Wolf at the table, p.29
Wolf at the Table, page 29
“Oh, that wasn’t me,” the condemned man says.
“Who was it, then?” Sion asks.
“This other guy. Looked like me, moved like me, even sounded like me, but the fact of the matter is that it was a totally different person.”
“That what you tell yourself?” Londell says.
The condemned man smiles—to himself, it seems—and shakes his head as if in some rueful, private knowledge of his innocence, the grand indignity of being a doomed martyr egregiously wronged by the universe.
“My understandin’ is that there was this one kid that got away. Dark-haired kid. Tall. Real good-lookin’.”
“Oh yeah?” Londell says. “Why’d your friend let that one go?”
“’Cause he was too long in the tooth. My sources tell me he’s prolly still out there roamin’ around, tryin’ to figure things out.”
Myra inserts the tips of the stethoscope into her ears and sets the drum in the center of the man’s chest. She listens to his breathing, the rhythm of his heart. His heartbeat is large, strong, once again not what she expected from his unfit appearance. She imagines him building up his hidden strength by dragging bodies across the floor of his house in suburban Norwood. He probably couldn’t lift the Chicago phone book over his head more than a few times, but he can manipulate a young man’s body, thick with rigor mortis, into any shape he desires. She has the keen sense that his heart will continue beating long after he’s dead, that in the middle of the night it will thump maddeningly in the heads of all the grieving mothers of his victims. Those poor women who have been cursed to outlive their boys.
“Hey, I just hope the dang Cubbies get their act together,” the condemned man says, seemingly out of nowhere. “They’ve only won eight games! Eight goddamn games!” He shakes his head.
Myra can’t help but think of Ronan, a true die-hard Cubs fan, and how he used to watch every game on WGN. He’d sit too close to the television and she’d often have to beg him to move his chair back.
“My lawyer’s got all the details about the funeral service,” the condemned man then says to Sion. “We confabbed about it yesterday. You boys should come. I’d be happy to make sure you get put on the invitation list. And you, too, Myra.”
It shocks Myra to hear her name coming out of the condemned man’s foul-smelling mouth. How could he possibly know it? He smiles again and her stomach twists into a fist. Her insides have been giving her trouble for months now. Her bowel movements are wildly inconsistent, at times very painful, and her appetite has been half of what it used to be, as if she has reverted to those excruciating years after Denny left.
She is somewhat relieved when she realizes that she failed to remove her ID laminate, which is clipped to the shirt pocket of her nursing uniform. Normally after she clocks in in the morning she leaves it on her desk, just like her watch. Thank God he didn’t conjure her name through some dark act of sorcery.
“There’s gonna be some good grub at the afterparty,” the condemned man says, almost gloating, as if he’ll be there in disguise, having risen from the dead.
Myra imagines him skulking around in the background of some cheap restaurant in Norwood. A place with old carpeting and a secondhand buffet. He’s wearing dark sunglasses and a long beige raincoat, overloading his plate, belching aloud without covering his mouth, mocking those who’ve come to pay their respects, whoever they might be.
“Baby back ribs,” he adds to Londell, twisting his torso, peering at him over his shoulder. “Chitlins. They might even have some black-eyed peas for you two giant porch monkeys.”
WHEN MYRA LEAVES WORK the crowds outside the prison have doubled, maybe even tripled. Several squad cars from the Joliet Police Department are on hand, as is a fleet of state police cruisers. The news trucks have assembled their satellites, and cameramen are lining up shots with reporters. It’s still somewhat bright out, twilight really, calm, not quite summery. It’s the kind of night that Myra would have watched a Cubs game with Ronan, before he went off to college, the kind of night they might eat together on the sofa with plates in their laps.
She gets in her car and elects to keep the windows rolled up. As she grips the steering wheel a sharp pain, like a piece of metal twisting, stabs deep in her abdomen, as if she swallowed an earring in her sleep—or her engagement ring, which she still keeps in the little porcelain box beside her bed. The pain is so intense that she has to hold her breath until it passes. She counts to fifty. The numbers are like scarecrows erected at the edge of a vast cornfield. She must touch one and run to the next, touch that one, run to the next…
ON HER WAY HOME, almost in a trance, Myra stops at the Kentucky Fried Chicken on Jefferson Street and orders a three-piece original recipe dinner, which consists of a breast, a wing, and a drumstick. For her two sides she chooses small Styrofoam containers of mashed potatoes and corn.
