Creamy White Thighs

Tim Flynn Unloads

The mud-brown straps that lay across Connor’s chest now, sticking him to the gurney like gum to a shoe, were wider and thicker than the ones he’d gotten to know in the small gray boxy home that he and Aunt May shared on Holbrook Avenue in Cairo, a decayed little river town hanging off the bottom of Illinois like a stubborn drip off a faucet. He wondered if, when they took the straps off, after, they would leave flat pink bars over his translucent skin, the way the belts used to.

He edged his white head sideways, to the extent that he could. His arms were strapped out from his sides, on two extensions from the gurney, making even small movement difficult. The six bright lamps overhead spilled their light lavishly into the small stark room—glassy pale-yellow brick on three sides, a wall-sized green curtain on the fourth. Behind the curtain, he knew, was a window, and beyond that, another room, full of seated people who would watch through the glass.

Two men entered the room from the metal door opposite the curtain. He recognized the assistant warden but not the other one, in the steel-blue medical smock. They stared at Connor silently, as if he were a painting on the wall. Then they focused on the array of tubes and bags next to the gurney.

His name meant poet. As a boy, Bard Connor had never read a poem, wouldn’t even have known how to go about finding one. Aunt May never told him what his name meant. When he discovered it in a dictionary at the back of his classroom and asked her about it, she said: “Your mother had notions.”

Bard; poet. Had his mother, gone from his life before his earliest memory, thought him special? Certainly others did. He’d been in first, maybe second grade when he began to suspect that the perpetual staring he felt from others—secret sideways staring from adults, open gawking eyes-boring-in staring from other children—wasn’t something that others felt. The realization gelled on the day his second-grade class pictures arrived and he saw how he stood out among his classmates. He was like a snowflake on asphalt. He all but glowed. No wonder they stared.

By high school he talked so little that, when he did, the sound of his own voice startled him. It was a delicate and trebly voice, full of trails that went off into the woods and disappeared, accented by warbles worthy of birds. It was a voice full of air. The voice in his head was different: bold and big and, most of all, colored. Not colored as in the black kids who comprised the majority of his classmates, the ones Aunt May warned him to stay away from, but colored as in . . . having color. He knew that to others he sounded like he looked: frail and unsteady, milky, ghostly. But the words in his head stood out in sharp relief, like purple flowers in grass. He swiped a breadloaf-sized tape recorder from science class during his freshman year and spent one fall in his bedroom with it, wearing out the single cassette, holding the corded microphone to his pale pink lips and repeatedly reciting religious passages—the only printed material Aunt May had in the house—and playing them back, then reciting them again, struggling to put color into the words. No matter what he did, the recorded words were like melting ice cubes, soft-edged and glasslike, bending light here and there but failing to achieve the opaque solidity he heard in his mind. By sophomore year, he had virtually stopped talking.

His silence hadn’t mitigated the misery of those two years at Cairo Community High. In gym class, in the locker room, the other boys would stop what they were doing to watch him undress, marveling—silently at first, then, later, verbally—at the unbroken whiteness of his body. One asked: “Are you an alien?,” and no one laughed. He stopped going to school a month into his junior year, spending his days instead under the hood of Aunt May’s old Cadillac by the curb, changing oil or sanding spark plugs or replacing belts. The car was old and worn enough to need more-or-less constant help and Connor enjoyed the silent and solitary work. The elm tree in the yard kept the spiteful sun off his white skin, and when walkers or drivers came by, he could slide deeper under the hood. A woman from the school came to the house a few times to talk to Aunt May about his absence, but Aunt May refused to answer the door as usual, and after he turned sixteen the woman stopped coming.

Aunt May never struck him that he could remember, never did anything to him worse than strapping him to the bed during the group meetings (which she stopped doing by the time he was eight and was able to convince her he would stay put and not leave his room). Had he talked to people back then, he’d have told them that he didn’t hate Aunt May, particularly. By the time he was sixteen, she was the only person he ever talked to, though only about the necessities of their daily interactions. She would cook at night and they would eat in silence, and afterward he would watch television as she sat at the kitchen table, reading her verses. She didn’t take any interest in his work on the car but she didn’t prevent him from doing it. She never asked what he did when he left the house on foot in the late afternoon as the sun cooled. She left him alone. He hadn’t hated her, particularly.

The two men in the room murmured to one another over the array of tubes. Connor noticed the remnant of a spider web in one upper corner of the room and he thought about the oddity of it: building a web, in here.

