The Walls

by Hollie Overton

“Can’t complain,” Kristy said. “My son just made the debate team. First freshman to do that in ten years,” Kristy boasted, her motherly pride on full display.

  Warden Solomon nodded. “That’s nice.”

  But Kristy heard the false cheer in her voice. The warden’s son was a star quarterback at Montgomery High School. Kristy hated that she let it bother her. Who cared if anyone else was impressed by Ryan?

  “Should we get going?” Kristy asked, changing the subject, hoping to avoid the warden’s enthusiastic stories about this week’s playoff game and her son’s skills on the field.

  Flanked by Bruce, they headed through the labyrinthine halls of the prison, the two women chatting about the upcoming cold front. Weather was a popular topic for prison staff, everyone longing to be outside and away from these dark and depressing cells. They turned down a long corridor and the mechanized gates buzzed open. This was death row.

  Kristy regarded the sign posted at the entrance to the cellblock: NOTICE. NO HOSTAGES WILL EXIT THROUGH THIS GATE. This sign served as a reminder that these inmates were not to be trusted, that in here, your life hung in a delicate balance.

  Moving down the hallway, Kristy’s senses were assaulted by a wave of smells that no amount of training could prepare you for: piss, shit, sweat, all of it mingling with a hopelessness and desperation so profound it seemed to seep into your bones.

  “Take your time,” the warden said. Kristy nodded, but she intended to finish this task as quickly as possible. She hastily snapped photos of the hallways and rows and rows of cells. Inmates’ faces peered out through the tiny shatterproof windows on their cell doors. Some of them recognized her.

  “Yo, Miz Tucker, my lawyer’s got questions for you.”

  Some were heavily medicated and desperate.

  “These motherfuckers are torturing me. You gotta get me help.”

  Others were lost causes.

  “That’s one fine piece of ass. Come here. I’ll show you what a real man is like.”

  “I’ll kill you, you motherfucking, cocksucking bitch. I’ll kill all of you.”

  Not much shocked Kristy. Not anymore. She was used to hearing men talk like this. Inmates in prison weren’t that different from regular folk. Some were kind and polite. Some were mentally ill and should never have been put on death row in the first place. Others were wretched, miserable souls with no chance of redemption. Sometimes it was hard to tell who was who. It had taken Kristy years to adjust, but their words no longer rattled her. As a PIO, she had to appear in control, unmovable.

  She stepped into an empty cell and snapped more photos. Polunsky was often called “the hardest place to do time in Texas,” and Kristy agreed. All the inmates were kept on lockdown twenty-two hours a day in these small solitary cells. Even their one hour a day of recreation was caged, no contact with any other inmate. With no access to phones or televisions and no contact visits, inmates were basically entombed in these cells. It was about as close to hell on earth as you could get. Kristy couldn’t imagine being trapped behind these walls, day in and day out.

  She scanned through the images on the digital camera she had borrowed from Ryan, checking to make sure they would suffice. Good enough. She couldn’t wait to get the hell out of here. She craved sunlight and fresh air. Kristy stepped back into the hall where Warden Solomon and Bruce were waiting, and followed them back down the hall.

  For some reason, right before they reached the exit, Kristy glanced over at one of the cells, inexplicably drawn to it. Through the tiny sliver of glass, she spotted an inmate, his body splayed out on the floor beside his state-issued cot. Baby Killer Harris. That’s what the press and some of the guards called him. Kristy knew him as Clifton Harris. He had been sentenced eight years ago for killing his two young children.

  “Jesus Christ, he’s bleeding,” Kristy said, turning toward the warden. She hated how shrill and high-pitched her voice sounded, like this man had a paper cut and not wrists that were flayed open. The warden stepped forward, looking through the window to confirm that what Kristy was saying was true.

  “Get some more officers down here. Now!” Warden Solomon shouted to Bruce, who pressed a button on his radio, the squawking sound echoing down the halls.

  “Get back,” the warden yelled at Kristy. The buzzer sounded and the cell door’s lock opened. Unable to wrench her gaze from Clifton’s pale face, his blue lips, his eyes rolling back in his head, Kristy rushed past the warden and pushed the door open, kneeling beside Clifton, touching his neck and searching for a pulse.

