Such a Good Girl and Other Crime Stories

That Day at Eagle’s Point

The day was dark suddenly, even though it was only four in the afternoon, and lightning like silver spider’s legs began to walk across the landscape of farm fields and county highways. It was summer, and kids would be playing near creeks and forests and old deserted barns, and their mothers would see the roiling sky and begin calling frantically for them, trying to be heard above the chill damp sudden wind.

The rains came, then, hard slanting Midwestern rains that made me feel snug inside my new Plymouth sedan, rains making noises on the hood and roof like the music of tin drums.

That was the funny thing, I told Marcie I was buying the Plymouth for her, and she even went down and picked out the model and the color all by herself, but even so, a couple of weeks later, she left. Got home one day and saw two suitcases sitting at the front door, and then came Marcie walking out of the bedroom, prettier than I’d seen her in years. “I’m going to do it, Earle,” was all she said. And then there was a cab there, and he was honking, and then she was gone.

I didn’t handle it so well at first. I just read and reread the letter she left, trying to divine things implied, or things written between the lines, sort of like those Dead Sea scholars spending their whole lives poring over only a few pages.

Her big hangup was Susan Finlay, and how I’d never really gotten over her, and how there was something sick about how I couldn’t let go of that gal, and how she, Marcie, wanted somebody to really love her completely, the way I never could because of my lifelong “obsession” with Susan Finlay.

That was a year ago. She only called once, from a bar somewhere with a loud country-western jukebox, said she was drunk and missed me terribly but knew that for me there’d never be anybody but Susan, and she was sorry for both of us that I’d never been able to love her in the good and proper way she’d wanted.

Another thing she hadn’t liked was my occupation. Over in Nam, I was with a medical unit, so when I got back to New Hope, the town where I was raised, I just naturally looked for work at the hospital. But the hospital per se wasn’t hiring, so they put me in touch with the two fellows who ran the ambulance service. I became their night driver, four to midnight, six nights a week. The benefits were good, and I got to learn a lot about medicine. In the beginning, Marcie was proud of me, I think. At parties and family reunions, people always came up to me and wanted to know if I had any new ambulance stories. Old ladies seemed to have a particular fascination with the really grim ones. Marcie liked me being the one people sought out.

But then my novelty faded, and there I was just this Nam vet with the long hair and Mexican bandit mustache, and a little potbelly, and glasses as thick as Palomars, bad eyesight being a family curse. Forty-three years old, I was, time to get a real job, everybody said. But this was my real job, and it was likely to be my real job the rest of my life...

I’d hoped to catch a good glimpse of the hills on the drive up this late afternoon. The hills were where David and Susan and I liked to play. This was Carstairs, the town I grew up in and lived in till the year before they shipped me off to New Hope. Dad got the lung disease, and Mom felt it was safer to live in New Hope where they had better hospital facilities.

But in my heart, Carstairs would always be my hometown, the town square with the bandstand and the pigeons sitting atop the Civil War monuments, and the old men playing checkers while the little kids splashed in the hot summer wading pool. If I tried hard enough, I could even smell the creosote on the railroad ties as Susan and David and I ran along the tracks looking for something to do.

The three of us grew up in the same apartment house, an old stucco thing with a gnarled and rusty TV antenna on the roof and a brown faded front lawn mined with dog turds. We were six years old the first time we ever played with each other.

We had identical lives. Our fathers were laborers, our mothers took whatever kinds of jobs they could find — dime store clerking, mostly — and we had too many brothers and too many sisters, and sometimes between the liquor and the poverty, our fathers would beat on our mothers for a time, and the “rich” kids at school — anybody who lived in an actual house was rich — the rich kids shunned us. Or shunned David and me, anyway. By the time Susan was ten, she started working her way through all the rich boys, breaking their hearts one at a time with that sad but fetching little face of hers.

But Susan had no interest in those boys, not really. Her only interest was in David and me. And David and I were interested only in Susan.

I was jealous of David. He had all the things I did not, looks, poise, mischievous charm, and curly black hair that Susan always seemed to find an excuse to touch.

I guess I started thinking about that when I was eleven or so. You always saw the older kids start pairing off about the time they reached fourteen. But who was going to pair off with Susan when we got to be fifteen — David or me? Sometimes she seemed to like David a little more than me; other times she seemed to like me a little more than David.

