Angels (26 page)

She displayed her pass to the guard at the front gate, but he refused her entrance, directing her instead to the Visitors' Gate on the compound's other side, quite a ways down the road. “If I faint in this heat,” she said, “please come rescue me.”

The day was humid after the rain. Perspiration burned in her eye sockets and ran down out of her hair. She started to feel overwhelmed, walking by a prison compound through the searing moonscape beside the dry bed of the Salt River. A breeze brought the stench of the City of Phoenix Landfill down the empty river and wrapped it around her face.

The Visitors' Gate gave way to a tiny compound separated by chain-link and razor-barb from the jail proper, and occupied solely by a large sky-blue house trailer. The guard at the gate accepted her pass. But stepping through the archway beside his kiosk, she made the metal detector speak with crazed alarm.

She was afraid. “I gave you everything.”

The guard appeared unruffled. He ran his hand-held detector up her left leg, over her head and down, it squeaked when it neared her teeshirt's breast pocket. “That a pack of smokes?”

“Yeah, but they ain't metal,” she said.

“Even the tin foil in a cigaret pack sets it off. These are high-powered. Not like the airport.” Jamie had never been in an airport.

He accepted the pack from her and added it to her coins and keys—keys to doors she would never confront again—in a small plastic tray. He placed her property in a locker inside his kiosk.

“You mean I can't take in my cigarets?”

“Sorry. Not in an open pack.” Together they went up the brief walk and into the visitors' trailer.

Inside, the air was crisp, and her perspiration began to dry. The area was furnished like a lunchroom—vending machines, fluorescent lighting, plastic chairs, tables of indestructible blond false wood. She spent a good two minutes drinking from the humming grey water fountain, giving herself a headache. She was still standing beside it, breathing hard, when two guards escorted Burris through the trailer's opposite door. He was handcuffed. And it was obvious nobody liked him. It was the first thing she sensed from the three guards in the room.

But the guards retreated to opposite ends of the trailer, giving them a form of privacy. Burris sat across from her at one of the cafeteria-style tables. He was really happy to see her, that much was plain. “Hey—all right. Jamie,” he said. “Welcome to the fort.”

“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.

B
rian 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.

T
he 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 establishment? 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.

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?”