True Crime

1

Four guards escorted the gurney to the door of the Deathwatch cell. Luther Plunkitt led them. When he reached the door, he paused and gestured to them to wait. The guards stood where they were, two on each side of the gurney. They were heavy men and each carried a black plastic riot shield strapped to his arm, each had a long rubber truncheon dangling from his belt. The men were called the Strap-down Team. They were there to get Beachum dressed; get him onto the gurney and belt him down; and roll him back into the death chamber.

The lead guard was carrying a brown paper package. Tilting his head at the door, Luther tapped the guard on the chest with one knuckle. Then he nodded at the Deathwatch guard and the door was opened. Luther went in and the guard with the package followed him. The other three waited outside with the gurney.

Beachum was sitting on the edge of his cot, his head hung down. Reverend Flowers was on the chair beside him, leaning toward him, hanging over him, murmuring steadily in a low, mournful voice.

“You gotta put your hand in God’s hand,” the reverend was saying. “God is with you, look to Jesus and you can face this thing. He will walk with you, He will walk with you to glory …”He murmured without thinking, the words burbling up from a tarry anguish inside him, a mindless litany with which he nearly succeeded in hypnotizing himself.

Beachum’s hands kept coming up to his face to wipe his dry lips, kept dropping back between his legs again, coming up again. He stared at the floor, shaking his head. “1 swear to God I didn’t do anything, Harlan,” he kept repeating. “Nothing. I swear it. You gotta tell them. Jesus. My Bonnie. Gail My little girl. I didn’t even do anything.”

Long minutes ago, they had both passed the point of reason.

Now the door snapped open, and Beachum made a small, terrified noise; bolted upright as if a jolt of current had gone through him. His eyes darted back and forth between the clock and the door as Luther Plunkitt came in. Eleven, only eleven, it wasn’t time yet, he thought wildly. There was still an hour-a whole hour-left to go.

With a brief nod at Benson, Luther approached the cage. His step was firm, his expression was set in that meaningless smile of his. He was determined, he knew his duty and his mind had entered a zone in which there was only action. It was something he could count on himself to do at times like this: in battle, under pressure, in charge. For the next hour or so, he would be nothing more than the things he had to say, the things he had to do. He would become his job, and he would do his job.

He moved close to the bars. He saw Beachum get to his feet, the reverend beside him get to his feet. He spoke the words he had to speak in the tone of compassionate necessity that he deemed to be the voice of the state of Missouri.

“Frank. I’m gonna ask the reverend here to leave for a few moments, so that you can change your clothes and take care of some things. Then he’ll be able to come back in.”

And he nodded at the reverend, smiling blandly. But he registered, in some sequestered part of his brain, the prisoner’s terror-bright eyes, his mouth working like an insect’s mouth: the dull, scared, weirdly acquiescent countenance of every dead man he had ever seen. And he was dimly aware of the low boil of dread bubbling in his own unillumined recesses. But he ignored it, as he knew well how to do.

The cage bars slid back. Flowers clasped Beachum by the shoulder. “I’ll be right outside, Frank. I’ll come back as soon as they let me.” The words came out of him steadily, but he hardly knew what he was saying.

Beachum spun on him, like a blind man, spun toward the sound of his voice. The condemned man’s eyes were so bright, so full of desperate pleading that it seemed he was trying to hold Flowers to the spot by the sheer strength of his stare alone. Flowers could not wait to get out of there, just for a minute, just to breathe for a minute. Hating himself, he was still glad of the necessity to tear himself from Beachum’s gaze and step out of the cage.

He walked quickly to the door, had to force himself to pause there and look back with a reassuring smile. Then the door was opened and he stepped through.

Coming out of the cell was like surfacing from his own grave: his relief was that great. And yet the moment he entered the hall, he saw the gurney, with its heavy leather straps; its suffocating presence; and the Strap-down guards with their stances relaxed, professional and implacable. So he could not sag or gasp in the freer air of the hall. Reverend Flowers made himself walk past these men with all the grave dignity he could muster.

He went down the hallway to the barred checkpoint and was allowed through into the medical section. There he asked for admittance to a men’s room and was shown the way by a nurse.

It wasn’t until he stood before the urinal that he could let the tension stream out of him. He leaned his head against the cinderblock wall, his dick in his fingers, his piss draining. He closed his eyes and breathed through his open mouth. “Lord, Lord, Lord,” he whispered. “Why do you let us do this to each other?”

In the cage, the Strap-down guard dropped his package on the table. To Beachum, it seemed to make a loud noise when it fell-whap-and he started. He leaned away from the package in almost mystic horror of it, staring at the smooth brown paper as if the parcel might suddenly explode.

The warden was talking to him. It was just a sound to Frank, an inexorable mutter, like the hum and motion of the clock, nudging him to the next step in the proceedings. He hadn’t done anything, and yet it just would not stop.

