Mark Doyle
The first thing you notice when you go to that prison they’ve got up there in Rawlins is how shoddy the workmanship is. Soon as we were in the intake center, first stop on the tour, I said to the guide, this kid who was probably doing this as a summer job, I said, “That’s some pretty nice workmanship on that door there,” and I pointed at the header, which was all warped because they’d used the wrong kind of wood, but he just smiled like he didn’t understand what I was talking about. “Just kidding,” I said and nudged him a little, and he gave the kind of laugh you give someone who you think might be senile.
Gomez got it, though. “Probably made by one of the prisoners,” he said, and we chuckled a little over that.
It’s a state pen, not a federal one, that prison up in Rawlins. They call it the Wyoming Frontier Prison, but there’s not much frontier about it because didn’t open until 1901, so really it was just your ordinary, twentieth-century type prisoner they kept in there, not your Butch Cassidys or Jesse Jameses. I guess they call it that to bring in the tourists.
***
There were just three of us on the trip that year, me and Arthur Gomez and Jerry Kalani. There used to be more, but we’re dwindling, guys keep getting sick or dead, you know how it goes. We started doing these trips in, oh, I guess it was the late seventies, after we’d had a few years to find our feet after the war. One day I got a call from Neil Kuchenik—Maggie was putting the kids to bed, so it was me who had to answer the phone—and Neil said, “Hey, Gus, me and some of the boys thought we might take a little road trip this summer.”
“Like where, Kuche?”
“Florida maybe. Panhandle to Key West. Couple three guys live nearby, and the rest will fly in. I guess you’d fly in from Denver, huh?”
“Sure,” I said. “Sure.”
So every summer about the middle of June a bunch of us former inmates of the Hanoi Hilton started going on these little road trips, seeing the country that had sent us out to fight and die for it. We weren’t raising money for MIAs or protesting the neglect of returning servicemen or anything like that. We were just driving around, bullshitting, reminiscing. In the beginning we were young enough that all we really wanted to do was drink beer and chase pussy. There were even a couple years where we borrowed Harleys from some local vet groups and rode around like Hells Angels. But I guess we all grow up, whether we want to or not. These days we pay attention to the places we’re going. Learning the history, trying the food, getting all cultured.
One year we drove out along the coast of New England, and Al Tucker, who ran an auto parts shop in Old Orchard Beach, showed us how to go clamming. Another year we did a loop through some Civil War battlefields, and Billy Jessico got so into it that he joined a reenactment group when he got home to Tennessee, grew a beard and everything. We’ve sure had some good times.
Well, Kuche killed himself about fifteen years back, and a bunch of others bought the farm one way or another. Billy Jessico had a heart attack while he was driving his truck and smashed into an overpass. Al Tucker got drunk and fell off his boat and drowned while he was out fishing with his grandkids. Gomez calls those lucky deaths, lucky because they’re quick. Others haven’t been so lucky. Cancer, dementia, whisky. Gomez himself had a minor stroke the year before this prison deal I’m telling you about and almost couldn’t come. And I’d just gotten my Parkinson’s diagnosis. I was still walking okay but my hands were shaky. They said I had about seven good years left.
Only one of us who’s been more or less healthy this whole time is Jerry Kalani. He says it’s his sensible Mediterranean diet, but one look at him will tell you he’s lying his enormous brown ass off. The man can put away more red meat than a pit bull. Once, in Amarillo, he ate a whole 72-ounce Big Texan steak – you know the one where if you eat the whole thing in under an hour you get it free? – and followed it up with a chocolate milkshake. I still remember what he said: “Them commies stole three years of my eating life, and I’ll be damned if I ain’t going to steal it back.” That’s Jerry Kalani for you.
***
Well, this prison tour was pretty interesting. Me and Gomez asked a bunch of questions, kind of hassling the kid, you know, things like, “Did they use cinderblocks to build those outer walls?” when we knew damn well they were just poured concrete slabs. Gomez did most of the asking. He wanted to know if the prisoners developed a tap code like we did in Nam, how many calories they consumed on average, if anyone ever developed beriberi. Gomez got beriberi once in a camp called the Briarpatch and never could walk good after that, but of course the kid didn’t know anything about beriberi. At first he’d say things like, “That’s a really good question, sir! I’m not really sure, but I can find out for you…” but after a while he’d just move his lips like he was giving an answer but without any sound coming out.
