by David R. Dow
The driver returned. The guards ate their hamburgers and fries and licked grease and salt from their fingers. The driver said, Buckle up, ladies, and we took a two-lane highway across a muddy creek. Through the windshield I saw a motorboat speeding across an enormous lake. The road turned sharply to the right, and a squat red-topped water tower came into view. Through the driver’s closed window I could hear barking dogs in a metal prefab building behind a row of rusted barbed wire. The van pulled up to a gate guarded by a man on horseback cradling a rifle and another sitting in a weathered plastic chair wearing a holstered .45. The seated guard stood and approached the driver’s side window. He looked at the IDs the deputies carried, made some notes on a form attached to his clipboard, and asked how long they intended to be. The driver said, However long it takes you people to get this guy unloaded. We’re off the clock in an hour.
The guard said, Your lucky day. Row’s on lockdown. Won’t take long to get this one processed.
Then he turned his gaze to me. He said, Welcome to death row, son.
We pulled up to a loading dock, where two guards from death row were waiting. One was a chicken-necked white kid with a splotch of acne on his forehead and braces on his lower teeth. The other was a thick black woman who was twirling a mahogany baton. The deputy sitting to my right got out of the van, and the guard in the passenger seat looked at me and said, Your turn. He stepped out at the same time as I did and pulled a pouch of tobacco from his pocket. He said to the white kid, Shift’s over. Y’all got an issue me dippin’ here? The CO said, Nope, so long as the warden don’t come out, and he spat a glob of thick yellow mucus onto the pavement beside my right foot. The black woman slid the baton into a leather loop, then manacled me in the prison’s own hardware. She unlocked the other set of cuffs and chains and they fell to the ground. The guard who had sat next to me and offered me water picked them up and tossed them onto the floorboard in the back of the van. Then he said, May God grant you mercy, young man, and I realized for the first time he had white hair at his temples and his two-day beard was flecked with gray. The guard whose eyes had roamed over me snorted and said, Shit, old-timer, let’s go get a beer. They were laughing as they left.
A third corrections officer appeared. Although I did not yet recognize the insignia signaling rank, it was obvious he was in charge even before the kid with acne called him Captain. He checked the cuffs on my hands and dropped a second chain from the leather belt to the loops on my ankles. It happened very fast. The captain said, Welcome to your new world, inmate. His tone was not facetious, and his eyes were sincere. The black woman smelled like lilac. She said, Ready, Captain, and he said, We are, Sergeant.
Lilac led the way, with Captain and Kid on my left and right. The buildings were concrete and steel, forming a U-shape surrounding a neatly manicured lawn being tended to by a gaunt middle-aged black guy wearing a white cotton shirt that said Trustee. Even from up close, the square single-paned windows were as small as portholes on the lower deck of a cargo ship. Their scarred plexiglass, I would learn by morning, turned the sunlight into a broken spectrum comprising different shades of dirty bathwater. I looked down and saw my reflection in the manacle, startled to see deep lines cutting into the face of a man who had aged thirty years in thirteen months. I shuffled along, because shuffling was the only way to move, and because I didn’t want to get wherever I was going. The captain said, Inmate, you’re going to have to learn to move faster than that.
We arrived at a cage, eight feet by eight, with a drain in the center of the floor and steel bars for all four walls. Lilac nudged me in, gently I thought, then all three guards stepped back as the door swung shut. The Kid reached through the bars to unlock the chains and told me to remove my clothes. Lilac picked up what looked like a fire hose and blasted me with warm water mixed with bleach and soap. She told me to face forward and lift my scrotum, and then to turn around, squat, and spread my cheeks, and she blasted me again. Perspiration mixed with the water dripping from my pits. Lilac told the captain I was clean, and he said, Good job, Sergeant.
To my left was a booth with a single guard watching four twenty-year-old computer monitors and manipulating a row of joysticks. A digital clock read 4:47 P.M. They left me there for two hours. It grew dark. A row of incandescent bulbs in sockets protected by chicken-wire orbs clicked on. I heard doors slam and men laughing. I smelled mustard greens cooking in grease.
