by Jim Nisbet
“Good,” said Johanson. He unfolded a typewritten page from his hip pocket and read it aloud.
“Robert Lambert Mencken, by order of the Superior Court of the State of Texas, having been tried and convicted of the capital crime of murder in the first degree, and having exhausted all manner of pleas and appeals thereof; and condemned to die by that court, no subsequent judicial review having found fault with that judgement; you are at this hour to fulfill the order of that court, whose sentence upon you is that of death, to be accomplished by the introduction of lethal chemicals into your bloodstream, until such time as all life shall have ceased to inhabit your earthly body. As deemed humane and required by the State of Texas, statute number 2838-21.5 ratified by the Supreme Court of the United States of America, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and seventy-six, and not subsequently rescinded.”
Warden Johanson paused to pass a gray handkerchief over his brow. Silence reigned in the room. Beyond the doubleglazed window six witnesses sat in the double row of benches, and a seventh stood to one side. Except that a few were making notes, they might have been watching television.
“In accordance with this statute, Robert Lambert Mencken, you have received the final meal of your choice, and retained the possibility of intervention from the clemency and mercy of the State, as represented by the sovereign governor of this State, until the last possible moment. As warden of this prison and agent of that State, I now inform you that, all possibility of appeal, reprieve and clemency being exhausted, the will of the people of Texas will now be carried out. May God have mercy on your soul.”
Johanson folded the paper, replaced it in his hip pocket and looked at Royce.
“Dr. Royce, it is understood that as a member of medical profession, you are here solely in your humane capacity, to ensure that the condemned man suffers as little as possible during the course of his punishment, to see it administered with compassion; and that you are not here to actually administer this lethal potion to him. This being understood, are you prepared to ready the prisoner for the injection?”
“I am,” said Royce.
“Robert Lambert Mencken,” continued Johanson, “do you have any last words?”
When Mencken failed to respond to this question, Royce thought he might have been overwhelmed by the morphine. Mencken’s eyes were closed; his breathing was quiet; he looked very comfortable. Royce thought of the bottle of smelling salts in his bag.
Johanson addressed the witnesses. “The condemned Robert Lambert Mencken has nothing to say for himself. If Doctor Royce—”
“How about, I’m glad I killed him’?” said Mencken in a strong, clear voice.
Johanson turned.
Silence.
Johanson and Royce exchanged a glance.
Johanson’s face suddenly went purplish red. Royce could see where he’d scoured his jowls with a safety razor at five-thirty every morning for forty-five years. Johanson was suddenly shouting. “And what about that poor mother of five you blew away for a six-pack!”IT
Mencken’s eyes snapped open, flooded with pain. His face twisted with outrage. “I didn’t—” He stopped.
“You didn’t,” Johanson snarled, his voice dripping with contempt.
But Mencken was watching Royce. Royce watched Mencken’s eyes. The face relaxed, but the eyes reiterated the plea. “I didn’t,” they said, as eloquently as the man’s voice—perhaps more so. But Mencken’s mouth jerked into a sneer and he said, “I didn’t mean to kill Pit Bull, Warden. I was just trying to paralyze the sonofabitch for life.” He closed his eyes.
“Peters was a God-fearing man doing his duty as he saw—” Johanson stopped midsentence. His mouth contorted his face into an ugly mask and a muscle twitched in his cheek. A moment, then two passed.
“Is that all the prisoner wished to say?” Johanson said in an official, dispassionate voice.
Silence.
“Dr. Royce.” Johanson turned and took up a position against the wall, next to the red telephone that connected the gas chamber to the office of the governor of Texas.
Royce looked at the telephone. Since midnight there had been no chance of its ringing. Before midnight there had been damn little chance. It was Friday night, or rather, Saturday morning. It was very likely that the governor hadn’t yet sent home the last guests from a large fund-raising barbecue on his ranch, two hundred miles from the governor’s mansion in Austin.
Royce approached the small table to the right of the strapped prisoner and took up the Velcro cuff of the sphygmdomanometer. As he wrapped it around Mencken’s left bicep, Mencken opened his eyes.
