There was but one act to be played out and it occurred on October 6, 1957, at the Arkansas State Penitentiary at Tucker, where they'd removed Reggie from the Cummins Farm when his last appeal was finally denied. It was the day of the fourth game of the World Series, and Sam listened to the game that afternoon as he drove the hundred-odd miles to Tucker, just southeast of Little Rock. It was not his first time to make such a trip, nor would it be his last. On the other hand, he didn't make it automatically; of the twenty-three men he sent to the electric chair, he only watched eleven die. Tonight it was Reggie's turn.

Simply in terms of convenience, it worked out. He was able to get a clear signal from Little Rock and listened numbly to the baseball all the way over. Warren Spahn was on the mound, mowing them down. Sam hated anything with the word "Yankee" in the title just as he hated anything with "New York" in the title, so he lost himself in the baseball, hoping the upstart, uprooted "Milwaukee" team-really, just the old, pitiful Boston Braves-would triumph. Sam stayed rooted in the drama the whole way, even as the game went into extra innings, even as the Yankees tied the game in the ninth on Ellston Howard's three-run homer and then scored the go-ahead run in the top of the tenth (goddammit!) (goddammit!).

It looked over for the Braves, but somehow they clawed their way back into the game, when Logan doubled to left, scoring Mantilla to tie again, and Sam had the sense that something very special was about to happen. It did, shortly thereafter: Eddie Matthews's two-run shot over the right-field fence, Braves win 7-5.

Sam looked up: he was at the prison. He'd driven straight through town, forgotten to eat dinner. He doubled back, found a diner, had roast beef and mashed potatoes.

Eleven P.M P.M. He pulled into the parking lot of the penitentiary after a nodding acknowledgment from a guard. He was known: there was no difficulty getting in, and getting through the checkpoints, until at last, with twenty-some others, he found himself in a little viewing room that opened on the death chamber. He recognized a couple of Little Rock newspaper boys, somebody from the Governor's Office, the assistant warden, and a few others. It was an odd group; one could listen to the determined banality of the conversation, most of it now turning on the great game that afternoon and the Braves' chances against the pinstriped colossi of Gotham, with the mighty Mantle, Berra, Larsen, McDougald and Bauer. In the chamber, a few guards were making last-moment adjustments; the electrician was tightening circuits on the chair, a sturdy oak thing that was so well made and severe it could have fit into a Baptist church.

"You must feel pret' good, Sam," said Hank Kelly, of the Arkansas Gazette Arkansas Gazette.

"Not really," said Sam. "You just want it to be over."

"Well, I'll be glad when it's over too. I mean, he is just a nigger and he killed a girl, but now they got us believing niggers are human too. We had all that trouble with 'em this summer, the goddamned army and everything. Mark my words, it's just the beginning."

Sam nodded; Hank was probably right, though old Boss Harry Etheridge was raising hell in the House, aligning himself with the Dixiecrats and swearing to gut the army appropriation in the upcoming budget to make Dwight Eisenhower pay for sending the 101st Airborne to Little Rock and humiliating the great state of Arkansas before the nation. But everyone knew that Boss Harry would never do such a thing; it was all show for the folks who elected him with 94 percent of the vote every two years.

None of that had anything to do with tonight's drama, however, which was simply the squalid end of some very squalid business, which nobody could really remember except Sam, and in which nobody had much vested interest and emotion. As ceremony, it was banal and flat; the Masons understood ritual much better.

He pulled away from the milling gents and went up to the glass window, where he got a better look at the engine of destruction: a chair, solid but upon closer inspection much worn, somehow institutional and bland for all its presumed meaning. Sam stared at it as he always did: heavy cables ran from behind a screen (where the executioner would do his business in private) to one leg, were bolted to the leg and pinned up the strut of the chair, rising to a sort of Bakelite nexus. Smaller wires extended from it, two down the front, one down each arm and one to lie across the top of the chair, which ended not in a wrist or ankle bracelet but a little cap. It looked very thirties, Sam thought, assigning to it the style of the decade that had spawned it.

A phone buzzed, the assistant warden picked it up and listened.

"Gentlemen, please take your seats. They're bringing the condemned man up from death row."

Sam looked at his watch. They were late. It was 12:02 A.M A.M. He found a seat as the lights dimmed; around him, as in the theater, people squirmed and made ready, then fell silent. The minutes ticked by; the assistant warden lowered the lights until they sat in darkness, and then he too sat.

