Last smile

Shannon had never trusted a white man. Not once. It wasn't an opinion. It was the body. The body had known since Scott Street. Since the landlord who came up on the first of the month with his eyes that counted before they looked. Eyes that saw the rent before they saw the woman and the lateness before they saw the child. Shannon had learned white faces that way. The tics. The lips. The nostrils. The way a neck stiffens when a white man steps into an elevator where there's a Black man.

That morning, the guard in front of his cell had a different mouth. The muscle had allowed itself something. A smile of one millimeter. The eyes hadn't moved. Cold. Precise. The mouth released one millimeter and the eyes measured. Two men in a single face. One millimeter is enough to make a ravine. Shannon had known that since Scott Street. He'd known it since his mother's womb.

That morning Father Benedict wasn't there. A face appeared behind the bars. White. Young. Clean. Skin smooth as a new glove. Stiff collar, ironed that morning with the care of a boy who irons his first shirt for his first dead man. He carried a small leather bible against his chest. He carried it the way you carry a package to be delivered. His eyes swept the cell. The walls. The floor. The man on the floor. He came back to the man and his Adam's apple rose and fell and his fingers whitened on the bible. Shannon looked at him. The priest looked at him.

— Where's Benedict?

The boy swallowed. Shannon saw the cartilage move beneath the skin of his neck.

— Father Benedict is unwell. I'm Father Dempsey. I'll be...

Shannon turned his head. He looked at the wall. The wall was white. Nothing on it. He looked at it as though there were something. His index finger rubbed the nail of his thumb. His mother used to leave him on a plastic chair in waiting rooms that smelled of disinfectant and warm linoleum. He was five, maybe six, and he rubbed his nail with his index finger and the sound kept him company while his mother was behind a door. Thirty-three years old and the finger still made the same gesture. He was waiting for someone who wasn't coming back.

The priest didn't move. He held his bible too high, pressed against him.

— I understand this must be difficult.

Too crisp. New coins laid on a counter. Shannon didn't turn around. Hands on his knees, knees apart, head down. The tube hummed. Under the big toenail, an itch. The toe that itched on the day he was going to die. His mouth moved. One corner. Not a smile.

The boy began to speak. The words came out and they had no intention of stopping because stopping would have meant hearing the silence and the silence in that cell was a thing the boy was not equipped to hear. Mercy. The word fell on the concrete. Peace. The word fell beside the first. Valley of shadow. Dwelling places. The words kept falling, clean, orderly, spaced. Objects pulled from a suitcase in the order they were folded. The words had been manufactured elsewhere. In places with stained glass and polished wooden pews. They had been manufactured for those places. Here they bounced off the walls and fell back down with the dust and the dead skin of men who had heard the same words before dying. He did not pick them up.

To Benedict he had spoken. Benedict came on Tuesdays. He came down the corridor with his tired knees and his mint and his cold tobacco and he sat on the other side of the bars. He said nothing. He breathed. Shannon said nothing either. Two men on either side of a grate in a corridor where no one comes unless he has to. Benedict didn't have to. He came. It was like a porch. Not the nice ones. The shit porches. The ones with the broken step and the screen door that won't close anymore and the full ashtray on the railing and two plastic chairs that aren't the same color. The porches where two men sit and don't talk and watch the street and the street does nothing.

Then one evening he had spoken. The parking lot first. July. The heat on the asphalt. The asphalt was soft. He remembered that. Soft under the soles. The gun in his hand. A gun in a hand is a funny thing. It's light. People who've never held one think it's heavy. It's not heavy. It's even surprisingly light and that's the problem. If it were heavy maybe the arm would tire and the hand would let go. But it's light and the hand doesn't shake and the finger finds the trigger without hesitating. The man was in front of him. Shannon hadn't said his name to Benedict. He would never say his name. He had fired. The body hadn't done what bodies do in movies. A jolt. Small. Pathetic. The gesture of touching an electric wire with your elbow. The body had done that and the body had fallen on the asphalt. Something dark was beginning to spread. The shoe. He had talked about the shoe. The man's foot when he'd pushed him out of the vehicle. The foot striking the body panel. A sound of meat on metal. And then the tires. The car had rolled forward and there had been a resistance. Brief. Something elastic. Something that had given way the way elastic things give way: first they resist and then they don't resist anymore. It was a hand. A hand under the tires. The car had kept going. The engine hadn't felt a thing. The tires hadn't felt a thing. The steering wheel hadn't transmitted a thing.

