Nantucket Penny

by Steven Axelrod

  “But you goaded them into it.”

  “Yeah. So what?”

  “Then you almost killed Sip—Jim Bascomb—”

  “Fish Face. Right. He had a little asthma attack in our family’s storage barn.”

  “And then you made us sodomize each other.”

  “After you tried to rip me off.”

  Haden Krakauer had been sitting in the corner facing the wall. Now he turned.

  “That’s what he did? Oh, my God, that’s what happened? You never told me… I never knew…”

  “Well, now you know. And that’s why you’re here, Judas. You sold us out just so this fucking ape and his pals would like you. And it didn’t even work. They despised you more than ever after that! You betrayed me and Sippy—you destroyed our lives FOR NOTHING!” Todd turned back to Delavane. “So what do you think about those days, Ed? Any regrets?”

  “I don’t think about those days. And I don’t regret shit.”

  “Not even now?”

  “I was thinking of killing both of you that night and chucking your bodies into the sound for fish food. I let you live. I regret that.”

  “No remorse. You know, judges consider leniency when they sense remorse.”

  “Come on. We were just fuckin’ around. Colleges have frat houses. The initiations are ten times worse than anything we did. And guys love it. They do it to the next guys. They don’t whine about it and start lynching people twenty years later.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me? I was harassed. I was humiliated. I was tortured.”

  “Come on! We were fuckin’ around, that’s all. Kids’ stuff.”

  “So did anyone ever fuck around with you?”

  “Nobody’s that stupid.”

  “How about your dad?”

  “My dad was a great guy. He was a war hero, okay? Thirteenth Marine Expeditionary Unit. Navy Cross, two Silver Stars, and a Purple Heart.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Marine dads are tough.”

  “So what?”

  “So maybe your dad was a little too tough on you.”

  “He kicked the crap out of me. My childhood was a fuckin’ boot camp, and I’m grateful for that. Okay? He taught me values. I have values because of him.”

  “Attack weak people because they’re weak. That’s a value?”

  “Push weak people to make them strong. That’s the value.”

  “So you were doing me a favor?”

  “Fuckin’ right, I was. You cracked, that’s all. Most guys get stronger. They turn out okay, they get married, have a bunch of kids. Hard-working family guys. Pillars of the fuckin’ community.”

  “So bullying is good.”

  “Bullying. Fuckin’ pussy word. You had some tough times, and you couldn’t handle them. Boo hoo. Things are tough in the real world out there, too, Peanut. Life is tough. You learned that early. Unlike most of these spoiled brat punks we went to school with. Too bad you couldn’t handle it.”

  Todd stared at him for a long moment. “Well, that was a tragically inept defense, Mr. Delavane. Suicidally inept. The verdict is guilty, and the sentence is death.”

  Ed started to say something, lurching forward until the pain in his crushed shin bone yanked him back like a dog at the end of a chain. Todd retreated involuntarily. Even in his weakened state, Delavane was a dangerous animal, not that much different from the bears the trap had been intended for. But bears were innocent. They killed to eat or defend themselves. There was a simplicity about them, a beauty, a nobility.

  Delavane was the opposite in every way: tangled with complex human pathologies, ugly and debased.

  Todd cleared his throat. “You will be hanged, like all the other convicted defendants here. But first, we have one final villain to stand her turn in the dock.”

  He strolled up the line of crouching, miserable prisoners manacled to the bar he had bolted into the wall of the shack, wearing the same filthy clothes for days, half-starved, broken and whimpering. The place smelled like the monkey house at the zoo. Todd had boarded up the windows. He didn’t want ventilation. The cool breeze from the Sound would make his jail too comfortable. He wanted his prisoners to stifle and suffocate. He wanted them to learn every physical detail of their punishment, to grasp their sins and his retribution on the skin and in the sweat glands before they died. Most of all, he wanted to break their egos, shatter their invincible self-regard. That’s what Sippy with his big brain and his check-the-boxes outsourced execution plan hadn’t understood. Merely killing these people? That would have been meaningless. They had to die with their brains full of their own guilt and self-hatred, their fear and remorse, the way the rooms in a burning house are filled with smoke.

  He thought again of the school—the great burning that Jane and Ed’s do-gooder brother had prevented. Todd had convinced the jowls and jackets at the Bridgewater medical board that he was a different person from that adolescent arsonist, that he could never even contemplate such an act of madness again.

  But he was contemplating it now. A splash of gasoline in each of their laps, their wide eyes staring at the match glowing between his fingers…but he had no gasoline on hand, not even in the generator, which he had emptied showing Mark Toland’s vile, incriminating home movies—the awful party, the unendurable night on the beach here, the arrest at the school, all of it.

  Hard to mount a defense in the face of that evidence!

  One picture was worth a thousand words, wasn’t that the phrase? How about hundreds of thousands of pictures, flickering past at twenty-eight frames a second? There weren’t enough words in the language to make that exchange.

  So, anyway, he had burned off all his gasoline. But that was fine. That was better. Hanging was the appropriate punishment backed by hundreds of years of judicial precedent and authority. These monsters would die with all the proper legal trappings and formalities, and Todd would remain in control at all times. He would maintain his dignity. He would maintain the dignity of these proceedings.

