“I tuned into Sky High News the other night. Other than Andrea I hardly recognized the place, or the faces.”
Rick agreed. “They got a new set. It looks like ‘Sesame Street’ to me. Ron Shea took that anchor job in Washington. The new anchor is named Stan Butts. They call him ‘the butthole from Cleveland.’ The new weather girl is from Salt Lake City.”
The Weatherman shook his head in disgust. “Dumb blonde. Doesn’t know a cool front from a storm front. What became of Jack Save-Me-Jesus Napoleon?”
“He’s working for a television consulting firm in Des Moines. He’s one of those TV doctors who run around the country trying to heal broken stations. Dave Cadieux went to work for a video production company in Los Angeles. Nobody ever hears from him.
“Charleen Barington?”
“Settled her lawsuit out of court. Lives in Dallas. Divorced. Works at a consulting firm for beauty pageants.”
“Gayle the Ghoul?”
“Got married. She edits a magazine in Chicago. Her husband writes for a newspaper there.”
“Chris Mack?”
“Took a PR job with Northwest Airlines.”
“And Andy Mack dropped dead right in front of the weather wall.”
“Yes.”
“Television. What a business.”
“Yeah, what a business.”
After another uncomfortable interlude Dixon Bell announced, “I know what Andy said just before he died.”
Rick looked up, startled. Impossible. How could he know? Rick and Andrea had told nobody about the puzzling last words muttered by the old weatherman as he lay dying on the studio floor.
Dixon Bell smiled, then broke into his favorite Andy Mack impersonation. “And in Rugby, North Dakota, today it was forty-eight degrees. And in Myrtle Creek, Oregon, it was fifty-five degrees. While down in Bogalusa, Louisiana, the temperature got all the way up to eighty-one degrees. Hard to believe.”
Rick’s heart dropped back into place. “That was Andy.”
The Weatherman admired the clouds painted on the wall. “I see the National Weather Service finally got the Nexrad system up and running. It looks phenomenal. They say its radar would have spotted the Eden Prairie tornado.”
The former television news producer got up from his chair and walked to the sky-blue wall. “Hell, you did that, and you didn’t cost taxpayers three billion dollars.” What had seemed impossible only a year ago now seemed inevitable to Rick: the state was going to execute this man who had saved so many lives that day. “There’s a fingerprint expert from Scotland Yard speaking at a police chiefs’ convention in Chicago next month. I told Stacy I might take copies of the transformer print there along with the
APIS
information and get his opinion.”
“What are you trying to tell me?”
“Just that we’re still working on it.”
Dixon Bell sighed. “I wonder where I’d be right now if that tornado had shown up on computers, and that fingerprint hadn’t.”
Rick Beanblossom took a deep breath. “Dixon, I want to have your diary published. At least let the local papers have it.”
“No siree, absolutely not.”
“You’ve never understood news, Weatherman. There are a hundred copies of your diary down at the county attorney’s office. It’s going to leak out anyway, page by page, and every page will be out of context. If the Supreme Court doesn’t hear your case, the only thing that’s going to save your ass is a PR campaign launched at the governor. In his heart Ellefson doesn’t believe in the death penalty any more than I do.”
The Weatherman nodded in agreement. “You’re right. I’ve never understood news. What exactly does this ‘off the record’ mean?”
“It means that you never said it, and I never heard you say it. You know that.”
“But I mean, to really maintain a trusting relationship with all those secret sources of yours, you have to be pretty true to this ‘off the record’ stuff-kind of like a
priest, huh?”
“Yeah, kind of like a priest.”
“Betray one source, you lose them all?”
“Probably, yes.”
Dixon Bell glanced over his shoulder. The guard at the desk was on the phone, paying them no attention. The Weatherman lifted a piece of paper from his shirt pocket. It had been folded and tucked so many times it looked like a tiny present. He held it out to Rick. “Here, Kemo Sabay, this is for you.”
Rick Beanblossom reached for the note but Dixon Bell jerked it away, the devil’s grin breaking like lightning across his face. “But you see, it’s off the record.”
“What does that mean?” asked Rick.
