She placed her hand on the white ruffles of her own breast. “This is me.”
6
Brian, the Death House three-to-eleven guard, wore the usual guard’s uniform of starched khaki. But as soon as Brian, Bill Houston, and the guards transferring the prisoner had entered the small red brick building that housed the condemned in their last two weeks of life, Brian took off his shirt and never wore it again except when leaving the Death House. He kept his fatigue-style cap on his head at all times, however, and also his mirrored Air Force sunglasses, which Bill Houston knew from experience were a hindrance to clear vision and could only be a punk affectation. Plainly, for Brian, the way he looked was the beginning of the way he wanted to be. He was only twenty-three or twenty-four.
“Well,” Bill Houston said, standing in the doorway of his new home with the three guards, “it ain’t exactly a dungeon or anything.”
“No,” Brian said. He was a serious man and a nervous one. “It’s dry in here.”
Bill Houston couldn’t think why the guard would speak of dryness, unless he meant to reassure him about a few spots of water here and there on the concrete floor, apparently remaining after a hosing down. On his right, through a doorway without a door, was the Waiting Room, consisting of two small cells side by side. To his left was a wide glass window through which he saw a small room like a radio station’s sound-booth. This was the room for the witnesses.
Directly before him was the gas chamber, looking like nothing so much as a shabby vehicle of transport. Its heavy air-lock door stood open wide, and he regarded with a dizzy incredulity the bulky metal chair with its leather straps, while Brian whistled and removed his khaki shirt, enjoying this.
“Have a seat,” Brian said. “Make yourself at home.”
Bill Houston tried to laugh. But he failed.
“No — seriously. Nobody would care. You want to try it on?”
Bill Houston saw that he made this offer not simply because it was in his power to make it, but because he really believed it might be accepted.
A group of men from the yard had gathered near the entrance — men who’d been going to the clinic to sell blood plasma under the supervision of a tall guard who now stood among them hatless under the hot sun, looking almost like their prisoner. Brian talked to them with true friendliness: “Anybody want to go for a little ride today?”
The men laughed — a burst of sound like the outcry of startled game birds. It carried out over the field and echoed off the walls that dwarfed them.
Through Bill Houston there raced an impulse, which he felt was not his alone, to say all right, sure, yes. But he said nothing. Swiftly on the heels of curiosity came the habitual yardbird fear and trembling, the knowledge that these people could get away with murder and the suspicion that they would like to try. It was the wholesale dream of these prisoners that they would be gassed to death while trapped in their cells. In their wild imaginings the borders of their confinement talked to them, and they were waiting for whatever would come, waiting for another name, waiting for giant times, waiting for the Search of Destruction. He knew a rush in his veins — he felt their need baked into these walls — and he wanted to make himself a sacrifice and his death a payment for something more than his stupid mistakes. If Brian could promise him he’d make the crucial difference for somebody, he would walk through the door and be slaughtered here and now.
He came within a yard of the opening and looked around inside the chamber. The seat of the chair rested on a cast-iron case perforated with holes to permit the escape of gas. Two straight two-inch pipes ran from directly beneath the witnesses’ window and into the base of perforated metal. He assumed these pipes fed the pellets of cyanide into their bath of acid beneath the chair. The thick leather straps for the arms and legs were plainly darkened by the sweat of those who had preceded him here.
He was wordless, and when it became obvious that he had nothing to report to them of what it was like to stand here condemned, the other prisoners moved on toward the clinic.
The guards waited patiently for Bill Houston, and Bill Houston stood waiting patiently to be terrified by the means of his death, which was after all just a little room like a diving bell, or a cheap amusement park submarine ride, with a large wheel on its door for screwing it tightly shut. He just felt obligated to experience more than mild interest. But the sight failed to move him until he saw the stethoscope — one with an unusually long tube — built into the door. He comprehended that the shiny flat end of this listening device would be attached to his chest after he was strapped in, and it just didn’t seem fair to him. It meant he wouldn’t be allowed to wear a shirt, he’d be half naked before strangers — and now it came over him vividly that his death would be attended, observed, and monitored by people who couldn’t appreciate how much he wanted to live. They would probably think, because he offered no resistance, that all of this was all right with him. But it wasn’t. They just didn’t know him. They were strangers.
He peered around at the other side of the door, the side he wouldn’t see after they closed it, and was disgusted to see the stethoscope’s rabbit ears dangling there helplessly. It wasn’t all right with him at all! — that somebody would be hooked up to him while he was dying. It wasn’t all right that a doctor would hear his pulse accelerate in the heart’s increasing frenzy to feed him with airless drained impotent blood, until the major arteries burst. And all the while, this doctor would probably be wishing he’d hurry up.
But he thought of how he’d wanted to cover the bank guard Crowell with death, like paint, until no dangerous rays of life were shining out of him. I got this coming. He moved his trigger finger slightly. That’s all it took. And now it’s my turn under the wheel.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked Brian. Over the small window cut into the door, on the inside, ran a semicircular line of words in Old English lettering, something to read while the hydrocyanic gas swirled up toward your nostrils: Death Is The Mother Of Beauty.
“I don’t know what it means,” Brian said. “I guess you’ll find out, won’t you?”
But Bill Houston already knew.
“You wouldn’t believe how good this stuff tastes,” he told Brian, as he ate Wonder Bread with margarine-flavored lard on it and anonymous reconstituted soup. “That’s what that sign on the door is trying to say.” He gestured with his plastic spoon. “When you only got two weeks coming at you, a shit sandwich would be just fine. Even a shit sandwich without no bread.”
Brian took off his cap and rubbed his head all over briskly. He was thin and handsome with short light hair and a big Adam’s apple that made him look like the country boy he was. He didn’t smoke, and he claimed not to drink whiskey. “They’ll never get me dirty in here,” he had told Bill Houston that afternoon. “They fired twenty-three dirty staff two months back. But I’ll never go — you can’t corrupt me. I don’t have any vices you can get a pry into, if you understand what I mean.”
“I ain’t trying to corrupt you,” Bill Houston said.
“Well don’t bother trying, is what I’m getting at.”
“Are you religious?” Bill Houston asked.
“Of course I’m religious. Everybody’s religious in the Death House. The way I see it, we were meant to be here together at the end of your time.”
“Well,” Bill Houston said, “yeah.” And he did agree. But he was embarrassed to say so.