Lethal Injection

by Jim Nisbet

  Ever since his childhood, and now more than ever, he’d been able to sit so perfectly still that he could sense the vibratory edge of chaos on which everything balances, beyond which he might phase into a blur, amazed that the sheer power of his hatred couldn’t merely disintegrate the world—or at least its walls—around him.

  Death and freedom, each contrapositive to the other, had become opposite, equivalent and interchangeable in the other’s syllogism: each the fulfillment of the other’s hope.

  Not only that, he failed to laugh, that soup had cost him two bucks.

  He sat, perched on the edge of his rude bed, and looked at the shoes arriving beyond the bars of his cell door, waiting in the causeway. Was his executioner among them? Who, among these functionaries, was to put the needles in his arms, and flick the valves, to inject a cunning deadly fluid that would jet into his heart the terminal blackness, spreading like the ink of a squid shot into the sea around it?

  His chains rattled as he covered the inside of his right elbow with the palm of his left hand and rubbed a scarred vein pulsing there. Though much abused in the past, his veins were now by the ironic virtue of two years of workouts in the prison gymnasium very thick and strong and prominent: healthy, as it were. It had been hope that caused him to pump iron on a daily basis, pushing himself to a previously unknown extreme of physical endeavor. He stretched out both his arms and looked at them. His triceps, biceps, pectorals, the forearms, all had grown shapely and powerful—quite the reversal for the scrawny junkie a mere two cops had bludgeoned a confession out of, in the back of a Dallas jailhouse, three and a half years before.

  He flexed his arms, one then the other, and the tattoos running the lengths of both of them waxed and waned accordingly. Colleen… Would she make good use of this body now? It might show even Fast Eddie a lubricious thing or two. He touched the twin circular scars on his shoulder. Quickly, he dismissed these names from his mind. They were emotional substantives, fraught with feelings which for two years he had refused to allow himself to feel, ever since the final sentencing that would ultimately, all appeals having failed, send him to his death. Still… He flexed his arms again, the musculature swelled and rolled, rippling as he’d learned to make it do in front of the scratched and pitted plexi-encased gymnasium mirrors. Not bad, not bad. No punk in population had ever denied him, even a boyish guard or two had tumbled to the allure of this physique, perpetrator of pleasure, perpetrator of death.

  Still, would they give him a choice? Which drug? And exactly which veins would receive the deadly point? And, what kind of point, what kind of dope? Dopes plural, it was rumored up and down the line. He half laughed, confident in the thought that the state would provide the finest drugs available to ensure his thorough demise. And in spite of the intense summer heat a shiver passed over him, and his naked flesh came up in goose bumps. An icy void swallowed his laugh and he hugged himself. The loop of chain connecting his wrists sagged against his chest. Its links felt warm on the cringing flesh.

  Then they were all at the door. Warden Johanson, Pit Bull Peters, a man from the governor’s office, the other four guards, various attendants. One of them keyed the lock.

  Peters stepped into the cell, with an expression on his face that could only be described as thanatophagous—“death-eating.” He stood a moment. The door slid closed behind him.

  Whoa, thought Mencken, and sharp, paranoiac adrenalin chased the languid Valium from the operation centers of his metabolism. Without moving so much as a facial muscle to betray his redoubled perspicacity, every fiber of Mencken’s body keened alert. The feeble incandescent light in the cell seemed to glow brighter with each insect that ticked against it. Something was up. Putting Peters in the same cell with Mencken was a deliberate provocation, much as… His eyes flicked to the praying priest.

  Much as the slaying of a pet cockroach had been?

  Peters stood at parade rest, his skilled hands clasped behind his back, uncertain as to whether the priest were finished with the churchly rituals, but in the main waiting for Prisoner Mencken to make a false step on the way to his hot shot. The guard’s body had the evil geometry of an inverted pyramid.

  Slowly drawing his feet up onto the edge of the bunk, Mencken rested his forearms on his knees in front of him, and regarded his nemesis, calculating the distance between them as he puzzled. The time-honored ritual of such places demanded absolute courtesy toward a man condemned to die. Didn’t it?

