Sunday
The best trick Floyd can do is the one where he has you write your name on a dollar bill and then makes it disappear, only to be found later buried in his shoe.
“I’m a reporter,” Floyd says to the waitress as he takes another bite of a miniature spinach quiche he took from her plate. It’s his third one. His best friend from college, Greg, always has delicious food at his parties. Tonight, a full six days away from Derrick Thomas’s execution, Floyd is the poorest one in the room, surrounded by bankers, lawyers, and other variations of the power-player pedigree. That has not stopped him from dividing the room into thirds. He has positioned himself in the section mostly filled with men over the age of forty-five. His logic behind this is quite simple. By surrounding himself with men close to twenty years his senior, he, for once, is a very eligible bachelor.
“What do you do?” Floyd asks the waitress. “Other than this, I mean.” He’s sure she does a lot of things. After all, he’s always done a lot of things. Like play with numbers. Floyd has a great mind for numbers. He can tell you the top three scoring averages in the Sonics game he’s currently missing. He can tell you the top three scoring averages to a tenth of a point.
Michael Jordan: 26.3 points per game. Gary Payton: 22.4. Shawn Kemp: 18.6.
Floyd: 0.0
If you add up all those points per game, if those three superstars played average on this given night, they’d score 67.3 points, which is .7 below the 68 Derek Thomas scored on his first court-mandated IQ test. That total of 67.3 points is a full 2.7 below the legal cut-off that defines full mental capabilities, the magic number of 70, which just so happens to be the same number Derek Thomas barely exceeded on his second IQ test, this time administered by a different state-appointed psychologist, one who was declared more of an expert in the field.
So now, in less than a week, history will be made. It will be the first execution of a formerly mentally retarded prisoner in Washington State history. Floyd will be there Saturday morning, careful not to fog up the viewing glass as he writes down every last thing Derrick Thomas does.
An older man across the room from Floyd smiles at him and then nods, but Floyd cannot place him. The man has a scar awkwardly along his jaw line. It is bright red. Floyd’s stopped listening to the waitress to stare at that scar, but then his eyes drift over to the man’s wife and try to decide if she used to be attractive before gravity and wrinkles did her in. Floyd looks back at the waitress in front of him. She’s stopped talking and must’ve asked something that needed a response because she stands there, just looking at him. Fourth round pick. She’s definitely a fourth-round pick if he were trying to select a basketball team out of the women he’d seen at this party. Got some height so she could play the four, the power forward position, but from the looks of it, not much coordination. Still, Floyd would love to stick that big butt under the basket.
“Who do you work for? Times or P.I.?” asks the waitress, breaking the silence.
“Times.”
“Like it there?”
Floyd shrugs and ups his quiche count to four so he doesn’t have to answer. He stuffs it in his mouth. In one bite. This is a big party, an opulent party, a Jay Gatsby type of party. There’s a band playing in a corner. A real honest-to-God band. Floyd knows no one here other than Greg and his wife. That’s why, he tells himself, that’s why he’s talking to some fourth-round pick waitress.
“It’s interesting work, to say the least,” Floyd says
He makes eye contact with one of the other servers darting around the room. She’s cute enough and definitely cuter than the one he’s talking to now. Second-rounder perhaps. The next time she comes near him, Floyd swears to himself that he’ll try to start up a conversation, but when she makes eye contact with him, he quickly looks away, moving his eyes around the room until he finds Greg. Once he does, Floyd raises his glass in a mock toast. Greg smiles back. It makes Floyd want to remember the good times but he can’t settle on a particular one. Nothing comes to mind.
Greg’s wife-to-be, Florence, corners Floyd. She’s brought a girl over with her, one with long blonde hair and a face of someone who’s afraid of all her friends getting married before her. The waitress disappears. One moment she’s there, the next she’s not. This makes Floyd smile. What a trick. He wonders how she did it.
The band cues up a classic, Can’t Take My Eyes Off You by Frankie Vallie. Floyd shudders upon hearing the first note. Your skin would be like heaven to touch. Florence’s friend, Cheryl, walks and talks, just like a real person. Floyd is surprised. They make small talk. Floyd finds it isn’t as boring as usual.
“What do you do, Floyd?” Cheryl asks.
“Magician’s assistant.”