Then one day, when we were thirteen, I came late up to Eagle’s Point, and when I got there, I saw them kissing. It looked kind of comic, actually, they didn’t kiss the way movie stars did, they just kind of groped each other awkwardly. But it was enough to make me run over and tear him from her and push him back to the edge of the cliff. The fall would have killed him, and right then that was what I wanted to do, take his life. I pushed him out over the cliff, so he could get a good look at the asphalt below. All that kept him from falling was the grip I had on the sleeve of his shirt.

But then Susan was there, crying and screaming and pounding on me to pull him back before it was too late.

I’d never seen her that upset. She looked crazed. I pulled him back.

I didn’t speak to either of them for a few months. I mostly stayed home and read science fiction novels. I’d discovered Ray Bradbury that spring.

School started again, and David could be seen in the halls with this cute new girl. I started hanging around Susan again. If she was sad about David, she never let on. She even asked me to go to the movies with her a couple of times. David kept hanging around the cute new girl.

In October, the jack-o’-lanterns on the porches already, I went to Susan’s house one day. I kind of wanted to surprise her, have her go over town with me. Nobody answered my knock. Both the truck and the car her folks drove were gone. I tried the kitchen door. It was open. I figured I’d go in and call out her name. She slept in some Saturday mornings.

That’s when I heard the noise. I guess I knew what it was, I mean it’s pretty unmistakable, but I didn’t want to admit it to myself.

I didn’t want to sneak up the stairs, but I knew I had to. I had to know for absolutely sure.

And that’s what happened. I found out. For absolutely sure.

They were making love. I tried not to think of it as “fucking” because I didn’t want to think of Susan that way. I loved her too much.

“Oh, David, I love you so much,” Susan said.

Susan’s bedroom was very near the top of the stairs. Their words and gasps echoed down the stairs to me and stayed in my ears all the time I ran across the road and into the woods. No matter how fast I ran, their voices stayed with me. I smelled creek water and deep damp forest shadow and the sweetness of pinecone. And then I came to a clearing, the sunlight suddenly blinding me, to the edge of Eagle’s Point. I watched the big hawks wheel down the sky. I wanted them to carry me away to the world Edgar Rice Burroughs described in his books, where beautiful princesses and fabled cities and fabulous caches of gold awaited me, and people like me were never brokenhearted.

What I’d always suspected, and had always feared, was true: she loved David, not me.

I stayed till dark, smoking one Pall Mall after another, feeling the chill of the dying day seep into my bones, and watching the birds sail down the tumbling vermilion clouds and the silver slice of moon just now coming clear.

In the coming days, I avoided them, and of course they were full of questions and hurt looks when I said I didn’t have time for them anymore.

Dad died the autumn I was sixteen, the concrete truck he was driving sliding off the road because of a flash flood and plunging a few hundred feet straight down into a ravine. Mom had to worry about the two younger ones, which meant getting a job as a checkout lady at Slocum’s Market and leaving me to worry about myself. I didn’t mind. Mom was only forty-six but looked sixty. Hers had not been an easy life, and she looked so worn and faded these days that I just kept hugging her so she wouldn’t collapse on the floor.

I saw Susan and David at school, of course, but they’d months ago given up trying to woo me back. Besides, a strange thing had happened. Even though they lived on the wrong side of town and had the wrong sort of parents, the wealthy kids in the class had sort of adopted them. I suppose they saw in Susan and David the sort of potential they’d soon enough realize, first at the state university, where they both graduated with honors, and then at law school, where honors were theirs once again.

I stayed around the house after college, working the part-time jobs I could get, hoping to work full-time eventually at the General Mills plant eighteen miles to the north. I dropped by the personnel department there a couple of times a month, just so they’d know how enthusiastic I was about working for them.

But by the time they were ready to hire me, Uncle Sam he was downright insistent about having me. So they gave me an M-16 and a whole bunch of information about how to save your ass in case of emergency and then shipped me off with a few hundred other reluctant warriors and set us down in a place called Dan Tieng, from where we would be dispatched to our bunkers.

I’ve always wished I had some good war stories for the beer nights at the VFW and the Legion. But the truth is, I never did see anybody around me get killed, though I saw more than a few men being loaded into field hospitals and choppers; and so far as I know, I never killed anybody, either, though there was a guy from Kentucky I thought about fragging sometimes. I did not become an alcoholic, my respiratory system was not tainted by Agent Orange, I was not angry with those who elected not to go (I would not have gone, either, if I’d known how easy it was to slip through the net), and I never had any psychotic episodes, not even when I was drinking the Everclear that sometimes got passed around camp.

