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Later, the Red Hat House became the home of Angola’s electric chair, known as Gruesome Gertie. The fact that I’d watched passively while a man was cooked alive had a peculiar effect on my life. It did not fit with my perception of the supposed democracy in which I lived. A man wearing waist and leg chains was delivered to the unit by the same people who had fed and cared for him for years on death row. The warden, a rotund man with a hush-puppy accent, oversaw the ritual; also in attendance were the prison chaplain, a physician, two journalists, and what was called “the team,” employees of the state who wore charcoal-gray uniforms and red “boot” patches on their shirtsleeves, the boot appellation derived from Louisiana’s geographic shape.
The executioner, a man I knew for many years, was called “the electrician.” Of all the people in the room, only he showed any emotion, and it was pure hatred for the men he launched into eternity. Not the kind of hatred that flared or the kind that caused people to rage or get drunk or strike others. His anger never left his eyes; there was never more of it and never less of it, as though he nursed it the way a professional drunkard nurses alcohol, the way a man can love a vice so much he dare not abuse it lest it be taken from him.
The preparation of the condemned by the team was methodical. The condemned man’s head was shaved, his rectum packed with cotton, an adult diaper wrapped around his buttocks and genitals, a gown dropped over his body, slippers placed on his feet.
The skin of both men was as gray as shirt board. Their glands seemed no longer able to secrete the juices that kept the tissue on their bones. There was dried mucus on their lips, dirt under their fingernails, razor scrapes in their stubble, and a sheen of fear in their eyes that was luminous. As I watched the preparations taking place a few feet away from the chair in which the condemned sat, I tried to keep in mind the severity of the crimes he had committed. But I couldn’t. I was consumed by the process, the detachment of the team, the specificity of each man’s work, all of it aimed at a pitiful wretch who watched their hands touching his skin, buckling the straps on his body, placing a saline-soaked sponge and caplike electrode on his shaved head, putting a lubricant and electrodes on his ankles, and finally, dropping a black cloth over his face so none of us would have to see its reconfiguration when the first jolt hit him.
Each man’s body stiffened against the straps with such force I thought the oak in the chair would burst apart.
The odor made me think of the laundry where my mother ironed clothes with women of color, inside a building that had no ventilation and no fans. I had a hard time swallowing and had to look at the floor a full minute before I stood up.
I left both executions without speaking to anyone else in the room. On both occasions I rumbled across the cattle guard at the main gate and drove straight to a bar one mile down the two-lane and got swacked out of my mind. In twelve-step programs, pathetic drunkards such as I end up trying to figure out the nature of God, no matter how unknowledgeable we may be about such subjects. But the real mystery for me is not in the unseen but in the one at our fingertips: How is it we can do so much harm to one another as long as we are provided sanction? How is it we make marionettes of ourselves and give all power to those who have never heard a shot fired in anger or had even a glimpse of life at the bottom of the food chain?
The day after the killings on the four-lane was Saturday. I woke up on Clete’s couch at ten A.M. Clete had left me a note that read, “Coffee on the stove, beignets in icebox. I’ll see if I can get a lead on Pickins. Don’t let those motherfuckers get behind you.”
Chapter Thirty-two
THE TREES WERE still dripping, but the skies had cleared and the wind was cool and flowers were blooming in the yards along East Main. I showered and shaved and put on fresh clothes and checked in with Helen at the department and ate lunch at Victor’s, then returned home and called Alafair at Reed College in Portland.
It’s hard to tell your child that you’re lonely and the child’s absence is a large part of the problem. In fact, I believe the inculcation of guilt in a child is a terrible thing. So I said nothing about my state of mind or the murders out on the highway, or the likelihood that either Clete or I would pay a price for our involvement in the feud between the Shondell and Balangie families.
I had pulled Alafair from a downed plane out on the salt when she was five years old. Technically, she was an illegal, a refugee flown with her mother out of El Sal by a Maryknoll priest who died with the mother in the crash. I nicknamed her Baby Squanto for the Baby Squanto Indian books she read, and I watched her grow into a beautiful young woman who earned an academic scholarship to Reed but whose dreams still took her back to the day an army patrol came into her village and decided to create an example.
I was about to end our conversation when she said, “Is everything okay, Dave? You sound funny.”
“We had a double homicide out on the four-lane last night,” I said. “The shooter may have been after Clete.”
“You need me there? I can get a flight this afternoon.”
“We’re fine here.”
“No, there’s something else wrong, isn’t there?”
How do you tell your daughter about multiple encounters with a time traveler who was an executioner in the year 1600 and perhaps an adherent of Mussolini in the 1920s?
“Dave, you tell me the truth or I’m coming home,” she said.
“I’ve met someone,” I said to avoid opening a subject I would not be able to shut down.
“Good. Who?”
“It didn’t work out.”
“Who, Dave?”
“The wife of Adonis Balangie, although she says she’s not his wife.”
“I don’t believe this.”
“I asked her to marry me. She didn’t seem in the mood. So I said adios.”
“You’re making this up.”
“You miss Paris?”
“I was only there a week. Don’t change the subject.”
“We’ve got some bad stuff going on here, Alf,” I said. “I think it may involve evil entities. It’s hard to explain. I think Mark Shondell wants to kill Clete. I believe Shondell might be in league with the devil.”
