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“Boss Edgecombe!” The President called. “Do you think that little bastard knows Wetmore isn’t here? I do, by God!”
I felt about the same… but I wasn’t going to say so out loud.
Harry came out into the hall, hitching up his pants the way he always did after he’d spent a refreshing few minutes in the can, and stood there with his eyes wide. Toot-Toot was also staring, a sunken grin doing unpleasant things to the soft and toothless lower half of his face.
The mouse stopped in what was becoming its usual spot, curled its tail around its paws, and looked at us. Again I was reminded of pictures I had seen of judges passing sentence on hapless prisoners… yet, had there ever been a prisoner as small and unafraid as this one? Not that it really was a prisoner, of course; it could come and go pretty much as it pleased. Yet the idea would not leave my mind, and it again occurred to me that most of us would feel that small when approaching God’s judgment seat after our lives were over, but very few of us would be able to look so unafraid.
“Well, I swear,” Old Toot-Toot said. “There he sits, big as Billy-Be-Frigged.”
“You ain’t seen nothing yet, Toot,” Harry said. “Watch this.” He reached into his breast pocket and came out with a slice of cinnamon apple wrapped in waxed paper. He broke off the end and tossed it on the floor. It was dry and hard and I thought it would bounce right past the mouse, but it reached out one paw, as carelessly as a man swatting at a fly to pass the time, and batted it flat. We all laughed in admiration and surprise, an outburst of sound that should have sent the mouse skittering, but it barely twitched. It picked up the piece of dried apple in its paws, gave it a couple of licks, then dropped it and looked up at us as if to say, Not bad, what else do you have?
Toot-Toot opened his cart, took out a sandwich, unwrapped it, and tore off a scrap of bologna.
“Don’t bother,” Dean said.
“What do you mean?” Toot-Toot asked. “Ain’t a mouse alive’d pass up bologna if he could get it. You a crazy guy!”
But I knew Dean was right, and I could see by Harry’s face that he knew it, too. There were floaters and there were regulars. Somehow, that mouse seemed to know the difference. Nuts, but true.
Old Toot-Toot tossed the scrap of bologna down, and sure enough, the mouse wouldn’t have a thing to do with it; sniffed it once and then backed off a pace.
“I’ll be a goddamned son of a bitch,” Old Toot-Toot said, sounding offended.
I held out my hand. “Give it to me.”
“What—same sammitch?”
“Same one. I’ll pay for it.”
Toot-Toot handed it over. I lifted the top slice of bread, tore off another sliver of meat, and dropped it over the front of the duty desk. The mouse came forward at once, picked it up in its paws, and began to eat. The bologna was gone before you could say Jack Robinson.
“I’ll be goddamned!” Toot-Toot cried. “Bloody hell! Gimme dat!”
He snatched back the sandwich, tore off a much larger piece of meat—not a scrap this time but a flap—and dropped it so close to the mouse that Steamboat Willy almost ended up wearing it for a hat. It drew back again, sniffed (surely no mouse ever hit such a jackpot during the Depression—not in our state, at least), and then looked up at us.
“Go on, eat it!” Toot-Toot said, sounding more offended than ever. “What’s wrong witchoo?”
Dean took the sandwich and dropped a piece of meat—by then it was like some strange communion service. The mouse picked it up at once and bolted it down. Then it turned and went back down the corridor to the restraint room, pausing along the way to peer into a couple of empty cells and to take a brief investigatory tour of a third. Once again the idea that it was looking for someone occurred to me, and this time I dismissed the thought more slowly.
“I’m not going to talk about this,” Harry said. He sounded as if he was half-joking, half-not. “First of all, nobody’d care. Second, they wouldn’t believe me if they did.”
“He only ate from you fellas,” Toot-Toot said. He shook his head in disbelief, then bent laboriously over, picked up what the mouse had disdained, and popped it into his own toothless maw, where he began the job of gumming it into submission. “Now why he do dat?”
“I’ve got a better one,” Harry said. “How’d he know Percy was off?”
