Povich on Yocum: clinical curiosity... what made this sick puppy tick? What sent him over the edge? The inquisition itself was voyeuristic...borderline perverse. Does motivation matter when a thirty-year-old security guard fries a toddler's pectoral muscles in vegetable shortening and preserves a kid's scalp with acetone? Not once, but seventeen times? Of course not; such a man is an obvious aberration, a malignancy, a mutated chromosome in the corpus delecti of mankind, and deserves not to be understood, but to be excised...sooner the better. On the other hand, Povich had half an hour to fill, five times per week, and Yocum's deeds had clearly tickled the dark side of America's fancy. Ratings will out. Possibly, Povich himself understood that much; he looked like he was fighting down a little bile. Cut to an Audi spot; nick of time. Two hundred horse, stick and automatic shifter in the same car. Pretty slick. Judge Norden Reese eased a stainless steel cylinder into his left nostril. A curved, recessed blade mowed his nose hairs down to a sixteenth of an inch. The fully immersible Panasonic nose-hair trimmer worked for ear hair, too, but ear hair wasn't the problem. Nose hair probably wouldn't have been a problem either, but Judge Reese had recently read an interview in which some condemned slimeball claimed he got through the penalty phase of his trial by concentrating on the nose hairs of the judge who was handing down the bad news. Thus alerted, Reese had been careful to trim his nose hairs below concentration length. Once a week, during Povich. Why give the bastards an inch?
Musing in the pine-paneled privacy of his duplex library, Judge Reese had his shoes kicked off, his feet propped up on cut-velvet ottoman cushions, a tumbler of weak Johnny Black and soda at his fingertips. The door was locked. Ms. Wrigley, the housekeeper, knew enough not to knock, not even if a million-man revolution began looting Seward Avenue out front. If Ms. Wrigley was to be robbed or ravished, she must do it discreetly. There was no functioning phones within Reese's cloister either. Had there been, one of Povich's lackeys would have been harassing him for Delbert Yocum comments.
That afternoon, at a quarter past two, Judge Reese had advised Delbert Yocum of the jury's decision to terminate his existence, via a state-issued noose, directly after his automatic appellate reviews were exhausted. There was no profundity behind the jury's choice. No question as to its rationale. If Yocum didn't deserve to swing, nobody did. He was the nastiest summabitch any of these twelve peers had ever come across. The alternates either. They'd squirmed through twenty thousand pages worth of horrific testimony while Yocum grinned and twirled a plastic comb; despite the cannibalism and the most savage tortures and mutilations he'd inflicted on seventeen kindergarteners, there wasn't the slightest evidence of remorse in the tiniest fibre of Yocum's attitude; no empathy, not even for himself. It was if his mother had been a Thalidomide junkie and produced a son genetically devoid of a soul. Throughout his very-public murder trial, Yocum had confessed to killings he couldn't possibly have committed and disavowed knowledge of those he clearly did. He'd cheered at the gruesome evidential photographs, laughed at the sobbing parents, and masturbated in his cell to the vocal reminiscence of his most unspeakable acts of sadistic creativity. Asked to what church he'd belonged as a child... by his own attorney... he'd replied: "Our Lady of Perpetual Indulgence;" to which, defense had rolled its collective eyes and requested recusal.
Upon hearing the jury's sentence and Reese's advisory of the steps required to effect it, Yocum had said, in his mellifluous Biloxi drawl, "Yo' honnah, now that it's all 'most ovah, ah'd like to explain to youall... man to man... why I done what I done to them seventeen young 'uns."
Reese had felt his palate phlegm coagulate into thick sludge. He'd chosen his next words carefully, trying not to hyperventilate. "Mr. Yocum, my reaction to that statement is one of... breathless revulsion... and utter disgust... I know there are disciplines out there, scientific and philosophical schools, spending time and money trying to understand the motive behind such... pure, palpable atrocities. As if there somewhere exists a plausible explanation for these dead children. The fact that you're a good-looking young man with an IQ into three digits? That further stirs their..." He spat out the phrase like it was green meat: "...professional interest." ...Suddenly, Judge Reese felt himself growing faint. Actually had to clutch the mahogany bench rail to keep from collapsing... "Well, young man, I'm not interested in your explanations. Or theirs either, come to that... Not at all. But, I'll tell you this much; you've got some rough goddamned months ahead of you; and let me say that .... however much you suffer... suffer..." He mind-flashed on a 5X7police file photo a of a blonde boy's head packed inside a Hefty OneZip storage bag. "...suffer during those months, I can't imagine it compares to what your victims and their families have endured... now endure... will endure..." Yocum stood before him, straight as an Honor Guard, grinning like a retard. As a human being, Yocum made no sense. He was actually waiting for a chance to speak! Patiently! Reese bellowed: " What possibly could you have to say for yourself? How could a man... how could a savage... put a fellow being through such agony? How could someone, even to himself, let alone at a public forum, attempt to justify ruining and destroying these... innocent.. helpless...blameless lives...?"
