The Essential Ellison Part 113

He stopped right across from me, with his hands on the back of the chair, and he didn' t say a word, just gave me the nicest smile I' d ever gotten from anyone, even my momma. Oh, yes, I thought, oh my goodness, yes. Henry Lake Spanning was either the most masterfully charismatic person I' d ever met, or so good at the charm con that he could sell a slashed throat to a stranger.

" You can leave him," I said to the great black behemoth brother.

" Can' t do that, sir."

" I' ll take full responsibility."

" Sorry, sir; I was told someone had to be right here in the room with you and him, all the time."

I looked at the one who had waited with me. " That mean you, too?"

He shook his head. " Just one of us, I guess."I frowned. " I need absolute privacy. What would happen if I were this man' s attorney of record?

Wouldn' t you have to leave us alone? Privileged communication, right?"

They looked at each other, this pair of Security Officers, and they looked back at me, and they said nothing. All of a sudden Mr. Plain-as-the-Nose-on-Your-Face had nothing valuable to offer; and the sequoia with biceps " had his orders."

" They tell you who I work for? They tell you who it was sent me here to talk to this man?" Recourse to authority often works. They mumbled yessir yessir a couple of times each, but their faces stayed right on the mark of sorry, sir, but we' re not supposed to leave anybody alone with this man. It wouldn' t have mattered if they' d believed I' d flown in on Jehovah One.

So I said to myself f.u.c.kit I said to myself, and I slipped into their thoughts, and it didn' t take much rearranging to get the phone wires restrung and the underground cables rerouted and the pressure on their bladders something fierce.

" On the other hand..." the first one said.

" I suppose we could..." the giant said.

And in a matter of maybe a minute and a half one of them was entirely gone, and the great one was standing outside the steel door, his back filling the double-pane chickenwire-imbedded security window. He effectively sealed off the one entrance or exit to or from the conference room; like the three hundred Spartans facing the tens of thousands of Xerxes' s army at the Hot Gates.

Henry Lake Spanning stood silently watching me.

" Sit down," I said. " Make yourself comfortable."

He pulled out the chair, came around, and sat down.

" Pull it closer to the table," I said.

He had some difficulty, hands shackled that way, but he grabbed the leading edge of the seat and sc.r.a.ped forward till his stomach was touching the table.

He was a handsome guy, even for a white man. Nice nose, strong cheekbones, eyes the color of that water in your toilet when you toss in a tablet of 2000 Flushes. Very nice looking man. He gave me the creeps.

If Dracula had looked like s.h.i.+rley Temple, no one would' ve driven a stake through his heart. If Harry Truman had looked like Freddy Krueger, he would never have beaten Tom Dewey at the polls. Joe Stalin and Saddam Hussein looked like sweet, avuncular friends of the family, really nice looking, kindly guys- who just incidentally happened to slaughter millions of men, women, and children. Abe Lincoln looked like an axe murderer, but he had a heart as big as Guatemala.

Henry Lake Spanning had the sort of face you' d trust immediately if you saw it in a tv commercial. Men would like to go fis.h.i.+ng with him, women would like to squeeze his buns. Grannies would hug him on sight, kids would follow him straight into the mouth of an open oven. If he could play the piccolo, rats would gavotte around his shoes.

What saps we are. Beauty is only skin deep. You can' t judge a book by its cover. Cleanliness is next to G.o.dliness. Dress for success. What saps we are.

So what did that make my pal, Allison Roche?

And why the h.e.l.l didn' t I just slip into his thoughts and check out the. landscape? Why was I stalling?

Because I was scared of him.

This was fifty-six verified, gruesome, disgusting murders sitting forty-eight inches away from me, looking straight at me with blue eyes and soft, gently blond hair. Neither Harry nor Dewey would' ve had a prayer.

So why was I scared of him? Because; that' s why.