In the chamber, the door opened. Two guards, followed by the warden, followed by a priest, followed at last by Reggie Fuller, nineteen, of Blue Eye, Arkansas, Negro male, 230 pounds, eyes brown, hair brown, though it had all been shaved off.

Reggie was weeping. The tears ran down his eyes and his face was puffy and moist. A little track of glistening mucus dribbled from a nostril, and Sam watched as his tongue shot out to lick at it. He was manacled, walking in little stutter steps, talking to himself in a desperate stream of chatter. His eyes were out of focus. He was still fat; prison had not slimmed him down or, apparently, toughened him up.

They led poor Reggie to the chair and sat him down in it, though his body appeared stiff and he had trouble understanding what they were saying to him. At last he was seated; then came a horrid instant when one of the guards stepped back quickly, out of reflex: a stain of darkness blossomed at the crotch of Reggie's prison denims.

The priest whispered something to Reggie but it did him no good at all; his face seized up and his eyes closed; he continued to mutter madly. The guards moved in to secure the boy to the chair: one of them applied a slippery saline solution to his bare ankles, his wrists and the top of his head, where the electrodes were to be tightened-that would get all the electricity into him and prevent his skin from burning, although in Sam's experience this didn't always work out. Two others tightened and buckled the straps after the liquid had been sloshed on. Finally, they strapped the little leather beanie atop Reggie's round, shaven head though they got it slightly skewed, so that it looked like a dunce cap.

Quickly, a little man emerged from behind the screen and checked all the electrodes a last time, the sure professional, making dead certain that all would work. He pointed to one problem area, and a guard bent to make an adjustment. Then the little man stepped back and disappeared.

Sam looked at his watch. It was 12:08 A.M A.M., eight minutes late. The warden seemed to be choreographing things. He gave a nod, and the guards left the room, leaving him alone with Reggie. He gave another nod and apparently a microphone was switched on because he now spoke in a grave voice and his tones were amplified into the witness chamber.

"Reginald Gerard Fuller, the state of Arkansas, in full accordance with the laws thereof, finds you guilty of murder in the first degree and sentences you to death this sixth, uh, seventh, day of October 1957. Reggie Gerard Fuller, do you have any last words?"

It was silent, though the mike caught Reggie's ragged breathing. Then he took a deep breath and spoke through sobs: "Sir, I apologize for wetting myself. Please don't tell nobody I peed my pants. And I am sorry for Mr. George if I got pee on him as he always done treated me nice."

He broke down, losing his words in a string of choking sobs. But then he breathed deeply, fighting the anguish. A dribble of snot ran out his nose, irritating his lips, but he could not do a thing. He looked out to the men behind the window. He took another deep breath: "And I miss my mama and my daddy and love them very much. I didn't kill Shirelle. God bless all the people who was nice to me and I hope someday somebody be able to tell why this had to happen."

"Are you done, Reggie?"

"Yes sir. I am ready for Jesus."

"Jesus probably ain't ready for him," said a man next to Sam in the dark.

The warden leaned over him, unsnapping something in the top of the beanie, and a blank mask unfurled, sealing off Reggie's features.

The warden left the chamber. Reggie sat still in the chair and for a second there was no change. Sam almost thought that-but no, the first charge hit him.

From his experiences, Sam knew it was a cliche of the movies that the lights dim in prison when an electrocution takes place: the chair and the prison lighting systems draw their power from separate generators. What happens is that witnesses involuntarily flinch, for to watch the cold extermination of a man, no matter how evil, is not an easy thing; and in memory, they recall the diminution of illumination and ascribe it to a power drain. But Sam didn't flinch or look away and had no illusion of flickering lights; he watched the whole thing, because that was his duty. He represented Shirelle and he hoped that by witnessing he was in some way liberating her soul from the agony of her death.

Reggie stiffened against the restraining straps as two thousand volts hit him. The shot lasted over thirty seconds. A vein on his neck bulged. He fought like a bull. His hands seized up into fists which held so tight Sam thought they'd explode. He seemed to pivot in the chair, just a shade, as if he were daintily trying to sidestep his fate. A small wisp of smoke rose from his skull and another from one of his wrists. His head lolled forward, but then somehow picked itself up again. He coughed and a spasm of vomit, mostly liquid, spurted out from under the mask to cling in globules to his naked chest. Huge crescents of perspiration blossomed moonlike under his arms.