  The cell was small, less than ten feet across; Mencken knew its dimensions exactly.

  Peters’ eyes shifted toward the authorities conferring beyond the bars. Johanson would have left him little leeway. There were many witnesses.

  Peters’ gaze shifted back to Mencken. Since Peters had entered the cell Mencken had not entirely taken his eyes off him. Mencken did of course have a last request. The authorities that ran this institution didn’t indulge their charges such niceties, and Mencken knew that, but, until the sniveling priest had stepped on Matilda, he’d thought Peters might be its object. Mencken shifted his gaze to the priest, who returned Mencken’s glare with a frank look of pity. Mencken shifted his eyes to Matilda, the mucilaginous pulp on the floor between them, then back again fiercely. A puzzled expression flitted over the priest’s mild, unlined face, then a hint of consciousness concerning the enormity of his thoughtless deed began to distort it. Mencken’s telepathic glare intensified, until it might have iced the blood of the elves in Santa’s workshop, let alone that of the fainthearted priest, who suddenly realized he might actually be in danger, that the prisoner Mencken looked about to explode. Although he assumed any precipitous act on the part of the prisoner would be profoundly futile, the man of God was beginning to feel himself decidedly unsafe from Mencken’s manic stare when the little round mouth full of sharp teeth in Peters’ face opened, and the tapering canine features in the head surrounding it pointed just a bit extra as Peters breathed his version of the penultimate question.

  “Ready, nigger?”

  The priest looked at Peters and gasped aloud. Then he returned his eyes to the prisoner and blurted, “God bless you, my son!” and crossed himself in terrified outrage. Doing this he dropped his prayer book, likely thereby, Mencken was thinking calmly, reprieving his own life. For the priest’s sudden outburst of sympathy startled Peters, who, making his last mistake in Texas, took his eyes off the condemned man.

  TWO

  In the death chamber, Franklin Royce glanced again at the clock on the wall, then checked it against his watch. Five minutes after midnight. They were late. Most unusual. Executions were never late. If they were late, it was because they’d been called off. But the reprieve should arrive via telephone, if it were granted at the last minute. He looked at the telephone mounted on the pea-green wall beyond the stainless steel gurney, and exchanged glances with the man posted there specifically to answer it. They both knew it hadn’t rung. So something had gone wrong.

  Royce tugged at his right ear with his left hand, an habitual gesture. This was no easy job, executing criminals, and it would be just a little more—well, not tolerable exactly—perhaps less nerve-wracking if it were to go off on time. But in any case, executing criminals was not an easy job, and not one you ordinarily expect a doctor to abet. But execution was not a simple matter any more, not even in Texas. Anyone could hang a man, and quite a few people could pull a lever that released cyanide gas into an airtight room. A fewer number could properly electrocute a human; that was a job frequently botched. The half-burned corpus still twitching, requiring another thirty-second jolt of fourteen hundred volts, the lights dim again in the prison library, et cetera. But hardly anyone outside the medical profession could be found qualified to measure a lethal dose of poison and neatly prepare a man for the injection of it. Moreover, the law requires that a doctor take the subsequent measurements necessary to certify that life has indeed ceased.

  Once the Supreme Court had reinstated capital punishment, in 1976, humane treatment became
the issue. No matter how heinous the crime, nor how guilty the perpetrator, the execution had to be accomplished with dignity. A hanged man could take as long as twenty minutes to choke to death; he might not even die at all, if the fall failed to snap his neck. Electrocution often failed to achieve an immediate effect, and the intervening failure was horrifying. Cyanide worked, but administering it as a gas took time, and, inasmuch as a cyanide execution left the state with a room full of poison gas with a possible corpse sitting in the middle of it, it produced awkward aftereffects, difficult to clean up.

  So the system had devolved upon injecting a lethal substance directly into the condemned’s bloodstream as the most efficient method of execution, and most satisfying all round, both to the condemned man and those who had to watch.

