32.
At the death house, Mitchell was tired of contemplating his fate. He didn’t want to hear from that damn bone anymore. Let
his grandfather have all the coffee klatches with the dead he wanted. Mitchell was still a young man—or rather, he had been
when he came here—and he was done thinking about death. He still wanted to run and jump and play; he wanted to dance like
Ruby had danced, to feel the joy of music and the rush of a healthy young body.
This was not allowed, so he spent his final days the best way he could. Now he understood why Wicked Willy did push-ups in
his cell. Mitchell hadn’t understood before. It wasn’t a discharge of energy—it was a way to harness it. To pretend you had
some great future, outside these walls.
He had always been a model inmate. This was not hard to do when you’re in a cell. They had a room they were taken to for exercise.
Mitchell drilled the old, half-deflated basketball with the chew marks on it from the insane and driven insane against the
concrete wall. Once, he had found an insect in that room, and he had marveled at it, and later thought about it a lot. The
insect was alive, but unlike Mitchell and the other men on death row, it didn’t know when it would die. No living creature
should know exactly when it would die. That curse was something only humans delivered to each other, in the form of the death
penalty. He realized that this was the point. They were stealing the mystery of life from him.
Now he lay on his cot, aware of the hours draining away. He was waking up out of the death fog of the past few weeks and didn’t like the reality he was finding.
He tried to distract himself with memories. The problem with dying young is you don’t have enough memories to entertain yourself.
He thought of his mother, Charise. His memory of her was fuzzy, but he would never forget the squishy feeling of her ample
belly. As a little guy, he had liked to stroke the soft inside place of her arm, and she would laugh while he did it, and
then look faraway and distracted.
He remembered cooking the first trout he had caught. He liked it with maple syrup, because it reminded him of campouts with
his mom, on the shore of the river. She was the one who’d taught him how to fish. Charise liked the woods. She liked nature.
She often went into the woods, acting like there was something there for her to find, though Grandfather had warned her to
be careful.
Restless, Mitchell got up. For the first time in many years, the cell felt too small: He was aware of its edges. Wicked Willy,
counting days till his death like they were cards in a deck, waiting for the joker to turn up, watched Mitchell carefully.
Sometimes men went crazy in the last days. Mitchell would soon be placed on death watch, with two officers assigned to monitor
him around the clock. Sometimes men tried to cheat the executioner. They tried to kill themselves, and this the state did
not like. They wanted that power. They got to be gods in that moment.
“You okay, son?” Wicked Willy called. Usually the men on death row didn’t talk to each other. This was not the place for friendship.
You didn’t make friends with dying men.
“I’m fine,” Mitchell said tersely.
Wicked Willy fell silent. They could hear an officer approaching, his rubber-soled shoes soft against the floor. He had heard
the voices. Talking was not allowed.
The officer stopped outside Mitchell’s cell.
He looked at Mitchell with some sympathy: It wouldn’t be long now, and Mitchell had been an all right guy.
For a killer. It was a truism of the job, which the officers repeated to each other ad nauseam: Never forget who you are dealing with.
One wrong move—a handshake through cell bars, for instance—and you could pay a very steep price.
He had seen guards almost killed by a few inmates.
“You need something, Mitchell?” the officer asked, paying him the courtesy of using his name.
“Can I go outside?” Mitchell joked, but it was not a joke. He had not asked anything like this in ten years. He had been a
compliant animal, and now he was bristling with fear and restless anger.
“Ha. No.”
“I want to go outside before I die!”
“Come on now.”
Wicked Willy came to the bars of his cell, too, and the officer was aware that he was between the two men. Even though they
could not reach him, he stepped out of range. You just never knew. Sometimes men threw things from their cells. Shit and piss
were not the worst of them. One guy had made a slingshot from a sheet and used it to drill a bolt from his cot at an officer.
That officer had lost his eye.
“You don’t got much longer,” the officer said, trying to be nice. “Just hold on.”
“To what?” Mitchell asked.
He sat down on his narrow bunk, then got back up.
“I want the exonerator,” he said.