Back at her apartment she arranges her food on a plate and sits at her small kitchen table with the seven o’clock news playing on the TV in the living room. The anchors are talking about the condemned man she just visited in that strange little holding cell with the desk and the telephone. In a matter of hours—just after midnight—he will be executed by lethal injection. According to the anchors, he enjoyed a picnic dinner with members of his family on one of the lawns of the prison grounds. After that he had a conversation with a Catholic priest, who chose to remain anonymous. The anchors repeat the news that Myra already knows: that the condemned man murdered and raped thirty-three young men from the Chicago area and buried many of them in cement in the crawl space of his Norwood home.
At Stateville the on-site reporter, a woman with a low, soulful voice, likens the proceedings to a sporting event. There are superfans. There are religious groups. Nuns and priests and a party of Chicago-area rabbis. There are families of the victims holding lit candles and displaying large pictures of their murdered sons. There is a small band of men dressed up as circus clowns who are dancing to the condemned man’s favorite band, REO Speedwagon, whose hit album You Can Tune a Piano, but You Can’t Tuna Fish is being broadcast from a boom box. Drums can be heard beating in the background.
“Are these the drums of justice, or the drums of evil?” the on-site reporter asks rhetorically.
Myra recalls the condemned man’s sickly breath, his short, dim teeth, his restless, pale manacled hands, the four white hairs along his shapeless jawline, the cleft in his fleshy chin. She wonders if the unfortunate undertaker who will have to prepare him for his wake will shave those random whiskers or if they will be left alone; if Gacy will be cocooned in his leather-clad fantasy casket in the same hygienic state in which he was executed. Then again, maybe all of that talk of his funeral and his double-breasted suit and the afterparty was just a lot of hot air. Myra has always been under the impression that after his execution a condemned inmate is cremated.
She eats half her chicken breast and a forkful of corn, but quickly loses her appetite. She doesn’t even bother opening the side of mashed potatoes. There’s another twisting in her stomach. The fried food probably wasn’t the best idea. And suddenly she remembers, with a wave of nausea, that Kentucky Fried Chicken was part of what Gacy intended to order for his last meal, right down to the original recipe option. The notion must have somehow gotten into her subconscious. She forces her hand over her mouth to keep herself from vomiting. Quickly she swallows three mouthfuls from her water glass, then a fourth.
After she scrapes her plate into the garbage and places her dirty dishes in the sink, she returns to the living room and changes the TV to WGN Channel 9. The Cubs are playing the Cardinals in St. Louis. It’s in the top of the third inning and they’re up 3–1. It’s a good start for a change but she decides to turn the television off and take a shower.
The hot water—thank God there’s hot water!—is the best thing she’s felt all day. It makes her weak, sleepy. She releases an audible sigh. She doesn’t even bother shampooing her hair. She doesn’t have the energy. Lifting her arms over her head would take too much effort. She can’t recall the last time she’s felt this tired. Afterward she can barely towel herself off. She has to sit down on the toilet to put on her nightgown. It’s only just after eight p.m. but Myra decides she will go to bed early. She’ll need all the rest she can get for work in the morning.
Before she turns in she goes out to the kitchen and calls Ronan. “Hey,” she says to his answering machine, “I just wanted to hear your voice.” She has to swallow again, to keep from getting sick, and sits down at the kitchen table. All this swallowing. All this needing to sit. “The Cubs are playing the Cardinals tonight,” she continues, “they’re up early, but I’m sure you know that. I think Mark Grace is their only decent player this season…” She’s so sleepy she has to resist letting her head rest on the table. “Everyone at work likes the White Sox,” she says. “I constantly get teased about being a Cubs fan. They keep saying Joliet is on the South Side of Chicago and that I need to wake up and join the party.”