  Ten minutes after twelve.

  In his capacity as competent medical man, Royce once again checked his equipment. He hadn’t set up all of the apparatus yet, which was fortunate, because by now one or another of the solutions might have coagulated in the shaft of a needle. Royce was a fairly methodical man, determined to ensure that his technique would never be as shaky as his hands could be. His stethoscope he wore, of course, with the earpieces around his neck and the diaphragm in his shirt pocket. On a small wheeled table next to the stainless steel gurney lay a length of amber rubber tubing, two serum bottles, a spool of white adhesive tape, two syringes, a bottle of isopropyl alcohol, scissors, a roll of gauze, a small box of cotton, and the Velcro cuff, round gauge, associated tubing, and rubber bulb of the sphygmomanometer, with which to measure the blood pressure. All this was on top of a folder containing Prisoner 61-204’s medical history, soon to be completed.

  From a tall wheeled IV stand were draped various tubes, clamps and hangers, and a one-liter bag of a saline solution. The tubes swarmed around a glass manifold, from which a further network of tubing led to the wall. Beyond the wall, out of sight of everybody else connected with this affair, three volunteers, paid two hundred dollars each, would simultaneously unclamp three plastic tubes when given a signal. One of the tubes would introduce the mortal chemicals into the saline solution and thence into the condemned man’s bloodstream.

  Royce gently squeezed the one-liter bag. Its fluid level rose and fell accordingly. This bag contained a plentiful supply of a nontoxic saline solution, used to get the apparatus circulating. The method of circulation relied on the condemned man’s own blood pressure.

  On the table was a brown serum bottle with a pink rubber cap containing three compounds. A powerful barbiturate called sodium thiopental, commonly used as an anaesthetic in surgery, too much of which induces rapid pulmonary collapse. The salt potassium chloride stops the heart. And Pavulon is a muscle relaxant, also used in surgery, to induce paralysis so the patient won’t twitch inadvertantly under the surgeon’s knife. Tonight, all three were to be introduced into 61-204’s bloodstream in massive overdose.

  Everything was there. On the floor behind the steel entry door lay the knackered pigskin Gladstone bag containing the standard supplies appurtenant to general medical practice. The bag had come down to Royce from his grandfather through his uncle. Both relatives had practiced medicine in Texas, his grandfather of necessity engaging in a great deal of veterinary medicine to make ends meet. There had been, in those days, much more livestock in Texas than humanity.

  Twelve-fifteen.

  Royce had known the great man only slightly; he remembered him as very tall and thin, with a very full head of white hair permanently creased by the ever-present short-brimmed black Stetson, and a similarly full and white handlebar mustache. Though his grandfather’s stern demeanor had been very humorless, and he’d remained a rock-hard veteran of cattle wars, cholera epidemics, gunshot wounds, oil fires and gored rodeo cowboys, Royce could never forget his first impression of the imposing mustache’s uncanny resemblance to the large pair of curvilinear steer horns inverted over the door of his father’s barn. By proxy, Grandfather had forgiven this irreverence when young Franklin Royce graduated from the University of San Francisco—though without honors—and returned to Texas with his MD. Grandfather’s instructions to Franklin’s Uncle Addison concerning the ancient Gladstone bag confirmed this absolution.

  Although, Royce thought ruefully, for the thousandth time, he’d never really gotten the story behind the bullet hole in the bag.

  Because Royce’s father Jesse had chosen a beautiful wife and a large, run-down ranch over the medical profession, Royce’s father had never quite gotten along with Grandfather, who always had Sunday dinner with his other son, on a neat spread well kept by a caretaker Uncle Addison supported with his own lucrative city practice. If Royce and his father wanted to have Sunday dinner with Grandfather, they had to go to Uncle Addison’s. Mother never went, and nobody ever asked about her. Even at the tender age of seven or eight, young Franklin could sense the tension among the three older men. Once they’d had a particularly quiet and tense Sunday dinner, through which his father had sulked over his iced tea and said very little. Leaving the older men to their détente, wandering through the big, cool house, young Royce had found the Gladstone bag behind the open door to the parlor. The carefully organized tools within—the stethoscope, the bottles of pills and serums, the little reflex hammer with its pink triangular head and chrome handle, the glass syringes with stainless steel annult on their plungers—these had fascinated him. Riding the twenty-three dusty miles home from Addison’s place, Royce asked his father about the bullet hole. “Aw hell, Franklin,” his father had flicked the reins over the back of the horse in front of them, “he probably had the goddamn bag with him at the goddamn Alamo.”

