the means of his death, which was after all just a little room like a diving bell, or a cheap amusement park submarine ride, with a large wheel on its door for screwing it tightly shut. He just felt obligated to experience more than mild interest. But the sight failed to move him until he saw the stethoscope — one with an unusually long tube — built into the door. He comprehended that the shiny flat end of this listening device would be attached to his chest after he was strapped in, and it just didn’t seem fair to him. It meant he wouldn’t be allowed to wear a shirt, he’d be half naked before strangers — and now it came over him vividly that his death would be attended, observed, and monitored by people who couldn’t appreciate how much he wanted to live. They would probably think, because he offered no resistance, that all of this was all right with him. But it wasn’t. They just didn’t know him. They were strangers.

He peered around at the other side of the door, the side he wouldn’t see after they closed it, and was disgusted to see the stethoscope’s rabbit ears dangling there helplessly. It wasn’t all right with him at all! — that somebody would be hooked up to him while he was dying. It wasn’t all right that a doctor would hear his pulse accelerate in the heart’s increasing frenzy to feed him with airless drained impotent blood, until the major arteries burst. And all the while, this doctor would probably be wishing he’d hurry up.

But he thought of how he’d wanted to cover the bank guard Crowell with death, like paint, until no dangerous rays of life were shining out of him. I got this coming. He moved his trigger finger slightly. That’s all it took. And now it’s my turn under the wheel.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked Brian. Over the small window cut into the door, on the inside, ran a semicircular line of words in Old English lettering, something to read while the hydrocyanic gas swirled up toward your nostrils: Death Is The Mother Of Beauty.

“I don’t know what it means,” Brian said. “I guess you’ll find out, won’t you?”

But Bill Houston already knew.

“You wouldn’t believe how good this stuff tastes,” he told Brian, as he ate Wonder Bread with margarine-flavored lard on it and anonymous reconstituted soup. “That’s what that sign on the door is trying to say.” He gestured with his plastic spoon. “When you only got two weeks coming at you, a shit sandwich would be just fine. Even a shit sandwich without no bread.”

Brian took off his cap and rubbed his head all over briskly. He was thin and handsome with short light hair and a big Adam’s apple that made him look like the country boy he was. He didn’t smoke, and he claimed not to drink whiskey. “They’ll never get me dirty in here,” he had told Bill Houston that afternoon. “They fired twenty-three dirty staff two months back. But I’ll never go — you can’t corrupt me. I don’t have any vices you can get a pry into, if you understand what I mean.”

“I ain’t trying to corrupt you,” Bill Houston said.

“Well don’t bother trying, is what I’m getting at.”

“Are you religious?” Bill Houston asked.

“Of course I’m religious. Everybody’s religious in the Death House. The way I see it, we were meant to be here together at the end of your time.”

“Well,” Bill Houston said, “yeah.” And he did agree. But he was embarrassed to say so.

The Death House was not air-conditioned. Against regulations, Brian left the Waiting Room door open to catch the breeze and presented Bill Houston with a meager view of some dirt and a stretch of concrete wall. Somebody had planted a twenty-foot row of as yet unidentifiable vegetation along the wall’s base, and Bill Houston watched all day without any real interest to see if the person would come along sometime and water it, but nobody came. On the other side of the wall was the prison’s medium security South Unit, and farther south than that was the self-contained maximum security Cellblock Six, where he’d spent only nine days before his transfer to the Waiting Room.

At sundown, just before the stars came out, the sky went deep blue and the yards and buildings seemed as yellow as butter under sodium arc-lamps. The air cooled swiftly, but the walls stayed hot for a while into the darkness, and the generous loops of razor-barbed wire coiled atop them were the last things to catch any daylight. The desert outside was asleep: it was the time when the animals of the day took shelter, and the animals of the night kept hidden a little longer. Across the highway to the north, the Department of Corrections’ fields of alfalfa breathed green heat into space. If it wasn’t peace, still it wasn’t war. The prisoners had eaten their dinners and were quiet. Those serving sentences of a comprehensible length could blacken another day.

After a while an energy came out of the dark, a tin-foil singing of wind over the walls. The animals of the night set out. Inside, the TVs got louder and more lights came on. Voices were raised, and in lowered voices bargains were struck, and transactions took place among confederates. Prisoners or not, people had to make a living.

In his new quarters Bill Houston felt closer to the prison’s life — closer to being in circulation — than he had in CB-6, which shared nothing, not even a kitchen, with the rest of Florence Prison. But he knew he was no part of that life, and never would be again. James would eventually come into it, and Burris might, too. Bill Houston felt sorry for himself tonight. All he could do was talk to Foster, the wheezy old suppertime guard, or taste the air. He’d never noticed before that the air had a flavor to it. It had a taste. It tasted wonderful.

That he might spend only three weeks in prison now seemed one of the worst parts of his punishment. It was inside the level, uniform dailiness of these surroundings that the wonder of life assailed him. Minute changes in the desert air, the gradual angling of supposedly fixed shadows along the dirt as the seasons changed, the slow overturn of all the familiar people around him — they spoke of a benevolent plot at the heart of things never to stay the same. But on the streets events jumped their lanes. Everything turned inside out, flew back in his face, left him wide-eyed but asleep. He’d never known himself on the streets. It was here at the impossible core of his own accursedness that they were introduced.

In this version he laid the bouquet of flowers disguising the Remington on the check-writing counter and suddenly had a thought. “Hold it, Dwight”—quietly; nobody took any particular notice.

Dwight, up by the desks, was confused. He came forward. “What is it, Bill?”

“I just think we better hold off.”

“Well, we’ll hold off, then. But what’s the trouble, Bill?”

“Dwight, I have an uneasy feeling about today. Can you trust me on it?”

“I can if I have to. And I think I have to, Bill. Why don’t we come back and try tomorrow?”

“Let me make a suggestion,” Bill Houston said in this version. “Let’s come back when a different guard is on duty. I have an uneasy feeling about the guard.”

“I don’t want to come back tomorrow,” Bill Houston said in another version. “I don’t want to come back ever again. I have a chance at a pretty good life — a woman, a couple of kids. There’s no sense me being here. I haven’t been appreciating all the gifts surrounding me.”

‘Neither have I, Bill,” Dwight agreed in another version.

