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  4

  As it happened, however, I wasn’t at home. As it happened, I was at Bob’s home. I was in Bob’s bed, in fact. I was smoking a cigarette and considering his wife’s naked backside.

  Her name was Patricia. She had a nice backside too. Round and pink. Same as Bob’s face, come to think of it. Just now, I was noticing a long oval bruise at the base of its right globe. I guess I had put it there when I slapped her. I felt bad about it now. I hadn’t slapped her in anger, after all. She’d wanted me to do it. She liked it when I swatted her and pulled on her hair while we were having sex. It wasn’t my sort of thing, to be honest, but it was exciting enough and it made a change from the wife. That bruise, though. I guess I’d just gotten carried away, and now I felt bad.

  She rolled over. My breath stuck. After only six weeks with her, the sight of her body still did that to me. Sturdy and long and tinted rose, with flaring hips and big breasts that spilled wide when she was on her back. Cool as a statue, as her face was statue-cool: framed in auburn hair, chiseled, distant, inquiring, a little mocking too. An all-around cool customer Patricia was.

  She blinked sleepily across the bed at me. “Do you really like it?” she asked.

  “Your body?” I said. “Yeah, I’d give it a nine-seven, sure.”

  She smiled and brushed her hair back with her hand. “Sorry. I guess I fell asleep for a minute. Is it late?”

  “No. It was just a minute. We’re still all right.”

  She stretched, and let her hand come down softly on my chest. She let her fingers trail over the black hair to the spade-shaped patch of raw tissue just under the sternum. She played with it.

  “What is this anyway?” she murmured.

  “I don’t know. I’ve always had it.”

  “It’s some kind of scar. Something must’ve happened to you.”

  “I guess.”

  “Didn’t your parents ever tell you?”

  “No. My adopted parents—they didn’t know. It was there before I came to them.” I watched her fingers, the port-red polish on her nails. “It’s always been there.”

  She withdrew, and stretched again, both arms sweeping up gracefully until her clasped hands touched the headboard behind her. She yawned. “I meant the newspaper.”

  “What?”

  “When I asked if you really liked it? We were talking about the newspaper before I fell asleep. Weren’t we?”

  “Oh. Yeah. I guess we were.”

  Her arms came down. “I mean, do you? Do you really like working there?” She rolled toward me, propping her head on one hand. “The whole thing just seems so—repetitive to me somehow. After a while, I mean. It’s just the same stories over and over, isn’t it? How many times can a train wreck or a murder or an election or something be interesting?”

  It was about Bob really, see. When she was with me, it was always really about Bob.

  I lay there awhile without answering. I watched the wavering smoke of my cigarette rise toward the ceiling. The loud rhythms of cicadas in the heavy-laden trees outside drifted in to me through the open window. So did the warmth of July and the smell of the maples and the sycamores. Patricia, naked, next to me, the shadowy bedroom with our clothes thrown around it, the whole scene, softened and blurred without my glasses on: it made me hanker for something, I don’t know what. It was a sweet nostalgic feeling, sad and good. I didn’t want to talk about Bob.

  “I have a bachelor’s degree in English literature,” I said finally. “I’m not qualified to do anything else.”

  She laughed, not really a laugh, a sort of “Hmmm,” always cool. “Bob takes it all so seriously,” she said.

  “Well. Bob is a pretty serious guy.”

  I saw her lips arch mischievously. “Do you know what he says about you?”

  “Yeah. More or less.”

  “He says you’re just in it for some kind of sick thrill. He says you get some kind of ugly … kick out of watching people suffer: murder trials and fires and scandals and things. He says even if you see some woman screaming while her children die in a burning building, it just turns you on. It’s just a story to you.”

  “Me and the readers both,” I said. “That’s what sells those papers.”

  “He says you don’t care about the human suffering involved. You don’t care about the real issues.”

  I smiled into the shadows. “Issues,” I said.

  “He complains about you a lot, you know. He doesn’t like you. He says Alan Mann just hired you because you were his friend.”