New guards came to get me: Their name tags said Sanchez, Forester, and Meggyesfalvi. I stared at the laminated ID with the surname I couldn’t pronounce. He said, Inmate, have you got a problem? And he handed me a white cotton jumpsuit with the letters DR stenciled on the back, a pair of polyester boxer shorts, a crew-neck T-shirt, shower slippers, and a plastic ID with my name, photo, personal information, and inmate number. His accent was Eastern European, Hungarian, maybe. In my mind I named him Bela.
Earlier, after Lilac had hosed me down, the Kid had asked, Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, or Jew? I told him none of the above. He elbowed Lilac and laughed. He said, How come the terrorists brag about being Muslim and the Jews pretend they ain’t nothing? The captain grinned.
I said, My mother was Jewish, my father was not. I practice no faith.
The captain said, Suit yourself, inmate. We’ll put you down as Jew. You make hebe number three.
The kid wearing braces laughed and said, That’s a good one, Cap’n, hebe number three.
The captain glared at him, and the Kid got quiet.
According to my ID, I was Rafael Zhettah, 6'1", 175, Caucasian-J, DOB 7–18–66, no. 0002647. The photo was a head shot, taken when I was preparing to be hosed down. I looked at my eyes and saw the terror I had been too numb to feel.
Bela said, Inmate Zhettah, hands.
He pronounced it za-heater. I said, It’s pronounced je-tah.
Bela said, I promise you, inmate, how I say your name in here is the least of your fucking problems. Now give me your goddamn hands. I dropped my hands in front of me and pressed my belly against the bars. Bela said, Are you seriously a goddamn retard, za-heater? Turn your ass around. I said, Sorry, this is a different routine from county. I faced away and felt Bela’s warm damp breath on my neck. He said, Damn straight it is, numb nuts. Welcome to the major leagues, and he snapped the cuffs on my wrists.
They walked me down a long corridor, through two electronic solid steel doors operated by guards in a booth like the one I had seen before. I was carrying a small mesh sack with toiletries and a moleskin notebook Lilac had examined carefully when I arrived. I said to my escorts, Is it possible for me to get a pencil or pen? Nobody answered. Inmates were banging on their cell doors and there was a hissing sound coming from an area I later learned was the shower. I smelled ammonia mixed with urine. Bela said, Here’s your house, Inmate za-heater. Welcome to the neighborhood. Forester made a call on a two-way radio then used a key to open the sliding door to my cell: unit 11J on B-pod, one of six wings here on death row.
We inmates call the cells our houses, as if naming a cage something desirable can make it so. It was four strides from front to back, and not quite three from left to right, approximately sixty square feet. My closet in Tieresse’s house had been substantially larger. With my back to the door, a metal cot hung by chains from the wall on the right. Behind it was a shelf for my books. To the left, a stainless-steel sink and toilet. Next to it, a single outlet where I could plug in a hot plate to make coffee or heat beans purchased from the prison commissary, if I had any funds in my inmate account.
Forester told me to squat, With your back to me, he said, and when I did, he reached through the beanhole—that’s what you call the slot in the door—and removed the cuffs. I felt him slip a felt-tipped pen into my hand.
It was nearly seven P.M. I’d missed dinner but I wasn’t hungry. I spread a stained polyester sheet over a quarter-inch pad atop the metal bunk, lay down with my head on a thin foam pillow, covered my
self with a scratchy gray fleece blanket, and listened to the sounds of my new home. I took out my notebook and made the first entry in my diary.
Day 1: My celebrity preceded me. There’s a guy in the cell next door screaming that he doesn’t want a Mexican lady killer as his neighbor. He’s saying, Put the spic with his own. I ain’t gonna live next to no Mexican. I’m not sure who he was talking to, but I heard someone else scream, Shut your mouth, Adolf, and then the guy next to me said, Fuck you, nigger lover. I wonder how they know anything about me. I wonder if I should worry about my neighbor. Less than ten hours ago I was in Houston wearing a suit. Five days ago I was ready to go home. Now I am here, in a dark and cramped space, unsure of my neighbors and wary of the guards, smelling of sulfur, and shivering from either cold or fear. After the deaths of Tieresse and my padres, it’s the fourth-worst night of my life. I wonder why, as much as I want to, I am unable to cry.
