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A Capital Idea

Abbie Doll

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We hopped on the bus with a tremendous buzz in the air—this collective hum hovering there—accompanied by that marvelous jailbreak feeling only a field trip can bring. The chaperones stood at the front clutching their clipboards as they stumbled through rollcall, attempting to chisel past the chitter-chatter of a busload full of jittery kids—the essence of youth buzzing through our veins like a hive brimming with bees.

The day’s destination had not yet been disclosed to us, which did nothing but heighten our anticipatory vibe. We thought we were in for a day wandering the maze of our zoo, oohing and aahing ‘round every corner at every discovery; or perhaps a trip to view the visiting mummies at our local museum, in from Cairo or wherever they’d last been on their postmortem tour; but it was nothing like that, nothing the least bit ordinary. When the powers that be finally got around to revealing where it was we were headed, our jaws fell to the filth of the floor, joining the hardened wads of gum long forgotten, the leftover lunch money too dirty to nab, the broken pencil nubs with their nibbled erasers, amidst a whole world of unrecognizable trash that was once ours but now, we couldn’t be bothered to pocket.

“Class…today…we’re taking you…to a correctional facility…to witness…an execution…”

The gaps hung heavy.

They were taking us to see a man die.

Headed to a beheading.

A hanging.

An electrocution.

Christ, we were clueless. Our imaginations ran rampant with possibilities. This was the first outing of ours that had zero tie-in to recent studies, zero connection to lesson plans, so what on earth did we know. To us, the announcement was a joke—a prank to scare us straight…nothing more than a threat from adults desperate to secure a modicum of order and control in this raucous bus on a ride that seemed interminable, stretching on and on into the winding folds of noisy eternity.

But they weren’t. Kidding, I mean.

And as for our rowdiness—our vitality—that was the one thing they couldn’t confiscate. Still, we had no idea you could be so bad they’d kill you. That death was a legitimate option on the proverbial table…or should I say, chair. The punishments we’d seen and endured up until now were nothing—compared to that. Your daddy’s belt was one thing, but this…this was beyond comprehension. Our belief in the myth of “safe” had discovered yet another way to erode.

The publicity of it all—the execution, I mean—came as a surprise; the who, what, when was information freely available and easily accessible: a list of the state’s scheduled executees, if you will, posted online for all to see, with an “add to calendar” button right beside those greasy mugs, like you navigated to this site to schedule a dentist appointment, not to study a list of state-sanctioned murders. Acts of euthanasia? Whatever, you get the gist.

They passed the list around as proof, and we skimmed, each of us searching for our own names and sighing in relief at their absence; we were ten, old enough to have done our share of regrettable shit; any sense of lingering innocence was a lullaby we’d long outgrown. Busted windows from long innings of alley-cramped baseball, the occasional shoplifting (taking things we were denied but insisted we deserved), always coming home late and refusing to hold our tongues. Every chance we got, we mouthed off and disrespected authority—you were young once, you get it. Let’s just say we didn’t have the best past of respecting the rules, especially those that felt so indecipherably arbitrary and, dare I say, authoritarian.

But back to the list. Every single name belonged to a man, a fact which the girls noticed in an instant, looking down upon us with a singsongy haha and their stupid coquettish charm; needless to say, we hated them for it. Hated them for their inherent goodness, their cut-from-a-strawberry sweetness. We knew this was one of those things they’d never let go, yet another sex-based victory they’d dangle over our heads ‘til we one day outgrew ‘em. Those dumb girls never stopped seeking ways to prove their superiority—their baseline better-than-us-ness.

Anyway, the guy they brought us to see had a history much worse than our own. He’d spent the better part of a decade terrorizing our town; his rampant reign went down long before we were born, but our neighborhood’s long-term residents hadn’t forgotten the fear, the second-guessing, the paranoia, that distinct sense of dread. We knew to keep the doors locked; that much, we knew. Not to open up for strangers, neither. The way they tell it, kids were banned from the streets. The town, on total lockdown. Nightly curfew, all that. The man was an absolute menace. Not some lovable scamp like Dennis the Menace, but rather, a true terror.

Before we went in—before we waltzed our way into a facility where people got paid to operate machines designed to kill—the chaperones gave us a rundown of his crimes, divulging enough nightmare fuel to last the rest of our lives. You’d think we’d be relieved by the fact that such a monster was no longer loose among us, but relief wasn’t on the list of things we felt. Half of us had already begun to dissociate, and we hadn’t even gone in the building yet. We were full of unease and anxiety and this bizarre dose of eagerness, as if we knew we’d been brought to see some should-be-forbidden, societal rite of passage—a glimpse of the real world at play, which up until now, had been nothing but a locked door. Nothing but frivolous make-believe.

*

The guy’s name was Biff Malone, a name he took way too literally. Old English for punching, I guess. Maybe if he’d gone and been a boxer, he could’ve kept himself safe and sound on the straight and narrow, instead of lethal to be around. Hypotheticals aside, somewhere along the way, he wandered off the wobbly path of righteousness and let his violent tendencies take hold. Biff started stalking and targeting the women in town, breaking in and beating the living daylight out of unsuspecting housewives. Turns out, his wife had left him a year or two before the incidents began; everyone figured why she’d left, and good for her, saved her own skin for sure.

The man needed a punching bag—that much was clear; couldn’t function without flesh to pound…too bad for Arlene Summers and Marjorie Brown. While they stood doing dishes at the sink, he snuck up from behind and went to town. Threw ‘em down on the linoleum and bashed their brains in. He knew what he’d done, no sense in trying to hide. Cops found him rocking in the smoke-ridden den in a recliner with a stogie stuck betwixt his lips, not a lick of remorse on his face; Marjorie’s cornflower-blue apron, still dishwater soggy, was tied ‘round his hips, the lace trim torn and bloody.