  My smile faded away. So did my nostalgic hankering. That was about all the Bob I could take for now. I turned over, reached over slowly and cupped my hand on his wife’s breast. I felt the calming movement of the liquid flesh again. “Maybe we oughta wash out the ashtray,” I told her softly. “Air out the room too, or he’ll smell the smoke when he comes home.”

  She lifted her chin haughtily. “Oh ho. What’s all this?”

  “Nothing. You gotta get to work. I gotta get home. To my wife and kid.”

  “You’re not going to tell me how awful we’re being, are you?”

  “I don’t know. I might. Bob is a decent guy, Patricia.”

  “Oh, please, Ev! Don’t. I know he’s a decent guy. Why do you think I married him?”

  I drew my hand down from her breast, circled it over her belly. “He’s a good newspaperman too,” I said. “He’s gonna be a big deal someday. We just see things differently, that’s all.”

  She frowned. Her lips trembled as if she were about to burst into tears. But she didn’t. I think she just thought she was supposed to.

  “All right,” she said. “So this all just stinks, right? What we’re doing.”

  I smiled dreamily, mesmerized by the downward spiral of my hand. “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “We’re just two simple people swept away in a whirlwind of passion.”

  Patricia went Hmmm again.

  “Something like that,” I said.

  She took my hand, stopped it as it touched the first curlicues of red hair. She met my eyes. “Look. It’s all right. It’s not like I love you or anything.”

  I smiled. “Thanks. I don’t love you too.”

  She kept my hand, held it in both of hers. She toyed with the fingers thoughtfully and I saw all her attempts to be conscience-stricken pass away. That mocking, wicked look came back over her, the corners of her mouth uplifting. “Why did you leave New York anyway?”

  “Christ,” I said. I laughed. Bob again. I dropped, sighing, onto my back. I resigned myself to the game.

  “Really,” Patricia said. “Why did you? Bob’s always wondering.”

  “Oh, well, if Bob is wondering …”

  “He heard you were fired off your paper. He says no one else in the whole city would hire you.”

  “I was. No one would.”

  “So how come?”

  “All right. You’re not gonna tell him though?”

  She giggled, nibbling on my fingertips. “No. How could I?” Then she rolled into me. And I could feel her cheek against my chest and her breasts against me. I could smell her hair and I wished … I don’t know what I wished. I wished something. “So tell,” she said.

  “I got caught in the supply room boffing a seventeen-year-old desk assistant.”

  She reared off me. “No!”

  “She turned out to be the daughter of the paper’s owner.”

  Her mouth opened in mock horror. “You bad man!”

  “He blackballed me.”

  “I don’t blame him. What did your wife say?”

  I winced, grimaced at the memory. There is nothing quite like that first time your wife discovers you’ve cheated on her. Somehow, you always think she knows or suspects or something. You don’t realize how much she trusted you until you see the coldcocked hollowness of betrayal in her eyes.

  “Well,” I said. “We’d just had the kid, you know. It was tough on her, but she wanted to keep us together. And when Alan said he’d take me
on, I guess she figured, you know, another town, another chance.” My backstory.

  “You bad man,” Patricia said again. Shaking her head, she returned her cheek to my chest. I held her and breathed the summer’s air. “I don’t know about you,” she said after a moment. “First the owner’s daughter, now the editor’s wife.”

  “You left out a few.”

  “I’ll just bet I did. The mayor’s sister maybe? The police chief’s secretary?”

  “The prosecutor’s.”

  “I’m beginning to detect some sort of hostility against authority figures here.”

  “Yeah. Plus a hard-on that won’t quit. It’s a dangerous combination.”

  She laughed—Hmmm—and murmured. Ran her hand down my body. Shifted against me, so she could look at my face.

  “And is that what you’re going to say about me?” she asked. “In the next city, with someone else.” She made her voice deep, imitation-macho. “ ‘Oh, I got caught boffing the editor’s wife. You know how that is. Ho ho ho.’ ”

  I turned onto one shoulder so I could wrap my arms around her, press my face to hers. “Listen,” I said, “if I get caught boffing you, I don’t know how many more cities will have me.”

