“Put out your hands!”
Vernon Eriksen’s voice was quite high, his accent typical of south Ohio, a local boy who’d come to work at the prison in Marcusville for a summer when he was nineteen and had stayed, and was then promoted to senior corrections officer on Death Row only a few years later.
John couldn’t see what was happening anymore; the big uniforms were in the way.
But he knew.
Marv’s hands were poking through the bars and Eriksen had put the handcuffs around his wrists.
“Open Cell Seven!”
Vernon Eriksen, a corrections officer whom John had slowly come to respect. The only one. The only one who got involved in the inmates’ daily life, despite the fact that he didn’t really need to or in fact shouldn’t at all.
“Cell Seven open!”
The central security PA system crackled; the door to Marv’s cell slid open. Vernon Eriksen waited, nodded to his colleagues, and stayed standing where he was while two officers entered the cell. John watched him. He knew that the senior officer hated doing this. Collecting a prisoner who he’d come to know, escorting him to the Death House, preparing him for death. It was not something he’d ever said, it was not something he could ever say, but John had understood and recognized it a long time ago; he just knew. He was tall, Eriksen, not muscular but solid, with thinning hair, an old-fashioned pudding-bowl haircut like an inverted gray halo under the rim of his uniform hat. He was looking into Marv’s cell, watching the movements of his colleagues, his white gloves fiddling with the two sets of keys that hung from his belt.
“Stand up, Williams.”
“It’s time, Williams.”
“I know that you can hear me, Williams, stand up, for God’s sake, so I don’t need to lift you.”
John heard the two officers forcing his neighbor up from the bunk, feeble protests from a drugged sixty-five-year-old man. He looked at Vernon Eriksen again, who was still facing the cell. He wanted to scream, but not at the senior officer, who bizarrely was on their side, so to shout at him would be meaningless. Instead he turned around and pissed into the hole that was supposed to be a toilet. No words anymore, no thoughts. As Marv was led out of his cell on the other side of the wall, John chased a piece of paper down into the water-filled hole. He forced the piece of paper back and forth with his jet stream until it finally stuck to the white porcelain.
“John.”
Marv’s voice, somewhere behind him. He buttoned up his orange prison coveralls, turned around.
“I want to talk to you, John.”
John looked at the senior officer, who gave a curt nod, then approached the bars, the metal bars between the lock and the concrete walls. He leaned forward, as he always did, his thumb and index finger encircling one of the bars. Suddenly, he was face-to-face with a person he had seldom seen but had spoken to several times a day for the past four years.
“Hi.”
That voice that he knew so well, friendly, safe. A proud man, straight backed, his black hair had long since turned gray, clean shaven as John had always imagined he would be.
“Hi.”
Marv was dribbling. John could see that he was trying to concentrate, that the muscles in his face would not obey. A prisoner who is about to die has to be sedated, no unnecessary anxiety; John was certain it was in fact for the officers’ sake, to quell
their
fear.
“This, this is yours.”
John watched Marv lift his hand to his neck, how he fumbled for a while with deadened fingers, but finally got hold of what he was after.
“I would have to take it off later anyway.”
A cross. It meant fuck-all to John. But everything to Marv. John knew that. Marv had found God a couple of years ago, like so many others who were kept in this corridor while they waited.
“No.”
The older man bundled up the silver chain, wrapped it around the crucifix, and thrust it into John’s hand.
“There’s no one else. To give it to.”
John looked at the chain he was now holding and then uneasily over at Vernon Eriksen again.
The senior corrections officer’s face—John had never seen it like this before.
It was completely red. Like he was in spasm, like it was burning. And his voice, it was too forceful, too loud.
“Open Cell Eight!”
John’s cell.
That wasn’t right. John looked at Marv, who didn’t seem to react, then at the three other officers, who stood still but glanced at each other, confused.
The cell door was still locked.
“Please repeat, sir.”
A voice from central security over the PA system.
