Frankie noticed that he was wearing bowling shoes with both laces neatly tied.
‘They ain’t takin’ him no place but the dentist’s chair,’ Applejack grumbled irritably at Frankie’s side.
Yet Frankie was to recall with awe, months later, those neatly tied bowling-league shoes still faintly touched with chalk.
‘A guy got somethin’ like that on his mind ’n he jokes about goin’ to the chair ’n ties his laces like he had a big-league bowlin’ match comin’ up,’ Frankie complained to Katz.
‘He has,’ Applejack decided dryly, ‘he got to bowl over six thousand volts from a settin’ position. They’re puttin’ him down in the deadhouse Monday week.’
Little Lester’s last appeal had been denied.
When, two days later, Lester was taken into the prison yard for a workout Frankie and Applejack watched, from the ground-level laundry window. Lester and three others were being marched out there like stock. It was strange that the other three, though only small-time thieves, would draw a certain prestige about the prison for having been exercised beside the condemned youth.
It was three o’clock of a May afternoon, the hour when school doors open and the city’s children ramble home down a thousand walks with books and crayons under their arms and their shoelaces tied into small, neat bows. A few more days till summer vacation and out in the prison yard a great crane, straining skyward to see the first sign of summer, caught only a glint of rusted iron sunlight instead. These were days of clouds swollen gray with promise of rain – only to burst emptily and reveal the deepest sort of blue drifting there all the time. Against the concrete wall Frankie saw a single con sitting on an upturned orange crate looking, under his winter pallor, like someone who’d seen all there was to see of grief, in prison or out.
That yard is laid out like somebody’s country garden; there’s a duck pond and a chicken house and a pale blue birdhouse. Beyond the wall rises a two-story-high legend:
BUDINTZ COAL
One Price to All
While directly across the way from Budintz that company’s chief competitor offers its own appeaclass="underline"
RUSHMOORE COAL
Fastest Delivery
Cheapest in Years
Along rows where, in summer, vegetables would grow, the four cons stood under the eyes of four guards. Behind them a machine gun’s eyes peered from the sentry’s tower.
Without uniformity the cons touched their toes with their fingertips, bending awkwardly from the waist. Three of them had to stand spread-legged to do so. Lester, Frankie saw with an odd pride, touched the toes without either bending the knees or spread-legging. Touched the tips of the shoes’ neat bows with the condemned tips of condemned wrists.
A man no taller, not so old, neither uglier nor handsomer than himself. A man like any man, with a bit less luck than most. A punk like any punk. Clean-shaven, vain of his heavy head of hair. A youth much like any youth who has seen night games at Comiskey Park, shot six-no-count pool, applauded a strip tease on South State, played nickel-and-dime poker in the back of a neighborhood bar, crapped out on an eight-dollar pass or carried a girl’s photograph in his wallet one whole spring. Who perhaps had had a drink on the house from time to time and worn bright new swimming trunks to the Oak Street Beach some summer afternoon when he’d owned lake, water, sky, beach, sand, sun, the bright blue weather and every girl of all the girls that had passed so yearningly by.
‘He just does caliskonectics is all,’ Applejack informed Frankie. ‘Don’t worry, they ain’t gonna let him climb the horizontal bars. He might get too good at it.’
‘If it was me I’d tell ’em to let me skip the rope,’ Frankie said, because he wanted to say something funny too. Only Applejack didn’t see anything funny. ‘What good would that do?’ he demanded to know. ‘You’d still have to beat the chair. Nobody gets the rope in Illinois any more.’
Yet Frankie wasn’t quite as wrong as Applejack Katz thought. There was still one fugitive on Illinois’s books that would die by the rope when he was caught. Down in the sheriff’s basement, among slot machines confiscated from half a hundred roadhouses and roulette wheels that once had whirled for Guzik, Nitti and Three-Fingered White, stood the gallows that waited, year in and year out, for Terrible Tommy O’Connor’s return.
Not many knew that still, behind the Board of Health Building, where once the County Jail had stood, the death house from which Terrible Tommy had escaped remained. Though the building about it had long been demolished, the little brick room waited, in the middle of a parking lot, for Tommy to come back. The law forbade the room, as it forbade the gallows, to be demolished until O’Connor was hanged. It looked like a long wait.
For it well might be that the little room would be the great city’s most immemorial monument, more lasting than the Art Institute lions on the boulevard, Bushman in his cage near the Lincoln Park Lagoon or Colonel McCormick in his bomb shelter below the river.
‘Just tryin’ to make a little joke,’ Frankie apologized for his reference to skipping the rope. And the pale gray laundried light wavered, with an unwavering wonder, along the laundered walls.
‘I think the stuff is almost done,’ Applejack confided that night to Frankie after a long visit to the ventilator. ‘Give it one more day.’
With the pungent reek of the stuff on his breath as he spoke.
Each man knew the hour. Each man knew the day. Lester had not slept well the night before, the word was going about. He had wakened and played casino with the night screw through the bars. The night screw had taught him the game, the punk had grown to like it. Somebody who had it right from the night screw himself said that Lester had had one good last laugh at some misplay the guard had made. He’d been happy because he’d beaten the guard at the guard’s own game.
Yet when the warden had gone to the death cell, the word went around, to read the death warrant, Lester had looked at him without fear and said, ‘Wait a minute, Frank, I want to finish this cup of coffee.’
Such calmness seemed somehow more terrible to Frankie than if they’d said Lester was lying on his bunk in a dead-cold nightmare sweating out the hours. Instead he was sitting there killing the hours with cards just as Frankie had killed so many; while a clock had ticked away below a luminous crucifix.
There were no luminous Christs for Lester. Neither Christs nor clocks nor calendars.
Yet each man knew the hour. As each man knew the day.
But what if the laces broke on the way? Would he stop to tie them – or demand a new pair before he took another step? It seemed so wrong to trouble tying laces at such an hour, to comb and oil your hair and make corny jokes about going to the dentist’s chair. It seemed so wrong to laugh because you caught a winning deuce against one of the men who was going to help strip you for the cold white slab. To brush your teeth or write a letter to your mother in California.
‘If that letter goes out tonight,’ Frankie reckoned, ‘he’ll be buried by the time his old lady reads it ’n he knows that when he’s writin’ it ’n when he tells the screw to send it air mail ’n seal it good – “it’s somethin’ personal.”’
Would he have to add that same old crack, used twice already in that same cell, ‘This is certainly going to be a good lesson to me’?
‘One more white shirt is all you’ll wear,’ Frankie told Lester, though Lester lay many cells away. ‘Shine your shoes like you’re goin’ to get married. Five’ll get you ten, you forget your act when they fit you into them tight black tights.’
Frankie lay on his cot half fevered with the idea of Lester’s trip to the chair, suddenly uncertain that he himself had really missed it after all. In his mind Little Lester and himself had merged.