The Best American Mystery Stories 2000

Thomas H. McNeely Sheep

From The Atlantic Monthly

Before the sheriff came to get him. Lloyd found the sheep out by the pond. He’d counted head that morning and come up one short. He did the count over, because he was still hazy from the night before. And he’d waked with a foul smell in his nose. So he had gone into Mr. Mac’s house — it was early morning: the old man would be dead to the world — and filled his canteen with white lightning. He felt shaky and bad, and the spring morning was cold. He shouldn’t have gone to town the night before.

The sheep lay on its side in some rushes. A flow of yellowish mucus was coming from its nose, and its eyes were sickly thin slits that made it look afraid. Lloyd thought the sheep honorable — it had gone off to die so that it wouldn’t infect the rest of the flock. Lloyd knew that the sheep’s sickness was his fault and that he couldn’t do anything about it, but he squatted down next to the animal and rubbed its underside. In this hour before sunrise, when the night dew was still wet, the warmth and animal smell felt good. Lloyd moved his hand in circles over the sheep’s lightly furred pink skin and lines of blue veins, its hard cage of ribs, its slack, soft belly. Across the pond the sun peeked through the Panhandle dust over a low line of slate-gray clouds. With his free hand Lloyd look his canteen from a pocket in his jacket, clamped it between his knees, opened it, and drank. For a moment the liquor stung the sides of his tongue; then it dissolved in him like warm water. The sheep’s lungs lifted up and down; its heart churned blood like a slowly pounding fist. Soon the sun broke free and the pond, rippled by a slight breeze, ignited in countless tiny candle flames. When Lloyd was a child, Mr. Mac used to tell him that at the last Judgment the pond would become the Lake of Fire, into which all sinners would be cast. Lloyd could still picture them falling in a dark stream, God pouring them out like a bag of nails. The sheep closed its eyes against the light.

When Sheriff Lynch walked up behind him, Lloyd started. He still caressed the sheep, but it was dead and beginning to stiffen. His canteen felt almost empty; it fell from his fingers. By the sun Lloyd saw it was almost noon. Big black vultures wheeled so high above that they looked the size of mockingbirds. Uneasiness creeping on him, Lloyd waited for the sheriff to speak.

Finally the sheriff said, “Son, looks like that sheep’s dead.”

“Yessir,” Lloyd said, and tried to stand, but his legs were stiff and the liquor had taken his balance.

“You look about half dead yourself.” The sheriff picked up Lloyd’s canteen from the dry grass, sniffed it, and shook his head. “You want to turn out like Mr. Mac? A pervert?”

Lloyd waggled his head no. He thought how he must look: his long blond hair clumped in uncombed cowlicks, the dark reddish-gray circles around his eyes, his father’s dirty herding jacket hanging off his broad, slumped shoulders. Sheriff Lynch stood there, his figure tall and straight. He wore a star-shaped golden badge hitched to a belt finely tooled with wildflowers. His face was burnt the rust color of Dumas County soil, the lines on it deep, like the sudden ravines into which cattle there sometimes fell. His eyes were an odd steely blue, which seemed not to be that color itself but to reflect it. He studied Lloyd.

“That probably doesn’t make much of a difference now,” he said, lowering his eyes as if embarrassed.

“What?” Lloyd said, though he’d heard him.

“Nothing. We just need to ask you some questions.”

Lloyd wondered if Mr. Mac had found out about the sheep somehow. “But I ain’t stole nothin’,” he said.

“I’m fairly sure of that,” the sheriff said. A grin flickered at one corner of his mouth, but it was sad and not meant to mock Lloyd. “Come on. You know the drill. Hand over your knife and shears and anything else you got.”

After Lloyd put his tools in a paper bag, the sheriff squatted next to the sheep and ran his hand over its belly. His hand was large and strong and clean, though etched with red-brown creases.

When they got up to the house, Lloyd saw three or four police cars parked at odd angles, as if they’d stopped in a hurry. Their lights whirled around, and dispatch radios crackled voices that no one answered. Some policemen busied themselves throwing clothes, bottles, and other junk out of Lloyd’s shack, which was separated from the house by a tool shed. Others were carrying out cardboard boxes. Lloyd recognized one of the men, name of Gonzales, who’d picked him up for stealing a ten-speed when he was a kid. Lloyd waved at him and called out, but Gonzales just set his dark eyes on him for a moment and then went back to his business. Mr. Mac stood on the dirt patch in front of the house, his big sloppy body looking like it was about to fall over, talking to a man in a suit.

“If you’re gonna drag that pond,” he said, his eyes slits in the harsh, clear sunlight, “you’re gonna have to pay me for the lost fish. I’m a poor old man. I ain’t got nothin’ to do with thisayre mess.”

The man started to say something to him, but Mr. Mac caught sight of Lloyd. His face spread wide with a fear that Lloyd had never seen in him; then his eyes narrowed in disgust. He looked like he did when he saw ewes lamb, or when he punished Lloyd as a child.

“Mr. Mac,” Lloyd said, and took a step toward him, but the old man held up his hands as if to shield his face.

“Mr. Mac.” Lloyd came closer. “I ’pologize ’bout that ’er sheep. I’ll work off the cost to you someway.”

Mr. Mac stumbled backward and pointed at Lloyd; his face was wild and frightened again. He shouted to the man in the suit, “Look at ’im! Look at ’im! A seed of pure evil!”

