Sports in Hell by Rick Reilly Read Free Book Online Page B

He’s in for murder …”
    I swallowed.
    â€œâ€¦ but he’s a helluva cook.”
    I looked at the small Vietnamese man through the kitchen door. He wore an orange jumpsuit and leg irons. He was chopping meat with a butcher knife. There were no guards and no guns between us and that knife.
    I stopped swallowing.
    â€œI asked Hop Sing once why he done it. He said, ‘Mr. Warden, a man whipped me two times. The third time, I was waiting with a gun. And Mr. Warden, once that automatic starts firin’, it don’t wanna stop.’”
    Cain’s rodeo is controversial, too. For one, people say it’s just the lions vs. the gladiators in stripes. They say he’s using the blood of the inmates to fill his coffers. Cain points out that (a) the inmates volunteer to do it, (b) nobody’s died yet, and (c) most of the money goes to the inmates themselves. “These are men who’ve pretty much failed all their lives,” he said. “But when the rodeo is here, people are cheering them! That does a lot for a man.”
    I suppose so. I just wondered what it would be like to be sitting in the rodeo and hear, “Hey, Mom! The guy who killed Dad just won Wild Cow Milking!”
    Then there’s the massive inmates crafts fair that comes with the rodeo—furniture, leather, and art, often sold by the inmate himself. Cain lets the minimum-security prisoners mix with the crowds, so you get inmate and citizen elbow to rib cage, over tables full of jewelry and bowls of chili. The inmates wear their usual: jeans, Timberland boots, and white T-shirts. The citizens wear their usual: jeans, Timberland boots, and white T-shirts. It can be a little awkward. Ironhead, for instance, makes his famous gumbo at the fair. One time, an old friend showed up at his booth. “Hey, man, I been lookin’ all over for you!” the friend said. “Where you been?” And Ironhead looked at him and said, “Uh, in here.”
    One of the biggest criticisms of Warden Cain is that he’s too nice to the people he kills. That’s when I made the mistake of asking him where it happens.
    He took us into Angola’s lethal-injection chamber. Death was so present in that room, on you like a fog, that it immediately brought Hop Sing’s cookies about two-thirds up. It was a cinder-block room, maybe ten feet by fifteen feet, with the killing table laid out like a crucifix. There were six belts up and down the length of the table and more belts for the arms and hands. There was even a small pillow for the man’s head. After all, what if he gets a stiff neck? There was a little square hole that led into another room, where the doctors dispense the sodium thiopental. This way they don’t have to see the man they’re killing. All of this is watched from a room with about twelve chairs through one-way glass.
    â€œIt takes about a minute and a half for the drugs to kill the man,” Cain said. “They usually take two breaths and they’re gone. And then it’s another four minutes for the heart to stop. But sometimes they’ll surprise you. One ol’ boy took his two breaths and we thought he was dead. And then, all of a sudden, he rose up and said ‘Wow!’”
    The warden holds their hand through the whole process. (“Now, if it was an electric chair, I wouldn’t do that,” he said.) Once the juice is flowing, he tells the man he has about ninety seconds and would he like to say one last thing? One man said, “Yeah, tell my lawyer he’s fired.”
    I asked Cain if he’s for the death penalty.
    He tilted his ball cap back on his head and thumbed his rosy chin awhile and said, “Well, if there’s one thing I’ve learned is it’s all about the jury and your lawyers. O.J. proved that money gets you off. You know the inmate who served you the cookies? He’s done worse than what some of the men who died here have