"Yo'onnah..." Yocum said, extra-mellifluously, as though talking to a child... "didja evah considah...that was the whole point?"
*
When he was a kid, Yocum used hold his basset hound up to his ear, listening to it's heartbeat, wondering how the dog worked. How the insides kept thumping, squishing, squirting away without any wind-up key. Or any cord. He was always wondering about stuff like that. Mysterious, invisible forces. In a candid interview with the CrimeFocus news magazine, for which he'd been paid thirteen thousand dollars, Yocum's eighth-grade shop teacher had maintained, "Delbert coulda been a.. shoulda been a... mechanical engineer... if he hadn'ta fallen in with the faggots... "
The shop teacher had kept meticulous records, lucky for him and his thirteen large. An 'A' one semester, an 'F' the next. Same year. "...Second term, Delbert was high all the time, seemed like. I could smell scotch or gin or something on his breath. He would regularly disrupt the class, screaming out my name. Bleating like a sheep..."
In Reese's piney, shellac-smelling library, on a sixty-inch television screen, a juggernaut phalanx of Argentinean army ants was plowing through the Pedroluro cloud forest like a science fiction monster, devouring whatever unfortunate creature stood in its way. A full-grown tapir succumbed as unequivocally as a beetle. Reese had flipped over to a PBS nature show; enough Povich was enough. Yocum's celebrity status was as big a national disgrace as the OJ verdict. He had scant respect for the exploiters, little more than for the exploitee. 'Choke-'em Yocum' the sensationalist rags were calling him, supposing perhaps that the grieving parents of sexually violated and strangled five-year-olds could overlook that irresistible gush of cleverness. The merchandising of Delbert Yocum had been in full swing for many, many weeks. He had his own 900 number, where callers could hear a recording of his most outrageous outbursts during the trial. Jay Leno was telling Yocum one-liners: "Hear they renamed Biloxi... Hackensack...?" In prison, he received a bag of fan mail per week, a lot of it from graphic, horny young women. An Old Testament injunction ran through Reese's head, as it had numerous times during his tenure with capital jurisprudence: The land cannot be cleansed until it has spewed out this unclean beast. Might it refer to Yocum's suitors and commentators and biographers as well as to the killer himself?
Reese watched the tv screen as it flickered and filled with billions of tiny, pernicious, mindless-but-focused myrmidons, charging forward, ever forward, always, apparently, choosing the path of the most profitable resistance; the path that was clogged with foodstuff. Innocent foodstuff, arguably. Helpless foodstuff, especially. As if... that was the whole point.
*
Eight years and five months later, Judge Reese was dead of a pulmonary embolism, and thirty-nine year old Delbert Yocum was shit out of legal luck. The state supreme court found no constitutional errors upon which a reversal might be based; the Federal high court was unwilling to grant a hearing on his direct appeal; habeas corpus petitions came up empty. The executionwarrant was issued. The Governor shrugged. A stay...? Get real. If you were gonna do it to anybody, this was the cat you did it to. If he was moved by Yocum's apparently sincere conversion to Christianity during his long sojourn on death row, it didn't make a whit of difference to the law's long arm. Such jailhouse re-baptisms were a common enough occurrence. More power to him, said the Governor. Where he's going, he'll need all the brownie points he can get.
Yocum had spent eight and a half years inside a six by nine high-security cell, with an open toilet dead center, a small sink, and a steel cot. He'd been afforded two ten-minute showers per week, served his three squares through a slot in the door. An hour per day, he'd been shoved outside and allowed to pace concrete in a fenced-in exercise yard, alone, clutching a Bible. Actually, being weighed and measured by the execution squad in order to calculate optimal length and flexibility for the hanging rope was a welcome break in the monotony.