Florence frowns and then pouts in a way that reminds Floyd of curdled milk. “God damn it, Floyd.”
Cheryl laughs at an inside joke she doesn’t understand. “I don’t believe you,” she says.
“Why not?”
“Because your face, it’s not pretty enough,” and then she puts her hand on Floyd’s chest, “And your boobs, they’re not big enough. Don’t you have to be a blonde?”
Floyd takes a sip of his drink to keep a straight face. It’s just water. “I’ve seen brunettes before in shows. Anywhere north of here, up in Canada, you’ll find a brunette.”
Cheryl laughs and Floyd cracks a smile. Florence keeps pouting, her face registering that the conversation is moving on without her. “He’s a reporter at the Times, on the Local News desk,” she says but no one is listening to her. What a trick. She’s fading from view as Cheryl keeps her hand on Floyd’s chest.
“Want to dance?” Cheryl asks. Floyd nods and takes her by the hand, not particularly surprised that Cheryl didn’t wait for him to ask her for the honor. I love you, baby, and if it’s quite alright, I need you, baby, to warm a lonely night.
Sing it, Frankie. Floyd puts one hand on Cheryl’s hip and then presses their palms together. Floyd’s a nimble guy, no one has ever said otherwise. They move like they’ve been together for years. First-round pick. With foot speed like this, Cheryl could run the point.
“I have a question,” Cheryl says. Floyd stiffens slightly. He hates when people say that. Nothing good could ever follow. But then she leans closer against his chest so he can feel her hair sticking to his neck and when she looks up at him with those blue eyes, he makes the mistake of relaxing just a little bit too much.
“Of all the jobs, why a magician’s assistant?”
You’d be like heaven to touch. I want to hold you so much.
Floyd stays silent, dancing her around the floor. The band wraps up the song. Can’t Take My Eyes Off You fades away, much to Floyd’s chagrin, leaving him and Cheryl dancing to the silence. He doesn’t stop moving though. It must look peculiar, the two of them moving so gracefully to nothing. Floyd thinks it must be like watching a cloud go across the sky or something equally cheesy and cliché.
“That’s the most played song in radio history. Did you know that?” he says to Cheryl. The band starts playing some slow number Floyd imagines the old man with the red scar will soon enjoy at his funeral. He knows Cheryl isn’t listening to him telling her important things because she’s still talking herself. She’s listing jobs, listing them off one by one.
“Why not a geologist? Or a storm-chaser? Or gas station attendant?”
Floyd thinks about how magic is based on belief. In his mind, he needs to see the dollar beneath his foot before it can ever get down there. He needs to practice in front of the mirror, in the bathroom, at the kitchen table, during lunch breaks down at the food court in the mall across from the Times’ office. He needs to talk through the patter but first he needs to script out the patter, the all-important story, which will answer why the dollar is in the shoe and what that says about the human condition. Those words will take the shape of his non-existent big boobed, blonde-haired assistant, who is really just an assistant to an assistant, the poor soul who believes in someone who is just a believer himself. But what Floyd really wants to tell Cheryl is that it’s all just a hobby, all the practicing and storytelling and believing. He wants to tell her that his real job is watching people disappear.
Tuesday
The best trick Floyd can do is the one where he holds the basketball in the crook of his wrist because his hands are too small to palm it and then goes up and tomahawks it through the hoop, landing with knees bent and hands outstretched like an airplane, all for dramatic effect.
In five days, Derrick Thomas will be executed. Floyd will stand on the victim’s side of the room with the family of Carmen Wacker because it makes it easier for him to get out and back to the office to file his story. That story will have to find a tactful way to talk about how Thomas strangled Carmen behind the Horticultural Center while she was collecting flowers for a sixth grade science class assignment. Floyd has not yet figured out a way to do this. It is starting to get frustrating.
“This is wrong,” he screams, taking his job as coach seriously as always. He dunked at the first practice, just walked into the gym, picked up a ball and dunked it. When you’re thirteen, that’s all the credentials you need to see from your volunteer coach so that’s all Floyd has ever shown.
Their first league game is on Friday. His story must be filed shortly after the execution on Saturday. Floyd blows his whistle. The gym at St. Joseph’s echoes with the sound of his displeasure. Floyd scowls. “Bring it in. Bring it right now, goddamn it.”
