Floating Like the Dead Read online

  I haven’t seen her since the trial. I know it was hard for her, the courtroom with all the photographers and reporters, people lining up to get seats. Her eyes welled up every time the prosecutor spoke. My mother, who sang songs in Italian about angels.

  “But I’m trying to make it better,” I told my dad. “For Mom, and everyone. They’ll take my eyes and give them to a little boy. I’m going to help someone see.”

  “She’s happy to hear you’re praying again,” he said. “We’re all happy. But desecrating God’s temple … You know as well as anyone it’s forbidden. It’s written in the Bible.”

  My body hadn’t felt like a temple in a long time.

  I only hoped my eyes wouldn’t carry my memories. There are some things a nine-year-old boy just shouldn’t see.

  Through my cell window, I could hear the shouts of the protestors outside. They started gathering around the Westgate service exit early this morning, and from the way the shouts were getting louder, I could tell the crowd was growing in number as the day wore on. It was hard to make out exactly what they were saying and sometimes I wondered if they all wanted me to hang, or if there were maybe some of them who didn’t. After the quiet of the last six months, hearing their constant chanting made my hands jittery. I had to do something to keep them busy, so I asked Constable Willard for some soap.

  “You got your whatnot for washing in there already, don’t you?”

  “And some water. I want to wash my cell.”

  “What for?” he said, but he brought me soap and a bucket of water, too.

  I washed the walls and the floor of my cell until my hands were bleeding and Constable Willard finally told me to stop. We’d talked a couple of times since Monday. He seemed like a decent guy, not like some of the guards I’d seen on South Wing who’d whip a man for the sheer pleasure of the crack of leather in the air.

  Now he set up a poker game for us, trying to distract me. “Don’t forget, your family’s coming soon,” he said.

  I sat down and we played between the bars, him sitting at his table outside my cell, me perched at the end of my cot that was nailed to the wall.

  Constable Willard looked to be about the same age as my dad and when I asked him how long he’d been working here, he had to think for a moment before he said he’d been at Oakalla for twenty-five years. “I guess you could call me a lifer, too.”

  “So, you believe … in this?”

  “I’ve seen over forty executions,” Constable Willard said, “for whatever that’s worth, and I remember all of them. I believe in the law.”

  “Are you a Christian man, Constable Willard?”

  “Call me Frank,” he said.

  The chanting outside was getting louder and I thought I was going to explode. I swear I heard someone say, “Choke the dirt” or “Choke the jerk.” I looked away from the window trying to focus my attention away from the chanting and onto the cards in my hand.

  “Do you have faith?” I asked him.

  “Sure,” he answered. I could tell from the puzzled look on his face he didn’t know what I was getting at. “You ask funny questions, son.”

  “How do you know? I mean, how do you know you have faith?”

  He started dealing another hand. “Faith … is faith. It’s not a question of knowing. I don’t have to think about it.”

  On the wall next to my bed, I happened to notice a mark, maybe the beginning of an A, someone’s initial. It looked like someone had scratched it into the wall and I wondered who it was.

  “Did you play cards with all the men?” I asked Frank.

  “Some men would’ve liked to smash me over the head with this table soon as sit with me at it.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t do that to you,” I said. I meant my voice to sound reassuring. It came out sounding pleading, like I was trying to prove something. So I tried again: “You believe me, though, that I wouldn’t do that to you.”

  “I wouldn’t be sitting here otherwise.”

  We played poker until another guard told us my family had arrived. Before we went into the visiting room, Frank told me the rules. “One kiss and one hug at the start of the visit. One kiss and one hug at the end. You can hold hands with your folks so long as you keep your hands where I can see them.”

  “Even though I’m wearing cuffs? You kidding?”

  My father and my little sister Sophia were inside, but not my mother.

  My dad got mad about the handcuffs on my wrists. “Why does he got those for? He can’t run away.”

  “Don’t do that to him,” I said. “He’s a good man. He just has his orders.”