Execution-eve, he granted a live, visitor's-cubicle interview to CrimeFocus. It was heavily promoted throughout the country, at considerable risk to the show's credibility, since for security reasons, the prison itself could not commit to an agreement regarding the television crew until the day before. The interview received a fourteen share, though if the twenty million households in the United States that tuned in to see what sort of inane antics their doomed darling might dream up for the eleventh-hour extravaganza, they were disappointed. He was tame and composed and uncharacteristically introspective. In the end, apparently, he'd lost all his diabolical charisma; he came across as a pudgy, balding, tired-out, middle-aged ex-security guard who'd accepted fate as philosophically as a patient with terminal prostate cancer. He blew off most of the host's sick prompts, and committed what the CrimeFocus producers considered the most ghoulish crime of his career: he was a crashing bore. He'd said simply, "Question idn't, do I deserve to live? Doubtless, I don't. The question is, by which authority can any jury make this determination for me? Doubtless, they can't. Why? The right to life is inalienable. Inalienable. Not my word. I grew up in southern Mississippi; we wudn't taught words like inalienable. So I looked it up. Maybe youall should too."
A couple of people actually did, including the Governor. Just to be sure. Didn't matter. Next morning, they packed up Yocum's meager belongings, fed him a plate of steak and grits, allowed him a spell with Reverend Cletis Sprengle, his spiritual advisor. Yocum's last mile was paced every micrometer of the way by those paparazzi permitted to attend the affair, but most of the flash was gone from their step. Their colleagues were equally apathetic, gathering with the Yocum supporters and sign-carriers out in front. Back at the ranch, no press was held up. No editorial staff waited with bated breath. After the interview fiasco, journalists and their public were anticipating an anticlimax. And sure enough, Yocum was solemn and steady throughout the vigil, not frightened, though not particularly eager, either. He performed according to the official script, shuffling to the warehouse gallows as though everything beside his body had been killed long since. An official photograph was taken of the condemned and his final statement was video-recorded. Yocum bowed his head and read from a small square of paper tucked inside his Bible:
"I know I caused a lot of folks a whole mountain of hurt, and if they's any blame to be laid... for aw this pain... aw this suff'rin....aw these killed youngstahs...hey, they coulda been my own youngstahs, maybe, in a different life.... this aw is the fault of... and I need to be trooful 'bout this, befoah mah Lord and risen Christ... it's entirely the fault of... Miss Patience Gallagator of Hickory Grove, Mississippi..."
Puzzled gasps. Angry grunts. Clinical curiosity. But there was no place in the ritual for a follow-up; ninety seconds later, at one minute past seven, the trapdoor sprung open, and the career scumbag fell away into his own rank oblivion. The very last words from the born-again pedophile, the Crisco cannibal, the pectoral fryer who'd pounded nails into the skulls of his victims and recorded their dying howls with a background of Harry Simione Chorale Christmas carols... He'd said, through his black hood, to the executioner: "Shux, brother! It's a beautiful world, idn't it?"
So, the questions went begging. Patience who? Of Hickory what? Journalists with no more promising angle to an execution assignment than an execution seized the initiative along with an atlas, located Hickory Grove; a podunk borough inside Doxtator Township, twenty miles from the shotgun hovel where Yocum had grown up, and dialed Ameritech national directory assistance. Alas, nada. Nobody's wife, either; the name Gallagator did not exist. Not in the township; not in the county, not in the state. So, just about everybody creamed all over the 'mystery woman' slant and twenty minutes later forgot all about it.
Except for one wiseacre. Neil Mifsud, who wrote for a supermarket-checkout-aisle weekly out of Evanston, Illinois. Terra Incognito ran a characteristically depraved execution story beneath the headline Just Another Manic Bundy? and understated nothing except for Yocum's cryptic last words. Meanwhile, Mifsud was working at a fevered pitch, trying a number of variations on the theme, and along with a wing, a prayer, and a minivan, actually managed to locate a couple of obsolete phone books inside a Hattiesburg library. And lo and behold, there was a listing for a certain Patience Gallagher, who'd held an address on Pyrtle Street in Hickory Grove, Mississippi, back in 1979.
An address! Definitely worth a shot. So agreed his editors. If the tapir is sleeping, you settled for the beetle. Meticulously destroying the phone book in order to keep the scoop under wraps, Mifsud charged down to the vast rural nowhere of Doxtator Township, thumped at the door jamb of a dilapidated shack on Pyrtle Street. He was duly informed by an albino, hair-lipped mother nursing an albino, hair-lipped baby that the woman named Gallagher, who had once occupied the lot, had doddered off to the Golden Rule nursing home several years earlier. Still alive? The hair-lip shrugged; it was a small enough community, and she hadn't heard any differently. Bingo! Mifsud took a quick portrait of her with his Kodak digital... a deft PhotoShop technician could later transform the albino hair-lipped baby into albino hair-lipped quintuplets. Better still, septuplets. Hell of a story that'd make. Meantime, he gave mom twelve dollars, a Hershey bar, and a Radio Shack calculator...the only things he had in his pockets... and bee-lined for the Golden Rule.