  “Jane Stiles.”

  She looked up. She was still disoriented. She hadn’t had time to assimilate her situation the way the others had. She was still in denial, still in shock. But she had listened to Ed Delavane’s testimony. She knew what was going on, and she must have sensed that she was next.

  “Todd—”

  “Jane Stiles, your trial has begun. At long last you will have to answer for your crimes. I would put you under oath, but you have nothing to swear upon, no loyalties and no beliefs.”

  “That’s not true. How can you say that? You don’t even know me and—”

  “I loved you.”

  “You didn’t. You couldn’t. You barely knew me.”

  “We were fated to be together.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut. “I don’t know what that means, what you think that means. How could we be fated to be together? We’ve spent our lives apart.”

  “But we’re here! Don’t you see that? Fate manifests itself. It unfolds! This is the proof. This shack, this beach, this day. It was fated from our first meeting. On the ferry.”

  “I walked in on you puking, that’s all. It was an accident—a coincidence. You liked the way I looked and filled in the blanks.”

  “You don’t believe in love at first sight?”

  “No. I don’t know. I suppose so. Maybe.”

  “And what happens at that moment? When the lovers first see each other?”

  “I don’t… How could I possibly—why are you asking me this?”

  “Because I think that moment is sacred. It’s all we can ever know of God. And because you violated it. You crushed it like a bug. Like, like…like I was some kind of water bug on your face. I reached out. I offered you everything.”

  She met his furious gaze with a calmness that silenced him. �
�Todd, listen to me. No one is going to be grateful if you offer them something they don’t want.”

  “You saved me that night, the night of the party. You got me out of that house, you got me away from those people. We crossed the water together! We were alone under the stars, just the two of us. You made me believe we had a connection. You let me dream. And then you woke me up in hell. I’ve been there ever since. Twenty years of hell. Because of you!”

  “I had nothing to do with it! I can’t help the way you—”

  “You refused to accept our fate! You led me on! I was a steer in a cattle chute—you herded me right into the slaughterhouse. German butchers wear a cup around their necks to drink the first blood when they cut the cow’s throat. Oooh, you must have wanted to drink mine that night. Pumping out hot from the jugular.”

  “Todd, stop! You don’t mean that. You can’t mean any of this. You had a crush on a girl. So do a million other boys every day. They move on. Didn’t anyone ever tell you there are other fish in the sea?”

  “Yes. Yes, they did. I made a joke about it. Would you like to hear my joke? It’s very literary. We’re both writers, so it can be our private joke.”

  She shut her eyes. “What is it?”

  “They say there are other fish in the sea, and I say, ‘That’s what people told Ahab.’”

  “So, I’m your white whale?”

  “You took my leg! So I hunt you down and I harpoon you, and we go down to the bottom of the sea together. Get it?”

  “Todd, look. You’re a free man. They let you out of Bridgewater. That’s an accomplishment. You proved yourself. You’ve served your time. You’re still young. Nothing final has happened here yet. Ed won’t press charges. We can call it an accident. We can call this whole crazy trial a game. No one even has to know about it. Let us go. You can start over. You have the best years of your life—”

  “What about Sippy?”

  “What?”

  “What did you do to Sippy that night? At the Lock-In? He never told me. He never told anyone. Only you know what happened. And he wanted to kill you, to make sure you’d never tell. But things are different now. Sippy’s dead, and you’re on trial for your life. What did you do to him?”

  “Nothing.”

  “WHAT HAPPENED? Don’t lie to me.”

  “Nothing happened. He tried to rape me, but I cooperated and he couldn’t…perform.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “I was trying to shift things, to make it a shared moment between two people instead of one person wielding power over another.”

  “And you knew.”

  “Knew? Knew what?”

  “You knew the effect that would have. You used your female judo! You stole his power and turned it against him. You ruined him for life.”

  “I accepted him.”

  “You tricked him! You knew what would happen!”

  Her look was cool and level. “I took a calculated risk.”

  “You neutered him!”

  “I pitied him.”

  He mimicked her earlier didactic tone: “No one will be grateful if you give them something they don’t want. No one wants your pity! You castrated him with your pity! You should have used garden shears. It would have been kinder.”

  “I’m not the villain, Todd. I’m a good person. I tried to help Sippy afterward. I told him about Dr. Abruzzese at the Counseling Center. I could have turned Sippy in, but I felt bad for him, and I didn’t. Now I wish I had. I should have. We wouldn’t be here now. You needed him, you and Lonnie. You couldn’t have pulled this off by yourselves.”

  “And thus concludes the testimony phase of our proceedings. Jury summations will be waived due to time constraints. The prosecution rests, and the defense abstains. Sentencing has been determined in advance. Let the executions begin.”

  Todd pulled the handcuff key out of his pocket and threw it to Billy Delavane. It landed in the raw planking between his feet.

  “Uncuff yourself and your brother. You’re the executioner today.”