While I was there, Susan wrote me three times, each time telling me how heroic she thought I was, and how she and David both missed the old days when we’d all been good friends, and how she was recovering from a broken arm she got from falling down on the tennis court. Tennis, she said, had become a big thing in their lives. They’d both been accepted by a very prestigious old-line law firm and were both given privileges at the city’s finest country club.

I wrote her back near the end of my tour in Nam, telling her that I’d decided to try golden California, the way so many Midwestern rubes do, and that I was planning on becoming a matinee idol and the husband of a rich and beautiful actress, ha ha. Her response, which I got a day before I left Nam, was that they were going to Jamaica for their vacation this year, where it would be nothing but “swimming swimming swimming.” She also noted that they’d gotten married in a “teeny-tiny” civil ceremony a few weeks earlier. And that she’d been married in a “white dress and a black eye — clumsy me, I tripped against a door frame.”

Well, I went to California, Long Beach, Laguna, San Pedro, Sherman Oaks... in three years, I lived five different places and held just about double that number of jobs. I tried real estate, stereo sales, management trainee at a seven-eleven, and limo driver at a funeral home, the latter lasting only three weeks. I’d had to help bury a four-year-old girl dead of brain cancer. I didn’t have it in me ever to do that again.

By the time I got back to New Hope, Mom was in a nursing home equidistant between New Hope and Carstairs. I saw her three times a week. Back then, they weren’t so certain about their Alzheimer’s diagnoses. But that’s what she had. Some days she knew me, some not. I only broke down once, pulling her to me and letting myself cry. But she had no idea of our history, no idea of our bond, so it was like holding a stranger from the street, all stiff and formal and empty.

I met and married Marcie, I got my job at the ambulance company, I joined the VFW and the Legion, I became an auxiliary deputy because my Uncle Clement was the assistant county sheriff and he told me it was a good thing to do, and I made the mistake of running into a cousin of Susan’s one day and getting Susan’s address from her.

The funny thing is, I was never unfaithful to Marcie, not physically anyway. I had a few chances, too, but even though I knew I didn’t love my wife, I felt that I owed her my honor. Bad enough that she had to hold me knowing that I wanted to be holding Susan; I didn’t have to humiliate her publicly as well.

I never did write Susan, but I did call her. And then she called me a couple of times. And over the next six, seven years, we must have talked a couple of dozen times. Marcie didn’t know, and neither did David. She told me about her life, and I told her how crazy she was and where it would all lead, but she didn’t listen. She loved David too much to be reasonable. I made all kinds of proposals, of course, how I’d just sit down with Marcie and tell her the truth, that Susan and I were finally going to get together, and how I’d give Marcie the house and the newer of the cars and every cent in the savings account. One time, Susan laughed gently, as if she was embarrassed for me, and said, “Earle, you don’t understand how successful a trial lawyer David is. He makes more in a month than you do in a year.” Then her laugh got bitter. “You couldn’t afford me, sweetheart. You really couldn’t.”

There were a few more conversations. She saw a shrink, she saw a priest, she saw this real good friend of hers who’d gone through the same thing. She was going to leave, she had the strength and courage and determination to leave now, or so she claimed, but she never did leave. She never did.

The prison was a WPA project back in the Depression. Stone was carried from a nearby quarry for the walls. The prison sits on a hill, as if it is being shown to local boys and girls as a warning.

You pass through three different electronically controlled gates before you come to the visitors’ parking lot.

You pass the manufacturing building where the cool blue of welding torches can be seen, and the prison laundry where harsh detergent can be smelled, and the cafeteria that is noisy with preparations for the night’s meal. I walked quickly past all these areas. The rain was still coming down hard.

You pass through two more electronic gates before you reach the administrative offices.

The inmates all knew who I was. I wouldn’t say that there was hostility in their eyes when they saw me, but there was a kind of hard curiosity, as if I were a riddle to be solved.

The warden’s office had been designed to look like any other office. But it didn’t quite make it. The metal office furniture was not only out of date, it was a little bit grim in its gray way. And the receptionist was a sure disappointment for males visiting the warden: he was a bald older guy with his prison-blue shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal several faded and vaguely obscene tattoos. He knew who I was.

“The warden’s on the phone.”

“I’ll just sit here.”

He nodded and went back to his typing on a word processor. He worked with two fingers, and he worked fast.

I looked through a law enforcement magazine while I sat there.

The receptionist said, “You do anything special to get ready?”

I shrugged. “Not really.”

He went back to typing. I went back to reading.

After a time, he said, “It ever bother you?”