“He didn’t,” I said. “It was just coincidence, that mouse showing up tonight.”
Except that got harder and harder to believe as the days went by and the mouse showed up only when Percy was off, on another shift, or in another part of the prison. We—Harry, Dean, Brutal, and me—decided that it must know Percy’s voice, or his smell.
We carefully avoided too much discussion about the mouse itself—himself. That, we seemed to have decided without saying a word, might go a long way toward spoiling something that was special, and beautiful, by virtue of its strangeness and delicacy. Willy had chosen us, after all, in some way I do not understand, even now. Maybe Harry came closest when he said it would do no good to tell other people, not just because they wouldn’t believe but because they wouldn’t care.
4
Then it was time for the execution of Arlen Bitterbuck, in reality no chief but first elder of his tribe on the Washita Reservation, and a member of the Cherokee Council as well. He had killed a man while drunk—while both of them were drunk, in fact. The Chief had crushed the man’s head with a cement block. At issue had been a pair of boots. So, on July seventeenth of that rainy summer, my council of elders intended for his life to end.
Visiting hours for most Cold Mountain prisoners were as rigid as steel beams, but that didn’t hold for our boys on E Block. So, on the sixteenth, Bitterbuck was allowed over to the long room adjacent to the cafeteria—the Arcade. It was divided straight down the middle by mesh interwoven with strands of barbed wire. Here The Chief would visit with his second wife and those of his children who would still treat with him. It was time for the good-byes.
He was taken over there by Bill Dodge and two other floaters. The rest of us had work to do—one hour to cram in at least two rehearsals. Three, if we could manage it.
Percy didn’t make much protest over being put in the switch room with Jack Van Hay for the Bitterbuck electrocution; he was too green to know if he was being given a good spot or a bad one. What he did know was that he had a rectangular mesh window to look through, and although he probably didn’t care to be looking at the back of the chair instead of the front, he would still be close enough to see the sparks flying.
Right outside that window was a black wall telephone with no crank or dial on it. That phone could only ring in, and only from one place: the governor’s office. I’ve seen lots of jailhouse movies over the years where the official phone rings just as they’re getting ready to pull the switch on some poor innocent sap, but ours never rang during all my years on E Block, never once. In the movies, salvation is cheap. So is innocence. You pay a quarter, and a quarter’s worth is just what you get. Real life costs more, and most of the answers are different.
We had a tailor’s dummy down in the tunnel for the run to the meatwagon, and we had Old Toot-Toot for the rest. Over the years, Toot had somehow become the traditional stand-in for the condemned, as time-honored in his way as the goose you sit down to on Christmas, whether you like goose or not. Most of the other screws liked him, were amused by his funny accent—also French, but Canadian rather than Cajun, and softened into its own thing by his years of incarceration in the South. Even Brutal got a kick out of Old Toot. Not me, though. I thought he was, in his way, an older and dimmer version of Percy Wetmore, a man too squeamish to kill and cook his own meat but who did, all the same, just love the smell of a barbecue.
We were all there for the rehearsal, just as we would all be there for the main event. Brutus Howell had been “put out,” as we said, which meant that he would place the cap, monitor the governor’s phoneline, summon the doctor from his place by the wall if he was needed, and give the actual order to roll on two when the time came. If it went well, there would be no credit for anyone. If it didn’t go well, Brutal would be blamed by the witnesses and I would be blamed by the warden. Neither of us complained about this; it wouldn’t have done any good. The world turns, that’s all. You can hold on and turn with it, or stand up to protest and be spun right off.
Dean, Harry Terwilliger, and I walked down to The Chief’s cell for the first rehearsal not three minutes after Bill and his troops had escorted Bitterbuck off the block and over to the Arcade. The cell door was open, and Old Toot-Toot sat on The Chief’s bunk, his wispy white hair flying.
“There come-stains all over dis sheet,” Toot-Toot remarked. “He mus’ be tryin to get rid of it before you fellas boil it off!” And he cackled.
