So his hand closed on the brown paper and it felt as if he had made a pact between himself and this next stage, just this stage, this changing of clothes. He would do this but he was not committing to the next stage after it, the next step. He knew-but did not let himself know-that it would be like that from now on: agreeing not to the whole of the process, but to each stage, each step, step by step, in the hope that the next step would bring rebellion or rescue when, in fact, all the decisions had already been made. It would go on this way to the end.
He picked up the package, still staring at it.
“Good,” he heard the warden say.
It was the best Luther Plunkitt could do; the least he could do and the most. The official protocol required all four of the Strap-down guards to enter the cage at this point, to surround the prisoner and ensure that he put on the fresh clothes and the hygienic diaper. The message was supposed to be sharp and overwhelming: either dress yourself or we’ll do it for you. But Luther didn’t like to handle it that way. A man ought to be allowed some dignity, he felt, even if it put security at risk. A man ought to be allowed to make his own decisions whenever possible. Luther had made the professional judgment that Beachum, in the end, would decide to be a man about it and do what he had to do.
Now Luther was speaking again, not by rote, but fluently, hardly needing to think about the words, just saying what he had to say next. “It would be wise at this point, Frank, if you took the opportunity to use the toilet. For your own comfort, since there might not be an opportunity later on.”
Frank, holding the package, staring off at nothing, nodded.
Luther gestured to the Strap-down guard. The guard came out of the cage and the bars slid shut.
“I’ll wait outside,” said Luther. “The guard’ll call me when you’re done.”
Frank Beachum sat on the steel toilet in its nook in the cage. He kept his pants on, down around his ankles: it would have made him feel too naked and helpless to take them off completely. And he did not want to see himself either. Even as it was, now, when he looked down at his penis, it gave him a queasy feeling. It was shriveled to the size of a thumb joint, his scrotum so tight that his balls were almost invisible underneath. The sight made him hate himself.
There were all kinds of stories at Osage, in the cells, in the yard, about how they let you fuck your woman in Death-watch. At least you get a last piece of nookie before you go, the prisoners said. Frank didn’t know whether this was true or not. Even when Bonnie had been there, he had never felt less like having sex in his life. And now the urge was gone from his completely, gray ice where the steady red ember of it had been. He could remember, all right, as if it had happened to another man, his own past, the sweat-sheened faces of women, the gray-white ridges of sheets, the shapes of headboards, the colors of walls. He could remember sliding into some Kansas cowgirl with hilarious pleasure, ramming some Badlands bitch bone to bone in a snarling rage, looming over Bonnie like a solid sky, like nothing could rain through him and touch her, harm her: it seemed as if it had all been good, it had all been life which was good. And it was all gone, everything tangible gone. The sight of his shrunken dick made him hate himself for not having it in him anymore, for being a sickly, flaccid, castrated piece of flesh ordered to shuffle through the stages of his own death. Even his imagination had lost its visceral powers. To conjure the smell, the taste of pussy-once one of the pleasures of his leisure time-was simply beyond him now. Which sickened him like fever, a nausea of helplessness. The way the piss only dribbled and spurted out of him-that said it-that damned him in his own mind, and made him feel more sickly still.
Just like a man with a fever, weakly, he stood, and pulled up his pants. He yanked his shirt up over his head and unfolded the pressed white T-shirt from the parcel on the table. He put this on and then removed his pants. He had to swallow a wad of distaste and humiliation as he stepped into the plastic underwear. The last article-the loose green trousers-he drew over his legs so quickly that he fumbled and nearly fell over: he wanted to cover the diaper as fast as he could. All the same, with the trousers on too, he could feel the plastic against his skin, a reminder of how shriveled and childlike and helpless he was, his manhood gone.
When he was dressed, when he stood with his shoulders slumped, and his chin lowered, and his mouth half open and his eyes gazing dully at the floor, the door opened and the warden reentered. He came toward the cage bars and nodded at the prisoner.
“Good,” he said again.
Around eleven-fifteen, Luther came out of the cell and told Flowers he could go back in. Flowers was standing in the hall behind the gurney, trying not to look at the gurney but looking anyway from time to time and feeling a macabre and hateful thrill. He moved around it to the door now and he and Luther passed each other just outside the threshold. The tall minister with his black, solid head, his monumental gravity, his sad, yellowing eyes glanced at the smaller man with his silver hair and his face of putty and its small deep-set pair of gray marbles, and the warden glanced back. At that moment, Flowers felt closer to Plunkitt than to Beachum, than to anyone else. He recognized a fellow sufferer, saw in the warden’s look the feeling he acknowledged in his own heart: Thank God, they were almost through it. It was almost done.
Flowers had taken the Bible from his jacket pocket and sat by Beachum’s cot now reading to him.
“The Lord is my shepherd,” he said in his deep, rolling baritone. “I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul …”
It was-as it frequently was-amazing to him how great a comfort this psalm was to him. He sometimes thought it was the mere rhythm of it, or the sound of its words, as much as their meaning. When he read it, his mind bathed in it like warm water and the churning in his belly lessened. He read it with real emotion. “Yea-though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no eviclass="underline" for thou art with me …” He tried to will his voice to deliver the solace of it across the space between his lips and the ear of the condemned man. That little endless space.
Beachum was glad of the words, of the sound of a human voice, but all the concentration of his soul was on his cigarette. His long, drawn face leaned into it, the limp forelock slashing his brow untouched. He sucked at the cigarette with a hiss, drawing in the smoke like honeyed wine. When the reed burned down, he lit another off the end of it and smoked that one the same way, with the same intensity. He didn’t want any of these last moments to go by without that pleasure.
And all the while he glanced up at the clock, lifting his head at shorter and shorter intervals, not wanting the change to be too great since he last looked, afraid to be taken by surprise, but nauseated by the sight of the second hand moving.
Then, when he looked away, he lost himself for moments in a daydream of the past: the smell of mown grass, the heat of the sun on his skin, the happy baby in the sandbox, his wife at the screen door with the empty bottle of A-1 Sauce. But not for too long. He did not want to get lost for too long. The clock moved faster when he took his attention from it. So he glanced up again, and sucked on his cigarette, and thought that he hadn’t done anything, that he had to think of a way to make them see that, and then was lost in his daydream again with the psalm lulling him.