"Who's there?"

Rarely is he answered.

After two years, the corrections officers assigned to death row are weary of the mutant madman Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. They look forward to the end of him. The French wolfman with his deformed penis and hairy body is repulsive. His face is asymmetrical, as if the two sides were not lined up when they were put together in the womb, one eye lower than the other, his tiny baby teeth widely spaced and pointed. Until recently, he shaved daily. Jean-Baptiste doesn't shave now. This is his right. The last four months before execution, the condemned inmate doesn't have to shave. He can go to the death chamber with long hair and a beard.

Other inmates do not have baby-fine swirls of hair that cover every inch of their bodies except for the mucous membranes and the palms and the soles of their feet. Jean-Baptiste has not shaved himself in two months, and three-inch-long hair covers his lean, ropy body, his entire face and neck, even the back of his hands. Other death-row inmates joke that Jean-Baptiste's victims died of fright before he had a chance to beat and bite them into hamburger.

"Hamburger! Help her!"

The taunts are meant for Jean-Baptiste to hear, and he receives written cruelties, too, in the form of notes-or kites, as they are called-that are passed through cracks beneath the doors, cell to cell, like chain letters, until he is the final recipient. He chews the notes to pulp and swallows them. Some days as many as ten. He can taste each word, they say.

"Too bad we won't be strapping his hairy ass in a chair, then he'd be cooked well-done. Fried." He has overheard officers say words to that effect.

"The whole joint would smell like burning hair."

"It ain't right that we don't get to shave them bald as a cue ball before they get the needle."

"It ain't right they don't get fried anymore. Now it's too fuckin' easy. A little needle prick and nighty-night."

"We'll chill the juice extra good for the Wolfman."

13

JEAN-BAPTISTE STRAINS on the toilet, as if he is hearing these derisive comments now, although it is silent outside his door.

Chilling the juice is a dirty secret of tie-down and IV teams who want their little bit of sadistic fun at each execution. Whoever is in charge of the lethal drugs places them in an ice chest when transporting them from a locked refrigerator to the death chamber. Jean-Baptiste has overheard death-row inmates claim that the drugs are chilled beyond what's necessary, almost to the freezing point. The teams think it only fair that the condemned inmate feel the frigid intravenous hit, as enough poison to kill four horses rushes through the needle and shocks the blood. If the inmate doesn't exclaim, "Oh, God!" or, "Jesus!" or some utterance when he feels his icy, imminent death, the members of the execution teams are disappointed and a bit pissed off.

"That last ol' boy sure as hell had an ice-cream headache," voices yell and bounce off steel doors as inmates retell the stories.

"A screamin' one. You hear how he puckered when the shit hit?"

"No way that was on the radio."

"He begged for his mama."

"A lot of the whores I done begged for their mama. Last one screamed, 'Mama! Mama! Mama!'" The man the other inmates call Beast is bragging again.

He thinks his anecdotes are funny.

"You're a fucker. Can't believe the governor gave you another month, you fucker!"

Beast is the source of most of the execution stories circulating through the cells in the death-row pod. Beast was transported by van the forty-three miles to Huntsville and was already eating his last meal of fried shrimp, steak, fries and pecan pie in the barred cage next to the death chamber when the governor suddenly granted him a stay of execution so further DNA tests could be run. Beast knows damn well the tests are a waste of time, but he continues to milk what he can out of his last days on Earth now that he has been returned to the Polunsky Unit. He goes on and on about a process that is supposed to be secret. He even knows the names of the members of the tie-down and IV teams and the doctor who was scheduled to start the IV and pronounce Beast dead.

"If I ever get out, I'm going to do every one of the bitches and videotape it!" Beast brags some more.

"Wish I videotaped the ones I did. Hell, I'd pay all I got for even one videotape. Don't know why I didn't think of it at the time. Give those shrinks and FBI assholes an eyeful to worry about when they go home to their little wives and kiddies."

Jean-Baptiste never filmed his murders. There wasn't time, and stupidly, the idea never occurred to him. For that he continually rebukes himself. How rare it is for him to be so stupid…

Espиce de sale gorille…

Stupid monkey mutant.

Jean-Baptiste covers his ears with his hands.

"Who's there?"

If only he had filmed his bloody art or at least had taken photographs.

Uh, the longing, the longing, the anxiety he cannot relieve because he cannot relive, relive, relive their ecstasy as they died. The thought turns the key on an unbearable pressure in his groin. He can't relieve the misery. He was born with an ignition that doesn't work, sexual pistons that spark but will not fire. He breathes hard, straining on the toilet, sweat dripping from his face.

14

"WHAT YOU DOING in there?"

An officer bangs on the door. Two mocking dark eyes are there again, between the bars in the window.

"Playing ring-around-the-ass again. Man, your guts are gonna come out one of these days."

Jean-Baptiste hears footsteps on metal catwalks and other death-row inmates yelling their usual complaints and obscenities. Not including Jean-Baptiste, 245 men wait their turn while lawyers continue appeals and do what they can to persuade district supreme courts or the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a sentence or at least convince a judge to rule in their favor and allow DNA tests or some other trickery. Jean-Baptiste knows what he did and pled guilty, despite the histrionics of his attorney, Rocco Caggiano, also owned by the Chandonne family.

Rocco Caggiano s feigned vigorous opposition to Jean-Baptiste s pleading guilty before the judge was very poor acting. Caggiano abides by his instructions, just as Jean-Baptiste seems to do, only Jean-Baptiste is a very good actor. The Chandonne family believes it best for their shameful, disgusting son to die.

Why would you want to sit on death row for ten years? they reasoned with him. Why would you want to be released back into a society that will hunt you down like a monster?

At first Jean-Baptiste could not accept that his family would want him to die. He accepts it now. It makes sense. Why would his family care if he dies when they never cared that he lived? He has no choice. It is clear. If he didn't plead guilty, his father would have seen to it that Jean-Baptiste was murdered while awaiting trial.

Prison is such a dangerous place, his father softly told him in French over the phone. Remember what happened to the cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer? He was beaten to death with a mop, or maybe it was a broom.

Jean-Baptiste was emotionally beaten to death, all hope gone, when his father said that. Jean-Baptiste relied on his mind and meticulously began to study his predicament as he was flown to Houston. He vividly remembers the Welcome to Humble sign and a Holiday Inn with a Hole in One Cafй, which made no sense, since he saw no golf courses in the area, only parched leaves and dead trees and what seemed to be an endless stretch of slack telephone lines, scrubby pines, feed stores, mobile homes, decapitated buildings and prefabricated houses on cinder blocks. His motorcade turned off North 59, all those federal and local agents treating Jean-Baptiste like Frankenstein.