The warden reads an estimate from a construction firm on the costs of updating the prison with modern locks and motion sensors to keep the wanderers at bay. The price tag gives him a wry smile. He can’t wait to see the response from the capitol on that one. It might be as much fun as the time he asked for better food. The hue and cry over how he wanted to pamper prisoners was amazing.
The chanting and singing have started outside. He looks at his watch. Hope you’ve got good voices, guys, he thinks—you’ve got hours to go.
At six o’clock he eats his packed dinner. Cold lasagna from the deli. A rather stale piece of focaccia bread. A pat of butter. A can of light lemonade. He finishes with homemade banana-walnut bread taken from the freezer. He takes one bite before it makes him think of his wife, and he puts it down.
He fields two hours of phone calls, all from freaks who somehow got his number. One guy sounds like he is masturbating. Many just scream “murderer” at him before hanging up.
Eight o’clock. The wait is killing me, he thinks ruefully, and laughs despite himself. He doesn’t see how his face folds into creases of sadness when he is done.
Dusk is falling. A breeze blows off the river and comes in his window. It feels good. The sun dips, and the sky illuminates into a deep gray streaked with pink. The geese take flight and pinwheel back to the river.
He calls a guard down on the row. “How is York holding up?”
“Happy as a pig in shit,” the guard says.
“Any last-minute visitors? The priest?”
“Says he doesn’t want to talk to anyone, least of all that weepy bastard.”
“Good.” The warden pauses. “You see the lady?”
“Nope. Not for a few days.”
This concerns the warden. He tries to reassure himself that it is too late for her to be petitioning the courts. He knows it is never too late.
He gets a mildly hysterical phone call from the prison doctor. They had a problem with the machine, but they worked it out. Yes, they did the practice runs. The chairs for the witnesses are set up. They put out coffee and donuts for the victims’ families, who have not yet arrived.
All systems go. Nine o’clock. Three hours to go. The chanting is loud and angry. He is glad he has the state police outside to manage the circus. He doesn’t have to worry about the inevitable fights. The victims’ families show up. He can always tell when that happens, because the crowd roars in both abuse and support. Armed guards chaperone the families to the viewing room in the chamber. He will see the families when he brings down York, and talk to them after he is dead to make sure they are okay.
The building starts to lock down for execution. One by one the watchtowers flash their lights—the yard is clear. All inmates are supposed to be in their cells. Prison doors slam, and the red lights down the halls and over the towers flash twice. The guards on the rows take their chairs.
The yard is dusty and alone, and in the towers, the guards stand and wait, rifles over their shoulders. It is night now. The stars come out over the yard, and strong lights illuminate the parking lot.
The Advocates cheer. The famous nun has arrived. The Victims frown. They cannot chant against a nun. Their voices grow sulky. They chant louder.
There is a knock on the door. The chief of inmate services, letting him know all is well. The warden says thanks.
Ten o’clock. His phone has grown silent. As each hour passes, the chance of reversal grows slimmer. Unless the lady has done something he doesn’t know about. He reminds himself that he has never had a date with death changed so late in the game. But there is a first for everything.
The chanting has taken on a harsh, ringing sound, with the two sides bouncing off each other. At least there aren’t news cameras. The public is bored with executions. Still, an armed guard will escort him to his car when it is all done, and one of the state police will check under the hood. A warden in another state was killed when a bomb strapped to his car went off following an execution. The warden thinks, Why do we make it so hard? Why do we make it so easy?
A wind picks up, and a sweet night smell comes in the window. He yawns. He drinks a cup of strong hot coffee from the thermos on his desk, laced with plenty of sugar.
He keeps glancing at the phone and realizes he is waiting for a call about the lady, and he feels a twinge of fear—for her—that she will not win this case. He shakes his head at himself. He is in the wrong business when he starts rooting for the lady. He tell himself she makes his life interesting.
Eleven o’clock. Time to go get York. He will meet the black shirts, and they will walk York to the chamber. The warden will watch as the doctor threads his arms to the medical vine, and he will ask York his last words, and he will press the buttons and watch York die. He will hear the time of death, and hear the cheering and the veneration outside, just like all the other executions he has done, including those of Striker and the ones who came before. He will comfort the families and talk to any guards who regretted putting on the black shirt—there is always one, a wet-eyed man who felt sick at the taking of a life. The warden respects those men as much as the others. This is just a job, he tells them, and there is no value in doing what you don’t want to do. Then he will go home to his empty house, with the overgrown lawn and the For Sale sign outside, and remember his dead wife.
They are singing outside. Lord help him, it is “Kumbaya.”
Time to go. He gets up heavily.
Down on our row, York has been waiting at his door for hours.
He finished his last meal with gusto, exclaiming loudly for everyone to hear that he hasn’t had an appetite in ages, but boy howdy, this was good. I could smell the fried chicken from where I was—fried chicken and mashed potatoes with gravy, corn on the cob, and hot apple pie.
