Angels

“Don’t seem like much of a fort to me,” she said. “If you just stared hard at that jailhouse it’d fall over.”

  Frowning and smiling, he raised his shackled hands and put a finger to his lips.

  She laughed. “You don’t look too rehabilitated with that scroungy beard all over your face. I liked it better when you were shaved.”

  She saw that in many ways he was her brother now. She loved him. But all she felt able to do was to kid around.

  “That tobacco in your pouch there?” She indicated the pocket of his workshirt. “Think you can roll me a cigaret with your hands tied?”

  “Yeah, it’s tobacco. Wish it was something else.” He managed to roll two cigarets without much difficulty, despite his handcuffs. Neither of them said a word during this operation. Jamie had to call one of the guards over for a light.

  They both smoked. “Wish it was something else,” he said again, laughing slyly.

  “I got a little bent around by them chemicals,” she told him.

  “We had some high old times, didn’t we?

  “Yeah. But I mean, I’m serious. I was in the nuthouse. I’m still in the nuthouse.”

  “I know, Mom told me about it.”

  “So, I’m going in a whole nother direction now.”

  “Well, you look good. You look great.”

  “Oh yeah. I feel one hundred percent better,” she said, “maybe more.”

  “You were just fucked up on drugs,” Burris said.

  “No. It was more. Much more,” she said. “Over into the area of religion.”

  “No kidding,” he said. “Like Mom.”

  “Like Mom,” she said. “Exactly.”

  “Not like Jeanine I hope,” Burris said.

  “Not like Jeanine,” Jamie assured him.

  They smoked their cigarets. She tried to think of a few things to say. But she really didn’t want to ask about the food.

  She said, “I mean, sure, I was just fucked up on drugs. But it’s kind of like you could look at it two ways.”

  “I was going nuts over dope, too,” he said. “But I’m okay now.”

  “You all cleaned out?”

  He looked sheepish. “Well, not exactly. There’s a little something available in here every once in a while—you know.”

  “Well, I’m clean,” she said. “I’m going to Narcotics Anonymous. I’ll be in therapy, a halfway house, One Day at a Time, Attitude of Gratitude, the whole program. I mean to get my kids back, or die on the way.”

  “I can respect that, Jamie. It takes balls.”

  “I’m more scared than I ever been,” she said frankly.

  The door behind Jamie opened, and the guard brought in another visitor, a boy no older than Burris. Without thinking about it, Jamie felt their interview had reached an end.

  “I got a note from Bill, is why I came. I came here with a message.”

  He grew visibly paler. His eyes were wet, and he was wordless.

  “He says, ‘Tell Burris he’ll still be my brother.’”

  He released his breath.

  “They’re fixing to kill him tomorrow, you know about that?” she said.

  “Course I know,” he said. “It’s all I ever think about.”

  “I didn’t know if they told you that kind of stuff, or what.”

  “They tell me. They want me to think about it.”

  “Well, if they really go ahead and do it to him—don’t think he’s on your conscience. He’s past that. He’s resentment-free. Nobody holds any of it against you, Burris.” She wanted to give him peace. All she could think of to communicate it was to say, “Rest easy.”

  “Okay. I appreciate it, Jamie.” And clearly he did.

  Brian was having himself a great time, going over their heads with the clippers. “You just fucking with me,” Richard told him. “I know my appeal gone through. Hold up!” he said, raising a hand. Brian stopped the clippers, and Richard sneezed violently.

  “You’re allergic to your own hair,” Brian concluded.

  Bill Houston sat on his bunk listening to this, running his hand around his new crew-cut. “This is humiliation,” he said. “How much poison gas could stay in a little bit of hair? They don’t really need to do this. Fuckers.”

  “It’s cooler,” Richard said. “My head feels cool.”

  “My head feels stupid,” Bill Houston said.

  “My appeal gone through anyway. They tell me tomorrow. Be a big surprise.”

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Brian said.

  “Maybe mine went through, too. Maybe they’ll tell me tomorrow,” Bill Houston said.