I sighed. “I suppose. Sometimes.” I got into this five years ago when the state passed the capital punishment bill. MDs couldn’t execute a man because of the Hippocratic oath. The state advertised for medical personnel. You had to take a lot of tests. I wondered if I could actually go through with it. The first couple times were rough. I just keep thinking of what the men had done. Most of them were animals. That helped a lot.

“It’d bother me.” He went back to his typing again.

Then: “I mean, if you want my honest opinion, I think it’d bother most people.”

I didn’t respond, just watched him a moment, then went back to my magazine.

George Stabenow is a decent man always in a hurry. Pure unadulterated Type A.

He burst through his office door and said, “C’mon in. I’m running so late I can’t believe it.”

He was short, stout, and swathed in a brown three-piece suit. This was probably the kind of suit the press expected a proper warden to wear on a day like this.

He pointed to a chair, and I sat down.

“The frigging doctor had some sort of emergency,” Stabenow said. “Can you believe it?”

“You getting another doctor?”

“No, no. But he won’t be here for the run-through, which pisses me off. I mean, the run-through’s critical for all of us.”

I nodded. He was right.

He walked over to his window and looked out on the grounds surrounding the prison.

“You see them on your way in?”

“Uh-huh.”

“More than usual.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Maybe a hundred of them. If it’s not this, it’s some other goddamned thing. The environment or something.”

“Uh-huh.”

“That priest — that monsignor — you should’ve heard him this afternoon.” He grinned. “He was wailing and flailing like some goddamned TV minister. Man, what a jackoff that guy is.”

He came back to his desk. To his right was one of those plastic cubes you put photos of your family in. He had a nice-looking wife and a nice-looking daughter. “You eat?”

“I had a sandwich before I left New Hope,” I said.

“I’m going to grab something in the cafeteria.”

I smiled. “The food’s not as bad as the inmates say, huh?”

“Bad? Shit, it’s a hell of a lot better than you and I ever got in the goddamned Army, I’ll tell you that.” He shook his head in disgust. “Food’s the easiest target of all for these jerkoffs — to get the public upset about, I mean. The public sees all these bullshit prison movies and think, they’re for real. You know, cockroaches and everything crawling around in the chili? Hell, the state inspector checks out our kitchens and our food just the way he does all the other institutions. Even if we wanted cockroaches in the chili—” He smiled. “They wouldn’t let us.”

I said, “I need a badge.”

“Oh, right.”

He dug in his drawer and found me one and pushed it across his desk. I pinned it to my chambray shirt. The badge was “Highest Priority.” All members of the team wear them.

“The rest of them here?”

“The team, you mean?”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“Everybody except the goddamned doc.”

Before he could work up a lather again, I said, “Why don’t I just walk over there, then, and say hi?”

“You’ve got twenty minutes yet. You sure you don’t want a cup of coffee at least?”

“No, thanks.”

He looked at me. “You know, I was kind of surprised that he requested you.”

“Yeah.”

“You sure you’ll be all right?”

“I’ll be all right.”

“Some of the team, well, they had some doubts, too, said maybe it wasn’t right. You knowing him and everything.”

“I know. A couple of them called me.”

“But I said, ‘Hell, it’s his decision. If he thinks he can handle it, let him.’ Anyway, this is what the inmate wanted.”

“I appreciate that.”

“You’re a pro, and pros do what they have to.”

“Right.”

He smiled. “I’m just glad Glen Wright has to handle the media. If it was up to me, I’d just tell them to go to hell.”

He was going to upset himself again, and I wanted to get out of there before it happened. I stood up.

“You fellas used to carry little black bags,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Just like doctors. Guess you don’t need them anymore, huh? Now we provide everything.”

“Right.”

We shook hands, and I left.

There are six members on the team.

Five of us stood in the chamber and went through it all. You wouldn’t think there’d be much to rehearse, but there is.

One of the men makes certain that the room is set up properly. We want to make sure that the curtains work, that’s the first thing. When the press and the visitors come into the room outside the chamber, the curtains are drawn. Only when we’re about to begin for real are the curtains drawn back.

Then the needles have to be checked. Sometimes you get a piston that doesn’t work right, and that can play hell for everybody. They get three injections — the first to totally relax them, the second to paralyze them so they won’t squirm around, and the third to kill them. In my training courses, I learned that only two things matter in this kind of work: to kill brain and heart function almost immediately. This way, the inmate doesn’t suffer, and the witnesses don’t get upset by how inhumane it might look otherwise.