“Neither have I,” James said.

“Neither have I,” Burris said.

“Neither have I,” Jamie said.

Things hummed, and things trembled. But things held.

She wore a pink skirt and a black teeshirt. It was wonderful to feel panty-hose against her skin. But the tennis shoes made her feel like a shopping bag lady.

“About how much alcohol — what was it? Wine?” the Welfare lady asked.

“Yes. That’s right. Wine.” Dr. Wrigley was looking at his charts attached to a clipboard. In this situation, he was Jamie’s champion.

“How much wine did you drink daily, on the average, let’s say,” the Welfare lady asked.

“I had it down to a real regular thing there,” Jamie told the assembled officials. “I did away with the most of a half-gallon of purple wine ever night. Then I had the rest for breakfast.”

Everybody nodded. There were four of them around the conference table with her. They took notes.

“And the drugs?” This question came from a small woman who was also a doctor. Jamie liked her because she seemed to be on Jamie’s side, and because she wore tennis shoes. “Can you tell us what kind, or about how much?”

“There was nothing regular about that,” Jamie said. “I just took every opportunity that came along to get as ripped as possible.”

“How are you feeling today?” the Welfare lady asked.

“Nervous,” Jamie said.

Nervous was the wrong word. She could see that instantly.

“I mean, I have my problems,” she said, “but I don’t think this is the Empire State Building, or anything like that.”

They shifted in their seats.

“You’re just nervous about being here,” Dr. Wrigley said. “You got it,” Jamie said.

Everybody nodded. When she said the wrong thing, the bodies shifted. When she said the right thing, the heads went up and down.

Dr. Wrigley wasn’t the only man with a chart. There was another, Dr. Benvenuto, who flipped his pages and said, “Jamie, what do you see yourself doing ten years from now?”

She closed her eyes and it came before her like a vision. “I’ll be watching a color TV and smoking a Winston-brand cigaret.”

That made their heads go up and down wildly. They loved that one.

“My two girls, they’ll be right in the next room. Miranda’ll be going on sixteen, she’d probably be talking on the phone. Got a boyfriend on the other end.” She was definitely putting it all in the proper slot now — four happy faces surrounded her. “Ellen would be ten, right? She’s — playing the piano. Practicing on a few tunes for the big debut thing, I guess. The recital.” She looked into their smiles, and beyond their smiles, she looked into their homes. “That’s what I want. A piano, a vase with flowers inside of it. A little economy car. A regular kind of life.”

She lit a cigaret. “Everything would be organized into monthly payments.”

Oops.

“I mean, all my current debts and stuff.”

“We understand,” Dr. Wrigley said, and the other guy, Dr. Benvenuto of the Outpatient Program, actually laughed.

Back in the Express Lane. She backed up a space in her head and saw the room as one sheer piece, all of itself. Actually, they were all on her side here. They were all giving her the signals: This Way Out.

When the Welfare lady and the lady doctor with the tennis shoes had gone, Dr. Wrigley stayed behind and introduced her to Dr. Benvenuto. “I think you belong in the Drug and Alcohol Rehab program,” Dr. Benvenuto said right away.

“On an outpatient basis,” Dr. Wrigley said.

“Out,” she said. “I love the sound of that word.”

“You’ve got a long way to go — I hope you understand that,” Dr. Benvenuto said.

“I’ll take it on an inch-by-inch basis,” Jamie said.

“Are you willing to do whatever’s necessary to stay away from chemicals?”

“You could cut off my arms and legs.”

“We don’t have to go quite that far. Would you be willing to live in a halfway house, and go to a daily therapy group? Would you agree to a urinalysis every three days?”

“I’ll do anything. Where do I sign?”

“It doesn’t involve signing,” Dr. Benvenuto said. “It involves living. That’s a little tougher.”

Jamie read the message several times. It was hard to get a fix on it with Dr. Wrigley standing by the bed. It was her first communication of a personal nature from the outside world — although actually it had come from another Inside World.

She felt that her reaction would be important. Dr. Wrigley had come to deliver it to her himself.

“How far back in the summer was it, when he wrote this?” she asked him.

“I believe it was right after his arrest. Sorry it took so long, but I guess you can understand.”

“Oh yeah,” she said. “No problem. I was just wondering.” She read it again:

Seperation is painfull. I still think of you everyday. There was a flood here it was on the 2nd day after they got me — Later everybody found out it was 2 cooks — they did it on purpose & screwed up the drains in the kitchen — Hey I hope you get a chance to tell everybody Im sorry. This is beng delivered by Freddy my lawyer. Im glad James didn’t die

I have feelings for you you know its hard to say — Tell Burris no hard feelings, it could of been anybody.

Seperation is painfull. But who knows of hopes of tomorrow? Maybe we’ll meet again some sunny day Jamey.

Love

Wm Houston Jr

Tell Burris hell still be my brother

“He says, ‘Tell Burris he’ll still be my brother.’”

“Well — if that’s what he says,” Dr. Wrigley said.

She gave it a little thought. “I think that would be just lovely.”

When Brian came back from his supper, he was lugging a stack of newspapers and was accompanied by the two guards from CB-6. They had Richard Clay Wilson in tow. Everybody was silent. This person had killed children. There was no kidding around, and nobody offered him a try in the gas chamber’s bulky chair.

Wilson took up residence in the adjoining cell with self-conscious efficiency, putting a large battery-operated stereophonic radio on his shelf space, turning it up full blast, and staring at Bill Houston with innocent menace through the noise and through the bars that separated their quarters. Bill Houston’s short stay on CB-6 had given him no opportunity of meeting Wilson, but he looked hardly different from the youthful pictures Houston had seen in the papers years before. He was skinny and black, but not very black — half Jamaican and half white — with an extremely wide, flat nose and a terrible complexion: freckles and blackheads across his nose and cheeks, and irritated pores where he shaved. He threw his blue workshirt on his bunk, standing with his hands on his hips and staring them all down — casually administered gestures designed to establish him as an entity rather than a punk. Superimposed over each of his nipples he wore a tattooed cross, with lines indicating light radiating from them. He had been on Death Row, and then its successor CB-6, for a little more than thirteen years. He was thirty-one years old.

They introduced themselves to each other as Richard Clay Wilson and William H. Houston, Jr. These were the names they’d been given by the newspapers.