The spring after he was freed from school, with nowhere to be each day and no one to answer to, he killed the first of the dogs. He came across it during one of his aimless walks through the eastern edge of town, toward the river, with the predatory sun low and safely behind him—walking through the black neighborhood, where the stares he got from the porches were of disinterest rather than judgment. He apparently didn’t look that much whiter to them than did the other whites. He looked whiter to the dogs, though. He could tell by the way they followed and snarled as he walked through, leaving a wake of raised fur and bared teeth. The scabby mutt with the black snout followed him belligerently for three blocks, knee-level but larger in its mind, a mastiff pursuing a ghost, herding him toward the river with snaps and growls, moving away each time Connor stopped and turned, then resuming its noisy chase. Connor, his voice like wax paper, said: “Shoo! Go away!” The dog didn’t. At the railroad tracks, with the steel-colored Ohio River creeping just beyond the next jagged rise, the dog got bolder, almost touching Connor’s leg with its snapping black snout. Connor stooped and picked up a brick from the broken bed around the tracks and, with nothing more in mind but to end the pursuit, brought it down hard on the dog’s head. A crunch and a yelp, and then Connor watched in wonder as the collapsed animal kicked repeatedly with one hind leg, the other apparently paralyzed, so that it moved in a circle on the ground in a canine approximation of the then-new craze of break-dancing. After a minute or two of its twitching dance of death, the dog died. Connor nudged it with his foot, then walked on and stood on the gravelly bank and threw rocks into the gray maw of the river until dark.

After that, he brought a baseball bat with him during his daily wanderings, a faded black bat with white lettering on it that he’d found in a grass-choked lot a few years earlier. He started bringing it along for protection from the dogs, though he was aware each time he walked the weedy desolation of Commercial Avenue that now he wanted the dogs to follow. Some didn’t, seeming to sense a trap. Others harassed him the way they always had, and now they died for it. He’d wait until he was amid the shattered concrete and rust-spotted spires of the vacant processing plant, the river whooshing softly nearby, no one in sight but himself and his mangy pursuers, and he’d bring the black bat down hard on whatever wooly head was closest. The others would turn and run upon hearing the death-sounds. Sometimes it took four or five swings to finish it.

The assistant warden pointed at one of the tubes, and said: “This one.” The other man, in the smock, squeezed the clear plastic tube with his finger and thumb, twice, three times. He traced his other hand down the length of the tube, to where it ended at the wheeled table next to the gurney. He studied it the way Connor had once seen an electrician study a breaker box at the school after the lights went out one day.

He hadn’t hated Aunt May, particularly. She was a short wide woman with hair like a plastic helmet and skin like a layer of slick on a pond’s surface in late summer. She’d looked like someone in the process of dying for several years before the night she did, the night they argued about the house. When Connor was younger, he assumed it was all her verse-reading and group-meeting that kept her alive—surely that was part of the bargain. It was only when Connor was an adult, and he understood that the verse-reading wouldn’t necessarily have that effect, that he started viewing her as a potentially dead person. As dead as the half-dozen dogs that he’d clubbed by the river, feeling each time a build and a release and, ultimately, a calm. He truly hated the dogs, hated the way they snarled and snapped and judged. The clubbing made it better. It was a resolution of sorts, a satisfying end to the argument he’d been having with the world since he was old enough to understand how the world saw him—the boys in the locker room and the neighbors with their sideways looks across the yard and the children who stared openly from the safety of the back seats of their passing cars. In some moments, he supposed he might have clubbed them all, had it been feasible. But he didn’t hate Aunt May, particularly.

Still, he held no better feelings for her, either. The prospect of having his mother’s house sold out from under him—of forcing him out into a world where he would have to talk to people, to employers, to landlords, to others—made the decision a fairly simple one. It was without hate or anger that he held the pillow over Aunt May’s clammy pale face as she slept that night, and it was without hate or anger that he lowered the full weight of his body over the pillow as she twisted and kicked and finally lay still. He worried about his ability to act like a normal grieving nephew in front of the paramedics the next morning, but it wasn’t a problem. As usual with those who weren’t children and weren't dogs, they wouldn’t look him in his face.

