The river had reminded everybody of its awesome power. But something powerful had happened to Rick Beanblossom while building that dike. He was accepted among his own people without question, without stares or whispers. They smiled at him where they once had grimaced. Andrea told him people had been smiling at him for years, he was just too blind and bitter to notice.
Rick junked his needle kit. He threw out a damn good X-rated video collection. He thought of buying a house. He remembered the fun he had showing Andrea this small town where he had grown up. Today it was a fast-growing suburb. Back then it was just a blue-collar river town people drove through to get to the bridge to Wisconsin. They played baseball in an alleyway between old houses that had been built for lumbermen. The garages kept the ball in play. Mrs. Miller’s yard was a home run. In later years they looked back and counted the casualties. Of the score of kids that played ball in that alley, seven went off to Vietnam. Only four came back, one without a leg, another without a face. A mighty high price for one sandlot baseball team.
The church he attended as a boy stood on a hill up the street, its steeple blessing the canonized valley below. It wouldn’t hurt him to drop in there some Sunday morning. And his junior high school was right across the street. They were getting ready to close it now, and another fight was brewing over whether to convert it to condominiums or to bulldoze the memories to the ground. Rick could still rattle off the school motto: Non Scholae Sed Vitae Discimus-We Learn Not for School but for Life.
Some of the stately homes on the South Hill had been restored and converted to bed-and-breakfast inns. Wouldn’t it be fun to buy a grand Victorian and fix it up? The Cities were but a ghost of what they could have been. Perhaps it was time to come home. He had spent years clawing his way out of this town; now he was going to claw his way back in. Like the august courthouse behind him, the old hometown still seemed a place worth fighting for.
On the courthouse lawn beneath a pair of tall evergreens stood a monument to the county soldiers who enlisted and fought in the Civil War. Rick Beanblossom walked down to the memorial and read the inscriptions.
Atop a slab of granite an infantryman of that day marched south in righteous glory, a bayonetted rifle in one hand, a fistful of determination in the other. Six score and ten years later stood the wounded veteran of another civil war. He reached into his coat pocket and once again pulled out the letter from New York. Again he unfolded it and read. It was every writer’s dream.
E. P. Dutton
2 Park Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016
Dear Rick:
For a first novel this is a fine start. You write well and powerfully. This was a tragic period in our history. Your vivid descriptions of the horrors of war and of the soldiers who must live with the mental and physical wounds was very moving. In reading it, it was obvious to me you are a veteran and this book is very personal to you. You’ve written a novel with a lot of heart and guts. I think it could do quite well. Are you represented? I would like to hear from you in any case.
Hilary Avery Associate Editor
His historical novel about the year 1968. Five years of work. A dozen rejection slips. A book about four smalltown boys in the Midwest who graduate from high school together and then go their separate ways. Four different directions. West to Haight-Ashbury. East to the bloody streets of Chicago during the Democratic National Convention. North to Canada to avoid the draft. And south by southeast-Vietnam.
Rick Beanblossom refolded the letter and tucked it neatly into its envelope. The proud Marine would read the letter a hundred more times before his novel was published. Dream achieved.
They had to wait for the body to cool. Already there was talk of an investigation. The corpse was photographed while still strapped to the chair. The electrician unplugged the electrodes and then staggered from the room. The smell of burned flesh and bone was too putrid to work in. The Weatherman was left sitting in the death chamber all by himself.
By the time the ME assistants got to him he’d been left sitting for an hour. The grim, excruciating task of removing the corpse from the chair was left to them. They were shocked by what they saw, what they smelled. He was coated with white foam. His swollen face was half black leather, half blackened flesh. His clothes were nothing but charred and tattered remains. Rigor mortis had set in. They had to pry the electric crown from his head. Then they unstrapped him from the chair and carefully lowered him to the stretcher, still in a grotesque sitting position. From there the scene got almost comical. Four of them worked to straighten his limbs, slimy from the foam. Whenever they got an arm to lie down, a leg would pop up. Even with their face masks on, the stench of burned flesh nauseated them. It took them forty minutes to get him strapped to the stretcher. Finally they wheeled him from the prison, through the cold November rain. They loaded him into the back of the big Chevy Suburban and drove him one last time around the two cities he had grown to love-down to the Ramsey County Morgue in St. Paul.