  “Hold on, Clifton. Just hold on.”

  Clifton’s eyes fluttered open, haunted, life slipping from them. A bloodstained hand reached out, grasping Kristy’s wrist.

  “Ms. Tucker, I can’t do this no more. I can’t,” he said desperately, that same hand now reaching up to grab Kristy’s collarbone. “Just let me go,” Clifton begged, his hand starting to squeeze.

  Kristy’s breath caught in her throat. She remembered that sign at the entrance. NO HOSTAGES WILL EXIT THROUGH THIS GATE. She had rushed in here without thinking, worried that Clifton might die, desiring to help someone for a change, to do something instead of just being a bystander in her life. But Kristy realized in this moment that her unease, that sense of impending doom, had been an actual warning. With this convicted killer’s hand around her throat, Kristy wondered if Ryan had been right all along, that by staying in this job, by accepting what they did here, Kristy had made a fatal mistake.

  CHAPTER TWO

  There was so much blood, thick and sticky, a deep maroon that stained Kristy’s hands and her khaki pants. She wasn’t sure how long she knelt beside Clifton, his expression desperate and pleading. Seconds. Minutes. An eternity and yet no time at all. For someone who witnessed death behind a glass wall, who saw executions occur on a monthly basis, nothing had prepared her for being this close to it.

  “Let go, Clifton. Please,” she whispered, and he released her and closed his eyes. Maybe he thought she was giving him permission to give up. Tears pricked at Kristy’s eyes. Never before had she been so close to such despair. Masculine hands grabbed Kristy and yanked her to her feet, and shoved her into the hall as guards streamed into Clifton’s cell.

  “Goddamn it, Kristy, are you trying to get yourself killed?” Mac Gonzalez said, glaring down at her. Mac was one of her closest friends, a longtime guard working on death row. At six foot four and two hundred and thirty pounds, Mac towered over Kristy. He liked to joke about his size. Mexican people are never this tall. I keep asking Mama Gonzalez if she was getting a little on the side. He wasn’t joking now; his face contorted in disapproval.

  Kristy’s trance was broken. She could hear blaring alarms, the frenzied shouts of the inmates reacting to one of their own in peril, a cacophony of rage, anger, and sorrow playing out in slow motion before her.

  “You know better than that. Stand back and don’t move,” Mac barked.

  Kristy flattened herself against the wall, obeying like a scolded child. Her eyes darted back to Clifton, still sprawled out on the cell floor. Guards surrounded him, trying to locate the weapon he’d used to slit his wrists. Kristy had broken protocol and put herself in danger. If Clifton were desperate enough, he could have faked his suicide attempt and taken her hostage. She had failed to follow the rules. She was trembling uncontrollably now, staring down at her pants, now crimson colored.

  Generally, suicides, even unsuccessful ones on death row, inspired anger and annoyance from the staff. Reporters often painted the guards as incompetent, criticized them for being unable to monitor someone that was under constant supervision. Human rights groups would jump on the bandwagon, creating an uproar about the morality of the death penalty and the suffering of the inmates that were kept in confinement while awaiting their death sentences. Kristy generally found attempted suicides just as bothersome as her colleagues. They created a mountain of work, falling on Kristy to inform the media and public at large about what had occurred. The questio
ns were endless.

  “Are you denying that the prisoner was murdered by a guard?”

  “Or a cell mate?”

  “Or a white supremacist?”

  “Or the Mexican Mafia?”

  “Is this some kind of cover-up?”

  But today her concern was only for Clifton, his blood pooling onto the gray concrete in puddles. Clifton’s highly publicized crime and subsequent refusal to confess made him a pseudo-celebrity. Reporters flocked to listen to him; movie stars and music icons set up money for his defense. Kristy had been visiting Clifton every Wednesday for over eight years now. He loudly and vocally proclaimed his innocence, but others would say this was just another ploy to solicit sympathy. In the criminal justice system, especially in Texas, there was no sympathy. There are more people on death row and more executions in Texas than in any other state in the United States. If a jury voted to send you to death, it was almost guaranteed that you were going to die.

