Faces of Fear (28 page)

Watching Jamie shaking that gallows gave me a spasm of utter dread, like nothing I had ever experienced before. I turned to Wolf Bodell and said, “Is there a phone in this place?”

“Sure, next to the jakes. But don't take too long … he's just about to do the business.”

I pushed my way through the murmuring, mesmerized crowd. As I did so, I think Jamie must have caught sight of me, because he stopped shaking the gallows and peered into the darkness which enveloped the audience, his hand raised over his eyes to cut out the glare from the spotlight. I dodged behind a large red-faced man in a crumpled business suit and continued my journey to the telephone with my face turned away from the gallows and my shoulders hunched.

I reached the booth, closed the folding door, and thumbed in a dime. The phone rang for a long, long time before anybody answered.

“Bryce.”

“Deputy Bryce? It's Gerry, from the
Bee.
If I were you, I'd come on out to the Golden Horses with your foot flat to the floor. And bring some backup.”

“I just started supper. Can't it wait?”

“Not unless you want a man to die.”

Deputy Bryce said something unintelligible, but I didn't wait to hear what it was. I pushed my way back to the bar, where Wolf Bodell had already lined up another Jack Daniel's for me. I was half drunk already, but he wouldn't take no for an answer. “You can't face the Grim Reaper sober,” he told me.

With Ms Suffer Kate prancing and pirouetting around him, Jamie mounted the low grey-painted trestle which stood directly below the noose. The trestle was arranged so that when Jamie himself tugged on a lanyard, the legs would collapse flat and he would be left hanging six or seven inches above the floor. He took hold of the noose and gently tugged it, to test that the rope was running free. The hi-fi music changed to ‘Stand By Your Man'. Jamie loosened the collar of his cloak – and it was then that I saw for the first time the terrible blue and red bruises and rope burns that disfigured his neck. His carotid artery bulged in several purplish lumps, and his Adam's apple was crisscrossed with deep shiny weals.

He lifted the noose over his head with all the solemnity of a king crowning himself. I thought I caught the faintest trace of a smile on his lips, but I couldn't be sure.

Ms Suffer Kate made an exaggerated Betty Boop O with her red-lipsticked mouth, her breasts bounce-delay-bouncing with every step she took.

Wolf Bodell grinned at me and said, “Heart-stopping stuff, ain't it? The odds against him surviving are about three to one. So you see
my
livelihood's going to be hanging by a thread, too.”

‘Stand By Your Man' was abruptly interrupted by a long, thunderous drumroll. Jamie was standing straight-backed amidst the eddying cigarette smoke, the noose around his neck, staring at someplace far in the distance. I looked for sweat on his face, but he appeared dry and pale and almost saintly. I wondered what he was thinking; but maybe he wasn't thinking anything at all. Did he really want to die? Or was he mortally afraid?

“Maize darmsey maize sewers, burr-ace yourselves!” screamed the master of ceremonies.

Jamie took a tighter grip on the lanyard. The drumroll went on and on. In fact, it went on for so long that I began to think that he wasn't going to do it. Maybe he had lost his nerve. Maybe he had stood on this trestle and faced his Maker just once too often.

But then, with his left hand, he pushed back his cloak, so that it slid off his shoulders and revealed his nakedness. More red-lipsticked O's from Ms Suffer Kate. She perched on the edge of the trestle and caressed Jamie's scarred and bony legs, smiling up at him and O-ing the audience alternately.

Jamie's penis hung heavy and dark between his thighs, not yet aroused. Ms Suffer Kate ran her hands up and weighed his hairy scrotum in her hand. Then she squeezed and rubbed his penis until it began to swell up a little. The drumroll continued, but they didn't really need a drumroll. Everybody in the Golden Horses was staring at Jamie transfixed, their mouths open, their eyes wide, daring him actually to do it, begging him not to do it, fearful and fascinated at the same time.

I found myself pushing my way forward.

“Jamie!” I shouted. “Jamie, it's Gerry!
Jamie
!”

Wolf Bodell snatched at my elbow. “Hey, come on, man, don't break his concentration!”

“
Jamie
!” I yelled.

I forced my way right to the front and stood in front of the gallows. Ms Suffer Kate stared at me – crossly at first, but then with growing recognition.

“
You
?” she said, in a blurry voice.