He had talked about the motel. Ten minutes before. The motel sheet, the sheet that's seen enough bodies pass through to know what bodies do. The woman's perfume. Too sweet. He had talked about his mother. The apartment on Scott Street. The wallpaper peeling in the kitchen. The curled edges, yellowed. Underneath the dried glue. Underneath the plaster. Underneath the wall. And the walls were all there was. Too many bodies in too few rooms. A damp heat that stuck to the skin. And at night the roaches. On the ceiling. Hundreds. An inverted sky, low, black, alive. The sound of a thousand legs on plaster. Not a loud sound. A soft sound. The soft, filthy sound. He was five. Six. He was lying on his back and he watched the ceiling walk above him. He didn't scream. His mother was in the other room. In the other room there was a man. When there was a man you didn't scream. The rule existed the way gravity exists. You don't explain it. You fall to the ground and that was all there was to know.

He had given all of that to Benedict. Piece by piece. The way you extract shards of metal from a wound with tweezers. Each shard tore a bit of flesh on its way out. Benedict hadn't interrupted. Benedict listened. He received. That's all. He sent nothing back. He didn't say I understand because I understand is the most useless thing a man can say to another man who has just told him how he killed someone in a parking lot in July. His face was a face. A face of worn mountain, low, that has been there so long no one remembers it wasn't always there. Sometimes, before answering, he clicked his tongue. A small dry sound. The sound of a man tasting something. Click. And then he waited. Sometimes he took out a handkerchief. An old white handkerchief, washed so many times the cotton had lost its memory of cotton. And he folded it. Unfolded it. Refolded it. Corner after corner. And the following week he came back. He came down the corridor. The knees. The soles. The mint. The tobacco. He asked for nothing. He came back like the morning.

The word faith had lost its lodging a long time ago. It had been evicted with the others, hope, grace, redemption, forgiveness. But Benedict came back. A man who comes back. That's all.

And that morning, that chair was in bed. Father Benedict is unwell. And someone opens a drawer and pulls out a name and the name is Dempsey.

At seven thirty, they came.

— Last meal.

Two words. He said them the way you say next at a government counter. The guy was wide. Wide the way men get wide when they spend twenty years eating whatever they find in a vending machine. He held a clipboard. The clipboard had a sheet and the sheet had lines and the lines had to be filled. Not for Shannon. For the lines. He clicked his pen with his thumb.

— What do you want.

— Steak. Medium. Mashed potatoes. Gravy. Fried okra. Cobbler. Peach. With vanilla ice cream. Sweet iced tea.

The words came out in order. An order at the counter of a diner on a country road. The man wrote. He slapped the clipboard against his thigh. The man and the pen made the same sound because the man and the pen were the same thing. He left.

Shannon had dreamed that meal. Fifteen years. On the bunk, eyes closed. Not in the head. In the mouth. The tongue remembered when everything else had let go. When the eyes had forgotten the color of the sky at six in the evening in October above the hills of Kentucky: the tongue remembered. The fat of butter on bread. Not any fat. The fat of butter taken out of the fridge an hour before, when it's had time to soften just enough for the knife to pass but not too much. The salt. The grain on the meat. Salt is a crystal that enters the fiber and forces the fiber to give what it has. He had hallucinated the cobbler. At the bottom the fruit: the peach made denser by fire. The sugar burned, turned to caramel. Over it the crust. Golden. Crumbly. Greasy with a kitchen grease where someone worked standing all morning. And the ice cream. Cold on hot. The vanilla touching the burning fruit. The white running into the black. A taste that exists only in that second. On cold nights he summoned the warmth of a gravy. He didn't pray. He had no God. He had a gravy. Fifteen years eating a meal that didn't exist. The prison tray, the gray meat, the beans, the bread in cellophane: that only fed the body. And the body makes do with almost nothing.

At eleven the tray arrived. The guard set it on the shelf without setting his eyes on the man. The guard left. The silence came back to take its place. Covered in aluminum. Then the smell came through. Through the metal, through the dead air. Steak. Butter. Hot fruit. The smell went straight to the place. The exact place. The place where fifteen years of dreams had built a room. A room made of invented butter and imagined salt and ghost juice. And the room was full. Fifteen years stacked floor to ceiling. Not a gap. The smell had nowhere to go. Shannon pulled back the aluminum. The meal was there. Compartments. The steak sweated. A pink juice running toward the mashed potatoes. That trickle was the only thing moving in the cell. The ice cream on the cobbler was already soft. The white was descending into the black. The meeting he had dreamed for fifteen years was happening on an aluminum tray in a death row cell and the ice cream was melting because that's what ice cream does.

