Matt Carty had always been a little man. Not a small man, for that is a thing of personality, and Matt’s personality was just fine, thank you. He was outgoing and dryly witty, with perception to temper it; but this was too much offset by his lack of height — an almost comical lack. He was five feet, one inch tall.
He had often considered elevator shoes. Only the inherent hypocrisy of them prevented their purchase. In their place he substituted an almost pathetic eagerness for love and friendship. Indiscriminately, Matt Carty made friends.
Unfortunately, they did not stick to him for long:
“Jeez, it’s real funny, meeting a guy from Princetown here in Chi. I mean, me being a guy from Henshaw, I mean that’s only twenty-six miles, an’ this is a helluva big town. Wanta ’nother drink, Matt?”
“Oh, golly, no. So tell me — uh, what was it? Harold? — Harold, tell me, what are you doing here in Chicago?”
“I’m a buyer for a linoleum house. You know, I price rolls and cuttings. How about you?”
“I’m at the U. of C.”
“No kidding?”
“Uh-huh. Studying plane geometry and advanced engineering design.”
“What line are you in?”
“I’m a hangman.”
“— uh?”
“That’s right. I’m a professional executioner. I work free-lance for the states. Of course, I haven’t had too many jobs to my credit, but, well, you know … you’ve got to start somewhere. You see, I’m studying the mathematics of falling weights, and the force of vectors so when I — say, where are you going?”
“— uh — I just saw an old friend of mine, a business acquaint — I, uh, gotta go. Say, it was real swell meeting you; take it easy, huh.”
End of friendship.
With love, it was considerably more difficult. Being a normal, red-blooded American lad, Matt Carty sought the companionship of attractive young women. But in that case, also, it was star-crossed:
“Matty, pl eee ase!”
“Aw, c’mon, Jeannie.”
“Now, Matthew Carty, if you don’t take your hand out of there, I’m getting out of this car this minute! ”
“I thought you loved me …”
“… well … I do , but …”
“But what?”
A prolonged silence.
“Isn’t the night cool, Jeannie?”
“Mmm.”
“It was on nights like this that the hangmen of Henry the First’s period prepared their scaffolds.”
“What a perfectly sick thing to think about, Matt.”
“Why, what’s sick about it? I think it’s a real fine thing to think about. I mean, after all, it is my line of work.”
“You-y whaaat? ”
“I, uh … heh-heh …”
“You told me you were in lumber!”
“Heh-heh …”
“ What, exactly , do you do for a living, Mr. Carty?”
“I’m a, uh, well, I’m a h —”
End of love.
But the hazards of the trade were offset by other, more ephemeral, pleasures. There was the pleasure of the feel of good hemp stretched taut. There was the satisfying rightness of a great weight swinging free, like a pendulum, at the end of a straight plumb. There was the heady wine of sound produced by the progression of an execution:
Feet mounting scaffold.
Milling about.
Monotoned prayers.
Man puffing cigarette.
Adjustment sounds, most precise.
Trap release.
The door banging free.
The thwumpppp!
The twannnng!
The sound of silence.
From the first tentative stirrings within him, the subliminal cravings for recognition — recognition in the field he had chosen — Matt Carty had gone about the business of preparation properly. First high school, with emphasis on woodworking (in case of do-it-yourself emergencies), mathematics, abnormal psychology, dynamics of geometry and a fine grounding in biology — one must know the merchandise with which one works.
Then college, with several architectural courses, penology, criminology, group behavior classes, ethics, advanced vector analysis and even biochemistry. He did not stay long at any one University, however, and as a consequence, he never came up with a degree of any sort. How could he, with the variegated courses he undertook, a smattering of one, a spray-exposure to another?
And oddly enough, there were no deterrents to his career. His parents at first expressed a white-faced horror and complete refusal of cooperation. But they were much too involved with their own problems — she with her religion composed of unequal parts devout hypochondria and incipient nymphomania, and he with his God: the Mighty Green Buck — so they sent young Matthew to the schools he wished to attend.
Thus he observed the slaughtering of cattle, watching carefully as they were weighted and hung. He sat in at executions. His eyes were constantly on watch for stresses and effects brought about by pressure and dead-weight. He carried on harmless experiments.
He went to study at Columbia, and fell in with a disparate clique of Greenwich Village bohemians, one of whom was a bottle-auburn brunette named Carinthe who inducted him into the mysteries of sex and liquor, narcotics and bad poetry, and who cast him aside, huskless, some months later, leaving him with a bruised id and a resolute determination to become the first hangman in history to bring neck-stretching out as a sincere art-form.
Soon enough, for he was — as noted — perceptive and diligent, he developed a certain efficiency and style in the matters of hangsmanship. So, figuratively speaking, he hung out his shingle.
He offered himself — after his first bonding — to the state of New Hampshire. His rate was reasonable, his manner quick and orderly, and the job was dispatched with aplomb and a certain grace. His reputation was very much like a summer virus: it spread to odd places and sank deep.
By the time he was an unwrinkled thirty, Matthew Carty was known as “that hanging man” and he had acquired a scent of fame that was responsible for articles inTHE SATURDAY REVIEW, andTHE AMERICAN PENOLOGIST. He was known as “that hanging man.”
There were high points, of course, as there must be in all careers of note:
The celebrated swinging of “Lousy” Harry Gottesman, the helicopter-employing rustler, in Montana. His was a singular case: Mr. Gottesman weighed three hundred and sixteen pounds. It brought Matthew Carty to the notice of law enforcement agencies in each of the (then, nine; now seven) states and two territories where hanging was the accepted form of capital punishment. And, until they became states, switching to life imprisonment, Hawaii and Alaska as well. For Gottesman’s demise was achieved with a facility and care that could only be arranged by a genius in his field.
In his way, Matthew Carty had become the Picasso of the scaffold.
There was an all-expense-paid trip to Hawaii, in the sixth year of his fame, sponsored by the local government, to perform what the officials called an “ Aloha ceremony” on Miss Melba Rooney, a four-timer poisoner of husbands, not all of them her own.
There was the notoriety gained from the Restout Case, and its accompanying gruelling activity on the part of the Utah state police to locate Algernon Restout’s victim, a certain Miss Mamie Helf, known locally as an exotic dancer. Mr. Restout had separated the well-known belly dancer from her equipment — with a meat cleaver.
Public sentiment was high on that occasion; the bleachers were packed, and the popcorn sales were a local record high; Matthew Carty fulfilled his obligation to an attentive audience.