Black Water (13 page)

Her
head, now she was awake, was livid with pain.
Splotches of
light like
tumorous
growths behind her eyes,
tight-impacted in her skull.
It seemed that her face had lost all sensation,
she'd held her lips so pursed for so long, gasping, sucking, the air bubble
floated away teasing and cruel as a living capricious thing, bobbing and
drifting this way, and now that way, and again this way, so she strained,
sobbing with the effort, to reach it.

I'm here. I'm here. Here!

He
had dived into the black water to rescue her but he was far away, and
everything was so dark, blind. And she understood she'd offended him, and the
insult was irrevocable.

Her
lips playfully shut against his tongue. The ease of it she'd imagined, the
banter, the mutual regard, respect, he
did
respect her she knew, she knew, and then reluctantly parting her lips, his fat
thrusting tongue, the hunger in him.

The
shame of it, how desperate she'd been clutching at the man's trouser leg, at
his shoe! As he'd kicked to get free!
His shoe, soaked, in
her hand.

His
shoe!

Oh
Kelly, her girlfriends would laugh, Buffy would shriek with laughter wiping her
eyes, —his
shoe!

Limping one shoe on one shoe off
fleeing on foot back along the marshland road to the highway from which they'd
turned off where there was sure to be
a 7-Eleven store, a gas
station, a tavern with an outdoor telephone booth
.

No.
It had not happened yet. The sun blazing late in the afternoon, this long
hilarious day like a pinwheel inexhaustibly throwing off sparks.

The
splendid American
flag
all flapping silk
red-white-and-blue at the top of Edgar St. John's flagpole.
The
tallest flagpole on Derry Road, very possibly on Grayling Island.

My
daddy's a patriot, Buffy said. Served in the C.I.A. for twenty years and didn't
get his ass blown off.

It
had not happened yet because there again was Buffy arranging her guests so she
could take Polaroid pictures. Buffy in jeans and bikini top her
"faux" ponytail sleek and blackly gleaming falling to the middle of
her back, her lewd green-
taloned
nails curved about
the camera, tongue protruding between glistening white teeth. Oh please be
still will you, look up here please—and you, Senator,
mmm
?—like
that! Great!

There
were several
Polaroids
of The Senator standing at a
picnic table, one foot on the bench, an elbow on his seersucker knee and a
casual pose it was, Kelly Kelleher close by as if in the crook of his arm,
laughing into the camera's eye as the flash popped, and The Senator was smiling
guardedly, a tucked-in sort of smile, an almost-meditative smile, a smile of
the kind that retracts even as it expands, something in the eyes deflected too,
grave, as if the man were pondering what caption might be inserted beneath this
festive Fourth of July pose to be transmitted by wire service through the
United States and numerous foreign countries, featured on network television
news?

But
no, you can't imagine your future. Even that it is yours.

One shoe on, one shoe
off.
Limping.
Drenched and shivering and murmuring aloud Oh
God. Oh God. Oh God.

...five means
of capital punishment remaining
in
the United States at the present time.
Recent Supreme Court
rulings, states' rights.
Overwhelming support of death
penalty in polls.
Why?—because it's a deterrent. Because it sends out the
message: Life isn't cheap.
Five means of which the oldest is hanging.
Last used
in Kansas, 1965. Condemned man took sixteen minutes to die, sometimes it's
longer.
Still an option in Montana.
The only kind of
deterrent these animals understand.
Firing squad, Utah.
Electric chair,
introduced 1890, New York State.
"Humane" alternative to
hanging, firing squad:

condemned
man (or woman) is strapped into chair, copper electrodes affixed to leg, shaved
head. Executioner administers an initial jolt of between 500 and 2,000 volts
for thirty seconds.
We're talking about hardened criminals here— murderers.
The mentally and morally unfit.
If death fails
to occur with the initial jolt, additional jolts are administered.
Two, three, four.
Some hearts are stronger than others.
Accidents occur. Smoke, sometimes bluish-orange flames rise from the burning
body.
A smell as of cooking meat.
As with hanging,
eyeballs sometimes pop out of sockets to hang on cheeks.
Vomiting,
urination, defecation.
Skin turns bright red blistering and swelling to
the point of bursting like an overcooked frankfurter. Often, current is not
strong enough and death is not "instantaneous" but by degrees.
Prisoner is tortured to death.
Not decent civilized
people like the kind we know but people who are a genuine threat to society,
who must be stopped. If not, they will be given light prison sentences,
paroled—to strike again!

