True Crime

2

Frank Beachum was eating his last meal. Steak, fries. A large paper tumbler full of beer. He sat at his table and ate quickly. He could hear the increasing number of footsteps in the hall outside. He glanced up at the clock.

It was after seven. He had less than five hours to live. He went on eating. The steak was thick and rare but stringy at the center, tough. The fries were undercooked. He couldn’t taste any of it and chewed dully, gazing dully at his plate. Only the beer, when he drank, was a comfort to him. Not cold, but cool enough and foamy. The taste seemed to take him back to Sal’s Tavern in Dogtown. He used to stop at Sal’s sometimes for a quick one after work. When the beer touched his lips, the dark wood of Sal’s bar, the colors of the bottles on the shelves, the smell of smoke and the sound of country music surrounded him in a visceral rush, faint but definite. He found this comforting. He didn’t want the beer to end.

His thoughts, otherwise, were a jumble. Brief passages of memory interrupted by fear. The chill and ceaseless tremor of terror in his chest demanded attention. Whenever his mind wandered, the fear drew him back to himself. It forced him to glance up at the clock again, and the minute hand moving deeper and deeper past the hour made his throat grow narrow. Then he would look down at his food and eat and images would come into his mind, and memories. Then the terror would rouse him again like an alarm.

So he ate, and he thought of his mother. Hacking cigarette smoke at the kitchen table back home. Frank supposed she knew this was happening to him. She had sent him a postcard after his conviction, but he hadn’t heard from her since. He did not expect he would hear from her now … He glanced up at the clock.

He ate again. He thought of his father. Storming out the door into the Michigan snow. He would’ve liked to’ve known whatever happened to the man. He ached to know. He tried to imagine … Then the terror gripped him, and he glanced up at the clock.

He returned to his food, swallowing hard. And now, he thought about me. The reporter who had sat across the bars from him. My words floated through his mind. I don’t give a rat’s ass about Jesus Christ. About justice in this life or the next. About right and wrong. After I’d left, Frank had told Bonnie that he would rather be here in this cage than outside living like that, like me. Vaguely he sensed, in his heart now, that this was a lie. He glanced up at the clock.

He had envied me. He went on eating. The french fries were soft and tasteless in his mouth. That was the truth of it he knew: He had envied me-my freedom, my indifference, my life. No black, glassy eye of God was watching me, no ceaseless eye. No other world of perfect justice overhung me. That other world, God’s high unknowable country, it sometimes seemed as real to Frank, as present in the cell as this one … He glanced up at the clock. Seven-twenty. It moved so fast. He shuddered.

When he tried to swallow now, he found his mouth was dry. He lifted his paper tumbler to his lips and as he stared across the rim of it, the cinderblocks on the far wall blurred, the clock blurred. Yes, he thought. He had envied me. He had wished that he were I. Because I was out there, sure, and he was in here. Because I would be alive tomorrow, and he wouldn’t. Sure. And because I did not care.

He sensed this too, though he couldn’t phrase it to himself. He had envied me because I did not care about the things that were tormenting him. Because I wouldn’t have tortured myself as he had tortured himself to spare his wife’s feelings, to show her a strong face. I wouldn’t have endured the agony of behaving well. I would have screamed, I would have fought, I would have cried-so Frank believed. I wouldn’t have wracked my mind to find the message of God in this miserable, meaningless death. Nor would I have sought to please God, this God whose eye impassively watched him careening toward his own destruction. This God who would not intercede. I would not be submissive to that God, Frank thought, or sit here holy and quiescent and well-behaved before these guards and wardens and lawyers, these men who coolly attended the business of his murder, these bastards who had fucked with him all his life and were fucking him now right into the grave.

And which of us was better off, he asked himself, he or I?

He drank his beer. Almost in a spasm, his hand jerked up, tipping the cup at his lips. He took a long swallow and, once again, the taste conjured the aura of Sal’s Tavern in him: the dark wood of the bar, the colors of the bottles on the shelves, the smell of smoke and the sound of country music. The desolate relief.

He set the tumbler down on the table. He glanced up at the clock.

Which of us was better off? He wiped his raw lips with the back of his hand. Christ, he thought, there were men in this prison-there were men on the streets-who murdered children as they cried for their mothers, who raped and tortured women, or executed men with no more show of feeling than a dreamy smile-and they were better off than he was. They were not here. Some weren’t even condemned to come here. Some would live free men and die in the joy of their cruelties. And they wouldn’t care. As I didn’t care.

And what if …? thought Frank. And before the thought was finished, something happened to him. Something terrible, violent and illuminating. He felt it that way-it struck him almost as a physical fact.

It seemed, as he sat there, his hand around the paper tumbler of beer, that the eye of God above him winked out. Just for a second. It vanished. For a few seconds perhaps. But in those seconds, Frank felt its disappearance certainly. And he felt, at the same time, as if he had burst from dark water into open air. For those few seconds, he felt he saw things clearly. He saw that he was … here-how here-how incontrovertibly here. He was here alone, in this cage, in this insane predicament, with no one to witness him but self-interested men, with no other system to judge him but the one that had unfairly condemned him to die. There was no God to make his suffering good. There was no heaven to make it all come right. For these few seconds, the gleaming bars, the dull cinderblock walls, the clock with its red second hand in unceasing motion-they all took on a hard, glistering clarity-and they were here-how here they were-these bars, these walls, that clock-there was nothing else but these. These were the facts. These were the only facts of his life. These were the things that happened. And there were no other things.

In those seconds, he could see all this at once, altogether, as in a vision. And he could see more. He could see the things that would happen too. He could see that they would come for him. These guards, these men. For their daily bread, they would strap him down. They would pump the poison into his arm while he lay there helpless. And no God would be watching. No heaven would receive him. They would turn him off, like a light, entirely. And he would be gone. And his wife, his good Bonnie, she would not be better off, as he had told himself. They would not meet again, as he had told himself. She would be poor. She would be old before her time. She would shuffle through the world, accepting and baffled and sour. Frantically praising the Lord like a dizzy lunatic to keep from suspecting the truth that the Lord wasn’t there, that none of this mattered, that it was all in aid of nothing. And their daughter: She would find no peace. She would be scarred forever. She would keep her father alive in her bitterness only. Lacerated with rage, lacerating her children with her rage, and the uninterested world with her rage. And in the long run, of course, they would die-Bonnie and Gail, the two of them-they would die and leave it all to be forgotten except for the scars they had inflicted on others because of the scars that had been inflicted on them and on and on …

And it’s written in ink, thought Frank. Nothing will ever erase it. It’s all written in ink.

And then the vision was over. The seconds were at an end. The eye of God reopened above him. The whole mental event had barely risen to his consciousness before he experienced a spasm of revulsion-an opening inside him into a well of bottomless terror and grief-and in that spasm, the vision was forced down. His mind at once grew clamorous with his own exhortations. Hang on there, boy. You’re just losing it that’s all. Keep steady. Keep the faith. For Bonnie’s sake. For Gail. Don’t go out crazy. Hang on. Hang on.

But, of course, it was not the same as before. Once you have seen something, you can’t simply stop seeing it. The vision remained, buried though it was, smoldering beneath his self-encouragement with a blue-white fire of clarity and despair.

Frank Beachum raised his beer to his lips and his hand was shaking. He drank and set the tumbler down unsteadily. He stared at the table. He thought of his wife. How much, how much he had loved her …

He glanced up at the clock.