Cell 2455, Death Row Read online

  The death watch is expected in a few more minutes. Then, one at a time, it will remove two men from their individual cells.

  One of the two is Big Red.

  Big Red is an uncomplicated, normally jolly Arkansan in his late thirties, who drifted to California to labor at agricultural jobs in the San Joaquin Valley. For years Big Red was plagued with domestic troubles. “Me and the old lady didn’t get along.” His wife had him locked up several times for nonsupport, which rankled. He failed to see why he should support a wife who refused to live with him and perform her wifely functions. He was convinced “she was carryin’ on with another guy,” and felt badly because their only daughter had been placed in a state institution. Big Red blamed his wife for the girl’s commitment. One night he got himself likkered up and grew broodingly belligerent. The local constabulary jailed him until he sobered up. He was placed in a drunk tank with two other men, neither of whom he had ever seen before in his life. Something in Big Red’s alcohol-steeped mind snapped. He beat one of the men to death. A jury found him guilty of first degree murder and fixed his punishment at death. October 31, 1952, was fixed as his execution date.

  So Big Red is waiting. He’s waiting in Cell 2439, just four cells from the east end of the Row corridor.

  Henry is the other man who is waiting. White-faced, he cringes pitifully in Cell 2449. He has withdrawn into a sort of fear-induced stupor.

  Sex killer! Sex fiend! That’s what the newspapers call Henry. With a prior history of sexual misconduct with children, he was convicted of the sex murder of a ten-year-old girl, and doomed. He himself has a defective, child’s mind in a man’s body. He knows the state intends to gas him to death in the morning. He shivers and trembles with fright.

  “Hey, Knuckle-Head!” Big Red’s voice booms out, shattering the silence, “Wha’ time izzut?”

  Knuckle-Head shouts back, “Four minutes o’ four, Red.”

  “Well, it won’t be long,” Big Red says. “You only gotta put up with me fur a few more minutes.”

  But Big Red doesn’t want to believe this. He knows his attorneys have filed papers for him in a Federal court and he doesn’t know he has been denied relief. He’s waiting and hoping for an eleventh hour stay. Like most men, he doesn’t want to die.

  “Hey, Knuckle-Head!”

  “Yeah, Red?”

  “You know what I’m gonna be eatin’, don’t you?”

  “What, Red?”

  “Banana cream pie. An’ I ast ’em to put lotsa bananas in it. I’ll think about you.”

  “Okay, Red.”

  Knuckle-Head is an intelligent Brooklynite who unintelligently shot his sweetheart to death. He and Big Red are tied for first place as the Row’s champion eaters and talkers.

  Big Red says plaintively, “Only thatsa heckuva way to get pie, ain’t it?”

  The question is left unanswered.

  Knuckle-Head asks, “What else you gonna eat, Red?”

  “Black-eyed peas. Southern fried potatoes. Some . . .”

  “No chicken?”

  “Naw.”

  “How come?”

  “Don’t like it. But I’m gonna eat plenty else. I’m gonna eat ’em outa house and home. And I’m gonna have ’em set up the victrola and play me a lotta Eddie Arnold records.”

  Big Red sings a few snatches of a sad hillbilly song; next he whistles a couple of bars of another and livelier tune.

  “Hey, Knuckle-Head!”

  “Yeah, Red.”

  “I still like Ike. Tell Frisco I’d bet ’im a carton o’ cigarettes on the election but if I wuz to win he might have a little trouble gettin’ the cigarettes to me.”

  Big Red laughs at his own joke. A babble of voices expresses varied political opinions. Big Red and the slow-speaking “Phantom Sniper” (a newspaper appellation—the Sniper ran around Los Angeles shooting at women with a small bore rifle; one of them died; the Sniper was caught, tried, doomed) are strongly pro-Republican. Knuckle-Head and Frisco are ardent Democrats.

  Big Red raises his voice and is given the floor. It is not uncommon for all four of them to be talking at once. Quite often debates are won by the man among them with the healthiest set of vocal cords. This afternoon, however, some of the proprieties are being observed and Big Red enjoys a favored position. He expounds at some length on why he is convinced Dwight David Eisenhower should be the next President of the United States.