  “Ooh,” she said huskily, rubbing her nose against mine, “that makes it all sound very danger—”

  The phone rang, a startling blast from the other table, the one on her side of the bed. She sighed. “Yuch,” she said. She reached backward for the receiver. I released her. She settled onto her back, the phone to her ear. “Hello?”

  She didn’t make any other sound—she didn’t gasp or anything—she was much too cool for that. But I heard the disaster happening all the same. There was some rhythm in her hesitation, some desperate impatience in her voice that gave it away.

  “All right,” she said. “Yes, yes—yes. All right.”

  She set the phone down again without saying good-bye. She lay back next to me and closed her eyes. The pause was dramatic enough, which was maybe what she was going for. I can never tell, in these emotional situations, how much is real and how much is played for effect.

  “You won’t believe this,” she said. And then she delivered the punch line on an upturning note of surprise. “That was my husband.”

  “Bob?” I asked stupidly.

  She turned her head on the pillow and gazed at me. “He was looking for you.”

  PART TWO

  POTATO

  CHIPS

  1

  At about ten-thirty, Luther Plunkitt, the Superintendent of Osage Correctional Facility, walked into the Deathwatch cell. The duty officer stood up behind his typewriter. A new guard since eight: Benson, in his thirties, a veteran of these procedures. A good man; took his job seriously. Luther nodded at him and turned toward the cage, toward the prisoner.

  Beachum was sitting at his small table now behind the wall of bars. A lone, small, stark figure against the white cinderblock background. Several blank sheets of paper lay on the table with a Bic pen lying slantwise across them. Beachum’s hands rested at the pages’ edge, encircling a Styrofoam coffee cup. A cigarette, held between two of his fingers, sent a zigzag of smoke to the ceiling. His face was lifted to Luther. Drawn, mournful. The eyes, deep and steady, meeting Luther’s eyes.

  Funny, Luther thought, gazing through the bars. Funny the look that comes into their faces.

  He recognized the prisoner’s expression. He remembered it, always the same, from other executions, from Nam, from Hue. The warden had known a lot of men who died at Hue and every one of them, before it happened, before they even caught the slug—they got that look. Their mouths slackened just a little and something came into their eyes, down deep, something slow and torpid, something weirdly willing somehow. As if Death had already risen up like a cobra in their minds and mesmerized them. After you saw that look on a man’s face, it didn’t matter what you did for him. You could try to cover him, take him off point, surround him, send him to the rear. The shell found him, or the mine or whatever. One boy had even drowned in an old crater that had filled up with mud.

  Luther Plunkitt and Frank Beachum looked at each other steadily through the bars, and Luther knew as surely as he stood there that Beachum was not going to be reprieved tonight.

  Luther smiled, a bland smile, his usual bland smile. He was a man in his sixties. A small man in his natty black Sunday suit, no more than five foot six or seven, but husky and solid with a little too much flesh on him if anything. He had a square, doughy face capped with silver hair. That meaningless smile rarely left it. The smile drew attention away from the marbly gray eyes set deep in the spongy folds beneath his brow. In fact, with his smile, with his soft, amiable manner, people sometimes didn’t notice those marbly eyes at all. But after fifteen years in the military, after ten years with the state police, after seventeen years working one prison or another, Luther, believe me, could be a marbly kind of a guy.

  “Morning, Frank,” he said.

  “Mr. Plunkitt,” said Beachum softly. He continued to hold himself very still. He did not bring his cigarette or his coffee to his lips. He held them loosely as if he hadn’t the energy to grip or lift them.

  “Anything I can get for you? Anything you need?” Luther asked.

  “No,” said Beachum. “Not that I can think of.”

  Luther had one hand in his pants pocket. It was holding on hard to his keys. He gestured easily with the other as he spoke. No one, he knew, could have told what he was feeling. “I hear you got your wife and daughter coming in again today.”

