The cap was steel, and with the straps dangling down on either side, it looked sort of like a dough boy’s helmet. Brutal put it on Old Toot-Toot’s head, snugging it down over the hole in the black headcovering.
“Gettin the cap. gettin the cap, gettin the cap,” Toot said, and now his voice sounded squeezed as well as
muffled. The straps held his jaw almost closed, and I suspected Brutal had snugged it down a little tighter than he strictly had to for purposes of rehearsal. He stepped back, faced the empty seats, and said: “Arlen Bitterbuck, electricity shall now be passed through your body until you are dead, in accordance with state law. May God have mercy on your soul.”
Brutal turned to the mesh-covered rectangle. “Roll on two.”
Old Toot, perhaps trying to recapture his earlier flare of comic genius, began to buck and flail in the chair, as Old Sparky’s actual customers almost never did. “Now I’m fryin!” he cried. “Fryin! Fryyyin!
Geeeaah! I’m a done tom turkey!”
Harry and Dean, I saw, were not watching this at all. They had turned away from Sparky and were looking across the empty storage room at the door leading back into my office. “Well, I’ll be goddamned,” Harry said. “One of the witnesses came a day early.”
Sitting in the doorway with its tail curled neatly around its paws, watching with its beady black oilspot eyes, was the mouse.
5.
The execution went well – if there was ever such a thing as “a good one” (a proposition I strongly doubt), then the execution of Arlen Bitterbuck, council elder of the Washita Cherokee, was it. He got his braids wrong – his hands were shaking too badly to make a good job of it – and his eldest daughter, a woman of thirty-odd, was allowed to plait them nice and even. She wanted to weave feathers in at the tips, the pinfeathers of a hawk, his bird, but I couldn’t allow it. They might catch fire and burn. I didn’t tell her that, of course, just said it was against regulations. She made no protest, only bowed her head and put her hands to her temples to show her disappointment and her disapproval. She conducted herself with great dignity, that woman, and by doing so practically guaranteed that her father would do the same.
The Chief left his cell with no protest or holding back when the time came. Sometimes we had to pry their fingers off the bars – I broke one or two in my time and have never forgotten the muffled snapping sound – but The Chief wasn’t one of those, thank God. He walked strong up the Green Mile to my office, and there he dropped to his knees to pray with Brother Schuster, who had driven down from the Heavenly Light Baptist Church in his flivver. Schuster gave The Chief a few psalms, and The Chief started to cry when Schuster got to the one about lying down beside the still waters. It wasn’t bad, though, no hysteria, nothing like that. I had an idea he was thinking about still water so pure and so cold it felt like it was cutting your mouth every time you drank some.
Actually, I like to see them cry a little. It’s when they don’t that I get worried.
A lot of men can’t get up from their knees again without help, but The Chief did okay in that department.
He swayed a little at first, like he was lightheaded, and Dean put out a hand to steady him, but Bitterbuck had already found his balance again on his own, so out we went.
Almost all the chairs were occupied, with the people in them murmuring quietly among themselves, like folks do when they’re waiting for a wedding or a funeral to get started. That was the only time Bitterbuck faltered. I don’t know if it was any one person in particular that bothered him, or all of them together, but I could hear a low moaning start up in his throat, and all at once the arm I was holding had a drag in it that hadn’t been there before. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Harry Terwilliger moving up to cut