He had to get a job anyway, as it turned out. He had to eat, had to pay utility bills, was getting tax bills in the mail, things he hadn’t thought about before. First he sold the Cadillac, putting a hand-printed sign on the windshield and then completing the cash transaction two days later there by the curb in the elm shade. The couple who bought it smiled too widely and talked too loudly as the money and title changed hands, their discomfort and determined politeness hitting Connor in sickly sweet waves, as their three young children gawked at him through their car windows as if through the glass at a zoo. The money from it lasted five months. It was two days after he spent the last of it, and with something like desperation, that he walked into the garage downtown to answer the help-wanted sign in the window. He murmured translucently to the man inside about his automotive experience, dressing up his curbside tinkering with the Cadillac into something more closely approximating an actual previous job. The man glanced uncomfortably around during the conversation, finally setting his eyes on Connor’s with obvious effort.

He started part-time, eight to noon. But walking home in the noontime sun was worse than working, so he stayed in the asylum shade of the garage most days—the sunny days—and worked through late afternoons under the chassis before venturing toward home at dusk, faded black baseball bat in hand. The man he worked for, Dale, mistook his solarphobic self-preservation for dedication to his job, and by the third week moved him to full time. Connor talked as little as possible to Dale or to the other two employees and they didn’t press him to talk more. When customers were around, Connor kept his head scrupulously buried in or under whatever engine he was working on, whether there was anything to do there or not, and no one questioned it. When someone had to go on a towing run or pick up a part, Connor was usually the one chosen to leave.

The assistant warden and the man in the smock exited the chamber, leaving Connor to ponder the brown straps and the plastic tubes and the remnants of the spider web up in the corner. Minutes later, the man in the smock returned, now accompanied by an older man in a smock. They stood looking at Connor, as if unsure what to say. Then the older man said: “We’re going to insert the needles.” He said it to Connor, but he looked to one side as he said it.

It was during one of the towing trips that Connor killed the first driver on Interstate Fifty-Seven. Dale gave him directions to an intersection just off the interstate, twenty minutes north of town. He arrived at the spot and pulled onto the rocky debris-strewn shoulder but found no car. It had happened twice before in Connor’s tenure at the garage, customers who called for help from a nearby house, then somehow got their cars going again, then vanished like waved smoke. Dale would be pissed. Connor stood beside the tow-truck, looking at the empty crossroad, as if the missing customer might materialize there. He was starting to climb back into the truck when he noticed the flat rear tire on the driver’s side, punctured by the debris. He said, softly: “Shit.” Then he pulled out the spare and the jack and the tire iron and began changing it, the belligerent southern Illinois sun punishing him for his poor luck. He was almost done when the maroon Oldsmobile pulled up behind him, crunching gravel.

The driver emerged, a slim man of maybe forty, well-dressed in slacks and a polo, wearing sunglasses. Connor could see a golf bag in the back seat.

The driver said: “Are you all right, sir?” He said it with enough concern that Connor wondered if he was visibly bleeding or something. Sir? And why wouldn’t he be all right?

Connor stood up from his crouch next to the tire, still holding the tire iron, like a giant index finger bent in invitation. They locked eyes, and the mistake was immediately clear. The man was so startled by his first full look that he literally stopped in mid-step. He said: “Oh.” Then: “I—uh—I . . . I thought . . .”

The man, composing himself, said: “I thought maybe you needed help.” He looked at Connor as he spoke, but his eyes didn’t stay locked on his. They meandered, through his shimmering hair, around the pink veins that played along his ears, along the bleached stalk of his neck. Curiosity hung plainly on the man’s face—not the earnest curiosity of knowledge-seekers, but the vulgar kind attendant to circus freak shows and bloody car accidents. He was gathering details to convey later, Connor knew. After another moment of it, the man said: “So—do you need help?,” in a way that made clear the help was no longer being offered. Connor answered: “No.”

They stood like that a moment, facing each other in the punishing sun, the distant interstate humming in a way that reminded Connor of the lazy whoosh of the Ohio River back in town. Then the man said: “Well,” and he nodded, and he took one more lingering look at the flour-white creature before him. He turned away and stepped toward his car. It was then that Connor gripped the narrow end of the tire iron with both hands and swung, wide and hard, as if at a fastball, striking the man just behind the ear with the flared end and dropping him to his knees. He swung twice more, both times producing a sharp, resolute sound like a hammer driving home a nail.

The older man in the smock dabbed Connor’s arms with alcohol pads before inserting the two needles—an odd precaution under the circumstances, Connor thought. The needles burned going into his powdery white skin, then turned cool. The younger man in the smock flicked his middle finger against one of the tubes, tilting his head back to look at it through the lower portion of his glasses. Connor looked from one man to the other, wondering idly if they would at some point look him in his face. They didn’t.