  Twenty after twelve.

  The room in which the execution was scheduled to have taken place twenty minutes ago originally had been designed as a gas chamber. This design still served. The room was hexagonal. Its terra cotta tile floor sloped down slightly toward a central four-inch drain. Against one wall of the hexagon stood a large and sturdily built wooden chair, crisscrossed by thick leather straps with heavy metal buckles, each with two tongues. A small trap door was set into the wall beneath the chair, about a foot off the floor. At a signal from the warden, pellets of sodium cyanide were dropped through the door. These fell into a beaker of sulphuric acid beneath the chair, and the ensuing reaction released cyanide gas into the room. A complicated system of circulatory fans evenly spaced through the room, and its shape, were theoretically to ensure even distribution of the deadly fumes. But the condemned was securely strapped into the chair directly above and as close as possible to the origins of the fumes, to maximize the possibility of his choking to death sooner than later. The method almost always worked, but sometimes took a long time—particularly if the condemned man tried to hold his breath.

  The wall directly across the room from the chair was glass waist-high to the ceiling and now had curtains drawn over it. Beyond were two rows of benches and room to stand, for the witnesses required by law. The window was double glazed, to ensure containment of the cyanide fumes, but because of the inadvertent soundproofing a microphone had to be installed in the death chamber, with a speaker in the wall over the witnesses, so that they could hear the condemned’s last words, perhaps a blurted confession. No one ever came away from one of these events without remarking on the strange effect of watching the condemned man’s death throes through the thick window while hearing him choke over a cheap sound system prone to distortion and squeals of feedback. Every journalist who had ever witnessed an execution here for the first time had gone away to write that no criminal, having spent a midnight among the witnesses on the other side of the glass from such an execution, would fail to mend his ways.

  In modern times, the system was little changed. A stainless steel gurney had replaced the wooden chair, and the lethal injection had superseded the rope, the electrodes, and the cyanide pellets. But the window remained, as did the custom of admitting a certain number of witnesses, as did the direct line to the governor’s office, as di
d the curious possibility of the last minute reprieve, as did capital punishment, as did capital crime.

  At twenty-five minutes after the hour of midnight, just as Franklin Royce and the anonymous guard standing by the telephone had begun to run out of introspective thoughts, and were contemplating speaking to one another to pass the time, the door to the death chamber burst open. An excited guard in the blue jumpsuit and crepe-soled paratrooper boots worn by the men in his profession hurried in to address the only two men in the room.

  “He’s killed Peters!”

  Royce and the man at the telephone stared uncomprehendingly.

  “Who has?” said the man at the phone.

  “Mencken! Killed him in a flash, just like that, broke his goddamn neck with the chain between his wrists when Peters went in to get him! Cleanest hit you ever saw,” he snapped his fingers, “just like that. And his legs was still chained to his bunk!”

  The guard at the telephone, who was black, allowed himself a grin and said, rather matter-of-factly, “Why that nigger so-and-so.”

  Although the twenty-minute walk from the front gate to the gas chamber, as it was still called here, could be most astonishing to the layman, even at midnight, Royce knew little of what went on in prison society. But from the black guard’s expression it was easy to tell that this messenger would have to travel yet a little further before he found someone by whom this fellow Peters would be missed.

  “I’ll get my bag,” Royce said.

  “No need,” said the messenger, “They’ve already hauled him to the infirmary. Warden says for you all to sit tight. They’re going to put Mencken down anyway.”