The Red Scream by Mary Willis Walker

Author:Mary Willis Walker [Walker, Mary Willis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-5409-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-01-21T05:00:00+00:00

chapter 14

Pretty gal all alone

On the highway, car broke down.

You pull behind her quick.

She gets to looking sick,

Mouth all dry

Starts to cry

Like a flood,

Sweating blood.

Please, please don’t.

Honey I won’t

Won’t hurt none.

There it’s done.

Weren’t that fun?

LOUIE BRONK

Death Row, Ellis I Unit,

Huntsville, Texas

After a few minutes a door opened on the prisoner’s side of the room. Louie Bronk shuffled in, dwarfed by the two guards, one on either side of him. His hands were cuffed and chained to his waist. His feet were shackled and he clanked with each step.

One guard left while the other led Louie to the cage, unlocked it, and, holding tight to his upper arm, sat him down on the chair. As he locked the cage door, the guard said to Molly, “I’ll be right here, ma’am, if you need me.” He walked back to the door and stood at attention.

During this procedure, Louie had kept his eyes glued to the guard. He kept his head turned away from Molly and continued to stare at the guard.

Molly looked through the several layers of mesh at the man in the cage—a small figure dressed in a coarsely woven white prison shirt and pants. On his feet he wore the cheap soft slippers that were issued to all death-row inmates.

From the first, Louie’s appearance had struck Molly as one of insufficiency in every feature. It was as if his unwanted birth and stunted childhood had supplied barely enough love and nutrients to create a full human being. He was short and, except for the hard lump of a paunch that protruded above his belt, scrawny. His hair was sparse and limp, his lips mere gray lines, his eyes squinty and narrow, close-set, with no lashes or eyebrows. And his skin was papery-looking, insufficient to cover his body decently; his sharp, beaky nose and flat cheeks and long chin looked like naked bone.

He had aged in the past two years, just as Tanya Klein had said. His hair was even thinner now and totally gray, so you could see his scalp through it, and his arms, which used to have at least a stringy, tensile strength, had gone slack; the skin on the underside had loosened from the bone, making the crude blue images tattooed there wrinkle into an unrecognizable mess. If she hadn’t known what the tattoos were—a hawk, a serpent, and a naked woman—she wouldn’t be able to make them out now.

Still turned, staring at the guard, he said in a reedy, singsong voice,

“Time to die?

Go bye-bye?

Don’t you cry.

Gonna cook my goose?

Make me the caboose?

Set me loose.

Time for the red scream?

Or just a bad dream?

Man, let off some steam.”

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