Vernon Eriksen lifted his chin in irritation, made sure he was looking straight at the officer at the other end of the corridor when he spoke: “I said,
open Cell Eight.
Now!”
Eriksen stared at the bars, waiting for the door to slide open.
“Sir—”
One of the three officers appealed to him by throwing open his hands, but he had barely opened his mouth before his boss interrupted.
“I am aware that I am now deviating from the set time schedule. If you have a problem with it, please file your complaint in writing. Later.”
He looked over at central security again. A few more seconds of uncertainty.
They all stood in silence as the cell door slowly slid open.
Vernon Eriksen waited until it was fully open, then turned to Marv and nodded in the direction of the cell. “You can go in.”
Marv didn’t move. “You want me to . . . ?”
“Go in and say good-bye.”
It got cold later, damp; there was a draft from the window in the corridor high up by the ceiling, a muted whistle that dropped to the floor. John buttoned his coveralls right up to the collar, orange cotton with no fit, and the letters
DR
printed in white on the back and thigh.
He was shivering.
Maybe it was the cold.
Or maybe it was the grief that he was already starting to fight.
HE STRUGGLED AGAINST THE STRONG WIND. NO ONE ELSE ON DECK
. THEY were all inside, somewhere in the floating community of restaurants and dance floors and duty-free shops. He heard someone laugh, then the murmur of voices and the clinking of glasses, music pumping electronically from one of the lounges full of beautiful young things.
His name was John Schwarz and he was thinking of her. As he always did.
The first person he had really been close to. The first woman he’d ever touched; her skin, he could feel it, dream it, yearn for it.
It was eighteen years now since she died.
To the day.
He moved toward the door, one last deep breath of cold Baltic air, then into the boat that smelled of engine oil and drunkenness and cheap perfume.
Five minutes later, he was standing on a tiny stage in a huge lounge, looking out over the crowd who would be his audience for the evening, who were there to be entertained between drinks and cocktail umbrellas and bowls of peanuts.
Two couples. In the middle of the dance floor, which was otherwise empty.
He cocked his head. He wouldn’t have spent his Thursday night on the Åbo ferry either, if he could help it. But the money—with Oscar at home, he needed it more than ever.
Three quick numbers with a swinging four-beat usually woke them up, and there were already more people on the floor; eight couples holding each other tight, leaning in toward each other, hoping that the next number would be the first slow dance, one that required body contact. John sang and searched among the dancing people and those standing around the edge of the floor waiting to be asked. There was a woman, so beautiful, with long dark hair, dressed in black, who bubbled with laughter when her partner stepped on her toes. John followed her with his eyes and thought of Elizabeth who was dead and of Helena who was waiting for him in an apartment in Nacka; this woman, both of them—Helena’s body and Elizabeth’s movements. He wondered what she was called.
They’d had a break and a drink of mineral water. His shirt, which was turquoise and blue with a black collar, was now soft and damp under the arms from the smoke and spotlights that harassed him. He was still trying to make eye contact with the woman, who had not left the floor for a moment; she had just switched partners a couple of times and was hot now too, her face and neck glistening.
He looked at his watch. One more hour.
One of the passengers, whom he recognized from a couple of trips around Christmas, approached the throng on the dance floor. He was the sort who got drunk and was calculating, accidently touching women’s thighs whenever he could. He moved between the couples and had already brushed a young woman’s breasts for a moment. John wasn’t sure whether she’d noticed—they seldom did; what with the music and the passing bodies, a groping hand just vanished.
John hated him.
He’d seen men like him before: they were drawn to the band, dance music, and strong beer and sprayed their angst on anyone who got in the way. A woman who danced and laughed was also a woman who, in the dark, you could press against, grope, steal from.
And then he took something from her.
The one who was Elizabeth and Helena.
The one who was John’s woman.