“Shut up, Toot,” Dean said. “Let’s play this serious.”
“Okay,” Toot-Toot said, immediately composing his face into an expression of thunderous gravity. But his eyes twinkled. Old Toot never looked so alive as when he was playing dead.
I stepped forward. “Arlen Bitterbuck, as an officer of the court and of the state of blah-blah, I have a warrant for blah-blah, such execution to be carried out at twelve-oh-one on blah-blah, will you step forward?”
Toot got off the bunk. “I’m steppin forward, I’m steppin forward, I’m steppin forward,” he said.
“Turn around,” Dean said, and when Toot-Toot turned, Dean examined the dandruffy top of his head. The crown of The Chief’s head would be shaved tomorrow night, and Dean’s check then would be to make sure he didn’t need a touch-up. Stubble could impede conduction, make things harder. Everything we were doing today was about making things easier.
“All right, Arlen, let’s go,” I said to Toot-Toot, and away we went.
“I’m walkin down the corridor, I’m walkin down the corridor, I’m walkin down the corridor,” Toot said. I flanked him on the left, Dean on the right. Harry was directly behind him. At the head of the corridor we turned right, away from life as it was lived in the exercise yard and toward death as it was died in the storage room. We went into my office, and Toot dropped to his knees without having to be asked. He knew the script, all right, probably better than any of us. God knew he’d been there longer than any of us.
“I’m prayin, I’m prayin, I’m prayin,” Toot-Toot said, holding his gnarled hands up. They looked like that famous engraving, you probably know the one I mean. “The Lord is my shepherd, so on ‘n so forth.”
“Who’s Bitterbuck got?” Harry asked. “We’re not going to have some Cherokee medicine man in here shaking his dick, are we?”
“Actually—”
“Still prayin, still prayin, still gettin right with Jesus,” Toot overrode me.
“Shut up, you old gink,” Dean said.
“I’m prayin!”
“Then pray to yourself.”
“What’s keepin you guys?” Brutal hollered in from the storage room. That had also been emptied for our use. We were in the killing zone again, all right; it was a thing you could almost smell.
“Hold your friggin water!” Harry yelled back. “Don’t be so goddam impatient!”
“Prayin,” Toot said, grinning his unpleasant sunken grin. “Prayin for patience, just a little goddam patience.”
“Actually, Bitterbuck’s a Christian—he says,” I told them, “and he’s perfectly happy with the Baptist guy who came for Tillman Clark. Schuster, his name is. I like him, too. He’s fast, and he doesn’t get them all worked up. On your feet, Toot. You prayed enough for one day.”
“Walkin,” Toot said. “Walkin again, walkin again, yes sir, walkin on the Green Mile.”
Short as he was, he still had to duck a little to get through the door on the far side of the office. The rest of us had to duck even more. This was a vulnerable time with a real prisoner, and when I looked across to the platform where Old Sparky stood and saw Brutal with his gun drawn, I nodded with satisfaction. Just right.
Toot-Toot went down the steps and stopped. The folding wooden chairs, about forty of them, were already in place. Bitterbuck would cross to the platform on an angle that would keep him safely away from the seated spectators, and half a dozen guards would be added for insurance. Bill Dodge would be in charge of those. We had never had a witness menaced by a condemned prisoner in spite of what was, admittedly, a raw set-up, and that was how I meant to keep it.
“Ready, boys?” Toot asked when we were back in our original formation at the foot of the stairs leading down from my office. I nodded, and we walked to the platform. What we looked like more than anything, I often thought, was a color-guard that had forgotten its flag.
“What am I supposed to do?” Percy called from behind the wire mesh between the storage room and the switch room.
“Watch and learn,” I called back.
“And keep yer hands off yer wiener,” Harry muttered. Toot-Toot heard him, though, and cackled.
We escorted him up onto the platform and Toot turned around on his own—the old vet in action. “Sittin down,” he said, “sittin down. sittin down, takin a seat in Old Sparky’s lap.”
