Back on shore after a day of moral ambiguity and too much tequila, Artery walked up his driveway. Out of a towering oak high over the grounds dropped the cape-clad figure of Ursula D’Alario. She pounced on his back, rode him earthward, and frantically began trying to conceive Artery’s first-born right there amid the oil drippings and beer stains of his well-used drive. He couldn’t help noticing the stop-watch in her bejeweled right hand.
“I’ll be fertile for the next seventeen minutes,” she yelled. “Take me. I’m yours.”
“I’m not crazy about children,” Artery said. “And frankly, I’m scared to death of you. What if Veronica sees us?”
“She’s in a whirlpool with Swann’s Way in one hand and some doofus’s bird in the other,” Ursula said. “She’s cheating on you, Artery. I’ll be your revenge. Take me.”
“I don’t want revenge on her,” Artery said. “Get that cape out of my face. It smells like patchouli and mothballs. Gimme back my glove.”
“Let us create a new race of supermen,” Ursula pleaded. “Half Babe Ruth, half Ayn Rand!”
Ursula prostrated herself on the driveway and lifted her cape skyward, revealing everything and nothing.
Artery fled toward the house, where a bevy of stewardesses, models, coke dealers and local investment apprentices lounged in various attitudes of leisure and distress. They sure knew how to brighten up a room, though.
“Hi, girls. What’s up?” he said. The ladies looked at one another with the mutual congenital sisterly understanding that all men are dopes. They served him drinks that he really wasn’t supposed to have on game-day. Cooties Lumbago gave him the odd dirty look, but as the season progressed, Lumbago’s scowls were indistinguishable from his nods of approval. As the record loomed large, emotions melted and merged; all expression blended into one grand brew of consternation and awe. And lust, of course.
Some games went by without a home run, and thus no execution. On such days, disappointed fans left the stadium hungry for action and by sundown the jail was full of rowdy capital punishment enthusiasts who, if they couldn’t get their fill of doom at the old ballpark, would create a little of their own on the sodden, lonely streets of greater Des Moines.
But Artery was getting walked a lot. And Machine Shed Washington started hitting long taters that occasionally zapped the day’s condemned, thus depriving Artery of the day’s glory. Artery bore Washington no malice; he liked the guy. But more and more, Machine Shed was getting in his face about dispatching the condemned, and pre-empting Artery’s assault on the record.
“Pretty soon, it’s gonna be me wearin’ Miss Polk County’s tiara, ’stead of you, pussy,” Machine Shed crowed. It was a cruel world, Artery knew, and the longer it took him to break the record, the crueler it got.
The legislature had done what it could to help him. A few years earlier, they increased the number of capital crimes to include, not just the usual murder and rape and mayhem, but adultery, Sunday fornication, and simony as well. The hapless nobodies convicted of these slovenly crimes slowly worked their glacial ways through the labyrinthine appellate process and now, having run out of time, lawyers and funds for further appeals, they stood poised and at the ready to get every volt of Justice the state of Iowa could rev up for them.
Artery’s first dozen or so victims were all career matricides and fratricides, despoilers of virgins and churches, not that there had ever been much of either commodity to despoil in Des Moines, but there was some. Criminals with interesting histories and long sad tales of psychosis and woe had turned up from time to time. But as the season dribbled to its conclusion, the Halo seemed to shrivel. Where it had once contained axe murderers and chainsaw desperados and guys who held up Quik-Trips with Uzis, now it held nobodies who were unworthy of its fierce and dignified grip.
“I can’t really get psyched up for nuking an adulterer, even if he is a communist,” Artery said at batting practice.
“I hear you, kid,” Cooties said. “Them commies never cut it for me.”
Artery had to admit that the old windbag was right. That was the real reason for his slump. There wasn’t anybody worth sending out of The Great Beyond anymore. Leontes Daleiden had left a scorched earth in his wake; there was nobody left worth burning.
“But your job ain’t to make the rules, wise guy,” Cooties reminded him. “Your job is to break that record.”
But to pick up the morning paper and see that the nobody he dispatched the previous evening was some deprived and defective seed-corn dealer who’d gotten it on with a cheerleader who was sixteen going on thirty-one made him wonder: What kind of Justice is this?
“Are you feeling all right, Artery?” Veronica said. He knew their marriage was in trouble when she started addressing him by his last name. “I hope the thought of being Des Moines’s favorite serial killer isn’t praying on your little mind, my sweet. Did it bother you, my pet, just because you electrocuted that physical education teacher who fell in love with one of his well-endowed pupils amongst the volleyball nets in the storage room?”
“I’m just doing my job,” Artery said.
“You sound like the Hitler Youth,” Veronica said, looking up from a new translation of Within a Budding Grove.
“The record’s within my grasp,” Artery said. “When this is over, we can take a vacation. Go on a cruise. Get to know each other again.”
“But we do know each other, light of my life,” Veronica cooed. “You know that I’m a good housewife and industrious student, and I know you’re a heartless murderer—”
“So she doesn’t understand you,” Jessica Headley said, kneeling beside and above Artery poolside as she peeled him a grape and watched him soak. “I understand you.” She dropped the fruit into his open mouth, then slipped into the and bade him begin a new generation of superior beings.
