Read Online Cargo of Orchids by Susan Musgrave - Free Book Online Page B

and an adulthood of being beaten with wire coat hangers colour her attitude. The only reason she has accepted Christ is because she wants at least one sympathetic male figure in her life.
    Here I am getting a touch preachy. My rule is there’s no room for preachiness on the Condemned Row. Frenchy admonishes me. “Rules are for breaking. What else would anyone make them for?”
    But don’t get too attached to Frenchy. She doesn’t make it to the end of this book. Hardly even to the middle. She chose the firing-squad. The first time.
    The prison chaplain, the guards, your classification officer, your care and treatment counsellor—all work on you to choose the firing-squad, or hanging, so that your organswon’t be damaged. They distribute all these pamphlets urging you to “Be an Organ Donor.”
    When you choose the firing-squad, they tie you to a chair and pin a red tissue-paper heart to your chest. (I guess they must figure the heart doesn’t count as an organ, or that people needing a transplant would rather die than go on living with the heart of a condemned criminal.) The guards stand behind a screen with a slit in it, facing you. If any one (or all) of those five guards likes you, or even feels sorry for you, she’ll aim as far away from the bull’s-eye as she can get without missing you and getting a demotion for gunnery. This could mean four bullet holes in the right side of your chest (one of the rifles has a blank in it) and you bleeding to death, slowly, while everyone reloads.
    Gary Mark Gilmore, who helped revive capital punishment, donated his eyes. Something else I know about him—he ordered pizza for his last meal and then couldn’t finish it. (His eyes must have been bigger than his stomach, Rainy says.) I always wondered who got his eyes. When you stop at Pizza Hut for your pepperoni and pineapple two-for-one special, is that pimply faced boy taking your order looking out at you through Gary Gilmore’s eyes?
    His last words were “Let’s do it.” No muss, no fuss, no bleeding to death before getting executed properly. When they did it, the four shots overlapped in the centre of the bull’s-eye, like a four-leafed clover, without the luck usually associated with four-leafed clovers.
    Rainy’s chosen “legal injection.” She figures it gives her a chance; Rainy’s been a drug user all her life—there’s hardlya vein in her body that hasn’t dried up or collapsed from the constant barrage of dope. The only usable blood vessel left is under her tongue, she says, and she doubts whether anyone will find it.
    Lethal injection is made to look like an everyday medical procedure. They even swab your forearm with a disinfectant before trying the most likely vein, as if you have a medical future. Two people sit in different rooms and each presses a button: one cocktail goes into your vein through an IV drip, the other down a drain. This means the person pushing the button never really knows if she is the one doing the killing. The executioner can always console herself: “Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t.”
    That’s how I console myself too. I know I screwed up at the trial by saying I would have done
anything
to save my baby. I didn’t mean it literally.
Anything
didn’t include killing him. I was just telling the truth.
    That was another mistake: telling the truth. Hindsight, as Frenchy would say, is 30–30. Frenchy used a .30–30 on her boy in that bank. She should know about hindsight.
    Rainy is looking forward to having her execution televised. She hopes it will deter other people from killing their kids. She tells Officer Freedman that she should buy stock in the network doing the televising, that her execution—the instant replays and summer reruns—will make investors a ton of money.
    Executions began being televised when the state of California went pro-choice in 1995, five years after I moved to the Row. I figured that in a culture as show-businessoriented as ours, executions, when