He stood still, with his arm around his wife, and she clasped her hands together before her. They might have been any thirtyish couple out for a Sunday constitutional after church. Until you noticed how white her knuckles were, how hard her hands clutched each other. Her small, sagging face-aged, like some false antique it seemed, as if by blows-was unnaturally lit by the fever in her eyes. A horrible brightness-of insane hope, I thought, and helplessness.
The guard-Benson-pulled a chair up and set it down for me in front of the cage. I came toward it slowly. Beachum stuck his hand through the bars. I shook it. His palm was dry and cold. I didn’t like touching him.
“Mr. Everett,” he said. “I’m Frank Beachum. Have …” The words came from him thickly, painfully. They dropped like lumps of clay. It was an effort for him even to speak, he was that worn down. He gestured to the chair.
“Yeah. Thanks,” I said.
I sat and pulled my notebook out, my pen. Beachum gently disengaged himself from his wife and lowered himself into the chair at the table in front of me. Mrs. Beachum sank back, sank down again onto the cot. Her bright eyes never left me.
I was fiddling with my cigarettes by this time. I jerked one halfway out of the pack and offered it to Beachum. He held up a hand. “I got em,” he said. He removed one from his shirt pocket. I could hear my heart thudding as we both lit up on opposite sides of the bars.
We lifted our eyes to each other and filled the white space between us with gray smoke. “How’s … that girl?” he said. I didn’t understand him. He forced out more. “That other. Michelle … something. She had some accident.”
“Oh. Oh, yeah,” I said. “She was in a car crash. It was pretty bad. The last I heard she was in a coma.” I realized I’d forgotten to ask Alan for the latest details. My mind had been too much on my own troubles.
“I’m sorry,” Frank Beachum said. “To hear it.”
I nodded, faintly ashamed. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, it was pretty bad.”
Then I was silent. So was he, and we both smoked. I could feel the movement of the clock on the wall behind me. It made the hairs on the back of my neck bristle. Jesus, I thought. The poor bastard. Jesus. It was a bad few seconds. The excitement, the need to piss, the pity and the infectious fear: It was hard to get my thoughts in order. What was it I’d wanted to ask him anyway? My assignment was to talk about his feelings, give the readers a sense of the place, some vicarious Death House thrill to enjoy over their raisin bran. Don’t get into the case too much. We’ve already covered that. That’s what Bob had told me. And as for the rest: my own suspicions felt suddenly confused and inarticulate. I crossed my legs, trying to quiet my bladder, trying to focus my mind.
The condemned man broke the deadlock for me. “The girl,” he said. “That … Michelle-she said she … I don’t know … she wanted to talk to me about how it felt. Here. In here.” The long, sad, tired face continued to push the words out at me, across the table, through the bars, through the smoke. I saw him blink wearily under the shock of his lank brown hair. I supposed I should’ve felt guilty for getting my thrills, my readers’ thrills, from his agony. So I did; I felt guilty. And I nodded.
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s it,” I said. “It’s a human interest story.”
Beachum took a deep drag of smoke. He went on, speaking carefully, as if he had prepared what he meant to say. “What I wanted … What I wanted to tell everyone that … was that … I believe in Jesus Christ. Our Lord and Savior.” I nodded again, licking my lips. Then, straightening in my chair, coming to myself, I realized I had to write down what he was saying. I scribbled it onto my pad. Believe in JC … Lord +Sav … Just fifteen minutes, I thought frantically. Just fifteen minutes for me. Just eight hours for him. With another breath for strength, Beachum continued. “And I believe … I believe that I’m being sent to a better place and that …” He paused because his wife had made a sound. A shuddering sob. I saw her clench her arms against herself, force herself into silence. Beachum didn’t turn around. He said, “… and that, uh, there’s a better justice there, and I’ll be judged innocent. I won’t say I’m not afraid cause I think … I think everyone’s afraid of dying pretty much-unless they’re crazy or something. You know. But I’m not afraid that the wrongs that are done here on earth won’t be made right. The crooked will be made straight, that’s, that’s what the Bible says and I believe that. And I wanted to testify to that to people before this happens. So … that’s how I feel about it.”
I went on nodding, went on writing it down. Wrongs made right … crooked made straight … I nodded and wrote. It was what he’d wanted to say, I guess. It was why he’d agreed to the interview. But with the clock on the wall, with the look in his eyes, with the anguish flaming out of his wife’s steady gaze, I found the scribbled words on the narrow page made me vaguely nauseous. That clock went on behind me, turning and turning. The poor bastard, I thought. The poor frightened bastard.
I finished writing, but I didn’t look up. I gripped the Bic hard. The point dug into the paper. I still didn’t look up. I didn’t want to meet Frank Beachum’s eyes just then. I felt embarrassed for him just then. Sitting there in his cage with his terrified wife. Talking about Jesus. It was embarrassing. The fact is: I always feel that way when someone talks about Jesus. Whenever someone even says the word-says “Jesus” as if they really meant it-it makes my skin crawl, as if they’d said “squid” or “intestine” instead. It makes me feel as if I’m talking to an invalid. A mental invalid who has to be protected from the shock of contradiction and harsh reality. Whenever I hear a man praise God, I know I am dealing with a crippled heart, a heart grown sick of grief and the plain truth, sick of a world in which the strong and the lucky thrive and the weak are driven under without recompense. Sick and afraid of dying; clinging to Jesus.
I was embarrassed for the man. And now, when I did look up, the sight of him pained me. This poor guy, this once-manly guy, waiting in his cage to be carted off to nowhere, reduced to cuddling his religious teddy bear, to sucking his christian thumb, to telling himself his biblical fairy tale so he could make it down the Death House hallway without screaming, so he could confront his final midnight without going insane. Maybe I’d have done the same in his position. There aren’t many atheists in a joint like this. Maybe that’s why it bothered me so much to see him. And it did bother me. I felt my stomach boil and churn.
To avoid his weary eyes, I glanced back over my shoulder at the clock. The duty officer, sitting at his long desk, was watching me. He lifted his chin by way of a challenge.
“You got nine more minutes,” he said.
I turned back to Beachum. I smiled an embarrassed smile. I boiled inside and churned.
The condemned man in his cage spread his hands a little, his lips working, his eyes uncertain. He’d made his speech. He was waiting for me now. “Is … is that all right, Mr. Everett?” he said softly. “Is … that what you wanted or …?”
A stream of smoke came out of my mouth on an unsteady breath. I leaned forward in my chair, toward the bars. I stared-I felt my eyes burning as I stared through the bars at the man. I felt I was gazing on a pounding, leaden depth, at the incalculable toil going on inside him, the work of living out his last hours. Is that all right, Mr. Everett? Is that what you wanted? I felt his wife’s bright gaze boring into my peripheral vision. I felt my lips drawing back until my teeth were bare.