The Collection

squelching sound, and the hairy brown legs protruding from beneath his boot jerked once and then were still. Red blood spread out­ward in uneven rivulets, slowly pushing a gum wrapper and cigarette butt across the cement floor.

'What was he?' someone asked, and everyone looked around, searching the faces of the older people, who shook their heads, confused.

'Traitor!' White Dog yelled, and spit on the dead body of the Black Hawk thing.

The other council members, gathered behind the para­medics, were backing up, frightened by the mood of the room.

'Kill them, too!' someone yelled. A woman.

Jimmy Big Hands and White Dog grabbed Ronnie, the nearest council member.

'Let him go,' Full Moon said quietly.

'What?'

'Let him go. Let them all go.'

'But they knew!' White Dog yelled.

'They knew, but they are still here. They are not like him. They are like us.'

He didn't like using words like us and them. It made him uncomfortable, and he thought of the whites on the Row who had stood and watched and laughed as his grandfather had been murdered in the street. But, like it or not, it was true, and once again he held up his hands. 'It's over!' he an­nounced. 'Death Row is dead. It's over.'

He looked around the room at the members of the tribe, the eyes, old and young, that were trained on him, and suddenly he felt like crying. Other people were crying already. Older people mostly. People who remembered. He saw the faces of the men and women he'd grown up with, his friends and fam­ily. He scanned the crowd for Rosalie but didn't see her.

'She's at home,' John said, touching his elbow.

He nodded, and the crowd parted before him as he started to walk. The people were silent as he headed toward the door, and he walked out of the casino, outside, and into the sunlight.

He looked up at the sky, the sun, the clouds, breathing deeply, the tears beginning to flow.

His father, he knew, would have been proud.

 The Show

In high school, a student in my class claimed to have seen a snuff film. No one thought he really had, but he traded on that story for our entire senior year. I didn't believe him either, but the idea haunted me, and when I was in college I decided to write a story about a teenage boy who watches a snuff movie. I had just seen Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd on TV, and it occurred to me that maybe snuff films were not mur­ders staged specifically for the camera but were, like Sweeney Todd, filmed plays, events produced for live audiences that also happened to be recorded. I liked the idea of the boy going to a snuff 'show,' and wrote this story.

***

My parents were fighting again in the front of the house, my dad calling my mom a stupid boring bitch, my mom calling my dad a cheap insensitive bastard. I closed the door to my room and cranked up my stereo, hoping it would drown out the screaming, but their words ran as an angry undertone to my music, the meanings clear even if the words weren't. I lay on the bed, reading a Rolling Stone, forcing my mind to concentrate on something else.

When the phone rang, I answered it immediately. I half hoped it would be for one of my parents, which would at least provide a momentary break in the battle, but it was only Jimmy. 'Hey,' I said. 'How's it going?'

'Parents fighting again?'

'What else?'

He cleared his throat. 'How'd you like to do something different tonight? I mean really different?'

'What?'

'I can't tell you.'

'Knock off the crap.'

'Look, do you want to do something tonight, or do you want to sit there alone and listen to them fight?'

He had a point. 'Okay,' I said. 'What's the plan?'

'You just meet me at my house in fifteen minutes. I'll drive. We have to be there by eight.' He laughed. 'You're gonna love this. It's gonna blow you away.'

My curiosity was stimulated and he knew it. 'What is it?'

'You'll see. And make sure you bring some bucks. It cost twenty dollars last night, but the guy who took me said it's sometimes more.' He laughed again. 'See you.'

I hung up the phone and slipped on my shoes. I pulled a shirt from the pile next to my bed, grabbed the pickup keys from the dresser, and carefully opened my bedroom door. They were still arguing, their screaming now more furious, their words more overwrought. They were in the living room, and I crept down the hall into the kitchen and snuck out the side door.

Outside it was still hot. The dry desert heat had not dissi­pated with nightfall, and Phoenix was not blessed with a breeze. Above me, the sky was clear and I could see billions of stars. There was no moon.

I pulled up in front of Jimmy's house five minutes later. He was already outside, sitting on the hood of his Jeep, wait­ing. He walked toward me as I hopped out of the pickup, his boots clicking loudly on the asphalt driveway, and there was something in his expression I didn't like. 'All right,' I said. 'What're we doing?'

'We're going to a snuff show,' he said.

I stared at him, not sure I was hearing right. 'What did you say?'

'I didn't want to tell you until we were there, but then I thought it would be better to prepare you for it.'

'A snuff movie? One of those movies that show someone actually getting killed?'

'Not a movie,' Jimmy said. 'I didn't say snuff movie. I said snuff show. This is a live show.'

My mouth felt suddenly dry. 'You're bullshitting me.' 'I'm serious. I saw it. I was there last night.' 'It has to be fake,' I said. 'It can't be real.'

'It's real.'

'I know a guy who saw one of those movies, and he said it was real cheap and amateurish. He said you could tell it was fake. I mean, if legitimate movies have a tough time showing realistic deaths, these guys with no budgets at all must be really bad at it.'

'It's not a movie,' Jimmy said. 'And it's real.'

I looked at the expression on his face, and there was no horror or revulsion in it. There was only an open interest and what appeared to be a look of excited anticipation. Jimmy was not stupid, and I realized that if he thought the show was real, it probably was real. I thought suddenly how little I really knew my best friend.

'Come on,' he said, motioning toward his Jeep. 'It's get­ting late. Let's go.'

I shook my head. 'I don't think I want to go.'

'Yes, you do,' he said. 'Come on.'

And I followed him to the Jeep.

We drove in silence. I looked out at the empty streets of Phoenix as we drove toward the outskirts of the city. I really didn't want to see this. But I remembered the time when Jimmy and I were both eight and we had seen an even younger boy hit by a brakeless Buick. The car had slammed into the boy's tricycle, and the kid had been carried halfway down the street, his head smashed into the vehicle's grille. I had thrown up then, as had Jimmy, and I had had nightmares for months. But in school, on my papers, I had drawn endless variations of the accident, and I realized that I was both attracted to and repelled by the incident.

Despite my conscious objections, I had a similar perverse interest in seeing the snuff show.

I was repulsed by the very thought of it, but I wanted to see it.

The buildings of the city became more run down and spaced farther apart. The fast food franchises were replaced by neon-lit massage parlors and bars. We traveled through one stretch of road which was still desert, though it was technically within the city limits.

Jimmy pulled into a crowded parking lot in front of a low pink building. A string of white Christmas lights hung in an inverted arc over the warped wooden door, and a faded mural on the side of the building had a picture of an