David Dow - The Autobiography of an Execution

I think all the time about what I would do if I knew how many weeks, how many days, how many hours I had left. I’d circle the date on a calendar. That’s all I know. Everything else is a question. Would I sleep a lot, or not at all? Would I eat a lot, or would I have no appetite? If I ate, would I eat new foods I’d never tried, or gorge myself on my favorites? Would I watch TV or movies? Would I read books? Would I be able to concentrate? Would I exercise? What would be the point? Would I travel? Would I jump out of an airplane again, kayak huge white water, fly a jet? Would I call everyone I know and say good-bye? Would I spend every waking moment with my family, the people I love the most, or would that be too painful to withstand?

Doesn’t everybody think about these things?

I didn’t want Quaker not to think about these things. I didn’t want to give him hope. Like I said before, I’m always hopeful, but never optimistic.

Most of my clients nod their heads at that point. Some just bow their heads. They perceive my hope like a vanishing scent. They breathe it in and memorize its smell. They cling to it when they visit their parents or their children, because it is the only reason they have to think they will visit again. They don’t want to give me a chance to say anything else, anything else that might reveal how slender the reed happens to be. Not Quaker. He said, Why?

I didn’t answer right away. I thought to myself, Katya is right. A sliver of belief had crept into my head and I couldn’t stamp it out. It was like the aroma of baking bread. How could twelve jurors have looked at him and seen a killer? I said, Because none of this adds up.

He said, In case you’re wondering, I didn’t kill my family.

I almost said, I know , but I was not ready to surrender. I nodded.

He said, I don’t know what happened to that gun, I really don’t.

I wanted to nod again. I wanted to straddle the line. I wanted to support him and to protect myself. He exhaled through his nose.

I said, I know. I know you didn’t.

Instantly his eyes filled with tears. His lips parted then closed. He covered his mouth and nose with his left hand. He lowered his head and lifted it. My heart was so loud I could hear it. I thought, Where do we go from here?

I said, The plan is to get some judge to believe that, too.

I wanted to run out of there. I stood up. He said, Thank you. Thank you. We touched our hands to the glass between us.

Nicole was the guard operating the electronic door that day. She asked me how my Thanksgiving had been, and I wished her a merry Christmas. I told her I’d see her after the first of the year. She said, Quaker’s all right. He never causes no trouble. If you need any kind of statements from me or anyone else, you tell me, okay? There’s lots of guys in here who want to help him.

I emerged from death row onto the asphalt yard at two in the afternoon. I don’t believe in omens, but that didn’t change the fact that the sky was turning from ochre to black. I smelled sulfur in the air. I started to hurry across the prison yard, wanting to beat the rain to my truck. Maybe the guard didn’t want me to make it. While I was waiting for him to buzz me through the third of three gates, rain drops as fat as grapes began to fall. The sky crackled with lightning. Thunder like a sonic boom made me think of the night that Tim Robbins escaped from Shawshank. By the time I reached my truck, I was shivering hard and so soaked I squeaked.

THAT NIGHT I had a dream. I was driving home from seeing Quaker, down the twisting two-lane farm road that slices through fecund farmland just north of death row. The rain was pouring down, and the creek that runs along the east side of the prison was rising fast. Across from Florida’s restaurant the road doglegs to the left. A canoe usually tied up at the dock behind the restaurant floated into the road. I swerved to miss it and my truck skidded into the creek. It bobbed like a cork, then pointed nosedown and started to sink. Water began to leak into the cab. I took off my seat belt and fell against the windshield. Legal papers and CDs were sliding all around me. I reached for a rock hammer I keep in my truck for just this emergency, but of course it wasn’t there. Muddy water was two-thirds of the way up the door. I found the hammer and I swung it at the driver’s-side window. It shattered and looked like a spider web. Instead of swinging again, I used my fist. Shards of glass pierced my wrist like a bracelet. I squeezed through the window and breaststroked upward, following the bubbles as I exhaled. I ran out of air and sucked down a greedy breath a moment too soon, so when I broke through the surface a moment later I was gagging. The rain had stopped. The sun was shining in a cloudless sky. A young boy wearing overalls and rubber boots was standing ankle-deep on the side of the creek fishing with a bamboo pole. He looked at me with no surprise and said, Hey mister, what are you doing?

THERE IS A MOMENT in the middle of every night when I am the only man alive. I slip out of bed and put on a sweatshirt. I fill a mug with hot water and a squeeze of lemon. I carry it into Lincoln’s room and watch him sleep. If he’s still enough, I touch his hair or stroke his cheek. I picture him and Katya sitting at the piano playing four-handed, or the two of them dancing at a wedding. Every New Year’s Day, they go swimming together in the ocean. I don’t need to stay alive. I’ve done my job. I sit at my desk and think of nothing. With headphones I listen to Art Tatum or Teddy Wilson. I wait. Sometimes I fall asleep there. Sometimes I just sit. Sometimes something comes to me. That night it was the blood. The blood might tell us something.

I crawled back into bed. Katya asked if everything was okay. I said, No, not really.

She said, It will be. She put her right leg over mine and dropped her arm over my shoulder, and for the few moments before I fell back asleep, she was right.

ON SOME DAYS, it is hard to believe that mind readers are confidence men. When I got to the office the next morning, everyone was already in the conference room. A time line and a dozen photographs of the crime scene were tacked to the wall. I went and got my rubber ball and came back. The two children had been killed in their beds. Dorris had been killed on the couch in the living room, lying on her back, a single gunshot wound in her temple. There was a trail of blood connecting the two rooms. To my eye, the drops looked thinner on the side closer to the kids, and fatter on the side closer to Dorris. That would mean that the kids died first, and the killer then walked back toward Dorris, dripping blood as he went, either from the gun or maybe from his body. Of course, your eyes often see what you want them to. Plus, the blood could have been there already, since before the murders, but there’s no point to believing in coincidences, especially when they’re not helpful. We had to assume that the killer trailed it from one victim to the next. But if the kids were shot first, Dorris would have heard the shots, and if she had, she would have gotten up. But she didn’t get up; she was killed lying on the couch, with no signs of struggle. Nobody sleeps that deeply. That meant she had to have been killed first, probably while she was sleeping. If she was, the blood drops would be from her. If the blood wasn’t from her, if it was from one of the children, then maybe she did commit suicide after all, first shooting her kids and then taking her life. The story was in the blood. We needed to test the blood drops and see who they came from and to see which direction the killer was walking.