Lloyd could feel his chest move ahead of his body toward Mr. Mac. He wanted to explain about the sheep, but the old man kept carrying on. The sheriff’s hand, firm but kind, gripped his arm and guided him toward a police car.

The sheriff sat bolt upright on the passenger side and looked straight ahead as the rust-colored hills passed by outside. A fingerprint-smudged Plexiglas barrier ran across the top of the front seat and separated him from Lloyd. As always, the hair on the nape of the sheriff’s neck looked freshly cut. Lloyd had expected them to take his shears and bowie knife, but why were they tearing up his shack? And what was Mr. Mac going on about? Still drunk, probably. He would ask the sheriff when they got to the jail. His thoughts turned to the sheep. He should’ve put it out of its misery — slit its throat and then cut its belly for the vultures. Not like at slaughter, when he would’ve had to root around with his knife and bare hands and clean out its innards. What a godawful stink sheep’s insides had! But this would’ve been easy. It wouldn’t have taken a minute.

In the jail two guards Lloyd didn’t know sat him down inside a small white room he’d never seen before. The man in a suit who had been talking to Mr. Mac came in, with Sheriff Lynch following. Lloyd hadn’t gotten to ask the sheriff what was going on. The man put what looked like a little transistor radio on the table and pressed a button and began to talk.

“Is it okay if we tape-record this interview?” he asked Lloyd.

Lloyd shrugged and smiled a who’s-this-guy? smile at the sheriff. The sheriff gave him a stern, behave-yourself look.

“Sure,” Lloyd said. “I ain’t never been recorded before.”

“Okay,” the man said. He said all their names, where they were, what date and time it was. Then he opened a file folder. Lloyd didn’t like his looks: he had a smile that hid itself, that laughed at you in secret. Mr. Mac could get one of those. And the man talked in one of those citified accents, maybe from Dallas.

“Okay,” the man said. “My name is Thomas Blanchard. I am a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I work in the serial-homicide division.” He shot his eyes up at Lloyd, as if to catch him at something. “Do you understand what that means?”

“Which part?” Lloyd said.

“Serial homicide — serial murder.”

“Nope.”

“It means to kill more than once — sometimes many people in a row.”

“Okay,” Lloyd said.

The man gave him another once-over and said, “You are being held as a material witness in seventeen murders that have occurred in and around this area. You have not been charged in any of them. Should you be charged, you will have the right to counsel, but at this time you have no such right per se. However, as a witness, should you wish to retain counsel, that is also your right. Do you wish to do so?”

Lloyd tried to put the man’s words together. Blanchard bunched up his shoulders, like a squirrel ready to pounce. The sheriff leaned back his chair and studied the ceiling.

After he had drawn out the silence, Lloyd said, “I don’t know. I’m still pretty drunk to think about suchlike. Would I have to pay for him?”

Blanchard’s hand snaked out to the tape recorder, but the sheriff looked at Lloyd and said, “Lloyd, you think you’re too drunk to know what you’re sayin’? I mean, to the point of makin’ things up or disrememberin’?”

“Oh, no,” Lloyd said. The sheriff asked him if he was sure, and he said yes. Then the sheriff told him that to retain a lawyer he would have to pay for one. In that case, Lloyd said, he didn’t want

“Sheriff,” he said. “What’s thisayre all about?”

The sheriff told him he would find out.

But he didn’t, not really. Blanchard asked Lloyd about the night before. He’d gone to Genie’s Too, where the old Genie’s used to be. He’d brought a canteen of Mr. Mac’s stuff with him for setups, because they’d lost their license. He saw all the usual people there: Candy, Huff, Wishbone, Firefly. Dwight, Genie’s old man, did the colored-baby dance, flopping around this brown rag doll and flashing up its skirt. Everybody seemed to be having a real good time. Big plastic bottles were on nearly every table; people were talking — men arguing, women listening. People leaned on each other like scarecrows, some dancing slow and close, others just close, doing a little bump-and-grind.

Blanchard asked him if he had met anyone, danced with anyone. Lloyd grinned and blushed and sought out the sheriff, who smiled this time. Lloyd said, “I always been shy. I guess it’s my rearing, out on that old ranch. And they got their own group there at Genie’s, everybody always foolin’ with everyone else’s.”

By the end of his answer the sheriff’s smile had gone.

Blanchard asked Lloyd the same thing about ten different ways — had he seen anyone new there? The questions got on his nerves. He said, “Sheriff, now what’s this about?”

The sheriff told him to have some patience.

Blanchard asked about places in Amarillo, Lubbock, Muleshoe. Longview, Lamesa, Reno, Abilene — bars Lloyd had sneaked away to when he wanted to be alone. The ones he could remember were all about the same as Genie’s, each with its own little crowd. Blanchard mentioned places from so long ago that Lloyd began to feel as if he were asking about a different person. He drifted off into thinking about Mr. Mac.

Mr. Mac, when Lloyd would ask him where they were, used to say that all he needed to know was that they were in the United States of America. Me used to tell Lloyd that where they were was just like Scotland, and then he’d start laughing to himself until his laughs trailed off into coughs. The sheriff had never, ever laughed at him like that. He didn’t have those kinds of jokes inside him.

Blanchard began asking personal questions: Did he have a girlfriend? Had he ever? No. How long had he been out at the ranch? All his life — about thirty years, according to Mr. Mac. Was he a virgin?