  “Well, you got about eight more hours. Anything can happen,” Brian said. “They’ll crank things up in the middle of the night, if they have to—the whole Court of Appeals, everything.”

  “Eight more hours!”

  “I’ll be here. I had my shift changed around just for you,” Brian said.

  “I’m glad to have you,” Bill Houston said sincerely. “You count as one of my friends. You’re one of my friends, too, Richard.”

  “You won’t have no friends in eight hours.”

  Bill Houston nodded—but nobody could see him nod, Brian was in Richard’s cell. “There’s always some kind of a countdown, though, ain’t there? That’s part of the whole story, ain’t it?”

  The clippers in the next cell ceased whirring. In the quiet moment, he couldn’t even be sure who, if anyone, was there. He could never be connected: there was always something—bars, or laws, or words—in the way. It was only deep inside that he felt he made some contact. And then he couldn’t be sure.

  “Wash out your cup, Houston. Get it real clean.”

  He was startled. “What is it?” he said. He still couldn’t see them.

  “Man! This my favorite hotel!” This was Richard.

  There was a terrible popping noise, and Bill Houston was up and hanging onto the bars.

  Brian stepped over to his cell holding a big green bottle. “You’re one of my friends, too, Mr. Houston.” Champagne.

  The Highway Patrol kept the prison side of Route 89 clear of the seekers and desirers, the ones who had to be there, the ones who sought to know. But the dirt margin of the road on the town side was lined with campers and motorcycles and trucks, with their owners and the children and families of the owners, who placed their forearms and elbows on these machines and leaned on them quietly for support during their vigil. It was dark. The blue roof-lights of the police raked their faces. Everything about the moment conspired to keep them silent: the death of stars in the east where the sun prepared to rise out of Tucson eighty miles away, the deep emptiness of the pre-dawn heavens, the imperious stupor of the Arizona State Prison Complex across the road and over the squad cars parked on its shoulder and beyond a cultivated field of cotton, its sand-colored structures on fire with the orange light of numberless sodium arc-lamps, and over all of the dawn of execution day, the desert night’s dry foreboding, the negligent powerful breath of the day’s coming heat, the heat that burns away each shadow and incinerates every last particle of shit inside the heart. But at this hour it was still cool—in their hands some of these people cradled styrofoam cups of steam.

  The lawyer Fredericks was among them, and they troubled him. What made them think that after twenty years of merciless forbearance in dealing with murderers, the state would choose suddenly this morning to press its intentions to their end, and finish Bill Houston? Fredericks didn’t feel like one of them. It seemed to him they represented mostly the very people who’d be incarcerated here tomorrow, goodtimers in sleeveless sweatshirts and teeshirts vulgarly inscribed (“The Itty Bitty Titty Committee”)—slogans without meaning, transmissions into space—Honk If You Know Jesus and National Rifle Association bumper emblems nearly effaced by wind-driven sand—the children grubby and crew-cut, the women splayfooted and rubber-thonged—where were the young ladies apparelled for tennis, apparelled for golfing? Where were the outraged owners of the establ
ishment? The bankers, the people with tie-pins and jeweled letter openers and profoundly lustrous desks of mahogany, the workers of all this machinery of law and circumstance? The people he couldn’t fight—the people who were never here? The truth was, he knew, that they had enough to keep them occupied. They were busy, complete people. They didn’t need to come here in the dark night to seek warmth around the fire of murder or draw close to the ceremonies of a semi-public death.

  But these people around him—who’d probably gone to the same school as William Houston, Jr., or been acquainted with one or more of his relatives or had the same parole officer—came here because they sensed that why they themselves had not been executed was inexplicable, a miracle. And as best they could, they had to find out what it was like.

  How does it feel.

  Tell me how does it feel.

  With no direction home.

  A complete unknown . . .

