Wages of Sin

by Penelope Williamson

  Rourke held out his hand and the man introduced himself as the Reverend Roland Wright. “Is it all right if we be back here, boss?” he asked. His gaze skittered away from Rourke's, and his palm had been damp with sweat. “We won't be sittin' in them chairs or nothin'.”

  “You're fine.” Rourke wanted to tell them that they could go ahead and use the chairs if they wanted, but the fact was they probably couldn't.

  Titus Dupre's younger brother, Cornelius, stood off to one side. His face was flat as glass, but the eyes that glared back at Rourke were dark with rage.

  His grandmother's eyes were scaled over and frosted with cataracts. Her deep brown skin was soft and crinkled like fine old kid gloves. “Mrs. Dupre,” Rourke said. “They let y'all visit some with Titus this evening?”

  “Yessuh. An' they let me bring 'im some of my shrimps étouffée for his supper.”

  “That's good. He told me you make the best étouffée in all New Orleans,” Rourke said. He knew he was being patronizing, but he had no real words of comfort to give to this woman, and even if he'd had them to give, he would have had no right to offer them.

  Yet she managed a smile of gratitude for him anyway, although it trembled around the edges. “I'ma worried 'bout what they goin' to do with Titus afterward. I tried to tell that man, the warden, that I got the burial insurance for my boy, but I don't think he listenin'.”

  The Negro burial insurance would have cost her fifty cents a week. She would have scrimped and saved and done without for years for a cheap plywood casket and a piece of cheesecloth dyed black to wrap the corpse in, but the funeral she was buying on time was supposed to have been for herself.

  “I'll make sure the arrangements are all taken care of,” Rourke said.

  “God bless you,” Gran'mon Dupre said, and Rourke felt ashamed because he knew she'd meant it.

  There was a little commotion over by the door just then and they all turned. A man in a dark suit came in carrying a black bag: the prison doctor who would be the one to pronounce Titus Dupre officially dead.

  A raw grating sound erupted out of Gran'mon Dupre's chest. “Oh, Lordy, Lordy. Why they doin' this? Why they killin' my gran'baby? You can say he was alla time angry over the stuff he cain't do and the stuff he cain't have, but he couldn't do what they say he done to that white girl. He come from good stock, my boy. Good stock.”

  “Hush, now, Gran'mon,” the Reverend Wright said. He gripped her arm tighter, as if she needed support, but she wasn't swooning. If anything she had drawn herself up taller. “You got to be takin' comfort that your boy be goin' home to Jesus.”

  Cornelius Dupre took a jolting step forward, his fists clenched, and for a moment Rourke thought he was going to take a swing at the old man. “You think Titus takin' any comfort, ol' fool?” the boy said. “When they goin' to strap his ass to that chair and fry him till he's like cracklin's.”

  Gran'mon Dupre moaned again, so loudly this time that she quieted the rest of the room.

  Rourke gave the boy his cop look, but he spoke to the reverend, whose face had gone gray. “Sir, why don't you take Mrs. Dupre out in the hall for some air?”

  The old man's lips pulled back from his few teeth in what was supposed to be a smile and he nodded vigorously. “Yessuh, boss. We can do that. Uh-huh. Get us some air.”

  “Don't you think you could have spared her that?” Rourke said to the boy once his grandmother was out of earshot.

  Cornelius Dupre could produce a sneer better than anyone Rourke had ever seen. “What you goin' to do 'bout that, Mr. Policeman? Arrest me now just for tellin' the God's ugly truth?”

  Rourke surprised them both by smiling. A smile that wasn't mean. “Man, Cornelius, you got some brass in you,” he said.

  Cornelius's eyes narrowed, as if he didn't know whether to smile himself or use up another of his sneers. “What you about?” he said.

  “I would just like,” Rourke said suddenly and with feeling, “to keep you alive and out of jail.”

  “Hunh.” Cornelius started to push past him, but then he stopped, and his throat worked hard to dredge up the words. “Titus is my brother,” he finally said, and though it came out a whisper, it might as well have been a shout. “You killin' my brother.”

  Rourke said nothing, because there was nothing he could say—certainly not, I'm sorry.

