The sedan that will take him to the execution waits at the curb, its engine running. Willie stands at the top of the courthouse steps, handcuffed and shackled, Grazer on one side and another deputy on the other. His fresh clothes are stiff and have a smell that makes the back of his throat tickle.
It is late, dark, quiet. There is no blinding sunlight, no shouting; there are no hats or flashbulbs, as when Willie left the building to go to trial months ago. It is just him and the officers, the car and driver, and between them, Lady Justice, rising as she always does from the center of the staircase.
“Let’s go,” Grazer says, nudging Willie with his elbow. Willie looks down at his shackled legs as he descends the stairs, one small step at a time. It’s an old man’s shuffle, awkward, and it takes the three men some minutes to reach the sidewalk where the car is waiting. The deputy opens the door and slides in across the black leather of the seats. Grazer gestures to Willie to get in next. Willie turns first, and looks up for a final time at the small window of his fourth-floor cell. His heart races.
“Go on,” Grazer says, prodding him.
Willie ducks into the car, pulls his legs in, and scoots across the seat. The only place to rest his feet is on the hump of the covered axle shaft, and his knees jut up nearly to his face.
Grazer lowers himself heavily into the seat beside Willie and slams the door. “You all right?” he asks.
Willie nods once. His ears are ringing. His mouth is dry.
They pull away from the curb and soon turn onto Main Street. Shadows sweep through the car as it passes beneath each streetlamp, arc after arc of tinny light. The storefronts are dark, the parking spots between the diagonal stripes on the pavement empty. Only a bakery shows any sign of life; steam rises from a round aluminum vent on the roof. Willie imagines the smell: fresh bread, cakes, vanilla, pastries—and it makes him think, fleetingly, of Grace. He shuts his eyes.
He doesn’t open them for some time. He listens instead to the gravel of the highway strike the bottom of the car, and he thinks of rain. He tries to remember the last time he heard rain, but he can’t summon the memory. Had he known at the time it was the last rain he’d ever hear, he’d have paid attention.
Beside him, Grazer begins to make a clicking sound at the back of his throat, and Willie can feel against his thigh the vibrations running through Grazer’s own as he jiggles his foot. Willie opens his eyes and looks at the sheriff, at his dark profile against the night sky outside. “I be OK, sheriff,” Willie tells him.
The sheriff’s foot goes still as he turns to look at Willie. He looks as if he is going to say something, but he doesn’t. Instead he blinks rapidly, then turns his face out toward the night.
Willie lets his gaze on the sheriff soften and focuses instead on the passing roadside fields beyond the man, the blue fields of sugarcane that used to terrify him. When he was a child, daytime warnings became nightmares, and he’d dream of being chased naked through the slashing stalks, his flesh being sliced into so many raw, red lines as he fled a white man. He can’t remember who first told him that story, but he thinks now that this kind of fear never did anyone any kind of good.