“That means I never wrote it, and you never read it.”
That crazy look was descending over the Weatherman.
“It’s for your eyes only. Not to be opened until after my
deathbe that next month, or be it the next century. Is it
a deal?”
“Onlv under one condition.”
“No conditions.”
“One condition,” Rick demanded. “Could this note-or whatever it is-could it save your life?”
The Weatherman began laughing; his shallow, mocking laugh.
“C’mon, stay with me on this, Weatherman. The sun is setting on this story.”
“No. The words on this piece of paper can’t save my life.”
The newsman with a thousand sources, and a thousand promises to keep, took another second to think about this odd request from this incongruous man. “Okay,” he said. “It’s a deal. Off the record.”
“Forever?”
“Forever.”
Dixon Bell handed over the note.
Rick Beanblossom rolled the small rectangle between his fingers. “Why are you giving this to me now?”
“Because I don’t want to see you anymore.”
“And why is that?”
“Let’s just say I’m tired of looking at your ugly face.”
Dixon Bell was back in his cell for the 3:30 lockup. Rick Beanblossom brought out the devil in him. At what point would the masked asshole read the note? Would it matter? Just before the bars slid closed, Carol Theguard handed him his daily bundle of mail. He sat on his bunk and listened as a thousand prison cells slammed closed and the body count began. The afternoon sun was streaming through the tall windows, causing a precipitate rise in the temperature. The giant fans in the day room only blew the hot air around. The Weatherman flipped through the mail, checking the postmarks. He always opened first the letters that came from the farthest away. Today there was a letter postmarked Honolulu, Hawaii. No return address showing. Without opening it he held it up to the light like a private detective. He was getting good at this. A prison game he’d invented: forecasting the contents of his mail.
The letter was handwritten in a beige envelope. It had the faint scent of island flowers. It was from a young woman. It was a friendly letter, but the stationery had a military feel to it. It was a very personal letter; she wanted something. He ran the envelope beneath his nose and could almost smell the ocean breeze. Then it hit him, stronger than any letter delivered in prison had ever hit him. This letter was from a girl he had known long ago. A girl he loved? A knot grew in his stomach-nothing to be afraid of, but the knot was there. Letters had always been his undoing. He slowly peeled open the resealed envelope and removed the sheet of paper. He unfolded it and read. The Weatherman was right on all counts.
Dear Dixon Bell
My name is Su St. Germain. I am a nurse at the Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. Though I am now an American citizen, I am Vietnamese by birth. Like many Vietnamese Americans I came to the States in 1975 after the war was lost. I was a four-year-old orphan then. Upon arriving in Hawaii I was put up for adoption. I’m told I was very cute, and it was these cute looks I used to charm a naval officer and his wife into adopting me. I grew up a Navy brat. But I was very lucky. They were wonderful parents, retired now and living on Maui.
So why am I writing you? Those of us who were forced to flee our homeland have formed something of a refugee club here in Honolulu. Members of our club have told me a story about my escape from Vietnam that I only vaguely remember. I remember this nice man who found me in a crowded room and bought me a bowl of soup. I remember bombs falling on us and I was very scared. I remember the man chasing an airplane and trying to put me on it, but I didn’t want to go. Then they pulled me out of his arms and into the airplane with all the crowded people and I couldn’t stop crying. That is all I remember. But others in our club are much older than I am. Two of them were on that same airplane. They have told me the plane was overcrowded and everybody was afraid they were going to crash. The pilot was trying to take off so no more people would get on board. They were fighting to close the door when a big man came running down the runway chasing the plane with a little girl in his arms. The little girl was me. My friends believe this man was the weatherman at the Tan Son Nhut Air Base.
Over the years I have tried to find out who this weatherman was so that I can thank him. But all of my letters to the Air Force have come back with the same dismissive answer. “Sorry, your request is for
CLASSIFIED
information. Your request has been
DENIED
.”
I have read in news magazines of your trial and your conviction. I am very sorry. One of the articles said that you were a meteorologist in the Air Force and you were stationed in Vietnam during the fall of Saigon.
