The moment he fixed upon came at the exact end of thirty years. Crenshaw had long owned the pistol with which it would be accomplished; he had fingered the shells lovingly and calculated the lodgement of each in the Fiend’s body, so that death would be sure but lingering—he studied the tales of abdominal wounds in the war news and delighted in the agony that made victims pray to be killed.
After that, what happened to him did not matter.
When the day came he had no trouble in smuggling the pistol into the penitentiary. But to his surprise he found the Fiend scrunched up upon his iron cot, instead of waiting for him avidly by the bars.
“I’m sick,” the Fiend said. “My stomach’s been burning me up all morning. They gave me a physic but now it’s worse and nobody comes.”
Crenshaw fancied momentarily that this was a premonition in the man’s bowels of a bullet that would shortly ride ragged through that spot.
“Come up to the bars,” he said mildly.
“I can’t move.”
“Yes, you can.”
“I’m doubled up. All doubled up.”
“Come doubled up then.”
With an effort the Fiend moved himself, only to fall on his side on the cement floor. He groaned and then lay quiet for a minute, after which, still bent in two, he began to drag himself a foot at a time toward the bars.
Suddenly Crenshaw set off at a run toward the end of the corridor.
“I want the prison doctor,” he demanded of the guard, “That man’s sick—sick, I tell you.”
“The doctor has -”
“Get him—get him now!”
The guard hesitated, but Crenshaw had become a tolerated, even privileged person around the prison, and in a moment the guard took down his phone and called the infirmary.
All that afternoon Crenshaw wailed in the bare area inside the gates, walking up and down with his hands behind his hack. From time to time he went to the front entrance and demanded of the guard:
“Any news?”
“Nothing yet. They’ll call me when there’s anything.”
Late in the afternoon the Warden appeared at the door, looked about and spotted Crenshaw. The latter, all alert, hastened over.
“He’s dead,” the Warden said. “His appendix burst. They did everything they could.”
“Dead,” Crenshaw repeated.
“I’m sorry to bring you this news. I know how-”
“It’s right,” said Crenshaw, and licking his lips. “So he’s dead.”
The Warden lit a cigarette.
“While you’re here, Mr. Engels, I wonder if you can let me have that pass that was issued to you—I can turn it in to the office. That is—I suppose you won’t need it any more.”
Crenshaw took the blue card from his wallet and handed it over. The Warden shook hands with him.
“One thing more,” Crenshaw demanded as the Warden turned away. “Which is the—the window of the infirmary?”
“It’s on the interior court, you can’t see it from here.”
“Oh.”
When the Warden had gone Crenshaw still stood there a long time, the tears running out down his face. He could not collect his thoughts and he began by trying to remember what day it was; Saturday, the day, every other week, on which he came to see the Fiend.
He would not see the Fiend two weeks from now.
In a misery of solitude and despair he muttered aloud: “So he is dead. He has left me.” And then with a long sigh of mingled grief and fear, “So I have lost him—my only friend—now I am alone.”
He was still saying that to himself as he passed through the outer gate, and as his coat caught in the great swing of the outer door the guard opened up to release it, he heard a reiteration of the words:
“I’m alone. At last—at last I am alone.”
Once more he called on the Fiend, after many weeks.
“But he’s dead,” the Warden told him kindly.
“Oh, yes,” Crenshaw said. “I guess I must have forgotten.”
And he set off back home, his boots sinking deep into the white diamond surface of the flats.
Published in Esquire magazine (January 1935).
