Andrew Klavan - True Crime

“Frank. I’m gonna ask the reverend here to leave for a few moments, so that you can change your clothes and take care of some things. Then he’ll be able to come back in.”

And he nodded at the reverend, smiling blandly. But he registered, in some sequestered part of his brain, the prisoner’s terror-bright eyes, his mouth working like an insect’s mouth: the dull, scared, weirdly acquiescent countenance of every dead man he had ever seen. And he was dimly aware of the low boil of dread bubbling in his own unillumined recesses. But he ignored it, as he knew well how to do.

The cage bars slid back. Flowers clasped Beachum by the shoulder. “I’ll be right outside, Frank. I’ll come back as soon as they let me.” The words came out of him steadily, but he hardly knew what he was saying.

Beachum spun on him, like a blind man, spun toward the sound of his voice. The condemned man’s eyes were so bright, so full of desperate pleading that it seemed he was trying to hold Flowers to the spot by the sheer strength of his stare alone. Flowers could not wait to get out of there, just for a minute, just to breathe for a minute. Hating himself, he was still glad of the necessity to tear himself from Beachum’s gaze and step out of the cage.

He walked quickly to the door, had to force himself to pause there and look back with a reassuring smile. Then the door was opened and he stepped through.

Coming out of the cell was like surfacing from his own grave: his relief was that great. And yet the moment he entered the hall, he saw the gurney, with its heavy leather straps; its suffocating presence; and the Strap-down guards with their stances relaxed, professional and implacable. So he could not sag or gasp in the freer air of the hall. Reverend Flowers made himself walk past these men with all the grave dignity he could muster.

He went down the hallway to the barred checkpoint and was allowed through into the medical section. There he asked for admittance to a men’s room and was shown the way by a nurse.

It wasn’t until he stood before the urinal that he could let the tension stream out of him. He leaned his head against the cinderblock wall, his dick in his fingers, his piss draining. He closed his eyes and breathed through his open mouth. “Lord, Lord, Lord,” he whispered. “Why do you let us do this to each other?”

In the cage, the Strap-down guard dropped his package on the table. To Beachum, it seemed to make a loud noise when it fell- whap -and he started. He leaned away from the package in almost mystic horror of it, staring at the smooth brown paper as if the parcel might suddenly explode.

The warden was talking to him. It was just a sound to Frank, an inexorable mutter, like the hum and motion of the clock, nudging him to the next step in the proceedings. He hadn’t done anything, and yet it just would not stop.

“Frank,” the warden said, “we’ve brought you a change of clothes, like I told you we were going to. I’m gonna ask you now to put those clothes on, including the special underpants that are provided for hygienic reasons. This is required and I have to ask you if you’re going to give me any problems about this.”

The sense of the words seemed to come to Frank moments after they were spoken, like a translation spoken over earphones. When the meaning did reach him, so many possible answers, possible reactions played themselves out in his mind that it seemed a single second couldn’t hold them all: it was the condensed time of dreams. He saw himself rebelling, screaming, hurling himself at the guard, maybe killing the guard, maybe forcing the guards to strip him naked by sheer force, maybe even breaking past them and running into the night to find Bonnie, to run off with Bonnie hand in hand … And at the same time, just as in a dream, he felt too weak even to move, even to speak, his muscles limp with fear, his will withered and yellow. Yet even now, before he had decided what he would do, before he felt he had the strength, he was coming forward, he was reaching for the package. It was just a change of clothes, that’s all; it wasn’t the thing yet, the thing itself.

So his hand closed on the brown paper and it felt as if he had made a pact between himself and this next stage, just this stage, this changing of clothes. He would do this but he was not committing to the next stage after it, the next step. He knew-but did not let himself know-that it would be like that from now on: agreeing not to the whole of the process, but to each stage, each step, step by step, in the hope that the next step would bring rebellion or rescue when, in fact, all the decisions had already been made. It would go on this way to the end.

He picked up the package, still staring at it.

“Good,” he heard the warden say.

It was the best Luther Plunkitt could do; the least he could do and the most. The official protocol required all four of the Strap-down guards to enter the cage at this point, to surround the prisoner and ensure that he put on the fresh clothes and the hygienic diaper. The message was supposed to be sharp and overwhelming: either dress yourself or we’ll do it for you. But Luther didn’t like to handle it that way. A man ought to be allowed some dignity, he felt, even if it put security at risk. A man ought to be allowed to make his own decisions whenever possible. Luther had made the professional judgment that Beachum, in the end, would decide to be a man about it and do what he had to do.

Now Luther was speaking again, not by rote, but fluently, hardly needing to think about the words, just saying what he had to say next. “It would be wise at this point, Frank, if you took the opportunity to use the toilet. For your own comfort, since there might not be an opportunity later on.”

Frank, holding the package, staring off at nothing, nodded.

Luther gestured to the Strap-down guard. The guard came out of the cage and the bars slid shut.

“I’ll wait outside,” said Luther. “The guard’ll call me when you’re done.”

Frank Beachum sat on the steel toilet in its nook in the cage. He kept his pants on, down around his ankles: it would have made him feel too naked and helpless to take them off completely. And he did not want to see himself either. Even as it was, now, when he looked down at his penis, it gave him a queasy feeling. It was shriveled to the size of a thumb joint, his scrotum so tight that his balls were almost invisible underneath. The sight made him hate himself.

There were all kinds of stories at Osage, in the cells, in the yard, about how they let you fuck your woman in Death-watch. At least you get a last piece of nookie before you go, the prisoners said. Frank didn’t know whether this was true or not. Even when Bonnie had been there, he had never felt less like having sex in his life. And now the urge was gone from his completely, gray ice where the steady red ember of it had been. He could remember, all right, as if it had happened to another man, his own past, the sweat-sheened faces of women, the gray-white ridges of sheets, the shapes of headboards, the colors of walls. He could remember sliding into some Kansas cowgirl with hilarious pleasure, ramming some Badlands bitch bone to bone in a snarling rage, looming over Bonnie like a solid sky, like nothing could rain through him and touch her, harm her: it seemed as if it had all been good, it had all been life which was good. And it was all gone, everything tangible gone. The sight of his shrunken dick made him hate himself for not having it in him anymore, for being a sickly, flaccid, castrated piece of flesh ordered to shuffle through the stages of his own death. Even his imagination had lost its visceral powers. To conjure the smell, the taste of pussy-once one of the pleasures of his leisure time-was simply beyond him now. Which sickened him like fever, a nausea of helplessness. The way the piss only dribbled and spurted out of him-that said it-that damned him in his own mind, and made him feel more sickly still.