“Now, Sheriff, have I got to answer that?” In truth he didn’t know what he was, because, as he often reflected, he didn’t know whether what Mr. Mac had done made him not a virgin.

Perhaps sensing this, the sheriff told him no, he didn’t have to answer any more questions. In fact, it might be better to quit for the day. “I’m afraid, though, son, we’re gonna have to hold you as a suspect.”

“Suspect of what?” Lloyd said, a sweat creeping on him like the cold rain when he herded in winter.

Lloyd woke to the stink of his own sweat, and he seemed wholly that sweat and that stench — the stench was him, his soul. The overhead light had been switched on. It was a bare bulb caged by heavy wire. He glanced at the steel place he was in: steel walls, floor, ceiling, toilet, stool, table. Everything was bolted down. The steel door had a small square high window made of meshed security glass, and a slot near its bottom, with a sliding cover, for passing food. Lloyd hid his face in the crook of his arm and shook and wished he could go to Mr. Mac’s for some white lightning.

The door clanked open. Lloyd could tell it was the sheriff even though he kept his face hidden and his eyes shut tight. The sheriff put a plastic plate on the table and said, “I was afraid of this.” Then he left.

Maybe the food would help. Lloyd stood up, but his legs felt wobbly and his eyes couldn’t focus right. He lurched to the stool, planted himself on it, and held the edge of the table. When he picked up the plastic fork, it vibrated in his fingers. His touch sent a jangling electrical charge through his arm and down his back. The harder he gripped, the more he felt as though he were trying to etch stone with a pencil, yet only this concentration made any steadiness possible. Keeping his face close to the plate, he scooped the watery scrambled eggs into his mouth. He fell to his knees and threw up in the toilet. Curled facedown on the floor, Lloyd felt a prickly, nauseous chill seep into his muscles and begin to paralyze him.

Someone not Sheriff Lynch, who seemed by his step to be burly and ill-tempered, grabbed Lloyd’s shoulder and twisted his body so that he faced the ceiling. The floor fell cold and hard against the back of his head. The man spread Lloyd’s eyelids, opened his shirt, and put a cold metal disc on his chest. Lloyd had not noticed until now, but his heart was racing — much faster than the sheep’s. That seemed so long ago. Mr. Mac was angry with him. The man started to yank down Lloyd’s pants. Lloyd moved his lips to say no! No! But his limbs and muscles had turned to cement. His mouth gaped open, but he couldn’t catch any air. The chill sweat returned. He was a boy again. Mr. Mac’s heaviness pressed the air from his lungs, pinned him from behind, faceless, pushing the dull, tearing pain into him; he choked Lloyd’s thin gasps with old-man smells of sweat and smoke and liquor and his ragged, grunting breath. The man rubbed something on Lloyd’s right buttock and then pricked it with a needle. He left without pulling up Lloyd’s pants.

Lloyd’s body softened, and the cement dissolved; a cushiony feeling spread through him, as though his limbs were swaddled in plush, warm blankets. He could breathe. He could not smell himself anymore. “Son,” he heard the sheriff say. “Put your pants on.”

The two of them sat in the little white room, this time without Blanchard.

“Sheriff.” Lloyd’s words seemed to float out of his mouth. “Sheriff, what’s all thisayre ’bout?”

Sheriff Lynch sat across the table. His face changed faintly as animals and unknown faces, and then the spirits of Mr. Mac and Blanchard, passed through it. He popped a peppermint Life Saver, sucked on it hard, and pulled back into focus.

“Let me ask you a question first, son, and then I’ll answer yours.” He reached down next to his chair and put two Ziploc bags with Lloyd’s shears and bowie knife in them on the table. Both the shears and the knife were tagged, as if they were in hock. The sheriff pressed them a few times with the tips of his long rust-colored fingers, lightly, as though to make sure they were there, or to remind them to stay still. “Now,” he said. “I think I already know the answer to this question, but I need to know from you.” He pressed them again. “Are these your knife and shears?”

How should he answer? The sheriff leaned back, waiting, with a look on his face that said he didn’t want to hear the answer.

“Maybe,” Lloyd said.

“Maybe.” The sheriff joined his hands behind his head and pointed his eyes up and away, as though he were considering this as a possible truth.

“Maybe,” Lloyd said.

“Lloyd Wayne Dogget,” the sheriff said, turning his not-blue eyes on him. “How long have I known you? I knew your daddy and your grandpappy when they were alive. I know more about you than you know about you. And you ain’t never been able to lie to me and get clear with it. So I’ll ask you again — are these your knife and shears?”

Mr. Mac had given Lloyd the shears when he was sixteen. They were long and silvery. At the end of each day of shearing, after cutting the sheep’s coarse, billowy hair, Lloyd would sharpen them on a strop and oil them with a can of S’OK to keep off the rust The merry old man on the green can, a pipe in his mouth, always reminded him of Mr. Mac.

“What if I say yes?” Lloyd said.

Sheriff Lynch sucked on the Life Saver and blew out a breath. He leaned close to Lloyd and put his elbows on the table. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “it doesn’t make a whit’s difference.” He pressed the plastic bags again. “There’s blood on these tools matches the type of a young lady people saw you leave Genie’s with, a young lady who turned up murdered. And I confiscated these two things from you. So it doesn’t make a whit’s difference what you say, whether you lie or not. I’m just trying to give you a chance to get right with yourself, to be a man.” He sank back and ran his hands through his stubbly iron-gray hair as he bowed his head and looked at the bags. He massaged his clean-cut neck. “Maybe to get right with the Lord too. I don’t know. I don’t believe in that kind of thing, but sometimes it helps people.”