“We might as well get along,” Bill Houston said.

“We might as well,” Richard said, and gratefully plugged in a set of earphones and placed them over his head.

“Never saw nobody come down to the gas-house so fast,” Richard told him, as they taped up pages of old newspapers to shield themselves from each other.

“My lawyer told me it’s a new era we’re entering,” Bill Houston said.

“Nobody been down here for six year. I was never down here before.”

“Who came over?”

“A white biker gentleman name Mavis. He got back home to CB-6 in two days.”

“They want my ass. They want yours, too,” Bill Houston said.

“I am the oldest and you are the youngest on CB-6,” Richard said. He seemed to have a habit of suddenly puffing himself up, like a lecturer.

Bill Houston thought the man was a fool. He started to put up the paper faster. “Well, we’re going to go up the pipe,” he insisted.

“You for real, boy? Nobody go up that pipe no more. That pipe don’t work. Shit.”

“This time it’s different,” Bill Houston promised him. “I can feel it.”

“You can’t feel nothing. You just a baby.”

“I’m a damn sight older than you are, Richard.”

“Shit. This my home. You just a baby in my home.”

“CROSSVADER!”

Bill Houston came up out of a dream of fields. Right; three AM.

“CROSSVADERRRRRRR!”

The guard — Houston didn’t know him, had been sleeping at shift-change — was nobody; just the moving circle of a flashlight like ice in his eyes. “Next door,” Houston said to the light.

“TAKE IT BACK TAKE IT BACK TAKE IT BACK…”

The guard shone his light into the other prisoner’s quarters. Against the layer of newsprint taped up between their cells, Bill Houston saw the changing shadows of bars and the deformed silhouette of Richard Clay Wilson, the famous Negro child-murderer. He appeared to be down on the concrete floor, on his knees—

“CROSSVADER!” he screamed.

Now the flashlight held still, trained upon him in his cell.

“CROSSVADER!”

“What the fuck is shaking down?” the guard cried softly.

“It’s kind of like praying,” Bill Houston said.

“TAKE IT BACK! CROSSVADER! TAKE IT BACK!”

“Wilson!” the guard shouted, waving the light and stirring the shadows around. “Wilson!”

“Did it every single night, over in CB-6,” Houston said. “But I never heard it up close before.”

“CROSSVADER! TAKE BACK YOUR SUICIDE!”

“Well, nobody told me.” The invisible guard sounded miffed. “What’s he saying?”

“It’s like his prayer, man. Every night, three AM. Crossvader Take Back Your Suicide.”

“Crossvader take back your suicide?”

“CROSSVADER!” Wilson screamed. Saliva spilled out of his cries. The rawness of his throat was audible. “TAKE BACK YOUR SUICIDE!”

“What the hell is he talking about?”

Bill Houston said, “He’s talking about Jesus, supposably. How about cutting that light out? What say we all get a little sleep?”

“CROSSVADERRRRRRR!”

“Well hell,” the guard said, “if you can sleep, I can sleep.”

“He’ll be done in a minute. You ain’t supposed to sleep anyways.”

The guard cut out the light. For a moment the dark was a soft blanket over Bill Houston’s sight. And then the dim illumination of the yard lamps made a room out of it.

“CROSSVADER!” the murderer prayed in the black cell, “TAKE BACK YOUR SUICIDE!” He sobbed as after a terrible beating.

Bill Houston lay in the dark with his hands behind his head, and did a little praying himself: What do you want from me? You want me to die? He thought of the hardware store clerk he’d robbed in Chicago: I made that man get down and pray.

“Crossvader…” He was down to the last hoarse noises he could make.

In the daylight Richard told Bill Houston, “I will not go to Jesus!” He embarrassed Bill Houston by his vehemence. “I am an alien from another planet. I was not meant to be saved.”

“I admire your spunk,” Bill Houston admitted.

“I just can’t stop

when my spunk get hot,”

Richard sang — words from “Disco Inferno,” most beloved of his stereo cassette tapes and one he played as often and as loudly as he himself could bear it.

Beyond rare snatches of song and his occasional speechifying, Richard by day was expressionless. His movements were at all times spacy and languid, as if he operated under an oppressive tropical torpor. What Bill Houston noticed about him early was that he never shadow-boxed, drummed his hands, or danced extemporaneously like the other blacks he’d known out on the yard. In his youth Richard had been a legendary psycho, climbing the bars like an ape, howling at the moon, crying oaths of revenge, screaming of meat and blood and sex, often going for days without sleep or rest. But isolation and a solitary intimacy with his memories had given him a shaky purchase on self-control.

A sixteen-year-old dropout, a loner, a Southside neighborhood denizen with nothing to recommend or condemn him, he’d been discovered with the hacked skeletons and dismembered bodies of four missing white children, and his lawyers had thrown him to the wolves. The general attitude on the yard toward child molesters was one of horrified despair: they were sick individuals who deserved whatever fate they might receive, and to execute them informally, by stealth, was encouraged. But the CB-6 population had mellowed toward Richard, particularly as he outlasted others who were resentenced or transferred and became the longest resident of CB-6. Bill Houston knew all about him. It was Houston’s duty as a human being to hate this monster, this psychotic mutant born out of the always tragic mingling of separate races. But he was confused. He felt removed from the places where his ideas made sense. In the Death House these ideas seemed small. There was a great project taking place here — he and Richard were going to be killed — and the beat of life inside him just took his breath away and made it hard to remember why anything else mattered.

“He may not believe in Jesus, but that man is Jesus to you,” Brian told Bill Houston. He was speaking right in front of Richard.

“Okay,” Bill Houston said.

Richard ignored him.

“I’m not the big expert, okay?” Brian said. “But it sure seems like this, that once they do away with one of you, the other one won’t have to take his ride. And there’s a few people around here who agree. I’m not at liberty to say who.” Brian took off his sunglasses, and to Bill Houston his eyes seemed pale and small. “So which one do you think they’d do first?” He was looking back and forth between the two cells. “Which one?” He banged the heel of his hand against Richard’s bars. “Which one of you you think they’ll do first, Richard?”

“Me,” Richard said.

Brian shrugged. “It stands to reason. You’re the decoy,” he told Bill Houston.