  Beachum nodded. “Yeah.”

  “That’s good. Bonnie her name is, your wife?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And the little girl is …?”

  Beachum coughed, cleared his throat. “Gail.”

  “Gail. Very pretty, very nice name.” Beachum didn’t answer. Luther couldn’t blame him. He pressed his lips together, pressed on. “Well, anything you need for them you just let me know,” he said. “You let the CO know and we’ll take care of it for you.”

  “I appreciate that, Mr. Plunkitt,” Beachum said quietly. “Thank you.”

  For a second, in the pause that followed, Luther’s glance fell to the prisoner’s cigarette. The ash had grown long. And now, it dropped to the table of its own weight. And still, Beachum didn’t raise the cigarette, didn’t move his hands at all.

  It bothered Luther somehow. He had to look away. He forced his voice to sound brisk and businesslike. He stepped forward toward the cage bars, his thin smile in place, his open hand moving.

  “There’s some matters I gotta discuss with you,” he said. “Figure we do it first thing, get it out of the way.”

  Beachum nodded. “All right.”

  “Your dinner tonight, for one thing. Anything special you want? It can be pretty much anything you want.”

  “Steak …” Beachum cleared his throat. “Steak and french fries, I guess,” he said. “A beer would be nice.”

  Luther inclined his chin. “No problem. We’ll see what we can do.” He took another small step forward. He was within reach of the cage bars now. A more intimate distance. He lowered his voice. “Now about your personal effects and belongings …”

  Luther’s eyes flicked down to the prisoner’s hands again as another ash fell from his cigarette, unattended. His damn coffee must be cold by now, Luther thought, annoyed with himself for feeling so shaken.

  “My wife’ll take em,” said Beachum.

  “And your remains? Does that go for your remains too?” Luther asked. “If she can’t afford the funeral expenses …”

  “No. No. Her church raised some money. It’s all right.”

  “So your wife will be claiming your remains then.”

  Drawing a breath, Beachum straightened slowly in his plastic chair. It was the first sign he’d given of what had to be going on inside him. That little movement—that rattled Luther too. He felt a weight in his stomach, felt it twist and drag.

  “Yes, s
ir, that’s right,” said the prisoner.

  “Okay.” Luther felt his hand—the one in his pocket, on his keys—growing warm and damp. He brought it out and laced it with the other, hanging them both before him like a preacher at a graveside. He went into the next order of business, speaking briskly as before.

  “I want to give you some idea here of what’s going to happen tonight so there are no surprises,” he said. This was a standard part of the protocol now. In one of the discussions they held after each procedure, the Osage execution team had decided it would help matters along to keep the condemned man thoroughly informed. Otherwise, with everyone so jumpy as the hour of execution approached, any little deviation from what the prisoner expected would tend to startle him, and might cause trouble. “We’ll have to ask your visitors to leave at six P.M.,” Luther went on. “So you might want to inform them of that in case they’re expecting to stay till ten. You’ll be given your dinner and a fresh set of clothes. There’s a sort of plastic underwear thing we have to ask you to put on. No one’ll be able to see it or anything but we need it for sanitary purposes. We’ll make certain that it’s removed before your wife claims your body. After about ten-thirty tonight, you’ll be able to have your spiritual advisor down here with you if you want, which I believe you’ve requested.”

  The prisoner tried to answer, but couldn’t. He closed his eyes a moment and swallowed. Luther went on.

  “The gurney is actually brought right down here to the cell, oh, about half an hour before the procedure. You’ll be taken into the procedure room and they’ll hook an EKG up to you and the intravenous lines at that time. But nothing’s gonna happen early or anything. We start at 12:01 and right up to then, we’ll be monitoring the phones and we got open lines to the attorney general and the governor and those’ll be checked right through to make sure they’re in working order. You got any questions about any of that?”

  Beachum let out his breath as if he’d been holding it. “No.”