The Autobiography of an Execution

by David R. Dow

  ON THE WESTERN TIP of Galveston Island, where the Gulf of Mexico meets the bay, only the ignorant stray far from shore. The vicious swirling currents pull overconfident swimmers out to the open seas and drown a dozen unsuspecting fishermen a year. I got into my kayak and floated into it. Underneath it’s a maelstrom, but from on top of the water, where I intended to stay, it seemed peaceful and calm. The Buddhist river runners I used to know would say that the secret was never to fight the river. I was willing to go wherever the tides wanted to put me.

  I saw a couple of dorsal fins. I thought the dolphins had come over to play, then I saw that there was only one fin, not two, and that it was a shark. It was only six feet long, which is long enough when you’re floating in a plastic seven-foot boat in the middle of the ocean. A school of jellyfish, thousands of them, streamed toward my boat, then fanned out along its length, half reaching toward the bow, half toward the stern, forming a torus, and rejoining into a line on the other side. It was cold, a hard wind blowing in from the north, the second day of the new year, and at 3:00 p.m., the sun was already low in the western sky. Four pelicans flew in a line, nose to tail, not a foot above the surf. I watched them until they were a dot. Looking south toward Cuba, I saw nothing, not a boat, not a rig, not a man, just the horizon, and a sliver of moon. The tide pushed me a mile to the east, where the waves began lapping, easing me to the shore. An hour later I was aground. I laced on my shoes and jogged back up the beach, through the soft sand, to my truck. By the time I got back to our cabin, Katya and Lincoln were back from shopping, and my mind was washed. Lincoln asked whether we could go build a sand castle before dinner, and I said sure.

  Katya and I sat on the deck and ate fried trout while Lincoln watched TV and ate buttered spaghetti. When I was ten, my brother Mark, who was then eight, decided to be a vegetarian. We had a housekeeper named Evelina, just like Quaker’s mom. The second day of Mark’s vegetarianism, she made pepper steak, his favorite, stirring thinly sliced flank steak in a cast-iron skillet with just a tad of oil, some garlic, a tablespoon of freshly ground peppercorns, and sliced jalapeños. Mark ate two servings. We shared a room. That night, as we were going to sleep, he said, If I’m going to be a vegetarian, I’m not going to be able to eat some things I really like. I told him that was true. He nodded like he had had a great insight then told me good night. He did not eat meat again for more than fifteen years.

  Katya said, Where did you go? I told her I was thinking about how Henry’s mom had the same name as a woman who used to cook for us. She said, I think this case is officially under your skin. I told her she might be right. We decided that she and Lincoln and the dog would come back to Galveston in a month, while I would be occupied with the Quaker hearing, so that I did not drive them crazy, and vice versa. We told Lincoln the next day on the drive back to Houston.

  He said, But it won’t be fun without Dada. I told him that he and Mama would have plenty of fun. He said, I know. It will still be pretty good, but not great. He spread his hands two feet apart. He said, If this is great… Then he held his hands two inches apart and said,… and if this is terrible… He held his hands about six inches apart and said, Going to Galveston without Dada will be this good. Katya leaned over and kissed him on the head. He said, Dada, I’m hungry.

  We stopped for ice cream. Walking back to the truck, Lincoln noticed the tape measure next to the door. He asked why it was there. I told him that if the place got robbed, and police asked the clerk how tall the thief was, she wouldn’t need to guess. Lincoln asked why someone would steal, and I said that there are some bad people in the world. He said, But maybe he just needs money to eat. I said that might be possible. Lincoln said, Besides, if he’s bad, Dada, he might shoot the person. I told him that was true. He said, Remember when Mia pulled my hair? I told him yes, I did. He said, I still don’t understand why some people are bad. I just don’t get it.

  LINCOLN STARTED GETTING night terrors when he was almost two. He would start to cry softly, and it would grow, crescendo-like, until he was screaming. His eyes would be closed. Katya or I would lift him from his bed, and he would be limp and tense, back and forth, eyes shut, shrieking. We would pace, turn on the lights, talk to him loudly. Minutes would go by, sometimes five, sometimes ten. He would finally stop without ever waking, and in the morning recall nothing.