Brian grabbed the thumb and forefinger of one hand with the other. “I’m at the doctor. He says, I gotta cut off your thumb and your finger, Mr. Cooper. They both have to go, I’m chopping them off. Oh, man, no, not my finger. Not my thumb. I go around for a couple weeks, okay? — oh, no, they’re gonna cut off my finger, they’re gonna cut off my thumb. I go down, the big day arrives, I’m going crazy, and just at the last minute the doc says, well, how about if we just cut off your finger? Oh, boy! Just my finger? Sure! Gladly! Get it?” he asked Bill Houston. “Doctors do that all the time. They tell you the worst. They say, we’re gonna amputate two things — so you don’t feel bad for the rest of your life when they just amputate one. You’re the thumb. You’re here for the benefit of the liberals who have to save somebody.” He looked at Richard: “And you’re the finger they’re really gonna amputate. You’re dying for William H. Houston’s sins.”

Richard said, “I know about engraving, you know that? Neal Harverry, the greatest forger ever, probably one of them, he was in the old Death Row and him and me receive a Federal contract making forty-five cents per hour. Seem like nothing, but it was rich back then. That gentleman taught me everything there is about forgery. I could be rich if they let me go one time. I take a week off. I take two days off — I bring you back a stack of money, Jack. I engraved a mold of stone, three feet by four feet, almost. It weighed seventy-eight pounds, they going to make a sign for a national seashore park that say: Ancient Indian Well. Corngrinding Area. It’s a map for you to look at and know where you are, and it say on there with an arrow, ‘You are here.’ But you ain’t here.” He was emphatic on this point, drilling Bill Houston with his gaze through the window in the wall of paper between them. “You are not here.”

He waited for Bill Houston to form an appreciation of this fact, and then went on: “Neal Harverry said imagine about standing in the middle of a marsh in Massachusetts. Imagine about standing at the national seashore park. You be looking at that big cast-iron map. A completely stupid person. You wouldn’t have no idea of the fact of a killer talking to you, telling you, ‘You are here.’ He said about a marsh, when the cattail plant get dry in the autumn, they sound on fire, you know, when the wind blow down on them. They crack like a battle was going on.” He breathed heavily, and squirted shaving cream from an aerosol can into the palm of his hand. “You are not here,” he said.

“They can’t kill me because I have the poem. The poem lives forever,” Richard told Bill Houston. “I connected to the creative forces on the day I wrote it.”

The poem’s history was known to Bill Houston. The poem had actually been written as an essay based on a letter once published in a newspaper. For most of its life it had been repeatedly plagiarized by members of the prison’s community college English composition classes, and edited and revised by any number of teachers.

But if the essay had been everyone’s, it was Richard who’d hit on the idea of breaking it into lines resembling verse. He hinted that he’d made many other improvements. Now in his view the poem was the child of his own creation. He kept it folded up inside a small plastic box for a stereo cassette, and it galled Bill Houston, who didn’t read much, that Richard acted as if this piece of paper were better than money. From it he seemed to take much more than the pride of accomplishment. It was food and drink to Richard’s ego. “I’m going to read it for my last words.” Richard lifted up his chin; Bill Houston almost gagged. “Then they’ll all know bitterly that they can never kill me.”

Bill Houston pretended to be interested when Richard let him read it. But he really couldn’t understand why Richard insisted on personally owning this masterpiece. It didn’t rhyme, and the words were plainly not Richard’s — it even talked about a “nigger”—and anyone could see that somebody had typed it and then Richard had squeezed things in here and there by hand. It wasn’t actually a poem: it used words of a sort that Bill Houston used himself all the time, but didn’t care to see written down. He handed it back by way of Brian, because they weren’t allowed to pass things directly to each other. “This is a real good poem, Richard,” he said.

Brian read some of it, too, and said, “Hm! It’s a work of art.” He didn’t seemed particularly excited, but he handed it over to Richard with a noticeable amount of respect. Bill Houston shared the guard’s uncertainty about it.

Later, Bill Houston wanted to read it again. He borrowed it and kept it for a while after supper. It was just nice to have a document created by other prisoners. He couldn’t make any sense of the poem, but sadness overcame him when he looked at it. He gave it back to Richard without comment.

But he thought about it off and on all night, and the next day without any preliminaries he said, “That’s a beautiful poem, Richard. I’d like to take a copy with me on my ride.”

Richard said nothing, but he jumped up and moved about his cell. “I’ll think about it,” he said finally.

Bill Houston and Richard talked a lot about what each was going to have for his final meal. Bill Houston wanted steak. Richard couldn’t decide between chicken and pork. Bill Houston was grateful to know they wouldn’t be eating the same thing. It seemed appropriate that the State of Arizona should provide them with a variety of foods before their big finish. Bill Houston didn’t like to hear the guards calling it The Last Supper. It was a common prison expression, but he’d already heard enough about how Richard Clay Wilson would turn out to be his savior.

It was getting on his nerves. “I never asked you to die for me,” he told Richard.

Richard only put his earphones over his head and pretended to be alone in the universe.

“C’mon, Richard.” Bill Houston waved his hand before their window. “Hey. C’mon.”

When Richard removed his earphones, tiny music came out of them like the whirring of a bug.

“Listen. How about reading me your poem one time?”

Richard appeared lost in a haze of considerations.

“Fact is, I read terrible, Richard. So that’s why I’m asking you.”

Richard opened the small stereo cassette box that housed the poem like a jewel. He unfolded the document and stepped back, standing himself up on the far side of his cell where Bill Houston could get a bigger picture of him. But he cast his gaze toward the corner, where there was nobody. “Talking Richard Wilson Blues,” he said. “By Richard Clay Wilson.” And he read in a Baptist sing-song:

“I felt like a man of honor of substance,

but the situation was dancing underneath me—

once I walked into the living room at my sister’s

and saw that the two of them, her and my sister,

had turned sometime behind my back not exactly

fatter, but heavy, or squalid, with cartoons

moving on the television in front of them,

surrounded by laundry, and a couple of Coca-Colas

standing up next to the iron on the board.

I stepped out into the yard of bricks

and trash and watched the light light

up the blood inside each leaf,

and I asked myself, Now what is the rpm

on this mother? Where do you turn it on?

I think you understand how I felt.

‘I’m not saying everything changed in the space

of one second of seeing two women, but I did

start dragging her into the clubs with me. I insisted

she be sexy. I just wanted to live.

