Blackburn

by Bradley Denton

  He dozed, but the guards awoke him at eight-fifteen and took him to a shower stall next to the holding cell. They had him strip and throw his clothes into a laundry bag. When he finished showering, they handed him a towel, and then clean clothes and a pair of slippers. He dressed, commenting on the fact that the shirt was short-sleeved. The guards did not respond to that, but returned him to the holding cell and told him he could relax for a few hours.

  Blackburn couldn’t relax. He wasn’t frightened, or even nervous; he was simply wide awake. Showers did that to him. One of the guards asked if he would like a television brought in, but Blackburn asked for a Houston Chronicle instead. When that was provided, he skipped the news sections in favor of the advice columns and funnies. He didn’t see much point in knowing what was going on out in the world; it was probably just more Iran-Contra bullshit anyway.

  The warden and chaplain came at eleven-thirty, along with three men in suits whom Blackburn didn’t recognize and a guard wheeling a gurney. Blackburn was glad to see that the gurney had a mattress. He was taken from the holding cell and escorted to a closed door, where he was told to unbutton his shirt and to lie down on the gurney. He did so, lying down with his feet toward the door, and the guards secured him to the gurney with six leather straps. His right arm was strapped to a board that angled out from the side of the gurney. Then the warden opened the door to what Blackburn knew was called “the Death House,” and the gurney was wheeled inside.

  The room had brick walls. The wall on Blackburn’s left had a door that led to the executioner’s room. Beside that door were two small, square holes, one above the other. Beside the upper hole was a rectangular mirror. Blackburn knew that the executioner and a doctor on the other side of the mirror would be able to see him, but he wouldn’t be able to see them.

  The gurney stopped under the mirror. Blackburn looked up at it and winked.

  The door beside the square holes opened, and a man in a blue smock stepped into the Death House. This man was not a doctor, but a “medically trained individual.” He came around the gurney to Blackburn’s right side, reached across Blackburn, and took a long needle attached to a clear plastic tube from the lower of the two square holes. He pulled the tube out so that it lay across Blackburn’s bare chest, then smoothed the skin on Blackburn’s inner elbow and pushed in the needle.

  Blackburn watched the needle go in, but had no pain. “You’re good,” he told the man in the smock. “I didn’t feel a thing.”

  “Thanks,” the man in the smock said. “You have good veins.” Then he looked startled, and glanced at the other men in the room. They pretended not to have heard anything.

  The man in the smock taped the needle to Blackburn’s arm, then pulled a second tube from the lower hole. This tube was gray, ending in a metal disk that the man in the smock taped to Blackburn’s chest. It was a stethoscope for the doctor.

  The man in the smock returned to the executioner’s room and closed the door.

  “Hey,” Blackburn said. “What’s the top hole for?”

  The warden’s face appeared over Blackburn. The warden had a weak chin and a receding hairline. He wore glasses.

  “We don’t use the top hole,” he said.

  “Then why’d you put it in the wall?” Blackburn asked.

  The warden didn’t answer. Instead, he said, “Jimmy, you can make a statement now, if you like.”

  Blackburn had known this moment was coming for almost a year, and had rehearsed various statements. But he hadn’t been able to pick one and one alone, and he still couldn’t decide.

  I have never killed a woman; Leslie doesn’t count, because she lit the fuse herself.

  Auto mechanics are, without exception, crooks.

  No man knows love who has never had a dog.

  I regret making Leo drink motor oil; I should have just come back later and shot him.

  Artimus Arthur will be remembered as the greatest man of letters of the twentieth century.

  Go fly a kite.

  The unit of currency in Laos is the kip; in Mongolia, the tugrik.

  Morton giveth, and Morton taketh away.

  Tell Jasmine not to take less than sixty thousand for the homestead.

  Tell Dolores I forgive her.

  Tell the people of Wantoda, Kansas, that I’ve made them famous.

  Tell Ernie’s parents that if they never did anything else in their lives, they can still be proud because they made Ernie.

  Tell Heather not to let Alan play with anything sharp.

  All of these were worth saying, and none of them were enough.

  “Jimmy?” the warden said.

  Blackburn tried to shrug, but the leather straps were tight.

  “Green Lantern isn’t what it used to be,” he said.

  The warden frowned, then stepped away. The chaplain appeared over Blackburn then, and Blackburn made a noise in his throat as if he were bringing up phlegm. The chaplain stepped away too.