To Lloyd, the sheriff seemed embarrassed about something. Lloyd wanted to help him. But he was also afraid; he could not remember any young lady, only smiling dark-red lips, the curve of a bare upper arm, honky-tonk music. Dwight flinging the colored baby doll around.

“Okay, Sheriff,” he said. “Since it don’t make any difference, you know they’re mine.”

The sheriff escorted him to the showers, where he took Lloyd’s clothes and gave him an inmate’s orange jumpsuit and a pair of regulation flip-flops. After Lloyd had showered and changed, the sheriff told him he was under arrest for capital murder, read him his rights, and handcuffed him. They got in his car, Lloyd riding in the front seat, and drove the two blocks to the courthouse. The judge asked him if he had any money or expected any help, and he said no, which was the truth.

Every morning Sheriff Lynch came to Lloyd’s cell and walked with him down to the little white room, where Lloyd talked with his lawyer. When the sheriff opened the door to the room, Lloyd watched his lawyer and the sheriff volley looks under their pleasantries. He remembered a cartoon he’d seen: Bluto and Popeye had each grabbed one of Olive Oyl’s rubbery arms. They were stretching her like taffy. He couldn’t remember how it ended.

Raoul Schwartz, the lawyer Lloyd had been assigned, said the judge had granted Lloyd a competency hearing, but not much money to do it with. He, Schwartz, would have to conduct the tests himself and then send them to a psychiatrist for evaluation. In two months the psychiatrist would testify and the judge would decide whether Lloyd was competent to stand trial. Schwartz said they had a lot of work to do. Schwartz said he was there to help.

Schwartz was everything the sheriff was not. He had short, pale, womanish fingers that fluttered through papers, fiddled with pencils, took off his wire-rimmed granny glasses, and rubbed the bridge of his nose. When he got impatient, which was often, his fingers scratched at a bald spot on the top of his forehead. Lloyd thought he might have rubbed his hair off this way.

Schwartz wouldn’t let him wriggle out of questions, sometimes asking the same ones many times, like Blanchard. He asked about Lloyd’s whole life. Sometimes the glare of the white room and Schwartz’s drone were like being in school again, and Lloyd would lay his head down on the slick-topped table between them and put his cheek to its cool surface, “Come on, Lloyd,” Schwartz would say. “We’ve got work to do.”

Also unlike the sheriff, Schwartz cussed, which was something Lloyd could never abide, and the little man’s Yankee accent raked the words across Lloyd’s nerves even worse than usual. When Lloyd told him that Sheriff Lynch had been out to talk to Mr. Mac after a teacher had spotted cigarette burns on his arms, Schwartz murmured, “Excellent, excellent. Fucking bastard.”

“Who’s the effing bastard?”

“Mr. Mac.” Schwartz’s head popped up just as Blanchard’s had when he’d wanted to catch Lloyd at something, only this time it was Lloyd who had caught Schwartz in a lie.

Schwartz began giving Lloyd tests. Lloyd was worried that he might fail them, but he didn’t say anything; he had already gotten the impression that this man thought he was stupid. But it was the tests that were stupid. First Schwartz asked him about a million yes-or-no questions. Everything from “Do you think your life isn’t worth living?” (no) to “Do you ever see things that aren’t there?” (sometimes, in the woods). Then came the pictures. One showed a man and a boy standing in opposite corners of a room. At first Lloyd just said what he saw. But this wasn’t good enough. Schwartz said he had to interpret it. “Tell me what you think is going to happen next,” he said. When Lloyd looked at it closely, he figured the boy had done something wrong and was about to get a good belt-whipping. Schwartz seemed pleased by this. Finally, and strangest of all, Schwartz showed him some blobs of ink and asked him to make something out of them. If Schwartz hadn’t been so serious, Lloyd would have thought it was a joke. But when he studied them (Schwartz had used that word — “interpret” — again), Lloyd could see all different kinds of faces and animals, as he had when he’d talked to Sheriff Lynch about his knife and shears.

It took only one little thing to tell him what the sheriff thought about this testing.

One morning the sheriff walked Lloyd down the hallway without a word, and when he unlocked the door to the white room, he stepped back, held it open, and swooped his hand in front of Lloyd like a colored doorman.

“Mr. Dogget,” he said, for the first time making fun of Lloyd in some secret way.

The sheriff turned and let the door close without so much as a glance at Schwartz. Lloyd wanted to apologize to the sheriff. He was beginning to understand that it came down to this: the worse the sheriff looked, the better he, Lloyd, looked. He felt he was betraying the sheriff, with the help of this strange, foul-mouthed little man. Schwartz seemed to see everything upside down. When Lloyd had told him about Mr. Mac, even though Schwartz said it must have been awful, Lloyd could tell that in some way he was pleased. When he told Schwartz about times when a lot of hours passed without his knowing it, like when he’d sat with that sheep, or about drinking at least a canteen of Mr. Mac’s white lightning every day for the past few years, Schwartz began scribbling and shooting questions at him. Same thing with the pills and reefer and acid and speed he’d done in his twenties. Even the gas huffing when he was just a kid. Lloyd felt dirty remembering all of it. Schwartz wanted details. Lloyd could almost see Schwartz making designs out of what he told him, rearranging things to make him look pitiful.