I dropped to my right knee before his right leg. Dean dropped to his left knee before his left leg. It was at this point we ourselves would be most vulnerable to physical attack, should the condemned man go berserk, which, every now and then, they did. We both turned the cocked knee slightly inward, to protect the crotch area. We dropped our chins to protect our throats. And, of course, we moved to secure the ankles and neutralize the danger as fast as we could. The Chief would be wearing slippers when he took his final promenade, but “it could have been worse” isn’t much comfort to a man with a ruptured larynx. Or writhing on the floor with his balls swelling up to the size of Mason jars, for that matter, while forty or so spectators—many of them gentlemen of the press—sit in those Grange-hall chairs, watching the whole thing.
We clamped Toot-Toot’s ankles. The clamp on Dean’s side was slightly bigger, because it carried the juice. When Bitterbuck sat down tomorrow night, he would do so with a shaved left calf. Indians have very little body-hair as a rule, but we would take no chances.
While we were clamping Toot-Toots ankles, Brutal secured his right wrist. Harry stepped smoothly forward and clamped the left. When they were done, Harry nodded to Brutal, and Brutal called back to Van Hay: “Roll on one!”
I heard Percy asking Jack Van Hay what that meant (it was hard to believe how little he knew, how little he’d picked up during his time on E Block) and Van Hay’s murmur of explanation. Today Roll on one meant nothing, but when he heard Brutal say it tomorrow night, Van Hay would turn the knob that goosed the prison generator behind B Block. The witnesses would hear the genny as a steady low humming, and the lights all over the prison would brighten. In the other cellblocks, prisoners would observe those overbright lights and think it had happened, the execution was over, when in fact it was just beginning.
Brutal stepped around the chair so that Toot could see him. “Arlen Bitterbuck, you have been condemned to die in the electric chair, sentence passed by a jury of your peers and imposed by a judge in good standing in this state. God save the people of this state. Do you have anything to say before sentence is carried out?”
“Yeah,” Toot said, eyes gleaming, lips bunched in a toothless happy grin. “I want a fried chicken dinner with gravy on the taters, I want to shit in your hat, and I got to have Mae West sit on my face, because I am one horny motherfucker.”
Brutal tried to hold onto his stem expression, but it was impossible. He threw back his head and began laughing. Dean collapsed onto the edge of the platform like he’d been gutshot, head down between his knees, howling like a coyote, with one hand clapped to his brow as if to keep his brains in there where they belonged. Harry was knocking his own head against the wall and going huh-huhhuh as if he had a glob of food stuck in his throat. Even Jack Van Hay, a man not known for his sense of humor, was laughing. I felt like it myself, of course I did, but controlled it somehow. Tomorrow night it was going to be for real, and a man would die there where Toot-Toot was sitting.
“Shut up, Brutal,” I said. “You too, Dean. Harry and Toot, the next remark like that to come out of your mouth will be your last. I’ll have Van Hay roll on two for real.”
Toot gave me a grin as if to say that was a good ‘un, Boss Edgecombe, a real good ‘un. It faltered into a narrow, puzzled look when he saw I wasn’t answering it. “What’s wrong witchoo?” he asked.
“It’s not funny,” I said. “That’s what’s wrong with me, and if you’re not smart enough to get it, you better just keep your gob shut.” Except it was funny, in its way, and I suppose that was what had really made me mad.
I looked around, saw Brutal staring at me, still grinning a little.
“Shit,” I said, “I’m getting too old for this job.”
“Nah,” Brutal said. “You’re in your prime, Paul.” But I wasn’t, neither was he, not as far as this goddam job went, and both of us knew it. Still, the important thing was that the laughing fit had passed. That was good, because the last thing I wanted was somebody remembering Toot’s smart-aleck remark tomorrow night and getting going again. You’d say such a thing would be impossible, a guard laughing his ass off as he escorted a condemned man past the witnesses to the electric chair, but when men are under stress, anything can happen. And a thing like that, people would have talked about it for twenty years.
“Are you going to be quiet, Toot?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, his averted face that of the world’s oldest, poutiest child.
