Stacy picked up the.22 rifle and looked it over. She slid it into shooting position against her right shoulder and aimed along the barrel through the screen door and the fluttering cluster of moths to the outside lamp.
“Is it still loaded?” she asked.
“There’s four rounds left, so don’t fuck with it.” He yanked the spindly legs off the underbelly of the lobster and sucked the meat from each and dropped the emptied tubes, one by one, onto the counter in front of him.
Slowly, Stacy brought the rifle around and aimed it at Noonan’s skull. “Noonan,” she said, and he turned.
“Yeah, sure.”
She closed her eyes and pulled the trigger and heard the explosion, and when she opened her eyes, she saw in the middle of Noonan’s broad, white forehead a dark hole the size of a dime, which instantly expanded to a quarter, and his large body jerked once as if electrocuted and flipped backward, his astonished face gone from her sight altogether now, and she saw instead the back of his head, and a hole in it the size of a silver dollar. His body, like a large, rubberized sack of water, fell to the floor, spinning away from her as it descended, ending flat on its back, with Noonan’s wide-open eyes staring at the pot rack above the counter. Blood pumped from the hole in the rear of his skull onto the pale-green linoleum and spread in a thickening, dark-red puddle slowly toward her feet.
She laid the rifle on the counter beside the broken remains of the lobster, crossed to the stove, where the pot of water was still boiling, and shut off the gas flame. Slowly, as if unsure of where she was, she looked around the room, then seemed to make a decision, and perched herself on a stool next to the walk-in refrigerator. She leaned her head back against the cool stainless-steel door and closed her eyes. Never in her life, never, had Stacy known the relief she felt at that moment. And not since the moment before she was struck by lightning had she known the freedom.
A rattling Ford pickup truck stopped beside the darkened roadside sign, and the LaPierre brothers, Donny and Timmy, leaped from the truck bed to the side of the road. “Hey, good luck with ol’ Noonan, you little assholes!” the driver said, and he and a male passenger in the cab cackled with laughter. Two beery, expansive carpenters, they were cousins of the LaPierres, heading home to their wives and kids late from the bars of Lake Placid. They waved cheerfully to the boys and pulled away.
Donny and Timmy crunched across the gravel parking lot. The kitchen light and the lamp outside were still on, and when the boys were halfway across the lot, they saw Stacy through the screen door, seated on the stool by the big walk-in fridge. She was asleep, it looked like, or maybe just bored out of her mind listening to one of Noonan’s dumb hunting stories.
“You think he’s screwing Stacy?” Timmy asked.
“C’mon, man. Stacy’s a babe. And he’s ancient, man,” Donny said. “It’s cool she’s still here, though,” he added. “She likes us, and he’ll hire us back just to look good.”
“I wouldn’t mind a little of that myself.”
“A little of what?”
“Stacy, man!”
Donny punched his younger brother on the shoulder. “Yeah, well, you’ll hafta wait your turn, little fella!” he laughed. He waved away the swarming cloud of moths and pulled the screen door open. Timmy entered first, and Donny, hiding his fading grin behind his hand, followed.
Michael Downs
Prison Food
From Witness
Shelly Wolansky’s desk faced a wall, and to the right, over the in-basket, was the only window in the prison kitchen. It was a small window, no bigger than a cutting board, with a view Shelly could live without: razor-wire and grim concrete walls, beyond that acres of dead weeds bordered by cyclone fence and more razor wire, and in the distance Route 5 and the doughnut shop where corrections officers could buy Bavarian crème and chocolate frosted at a 20 percent discount. When Shelly had seen it all once, she’d seen it too many times.
Her head ached. Her desk was a mess. She untucked her shirt, undid the top button of her pants — the waistband pinched when she sat, the price she paid for having quit smoking — and reread the warden’s memo. He needed her to work Thursday night — the night of the execution — to make the last meal.
The warden promised Friday off — Thursday, too, except the few hours that night. Fine with her. Not working Friday meant she could make Chuck’s hockey tournament in New Haven, keep an eye on him. Lord knows he needed watching, especially after the bit two months back with that other boy’s car. That was the worst, but she didn’t like the way he’d been drawing penalties on the ice, either. Chuck’s coach had said it was part of the game, that hockey players need an attitude. “Yeah, well, he needs his attitude adjusted,” she had said.
If Hank were still alive…
Ah, quit it, Shelly told herself. Maybe, if, maybe, if. You can’t play that game anymore. Four years is too long.
The banging pans and rattling blowers of the kitchen didn’t help her headache, and when Danny, the trusty, dropped a soup pot he was washing, she yelled at him. “Sorry, Julia Child!” he shouted back. She smiled, despite herself. She liked it when people in the prison called her Julia Child. She liked what it said about how she ran the kitchen.
Shelly rolled back in her chair — inventory reports could wait — and glanced out the window. It was snowing. Somehow that made the view even harder to bear. In the distance, out past the fence, she could see little stick people waving signs. Protesters already, and the execution still two days away. All those people standing in the cold — good news for the doughnut shop.
The kitchen’s fluorescent bulbs stuttered. The stainless steel shone dull in the flickering light. She needed her hands in food, needed to chop something. So she buttoned her pants, pulled on latex gloves, and stopped near a cutting board to put zucchini under the knife. She wondered what the guy would order for his last meal. Though she’d worked at the prison three years, the state hadn’t killed anyone since she started. A new governor now changed all that. She figured this late-night supper would be the first of many, and that thought turned her stomach queasy.
“What’s up, Julia Child?”
Danny nudged her, shoulder-to-shoulder as if they were dancing. “You’re staring into space land,” he said, bending around to see her face. He smiled his soda-pop smile, the smile of a con man, which he had been until an old couple turned him in. The file Shelly read had told how Danny, out on bail before the trial, stopped by the couple’s house and hospitalized them for six weeks each. That tantrum earned him his spot in maximum security. Good behavior, and likely that smile, had freed him for the kitchen. That and the fact the warden liked to make the white guys trusties.
“You’re not supposed to touch the staff,” she said.
He ignored her and pointed at the knife. “You don’t focus, you might lose a finger. What’s on your mind?”
Shelly put down the knife. It was easy to see how he could bilk people — his gentle laugh, his sincere and curious face — Shelly had overheard kitchen workers confess deep anxieties to Danny. But he was scary, too, because of what he’d done. Because he was maximum. Because when Shelly looked close enough, she noticed parallel scars at his wrist and the earlobe that was missing, and when she paid attention to his voice she heard that dialect white men only speak when they’ve been inside the walls a long time.