* * *
• • •
I still remember the first night. On the first night, I noticed the sounds.
In the county jail where I had spent more than a year, the inmates had hope. They dreamed of being acquitted. They planned to go home. In the county jail, once the lights clicked off at ten, commotion stopped. Crazy guys got taken somewhere else. A few night owls sat up and whispered or read by lamp, but most of us slept. Deputies kept their radio volume low and left us inmates to ourselves. They knew the gig was temporary, that they’d be back riding patrol in a week or two, so they didn’t need to prove how different they were from the inmates by constantly beating us down. We couldn’t leave when we wanted, but we all knew we’d be leaving. It was guaranteed. What made us peaceful, almost serene, was the existence of hope.
Men do not go crazy from being locked in a cage. They do not go crazy from the outside pushing in. They crack from the inside pushing out. When you take away hope, madness fills its place, and madness is loud. Death row is the loudest thing I ever experienced, louder than anything in the free world, louder than a concert, louder than a jet, louder than a firecracker exploding inside your ear; and it is loud all the time, morning, day, and night. We do not count down the days until we will be free in here. We count them down to our deaths. Making noise is the proof you aren’t yet dead. In place of hope there is anger, and anger, too, is very loud.
If you listen carefully, you can hear layers of sound: crazy inmates screaming and banging on solid steel cell doors, white guys blasting country music on transistor radios they’re allowed to buy so long as they are well behaved, Jesus freaks praying for salvation while listening to Christian talk, static-laced intercom messages announcing shift changes, and hourly reminders to conduct a count. The guards are different too. They’re not like the deputies in the county jail who were marking time before leaving the asylum and heading back out to the streets. These guards are lifers. Their future is nearly as dismal as ours. Out of malice or ennui, COs check on prisoners by lifting up then slamming shut the cover to the beanhole, ensuring (perversely, I know) we are still alive. They ram meal carts into steel doors. They add to the cacophony as part of their jobs.
That first night, even more than freedom, I prayed for earplugs.
Some people say the first night is the worst, but I disagree. What it is is different. It is unlike anything you have ever known. But once you get accustomed to the constant din, to the menacing white supremacists and sadistic COs, to incoherent babbling and inexplicable shrieks, once you get used to all that, every night is the worst.
* * *
• • •
Day 2: Morning came, my first morning on death row, soiled sunlight slicing into my cell, and I had not even closed my eyes. I pulled my knees to my chest and rolled off my bunk. I examined the bolts holding the toilet to the floor and then looked to see if it was possible to use a paper clip to jimmy open the door. If it was possible, it was beyond my skill set, but it didn’t matter, because I didn’t have a paper clip anyway. I craned my neck to see where I would be if I managed to lose enough weight to shimmy through the tiny window. (I would have been on a walkway lined with a twelve-foot razor-topped fence.) These were fantasies. No one had ever escaped from this prison or even managed to slip out of his cell. But I’d have these fantasies, and others like them, a dozen times a day for every day I was here, every last one.
Breakfast was powdered eggs and a slice of untoasted white bread that contained more chemicals than wheat. I had a single swallow of juice from a box. When the guards came for the trays later that morning, the guy in the cell next door to mine started demanding again that they move him. I did not yet know all their names, but the kid with braces I’d met the day before lifted up the beanhole and told the guy to shut up. Then he said, By the way, Taylor, he ain’t only Mexican, your neighbor’s also a Jew. Guess you’re a two-time loser. He banged shut the beanhole, and I heard him laugh. Taylor screamed, Tell the captain I want an I-90, you hear me, bitch? A few days later I learned an I-90 is a form inmates fill out when they have a complaint about something. It was pretty obvious what Taylor’s complaint was, but just in case, he made it clear to me. He said, It ain’t nothin’ personal, Chavez. All you got to do is read the Bible. God says we ain’t s’posed to be mixin’ with the niggers and the spics. Live and let live. I wanted to tell him God also says you’re not supposed to murder. Instead I said, My name isn’t Chavez.
