True Crime (20 page)

Frank, standing where he was, shuddered once, his whole frame rippling. He moved his hand as if to cover his face, but his raised arm froze and the hand trembled in front of him. Finally, it fell. He slumped, his head hanging, his shoulders caving in. Like that, and with his back bowed, he shuffled, in turning, like an old man. He lifted his head wearily and looked at Bonnie.

She was sitting on the cot, as she had been. Very still, her hands folded in her lap now, her head slightly lowered. She was not crying, and her face was quiet. Though the lines of her brow, her cheeks, her mouth, were all drawn down, she wasn’t frowning. They fell as of their own weight and it made her look very old as well. Her eyes looked old when she lifted them to her husband.

“This is more than I can bear,” she said in a low, clear voice. “I thought God wouldn’t send me more than I could bear. But this is more …”

Frank nodded. She lowered her head again, He shuffled to the chair and settled himself into it, gripping the back for support.

“I thought God never sent you more than you could bear,” she said, staring down at the floor. “This is more.”

Frank sat in silence, his eyes wandering, seeing nothing. He wiped his lips with his palm. He let his breath out slowly through pursed lips, like a man recovering from a blow.
“It’ll …” His voice failed. He ran his hand across his mouth again. “It’ll be all right,” he said.

Bonnie laughed once, a terrible sound. An expression of annoyance crossed her face. Then she shook her head and looked away from him, looked off into space.

“Maybe the appeal,” she said softly to no one. “Maybe they’ll listen this time. I mean, they can’t just go ahead and murder an innocent man. Maybe …”

“There’s no appeal,” said Frank, his eyes wandering the room.

“…  at the last minute, they’ll have to see. I mean, this is still America, for heaven’s sake. Isn’t it? You were just going to the store. I just asked you to go to the store for me. They’re not just going to take a man, a good, decent man …”

“They turned the appeal down, Bonnie.”

“…  and execute him. That wouldn’t make any sense. All these technical things they talk about. In the end, don’t you think in the end, maybe they’ll just say …”

Frank straightened himself in the chair, focusing on his wife finally. “Bonnie,” he said quietly.

“…  they’ll just flat-out
see.”

“Bonnie, for God’s sake.”

“They’ll have to see. It’s not a matter of some—some technical thing. It’s an injustice. An injustice. The lawyers will make them understand …”

“There’s no appeal, Bonnie,” said Frank, his voice rising. “They turned the appeal down.”

“…  that they’ve made a terrible …” Bonnie stopped. Her lips moved a moment, as if she would go on, but she didn’t. She closed her eyes.

“That’s what Tryon was calling about before,” Frank said.

Bonnie didn’t answer. She didn’t move. She didn’t open
her eyes. Frank watched her.
She knew
, he thought.
Of course she knew
.

After that, for a while, they went on as they were, seated where they were, apart from each other, staring off. The clock moved round and they felt the motion of the clock, the burden of its motion, heavy on their backs and in their stomachs. Finally, Frank—unable to stand the loneliness anymore—pushed himself to his feet. He walked the few steps to the cot wearily, and sat down beside his wife. After another moment or two, he put his arm around her. She rested her head on his shoulder.

O
h, ye Tempo of the Gods! You car! You car of cars! I ask you: Is there anything on earth a man can’t accomplish when he and his automobile become one? That drive down to Osage Prison—I tell you, it was the best thing that had happened to me all day. It was the first good thing that had happened to me at all since I had left Patricia. The wind at the windows. The music on the radio. The cigarettes—no end of cigarettes and each one tasting better than the last. And the speed. Mostly the speed. I had less than fifty minutes to make the hour-long drive and, once I climbed onto the highway, I just floored it. And the old bird flew. It took a while to work up to it, I admit. But after that—it flew. Traffic didn’t matter. There was traffic just outside the city, lots of semis rumbling cab to cab like elephants on parade. But it didn’t matter. I went past them, between them, never slowing, going faster, so fast sometimes I felt I must have vaporized and traveled right through the bulk of them, the Tempo’s atoms vibrating between theirs. And the cops didn’t matter. Where were the cops? It was sixty miles of open road; speed traps everywhere—there must have been. But where were they? The cops with their dark glasses, with their radar? They were nowhere to be found. Because they couldn’t see me. That’s why. Their radar guns couldn’t pick me up. They just registered a zip as I went past, just a little green breath of electronic light.
Must’ve been the wind
, they
said to themselves.
Must have been dust blowing by in the wind
.

