The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (25 page)

These words—“to do something for others”—had played on a loop in his mind throughout the pilgrimage. And he knew where they came from. As he lay dying years ago, he had looked to the sky and proposed a deal: if You save me, I will dedicate my life to doing something for others. This journey to Mecca had reminded Rais that he had strayed from that pledge. Life after the shooting became, more than ever before, about himself. It had to be so. It had been a time for recovery—for surgeries and rehabilitation and the securing of bread and roof. God couldn’t begrudge him that. But what he felt now was that he had crossed some invisible line separating the moment of rebuilding from a new phase. What or why or how, he didn’t know. The debt was gone. The right eye, mostly blind, was what it was. The more Rais prayed, the more God elucidated the message He had been sending. God was calling in an old favor. He was telling Rais it was time.

Rais’s father had told him, before he left, that whatever he asked for in Mecca would be granted. One day Rais and his mother were praying at the Kaaba. His mother was chanting. Rais remembers her asking God: please help my son to fulfill his promises to You. Rais, feeling the summons of a new mission, asked God for the resources he might need to serve others. He asked Him for mental, physical, and financial strength, so that those basics could recede from his
attention and free him to concentrate on service. He asked for guidance about where his life should go, knowing that it had to travel in new directions: “I said, ‘Help me to lead a respectful, good life, and keep me from all evils. Give me the power and the strength to help others. Once I come back to You, You put me in the highest Heaven that You have created.’ ”

He had told his mother of his long-ago promise, and she encouraged him to bring it up with his God, which he now did. “Before I close my eyelids forever, I want to do something for others,” he whispered.

They were not idle words. Rais couldn’t explain it, but as the pilgrimage ended, he felt very different. It was perhaps the prompt for another of his leavings, though he didn’t yet know what he was escaping or where he was bound. For now he knew only this: “My heart feels softer than ever before.”

“T
here’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think of what I’m here for,” Stroman wrote in 2008. Six years at Polunsky had given him plenty of time to stew. He felt himself occupying a front-row seat at a spectacle of self-examination. He pondered what he was, what else he might have been. Not that he could have been a lot else, he figured. Not with the “liars” who called themselves his family. Not with the mother who wouldn’t come visit him: “Every time I try to write her anything, I always get the same story: ‘It’s too hard. It’s too hard to accept this.’ ” Not with the boys who were all about him when he was buying rounds but melted away at the first inconvenience. He hadn’t seen anybody from the family, besides his sister Doris, whom he couldn’t trust after she testified before the grand jury: “I still got love for her because we’re blood kin, but that respect’s gone.” It wasn’t that Stroman didn’t understand their behavior. They were doing him like he’d done them. That’s how they would explain it. He
just wished they’d remember that “every flower that ever bloomed had to go through a whole lot of dirt to get there.”

If you asked Doris or Mary when they first knew something was amiss with their little brother, they might cite his dreams. He’d had nightmares since he was a little boy. Sometimes it would be an imagined alligator under his bed. Sometimes it would be some crazy thing that convinced him, still half-asleep, to try to rip out the ceiling fan. Mary said, “He would also sleepwalk. I know he would go out the window, and my mom would hear something out the back door, and it would be my brother standing there in his underwear. And he didn’t even know how he got there.”

Now, all these years later, Stroman’s sleeping mind still swam with dreams. He was one of those people who remembered his dreams, though he wished at times he didn’t. Sometimes he would be dreaming of life on the outside, sweet and breezy, and then jump up startled: “just woke up from a short sleep … what a hellish sleep it was … I was dreaming of free life … and to awaken in this place and to hear all the insane screams and yelling of the ones around you is almost enough to make one want to exit this sad little existence.” He dreamed on other occasions of falling from cliffs and ledges. He dreamed of the gurney—of being strapped down, the sheet placed over his body, amid icy silence.

Sometimes the gurney dream and the falling dream flowed together in his mind—the first creating in him the feeling of the second. Sometimes as he dreamed of the gurney, it went as far as the final moment itself: the needle is about to be injected, and then he hears the strangest screams. He reckoned it to be the “yells of the damned.” Was it a glimpse of Satan coming for him? Maybe, he mused, it was a preview of heaven. What did it mean? Was he being warned?