York didn’t trust the kitchen to make his last meal, so he ordered out. A guard brought the last meal in a huge grease-spotted bag from Kentucky Fried Chicken. I remembered hearing about the place when I was a kid; I never ate there, but it sure smelled good. York crunched through the chicken skin so loudly that everyone could hear it down the row. My mouth was drooling. Some of the men were groaning, and York was laughing through a mouthful of food. I looked at my own dinner tray. There was the gray-green mush in a dishwater puddle, and a circle of something that might have been brown lentils but could have been mouse turds. On the side was a small glass of greenish instant milk in a dirty paper cup with bloody tooth marks from a previous drinker. I scraped a dot of blood off the wax rim, thinking about the priest. He left hours ago, after being turned down by York for prayer, shaking his head at the jubilation coming from York’s cell.
I have never heard York so happy. He is waiting and laughing like a young boy at his cell door, exchanging jokes with the other men on the row, eagerly counting down the minutes until his own death.
“Can’t wait, buddy,” he says, dancing off the bars. “Going to be sweet.”
“Going to meet your Maker, York?” one of the men calls.
“Hell, yes. Out of this place.”
“Blessed relief, brother. Blessed relief.”
The door slams at the far end of the row. Everyone breathes and sighs.
Everyone knows the gait of the warden, followed by the black shirts. Silence follows their footsteps.
The warden reaches York’s cell. The black shirts are behind him.
York looks past the warden as if he expects to see the lady standing there, waiting with his folder. But she is gone.
He smiles, relieved. “I’m ready, boss.”
The warden swings the keys, and the guards go to open the cell.
And that is when we all hear the faintest trembling, the tiniest tremors that tell us the horses are getting ready to run again. I stand up off my cot and go to the back wall. I press my hands on it and feel the horses tremble through the stone, feel the way the vibration moves down my thin legs with the spaces between the thighs, feel it in the knobby bones of my knees and the curving cradle of m
y bony hips.
I spread my fingers and I feel the golden horses. They are deep below me, snorting, wild-eyed with expectation. They roll their dark eyes, and hot steam billows from their mouths like streams of gold froth. The hot yellow mist rises all the way to my cave. What are they excited about? The ground shakes a little in response. Something big, they say. Something big is happening this way right now.
The guards are shouting in the halls, “Get down, get down,” as the entire prison begins to shake. The horses are running! Get down, assholes! The warden and everyone fall to the ground as if in prayer.
The horses are running, I think. Run, horses, run!
Sure enough, they answer me, pummeling up closer to the earth, their delighted hooves hammering the underground as they run, their molten bodies channeling their golden heat to the surface.
Far across the yard, deep in this enchanted night, the white-haired boy is out alone. He has been wandering the halls for hours, unmolested, looking at all the men sitting on their bunks, waiting for the execution. He passed the corpse valets, sitting awake at the edges of their bunks, waiting for the calls. On this night of all nights, the prison is empty and quiet. He passes the dark mess, the empty cafeteria tables, the shining scuffed metal cabinets and huge mixing bowls that clatter with the passing tremors. He wanders through closed factories and down empty halls until he comes to a door leading to the yard.
The yard is oh so quiet; there is only the boy. He walks in the shadows under the overhanging buildings so the watching guards do not spot him. The empty picnic tables cast deep shadows, the baseball diamond an empty spot worshipping three bases and a final destination. The blank walls of Building H loom above him. The oven is waiting. A freshly hired guard has joined the other man in the sweltering lunchroom, not understanding why his coworker is so quiet and withdrawn while they wait for the last body, which will be York. They feel the latest tremors and look at each other in concern, holding the small lunch table as its feet dance on the floor. Down below in the basement, the flibber-gibbets pant in expectation, gray clay limbs winding among the ash-caked urns.
The yard dust is so dry, it creaks under the boy’s soft steps. His eyes are as pale and unseeing as a blind calf’s, and he wanders like one.
The horses are running! I want to yell. Watch out, boy!
The guards in the towers hear the crackle of their radios and drop to the floor as the horses run harder than any of us have ever known. They run so hard, the towers shake. Down in our dungeon, the warden himself is prostrated on his hands on the floor outside of York’s cell. All the men are on the floor, the black shirts and guards alike. York begins laughing, and the warden looks at him through the cell bars, both of them with cheeks pressed to the ground, and the warden starts laughing, too.
Only the boy walks, unconcerned, dropping to his hands every now and then from the shaking, only to rise again and make his way, dust on his palms. He is so light that his delicate feet seem to float above the trembling of the horses.
Out in the parking lot, the protestors cry out in alarm and drop to their knees, crawling for the safety of their cars.
Go, horses, I think. Go! And they do, running so hard that the box of my dungeon cell sways from side to side and dust rains down hard from the ceiling. The legs of my cot drum the ground, dancing like water in a hot skillet. I fall to the floor, delighted beyond all measure. Go! And the horses answer, their muscles rising up like golden dragonfly wings fluttering hard beneath my body.
The white-haired boy wanders under the windows of the administration building. His ghostly hair is lifted up. There. One of the counselor windows was left open, cocked for a hopeful breeze and then forgotten. The boy sees his thin hands reach, and then he is pulling himself up, his feet scrambling against the stone.
