by Steve Thayer
Most of the men in the Seg Unit went to class or to their prison jobs during the day, but since Dixon Bell was supposed to be rotting away on death row he stayed behind. He read books. He wrote a weather feature for the prison paper. He answered letters. And for two years he watched television. The routine pushed his frustration level to the boiling point.
“Do you have any final words before the will of the people is carried out?”
“Yeah, shit-for-brains, I got some final words. You got the wrong man! It’s not my fucking fingerprint. I was in all those places because the real killer was following me. Following me because I’m on television. I was set up. Can’t you see that? Beanblossom knows. Angelbeck knows, the old bastard just won’t admit it. You dumb assholes got the wrong man. The day after I fry he’s gonna go out there and kill again. Every season another dead body on your hands. What are you gonna do then? Who y’all gonna kill next?”
Few of the inmates believed Dixon Bell would be executed—or so they kept telling him. But the state had spent millions. Sooner or later Minnesota would have to execute somebody. He may not have been sitting on a real death row these past two years, but that Death House they were building out in Industry was as real as rain. There seemed to be a somber feeling among the prison staff that the Weatherman was a dead duck. That his time was near. The sand in his hourglass was running out. Take the strange case of Dr. Yauch.
Dr. D. Yauch, as his nametag read, ran the prison hospital. He appeared to be about the same age as Dixon Bell, but he had the demeanor of an old fart. In school he had undoubtedly been the class nerd. His horn-rimmed glasses were probably surgically implanted on his face during puberty. Every month for two years Dixon Bell was sent to Dr. Yauch and ordered to undergo a complete physical. It was the doctor’s job to see that the Weatherman was fit to be fried. Shortly after the federal court of appeals refused to hear his case Dixon Bell was led over to the hospital and into the good doctor’s office for his monthly exam. As usual, they were left alone.
“Hey, Doc, may be less than six months now. Don’t let it worry your little heart. I’ll see that your bill gets paid.”
Ignoring what the Weatherman had said, Dr. Yauch silently wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around his patient’s right arm, then asked, “Do you have trouble sleeping at night?”
Dixon Bell rolled his eyes, snickered at the doctor’s stupidity. He turned his head away, fed up with the whole charade, the sickening ritual of passing a monthly physical examination so that he could be strapped into a chair and electrocuted. The Weatherman made no attempt to hide his disdain.
“I asked you a question, mister!” The doctor’s voice had suddenly changed. It was firm and harsh now, like a commanding officer demanding an answer.
Dixon Bell turned back to him, surprised by the sharp change in attitude. Through those nerdy glasses he could see real anger in the eyes of Dr. Yauch. It was then he realized that the doctor didn’t enjoy these visits any more than he did. The son of a bitch was human after all. “Yes, I have trouble sleeping at night.”
Dr. Yauch reached deep into his black bag of medicine. “I think what you need, Dixon, is a sleeping pill. Just one pill.” He held up a milky gray pill the size of a lemon drop and lowered his voice to intense, almost conspiratory tones. “With this pill I’ll give to you the same warning that I give to all of my patients. This sleeping pill is very strong. I guarantee it will knock you out for the night. In fact, this type of sleeping pill is so strong that if you were to take four of them at one time, they would kill you. You would quietly pass away in your sleep. Do you understand what I am saying?”
Dixon Bell gulped down his surprise. “Yes, siree. I believe I do.”
“Good. Now if this pill works for you tonight, I’ll give you another pill next month.”
Dixon Bell had now saved two pills. God bless the good doctor.
That was another thing about his stay in Stillwater. God was behind bars. There was a Bible in his cell. A sweet lady from prison ministry gave it to him during a visit. She’d had his name printed in it. Probably an old fan. Anyway, once in a while Dixon Bell, a man who thought he knew too much science to believe in God, would page through this Bible, not really sure what it was that he was looking for.
His fellow prisoners would come to see him. A new inmate would stop by to talk almost every day. And, boy, could they talk up a storm. He told them little; mostly he just sat and listened. The way he figured it, the entire inmate population was there because of a woman. They got into a fight over a woman. They stole for a woman. They raped a woman. They killed a woman. Seemed just about every story in Stillwater had a woman in it.
It was 10:00 P.M. Lockup time. The Weatherman could hear the schlocky music. The news was coming on.
Every winter the Electric Star disappeared from the night sky. Every spring it returned. Then every night the star would get brighter and every day the sun would get warmer. But Old Jesse was slowing down. Some nights he wasn’t finishing his chores. This night he made no attempt to finish. He spent most of his shift watching the sparkling star.
They probably thought it was just his age slowing him down, and being as how they all loved the old man he’d be allowed to walk the halls of Stillwater until the day he died. But it wasn’t an aging heart that was bothering him. It was a troubled heart.
He sometimes saw the Weatherman in passing. He recognized him right away from the trial. He remembered watching him on television. Often he wanted to stop and say hello. Even in person he seemed like such a nice man. Maybe ask him about the star. But he never did. For in his troubled heart Old Jesse at last knew why that star was up there. It was up there for him. It hung over the valley for granddaughter Shelly and all of those murdered women. It shone for the Weatherman.