The house where Connor and Aunt May lived—and where Connor ultimately lived alone—was sheathed in wood that had once been painted deep blue but now was a light blue-ish gray. The porch was more a stoop than a porch. Connor walked quickly over the stoop when he got home that night, locked the door behind him, turned and peered out the grimy window and up and down the street and, seeing no one there, proceeded to the kitchen. There, he emptied the contents of his knapsack onto the table: wallet, sunglasses, the gun he found under the passenger seat. He had left the golf clubs.

Connor knew nothing about guns. This one wasn’t silver and curvy like the ones he’d seen on television, but was black and squarish. He was surprised by how brick-like it felt in his hand. He didn’t know how many bullets might be in it, didn’t know even how to check. Nor did he know how loud it might be—a potential problem, were he to use it by the river, within shouting distance of houses. He spent hours that night walking around the kitchen and living room and bedroom with it, leveling it at imagined adversaries. Later, sleeping, he dreamt of the man in the polo. In the dream, the man was lying next to his maroon Oldsmobile, his blood darkening the gravel around him, just as it had, but in the dream he continued looking at Connor with vulgar curiosity in his eyes, even under the blows of the tire iron. In the dream, Connor tried to end the looking by flailing wildly again and again with the tire iron, and then with several different golf clubs, aiming at his eyes, and finally shooting him repeatedly with the squarish gun, but even that didn’t stop his looking. He recalled the next morning that there were dogs in the dream, unseen but known to be circling in the distance.

The assistant warden was back in the chamber now, talking quietly with both the men in smocks. Each of Connor’s outstretched arms was linked now to the array of tubes via the two needles in his veins. He heard the assistant warden say: “Okay,” ending the conversation. Then he turned and addressed Connor directly for the first time: “We’re going to start.” One of the technicians pulled a cord and drew aside the green curtain by the wall, exposing the wide picture window. The six lights on the ceiling flooded it with a waterfall of silver-white, obscuring everything beyond it. He could make out the shapes of figures back there, some heads moving slightly, someone negotiating the crowd to sit, but mostly what he could see was himself, mirrored, white as milk, strapped to the gurney.

He'd waited a month to use the gun, then he used it twice in one day, first on the Asian man in the yellow sports car and then on the older woman in the boxy Buick. He’d taken the Greyhound up I-Fifty-Seven to Mattoon, two-hundred miles north of where they’d found the golfer’s body next to his car. He arrived at the bus station in early afternoon, then began walking back along I-Fifty-Seven, southbound. He didn’t put out his thumb, didn’t look at the drivers as they passed, didn’t do anything but walk on the interstate shoulder, carrying his knapsack and waiting. He didn’t have a plan so much as a question: Why was an old man worthy of their humanity, but a young man who happened to be the color of snow wasn’t? In the month since the golfer, Connor pondered the event many times—pondering especially the moment he first swung the tire iron—and he concluded that the reason the man died wasn’t that he stopped to offer help, but that he’d taken back the offer after seeing Connor up close.

So it was with the Asian man in the yellow sports car. Connor heard him coming before he saw him, heard the rumble of the engine and the thump of the music. The man glanced at him as he passed, then his brake lights blazed and the car angled to the shoulder ahead and stopped. Connor walked up to the open driver’s side window and stood staring. The man stared back, his mouth falling open. He said: “Oh,” confirming with that one word that he knew he’d made a mistake in stopping. He had.

Connor drove the yellow sports car south for two hours, minding to keep his hands and elbow out of the blood on the dashboard and arm rest. He parked it at the gas station at Marion, behind the building, among a couple other cars there, where it might go unnoticed for awhile. He walked back to the exit and down the ramp and resumed his trek southward on foot, slightly stooped. The boxy Buick pulled over ahead of him an hour later, as dusk descended.

The assistant warden returned to the chamber, accompanied by an older man in a suit who Connor recognized after a minute as the warden—he’d met him just once, years earlier. The two suited men stood looking at Connor, as if waiting for him to say something. He didn’t. He was peering past his shimmering reflection in the glass, at what was behind it. He could make out a few faces, most of them unfamiliar: An old woman—someone’s mother?—in what looked like her Sunday best. A wide, red-faced man who was practically taking up two seats. A youngish dark-haired woman, oddly attractive despite (because of?) her notably heavy eyebrows.