Mr. Bell, were you the weatherman at the Tan Son Nhut Air Base on April 29, 1975? Did you find a lost little girl at the evacuation center and race to put her on a plane to America? If you did, I am that little girl. I would like very much please to hear from you. I am married (yes, he too is in the Navy) and I have a little girl of my own now. We hope to have another child soon. It would mean a lot to me and my family if I could tell them more about how I came to America. If you can help me in any way please write me at the address below. I’ll be praying for you.
Sincerely
Su St. Germain
The former Air Force officer dropped the letter on his bunk, the bunk where he now had three sleeping pills safely tucked away. He grabbed the roll of toilet paper from the shelf and blew his nose. He swallowed the lump of pride in his throat. He looked at the bars on the door and felt swallowed up in shame. Little Tan Jan. Who’d have thought it? Dear God, what to tell her? He swiped at a tear. Dixon Bell read the letter again. When he was finished he read it one more time.
He left the rest of the day’s mail unopened. He stepped over to his desk and picked up the Holy Bible. He knew enough to turn to the New Testament. Dixon Bell found himself paging through the Gospel According to Matthew. At chapter 16 he smiled. Seems even Jesus Christ had taken a stab at weather forecasting. Christ said to the Pharisees, “It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening.” Matthew didn’t say what happened after that, so it was a safe bet that Christ blew it and it was sunny all day. The Weatherman returned to the bunk with the Bible. When he finished reading an hour later, he marked his spot with the letter from Tan Jan.
On the day the Weatherman was scheduled to leave the Ramsey County jail for death row in Stillwater, the deputies lined up beside the sally port to shake his hand, joking he was the first prisoner in the jail’s history who actually stuck his head right through a wall. He smiled a sad smile at the thought of that day. And he thought of other times. He thought back to the children who gave him a standing ovation for merely walking into their classroom. He remembered the night Sky High News won the ratings war and they drank champagne out of styrofoam cups like the one he now gripped in his hand. And, of course, of the afternoon he picked the tornado out of the sky over Eden Prairie and sounded the first warning.
He remembered the first time he laid eyes on Andrea Labore. She walked into the newsroom in a gold plaid pantsuit over a yellow blouse. The bright colors set off her big brown eyes and her shiny autumn hair. He was thunderstruck. Frozen by her beauty. Recognizing the Weatherman from television, she smiled at him from across the room. Then Chris Mack slapped him on the back. “Be careful, Dixon-she once killed a man who looked at her wrong.”
He remembered his first night on Memphis TV. He was so awful, so tongue-tied he was sure he was going to be fired. Thank God it rained cats and dogs that night, just like he said it would. When he was honorably discharged from the Air Force after twenty years of service the pilots he had guided through the storm clouds threw a party for him in the control tower. Why no planes crashed that night is still a military mystery.
He remembered the Vietnamese people who thought he was God because he could read the weather. He saw himself running down the runway chasing a transport plane with the only girl who ever loved him back begging not to be released from his arms. Then the newsreel of his life came to an end.
Weeks had passed since the letter from Tan Jan. Summer had rolled to an end. The first Monday of October had come and gone. The United States Supreme Court had returned to work. Now Dixon Bell sat on the edge of his bunk with a lethal combination of five sleeping pills in the palm of his left hand and a styrofoam cup filled with cold water in the fist of his right hand. Light from the new moon of the falling leaves slipped through the windows and the shadows of the iron bars spilled over him. In the dark those pills looked like the lemon drops he sucked on as a boy. He wished that somehow the glass of water was a glass of wine. The snoring and deep breathing of a hundred men locked behind bars filled the block. Once in a while a toilet flushed. The guard on the graveyard shift had just moved by his cell, counting bodies. They’d been locked up all day because of the Weatherman. But nobody complained. Nobody blamed him. He wore a badge of respect among the inmates, especially those in the Seg Unit. Death row. Now he was leaving them.
In the hours before lights out they yelled, “Fucking bastards!”
“You hang in there, Weatherman!” “Our hearts will be out there with you!” In his previous life as a TV weatherman these men were the scum of the earth whose crimes he saw at the top of the news show. Now they were the only family he had left.