Dreams could also soothe him. Dreams of freedom, of laughter, of loved ones long dead. He dreamed of the 1980s, cowboying
around, being the Mark who could set any room alight. Dreamed of his grandpa and running away to him on Old Seagoville Road, which back then felt so far from Plano, and riding a tractor and horses there. It made Stroman wonder if it was God laying out these images, or just the brain’s endless churning. “It amazes me that we are able to store these things inside of our minds for all these years and then it’s like something HITS the rewind button *WHEW*.”

These thoughts found expression when, in the summer of 2008, Stroman became a blogger. Ilan Ziv, the filmmaker, agreed to receive letters from him for this purpose and post them online. If you had someone on the outside willing to do this for you, it was a legal way to publish from prison. (As a result of this process, it is not always clear whether the misspellings that appear are Stroman’s or Ziv’s.) “This blog is just to open the eyes of the ones who are reading it, to show you what goes on behind these doors of Texas death row,” he wrote. He presented himself as “a simple Texan stuck in a freaking hellish nightmare.” What he wanted above all from blogging was to establish his humanity in the eyes of his audience: “Most call us animals, not to have any type of feelings or compassion. Well that’s wrong and I’ll show that in these blogs.”

Stroman had served on the Row long enough to understand that death was not a one-time thing. A man didn’t just up and die. He died tendon by tendon, vein by vein, synapse by synapse. He died daily in proportion to the number of days he had left, even if the date hadn’t been set. He died in and by the act of waiting.

Working through lawyers, Stroman had tried the usual Death Row appeals—with the usual Death Row results: an appeal of the conviction here, a state petition for habeas corpus there; a federal judge’s recommendation to deny habeas here, a turned-down certiorari petition to the Supreme Court there. It took years to execute a man because of the opportunity to make these appeals. But you’d be a fool to think you had a chance.

Day after day, Stroman sat and stood and paced his cell, asking
difficult questions of what remained of himself. Never in a million years had he imagined his life ending up like this. He wondered how that wild boy had become this caged man. “How did I end up so far away from home I’ll never know. Fate? Destiny? Karma?”

Of course, Stroman had arrived on the Row as a double murderer. Sometimes, as he sat inside, casting himself in writing as a victim of fortune, he could seem oblivious to the long trail of victimhood that he had hacked.

His moods could lurch like a truck on a mountain road. Some days he felt happy “to the point I could piss smiley faces.” The voices within him and around the Row were quiet; it was a good time to “gather up my thoughts and grab a hold of my sanity.” But sometimes, halfway through such a letter, his brain would swerve, and he would declare happy Mark to have exited the building.

He wrestled with apparent depression: “The days blend into nights, the nights turn into days. The ways to battle depression are lost to me it would seem.” The isolation was eroding what humanity remained in him. He claimed to be hearing voices in his head, but even they were growing tired: however loud they screamed, there was no one to listen but him. Stroman confessed that he’d contemplated ending things himself: “Sometimes it seems like suicide is the only solution, but I’m not that brave.”

He cowered and cried when he received word that his daughter Cassandra had gone missing. He knew to be afraid, because his time inside had taught him to believe “in real time monsters, not the kind that lived under our beds as small children, but real sicko monsters.” And then he praised God when He returned Cassandra to her mother.

Anniversaries of September 11 were also hard, because they reminded him of the war into which he had been drafted, only to find himself alone, a soldier without comrades. After these many years, however, he was also able to see the events of 2001 at a philosophical remove—to conceive of himself more as a part of that tragedy
than a hero of it. “I myself struggle daily knowing my actions have caused pain just like the attacks on our country have caused pain,” he wrote. “This vicious cycle of hate has to stop somewhere.”