The Weatherman was placed on a gurney, then stripped and peeled of his charred rags. The burned leather was removed from his face with a razor and a tweezers. His toe was tagged. They tied a plastic bag over his swollen head and covered him with a white sheet. He was pushed into the cooler alongside ten other stiffs. The temperature was 38°. Bugs crawled up the walls. They closed the cooler door and left him there.
The next day he was wheeled into a sterile examination room, as white and cold as snow. The medical examiner was a huge, frizzy-haired woman in a military uniform; she was named Freddie. She began the autopsy with a joke. “Let’s turn out the lights and see if he glows in the dark.” Her assistants guffawed loud and hard. Freddie slapped her knee, then pulled the sheet from the body.
A long blister of fried pus ran from his right leg to up over his chest. His shaved head was fried bloody raw above the eyes. His eyebrows were gone. His face was black as coal, a frozen grimace of excruciating pain. Torture. One eye was wide open and bulging. The other eye had been burned closed. His jaw was locked, his cheeks and nose clenched in violent contortions. Maggots had replaced tears vaporized in the fire.
“Oh, Dixon, look what they did to your lovely face. I hate to say it,” Freddie told her assistants, “but the state really screwed this up. It was that fucking sponge.”
“Yes, it was the sponge,” said an assistant named Cynthia.
The assistant named Carl agreed. “We better enjoy this while we can. I don’t think there are going to be any more executions in this state for a long, long time.”
Freddie looked at Cynthia and grinned. “Cynthia, why don’t you inspect the groin area for us.”
Cynthia giggled, turned red, then went ahead and spread his fat thighs. “Oooh, it’s not as bad as I thought.”
“What did you expect to find, excrement? That’s one of those myths about executions,” Freddie told her, “that they shit their last supper. That doesn’t happen.”
“But it looks like he did wet his pants,” Cynthia said, pointing to a yellow stain on his inner thigh.
“No he didn’t. That’s a semen stain. What a way to go, huh? Death is the ultimate orgasm.”
Cynthia giggled again and turned away.
Freddie bent over and kissed his raw head. “I loved you, Dixon Bell. I’m sorry it had to end like this.” She held up her hands as if conducting an orchestra. “All right, kids, plug in the shears. Let’s cut this son of a bitch open and see if that cheeseburger is well done yet.”
They cut him open with a Y incision, from his belly button to both shoulders. “I’ll be damned, he does have a heart.”
“What did you expect, a barometer?” Again they broke into belly laughs.
“If we don’t finish this soon it’s going to cloud up and rain on us.”
Freddie could hardly control herself. Cynthia and Carl were in hysterics. When the laughter died, Freddie leaned over the charred stiff and shook her head in pity. “What was it Judge Polack said when he sentenced this sorry bastard?”
“Until you came along the people of Minnesota held dearly human life. No more. You have been convicted of the most serious offenses against peace and dignity, against the state and humanity. The jury has concluded the only fair penalty is taking your life. Let the ritual begin. Dixon Graham Bell, on the last stroke of the clock on the last day of October, it is the sentence of the court that a current of electricity be passed through your body until you are dead. May God have mercy on your soul. May God have mercy on us all.”
Freddie shrugged her big shoulders. “Well, let’s cut off the top of his head and see if God had any more mercy on his soul than he had on his face.”
“Why do we have to cut off the top of his head?”
“Because we have to take out his brain,” Freddie explained. “Then we suspend the brain in a bucket for about three weeks until it gets hard. When it’s nice and crunchy we slice it open and try to find out what the hell was wrong with this guy.”
They fired up the Stryker saw, and with the chilling whine of the circular blade they went about cutting off the top of the Weatherman’s skull. Then they opened up his head like it was a cookie jar. “Look at that-baked hard. What is this?” asked Carl, picking at the black soot. “Charcoal?”
