Thicker Than Blood - Crouch Blake - Страница 126

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The three-legged chair was constructed of massive oak timbers. It rested on rubber matting and was bolted to the concrete floor. Straps ran across my brother's lap, chest, arms, and forearms, and a leg piece was attached to his shaven right calf. It held a sponge soaked in a saline solution between his skin and an electrode. Orson also wore a metal headpiece. Another dripping sponge rested on his scalp, separating another electrode from his skin so it would not catch fire when the electricity came. Electrically-conducive gel was smeared about the crown of my brother's head, and it shone in the hard light of the execution chamber.

The man with the phone looked at the superintendent and shook his head. The superintendent approached Orson, and his footsteps echoed through the speakers in the witness room. He glanced at us through the glass with a solemnity that put knots in my stomach, and then he turned to my brother. He said his full name, Anthony Orson Thomas, the way they always say it, and preceded to read the death warrant. When he had finished he said, "Mr. Thomas, you can make a statement now if you wish."

Orson could not move his head, but his eyes passed over the witnesses. They came back to me, and he smiled as he stared into my eyes. "William," he said, in a voice that was almost nostalgic. "When you embrace it, you'll find escape, but not until. The longer you wait, the stronger it grows, and when it finally does take control, there'll be nothing you can do to stop it." A touch of sadness entered his voice. "We could've done something amazing, brother."

His eyes moved to the other witnesses. "Any families of the victims here?" The women beside me tensed and muttered under her breath, and a man sitting near the glass stood up.

"You killed my brother you son of a bitch. I came here to watch you die."

"I remember your brother," Orson said. "He cried like a baby while I slit his throat. He begged me…" The speakers in the witness room went dead, and the escort told the man by the glass to sit down.

"Are they gonna do it now?" A woman asked. Our escort nodded.

The executioner slid a leather hood over Orson's face and returned to the control panel. I remembered everything the escort staff had told us as I watched the executioner close the safety switch and engage the circuit breaker. He put his finger on the execution switch and looked at the superintendent. I held my breath. When the superintendent nodded his head, I turned away. I stared at my watch and counted through the three cycles:  2,300 volts for eight seconds, 1,000 volts for twenty-two seconds, 2,300 volts again for eight seconds. The gasps and uninhibited utterances of the other witnesses made me nauseous, and I was thankful that the airtight glass kept the sweet scent of charred flesh from my nose.

When the current was stopped, I lifted my head. The execution chamber looked no different except for a thin layer of smoke that encompassed the room. The five men were staring at Orson's body, and with the mask and the headpiece supporting his head, it looked only motionless, not dead. After a moment, the physician examined Orson's body for vital signs. He shook his head when he had finished and signed the death certificate. The man holding the phone notified the Governor that the execution had been carried out, and we were led from the witness room.

I'm sitting on my bed in the Big Horn Motel. It's 12:15, and moonlight is streaming into the room, illuminating these pages. I've just cracked the seal on a fifth of Jack Daniels, and I'm going to get as shit-faced tonight as I've been in a long, long time.

There is a memory that has been haunting me for the last hour. We're eight years old, it's summertime, and Orson and I are playing in the woods under a warm, Michigan sky. Like many young boys, we're fascinated with animals, and Orson catches a lizard that's scampering across a rotten log.

We're thrilled with the find, and I tell Orson to hold the lizard down. With a smile on his face, he does, and I extract a magnifying glass from my pocket. The sun is bright, and in no time, there is a small, blinding dot on the lizard's slimy skin. The light burns through, and Orson and I look at each other and laugh, enthralled as the lizard squirms to get away.

"It's my turn!" He shouts. "You hold him."

We spend the entire afternoon torturing the poor creature. When we're finished I throw it into the grass, but Orson insists on taking it with him. "I own it now," he says. "It's mine."

I can see the skyline of mountains rising above the trees as plainly as if it were day. The ice fields and patches of snow in the high country glisten in the yellow light, and I'm thinking that I may stay in this country for quite some time. There's something about the openness here that draws me. The East is claustrophobic, so dense with trees that you often miss the sky. But here, the sky is unavoidable. From horizon to horizon it extends. It's bigger than anything, and if you need to, you can lose yourself in it.

DESERT PLACES ALTERNATE ENDING

I've let it slip in a number of interviews that there were major alternate endings to both Desert Places and Locked Doors, and over the years, I've gotten quite a bit of email from fans wanting to read these original endings.

I completed my first draft of Desert Places in the winter of 2000, working with my writing professor at UNC Chapel-Hill, the great Bland Simpson. At the time, I thought I had just finished the best novel I'd written to date. The ending was a gutsy, surprise mindfuck if there ever was one. I got an agent with this draft, but when she tried to sell it, a number of editors had issues with how the book ended. Maybe it was a little too ambitious. After a lot of hand-wringing, I decided to rewrite the last hundred pages of the book (that rewrite went on to become my first published novel and the version of Desert Places with which all of my readers are familiar).

One of the beautiful things about ebooks is that I can now share the original, uncut ending of Desert Places.

This picks up at the moment when Andrew Thomas is hiding in Orson's house in Woodside, Vermont. He hears a Lexus pull up, and watches Orson get out of the car. In the original ending, Andy sees someone else, and it takes the book in a completely different, much darker direction (the last two chapters are stunners).

I'm still very proud of the original ending, and it's a substantial chunk of text, clocking in at 22,000 words, or roughly 100 printed pages. This alternate ending has never been edited, proofread, or copyedited. It is in the same raw, uncut, unpolished state from which I downloaded it off an 11-year-old, 3.5-inch floppy disk.

I hope you enjoy this exclusive look at a Desert Places of a different feather.

# # #

The alternate ending takes its turn into left field in the existing Chapter 24, following this paragraph:

The low shudder of a car engine pulled me to the window. I split the blinds with two fingers and watched a white Lexus sedan turn into Orson’s driveway. I waited, my stomach twisting into knots. If Orson came in through the back door, he’d see the broken glass...

ALTERNATE ENDING

The slim figure of a woman, between forty and fifty, with frosted hair that may have once been jet black, walked up the sidewalk towards the front porch. She wore a long, navy trench coat that dropped to her ankles and carried a brown briefcase in her right hand. The sky darkened fast behind her, and as she ascended the steps and disappeared from view, my mind turned to chaos.

When I heard the deadbolt turning, I ran from the study, through the living room, and past the staircase. I turned right into the dining room and stood by the open passageway which connected it to the kitchen. From here I could watch the sunroom where I'd made my entry, and make sure she never saw the broken glass.

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