  Kristy watched as a gurney was procured and the guards rushed Clifton down the hall toward the exit. Every inmate on the row had some kind of reaction to Clifton’s last-ditch attempt at escaping his execution, howling, screaming, and banging on the glass. Some called out their condolences.

  “Cliff, my man, hang in there.”

  “Don’t let those fuckers break you.”

  Others couldn’t care less.

  “Burn in hell, baby killer. You fucking piece of shit.”

  As Clifton hovered somewhere between life and death, a fleet of armed guards would transport him to a waiting ambulance, and then on to Saint Luke’s, the nearest trauma center, where medical personnel would work desperately to save his life. If he didn’t make it, Kristy’s job would require her to release a statement to reporters that Clifton Harris was deceased. If Clifton lived, he’d be treated by doctors and returned to his cell to resume his life, or what was left of it.

  Kristy’s innate intuition that today was going to be a nightmare was spot-on. She turned and headed down the long gray halls, Mac falling into step with her.

  “You know the rules. You’ve had all the training,” Mac began.

  “He was bleeding out. I wasn’t thinking.”

  “You have to think, Kristy. These animals could fucking kill you. God, you scared the shit out of me.”

  He stopped short and pulled Kristy in for a hug. She let him hold her for a second and then she pulled away. Last year she’d made the mistake of getting involved with Mac. She’d been vulnerable after a particularly brutal execution, a man who begged the entire time for his mother. Kristy watched as the woman, in her seventies, bent and broken, wailed for them to stop. “Please don’t kill my boy. He’s all I have.”

  All Kristy could think about that night was how this woman had kissed her son good night and read him bedtime stories and now she had to watch him die. After that execution, all Kristy wanted was companionship, and Mac, who had harbored a crush on her for years, filled the void. He took her dancing, bought her Cuervo shots, held her tightly, and when Kristy had kissed him and asked if she could stay the night, he’d said yes. They’d fallen into bed, sweet and a little clumsy. A nice evening, she told herself, but nothing life altering. And yet despite her hesitation that night turned into dinners out at TGI Fridays, trips to the batting cages, some make-out sessions in Kristys pickup, but there was no passion, no fireworks. She tried to pretend. Tried to tell herself that nice was okay. That with all the evil she saw day in and day out, nice was good enough. But Kristy realized after a few months that she was never going to love Mac. Not the way he deserved to be loved. When she gave him the we’re better off as friends speech, Mac effortlessly accepted her rejection, as if it were inevitable.

  “No worries, Tucker. You’re not my type anyway. A bit too much of a know-it-all,” he said with a cheerful smile.

  Despite his agreeable nature, Kristy sensed his disappointment. He’d moved on, started dating Vera, an adorable RN. Sometimes though, especially late at night, when Kristy’s entire being ached, when she was desperate for someone to hold her, on the nights she had to witness a victim on their knees, wailing over the loss of a family member, or the nights her worries about Pops’s medical bills or Ryan’s impending college tuition seeped in, Kristy wished she’d settled for nice.

  “Kristy, that wasn’t like you. You have to be careful,” Mac said again.

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Warden Solomon chimed in as they reached the exit of death row. “I’d like to speak with you in my office.” Mac gave Kristy a hang in there pat on the back, and she followed the warden to her office.

  If Kristy thought the low point of the morning was finding Clifton on the brink of death, she was wrong. Kristy sat in the warden’s office and endured a thirty-minute lecture in which Warden Solomon reminded her in painstaking detail about the rules and regulations that she was expected to follow as an employee of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Kristy nodded and clucked in all the right places, promising the next time she saw an inmate bleeding out she would do absolutely nothing. Fortunately, the warden missed her sarcasm or at least pretended to. Once her dressing-down was complete, Kristy’s next order of business was canceling today’s inmate interviews. Some of them would be spoiling for a fight; others would be demanding to see their lawyers, using Clifton’s suicide as another example of the mental anguish they experienced. The guards also had to do a thorough search of the cellblock to make sure there were no other weapons and that each cell was secure.

