David Dow - The Autobiography of an Execution

He said, I want you to do anything you can.

I said, Okay, but let me explain how it will work before you decide that.

I went through the normal speech, telling him that we would probably lose, and that we would not know we had lost until twenty minutes before six, and that I would call him and he would not have a chance to prepare or tell anyone good-bye.

He said, I ain’t got nobody I have to say good-bye.

Okay. But you still won’t have much time to get ready.

So you don’t think I’ll get me a stay?

I said, I think there is at most a one percent chance you’ll get a stay.

What’s that?

What’s a stay?

No. A one. What did you say?

I said there is no more than a one percent chance we’ll win.

He said, Yeah, that. What is it? Like out of a hundred?

I said, Percent? Yes. It’s like there are a hundred Ping-Pong balls. One chance we will win. Ninety-nine chances we will lose.

He said, Okay. Yeah. I want you to.

That night I told Katya about the visit. She knew what was coming. I said I couldn’t go to New York. She said, For somebody who claims he doesn’t want people depending on him you sure create a lot of dependency.

I said, I know it won’t make any difference, but I think it helps him to know someone is out there trying to help him. Katya didn’t say anything. I said, I think the worst thing is to feel completely alone in the universe.

Katya was mad I was not going to go to New York. She said, I get that.

LINCOLN AND KATYA were watching SpongeBob SquarePants when I got back to the beach. Lincoln ran over and hugged me. I pretended that he knocked me down and we rolled around on the floor, me tickling him, until he begged me to stop. Katya said, How did it go?

I said, Quaker asked me whether when I met you it was love at first sight.

She laughed. She said, Did you lie and say yes?

I said, If I had said yes it wouldn’t have been a lie. It just took me several years to realize it.

She said, Right.

Lincoln said, What’s love at first sight? Katya explained that it is when two people know as soon as they meet each other that they want to be with each other forever. Lincoln said, That’s impossible.

Katya looked at me and smiled. She said, He’s definitely your son.

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.