That gets the Catholic schoolboys’ attention. Tommy Antony, the only sixth grader to make the middle school varsity team, shoves his way to the front, elbowing past bigger eighth graders. Floyd remembers a high school teammate who used to puke in the bathroom before games, puking until his knees buckled, until all that was left was an empty hole needing to be filled. Tommy reminds him of that teammate. He’s never heard either of them speak a word.
The boys take a knee around the center circle. Floyd is thinking of letting Tommy start Friday but whenever he thinks about their first league game, Floyd cannot help the nagging feeling that he is really looking forward to Saturday. He thinks of Cheryl’s perfume. It smelled vanilla, like those wafers he used to snack on during the five-hour drive out to the state penitentiary where the death row prisoners are held. He’s stopped eating them because the crumbs were doing hell to his car’s carpet upholstery.
“We can’t play like this. We have to execute,” Floyd says and then immediately regrets his word choice. Floyd glances at his wristwatch. Practice is almost over. When he looks back up he sees Tommy staring at him with a blank expression. Tommy’s going to start, Floyd decides. Tommy’s going to start even if that loses them the game.
Wednesday
It is only mid-week and Floyd is out of tricks.
Today is the day Floyd goes to interview the families but it is also the day he cannot stop thinking of Cheryl and her hair against his chest with Can’t Take My Eyes Off You playing in the background. Even as he sits with Derrick Thomas’s mother, he thinks of Cheryl. He supposes the two women do share one trait: large breasts that they do not care to hide.
Mrs. Thomas lives near where Floyd grew up, small houses surrounded by small driveways surrounded by small trees and shrubs. Once upon a time, Floyd mowed a lawn or two out here for cash. No one tipped well. He’s sure somehow that he’s been to the exact spot of the Horticulture Center where Derrick Thomas came upon Carmen Wacker while he was out walking the family dog. Floyd had a dog once. An Airedale terrier named Jamaica, just like the country.
“My boy didn’t, and still doesn’t, know what he did. It’s a sham. And it’s a political move,” says Mrs. Thomas.
Floyd sits in the living room, listening to Mrs. Thomas. He writes down none of what she says. Floyd does not talk in these interviews in anything other than question form. Even his greetings are usually in the form of a question. Hello, how are you? He does not allow himself to nod. Currently, he is thinking about how Derrick did it, how it would feel—no, he can’t imagine that, he shouldn’t but he still does. Bare hands on flesh, squeezing so hard, just as his and Cheryl’s hands had clasped as they glided around the floor. Like a cloud, right? Like a cloud.
“Just because she’s a little black girl and he’s white. Just because she looks cute in her school photo and Derrick doesn’t. You know what?” Mrs. Thomas says, picking her shirt off of her shoulders and then letting it fall again, “Derrick doesn’t even have a school photo.”
He does not ask where Derrick went to school. It feels strange to him that Derrick is just two years older than him. Apparently, two years can be a lifetime, or at least the difference in one.
Above the fireplace is a photo of the late Mr. Thomas. Floyd imagines what this conversation would be like if he were talking to a man or simply if Mr. Thomas had been around to take care of walking the dog. The Thomas family living room has a view of Lake Washington, and he can see a few boats going by, their wake disappearing behind a line of trees down at the shore. On the other side of the lake is Husky Stadium where the University of Washington plays football throughout the fall. It makes Floyd think of the other Derrick Thomas, the one who plays football for the Kansas City Chiefs. The stadium’s jagged edges look like crooked cliffs, waiting to be rappelled. If one squints, as Floyd does now, the space between those cliffs spells out a W, the same trademark one that adorns the team’s helmets. Floyd traces it on his notepad because he feels he should put something down or this interview will be a complete waste of time. Mrs. Thomas stops adjusting her shirt long enough to catch him the next time he looks up and out the window.
“You like football? Derrick loved the football games. Put that down. He loved them.” Mrs. Thomas stops and points out the window and when she begins again her voice is much quieter. She is almost speaking in a whisper.
“When the crowd roared after a big play, he’d roar too.”
Floyd says nothing. He’s bored of sketching W after W but still needs to keep writing. A list. He’ll write a list. One of his favorite three point shooters of all time.
