doubled-over, holding his gut. The guards always smacked their clubs right there, right where the bullet went clean through his kidney, right where they knew it hurt bad.
“Get up, Judd-Ass.”
Judd K. Perkins, a.k.a Puff, was counting the days: in exactly one year he would have his shot, his last hurrah, his gurney nap, his meal card punched.
Dead man walking, the Texas Death Row Shuffle.
Nobody cared; no relatives, no friends, certainly none of the inmates in Polunsky Unit who complained that the overweight old man always smelled like shit. It was a fair criticism. The south end of the 12 Building, Puff’s end, was often flooded and musty. Puff had molded several bricks using his feces and food scraps and stacked them in a damp corner of his cell, and every couple of weeks he harvested the ashen mushrooms that magically appeared.
Then the guards found dried spores in his pocket. Convinced he was carrying Mary Jane-marijuana hash-they beat him. Real bad.
“I told you to get up, Judd-Ass.”
As Puff held onto the bars, a lone Texas Department of Criminal Justice guard watched him, making sure the fat old man didn’t choke and check out before his time.
“The Lord forgives you,” Puff coughed, spitting up a chunk of blood.
“Shut up,” the guard said, “and gimme two.”
“Please, not my cookers!”
“Rules. Pass ’em through.”
Puff stood up. “I don’t jack the tray never and I don’t throw my shit at you like Ritchie and-”
“Should I make it three?”
Puff’s coughs melted to a whimper. He pushed two books through the tray slot.
“ ‘
Puff just smiled. “No fried drumsticks for my last supper, no sir. I’m starting off with a duck pate followed by a lobster risotto and then-”
The guard let out a hearty laugh. “And for dessert, a menagerie of sodium thiopental, pancuronium, and potassium chloride, right? ’Night, Judd-Ass.”
The locals call it Prison City, a small Baptist town in east Texas, a company town where the company is the penal system. I took a furlough from my weekly feasts and spent Mondays at 12 Building and “the Walls.” Each visit I brought four-dozen homemade chocolate chip cookies for the guards; I brought the inmates pastries and took their confessions: long, teary-eyed confessions. My how the predead talked and talked and talked, and always about the same old things: the past, the Lord, the shame, and the pending trip to see Joe Bryd, the name of the prison cemetery.
Except for inmate TDCJ #1962.
All he wanted to talk about was cooking.
“Guard says you a chef.”
“Of sorts,” I answer. I’m in the visitor’s booth and we’re separated by thick glass. It gives me little comfort.
“Preacher, can you use an immersion hydrothermal circulator to prepare a two-hour egg?”
“Sure, but why would you, when you can just boil it?”
“Georges Pralus says you can, but you gotta watch out for botulism poisoning at ’dem low temperatures. You ever make carrot caviar?”
“Once.”
“Did you use sodium alginate? It’s a damn good emulsifier, ain’t it?”
I listen in awe as TDCJ #1962 debates the benefits of hydrocolloid gums-obscure starches relegated to the bowels of food labels on Ring Dings and Twix. He wants to know if it’s possible to make a condiment that you could wrap around a hot dog like a string using an emulsified puree of mustard seed and xantham gum. When our time is up, I ask how he knows of such things.
“My cookers. That’s all I read. I like the ones with pictures best. I know they wash ’em in detergent and paint ’em with food coloring and all that, but still the food in ’em pictures looks mighty fine.”
“You know a lot about cooking.”
“Spent eight years planning my last supper. I deserve to die, no question about that, but I also deserve a good home-cooked meal before I go.”
“Might be tough to pull off something fancy in the kitchen here.”
“But you could cook it for me, Preacher.”
“Me?”
“Sure. Please?”
“No, Preacher can’t,” is all I say. I want to add: “Especially not for the bastard who murdered my wife,” but the good Lord holds my tongue in place.
It’s almost dawn. I can’t sleep. The Puff monster didn’t recognize me; guess I had changed a lot in eight years. How easy it is for some people to forget the taste of murder. I pull the Smith & Wesson Model 60 out from under the bed, stumble down to the kitchen, and place it on the counter next to the 9-inch Switchblade Stiletto CarbonFiber. The gun is dull, chunky, and awkward, but the silver blade dances smooth and fit under the kitchen lights. Yin and yang, male and female.
I sell the Double Action.38 caliber for $495 on eBay; the auction takes seven minutes.
I’m not going to shoot Puff, not now, not after how much I’ve grown, evolved. Mary wouldn’t want that; the man she married is a priest, not some common thug.
That day I beg Peter Radin to do everything he can to grant Judd Perkins a clemency. I pull the Bishop Neal card, too. My campaign begins: an eye-for- an-eye makes the world go blind.
And I decide to cook Puff’s last supper.
The most delicious meal of his entire wretched life.
Two weeks left for Puff.
I’m in the visitor’s booth at Huntsville, working through the menu. “I researched deadmaneating.com,” I report. “You’re right, not one death row inmate ever asked for mushroom pate.”
“So you’ll do it?” he asks.
I pull out a pad and a pen. “I was thinking we’d start off with puff-ball soup, you know, given your nickname and all that.”
“No, no. I wrote it all out for you already.”
“So you knew I would agree to cook for you?”
Puff grins a yellow smile. “Make sure you get only the freshest ingredients, local and organic, like Martha says.”
“Like Martha says,” I repeat, now relegated to a sous chef to Death Row’s very own Julia Child. A guard passes me the slip of paper filled with perfect handwriting:
