by David R. Dow
I said, Before my trial I was married to the love of my life. I did not kill her.
It had not occurred to me she did not already know everything about me, but why should she? I started to tell them about the day I learned Tieresse had been murdered, but Olvido interrupted. She said, Tell me first about how you met her.
Five hours later, I had told them about how I met Tieresse and our life together. I told them about my parents and my childhood. I told them about my restaurant and my career. I told them about the places Tieresse loved and the charities and causes she supported. I told them almost everything.
Gradually the room grew more quiet and dark. The booths emptied, and the visitors returned to the free world. At five o’clock, a guard knocked on the door behind Olvido, and Luther swung it open. Olvido greeted the guard by name. The guard smiled, said something I could not make out, and pointed at her watch. My lawyers stood up.
Laura said, We did not tell them our legal visit would last past regular hours, but we’ll be back soon.
Olvido said, Before we leave, do you have any questions for me?
I said, How are you going to prove my innocence?
She said, I don’t know yet. What else?
I said, Can I sign a document allowing you to move money from my bank account to my commissary? They took my inheritance, but I have several assets left. I’d like to buy a radio and some books, and some edible food.
My plan was to live on tuna fish, peanut butter, pinto beans, corn tortillas, bottled salsa, and prewashed salads in plastic bags, all of which I could buy by filling out a form and giving it to the guard who checked in on me every morning. Texas planned to execute me in six or seven years, but I wasn’t going to let their diet kill me first.
I said, I have a neighbor who showed me how to fill out the forms to get stuff and he let me borrow some cash from him, but I don’t have any money in my account.
Luther said, Sure, that’s not a problem.
He opened a slot at the bottom of the glass separating us, reached into his bag, and slid me a document. I signed it and gave it back. I asked, Is that all I have to do?
Luther said, You’ll have money in less than a week.
Olvido said, Last call.
I said, Is it possible the guy in the cell next to mine is an informant?
Laura might have laughed. Olvido said, No, not a chance. You are on death row, in case you haven’t noticed. They don’t need an informant anymore.
I said, I definitely have noticed.
They stood up and touched their hands to the glass. I supposed I was expected to touch it back, so I did. A metal door slid open, and they were gone.
For more than two hours I sat there and waited. The next time I had a visit, I’d remember to go to the bathroom first. The guards had not forgotten about me. They just weren’t in a hurry. When I got back to my cell, a plastic tray lay there with a cold mound of what might have been beef stew. I examined a gray-green object I think was a pea and flushed it all down the commode. I replayed in my mind the conversation with the lawyers, and I realized I had done all the talking. Should I have asked them about themselves? Nobody teaches you the etiquette of being a prisoner.
Águila accepted my apology with grace. He said, You ain’t been here long enough yet to be going loco, muchacho. No me molesta. He also sent me a kite with his suggestions about what kind of soap, razors, and shower shoes to buy, and warning me about which guards screw the cuffs too tight, which leave you in the shower for an hour or more after you’re done, and which you can bribe to look the other way if they spot your home-distilled hooch or to score you some drugs.
Most death row inmates have no idea what the others have done, but Águila said they all knew about me. They’d followed my case on the nightly radio news. I was famous before I got here because of the fame of my victim. Águila said, This ain’t a place you want to be famous, Inocente.
I got down on the floor and quietly asked him if he knew how much some Valium would cost, and how I could pay for it until somebody outside had time to make the transfer for me. He said, loud enough for anyone to hear, In that case, Cazador, you’re screwed. A moment later he kited a triangle of tightly folded notebook paper under my door. Inside he’d drawn a smiley face, and he’d enclosed six small white pills. I wrote Gracias, and I kited it back.
The next morning, on the ninth move, Águila played Bxf4. After I looked at it I said, Queen to e8.
He said, Fuck. Nice move, Inocente. I’ll get back to you.