She looked up at Jamie, and I did, too. He was smiling down at me with a wounded, beatific smile. The Hero of the Hempen Rope. The Nero of the Noose.

“Jamie,” I said, as loudly as I could, so that he would hear me over the drumroll, and over the impatient whistling of the crowd, and over his own dreamlike trance. “Jamie, it's over. It's time to come down now. You don't have to do this anymore.”

“Hey, mister, mind your own fucking business and get out of the fucking way!” somebody roared at me; and there was a roar of approval and a locomotive-like stamping of feet.

Jamie looked down at me, and I don't know whether he recognized me or not. I like to think that he didn't. Because the next thing that happened was – without warning – he pulled the lanyard, and the trestle table collapsed with an ear-splitting bang. Jamie dropped three feet and then jolted to a stop as the noose tightened. He swung around, spun around, his feet bicycling wildly in the air, his hands clawing at his throat. He made the most terrible cackling sound; and when he spun around again and I saw his face J felt a surge of warm sick in the back of my mouth. His eyes were almost bursting out of his head. He was purple – a dark, eggplant purple – and he kept opening and closing his mouth in a desperate attempt to breathe.

I tried to push my way forward, but I felt Wolf Bodell gripping my arm. “You can't help him, my friend. You can't help him. It's something he has to do. If you save him today, he'll do it again tomorrow.”

Jamie was twisting around and around, and the crowd was baying in horror. A woman was screaming, “
No! No! No! No
!” and a man was roaring, “Cut him down, for Christ's sake! Cut him down!”

The whole of the Golden Horses was surging with fear and disgust and a hideous unbalancing fascination. It was like wading through a warm, heavy swell with ice-cold undercurrents.

Jamie kept on gargling and kicking. Whenever he stopped twisting, Ms Suffer Kate gave him another push, so that he spun round yet again, and again. His eyes were bulging so much now that I could see the swollen scarlet flesh behind the eyeball, and he had clawed at the noose around his neck so furiously that one of his fingernails was flapping loose.

Now, however, came the climax. As Jamie spun around again, Ms Suffer Kate stopped him, and steadied him, and we could see that his penis had stiffened into a hugely distended erection. His testicles were scrunched up tight, and the shaft rose thick and veiny and hard as an antler.

Ms Suffer Kate stood up in front of him and kissed him, leaving lipstick imprints all over his heaving white stomach.

Then she stepped back, so that she was at least six inches away from his rigid penis, and stretched her mouth open wide.

“Holy Mother of God,” I heard a man say; and his words weren't a blasphemy; not even here; not even while we were witnessing a slow and deliberate self-suffocation.

There was a second's agonized pause. Jamie's entire body was arched like a bow. He had stopped scrabbling at his noose, and his hands were held up in front of him, his fingers skeletal with tension. He let out one gargling, strangulated breath, and then another. He was so taut, he was straining so hard, that his right eyeball at last squeezed right out of its socket and bobbled on top of his cheek, staring downward without expression at Ms Suffer Kate.

Then – with a sickening convulsion – he climaxed. His penis seemed to swell even more, the head swelled, and then a thick spurt of sperm flew out of it, right into Ms Suffer Kate's stretched open mouth. It spurted again, and again, and again – more sperm than I had ever seen a man ejaculate in my life – and it covered Ms Suffer Kate's lips and cheeks and eyelashes and clung in her black funereal ostrich plumes.

Throughout the whole ejaculation, she hadn't touched him once. He had climaxed from lack of oxygen, from agony, from dancing with death.

Ms Suffer Kate turned around, and raised her arms, and nodded her plumes, her face still glistening with sperm. Then, with no more hesitation, she stepped up onto one of the trestles and released the locking catch that had prevented Jamie (when the table had collapsed beneath him) from reaching the floor.

Jamie was lowered swiftly down; and Wolf Bodell was right beside him; and so was a man with thinning greased-back hair and a cigarette between his lips and a worn-out medical bag. Ms Suffer Kate meanwhile was standing a little way back, wrapped in a grubby baby-pink toweling robe, wiping her face with Kleenex. She looked no more concerned about what she had just done than a runner who has just
completed the 500 meters in a fairly unspectacular time.

For some reason I looked at my watch. Then I walked stiffly to the bar and said, in a kaleidoscopic voice, “Jack Daniel's, straight up.”