  Frisco stutteringly demurs. Notwithstanding the fact that he can barely read and write, Frisco is not in the least backward about letting it be known that he is a political pundit of no small stature. When Big Red interrupts, Frisco declares: “Ah, ah, ah, ah; he got the soapbox now; tomorrow, ah, ah, ah, I’ll have the soapbox.”

  Big Red retorts, “I bet if I showed up in tronta Frisco’s cell tomorrow night he’d break out.”

  To this the Sniper mumbles an aside and Big Red roars with laughter. Then—two bells! And a sudden, chilling silence.

  Big Red knows that give or take two or three minutes, the time is 4:45. (And this time it’s different, Red. This time they’re coming for you. Before, it was the other guy. Now you’re the other guy, and you’re ready; in a way, you’re impatient to be on your way. “Hell, if it’s gotta come, I may as well get it over with!” That’s right, Red.)

  “They ain’t forgot me. I hear ’em comin’,” Big Red says.

  “They tied a string around their finger,” Knuckle-Head adds.

  “Well, I been waitin’ eleven months for this.” Big Red’s mind is now sharply focused on what faces him.

  The safety bar squeaks; keys on a ring jangle; bolts slide.

  Big Red’s voice booms out: “They’ll get the biggest pile first.” He’s referring to himself. Then he adds ruefully, “I think I’ll hide under the bed. Tom, you tell ’em I’ve moved to forty-five.” Forty-five:—Cell 2445—is Knuckle-Head’s cell.

  The death watch officers—one of them chews on an unlit cigar— enter the Row corridor and proceed to Big Red’s cell.

  “I’m gonna take Ike widi me,” Big Red says. He’s referring to a large picture of Eisenhower he has in his cell. When his cell door is opened, he steps out with the picture in his hand. The death watch doesn’t protest.

  Big Red has a choice: if he wants, he can say goodbye to all or any of the men he’s been living with for eleven months, or he can walk straight to the bird cage. He decides to say goodbye. He walks down the corridor and then starts back.

  “So long, Chief . . . So long, Tom . . . So long . . .”

  “Keep yer chin up, Red. . . . Take it easy, Red. . . . Be seein’ ya, Red. . . .”

  Big Red is being passed through the bird cage when he quips, “If I got any bigger we all wouldn’t fit in here.”

  There’s laughter. A guard asks, “How much you weigh, Red?”

  “Two-eighty. I been kiddin’ the day sergeant I been tryin’ for three hunnerd. Now it don’t look like I’m gonna make it.”

  A gate swings open and then Big Red is gone forever from the sight of the doomed, those he is leaving behind to live out the few days or weeks or months left to them. The ones listening to their headsets know that on the Open House program with Bert Solitaire the Frank Sinatra recording of “Birth of the Blues” is being played.

  Condemned Row grows broodingly quiet for a time.

  Big Red reminds you of your own plight, and your cell grows smaller in front of your eyes. The walls have a way of closing in. You light a cigarette and you think. The image that forms in youi mind is stark and vividly clear. . . .

  In the sergeant’s office, Big Red changes his blue jeans, denim work shirt, underclothing and slippers for similar but new attire, keeping up a running fire of conversation. A restraining belt is fitted snugly around his huge middle; he’s handcuffed, and the handcuffs are attached to the belt by a short length of chain. One of the death watch carries the picture of Ike. Big Red is whisked down the elevator to the ground floor, marched a few feet. The talk—the shielding tal
k— goes on.

  A key is thrust into a lock, a solid steel door is pushed open, and Big Red is ushered through into a short hallway. To his right, a few feet away, are two cells, both brightly lighted. He is placed into the first cell. The handcuffs and restraining belt are removed. He’s locked in.

  It is here, under constant surveillance, that Big Red will spend a long and final night on earth.

  Two of the death watch stay with Big Red; three of the remainder go back upstairs for Henry.

  Henry’s cell is dark and he is huddled on his cot.

  “It’s time to go, Henry,” the lieutenant says.

  “Go? Go where?”

  “Downstairs.”

  “Why?”

  “You have to go, Henry.”

  “But I don’t wanta.”

  They help Henry to his feet. One on each side grips a shoulder and elbow to support him. In this way, his head bobbing on a rubbery neck, his feet dragging, they walk Henry to the bird cage.

