He clasped the bars and rattled them. It seemed almost like he could bend them apart and step through and come at me. But the bars held.
Then he picked up the bucket and threw the contents at me. The bucket clanged hard against the bars. There wasn’t much in it, and it missed me and puddled in the aisle.
“Kind of a stink to live with, ain’t it?” I said.
I stepped over the puddle and headed for King Bragg’s cell, down one and across.
He lay on his iron bunk, staring upward. He seemed lost to the world already, as if he had somehow passed away, but he was alive still.
“They treated you all right?” I asked.
He didn’t reply.
“You get the meal you wanted?”
“I don’t want any food. What good is a last meal? A fancy last meal does nothing for a man about to die; it’s offered so the hangman can feel better.”
I guessed that was true.
“You want to come out and stretch in my office?”
He stared, absorbing that, and nodded.
I unlocked, and stepped aside, wary and ready for anything. But the kid just stepped through, and walked ahead of me down the aisle past his pa.
“If you can let him out, you can let me out,” Admiral said.
“I’d be a foolish sheriff if I did that,” I said.
“You already are,” he said. “And you won’t be sheriff for long. You’ll be out of office—one way or other—in hours.”
“Thanks for the warning,” I said. “Your daughter’s told your men to put their guns away tomorrow.”
Bragg loosed an animal yowl that scraped my nerves, but I ignored him. I let the kid out in the office, ready for trouble, but he just stood there in that lamplight.
“Have a seat,” I said.
King Bragg sat, staring at the walls, at the gun rack, at the stuff on my desk, and then sort of sagged into the chair.
“Anything you want to talk about?” I asked.
“No. There’s nothing. There’s no tomorrow, so there’s nothing.”
“Anything you want me to do? To tell people? Anything you want to write?”
He stared into the lamp so long, I thought he wouldn’t say anything. “I have a question you won’t like,” he said. “How can you sit there talking to the man you’re going to hang in a few hours?”
He was right. I sure enough didn’t like that one. I guessed that most hangmen don’t want to meet or know the ones they slip the noose over.
“Just dumb, I guess,” I said. “You want to know how I feel? I feel like opening that door and telling you to fly into the night and don’t never come back to Puma County. But I can’t. I got a duty and I got to do it, and what I feel don’t count.”
“I hoped for it,” he said. “Maybe it would be good. But mostly I’d be a fugitive, my life no good.”
His pa was back there bellowing some. “Let me out, you son of a bitch,” he was saying.
“My ma would take offense,” I said.
“My mother wasn’t like my father. He controlled her, just like he controlled Queen and me and his men, and tried to control his neighbors, and the politicians, and you, and tried to control the rain and the snow and the land and the water and the stock and the game. She simply died, because that’s all she could think to do when she got tired of being his woman. He taught us to be like himself. He gave me a gun four years ago and told me to make the whole world afraid of me, and then I’d be a real king.” He stared at me. “Look what it got me.”
“You and Queen, you’ve both busted loose of him.”
“Too late,” he said. “She set herself free?”
“She did.”
“That’s why she’ll live a good life. I was too late.”
We sank into one of them silences, and I watched a moth flit around the lamp. It’d likely get itself burnt pretty quick.
“Do you think there’s an afterlife?” he asked.
“I’m inclined against it, but I haven’t got it figured out yet,” I said.
“I guess I’m slated for hell,” he said. “If I killed three men, that’s it. So God says, get down there and suffer, and get burned up, and know there’s no hope from now until the end of time. Maybe that’s it. Maybe this is just the beginning. Maybe this is the easy part, getting my neck snapped in one bad moment. It’s the slow stuff, the roasting in the flames. A thousand years from now, ten thousand years from now, I’ll still be roasting away down there, and there’s no getting loose.”
“Sounds almost as bad as heaven,” I said. “I sure get myself in a snit when I think of getting stuck there. I