  But Fredericks didn’t hear that song, except as it issued from their collective dream of suffocation. He heard only the radios playing a news program, an eye-witness show about this execution, broadcast from the west side of the prison, near the main entrance, where radio and TV news teams had been parked since suppertime last night. What made them all believe it would actually happen? What hadn’t he been told? I am here in my white dress shirt and brown loafers. Someone is keeping a secret. I am the little boy whose dog is dead.

  Cars had ceased arriving. The light in the east was blue-grey. People were talking a bit louder now; there was laughter; they were nervous. The children were getting anxious, quarreling and chasing aimlessly around all the cars, eluding their mothers.

  Fredericks determined in his mind not to look at his watch. After a minute, he had to take off his watch and put it in his pocket to keep from glancing at its face. And then he went over to his Volvo and threw the watch onto the front seat and walked away from it. He just wanted to find out if he would know, without a watch, when it was time.

  It was time.

  Brian said, “Mr. Houston? Let’s take you for a ride up that pipe.”

  He couldn’t believe he’d actually been asleep. All night he had lain with the Unmade, with God, the incredible darkness, the huge blue mouth of love.

  I’m going to be turned into space. This is the hour of my death.

  He couldn’t stand. “Didn’t the appeal go through?”

  “No,” Brian said.

  “Well it doesn’t even have to go through. They just have to get it started.”

  “Nothing happened. This is it, Bill.”

  “See you, Richard.”

  “See you,” Richard’s voice said.

  “Are they all in there?”

  “Everybody’s in there but you and me,” Brian said.

  He stood up. He had a desire out of nowhere to let everyone know it was all right; everything was fine.

  “Take off your pants,” Brian said in a kindly way.

  “Take off my pants?”

  He looked down at his prison-issue jeans. What did everybody want his pants for? He thought he was going to cry.

  “We can’t have a big pile of clothes all soaked with gas,” Brian said. “Didn’t anybody tell you?”

  “You mean I got to be naked?” Tears sprang out of his eyes. It must have been years since he’d cried tears before another; but this was too much. They hadn’t warned him about this.

  “You can keep your shorts on,” Brian said.

  He stood there handcuffed, shorn nearly bald, wearing only his white underpants. It was chilly and he was shaking, but it wasn’t important, even if they thought he was afraid. Two guards from CB-6 were present, and he noticed them. Familiar faces. He nodded. There was a young doctor from the clinic standing there, and a short gentleman reading out loud. The warden. The Order of Execution. The door was open. There was a hearse parked outside it in the early morning. Only one.

  The witnesses were already behind the glass. He couldn’t hear, and shook his head. Was everything behind glass?

  The warden stopped reading. “Is something wrong?”

  Wrong? He stood next to Brian facing the warden, the doctor, the two guards. Every one of them was terrified. They were all scared to death of what was happening. The warden’s voice trembled. “Do you have anything to say at this time?” he asked Bill Houston.

  Bill Houston was floored by the question. “Is there something I’m supposed to say now?”

  Everyone was confused.

  Brian said suddenly, “I want you to know I don’t think you deserve to die. I think you been healed.”

  Nobody knew how to react. They all looked around. It was obvious even the warden didn’t know if Brian had just broken a rule. “I really feel that way,” Brian said defiantly.

  “Thank you,” Bill Houston said.

  They all stood there in a long silence. What was going on now?

  “What’s going on?” Bill Houston asked.

  The warden looked green and ill. “We still have a couple of minutes,” he said. “I think we should wait, don’t you?” He glanced around helplessly.

  Bill Houston whispered to Brian, “I don’t think I can stand up any more.”

  Taking him by the elbow, Brian helped Bill Houston into the gas chamber.

  A truth filled up the chamber: there was nothing left for him now. The door had shut on his life. It said DEATH IS THE MOTHER OF BEAUTY. He couldn’t hear a thing. He wondered if they’d put cotton in his ears.

  And then there was a faint rattling in the pipe to his right, and the sound of boiling liquid beneath him. He looked down at the length of surgical tubing that ran from his chest to the door. There it goes. Up that tube. Boom boom boom boom boom boom boom. That’s all that’s ever really been important. A visible vapor was curling up over his knees.