“If you’d quit lolling around pools you’d start hitting some loooong taters,” Cooties Lumbago groused. The old coot at times looked like the unraveled mummy in the glass case at the museum.
Artery slowly got back on track the day he found an envelope, key, and a map in his locker. After another hitless game, he followed the directions and see to what palace, what pool, what whirlwind of pleasure it led, but he soon found that the directions led to the Hotel Magnus, a foul, vile, base structure filled with low-lifes and terminal derelicts.
The key opened door number 314. Artery turned the ancient lock, the door opened up onto the abode of Cooties Lumbago, who had lived here since his first and last wife threw him out thirty-seven years earlier on account of his tobacco juice on the sofa and his liniment and his funny hours and his bringing crude and remorseless ballplayers over to the house for Everclear and napalm in the middle of the night. Cooties handed Artery a mirror and bade him study its reflection, observe its teachings. In the mirror, Artery saw the vaguest hint of an incipient Cooties, foul but wise.
The reflection stayed with him in his next at-bat. The thought of spending his dotage as Cooties II appealed to Artery not in the least, but with the old-coot scent of the Hotel Magnus still fresh in his reeling nostrils, Artery felt rejuvenated and refreshed enough to face a new knuckleball hot-shot named Dooley Shooter, fresh off the diamond of a prison farm somewhere in Kentucky. Dooley’s knuckleball was a ferocious legend, as was the day’s condemned, one Orville “Scabs” Pfidinkus, who earned his spot in the Halo by streaking the stage at a Randy Travis concert at the Iowa state Fair, causing a riot and melee in which fifty-nine were trampled to death.
Scabs had been pummeled so mightily by the festive crowd on that night that he still seemed to be in a bit of a daze these two years after. Artery put his sympathy aside and, as the stadium speakers blasted “Forever and Ever Amen,” Artery took a feeble change-up from the Kentuckian and put it into orbit, an awesome, cruel, legendary and epic shot, shining in its superiority and its sheen. He stood at the plate and watched the pellet fly, because he knew, he knew, that this shot spelled curtains for Scabs Pfidinkus. Curtains, too, for his slump; he was out of it, he was free, and Machine Shed could only stand by and shake his head as Artery sailed ’round the bases again.
Nick Artery tied the record by sending Eldon “Booger” Jones into eternity. The night before the annual Iowa-Iowa State football game Eldon poured gasoline onto the field and igniting it. This, to protest his dismissal from the Iowa State team’s position as official Gatorade Boy due to his unfortunate tendency to moon visiting dignitaries, such as the wife of the Governor, during the official visits of state hot-shots to the teams’ practice fields on the eve of the Big Game.
Artery no longer felt any compunction about assisting in the translation of Eldon “Booger” Jones to the next level of intergalactic languages. Lawyers still debated whether exposing one’s nether regions to the wife of the State’s First Windbag was a capital crime, but now that the little scofflaw was ash on the lawn of The Great Beyond, Artery wasn’t worried. One more dinger, one more crash of the scoreboard. Artery would circle the bases one last time and then be gone, never to return. He would dash directly from the field to his beloved home, scoop up his sweet Veronica in his loving arms and transport her somewhere, he still hadn’t decided exactly where, but somewhere far away, someplace clean, maybe a mountaintop, maybe a canyon arroyo or a desert oasis, he didn’t care. He would renew his marriage vows for her, beg her forgiveness. If she wanted to spend the rest of her life reading Proust, he would help her. Hell, he would go to France and find the little bastard or someone who looked just like him and haul his skinny frog ass stateside and drop him at Veronica’s feet and let them discuss whatever it was they liked to discuss, until the cows came home. As long as she would take him back.
The last game of the season found the usually stoic Cooties Lumbago in tears. “Can’t tell ya, kid,” he said, brushing away Artery’s hand in the fetid hallway of the Hotel Magnus. “Only I just want you to know, I had nothing to do with it.” The old man walked away, holding a foul parody of a handkerchief to his face, waving away any gesture of inquiry from his star slugger. Artery walked to the stadium alone.
At The Great Beyond, his teammates were aloof to the point of hostility.
The National Anthem was sung by an interminable children’s choir. Children representing every nation gave musical and floral tribute to Nick Artery, in gratitude for ridding the streets of woeful miscreants and assorted wrongdoers. Fans dripped from the rafters like melting icicles. Beer was free and ran uphill. Weddings and baptisms and family reunions and all manner of gatherings sacred and profane were cancelled so that one and all could come to witness history as Nick Artery prepared to become the first man in history to not only hit 100 home runs, but to execute just as many loathsome criminals in the process.
Nick Artery accepted tribute and waved to a grateful nation on international satellite hook-ups, until he saw the prison guards emerge from the dugout escorting Veronica to the Halo.
Artery swooned and was brought around by Cooties Lumbago using a can of Black Dog.
“The crime is adultery,” someone said.
“What crime?” Artery cried. “When was she convicted? When’s the trial? What about the appeals, for God’s sake?”
