“I need to be executed” part 1
It had been over three years since he'd gotten a message from the kid. “I need to be executed,” it read. Well, it wasn't the first time he had done an execution scene; really, most of the guys who came to sample the noose were into that, to some degree or another. But something felt off. Of his many clients, this kid still stuck out; but after five trips to the gallows, the man thought he was done. Three years.... So he was twenty-three now; he ought to be done with school. He could be married, a dad, a grad student; three years at his age could go a lot of ways. For all the man knew, he could have joined the marines. Given that it was the same account, he probably wasn't in prison, but then, that's the last thing the man would have expected anyway. In the end the man just replied, “?” and went upstairs to bed.
“You should stop reading your email just before bed,” his partner said.
“And you say that because?”
“Your face says 'I have something on my mind.'”
“Well, I just got a message from the 'whatever you want' kid.”
“He was what, three years ago?”
“Yeah, and not a word since, and now he says he wants an execution.”
“OK, well, you've done that enough for other guys.”
“It's just that we didn't do anything like role play, not ever. Everything was utterly real with him, no acting at all. Well, at least not from him, but really, you remember how he put me on the spot. The only act I ever pulled on him was the coin trick.”
“So he wants you to hang him dead?”
“I don't know. I threw the ball back in his court.”
'Well, then, you just roll over here and I'll distract you while you wait.”
Waiting lasted until the next morning. The message came in: “I need you to execute me.”
“You want me to hang you again?”
“You'll find out when I get there.”
The man sat back. What did he mean by this? He started to reply, but another message came in.
“I can pay. Can I come this weekend?”
He looked at his schedule: a kid coming, a newbie, wanting a hanging too. He sighed.
“Thank you. I'll see you at the yard gate.”
The man scratched his head. What the hell was going on here? It didn't sound like he was looking for role play.
When the man came out of the door to the yard, Logan was already standing at the gate, dressed in jeans and a gray T shirt and wearing an army pack, and looking very solemn. The man went to the gate and opened it.
“I've come to turn myself in, sir,” the kid said.
“Have you? OK then, set that pack aside, turn around, and hands behind your back.” Logan complied, and the man cuffed him. “What's in the pack?”
“Didn't want to wear it here?”
“Against regulations, sir.”
“But the regulations don't apply inside.”
“No sir, not if you say they don't.”
“And you brought it because you think you should be wearing it here.”
“All right then.” He picked up the pack by its straps. “Let's go inside.” And he took the kid through the gate and into the entry room, where the kid went to stand on the footprints.
“Still the model prisoner, I see.”
“Yes sir.” He stood, the man thought, almost at attention.
“Smith, sir. Logan Smith.”
“I see. And if and when you change into that uniform, is it going to say 'Smith' over the pocket?”
“No sir. It's not going to say anything. I left the name tapes at home.”
“But your name is Logan?”
“So, soldier Logan alias Smith, what rank do you hold?”
“Corporal, sir. I made corporal last month, sir, right after— we got back.”
“OK, Corporal Smith, you get into that uniform, and then we can go from there.”
So Logan stripped to his underwear and put his clothes in a bin, same as before; then he opened the pack and pulled out his uniform, and in a few short minutes was dressed as smartly as he wore his BDUs and boots on his last visit, standing on the footprints.
“OK, then, hands on your head and you know what's next.” And he pulled out a belly chain and cuffed Logan in front. “Let's go.” They went out the door, but not to the gate; instead, the man opened the door to the interrogation room and led Logan in.
“I supposed I should lock you down, for old time's sake.”
“Yes sir.” So the man padlocked the belly chain to the wall, as before, and then he sat down across from Logan.
“We have a lot to catch up on, after three years. You're twenty-three now.”
“I kept thinking of you as 'the kid,' but looking at you, you're no way a kid any more.” Logan said nothing. “You fill that uniform out rather nicely. Ought to model for men's photo sites, really. But I'm guessing that's hardly the beginning of what's happened, isn't it?”
“So you took my advice? Went and joined the national guard?”
“Yes sir. Two years ago.”
“That's all? Nothing technical?”
“No sir. I still have my career to think about. And I didn't want to sign up for a long term.”
'Plus two summers of fire fighting makes you kind of an expert with a shovel. So why did you do it?”
“It's like you said, sir. What you taught me, served me well there.”
“Not patriotism? Duty to country?”
“Not like that, sir, but yes, I was proud to swear the oath.”
“Well, now I know what you do with your weekends, but the rest of the week? I assume you graduated?”
“And got a job in your field? Or is it grad school?”
“My uncle got me a position working in the ag department labs, sir, but I'm going to grad school in the fall.”
“And what do you do at the labs?”
“Well, I couldn't do the internship because of the guard, but I did do an independent study with him, analyzing apple lineages. And now I've been working with one of his colleagues on sorghum genomes.”
“Sounds very technical. But you're going to grad school?”
“Because that's where my wife's job is now.”