Jerry was quiet this whole time. He mostly hung back, bringing up the rear like always. He looks like a buffalo and moves like a buffalo, old Jerry. He’s even got these big round eyes like a buffalo that he’s always turning on you and making you feel like you’re just the silliest thing on the planet. But he’s a good guy, he really is. Every once in a while I’d look over and he’d be watching the little kids who were in the group. Jerry and Linda never could have kids, which is too bad because he’s always had a soft spot for them. The guide would be telling us about prisoners dying of hypothermia or how they’d hit each other in the face with cafeteria trays, and Jerry’d be watching those kids, who of course were wide-eyed the whole time and their parents all grimacing during the grisly parts, wondering why they’d brought them on this tour in the first place.
I was glad this wasn’t one of those tours where they try to make you feel bad for the prisoners. Our guide, the kid, he might not have known much about the construction of the building, but he did have some pretty funny stories about how the guards would beat the prisoners with rubber hoses or how this one warden installed a basketball hoop just beyond the line where prisoners weren’t allowed to go, so they could see it but never use it. Whenever he told one of those stories the little kids’ parents—you could tell they were coastal types, the ones with the California and Massachusetts plates out in the lot—well they’d get all stony faced and disapproving like this didn’t fit their notions of the humane treatment of prisoners, blah blah blah. But you know if any of the guys locked up in this place ever so much as looked at their precious little angels they’d be dialing 9-1-1 faster than you can fart.
***
Probably the most interesting part of this tour was the death house. I wasn’t expecting to see the actual places men were executed, I guess I figured they did that off-site, but that’s what this was. There were two methods, one old-fashioned and one what you might call modern. The old-fashioned method was hanging, but this wasn’t your garden variety gallows. You ever see one of those machines where you push a button and it sets off this complicated chain reaction all over the room just to do something simple like ring a bell? Rube Goldberg machines, we used to call them. Well, this was like that. I guess the idea was they didn’t want any of the guards to have someone’s death on their conscience, so they rigged up this deal so the prisoner ended up killing himself.
It worked like this. After they put the noose around the guy’s neck, he’d step onto this square wooden platform. The weight of his body would move a lever, and the lever would pull a plug out of the side of a barrel. The barrel was full of water, and as the water drained a float would drop. This float, when it got below a certain level, it’d pull another lever, and that lever pulled a rope that was attached to a post that was holding up the platform the guy was standing on. That post was just a 2×4 cut into three pieces and held together by hinges—sturdy enough to hold the guy up, but when the rope pulled it, it would collapse like a tent pole. The platform would fall and he’d be swinging in no time.
Something about that thing bugged me. It wasn’t the workmanship, which was actually pretty solid, and it wasn’t the fact that these guys were basically being forced to pull their own triggers. They brought that on themselves, I figure. No, I think it was that water barrel. There you’d be, standing on this platform with a rope around your neck, and you’d know at any moment enough water’s going to flow out of that barrel to pull the lever and collapse the post. It probably only took a couple of seconds, but I bet it felt like years.
“They ever botch one of those hangings? Not kill the guy first try?” I knew Gomez was going to ask that. He once had a guy, lieutenant I think he was, hauled into his barracks at the Briarpatch whose body was half blown apart by a landmine. No legs, throat cut to ribbons, only half an arm. For some reason they stitched him up and threw him in the Briarpatch instead of finishing him off where they found him, and Gomez and the other guys had to listen to him coughing and screaming for three days before he finally kicked it. He talks about it all the time, old Gomez. Says three days of agony and then it’s over is better than the slow decline us old codgers are going through. Feeling your muscles weaken, watching your friends die, knowing but not quite knowing that your mind is slipping. “I’d prefer it quick,” he says. “Aneurism, hit by a bus. But as a second prize I’d take what that guy went through after the landmine. Three days praying for death and conscious enough to welcome it when it comes. Sure beats this growing old shit.”
Gomez is nuts, of course. I think that Briarpatch really scrambled his eggs. But I do kind of get what he’s saying.
Well, the kid didn’t answer his question about botched executions, but he did show us a picture of a guy with a crooked neck who was hanged on those gallows. “So he came in here with a crooked neck and left with a straight one,” he said, which was obviously a pre-prepared line but it made us chuckle. Then the kid jumped on the place where the wooden platform used to be, it was sealed up with a steel plate now, and he said it was good luck to do that, to jump on the steel plate I mean, so me and Gomez and the little kids jumped on it. Jerry, I noticed, did not.
But around the corner was the thing that’ll really stick with me: a real-deal gas chamber. For once the workmanship wasn’t just solid, it was goddamn impressive. It was this big steel chamber set into a corner, pleated and welded and rivetted to within an inch of its life. From the outside it looked like a spaceship from one of those TV shows we watched as kids, Buck Rogers or Lost in Space, but inside it looked like what it was: an execution chamber, just a small, curved room with a steel chair with rings for strapping the guy in by his wrists and ankles.
