The guard paused to type the request into his chronological report. Then he stood up and talked to the other guard stationed outside the cell door. The other guard poked his head in through the door. He looked nervous, too, and pale. He seemed to receive Frank’s breakfast order with great respect and gravity. There was an air of ceremony to the whole procedure. It made Frank nauseous: one step following the next in an inevitable ritual. As the minutes followed each other.
“We’ll have that for you right away,” Reedy told him solemnly. He returned to his desk and sat down. He typed the transaction into his report: 6:24—Breakfast order relayed to CO Drummer.
Seated on the edge of his cot, Frank looked down at his feet now. He tried to put poor nervous Reedy out of his mind. He tried to focus his thoughts, block out everything, until he felt as if he were alone. He put his hands between his knees and clasped them. He closed his eyes and concentrated. He began to pray: his morning prayer.
It steadied him. He was always aware, every moment, that the eye of God was on him, but when he prayed, he could feel the eye, there, above him, very clearly. The eye was motionless, unblinking and dark, like those cameras in the ceilings of elevators that watch you just when you feel most secluded and alone. When he prayed, Frank remembered that he was not alone and he felt that eye watching him. Behind that eye, he told himself, there was a whole other world, a whole other system of justice, better than the state of Missouri’s. To that system, and to its judge, he appealed as he prayed.
He prayed for strength. It wasn’t for himself he was asking, he said, it was for his wife, for Bonnie, and for their little girl. He asked Jesus to take them into consideration now, on this final day. He prayed that he’d be given the strength to tell them good-bye.
After a while, he did feel stronger. The dream was half forgotten. He raised his gaze to the clock on the wall. And he felt the eye of God was ever on him.
2
Now, the eye of God and the eye of the news media are frequently mistaken for one another, especially by the news media. But whether or not Frank Beachum was being watched over by the former, one member of the latter had him firmly in her heart and mind.
Michelle Ziegler of the St. Louis News was a formidable creature. Young, a kid really, only twenty-three. But her insecurities didn’t show, and her good looks did, and so did an alluring, intelligent and grim hauteur that struck terror in the hearts of men and an envious disdain in the minds of women. Myself, I kind of liked her. She had a soft, oval face with a Roman nose and large brown eyes that saw enough to make you sweat. She dressed like what she was: a high-octane college girl set loose upon the world. Button-down blouses that emphasized her figure—a shape that would’ve been called graceful when grace was still a concept. And skirts so short that some of the less mature males on the News staff had a running pool on the color of her panties. I’d won forty dollars in it once when I hit pink three times in a row.
She was a good reporter, or was going to be one day. She had authority, and people talked to her; I think they were afraid not to. What’s more, some vast, uncompromising social vision in that big brain of hers erased whatever qualms she might’ve had about her methods. She was willing to flirt, lie, blackmail, terrorize and steal to get her hands on information. Any information: when she was on a story, she collected every detail, every document, every quote from every involved person she could find—most of which she never referred to again but kept stored in cardboard boxes tossed around the crazy loft she lived in. She couldn’t write very well, and her college ideologies were so thick and fervent on the page that the editors who had to rewrite them had nicknamed her stories “Incoming Michelle Fire.” But once you cut all that stuff out—and luckily the editors usually did—she always got the facts, did Michelle, every single time.
She had been assigned to the Beachum case about six months before: a token of Bob Findley’s respect for her talents. She had a press ticket to witness the execution and had even somehow managed to wangle a last-minute face-to-face interview with the condemned. That interview—I have to say that inspired my respect right there. It violated the prison’s protocol, which cut off press contact with the prisoner even by phone after 4:00 P.M. on the last day. I’d had dealings with Osage’s warden, Luther Plunkitt, and had found him about as flexible on such rules as a brick wall. Michelle must have stripped naked to get permission for that interview, which she would’ve done too; she was thoroughly unscrupulous. I like that in a person.
The evening before she was scheduled to go down to the prison—that Sunday evening—Michelle strode across the city room to my desk for a professional conference on some of the angles of the case. She tapped her elegant fist against the surface of my desk and smiled with that brand of wry fury that made strong editors quail.