The Golden Rule was an anemic stack of cinderblocks wedged between an abandoned junkyard and a stand of jackpines on Route 49, in tiny, nearby Myettville, seven miles from Hickory Grove. From the exterior, the chief sign of occupation was the smell, noticeable as soon as Mifsud parked the Aerostar. It was the smell of feces and urine underscored by citrus-flavored disinfectant; the smell of very old, very sick people. The lobby was filled with them; they huddled at a heat register even though it was summer and the humidity was ninety percent; they parked like inert slugs on well-worn furniture, glued to a television set. The Match Game was into reruns.
A Reality Orientation board hung above the nursing station. It was posted with interchangeable plastic letters which announced the day of the year: Wednesday the fifth, the weather outside: cloudy and eighty-one, and the next meal: lunch. The attendant was a square-headed nurse with a small, curt mouth and a Daughters of the Confederacy lapel pin. Her hair was bobbed and peaked in the front like a bluejay. She looked about forty. She smiled at the visitor, but the expression didn't suit her features; it made her look like her teeth were going to squirt out of her skull. "Understand you have a patient here named Patience Gallagher, correct?" said Mifsud, fanning credentials across the counter. "Which one is she? That drooling one strapped to the geriatric chair? How about the old broad with the steaming colostomy bag? By the way, it smells like a fucking shit factory in here."
"Clinically speaking, that's what it is, Mr..." replied the nurse, adjusting her specs, pursing the grin from her lips, looking closely at his card, "...Mifsud. We have thirty-two beds, all of them are full, and most of our residents are incontinent, at least part of the time... We do the best we can, given what we have to work with, which isn't much. Granted, the smell takes some getting used to."
Mifsud drummed his fingernails on the counter. The nurse was taking an inordinate amount of time examining his business card, checking out the back in case there was more, which there wasn't. After a while, she said, "Terra Incognito, huh? Never heard of it. What sort of stories, exactly, do you... publish?
"Human interest stuff. Inspirational, you know. Like Reader's Digest, only a little more cutting-edge. Very well-respected in grocery circles. I'll send you a subscription. For now, all I'd like to do is ask Miss Gallagher a few..."
"Absolutely not," said the nurse, handing back the card. "Residents at Golden Rule are protected from unsolicited contact with anyone but relatives."
Mifsud was used to being cold-shouldered by jittery receptionists; it was the Sixty Minutes syndrome. "Yeah? Do you realize that Miss Gallagher was mentioned in Choke'em Yocum's last statement to the press, right before they executed him on Tuesday? He comes from some crossroads scab right around here someplace, doesn't he?. Maybe he was a relative...?"
"I am aware of the idiotic comments made by that madman, certainly... as you've noticed, we watch a lot of television around here. I can assure you, our Miss Gallagher was not the subject of those comments. She has no idea who he is or what he was talking about."
Mifsud was shamelessly impatient. He interrupted, "Is the administrator around?"
"That's me."
"What about Miss Gallagher's physician?"
"That's me, too. We all wear a number of hats down here, Mr. Mifsud. In addition to administrative duties, I'm the resident speech pathologist, activities director, dietician, and occupational therapist. The last week I put in forty hours was my vacation... As to your publication, whatever it is, Miss Gallagher has no comment to make. I have power of attorney, so that's the end of the story. Now, if there's nothing else I can help you with..."
A number of sullen codgers had begun to gather in a clot around the nursing station. The upgrowth of tension was the most spine-tingling event to have happened in the lobby since Crosby McWhirr aspirated a peach pit. A linebacker-sized aide stepped in from the cafeteria, which doubled as a dayroom, which doubled as a chapel. Mifsud had the clear impression that he was outnumbered.
"Look, ma'am," said Mifsud. "I wanna level with you... Let's cut through the fat. An interview with Patience Gallagher is worth seven hundred dollars to my organization. Twist my arm and I'll make it seven fifty." He figured a colloquialism might woo her: "Cash money, on the barrel head.
One photograph. Five minutes' time. And I'll clear the questions with you first."
The nurse shook her head. "Money's not the issue; the patient's best interest is the issue. This may come a shock to you, Mr. Mifsud, but we actually try to offer our seniors a little dignity at the Golden Rule, wherever that's possible. But let me level with you. Are you sure your organization is playing with a full deck? My Patience Gallagher is not the person Delbert Yocum mentioned. The name's not the same, even the town's different. They sent you on a wild goose chase if they sent you down here to Myettville. You know that, don't you?"