The office of the counselor is dark. No one is here. The boy lands with soft feet. The lights are off, and the hallways are pitch black. The boy glides down the dark, shaking hall.
Only the office of Conroy shows a light. He has been sitting at his desk, writing reports but mostly tapping on his treasured phone with a pen, lost in thought. He likes to stay for the executions. He likes to feel the circle of life end. Someday he will be the warden and will be the one to watch them die. He will be the one to press the red buttons, the one to make sure the body is tumbled off to the oven, the one to comfort the families of the victims. He smiles to himself as he thinks of this, and he wonders if all men want to be a god, and what is wrong with that?
Conroy has been feeling the horses running. But he doesn’t react with wild laughter, like York and the warden, or with joy, like me. He thinks the horses are an annoyance, which is why I think they want to punish him. Yes. They want to punish him.
The horses run around the bend and are trembling next to my wall, and I feel them shaking down the line. York is whooping joyously on the ground, laughing fit to split, and outside his cell, the warden is laughing, too, in the wild abandoned excitement of the moment and the hysterical irony that in this moment of execution, death threatens us all.
“We’re all going to die, boss!” York yells, and the warden laughs even harder, clutching the ground and feeling his belly shake against the tremors.
Though the guards in the black shirts and the other inmates listen to the warden in amazement, soon everyone is laughing, splayed like starfish on the floors while the horses buck.
The horses pass, heading straight for the administration building. Their hooves are drumming, the molten gold flowing off their backs, their wild eyes rolled clear back so only the blue whites are visible, so joyous are they in the mindless heat of their run that they do not need to see. The small men with their hammers scamper down the walls to hide, chattering noisily in their excitement.
No one sees the boy, wandering down the dark halls of the offices, his pale hands reaching to guide his way. His eyes are still unseeing.
Go, horses, I think. Go!
In his office, Conroy curses. Damn horses. He wonders if he should crawl under his desk, but that thought seems pretty damn sissy to him. From the time of his infancy, his father taught him about being a man. Men do not fear. Men act.
Another tremor as the horses pass, even closer. He holds his desk. Damn horses. Pens shake in the desk jar, and his phone bounces, the handle rattling. He puts a hand on the black handle to steady it.
The boy sways off the walls down the hallway, and the horses are passing so hard that Conroy is thinking, Maybe I should get under that desk.
Instead, he looks up to see the white-haired boy there, swaying like a pale ghost in the shaking doorway. For a moment he can’t place the boy, he is so shocked to see an inmate in his door at this hour. It is an unthinkable transgression, a shooting offense. Then he remembers the white-haired boy, remembers he is a broken boy, a used boy, a throwaway boy. It is almost midnight, he thinks, and what the hell is this crazy boy doing in my office?
The boy sways, a ghost in his prison clothes, and it seems odd to Conroy that he is dancing lightly on his feet even as the walls shake. The boy looks at him with wild, lost eyes. Conroy thinks he will have to shoot him. It will be an annoyance, more than anything—he’ll have to call the corpse valets, make the death look official. He knows from experience. How many inmates has he shot over the years, from the guard towers, on the yard, in the back of halls no one could see? An even baker’s dozen? Fifteen? Twenty?
Conroy stands and reaches for his service holster just as the horses make another joyous pass.
Go, horses, I think. Go! The walls shake, and in my cell, the ceiling is raining dust like a storm, like an avalanche, and I rise to dance in the floating silver cloud. The silver dust is raining in my hair, coating my skin like moth dust. It is coating my arms until they look like the cold beautiful silver skin of fish.
The warden is laughing, more than he has ever laughed, and all of the black shirts are laughing along with him at the absolute crazy joy of this moment, all the men in the dungeon roaring in
their cells as the walls are rocking so hard that we think all the walls might come down. Go, horses, go!
Conroy reaches for his pistol, but the horses are there, slipping right under his feet, buckling the very earth he stands on, their muscular haunches heaving and rising to make the earth slip and slide under his black dress shoes.
Damn horses, he thinks, reaching down to catch the edge of his desk just as his legs slip from under him, and he is falling right to the hard floor behind his desk, his knees cracking in pain and surprise.
But it is strange, he thinks. The boy has turned into white liquid, he has turned into fast, and pours across the few feet of space like a poem or the wind. The boy moves with uncanny grace, as if the horses are there to help him, as if he knows the spaces between the tremors and this is where his delicate feet touch the floor, so in moments, he is simply There.
He is There and Conroy is fallen.
Only seconds, Conroy thinks, only seconds. His hands are on the floor, and he is trying to get his balance, trying to reach for the pistol at his hip, but the gun feels yards away from his awkward hand, and he can see that the boy’s legs are suddenly next to him, along with the uptake of air that says he’s raised an arm. A feeling of cold metal—where did that come from? Then he knows. He knows with searing, unending pain as the walls shake and the horses pound and pound and pound and pound, until the floors are awash with the joy of their panting pleasure and the hot beautiful knowledge of a job well done.
The white-haired boy slips back through the dark administration halls as the tremors slowly fade. The walls sigh and creak back into place, the enchantment falling into new rhythms.