“That was the blood,” Freddie told him. “Now let me in there.”
Freddie slipped on a fresh pair of rubber gloves. She slowly slid her hands into the skull and wrapped her fingertips around the fried brain. Then she gently pulled the Weatherman’s mind from its burned casing and held it in her hand, “Do you think if we squeeze it, it’ll spit out a forecast?”
They were having a last laugh when the Weatherman bolted upright on the table and grabbed Freddie by her throat. “Put it back!”
The medical examiner tore away and went screaming from the room, brain in hand. The two assistants went screaming after her. The Weatherman sat on the table shouting, “You bring that back here! Bring it back!”
The electronic bolt shot open. The deputy slid aside the steel door. Dixon Bell was sitting on the edge of his bunk, his head buried in his hands. He was crying. “Give me back my mind. I want it back.” “Are you all right, Dixon?”
The Weatherman wiped the tears from his eyes. He looked out his window at the night sky. It was raining. A steady downpour. The only thing visible was the translucent lights of the High Bridge festooned between the cliffs. He put the temperature at 55°. The barometer was below 30 inches and falling. He sensed a north wind. “I had a nightmare,” he told the deputy. “A terrible nightmare. I’m okay now.”
“You sure? Can I get you something?” “I’m fine. Thank you for your concern.” “Actually, I was just coming to wake you up. The jury is in, Dixon. They’ve reached a verdict.”
The queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. “Off with his head!” she said, without even looking round.
-Lewis Carroll
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
From literature to Hollywood, from the morning headlines to the evening news, the convict on death row has always been portrayed as one of the great martyrs in the American drama. As the years go by, the crime does a slow fade into the past and the punishment becomes the story. The murderer becomes the victim. And so it was with Dixon Graham Bell, convicted on seven counts of first-degree intentional homicide and then sentenced to death, a verdict that sent a wave of shock through the courtroom.
Appeals were filed, but the Weatherman’s conviction and sentence were upheld by the Minnesota Supreme Court. Congress put more limits on habeas corpus appeals. The Federal District Court in Minneapolis refused to review the case, as did the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis. Stacy Dvorchak’s final appeal was before the United States Supreme Court. The nine justices were expected to consider it in the fall. If they refused to hear the case, the governor of Minnesota would sign his death warrant and convicted serial killer Dixon Graham Bell would be rescheduled for execution.
And now, as Dixon Bell’s appeals were exhausted and his date with death neared, his punishment became the news event of the year. So much so that Clancy Communications through Sky High News filed a federal civil lawsuit in Minneapolis to be permitted to do a live broadcast of the execution, or at the very least videotape the execution to be broadcast on the evening news. They employed the same argument they had used to gain access to the state’s courts: television reporters with cameras, the station contended, have just as much right to cover the ritual as newspaper reporters with notebooks. Channel 7 wanted their weatherman back on the air any way possible.
Rick Beanblossom followed Warden Oliver J. Johnson through the Stillwater State Correctional Facility. The warden was giving the media a tour of the new Death House facilities. No cameras were allowed. Rick no longer worked for the television station, but he wanted toj stay with the story, so he promised a lengthy feature to a Minnesota monthly magazine.
Before pushing on, the warden addressed the entire I group. “I just want to give you a little background about this solemn business. The concept of the electric chair came from Thomas Alva Edison. In the 1880s he sent an electric chair around the country to demonstrate the power of electricity. Stray dogs, cats, even an orangutan were strapped into the chair and electrocuted. In fact, the only electrical appliance older than the chair is the light bulb. The first man electrocuted,” Warden Johnson went on, “got it in Auburn Prison in New York State in 1890. The first woman to be electrocuted died in the electric chair at Sing Sing in 1899. The youngest person sentenced to die in the electric chair was a fourteen-year-old boy convicted of killing an eleven-year-old girl. That was in South Carolina in 1944. Witnesses say the boy was so small his arms kept slipping out of the straps.”