* * *
• • •
In the first four months, I left my cell thirty-three times: eighteen for an hour of rec, twelve for a shower, once to visit the warden, and twice for legal visits that totaled 17 hours, including the time I sat waiting to be brought back home. All told, I spent 50 hours, give or take, somewhere else. Other than that, for 2,878, I was alone in my sixty-square-foot cell. My next month, I wouldn’t leave at all.
Day 123: Until today, about ten percent of the guys on the row had cell phones. I did not have one, but I knew about them. Everybody did. The inmates bought them from guards for a grand apiece, paid for in cash by the inmates’ families, and they hid them in hollowed-out books, inside typewriters, or in other places COs didn’t look. The operation was discovered when an inmate known as Chief Notebook placed a telephone call at seven thirty P.M. on a Tuesday night to the chairman of the Texas Senate’s Committee on Criminal Justice. He apparently called the senator at home just as the senator was sitting down with his first vodka martini. No one knows how Notebook got the senator’s unpublished number. He introduced himself, said he was calling from his cell, and complained about the lack of computers and exercise equipment, sadistic guards, absurd mealtimes, and the lack of all-natural chunky peanut butter. According to most versions of the story I heard, the senator said, Who is this again? and Chief Notebook repeated his name and his inmate number and asked how soon the problems might be redressed.
About fifteen minutes after the senator’s cocktail hour was interrupted, guards began the process of tossing every cell on the row. It took a few days. There were 378 death-sentenced inmates at the time. By dawn, they had found fourteen cell phones. By dinner the next day they had twenty-three. When they finally finished, they had thirty-one, including one hidden in a wheelchair-bound inmate’s rectum and another under the folds of belly fat of an obese guy named Big Al. I know for a fact they didn’t find them all.
Four guards got fired. The guys with phones got sent up to level 3 for ninety days, where they got no showers, no exercise, and no outside food. All the rest of us were on lockdown for thirty, meaning we were confined to our cells twenty-four/seven. I’m not sure what the penological theory of communal punishment is, but I do know not letting us out of our houses made us forget how mad we were at Notebook.
The day before Notebook made his call, Águila flicked me a kite that said, Hah, I got you now. Qf3. I wrote, Kd8, and sent it back immediately. He groaned. He wrote, Damn. Rematch?
During our month of lockdown, we played fourteen more games. Two were draws. Two I won. He won the rest. On the thirty-first day, the same day lockdown ended, the captain came by Águila’s cell and spoke to him too softly for me to hear. I asked him what was up.
He said, Captain came by to tell me I got a date. Looks like you’re gonna have to find some other maestro to school your ass.
I was quiet, trying to imagine how that conversation went. I said, So when do they move you?
He said, Captain told me they got to leave me in my house on account a the death-watch cells have some kind a infestation. He wanted to know if I minded. For a supposably smart hombre, he asks some dumb-ass questions.
He turned on his radio. I heard water dripping from somewhere. I said, Tell me about your family?
He said, Escuche, Inocente, don’t be gettin’ all sentimental on me now. Everybody y
ou know here’s gonna get the juice.
I said, I know, but tell me anyway.
He said, Maybe some other time.
The next morning I asked again. He said, You writin’ a book or something?
I said, Why are you asking me that?
He said. No reason. Are you?
I said, I write in my journal. I’m thinking about writing the judges. That’s the only writing I do. You think it would do any good?
He said, What? A book? Or writing the judges?
I said, The judges.
He laughed. He said, Shit, Inocente, what I heard is they don’t even read what the lawyers write.