  He held his breath. Every rivet of metal was a jewel to him. He felt he could hold his breath forever—no problem. Boom, boom. Even as his heart accelerated, it seemed to him inexplicably that his heart was slowing down. You can get right in between each beat, and let the next one wash over you like the best and biggest warm ocean there ever was. His eyes were on fire. He hated to shut them, but they hurt. He wanted to see. Boom! Was there ever anything as pretty as that one? Another coming . . . boom! Beautiful! They just don’t come any better than that.

  He was in the middle of taking the last breath of his life before he realized he was taking it. But it was all right. Boom! Unbelievable! And another coming? How many of these things do you mean to give away? He got right in the dark between heartbeats, and rested there. And then he saw that another one wasn’t going to come. That’s it. That’s the last. He looked at the dark. I would like to take this opportunity, he said, to pray for another human being.

  Casablanca Cafe, normally closed before six AM, was open early for the execution. Fredericks looked in through the window, and saw that the place was still empty. The crowd was still down by the highway. At this moment they would all be looking toward the Death House, watching the rust-colored pipe that rose ostentatiously above the little building that was itself obscured by other prison buildings; and as the chamber beneath it was voided by a suction pump, some would believe they smelled the stench of rarefied cyanous vapors, like peach blossoms. And they would be excruciated, amused, reassured, or made pensive, depending on who they were.

  “Everybody’s still over by the show,” the waitress said. Her name was Clair. Fredericks knew her name, but that was all.

  “Was it on the radio?” Fredericks asked her.

  “Just now. It’ll be on again in two minutes, I guarantee you.”

  “Can I have some Scotch in my coffee?”

  Clair brought him a pot of coffee, a fifth of Black Label, and a white cup. In a few minutes, as they listened to the radio that sat beside the cash register, the morning produced its soft light. William H. Houston, Jr., had been put to death. Richard Clay Wilson’s sentence had been commuted to life.

  “A lot of people got fin
essed this morning,” Fredericks told Clair.

  Clair stood by the window, holding aside its curtain delicately between two fingers and watching the street. “Us, too,” she told him now. “Everybody’s just zooming right out of town. The only ones who made a profit on this deal was Seven-Eleven. They sold everybody coffee.”

  “And you sold me Scotch,” Fredericks said.

  “Oh, call it a gift, okay? We don’t have a license.”

  Fredericks stayed a long time in Casablanca Cafe. For a while he napped in the booth, his head thrown back, his mouth open, and he woke feeling furry inside and disoriented.

  As he was paying for his coffee, at the instant he was putting one of the free toothpicks into his mouth, he sensed the presence of someone nearby, staring at him. The mood was palpable and real, but he knew there was hardly anyone in the place, just a man reading a magazine, which he held flat on the table beside his bowl of soup. Fredericks looked around a minute before he saw the portrait of Elvis Presley on the wall behind the cash register, almost directly in front of him. Rendered in iridescent paint on black velvet, hovering before a brilliant microphone, the face of the dead idol seemed on the brink of speech.

  Fredericks stepped out into the terrible noon and stood by the road with his hands in his pockets, his face shaded by the brim of a straw hat, and chewed his toothpick, aware that he looked very much like a country lawyer. He was still young, and it was completely possible that soon he’d begin carrying out his original intention of getting himself elected to something or other. But the truth was, he knew, that he’d been irretrievably sidetracked right at the start by his stint as a public defender, and that he’d probably continue the rest of his life as a criminal lawyer because, in all honesty, there was a part of him that wanted to help murderers go free.

  Most of his clients ended up in Florence. He’d spent a lot of time here. And he would be here a great deal more, in this town of bored dirt consisting mainly of a prison shimmering at this moment in waves of heat, a town that was always quiet except for the sounds of wind coming across the desert and ropes banging against flagpoles—where every evening the iridescent-on-velvet face of Elvis Presley climbed the twilight to address all the bankrupt cafes.