  I tried to lighten the mood by pointing to the name sewn onto my prison jacket, which says Deluca. “They still haven’t changed the spelling.”

  “You think if they’re going to kill a man they could at least get his name right,” my dad said.

  My dad was wearing his hat with the fishing pins. He took it off and wrung it in his hands. My sister Sophia stood looking at her saddle shoes. She’d placed a yellow rose through the buttonhole of her dress.

  “Is that from Mom’s garden?” I asked her.

  She nodded. Her eyes were bloated from crying.

  “Where’s Mom?”

  Sophia looked away.

  Dad put his hand on top of mine. He swallowed, holding himself in. It broke my heart to think of my mother curled into her slippery turquoise robe, unable to get out of bed because of the grief I’ve caused her.

  My dad said, “How are you holding up?”

  “Holding,” I said.

  I know this waiting can be a strain for some prisoners. We sat down and I told him it just about drove one guy so crazy he tried to kill himself before the guards came to take him to the gallows. And another inmate, a man who’s been in here for thirty years, can’t even walk to the showers by himself. He’s too old and frail to comb his own hair.

  “I don’t want to die like that, wanting to slit my neck, or so old that I want to trade this concrete coffin for a real one.”

  Sophia sat down and covered her eyes with her hands. “There’s got to be something,” she said desperately. “Another appeal. There’s got to be someone who can help.”

  “There’s nothing,” my dad said in a quiet voice.

  “It’s not fair,” Sophia said. “Justice is a joke.” She shook her head. “I don’t understand. How did any of this happen?”

  I shook my head. “I killed a man,” I said, not looking up.

  “So killing you makes it right?”

  “Sophia,” my dad said. “Let’s talk about something else.”

  My dad wiped his nose with his sleeve and from his wallet he pulled out a picture of me in the airplane ride at the Happyland midway. I must have been about ten. There was a chain-swing ride behind me. In the background I can see the top of a circus tent.

  Until I was twelve, we’d go to Happyland once a year and I was keen to stroll through the park, eating corn dogs and winning at the midway games. Happyland closed with the war in 1941. When it reopened five years later, nothing was the same: I was living in flop rooms, jacking cars, hoboing around with the gang, and visiting my folks maybe only once every couple of months.

  One of my fondest memories of Happyland is watching a military parade from my father’s shoulders. I would have been about ten at the time, but I was heavy and big for my age. Still, he lifted me as high as his shoulders could take me. I felt like a pilot; I felt like the earth and the sky and everything in between belonged to me

  “You cried when you saw the Alligator-skinned man,” I said to Sophia.

  Sophia went, “Haaa,” a gentle exhalation, not a laugh or a cry, maybe something in between.

  I leaned forward and touched her arm. “You okay?” I said.

  “How can they do this to you – kill the part of you that has those memories?” The word memories seemed to spurt up from somewhere deep inside her and I could tell from the way she was trembling that she was trying to stop the flo
w of anguish.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “for crying. I want to be strong.”

  “Don’t be sorry.”

  “I am sorry. I am. Because … there’s no death in God, only salvation.”

  “Sophia.”

  “I’m sorry.” She patted my hand. “I’m sorry.” Then she looked me deep in the eyes and her I’m sorry’s became sorry’s not just for herself but for me and all of humanity, the whole sorry lot of us.

  Frank took her out of the visiting room, leading her by the hand.

  I felt as helpless as the time she fell while I was teaching her how to ride her first bike. Her tooth had gone through her upper lip, but before the blood appeared, there was this moment when her tooth was just a tooth in a bed of red lip, and I felt like I could still save her from the pain. Of course, nothing I could do would stop the blood from spilling. Nothing I said could take away her anguish.

  When she left the room, my dad asked me, “Have you prayed? I mean really?”

  “Sometimes there’s no words,” I said. “Just emptiness inside.”