And I did: some nights were so sensory

I felt the starlight landing on my back

and I believed I could set fire to things with my fingers.

But the strategies of others broke my promise.

At closing time once, she kept talking to a man

when I was trying to catch her attention to leave

It was a Negro man, and I thought of black limousines

and black masses and black hydrants filled

with black water. I thought I might smack her face, or spill a glass,

but instead I opened him up with my red fishing knife

and I took out his guts and I said, ‘Here they are,

motherfucker, nigger, here they are.’

There were people frozen around us. The lights had just come on.

At that moment I saw her reading me and reading me

from the side of the room where I saw her standing,

the way the sacred light played across her face.

“Right down the middle from beginning to end

my life pours into one ocean, into this prison

with its empty ballfield and its empty

preparations. If she ever comes to visit me

to hell with her, I won’t talk to her.

God kill you all. I’m sorry for nothing.

I’m just an alien from another planet.

“I am not happy. Disappointment

lights its stupid fire in my heart,

but two days a week I staff

the Max Security laundry above the world

on the seventh level, looking at two long roads

out there that go to a couple of towns.

Young girls accelerating through the intersection

make me want to live forever,

they make me think of the grand things,

of wars and extremely white, quiet light that never dies.

Sometimes I stand against the window for hours

tuned to every station at once, so loaded on crystal

meth I believe I’ll drift out of my body.

“Jesus Christ, your doors close and open,

you touch the Maniac Drifters, the Fireaters,

I could say a million things about you

and never get that silence. That is what I mean

by darkness, the place where I kiss your mouth,

where nothing bad has happened.

I’m not anyone but I wish I could be told

when you will come to save us. I have written

several poems and several hymns, and one

has been performed on the religious

ultra-high-frequency station. And it goes like this.”

Without waiting for any applause, Richard went immediately back to his bunk and returned the poem to its case.

Foster, the elderly suppertime relief guard, had joined them during Richard’s recital of the poem. “Who’s a maniac drifter?” he asked now. Bill Houston was embarrassed. He thought it must be an insult to ask any questions about Richard’s poem — Foster ran the risk of revealing that parts of it were stupid.

“That’s a gang on the Southside,” Richard said, “and the Fireaters, too. I was a friend to them. Once upon a time I carried a message. And then they had a war.” He held up his head in his annoying way. “They in my poem,” he said with genuine pride.

The three of them stood chained together by an awkward silence, and yet separated by prison bars. “I’m not supposed to tell you this,” Foster said. And then he didn’t tell them anything.

“Well?” Bill Houston said.

“They’re not going to say anything till the last minute,” Foster said. “But I know for a fucking-A fact that Richard’s appeal went through this afternoon. My sister works over in the Court of Appeals. They’re going to hang up the paper so you don’t: find out for a while — but I hate to see you sweat, Richard.”

“I ain’t sweating.”

“What about my appeal?” Bill Houston felt his supper turning to stone inside him.

“Well, I just told you everything I know.”

“Can’t you find out for me? C’mon, Mr. Foster.”

“I can’t because it’s Friday. If anything happens now, it’ll be off-hours, and my sister wouldn’t know about it anyway.”

“Man — I ain’t even been worried.” His legs went soft on him. “I need to get prepared.” He sat on the bunk. He couldn’t see Richard now, only Foster. “I need some reasons for this shit.”

He felt the sympathy in their silence, but it was only silence.

“When you go up the pipe — does it hurt?” he asked Foster. “How does it feel?”

“I don’t know. You tell me. Drop us a line, okay?” Even Bill Houston laughed at this, and he realized he was taking an attitude that made him look small. He should have been the one to say, “I’ll drop you a line.”

He resolved to be a better sport and show a cheerful disposition. Five AM Tuesday was the scheduled hour of his execution.

Did it ever cool off in this town? A downpour that morning had made a flood, but only three hours later no record of it lay anywhere on the hospital grounds, except for two puddles in the basins gouged out by children’s feet beneath a pair of swings.

There were a sandbox and a push-me-go-round beside the swings, which were near the front gate. To see them made Jamie think for the first time that of course children must be housed here — children born crazy, and never sane in all their lives. If I’m a little out of it now, she thought, at least I can call up a few memories of the real days.

At the kiosk by the gate, she handed the guard her pass. “So! Three hours!” He fastened the pass to his clipboard and began studiously copying data from it onto his gate-list.

“I could be back a lot sooner. This is my first shot out of the box.”

“I guessed that.” He was an old man. “First time is always three hours.” There was whiskey on his breath.

“I don’t know if I can really handle it,” Jamie said.

“You can handle it.” He returned her pass and she signed his list. When she turned to go he said, “My pen.”

“I was going to give it back to you. You think I’d steal your old pen?”

He gave an exaggerated shrug, his eyes glittering pinkly. You’re happy now, you old drunk. But wait till you’re watching The Movie Only You Can See.

Wait, she told herself; attitude. Attitude of Gratitude.

For the first time this summer, she stepped out onto the streets. Now she was grateful for her Welfare tennis shoes: a half-block west of her down Van Buren, three prostitutes loitered at a bus stop in festive dresses and bright stretch-pants and hip boots and spiked heels; but no one would mistake a goony little thing like herself for one of the day shift.

Before she could grow accustomed to the feel of pavement, her taxi arrived, a bright yellow Chevy. On the door she reached out and opened was stenciled: C.O.P.S. — Cabs On Patrol.

“Air conditioning!” she said.

“I wouldn’t go near this cab if they didn’t give me refrigeration,” the driver said. He had a head of pitiful brown hair that reminded her of Bill Houston’s, and it made her sad. “You’re the one going to the Annex?” he said.

“You got it,” she said.

Their route took them south and east, through the downtown, toward the freeway, and now she saw all the signs of the recent deluge — wet spots on the pavement, some oily pools in the gutters — she understood Phoenix had no sewers — and dark stains on the scaly hide of palm trees, beneath which lifeless brown fronds, some of them long as a man, had been scattered by the winds. The smog had washed out of the air, and as they rode the freeway, the flatness of the Southside to their right and the tall buildings of central Phoenix to their left looked beautifully varnished and free of imperfections.

This was the way she had hoped it would be — clean and clear.