I nodded to Brutal that he should get on with the rehearsal. He took the mask from the brass hook on the back of the chair and rolled it down over Toot Toot’s head, pulling it snug under his chin, which opened the hole at the top to its widest diameter. Then Brutal leaned over, picked the wet circle of sponge out of the bucket, pressed one finger against it, then licked the tip of the finger. That done, he put the sponge back in the bucket. Tomorrow he wouldn’t. Tomorrow he would tuck it into the cap perched on the back of the chair. Not today, though; there was no need to get Toot’s old head wet.
The cap was steel, and with the straps dangling down on either side, it looked sort of like a dough boy’s helmet. Brutal put it on Old Toot-Toot’s head, snugging it down over the hole in the black headcovering.
“Gettin the cap, gettin the cap, gettin the cap,” Toot said, and now his voice sounded squeezed as well as muffled. The straps held his jaw almost closed, and I suspected Brutal had snugged it down a little tighter than he strictly had to for purposes of rehearsal. He stepped back, faced the empty seats, and said: “Arlen Bitterbuck, electricity shall now be passed through your body until you are dead, in accordance with state law. May God have mercy on your soul.”
Brutal turned to the mesh-covered rectangle. “Roll on two.”
Old Toot, perhaps trying to recapture his earlier flare of comic genius, began to buck and flail in the chair, as Old Sparky’s actual customers almost never did. “Now I’m fryin!” he cried. “Fryin! Fryyyin! Geeeaah! I’m a done tom turkey!”
Harry and Dean, I saw, were not watching this at all. They had turned away from Sparky and were looking across the empty storage room at the door leading back into my office. “Well, I’ll be goddamned,” Harry said. “One of the witnesses came a day early.”
Sitting in the doorway with its tail curled neatly around its paws, watching with its beady black oilspot eyes, was the mouse.
5
The execution went well—if there was ever such a thing as “a good one” (a proposition I strongly doubt), then the execution of Arlen Bitterbuck, council elder of the Washita Cherokee, was it. He got his braids wrong—his hands were shaking too badly to make a good job of it—and his eldest daughter, a woman of thirty-odd, was allowed to plait them nice and even. She wanted to weave feathers in at the tips, the pinfeathers of a hawk, his bird, but I couldn’t allow it. They might catch fire and burn. I didn’t tell her that, of course, just said it was against regulations. She made no protest, only bowed her head and put her hands to her temples to show her disappointment and her disapproval. She conducted herself with great dignity, that woman, and by doing so practically guaranteed that her father would do the same.
The Chief left his cell with no protest or holding back when the time came. Sometimes we had to pry their fingers off the bars—I broke one or two in my time and have never forgotten the muffled snapping sound—but The Chief wasn’t one of those, thank God. He walked strong up the Green Mile to my office, and there he dropped to his knees to pray with Brother Schuster, who had driven down from the Heavenly Light Baptist Church in his flivver. Schuster gave The Chief a few psalms, and The Chief started to cry when Schuster got to the one about lying down beside the still waters. It wasn’t bad, though, no hysteria, nothing like that. I had an idea he was thinking about still water so pure and so cold it felt like it was cutting your mouth every time you drank some.
Actually, I like to see them cry a little. It’s when they don’t that I get worried.
A lot of men can’t get up from their knees again without help, but The Chief did okay in that department. He swayed a little at first, like he was lightheaded, and Dean put out a hand to steady him, but Bitterbuck had already found his balance again on his own, so out we went.
Almost all the chairs were occupied, with the people in them murmuring quietly among themselves, like folks do when they’re waiting for a wedding or a funeral to get started. That was the only time Bitterbuck faltered. I don’t know if it was any one person in particular that bothered him, or all of them together, but I could hear a low moaning start up in his throat, and all at once the arm I was holding had a drag in it that hadn’t been there before. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Harry Terwilliger moving up to cut off The Chief’s retreat if Bitterbuck all at once decided he wanted to go hard.