“I don’t want to do no testin’ today,” Lloyd said as soon as the door had shut. He sat and leaned back in his chair, arms dangling, chest out.

“Okay,” Schwartz said. “What do you want to do?”

“I been thinkin’,” Lloyd said. “It don’t make no difference if I was drunk or not. That don’t excuse what I did.”

“But you don’t know what you did.”

“That don’t make no difference. They got the proof.”

“They have evidence, Lloyd, not proof.”

Another bunch of upside-down words. “But if I can’t remember it, then ain’t what they got better than what I can say?”

“Lloyd,” Schwartz said, his head in his hands, massaging his bald spot. “We’ve been over this about every time we’ve talked. I know that it doesn’t make common sense at first. But our criminal-justice system — that misnomer — is predicated upon the idea of volition. It means you have to commit a crime with at least an inkling of intention. You can’t be punished in the same way when you don’t have any idea what you’re doing.”

This kind of talk made Lloyd’s head ache. “All I know,” he said, “is I don’t want to go foolin’ around with truth. It’s like the sheriff says — I got to get right with myself and be a man.”

“The sheriff says this?” Schwartz’s head popped up.

Lloyd nodded.

“Do you talk to the sheriff often?”

“I been knowing Sheriff Lynch since forever. He’s like my daddy.”

“But do you talk to him? How often do you talk to him?”

“Every chance I get.” Lloyd felt queasy. He knew he’d said something he shouldn’t have. But his pride in his friendship with the sheriff, perhaps because it was imperiled, drove him to exaggerate. “When we come from my cell, mostly. But any time I want, really. I can call on him any time.”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be talking to him about your case,” Schwartz said.

“And why not?”

“Because anything — anything — you say to him becomes evidence. As a matter of fact, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to talk to him at all.”

“So who’m I gonna talk to? Myself? You?”

For the next couple of days the sheriff didn’t speak to Lloyd unless Lloyd spoke to him first. Schwartz must have done something. But the sheriff never looked at him hard or seemed angry. He mainly kept his words short and his eyes on the floor, as if he was sad and used to his sadness. Lloyd wanted to tell him how he was trying to get right but it was hard. Eventually Lloyd realized that even if he said this, the sheriff probably wouldn’t believe him. If he were trying to get right, then he wouldn’t be letting this Schwartz character make him look pitiful. Each morning Lloyd rose early, dressed, and rubbed his palms to dry them as he sat on the edge of his bunk, waiting. When he walked in front of the sheriff down the hallway to the white room, Lloyd could feel the sheriff’s eyes taking him in. He tried to stand up straight and walk with manly strides, but the harder he tried, the smaller and more bent over he felt. He was careful not to wrinkle his prison outfit, pressing it at night between his mattress and a piece of plywood the sheriff had given him for his back. He combed his hair as best he could without a mirror.

At night Lloyd lay on his bunk and thought about Schwartz. Of course, Schwartz had tricked him into more tests. Next they were going to take pictures of his brain. Lloyd studied Schwartz’s words: “volition,” “interpret,” “diminished responsibility.” They all meant you couldn’t be punished for your mistakes. This didn’t square with Lloyd; he had been punished for plenty of mistakes. That was what Mr. Mac had punished him for; that was what the sheep died of. When you missed one on a head count and it got lost and fell into a ravine; when you forgot to give one a vaccination and it got sick, like the one that had died before Lloyd was taken away, you were punished. But how could he expect Schwartz, a womanish city boy, to understand this?

On one side were Schwartz and the law, and on the other were the sheep and God and the earth and Sheriff Lynch and Mr. Mac and everything else Lloyd had ever known. Who was he to go against all that — to hide from that terrible, swift sword the Almighty would wield on the Final Day? His fear was weak and mortal; it drove him out of his cell to plot with this fellow sinner to deceive God. Some nights Lloyd moaned in agony at the deceit of his life. For in his pride he had latched onto the notion that since he could not remember his gravest sins (and he believed they were all true, they must be true), he should not have to pay for them in this life. Oh, he would pay for them in eternity, but he flinched at paying here. What upside-down thinking! What cowardice in the face of sins that were probably darker, cloaked as they were in his drunken forgetting, than any he could have committed when he had “volition,” as Schwartz called it. Because Lloyd did not know his sins, he could not accept his punishment; but for the same reason they seemed to him unspeakably heinous.

Lloyd lay on his bunk in the darkness and thought about the pictures he had seen of his brain. Two officers he didn’t know had driven him to a hospital in Lubbock to get them taken. The hearing was in a week. Schwartz had pointed out patches in the pictures’ rainbow colors, scratching his bald spot and pacing. He’d said that although parts of Lloyd’s brain were damaged so that alcohol could cause longer and more severe blackouts in him than in normal people, such damage might not be enough for the court to recognize him as incompetent. And the rest of the tests had proved that he had a dissociative condition but not multiple-personality disorder. Lloyd had wanted to ask if Schwartz thought he was incompetent, but he figured he wouldn’t get a straight answer.