This was d.a.m.ned foolishness. I had all the weaponry, he was shackled, and I didn' t for a second believe he was what Ally thought he was: innocent. h.e.l.l, they' d caught him, literally, redhanded. b.l.o.o.d.y to the armpits, fer chrissakes. Innocent, my a.s.s! Okay, Rudy, I thought, get in there and take a look around. But I didn' t. I waited for him to say something.

He smiled tentatively, a gentle and nervous little smile, and he said, " Ally asked me to see you. Thank you for coming."

I looked at him, but not into him.

He seemed upset that he' d inconvenienced me. " But I don' t think you can do me any good, not in just three days."

" You scared, Spanning?"

His lips trembled. " Yes I am, Mr. Pairis. I' m about as scared as a man can be." His eyes were moist.

" Probably gives you some insight into how your victims felt, whaddaya think?"

He didn' t answer. His eyes were moist.

After a moment just looking at me, he sc.r.a.ped back his chair and stood up. " Thank you for coming, sir. I' m sorry Ally imposed on your time." He turned and started to walk away. I jaunted into his landscape.

Oh my G.o.d, I thought. He was innocent.

Never done any of it. None of it. Absolutely no doubt, not a shadow of a doubt. Ally had been right. I saw every bit of that landscape in there, every fold and crease; every bolt hole and rat run; every gully and arroyo; all of his past, back and back and back to his birth in Lewistown, Montana, near Great Falls, thirty-six years ago; every day of his life right up to the minute they arrested him leaning over that disemboweled cleaning woman the real killer had tossed into the dumpster.

I saw every second of his landscape; and I saw him coming out of the Winn-Dixie in Huntsville; pus.h.i.+ng a cart filled with grocery bags of food for the weekend. And I saw him wheeling it around the parking lot toward the dumpster area overflowing with broken-down cardboard boxes and fruit crates. And I heard the cry for help from one of those dumpsters; and I saw Henry Lake Spanning stop and look around, not sure he' d heard anything at all. Then I saw him start to go to his car, parked right there at the edge of the lot beside the wall because it was a Friday evening and everyone was stocking up for the weekend, and there weren' t any s.p.a.ces out front; and the cry for help, weaker this time, as pathetic as a crippled kitten; and Henry Lake Spanning stopped cold, and he looked around; and we both saw the b.l.o.o.d.y hand raise itself above the level of the open dumpster' s filthy green steel side. And I saw him desert his groceries without a thought to their cost, or that someone might run off with them if he left them unattended, or that he only had eleven dollars left in his checking account, so if those groceries were snagged by someone he wouldn' t be eating for the next few days...and I watched him rush to the dumpster and look into the c.r.a.p filling it...and I felt his nausea at the sight of that poor old woman, what was left of her...and I was with him as he crawled up onto the dumpster and dropped inside to do what he could for that ma.s.s of shredded and pulped flesh.

And I cried with him as she gasped, with a bubble of blood that burst in the open ruin of her throat, and she died. But though I heard the scream of someone coming around the corner, Spanning did not; and so he was still there, holding the poor ma.s.s of stripped skin and black b.l.o.o.d.y clothing, when the cops screeched into the parking lot. And only then, innocent of anything but decency and rare human compa.s.sion, did Henry Lake Spanning begin to understand what it must look like to middle-aged hausfraus, sneaking around dumpsters to pilfer cardboard boxes, who see what they think is a man murdering an old woman.

I was with him, there in that landscape within his mind, as he ran and ran and dodged and dodged. Until they caught him in Decatur, seven miles from, the body of Gunilla Ascher. But they had him, and they had positive identification, from the dumpster in Huntsville; and all the rest of it was circ.u.mstantial, gussied up by bedridden, recovering Charlie Whilborg and the staff in Ally' s office. It looked good on paper- so good that Ally had brought him down on twenty-nine-c.u.m-fifty-six counts of murder in the vilest extreme.

But it was all bulls.h.i.+t.

The killer was still out there.

