But if the essay had been everyone's, it was Richard who'd hit on the idea of breaking it into lines resembling verse. He hinted that he'd made many other improvements. Now in his view the poem was the child of his own creation. He kept it folded up inside a small plastic box for a stereo cassette, and it galled Bill Houston, who didn't read much, that Richard acted as if this piece of paper were better than money. From it he seemed to take much more than the pride of accomplishment. It was food and drink to Richard's ego. “I'm going to read it for my last words.” Richard lifted up his chin; Bill Houston almost gagged. “Then they'll all know bitterly that they can never kill me.”
Bill Houston pretended to be interested when Richard let him read it. But he really couldn't understand why Richard insisted on personally owning this masterpiece. It didn't rhyme, and the words were plainly not Richard'sâit even talked about a “nigger”âand anyone could see that somebody had typed it and then Richard had squeezed things in here and there by hand. It wasn't actually a poem: it used words of a sort that Bill Houston used himself all the time, but didn't care to see written down. He handed it back by way of Brian, because they weren't allowed to pass things directly to each other. “This is a real good poem, Richard,” he said.
Brian read some of it, too, and said, “Hm! It's a work of art.” He didn't seemed particularly excited, but he handed it over to Richard with a noticeable amount of respect. Bill Houston shared the guard's uncertainty about it.
Later, Bill Houston wanted to read it again. He borrowed it and kept it for a while after supper. It was just nice to have a document created by other prisoners. He couldn't make any sense of the poem, but sadness overcame him when he looked at it. He gave it back to Richard without comment.
But he thought about it off and on all night, and the next day without any preliminaries he said, “That's a beautiful poem, Richard. I'd like to take a copy with me on my ride.”
Richard said nothing, but he jumped up and moved about his cell. “I'll think about it,” he said finally.
Bill Houston and Richard talked a lot about what each was going to have for his final meal. Bill Houston wanted steak. Richard couldn't decide between chicken and pork. Bill Houston was grateful to know they wouldn't be eating the same thing. It seemed appropriate that the State of Arizona should provide them with a variety of foods before their big finish. Bill Houston didn't like to hear the guards calling it The Last Supper. It was a common prison expression, but he'd already heard enough about how Richard Clay Wilson would turn out to be his savior.
It was getting on his nerves. “I never asked you to die for me,” he told Richard.
Richard only put his earphones over his head and pretended to be alone in the universe.
“C'mon, Richard.” Bill Houston waved his hand before their window. “Hey. C'mon.”
When Richard removed his earphones, tiny music came out of them like the whirring of a bug.
“Listen. How about reading me your poem one time?”
Richard appeared lost in a haze of considerations.
“Fact is, I read terrible, Richard. So that's why I'm asking you.”
Richard opened the small stereo cassette box that housed the poem like a jewel. He unfolded the document and stepped back, standing himself up on the far side of his cell where Bill Houston could get a bigger picture of him. But he cast his gaze toward the corner, where there was nobody. “Talking Richard Wilson Blues,” he said. “By Richard Clay Wilson.” And he read in a Baptist sing-song:
“
I felt like a man of honor of substance,
but the situation was dancing underneath meâ
once I walked into the living room at my sister's
and saw that the two of them, her and my sister,
had turned sometime behind my back not exactly
fatter, but heavy, or squalid, with cartoons
moving on the television in front of them,
surrounded by laundry, and a couple of Coca-Colas
standing up next to the iron on the board.
I stepped out into the yard of bricks
and trash and watched the light light
up the blood inside each leaf,
and I asked myself, Now what is the rpm
on this mother? Where do you turn it on?
I think you understand how I felt.
âI'm not saying everything changed in the space
of one second of seeing two women, but I did
start dragging her into the clubs with me. I insisted
she be sexy. I just wanted to live.
And I did: some nights were so sensory
I felt the starlight landing on my back
and I believed I could set fire to things with my fingers.
But the strategies of others broke my promise.
At closing time once, she kept talking to a man
when I was trying to catch her attention to leave
It was a Negro man, and I thought of black limousines
and black masses and black hydrants filled
with black water. I thought I might smack her face, or spill a glass,
but instead I opened him up with my red fishing knife
and I took out his guts and I said, âHere they are,
motherfucker, nigger, here they are.'
There were people frozen around us. The lights had just come on.
At that moment I saw her reading me and reading me
from the side of the room where I saw her standing,
the way the sacred light played across her face.
“
Right down the middle from beginning to end
my life pours into one ocean, into this prison
with its empty ballfield and its empty
preparations. If she ever comes to visit me
to hell with her, I won't talk to her.
God kill you all. I'm sorry for nothing.
I'm just an alien from another planet.
“
I am not happy. Disappointment
lights its stupid fire in my heart,
but two days a week I staff
the Max Security laundry above the world
on the seventh level, looking at two long roads
out there that go to a couple of towns.
Young girls accelerating through the intersection
make me want to live forever,
they make me think of the grand things,
of wars and extremely white, quiet light that never dies.
Sometimes I stand against the window for hours
tuned to every station at once, so loaded on crystal
meth I believe I'll drift out of my body.
“
Jesus Christ, your doors close and open,
you touch the Maniac Drifters, the Fireaters,
I could say a million things about you
and never get that silence. That is what I mean
by darkness, the place where I kiss your mouth,
where nothing bad has happened.