  I knew these terrors were not my fault, and that they were. They started the night that Julius Anthony died. Anthony lived on death row for twenty-two years. He and two of his gang buddies shot an elderly woman for her Cadillac when Anthony was nineteen. His friends fired the shots. Anthony only drove the car, but the others were two years younger and not yet old enough to be executed for the crimes, so Anthony was the only one sentenced to die. On death row he grew up. By the time he died, he was not remotely the same person he had been. Six guards wrote letters, pleading with the governor to spare his life. They said they supported the death penalty, but not for Anthony. He was a peacekeeper, they wrote; he had intervened in fights and saved guards’ lives. He had counseled other inmates. He was not a risk to anyone and he caused others not to be risks as well. The governor turned them down, issuing a boilerplate statement the day of the execution that said the jury had spoken. The chaplain told me that it took prison officials forty-five minutes of poking to get the needle inserted into a vein. One of the guards on the tie-down team was crying. Anthony told him not to worry, that everything would be okay, the inmate consoling the executioner. After the execution, the victim’s son and I found ourselves standing next to one another outside the execution chamber, a rare social blunder by prison officials. He put his arm around me and leaned his head on my shoulder. A reporter called me on my cell phone while I was driving home to ask me how it felt. I told him to hold on for a moment. I put the phone down on the passenger seat, and left it there for the two-hour drive back to Houston.

  When I got home that night Katya was sitting in the rocking chair in Lincoln’s room listening to her iPod. She stood up and hugged me, and we watched him together, his arm wrapped tightly around a teddy bear. We went downstairs and I poured us a drink. An hour later, Lincoln was wailing.

  AS I PULLED onto the freeway after our stop for ice cream on the drive home from Galveston, I saw a flash of lightning out of my right eye. I asked Katya whether she had seen it. She said no, and then I saw it again. A window shade came down, and just like that, the top half of my vision was gone. I said, Uh-oh. Lincoln asked me what was wrong. I told him nothing. I asked Katya to drive. She heard something in my voice and didn’t ask why. When we got out of the car to change seats, I told her I couldn’t see out of my right eye. I called my neighbor, an eye surgeon, and he told me to come over as soon as we got back to town.

  I walked next door to Charlie’s house. He looked at me and drove us to his office. He dilated my eyes and told me that my retina was torn into the macula, and he wanted to operate on me the next day. He explained that the retina is the layer across the back of the eyeball that serves as the film for the eye. Images go from the retina to the optic nerve to the brain. I needed to have the retina repaired, or I would be blind. He said, I told you to stop boxing. I reminded him I had quit sparring more than ten years earlier. He said, Hmmm.

  I asked about the recovery time and Charlie said I would not be able to do any work for a week, maybe two, perhaps as long as three. I told him there was no way I could put things off for that long. He said, The alternative is that you go blind. I asked him what were the percentages of that. He said, Of going blind with an unrepaired retina that is torn into the macula? I nodded. He said, One hundred percent.

  I said, Well, I guess that’s that.

  After he drove us home I told Katya. The surgery would take around two hours. I found my will and my living will, telling doctors not to take heroic measures to save me. I called the office and talked to Jerome to let him know what was going on. I asked him whether he could call the judge’s clerk to see about the possibility of putting off the hear
ing for a week or two. The next morning, Katya and I dropped Lincoln at a friend’s house and she drove me to the hospital. At nine the anesthesiologist said I would begin to feel woozy in a minute or two. The last thoughts I had were: If I die, I wonder if Quaker will get a stay. Then: If I die, I’ll have stumbled onto a guilt-free way of not doing this anymore.

  Three hours later I woke up in the recovery room feeling like I’d eaten a bale of cotton. Katya and Lincoln were there, reading Narnia. Lincoln said, Look, Mama. Dada’s awake. I smiled and tried to drink some water. It spilled out of my mouth. My tongue felt like wax paper. Lincoln said, Look what I brought. He held up a wishbone. Nana gave it to me. Let’s break it, okay? He got the bigger piece, again.

