Nebraska

It was hot. Not your garden-variety summer heat. This was the kind that crawls down your collar like a pickpocket, lays its heavy hands on your lungs and doesn’t stop pressing till you’re gasping like a beached fish. The kind of heat that made cigars curl in their boxes and people curl in their beds.

She stood in the yard at dusk where the light, thin and old as water left too long in a rusted basin, slanted across the raw grass and the leaning porch posts and the road beyond on which the dust did not settle so much as hover like tremulous damselflies in a kind of exhausted suspension above the earth, twirling that baton slowly with one wrist while the other hand with chewed nails hung loose at her side and her face bore that expression — not innocence and not knowing either but something older than both, some stillness like the stillness of cattle standing belly-deep in a muddy creek under the August sun — and I sat watching from the car with the motor ticking and shaking beneath me and the sawed-off .410 across my lap, the metal warm from my hands and from the heat of the day itself, and it seemed to me then, though perhaps it only seems so now with the memory of blood lying backward across all things like sunset across a field, that neither she nor I had ever possessed any true beginning at all but had merely emerged out of that land already burdened with the weight of our ending, as though the old earth itself had dreamt us up in a moment of weariness or spite.

They wrote in the papers that we went driving westward from Lincoln across Nebraska and into Wyoming, and that 10 innocent persons lost their lives to us there among the highways and gas stations and isolated farmhouses where the screen doors slap once and are still again and where a lamp at night shines out across miles of emptiness like some small and stubborn denial against the dark, but they wrote it as the papers always write such things, arranging death into sequence and motive because they cannot endure the thought that violence moves through the world not as interruption but as its natural weather, and I remember the road unspooling endlessly before us beneath a sky bleached almost white with heat and her beside me smoking with the window down and one bare elbow resting outside against the rushing air while from the radio came songs broken by static and distance so that the voices sounded less sung than drowned, and each town we entered seemed already abandoned before we arrived, the people moving slow beneath the awnings and storefront signs as though exhausted by generations of wind and failed harvests and disappointments too ordinary to bother gussying up.

The first killing — and afterward I could never separate the first from the others because memory had mingled them together into one dolorous concussion of dust and gunfire and faces caught startled in the instant before understanding the convulsion of the world — the first killing seemed to occur not by decision but by inevitability, as though the gun rose of its own accord from my lap and the world itself leaned toward the blast, and after that there was no moment at which we might have stopped because stopping belongs to people who believe themselves bound toward some future different from their past, whereas we had already crossed into that territory where acts no longer accumulate into consequence but merely reveal what has always been waiting underneath, and sometimes after a shooting she would laugh softly and touch my arm with her fingers stained faintly of tobacco and gasoline and we would drive on through the evening with the windows open while the prairie darkened around us and the telephone poles passed in endless procession like the counting of years, and for a little while there existed between us something almost resembling peace, though perhaps peace is only the name doomed people give to the brief intervals in which they manage to forget themselves and have a little fun.

Care for a Dr Pepper?

Then the capture, the courthouse, the trial, all of it proceeding with that exhausted solemnity by which communities attempt to reassure themselves that justice exists because they have gathered enough men in coats and badges and black robes to declare it so, and I can still see the jurors seated there refusing my eyes except in quick furtive glances, as though they feared not me but the possibility of recognizing some reflection of themselves within me, and the prosecutor speaking of morality and the sanctity of human life while outside beyond the windows the same wind bent the same trees and carried the same dust through the streets exactly as it had before any of the dead had drawn breath at all, and when the verdict came down it seemed less like judgment than the mere continuation of a process set in motion long before my birth, perhaps before my father’s birth, perhaps before any of us, back in those first dim hours when God separated darkness from a deeper darkness and called one half day and the other night and left mankind to wander bewildered between them past crumbling grain elevators and under the faded banners fluttering over small-town gas stations.

Now they keep me in this cell beneath the prison where the nights smell of iron and old water and the footsteps of guards pass and repass beyond the bars with the monotonous regularity of a clock marking time not toward redemption but merely toward conclusion, and somewhere below waits the room with the chair and the leather straps hanging from it like tack in a stable and the wires coiled patient as snakes, and they say that when midnight comes they will lead me there and bind my wrists and ankles and place the cap upon my head and a man standing behind a wall will pull a switch and send that invisible fire through me until my body arches backward and my teeth crack together and whatever it is inside a man that suffers and remembers and desires is cast out into that great black vacancy they speak of in whispers because they fear to imagine it too clearly.

And still I think of her: of the baton turning in the evening light, of her laughter drifting across the seat beside me while the tires hummed against the road, of the scent of her hair mingling with cigarette smoke and the dry smell of harvested fields, and I want them to bring her there at the end, to seat her close enough that when the current takes me and snaps my head back I may look once more upon the only thing in all my life that ever seemed to choose me willingly, because a man condemned to vanish ought at least to be permitted the comfort of carrying one human face with him into oblivion.

They asked me why I did it, over and over, as though somewhere hidden inside me there existed a single clean reason waiting to be uncovered and displayed like a coin produced from behind the ear of a child, but there are no reasons, only currents, old dark currents moving beneath the crust of things, beneath the wheat fields and the pancake breakfasts and the fowl suppers at the Pentecostal churches where people kneel praying against the very nature that bred them, and perhaps some men are born with too little flesh between themselves and that ancient malice so that they hear it always murmuring beneath the ordinary noises of the world — the wind in dry grass, tires on pavement, the creak of porch swings at dusk — and eventually mistake its voice for their own.