  It didn't matter anyway, because a reporter came running into the room, hollering, “They're bringing him down now. Titus Dupre is walking down.”

  Titus Dupre wasn't walking, he was shuffling. What with the shackles and chains on his ankles, which were linked to the shackles and chains around his waist and on his wrists.

  His freshly shaved head shone beneath the bare light bulbs and the skin of his face was stretched tight with fear. His shirt was so drenched with sweat, you could see skin through it. Rourke thought he looked much younger than he had earlier this evening. Too young for this.

  They didn't waste any time getting him in the chair.

  The guard with the gnarly teeth and another whose large round head rested on broad shoulders without visible assistance of a neck, buckled the leather straps around the boy's chest and arms and legs. The state executioner knelt on the floor of the platform and fixed an electrode, along with a brown sponge dripping with saline, to the calf of his right leg.

  Then the prison warden stepped toward the chair. “You got somethin' you want to say, boy? Might be you want to ask forgiveness from the folks of those girls you raped and killed.”

  “Won't get no beggin' words out of me,” Titus Dupre said, but his eyes looked wildly around the room, and it seemed to Rourke that his gaze passed over his grandmother and brother and fastened hard onto Rourke's face and there was real terror in those eyes, and an accusation.

  “So be it,” the warden said and he stepped back, and the guard with the gnarly teeth took a black silk hood from off a brass hook on the back of the chair and rolled it down over the boy's face, shutting off those staring eyes.

  The hood had a hole in its top, and the executioner took a leather cap and strapped it onto Titus Dupre's head. A second electrode and saline-soaked sponge had been fastened into the leather cap and they came in contact now with the boy's bald scalp, so that the two thousand volts could shoot between that electrode and the one on his calf. It was why his head had been shaved—so that his hair wouldn't catch on fire.

  The executioner stepped away from the chair, and Titus Dupre was left alone. A seventeen-year-old boy, hooded and strapped to a chair and trailing electrical wires. All you could see of his flesh were his hands, and when the electrician turned the knob that goosed the generator, a steady low humming started up and the bones of his knuckles pushed white against the skin.

  “Titus Dupre,” the warden said. “You have been tried by a jury of your peers and found guilty of the rape and murder of Nina Duboche. You have been sentenced to death for those crimes by a judge in good standing in New Orleans Parish of the State of Louisiana. That sentence will now be carried out.”

  The warden for the New Orleans Parish Prison gave the thumbs-up signal, and the executioner for the State of Louisiana counted down: “Three, two, one—the execution is now in progress…” And he pulled the switch.

  Clara Louise Duboche screamed and then laughed and then sobbed, and her husband shouted, “Die hard, you murdering bastard!”

  Titus Dupre died hard. The leather cap on his head hummed and his hands spasmed into fists. A split second later his body convulsed and surged against the straps, so violently the chair rocked. He seemed to be trying to lurch to his feet to get away from what was happening to him, and then his bowels and bladder let loose.

  Electricity coursed through the body of Titus Dupre for one full minute, and Rourke heard a sound like frying bacon, and the sickly sweet smell of burning flesh filled the room, and the smell of hot electricity.

  The executioner shut off the juice, and after a long moment when everybody just stood there, the doctor—who had bee
n pressed against the wall with his black bag cradled against his chest—stumbled on stiff legs over to the body in the chair.

  He took out his stethoscope and listened for a heartbeat, and then he whirled toward the warden so fast he nearly fell. He shook his head, and his eyes were wide and horrified.

  “Shee-it,” the warden said, panic making him forget that he was in mixed company and putting a squeal into his voice. “God almighty, good God almighty, the fucker ain't dead yet. Give 'im another jolt.”

  The executioner, looking a little panicked himself, gave the chair another jolt, and the body of Titus Dupre jumped and twitched in the grip of the current for another full minute and it didn't seem like it could be real at first, but then it couldn't be denied. Wisps of smoke were feathering from the cap on Titus Dupre's head.

  “Stop!” Ethel Bloom screamed, pushing to her feet with such force the wooden folding chair toppled over. She tried to climb onto the platform, still screaming at them to stop.