“Fuck ’em,” she quipped.
I sighed. I had had a long weekend—people kept shooting each other—and was looking forward to taking tomorrow off. I had just been leaning back in my chair for one last violation of the paper’s no-smoking policy before heading home to the little woman. I reached under my glasses and pinched the bridge of my nose. I did not have the energy for a serious journalistic discussion.
“I’m through with this,” Michelle went on. “I’m serious.” She paced once, back and forth in the aisle behind me. “I’m going back to school. I’m going to get my Ph.D. I’ve had enough of this crap. I’m going to write things that matter.”
“Michelle,” I said, “I hate to break this to you, but you’re twenty-three: you don’t know anything that matters.”
That wry smile again, but she laughed in spite of herself. “And fuck you, Ev,” she said.
I laughed in spite of her too. I really did like Michelle. “All right,” I said, “what did they do?”
“He. Alan. Mann.” Three sentences for one guy. She was plenty mad. “The Great White Male of the Universe. He killed my sidebar on the Beachum case. I worked on it for two weeks. He just overrode Bob. Just—overrode him. It was the best thing about the story.”
I tried to look sympathetic. It wasn’t easy. I’d snuck a look at that sidebar of hers in the computer. It was dyed-in-the-wool Michelle Fire, all right. The angle was that we were only covering Beachum’s execution so closely because he was white and thus we were obscuring the large number of blacks on death row while also deifying Beachum’s pregnant victim in order to mask the patriarchal culture which had created the violence that killed her in the first place. Well, don’t look at me; that was the angle. Personally, I thought Alan had shown unusual restraint by merely killing it. I would’ve tortured it first.
Michelle stood there, glaring at me, waiting for me to respond, her fist pressed against my desktop again. Finally, to cheer her up, I said, “Well, at least you still get to watch the execution. That’s always kind of a kick.”
She flushed. She closed her eyes, opened her mouth: her signal that I had transgressed beyond the bounds of human understanding.
“No, I mean it,” I said. “I did one once in Jersey. They’re exciting. And, hell, considering the people they do it to, you know, it’s really good clean fun.”
Her mouth still closed, her knuckles rapped against my desk. “I don’t know. Why. I keep talking to you,” she said, as if she had broken a resolution to refrain from that pleasure. “I don’t know why I keep talking to you at all.”
Whereupon, with a deep breath to still her fury, she left me and went zigzagging off between the city room desks.
I put my feet up on my own desk and went on smoking. To be honest, I didn’t know why she kept talking to me either. But she did. I suppose it was yet another of life’s many mysteries.
Michelle went home that night in what must have been one of her blacker moods. She lay on the bed in her loft for about three hours, brooding as the last of the summer day died. After a while, she smoked a joint to loosen her clutched nerves.
Her loft, as I say, was a crazy place, huge, somber, furnished as her room in coll
ege had been with boxes, and dust balls, stacks of old newspapers and half-read books and tracts. It was on the third floor of a white brick warehouse that had been home to the Globe-Democrat before it went under. The newspaper’s sign with its globe logo still hung over the door outside. Only one of the other lofts in the place was occupied, and the street the building was on was a bland industrial corridor—gas stations, car lots and fast food joints—that bled up into the slums of the north. But Michelle loved that loft intensely, felt it around her intensely: because of the globe logo and because it was one block away from the Post-Dispatch and a block and a half from the News itself. Because it reeked for her with the scent, shone for her with the aura of newspapers. Newspapers, which had been big with romance for her in school. Agents for social change, history on the instant, battlegrounds of opinion. She had believed all that nonsense. She loved newspapers. Even now. She loved them still.
