‘Are they doing it?’ Father Patrick whispered. ‘I can’t tell.’

‘I can’t either,’ Bradley whispered back. ‘Maybe, but—’

There was an amplified click that made them both jump (the state’s legal representative remained as still as a statue). The warden said, ‘Can you folks hear me okay in there?’

The DA gave a thumbs-up, then crossed his arms again.

The warden turned to Hallas. ‘George Peter Hallas, you have been condemned to death by a jury of your peers, a sentence affirmed by this state’s supreme court and the Supreme Court of the United States of America.’

Like they ever said balls about it one way or the other, Bradley thought.

‘Do you have any last words before sentence is carried out?’

Hallas began to shake his head, then appeared to change his mind. He peered through the glass and into the observation room.

‘Hello, Mr Bradley. I’m glad you came. Listen, okay? I’d watch out, if I were you. Remember, it comes as a child.’

‘Is that it?’ the warden asked, almost jovially.

Hallas regarded the warden. ‘One more thing, I guess. Where in the Christ did you get that shirt?’

Warden Toomey blinked as if someone had suddenly flicked cold water in his face, then turned to the doctor. ‘Are you prepared?’

The whitecoat standing beside the panel nodded. The warden recited a mouthful of legal rigamarole, checked the clock, and frowned. It was 12:01 p.m. which made them a minute late. He pointed to the whitecoat like a stage director cueing an actor. The whitecoat flicked the switches and the three red lights turned green.

The intercom was still open and Bradley heard Hallas paraphrase Father Patrick. ‘Is it happening?’

No one answered. It didn’t matter. His eyes closed. He made a snoring sound. A minute passed. Another long, ragged snore. Then two minutes. Then four. No snores and no movement. Bradley looked around. Father Patrick was gone.

9

A cold prairie wind was blowing when Bradley left Needle Manor. He zipped his coat and stood taking long breaths, trying to get as much outside as possible into his insides, and as fast as he could. It wasn’t the execution per se; except for the warden’s bizarre blue shirt, it had seemed as prosaic as getting a tetanus shot or a shingles vaccination. That was actually the horror of it.

Something moved at the corner of his eye in the Chicken Run, where the condemned prisoners took their exercise. Except there wasn’t supposed to be anyone there. Exercise periods were canceled on days when an execution was scheduled. McGregor had told him this. And sure enough, when he turned his head, he saw the Chicken Run was empty.

Bradley thought, It comes as a child.

He laughed. He made himself laugh. It was just a well-deserved case of the whim-whams, no more than that. As if to prove it to himself, he shivered.

Father Patrick’s elderly Volvo had departed. There was no car but his own in the small visitors’ parking lot adjacent to Needle Manor. Bradley walked a few steps in that direction, then whirled suddenly toward the Chicken Run, the hem of his overcoat flapping around his knees. No one there. Of course not, Jesus Christ. George Hallas had been mad, and even if his bad little kid had been real, he was dead now. Six shots from a .45 pretty much guaranteed dead.

Bradley resumed walking, but when he got around the hood of his car, he once more came to a halt. An ugly scratch ran all the way from his Ford’s front bumper to the rear left taillight. Someone had keyed his car. In a maximum security prison where you had to pass three walls and a like number of checkpoints, someone had keyed his car.

Bradley’s first thought was of the DA, who had sat there with his arms crossed over his chest, a portrait of Talmudic self-righteousness. But the idea had no logic to support it. The DA had gotten what he wanted, after all; he had watched George Hallas die.

Bradley opened the car door, which he had not bothered to lock – he was in a prison, after all – and stood stock-still for several seconds. Then, as if controlled by a force outside himself, his hand rose slowly to his mouth and covered it. Lying on the driver’s seat was a beanie with a propeller on top. One of the two plastic blades was crooked.

At last he bent and plucked it up, tweezing it between two fingers just as Hallas had done. Bradley turned it over. A note had been tucked inside, the letters crooked and bunched together and downslanted. A kid’s printing.

KEEP IT, I HAVE ANOTHER ONE.

He heard a child’s laughter, high and bright. He looked toward the Chicken Run, but it was still empty.

He turned the note over and saw another, even briefer communiqué:

SEE YOU SOON.

For Russ Dorr

In The Hair of Harold Roux, probably the best novel about writing ever published, Thomas Williams offers a striking metaphor, maybe even a parable, for how a story is born. He envisions a dark plain with a small fire burning on it. One by one, people come out of the dark to warm themselves. Each one brings a little fuel, and eventually the small fire becomes a blaze with the characters standing around it, their faces brightly lit and each beautiful in its own way.

One night as I lay drifting toward sleep, I saw a very small fire – a kerosene lantern, in fact – with a man trying to read a newspaper by its light. Other men came with their own lanterns, casting more light on a dreary landscape that turned out to be the Dakota Territory.

I have visions like this frequently, although it makes me uneasy to admit it. I don’t always tell the stories that go with them; sometimes the fire goes out. This one had to be told, because I knew exactly what kind of language I wanted to use: dry and laconic, not like my usual style at all. I had no idea where the story was going, but I felt perfectly confident that the language would take me there. And it did.

A Death

Jim Trusdale had a shack on the west side of his father’s gone-to-seed ranch, and that’s where he was when Sheriff Barclay and half a dozen deputized townsmen found him, sitting in the one chair by the cold stove, wearing a dirty barn coat and reading an old issue of the Black Hills Pioneer by lantern light. Looking at it, anyway.

Sheriff Barclay stood in the doorway, mostly filling it up. He was holding his own lantern. ‘Come out of there, Jim, and do it with your hands up. I ain’t drawn my pistol and don’t want to.’

Trusdale came out. He still had the newspaper in one of his raised hands. He stood there looking at the sheriff out of his flat gray eyes. The sheriff looked back. So did the others, four on horseback and two on the seat of an old buckboard with HINES MORTUARY printed on the side in faded yellow letters.

‘I notice you ain’t asked why we’re here,’ Sheriff Barclay said.

‘Why are you here, Sheriff?’

‘Where is your hat, Jim?’

Trusdale put the hand not holding the newspaper to his head as if to feel for his hat, which was a flat brown plainsman and not there.

‘In your place, is it?’ the sheriff asked. A cold breeze kicked up, blowing the horses’ manes and flattening the grass in a wave that ran south.

‘No,’ Trusdale said, ‘I don’t believe it is.’

‘Then where?’

‘I might have lost it.’

‘You need to get in the back of the wagon,’ the sheriff said.

‘I don’t want to ride in no funeral hack,’ Trusdale said. ‘That’s bad luck.’

‘You got bad luck all over,’ one of the men said. ‘You’re painted in it. Get in.’

Trusdale went to the back of the buckboard and climbed up. The breeze kicked again, harder, and he turned up the collar of his barn coat.

The two men on the seat of the buckboard got down and stood either side of it. One drew his gun, the other did not. Trusdale knew their faces but not their names. They were town men. The sheriff and the other four went into his shack. One of them was Hines, the undertaker. They were in there for some time. They even opened the stove, which was unlit in spite of the cold evening, and dug through the ashes. At last they came out.