“You allowed to talk?”
Royce looked at Johanson. Johanson said nothing.
Considering his position was roughly equivalent to that of a man standing in the door of an airplane without a parachute, letting the slipstream feel him out, Mencken was calm. “What’s the score?” he asked. He might have been talking about a ball game or a rental agreement.
Royce drew a breath, then explained it in a soft voice, as he adjusted the rasping Velcro cuff.
“Right now the mainlines into your arms are circulating a harmless saline solution. When the warden gives the signal, three people beyond the wall behind you there will unclip three hoses. All the hoses have the salt running through them, into your system, but one will come from that bottle there.” Royce nodded at the bottle on the small table, past the prisoner’s head. Mencken rolled his eyes over and considered it.
“Nobody knows which hose is hot,” Mencken said.
“Right. First thing, you’ll feel sleepy. When you do, try to take a couple of deep breaths.”
“Sure,” said Mencken. “Don’t I get to count backwards from one hundred?”
Royce tugged at his ear. “You won’t have time.”
Mencken sucked on a tooth. His face gleamed with perspiration. “How about, will I have time to say, ‘The cocksucker deserved it’?”
“It’s kind of doubtful.”
“Whew. That’s some technology.”
“You’d be better off taking a couple of deep breaths. It makes it even faster, and you might not regurgitate that meal the warden was talking about.”
“I wouldn’t mind giving it back to him.” He raised his head. “Hey, Johanson.”
“Mr. Mencken,” Johanson said.
“Want to kiss me good-bye?”
Johanson said nothing.
“It’s my last request.”
Johanson scowled..
“Warden doesn’t like me.” Mencken laid his head down.
“Denying a man’s last request.” He looked at the bottles on the table next to him. Royce pumped the bulb of the sphygmomanometer. “Hey, Doc,” Mencken said sheepishly, “what’s in that stuff?”
One-fifty over ninety. The blood pressure of a perfectly healthy man on morphine and adrenalin about to die from an overdose of three other chemicals after getting tuned up by four prison guards. Royce wiped the sweat off Mencken’s chest with the blood-soaked towel end and applied his stethoscope. He felt like an ass, making sure this man was alive. Mencken had a strong heart, too, though it was beating a little fast at a hundred. He must be a little excited.
“Huh, Doc, say,” Mencken’s voice boomed through the tubes of the stethoscope, “you got a name?”
“Franklin. Franklin Royce,” he replied, replacing the business end of the scope in his shirt pocket.
“Dr. Royce,” Mencken smiled, “anyone ever called you Rolls? Rolls Royce?” Mencken laughed, looked toward the warden, laughed again, then looked back. “Huh?”
Royce smiled slightly and shook his head. “You’re the first.”
But Mencken hadn’t been waiting for an answer to his bad pun. “Wish somebody’d call, yeah. Don’t nobody call me anymore.” He laughed a short laugh and looked from Royce to the red telephone. “Hey man,” he said to the patient guard next to the phone, “why don’t you call Time or something, make sure that thing works? Warden there mi
ghta snuck down here in the middle of the night and unplugged it.”
The guard stared straight ahead, standing at parade rest, hands behind his back, and licked his lips.
“You ever heard that phone ring when there was Blood on this table? Does that suggest anything to you, man? Huh?”
No one spoke.
“For that matter,” Mencken’s eyes searched the faces around him, “for that matter, has there ever been anybody other than Blood on this table? Huh?”
Royce fitted the tip of a large needle to the rubber cap of the bottle of poison and drove it through the seal.
Mencken turned his head, the only part of his body that he could still move against the restraining straps that bound him to the gurney, to watch Royce. Royce inverted the little bottle and held it to the light. Everyone in the room and beyond the glass watched, fascinated, as the tube below the needle slowly filled with a clear fluid. The deadly serum flowed slowly because it was thick, which was also why the needle used to inject it had to be a large one.
“Rolls Royce,” Mencken breathed, watching him, “what’s in that stuff?”
“Poison,” Royce said.