Unbidden, she imagines Ronan being beckoned into the condemned man’s house up in Norwood. Gacy sees him walking by on the street and waves him over. He coaxes Ronan down to his basement with his oddball charm, deploying his knowledge of giant tortoises and Cubs trivia and quirky song lyrics. He offers Ronan something to drink, slips a powdered barbiturate into the mixture, invites him to join him on an overstuffed love seat. She forces the image from her head.
“I miss you, Ronan,” she adds. “I love you…”
She hangs up the phone. She could fall asleep right there. But a woman who wakes up at her kitchen table is not right for this world. This is either a drunk or a pathetic woman and Myra is neither of these people. She forces herself to her feet, turns off the kitchen light, and shuffles to her bedroom.
Before she falls asleep she turns to happier thoughts, imagining Ronan walking along the streets of New York City with his beautiful girlfriend, Henny, whom he’s been dating for three years. Myra still hasn’t met her, but she’s planning a weeklong trip to New York in July. She keeps a Polaroid of the couple on her refrigerator. Ronan sent it two months ago. In the Polaroid they are standing in front of Leshko’s Diner on Avenue A. It’s the winter and they’re bundled in many layers. Ronan is operating the camera and his right arm is extended. They look like they’re in love. According to Ronan they’re still crazy about each other and they’ve been talking about moving in together. Two playwrights falling in love in the greatest city in the world—how romantic. Myra sees them holding hands on the subway, getting dinner at a pizza parlor in the Village. Then they go see a movie and share a big bucket of popcorn.
Myra falls asleep envisioning Ronan and Henny watching a movie and holding hands with their giant bucket of popcorn wedged between them.
JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT, MYRA wakes to a searing pain in her lower abdomen. The kind of pain that causes the brain to flash white. The kind one feels in one’s molars. When she tries to get out of bed it feels as if she’s been impaled by hot glass, bitten by a wolf, stabbed in her sleep by a thief with a dagger. The flash of white leaves lightning in her head, a surging through her spine.
She hears her own voice cry out in a strange register that she doesn’t recognize. It echoes in some torn canyon of flesh deep within her.
She manages to hurl herself to the floor and writhe her way to the kitchen, where, by some sheer force of will, she yanks on the phone cord hard enough to dislodge the handset. By the time she gives the emergency operator her details, blood is beginning to pool underneath her. She can’t fathom its source. It’s as if a valve has been released, and the corona of blood expands around her on the linoleum, purplish, slow, thick as syrup, its smell both metallic and fungal, like old silverware left in the mud.
The feeling is of a great emptying, a hollowing out… Her nightgown is sopping with blood, her hair is taking it on…
Her last conscious thought is how fiercely her hands are clinging to the aluminum leg of the kitchen table.
12
TUNICA, MISSISSIPPI
APRIL 19, 1995
ALEC
THE BOY, HAVING STAYED up all night, is sitting on the floor in front of Alec’s thirty-inch flatscreen, his hands cradling the Nintendo control module. It’s after seven a.m. and he’s been playing Donkey Kong since around four thirty, which is when they stopped drinking mai tais and finished smoking what little bit of weed Alec still had on hand. The boy said the weed would help get him into the zone and Alec was happy to oblige him. He would have continued to make drinks but he’d run out of both the Bacardi and the triple sec, and besides a case of Coors Light the only other alcohol on the premises happened to be a bottle of isopropyl, which he uses for cleaning the endless cuts he gets on his hands and wrists from fishing and rowboating. The bottom line is that this kid must have a hollow leg. Or he has one of those systems that alcohol simply doesn’t affect. He obviously has the metabolism of a six-year-old. The agreement Alec made with the boy was that if he could beat his high score then he would give him his very special collectible baseball card. The weed certainly put him in an extremely focused mind state.