  Her husband got to her first. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her back, and she twisted around, trying to push free of him with her balled-up fists, and she was crying, great, gulping sobs. “Oh God, oh God, oh God, he's on fire. He's on fire.”

  The family of Titus Dupre stayed in the back of the room while it emptied out, because colored people couldn't go through any door of any room until all the white people there who wanted to leave had already done so.

  As two reporters passed by the old woman, the one said, “Man, that nigger had some cold in him,” and the other laughed and said, “Got fried in the end, though.”

  Up on the platform the guard with the gnarly teeth was taking the hood off the dead boy. Titus Dupre's eyeballs had popped out onto his cheeks, and as dark as his skin had been, it looked boiled red now, and stretched to the point of bursting. There were burns on his head, black and blistered, and so deep you could see the skull bone.

  The burns were still smoking.

  It seemed to Rourke that the boy had to have screamed when they shot the two thousand volts through him. His rational mind told him that hadn't happened, but it seemed to him the boy's scream had ripped through his own ears because he could hear no sound.

  Someone told Rourke later that the crowd outside the Parish Prison had cheered and celebrated for hours upon the official announcement of Titus Dupre's death, but when Rourke stood on the prison steps afterward he couldn't hear a thing. He could see black mouths open wide, and he watched as some Klansman swung his “Burn, nigger, burn” sign against a lamppost and it shattered into kindling, but it did so silently, as if Rourke was seeing it enacted on a movie screen. The man from this morning with the yellow shirt and purple suspenders played an accordion for a white man in blackface, who was dancing a jig and slapping out make-believe flames on his head and arms and legs, but Rourke could hear no sound.

  He watched as one laughing woman tossed a gin bottle to another, only it fell short and the smash of glass on the pavement was like a slap against Rourke's ears, breaking through the shroud of silence.

  He heard the shouts then, and the laughter and the accordion and car horns. He smelled car exhaust, and the New Orleans smell of swamp and must. The wind bit at his flayed skin and he could feel sweat in eyes, and his own heart beating in his chest.

  He breathed, and sucked life deep into his lungs.

  After the execution, Romeo had hung around with the crowd in front of the Parish Prison, drawn into it in spite of himself. Some jackass in a yellow shirt and purple suspenders and teeth like a beaver's was talking about how Titus Dupre's head had caught on fire when they'd pulled the switch, talking as if he'd actually been in the room when it happened and describing the moment in all its gory detail. He talked a good game, but Romeo knew the man had no real conception of what fire could do to human flesh: the way the flames could melt skin and tissue and boil the blood, and how fat crackled and popped when it burned, and smelled like the back end of a greasy diner.

  Romeo had joined in the laughter, though, because the whole thing had amused him even if he really didn't give a holy fuck if the State of Louisiana had fried that colored boy's ass tonight, or fried his head. It didn't change things. Not what had come before, and it sure didn't change what was coming after.

  It wasn't long before he had grown bored with the man in the purple suspenders and so he'd ducked into a nearby speakeasy for a drink, but the gin they served had tasted sour and he'd never taken much pleasure from drinking alone. He'd left the glass on the bar still mostly full and went back into the night. He prowled the empty neighborhoods for a while, which were deserted except for near the prison where the party looked to be lasting until dawn, and when the first brush of daylight was painting the river water gray and washing out the neon lights on Canal Street, he went on home to bed.

  To bed and into the arms of Remy Lelourie.

  Romeo loved Remy Lelourie to death, but she wore him out at times. She could be wild and wicked one night, soft and loving the next. Some nights she could be cruel. She'd tease him until he'd almost be coming and then she'd pull back, again and again, until his balls were blue and his cock was raw, and then she would threaten to leave him in that state, making him whimper and beg. Sometimes she would go on and leave him anyway, and he'd hate her to death then.

  He wasn't feeling particularly charitable with her tonight, in any event. The notes that he'd written her, in his blood, in her lipstick—they were supposed to make her see that she had to change her ways if there was to be any hope for them. All those lies of hers, all those betrayals and broken promises…Why couldn't she see that they had to stop?

