by Steve Thayer
Weeks had passed since the letter from Tan Jan. Summer had rolled to an end. The first Monday of October had come and gone. The United States Supreme Court had returned to work. Now Dixon Bell sat on the edge of his bunk with a lethal combination of five sleeping pills in the palm of his left hand and a Styrofoam cup filled with cold water in the fist of his right hand. Light from the new moon of the falling leaves slipped through the windows and the shadows of the iron bars spilled over him. In the dark those pills looked like the lemon drops he sucked on as a boy. He wished that somehow the glass of water was a glass of wine. The snoring and deep breathing of a hundred men locked behind bars filled the block. Once in a while a toilet flushed. The guard on the graveyard shift had just moved by his cell, counting bodies. They’d been locked up all day because of the Weatherman. But nobody complained. Nobody blamed him. He wore a badge of respect among the inmates, especially those in the Seg Unit. Death row. Now he was leaving them.
In the hours before lights out they yelled, “Fucking bastards!” “You hang in there, Weatherman!”
“Our hearts will be out there with you!”
In his previous life as a TV weatherman these men were the scum of the earth whose crimes he saw at the top of the news show. Now they were the only family he had left.
That morning the cells were not opened and a lockup began. Several times a year this happened. The entire prison population would be put under lockup. These lockups were unannounced. Every inmate was confined to his cell for two or three days. Meals were delivered through the bars. Access to telephones was denied. To ensure that all television sets and radios were out of commission the main power was switched off and emergency lighting was used, giving the entire fortress the dim, unearthly glow of a submarine. Then the guard staff went cell to cell with flashlights and dogs, searching for contraband—weapons, drugs, cash. Breakfast was delivered to Dixon Bell’s cell that morning, as was lunch. By dinner time the prison grapevine, which operated even under full lockup, signaled something was amiss. No searches were being conducted. There was something happening in the outside world that they didn’t want the inmates to know.
It killed the Weatherman to be denied his two hours of yard time. The leaves were showing their true colors. The air was crisp and clean. The barometer was on the rise. Birds were on the wing, heading south. In Minnesota the autumns are fleeting. He lived for one more day in the sun. But when the double-barred entrance to the Seg Unit clanged open after dinner, it didn’t take a sixth sense for Dixon Bell to realize there would be no more days in the sun. They weren’t coming to search the cells. They were coming for him.
He was white with fear. He worried about his pills. This was the first lockup since the good doctor had addressed his sleeping problem. He looked up. Warden Johnson was standing on the other side of the bars, as was the deputy commissioner of corrections. They were accompanied by the chief of security and four guards. The warden gave a nod of his head and Carol Theguard unlocked the cell door. Johnson stepped inside. The others waited in the day room.
The Weatherman stood and faced the warden the same way he had stood more than two years earlier and faced Judge Lutoslawski as the judge, in a sorrowful voice, sentenced him to death.
Warden Johnson was more straightforward. Phlegmatic. “Stacy Dvorchak called me from Washington this morning. She wanted me to be the one to tell you. The Supreme Court refused to hear your case. Governor Ellefson signed your death warrant at three o’clock this afternoon. The commissioner will set the date of your execution tomorrow morning. Then you’ll be moved to the isolation cell in the house. Get your things together tonight and let us know what you want done with them. You will not be allowed to take anything with you.”
“My Bible?”
“No, there’s a Bible out there.”
“But this one has my name in it.”
That was six hours ago. He was all alone now. Just him, five sleeping pills, and glass of water. The Weatherman stared into the face of his blackened Sony and tried to picture himself warning viewers of an approaching storm. Stay off the ice. Get an early start in the morning. Bundle up the kids. Y’all enjoy the weekend, it’s going to be a good one. For every day of every season a cliché that he could spit out without even thinking. Wherever his travels took him, he left with memories of the weather: the humidity of Mississippi, the heat of Vietnam, the soft green of Ten nessee in the springtime, the blazing autumns of New England, and the winter sun rising on a blanket of pure white snow over pine-laden Minnesota. There was something about the weather he loved and hated in all of those places. And each place he departed left a vacancy in his heart, the ache to feel and breathe the weather there one more time. It was never people he missed, but a chilly breeze through the trees, the dazzling sun on his skin, a thunderstorm being born, or the refreshing cool smell of a dying drizzle. A life dictated by the weather.
Dixon Bell looked up from the television set at the Sky High News weather calendar posted on his cell wall. It was on this October date nearly three decades ago that he ran his heart out in a Homecoming football game and then the next night went to the dance alone, stood off to the side like the court jester as the school crowned a queen.
One night while on death row this Homecoming Queen had come to him for the last time, not the frumpy, dumpy woman who testified at the trial but the eighteenyear-old southern belle who so obsessed him in his youth. When he opened his eyes in a half-sleep he guessed it was one of those ungodly hours when dreamers dream and writers write. The windows in the day room outside his cell that ran three stories to the ceiling were tinted blue, and bright moonlight filtered through the bars. It was in this blue moonlight she appeared, floating before him like the goddess he’d made her out to be.