In the darkness of the steel room Lloyd touched his head, trying to feel the colored patches of heat and coolness that the pictures showed in his brain. He imagined he could sense some here and there. He had come a long way — not many people knew what their brains looked like. But the thought that he might be incompetent frightened him. What if someday one of those big machines they put over his head was put over his chest and a picture was taken of his soul? What would it look like? He saw a dark-winged creature with tearing claws, cloaked in a gray mist.

The knock came to Lloyd in a half dream, and at first he thought he had imagined the sheriff’s voice. The whole jail was quiet; all the inmates were covered in the same darkness.

“Lloyd? Lloyd? You awake, son?” The voice didn’t sound exactly like the sheriff’s, but Lloyd knew that’s who it was. He rose and went to the door, too sleepy to be nervous. He peered out the square window. The glare of the hallway made him squint. The sheriff stood in silhouette, but his steely eyes glinted. Looking at him through the crosshatches of wire in the security glass, Lloyd thought that he, too, looked caged.

“I’m awake, Sheriff.”

The door opened, and the sheriff said, “Come on.” Lloyd could smell whiskey. He followed the sheriff out past the booking area. Everything was still and deserted in the bare fluorescent light. Gonzales dozed in a chair at the front desk with a porno magazine in his lap. The sheriff opened the door to his office, making the same mocking gesture as before, though this time he seemed to be trying to share his joke with Lloyd. He snapped the door’s lock and sat down behind his desk. A single shaded lamp glowed in a corner, casting shadows from the piles of paper on the desk and reflecting golden patches from plaques on the walls.

The sheriff pointed at a low-backed leather chair and told Lloyd to have a seat. “Excuse me gettin’ you out of bed, son. I figured this was the only time we could talk.”

“It’s no trouble.”

“You can prob’ly tell I been drinkin’,” the sheriff said. “I don’t do it as a habit, but I apologize for that too. I been doin’ it more lately. I do it when I’m sick at heart. At least that’s my excuse to myself, which is a goddamned poor one, unbefitting a man, if you ask me. But I am. Sick at heart.”

He took a long pull from a coffee mug. Lloyd followed it with his eyes, and the sheriff caught him.

“And no,” he said, “you can’t have any. One of us got to stay sober, and I want you to remember what I’m gonna tell you.” He leaned across the desk. “You know what a vacuum is, son? I mean in a pure sense, not the one you clean with.”

Lloyd shook his head.

“Well. A vacuum is a place where there ain’t anything, not even air. Every light bulb” — the sheriff nodded at the lamp behind him — “is a vacuum. Space is mostly vacuum. Vacuum tubes used to be in radios. And so on. A place where there ain’t nothin’. Is that signifyin’ for you?”

Lloyd nodded.

“Good. So we, because we’re on this earth with air to breathe, we are in a place that’s not a vacuum that’s in the middle of a vacuum, which is space. Think of a bubble floating out in the air.” The sheriff made a big circle above the desk with his fingertips. “That’s what the earth is like, floating in space. Are you followin’ me?”

“I think so.”

“Well, are you or aren’t you?” the sheriff said with sudden violence. Not waiting for an answer, he yanked open his desk drawer and took out a large folding map of the world. He tumbled it down the front of his desk, weighted its top corners with a tape dispenser and a stapler, and came around the desk to stand next to Lloyd. He told Lloyd what it was and said, “I study this all the time. Do you know where we are right now?”

To Lloyd, the shapes on the map looked like those inkblots. By reading, he found the United States and then Texas, and then he gave up. He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know, Sheriff.”

“That’s okay,” the sheriff said gently. He pointed to a dot in the Panhandle which someone had drawn with a ballpoint pen. Cursive letters next to it said “Dumas.” “This is where we are. Two specks within that dot, on the dark side of the earth, floating in space. Over here” — he pointed to Hong Kong — “it’s lunchtime. Japs eatin’ their noodles or whatever. Here” — he pointed to London — “people just risin’, eatin’ their sausages and egg sandwiches.”

He stepped back, behind Lloyd, and put his hands on the chair. The heat of his body and the smell of his breath washed over Lloyd.

“But look, son,” the sheriff said, “how many places there are. It’s some time everywhere, and everybody is doin’ something.”

The sheriff stood there for a few moments. Lloyd felt as he had when he was a child watching TV — he couldn’t imagine how all those people got inside that little box. Now he couldn’t fathom people inside the little dots. The world was vast and stranger than he had ever imagined.

“We are all here doin’ things,” the sheriff said, “inside this bubble that is not a vacuum. We all breathe the same air, and everything we do nudges everything else.” He stepped over and propped himself on the edge of his desk, next to the map, and crossed his legs. The lamp’s soft light cast him in half shadow.

“And this is why I’m sick at heart. Because I thought I knew you. Separation is the most terrible thing there is, especially for a man like me.” The sheriff gestured to take in the whole room. “This is what I got. It ain’t much. You and I aren’t that far apart, son. Both of us solitary. But what you done, son, and I do believe you did all that, that separates a man from the whole world. And that’s why I said you need to get right with yourself.”

Lloyd bowed his head.

“You don’t need to tell me you ain’t done that.” The sheriff’s voice rose and quickened, began to quiver. “You and I both know you ain’t. But that itself — a negativity, a vacuum — ain’t nothin’ to breathe in. Things die without air. So what I’m askin’ you is, I want to do my own competency exam, for my own self. This is between Lloyd Wayne Dogget and Archibald Alexander Lynch. I need to know what’s inside you to know what’s inside myself. So you tell that lawyer of yours I’ll stipulate to whatever he wants. Remember that word — ‘stipulate.’ Now get outta here.” He turned from Lloyd and began folding the map with shaking hands. The corner weighted by the tape dispenser tore. Lloyd could not move.