He met the boy at the local casino, where Alec spends his afternoons. For seven days a week he can be found in the slots or “fruiters” room, invariably outfitted in one of his many short-sleeve Hawaiian shirts, a pair of multi-pocketed water-resistant cargo shorts, and his trusty sport sandals with memory-foam soles. From his spot in front of his favorite third-row slot machine, he’d been clocking the boy for several minutes. The boy had certainly stood out in his red St. Louis Cardinals baseball hat, matching oversize T-shirt, big baggy basketball shorts, ultra-white tennis shoes, equally white socks pulled high, and dark braids creeping down the back of his neck like so many charred and rubber-banded lizard tails. The boy was chewing a coffee straw (also red) and affecting a bit of a limp. There was a lot going on. In Alec’s quick assessment, this kid was all pomp and swagger, with nowhere to go and zero money to spend.
Alec’s slot machine had already taken eighty of his two-hundred-dollar investment without so much as a single triple bar. It was turning out to be a gusher. But when the boy stopped to watch him—at that precise moment in fact—Alec pressed the play button and hit double centerline cherries and won himself a cool $657.42… Kablooey!
“You must be good luck,” he said to the boy, who might’ve been sixteen at the most.
Alec printed his winnings slip and headed to the box office. And of course the boy tailed him.
“It looks like you’re following me,” Alec said as he stepped up to the bulletproof Plexiglas.
“How long was you on that slot machine?” the boy asked, chewing his straw.
“Maybe twenty minutes.”
“Don’t the music drive you crazy?”
Alec listened for a moment, cocking his head to the left a bit, really taking in the tinny din of the slot machines. Today the wheedling fruiters were particularly merciless.
“It’s like Santa’s elves mad losing they minds,” the boy said.
“After an hour or two you don’t even hear it,” Alec offered.
“You win like that a lot?”
“Every time,” Alec answered, a flat-out lie, though it was true he fared better at the fruiters than the table games. There had been a period maybe four months earlier when he’d had a groove going with three-card poker, but he’d gotten tired of having to contend with the various personalities. Sunburnt fat women. Asian drifters in their stupid fucking sunglasses. Old arthritic widowers with their dentures and lopsided flea-market wigs. He eventually came to prefer the companionship of a machine.
“What’s your secret?” the boy asked.
“Two hundred dollars,” Alec said. “Load her up all at once and keep pressing that play button. If you haven’t won anything decent by the time it gets down to a hundred, you cash out, go home, turn on the boob tube, and consider it worth it for the free drinks.”
The boy stood by, chewing his coffee straw, while Alec collected his money. When Alec glanced over at him he was adjusting the brim of his Cardinals cap, which still had the silver sticker affixed to the back. He was maybe six feet tall, very little body fat. His calf muscles looked like a pair of sculptures that had been installed above the top of his long white socks. He was dark-skinned but not in that National Geographic, African-subcontinent way.
Alec requested all twenties, and Nikki, the female cashier with the blond frizzy hair and rodeo-clown makeup that Alec has come to really appreciate, processed his money down to the exact coinage in less than thirty seconds.
“Not a bad day, huh?” Nikki said.
“Better than yesterday,” Alec replied, tipping her the loose $17.42.
She thanked him by blowing him a kiss. “Spend that wisely now, John.”
Ten minutes later they were tooling down Highway 61 in Alec’s gray ’78 Chevy Malibu to the Sonic, where Alec and the boy both ordered SuperSONIC Bacon Double Cheeseburgers with Cheese Tots and Blue Coconut Slushes. After the little skinny redhead with the freckles delivered their food in her roller skates, they ate in silence for a while.
“What’s your name, anyway?” Alec asked the boy.
“Jermaine,” he said.
Cars sluiced by on Highway 61. The weather was outstanding.
Jermaine ate quickly, almost inhaling his burger, attacking his cheese tots like they deserved to be bullied.
Alec rolled his window down and unleashed a hellacious burp that tore through his chest’s softer tissues. “So do me a favor,” he said.
“What’s up?” the boy said.
“Explain to me what harebrained process leads a kid from Mississippi to the horrors of becoming a Cardinals fan?”
“I’m not from Mississippi,” the boy answered.
It turned out that he hailed from East St. Louis.
“What’s the difference between St. Louis and East St. Louis?” Alec asked.