Today, however, the place only depressed her further. As the yellow stripes of the sinking sun withdrew into the slits of the venetian blinds and faded away, she sucked her reefer and peered through the smoke at those boxes strewn everywhere. Boxes filled with loose papers and notebooks and crumpled documents. Overflowing with details, with facts, with the forgotten minutiae of the stories she worked on. Scraps that she collected with the helpless instinct of an autumn squirrel. They had her buried in them, she told herself. Alan Mann. Bob Findley. They had her drowning in details, petty facts, minutiae. When she thought about the things she had written in college … Big things that mattered. Theories that had made her the star of the Women’s Studies Department at Wellesley. Harridan and Eunuch University, I used to call it, when I wanted to get a rise out of her. She had felt brilliant there. Dissecting racism and patriarchy; exposing the oppressiveness of European culture; expounding on Foucault—sweet Foucault!—and the inner tyranny of free societies. In those bygone days, she had felt that intellectual sweep of comprehension known only to adolescents, psychopaths and college professors. And now she was swamped and stuck and sinking in these boxes, these scraps, these meaningless, sweepless details.
And what depressed her most, what made her sick at heart as she lay toking on the bed, was that she had begun to realize—had begun, at least, to half suspect—that this was the very reason she had taken the job at the News. She had begun to half confess to herself that she loved these boxes, their crumpled pieces of paper, their insignificant and disparate facts—these stories—more than she loved the Women’s Studies Department at dear old Harridan and Eunuch U.
So she sat in the loft for about three hours, brooding and smoking, until her forehead felt acres wide and her brain was floating in it. Then, no less nervy than she’d been before, she jumped up and headed out the door into the empty urban territories of Sunday night.
She drove her little red Datsun down to Laclede’s Landing by the river, hoping to find some activity there, some life. For the next half hour or so, she haunted the cobbled lanes between the red-brick buildings, wandering from old-fashioned streetlamp to streetlamp, sniffing loftily at the passing shadows of tourists and their children: the Great American Ignorant, who did not know what she knew. At last, she alighted in a jazz joint that had remained open for just this degraded trade. She set herself up alone at a small round table and started drinking bourbon with a fine chaser of melancholy. At the front of the room, a trio of elderly white men seemed to be playing “St. Louis Blues” over and over again. She shook her head at them with detached superiority and went on drinking.
She was not alone for long. A young man spotted her, a medical intern who had been on the prowl all night. He stood at the bar, a scotch in his hand, and ran his eyes over her. Michelle had now unbuttoned the top of her blue blouse. Her navy skirt ended high on her thighs. The intern knew his business and sensed her mood. He detached himself at once from the bar’s brass railing and sharked his way toward her across the nearly empty room.
His name was Clarence Hagen. He was handsome in a pretty way, with a lot of coiffed hair and a rakish smile that said: Sure I’m full of shit but ain’t I cute? He sat at Michelle’s table, bought her drinks and disparaged the flaccid-faced clientele until Michelle let loose. Then, expertly, he alternately knit his brows with interest and reeled back in his chair at the clarity of her concepts. Encouraged, the drunken girl unleashed the flood of her wisdom, explained the culture of a continent to him in the comfortable, eager, machine-gun patter of her lost college days. Oh, Michelle knew he was a son-of-a-bitch. She was smart enough for that. But she thought that knowing gave her the upper hand. She felt cynical and sophisticated and devil-may-care, powerful in her freedom as she toyed with the man. She felt much better than she had since Alan had killed her sidebar, that was for certain.
She and Hagen left the club together, his arm around her shoulders, her hip rubbing comfortably against his thigh. They got into their separate cars and headed out to University City, where Hagen lived. Michelle tagged after his Trans Am in her Datsun. She had to fight to keep the wheel steady and to keep her eyes open as she drove. After about twenty minutes, they parked in front of the three-story mock Tudor that the intern shared with two other young medical men. Young Clarence escorted Michelle inside.
And there, he fucked her, pistonlike, quickly, in a bedroom downstairs. Michelle was so drunk by then that she started to fade even while he was still pumping away. She wafted to the ocean bed of her own mind and lay there with some other man on some future day when life would be simple and she would be loved. After a while, she noticed that Clarence, finished, was snoring on top of her. She struggled out from under him and curled up at the edge of the bed, as far from him as she could. She told herself that she still felt cynical and sophisticated and devil-may-care and that Alan Mann could go to hell and so there. She told herself that this was Life; then she passed out.
