killer. Certainly, he did not make a good poster boy; he cursed, spat, and made filthy gestures whenever and wherever given the opportunity.
The old man appeared his exact opposite. The old man had sat straight and stiff throughout the proceedings like a staff, an ancient, worm-eaten wooden staff, erect and unbending, proud and sad all at once. Judge DeCampe could only imagine how a parent might react under such stress as God, Texas, his son, and circumstances had placed on him and his absent wife. DeCampe had come to think of the elder Mr. Purdy as a biblical character like Lot or even Job-the Job of Iowa Falls, Iowa.
She relaxed her arm along with the weapon, pointing it downward just as her father had always taught her. “Mr. Purdy, you damn near got your head blown off. You startled me.
Then he grinned a twisted and grimacing grin and mocked her words, “Mr. Purdy, you startled me. I plan for a heap more'n to startle you, Missy.”
Now she felt real fear of the sort that went without the blink of second-guessing, but too late! Maureen DeCampe didn't see the electric cattle prod he shoved into her abdomen from somewhere deep within the rumpled coat, through a hole in a pocket. She saw a flash of the silver tip, like the giant sting of a wasp, even as it remained somehow attached to the inner lining of his cloth overcoat. She only felt its report as it sent her into a confused convulsion, a sense of burning material and flesh filling her last thought before passing out.
“ You had your chance, woman. You done sat in judgment twic't on my boy, and you done kil't Jimmy Lee, but he ain't going outta this life without company. Electrocution… How's it feel? My boy and me're now gonna teach you a little about old time religion and justice. Call yerself a judge. Hawww!”
Her gun had fallen immediately, her hands reacting violently to the electric bolt sent through her every cell. She had slumped forward into him, unconscious, her weight against the frail figure nearly knocking Purdy over. He then must have used some sort of drug on her, she now surmised. Likely used a premeasured dose from a hypodermic.
“ I lifted your body, carried you to my waiting van, and there I deposited you… inside a pine wood coffin, same as Jimmy Lee's. You rode here right alongside one another in the back of the van. After I put you into the coffin, I nailed shut the top of the thing.”
She had a vague memory or sixth sense of having been shut up into a black inkwell.
Darkness complete.
Isaiah Purdy had grown tired, his eyes so heavy they had closed, his ears no longer registering the whimpering and animal cries of his victim. He dozed on the three-legged stool that sat in the barn. He half remembered, half dreamed now, rewinding his experience through the mechanism of his mind. What had happened? How had he found the courage and strength to carry out his dead son's wishes?
He recalled again how he had taken the woman in the garage in Washington, D.C., after he'd made a cruise by the White House and the Lincoln Memorial-places he'd always wanted to see. He recalled standing in a crowd of tourists, feeling he needed a bath or a shower.
He recalled next going to the courthouse, and what had happened after he'd jabbed her with the cattle prod and injected her with the drug. He had then banged tight the coffin lid over her unconscious form, nail after nail. When he had turned to climb from the van, he was shocked to see a vision standing there, a biblical character if ever there was one, a giant, bearded prophet, asking, “What're you doing there, mister?”
The unexpected man wore tattered clothes, sported a long beard, ragged hair, and confused eyes. With mouth wide open, he gazed at Purdy and past him to the coffin into which Isaiah had deposited Maureen DeCampe's benumbed form. Purdy thought of Moses and John the Baptist when he stared at the homeless man, who now asked, “Do ya' think you're doing the right thing here?”
“ I'm about doing the Lord's work. And you? You have come from God as a messenger, like John out of the wilderness, and you, sir, are a sign!”
“ A sign? Me?”
“ Yes, a sign that I am doing exactly as God intends me to do.”
“ Really?” Purdy's arms went up as he spoke, making him look like a preacher. “I am following the dictates of the One True Lord God. And you? Are you one of his prophets?” Purdy opened his palms to the homeless man. “Be at peace, brother.”
“ Then you're taking care of her, you mean?” The homeless man indicated the two coffins with a single finger. “Or them…”
“ Precisely, yes.”
“ Can I have her purse money?” The homeless man indicated where DeCampe's purse lay alongside her gun, several feet from her car.
'Take it; render unto Caesar that which is his.”
Purdy closed the van's rear doors on one coffin from which a slight groan erupted, and on one silent coffin. At the same time, the homeless man shuffled off for the purse DeCampe had dropped, but he first stared at the long- barreled gun, lifting it in his greasy, food-stained hands. His heart said use it, but his logical side won when he lifted the purse and carefully placed the gun back where he had found it.
“ I ain't been nobody's hero for a long time,” the man muttered to himself.
Purdy walked around to the front of the van and stared back at the homeless man. Purdy simply waved at the old prophet, climbed into the van, put his keys into the ignition, turned the motor on, and then slowly pulled away. The homeless man had already disappeared into the gray walls.
“ Well, Jimmy Lee… our undertaking's been blessed… blessed by Ol' John the Baptist himself,” the old Iowa farmer muttered as he arrived at the ticket booth, where he calmly paid his bill and continued on, the attendant so strung out on drugs that he had seen nothing and had heard less. Purdy, at Jimmy's urging, had brought plenty of drugs- mostly animal tranquilizers-to bargain with.
As for- Judge DeCampe, she was past caring, at least not for now. Purdy would taunt her with the story of her would- be knight in shining armor, who turned out to be Purdy's prophet. He'd share it all with her in detail when she next regained consciousness and when he next awoke. He knew the story well, but she had yet to hear it.
Maureen DeCampe now lay amid hay and dirt in an open room filled with dust, mites, and pollen. She could only imagine being in the coffin which was standing in a comer alongside Jimmy Lee's. The old man had told her all about how he had transported her here in it. He'd also begun to hint that it had all been a plan concocted in Jimmy Purdy's fevered brain. DeCampe at this point would prefer the safe confines of the coffin and a death by asphyxiation to that which the Purdy men had in mind. Had in mind was the right phrase, for the old man had his son's dead voice filling his mind, or so it seemed to her.
She would readily have chosen being buried alive to what torture she now endured. She felt her skin crawling with the decay from Jimmy Lee's body. For now she was in some sort of large area where animals had once been kept, some sort of a barn like structure, she realized.
“ Am I'n I-o-wa?” she asked under the gag, realizing the tape around her mouth protected the only area of her body touching the dead man's flesh-and grateful for this two- inch-wide swath of freedom from the desiccation. Unclean tissue… contamination, these words swam in her mind like feeding piranhas, but these toothy microbe fish ate away at her sanity and soul as well as her flesh.
The only response from the nearby darkness was a hearty laugh at her attempt to speak; she wondered if the old man could understand anything she said, that she had guessed at her whereabouts. If it were Iowa, how did he transport her without anyone knowing or seeing something? As if to answer her thoughts, the dark little man, Purdy, stood and lifted a kerosene lantern and turned the light up. She welcomed the pungent kerosene odor into her; for half a nanosecond, it masked the overwhelming odor of decay that had caused her to pass out more than once. Worse thought yet, she had gotten somehow used to the odor.
Her father had been a cattleman rancher in Texas, and his father before him, and she had often wondered how the DeCampe men could get used to the smells that came with slaughtering cows, but they did. In fact, it seemed to have lodged in their genes. Her grandfather had once sat her down and told her that men could, given the circumstances, get used to anything-anything at all. Any odor, any deed, any sinful behavior, if exposed to it long enough. He pointed to the slave trade, the Holocaust. She began to feel that she'd reached that point here, the point of no return, in which her senses, so assailed by the decay, simply had shut down. She could tolerate it, at