Before he realized how long he had been standing at the window, the morning sun came peeking over the bluff and the Electric Star disappeared. Old Jesse finally pulled himself away and pushed his broom down to the staff bulletin board.
IN THE CASE OF MCF-STW INMATE 137389 A VOLUNTEER IS NEEDED TO HELP CARRY OUT THE SENTENCE OF THE COURT. PAYS BONUS.
SEE WARDEN JOHNSON.
Old Jesse calmly removed the notice from the cork board and stuffed it into his shirt pocket. Then he pushed his broom down the hallway to the warden’s office.
The Confederate
From the bedroom window on the second floor of their South Hill home they could see the golden river, could smell the wind through the pines up from the water. On warm summer nights, as was this night, they could hear the gulls and the geese at play after the boats had docked for the evening. For Rick Beanblossom these sights and sounds were a hallucinogenic drug that sometimes made him forget that he had ever left Stillwater, forget that his face and his innocence were casualties of war.
For Andrea Labore this river town just outside the cities was as close as she would ever come to reclaiming the way of life she had known on the Iron Range. She could appreciate the same sights and sounds as her husband, could savor with him the redolence of the river. Never had she felt so contented.
It was a hot summer night two years back when she asked Rick to again ask her to marry him. The trial was over. Rick had left the station for the writer’s life. What he hadn’t planned on was the isolation. The monotony.Too much freedom and not enough discipline. He had money and time, a dangerous combination. It happened one of those dog days of summer in the dog days of his career, a day when Andrea stopped by his home in the sky. Only an hour earlier he had watched her deliver the ten o’clock news. Now they were sitting on the balcony, sipping wine and watching the lights of the city reflected in Lake Calhoun.
“And what became of the ring?” Andrea wanted to know.
“What ring is that?”
“The ring maybe I should have accepted.”
“It might have fallen into the river while I was sandbagging.” “How far out in the river might it have fallen?”
Rick laughed. “Damn near ha
lfway across. Hell of a throw. Threw my elbow out of whack.”
Andrea laughed at his ability to joke at something that must have been so painful. She took off her shoes and let her toes play in the wrought iron that bordered the balcony. “If you were to get married,” she asked Rick, “and I’m not suggesting you do, where would you do it? Like, would there be a honeymoon?” “Well, if I did get married, and I’m certainly not planning on it, I’d probably take the lucky woman to Hawaii. Take the plunge there.”
“Why there?”
“Sentimental reasons.” Rick swallowed a large mouthful of wine and remembered back. “On my way to Fort Sam Houston, after I left the burn unit in Japan, we stopped over in Hawaii. One day the Navy took us over to Kauai, one of the less touristy islands. There was this point out on Hanalei, lush and beautiful. A lot of inlets and little peninsulas. I mean, you could hike right into a waterfall. Anyway, I remember all of these wounded soldiers sitting along this beautiful beach, wishing we never had to leave, more afraid of the society we were going home to than of the war we had just come from. And I thought, What a special place. I’d like to come back here someday for something really special.” He took another sip of wine. “So if I was going to get married, and I’m certainly not going to, that’s where I’d take her.”
Looking out on the water, Andrea Labore could see the blinking red warning light atop the IDS Tower and the ring of newsroom lights just below. “I always thought —I know this sounds silly and vain, but I always thought that my being on television would attract better men, make me more desirable to a better class of men. Isn’t that stupid? I think we all believed that going in. We’re like that CBS logo, only one open eye.”
“And?”
“Assholes,” Andrea told him. “One asshole after another. Tall, handsome assholes. Rich assholes. Doctor assholes. Lawyer assholes. Political assholes. It’s been a real eye-opening experience.”
“The Weatherman calls me the Masked Asshole.”
“Yes, but, ironically, women don’t. I think men are more threatened by you than women . . . not just the mask but the war hero status, the journalistic skills.”
“Flattery will only get you so far, Andrea.” He stood and leaned over the rail, watching the lights dancing in the water.
“Hey,” she said, “I know you too well to flatter you.”
“How well?”
“Well enough to know that you’re the man I want to marry.” She smiled just a little, just enough to fire up her great brown eyes.
“Is this a proposal?” Rick said, to breathlessly to disguise his feelings.
“Well,” she said, moving over to kiss him, “will you?”
“Will I what?”
“Will you ask me to marry you?”
“Okay, but if you say yes, you have to buy your own damn ring.” And they melted into each other’s arms.
That was two years ago. She was asleep, her face turned away from him. Rick stole out of the fourposter bed and slipped on a pair of gym shorts. Rick envied his wife. Fifteen minutes after her head hit the pillow Andrea was out like a rock. Not even a happy marriage brought him peaceful sleep. He looked out the open window, the trace of a valley breeze filtering through the screen. The wind felt good on the bare skin below his mask.