There was the young minister, the one who’d come to his cell several times in the past few weeks, asking to talk, offering his guidance. He said: “God loves you in spite of everything, Bard.” The minister’s visits were among the few times in all his years of incarceration that Connor actively wished he had a baseball bat handy. He also recognized the state’s attorney who had convicted him, now a state legislator, Mr. Hayne, his hair as snowy as Connor’s own and a demeanor so grandfatherly that it appeared designed to frustrate the expected image of a death-penalty-seeking prosecutor. Through years of pre-trial and trial and post-trial, Hayne had only once betrayed any hint of personal vitriol at Connor, when they were briefly alone in a courthouse hallway and he turned to him and said, without prelude or follow-up: “Every person you killed was someone who was trying to help you.”

Connor stopped going to the garage with the arrival of winter, a mostly snowless event in Cairo, Illinois, but cold enough to make the walk from home to work uncomfortable. He’d saved some money from the job—he had little to spend it on—and for a few months he lived on it. Weeks would pass in which he went nowhere outside the house and saw no one, not even passing drivers. The once clock-like regularity of meals when Aunt May was alive now slid into a disarray of spontaneous sustenance-eating, generally standing at the kitchen counter or in front of the open refrigerator. Three times a day? Six? One? He didn’t know. He ate when he was hungry. He slept when he was tired, he showered when he stank, he ventured out to buy food when he needed it, and other than that, he watched television—until the old set stopped working one whistling March night.

After that, between eating and sleeping, he just wandered the house and thought about things. Aunt May. Dale, his former boss. The golfer. The Asian man in the yellow sports car. The boys in the locker room. The woman in the boxy Buick. She’d looked something like Aunt May—older, heavy. She tried to drive away after stopping at the shoulder of the road and seeing him up close. She didn’t even bother to disguise her shock when she realized her mistake, as the golfer had; didn’t even say “Oh” as the Asian man had. She just took one look at his young ghost-white self next to her car, threw it into gear, and lurched back out onto the highway, spitting gravel. He thought to let her go, then a moment later he pulled the squarish gun from under his shirt and fired two shots through her back window, hitting her on the side of her neck and sending the car veering across the empty lanes and down into the grassy ditch of the median on the other side. He walked across the highway and over to the askew car as if retrieving something he’d dropped. He looked through the side window at the blood-showered woman—eyes wide, mouth moving soundlessly—and he finished it with two more shots. He hadn’t hated Aunt May or the others, particularly, but for the few seconds that the woman in the Buick was pulling away, he hated her. It was a hatred not too different from that he harbored toward the dogs, who also didn’t disguise their revulsion.

The warden now stood on the other side of the window, before the seated audience. He touched something on the wall, and an electric thump thumped down from the ceiling above Connor. He looked up at the sound. The warden looked down at a page in his hand and read aloud, his words buzzing from above: “The court having sentenced Bard Connor to death for the crime of first-degree murder . . .”

It was an afternoon in late April when Bard Connor opened the cabinet and understood that he was out of food and out of money to buy more. It wasn’t a surprise, exactly, he’d known that day was coming, but it nonetheless snuck up on him. He’d been planning to do something about it—he wasn’t sure what—before that day arrived, and now here it was. Getting another job in Cairo seemed unlikely, as there were few mechanics jobs around to be had and he’d walked out on one of those few. He had no idea what other type of job he might find that didn’t require a high school diploma and didn’t involve talking to people or standing in the dread sun. He stood in his doorway looking out at the empty street, trying to come up with a plan. He still didn’t have one, exactly, as he stuffed a change of clothes into his knapsack, next to the gun, and stepped out into the late-afternoon sun and started walking north. He would walk along the interstate and see what happened. That was the plan.

It was nearly dark when the trucker stopped ahead of him on the shoulder and stuck his arm out of the driver’s side window and waved him in. Connor took his time walking up to the passenger side of the truck, not especially caring whether the guy pulled away without him. He’d been remembering a girl he liked in eighth grade, remembering how far away she seemed right at the next row of desks, imagining what it might have been like had he been able to look directly at her and talk to her—an unthinkable scenario even now, but one that was providing a welcome distraction from the hunger as he stepped along the gravel of the highway shoulder. She had once smiled at him in the school hallway, just a small polite smile but one that had now lasted years. He didn’t know even as he climbed the aluminum steps to the truck’s cab whether he would shoot the man when he got up there, or just sit.

He sat, and pulled the door closed, and the driver put it in gear and rumbled back out onto the road. He was a paunchy gray man, fifty-ish, hard-looking despite his paunch. He wore a red flannel checked shirt and jeans that seemed to be the uniform of his profession. The driver said: “Where you headed?” If he noticed Connor’s whiteness, he didn’t indicate it.