After the needles are checked, the gurney is fixed into place. If it isn’t anchored properly, a struggling guy might tear it free and make things even worse for himself.

Then we check the IV line and the EKG the doctor will use to determine heart death. Then we check the blade the doctor will use for the IV cutdown. We expose the inmate’s vein so there’s no chance of missing with the needle. That happened in Oregon. Took the man with the needle more than twenty minutes to find a vein. That wasn’t pleasant for anybody.

Then I went through my little spiel to the man about to be executed. I’m always very polite. I tell him what he can expect and how it won’t hurt in any way, especially if he cooperates. He generally has a few questions, and I always try to answer them. During all this, everybody else is rechecking the equipment, and Assistant Warden Wright is out there patiently taking questions from the press. The press is always looking for some way to discredit what we do. That’s not paranoia, that’s simple fact.

We didn’t time the first run-through, which was kind of ragged. But the second run-through, Wright used his stopwatch.

We came in a little longer than we should have.

In the courses I took, the professor suggested that fifty-one minutes is the desired time for most executions by lethal injection. This is from walking into the chamber to the prisoner being declared legally dead by the presiding doctor.

We came in at fifty-nine minutes, and Wright, properly, said that we needed to pick things up a little. The longer you’re in the chamber, he said, the more likely you are to make mistakes. And the more mistakes you make, the more the press gets on your back. Speed and efficiency were everything, Wright said. That’s what my instructors always said, too.

Finally, I checked out my own needles, went through the motions of injecting fluids. My timing was off till the third run-through. I picked up the pace then, and everything went pretty well. We hit fifty-three minutes. We needed to shave two more minutes. We’d take a break and then come back for one more run-through.

When we wrapped up, Wright said we could all have coffee and rolls if we wanted. There was a small room off the chamber that was used only by prison personnel. The rest of the team went there. I walked down the hall to another electronic gate and told him that I was the man the warden called him about. Even though visiting hours were over, I was to be admitted to see the prisoner.

The guard opened the gate for me, then another guard led me down the hall, stopping at a door at the far shadowy end.

He opened the door, and I went inside.

The man was an impostor.

David Sawyer had gotten somebody to stand in for him at the execution. Last time I’d seen him was at the trial, years ago.

The sleek and handsome David Sawyer I remembered, the one with all the black curly hair that Susan had loved to run her fingers through, was gone. Had probably fled the country.

In his place was a balding, somewhat stoop-shouldered man with thick eyeglasses and a badly twitching left hand. He was dressed in gray prisoner clothing that only made his skin seem paler.

I must have struck him the same way, as an impostor, because at first he didn’t seem to recognize me at all.

On the drive up, I tried to figure out how long it had been since I’d seen David Sawyer. Eighteen years, near as I could figure.

“Son of a bitch,” he said. “You changed your mind. The warden didn’t tell me that.”

I guess what I’d expected was a frightened, depressed man eager to receive his first sedative so he wouldn’t be aware of the next three hours. You saw guys like that.

But the old merry David was in the stride, in the quick embrace, in the standing-back and taking a look-at-you.

“You’re a goddamned porker,” he said. “How much weight have you put on?”

“Forty pounds,” I said. “Or thereabouts.”

He sensed that he might have hurt my feelings, so he slid right into his own shortcomings.

“Now you’re supposed to say, ‘What happened to your hair, asshole? And how come you’re wearing trifocals? And how come you’re all bent over like an old man?’ C’mon, give me some shit. I can take it.”

For a brief time there, he had me believing that his incongruous mood was for real. But as soon as he stopped talking, the fear was in his eyes. He glanced up at the wall clock three times in less than a minute.

And when he spoke, his voice was suddenly much quieter. “You pissed that I asked for you to do this?”

“More surprised than anything, David.”

“You want some coffee? There’s some over there.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

“You go sit down. I’ll bring it over to you.” Then the eyes went dreamy and faraway. “I was always like that at the parties we gave, Susan and I, I mean, and believe me, we gave some pissers. One night, we found the governor of this very state balling this stewardess in our walk-in closet. And I was always schlepping drinks back and forth, trying to make sure everybody was happy. I guess that’s one problem with growing up the way we did — you never feel real secure about yourself. You always overdo the social bullshit so they’ll like you more.”

“You were pretty important. Full partner.”

“That’s what it said on the door,” said the bald and stooped impostor. “But that’s not what it said in here.” He thumped his chest and looked almost intolerably sad for a moment, then went and got our coffee.