Mifsud shrugged; the nurse was missing the whole point. Truth was susceptible to retouch. "Only way I could be sure is to... ask her." He turned to a nearby, gaunt-looking geezer with spindle legs and a Milk of Magnesia moustache. "Hey, how about you, old timer? You wanna spill? I'm prepared to pay serious scoot for the Patience Gallagher story."
The nurse rose, cleared her throat in an effort to offset an impending temper meltdown. "Mr. Mifsud," she said with closely-clocked severity. "So you understand. Patience Gallagher is ninety-four years old. She's bedridden; has been for some time. She suffers from three or four chronic conditions, including dementia. She's nearly blind. She is on multiple sedatives. She calls everybody 'Lefty'. (God knows why). She has no living relatives, or any unknown relatives deceased in the last day or two, I can assure you. She came to us four years ago, after fracturing her hip in a fall on her driveway; she's supported entirely by the OAA; Medicaid, less her social security... She is a sick, frail old woman and I'll see myself in the guts of Gehenna before I'll have her upset for the amusement of Terra Incogwhatever it is."
"Okay, so bust my nuts. Eight hundred."
The nurse picked up her telephone, which was one of those antique small-town jobs where the operator was right there for you. "Maggie, I need a favor. Ring up Chief Ellison, tell him I've got some damned slick-tongued Yankee tabloid reporter out here harassing my patients." She turned to the gargantuan Negro by the cafeteria. "Tyrone, please escort Mr. Mifsud to his car."
Desperation time. As Tyrone bore down on him, Mifsud shouted, "Say, anybody here know Delbert Yocum personally? Loco boy makes good? It's worth eight hundred bucks..." There were no takers.
Tyrone took his left arm in a hold that tv wrestlers call the Hell-bow Crunch and impelled him toward the front door. "You the bouncer?" said Mifsud, gyrating to avoid damage to his ligaments.
"'Mongst other things," said Tyrone.
The square-headed nurse scurried forward, riding point, easing geriatric zombies out of the way. "...Like I was saying, Mr. Mifsud; we're all of us a little overworked around here, aides especially. You have any idea how difficult it is to find dedicated nursing home staffers in the Mississippi sticks? Most of my patients require help dressing, eating, bathing, going to the toilet... It's all I can do to find bodies warm enough to hire..."
Such as Tyrone. Golden Rule had scraped Tyrone off the scum coating the bottom of the Doxtator labor pool. Tyrone had the single worst job in the history of the planet; he was an underpaid honeydipper in a obscenely dirty institution on the lowest rung of the health care ladder. The residents at Golden Rule were mostly indigent white-trash cast-offs, without family or friends, living on public assistance; virtually all were senile. Changing the diapers of racist octonogerians for minimum wage did not offer Tyrone much in the way of professional gratification.
As soon as they got to the Aerostar, Tyrone said, "Youall want to see that smelly ol' white bitch Gallagher, come around back by the dumpster soon's I run you off; I'll get you back inside."
Bingo. Eight hundred dollars later, Mifsud was leaning into a cramped, multi-bed cell, a poorly ventilated showcase for the cheapest furnishings known to interior decoration, while Tyrone stood guard by the dumpster, sucking down a tallboy of malt liquor. Mifsud studied Patience Gallagher, who lay strapped to a gurney, an oxygen tube dangling from her withers, eyes half-open, mouth gaping, tongue thick and covered with thrush. He paced, squatted, and strained, working out his photographic composition for maximum horror. There wasn't much hope of an interview; Miss Gallagher was so catatonic she actually had cobwebs. Mifsud stuck the camera nine inches away from her face and snapped away at his card of shots until the multiple flashes caused Miss Gallagher to wheeze like a broken radiator and sputter, 'Turn that goddamn light off, Lefty...' A second later, her speckled tongue mashed out of her mouth like a mushroom, as if to herald to some sort of cardiac disaster.
Patience Gallagher's mushroom-tongue photograph appeared on the next Terra Incognito cover, beneath a screaming twenty-point headline: Who's Fault IsIt Anyway?
Morning after, Ellison Dapp, police chief of Doxtator Township, had upon his moss-bearded doorstep an onslaught of Biblical proportions. His normal docket included about ten drunk drivings per month, four or five burglaries, the odd car theft or domestic row. In twenty-one years on the force he'd never seen anything like this blitzkrieg that blew in from the north: in addition to twenty-one ravenous out-of-state SWAT teams from various wireservices, a full crew from the German publication Bild Zeitung, news magazines, and myriad sleazy publications, there came eight Mississippi satellite trucks, and two Jackson news copters, all of which descended onthe Golden Rule like it was G-Day in Kuwait, pillaging the nearby general stores, working locals for absurd angles, bivouacking out back of the Myettville No-Tell Motel and the Crackerjack boarding house once the rooms were taken.
