Free Shame by Alan Russell Page A

stared at him intently and asked if he remembered the night they had met. Caleb told her he didn’t, but he did. They had been introduced in a holding cell at Florida State Prison just a few hours before his father was to be executed. He had been coming, and she’d been going, and his goddamn father had been holding court. His father had been transferred to the Starke prison the week before when the governor had signed his death watch. That’s where the electric chair was. The chair was antique, a three-legged oak model built by inmates in 1923. It waited for him.
    The lights in D. G.’s flickered. The coastal breeze had picked up. Two of the fluorescent lights faded out and then began the laborious process of coming back to life, making sounds like insects being fried by bug lights. The flickering lights took Calebback to his last meeting with his father. There were so many things to hate his father for, but in the end, he had tainted even that pleasure. Damn you for that, Caleb thought. Damn you for everything.
    “Your father wants to see you,” his mother told him. She was already packing his bags.
    “I don’t want to see him.”
    “Shut your mouth. This might be the last time you’ll ever talk with him.”
    “Good.”
    His mama slapped him across the face. Then she started crying. That made Caleb feel worse than the slap.
    The bus trip from Texas to Florida seemed to go on forever. His mama was used to it by then. She’d been to Florida for both of the trials, had left Caleb to look after himself for up to a week at a time. None of their kin was willing to take him in. He’d never told her how their own home had become a prison to him, how packs of boys had come around yelling taunts and throwing things. He hadn’t told her lots of things.
    It had been almost two years since he’d last seen his father. They brought Caleb to a holding room where a man stood up that he didn’t even know.
    “Hello, Son,” he said.
    His father looked so different. He’d always been so handsome and cool, but now his head was shaved and his eyes were wide and agitated. He kept looking up at the fluorescent lights, kept flinching whenever they flickered and cracked. He stared at them as if he was following the flow of electricity. Then, he finally remembered his son was in the room with him waiting. They were both waiting.
    “They’re juicing up Old Sparky again,” his father announced. “They’ve been playing with Sparky all week. Getting him ready for the big show. If you listen real close you can even hear him humming.”
    Caleb hadn’t known what he was supposed to be listening for, but he tried his best to hear something. He tilted his head to the right, and then to the left, but he couldn’t make out any humming.
    “Hear it?” his father asked. “Hear it?”
    To please him, Caleb nodded.
    Caleb kept sneaking glances at this stranger, at his father. What struck Caleb most was the lack of barriers between them. Even before his father’s imprisonment there had always been a distance between them that seemed unbreachable. But not now. In the holding room there wasn’t anything separating them. Their being so close scared Caleb, even though his father was shackled in manacles and chains, and there were two guards in the room. It wasn’t that Caleb was afraid physically but more that he wasn’t comfortable with their unexpected intimacy.
    The condemned man noticed his son staring at his shackles. He shook the chains. “Like my bracelets?” he asked with one of his old smiles.
    Prison hadn’t changed his father’s large, snow-white teeth. Nor had it taken the seductive wattage out of his smile. His light blue eyes were almost opaque, as if you could take an eraser and wipe away the color. His mama said the two of them looked just alike. Caleb didn’t want to believe that.
    “Almost fifteen, aren’t you?”
    Caleb nodded.
    “We don’t have much time to talk, son. You’re my last wish. I figured there were