“Derrick would roar like a lion,” says Mrs. Thomas as she stands and walks towards the glass. Floyd stares at the back of her head, at her graying hair that’s up in a bun. “That sound, the cheering, comes across the water. He’d roar so loud. All he wanted to do was join in.”
Floyd starts writing.
1. Dale Ellis
She stands and moves towards the window.
“He used to go like this,” she says as she presses her hands against the glass. Floyd keeps writing, 2. Larry Bird, and tries to think of his next question but decides he has none left. He needs nothing else from her. He never did. The template for this kind of story was created long ago. All that changes are the names. That’s all that ever does.
Mrs. Thomas takes her hands off the glass, leaving ten little fingerprints. She has nothing left to give. 3. Hersey Hawkins? 3. Sam Perkins. Yes, it is much easier this way, to give up the reins to something you can’t see, to someone else’s will. But when Floyd looks up, it’s still there, that little bit of hope stuck in her eye, that jagged little piece of invisible metal. It makes Floyd look back down because he doesn’t understand. She must know. She must know and Floyd must know and Derrick, in whatever way he understands the world, must know there will be no more Saturdays spent with hands up against the glass, roaring like a lion.
Floyd can’t phrase that sentiment into a question so he leaves. He shakes Mrs. Thomas’s hand on the way out.
“Take care?” he asks in parting.
The drive to where the victim’s family lives takes him by Husky Stadium. He thinks of Cheryl only briefly but it’s worth it.
You’re just too good to be true.
Floyd regrets not asking Mrs. Thomas if Derrick ever went to a game. Not for the story, of course, but just for himself. He remembers loving Husky Stadium on Saturday. Warren Moon throwing deep. Spider Gaines. Oh, Spider Gaines. Floyd sighs. The first league game is just two days away. As he crosses the Montlake Bridge, carrying him over Lake Washington and away from the campus, he thinks once more of Husky Stadium and its twin purple peaks forming the two sides of the stands. By the time the road curves and becomes 23rd, he has moved on to composing his questions for the little girl’s family. He flies by the new Performing Arts Center at the local high school, named after Quincy Jones but the J and O have already been knocked down so who knows what sort of legacy is being left behind. Floyd can’t imagine Quincy Jones growing up here. He can’t imagine Jimi Hendrix doing so either. Maybe the Central District used to be different. Probably not. The cars might have been different back then. The people, different. The businesses and restaurants, all different. But Floyd is sure the neighborhood itself has stayed the same. Same low expectations. Same fear. Same lack of hope.
Floyd is sure of all of this because Floyd does not often believe in change.
Carmen Wacker’s father sits with his fists clenched in the living room of his house. It has no view of Lake Washington. It has no view at all because the curtains are pulled tight across the windows. There’s a gang war going on in the C.D. That’s what Mr. Wacker tells Floyd, that there’s a straight-up gang war going on. Does he know what that’s like? Floyd writes in his notepad as Mr. Wacker stands so he can rearrange his record collection in a nervous frenzy. 4. Ray Allen A kid just got shot yesterday outside the Community Center here, the one with the underground pool named after Medgar Evers.
“Do you even know who that is? Medgar Evers?” Mr. Wacker asks as he pulls a record out of its sleeve and blows the dust off it. “Do you understand how fucked up that is? To shoot someone in front of a building named after the Medgar Evers?”
Floyd keeps writing. 5. Reggie Miller.
“That’s what I used to worry about. Gang wars. Gangs wars started by dumb kids who don’t know who Medgar Evers is and couldn’t care less,” says Mr. Wacker. Floyd’s looking at his notepad but he hears the unmistakable sound of Mr. Wacker pounding his fist into his palm.
“That’s what I wanted to protect Carmen from, those kids, the same ones who sling spider bags by the bus stop.”
Mr. Wacker slides into the kitchen and opens the fridge, sticking his head deep inside. He yells back into the living room as if Floyd doesn’t already know everything he’s going to say. “She was collecting different types of flowers. For extra credit. My little girl, always with the extra credit.”
When Floyd looks up, Mr. Wacker is back at his LPs, blowing dust off the top of them. The twin speakers facing them dominate the room. They stare Floyd down as he sits on the couch.
“She shouldn’t have had to ride the bus to go pick flowers, but do you see any around here? Do you?”
It’s then that Floyd realizes Mr. Wacker asks questions almost as well as he does.
