The Weatherman (50 page)

Andrea stepped over to the bookcase and pulled an obscure novel from the shelf, that hardcover book where wives hide the letters their husbands must never see. She sat with it on the bed and tucked the governor’s lethal venom between the pages. Then she flipped a few pages and pulled out a different letter. A note really. Scribbled on school paper.

My Dear Dixon

About the date I owe you … isn’t there some other way I could repay you for the wonderful friend you’ve been? I didn’t mean for you to misunderstand my feelings for you.

Andrea slipped the note back into the book and flipped a few more pages. The next letter she retrieved was yellow and brittle. It was torn at the folds, as if it had been opened and read a thousand times over the years. She held the letter with the tips of her fingers barely touching the frail paper.

My Dear Dixon

I read your letter and have thought about it ever since. I wish you wouldn’t refer to it as your “sad story”, because it is only “you” who has made it sad. You have asked me out so many times and each time I have tried to say no as sweetly as I can …

Andrea read the entire missive. It sounded like a letter she’d been forced to write in high school-sadly, the kind of letter teenage boys force young women to write every year. Girls grow up so much faster than boys. They just don’t understand that.

... Please take my advice and don’t think I don’t understand how you feel, but I’am sorry you don’t understand how I feel, that makes the answer NO!

Love Lisa Beauregard

Andrea Labore was a television reporter, not a criminal lawyer. She had to think fast that day in the weather center. Task force detectives would be there shortly. Some protective instinct kicked in, the need to help this man who felt he loved her. She reasoned that without the letters all they had on the Weatherman was circumstantial evidence-enough to convict, maybe, but hardly enough for the death penalty. She was half-right.

Andrea glanced over at Rick’s note on the night table. Her husband was trying to stop the execution every way he knew how. She could do no less. The purloined letter written by a southern belle so many years ago was carefully refolded once again and tucked neatly between the pages of a novel nobody would ever read. Andrea returned the book to the shelf, its place reserved in dust.

She gathered pen and paper. She had a letter of her own to write. She put the flower to her nose. Then, in the ever-present glow of the television screen, the queen of the evening news knelt beside her bed. She folded her hands together and bowed her head as she had done every night as a child growing up on the Iron Range. And for the first time in years Andrea Labore whispered a prayer-a prayer for the three men who loved her.

TIME: 23:51 DATE: 10/31 TEMPERATURE: 39° BAROMETER: 29.84 RAINFALL: .36 WIND: N 11

Minnesota Governor Per Ellefson turned away from the digital weather station on his desk, the electronic gift that had been presented to him by a TV weatherman from the Channel 7 newsroom-a weatherman now nine minutes away from execution by electrocution. The governor walked to the window. Rain was falling on the Capitol grounds. No lightning. No thunder. Nothing so dramatic. Just a steady, dispiriting drizzle. November would dawn cold and rainy.

The dim lights that were the city of St. Paul fused with the midnight weather, casting an unearthly aureole over the modest skyline. Trees were black and bare, the dying embers of autumn blown into soggy piles along the gutters. The statue of a proud and noble Viking stood guard at the Capitol steps, his back to his descendant. Per Ellefson pulled a letter from an envelope and leaned against the window. Raindrops streaked the glass.

My Dear Governor

I did not marry out of spite. As hard as it is for people to accept, I married for old fashioned reasons-love and respect. Now there’s life inside of me again, from the seed of a man whose face is as physically ugly as your face is beautiful. This life I am going to

let live. But this is not an answer to your letters. This is a plea for mercy.

I am asking you to spare the life of Dixon Bell. Unlike my husband, who is too often blinded by his righteousness and his wounds, I believe the Weatherman may indeed be guilty. The black hole of hatred in the soul of Dixon Bell may be so deep that he should never be allowed to walk among free people again. But such a gifted man has so much left to give us that it would be a crime to snuff out his knowledge of the heavens. Please commute his sentence to life in prison.

You once told me that being from Minnesota used to mean something. You’ve been governor of our state for five years. What do we stand for now?

For the love we once shared, and I did love you, I beg you to spare the life of the Weatherman.