“Frank,” the warden said, “we’ve brought you a change of clothes, like I told you we were going to. I’m gonna ask you now to put those clothes on, including the special underpants that are provided for hygienic reasons. This is required and I have to ask you if you’re going to give me any problems about this.”

The sense of the words seemed to come to Frank moments after they were spoken, like a translation spoken over earphones. When the meaning did reach him, so many possible answers, possible reactions played themselves out in his mind that it seemed a single second couldn’t hold them all: it was the condensed time of dreams. He saw himself rebelling, screaming, hurling himself at the guard, maybe killing the guard, maybe forcing the guards to strip him naked by sheer force, maybe even breaking past them and running into the night to find Bonnie, to run off with Bonnie hand in hand … And at the same time, just as in a dream, he felt too weak even to move, even to speak, his muscles limp with fear, his will withered and yellow. Yet even now, before he had decided what he would do, before he felt he had the strength, he was coming forward, he was reaching for the package. It was just a change of clothes, that’s all; it wasn’t the thing yet, the thing itself.

So his hand closed on the brown paper and it felt as if he had made a pact between himself and this next stage, just this stage, this changing of clothes. He would do this but he was not committing to the next stage after it, the next step. He knew-but did not let himself know-that it would be like that from now on: agreeing not to the whole of the process, but to each stage, each step, step by step, in the hope that the next step would bring rebellion or rescue when, in fact, all the decisions had already been made. It would go on this way to the end.

He picked up the package, still staring at it.

“Good,” he heard the warden say.

It was the best Luther Plunkitt could do; the least he could do and the most. The official protocol required all four of the Strap-down guards to enter the cage at this point, to surround the prisoner and ensure that he put on the fresh clothes and the hygienic diaper. The message was supposed to be sharp and overwhelming: either dress yourself or we’ll do it for you. But Luther didn’t like to handle it that way. A man ought to be allowed some dignity, he felt, even if it put security at risk. A man ought to be allowed to make his own decisions whenever possible. Luther had made the professional judgment that Beachum, in the end, would decide to be a man about it and do what he had to do.

Now Luther was speaking again, not by rote, but fluently, hardly needing to think about the words, just saying what he had to say next. “It would be wise at this point, Frank, if you took the opportunity to use the toilet. For your own comfort, since there might not be an opportunity later on.”

Frank, holding the package, staring off at nothing, nodded.

Luther gestured to the Strap-down guard. The guard came out of the cage and the bars slid shut.

“I’ll wait outside,” said Luther. “The guard’ll call me when you’re done.”

Frank Beachum sat on the steel toilet in its nook in the cage. He kept his pants on, down around his ankles: it would have made him feel too naked and helpless to take them off completely. And he did not want to see himself either. Even as it was, now, when he looked down at his penis, it gave him a queasy feeling. It was shriveled to the size of a thumb joint, his scrotum so tight that his balls were almost invisible underneath. The sight made him hate himself.

There were all kinds of stories at Osage, in the cells, in the yard, about how they let you fuck your woman in Death-watch. At least you get a last piece of nookie before you go, the prisoners said. Frank didn’t know whether this was true or not. Even when Bonnie had been there, he had never felt less like having sex in his life. And now the urge was gone from his completely, gray ice where the steady red ember of it had been. He could remember, all right, as if it had happened to another man, his own past, the sweat-sheened faces of women, the gray-white ridges of sheets, the shapes of headboards, the colors of walls. He could remember sliding into some Kansas cowgirl with hilarious pleasure, ramming some Badlands bitch bone to bone in a snarling rage, looming over Bonnie like a solid sky, like nothing could rain through him and touch her, harm her: it seemed as if it had all been good, it had all been life which was good. And it was all gone, everything tangible gone. The sight of his shrunken dick made him hate himself for not having it in him anymore, for being a sickly, flaccid, castrated piece of flesh ordered to shuffle through the stages of his own death. Even his imagination had lost its visceral powers. To conjure the smell, the taste of pussy-once one of the pleasures of his leisure time-was simply beyond him now. Which sickened him like fever, a nausea of helplessness. The way the piss only dribbled and spurted out of him-that said it-that damned him in his own mind, and made him feel more sickly still.

Just like a man with a fever, weakly, he stood, and pulled up his pants. He yanked his shirt up over his head and unfolded the pressed white T-shirt from the parcel on the table. He put this on and then removed his pants. He had to swallow a wad of distaste and humiliation as he stepped into the plastic underwear. The last article-the loose green trousers-he drew over his legs so quickly that he fumbled and nearly fell over: he wanted to cover the diaper as fast as he could. All the same, with the trousers on too, he could feel the plastic against his skin, a reminder of how shriveled and childlike and helpless he was, his manhood gone.