But I persisted, and eventually he told me. He was born in Chicago, the youngest of thirteen siblings born to illegal immigrants. He said, ’Til I was ten, I thought my oldest brother was my father. He was fifteen years older than me, but the reason I thought he was my dad is on account of I never saw my dad. Águila’s father worked in a grocery store bakery at night, making bread and doughnuts, and during the day bused tables at a downtown diner. He said, You know how many hours a week a man getting paid seven bucks a hour needs to work to pay the rent and feed thirteen kids? He didn’t wait for me to guess. He said, More than there is, that’s how many. His mother attended mass every morning, then spent the rest of the day cleaning the house and cooking pinto beans, nopalito, and tortillas. On Sunday mornings the entire family went to church at eight. Águila said the pews were packed with brown-skinned people, and the priest’s sermons, always delivered in Spanish, warned that homosexuals could be cured, that abortion was murder, and that birth control was a mortal sin. Águila said, Mi padre dejó de ir a la iglesia, but he didn’t stop fuckin’, that’s for sure. Matter of fact, I might even have some half siblings runnin’ around. No estoy seguro. To my ear, his laugh was wistful. I asked how he ended up in Texas. This time his laugh was bitter.
When Águila was in third grade, a rival gang killed two of his brothers and wounded a third. The family packed their belongings into a van and drove all day and straight through the night until they reached a small rancho in central Mexico where they moved in with his mother’s parents. On his fifteenth birthday, he came to Texas to look for work. He lived in a housing project in San Antonio, worked in a garage, and sent most of his paycheck home to his family. One evening at a bar a friend offered him a thousand dollars to open the garage at night so some thieves could chop up stolen cars and sell the parts. Águila said, Mil dolares. For real. Is this a great country or what? Mis padres siempre estaban cansados, tired of never having no money and not enough food, and here I was, getting paid to just open a door and turn on the lights. A few weeks later, Águila was smoking a cigarette in the garage’s small office while his friends were removing wheel rims made from aircraft aluminum they intended to sell for five thousand dollars apiece. Two Honduran guys wearing balaclavas and carrying Uzis burst in and ordered everybody to lie down. Águila opened the desk drawer and removed a Heckler & Koch 9 mm handgun. He pulled back the slide, stepped from the office, and emptied the weapon. The brown-skinned guys who had burst into the garage were undercover drug agents. Águila had killed two cops.
He said, So that’s my life story. I got time for one more game. You can play white.
After six moves he said, If I’d a been wearin’ glasses I’d a probably seen their IDs. So in a ways, I blame my bein’ here on not havin’ no health insurance. Before I could say anything he laughed. A pawn up, I offered him a draw on the twenty-second move. He said, Play on, Inocente. Seven moves later, I resigned.
On a Thursday morning in May they took him to the Walls Unit to die. He asked the guard to lift the beanhole to my cell, then he said, Hey Inocente, here’s a copy of my last will and testament, I think you call it. Gomez knows to give you my chess set, all right? Vaya con Dios, amigo. I’ll miss you.
I said, I’ll miss you too.
He said, Shit, inmate, you got more important matters to worry about.
He raised his shackled hands to his sternum, bent over at the waist, and, as best as he could, saluted me goodbye.
Two years earlier I wouldn’t have hired a guy like Águila to mop my floors. That night, number 213, I cried for the first time since I’d arrived on the row.
* * *
• • •
Day 277: They put a new guy in the cell across from mine. Until today it had remained empty since they killed Águila. I heard somebody trading insults with Sergeant McKenzie. It had to be an inmate. Being that McKenzie is dumb, sadistic, and vindictive, I pretty much liked this new neighbor before I knew who he was.
He was quoting the Bible and using words I hadn’t heard since Tieresse and I used to watch old YouTube clips of William F. Buckley debating Gore Vidal in the sixties. The new guy called McKenzie a crypto-Nazi, and McKenzie laughed the way people who don’t understand something laugh to pretend they do. Peering through the slit above the beanhole, I could see that the new guy’s wrists were cuffed so tight his hands were pale from lack of blood. He was black, with a shaved head and muscles that pulsed beneath thin, almost translucent skin.
When the cell door opened, McKenzie karate kicked the new guy behind his left knee. The new guy buckled only slightly and said, Fat man, you kick like a girl in elementary school, but I’m impressed you could even lift your leg that far off the ground.
I heard McKenzie say, Tell me again how many times you had to repeat first grade, dumb-ass?