Henry Lake Spanning, who looked like a nice, decent guy, was exactly that. A nice, decent, goodhearted, but most of all innocent guy.

You could fool juries and polygraphs and judges and social workers and psychiatrists and your mommy and your daddy, but you could not fool Rudy Pairis, who travels regularly to the place of dark where you can go but not return.

They were going to burn an innocent man in three days.

I had to do something about it.

Not just for Ally, though that was reason enough; but for this man who thought he was doomed, and was frightened, but didn' t have to take no s.h.i.+t from a wiseguy like me.

" Mr. Spanning," I called after him.

He didn' t stop.

" Please," I said. He stopped shuffling, the chains making their little charm bracelet sounds, but he didn' t turn around.

" I believe Ally is right, sir," I said. " I believe they caught the wrong man; and I believe all the time you' ve served is wrong; and I believe you ought not die."

Then he turned slowly, and stared at me with the look of a dog that has been taunted with a bone. His voice was barely a whisper. " And why is that, Mr. Pairis? Why is it that you believe me when n.o.body else but Ally and my attorney believed me?"

I didn' t say what I was thinking. What I was thinking was that I' d been in there, and I knew he was innocent. And more than that, I knew that he truly loved my pal Allison Roche.

And there wasn' t much I wouldn' t do for Ally.

So what I said was: " I know you' re innocent, because I know who' s guilty."

His lips parted. It wasn' t one of those big moves where someone' s mouth flops open in astonishment; it was just a parting of the lips. But he was startled; I knew that as I knew the poor sonofab.i.t.c.h had suffered too long already.

He came shuffling back to me, and sat down.

" Don' t make fun, Mr. Pairis. Please. I' m what you said, I' m scared. I don' t want to die, and I surely don' t want to die with the world thinking I did those...those things."

" Makin' no fun, captain. I know who ought to burn for all those murders. Not six states, but eleven. Not fifty-six dead, but an even seventy. Three of them little girls in a day nursery, and the woman watching them, too."

He stared at me. There was horror on his face. I know that look real good. I' ve seen it at least seventy times.

" I know you' re innocent, cap' n because I' m the man they want. I' m the guy who put your a.s.s in here."

In a moment of human weakness. I saw it all. What I had packed off to live in that place of dark where you can go but not return. The wall-safe in my drawing-room. The four-foot-thick walled crypt encased in concrete and sunk a mile deep into solid granite. The vault whose composite laminate walls of judiciously sloped extremely thick blends of steel and plastic, the equivalent of six hundred to seven hundred mm of h.o.m.ogenous depth protection approached the maximum toughness and hardness of crystaliron, that iron grown with perfect crystal structure and carefully controlled quant.i.ties of impurities that in a modern combat tank can shrug off a hollow charge warhead like a spaniel shaking himself dry. The Chinese puzzle box. The hidden chamber. The labyrinth. The maze of the mind where I' d sent all seventy to die, over and over and over, so I wouldn' t hear their screams, or see the ropes of b.l.o.o.d.y tendon, or stare into the pulped sockets where their pleading eyes had been.

When I had walked into that prison, I' d been b.u.t.toned up totally. I was safe and secure, I knew nothing, remembered nothing, suspected nothing.

But when I walked into Henry Lake Spanning' s landscape, and I could not lie to myself that he was the one, I felt the earth crack. I felt the tremors and the upheavals, and the fissures started at my feet and ran to the horizon; and the lava boiled up and began to flow. And the steel walls melted, and the concrete turned to dust, and the barriers dissolved; and I looked at the face of the monster.

No wonder I had such nausea when Ally had told me about this or that slaughter ostensibly perpetrated by Henry Lake Spanning, the man she was prosecuting on twenty-nine counts of murders I had committed. No wonder I could picture all the details when she would talk to me about the barest description of the murder site. No wonder I fought so hard against coming to Holman.

In there, in his mind, his landscape open to me, I saw the love he had for Allison Roche, for my pal and buddy with whom I had once, just once...