Lisa Beauregard was resplendent in a formal evening gown that had nuances of royal red. It was not a gown a girl would wear to the prom but something a bit more special, like the attire of a young woman attending her first military gala on the arm of an officer. Her brown eyes sparkled. Her silky hair flowed down over her shoulders. Pearls ringed her neck. Pearls dangled from her ears. Her gold-ringed fingers were clasped in front of her, a Mississippi Queen in the regalia of southern aristocracy.
He smiled up at her—a genuine smile, one from the heart. Lisa smiled back the same way. A smile that said, You were a special friend to me, Dixon Bell. Thank you for loving me. Thank you for reminding me that I was once pretty and popular and boys followed me through town and vied for my attention. It was the smile he saw so often in the halls of Vicksburg High School. The smile he dreamed of in Vietnam. And, yes too, it was a smile that said good-bye forever.
For then her smiled turned ugly, the dream a nightmare. Slowly waking up, he remembered where it was he was sleeping. The saintly image of the first girl he truly loved began to vanish quite slowly in the blue moon glass, disappearing, disappearing, fading away until, as with the Cheshire Cat, only a malicious grin remained.
“Do you have any final words before the will of the people is carried out?” “Yeah, fuckhead, I got some final words. Y’all want a confession? I did it. I killed them all! Not just eight of them. I’m responsible for every unsolved murder from New Orleans to Duluth. Hundreds of them. I fucked them, then I killed them. Some of them I killed first, then I fucked them. Let’s do it, cuz y’all got the right man. I killed them all, ya fuckheads!”
Dixon Bell began to cry, tears streaming into his hands and over the sleeping pills, causing them to stick to his palm. He was not a meteorologist. He was not even the local-yokel weatherman. He was a convicted murderer sentenced to die in the electric chair. Through his tears he saw the Holy Bible on his desk, the Holy Bible where he had a letter stashed from a woman who wanted to know if he was the man who had saved her life, the Holy Bible in which his name had been printed. Oh, yes, Jesus Christ thought he too could read the weather, but in the end he failed miserably and they put him to death in the rain.
Dixon Bell wiped his runny nose with t
he sleeve of his shirt. He dried his eyes. He got up off his bunk and poured the cup of water into the toilet. He dropped the five pills into the water one at a time. Suicide required courage he did not have. He pushed the lever and watched euthanasia flush away. Then the Weatherman got down on his knees. He folded his hands over the toilet bowl. He bowed his head. And for the first time in his life he said a prayer.
The Ritual
And so continued the slow waltz with death. The state commissioner of corrections in consultation with Judge Lutoslawski set the date of the execution. At the stroke of midnight on the evening of October 31, Dixon Graham Bell was to be electrocuted, the first scheduled execution in Minnesota since 1906.
The third and final cell of the Weatherman’s incarceration was six feet by eight feet, even smaller than his cell in the Segregation Unit, which was smaller than the triangular cell he had destroyed at the Ramsey County jail. The state was boxing him into a coffin one foot at a time. He was put on death watch and it was every bit the nightmare he feared. His stay in this brick sepulcher was not meant to prepare him, it was meant to break him, so that when the time came to take the long walk he would be spineless, nothing but flesh and jelly. Death would be as welcome as a warm spring after a long, cold winter.
The isolation cell had been whitewashed and left void of amenities. There were only a mattress over a shallow bunk, a pillow, and a heavy blanket. A seatless toilet and his Bible. Nothing else. No sink. Not even a window. They had done the cruelest thing that could be done to a meteorologist: they took away the sky.
Most states that exercise capital punishment have hundreds of men on death row. Minnesota had only one. Everything was new. The state tried to proceed as if the routine were common practice, but the guards were almost embarrassed by the ritual. The low-watt-bulb in the condemned man’s cell was never turned off. Days without sun. Nights without dark. Every move he made was monitored both electronically and physically. A guard sat outside the cell and watched him twenty-four hours a day. Even when he sat on the toilet a guard sat and watched. Hanging from the ceiling above the guard was a surveillance camera pointing inside the cell. Another guard sat in the Security Center and watched him from there.
If he needed toilet paper, he had to ask for it; the same with a toothbrush and toothpaste. When done, he returned them. He was given one sheet of typing paper and a fat pencil with a dull point. He had to return them as soon as he had finished his writing. He was allowed one newspaper or magazine at a time, to be returned immediately when he’d finished his reading. Other than the Bible, books were forbidden.
They dressed him in a blue jump suit that made him look like an auto mechanic. White socks and blue slippers. His meals were served on a paper plate, his coffee in a paper cup. The only utensil he was given was a plastic spoon that they would collect right after the meal. The cook considerately sliced the meat for him, but for the most part he took to eating with his fingers. After a week of this nonsense Dixon Bell lost his appetite. He stopped eating. He lived on bread and coffee. It was not a hunger strike; there was not enough time to starve to death. The Weatherman simply sickened of the ritual.
“You haven’t been eating your meals.”
“No, siree, I haven’t. What are you gonna do, arrest me?”
Seemed every time Warden Johnson turned around, Dixon Bell was messing up the ritual. The warden didn’t enter the cell, just excused the guard and leaned against the bars. “I need to know what you’d like for your last meal, Dixon. I’ll get you anything you want. That’s the tradition.”