Arlene, however, was worse…much, much worse…so they said, before sparing us the gruesome retelling. Not sure why they bothered to leave anything out. We were here, weren’t we? Might as well know the man’s list of sins. The extent of his evil. No sense in being coy now.

Arlene and Marjorie weren’t the only victims, though; there were others, too—his wife for sure—but no other fatalities. Not that we kids could claim to say which fate trumped the other: surviving the assault and managing the endless PTSD aftermath…or being spared that hell and put out of your misery in a much briefer timeframe. Hell, the wives in town were still traumatized, still afraid to have their backs turned to an open room, still jumping at the slightest thing, still shrieking awake in their sleep at least once a week, still terrified to answer the door or be left alone for so much as a minute or two.

No one could say for sure where Biff went wrong. Psychologically, I mean. Maybe it was that concussion he got in freshman football; dude couldn’t see straight for weeks. Maybe his worldview blurred then too. Soured like milk left out. You know what they say: serial killers and brain damage are a match made in wayward heaven; and while Biff hadn’t done quite enough to make the serial-killer cut, he sure as hell was on his way. Had the authorities not intervened, he could’ve been a household name nationwide.

Maybe, it was that series of side-eye glances he swore he saw his wife giving the mailman and the milkman and the fireman next door; he knew shit like that didn’t stop at looks. Or maybe, he’d simply been born a bogeyman…violence, to him, as natural as breath itself. He’d been a Klansman too, go fucking figure; the other men in his chapter all harbored a hefty fear of Biff’s wrath, and that was saying something. This guy wasn’t one you wanted to cross.

And speaking of crosses, Father Harold just made his entrance, bible in hand. God was another thing we’d all been bullied into believing.

But as for Biff, we weren’t sure what to believe. He sat there in front of us—his physical power and hold over the community long since stripped away—staring straight ahead, not betraying a thing. The man was a safe locked tight and welded shut. Two among us were that special combination of brave and dumb enough to go stand at the glass and gawk, and that man stared right the fuck back, eyes like two guns loaded with compacted hate so sinister you couldn’t help but get a taste.

After a while, he stood to pace; the man was no doubt cagey and restless; we tried to convince ourselves they had in fact taken us to the zoo. This part, we figured, was more or less the same. The back and forth…back and forth…back…and…forth… We busied ourselves with the act of observation, trying to deny that which we all knew was coming.

*

The waiting made us stupid and bold. A few of us fourth graders made a contest out of contorting our faces and sticking out our tongues, jeering at a man whose death was just a hopscotch hop, skip, and jump away. He returned our death-defying gazes, barely blinking, barely breathing, devoid of any emotion besides this sense of muted rage that filled the room like smoke, same as the day they brought him in.

Soon after, the reporters began to file in, and those of us still standing were led to our seats, disturbingly giddy at no longer having to interact with this monster of a man…all the while wary of the impending show these hard-hearted adults expected us to watch with eyes wide.

I could barely stand to look at Biff, let alone his monstrous eyes. I was a pansy, a sissy, a coward, a pussy, whatever; they could call me every name in the book on the bus ride back, but it wouldn’t change the inescapable fact that I could not bring myself to watch. Simple as that. I stared at the floor instead, gripping my own hand hard enough to cut off the circulation, waiting with bated breath for this madness to end.

*

Sooner or later, it did. I couldn’t tell you how long it’d been. How long we’d sat there. How long I’d been holding my breath. But the switch got flipped, and we—well, most of us—sat there glued to our seats, eyes fixed upon this unnatural frying of a man, seeing ourselves reflected in the current, feeling our fingers tickle the switch as if we’d made the call through our attendance alone, drinking in that tenuous flow of life coming in like a tide, coming in and out and in and out of our veins and in and out of the room and in and out and in and out…until…

The end. Lights out.

I knew what was happening. Knew what had happened. My body knew. I didn’t need to see it to know. Nor to confirm. Being there was bad enough. I counted the lightning-like cracks in the floor and watched a trail of urine trickle down the exposed leg next to me. I heard the muffled sobs, despair strangled; it occurred to me that we were suffocating ourselves. Involuntarily, but still. Maybe we weren’t so different; maybe, we had more in common with Biff than we would’ve ever thought possible.

The bus ride home was silent—heavy with dread and heavy with dead. We sat there paralyzed by the first of many of life’s incomprehensible moments, reliving this unbelievably awful thing they’d taken us to see, cycling through it like a CD on repeat ‘til the disc scratched past the point of unplayable, all the while wondering what happened to the evil these authorities evacuated; would it linger—waiting to infect another—like a mist released back into the ether?

We, too, were haunted by Biff, now, but that wasn’t it; we were old enough to know: he wasn’t the last monster around. We eyed each other with newfound suspicion, working up the courage to surmise which of our playground playmates were destined for a similar fate. And me? I stared out the window consumed with bewildered wonder, trying to piece together how the sun dared to shine.

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Abbie Doll is a writer residing in Columbus, OH, with an MFA from Lindenwood University and is a Fiction Editor at Identity Theory. Her work has been featured in Door Is a Jar Magazine, 3:AM Magazine, and Pinch Journal Online, among others; it has also been longlisted for The Wigleaf Top 50 and nominated for The Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and the Pushcart Prize. Connect on socials @AbbieDollWrites.

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