The Red Scream

by Mary Willis Walker

  Molly grunted. “Yeah. The whole ugly wretched thing. I can’t bear to look at any of it. Just do it, honey. Get it over with.”

  “Okay. It’s your money.”

  “Ten,” Michelle called. “Keep breathing.”

  “Dad says Alison McFarland is setting up for an insanity plea,” Jo Beth said.

  “Yeah. So I hear.” Molly was panting. “I have no problem with that. She is insane. So was Louie, of course. But she’s rich insane and he was poor insane. Big difference.” Sweat was rolling into her eyes.

  “Thirteen … fourteen,” came the call.

  “What about her father?” Jo Beth asked.

  “They’re thinking about indicting him for criminal solicitation and conspiracy to obstruct justice. He’s in the hospital now, so I don’t know.” She stopped talking for a few seconds to catch her breath.

  “Now I want to hear about the important stuff,” Jo Beth said. “How about you and Dad?”

  “Oh, Jo Beth, I wish I knew. When he came to pick me up at that campground on Lake Livingston, I’ve never been happier to see anyone in my life. And it’s like that every time I see him. When he appears at my door, I feel like I’m having a heart attack.” Molly looked up at Jo Beth. Her daughter had tears in her eyes.

  “How about you, honey?” Molly asked.

  She shook her head. “Oh, Mom. Don’t ask.”

  “Seventeen … eighteen … nineteen.”

  Molly’s arms were quivering and her back burned. “Goddammit,” she muttered. “I watched an execution … I escaped a dangerous killer … and a watery grave … I swam across Lake Livingston in the dark … surely I can do twenty-five miserable—” Her breath ran out.

  “Twenty-one … twenty-two … twenty-three.”

  Molly was gasping, straining. Her arms shook wildly and her shoulders felt like they were wrenching out of the sockets. She looked up to see Jo Beth watching with wide, excited eyes.

  “Twenty-four … twenty-five.”

  Molly did the last one, then collapsed with a yip of triumph.

  “Mom,” Jo Beth whispered, “you did it. Now how about your Louie Bronk story? Have you gotten going on it yet?”

  “Tonight,” Molly said. “Richard’s promised me as much space as I need. Powers-that-be be damned, he said. I’m going to start it tonight.”

  From the front of the room Michelle bellowed out, “Very good. That was so good we’re going to do twenty-five more. Ready? Abs in. Let’s go!”

  Without showering or changing out of her exercise clothes, Molly sat down at the computer. She banished the flying toasters with one tap on the space bar and started to type. Her hands skimmed across the keyboard fluidly, as though the ideas in her head were pouring out through her fingertips. The words seemed to appear on the lighted screen of their own volition.

  At midnight on September 29, seventeen of us, upstanding citizens all, gathered behind high brick walls in Huntsville to commit a homicide—as cold-blooded and premeditated a homicide as it is possible to imagine. We stood by silently, we witnesses—journalists, prison officials, politicians, and ordinary citizens—as Louie Bronk was strapped to a gurney and a large dose of sodium thiopental was injected into his vein.

  He went pretty gentle into that East Texas good night, considering that he was a man given to deadly violence and considering that he was innocent of the murder for which he was being executed.

  No one tried to stop it. Not one of us. I knew he was innocent, but I did nothing. I didn’t object or cry bloody murder, or give in to the red scream—that shriek of terror and rage death-row inmates talk about. I just stood and watched—a passive witness.

  But no more.

  Here is my red scream.

  To understand how such a monstrous miscarriage of justice could happen, you have to go back eleven years to that hot July day when …

  She wrote long into the night with no awareness of time passing. The screen just kept on filling up with words.