John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“Yeah, and I need a steak and some spuds and a jug of Scotch.”

“How bout water?”

More laughter then, echoing.

“When do they come?”

“They come when they want to and don’t when they don’t. You’ll get used to it.”

“For how long?”

“Depends on what you done.”

“Mouthed off to a keeper.”

“Which one?”

“Freidlander.”

There was no response but the grinding of the dynamo.

“Hey! You still there? Jesus, don’t leave me in the dark—”

“Don’t worry, son,” said Kemmler then. “We aint goin nowheres.”

He went back down on the floor then, scuffing along on his keister till he found the papier-mâché bucket, no lid, to throw up in. His head hurt like hell, and was still hurting like hell when there was a scrape and a clang and then light, enough light for him to see the four walls, nothing but sheet metal and rivets and the stinking bucket on the floor and some torn strips of newspaper left to wipe himself with and the little barred slit in the iron door that he rose and stumbled over to. On the other side of the door was a vaulted stone dungeon, maybe fifty feet long, and a screw he’d never seen before walking toward his cell, footsteps echoing in the cavern, holding a bullseye lantern hung from the ceiling by a very long chain.

“You,” said the screw when he shined the bullseye in through the window slit, “step back from there and get your cup.”

Shoe took two steps back, then located a tin cup on the floor by the door. The narrow spout of an oil can was poked through the bars, waggled.

“Come get it.”

Shoe brought the cup under the spout and the screw tilted the can for a moment before pulling it out, leaving less than a finger’s thickness of water in the cup.

“What’s this?”

“What’s it look like?”

“That’s all I get?”

“One gill,” said the screw, “twice a day.”

“Can’t nobody live on that.”

“Do your best,” said the screw, and moved on to the next cell.

The water barely wet his mouth, not enough to work up a full swallow. He pressed his face against the window bars, just able to see the screw shining the bullseye lamp into the last cell in the dungeon corridor, then turning to head back his way.

“How long I got to be here?” he asked, trying to push the desperation from his voice.

“Keep count of your water,” said the keeper as he opened the door to the south wing, then extinguished the lantern and let it swing back into the dungeon. “One gill twice a day, you keep count. When we let you back into the population you can figure the time.”

The door to the wing slammed shut, the key grinding in the lock, then darkness again and the rumble of the dynamo and Shoe smelling his own puke in the tiny cell. He threw his cup hard and listened to it ping off the wall and rattle on the metal floor and then he lay down, rivets digging into his hide, stripping his filthy jacket off to roll into a cushion for his head. He lay for some time, probably awake cause who could dream such a monotonous hell and then there was a new voice, deep and echoing, singing in what he thought might be Yiddish.

“Who the fuck is that?” he called out from the floor.

“Number Three,” answered the con in the cell to his left.

“I thought he didn’t talk.”

“Singin aint talkin.”

The song was strange and mournful, full of quick risings and fallings and things that sounded more like moans than words.

“How long does he go at it?”

“No saying.” The echo from the vaulted chamber made it sound like the singer was everywhere, like the cell was Shoe’s head and the con was inside of it, wailing. “But when he stops you kind of miss it.”

Shoe was there long enough to learn to sleep through the singing, or to work it into his constant nightmare, was there when Number Two got pulled out and sent back to the tiers, a little gimpy con he later got to know was Pete Driscoll, was still in stir the day they came for Kemmler and made history with their electric death chair. A regular crowd come into the vault that day, four screws for an escort and a holy joe mumbling from his Bible, Shoe only getting a glimpse of the condemned man’s back as they led him out through the other door, the one that led to the shock shop.

It was the last he ever pulled cooler time. If he could con college-educated pigeons out of their pocket stuffing he could convince a bunch of dimwit screws he was a square egg, a new man. It was still your life, zebra suit or no, and you had to make the best of it.

The crows are restless in the afternoon, shifting from tree to tree, scolding each other, bending the branches with their weight. Shoe reaches the administration building and halts in front of Riordan.

“Shoemaker, sir. On an errand for Sergeant Kelso. Second floor.”

The keeper nods and he enters, climbs the stairs. There are no more than a half dozen runners assigned on First Work, and the day-shift turnkeys are used to seeing him loose. He knocks before entering and then stands just inside the bullpen door, waiting, with eyes locked on nothing, for them to cop to his presence. Dortmunder has his jacket unbuttoned, straddling the bench by his locker, his huge belly resting on the pine.

“It took us some time to perfect the procedure,” he says, “but now they come from all over the country, all over the world to observe it. You’ll get a go at it soon enough.”

Flanagan is there, and Gratz who the cons call Der Captain after the guy with the walrus moustache in the comic panels and a new one nobody has a nickname for yet.

“When we did our first it hadn’t been used on anything bigger than a dog.”

“There was that trolley worker in Rochester,” offers Flanagan.

“Oh, there was no doubt the juice would do for the job, no doubt at all. But the trolley fella was an accident, left smoking on the cobblestones with his hair stuck out like a scalded cat. A stray bolt from a thundercloud would have done the same to him. But an execution is a solemn business, a state function, and we had no idea if the contraption they’d rigged together down there was capable of completing the task in a dignified manner.”

“Ax-murderer, as I recall,” says Gratz.

“A brute of a man. You were here then, weren’t you, Shoe?” Flanagan somehow knowing he is there without turning to look.

“Two cells down from him on the Row.”

Dortmunder squints his eyes. “You? In the punishment block?”

Shoe shows them a wistful smile. “Before I got wise to how the joint operates.”

“It was just at sunrise,” Flanagan recalls. “ ‘Take your time, boys,’ says he, ‘and do it right.’ He even asked us to snug up the electrode on his head.”

“This is before we knew to stuff a bit of wet sponge in there,” says Dort-munder to the rookie screw. “To improve your connectivity.”

“Then we dropped a hood over his face, so as not to upset the witnesses present—”

“A full house that morning, two dozen at least. Novelty will always pack them in.”

“And as soon as we had him squared away they yanked the lever for the first jolt.”

“It took more than one?” asks the new man.

Dortmunder sighs. “We didn’t have our own dynamo then, and a belt came loose on the one they’d borrowed. Kemmler only got a prick of the devil’s tail and it stopped.”

“He must have been scared.”

“One might suppose so,” says Gratz. “But we stuck a scrap of shoe leather between his teeth before the hood went on, and he was unable to share his observations.”

“So they fixed the generator—”

“In a flash. And the second helping — well, there were members of the press observing and the effectiveness of the device to be established—”