Cut to the Bone(80)

A second, smaller, curtain shimmied to his right. Earl looked sideways, expecting to see Mom.

“Danny!” he shouted, equally stunned, overjoyed, and gut-shot. “What are you-”

“Mom just couldn’t do it, and asked me to come instead,” Danny shouted back. “I’m here for you, brother. The Monroe boys will ride this fire to the end.”

The intercoms clicked off, turning their talk to pantomime.

In the adjoining anteroom, a rigid copper switch, burnished bright for conductivity, slid into a willing prong. Dynamos kicked to life under Earl’s slippered feet. Danny felt the vibration and stifled a gasp. The public address crackled like AM radio in a thunderstorm. Earl locked eyes with Danny, thinking how happy he was Mom stayed home ‘cause he sure didn’t want her seeing this. Danny stared back, thinking of when those grade-school bullies knocked him off his Schwinn Black Phantom and said it was theirs now, punk, and Earl got it back, and Dad swabbed ointment on Earl’s ripped knuckles, not asking a single question, just patting his eldest son’s head. The official witnesses bit their lips and held their breath. Covington zithered his pocket comb, thinking of Andy and raspberry jam. Doc’s nostrils flared from hard breathing. Crew-cuts cracked their knuckles. Most stared with unvarnished glee. Some looked away, mumbling. Earl rubbed the chair like God gave a damn. Danny said anything that came into his head, just talking, motioning, moving toward the glass. The guard warned him to sit. Earl kept nodding, picking up a few of the lipped words and guessing the rest. The warden watched the hotline. The governor ignored it. Mom turned a degree colder. The red hand joined the blacks at twelve.

And the lightning bolt hit.

“Gwaa!” Earl puffed as the electric chair groaned like a peep show. If the restraints hadn’t been sufficiently tight, the surge would have flung him against the window, bug on a Peterbilt. His joints twisted, his backbone collapsed.

Four seconds.

He turned the red of boiled lobster. Spittle leaked from both corners of his grimace. His eyes banged Tilt with each shift in the alternating current, wildly spinning the witnesses. Danny punched one thigh, then the other, then the first, then the second.

Twelve seconds.

The 2,000-volt hotshot, designed to instantly blow out the central nervous system but hardly ever did, dropped to 500 for the secondary burn.

Springfield dentist Frank Mahoney felt his spine tingle as the condemned’s eyes bored in. “Did not,” they seemed to whisper. “Did not did not did not.” Then they rolled up, like those zombies on late-night TV. He fumbled for the airsick bags the warden promised. Leila Reynolds, a bookkeeper for a Chicago auto dealer, handed over two of hers.

Sixty seconds.

Tertiary burn.

The official executioner was a Stateville groundskeeper who needed the stipend for his kid’s braces. He cranked the voltage back to 2,000, exactly as the manual dictated. White lights dimmed to bronze throughout the prison as the dynamos suckled electric milk. Three thousand convicts flung curses, food, and feces.

The lightning hit again.

Bones snapped as Earl’s fingers twisted into square knots. If he hadn’t clipped his claws to the quick last night, they would have driven through his palms, Jesus nails. Skin blistered under the electrodes. Blood misted through his protruded lips.

“The condemned prisoner has bitten through his mouth guard,” the executioner said for the benefit of the tape recorders logging the event. “Cleaving his tongue and causing extensive bleeding that the witnesses can see. We need to reinforce it for next week’s burn.”

Danny, barely breathing, clenched his hands till finger bones crackled.

Ninety seconds.

Quaternary burn.

Glowing maroon blotches spread across Earl’s face. His skin slid around, and his eyeballs wormed from their sockets. Pinkish foam dribbled from his nose as capillaries burst. T-bone and sweet potato from last night’s Last Supper bubbled down his chin.

One hundred twenty seconds.

“I’m so sorry, Earl,” Danny whispered. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry . . .”

As WGN Radio telegraphed updates, Teddy Rehnt crossed his arms one way and his legs another, face contorting, eyes burning, wondering who he could maim for this.

Greasy smoke erupted from the skullcap, followed by metallic blue whomps of flame.

“The doctor should include electrode integrity in his final examination,” the executioner intoned. “The guards missed the gapping of the skullcap, and it’s causing a severe arc.”

Four witnesses gagged. Three sat unimpressed, one trembled like aspic. Frank Mahoney fainted on Leila Reynolds’s shoulder. Brewster Farri, a John Deere mechanic from Moline, thrust his fist in the air, shouting, “Amen!”