  I said, Amigo, are you cheating when we break these things?

  He said, No, Dada, I am not. Do you want to know my wish? I nodded. He said, My wish is that you get to help the person you are trying to help.

  THIS IS A LITTLE KNOWN FACT, but I invented books on tape. When I was in college, I said to myself, I should open a business renting out books on cassette tapes. It was my best idea, surpassing even my idea for a single serving of ground coffee that could be brewed in a bag like tea, for that fresh-brewed taste on camping trips. I also invented the idea of a computer in a car, with local maps programmed in, that could give you directions. I was going to put them in rental cars. Unfortunately, I took no steps in any of these instances other than having the idea, which apparently many other people had as well.

  My grandmother was an avid reader. She went blind before there was such a thing as books on tape. She lost her vision when she was eighty-four and died when she was eighty-eight. She had cancer in her sinus that required radiation. The doctor told her she might lose her vision in the eye next to the sinus with the tumor. The doctor didn’t say anything about losing the vision in the other eye. I wanted to sue. If I had been eighty-four and the doctor told me I would be blind, I’d take my chances with the cancer.

  Death-penalty lawyers have a peculiar definition of victory. I already said that when my clients die of AIDS on death row, I count those deaths as victories. But it doesn’t stop there. One of my clients was supposed to be executed on July 1. We got a stay on June 30, so he did not get executed until August 1. Another month of life in a sixty-square-foot cage. But he was breathing. That’s a victory. When you lose most of the wars, you start seeing successes in individual battles as victories. In the free world, as my clients call it, definitions are different.

  When I asked Charlie about the risks of the surgery, he told me I could lose my vision anyway. I said, I can’t work if I can’t see. He said that I’d learn to read Braille. I have a seven-year-old son and a wife I love. That seemed like a victory in my world.

  Everybody sent me books on tape. I listened to the first book, written and read by David Sedaris. For five minutes I laughed out loud. Then I could not stop thinking about never being able to read again. Instead of hearing what he was saying, I was hearing him reading, and being reminded with every word that I could not read to myself. I did not listen to any more of the tapes.

  FOR A WEEK I worked with my eyes closed. Though I wouldn’t want to stay that way, I have to say that my piano playing got much better, and my thinking was less clouded. Katya drove me to the office in the morning after dropping Lincoln at school, and I would lie on my couch and talk to Jerome, Gary, and Kassie about the case. Kassie felt sure Green was involved. She said, Woman’s instincts. Trust me here.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t trust her. Green was who I didn’t trust. When I was in elementary school, my brothers and I would dial a random number and tell whoever answered not to pick up their phone for the next hour because the electric company was working on the line, and if they answered the phone, whoever was calling would get a severe shock. We’d wait ten minutes and dial the number again. Someone usually answered, and when they did, we’d scream like we’d been electrocuted. People torture others because it’s fun, or because they don’t have anything else to do, or because they’re on death row, and they’re angry and cold, and they aim to inflict as much pain as they can on the outside world before they get removed from it.

  Two years earlier, a chaplain on death row started reading scripture to my clients. They began asking me to waive their appeals. The chaplain told them if they repented, Jesus would forgive them, but if they fought, they would burn in hell. In his universe, pursuing legal appeals was a form of fighting. By appealing, they were refusing to take responsibility for what they had done. Two times is a coincidence, three makes a conspiracy. After my fourth client wrote instructing me to waive his appeals, I drove to the chaplain’s small house in Huntsville and sat in a rocking chair on the front porch, waiting for him to get home. I’m not a Christian, and if I were, I wouldn’t be a good one. My capacity for turning the other cheek is shallow. I introduced myself and told him that if he spent another nanosecond with any of my clients, he’d learn for himself the ins and outs of litigation. He looked at me with what I first thought was incomprehension but later decided might have been sorrow, like I didn’t know salvation when it was sharing my clothes.

