more than three times the 700 volt jolt lethal dose that destroys a brain, for a pus-bag like Henry Lake Spanning.
But if we were lucky—and the scheduled day of departure was very nearly upon us—if we were lucky, if there was a God and Justice and Natural Order and all that good stuff, then Henry Lake Spanning, this foulness, this corruption, this thing that lived only to ruin…would end up as a pile of fucking ashes somebody might use to sprinkle over a flower garden, thereby providing this ghoul with his single opportunity to be of some use to the human race.
That was the guy that my pal Allison Roche wanted me to go and “chat” with, down to Holman Prison, in Atmore, Alabama. There, sitting on Death Row, waiting to get his demented head tonsured, his pants legs slit, his tongue fried black as the inside of a sheep’s belly…down there at Holman my pal Allison wanted me to go “chat” with one of the most awful creatures made for killing this side of a hammerhead shark, which creature had an infinitely greater measure of human decency than Henry Lake Spanning had ever demonstrated. Go chit-chat, and enter his landscape, and read his mind, Mr. Telepath, and use the marvelous mythic power of extra-sensory perception: this nifty swell ability that has made me a bum all my life, well, not exactly a bum: I do have a decent apartment, and I do earn a decent, if sporadic, living; and I try to follow Nelson Algren’s warning never to get involved with a woman whose troubles are bigger than my own; and sometimes I even have a car of my own, even though at that moment such was not the case, the Camaro having been repo’d, and not by Harry Dean Stanton or Emilio Estevez, lemme tell you; but a bum in the sense of— how does Ally put it?—oh yeah—I don’t “realize my full and forceful potential”—a bum in the sense that I can’t hold a job, and I get rotten breaks, and all of this despite a Rhodes scholarly education so far above what a poor nigrah- lad such as myself could expect that even Rhodes hisownself would’ve been chest-out proud as hell of me. A bum, mostly, despite an outstanding Rhodes scholar education and a pair of kind, smart, loving parents—even for foster-parents—shit, especially for being foster-parents—who died knowing the certain sadness that their only child would spend his life as a wandering freak unable to make a comfortable living or consummate a normal marriage or raise children without the fear of passing on this special personal horror…this astonishing ability fabled in song and story that I possess…that no one else seems to possess, though I know there must have been others, somewhere, sometime, somehow! Go, Mr. Wonder of Wonders, shining black Cagliostro of the modern world, go with this super nifty swell ability that gullible idiots and flying saucer assholes have been trying to prove exists for at least fifty years, that no one has been able to isolate the way I, me, the only one has been isolated, let me tell you about isolation, my brothers; and here I was, here was I, Rudy Pairis…just a guy, making a buck every now and then with nifty swell impossible ESP, resident of thirteen states and twice that many cities so far in his mere thirty years of landscape-jaunting life, here was I, Rudy Pairis, Mr. I-Can-Read-Your-Mind, being asked to go and walk through the mind of a killer who scared half the people in the world. Being asked by the only living person, probably, to whom I could not say no. And, oh, take me at my word here: I wanted to say no. Was, in fact, saying no at every breath. What’s that? Will I do it? Sure, yeah sure, I’ll go on down to Holman and jaunt through this sick bastard’s mind landscape. Sure I will. You got two chances: slim, and none.
All of this was going on in the space of one greasy double cheeseburger and two cups of coffee.
The worst part of it was that Ally had somehow gotten involved with him. Ally! Not some bimbo bitch…but Ally. I couldn’t believe it.