Far to the east, she saw some mountains that she and Dwight Snow had spent some time watching one day, a day they’d seemed more like monsters. It was enough for them now to look like mountains.

“Wow. Kind of a no-man’s-land out here, huh?” She counted her change carefully, and then got out of the cab and stood beside it.

“Probably someday, this whole desert is going to be a jail,” the cabbie said. Jamie tipped him a dollar and he drove away.

The Maricopa County Jail Annex — out here in the middle of nothing, two or three miles from the Phoenix Sky Harbor — looked a little flimsy to Jamie, a little too chain-link and pre-fab to hold any person bent seriously on escape. The complex of structures was dominated by a long yellow building of a single storey that seemed just to peter out. They were still building it; it grew hideless and then skeletal and then collapsed into piles of unshaped materials at its far end, near a dirt exercise yard with a couple of basketball hoops standing around in it hopelessly.

She displayed her pass to the guard at the front gate, but he refused her entrance, directing her instead to the Visitors’ Gate on the compound’s other side, quite a ways down the road. “If I faint in this heat,” she said, “please come rescue me.”

The day was humid after the rain. Perspiration burned in her eye sockets and ran down out of her hair. She started to feel overwhelmed, walking by a prison compound through the searing moonscape beside the dry bed of the Salt River. A breeze brought the stench of the City of Phoenix Landfill down the empty river and wrapped it around her face.

The Visitors’ Gate gave way to a tiny compound separated by chain-link and razor-barb from the jail proper, and occupied solely by a large sky-blue house trailer. The guard at the gate accepted her pass. But stepping through the archway beside his kiosk, she made the metal detector speak with crazed alarm.

She was afraid. “I gave you everything.”

The guard appeared unruffled. He ran his hand-held detector up her left leg, over her head and down, it squeaked when it neared her teeshirt’s breast pocket. “That a pack of smokes?”

“Yeah, but they ain’t metal,” she said.

“Even the tin foil in a cigaret pack sets it off. These are high-powered. Not like the airport.” Jamie had never been in an airport.

He accepted the pack from her and added it to her coins and keys — keys to doors she would never confront again — in a small plastic tray. He placed her property in a locker inside his kiosk.

“You mean I can’t take in my cigarets?”

“Sorry. Not in an open pack.” Together they went up the brief walk and into the visitors’ trailer.

Inside, the air was crisp, and her perspiration began to dry. The area was furnished like a lunchroom — vending machines, fluorescent lighting, plastic chairs, tables of indestructible blond false wood. She spent a good two minutes drinking from the humming grey water fountain, giving herself a headache. She was still standing beside it, breathing hard, when two guards escorted Burris through the trailer’s opposite door. He was handcuffed. And it was obvious nobody liked him. It was the first thing she sensed from the three guards in the room.

But the guards retreated to opposite ends of the trailer, giving them a form of privacy. Burris sat across from her at one of the cafeteria-style tables. He was really happy to see her, that much was plain. “Hey — all right. Jamie,” he said. “Welcome to the fort.”

“Don’t seem like much of a fort to me,” she said. “If you just stared hard at that jailhouse it’d fall over.”

Frowning and smiling, he raised his shackled hands and put a finger to his lips.

She laughed. “You don’t look too rehabilitated with that scroungy beard all over your face. I liked it better when you were shaved.”

She saw that in many ways he was her brother now. She loved him. But all she felt able to do was to kid around.

“That tobacco in your pouch there?” She indicated the pocket of his workshirt. “Think you can roll me a cigaret with your hands tied?”

“Yeah, it’s tobacco. Wish it was something else.” He managed to roll two cigarets without much difficulty, despite his handcuffs. Neither of them said a word during this operation. Jamie had to call one of the guards over for a light.

They both smoked. “Wish it was something else,” he said again, laughing slyly.

“I got a little bent around by them chemicals,” she told him.

“We had some high old times, didn’t we?

“Yeah. But I mean, I’m serious. I was in the nuthouse. I’m still in the nuthouse.”

“I know, Mom told me about it.”

“So, I’m going in a whole nother direction now.”

“Well, you look good. You look great.”

“Oh yeah. I feel one hundred percent better,” she said, “maybe more.”

“You were just fucked up on drugs,” Burris said.

“No. It was more. Much more,” she said. “Over into the area of religion.”

“No kidding,” he said. “Like Mom.”

“Like Mom,” she said. “Exactly.”

“Not like Jeanine I hope,” Burris said.

“Not like Jeanine,” Jamie assured him.

They smoked their cigarets. She tried to think of a few things to say. But she really didn’t want to ask about the food.

She said, “I mean, sure, I was just fucked up on drugs. But it’s kind of like you could look at it two ways.”

“I was going nuts over dope, too,” he said. “But I’m okay now.”

“You all cleaned out?”

He looked sheepish. “Well, not exactly. There’s a little something available in here every once in a while — you know.”

“Well, I’m clean,” she said. “I’m going to Narcotics Anonymous. I’ll be in therapy, a halfway house, One Day at a Time, Attitude of Gratitude, the whole program. I mean to get my kids back, or die on the way.”

“I can respect that, Jamie. It takes balls.”

“I’m more scared than I ever been,” she said frankly.

The door behind Jamie opened, and the guard brought in another visitor, a boy no older than Burris. Without thinking about it, Jamie felt their interview had reached an end.

“I got a note from Bill, is why I came. I came here with a message.”

He grew visibly paler. His eyes were wet, and he was wordless.

“He says, ‘Tell Burris he’ll still be my brother.’”

He released his breath.

“They’re fixing to kill him tomorrow, you know about that?” she said.

“Course I know,” he said. “It’s all I ever think about.”

“I didn’t know if they told you that kind of stuff, or what.”

“They tell me. They want me to think about it.”

“Well, if they really go ahead and do it to him — don’t think he’s on your conscience. He’s past that. He’s resentment-free. Nobody holds any of it against you, Burris.” She wanted to give him peace. All she could think of to communicate it was to say, “Rest easy.”

“Okay. I appreciate it, Jamie.” And clearly he did.

Brian was having himself a great time, going over their heads with the clippers. “You just fucking with me,” Richard told him. “I know my appeal gone through. Hold up!” he said, raising a hand. Brian stopped the clippers, and Richard sneezed violently.