  Then again, even though I didn’t want my clients surrendering their appeals, I had to admire the guy. He had gotten through to these men in a way no one had before. Sure, he had probably threatened them with eternal damnation, but still. I do believe he really did care about them. Almost all my clients should have been taken out of their homes when they were children. They weren’t. Nobody had any interest in them until, as a result of nobody’s having any interest in them, they became menaces, at which point society did become interested, if only to kill them. The chaplain had found a pressure point that could have saved lives, if someone had cared enough to find it sooner.

  But there are a resolute handful who spurn saving. They make shanks from their dinner trays and they spit on the guards. They save their feces to use as projectiles. They make a game of breaking rules. Their objective is to die without breaking themselves. When Breaker Morant was marched before the firing squad, he told the bishop who had come to pray for him that he was a pagan, and he screamed at his executioners, Shoot straight, ya bloody bastards. Green was less literate, but just as incorrigible. The chaplain I threatened would never had gotten through to him.

  Kassie had shown a picture of Green to Sandra Blue, the Quakers’ neighbor. Blue told Kassie she had never seen him before, but Kassie wasn’t sure. She decided to bluff. She paid Green a visit and told him that the Quakers’ neighbor had recognized him. He squinted at her and shook his head. He told Kassie that if I didn’t come up to see him, he was taking his secrets to the grave. Before she left he said, Sit there a few more minutes for me will you, and he dropped his hand into his lap.

  She said, I swear, it’s the last time I go talk to him. But you need to go see him. The scumbag knows something. I’m sure of it.

  Jerome had gone back to Bud Lomax’s house with a video camera. He sat in his car drinking coffee from six in the morning until he heard the TV through an open window at a quarter past ten. He knocked, and Lomax came to the door in his underwear. I watched the video. Lomax was unshaved but coherent. He was also believable. He looked at the camera and said, I don’t believe that Henry Quaker killed my sister. I lied on him at his trial. I did it because that detective threatened me. He told me I had enough drugs in my house to spend the rest of my life in prison. I didn’t want to spend no time in prison. I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry.

  Gary had filed a motion requesting that we be allowed to retest some of the evidence in the case. When the court said we could, the prosecutor and I agreed that Melissa Harmon would take the samples to the lab. She called. She said, Two of the blood drops are too degraded to be useful. I’m waiting on results for the other four. Kimberly Crist thinks there is no doubt whatsover that the blood was dripping from a person or from an object that was moving from the woman toward the children.

  Crist was the chief scientist at the lab. I did n
ot welcome her opinion, especially the no doubt whatsoever language. But scientists are often wrong, even if they are never uncertain. I was not ready to give up on my theory, which of course was actually just a hope, until the remaining blood drops had been typed.

  I said, If the blood belongs to one or both of the kids, she did it. If it belongs to her, the likely scenario is that she was shot first, and the killer went into the other room and then shot the kids. I’m not giving up on murder-suicide until we know whose DNA is in the blood.

  Melissa said, The problem with your theory is that she couldn’t have shot herself without a gun, but there was no gun.

  I said, Maybe there was. There had to be. Why else test her hands?

  I’m not sure.

  I said, Would you be willing to talk to Wyatt?

  Wyatt was the investigating detective. She said, Sure. Why not? It’s your money.

  I told the others about the call. Then I asked Gary to set up a trip to the prison for me to see Green and Quaker. I sat up and said, I’m walking next door to Treebeard’s. Anyone want anything to eat? Gary said he’d go for me. I said, No, I want to go. I need to walk. I’ll be back in ten minutes with shrimp étouffée and butter cake for everyone.

  I stood at the counter while the servers filled quart containers with étouffée, gumbo, and rice. I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned around. It was Judge Truesdale. She looked at my eye.

  Good God, what on earth happened to you? She touched my right cheek.

  You should see the other guy, I said.

  The server handed me my food. She said, I’m eating over there by myself. Sit with me for a minute. I followed her to her table. She said, This is off the record, okay?

  I am pretty sure that off-the-record conversations with a judge who is presiding in a case that I have pending in her courtroom is not okay.