“Shit,” the sheriff muttered. He wheeled unsteadily on Lloyd, his eyes wide with panic and surprise at what he’d said. Lloyd could tell he was afraid, but not of him, as Mr. Mac had been. The sheriff was afraid that he might show his own soul to Lloyd and so break out of the bubble in which he lived. “Git!” he yelled. “Go tell Gonzales to take you back! Get outta here before I say somethin’ foolish!”

“He wants you to do what?” Schwartz paced in the little white room, looking at the floor.

Lloyd was sitting at the table, turning his head to follow Schwartz. Was Schwartz right with himself? He repeated what the sheriff had told him.

“What does that son of a bitch want?” Schwartz said to himself.

“I wish you’d stop cussing around me.”

Schwartz made a distracted noise.

“I mean it,” Lloyd said. “It’s offensive.”

Schwartz made another noise. He had gathered his lips together into a pucker with his fingers, and he looked at the floor as he paced.

“Especially cussing on the sheriff.” When Schwartz didn’t answer, Lloyd said, “Are you hearing me? Don’t cuss on the sheriff.”

“I don’t know what kind of game he’s trying to play.” Schwartz did not stop or raise his eyes from the floor. “But I would guess he’s trying to trick some kind of confession out of you.”

“Sheriff don’t play no games with me,” Lloyd said. “He don’t have no tricks. You’re the one with all the tricks.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“Sheriff’s the one tryin’ to help me get right.”

“Sheriff’s the one tryin’ to help you get dead,” Schwartz said, mimicking Lloyd.

“Okay, man.” Lloyd stood up and pushed his chair away. It squealed on the floor, and Schwartz stopped. Lloyd saw that his own fists were clenched. He hesitated.

“What are you gonna do, Lloyd? Beat me up? Go ahead. I’ve been expecting this.”

“You think I’m stupid,” Lloyd said. “ And all them tests is to make me look pitiful and incompetent. What do you think that’s done to my trying to get right?”

“What do you think that means, Lloyd — ‘getting right’?” Schwartz moved close to him. He stared straight at Lloyd as he spoke. “It means giving up.”

That night, and for the days and nights to come, Lloyd turned over in his mind all he had seen and heard. What he had known before was like some foreign language that now he couldn’t understand. The worlds of Schwartz and the sheriff, of man and God, of what was in the law and what was in the fields, began to blur, and yet between them grew a chasm in which he hung suspended. He tried to remember what had happened in the places Blanchard had said he’d been, but he couldn’t. He could not make them connect the way the sheriff had said all the people in all those dots on the map did. An indifference grew around him, a thin glass glazing that separated him from the rest of humankind.

The sheriff led him down the hallway to the white room without a word or a look, and left him with Schwartz. The hearing was the next day. Lloyd felt as though he were about to take another test. He had fought with Schwartz, tooth and nail over the sheriff’s proposal, and in the end had gotten his way by threatening to fire him. After Lloyd sat down across the table from him, Schwartz explained that he and the sheriff had struck a deal: the sheriff had agreed that he would not testify about his “competency exam,” as he called it, on the condition that he not have to reveal to Schwartz beforehand what it was going to be about.

“I don’t like this,” Schwartz said, pacing, clicking the top of a ballpoint pen so that it made a tick-tick sound, like a clock. He sat down again, his elbows on the table and his hands joined as though in prayer, and brought his face close to Lloyd’s.

“I want to tell you the truest thing I’ve ever seen, Lloyd. I’ve seen a man executed. When you are executed in Texas, you are taken to a powder-blue room. This is the death chamber, where the warden, a physician, and a minister will stand around the gurney. Since executions can take place in Texas only between midnight and dawn, it will have that eerie feeling of a room brightly lit in the middle of the night. Before this, in an anteroom, a guard will tell you to drop your pants. Then he will insert one rubber stopper in your penis and another in your anus, to prevent you from urinating and defecating when your muscles relax after you have died. When you are lying on the gurney, the guard will secure your arms, legs, and chest to it with leather straps. The guard will insert a needle, which is attached to an IV bag, into your left arm. Above you will be fluorescent lighting, and a microphone will hang suspended from the ceiling. The warden — I think it’s still Warden Pearson — will ask whether you have any last words. When you’re finished, three chemicals will be released into your blood: sodium thiopental, a sedative that is supposed to render you unconscious; pancuronium bromide, a muscle relaxant, to collapse your diaphragm and lungs; potassium chloride, a poison that will stop your heart.

“I could tell that my client could feel the poison entering his veins. I had known him for the last three of his fifteen years on death row; he was old enough to be my father. At his execution I was separated from him by a piece of meshed security glass. There was nothing I could do when he began writhing and gasping for breath. The poison — later I found out it was the potassium chloride, to stop his heart — had been injected before the thiopental. Imagine a dream in which your body has turned to lead, in which you can’t move and are sinking in water. You have the sensations given you by your nerves and understood in your brain, but you can’t do anything about them. You struggle against your own body. But really, it is unimaginable — what it is like to try to rouse your own heart.