“You’re allergic to your own hair,” Brian concluded.

Bill Houston sat on his bunk listening to this, running his hand around his new crew-cut. “This is humiliation,” he said. “How much poison gas could stay in a little bit of hair? They don’t really need to do this. Fuckers.”

“It’s cooler,” Richard said. “My head feels cool.”

“My head feels stupid,” Bill Houston said.

“My appeal gone through anyway. They tell me tomorrow. Be a big surprise.”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Brian said.

“Maybe mine went through, too. Maybe they’ll tell me tomorrow,” Bill Houston said.

“Well, you got about eight more hours. Anything can happen,” Brian said. “They’ll crank things up in the middle of the night, if they have to — the whole Court of Appeals, everything.”

“Eight more hours!”

“I’ll be here. I had my shift changed around just for you,” Brian said.

“I’m glad to have you,” Bill Houston said sincerely. “You count as one of my friends. You’re one of my friends, too, Richard.”

“You won’t have no friends in eight hours.”

Bill Houston nodded — but nobody could see him nod, Brian was in Richard’s cell. “There’s always some kind of a countdown, though, ain’t there? That’s part of the whole story, ain’t it?”

The clippers in the next cell ceased whirring. In the quiet moment, he couldn’t even be sure who, if anyone, was there. He could never be connected: there was always something — bars, or laws, or words — in the way. It was only deep inside that he felt he made some contact. And then he couldn’t be sure.

“Wash out your cup, Houston. Get it real clean.”

He was startled. “What is it?” he said. He still couldn’t see them.

“Man! This my favorite hotel!” This was Richard.

There was a terrible popping noise, and Bill Houston was up and hanging onto the bars.

Brian stepped over to his cell holding a big green bottle. “You’re one of my friends, too, Mr. Houston.” Champagne.

The Highway Patrol kept the prison side of Route 89 clear of the seekers and desirers, the ones who had to be there, the ones who sought to know. But the dirt margin of the road on the town side was lined with campers and motorcycles and trucks, with their owners and the children and families of the owners, who placed their forearms and elbows on these machines and leaned on them quietly for support during their vigil. It was dark. The blue roof-lights of the police raked their faces. Everything about the moment conspired to keep them silent: the death of stars in the east where the sun prepared to rise out of Tucson eighty miles away, the deep emptiness of the pre-dawn heavens, the imperious stupor of the Arizona State Prison Complex across the road and over the squad cars parked on its shoulder and beyond a cultivated field of cotton, its sand-colored structures on fire with the orange light of numberless sodium arc-lamps, and over all of the dawn of execution day, the desert night’s dry foreboding, the negligent powerful breath of the day’s coming heat, the heat that burns away each shadow and incinerates every last particle of shit inside the heart. But at this hour it was still cool — in their hands some of these people cradled styrofoam cups of steam.

The lawyer Fredericks was among them, and they troubled him. What made them think that after twenty years of merciless forbearance in dealing with murderers, the state would choose suddenly this morning to press its intentions to their end, and finish Bill Houston? Fredericks didn’t feel like one of them. It seemed to him they represented mostly the very people who’d be incarcerated here tomorrow, goodtimers in sleeveless sweatshirts and teeshirts vulgarly inscribed (“The Itty Bitty Titty Committee”) — slogans without meaning, transmissions into space — Honk If You Know Jesus and National Rifle Association bumper emblems nearly effaced by wind-driven sand — the children grubby and crew-cut, the women splayfooted and rubber-thonged — where were the young ladies apparelled for tennis, apparelled for golfing? Where were the outraged owners of the establishment? The bankers, the people with tie-pins and jeweled letter openers and profoundly lustrous desks of mahogany, the workers of all this machinery of law and circumstance? The people he couldn’t fight — the people who were never here? The truth was, he knew, that they had enough to keep them occupied. They were busy, complete people. They didn’t need to come here in the dark night to seek warmth around the fire of murder or draw close to the ceremonies of a semi-public death.

But these people around him — who’d probably gone to the same school as William Houston, Jr., or been acquainted with one or more of his relatives or had the same parole officer — came here because they sensed that why they themselves had not been executed was inexplicable, a miracle. And as best they could, they had to find out what it was like.

How does it feel.

Tell me how does it feel.

With no direction home.

A complete unknown…

But Fredericks didn’t hear that song, except as it issued from their collective dream of suffocation. He heard only the radios playing a news program, an eye-witness show about this execution, broadcast from the west side of the prison, near the main entrance, where radio and TV news teams had been parked since suppertime last night. What made them all believe it would actually happen? What hadn’t he been told? I am here in my white dress shirt and brown loafers. Someone is keeping a secret. I am the little boy whose dog is dead.

Cars had ceased arriving. The light in the east was blue-grey. People were talking a bit louder now; there was laughter; they were nervous. The children were getting anxious, quarreling and chasing aimlessly around all the cars, eluding their mothers.

Fredericks determined in his mind not to look at his watch. After a minute, he had to take off his watch and put it in his pocket to keep from glancing at its face. And then he went over to his Volvo and threw the watch onto the front seat and walked away from it. He just wanted to find out if he would know, without a watch, when it was time.

It was time.

Brian said, “Mr. Houston? Let’s take you for a ride up that pipe.”

He couldn’t believe he’d actually been asleep. All night he had lain with the Unmade, with God, the incredible darkness, the huge blue mouth of love.

I’m going to be turned into space. This is the hour of my death.

He couldn’t stand. “Didn’t the appeal go through?”

“No,” Brian said.

“Well it doesn’t even have to go through. They just have to get it started.”

“Nothing happened. This is it, Bill.”

“See you, Richard.”

“See you,” Richard’s voice said.

“Are they all in there?”

“Everybody’s in there but you and me,” Brian said.

He stood up. He had a desire out of nowhere to let everyone know it was all right; everything was fine.

“Take off your pants,” Brian said in a kindly way.

“Take off my pants?”

He looked down at his prison-issue jeans. What did everybody want his pants for? He thought he was going to cry.

“We can’t have a big pile of clothes all soaked with gas,” Brian said. “Didn’t anybody tell you?”

“You mean I got to be naked?” Tears sprang out of his eyes. It must have been years since he’d cried tears before another; but this was too much. They hadn’t warned him about this.