Not that it was unusual for women to become mixed up with guys in the joint, to fall under their “magic spell,” and to start corresponding with them, visiting them, taking them candy and cigarettes, having conjugal visits, playing mule for them and smuggling in dope where the tampon never shine, writing them letters that got steadily more exotic, steadily more intimate, steamier and increasingly dependent emotionally. It wasn’t that big a deal; there exist entire psychiatric treatises on the phenomenon; right alongside the papers about women who go stud- crazy for cops. No big deal indeed: hundreds of women every year find themselves writing to these guys, visiting these guys, building dream castles with these guys, fucking these guys, pretending that even the worst of these guys, rapists and woman-beaters and child molesters, repeat pedophiles of the lowest pustule sort, and murderers and stick-up punks who crush old ladies’ skulls for food stamps, and terrorists and bunco barons…that one sunny might-be, gonna-happen pink cloud day these demented creeps will emerge from behind the walls, get back in the wind, become upstanding nine-to-five Brooks Bros. Galahads. Every year hundreds of women marry these guys, finding themselves in a hot second snookered by the wily, duplicitous, motherfuckin’ lying greaseball addictive behavior of guys who had spent their sporadic years, their intermittent freedom on the outside, doing just that: roping people in, ripping people off, bleeding people dry, conning them into being tools, taking them for their every last cent, their happy home, their sanity, their ability to trust or love ever again.
But this wasn’t some poor illiterate naive woman-child. This was Ally. She had damned near pulled off a legal impossibility, come that close to Bizarro Jurisprudence by putting the Attorneys General of five other states in a maybe frame of mind where she’d have been able to consolidate a multiple bill of indictment across state lines! Never been done; and now, probably, never ever would be. But she could have possibly pulled off such a thing. Unless you’re a stone court-bird, you can’t know what a mountaintop that is!
So, now, here’s Ally, saying this shit to me. Ally, my best pal, stood up for me a hundred times; not some dip, but the steely-eyed Sheriff of Suicide Gulch, the over-forty, past the age of innocence, no-nonsense woman who had seen it all and come away tough but not cynical, hard but not mean.
“I think I’m in love with him.” She had said.
“I know I believe him when he says he’s innocent.” She had said.
I looked at her. No time had passed. It was still the moment the universe decided to lie down and die. And I said, “So if you’re certain this paragon of the virtues isn’t responsible for fifty-six murders—that we know about—and who the hell knows how many more we don’t know about, since he’s apparently been at it since he was twelve years old— remember the couple of nights we sat up and you told me all this shit about him, and you said it with your skin crawling, remember?—then if you’re so damned positive the guy you spent eleven weeks in court sending to the chair is innocent of butchering half the population of the planet—then why do you need me to go to Holman, drive all the way to Atmore, just to take a jaunt in this sweet peach of a guy?
“Doesn’t your ‘woman’s intuition’ tell you he’s squeaky clean? Don’t ‘true love’ walk yo’ sweet young ass down the primrose path with sufficient surefootedness?”
“Don’t be a smartass!” she said.
“Say again?” I replied, with disfuckingbelief.
“I said: don’t be such a high-verbal goddamned smart aleck!”
Now I was steamed. “No, I shouldn’t be a smartass: I should be your pony, your show dog, your little trick bag mind-reader freak! Take a drive over to Holman, Pairis; go right on into Rednecks from Hell; sit your ass down on Death Row with the rest of the niggers and have a chat with the one white boy who’s been in a cell up there for the past three years or so; sits down nicely with the king of the fucking vampires, and slide inside his garbage dump of a brain—and what a joy that’s gonna be, I can’t believe you’d ask me to do this—and read whatever piece of boiled shit in there he calls a brain, and see if he’s jerking you around. That’s what I ought to do, am I correct? Instead of being a smartass. Have I got it right? Do I properly pierce your meaning, pal?”
She stood up. She didn’t even say Screw you, Pairis!
She just slapped me as hard as she could.
She hit me a good one straight across the mouth.
I felt my upper teeth bite my lower lip. I tasted the blood. My head rang like a church bell. I thought I’d fall off the goddam stool.
When I could focus, she was just standing there, looking ashamed of herself, and disappointed, and mad as hell, and worried that she’d brained me. All of that, all at the same time. Plus, she looked as if I’d broken her choo- choo train.
“Okay,” I said wearily, and ended the word with a sigh that reached all the way back into my hip pocket. “Okay, calm down. I’ll see him. I’ll do it. Take it easy.”