  The condemned look up to see Henry go by. On their headsets Bert Solitaire is spinning the brassy Kay Starr record of “Comes Along a Love.” Then Solitaire says brightly, “For our brainbuster today we asked: How old Joe was when he kicked the bucket? The answer’s eighty-four.” (Solitaire and his juvenile voice and his juvenile trivia and his jump records—and the Death Row and Big Red and Henry and the mechanics leading up to a “legal execution.”)

  In the sergeant’s office the death watch has to change Henry’s clothes for him. Henry has gone limp; he babbles and his face is puffy from shock. He’s handcuffed, swiftly taken downstairs.

  Big Red catches a glimpse of Henry as the latter is walked by his cell and placed into the adjoining one.

  “Don’t look like my partner’s doin’ too good,” Big Red observes.

  Right at this time the five o’clock news from San Francisco is being broadcast. Most of the condemned have their headsets on, listening. Red must die with Henry, says the newscaster. He has lost his legal action and his request to the warden to be executed at nine a.m. instead of ten, to avoid dying with Henry, has been rejected because, according to the newscaster, the California Attorney General has declared that the wording of Big Red’s death warrant won’t permit it. “I got kids of my own, Warden,” Big Red had told Warden Teets earlier. “If I die with this other guy there’ll be a lotta bad publicity, on account of what he did. So can’t you let me go an hour earlier?”

  With Big Red and Henry brought downstairs, the death watch settles into its long-established routine.

  This last night belongs to the condemned man. The death watch caters to his reasonable wants or requests. He can listen to programs on a radio outside the cell or have recordings played for him on an electric record player available to those waiting to die. He’s kept supplied with tobacco and steaming hot, freshly brewed coffee. He’s offered the traditional “hearty” meal. Reading material is furnished if he requests it, or a deck of cards with which to play solitaire. During the evening the warden and other prison officials may visit him to pass along legal or other news. He may write a last lettei to a loved one. He may be visited by a chaplain of his faith who will pray for the salvation of his soul. He may brood or talk or curse or sleep or pace the floor. Such as it is, the choice is his.

  Big Red talks and smokes and eats and listens to hillbilly records. The warden comes in and tells him he and Henry will have to die together, the courts have turned him down. Big Red still clings to the hope that a final plea by his attorneys will stay his execution. He kids with those standing the death watch on him. He sleeps for a few hours. He thinks back on almost forty years of life.

  Henry lies on his mattress, staring blankly at the wall. He spends the night like that, saying nothing, a picture of what naked feai can do.

  Inevitably, morning comes.

  “Care for some breakfast?”

  Big Red looks at the tray of food and his appetite deserts him. He forces down a few mouthfuls of food, smokes a cigarette, drinks two cups of hot, black coffee. Death is a tough proposition. Death is a funny feeling, a tightening in the belly; it’s a creeping numbness. Death is something too big to understand.

  And for Henry, waiting death is a terrible, lurking, shapeless Thing. The doctors look in upon him, as they have during the night.

  Ten o’clock draws near. Big Red is informed all hope for a stay is gone.

  Then Henry gets a stay. His attorneys have prevailed on a judge of the local superior court to stop his execution and to require the warden to show cause why he shouldn’t certify Henry as being legally insane and hence not liable for execution until his sanity is restored. Guards swiftly remove Henry from his cell, return him to the Row. Supported by two burly guards, Henry babbles hysterically. Over and over he repeats something that sounds like “Eeko, eeko, eeko.”

  9:50. Big Red puts on the white shirt they give him to wear. He smokes a last cigarette. “Maybe I shoulda played crazy,” he says. He grins crookedly. He doesn’t blame the men who will put him to death. With them, it’s just a job. It’s too late to fix blame; it’s too late to protest. But still there is something wrong with all this. Big Red feels the wrongness. He wonders: “What’11 they gain by killin’ me?” He knows he did wrong, but he remembers what a grammar-school teacher once told him: Two wrongs never make a right.

  Ten o’clock!

  “All right, Red,” he’s told, “it’s time.” The cell door is unlocked, opened.

  Big Red hesitates an instant. Then he picks up his picture of Ike. (Ike is someone to believe in.) He takes the picture with him. He’s marched around a bend in the hallway to the door of the gas chamber. There he stops and hands the picture to a surprised guard.