Carmen’s mother, who has been sitting quietly, suddenly speaks so viciously that the flower print on her dress wilts in front of Floyd’s eyes, and brambles grow out of the roses on the seat covers on the couch, pricking Floyd but not drawing any blood.
“I can’t wait to see that monster die. I only wish he could fry.”
Hell of a quote. Floyd would write that down but he knows it would never make it to print. Instead, he continues his list. 6. Steve Kerr. That quote doesn’t fit the template, which begins as follows:
At (INSERT DATE AND TIME), (NAME OF EXECUTED) was put to death by (MEANS OF EXECUTION). (NAME OF EXECUTED) was convicted of murder in the first degree of (NAME OF VICTIM), who was (A ONE SENTENCE LIFE SUMMARYAND EVEN IF THE VICTIM WAS ONLY TWELVE, IT STILL FEELS LIKE QUITE THE DAMNING THING TO HAVE TO DO)
The State of Washington uses lethal injection as its primary means of execution. Secondary means is hanging. Floyd imagines Derrick Thomas dangling from the gallows, but instead of the white, mentally retarded Derrick Thomas, it’s now the black Kansas City Chiefs outside linebacker Derrick Thomas who’s got the rope around his thick, muscular neck. For a second, Floyd feels a pang he identifies as wistful thinking. Such an event would allow for a new template, one that could focuses on the little things, one that could bestow on Derrick Thomas the honor of being the first formerly mentally retarded person and the first NFL linebacker to be executed in Washington State history. But then Floyd realizes where he is, a place where kids shoot each other in front of a pool named after Medgar Evers and that makes him shudder at the mental image he just conjured up, a big, black male with a noose around his neck. Floyd shudders because it forces him to think about a part of American history he would like to pretend didn’t exist, at least until after he’s filed his story. It’s not his place to think about history. He doesn’t do opinion columns.
If Mr. Wacker saw Floyd shudder, he doesn’t say anything. Instead, he just continues nodding. He must’ve been nodding for sometime but Floyd cannot remember when he started. He only knows he wishes he would stop.
On Floyd’s way out, Mr. Wacker stops him and forces him to shake his hand. Floyd’s is somewhat clammy. “You should look up Medgar Evers,” Mr. Wacker says. “Do you know he was murdered too?”
Floyd gets to practice just in time. The boys are already shooting around. They are Carmen’s age, he realizes for the first time. Except for Tommy. Tommy’s younger. That thought, for some reason, makes him smile.
Friday
Tommy steps to the free throw line. He spins the ball twice, dribbles once and shoots. It drops through the net. He runs back down the court and exchanges high-fives with Brian, a big beefy kid with Horace Grant-style protective goggles who sweats enough for the both of them.
“So what do you cover at the Times?” Cheryl had asked him last night. He’d taken her out to a nice Italian restaurant that happened to split the distance between the Wackers and the Thomases.
Floyd thinks about how he answered her as Tommy glides down the floor, leading the break with the ball attached by a string. There’s no music playing but it still looks like he’s dancing.
He’d told Cheryl the truth and she’d laughed, not believing him, or maybe she’d laughed because it was funny, so funny her face turned bright red. “Oh really? Tell me all about it. Tell about the first execution you ever saw.”
So he did. First, he told her lies because at that moment, he knew he was going to go home alone. He told her about the family members of victim exchanging high-fives as the machine started up, celebrating until the murderer started snoring, how when the drug cocktail put the murderer to sleep, the victim’s family started screaming that the death was too peaceful, too serene for such a bastard. He told her about how minutes before all that, before the first high-five, as they’d all been standing around, waiting for the show to start much like how you wait in a movie theater before the previews begin, the murderer had started singing, belting out, You’d be like heaven to touch. I want to hold you so much and all the other lines from that song. But then to end, he told her the truth, told her about the times he’d naively written down all sorts of details in his notebook, not knowing about the template. He told her about how he’d been so foolishly consumed with the thought that he, and he alone, finally understood what it meant to not be able to take your eyes off someone.