The square-headed nurse went into siege mode, locking the doors and windows and posting Tyrone and his hastily assembled posse around the perimeter, until a legion of city and county police cars showed up, light whirling, to relieve them. The reporters were herded to the periphery of the premises at the point of twelve-gauge riot guns. Whereupon, Tyrone orchestrated a new set of connections out by the dumpster, selling off smuggled snapshots that he himself had taken. Unfortunately, supply and demand being what it is, he found that the going price for a medium head shot of the comatose Miss Gallagher had drastically deteriorated.
Round about then, the Reverend Clevis Sprengle got back into the picture. He was a man of cloth, but a little ink and newsprint didn't seem to hurt him any. He was issuing a press release from his fastidious, foppish little chaplain's office in the State Penitentiary at Wendover, just about the time that the fourth estate plague was devouring Myettville... Turned out that he'd been given charge of the state-issued Bible that Delbert Yocum had carried along his last walk, and now, Sprengle, hoping to spare the elderly Miss Patience Gallagher any further embarrassment, announced that the page-marker used by Mr. Yocum on the morning of his execution had in fact been a tattered page from the old Doxtator township telephone directory he been carrying around forever as a touchstone from his youth. Yocum had, it seemed, merely reached a particular point in his closing remarks, then glanced down and read (or, nearer to the mark, misread)) a random entry aloud. A video recording of the pre-execution ritual appeared to make thatclear; he was looking at the bookmark the instant he'd mispronounced poorold Patience's name. Gallagator. What a putz. And even so, to a man, Yocum'd conned them; Reverend Clevis included. There'd been no death row salvation in the name of Baby Jesus, no penultimate introspection, no remorse, and in the end, nothing was the fault of anybody from anywhere except for Yocum himself. Of course. It was that simple. Choke'em Yocum had just wanted to stir up a bit of posthumous trouble... psychopathic mischief from beyond the pale... the final bird he could flip to a squanderedreality. And if, in doing so, he disrupted a few blameless lives? Innocent lives, arguably? Helpless lives, especially? Well, again, you had to consider... obviously... that was his whole point.
A diabolically effective point, too. By three-thirty local time, the occupying army had slunk back to motherships, storyless, clutching stupid portfolios filled with photographs of a dying old Mississippi crone, which were now about as valuable as Weimar Republic marks. Tyrone had a pocketful of fifty-dollar bills along with a set of business cards from reporters who quickly ceased to give him the time of day, despite his eagerness to peddle 'other stories'.
There's a final note to this one:
Three weeks and four days later, Dallas Barlow was meticulously unwrapping a crate filled with M-16 rifles, the muzzles of which had been stuffed with crumpled-up dunnage. Among the wads of paper was a copy of Terra Incognito magazine. Such packing material was as good as black-market scrip to a man in Barlow's position, since it was one of the few means that he had of gleaning information about the outside world. Barlow held the unfolded page a yard away from his dour, bearded face, zeroed in, and exclaimed, loudly, in his honeyed Gulf Coast accent:
"Hope t' God t' kill me dead if that ain't Miss Gallagator!"
The credibility of any exclamation uttered by Barlow might have been suspect, since he was a lunatic serving an open-ended stint inside the Fontana Institute for Mental Illness, a second-rate, V.A.-run asylum in St. Rocio, Florida. Not only had he been certified nuts by the US Army, but, since his arrival, ten years before, he'd been fed a steady regimen of the antidepressant Pamelor, which made him confused and generally disoriented.
He'd been booted out of the service on a psychiatric discharge; before that, he'd spent fourteen years as a gunnery sergeant at nearby Fort Killion. There's no question that he was violent and delusional, nor much in the end to refute a body of evidence that he was responsible for numerous burglaries and bizarre assaults in the towns around the sprawling Army base. Barlow had wound up in this particular snake pit through an series of convoluted maneuvers arranged by the Courts Martial, which managed to sidestep both a trial for Barlow and its attendant publicity, thus sparing the US military a major, major embarrassment.
The deal with the M-16s was pretty complicated, too. The CIA had been using the hospital as a waystation and temporary warehouse for armaments being covertly smuggled to rebel La Cabala factions in Uruguay. It was the ideal front. If a dollar for every psychiatric patient who babbles about CIA plots went toward the national debt, we'd be home free. Barlow's assignment, for which he was completely and uniquely suited, had been to oversee the shipping and receiving of these weapons. His peers, meanwhile (frazzled junkies, abused Army-wives, bendering alcoholics, and the one or two civilian basket cases who were hanging on until their insurance benefits bled dry) worked on construction-paper crafts and Play-Dough . For the serial rapist and the feds, it was win win; even Barlow had been sane enough to recognize a deal when he saw one.