  “Todd—”

  He turned at the sound of Jane’s voice. “You had your turn to speak.” Back to Billy: “Get your legs under you, walk over, and uncuff your brother. If you think I won’t shoot you, you’re a bigger fool than I thought.”

  Todd moved back toward the door of the shack. He knew enough about guns to know they could be taken away if someone got too close. Distance was your friend. Bullets travel faster than people.

  Billy uncuffed his brother and helped the hulking bully to stand. They were both stiff and feeble. It felt good to see them so diminished.

  “Re-cuff him—hands behind his back.”

  Billy did it.

  “Now, single file to the door. Ed first. Move!”

  It happened as Ed was crossing into the sunlight. He stumbled, Todd impulsively stepped in to help, and Billy seized the moment. He jumped Todd, and they struggled for a few seconds until Todd connected to Billy’s forehead with the butt of the gun and sent him reeling backward.

  The fight was over. Todd was in control again.

  But Billy had flipped the handcuff key to Mark Toland, and Toland had managed to open his shackles and Cindy’s, then flip the key back toward the door while Todd and Billy struggled. It was the right move. Todd was hyperalert, nerves jacked to circuit overload. His first words proved it. “The key! Where’s the key?”

  “I—it’s… I dropped it.”

  “Pick it up. Throw it to me.”

  Billy obeyed, and Todd slipped it back into his pocket. They moved out toward the viewing platform. Lonnie had built the post and crossbeam for the noose so that it lay flat and lifted easily on two big hinges, braced with a pair of folding brackets. Todd had set it up that morning and hung the first noose from the hook.

  He was ready.

  Ed and Billy took the stairs slowly, like old men, securing both feet on each tread before moving upward. Todd edged toward the door of the shack, feeling paranoid and outnumbered. But the situation was stable; the others were still huddled there, now stunned and disbelieving. Well, they’d believe it soon. They’d believe everything soon. The brothers reached the top of the platform.

  “Stand him on the trap door! Fit the noose around his neck!”

  Billy did it.

  “Now pull the lever!”

  Billy put his hand to the switch and then seemed to come out of his trance. He dropped his arm to his side.

  “No.”

  “What? What did you say?”

  “I won’t do it.”

  “I’ll shoot you.”

  “Maybe.”

  They still had no respect for him! It was infuriating. “I’ll give you five seconds. Five. Four. Three…”

  Billy stood absolutely still, watching him. He must have thought Todd was bluffing. After all these years, after all this work and planning, he thought Todd was going to chicken out like the night of the Lock-In, like all the other nights and days when they had laughed at him and sneered at him and tried to turn him into nothing.

  “…Two. One. Last chance.”

  Still Billy didn’t move. Todd took his stance, aimed the big gun, and squeezed the trigger. The shot boomed out over the water. The bullet caught Billy in the leg, spun him around, and toppled him off the platform. It sounded like he broke something—his arm? his wrist?—when he hit the sand.

  Todd grabbed the lever. “Any last words?”

  Ed gave him a crooked grin. “Fuck you.”

  Todd pulled the lever, and the big man dropped out of sight. The rope went taut with a shuddering crack and twisted as Delavane thrashed against the noose, his windpipe crushed by the raw hemp, strangling under his own weight.

  Finally the rope went still.

  Todd pulled out the Bowie knife he had purchased and sharpened for this
purpose only and cut the rope. The bulky corpse dropped to the sand with a gruesome thud. Todd set the knife down beside the open trap. He was going to need it again soon. He lifted the rope off the hook, dropped it, and attached the next one, the special one he had prepared for Jane Stiles.

  Inside the shack, he could feel the dislocated horror, the utter shock of his captives. Some part of them had refused to believe he was actually going to carry out the executions. Now it was different. Now they knew they were going to die. They were paralyzed, mute, shaking, gasping. Terwilliger was sobbing. It looked like her face was melting.

  How do you like your Mr. Peanut now, bitches?

  His voice was raw, high-pitched, and strange in his own ears when he spoke. “You’re next, Jane.”

  Her calm voice startled him. “I have a proposition for you.”

  What could she possibly offer him now? But he was curious. “What?”

  “I want a rematch.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The heads-or-tails game, Todd. Fair and square this time. Your coin. But when it comes up tails, you let one of the others go free.”

  “Why would I do that? I could make you strip at gunpoint.”

  “But that’s not you, Todd. You’re not Sippy. You’re the opposite of Sippy. You want me to do this freely. You want me to choose it. You want a game that’s not rigged with a player who’ll play to the end, no cheating. Ed’s gone. You don’t care about the others anyway. Not the way you care about me. This is the chance you’ve been waiting for since that night on the beach. Take it.”

  “You’re just stalling for time.”

  “What if I am?”

  “Another calculated risk.”

  “For both of us.”

  “You wouldn’t do it.”

  “I will. But you have to promise. You have to keep your side of the bargain.”

  “Why trust me?”

  “I know you, Todd. You can’t lie to me. Maybe to the others but not to me.”

  They stared at each other, unblinking.

  At last he nodded. “All right.”

  “But not in here. Outside, where it’s just the two of us.”