Stewart makes no response. He turns and leaves the room. A warden comes in and reads Poland his death warrant. Poland smiles condescendingly. The warden leaves the room. The intercom is turned off. Poland looks again at Kent, Natalie and Marshall and they see him silently mouth, "I love you."
As I watch Poland smile and talk, I don't feel any emotion. No anxiety or nervousness. Nothing. But my heart is beating so hard I can see its pulse through the fabric of my shirt. Standing beside me is one of the prison pastors, a small thin man with an air of nervous friendliness. On the other side of him are some teenagers, the grandchildren of one of the victims. They must have been born after his death, so I can't imagine why they want to be put through this.
Poland is so close to me that, were it not for the soundproofed glass, we would be able to hold a conversation without raising our voices.
All I can see is a man strapped to a gurney, with his neat hair and his glasses. But I know what is happening to him.
Poland closes his eyes, and his smile fades. His chest swells, then his cheeks puff out and his lips move like someone blowing a "raspberry.-- The teenage girls are sobbing. The pastor turns his face away, looking at the floor. I have a sty on one of my eyelids. It hasn't hurt since it appeared a few days ago, but now it throbs excruciatingly.
Poland seems to die quickly and without drama. He's just lying there, looking no different than he did a few minutes ago, except that now he isn't moving and there's no sign of breath. He looks quite healthy. We all stand and stare at him for a few minutes longer. Nobody speaks. Then it's announced that the execution has been carried out at fourteen minutes past three. The drape is drawn over the window, and the witnesses leave.
The last time I witnessed an execution, it took almost as long for witnesses to get out as to get in. We had to go through the same checkpoints, showing ID all over again. It's different this time. They just let us walk out. "
Dale Baich is standing in the sunlit dirt outside the prison. We ask each other if we're all right, and answer each other with affectionate lies. Baich says he's all right, but the truth is he feels like hell. I say I'm all right, but the truth is I haven't a clue as to how I feel. Disbelief isn't an emotion.
In a few hours it will be evening and Dale Baich and Ken Murray and Jason Hawkins and several others and I will gather in a bar in downtown Phoenix. The atmosphere will be that of a slightly depressed party, everyone laughing, trying to be good humored. There will be soft lights and comfortable chairs and jokes and bottles and glasses and drunken confidences and kindly bartenders late into the night. The lawyers will blame themselves - Murray will call himself a "fat stupid f*ck" - wondering if the outcome might have been different had they tried something else, done it another way. And their friends will tell them that they did the best they could.
But that will be later. Now Baich sees Kent and Natalie Poland, walking out of the prison gates, clinging to each other. He has to talk to them, tell them he has Michael Poland's property, and arrange for them to take possession of it. He won't have to give Natalie the letter Michael Poland wrote to her eight days before she saw his breath stop. She already has that.
You can't get away from the hate. Talk to a cop or a prosecutor, and they will tell you that the people on death row are vermin. Talk to a death row lawyer, and they will try to convince you that the finest human beings who ever graced this earth are all on death row - and that everyone is to blame for the killing except the killer. I once sat in a bar and got drunk with such a lawyer. His client had beaten a man to death and was now awaiting the needle. The lawyer told me that the victim had not been beaten to death, that he had died of a heart attack during the beating because he was overweight. Only that is not how the lawyer put it. "He was a fat f*ck," is what he said. He would not have tolerated anyone speaking so harshly of his client, but it was de rigeur to insult the man his client murdered. In the subculture of the execution industry, everything is absolute. The other side is the enemy. You're for the killer or you're for his victim, but you are not allowed to be for both. Pick a side, and start hating.
Lying goes with the territory, even among the most high-minded death row lawyers. The lawyer does the killer's PR, along with trying to keep him alive. The spin is everything. While Dale Baich represented Michael Poland, he would tell me that the other inmates looked up to Poland, respecting his intelligence and his fondness for books. I told him that I heard the opposite, that the inmates disliked Poland for his arrogance and pretentiousness. Baich denied this, on and off the record, but the story changed after Poland's death. When Poland's brother Patrick was executed a short while later, Baich mentioned that, unlike Michael, "people really do like Patrick."
"So," I said. "It's true that the other inmates couldn't stand Michael?"
Baich smiled and shrugged.
In the killing zone, hate is easy and lies are easy and everybody is looking for revenge or just looking to do their job well and such quaint notions as "truth" or "justice" are irrelevant. Trapped between conflicting agendas, you learn that there will be no justice and that there is only one verifiable truth: for a myriad of reasons, people are killing other people.
Time has passed. Now, in April 2008, Michael Poland and Jose Ceja are scribbled words in old notebooks. Since they were turned to nothing, I have drunk, eaten, pissed and shat. I have read books and watched movies and fucked. Dale Baich has produced albums by a local blues singer. I have left Arizona for some years, and recently moved back to Phoenix. I left town with the woman who drove me to Poland's execution, and I returned alone.
The world has turned, and will continue to turn.
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