Don' t try tellin' me that the Power of Love can open the fissures. I don' t want to hear that s.h.i.+t. I' m telling you that it was a combination, a buncha things that split me open, and possibly maybe one of those things was what I saw between them.

I don' t know that much. I' m a quick study, but this was in an instant. A crack of fate. A moment of human weakness. That' s what I told myself in the part of me that ventured to the place of dark: that I' d done what I' d done in moments of human weakness.

And it was those moments, not my " gift," and not my blackness, that had made me the loser, the monster, the liar that I am.

In the first moment of realization, I couldn' t believe it. Not me, not good old Rudy. Not likeable Rudy Pairis never done no one but hiss elf wrong his whole life.

In the next second I went wild with anger, furious at the disgusting thing that lived on one side of my split brain. Wanted to tear a hole through my face and yank the killing thing out, wet and putrescent, and squeeze it into pulp.

In the next second I was nauseated, actually wanted to fall down and puke, seeing every moment of what I had done, unshaded, unhidden, naked to this Rudy Pairis who was decent and reasonable and law-abiding, even if such a Rudy was little better than a well-educated f.u.c.kup. But not a killer...I wanted to puke.

Then, finally, I accepted what I could not deny.

For me, never again, would I slide through the night with the scent of the blossoming Yellow Lady' s Slipper. I recognized that perfume now.

It was the odor that rises from a human body cut wide open, like a mouth making a big, dark yawn.

The other Rudy Pairis had come home at last.

They didn' t have half a minute' s worry. I sat down at a little wooden writing table in an interrogation room in the Jefferson County D.A.' s offices, and' I made up a graph with the names and dates and locations. Names of as many of the seventy as I actually knew. (A lot of them had just been on the road, or in a men' s toilet, or taking a bath, or lounging in the back row of a movie, or getting some cash from an ATM, or just sitting around doing nothing but waiting for me to come along and open them up, and maybe have a drink off them, or maybe just something to snack on...down the road.) Dates were easy, because I' ve got a good memory for dates. And the places where they' d find the ones they didn' t know about, the fourteen with exactly the same m.o. as the other fifty-six, not to mention the old-style rip-and-pull can opener I' d used on that little Catholic bead-counter Gunilla Whatsername, who did Hail Mary this and Sweet Blessed Jesus that all the time I was opening her up, even at the last, when I held up parts of her insides for her to look at, and tried to get her to lick them, but she died first. Not half a minute' s worry for the State of Alabama. All in one swell foop they corrected a tragic miscarriage of justice, n.o.bbled a maniac killer, solved fourteen more murders than they' d counted on (in five additional states, which made the police departments of those five additional states extremely pleased with the law enforcement agencies of the Sovereign State of Alabama), and made first spot on the evening news on all three major networks, not to mention CNN, for the better part of a week. Knocked the Middle East right out of the box. Neither Harry Truman nor Tom Dewey would' ve had a prayer.

Ally went into seclusion, of course. Took off and went somewhere down on the Florida coast, I heard. But after the trial, and the verdict, and Spanning being released, and me going inside, and all like that, well, oo-poppa-dow as they used to say, it was all reordered properly. Sat cito si sat bene, in Latin: " It is done quickly enough if it is done well." A favorite saying of Cato. The Elder Cato.

And all I asked, all I begged for, was that Ally and Henry Lake Spanning, who loved each other and deserved each other, and whom I had almost f.u.c.ked up royally, that the two of them would be there when they jammed my weary black b.u.t.t into that new electric chair at Holman.

Please come, I begged them.

Don' t let me die alone. Not even a s.h.i.+t like me. Don' t make me cross over into that place of dark, where you can go, but not return- without the face of a friend. Even a former friend. And as for you, captain, well, h.e.l.l didn' t I save your life so you could enjoy the company of the woman you love? Least you can do. Come on now; be there or be square!