  “Here,” he says, “take this. I don’t want to take Ike in here with me.”

  The guard’s embarrassment is obvious as he accepts the picture. Big Red enters the chamber. He’s quickly seated in one of the two metal chairs, strapped down. One end of an electric stethoscope is taped to his chest. A guard pats him on the back, says, “Good luck.” In turn, Big Red quips; others before him—those who didn’t curse or pray or remain angrily mute—have done the same.

  10:02. The guards hurriedly exit. One of them twirls the spoked wheel that seals the chamber door airtight. Official witnesses stare at Big Red through the thick glass windows of this squat, infallible chamber of death.

  His face an expressionless mask, the warden signals the executioner. The executioner swiftly operates his levers.

  Big Red hears the plop, plop, plop of the deadly cyanide “eggs” as they drop into the acid pan beneath the chair. The chemical reaction is immediate; hydrocyanic acid gas generates, swirls up, envelops him in an invisible fog.

  Big Red sniffs tentatively. His nostrils twitch at the pungent, sickening-sweet odor of peach blossoms. He gulps a lungful of the deadly fumes; his senses reel giddily, then swiftly dim. As consciousness recedes into a final darkness, he strains once desperately at his straps. His eyes glaze. They no longer see; they will never see again. His head falls forward, grotesquely, but he’s wholly unaware of this. He has fallen into a black and bottomless pit; for ten minutes the process of dying goes on. His body jerks, convulses. Once. Twice. Three times. His heart races, pounds like a sledge hammer; then it slows and slows and slows—and finally stops.

  The attending physician stationed outside the chamber takes the stethoscope from his ears and gestures to the warden.

  Big Red is irrevocably dead.

  At his peril, the warden has failed not.

  The witnesses file from the presence of death into a sparkling Indian summer day. The motors behind Big Red whir; blowers drive the lethal gas upward through a pipe and release it into the air high above the chamber. A prankish breeze, coming off the bay, wafts a few molecules of the gas toward the Row, giving its keener-nosed occupants the faintest whiff of things to come. Henry crouches in his cell, the caricature of a man. “Eeko, eeko, eeko,” he mumbles. More than an hour after he has b
een pronounced dead, a special crew removes Big Red’s body from the “green room” and takes it to the prison morgue.

  But Big Red is oblivious to all of this. His spirit has flown, and for a few editions after its flight he is rather good newspaper copy, what with his keenly felt political views, his taking the picture of Ike to the door of the gas chamber and his getting his wish not to die with Henry a sort of consolation prize. Yet Big Red’s news value cools almost as fast as the prison morgue’s ice box cools his cadaver. The public promptly forgets him, turning its attention to the fate of living, breathing condemned men, or those on trial for their lives, or tfiose wanted for murder and other capital crimes.

  • 2 •

  Hell’s Anteroom

  Cell 2455—a highly guarded, next-to-inaccessible concrete and steel cubicle 4 ½ feet wide, 10 ½ feet long and 7 ½ feet high—is located on the south side of the top tier of the North cell block at the California State Prison at San Quentin. By design, not chance (because here nothing is left to chance), just getting to and into the cell is, in itself, no mean feat.

  The initial, ground level leg of the trip carries us, under double escort and the hawk-sharp eyes of rifle-bearing gun rail guards, along a path leading through a garden perennially ablaze with color; past a check station and the old Spanish cell block, quaint, whitewashed remnant of the nineteenth century; past the modern, bustling educational building; past the quonset hut temporarily housing the library; to the western end of the towering North cell block; and then, through an arched and guarded gateway, into the Big Yard, the prison’s epicenter, a vast, rectangular expanse of cement surrounded by huge concrete and steel buildings dotted with gun towers and interlaced with gun walks.

  On reaching the Big Yard, we veer sharply to the left and walk around what appears to be nothing more than a grouping of thin cement slabs stood upright by some casual, pranking esthete. However, we’re familiar with their functional purpose. Concealed within each is an electric eye that zealously probes for metals and clangorously announces its finds. (Since stool pigeons, human or mechanical, are not here generally looked upon as practitioners of a high calling, “The Eye” is one marvel of modern science whose virtues the inhabitants of this walled city do not enthusiastically acclaim.)