The man slid his hand onto her behind as she turned away; he came too close and ended up thrusting his crotch against her hip in what appeared to be a clumsy dance step. She was like all the others, enjoying herself too much and too nice to realize that he had just stolen something from her. John sang and he watched and he trembled, felt the anger that had once fired him up and made him fight. For a long time he had hit people; now he just hit walls and furniture. But this creep, this man who took what he could, he had rubbed against one woman too many.
HE LAY DOWN ON THE BUNK AND TRIED TO READ. IT DIDN’T WORK. THE
words just swam on the page, thoughts that wouldn’t focus. It was just like it had been when he first came here, when he was new, and after two weeks of kicking the walls and iron bars he’d realized that it was simply a matter of putting up with it, that he had to keep breathing while his appeals filled space, to find a way to pass the time without counting.
But today, today was different. Today he wasn’t doing it for his own sake. He knew that. He was thinking of Marv. It was Marv he was reading for.
John,
every morning the same question,
what’s it going to be today?
It was important to Marv.
Steinbeck? Dostoyevsky?
Four uniformed officers had just escorted the sixty-five-year-old man down the long corridor of locked cells. He was dribbling, thanks to the sedatives they’d given him, and his legs had buckled under him several times, but he’d kept his composure; he hadn’t screamed or cried, and the sharp barbed wire above their heads had twinkled dismally in the weak light that managed to force its way in through the small windows even farther up by the ceiling.
For John Meyer Frey, Marvin Williams was the closest to what other people called a true friend that he’d ever had. An elderly man who had eventually cajoled the aggressive and terrified seventeen-year-old boy into talking, thinking, longing. Perhaps that was what the senior officer had seen—a sense of family strong enough to make him grossly neglect security procedures. They had stood face-to-face in John’s cell, talked quietly together, feeling Vernon Eriksen watching them from the corridor, allowing a few minutes of shared time.
Now he was going to die.
His choice, electric chair or lethal injection. Marv had never been like the others. He hadn’t made the same choice as the others.
He was in the Death House, in one of the two death cells in the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, in Marcusville—the final destination for your last twenty-four hours of life, Cell 4 or Cell 5. No other cell had the same number, the number of death, not here, not in East Block, not anywhere else in the great prison. One, two, three, six, seven, eight. That’s how they counted in all the units, all the corridors.
The only black man in town.
He had explained after a few months of nagging, once John started to read the books he recommended. Before the Chinese restaurant with the two dead men at his feet in Ohio, Marv had lived in the mountains of Colorado, in Telluride, an old mining community that had been deserted when the minerals were exhausted. It died out for a while until hippies from the city had moved there in the sixties and transformed it to suit their alternative lifestyle. A couple of hundred enlightened, young, white Americans who believed in what you believed in then: freedom, equality, brotherhood, and everyone’s right to roll a joint.
Two hundred white people and one black man.
Marv really had been the only black man in town.
And some years later, whether it was to provoke people or to demonstrate brotherhood and all that, or due to his constant need for money, he had agreed to marry a woman from South Africa who needed a green card. He had regularly appeared in front of a panel of officials and explained that the only true love for the town’s only black man was, of course, this white woman from the home of apartheid, and he had done this so successfully that she was an American citizen by the time they got divorced some years later.
It was also for her sake that he’d gone to Ohio and stepped into the wrong restaurant.
John sighed, gripped the book even harder, tried again.
Throughout the afternoon and evening, he managed to read only a few lines at a time. He kept picturing Marv in the death cell, which had no bunk—maybe he was sitting there now, on the blue stool that stood in the corner, or he was lying curled up on the floor, staring at the ceiling.
A few more lines, sometimes a whole page, then back to Marv.
The light slowly drained from the small windows and was swallowed by the night. It was hard to lie next to the empty cell and not listen out for Marv’s heavy breathing. To his surprise, John managed to sleep for a couple of hours. The Colombian made less noise than usual, and he was tired from the night before. John woke around seven, with the book under him, then lay there for a few hours more, before rolling over and getting up, almost refreshed.