In the passenger seat, Mrs. Russel sat rigid. Like some dark cliff, rearing. Her hands were fists at her sides and her eyes were lanterns beaming through the windshield. She did not turn to see the park and the brick towers and the low car lots replace one another at the side windows second by second as we bucketed past. We seemed a single presence- to me anyway-her presence seemed the same as mine, part and parcel of the speeding car. I could feel her there-I could feel her terror-or thought I could-but I could not tell her terror from my own. I was hardly aware of her as a person separate from myself, until, as we went buzzing through the heart of University City, she spoke.
“I know the boy who sold him the gun,” she said.
“What?” Clutching the wheel, I screamed it above the whine and the roar.
She screamed back. “I know the boy who sold it to him. He’s in jail. He might talk to them if they give him some time off.”
Ahead of me, a Volks pulled up at a red light. Cars jerked through the intersection into my path. I did not brake. I did not slow. I shot into the closing space between a Jaguar and a van. I heard the screech of brakes. A horn. Then both were gone, the Tempo screaming away from them.
The gun, I thought, pressing the gas even deeper into the floor. Yes, it’s enough. It will be enough.
And at that, the world went red-red and white and full of howling-a siren howling like a wild wolf at the sky-drowning out the engine and the wind and my sense of time-drowning out everything but the answering howl of fear from the core of me.
I couldn’t look up at the rearview. I didn’t dare take my eyes off the road. But I could see the flashers at the edge of my vision-I could see them splash and whirl on my mirror, on my windows all around.
I knew that the cops were after me.
Suddenly, Luther realized that the moment had come. That moment he had dreaded the whole day long. He was standing at the foot of the gurney. It was eleven thirty-nine and forty-two seconds. It seemed as if it had been eleven thirty-nine and forty-two seconds for about an hour and a half. The second hand of the clock seemed to have gotten mired in the gray space between one black stroke on the dial’s perimeter and another. Worse, the room, this cramped rectangular box with its white cinderblock walls sealing it from the world around, seemed to have broken loose somehow from the planet’s mooring. Luther knew that Arnold McCardle was only a room away, watching the proceedings through the mirror on his right. He knew the witnesses were gathering behind the blinds of the window just in front of him. And yet he felt that they and the rest of the medical unit, the rest of the prison, the rest of the earth had fallen away from this place, that the death chamber had sailed off from them into deep space and was floating and tumbling end over end, connected to nothing. He felt dizzy and hollow as the room sailed and spun. And he felt alone. All alone, at eleven thirty-nine and forty-two seconds, with the condemned man, with Frank Beachum.
He saw Frank Beachum’s face. That’s what he had dreaded, what he had dreamed. He was confronting the face of the man on the gurney and, for all he had feared that, the actual sight of it took him by surprise. It was not what he expected. It was much more terrible somehow. He had imagined he would see the man as he had been these last six years-no matter that he knew better. He had imagined he would see the strong, sad, controlled features, the thoughtful eyes, the thin, expressive, intelligent mouth-the face that had, over all this time, communicated the unthinkable thing to him with slow insistence. He had imagined-he had dreaded-that he would see that face, that man, accusing him with his evident innocence. But that face, that man, was entirely gone.
The man on the gurney was just a container now, a person-shaped vessel brimful of mortal fear. Frank’s mouth was slack with it, and it had erased the lines of his features, of his cheeks and brow: the skin there seemed almost like a baby’s, that blank, that clean. Beneath the hairline, Frank’s bright eyes moved and moved as if disconnected from the rest of him, and all that was left of his life was in those eyes, all the white energy, the white fear.
But it was his hair-oddly enough-it was his hair that somehow struck Luther as the most awful feature: the jaunty, masculine tangle of it on his forehead as he lay there pinned down and covered to the chin. You could imagine him brushing his hair in the morning, jerking it out of his eyes with a twitch of his head, laughing out from under it-and it seemed weirdly extraneous now. It was as if someone had stuck a man’s wig on him, to taunt him, to mock him in his helplessness.
So for all his experience and expectation, the sight of Frank’s face took Luther Plunkitt off guard. It rocked him. It penetrated his professional purpose, struck through the depth of his craft to the human awareness beneath. He was like an actor, thoroughly immersed in a role, who suddenly realized the theater is on fire. He found he had to talk to himself, the warden to the man, to keep himself straight, to fight off that sense of drifting dizziness.
Now lookit, he thought, and his lips worked fitfully as he looked down at the man on the gurney. There was a girl too. There was a pregnant girl and people loved her. A father, a mother, a husband-loved her. There was a child inside her-a daughter, a son, a grandchild-who would have been in her arms, against her breast, would’ve looked up into her face. And this man-this Frank of yours, good old Frank here-he killed her, he killed all that Shot her in the throat, left her choking, dying. For some money, for a little loan-doesn’t matter what the reason was. Doesn’t matter what his life was like before, or the state his mind was in at the time. He had no goddamned right. He’s a man, like me. He had a choice, like I do. He didn’t have to do it and he did. That’s what a man is, after all, in the end. A man is the creature who can say “No.” A man … damn it.
To his amazement, Luther felt his right hand begin to tremble against his pants leg. That had never happened to him before. He slipped the hand into his pocket. For some reason this little lecture of his had only made matters worse. He had to open his mouth to breathe now. He felt the room spinning around him, spinning off through chartless depths. His fingers curled in his pocket into a fist as he tried to hold himself in place, hold the whole room, the whole operation in place, repeating, chanting determinedly against the giddy sensation:
A man is the creature who can say “No.”
“Noooooo!” I shrieked, as the cruisers closed in on me. There were two of them now: the second had come skidding out of a McDonald’s parking lot as if alerted by the first. They were both behind me, closing in to the left and the right. I jammed my foot down so hard against the gas that my whole body was pushed straight against the back of the seat, my arms stretching out to reach the wheel. My face must have looked like a skull, the skin was pulled that tight around the bone in my openmouthed desperation and fear. In front of me, the traffic was disappearing as the cars slashed off to either side to avoid the howling sirens and the whipping lights. The Tempo flew down the black highway like an arrow, like a bullet. And still, the bastards were gaining on me.
“Stop! For Jesus’ sake!” cried Mrs. Russel. “Let them help us!”
But I did not think they would help us-there was no time to make them understand-and I did not stop.