The hardest thing about the Row was watching men vanish into a destiny that awaited you, too. A kind of empathy grew from selfishness. Stroman lived with a group of men who had, in their own separate ways, arrived at the same fate: who had horsed around in that same cage for an hour a day, lived through the same gassing and shouting and chewy pancakes, learned with him to plug Vaseline into the ceiling to ward off the rain, been stripped by the same guards, herded to the bathroom in the same raids, become as obsessive as he was about the progress of their appeals, despite knowing the wispy odds of success.

The simple parallelism of the Row—people convicted of similar crimes, bound for the same penalty—made it hard to ignore the analogies between your life and others’. Everyone was a future version of someone else. What happened to another today would happen to you tomorrow.

Stroman kept a calendar on the cell wall, and beside it an execution schedule. “That combination of calendar and death list gives the day meaning and purpose,” he wrote on a good day, sipping coffee and crossing off another of the calendar’s boxes. He wondered about his peers. How did they feel on the day of their death, awaiting the injection that would send them to the “land of Oz,” as he called it? Did they feel remorse? Had they managed to hand Jesus their heart in good time? What did a man do as the hours dwindled and the walls closed in? Did he sleep? Did he limp around his cell like a wounded beast? Did he write letters? Did he finally say the unsaid things to his loves? What did he do on his last morning? Did he pray? Did he catch a final sunrise?

Stroman recounted to Ziv how the prison authorities had brought out paper forms from the psych department one day and asked the inmates to fill them out. The forms were seeking to gauge the
prisoners’ mental health, and one of the questions asked if they had frequent thoughts about death. “It’s like a joke,” Stroman said. Who could live on Texas Death Row and not think about death?

One of the benefits of the Row for Stroman was his discovery of inmates who’d known lives much worse than his. “I heard someone in our rec cage just yesterday saying that life is a wounding, an accumulation of pains and maiming’s and grief,” he wrote on his blog. That statement really got Stroman thinking: “There was nothing about love or happiness in his little sermon. I for one have had a lot of negativity in my life, but the happiness and love and good times outweigh anything else.”

Over the years, Stroman had been a troublemaker at Polunsky, but of an evolving kind. Six years turned him from flat-out angry to something more like constructively critical. He cast himself in his blog as a monitor of the prison regime. He was that eternally complaining customer who keeps returning to the restaurant anyway. His rage, scalding in the free world, cooled into a kind of nagging. He was Polunsky’s little gadfly: a reviewer of its food, a chronicler of what criminals less dignified than he did, an explainer of its overly bureaucratic processes. In his blog posts, he might disclose such things as the organogram of the prison, or the winding path that complaints followed, or the financial arrangement by which the county paid the state for keeping inmates until the death warrant was signed.

When Stroman first came in, he was more likely to write about things like what you should do to a black man if you happen to have a heavy truck and some unused chain at your disposal. As the years wore him down, he sounded more like a high-school-newspaper editor or a professor who thinks himself a contrarian. Stroman complained about the lack of access to televisions or church services. He complained of the guards’ behaving like “walking drones” who were “institutionalized in their own way” and “programmed to do as they are told even if it makes no sense at all.” He complained about being
allowed to shower only on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. He complained about the security procedures that required them to gas you in your cell before coming in if you’d had a stroke or heart attack or even died. He complained about the cameras on the Row. He cited with approval a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that cast aspersions on the American penal system. He complained about budget cuts that had the inmates going without dental floss while he heard that the governor, Rick Perry, was living in a mansion. He complained, with particular ferocity, about the raids on the prisoners’ cells, in which he claimed they were stripped and cuffed and sent to the showers while the guards rummaged through their possessions, leaving everything in a mess. He complained about the quality of the beans. He complained that the executioners, at least according to what he had heard, were paid by the killing.

There was in Stroman’s complaining a kind of citizenship. This was not the raving Mark who had come to Polunsky. He complained now more in the spirit of a cranky, self-important whistleblower: “Today is the 18th of January and so far we have had them horror-story pancakes fed to us 13 days this month. No one hardly gets up to eat these because they feed ’em so much and the end result is a waste of food and money.” His criticism was born of a quiet faith that it could, perhaps, be otherwise. The terrorist appeared at times to be reinventing himself as a reformer.