Later that day, the transport team came for me. I was still not familiar with the routine. I said, What am I supposed to do? A CO named McKenzie said, Put your ID in your pocket and your dick in your pants. I said, What? He said, Turn around, dumb ass, and show me your hands. He, the acne-scarred kid, and Lilac took me through a series of six doors and three corridors until we arrived at an area that could have been a decaying city high school. McKenzie knocked on a door and in an obsequious tone told a woman who turned out to be the warden’s secretary we were there. She steered us into a room. The warden was wearing boots, a plaid western shirt, and polyester slacks straining at the waist. He looked at McKenzie and said, Prison rodeo’s today. Then he introduced himself to me, told me we won’t have any problems getting along if I follow the rules, and asked whether I had any questions. I did. I wanted someone to explain to me how this nightmare was happening. I said, No sir. On the walk back, the kid with braces asked McKenzie, Does the warden compete in the rodeo? McKenzie said, How the fuck should I know?
When I arrived at the prison, Texas was executing people faster than it was sending new guys to death row. There was spare capacity. The cell directly across from mine and the one to the left were both empty. As the kid was opening my door, McKenzie made a joke about the vacant houses being a sign of a bad economy. He blamed it on the president. The kid forced a laugh. Lilac pressed her lips together. They left, and once again, Taylor and I had the wing to ourselves.
Somebody had left a yellowed newspaper article about Taylor’s case on top of my bunk. According to the story, Taylor, who was thirty-eight years old, had spent twenty-one of those years in prison. His first stint came after he was convicted of firebombing a black church near Dallas. While inside, he founded the prison’s Aryan Brotherhood gang and negotiated a treaty with the KKK. After being paroled, he was suspected of having killed two black neighborhood political organizers in the East Texas town of Vidor but was never charged with that crime. He was later convicted of murdering three Jewish doctors in their homes in an affluent San Antonio neighborhood, claiming they were aborting white Christian babies without the mothers’ consent.
Lilac checked on me that afternoon. She lifted the beanhole. I said, I’m here. She said, One thing we got in common, Inmate za-heater, is your new neighbor hates you as much as he hates me. Forester was with her. He added, Tell you the truth, inmate, most of the guards here, myself included, don’t much care for the guy, but we ain’t gonna interrupt our lunch if you get shanked. Do me a favor though and don’t let it happen on my shift, ’cause the paperwork’s a bitch.
Lilac said, I know that’s right. I said, Did one of you leave a newspaper on my bunk? They closed the beanhole and I heard Taylor scream, You’re all a bunch of lyin’ motherfuckers, all of ya.
Later that night I heard rhythmic tapping that might have been Morse code. I did not yet have a handle on the acoustics inside this place. The sounds could have been coming from next door, or from above me, or from a mile away. I said out loud, If that’s code, I don’t understand what whoever you are is saying.
The tapping stopped, then a voice whispered, It’s me. I said, Who? He said, Me, asshole. Your neighbor. It was Taylor. I didn’t know what to say. He said, Sadist motherfuckin’ COs just like to stir the pot. Did the warden give you his live-and-let-live diatribe? It’s all a bunch of bullshit. I ain’t a racist. I just told them I don’t want to live in a nigger neighborhood, same as they don’t wanna live in mine. Ain’t nothin’ personal.
It sounded like he was lying on the floor of his cell, with his head at the bottom of the solid steel door. I lay down on my belly and said, I’m not sure I like any of these neighborhoods. Are there black guys around here?
He said, What is it with you people and the niggers?
I said, Not sure what you mean by you people. I’m not really anything.
Taylor said, Not yet you’re not. Talk to me in a year, assumin’ we’re still around.
Minutes passed. I thought he had gone to sleep, and I started to make a note about our conversation in my journal, but fifteen minutes later he asked, You play hearts?
I said, Uh-uh.
He said, You want to learn you let me know. Got to do something to keep you sharp. Push-ups and hearts, key to longevity.
I said, Are you being ironic?