When he was dressed, when he stood with his shoulders slumped, and his chin lowered, and his mouth half open and his eyes gazing dully at the floor, the door opened and the warden reentered. He came toward the cage bars and nodded at the prisoner.

“Good,” he said again.

Around eleven-fifteen, Luther came out of the cell and told Flowers he could go back in. Flowers was standing in the hall behind the gurney, trying not to look at the gurney but looking anyway from time to time and feeling a macabre and hateful thrill. He moved around it to the door now and he and Luther passed each other just outside the threshold. The tall minister with his black, solid head, his monumental gravity, his sad, yellowing eyes glanced at the smaller man with his silver hair and his face of putty and its small deep-set pair of gray marbles, and the warden glanced back. At that moment, Flowers felt closer to Plunkitt than to Beachum, than to anyone else. He recognized a fellow sufferer, saw in the warden’s look the feeling he acknowledged in his own heart: Thank God, they were almost through it. It was almost done.

Flowers had taken the Bible from his jacket pocket and sat by Beachum’s cot now reading to him.

“The Lord is my shepherd,” he said in his deep, rolling baritone. “I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul …”

It was-as it frequently was-amazing to him how great a comfort this psalm was to him. He sometimes thought it was the mere rhythm of it, or the sound of its words, as much as their meaning. When he read it, his mind bathed in it like warm water and the churning in his belly lessened. He read it with real emotion. “Yea-though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me …” He tried to will his voice to deliver the solace of it across the space between his lips and the ear of the condemned man. That little endless space.

Beachum was glad of the words, of the sound of a human voice, but all the concentration of his soul was on his cigarette. His long, drawn face leaned into it, the limp forelock slashing his brow untouched. He sucked at the cigarette with a hiss, drawing in the smoke like honeyed wine. When the reed burned down, he lit another off the end of it and smoked that one the same way, with the same intensity. He didn’t want any of these last moments to go by without that pleasure.

And all the while he glanced up at the clock, lifting his head at shorter and shorter intervals, not wanting the change to be too great since he last looked, afraid to be taken by surprise, but nauseated by the sight of the second hand moving.

Then, when he looked away, he lost himself for moments in a daydream of the past: the smell of mown grass, the heat of the sun on his skin, the happy baby in the sandbox, his wife at the screen door with the empty bottle of A-1 Sauce. But not for too long. He did not want to get lost for too long. The clock moved faster when he took his attention from it. So he glanced up again, and sucked on his cigarette, and thought that he hadn’t done anything, that he had to think of a way to make them see that, and then was lost in his daydream again with the psalm lulling him.

The smoke, the prayer, the dream, the clock.

At eleven-thirty, they rolled the gurney in.

Luther, of course, understood the importance of the gurney. It was the single most important thing. At the protocol meetings, it was he who had first suggested that prisoners be strapped down in the cage and rolled to the death chamber, rather than walking to the chamber to be strapped down there. When the prisoners first saw the long table with its thick leather straps: that was the most difficult moment for them. That was when they were most likely to shy and panic. Up to that point, a man did not consider himself completely helpless. It was just something he couldn’t imagine. He would have fantasies that he might break away, or resist and “take someone with him.” The sight of the gurney with its straps and its metal frame, its thick wheels, brought the full reality of the situation home. After he lay down there, a condemned man knew there would be no further choices. No one would ask him to please get dressed or please go here or there. He would just be wheeled from place to place-pushed down the hall, into the final chamber-all as easily as moving a shopping cart. He would not even be able to move his arm away from the needle when they pushed it in.

Luther knew you had to get the man through that first moment of realization as quickly as possible. It had to happen in a contained space, with a strong presence of guards.

Then, once you had them strapped down, the worst of the process was over.

So this happened very fast, and silently.

The moment the gurney entered the cell, the bars of the cage slid back. Beachum hardly had time to jump to his feet, to glance in panic at the clock-and then the thing was in the cage beside him, pushing between him and Flowers, crowding him back. And the guards were surrounding him, edging him forward onto the table.

And still, in the condensed time of dreams, there was that interminable instant, before the closing circle of guards touched him, before the first heavy hand lightly brushed his arm, in which Frank still imagined that all manner of outcomes were possible: the dash for freedom, the murder of the guard, the long-planned escape delayed till this unexpected moment or simply waking in his own bed with the smell of the last cool dew wafting in through his window from the summer leaves.

And, again, even before he decided which choice to make, even before he determined that he would go along, he went along, turning his body to make it easier to lift himself onto the table, lifting himself with only the gentlest support from one guard’s hand, lying back upon the coarse blanket, staring up into the fluorescents, and even thinking: It’s just this, it’s just the gurney, it’s not the thing, it’s not the thing itself-while the leather belts were pulled across him swiftly, expertly, and then buckled tight, strapping him down.