I tightened my grip on his elbow and tapped the inside of his arm with one finger. “Steady, Chief,” I said out of the corner of my mouth, not moving my lips. “The only thing most of these people will remember about you is how you go out, so give them something good—show them how a Washita does it.”
He glanced at me sideways and gave a little nod. Then he took one of the braids his daughter had made and kissed it. I looked to Brutal, standing at parade rest behind the chair, resplendent in his best blue uniform, all the buttons on the tunic polished and gleaming, his hat sitting square-john perfect on his big head. I gave him a little nod and he shot it right back, stepping forward to help Bitterbuck mount the platform if he needed help. Turned out he didn’t.
It was less than a minute from the time Bitterbuck sat down in the chair to the moment when Brutal, called “Roll on two!” softly back over his shoulder. The lights dimmed down again, but only a little; you wouldn’t have noticed it if you hadn’t been looking for it. That meant Van Hay had pulled the switch some wit had labeled MABEL’S HAIR DRIER. There was a low humming from the cap, and Bitterbuck surged forward against the clamps and the restraining belt across his chest. Over against the wall, the prison doctor watched expressionlessly, lips thinned until his mouth looked like a single white stitch. There was no flopping and flailing, such as Old Toot-Toot had done at rehearsal, only that powerful forward surge, as a man may surge forward from the hips while in the grip of a powerful orgasm. The Chiefs blue shirt pulled tight at the buttons, creating little strained smiles of flesh between them.
And there was a smell. Not bad in itself, but unpleasant in its associations. I’ve never been able to go down in the cellar at my granddaughter’s house when they bring me there, although that’s where their little boy has his Lionel set-up, which he would dearly love to share with his great-grampa. I don’t mind the trains, as I’m sure you can guess—it’s the transformer I can’t abide. The way it hums. And the way, when it gets hot, it smells. Even after all these years, that smell reminds me of Cold Mountain.
Van Hay gave him thirty seconds, then turned the juice off. The doctor stepped forward from his place and listened with his stethoscope. There was no talk from the witnesses now. The doctor straightened up and looked through the mesh. “Disorganized,” he said, and made a twirling, cranking gesture with one finger. He had heard a few random heartbeats from Bitterbuck’s chest, probably as meaningless as the final jitters of a decapitated chicken, but it was better not to take chances. You didn’t want him suddenly sitting up on the gurney when you had him halfway through the tunnel, bawling that he felt like he was on fire.
Van Hay rolled on three and The Chief surged forward again, twisting a little from side to side in the grip of the current. When doc listened this time, he nodded. It was over. We had once again succeeded in destroying what we could not create. Some of the folks in the audience had begun talking in those low voices again; most sat with their heads down, looking at the floor, as if stunned. Or ashamed.
Harry and Dean came up with the stretcher. It was actually Percy’s job to take one end, but he didn’t know and no one had bothered to tell him. The Chief, still wearing the black silk hood, was loaded onto it by Brutal and me, and we whisked him through the door which led to the tunnel as fast as we could manage it without actually running. Smoke—too much of it—was rising from the hole in the top of the mask, and there was a horrible stench.
“Aw, man!” Percy cried, his voice wavering. “What’s that smell?”
“Just get out of my way and stay out of it,” Brutal said, shoving past him to get to the wall where there was a mounted fire extinguisher. It was one of the old chemical kind that you had to pump. Dean, meanwhile, had stripped off the hood. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been; Bitterbuck’s left braid was smouldering like a pile of wet leaves.
“Never mind that thing,” I told Brutal. I didn’t want to have to clean a load of chemical slime off the dead man’s face before putting him in the back of the meatwagon. I slapped at The Chief’s head (Percy staring at me, wide-eyed, the whole time) until the smoke quit rising. Then we carried the body down the twelve wooden steps to the tunnel. Here it was as chilly and dank as a dungeon, with the hollow plink-plink sound of dripping water. Hanging lights with crude tin shades—they were made in the prison machine-shop—showed a brick tube that ran thirty feet under the highway. The top was curved and wet.
