Heaven Ran Last

Chapter XVII

This is the night. There’s a lot of noise from the other guys along the block. Some of them are moaning and beating tin cups against the bars.

They didn’t waste any time after they got the confession. The judge gave me the chair about three seconds after my lawyer stopped talking. He spent about ten minutes telling me what a rat I was and he did a swell job of it because this is an election year and I guess he wanted the papers to get the story.

That was six weeks ago.

There’s a pretty nice guy here named Father Riley and he’s been in to talk to me every couple days. He brings in papers and cigarettes and one day he told me if I said I was sorry and meant it that everything would be all right.

I can’t say that, because it’s not the way I feel. Everything I did was wrong, but if I had the chance it would probably go the same way again.

The paper he brought me tonight has a story about Alice. She’s not on the front page. There’s another murder on the front page, and she’s over on page nineteen, beside an ad for women’s corsets.

The story tells how she got up this morning and went into the bathroom with her husband’s gun and shot herself under the heart. There’s a little in the story about Lesser and Frank and me, but it’s a pretty short story.

She lasted longer than I thought. In a little while I’ll take that same trip.

There was something wrong with us that made us end this way. We were twisted and warped and we couldn’t fit anywhere unless we were together.

Maybe if I’d stayed on the street I was raised on, where the kids played ball in the summer and the fireman came around in the afternoon to give us a splashing, it would have been different. Maybe if I’d married one of the girls I met at the parish dances, this wouldn’t have happened.

Nobody knows about things like that, but my guess is that we’d have still been in trouble, but just in a different place with different people.

We’re the same wrong kind of people, but if we could have been together, maybe it would have worked out.

Father Riley has told me about saying I’m sorry, and he’s told me a lot about Heaven, but I can’t get interested in what he tells me, because I know she won’t be there.

The noise from the other cells is louder now, so I guess the guards are on their way.