Andrea

Per Ellefson turned his back on the dispiriting drizzle. He sat down at his desk beside the telephone. He put the letter to his nose and inhaled her perfume one last time.

The electronic weather station captured his eyes with its fluorescent digits.

“No matter how wrong you are, Governor, you’ll always be right about the weather.”

The time flashed 23:59. The temperature was 38°. The barometer continued falling. So did the rain.

“P

Warol, is it still raining?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Do you know the temperature?”

“No, Dixon, but it’s cold.”

Dixon Bell bent over the sheet of typing paper on the concrete floor and scribbled his final thoughts with the fat pencil. Chills set in. Goose bumps ran up his arms. He tried to concentrate on the letter. The words he was putting to paper were so warm and inviting he wanted to crawl into the written page.

Carol Theguard choked back the tears. “You’re going to have to finish up there, Dixon, they’re coming for you.”

Then the bolts shot open on the heavy steel doors to the Death House. Death squad arriving. The Weatherman hurriedly scribbled his last forecast.

He struggled to his feet, almost too weak to stand. Carol Theguard collected his paper and pencil through the bars. It was 10:30 P.M. The death squad arrived with a black briefcase and chains to prepare Dixon Bell for execution. His regular guards then stepped into the isolation cell one by one. They shook his hand and said their farewells, most of them choking on their words. “Goodbye, Weatherman.” Their role in the ritual was thankfully over. Carol Theguard gave him a big hug, tears on her face.

“See that letter gets mailed, please.”

“I will, Dixon.” She turned him over to the death squad and ran from the house.

The death squad entered the isolation cell. They were large men, three of them, and though they were dressed in Stillwater guard uniforms Dixon Bell had never before seen their grim faces. They probably worked the towers. It was time to barber the prisoner for the chair.

They dragged in a stool and ordered him to sit, the way a man would talk to a dog. An apron was thrown around his neck. His unkempt white hair was removed with electric shears. Then they smeared his stubbled scalp with Gillette Foamy. They ripped open a pack of disposable razors and went about shaving his head. Just when he thought they had finished humiliating him, they held his face tight and shaved off his eyebrows.

One of these cold, hard men squeezed a white conducting gel into the palms of his hands and rubbed it into Dixon Bell’s bald head, a gob of it, giving his scalp a thorough massage. The gel dried chalky white, leaving the Weatherman with a hideous, ghostly appearance. They brushed him off and swept out the cell.

“Take off all of your clothes and put on these clothes.”

With so many bodies in the tiny cell it was hard to move. Dixon Bell stripped himself of the prison garb. He had dropped so much weight during his three weeks in isolation that his bones were beginning to show through the colorless cast of his skin. The Weatherman awkwardly crawled into his burial suit. Everything was black and white and one hundred percent cotton. White boxer shorts. White dress shirt. Black trousers. White socks. Black slippers.

When he was dressed he was ordered back onto the stool. Another squad member pulled a pair of scissors from the briefcase, stooped, and cut open the inside seam of his right trouser leg, cut it up to his knee. They shaved his right calf and rubbed in the conducting gel with the same care a trainer would give a horse.

Then the death squad removed the stool, stepped outside the cell, and waited. The door was left open. Dixon Bell sat on his bunk and stewed, naked and cold above the neck. He hugged his Bible like a child with a teddy bear. The Weatherman had refused to see the prison chaplain, saying he would deal with God in his own way.

At 11:30 P.M. Warden Johnson arrived and sat beside him on the bunk. “How are you holding up, Dixon?”

“All right. Did we get a good crowd?”

“Listen carefully. I want to explain what’s going to happen now so you won’t be alarmed by anything.” And with that Warden Johnson talked Dixon Bell through the final steps that would lead to his death. When he was done explaining the procedure, they sat on the bunk like old roommates. They talked about football. The Cowboys were doing well. The Warden was a Packer fan. The Vikings were riding a three-game winning streak into Sunday’s game. After a few minutes of sports trivia the Warden stood and nodded to the death squad.

