Coffey's Hands

9

THE NIGHT BEFORE Delacroix’s execution came down hotter and muggier than ever—eighty-one degrees by the thermometer outside the Admin ready-room window when I clocked in at six. Eighty-one degrees at the end of October, think of that, and thunder rumbling in the west like it does in July. I’d met a member of my congregation in town that afternoon, and he had asked me, with apparent seriousness, if I thought such unseasonable weather could be a sign of the Last Times. I said that I was sure not, but it crossed my mind that it was Last Times for Eduard Delacroix, all right. Yes indeed it was.

Bill Dodge was standing in the door to the exercise yard, drinking coffee and smoking him a little smoke. He looked around at me and said, “Well, lookit here. Paul Edgecombe, big as life and twice as ugly.”

“How’d the day go, Billy?”

“All right.”

“Delacroix?”

“Fine. He seems to understand it’s tomorrow, and yet it’s like he don’t understand. You know how most of em are when the end finally comes for them.”

I nodded. “Wharton?”

Bill laughed. “What a comedian. Makes Jack Benny sound like a Quaker. He told Rolfe Wettermark that he ate strawberry jam out of his wife’s pussy.”

“What did Rolfe say?”

“That he wasn’t married. Said it must have been his mother Wharton was thinking of.”

I laughed, and hard. That really was funny, in a low sort of way. And it was good just to be able to laugh without feeling like someone was lighting matches way down low in my gut. Bill laughed with me, then turned the rest of his coffee out in the yard, which was empty except for a few shuffling trusties, most of whom had been there for a thousand years or so.

Thunder rumbled somewhere far off, and unfocused heat lightning flashed in the darkening sky overhead. Bill looked up uneasily, his laughter dying.

“I tell you what, though,” he said, “I don’t like this weather much. Feels like something’s gonna happen. Something bad.”

About that he was right. The bad thing happened right around quarter of ten that night. That was when Percy killed Mr. Jingles.