The Autobiography of an Execution

WON AND ONE are homophones, spelled differently but pronounced the same, like two and too. My wife, on the other hand, says Juan when she means won, and she says it like a Mexican. I make fun of this habit. When she asks how things went at Lincoln’s Little League games, I say, It was great. Both teams Juan. Lincoln always corrects me. (My pronunciation, that is, not my content. It is t-ball. Both teams did win.) Before I walked down to my car, I sent her a text. It read, Oui Juan. She called as I was driving home. I asked her what she was still doing up. She said, Waiting for you to call me. I told her the story.

Lincoln was getting bored in Galveston. I told Katya that the two of them should come back to Houston for a few days. She asked whether I had a Plan B. This was a reasonable question. In the midst of futilely trying to save a client, I’ve been an asshole twenty or thirty times too many. I’m short-tempered and surly and altogether unpleasant to be around. Having client after client get killed can do that to you. But I was not going to be working on the Green case, and I was not yet feeling desperate about Quaker.

I said, I promise not to be entirely impossible.

She said, Pretty tall order, cowboy, but she still agreed they’d stay the week and leave the following weekend.

I was going to be driving to the prison first thing the next morning to see Quaker, so I decided to get some groceries on my way home. At one in the morning, you pretty much have the supermarket to yourself. The only other person in the produce section was a tall, lean, Marlboro-looking middle-aged man wearing a belt buckle the size of a cantaloupe and brown lizard-skin boots. He squinted at me while he filled a plastic bag with fat jalapeno peppers. Did I know him? He was too old to have been a student of mine. He walked over and said, Did I see you on the news tonight? I told him I wasn’t sure. He said, Wasn’t you one of the lawyers fighting for that retarded man?

There is always a point in my conversations with strangers where I have to decide whether to lie. This time I didn’t. I told him that I was.

I’m accustomed to what was coming. Whenever my name is in the paper, I get a dozen e-mails telling me my client is a worthless pig, and I’m even worse. (Sadly, most venomous e-mails tend to lack much creativity.) But here’s the thing about living in Texas: It’s a big state. The man with the peppers shook my hand like we were old friends. He said, My papa was shot in front of me when I was eleven years old. It happened right there in the kitchen. He was drinking a cup of tea. When I joined a group to fight against the death penalty, it just about tore my sister up. She doesn’t understand it at all, but I just don’t think we oughta be doing it. I told her, After you kill the bad guys, you’re just as angry as you were before, but there ain’t no one left to hate.

He was still holding my hand. He looked down like he’d forgotten about it, then he looked embarrassed and let me go and shoved his hands deep into his back pockets. He said, I didn’t mean to take up so much of your time. I just wanted to say I admire what you do.

WHEN I GOT HOME, I fixed a turkey sandwich and carried it and a bottle of Shiner beer up to my room. The ten o’clock news was repeating, and they showed the picture of me that the man in the grocery store must have seen. The video had been shot in the morning, when we were working on the papers we thought we would file in the Supreme Court. The scene was fourteen hours old. I could barely remember it, like it was something that had happened years ago. People sometimes think I am younger than I am, because my hair is short and not too gray, and all I wear is blue jeans. But I noticed my hands gesturing for the reporter. Hands always reveal age. The skin was thin and papery, dotted with sun spots. Through the wrinkles you could see the veins, thick and green. I looked at my fingers and thought, This is pointless. Then I thought, I’ve been doing this too long.

There is a relationship between those two ideas that I know to be true but that I will not acknowledge. There are certain truths in life you have to evade in order to keep being the person you have convinced yourself that you are.

BEING AT THE PRISON the day after staving off an execution is the closest I come to being a rock star. Inmates sitting in their cages look at you as if you’re magical. Chaplains and nuns, holding the tattered Bibles that they read to murderers, greet you as if you’re Joshua. Parents and spouses and children of the inmates stare at you the way Auschwitz survivors stared at the Allied soldiers who came to liberate them. It makes me want to slink out and never return. Most blind squirrels starve. When you see one find an acorn, you can easily forget that.

Quaker told me that he had dreamed about his family the night before. He was in a pit with smooth sides. He tried to climb out, but there was no way to get any traction. He sank down to the floor, shirt soaked with sweat, wondering where he was, and why. He looked up, and Daniel was peeking down at him from over the edge. His first instinct was to shout at Daniel to get away from the edge so he wouldn’t fall. Then he felt lightness and love, like he could float. Daniel dropped him a pair of platform shoes. Wearing them, he could press his feet against one wall and reach out to the other with his arms. In this fashion, he crawled up the sides of the pit. As he emerged, he saw Charisse, hiding playfully behind Daniel. He hugged them both and realized he was crying. He lifted his head and saw Dorris, wearing just a negligee, sitting in a bed. She said, Daniel, Charisse, can you two run off to your rooms for a little while and leave Daddy and me alone? Henry took a step toward her. He smelled her perfume. He woke up as the guard banged open the slot in the steel cell door and passed him breakfast.

He said, It was the best night I’ve had in years. We sat quietly for nearly a minute, then he added, I heard yours was pretty good, too.

I told him about the last-minute activity in the O’Neill case, and then I told him again about our plan for the hearing. But I had a bad feeling I had used up all my luck. Maybe he read my mind. He said, You remember that story I told you about when I was in the psych hospital in New Braunfels after the fire? I said I did. He said, I feel like that right now, man. My will is spent. I ain’t gonna tell you to give up or to stop what you’re doing, but if we lose, it’s okay. It really is. I’m ready to just be done with it, you know what I mean?

I knew exactly what he meant, but I didn’t say so. Instead I said, I’m not planning for us to lose.

WHEN I GOT HOME, Katya and Lincoln were there, playing a video game that I did not understand. Lincoln shouted, Dada, and came running to me. I kissed Katya and she hugged me tight, squeezing the air out of me.

I said, Hey, be gentle with me, and Lincoln laughed.

He went to the closet under the stairs and came back with our baseball gloves and a tennis ball. He said, Dada, can we play catch? I looked at Katya and she nodded. She said she’d go pick up Thai food while we were playing.

The temperature had dropped into the upper forties, which in Houston is cold enough to justify a fire in the fireplace. Lincoln and I carried in some logs, and Katya put the take-out cartons on the coffee table in the library. I said, Hey Linco, do you want to try this chicken with basil and peppers?

He said, In case you forgot, Dada, I’m a vegetarian. I told him I had not forgotten, that I was only kidding around. He said, Oh. Well, it’s not very funny. You shouldn’t kill animals to eat them.

Katya said, What a guy.

I said, I know it.

And I thought to myself, I wonder if I disappoint him.

FOR THE NEXT TWO DAYS, I went to my office at five so I could be home by eleven or twelve. Katya, Lincoln, and I rode our bikes, sat by the fire and watched SpongeBob, read books, went out to lunch, played board games, tossed the tennis ball, and saw some movies. On Thursday morning, as we were finishing our pancakes, Lincoln said, What are we going to do when you get home today, Dada? It was the day of Green’s execution. I told him that he was going to have to hang out with Mama today, because I had to go to the prison. He said, Are you trying to help some person? I told him that someone else was trying to help the man. I was just going to go visit him. He said, Why can’t you help him, too?

It had been hard enough explaining to Lincoln that I try to help people who have killed somebody. It would be harder to explain that, in truth, I can’t really help anybody. Last summer, Gary, Kassie, and I spent a week in East