I'm not anyone but I wish I could be told
when you will come to save us. I have written
several poems and several hymns, and one
has been performed on the religious
ultra-high-frequency station. And it goes like this.
”
Without waiting for any applause, Richard went immediately back to his bunk and returned the poem to its case.
Foster, the elderly suppertime relief guard, had joined them during Richard's recital of the poem. “Who's a maniac drifter?” he asked now. Bill Houston was embarrassed. He thought it must be an insult to ask any questions about Richard's poemâFoster ran the risk of revealing that parts of it were stupid.
“That's a gang on the Southside,” Richard said, “and the Fireaters, too. I was a friend to them. Once upon a time I carried a message. And then they had a war.” He held up his head in his annoying way. “They in my poem,” he said with genuine pride.
The three of them stood chained together by an awkward silence, and yet separated by prison bars. “I'm not supposed to tell you this,” Foster said. And then he didn't tell them anything.
“Well?” Bill Houston said.
“They're not going to say anything till the last minute,” Foster said. “But I know for a fucking-A fact that Richard's appeal went through this afternoon. My sister works over in the Court of Appeals. They're going to hang up the paper so you don't: find out for a whileâbut I hate to see you sweat, Richard.”
“I ain't sweating.”
“What about my appeal?” Bill Houston felt his supper turning to stone inside him.
“Well, I just told you everything I know.”
“Can't you find out for me? C'mon, Mr. Foster.”
“I can't because it's Friday. If anything happens now, it'll be off-hours, and my sister wouldn't know about it anyway.”
“ManâI ain't even been
worried
.” His legs went soft on him. “I need to get pre
pared.
” He sat on the bunk. He couldn't see Richard now, only Foster. “I need some reasons for this shit.”
He felt the sympathy in their silence, but it was only silence.
“When you go up the pipeâdoes it hurt?” he asked Foster. “How does it feel?”
“I don't know. You tell me. Drop us a line, okay?” Even Bill Houston laughed at this, and he realized he was taking an attitude that made him look small. He should have been the one to say, “I'll drop you a line.”
He resolved to be a better sport and show a cheerful disposition. Five
AM
Tuesday was the scheduled hour of his execution.
D
id it ever cool off in this town? A downpour that morning had made a flood, but only three hours later no record of it lay anywhere on the hospital grounds, except for two puddles in the basins gouged out by children's feet beneath a pair of swings.
There were a sandbox and a push-me-go-round beside the swings, which were near the front gate. To see them made Jamie think for the first time that of course children must be housed hereâchildren born crazy, and never sane in all their lives. If I'm a little out of it now, she thought, at least I can call up a few memories of the real days.
At the kiosk by the gate, she handed the guard her pass. “So! Three hours!” He fastened the pass to his clipboard and began studiously copying data from it onto his gate-list.
“I could be back a lot sooner. This is my first shot out of the box.”
“I guessed that.” He was an old man. “First time is always three hours.” There was whiskey on his breath.
“I don't know if I can really handle it,” Jamie said.
“You can handle it.” He returned her pass and she signed his list. When she turned to go he said, “My pen.”
“I was going to give it back to you. You think I'd steal your old pen?”
He gave an exaggerated shrug, his eyes glittering pinkly. You're happy now, you old drunk. But wait till you're watching The Movie Only You Can See.
Wait, she told herself; attitude. Attitude of Gratitude.
For the first time this summer, she stepped out onto the streets. Now she was grateful for her Welfare tennis shoes: a half-block west of her down Van Buren, three prostitutes loitered at a bus stop in festive dresses and bright stretch-pants and hip boots and spiked heels; but no one would mistake a goony little thing like herself for one of the day shift.
Before she could grow accustomed to the feel of pavement, her taxi arrived, a bright yellow Chevy. On the door she reached out and opened was stenciled: C.O.P.S.âCabs On Patrol.
“Air conditioning!” she said.
“I wouldn't go near this cab if they didn't give me refrigeration,” the driver said. He had a head of pitiful brown hair that reminded her of Bill Houston's, and it made her sad. “You're the one going to the Annex?” he said.
“You got it,” she said.
Their route took them south and east, through the downtown, toward the freeway, and now she saw all the signs of the recent delugeâwet spots on the pavement, some oily pools in the guttersâshe understood Phoenix had no sewersâand dark stains on the scaly hide of palm trees, beneath which lifeless brown fronds, some of them long as a man, had been scattered by the winds. The smog had washed out of the air, and as they rode the freeway, the flatness of the Southside to their right and the tall buildings of central Phoenix to their left looked beautifully varnished and free of imperfections.
This was the way she had hoped it would beâclean and clear.
Far to the east, she saw some mountains that she and Dwight Snow had spent some time watching one day, a day they'd seemed more like monsters. It was enough for them now to look like mountains.
“Wow. Kind of a no-man's-land out here, huh?” She counted her change carefully, and then got out of the cab and stood beside it.
“Probably someday, this whole desert is going to be a jail,” the cabbie said. Jamie tipped him a dollar and he drove away.
The Maricopa County Jail Annexâout here in the middle of nothing, two or three miles from the Phoenix Sky Harborâlooked a little flimsy to Jamie, a little too chain-link and pre-fab to hold any person bent seriously on escape. The complex of structures was dominated by a long yellow building of a single storey that seemed just to peter out. They were still building it; it grew hideless and then skeletal and then collapsed into piles of unshaped materials at its far end, near a dirt exercise yard with a couple of basketball hoops standing around in it hopelessly.