“They waived all that, for you,” Cooties explained. “They caught her in the sack with Proust or some such bastard. The legislature met in special session last night, just for you.”
Artery blanched. He thought he was having a heart attack. “I can’t kill my wife,” he said. “That’d be murder.”
“The legislature passed a specific immunity for spousal electrocution,” Lumbago said. “Those boys worked mighty hard for you, slugger. Don’t let them down.”
Cooties pointed toward the box seats along the first-base line and saw a large contingent of porcine individuals in sweaty suits, raising their foamy glasses in his direction.
“But I’m an adulterer too,” Artery said.
“You’re a baseball player,” Lumbago said, handing over his fuming and lethal flask. “Here, take this. It’s good medicine. I used to give this stuff to Jackie Robinson when he was feeling sorry for himself. It’ll work wonders for you, kid.”
“You were never within a mile of Jackie Robinson,” Artery said, “unless you mugged a Girl Scout for her cookie money to buy a ticket.”
“I know,” Cooties said, stuffing his maw with unutterable snuff and brandishing the booze like a blessing. “You and my memories, kid. You’re all I got.” He slapped Artery on the shoulder. “Now go give me something to remember, kid.”
Artery trudged up the dugout steps as Veronica was escorted to her final reward. Behind him, Moira Lefkowitz and Jessica Headley called his name, cheering Veronica’s imminent passing and promising tumultuous delights come the dusk.
Artery ran toward his wife. The guards greeted him and wished him well, but advised him that conversation with the condemned was strictly prohibited by Iowa law. He didn’t care.
“Veronica, my pet,” he said.
“It’s all over, bumpkin,” she said, seeming neither scared nor sad.
“Is something eating you, dearest?”
“I never did get around to finishing The Sweet Cheat Gone,” she said. “I’d ask you if you knew how it comes out, but you wouldn’t know. Can you read, Artery?”
“Just the scoreboard, dear. And the handwriting on the wall.”
“What does it say?”
“That you’re toast, toots, unless I can use some clout. You know, pull some strings, get you off the hook in exchange for some kind of permanent mortgage on my future.”
“Don’t bother,” Veronica said, as the guards who marched her to the Halo. “I don’t want any favors. I don’t want to live in a world where people like you prosper and people like Proust get sick and die early.”
Artery promised the guards cash, weekend passes to the finest pleasure domes in Polk County, everything he could think of with which to bribe them. They were unmoved.
“So long, Artery,” his beloved Veronica said as the guards chained her into the big iron circle. “Where I’m going, maybe I’ll get to party with Proust all the time. Where you’re staying, the best you can do is Cooties Lumbago, an heiress with a serious drinking problem, and Miss Polk County, bimbo of bimbos. She’s got the clap, by the way. I hear she got it from Clarence ‘Machine Shed’ Washington.”
The switch was pulled, and the big chain that lifted the circle up to its place above the scoreboard began to rattle and roll. The guards watched the Halo as it began its ascent.
Artery charged, knocked the guards aside, and grabbed onto the iron ring. The guards tried to pull him back, but he broke their fingers with his cleats, and he joined Veronica on her trip to the top of the big board. He held her around the waist and begged her to forgive him.
“Honestly, Artery, you’re so middle class, so small town,” she said. “It’s what drove me into the arms of Proust.”
“But my love, it was the will of the people.”
“Then the people need to read more Proust,” Veronica said. “Now jump down while you still can. Let me go in peace.”
But it was too late, and the big wheel swung back against the top of the scoreboard, where it was embraced by magnets and clamps fastening it firmly into place. Artery suddenly remembered he was scared to death of heights. The sight of the ungodly crowd in the distance made him weak. Everyone in the stadium had been drinking for hours, and their reek fell upon his senses with one gigantic hot breath.
He looked at Veronica one last time. He kissed her.
“Can I go with you?” he asked.
Veronica rolled her eyes and sighed, and when she exhaled, her cheeks puffed out, and for an instant she looked like a little chipmunk, and endearing gesture from their ancient courtship.
“God, Artery,” she said. “Do you have to follow me everywhere?”
Some four hundred and fifty-two feet away, Clarence “Machine Shed” Washington lumbered, unannounced and unscheduled, from the dugout to home plate. Cooties Lumbago shouted at Washington to get back to the dugout, but the big guy wasn’t about to let his chance go by. He held a baseball in one hand and his bat in the other. He stood at the plate and dug in. He tossed the ball into the air, and swung. That ball, as Dizzy Dean used to say, was tagged. The Babe smiled upon its ascent. Jessica smiled too, as her camcorder captured a glorious finale for a deluxe collector’s edition boxed-set farewell video, complete with certificate of authenticity. Moira waved bye-bye with one hand; with the other, she quickly got on the phone and ordered a special million-copy extra edition of The Des Moines Dollar. Veronica smiled, too. Artery watched the ball zeroing in. The last thing he saw before closing his eyes was his own personal and not so unwelcome Justice, which, of course, had been his most ardent and determined groupie all along.
Mr. Britson is author of 5 novels, and numerous short stories. You can view his lastest publication, "A Job For Gotsdiner" on the UK's The Beat.