“That’s a relief,” Mencken said absently, “I wouldn’t want to be going through all this for nothing.” He smiled. “Is it, you know, any good?”
“The best.”
“Good as that other?”
Royce didn’t think Johanson would appreciate that he’d given the prisoner some small relief in his last hour. He kept his eye on the fluid level in the bottle as he said quietly, “You tell me, Mr. Mencken.”
Mencken snorted. “Yeah,” he said, “I’ll be beaming you superlatives from the astral envelope.” He stared at the little bottle and the hose that hovered between him and the bright lights above.
Royce hung the bottle upside down on the IV rack, and let the hose that connected it to the wall dangle below.
Royce looked over Mencken at Johanson. Johanson frowned, and made a little circular movement with his hand and index finger, as if to say, “Get on with it.” Royce moved to Mencken’s side and looked down at him.
“Ready?”
Mencken briefly frowned, then suddenly scowled. He focused his eyes on Royce’s face and said, “Ready? Ready? What does that mean, ‘ready’? Ready for what? You mean am I ready to go to sleep now, like a good little boy—and I use the word ‘boy’ advisedly—and wake up in an hour in the same goddamn world, in the same goddamn room, on the same goddamn table, and have the white folks say, ‘That’s a good boy, Bobby, ’cause, since you didn’t die, you must be Superman, and so this has all been a joke. Since you is survived the Bardos of chemical death, we agree with you, boy, it’s all been a joke and you must be innocent, and now—are you ready for this?—you is free to go, you is a free man in a free society.’
“Yeah,” Mencken said bitterly, “I’m ready for that.”
Royce couldn’t look Mencken in the eye.
“Don’t look away from me, Doctor Royce, ’cause you’re the only man I can see in this room, and the last thing I’m going to look at on this bleak earth. And that thought makes me happy, Doctor, because, hey, you want to know why I’m ready? I’m ready to get off this planet because as long as I can remember, it’s been a very confusing, difficult place. You know why?
Royce fiddled with his stethoscope. “Why?”
“Because I’m tired of fighting a world that condemned me the day I was born, that’s why. You think I’m jiving?”
Royce suddenly, inexplicably, caught the smell of the condemned man full in the nostrils for the first time: blood, sweat, fear, garlic—Death.
Johanson cleared his throat. “Dr. Royce—”
“Think about it,” Mencken shouted, his eyes going from Johanson to Royce’s face. “I’m getting put down for the wrong thing here tonight, Doc, but I’m so used to it, I’m so ready for the flip-flop that I’m not surprised, Doc. You got that? This is nothing new, here. This has been happening to me all my life and I’m telling you that I have never, ever! suffered for the right reason! You hear me? Never! But I turned the tables on ’em tonight, yes I did. Tonight, at least, at the last possible moment, I arranged to be going down for the right goddamn reason. Yes I did. Oh goody, oh boy, oh shit!”
Mencken’s head fell back into a pool of perspiration tinged with blood on the surface of the stainless steel table, with a hollow, metallic thump, his teeth clenched in frustration. He was breathing hard. Tears filled his eyes.
“Fuck, I need a vacation,” he said.
Royce hadn’t notice the pool before. He folded a towel and gently placed it beneath the black man’s head.
Royce swallowed and looked at Johanson. This business was beginning to unnerve everybody; there was no sense in prolonging it. “Everything’s set,” he said. Neither Mencken nor Royce had noticed the priest, who had drawn near to be handy in case Mencken needed him.
Johanson didn’t hesitate. He crossed between the telephone and the stainless steel table and banged his meaty fist on the wall three times.
Mencken jumped in his straps. The priest jumped in his cassock. Even Royce, who was watching Johanson, started at the first blow.
Johanson’s face betrayed none of his pleasure as he resumed his position.
Royce placed his hand on Mencken’s shoulder and watched the fluid level in the inverted bottle. After a moment, it began to drop. He waited. Mencken’s skin was hot beneath his palm. A rope of muscle pooled at the point of the bone there. For the first time Royce noticed the small twin circles of scar tissue on the neck at his fingertips. Then he whispered, “A couple of deep breaths, now.” By this time Royce was perspiring as heavily as Mencken, and the shoulder was slippery to his touch. The bottle was half-empty. Royce forced his eyes away from the bottle to look at Mencken.