I switched on an easy listening station. A secret vice of mine, that music. Like treacle, like warm mushy stew on a windy day. I love it. Andy Williams, yes; Perry Como; Eydie Gorme. I sang along with them. I sang “I Wish You Love” at the top of my lungs. It poured out of me. Smoke and song poured out of me together, filled the car. “Love Is Funny,” I sang. And the crowd went wild. Mile after mile, cigarette after cigarette, song after song. “It Must Be Him.” “Close to You.” The classics. And no one to say me nay. No one to ask how I could listen to that music? And how many cigarettes was that? Whoops—there was no one there to ask me that either. Or how I could drive so fast. Or how I could cheat on my wife or neglect my kid. Or whether Frank Beachum was really innocent or whether Bob’s marriage was ruined by my fault. People at the side of the road might have wondered these things, they might have wanted to ask, they might have raised their hands to catch my attention. But I was gone already. Zippo. I was a memory. They didn’t stand a chance.

And I couldn’t have seen them anyway. They would have been part of the general blur, the blur of the roadside, the scenery, a changing texture merely, a shifting smear of colors at the window, slums, suburbs, farmlands blending one into the next. Hardly scenery at all. It hardly had time to be scenery. It was just
seen …
and then history. Only ahead of me, the raveling road, the lane markings gobbled furiously by my front fender, stayed visible, kept up the pace of the driving eye.

Finally, in the jet-fire of my wake I guess, it all just melted down and I was surrounded as I drove by a running bland absence: the white flats surrounding the prison. The first roadblock shot up out of the vanishing point and filled the windshield an instant later. I had arrived. As Jack Jones
and I finished our rendition of “Polka Dots and Moonbeams,” I glanced down at the clock on the dash. It was ten minutes to four o’clock. I had made the drive in forty minutes. I had averaged, by my figuring, approximately six hundred and seventy-two thousand miles per hour. But maybe it was just one of those Einstein things: maybe I had arrived before I even left town.

The prison came over the horizon-line, looking, at first, like a feature of the white stone, some chance-in-a-million formation. The low gray walls, the high gray towers. As if the rock had thrown up some sorcerer’s castle from the Europe of fantasy. Then the walls were surrounding me. The guards in their towers were passing over me with their slow, swiveling gazes. The barrels of their guns were passing over me. I had arrived.

I parked in the wide visitors’ lot in the corner reserved for press and tossed my beeper in the glove compartment so I wouldn’t have to hand it over inside. As I stepped out of the car, a man in a dark jacket and slacks materialized beside me. A tall man with a thick moustache. He was a case officer, he said. He would lead the way.

I followed him. I was excited now. The drive had cleared my mind and I was excited the way I had been at Pocum’s. This was it, I told myself as we went through the visitor’s checkpoint. This is the real stuff. The prison. The Death House. As in
Death. Execution. Brrrrrrr
. God, I love journalism.

We didn’t go through the cell blocks. We went down white halls, past office doors. But I could feel the prison around me. I could feel the thick walls hemming me in. I could feel I was descending into the place, like a man being lowered into deep water. We entered a stark corridor. A gate of bars slid open before us as a guard watched from a booth nearby. We passed through and the bars slid closed behind us with a clanking thud and I could feel the jolt of it in my
belly. Deeper and deeper. No free air to breathe, no fast way out. The prison seemed to be closing over our heads. I tried to look nonchalant about it, but it was all very thrilling indeed.

The case officer led me through more bars and then through a heavy door and into a little courtyard smothered with the afternoon heat. We crossed the yard into another building.
The Death House
, I thought.
Death Row. The Last Mile. Brrrrr
.

We traveled down a hall of windows to another row of bars. We passed through and down another hall where every door pulsed at me with significance. I noticed I had to go to the bathroom now but I didn’t want to ask, I didn’t want to interrupt the moment. We came before a door with a guard sitting outside.
This is it
, I thought.
Deathwatch
. I tried to look jaded and nonchalant.

I glanced up wryly at my moustachioed guide. “Nice place,” I said. “Remind me never to commit a violent crime.”

My companion looked down at me deadpan. “They lie, you know,” he said.