But, no matter about that. As it happened, the story he was now telling about the old lady in the Terra Incognito photo was perfectly true. He composed a five page letter describing his memories of Miss Gallagator, an old (even then) widow who had lived in the wild, poverty-stricken hollow where he, and his childhood chum, Delbert Yocum, had grown up.
...Her true-enough name was Gallagher, I guess... he wrote. But us kids in the holler never did call her naught but Gallagator, after the swamp critter which that ole foul witch goddamn well favored...
He addressed the letter to Neil Mifsud, who'd bylined the Terra Incognito
article; he copied the Biblical king Nimrod, whom he believed was monitoring
him from Cygnus II, where people went they died.
Outgoing mail was inspected by hospital workers, but not too closely, since patients tended to wax psychotic even in lucid moments, and it was assumed that most newspaper people receiving a letter copied to the king of Babylon would immediately chuck it into the circular. And, most would.
Except for one wiseacre. Neil Mifsud was perfectly prepared, even eager, to write an exposé on Cygnus II based on the testimony of a single mental patient in St. Rocio, and was equally intrigued with the idea that sweet old moribund Miss Gallagher might in fact be a child-pickling baba yaga from a haunted hollow in southern Mississippi.
...Ole Miss Gallagator lived in a little gumtree shed down deep in the cypress swamp... wrote Barlow. ...Wed apon a time to Lefty Trepagnier, a trifling woodcutter, who died by one of her hoodoo gris-gris dolls... Now, as to Yocum, swear to Holy Father, I didn't know till jist now he'd ever kilt them kids and got his damn neck tied to a tree. But I know now. And I know why. It was that chacta witch, Miss Gallagator. If I'm jokin I'm chokin. That Yocum boy had to come up crazy as a Bessie bug. Just had to... For starts, his mammy was a addict hoe who operated her bussiness out a shoddy log house in the holler. From age four or five, Delbert commenced to mostly living on his own. His hoe mammy ust to give Miss Gallagator a dollar per week to watch the boy when she had live-in custom...
He went on to describe a series of systematic tortures he'd known Miss Gallagator to loose upon young Delbert Yocum, including wall-slamming, cigarette-burning, hot-water scalding, under-the-cistern head-holding, and the most creatively sadistic torture in Miss Gallagher's repertoire (next to roasted rat-feeding): she used to hog-tie little Delbert inside a meal sack, suspend him from a meathook in an outbuilding, and slow-smoke him over a hickory fire like a Virginia ham.
...I seed it. Sho as Christian sin, God don't like ugly. Time was, Miss Gallagator stuck a basset hound in the sack with him. I clem up and peeked in the smokehouse windo and seed him swinging, wild crazy, like from the same hangman pole he finely wound up on...
Dallas had seen her perform similar tricks on several neighborhood urchins, including a younger sibling produced by Delbert's mother (an occasional occupational hazard): a small girl who had died of cranial injuries 'of unknown origin' sustained while in the keep of Miss Gallagher. That much, the Doxtator Legal Aid records could, and would, collaborate.
...It don't excuse Delbert from pushing the kind of fire he done pusht, but just wanted to let you know what kind of meanness exists in this world. If I'm lyin I'm dyin. ...Yours in God's enduring watchfulness, Dallas Barlow.
Upon receipt of the correspondence, Neil Mifsud huddled with his editors and underwent a serious, if condensed, soul-search. How best to launch the most lucrative exploitation thereof? The stakes had clearly been raised; this was beyond the nickel-dime stuff they were used to manipulating. Obviously, before the information was disseminated to the public, more photos, more quotes, and more factual distortion was needed. At the source. Down went Mifsud. This time, however, the Aerostar with the Illinois plates was spotted shortly after crossing Mississippi county lines. When, braced against the sickening odor, he showed up again at the Golden Rule, he found the lobby unpolluted by oldsters; Nurse Square-Head was at her post, but Police Chief Ellison Dapp was poised between the door and she, and did not appear eager to let him by. His service revolver was in clear view. Despite commiserating with the enemy, the bouncer had survived; Tyrone stood again by the cafeteria-cum-dayroom, arms folded so that his muscles bulgedlike over-inflated inner tubes. Mifsud winked; he was on to that game.