Tommy dribbles left at the top of the key and whips a no-look pass into the paint, the kind that sixth graders throw ten rows out of bounds, but no, not this one, not this sixth grader or this pass as Tommy’s falls into Brian’s waiting hands and he lays it up and in. When the other coach calls a timeout to stop the bleeding, St. Joseph’s already has a ten-point lead halfway through the first quarter. Tommy skips over to the sideline gleefully. Floyd keeps his arms crossed. The boys congratulate themselves, whoop it up and all talk at once. Well, all except Tommy. He sits quietly drinking water as the others pat each other on the back and act confident with such conviction, it seems they’ve become something brand new. Floyd says nothing. He keeps his arms crossed. Maybe his best trick is pretending he’s not impressed.
Saturday
As Floyd stands in the back of the viewing room with the Wackers, he closes his eyes briefly. The air is already too thick in the small room. By now, Big Frank and Dee Dee, the two guards at the check-in, know him by name and Floyd, them. That knowledge will give Floyd nightmares for weeks to come.
Derrick Thomas sits in the chair. The needle is already in his arm, waiting patiently. Derrick doesn’t say anything. Floyd knows that on the other side of the circular, hospital-looking room, through another one-sided mirror is Mrs. Thomas and whomever she brought. He knows if he closes his eyes, he will start imagining what she looks like at this moment, start thinking about whether she’s angry or sad or stone-faced. Floyd keeps his eyes open. He looks at Mrs. Wacker. She has already started crying. They are soft, quiet tears, sounding like ones smothered by a pillow in the middle of the night. Floyd opens his notebook and writes, continuing his list. 7. Toni Kukoc. Then, without thinking, he makes a note to look up Medgar Evers.
Cheryl had cried at dinner. Cried actual tears. Floyd thinks about how she told him she works downtown at a non-profit called Guardians for Change. Floyd thinks about how his high school journalism teacher told him that newspapers were the guardians of the public trust. That they were the first line of defense against corruption. A long time ago, he would’ve told Cheryl this. But it isn’t a long time ago anymore.
Derrick Thomas almost looks happy, almost looks like he smiles when two guards who don’t know Floyd by name come to tighten the straps that hold him down. Floyd feels something compel him to start moving forward when the guards inside the room move aside so the prison official can step next to Derrick.
Floyd moves to the glass window and thinks about how once the official starts the machine, first will come the anesthesia. It will put Derrick to sleep so he can dream whatever you dream about when you have nothing left to dream about. Then will come the drug to stop Derrick from breathing, relaxing the lungs to the point where they will dangle like loose rubber bands in his chest. And then there is the killer, potassium chloride, which will stop Derrick’s heart. It will choke the life out of him, just like the life was choked out of Carmen, flesh on flesh, squeezing. All Floyd can think about, as he puts his hand on his chest and drops his notebook to the floor, is his list, the final top ten he swears he will ever compose.
Number 8: Robert Horry.
“What did you say?” Mr. Wacker says. He moves towards Floyd and speaks again. “What are you talking about?” Floyd realizes he just said Number 8 out loud. He clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth.
“What’s wrong with you?” says Mr. Wacker. “What are you saying?”
What Floyd was or wasn’t saying is forgotten once the official gets to the killing machine, or as Floyd will refer to it in his story, the lethal injection device, Mr. Wacker must have forgotten about Floyd and Medgar Evers and everything else because right when the official looks away from Derrick, he must still be a coward, thinks Floyd, and places his hand on the button that will start this thing, Mr. Wacker grabs his wife and holds her close. Floyd wishes that Mr. Wacker would do something interesting, yelp in pleasure, high-pitched, orgasmic-like, or swear, or even punch him. Floyd finds himself wishing that Mr. Wacker would punch him in the face. But Mr. Wacker doesn’t and he won’t and he never will so Floyd doesn’t look over at him and Mrs. Wacker. He knows what they look like. He knows they are embracing, fingers interlocked, arms consuming bodies. He knows because he’s seen it before.
Floyd doesn’t reach down for his notebook. Instead, he kicks it away from him, sending it into a dark corner of the viewing room. He puts one hand on his heart and the other on the glass in front of him. He finds his mind is still stuck on Number 8. Robert Horry. Robert Horry. Robert Horry. He drowns in those four syllables for a moment. He rolls them around in his head, bouncing them off the roof of his closed mouth before swallowing them down into his stomach. He presses his other hand up against the glass, now having nothing left to hold on with. He closes his eyes and hopes to hear the roar for the first time.