  We bowed our heads and prayed. “Jesus have mercy on us, God have mercy on us, Christ have mercy on us, abbi mis-ericordia di me peccatore.”

  I don’t know how much time passed. When I looked up, my sister had returned.

  “God’s will is the important thing,” I said. “What I want doesn’t matter. God is going to make sure something good comes of my death.” It was hard not to choke on the words, I so wanted to believe them. But I would hold in my tears – I had already hurt my family too much.

  “God loves you,” my dad said. “You’ve got nothing to prove.”

  “It’s not that,” I said. Watching him like that, his shoulders hunched, his eyes red-rimmed, his cheeks nicked with little shaving cuts – it made me want to curl up inside.

  “I’m so angry right now,” Sophia said. “I don’t know if it will ever go away.”

  It hit me, then, truly, what I’d done. I wanted to tell her the last thing I’d be thinking about was how we used to sit on the banks of the Fraser and toss stones at the log booms. Or that time we found two rough-winged swallows just hatched, these little balls of down, in a mud-and-twig nest in the corner of our front porch. I tried to say something, but she was crying again and then I got to thinking that maybe I couldn’t tell her without making things worse. What was the point of returning to a place that no longer existed except in your head?

  Dad tried to smile. “Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked.

  “Stop crying and sit up straight,” I said.

  “But you’re my little boy.”

  We visited for five hours.

  Before they left, feeling my father’s body close to mine made me think of the days he worked at the restaurant, how he would come home with the smell of salami on his clothes. I stepped back and held his hands at an arm’s length. “Don’t watch me hang,” I said, surprised by my words.

  He let go and I think he was as shocked as me. He had the look of someone with a knife to his throat.

  Panicked, I wanted to reach out and put my hand on his shoulder, but in that moment my arms didn’t feel like they could change anything. I was made of shadows and smoke.

  The deepest injuries are those we inflict on our loved ones.

  But he can’t watch me die – people get lost in that kind of pain, and I don’t know if anyone can ever love you back out of something like that.

  Back in my cell, I sat on my bed and didn’t move. Frank got out the cards and shuffled the deck around, trying to get me to talk.

  I didn’t even look at him. If I could just sit still long enough, maybe I could hold the memory of my family’s visit inside, the way a car left out all day in the sun holds the heat and won’t let go, keeping the warmth inside long after night has fallen.

  It’s custom to give a man a shot or two of brandy in the hours leading up to his execution, if there happens to be a bottle. It’s called the therapeutic dosage and Frank told me that once he ran all the way home because there was no brandy in the jail. I haven’t asked for any.

  I won’t ask. I want to stay in charge of my mind.

  I want to keep my memories, even the ones I’d rather not remember. Maybe especially what I don’t want to remember. I don’t deserve to forget.

  It was the Thanksgiving Day long weekend. Inside the Happyland dancehall, I was hugging up on that girl with the Rita Hayworth hair and the yellow dress that rustled. For the second time that night the band played “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! That Cigarette.”

  Then Morton ran inside and yelled from the door to Come on, come on, the Alma Dukes had got Culos.

  In the end, I kicked a guy in the parking lot and he went down. I kicked him again. I thought I was being a hero, but he wasn’t even an Alma Duke. I just saw the image of Little Nicky lying on the pavement and I lost myself. The adrenalin was steel in my veins. I kicked a man to death.

  I heard the bones on the side of his head crack in. The sound was loud, louder than you’d think. I must have been using his head like a soccer ball pretty good because later my foot hurt. In my head I kept saying, “This one’s for Little Nicky,” but maybe I yelled it a couple times too. Some of his hair was stuck to my boot. The blood still felt warm when I brushed the hair off later. It wasn’t me at all.

  His name was Freddy St. Laurent and I found out at the trial he was a boxer. Nothing I say or do can ever stop my mind from imagining his fear, or what he felt as I kicked him, knowing I wasn’t going to stop. I can still see him lying there, looking up at me, and what he saw was worse than a blur of boot covered with his own blood, worse than the exploding fireworks that came with the sickening smack when that boot hit his temple. What he saw was something already dead, the nothingness in my eyes as cold and deep as outer space.