"Sorry to disappoint youall cream-puff sissies, but cha awready done all the damage you gonna do down heah in Dawxtatah..." drawled Dapp, barring the entrance with his ample gut.
"How's that, boss?" said Mifsud, trying to see around him to where Tyrone was.
"At twe've forty on Friday, August seventh, day after youah last visit, Miss Gallagher suffahed an acute episode...."
Mifsud began hammering out notes: "Beg pardon, Chief... an acute...?
"She died, Mr. Mifsud," came the nurse's voice from afar. Behind her, from the wings, Tyrone was winking through his glare.
Chief Dapp chained the door without a shred of Southern hospitality, and undoubtedly, in violation of fire codes.
Out back, by the dumpster, a couple of oily crows were picking at a dog's carcass. Five minutes later, Tyrone appeared, and clambered into the minivan. They drove to the Timberlake Tavern out on Old 44, found an irrevocably seedy corner, safely out of earshot of the other patrons, where Tyrone, over the next hour and a half, unloaded the details of what proved to be the making of Neil Mifsud's literary career.
Miss Gallagher had died alright, though the 'acute episode' was a reaction to the 50 cc of pancuroniom bromide which the square-headed nurse had injected into her arm. Evidentially, this was the way she ultimately dispatched most of the patients at Golden Rule. This had been going on for the entire duration of Tyrone's tenure; nine years, and was merely the most reprehensible phase of a coordinated scheme to bilk the OAA and Medicaid for services either grossly inflated by the home, or not provided at all; and frequently, for patients who were no longer even alive.
There was more: So systematic were the kickbacks to local officials for their complacency in the scheme that the Doxtator Township police force had been all but privatized; in fact, the county's entire political infrastructure was on the take. The corruption was absolute, ascending all the way up the political food chain, and included the D.A.'s office. Murders like Miss Gallagher's were not only overlooked, they were frequently required. Following the surprise surge of journalists, like the Auschwitz commandants with the Russians bearing down, the Golden Rule had liquidated nearly its entire register of patients. Who needed that kind of heat?
Mifsud pushed out his lip, scribbling notes, thinking, nodding, thinking, scribbling, thinking... What to do, what to do? Hmmm... Ironic, really... to have uncovered a genuine scandal in the quest for bullshit.
Rather than sully the reputation of his employer by printing a legitimate news story, Mifsud immediately quit Terra Incognito, wrote a bestseller about Mississippi's sin belt for Random House, which won a Pulitzer Prize and subsequently made him great, pustulant, throbbing wads of cash.
...Worse than the rank stench of death is the smell of the Golden Rule's neglected, abused, robbed, and murdered living... began Mifsud's painfully composed, if fascinating treatise...
Tyrone was briefly a hero. The Deep Throat of Doxtatorgate. He'd single-handedly burned the entire Caucasian powertrain in southern Mississippi from the vantage of a repulsive honkytonk in Myettville. Unfortunately, he didn't enjoy the rewards for long. With his name and photo displayed on the book's jacket, detectives up in Tupelo recognized him as a bail-jumper wanted on charges of sexual battery involving his thirteen-year-old niece. He was re-arrested, tried, and sentenced to six years in the Carthage state penitentiary, where the warden happened to be on the payroll of the Dixie Mafia. Eight days later, Tyrone was bludgeoned to death in the prison yard.
Meanwhile, advised by his lawyer that the value of his grisly execution souvenir was peaking, canny Reverend Sprengle put his Yocum Bible up for special auction at Christie's East at ten in the morning on the following Tuesday. Included in the package was the Patience Gallagher directory page. Bidding was brisk; the book was sold for forty-five hundred dollars to a memorabilia collector out of Racine, Wisconsin, who also purchased the steering wheel from Lee Harvey Oswald's automobile, four paintings by John Wayne Gacy, and a tile from Hitler's bathtub. Delbert Yocum's cheap, prison-issue, leather-grained Bible was the gem of the lot. What had notched-up the value were the handscrawlings made by Yocum along the page margins; some meandering insights into his view of himself and the death penalty. For example, between Deuteronomy and Kings, he'd written:
...the Rajahs in India used to strap the transgressor to an elephant's leg...
...the Chinese would cut away chunks of the culprit's skin over a period of weeks until he died...
...the Brits boiled decapitated heads of executed cons in salt and cumin and hung them from London Bridge...
...all of which implies a head boiler, a skin chunker, a leg strapper. Who precisely applied for those jobs? What sort of man flips the switch on his brother? That's the paradox... Executing a murderer requires a murderer.
On this regard, Yocum was quite correct. But, that's hardly the point. Is it?
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