He picked up the fork. The metal was cold. He held the fork above the steak. Three centimeters of air between the tines of the fork and the meat. The fork did not descend. He set it down. He put the aluminum back. With his fingertips. He pushed the tray to the edge of the shelf. Then he went back to the slab.

The boy wouldn't come back. Shannon knew it. The boy had retreated down the corridor, bible pressed too high, and his steps had faltered once. Just once. A sole had searched for the floor and hadn't found it. The foot had chosen forward.

Shannon was now alone. The word alone no longer meant what it meant when there was an outside. Outside, alone meant not accompanied. Here, alone meant that the forms had been filled out and the boxes checked and the signatures affixed. They would kill him. Not out of malice. By procedure. They would kill him at the scheduled time and the tile would be washed after.

And now Benedict wasn't there. And the procedure was there. And the calendar moved forward.

There had been a man in the cell next door. An old man. Past seventy. Wide hands. Hands of fence and post and barbed wire. Hands that had held a woman down. He had raped his neighbor. And he had killed her. In that order. Then he had sat in his kitchen. And he had eaten. The police found the old man at the table. The plate was empty. The old man had died in his sleep. A Monday evening. Shannon had known before the guards. By the silence. The old man breathed hard at night. A raspy breath, regular, a sawmill breath. Shannon knew that breath better than his own. Dying in your sleep. The way you carry a sleeping child from the car to the bed. You slide your hands under the body. You lift. The child doesn't wake. The child is warm and soft and you carry him through the night and Shannon envied him. The old man would never know he'd been carried.

All day the eyes had worked on him. Not the hands. The eyes. Layer by layer. And underneath there was the thing. Soft. Alive. The thing from before the layers. The thing that existed when he was five and he watched the sky black with roaches and he didn't scream.

They came at two o'clock. Two o'clock exactly. Because the form said two o'clock and the form didn't say approximately. Two guards and a man in a suit. Shannon stood. His knees cracked. A sound of wood. His legs took a second to remember what they were. The handcuffs closed on his wrists. Click. Click. They moved forward. Shannon felt the warmth of two living bodies on either side. A door opened. The air changed. Sharp. Chemical. The air of a room washed after each use. Shannon saw the feet of the gurney. Four metal feet. Wheels locked. No sheet. No pillow. He raised his eyes. The straps. Brown leather. Worn in the places where other wrists had pulled. You pull because the body pulls. The body doesn't know it can't escape. The body pulls even when the head has given up and the last gesture leaves a mark in the leather. They made him lie down. A hand on his shoulder. Not pressure. A guide. The leather was cold through the fabric. The straps closed. Shannon fixed his gaze on the ceiling. White.

Then the gazes. From the left. Not a sound. A pressure. Like when you open the door of an oven — nothing moves and the body receives. The glass was there. Behind the glass, they were seated. The woman. The children. The brother. Their gazes crossed the glass and came to rest on him. They searched for a vein in his left arm. A finger tapped the inside of the elbow. A professional finger that knew the geography of veins. The skin was wiped. A damp cold. The alcohol. The last cold of the outside before the first warmth of the inside. The needle went in.

The warden approached. Shannon knew by the sound. Leather on tile. Coffee breath. The last human breath he would smell.

— Do you have any last words to say.

No question mark. The last line of the last page of the form.

Shannon closed his eyes. Everything disappeared. The hum remained. He opened his eyes. The ceiling. The warden. The glass. The faces. The woman had aged. Not the whole face. The eyes. The eyes were fifty in a forty-year-old face. The children were adults. Broad shoulders, locked jaws, hands placed on thighs with the rigidity of people holding something too heavy. Seated. On chairs but on a wire. Stretched between that Tuesday in July and this Tuesday in February. The brother had the dead man's eyes. Shannon recognized it at once. The eyes of the man in the parking lot. The eyes of the second before Shannon fired. For a second something passed between them. A draft in a sealed room. The draft asked for nothing and said nothing and it passed anyway.

Shannon smiled. The smile didn't come from the mouth. It rose from lower. The only thing he could give. The only thing they couldn't take.

— Go home, he said. — Have fun. Smile. — I am happy. Why would I lie now. I have no anger. I have no fear.

The warden nodded. The last box. Checked. The warmth entered the vein. Warm like the butter in the dream on the bunk. Warm like the gravy on cold nights. The warmth reached the shoulder. Passed into the chest. Found the void. The void received it. Then the smile held nothing anymore.