What they’d do is they’d fill a bucket with water and sulfuric acid and put it under the guy’s chair. Then they’d swing this big oval door to, make sure it was sealed tight, and then someone would pull a lever that dropped sodium cyanide pellets into the bucket. The prisoner, if he was smart, would breathe real deep and get it over with quick. There was a window the witnesses could look through and watch—I asked the kid, and he said the dying man usually turned purple and started drooling, then he’d have a seizure—and when they were sure he was dead, which usually took about ten minutes, they’d pump in another gas to neutralize the poison, kick on the extract fans, and wait half an hour before removing the body.
Gomez got all quiet and asked if there were still some traces of cyanide left even then, and the kid said, “Yes, sir. They’d ruffle the guy’s hair to get it all out.” Now there’s an image, I thought, and again something bugged me about the whole deal. There you’d be, alone in this metal room, strapped to a chair, waiting for this poison to rise up from under your ass and choke you to death… I was glad it wasn’t me, put it like that.
Well, after he explained the whole thing, the kid said we could sit in the gas chamber and take pictures if we wanted. I jumped right in and put my hands to my throat and stuck out my tongue like I was choking. Gomez took my picture, then he ran his fingers through his hair and looked around for a minute, thinking about something I guess. Finally he climbed on in, and I got a great shot of him smiling and giving a thumbs up, all bright and cheery in his blue Hawaiian shirt.
The little kids wanted to go in there, too, but their parents wouldn’t let them for some reason. Then I noticed several people milling around in the next room like they were bothered by what they were seeing. One of them was Jerry. “Come on Jer,” I said. “Don’t you want me to take your picture?”
But he just turned his big buffalo eyes on me and said, “Ain’t nothing funny about death, Gus.” I just laughed, because Jerry’s got this real dry sense of humor.
Gomez laughed, too. “Aw, Jerry,” he said. “After all that shit we been through in Nam, you’re scared of that old hunk of metal? Afraid you’ll get locked in?”
“Ain’t scared,” Jerry said. “Just ain’t nothing funny about death,” and Gomez didn’t push it. Matter of fact, he did something kind of weird. He reached over and patted Jerry’s shoulder a few times, like a dad might do. Just patted him and kind of smiled at him.
There was a little girl leaning against a wall, sulking because her parents wouldn’t let her go in the gas chamber. Jerry saw her and said, “Wanna see something?” The girl, she was probably seven or eight, she just shrugged. “There’s something in that corner over there.” He pointed. “See it?”
“Where?”
“That little hole?”
“Uh, yeah?”
He lumbered over to the corner. “Some kind of mouse hole, I think.” It wasn’t a mouse hole, just a crack in the plaster. I started to say something, started to make another joke about the shoddy workmanship, but Gomez grabbed my arm and gave me a look like he was mad at me or something. I still don’t know what that was all about, but they always were pretty tight, Gomez and Jerry.
Jerry crouched down and twisted his fingers around in the crack, and when he stood up he was panting. “Here,” he said. “Look what that old mouse was hiding.” He was holding a red and white peppermint wrapped in plastic. He always carries those things around. “Want it?”
The girl took it. “Can I have another one for my sister?”
Jerry winked and pulled another from his pocket. “Here you go, angel.”
Well, the tour moved on after that. I stayed up front with the guide, asking him questions, joshing him a little, trying to let him know how much I was enjoying myself, but Gomez got real quiet now. He just hung back with Jerry, watching the little kids, kind of stroking his beard. I guess maybe his legs were bothering him.
When we got to the gift shop, I found this t-shirt that looked like a prison uniform and said I ought to buy it for Maggie. “Fifty years married to me, least she deserves is a new uniform,” I said, but Gomez didn’t laugh. Jerry neither. Then I noticed this scale model of the gallows over in a corner. The girl Jerry’d given the peppermints to was playing with it, putting a noose around this beat-up cowboy doll and standing it on the platform. I sat down to watch. I wanted to get a handle on how the thing worked, you know, watch that barrel drain and the post collapse, watch that little cowboy go swinging. I thought Gomez might sit down with me, but he just put his hand on Jerry’s shoulder and said they were going to go wait in the car. When they passed me, they both smelled like peppermints.
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Mark Doyle is a professor of history at Middle Tennessee State University. He is the author or editor of four books on British and Irish history, most recently The Kinks: Songs of the Semi-Detached (Reaktion 2020). He has published fiction in Maudlin House, Pangyrus, and Cagibi, and his story “Good New Teeth” won second place in Salamander’s 2022 short story contest. He is currently working on a book about John Cale’s album Paris 1919 for Bloomsbury’s music book series, 33 1/3.