I was still trying to lift the shot glass without spilling the whiskey when I heard the double doors crashing open and a familiar voice shouting, “Police! This is a raid! Everybody stay where you are!”

I turned and looked down at Wolf Bodell, and Wolf Bodell looked back up at me. I don't know whether he suspected me of tipping off the sheriff or not, but right at that particular moment I didn't care. Somebody had just said, “He's breathing … he'll make it,” and that was all I cared about. That, and making sure that Jamie never tried to hang himself again.

I went up to Ms Suffer Kate and said, “Hallo, Laurel.”

She slowly turned her eyes toward me, still dabbing her right cheek with a crumpled-up tissue.

“Hallo, you rat,” she replied.

The case never went to trial, of course. The Golden Horses was closed down by county ordinance and reopened eleven months later as the Old Placer Rib Shack, and promptly closed down again after an outbreak of food poisoning.

In lieu of prosecution, Jamie agreed to undergo a minimum of three years' analysis and rehabilitation at the appropriately named Fruitridge Psychiatric Centre in Sacramento, a secure institution for the gravely whacko.

Laurel Fay's parents stood bail for her and produced an oleaginous San Francisco lawyer who looked like
Jabba the Hutt in a seersucker suit, and who promised such a long and expensive and complicated trial that the district attorney decided that it would be against the public interest for the case to proceed any further. Laurel sent me thirty dimes in the mail, along with a postcard of the Last Supper and a ballpoint arrow pointing to Judas Iscariot.

I went to visit Jamie in the first week of September. The Fruitridge Psychiatric Centre had cool white corridors, and a courtyard with terra cotta pots and fan palms, and yellow-uniformed nurses who came and went with pleasant, proprietary smiles.

Jamie was sitting in his plain white room on a plain wooden chair, staring at the wall. He was wearing what looked like judo robes, without the belt. His hair had turned white and was cropped very short. His eye was back in its socket, but it had an odd cast to it now, so that I never quite knew if he was looking at me or not. His skin was peculiarly pale and smooth, but I suppose it was the drugs they were giving him.

He talked for a long time about backgammon. He said he was trying to play it in his head. His voice had no colour, no expression, no substance. It was like listening to water running. He didn't talk once about school, or the old days, or Chokes. He didn't ask what had happened to Suffer Kate. I came away sad because of what he had become; but also glad that I had saved him at last.

Two years later, the telephone rang at 2:30 in the morning, when my metabolism was almost at zero and I was dreaming of death. I scrabbled around for the receiver, found it, dropped it, then picked it up again.

“Did I wake you?” asked a hoarse, scarcely audible voice.

“Who is this?” I wanted to know.

“Did I wake you? I didn't mean to wake you.”

I switched on the bedside lamp. On the nightstand there was my wrist-watch, a framed photograph of my parents, a glass of water, and a dog-eared copy of
Specimen Days in America.

“Gerry, is that you?”

A silence. A cough.

“Gerry?”

“I need your help. I badly need your help.”

“You need my help
now
?”

“There's been an accident, Gerry. I really need you.”

“What kind of an accident?” I asked. A cold feeling started to crawl down my back.

“You have to help me. You really have to help me.”

I parked outside the Fort Hotel and climbed out of my car. The streets of Sacramento were deserted. The Fort was an old six-storey building with a flaking brown-painted facade and an epileptic neon sign that kept flickering out the words ORT HOT. Next door there was a Chinese restaurant with a painting of a glaring dragon in the window.

Inside, the hotel smelled strongly of Black Flag, with an undertone of disinfected vomit. A surprisingly neat and good-looking young man was sitting at the desk, short-sleeved shirt and cropped blond hair, reading
Europe on $60 a Day.
When I asked him for Jamie's room, he said, “Six-oh-three,” without even looking up at me.

I walked toward the elevator.

“Out of commission,” he said, still without raising his eyes.

I walked up five flights of stairs. It was like climbing the five flights of Purgatory. From behind closed doors, I heard muttering televisions, heard blurted conversations, smelled pungent cooking smells. At last I reached the sixth floor and walked along a dark, narrow, linoleum-floored corridor until I found 603. I listened for a while at the door. I thought I could faintly hear marching music. I knocked.