Robert Walker - Unnatural Instinct

Purdy walked around to the front of the van and stared back at the homeless man. Purdy simply waved at the old prophet, climbed into the van, put his keys into the ignition, turned the motor on, and then slowly pulled away. The homeless man had already disappeared into the gray walls.

“ Well, Jimmy Lee… our undertaking's been blessed… blessed by Ol' John the Baptist himself,” the old Iowa farmer muttered as he arrived at the ticket booth, where he calmly paid his bill and continued on, the attendant so strung out on drugs that he had seen nothing and had heard less. Purdy, at Jimmy's urging, had brought plenty of drugs- mostly animal tranquilizers-to bargain with.

As for- Judge DeCampe, she was past caring, at least not for now. Purdy would taunt her with the story of her would- be knight in shining armor, who turned out to be Purdy's prophet. He'd share it all with her in detail when she next regained consciousness and when he next awoke. He knew the story well, but she had yet to hear it.

Maureen DeCampe now lay amid hay and dirt in an open room filled with dust, mites, and pollen. She could only imagine being in the coffin which was standing in a comer alongside Jimmy Lee's. The old man had told her all about how he had transported her here in it. He'd also begun to hint that it had all been a plan concocted in Jimmy Purdy's fevered brain. DeCampe at this point would prefer the safe confines of the coffin and a death by asphyxiation to that which the Purdy men had in mind. Had in mind was the right phrase, for the old man had his son's dead voice filling his mind, or so it seemed to her.

She would readily have chosen being buried alive to what torture she now endured. She felt her skin crawling with the decay from Jimmy Lee's body. For now she was in some sort of large area where animals had once been kept, some sort of a barn like structure, she realized.

“ Am I'n I-o-wa?” she asked under the gag, realizing the tape around her mouth protected the only area of her body touching the dead man's flesh-and grateful for this two- inch-wide swath of freedom from the desiccation. Unclean tissue… contamination, these words swam in her mind like feeding piranhas, but these toothy microbe fish ate away at her sanity and soul as well as her flesh.

The only response from the nearby darkness was a hearty laugh at her attempt to speak; she wondered if the old man could understand anything she said, that she had guessed at her whereabouts. If it were Iowa, how did he transport her without anyone knowing or seeing something? As if to answer her thoughts, the dark little man, Purdy, stood and lifted a kerosene lantern and turned the light up. She welcomed the pungent kerosene odor into her; for half a nanosecond, it masked the overwhelming odor of decay that had caused her to pass out more than once. Worse thought yet, she had gotten somehow used to the odor.

Her father had been a cattleman rancher in Texas, and his father before him, and she had often wondered how the DeCampe men could get used to the smells that came with slaughtering cows, but they did. In fact, it seemed to have lodged in their genes. Her grandfather had once sat her down and told her that men could, given the circumstances, get used to anything-anything at all. Any odor, any deed, any sinful behavior, if exposed to it long enough. He pointed to the slave trade, the Holocaust. She began to feel that she'd reached that point here, the point of no return, in which her senses, so assailed by the decay, simply had shut down. She could tolerate it, at least long enough to hate this man Purdy strongly enough to want to live to wreak vengeance on him.

Why was the old man turning up the wick on that damned kerosene light of his? At first, she thought he simply wanted a better look at the progress of his gruesome art. However, in the next instant, the light shone on the two white pine boxes with cheap chrome handles: coffins. One had held his son's electrocuted body, and now she recalled the horror of having awakened inside her coffin. He'd lifted the lid, smiled down at her in grotesque, toothless fashion, and then he'd shoved a cloth filled with chloroform over her face, and when she next awoke, she was lashed to his son's decaying corpse.

And my brain is beginning to accept this shit? she inwardly screamed.

How long? How long had they journeyed from D.C. to this godforsaken place? Had she been lying unconscious for the duration of a trip that had taken her near lifeless body from Washington to Iowa, where the old man resided? Had she been out that long? Had he managed to bring her back to his private property-to the safety of his homestead amid the nothing void of rural Iowa, where the only other soul to set foot in his bam might be the occasional postman, or Jimmy Lee's mother, the old man's wife? Did he have a wife? Did she condone what was going on out in her bam? Had she masterminded the entire abduction from her front porch rocker? Was it a ma and pa operation? Or was ma out of the loop? It felt unseasonably warm for an Iowa fall; even the nights had felt somewhat warm. The warmer the weather, the faster the decay, she knew. What was the cause for the warmth? Was it part of that large thing they called global warming, Indian summer come early? Or was it simply the heat of her own decay?

She wondered these things and why the old man was hovering with the light over her, studying her again. She wondered all these things before passing out again.

Isaiah Purdy had gone to his son's execution with no expectations save to see the thing through and to follow through on Jimmy Lee's requests-appeals made in his psychic visits.

After the execution, which had been handled with an eerie and perfunctory precision, Isaiah made his way down an institutional green and yellow corridor that felt like a tunnel out of The Wizard of Oz, at the end of which, he could view the body. It was a cold and stony Jimmy, his boy, whose head had been shaved, and whose temples were bubbled- marks of the boiling brain that had been scrambled by the electrocution. He didn't want to know the number of volts they'd fired into the boy's head. Poor Jimmy. Poor boy… Last of his lineage… end of the line…

After this, they told Isaiah to drive his van around the back to a sign indicating the prison wood shop, where he could take possession of the body. Once at the wood shop, he requested the extra coffin, telling them he'd pay for it, and telling them that it was meant for himself. The shop foreman readily obliged, saying he couldn't take any money from any father of Jimmy Lee's. This made Isaiah proud to know that his son had still managed to make friends here, even as a death row inmate.

They had carried Jimmy Lee down on a stretcher to the wood shop, just like as if he were a side of beef, and they lifted him from the gurney and into the pine wood box that'd been awaiting him, throwing his arms and legs in last. The men in the shop loaded Jimmy's coffin into the van, and then they loaded the one meant for his bride, the judge who'd sent him to the electric chair so many years before. Jimmy Lee meant to travel into eternity with his chief accuser.

Once the two coffins and his boy's body were loaded, the old man solemnly thanked all involved and waved a good Iowa wave to the incarcerated men, wishing them all good luck. Moments later, the wood shop's loading platform door ratcheted down and came to a metallic, screeching halt, leaving Isaiah once again alone. But he was hardly alone. Jimmy Lee's body might be in the coffin inside the black van, alongside the pine box awaiting the judge, but in point of fact, Jimmy Lee himself was inside Isaiah now.

'Taking you home, boy,” muttered Isaiah as he stepped from the loading dock and down the stairs. “Home to your Lord and Maker, son.”