“Your wife? So, not a virgin.”
“October, a year and a half ago.”
“No. She does political research. She got a job with a think tank. She's got an apartment and I'm going to join her as soon as I get my guard assignment lined up.”
“Does she know about here?”
“And what does she think about it?”
“She says she understands. She says she likes a man with some secrets. And we do play with the handcuffs from time to time.”
“Just me. She has her own things she likes.”
“No sir, that's none of your business.”
“You know, that's the first time I've heard anything like that from your mouth. But sure, we can let that lie. And she knows you're here now.”
“OK, so that's your life thus far, have I missed anything? Oh, right. Not a virgin, so is anything coming of it?”
Logan looked down for a moment, then said, “we're expecting our first kid in three months.”
“Congratulations. Do you know what you're getting?”
“A boy, we think. At least that's what we saw on the ultrasound.”
“And knowing you, not a surprise baby.”
“No sir. What with her new job and the assistantship they've offered me and my guard money, we decided we didn't want to wait any longer. And they're going to let her work from home some and bring the kid to the office.”
“Very prudent. But a little risky. Just your style.”
“I do.” The man looked at his watch and stood up. “We're going to have to break things off here, because if everything is going according to schedule, my partner is about to arrive in the van with a kid just about the same age you were when you first came to me. So I'm going to need to supervise that. But when he's settled in, you and I are going to have to discuss exactly why you're here.”
So the man took the padlock off and led Logan down through the gate and to the cells. “I suppose I could put you in the other cell for a change of scenery, but you've had the same cell every other visit, and I think for old times' sake it's going to be your cell this time too.” So he unlocked the cell, and took off Logan's cuffs and chain, and left him locked away. “Want anything to read?”
“OK, then,” and he headed through the gate and closed it with its invariable crash, and headed down the hall to the entry room to get things ready. Fifteen minutes later, he heard the garage door start to open, and he went to meet the van.
“Thanks again for helping out,” he said to his partner.
“No problem at all. I could see you were going to need it. And this kid looks to be fun. Well, not fun, exactly, but you'll see in a minute.” He opened the van doors, then the inner door, then climbed in; and a moment later he came back out, followed by a kid who could have been Logan's brother. Not that he resembled Logan that much, except that he was very skinny. He was taller, and the hair was different, and he had striking gray eyes set in his bony face. But he was Logan all over again: the same reserve, the same skittishness, the same nerves. The man wondered if it was like this for school teachers running into their old students and then welcoming their siblings. OK, buckle down, get to work.
“Through the door and stand on the yellow footprints,” he said, and he and his partner followed as the kid shuffled off and into the next room. “You will address me as 'Sir', you will answer 'yes sir and 'no sir'. Is that clear?”
“OK, clothes in the bin, get showered, back out here and in your uniform on the footprints. You've got ten minutes.”
“Yes sir.” And he peeled off his clothes and headed into the shower.
“Quite the beanpole,” said the man to his partner when the kid had gone.
“Yeah, and nervous as hell. So, how do we divvy this up?”
“I figure I have a lot of talking ahead with the other guy, so if you can take care of this fellow until tonight, that'd be good.”
“And he swings in the night?”
“Same as usual. We'll have to see about tomorrow morning though. I want to talk to this guy too, but I may be busy. I'm going to try stalling the other guy until the afternoon. He insisted on his name.”
“Well, not exactly. Says his name is Smith, which it isn't. But his first name is Logan. Are you going to want to talk to him too?”
“I'm guessing not now. This is coming across as something between you and him. Though I'm terribly curious.”
“OK. I may need the car.”
“All yours.” Just then the kid came out, dried himself off very self-consciously, and dressed. “Stand on the footprints, hands on your head,” the partner said, and the kid complied. The partner chained and cuffed him, and then they all went to the gate, which was opened with a crash that made the kid jump, and led him to the other cell, opened it, put him in and unchained him, and locked him in.
“Here's your toiletries. You get dinner tonight, lights out at nine, back on at seven, then breakfast and lunch. If you want something to read we have some books and the like.”
“We'll come and get you when it's time.”
“Yes sir.” The man could see that the kid wanted to know when his hanging was, but was too cowed to ask.
“Right then.” They turned to Logan. “OK, prisoner, stand in the center, face the wall, hands on your head,” but Logan was already in position, his boots spread. The partner unlocked the cell and the man chained and cuffed Logan, then led him out and through the gate and down the hall to the interrogation room, and sat him in his usual place.
“So you want to be executed.”
“Well, there's only so far I can go with roleplaying that.”
“You want me to really execute you. Hang you by the neck until dead. You know I won't do that.”
“Do you really want to die? You don't need me for that. You just need the nerve, which you've certainly shown me here. But I'm guessing that it's not the dying part that matters here.”