  Yesterday the hangman came to measure me.

  “For a hanging to work right,” he said, “the rope has to be stretched for two years to take out its spring.”

  He weighed me carefully so he could select the proper length.

  Constable LaShelle took his hands out of his pockets and flipped his chin. “You practise with potato sacks first?” His eyes were gleaming with the hard shine of blue marbles.

  The hangman glanced up from the scale. His face was sharp, as if he didn’t like having to explain himself. “Flour,” he said, and looked down again. “I use flour sacks for practice.”

  “I heard about this mistake,” LaShelle said. “This huge guy, this prisoner, must’ve been 250 if he was a pound. When the rope went taut, his head popped off.”

  The hangman gave the constable a look, a wave of something like pity sweeping over his face. It reminded me of how you might look at a dog run over by a car, with a mixture of sympathy and disgust.

  I didn’t sleep much last night.

  Before my father and sister left, they gave me another picture. It was of the family standing in front of the new house on King Edward just a few months before I got arrested. I had come home for Easter, my first visit since Christmas. Thinking back on it now, it was the last time we were all together, before the trial.

  My sister is holding the box of chocolates I brought her. I’d looked at all the boxes in the drugstore down the street, trying to find the cheapest one – I only bought one box, thinking my mother and sister could share. They’d kissed me on both of my cheeks when I gave it to them. I hated myself, thinking of it.

  In my hand, I’m holding my childhood Bible, the white one I’d gotten for memorizing the twenty-third Psalm and reciting it in front of my Sunday-school class.

  I remember underlining lots of verses in red pencil when I was still in elementary school. “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.”

  I have a real Bible now. I’ve held this Bible, trying to remember the way I’d felt reading my white Bible as a kid, trying to get back to that place, that feeling of certainty, as solid and unwavering as an iron bridge.

  But I c
an’t. One minute Freddy St. Laurent was still alive and the next he lay curled on the pavement, one eye wide open, staring at me into forever. That split second turned me into who I’ll be the rest of my life; who my parents will remember for the rest of theirs; who the news clippings put down forever in black and white. When I think about that moment, something overwhelms me and I have to go inside myself. I’ve sat in my cell for days, not saying anything to anyone, waiting for all the shame to pass through me.

  But I can’t get rid of the feeling that the moment before still exists somewhere. That, if I could only get back to that moment, that split second of possibility, before everything went wrong, then maybe a part of me might be worth saving. The part of me that looked at the just-hatched swallows in a twig nest on our family’s porch or watched my parents, tall beside me, singing hymns on Sunday. I was a part of something good and pure back then. Maybe, if I could just get back there, that kernel of me might be worth saving. Might even be worth giving to someone else.

  After my family left, I ate my last meal. It was my favourite meal: a fried garlic and potato omelette with sliced tomatoes. For dessert, I wanted a piece of cheesecake. The dinner wasn’t like how my mom would have made it because the kitchen had run out of garlic, so it was just potato in the omelette. And the cheesecake was the frozen kind, but it was still good.

  Reverend Joseph sat beside me the entire time and patted my arm, assuring me he wasn’t going anywhere. He is a small man, skinny, with the kind of sucked-in cheeks that give the impression he’s taking a drag on a cigarette. He’s got thin hair and thin shoulders. I have a hard time imagining him doing stuff like buying groceries, driving a car, or cleaning his toilet. The job must take it out of him, I thought, because he looks like he has one foot in the grave himself.

  It was tricky to balance my plate on my lap while I ate because the holding cell doesn’t have a table. I didn’t know where to put down my knife except on the cot. Thinking I was getting close to my last bite made it even harder to eat. That’s when I looked down at my meal and made a guess at how many bites I had left. I doubled the number, taking smaller bites, so I could make what was left of my time last as long as possible.