I don' t know if Spanning talked her into accepting the invite, or if it was the other way around; but one day about a week prior to the event of cooking up a mess of fried Rudy Pairis; the Warden stopped by my commodious accommodations on Death Row and gave me to understand that it would be SRO for the barbeque, which meant Ally my pal, and her boy friend, the former resident of the Row where now I dwelt in durance vile.

The things a guy' ll do for love.

Yeah, that was the key. Why would a very smart operator who had gotten away with it, all the way free and clear, why would such a smart operator suddenly pull one of those hokey courtroom " I did it, I did it!" routines, and as good as strap himself into the electric chair?

Once. I only went to bed with her once.

The things a guy' ll do for love.

When they brought me into the death chamber from the holding cell where I' d spent the night before and all that day, where I' d had my last meal (which had been a hot roast beef sandwich, double meat, on white toast, with very crisp french fries, and hot brown country gravy poured over the whole thing, apple sauce, and a bowl of Concord grapes), where a representative of the Holy Roman Empire had tried to make amends for destroying most of the G.o.ds, beliefs, and cultures of my black forebears, they held me between Security Officers, neither one of whom had been in attendance when I' d visited Henry Lake Spanning at this very same correctional facility slightly more than a year before.

It hadn' t been a bad year. Lots of rest; caught up on my reading, finally got around to Proust and Langston Hughes, I' m ashamed to admit, so late in the game; lost some weight; worked out regularly; gave up cheese and dropped my cholesterol count. Ain' t nothin' to it, just to do it.

Even took a jaunt or two or ten, every now and awhile. It didn' t matter none. I wasn' t going anywhere, neither were they. I' d done worse than the worst of them; hadn' t I confessed to it? So there wasn' t a lot that could ice me, after I' d copped to it and released all seventy of them out of my unconscious, where they' d been rotting in shallow graves for years. No big thang, Cuz.

Brought me in, strapped me in, plugged me in.

I looked through the gla.s.s at the witnesses.

There sat Ally and Spanning, front row center. Best seats in the house. All eyes and crying, watching, not believing everything had come to this, trying to figure out when and how and in what way it had all gone down without her knowing anything at all about it. And Henry Lake Spanning sitting close beside her, their hands locked in her lap. True love.

I locked eyes with Spanning.

I jaunted into his landscape.

No, I didn' t.

I tried to, and couldn' t squirm through. Thirty years" , or less, since I was five or six, I' d been doing it; without hindrance, all alone in the world the only person who could do this listen in on the landscape trick; and for the first time I was stopped. Absolutely no f.u.c.kin' entrance. I went wild! I tried running at it full-tilt, and hit something khaki-colored, like beach sand, and only slightly giving, not hard, but resilient. Exactly like being inside a ten-foot-high, fifty-foot-diameter paper bag, like a big shopping bag from a supermarket, that stiff butcher' s paper kind of bag, and that color, like being inside a bag that size, running straight at it, thinking you' re going to bust through...and being thrown back. Not hard, not like bouncing on a trampoline, just shunted aside like the fuzz from a dandelion hitting a gla.s.s door. Unimportant. Khaki-colored and not particularly bothered.

I tried hitting it with a bolt of pure blue lightning mental power, like someone out of a Marvel comic, but that wasn' t how mixing in other people' s minds works. You don' t think yourself in with a psychic battering-ram. That' s the kind of arrant foolishness you hear spouted by unattractive people on public access cable channels, talking about The Power of Love and The Power of the Mind and the ever-popular toe-tapping Power of a Positive Thought. Bulls.h.i.+t; I don' t be home to that folly!

I tried picturing myself in there, but that didn' t work, either. I tried blanking my mind and drifting across, but it was pointless. And at that moment it occurred to me that I didn' t really know how I jaunted. I just...did it. One moment I was snug in the privacy of my own head, and the next I was over there in someone else' s landscape. It was instantaneous, like teleportation, which also is an impossibility, like telepathy.