The convict’s eyes met Royce’s, very large and dark and moist. Then Mencken yawned; it was the only sound in the room. Twice he inhaled deeply, each time as if he were having trouble getting his breath. His nostrils flared. He exhaled the second breath and held Royce’s stare with his own. He shook his head, moving his lips.
Royce bent quickly to catch Mencken’s last words.
“Colleen, I … didn’t …,” he whispered.
And he kissed Royce on the lips.
Royce quickly stood up astonished, touching his mouth. Mencken was still staring at him, but his eyes were sightless.
The slightest trace of a smile lingered about his lips.
FOUR
The Texas night, immense, black, hot, flowed imperceptibly above the pickup, as effortlessly as the pickup flowed through a constant stream of moths, bugs and crushed armadillos. The Texas highway stretched straight and seemingly endless before and behind, its way infrequently traced by headlights in one direction and taillights in the other, with great, immeasurable distances between them. It was four-thirty in the morning and Royce had both windows down, and he was still sweating; but after the stifling claustrophobia of Huntsville the hot bluster at the cab windows felt like cool alpine breezes. He’d been driving southeast for almost an hour. One hand held the wheel, his elbow propped in the open window beside him. The other hand fidgeted with the cap of a bottle of whiskey he’d stopped to buy a half-hour after he’d passed through the last checkpoint at the prison perimeter, well beyond the actual walls.
Royce drove with the distracted attentiveness which is the particular preserve of Westerners, who often must drive a hundred miles or more to go to church, or to the sale barn or cattle auction, or to visit a relative for Sunday dinner. A hundred or so miles in a V-8 pickup truck, with a bull in the back, at seventy-five or eighty miles per hour, a man can get a funny look on his face. Under these conditions he can think over his whole life. He can go over the ranch books transaction by transaction, debit by credit, if he knows them well enough, or he can spend a whole hour mulling the single fact that he really doesn’t know very much at all about bookkeeping. Or he can discern subtleties in the genealogies of cat
tle breeding that might have eluded him in less tranquil circumstances. Over the course of an hour his expression might not change much, but his mind will change, then go back to its original position, then change again to an entirely different, third opinion, then forget the whole thing.
If he has a phone in the truck, he can call his wife and ask her what she thinks about it, or somebody can call him and give their opinion.
The expense and network locations aside, a lot of folks don’t have phones in their trucks for just that reason.
Franklin Royce had a great deal on his mind when he left Huntsville prison that night. Warden Johanson hadn’t been much help.
“Y’ain’t got the stomach for the job, y’ best quit,” he’d said.
Royce had the stomach for the job. It wasn’t the job that was bothering him.
A half-hour out of Huntsville, he’d stopped by a road-house to buy a couple of beers.
It was the usual kind of joint: neon sign for Lone Star beer high in a cloud of bugs out front, with a half-dozen pickups parked in the dust around it. Some trucks with two bales of hay and a saddle in the bed, or maybe a couple of fifty-five-gallon drums of diesel, with a deer rifle or spinning rod slung on the gun rack in the cab, horse trailers hitched to two or three of them, each with a dozing horse or two or empty, as the big trucks sang by on the highway.
Inside was dark and cool, with a jukebox playing a Bob Wills tune. A game of Space Invaders played with itself in the back. Two men and a woman sat at the bar. The light of a television behind it played over their faces.
“Get a drink?” Royce asked a cowboy smoking at the bar.
“Might,” the man said, not taking his eyes off the screen. The woman a couple of stools down the bar laid her cigarette in an ashtray and stood up slowly.
“What’s it for ya?” she asked, as she circled the far end of the bar and walked up the duckboards behind it.
Royce sat at the bar and looked up at the television over his head. They were watching a news program. A tanned young man with perfectly coiffed white hair and a stack of papers in front of him spoke authoritatively into the camera.