"Another," said the warden into the phone.

The second surge bucked through Reggie but beat him down. He was limp by second 10, but the executioner held the circuit closed for another twenty, and by the small vibration of Reggie's now limp fingers could Sam tell that he was riding the bolt still. But then it ceased.

The odor of electrification reached Sam when the warden, two guards and a doctor entered the chamber. It wasn't the smell of burned meat or hair, but rather connected with Sam's memories of Christmas, when he'd given various of his boys Lionel train sets and usually set them up and ran them for a bit, until the kids tired of them: but they had an odd, metallic odor to them, heavy and pungent at once.

Sam flashed back from Christmas: in the room the doctor took out a stethoscope and pressed its cup to Reggie's chest, bare because the buttons had been ripped off his shirt. He stood and shook his head. The four retreated so that the executioner could hit Reggie again. It took five charges before the heart finally stopped beating.

"That boy just didn't want to die," said somebody.

The last official document in the file was the certificate of execution, meant to close the file out, mark it as justice delivered. Sam stared at it numbly.

Reggie, boy, why did you do it?

It was one of the great mysteries of the human heart, why one person will up and kill another. Sometimes it's money, sometimes sex, sometimes anger, sometimes simple meanness. Sam had studied it for most of his life and didn't know, not really. In this one, it seemed so simple: He figured Reggie must have picked the girl up after the church meeting and asked her for a kiss. She gave him the kiss. A young buck, a kiss, maybe he'd had a bit to drink at an Oklahoma Nigra crib, though no evidence as such was ever produced, and off he went. The more she fought, the more he wanted it. Finally, he did it and once he did it he was afraid she'd tell. So he drove her out Route 71 and smashed her over the head with a rock, just not noticing she was ripping at his shirt while he was smashing her. That simple. Usually when a Negro killed a Negro in those days, nobody much cared. Under usual circumstances he would have gotten away with it. It just happened to be Earl's last case and that that made it important to white people like himself, nothing else. made it important to white people like himself, nothing else.

The remaining documents in the file were the letters crazy Mrs. Fuller had written him until her death. They arrived, sometimes three and four a week, as the woman fought so desperately for her son's life before a brain aneurysm killed her. He had stopped reading them quite early and evidently a forgotten secretary along the line-he could never remember his secretaries' names-had just taken to dumping them unopened in the file. Fool woman! What was the point? If she were here and he could remember her name, he'd yell at her, like he did all his secretaries, which is why he had so damned many of them over the years! Most hardly lasted a year.

Sam looked at the letters. Now they seemed strange to him. He was on his knees in his basement looking through an old file. Why? He couldn't remember. Goddamn, it was happening again!

He looked at the file name. Parker. Parker. Oh, yes, the girl, Reggie, now it came back. Earl's last case.

All the letters from Reggie's mama, on their pink stationery. But why was one of them on blue stationery? Hmmmm? He plucked it from the stack, saw that it was in different handwriting. He had no memory of ever seeing it before. The date was September 5, 1957.

He turned it over and looked at the signature.

Lucille Parker.

It took him a second to realize that it was the dead girl's mama.

Thirty-nine years late, he opened the letter at last and started to read.

18.

So who would have moved your father's body?" asked Russ.

"Stupid question," said Bob.

He stood up. They were bunked in Bob's old trailer on land he still owned seven miles out of Blue Eye on U.S. 270, abutting Black Fork Mountain. In the years since he'd left, the souvenir hunters had taken their toll and so had the graffiti writers, but his keys still opened the padlocks. In just a little time they'd restored the place to livability, though of course there was no phone and no electricity. But a fire kept the water hot and Coleman lanterns kept the place lit at night. It was a hell of a lot better than camping and a hell of a lot cheaper than staying in the Days Inn.

It was dark outside and the drive back from the cemetery was bleak and silent. Bob wasn't talking. He'd paid the laborers, and the doctor said he'd bill him for expenses but not for professional services. They'd stopped at a diner and eaten and now they were back.

"Why is it stupid?" Russ asked.

"Don't they teach you nothing at that fancy university? I thought you were supposed to be smart."

"I didn't say I was smart," said Russ. "I said I wanted to be a writer. Different things."

"I guess so. You can't ask who until you first find out if, and then how. Who Who don't have no meaning until you have figured out that there don't have no meaning until you have figured out that there was was a who. Got it?" a who. Got it?"