The door closed behind him, and the new guy said, There you go again, fat man. A fool giving vent to his rage. Proverbs 29. Look it up.
One of the COs with McKenzie snapped the cuffs off the new guy, and the guards marched on down the block.
Later that night a kite came skittering under my door. It said, I’m Sargent. It’s a name, not a rank. You know you got a Nazi skinhead motherfucker next door, right? I think you and I got the same lawyer, Cuban chick with big ole tits, smartest and toughest one around. Your luck might be turning. Peace. It wasn’t signed. I wrote back and said, I’m Zhettah. I know about Taylor. I like my lawyer, but this shit takes too long. I flicked it back.
He answered, I know who you are. Long day for me. Buenas noches, compadre.
Five minutes later I heard him snoring, but when I woke up at three to use the toilet, I heard him chanting in his cell. Taylor was hissing, Shut the fuck up nigger, it’s the middle of the night, but Sargent either didn’t hear him or didn’t care, or maybe both. I put in earplugs and went back to sleep.
Day 290: I finally got to have what passes here for a normal conversation with Sargent, because he and I were in adjacent dayrooms. He asked whether I wanted to work out with him. I said sure, even though I had no idea how it would work. He said, Get on the ground and do some push-ups.
He then started to run. He ran four laps, stopped, and said, Your turn. So I ran four laps. We alternated this way for forty-five minutes. He’d run while I did push-ups, then we’d switch. It took him half as long to run his laps as it took me, and he did six times as many push-ups per set as I did, but every few minutes he’d say, Nice job, Zhettah, nice job. He pronounced my name correctly.
We talked about Águila. He and Sargent had known each other for years. Sargent called him Molina, which was apparently his actual name.
Sargent said, Hombre killed two cops and got life, but then came over here ’cause he killed an AB motherfucker in general. You got baby killers live here twenty years, and they go ahead and execute a dude who got rid of a piece of scum. How fucked up is that, Inocente?
I said, That’s what Águila called me. Or Molina, I mean.
Sargent said, Duh. I know that, Zhettah. Molina told me you’re the only guy he knows here who don’t belong. I promised him I’d look after you, as best I can anyways.
I said, Taylor’s Aryan Brotherhood. I guess that’s why he didn’t like Molina.
Sargent said, I
nocente, your skinhead neighbor don’t like nobody who ain’t as ignorant as he is, which don’t leave him too many brothers to like.
A couple of days later, Sargent’s cell got tossed. The lieutenant found his speed, and they busted him up to level 3. Sargent was laughing during the search, because he knew why they were there. He had bought the stuff from McKenzie. We all did. I’d been buying from him since my third month here. He hated Sargent, and Sargent acted like he hated McKenzie, but the inside narcotics trade was an emotionless business. Being a prisoner, you learn to be accepting, or maybe just nuanced. If you want something, and the only person who can get it for you is someone you detest, and buying it from him means helping him profit, what do you do? The only people who think there is not an obvious answer to that question haven’t been here.
On his way out, Sargent said, Catch you in thirty, Inocente.
But Sargent was mistaken. He was gone for two months rather than one. Twenty-nine days into his sentence, he refused an officer’s order to shave on the grounds Muslims do not shave during Ramadan. The CO told Sargent he wasn’t Muslim. Sargent said, I am what I am, which even I recognized as a Bible reference. On day 354, when they brought Sargent back, I sent him a kite. I wrote, Welcome home. Rumor is you finally went around the bend up there
He sent me back a picture of a smiley face winking.
Sargent said, Molina and I was neighbors during your trial. We listened to the updates on Pacifica every night. I won a hundred eight balls off him on account a the wager we made. He said you’d get off. I said no fucking way. We’d be seeing you in our hood.
I said, How come you bet against me?
He said, Spic kills a rich white lady? I don’t need to know nothin’ else.
I said, Yeah, but I didn’t actually kill her.
He laughed. He said, Shit motherfucker, like that’s gonna matter.
* * *
