‘Then I suggest you stay onshore, at least until your will is signed, witnessed, and notarized.’
Judge Beecher gives the young man a wintry smile. ‘You needn’t worry about that, son,’ he says. He looks toward the window, and the Gulf beyond. His face is long and thoughtful. ‘Those names … I can see them yet, jostling each other for place on that bloodred dune. Two days later, a TWA plane on its way to Miami crashed in the ’Glades. All one hundred and nineteen souls on board were killed. The passenger list was in the paper. I recognized some of the names. I recognized many of them.’
‘You saw this. You saw those names.’
‘Yes. For several months after that I stayed away from the island, and I promised myself I would stay away for good. I suppose drug addicts make the same promises to themselves about their dope, don’t they? And, like them, I eventually weakened and resumed my old habit. Now, Counselor: do you understand why I called you out here to finish the work on my will, and why it had to be tonight?’
Wayland doesn’t believe a word of it, but like many fantasies, this one has its own internal logic. It’s easy enough to follow. The Judge is ninety, his once ruddy complexion has gone the color of clay, his formerly firm step has become shuffling and tentative. He’s clearly in pain, and he’s lost weight he can’t afford to lose.
‘I suppose that today you saw your name in the sand,’ Wayland says.
Judge Beecher looks momentarily startled, and then he smiles. It is a terrible smile, transforming his narrow, pallid face into a death’s-head grin.
‘Oh no,’ he says. ‘Not mine.’
Thinking of W.F. Harvey
Life is full of Big Questions, isn’t it? Fate or destiny? Heaven or hell? Love or attraction? Reason or impulse?
Beatles or Stones?
For me it was always the Stones – the Beatles were just too soft once they became Jupiter in the solar system of pop music. (My wife used to refer to Sir Paul McCartney as ‘old dog eyes,’ and that kind of summed up how I felt.) But the early Beatles … ah, they played honest rock, and I still listen to those old tracks – mostly covers – with love. Sometimes I’m even moved to get up and dance a little.
One of my favorites was their version of the Larry Williams classic, ‘Bad Boy,’ with John Lennon singing lead in a hoarse, urgent voice. I particularly liked the exhorted punchline: ‘Now Junior, behave yourself!’ At some point, I decided I wanted to write a story about a bad little kid who moved into the neighborhood. Not a kid who was the devil’s spawn, not a kid who was possessed by some ancient demon à la The Exorcist, but just bad for bad’s sake, bad to the bone, the apotheosis of all the bad little kids who ever were. I saw him in shorts, and with a propeller beanie on his head. I saw him always causing trouble and absolutely never behaving himself.
This is the story that grew around that little kid: an evil version of Sluggo, Nancy’s friend from the funny pages. An electronic version has appeared in France and also in Germany, where ‘Bad Boy’ was no doubt a part of the Beatles’ Star Club repertoire. This is its first publication in English.
Bad Little Kid
1
The prison was twenty miles from the nearest small city, on an otherwise empty expanse of prairie where the wind blew almost all the time. The main building was a looming stone horror perpetrated on the landscape at the beginning of the twentieth century. Growing from either side were concrete cellblocks built one by one over the previous forty-five years, mostly with federal money that began flowing during the Nixon years and just never stopped.
At some distance from the main body of the prison was a smaller building. The prisoners called this adjunct Needle Manor. Jutting from one side of it was an outdoor corridor forty yards long, twenty feet wide, and enclosed in heavy chainlink fencing: the Chicken Run. Each Needle Manor inmate – currently there were seven – was allowed two hours in the Chicken Run each day. Some walked. Some jogged. Most simply sat with their backs against the chainlink, either staring up at the sky or looking at the low grassy ridge that broke the landscape a quarter of a mile to the east. Sometimes there was something to look at. More often there was nothing. Almost always there was the wind. For three months of the year, the Chicken Run was hot. The rest of the time it was cold. In the winter, it was frigid. The inmates usually chose to go out even then. There was the sky to look at, after all. Birds. Sometimes deer feeding along the crest of that low ridge, free to go where they pleased.
At the center of Needle Manor was a tiled room containing a Y-shaped table and a few rudimentary pieces of medical equipment. Set in one wall was a window with drawn curtains. When pulled back, they disclosed an observation chamber no bigger than the living room of a suburban tract house with a dozen hard plastic chairs where guests could view the Y-shaped table. On the wall was a sign reading KEEP SILENT AND MAKE NO GESTURES DURING THE PROCEDURE.
There were an even dozen cells in Needle Manor. Beyond them was a guardroom. Beyond the guardroom was a monitoring station which was manned 24/7. Beyond the monitoring station was a consultation room, where a table on the inmate side was separated from the table on the visitor side by thick Plexiglas. There were no phones; inmates conversed with their loved ones or legal representatives through a circle of small punched holes, like those in the mouthpiece of an old-fashioned telephone.
Leonard Bradley sat down on his side of this communication port and opened his briefcase. He put a yellow legal pad and a Uniball pen on the table. Then he waited. The second hand on his watch made three revolutions and started a fourth before the door leading to the inner regions of Needle Manor opened with a loud clack of withdrawing bolts. Bradley knew all the guards by now. This one was McGregor. Not a bad guy. He was holding George Hallas by the arm. Hallas’s hands were free, but a steel snake of chain rattled along the floor between his ankles. There was a wide leather belt around the waist of his orange prison jumper, and when he sat down on his side of the glass, McGregor clipped another chain from a steel loop on the belt to a steel loop on the back of the chair. He locked it, gave it a tug, then tipped Bradley a two-finger salute.
‘Afternoon, Counselor.’
‘Afternoon, Mr McGregor.’
Hallas said nothing.
‘You know the deal,’ McGregor said. ‘As long as you want today. Or as long as you can take him, at least.’
‘I know.’
Ordinarily, lawyer–client consultations were limited to an hour. Beginning a month before the client’s scheduled trip into the room with the Y-shaped table, consultation time was upped to ninety minutes, during which the lawyer and his increasingly squirrelly partner in this state-mandated death waltz would discuss a diminishing number of shitty options. During the last week, there was no set time limit. This was true for close relatives as well as legal counsel, but Hallas’s wife had divorced him only weeks after his conviction, and there were no children. He was alone in the world except for Len Bradley, but seemed to want little to do with any of the appeals – and consequent delays – Bradley had suggested.
Until today, that was.
He’ll talk to you, McGregor had told him after a brief ten-minute consultation the month before, one where Hallas’s end of the conversation had mostly been no and no.
When it gets close, he’ll talk to you plenty. They get scared, see? They forget all about how they wanted to walk into the injection room with their heads up and their shoulders squared. They start figuring out it’s not a movie, they’re really going to die, and then they want to try every appeal in the book.