“Good, because you have a wife, and a kid on the way, and they will need you, and I'm guessing that there are a lot of other people you would hurt if you killed yourself. You've taken on a lot of responsibilities now, adult responsibilities, and now that you've picked them up, it seems to me that you're obligated to carry through. And really, knowing you, I think you understand all this, I think you would never abandon them this way. And nothing you've said tells me that you are in such a bad way that you see death as the only way out. Am I missing something?”
“Not really, sir. At least not like that.”
“So you don't want to die.”
“No sir. But I need to be executed.”
“Why? Did you kill someone?”
“Aided or abetted someone else murdering someone?” But Logan did not reply. “OK, so there was a murder?”
“Well, that's good, because I really don't want to have to use this place as a real jail while I call the cops to turn you in. But something happened.”
“And I'm guessing because you wanted to wear your uniform that it has something to do with that.”
“Wait a minute. You were deployed to DC?”
“For the president's nonsensical crime cleanup.”
“And something happened.”
“Well, not there, exactly, but that's part of it.”
“OK, so what's the rest?”
“So, they took a bunch of us, they took us and trained us in basic police and crowd control tactics, and then they shipped us to Washington, for us to stand around on the streets.” He chuckled bitterly. “It was a farce. We all knew it was a farce. I'd been down there earlier with my wife when she was getting the apartment, in a place north of the city, called Glenmont. Lots of apartments, not as cheap as we would have liked because it's the end of the Metro line and you pay for that, but it's either that or drive into the city. Half the neighbors are from Central America, or from Africa; you get used to smelling other people's foreign cooking. Restaurants, if you want American food you have to go to McDonald's. So anyway, they put us downtown, around the Capitol and the Supreme Court. The place is already crawling with cops. Besides Metropolitan police—that's city cops—it seems like each agency has its own force. Then they moved us east, towards Anacostia. That's where the black people are, but the area just east of the Capitol is rich people—well, not rich but lawyers and such. Actual rich people don't live in the city. So, I don't know, maybe we stopped some burglaries, some muggings—“ He stopped for a second. “You know, I didn't even know what the word meant. I'm not really a country boy, but I'd never heard the word out here.
“Anyway, after a few months of this, the show's over, and we pack up to go home. Only, we don't go home. Well, they put us on buses to Camp Atterbury—“
“Just south of Indianapolis. They put us up there for the night, and then we got back on the buses and they took us to Minneapolis. That's where we met up with the ICE guys.” He shook his head before continuing. “They were a bunch of clowns. Well, hooligans anyway. I mean, us guard guys, we're not the sharpest soldiers on the planet, but they go over the rules of war at length with us, and I for one take the oath seriously, so the Bill of Rights means a lot to me. And these guys, they were just goons. Dressed up like they were going into battle, masking their faces because they were afraid someone would know who they were. Honestly, the protesters were a lot more disciplined. And they were accosting people just because they looked foreign, and picking fights with the bystanders and protesters.”
“Did you see this yourself?”
“I didn't see any of the the really bad stuff, no. But it was in the papers, and on the news, and on Twitter and stuff like that. And we did see the agents, sometimes. We didn't go on raids; they just deployed us around to make people nervous.
“And then they shot that woman, and then they shot the guy. They just killed him. It was a fucking execution, from what we saw. And they shouldn't have killed her either. But they were trigger-happy, they were always trigger-happy. No discipline. And they won't see any discipline either.”
“And what's your part in this?”
“We were there to make it possible. I figure if they could have gotten away with having us form a perimeter to keep everyone else out so the ICE guys could do what they pleased without any onlookers, they would have. But our commanders wouldn't do that. I heard they didn't want to be there at all. But they had no choice, and we had no choice, and so we were there like an occupying army. A bunch of combat engineers who took a gun from a weapons locker to the range every year to stay qualified, and then locked it back away the rest of the time. We stood around with guns on street corners to try to keep the ICE opposition down— which didn't work anyway— and to keep the immigrants scared and easy to round up, whether or not they had a right to be there. And not just illegals. They were grabbing anyone who looked foreign the wrong way.”
“And so you feel responsible?”
“We were all responsible. I was there to help them, to help them get away with what they were doing. I helped them snatch people. I helped kill them, even if I didn't do any of it.”
“And if I say you're making a mountain out of a molehill?”
“You weren't there, sir. And I shouldn't have been there. None of us should.”
“There was no emergency. The only civil disorder was from the ICE guys terrorizing people. I almost felt like they were seeing what they could get away with, putting us on the streets.”
“The people calling the shots. I don't really know who. But people in Washington.”
“Well, maybe they were. I haven't been following this closely, but it disturbs me too. But I just cannot see at this point what my role in this is supposed to be.” The man held up a hand to forestall a response. “I said I couldn't really execute you. And right now I can't see what I can do instead of that. So I need to go off and think things over. And get some sleep, which you no doubt need as well. And for now I'm going to keep this to myself, but I imagine my partner is likely to ask you about it too.” He got up and freed Logan from the bench. “Back to your cell, prisoner, and I'll see you in the morning.”
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