The June moon was at perigee, the closest it would ever come to the earth. Its reflection off the river flooded the St. Croix Valley with enough night light to read by. Perhaps somewhere out there tonight somebody was reading his novel. After the initial euphoria of being a published author wore off, Rick too often found himself yawning and shrugging his shoulders whenever an unpublished writer asked, “What’s it feel like?” They say that inside every newsman is a novelist struggling to be born, but inside this novelist was a newsman who wouldn’t die, wouldn’t even go to sleep.
On another hill in this same town sat a brilliant man in an iron cage, convicted, perhaps unjustly, of having killed seven times. Despite more than two years of trying, Rick couldn’t prove the Weatherman’s innocence. As with the Wakefield story, he waited for the dream that would tie together all of the clues and provide for him the dramatic answers. But the dream never came.
The author picked up the Weatherman’s photocopied diary and rested in an overstuffed antique chair beside the window. Moonlight fell across the pages, across the precise southern script learned by rote in another river town where during the sufferingly hot and humid summers a breeze off the water was as precious as a cool Yankee rain.
For instance this story I tell second hand because I wasn’t born yet. I heard different versions of the tragedy while growing up, but over the years I’ve been able to piece together a pretty good picture of what all happened that day. I had been conceived and I was fixing to crawl into the world in about a month when the roof literally fell in on us and left me and Momma to fend for ourselves.
My folks liked to fight. It didn’t take a whole lot to set them off. Just a Saturday afternoon taking the clan to the movies would pretty much do it. I had a brother and a sister, four and five years old, Momma was eight months pregnant with me, and Daddy he was pretty much fed up with the lot of us. We were supposed to go to the two o’clock matinee but the fighting and fussin’ pushed our arrival at the Saenger Theatre back to the four o’clock showing. They argued about the price. Most movies were twenty cents, but this was a Disney movie and Disney movies were a quarter. Daddy complained that meant a dollar just to get in the damn door. Once inside the movie house they argued about where to sit. Brother Alex and Sister, being little and all, wanted to sit up front and stare at the screen with their mouths gaping. My daddy who never quite got around to growing up liked to sit right up front too. Well, Momma wouldn’t have none of that . . . bad for the eyes, can’t see or hear a thing, and on and on. The fight ended as per usual. They went their separate ways. Daddy, Brother Alex and Sister took seats right up front, while Momma with me stuffed inside of her huffed and puffed all the way to the very last row against the back wall. The movie began. Don’t ask me what movie, I was told but I don’t recall, but it was a Disney movie.
It was unseasonably warm and blustery for early December. Hot winds were kicking up dust and debris. Christmas lighting already decorated Washington Street, that’s the main street through downtown Vicksburg. A charity football game was scheduled for that night and most of the town would have been there. Football and beauty pageants, that’s the South. Folks ran about town wrapping up their Saturday shopping because the stores closed at 6:00 P.M.
But that day the clocks never made it to 6:00 PM. They froze at 5:35. Without a second of warning, a tornado dropped out of thunderheads over the swamps of Louisiana, jumped the river like a Jack-in-the-box and tore into Vicksburg. It cut a diagonal line of death and destruction from the cotton compress on the Yazoo Canal to the National Military Park northeast of the city. And right in the middle of that fatal path was the Saenger Theatre packed with children and a smattering of parents.
When the twister had passed, the only part of the theatre left intact was the little foyer and two rows of seats along the rear wall. Beyond that . . . the worst natural disaster in Vicksburg’s history. The giant beams snapped like toothpicks bringing down the roof and the walls. The silver screen crumbled like a piece of typing paper. In seconds the sky went from day to night. Rain swept over the ruins in torrents. Can’t be anything sadder than the wails of children in the dark crippled by something they didn’t see and can’t understand. Years later I would study the photographs. Truth be told, more people got out of that theatre alive than anybody who first looked at it could have imagined . . . but Daddy, Brother Alex, and Sister weren’t counted among the living. My momma was rushed to the hospital in shock. I was born premature that night.
The streets of Vicksburg looked like the aftermath of Grant’s siege. But what took the Union general forty-seven days to accomplish took the tornado only forty-seven seconds. Christmas decorations hung helter skelter across mounds of rubble. Sold
iers arrived and barricaded the intersections. Thirty-eight people were killed in that terrible storm that terrible day, too many for a small town. An especially high toll on children. Besides the Saenger Theatre the tornado also leveled the Happyland Nursery, killing young ones there.
After that, Momma took to drink. We moved in with Granddaddy Graham in the shotgun house above the tracks and that’s where I was raised.
Momma told me before the tornado we lived in a big ole house off Halls Ferry Road near the Confederate lines. She’d even drive me by there at times and point it out. It was a big white house with pillars and it sat on a hill and it had a manicured lawn that rolled down to the road and the prettiest little garden filled with brilliant azaleas I ever saw. Of course, I knew early on we had never lived there, but I never questioned her. I think that’s where Momma wanted to live.