The first cup of coffee we spent catching up. I told him about Nam, and he told me about state capital politics and how one got ahead as a big-fee lawyer. Then we talked about New Hope, and I caught him up on some of the lives that interested him there.

We didn’t get around to Susan for at least twenty minutes, and when we did, he jumped up and said, “I’ll get us refills. But keep talking. I can hear you.”

I’d just mentioned her name, and he was on his feet, going the opposite direction.

I suppose I didn’t blame him. The courts had made him face what he’d done, now I was going to make him face it all over again.

“Did you know she used to write me sometimes?”

“You’re kidding? When we were married?”

“Uh-huh.”

He brought the coffee over, set down our cups. “You two weren’t—”

I shook my head. “Strictly platonic. The way it’d always been with us. From her point of view, anyway. She was crazy about you, and she never got over it.”

We didn’t say anything for a time, just sat there with our respective memories, faded images without words, like a silent screen flickering with moments of our days.

“I always knew you never got over her,” he said.

“No, I never did. That’s why my wife left.” I explained about that a little bit.

Then I said, “But I was pretty stupid. I didn’t catch on for a long time.”

“Catch on to what?” he said, peering at me from the glasses that made his eyes flit about like blue goldfish.

“All the ‘accidents’ she had. I didn’t realize for a long time that it was you beating her up.”

He sighed, stared off. “You can believe this or not,” he said, “but I actually tried to get her to leave. Because I knew I couldn’t stop myself.”

“She loved you.”

He put his head down. “The things I did to her—” He shook his head, then looked up. “You remember that day back on Eagle’s Point when you almost pushed me off?”

“Yeah.”

“You should’ve pushed me. You really should’ve. Then none of this would’ve happened.” He put his head down again.

“You ever get help for your problem?” I said.

“No. Guess I was afraid it would leak out if I did. You know, some of those fucking shrinks tell their friends everything.”

“I blame you for that, David.”

His head was still down. He nodded. Then he looked up: “I had a lot of chicks on the side.”

“That’s what the DA said at the trial.”

“She had a couple of men, too. I mean, don’t sit there and think she was this saint.”

“She wasn’t a saint, David. She never claimed to be. And she probably wouldn’t have slept with other men if you hadn’t run around on her — and hadn’t kept beating the shit out of her a couple of times a month.”

He looked angry. “It was never that often,” he said. “Still.”

“Yeah. Still.” He got up and walked over to the window and looked out on the yard. The rain had brought a chill and early night. He said, “I’ve read where this doesn’t always go so smooth.”

“It’ll go smooth tonight, David.”

He stared out the window some more. He said, “You believe in any kind of afterlife?”

“I try to; I want to.”

“That doesn’t sound real convincing.”

“It’s not the kind of thing you can be real sure about, David.”

“What if you had to bet, percentage-wise, I mean?”

“Sixty-forty, I guess.”

“That there is an afterlife?”

“Yeah. That there is an afterlife.”

Thunder rumbled. Rain hissed.

He turned around and looked at me. “I loved her.”

“You killed her, David.”

“She could have walked out that door any time she wanted to.”

I just stared at him a long time then and said, “She loved you, David. She always believed you’d stop beating her someday. She thought you’d change.”

He started sobbing then.

You see that sometimes.

No warning, I mean. The guy just breaks.

He just stood there, this bald squinty impostor, and cried.

I went over and took his coffee cup from him so it wouldn’t smash on the floor, and then I slid my arm around his shoulder and led him over to the chair.

I had to get back. The team had one more run-through scheduled before the actual execution.

I got him in the chair, and he looked up and me and said, “I’m scared, man. I’m so scared, I don’t even have the strength to walk.” He cried some more and put his hand out.

I didn’t want to touch his hand because that would feel as if I were betraying Susan.

But he was crying pretty bad, and I thought Susan, being Susan, would have taken his hand at such a moment. Susan forgave people for things I never could.

I took his hand for maybe thirty seconds, and that seemed to calm him down a little.

He looked at me, his face tear-streaked, his eyes sad and scared at the same time, and he said, “You really should’ve pushed me off that day at Eagle’s Point.”

“I’ve got to get back now,” I said.

“If you’d pushed me off, none of this would’ve happened, Earle.”

I walked over to the door.

“I loved her,” he said. “I want you to know that. I loved her.”

I nodded and then left the room and walked down the hall and went back out into the night and the rain.

The next run-through went perfectly. We hit the fifty-one-minute mark right on the button. Just the way the textbook says we should.