“What?”

“The prisoners. That’s what they do. Every word they say is a lie.”

I nodded. “Everyone lies, pal,” I said. “I’m just here to write it down.”

The guard stood up and opened the Deathwatch door.

Y
ou’ve got fifteen minutes, Mr. Everett,” said the guard in the Death-watch cell. “By order of Mr. Plunkitt. Fifteen minutes exactly.” I didn’t answer. I looked around me. At the cinderblock wall with the white paint smeared and congealed across its rough surface. At the guard’s long table and the typewriter there and the clock hanging above him, turning round. The cage and the dull glint of the bars under the fluorescents. The table within, covered with empty paper cups and a tinfoil ashtray overflowing. The rumpled bedding on the cot. The glaring nakedness of the metal toilet fastened to the back wall. And the man and the woman. Standing inside the cage. They had risen from the cot to greet me, his arm around her shoulders. My eyes rested finally on them.

This is it
, I told myself.
Deathwatch
. But I really didn’t have to tell myself anymore. The sickly sadness, the sickly fear were like swamp gas in the bright room, like a miasma, you could breathe them in.

I studied Frank Beachum’s face through the bars. I would have to be able to describe him in my story—my human interest sidebar—so I studied his face. I saw weariness there mostly. Weariness, and a terror deadened by dazed incomprehension. But mostly weariness. That’s how I remember him anyway. Narrow, craggy, rugged features that used to be strong but were drained of everything now but that, but weariness. With his long body held nearly erect by
an almost palpable effort of will, he looked like a cancer victim, like a hunger victim, like a sleepless pilgrim coming over one more rise of an endless, endless vale. Bone-weariness, soul-weariness, weariness past imagining. When I remember Frank Beachum I remember that—that first impression—more than the last one; more than the way he was that final time I saw him.

He stood still, with his arm around his wife, and she clasped her hands together before her. They might have been any thirtyish couple out for a Sunday constitutional after church. Until you noticed how white her knuckles were, how hard her hands clutched each other. Her small, sagging face—aged, like some false antique it seemed, as if by blows—was unnaturally lit by the fever in her eyes. A horrible brightness—of insane hope, I thought, and helplessness.

The guard—Benson—pulled a chair up and set it down for me in front of the cage. I came toward it slowly. Beachum stuck his hand through the bars. I shook it. His palm was dry and cold. I didn’t like touching him.

“Mr. Everett,” he said. “I’m Frank Beachum. Have …” The words came from him thickly, painfully. They dropped like lumps of clay. It was an effort for him even to speak, he was that worn down. He gestured to the chair.

“Yeah. Thanks,” I said.

I sat and pulled my notebook out, my pen. Beachum gently disengaged himself from his wife and lowered himself into the chair at the table in front of me. Mrs. Beachum sank back, sank down again onto the cot. Her bright eyes never left me.

I was fiddling with my cigarettes by this time. I jerked one halfway out of the pack and offered it to Beachum. He held up a hand. “I got em,” he said. He removed one from
his shirt pocket. I could hear my heart thudding as we both lit up on opposite sides of the bars.

We lifted our eyes to each other and filled the white space between us with gray smoke. “How’s … that girl?” he said. I didn’t understand him. He forced out more. “That other. Michelle … something. She had some accident.”

“Oh. Oh, yeah,” I said. “She was in a car crash. It was pretty bad. The last I heard she was in a coma.” I realized I’d forgotten to ask Alan for the latest details. My mind had been too much on my own troubles.

“I’m sorry,” Frank Beachum said. “To hear it.”

I nodded, faintly ashamed. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, it was pretty bad.”

Then I was silent. So was he, and we both smoked. I could feel the movement of the clock on the wall behind me. It made the hairs on the back of my neck bristle.
Jesus
, I thought.
The poor bastard. Jesus
. It was a bad few seconds. The excitement, the need to piss, the pity and the infectious fear: It was hard to get my thoughts in order. What was it I’d wanted to ask him anyway? My assignment was to talk about his feelings, give the readers a sense of the place, some vicarious Death House thrill to enjoy over their raisin bran.
Don’t get into the case too much. We’ve already covered that
. That’s what Bob had told me. And as for the rest: my own suspicions felt suddenly confused and inarticulate. I crossed my legs, trying to quiet my bladder, trying to focus my mind.