Second Chance

Chapter 18

IT WAS ALWAYS THE EYES that got him. Naked on the bunk, in the stark, cell-like room, he sat staring at the old black-and-white photographs he had looked at a thousand times.

It was always the eyes... that deadened, hopeless resignation.

How they posed, even knowing that their lives were about to end. Even with the nooses wrapped around their necks.

In the loosely bound album, he had forty-seven photos and postcards arranged in chronological order. He had collected them over the years. The first, an old photograph, dated June 9, 1901, his father had given him. Dezjones, lynched in Great River, Indiana. On the border, someone had written in faded script: “This was that dance I went to the other night. We sure played afterwards. Your son, Sam.” In the foreground, a crowd in suit coats and bowler hats, and behind them the limply hanging corpse.

He flipped the page. Frank Taylor, Mason, Georgia, 1911. It had cost him $500 to get the photo, but it was worth every penny. From the back of a buggy parked under an oak, the condemned man stared, seconds before his death. On his face, neither resistance nor fear. A small crowd of properly dressed men and women grinned toward the camera as if they were witnessing Lindbergh arriving in Paris. Dressed up as if it were a family portrait.

Their eyes conveyed that the hanging was something proper and natural. Taylor's, simply that there wasn't a damn thing he could do about it anyway.

He got off the bed and dragged his slick, muscular frame to the mirror. He had always been strong. He had lifted weights for ten years now. He flinched as he drew blood and mass into his swollen pecs. He massaged a scratch. That old bitch had dug her nails into his chest as he wrapped the coil around the ceiling pipes. It had barely drawn blood, but he looked at the scratch with contempt. He didn't like anything that disturbed the surface of his skin.

He posed in front of the mirror, looking at the seething lion-goat tattooed across his chest.

Soon, all the stupid assholes would see that it wasn't just about hate. They would read his pattern. The guilty had to be punished. Reputations needed to be restored. He had no particular antipathy for any of them. It wasn't hate. He climbed back on the bed and masturbated to the photo of Missy Preston, whose tiny neck was snapped by a rope in Childers County, Tennessee, in August of 1931.

Without even a groan, he ejaculated. The forceful rush made his knees quake. That old lady, she had deserved to die.

The choir girl, too. He was pumped up!

He massaged the tattoo on his chest. Pretty soon, I will let you free, my pet.

He opened his photo scrapbook and flipped to the last blank page, just after Morris Tub and Sweet Brown, in Longbow, Kansas, 1956.

He had been saving this spot for the right picture. And now he had it.

He took a tube of roll-on glue and dabbed all over the back of the photo. Then he pressed it onto the blank page.

Here's where it belonged.

He remembered her staring up at him, that sad inevitability etched all over her face. The eyes... He admired the new addition: Estelle Chipman, eyes stretched wide, looking at the camera just before he kicked the chair out from under her feet.

They always posed.