“You can keep your shorts on,” Brian said.

He stood there handcuffed, shorn nearly bald, wearing only his white underpants. It was chilly and he was shaking, but it wasn’t important, even if they thought he was afraid. Two guards from CB-6 were present, and he noticed them. Familiar faces. He nodded. There was a young doctor from the clinic standing there, and a short gentleman reading out loud. The warden. The Order of Execution. The door was open. There was a hearse parked outside it in the early morning. Only one.

The witnesses were already behind the glass. He couldn’t hear, and shook his head. Was everything behind glass?

The warden stopped reading. “Is something wrong?”

Wrong? He stood next to Brian facing the warden, the doctor, the two guards. Every one of them was terrified. They were all scared to death of what was happening. The warden’s voice trembled. “Do you have anything to say at this time?” he asked Bill Houston.

Bill Houston was floored by the question. “Is there something I’m supposed to say now?”

Everyone was confused.

Brian said suddenly, “I want you to know I don’t think you deserve to die. I think you been healed.”

Nobody knew how to react. They all looked around. It was obvious even the warden didn’t know if Brian had just broken a rule. “I really feel that way,” Brian said defiantly.

“Thank you,” Bill Houston said.

They all stood there in a long silence. What was going on now?

“What’s going on?” Bill Houston asked.

The warden looked green and ill. “We still have a couple of minutes,” he said. “I think we should wait, don’t you?” He glanced around helplessly.

Bill Houston whispered to Brian, “I don’t think I can stand up any more.”

Taking him by the elbow, Brian helped Bill Houston into the gas chamber.

A truth filled up the chamber: there was nothing left for him now. The door had shut on his life. It said DEATH IS THE MOTHER OF BEAUTY. He couldn’t hear a thing. He wondered if they’d put cotton in his ears.

And then there was a faint rattling in the pipe to his right, and the sound of boiling liquid beneath him. He looked down at the length of surgical tubing that ran from his chest to the door. There it goes. Up that tube. Boom boom boom boom boom boom boom. That’s all that’s ever really been important. A visible vapor was curling up over his knees.

He held his breath. Every rivet of metal was a jewel to him. He felt he could hold his breath forever — no problem. Boom, boom. Even as his heart accelerated, it seemed to him inexplicably that his heart was slowing down. You can get right in between each beat, and let the next one wash over you like the best and biggest warm ocean there ever was. His eyes were on fire. He hated to shut them, but they hurt. He wanted to see. Boom! Was there ever anything as pretty as that one? Another coming… boom! Beautiful! They just don’t come any better than that.

He was in the middle of taking the last breath of his life before he realized he was taking it. But it was all right. Boom! Unbelievable! And another coming? How many of these things do you mean to give away? He got right in the dark between heartbeats, and rested there. And then he saw that another one wasn’t going to come. That’s it. That’s the last. He looked at the dark. I would like to take this opportunity, he said, to pray for another human being.

Casablanca Cafe, normally closed before six AM, was open early for the execution. Fredericks looked in through the window, and saw that the place was still empty. The crowd was still down by the highway. At this moment they would all be looking toward the Death House, watching the rust-colored pipe that rose ostentatiously above the little building that was itself obscured by other prison buildings; and as the chamber beneath it was voided by a suction pump, some would believe they smelled the stench of rarefied cyanous vapors, like peach blossoms. And they would be excruciated, amused, reassured, or made pensive, depending on who they were.

“Everybody’s still over by the show,” the waitress said. Her name was Clair. Fredericks knew her name, but that was all.

“Was it on the radio?” Fredericks asked her.

“Just now. It’ll be on again in two minutes, I guarantee you.”

“Can I have some Scotch in my coffee?”

Clair brought him a pot of coffee, a fifth of Black Label, and a white cup. In a few minutes, as they listened to the radio that sat beside the cash register, the morning produced its soft light. William H. Houston, Jr., had been put to death. Richard Clay Wilson’s sentence had been commuted to life.

“A lot of people got finessed this morning,” Fredericks told Clair.

Clair stood by the window, holding aside its curtain delicately between two fingers and watching the street. “Us, too,” she told him now. “Everybody’s just zooming right out of town. The only ones who made a profit on this deal was Seven-Eleven. They sold everybody coffee.”

“And you sold me Scotch,” Fredericks said.

“Oh, call it a gift, okay? We don’t have a license.”

Fredericks stayed a long time in Casablanca Cafe. For a while he napped in the booth, his head thrown back, his mouth open, and he woke feeling furry inside and disoriented.

As he was paying for his coffee, at the instant he was putting one of the free toothpicks into his mouth, he sensed the presence of someone nearby, staring at him. The mood was palpable and real, but he knew there was hardly anyone in the place, just a man reading a magazine, which he held flat on the table beside his bowl of soup. Fredericks looked around a minute before he saw the portrait of Elvis Presley on the wall behind the cash register, almost directly in front of him. Rendered in iridescent paint on black velvet, hovering before a brilliant microphone, the face of the dead idol seemed on the brink of speech.

Fredericks stepped out into the terrible noon and stood by the road with his hands in his pockets, his face shaded by the brim of a straw hat, and chewed his toothpick, aware that he looked very much like a country lawyer. He was still young, and it was completely possible that soon he’d begin carrying out his original intention of getting himself elected to something or other. But the truth was, he knew, that he’d been irretrievably sidetracked right at the start by his stint as a public defender, and that he’d probably continue the rest of his life as a criminal lawyer because, in all honesty, there was a part of him that wanted to help murderers go free.

Most of his clients ended up in Florence. He’d spent a lot of time here. And he would be here a great deal more, in this town of bored dirt consisting mainly of a prison shimmering at this moment in waves of heat, a town that was always quiet except for the sounds of wind coming across the desert and ropes banging against flagpoles — where every evening the iridescent-on-velvet face of Elvis Presley climbed the twilight to address all the bankrupt cafes.

It was Fredericks’s understanding that the prisoners had a story: that each night for months, at nine precisely, a light had burned in a window in the town, where the men on one cellblock’s upper tier could see it and wonder, and imagine, each one, that it shone for him alone. But that was just a story, something that people will tell themselves, something to pass the time it takes for the violence inside a man to wear him away, or to be consumed itself, depending on who is the candle and who is the light.