“With all respect, Warden, I think you know what you can do with the last supper.”
“Yes, I thought you might say that. Also, as a veteran you are to be awarded an American flag upon your death for the service you gave to your country. Who do you want the flag presented to?”
“Why don’t you wrap the last supper in it.”
Warden Johnson rarely lost his composure. “I’m trying to be as fair to you as circumstances and the law allows. But I’ll bend. I’ll do my best to grant any last request you might have.”
The Weatherman laughed, his evil laugh. “Can you get me a woman?”
“Is that what you want?”
Dixon Bell almost saved the taxpayers of Minnesota an electric bill because he about dropped dead when he heard that. Then he thought a minute. He thought real hard. No, it wasn’t a woman he wanted. “I want to meet the man who’s going to throw the switch. The executioner. I want to talk to him.”
“Dixon, that’s ridiculous. It’s strictly against procedure.”
“There ain’t no procedure. I’m the first.”
Warden Oliver J. Johnson stood there and thought about it. Finally he said, “I’ll only promise you this . . . I’ll talk to that person and see what that person thinks of the idea.”
“Person” was a euphemism for “woman.”They were going to have a woman throw the switch. Dixon Bell watched as the warden left the Death House. “Lousy bastards,” he muttered.
It was not the horror of his final destination that bothered Dixon Bell as much as the waiting. He was forced out of monotony to watch television, the second-cruelest thing that could be done to him. On a chair outside his cell next to the guard sat a portable Sony. He was constantly reminded that it was a color TV, as if they still made black and whites. The guards turned it off and on for him and changed the channels whenever he asked. In other words, the guards spent all their time watching the Weatherman on their surveillance TV watching his TV set.
“Do you have any final words before the will of the people is carried out?” “Yeah, asshole, I got some final words. You lock me in a tiny cage where I can’t even walk back and forth and then you try to make up for it by giving me a fucking television set. ‘And it’s a color TV!’ Fuck y’all to hell! I hope this execution is televised. Then I can show you Yankee faggots how a real man dies. He doesn’t go out whimpering apologies or babbling to Lordy Jesus. No siree. He goes out screaming at the top of his lungs, ‘Fuck y’all to hell!’ Live and in living color, ‘Fuck y’all to hell!’”
The isolation cell was only thirty feet from the chair. The infamous long walk was really a very short walk. Dixon Bell was told he would not be allowed to see the death chamber until the end.
Once a day, usually late in the afternoon, they would test the chair. Suddenly and without warning there would be a loud clunk and all of the lights would dim. If this test was conducted to make the Weatherman shudder, it worked. It reminded him of those old Frankenstein movies he and his granddaddy had watched on late-night TV when he was a boy—sparks jumping all over the laboratory as the electricity shot into the monster’s brain.
One day they came into the cell and measured him for his burial suit, the clothes in which he would be executed. They wouldn’t tell him what he’d be wearing, but he suspected it wouldn’t be from Pierre Cardin.
By watching the reports on television and gathering yesterday’s weather data from the newspapers Dixon Bell was able to make his own forecasts. Though not nearly as accurate, he was still batting above .700. The autumn colors were at their peak now, and it pained him to be missing the closing act in Minnesota’s theater of changing seasons. Whenever the door to the outside world was unbolted and opened, the Weatherman could smell the leaves. As for the colors, he had to settle for what he could see on his TV.
Stacy Dvorchak remained in Washington, where she filed another desperate appeal with the United States Supreme Court. She publicly vowed she would be camped on the front lawn of the home of the chief justice when it came time for her client to take the long walk. Dixon Bell was not hopeful. His only prayer seemed to be the international outcry aimed at Governor Ellefson’s office. Here again he was not optimistic. The governor had signed the death penalty bill. He had signed his death warrant. Why would he now commute his sentence to life in prison, unless his conscience would not allow the Weatherman to be killed?
He was allowed only one visitor a day
. For one hour. They could sit in the cell with him. Rick Beanblossom requested a visit nearly every day, but Dixon Bell shot him down. He could no longer face that mask. Yet ten days before the execution date he did grant a visitation request to a friend and foe of a different sort.
When the outside door swung open, Dixon Bell could smell the cigarette being extinguished in the grass. The hacking cough rattled through the Death House. The Marl - boro Man to the bitter end. He appeared near death, wheezing up a storm. The guard was worried about him as he unlocked the cell door. Les Angelbeck took a seat on the bunk beside the Weatherman. He caught his breath. The guard held on to his cane outside.
“You look like hell,” Dixon Bell told him. “I’ll probably outlive you.” “No,” said the captain, clearing his throat, “I’ll see you to your grave, Dixon.” He paused for the longest time, carefully measuring every breath, every word. “On the other hand, I met with Governor Ellefson yesterday. I believe the governor would consider commuting your sentence to life imprisonment if you were to confess to your crimes.”
“Strange offer,” Dixon Bell said with an ironic chuckle. “If you know for sure I’m guilty, you’ll let me rot in prison for the rest of my life. But if you’re not sure, then you’ll kill me.”