Connor said: “As far north as you’re going, I guess.”

They drove in near-silence for an hour, the driver commenting on the traffic and fiddling with his two-way radio. At one point, he held it to his mouth and announced his position and asked for advice on traffic conditions up the road. Someone named Traveling Man answered back from the static, telling him he was free and clear. Finally, the driver turned to Connor and gave a little tense laugh and said: “You know, when I saw you there on the road, I thought you were an old man. But I bet you’re not thirty.”

Conner: “No.”

The trucker nodded. Then he said: “You’re an albino, are you?”

Connor was silent—it had never been put to him quite like that. Finally he managed to say: “Yes.”

The trucker said: “Maybe that’s why you’re so quiet.” Then the driver launched into an oddly cheery story about a cousin he had who’d been born with a cleft lip, and how it affected her ability to interact with people.

Connor asked: “But—a cleft lip makes it hard to talk, right?”

“Well, yeah,” said the driver, considering. “So I guess that’s a little different.”

Silence descended, during which Connor felt the unfamiliar sensation of laughter creeping up his throat. It wasn’t just the earnest and utterly inapplicable parable of the cleft-lipped cousin, but also the man’s easy warmth and patience, his failure to display either revulsion or forced nonchalance at Connor’s appearance. The man’s casual engagement with the whiteness before him—as casual as one might discuss the color of a shirt or the style of a shoe—felt to Connor like a door creaking open. In that moment, he didn’t feel separate, for perhaps the first time since he'd look at his school pictures and had seen himself standing out like a lonely distant star in the night sky.

The trucker shifted down and veered fluidly to the right, up a rest stop exit. He said: “I need coffee. Want some coffee?” Connor had never once in his life drank coffee, but now he wanted some. He said: “Yes. Thank you.” His words sounded as hollow and transparent as ever, but the driver seemed not to notice, only nodded. He parked the truck and turned off the engine. Then he turned and looked at Connor, issued a small, comforting smile, and reached up to the windshield visor above his head. He drew out a bundle of papers, and from it a pamphlet. He handed it to Connor. It was immediately familiar to him—the kind of writing that cluttered the home he grew up in, the only kind. The cover held a picture of Jesus, under a heading proclaiming something about The Word. The trucker smiled and said: “This will help you, son.” Connor stared at the cover and breathed deeply, feeling the brief light of connection going out, feeling the door slam shut.

Connor, after a moment, said: “This is Bard Connor.”

The tinny voice: “Hi, Bart Connor.”

Connor, correcting: “Bard.”

“Okay.” Then: “What’s up, Bard?”

Connor: “I’ve just killed a truck driver on Interstate Fifty-Seven, at the rest stop north of Cairo, Illinois.”

He’d intended to jump down out of the cab and point the gun at the police when they arrived—that was the plan—but their arrival took longer than he imagined it would, and he fell asleep. He awoke as two them were pinning his face against the dash and pulling his arms behind him. Shouts came at him from all directions, an explosion of sharp hard voices. Gun muzzles surrounded him like a cage. Outside, amid the spinning blue lights and the chatter of radios and the drone of engines from a dozen squad cars, they pressed him belly-down into the asphalt and clamped the cold metal cuffs around his skinny white wrists. Somewhere within the shock and adrenaline, he pondered that he was no longer separate. The night was a whirling galaxy of noise and light with himself at the center of it.
The warden, standing outside the window in front of the gurney, said through the intercom: “Mr. Connor—would you like to make a final statement?” Connor had been meaning, for months now, to come up with a final statement to say at this moment, something to convey some form of remorse to the survivors. He never actually felt remorse—it sometimes surprised him how utterly absent remorse was from his thinking in all the years since those things had happened—but he didn’t see any reason not to give them that. He'd hated the dogs, and he'd briefly hated the woman in the Buick, but all that was years ago, and he didn’t currently hate anyone, not particularly, so why not give them a little statement, if that provided for them something they needed? It would be more out of politeness than any actual remorse, he knew, but it wouldn’t cost him anything, so why not? He’d meant to come up with something, a final statement, but he kept putting it off, figuring he had plenty of time to do it, and now he had run out of time. He thought about looking over at the audience and just saying: “I’m sorry.” He wasn't sorry, particularly, but again—why not just say it?

Then he decided, no, it would be inadequate, in addition to being dishonest. So he shook his head no at the warden. Then he closed his eyes and remembered the way the girl smiled at him in the hallway in eighth grade.