“You mean I got to be naked?” Tears sprang out of his eyes. It must have been years since he'd cried tears before another; but this was too much. They hadn't warned him about this.
“You can keep your shorts on,” Brian said.
He stood there handcuffed, shorn nearly bald, wearing only his white underpants. It was chilly and he was shaking, but it wasn't important, even if they thought he was afraid. Two guards from CB-6 were present, and he noticed them. Familiar faces. He nodded. There was a young doctor from the clinic standing there, and a short gentleman reading out loud. The warden. The Order of Execution. The door was open. There was a hearse parked outside it in the early morning. Only one.
The witnesses were already behind the glass. He couldn't hear, and shook his head. Was everything behind glass?
The warden stopped reading. “Is something wrong?”
Wrong? He stood next to Brian facing the warden, the doctor, the two guards. Every one of them was terrified. They were all scared to death of what was happening. The warden's voice trembled. “Do you have anything to say at this time?” he asked Bill Houston.
Bill Houston was floored by the question. “Is there something I'm supposed to say now?”
Everyone was confused.
Brian said suddenly, “I want you to know I don't think you deserve to die. I think you been healed.”
Nobody knew how to react. They all looked around. It was obvious even the warden didn't know if Brian had just broken a rule. “I really feel that way,” Brian said defiantly.
“Thank you,” Bill Houston said.
They all stood there in a long silence. What was going on now?
“What's going on?” Bill Houston asked.
The warden looked green and ill. “We still have a couple of minutes,” he said. “I think we should wait, don't you?” He glanced around helplessly.
Bill Houston whispered to Brian, “I don't think I can stand up any more.”
Taking him by the elbow, Brian helped Bill Houston into the gas chamber.
A truth filled up the chamber: there was nothing left for him now. The door had shut on his life. It said
DEATH IS THE MOTHER OF BEAUTY
. He couldn't hear a thing. He wondered if they'd put cotton in his ears.
And then there was a faint rattling in the pipe to his right, and the sound of boiling liquid beneath him. He looked down at the length of surgical tubing that ran from his chest to the door. There it goes. Up that tube. Boom boom boom boom boom boom boom. That's all that's ever really been important. A visible vapor was curling up over his knees.
He held his breath. Every rivet of metal was a jewel to him. He felt he could hold his breath foreverâno problem. Boom, boom. Even as his heart accelerated, it seemed to him inexplicably that his heart was slowing down. You can get right in between each beat, and let the next one wash over you like the best and biggest warm ocean there ever was. His eyes were on fire. He hated to shut them, but they hurt. He wanted to
see.
Boom! Was there ever anything as pretty as that one? Another coming . . . boom! Beautiful! They just don't come any better than that.
He was in the middle of taking the last breath of his life before he realized he was taking it. But it was all right. Boom! Unbelievable! And
another
coming? How many of these things do you mean to give away? He got right in the dark between heartbeats, and rested there. And then he saw that another one wasn't going to come. That's it. That's the last. He looked at the dark. I would like to take this opportunity, he said, to pray for another human being.
C
asablanca Cafe, normally closed before six
AM
, was open early for the execution. Fredericks looked in through the window, and saw that the place was still empty. The crowd was still down by the highway. At this moment they would all be looking toward the Death House, watching the rust-colored pipe that rose ostentatiously above the little building that was itself obscured by other prison buildings; and as the chamber beneath it was voided by a suction pump, some would believe they smelled the stench of rarefied cyanous vapors, like peach blossoms. And they would be excruciated, amused, reassured, or made pensive, depending on who they were.
“Everybody's still over by the show,” the waitress said. Her name was Clair. Fredericks knew her name, but that was all.
“Was it on the radio?” Fredericks asked her.
“Just now. It'll be on again in two minutes, I guarantee you.”
“Can I have some Scotch in my coffee?”
Clair brought him a pot of coffee, a fifth of Black Label, and a white cup. In a few minutes, as they listened to the radio that sat beside the cash register, the morning produced its soft light. William H. Houston, Jr., had been put to death. Richard Clay Wilson's sentence had been commuted to life.
“A lot of people got finessed this morning,” Fredericks told Clair.
Clair stood by the window, holding aside its curtain delicately between two fingers and watching the street. “Us, too,” she told him now. “Everybody's just zooming right out of town. The only ones who made a profit on this deal was Seven-Eleven. They sold everybody coffee.”
“And you sold me Scotch,” Fredericks said.
“Oh, call it a gift, okay? We don't have a license.”
Fredericks stayed a long time in Casablanca Cafe. For a while he napped in the booth, his head thrown back, his mouth open, and he woke feeling furry inside and disoriented.
As he was paying for his coffee, at the instant he was putting one of the free toothpicks into his mouth, he sensed the presence of someone nearby, staring at him. The mood was palpable and real, but he knew there was hardly anyone in the place, just a man reading a magazine, which he held flat on the table beside his bowl of soup. Fredericks looked around a minute before he saw the portrait of Elvis Presley on the wall behind the cash register, almost directly in front of him. Rendered in iridescent paint on black velvet, hovering before a brilliant microphone, the face of the dead idol seemed on the brink of speech.
Fredericks stepped out into the terrible noon and stood by the road with his hands in his pockets, his face shaded by the brim of a straw hat, and chewed his toothpick, aware that he looked very much like a country lawyer. He was still young, and it was completely possible that soon he'd begin carrying out his original intention of getting himself elected to something or other. But the truth was, he knew, that he'd been irretrievably sidetracked right at the start by his stint as a public defender, and that he'd probably continue the rest of his life as a criminal lawyer because, in all honesty, there was a part of him that wanted to help murderers go free.
Most of his clients ended up in Florence. He'd spent a lot of time here. And he would be here a great deal more, in this town of bored dirt consisting mainly of a prison shimmering at this moment in waves of heat, a town that was always quiet except for the sounds of wind coming across the desert and ropes banging against flagpolesâwhere every evening the iridescent-on-velvet face of Elvis Presley climbed the twilight to address all the bankrupt cafes.
It was Fredericks's understanding that the prisoners had a story: that each night for months, at nine precisely, a light had burned in a window in the town, where the men on one cellblock's upper tier could see it and wonder, and imagine, each one, that it shone for him alone. But that was just a story, something that people will tell themselves, something to pass the time it takes for the violence inside a man to wear him away, or to be consumed itself, depending on who is the candle and who is the light.