Oliver J. Johnson stepped out of the cell. The death squad stepped in. “Stand up, please.”

The Weatherman stood. They threw heavy chains around his waist. The way they went about their task it was obvious they had been practicing on each other. “Hold out your hands.”

Dixon Bell did as he was told. “Y’all going to the show?”

They clamped on the four-point handcuff restraints and adjusted the torture pins.

“Not talking, huh? You guys are just pissed off because I got a better seat than you.”

Two of them dropped to the floor and locked the manacles to his ankles.

They stood up and spun him completely around. Then they stepped back so that Warden Johnson could admire their work. The warden nodded his head in approval. Nothing left to do now but listen to the ticking of the clock. Morbid wisecracks were coming to mind every second, but Dixon Bell swallowed them. They stood in silence.

Then came a strange sound from outside. A wonderful chanting sound, unmistakable in its passion. A thousand voices. A choir of convicts. The Death House was sealed tight, and Dixon Bell couldn’t make out what they were saying, but he knew it was a cry for justice, a cry for him. 11:45 P.M. Warden Johnson stepped back into the cell and placed a hand on his shoulder-a humane little touch. “It’s time, Dixon.” The long walk.

The Weatherman took a deep breath. The wisecracks were gone. He wasn’t angry, nor was he frightened. He just felt incredibly sad. It was the same type of sadness he felt when he was a little boy and his momma told him the story of how his daddy and his two siblings were killed by the tornado. For the first time in weeks Dixon Bell stepped out of the isolation cell. He looked the thirty feet to the death chamber. The door was wide open. It had been closed when he first arrived. Now it was a bright light at the end of a short tunnel. A death squad guard took hold of each arm. The other guard stood behind him. Warden Johnson stepped to the front and led the way. They passed by the small booth where the old janitor would be sitting, probably paging through this year’s Schwinn catalog. Then, almost as soon as it began, the long walk was over. The Weatherman stepped through the armored steel door and into the death chamber.

Dr. Yauch was standing along the wall in his white robe, his stethoscope dangling from his neck, his hands shoved deep into his smock pockets. The good doctor paid no attention to his star patient. Just stared coldly into space. A prison hospital intern stood beside him, his eyes wide with morbid curiosity.

Dixon Bell’s first view of the death chamber was a real eye opener. He had always pictured it dark and gloomy, but it was a white room, brilliantly illuminated. Strangely quiet. The big wooden chair looked as if it were crawling with snakes; there were enough straps and buckles for a football team. The glossy oak finish had been buffed to a shine. The death squad ushered him to his seat.

It wasn’t until Dixon Bell took that special place reserved for him that he lifted his head to the witnesses, the two dozen ghouls who in the guise of justice or journalism had come to watch him fry. Track lighting hanging from the ceiling and directed at the chair made it difficult for him to see their faces, but it looked as if every seat was taken. Standing room only. Mostly men. A couple of women. Some notebooks were open. A few pencils fluttered back and forth. He didn’t see anybody he really cared about.

The death squad worked methodically. The first of the broad leather straps went around his chest and pulled him back into the chair. The second and third straps tied his forearms to the wooden arms. Only when his arms were buckled tight were the special handcuffs removed.

More straps followed. Two straps went over his wrists. One went around his waist and pinched his stomach. Another went over his lap and caused his thighs to bulge. It was beginning to feel like a Houdini stunt. The ankle straps went on last. When they were secure the manacles were removed from his legs.

An electrician kneeled before him as if he were going to wash his feet. The electrician parted his right trouser leg and strapped a leather anklet to his calf. The anklet was lined with cold copper and tied so tight it cut off the blood to his foot. Maybe they were being sadistic, or maybe it was just their lack of experience, but every restraint was skintight. The electrician connected the polished electrodes to the anklet. Dixon Bell glanced down and saw the thick black cord snake away behind the chair. It looked just like the deadly water moccasins that whip through the Delta waters.

The ritual continued. They placed a microphone before him. The last press conference. Warden Johnson stepped up to him, very official. “Dixon Graham Bell, would you like to make a final statement before the will of the people of Minnesota is carried out?”