“What if everything goes as planned? A nice, sleepy feeling — the sedative tricking your nerves — will dissolve your fear. The question is, will you want it taken away, fear being the only thing that binds you to life. Will you want to hold on to that, like the survivor of a shipwreck clinging to a barnacled plank? Will you struggle, in the end, to be afraid?”

Schwartz slumped back in his chair and began again to tick-tick the top of his pen so that it made a sound like a clock. The whiteness and silence of the room seemed to annihilate time, as though the two men could sit there waiting forever. They fell on Lloyd like a thin silting of powdered glass.

“You spend a lot of time thinkin’ about that, don’t you?” Lloyd said.

“Yes.”

“You told me that to scare me, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

Lloyd thought that Schwartz might have gotten right with himself, in his own way, by seeing what he had seen and thinking on it. But something still didn’t add up.

“How do you know I’d be afraid?” Lloyd said. “How do you know that would be the last thing I’d feel?”

“I don’t know that.” Schwartz tick-ticked the pen. “You can never know. That’s what’s terrible about death.”

“Lots of things you don’t know when you’re alive. So what’s the difference?”

Schwartz’s fingers stopped, and he stared at Lloyd as though he had seen him purely and for the first time. A knock at the door broke the brief, still moment, and Sheriff Lynch entered. He carried under his arm a stack of manila folders, which he put down on the table. Schwartz rose, studying Lloyd. He shook the sheriff’s hand when it was offered. His eyes, though, were fixed on Lloyd. The sheriff caught this, but smiled pleasantly and told Schwartz it was good to see him again.

“Lloyd,” he said, and nodded at him. He lifted a chair from the corner, put it at the head of the table, and sat.

“I think I need a little more time to consult with my client,” Schwartz said.

The sheriff pressed his fingers a few times on top of the folders. “Okay. How much time do you think you’ll need?”

“We don’t need no more time,” Lloyd said, rocking back and forth in his chair. “I’m ready.”

“I’d like to look at what you’ve got there first.”

“But that wasn’t the agreement, Mr. Schwartz.”

“Come on,” Lloyd said. “I’m ready.”

“Why don’t you listen to your client?”

Looking from Lloyd to the sheriff, Schwartz paled. He seemed pinned in place for a moment; then he took off his glasses and rubbed them on his shirt. He put them on again. Sheriff Lynch stared at the stack of folders, his fingertips resting on them like a pianist’s, his expression one of patient indulgence toward a child who was finishing a noisy tantrum. Lloyd clenched his hands between his thighs, wondering what would be revealed to him.

“Do you mind if I stand?” Schwartz said.

“Go right ahead.” Sheriff Lynch pressed his fingers again to the top folder, as if for luck or in valediction, look it from the stack, and opened it in front of Lloyd. Lloyd did not see at first what was there, because Schwartz had made a sudden movement toward the table, but Sheriff Lynch, with the slightest warning lift of his hand, checked him. He faced Schwartz a moment and then turned to Lloyd.

“Go ahead, son,” he said. “Tell me what you see.”

When Lloyd looked down, he was disappointed. It was another one of those crazy tests. He saw shapes of red and pink and green and black. It was the inkblot test, only in color. He studied more closely to try and make sense of it. He realized it was a picture of something. He realized what it was.

“I think I got it,” he said to the sheriff. The sheriff nodded to help him along. “It’s a sheep,” Lloyd said.

“Look at it a little more closely, son.” Lloyd saw Schwartz again move and the sheriff again check him while keeping his neutral blue eyes on Lloyd. Lloyd went back to the picture. He had missed some details.

“It’s a sheep gutted after slaughter,” he said.

“Turn the picture over, son,” the sheriff said. This time Schwartz did not move and the sheriff did not hold up his hand. Paper-clipped to the back of the picture Lloyd found a smaller photo of a young woman. She had straight brown hair, wore blue jeans and a red-and-white-checkered blouse, and sat in a lawn chair, smiling to please the person who held the camera.

“Now turn the picture over again,” the sheriff said, in his calm, steady voice. “What do you see?”

Lloyd tried to puzzle it out, but he couldn’t. There must be something he wasn’t seeing. He studied the picture. As he followed the shapes and colors of the sheep’s emptied body, a trickle of pity formed in him for all three of them — the woman, the sheep, and himself — and dropped somewhere inside him. The glaze over him tightened. He could only tell the sheriff that he saw a sheep.

After the sheriff left, gathering the folders under his arm, the room went back to its silence.

“If I’d known,” Schwartz said. “I would’ve had him testify.”

“What?” Lloyd said. “If you’d known what?”

“Never mind.” Shielding his face with his pale fingers, Schwartz laid his other hand on Lloyd’s shoulder. “Never mind, Lloyd. You’re perfect the way you are.”

They had sat there a long time, the sheriff opening a folder in front of him, asking him the same questions, and then putting it aside. And in each folder Lloyd had seen the same things: a gutted sheep and a pretty young woman. He knew that the sheriff was trying to do something to help him get right, but as the glaze thickened, that chance seemed ever more remote. Before he left, the sheriff had nodded to Lloyd, to acknowledge that he had found his answer, but his gesture was as distant as that of a receding figure waving a ship out to sea. With each drop of pity Lloyd felt himself borne away yet drowning, so that he knew the heart of the man in the execution chamber, suffocating and unable to move, and he wondered how he would survive in this new and airless world.