"Well-"

"Well, yourself. Think about it. How could it have happened?"

"Could the ground have shifted in some way?"

"No. The earth doesn't work like that. I thought you grew up in Oklahoma, not New York City."

"I did, but not on a farm. Anyway, they could have come at night and made an exchange with another body somewhere in the cemetery and-"

Russ paused.

"You saw for yourself how hard it was to excavate a body," said Bob. "It took three strong men the best part of a morning to uncover one. We didn't even get to the moving. It would involve block and tackles, a hearse or some kind of cart or something. Then you need the same thing with the other body. Then you got to patch up all that dirt so nobody would notice. Couldn't get all that done in a single night. Too much to do. So they'd have to do it in the day, under some kind of legal guise. But that wouldn't do 'em no good neither. You'd have to have lawyers, you'd have to concoct some kind of legal justification, it would end up doing exactly what maybe it was trying to avoid, and that is draw a lot of attention to itself."

Russ nodded.

"So what do you do?" asked Bob. "Think "Think, son. Either come up with it or call that Princeton place and get back the half million or so your poor dad spent to get you educated."

"He didn't spend a cent," said Russ.

"Oh, that's right, I forgot your dad was such a bastard. Anyhow, think think. Think!"

"I can't-"

It came from nowhere. Hooray, humiliation momentarily avoided!

"The stones. They move the gravestones! Two men could do it in a few hours under the dark of night. No problem. Especially since the original records have long since disappeared and whenever they did it, no one was there to give a damn."

"Not bad," said Bob. "But you are ahead of yourself. Maybe some night in the sixties a bunch of high school kids got drunk and went gravestone tipping. And maybe they was caught and maybe some judge made 'em replant the stones. But they were kids, they didn't give two shits. So they just stuck 'em in any which way. So what does that leave us?"

"Fucked," said Russ.

"Yes, it does. On the other hand-well, well, lookie here."

Russ saw headlight beams sweep across the windows and heard the car engine.

Bob opened the door.

"Howdy, Deputy," he called. "Come on in."

He stepped back and Duane Peck entered. Without his sunglasses, his eyes were small and dark.

"Mr. Swagger, I just wanted to tell you something. Remember I told you I'd see about getting the sheriff's records?"

"Why sure, Duane. You want a cup of coffee? Russ, put some coffee on."

"No, no," said Duane, then paused quickly to look around and up and down the room. "I'm on duty, got some patrol patterns to run. I just wanted to say they moved them records over to the courthouse basement. That's where most of the municipal records was stored. You know, it burned down in 1994."

"Damn!" said Bob. "I knew the court records were lost but I was hoping maybe the sheriff's records were different. Damn!"

"I'm real sorry."

"Duane, don't you fret on it. So far we got pretty much a big zero. With the body lost and no cemetery records, the whole damn thing is falling apart on us. We just may have to hang it up."

"Okay, I just wanted to tell y'all."

He gave each man a hearty smile, then backed out.

They waited until they heard the car pull out.

"Now, where were we?" Bob asked.

"You were saying that if it was kids who messed up the tombstones we were screwed. On the other hand ..."

"On the other hand, if just for the hell of it we figure someone did this on purpose, then don't it follow only two tombstones were exchanged?"

"Yes."

"And we know the wrong one belonged to a twenty-five-year-old fellow killed in the Civil War?"

"I got it, I got it. We try and find records-in the courthouse, dammit, burned again, no, no, the historical society-on deaths in Polk County during the Civil War. Maybe we can find the names of the young men who fit that category. That would cut way way down on the possible alternative grave sites. But what-excavate ten or twenty of them? I don't-" down on the possible alternative grave sites. But what-excavate ten or twenty of them? I don't-"

But Bob was fishing through the familiar manila folder of clippings and soon enough produced the front page of the Southwest Times Record Southwest Times Record, July 26, 1955.

HERO TROOPER BURIED, it read.

Under a spreading elm, on rolling fields filled with trees, a group of mourners stood, somber people putting a good man into the ground.

"I don't-" Russ said. "The trees are all gone. You couldn't get much out of that picture. It's just a field."

"The trees are gone but the land's the same. Look at the rolls in the earth, the orientation to the sun, the mountains in the distance. I'm betting I can read the land from the photo and pretty much triangulate on that part of the graveyard. We link that with a name and bingo."

"You're not thinking of giving up?" said Russ.