  “Don't make me do it, Remy,” he shouted at her. “Don't make me do it.” And then that little voice deep in his head, the one he couldn't shut up now no matter how much dope he shot in his veins, began to chant:

  “For never was a story of more woe Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.”

  The voice made him so mad he swung at her face with his balled-up fist. Only he caught himself up at the last minute, shifting his weight so that he punched the wall instead. Punched a big hole through the plaster.

  He fucked the hell out of her after that. Pounded into her until the bed shook and more pieces of plaster crumbled out of the wall. Pounded into her so hard his butt lifted off the bed, and when he came he hooted like a loon. Romeo lay on the bed, running with sweat, his chest heaving, his cock twitching and slowly dying.

  When he could catch enough of a breath, he got up. He wiped off his belly and hands with a ragged towel and then tossed the towel on top of the pile of dirty clothes in the corner. As he tucked his wet, limp penis back into his trousers, for some reason an image came into his head of that colored boy they'd fried tonight. When two thousand volts of electricity shoot through your body, do you get a hard-on?

  Hey, he should've asked that know-it-all asshole with the purple suspenders, Romeo thought, and then laughed at himself.

  “Jesus, you're one sick bastard,” he said, and then the laughter fell off his face. Melted off his face, as if it had been burned off. “Fuck it,” he said to that, and then he shouted it, nice and loud, drawing out the vowels. “Fuuuck iiiiit!”

  He made a halfhearted attempt to straighten the bed. The sheets were gray and reeked of sex, and the bottom one was starting to rip at one corner. He hadn't noticed that before and he felt suddenly ashamed. She was used to better, used to the best, and yet she hadn't complained. He'd pick up some new sheets tomorrow and maybe some of those nice, sweet-smelling soaps they sold in drugstores.

  “I'll do right by you, darlin',” he told her. “But you also got to do right by me.”

  He picked up her photograph and put it back on the bedside table, but not before kissing her first.

  “Soon, Remy,” he said. Soon.

  But not yet.

  In the meantime, though, a new day was dawning and he had places to go.

  Someone to see.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Ea
rly every Sunday morning for the last fifty-seven years, Tornado Jones had gotten up with the sun and gone on down to the river to catch himself a mess of catfish to fry up for breakfast. It had gotten harder lately; what with the way the rheumatism was twisting up his old bones into sailor's knots, it had gotten hard just dragging his sorry ol' ass out of bed. He kept on doing it, though, even on the Sundays when he wasn't much hungry for fish. Habits made a man dependable and Tornado Jones prided himself on being a man of habit. Tornado Jones liked to say that come Sunday mornings, you could depend on finding him down at the riverbank cleaning up a string of fresh-caught mudcats.

  Tornado's mama hadn't given him such a name when he was born, of course. Tornado liked to tell folk he couldn't remember what his given name was—he'd been called Tornado for so long. He'd been a champion prizefighter in his younger days, and the newspapers had taken to calling him Tornado because of the way he windmilled his punches and danced around his opponent in the ring. Hunh. He hadn't been dancing, he'd been ducking, only he'd never told anybody that. Lord Gawd, he'd been fast in those days, though. Everything about him had been fast, including his patter. He'd had a patter that could charm the peaches off the trees, in those days.

  Not so quick anymore, though, uh-uh, he thought, as he picked through a web of dried algae and river trash on his way across the mud flat to the river. Certainly wasn't moving like any tornado this morning. Done lost his patter, and his ducking and dancing, and his windmill punches, too. He was going on eighty-three now, and it had been a long time since he'd swatted at anything bigger than a mosquito.

  His old bones creaked and his old joints cracked as he squatted on the bank and dipped a tin pan into the water. He pulled a mudcat off the string and slit its belly, enjoying the heat of the morning sun on his back. It had been cool lately, but today it looked like it was fixing to be hot. The sky was white as bone.

  He paused in his fish cleaning for a moment to take in the morning. He watched the mud daubers fly around and the crawfish peep above their mud holes. Around a bend upriver it looked like there was a dead garfish lying on the gray mud beach, adding to the stink. The Mississippi, he thought, was one big mess of smelly mud.