Gas chamber, introduced 1924, Nevada.
A popular choice as a "humane" alternative.
Condemned man (or woman) is strapped in chair, beneath the chair a bowl filled
with sulfuric acid and distilled water into which sodium cyanide is dropped
releasing hydrogen cyanide gas. Oxygen cut off from brain at once.
Prisoner experiences extreme horror—strangulation.
The issue of
race isn't the issue believe me, that's a smokescreen, maybe it's so that more
black men have always been executed in the United States than white men, maybe
it's a statistical fact that whites who kill blacks are less likely to receive
the death penalty than blacks who kill whites, yes there's a big difference
between states, counties, urban areas, rural areas, the prosecutor makes the
charges maybe some of them are racists but you can't expect the criminal
justice system to rectify the problems of society for God's sake.
Violent spasms
as in an epileptic fit.
Popping eyes.
Skin turns
purple. Not immediate toxic action on vital organs but asphyxiation is the
cause of death.
"Arguably the most barbaric and painful
way to die."
(Physician)

Death by lethal injection, newest and
most enthusiastically promoted "humane" method of state-inflicted
death.
Invented 1977, pioneered in Oklahoma.
Condemned man (or woman) is strapped to a hospital gurney, given a catheter
needle dripping intravenous fluid into a vein. The first drug injected is
sodium thiopental, a barbiturate; then 100 milligrams
pavulon
,
muscle relaxant; potassium chloride to speed the process of death.
Some of these scientific ways these "merciful" ways are too
good for those
animals,
I'm speaking of filthy beasts
not of human beings. Why keep them alive, why feed them, cater to them, why
shouldn't they suffer seeing the suffering they cause in others, why not
"an eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth," tell me why?
why
not?
And lethal injection is low-cost,
appeals to budget-conscious legislatures, favorite of capital punishment
advocates since death is perceived as painless just falling asleep, society is
absolved of charges of barbarism, the wish to torture, seek vengeance.

Quest
for "humane" alternatives in death a quest not for the sake of the
condemned but for the sake of American citizens that, in premeditated murder
inflicted arbitrarily by the state, they be absolved of guilt...

He'd
flattered her, Elizabeth Anne Kelleher, saying, insisting, yes he was certain
he'd read her article in
Citizens' Inquiry
—or, perhaps, one of his
staff had given him a
precis
.

Why
did you write on such a subject, The Senator asked, curious, and Kelly Kelleher
paused not wanting to say that Carl Spader had suggested it to her, saying
instead, It's a subject I've been interested in for a long time, the more
research you do into it the more disgusted you feel.
Which
was true, too.

Her quarrels with her father
notwithstanding.

"Eye for an eye, tooth for a
tooth"—why not? Crude, maybe, primitive maybe, but it sends the message
that life isn't cheap—why not?

Certainly
The Senator was on record opposed to the death penalty.

Certainly
he was bravely at odds with many in his home state, where capital punishment,
by electrocution, was still on the books; where there were still condemned
prisoners on Death Row, exhausting their appeals, waiting to die.

Certainly
he'd made speeches. He'd been eloquent.
As politically
adamant as his friend Mario Cuomo.
Capital punishment is unacceptable in
a civilized society because the taking of any life for any purpose is
loathsome, reducing society to the primitive level of the murderer himself.
And, most frightful of all, considering the wildly arbitrary nature of the
American criminal justice system there is always the possibility of innocent
men (and women) being sentenced to death... from which punitive fate, unlike
any other, there can be no return.

am
i
ready?

Packing her things in haste as the
evening before she'd unpacked them carefully, ceremoniously as if this room on
Grayling Island with its strawberry floral wallpaper and chaste white organdy bed
were a sacred place she forgot completely from one visit to the other, and now
it was a place from which, by her own eager effort, she was being expelled.

The plan was to slip away from Buffy's
at precisely 7
p.m
. to catch the 7:30
p.m
. ferry to Boothbay Harbor but a new
carload of guests had just driven up and The Senator was having
another
drink intense in conversation so perhaps they would not make that ferry, and
when was the next?—no matter, there is always a next.

Don't expect anything, really. Whatever
it is, it is. And that will be enough.

Practical-minded Kelly Kelleher,
sternly admonishing herself.

Still,
her hands were trembling. Her breath was quickened. In that heart-shaped
white-wicker-framed mirror over the bureau a girl's face floated rapt, glowing,
hopeful
.

In
all truthfulness her mind did fly free like a maverick kite drunkenly climbing
the air above the sand dunes thinking he
is
after all separated from his wife, his marriage
is
after all over—he says; voters are no longer puritanical, punitive.