And that was how the reporter for the St. Louis News spent the night before her death row interview with Frank Beachum.
* * *
Around six-thirty the following morning—just as Beachum was awaking from his dream—Michelle forced her crusted eyelids apart and wished, as Beachum wished, that she was in any other place. She recoiled from the sleeping Hagen as if he were a slug and stumbled, naked, into the bathroom, to piss and wash her face. She leaned over the toilet for a while, thinking she might vomit. When she didn’t, she stood up trembling violently. She was not a crier, but now she had to force herself not to cry.
Hagen awoke as she was dressing. He sat up in bed, his head in his hands. Michelle buttoned herself up quickly. She could not think of anything he could say to her that wouldn’t make her want to kill him.
“You want some coffee?” he mumbled.
“Just shut up,” she said.
“Hey!” he said. “What did I do?” As she walked out, he muttered a curse after her and waved good riddance. Then he dropped back onto the sheets with his arms wide, and his tongue hanging out of his mouth.
Michelle walked out through the kitchen where Clarence’s roommates greeted her with a pair of sleepy leers that incinerated her spirit. She slammed out the front door and wobbled down the path to her car.
She drove until she found a nearby McDonald’s. She got her coffee there and drank it in the parking lot, pacing up and down the Datsun’s length. She cursed Hagen and his manhood first, but it simply wouldn’t serve. Stupid! she told herself finally. How can you be so smart and be so stupid? A truck driver, roaring past on the boulevard, shouted an obscene remark at her—something about putting his head under her short skirt. It made Michelle feel filthy and horrible and she climbed back in behind the wheel of the car.
And there, at last, she did begin to cry. Her face just crumpled like a child’s and, like a child, she despaired. She wept and moaned aloud, her throat contracting until she felt she would choke on her own tears. She held her head and bowed it, and shook it back and forth, her black hair whipping her face. Despair, despair. Alone, so terribly alone. No boyfriend sinc
e high school. No friends since college. No real friends there; she was too above them. Her social life was all errors in judgment. Her career—on which she relied for self-respect—was in a pit. She knew everything about everything and nothing about anything and she could not get a handle on how she was supposed to live her life. So, in her wisdom, she believed.
“My life is shit,” she spat out angrily, hurting herself, crying. “My life is such shit.”
By about 7:05 A.M., she had cried herself out and felt better. Sniffling, she threw the empty coffee cup into the backseat: into the landfill of empty coffee cups back there, and fast food containers and yellowing newspapers and notebooks and press releases. With a shuddering sigh, she pushed the little red car into drive. She had come to a decision, she told herself. She knew what she was going to do. The car screeched out onto the road, weaving wildly.
Someone probably should have stopped her then. God knows, the cops have a hard job of it on the road; they can’t be everywhere. Still in all, someone probably should have pulled her over the night before, driving out there, drunk as she was. And she wasn’t much better this morning. Her head felt feverish and thick. Her sinuses were jammed up. Her stomach felt like an upside-down volcano. Her vision was gamy and blurred, what with all the booze and dope and all that crying. Even she knew she was thinking with rusted cogs; thinking slowly, reacting slowly. But hell, she’d driven home like this before. She’d done it plenty of times. She’d never had an accident yet. She figured it was going to be all right this time too.
It was all right—at first, on the broad boulevard leading back to the city’s edge. The Monday morning traffic was fast, but it was still pretty sparse. Michelle attached her gaze to the red taillights of the car in front of her, let them draw her along like the stare of a vampire, sped after them in a nodding trance. She was thinking about her decision. She was nodding to herself, her lips pressed together tight. She was going to stay at the paper, she thought. It was what she was born for; she knew it, and she wouldn’t let any of them make her quit. She was smarter than they were—Alan, Bob, me—she was smarter than all of them and she was going to be better than all of them put together. They didn’t have to like her, she announced to herself, they just had to put her into print.…