  Blackburn felt something cold in his arm, and he raised his head to look at the clear tube lying across his chest. It was full of a colorless liquid. He knew that the liquid was a saline solution, with no poison in it. They would keep this going for a while, so he wouldn’t know when the drugs started. The drugs would be sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride. He didn’t know what those words meant, exactly, but he had taken pride in learning them. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was something like learning the words “Colt Python,” which also didn’t mean anything, by themselves. They only meant something when applied to steel and lead. Just as drugs only meant something when they slid into your body.

  He became aware of a dull pressure in his bladder and bowels, and smiled. They would wish they could kill him twice.

  He turned his head to the right and saw a glass panel in the far wall. The glare from the ceiling light kept him from seeing the faces of the witnesses behind that panel, but he saw their shapes. They were like ghosts. He stared at them for several minutes to make sure they were uncomfortable. Then he looked up at the ceiling light. This was taking too long.

  The ceiling light was a single bright bulb. Blackburn guessed that it was at least two hundred watts. He stared at it, playing a game to see how long he could look without blinking. Then one of the men in the room appeared over him again, blocking his view.

  “You’re in my light,” Blackburn said.

  The man stepped away, and the sun was bright in Jimmy’s eyes. His black fiberglass rod and Zebco 404 reel gleamed.

  “Well, come on if you’re coming,” Dad said.

  Jimmy hurried down the bank, almost falling. Dad took the lid off the Folger’s coffee can, reached in, and pulled out a wriggling red worm.

  “You do it like this,” Dad said, holding the hook of his own rod and reel in his right hand. “You thread it on, head to ass or ass to head. You don’t jab it through sideways, ’cause then the fish just bites off what he wants.”

  Jimmy stood close and watched. The worm bunched up on the hook as Dad pushed it on. The free end flailed.

  “Does it hurt it?” Jimmy asked.

  “Worms ain’t got nerves.” Dad took his hands away from the hook. It dangled before Jimmy’s face, no longer metal, but hook-shaped flesh. “Now do yours,” Dad said.

  Jimmy laid his rod on the flat mud beside the water and sat down. He dug into the dirt in the coffee can and pulled up a worm, slimy and strong. It almost slipped away. He clutched the worm in his right hand and picked up the brass hook at the end of his line with his left.

  He couldn’t get the hook into the worm the way Dad had done. The worm’s ass or head or whatever wouldn’t stay still long enough for him to push the point of the barb into the hole. He jabbed in desperation and stuck himself in the thumb.

  “Ow!” he yelled, dropping both worm and hook.

  Dad picked them up and squatted beside him. “I’ll show you one more time,” he said, “and if you don’t get it right after that, we’re leaving. Give
me your hands.”

  Jimmy held out his hands, and Dad placed the worm in his left and the hook in his right. Then Dad guided Jimmy’s fingers.

  “Like this,” Dad said. “It ain’t hard.”

  The worm slid onto the hook as slick and easy as macaroni onto a toothpick.

  In that instant, Jimmy became dizzy with a joy he had never before experienced. He didn’t know what had caused it, but he didn’t want it to stop, so he tried to memorize everything: the warmth of the sun on his crew-cut scalp; the coolness of the mud beneath him; Dad’s rough fingers wrapped around his; and the smell of earth and blood from the worm on the hook.

  About the Author

  Bradley Denton is the author of five novels and three short story collections. He lives on the outskirts of Austin, Texas. You can sign up for email updates here.

  Also by Bradley Denton

  Wrack and Roll

  Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well on Ganymede

  The Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians

  A Conflagration Artist

  Lunatics

  One Day Closer to Death

  Laughin’ Boy

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Victim Number Two

  1. Blackburn and the Blind Man

  Victim Number Four

  2. Blackburn Flies a Kite

  Victim Number Five

  3. Blackburn and the Chicken-Killer

  Victim Number Seven

  4. Blackburn Pulls the Trigger

  Victim Number Eight

  5. Blackburn the Breadwinner

  Victim Number Ten

  6. Blackburn Chooses Sterility

  Victims Number Fourteen and Fifteen

  7. Blackburn Kisses the Old Man

  Victim Number Seventeen

  8. Blackburn Sins

  Victim Number Nineteen

  9. Blackburn and the Lamb of God

  Victim Number Twenty-One

  About the Author

  Also by Bradley Denton

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  BLACKBURN. Copyright © 1993 by Bradley Denton. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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  Portions of this book have appeared previously, in slightly different forms, in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and in Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine.

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  First published in the United States by St. Martin’s Press

  First Picador Edition: March 1995

  Second Picador Edition: May 2007

  eISBN 9781250091604

  First eBook edition: June 2015