  This meant Kristy had to face her own firing squad—half a dozen reporters who had driven or flown in from all over the country. Needless to say they were pissed, all of them rushing off to tell their editors about missed deadlines or to pitch new stories. One reporter, a portly, balding man, seethed with rage, spittle flying all over Kristy as he spoke.

  “You people don’t give a shit about our deadlines.”

  Kristy had to bite back her response. No. She didn’t give a shit about these reporters and their deadlines. Not today. Not when she had witnessed such suffering. Not when the inmates were riled up and itching for a fight. She didn’t care about them at all.

  As the reporter walked away grumbling, Kristy wondered how long it would take before she lost her own humanity. For her to see these men as just another story, to care so little about someone else’s suffering. Sometimes she worried that it was already happening.

  At long last, she was free of Polunsky, at least until next week. Kristy dreaded the shit storm that awaited her when her boss, Gus, found out about Kristy’s “infraction.”

  Navigating the old Chevy back into town, Kristy turned on the air conditioner to find nothing but humid air blowing from the vents. She tried to adjust it, seething silently. She had just spent six hundred dollars to fix it. How typical, she thought. Something’s always broken.

  Kristy looked out the spotty windshield as she coasted along the 45. To the east and the south, she could see the coastal plains, Bahia grass swaying gently in the breeze. To the west were the rolling hills stretching down through Hill Country.

  She passed Lake Livingston, the tranquil blue water sparkling in the sun. The traffic eased up as Kristy neared Huntsville, and the trees turned immediately into the tall stoic pines of the pine curtain that ran through the Deep South. Driving along those roads, after what she had witnessed today, knowing that she still had to sit through an execution, Kristy forced herself to focus on beauty where she could find it, cataloging it for later when the ugliness of the job threatened to consume her.

  Each time she drove past the picturesque Courthouse Square, Kristy always thought Huntsville seemed like a town with secrets hidden beneath the quaint, tranquil exterior. The main street was inviting, with well-preserved historic buildings. But people died all the time in this town. She imagined their ghosts roaming about side by side with the locals in their Lucchese boots and rhinestone-studded jeans, many of whom were also employed by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

&nb
sp; Kristy’s destination was the Huntsville Unit. “The Walls,” as it was more commonly known, was a colossal, foreboding structure crowned by razor wire and encompassed by a two-block-long redbrick fortress. Death row inmates lived at Polunsky, but the Walls was where they’d take their last breath. The Walls was home to the most active death chamber in the country. Kristy pulled up to the prison and headed to her office in an administrative building across from the death chamber. Today they would add another name to the list of the executed—Tyler Watkins, a serial rapist and murderer, was set to die.

  Kristy entered the office to find a group of reporters camped out, the “early birds,” she dubbed them. The vibe in the room was jovial, some reporters texting, some surfing the Internet, others making crude jokes about Watkins’s last words. “I bet he begs like a pussy for his mother,” she heard one reporter say. Another reporter was passing around a jar, collecting money and placing bets on how long it would take for the man to die. Kristy was used to all of this, a familiar routine for the public information officer. Her job required that she remain calm and unemotional, but after what she had endured at the prison, Kristy wanted to shout at them, Stop it. Give me some goddamn peace.

  “You ready to watch this motherfucker die?” Gus Fisher, Kristy’s boss, asked. Kristy sighed. No such luck.

  She turned to find Gus, the director of the public information office, hovering behind her, a gleeful smile on his ruddy face. A tiny bulldog of a man—five foot three and bald except for an embarrassing fluff of black hair on top of his head—Gus had been Kristy’s boss for a little over a year, and yet she still couldn’t get over the zealousness with which he approached this part of the job. She often thought that if it were up to him, they’d bring back public hangings and charge a fee. Not that Gus was some kind of advocate for victims’ rights. He didn’t know anything about the victims and rarely gave their families the time of day unless he thought it might ingratiate him with the higher-ups or the press. No. Gus was a petty man with a god complex who had landed a job that made him feel godlike. She’d heard through the grapevine when he got hired that he’d failed to qualify for the police academy three times. His cousin was married to the deputy governor, which was how he wound up here.